SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (47 page)

Clubs thrived on variety. There were men who came in especially to see a fat woman, a woman other than white, or a less then model-perfect desirable woman. Men had fetishes and obsessions. None of the clubs featured all-young live flesh, not if they were the lower-class clubs and they knew the business.

“The girls have noticed our cop's got a thing for you.”

Shadow, lost in her thoughts again, was startled to see Mad still in the dressing room with her. The girl was adjusting her stockings and looking over her shoulder in the mirror at her naked ass. Now that ass, Shadow thought uncharitably, is decidedly undesirable. Her pores are clogged. She needs a dermatologist to look at those pimples.

“I'll just ignore him,” she said, unconcerned.

“What's so funny,” Mad said, “is he never took that kind of interest before. He useta come in here to see one girl, but he never went after her when she got off work. That was Jezebel, but she quit before you started here.”

“How do you know about him trying to see me after work?”

“You forget I was on stage when you left your shift. I saw him leave. He looked like he had a real mission. I knew he was going for the alley and the back where we park.”

Shadow shrugged. She was tired of this conversation. What there was of it. She stowed her gear in the locker and turned the tumbler on the lock.

“He catch up with you?”

“Mad, just leave it alone, okay? I don't care about dating customers and I sure won't be in the market for a cop.”

“Well, excuse me. I should ask before I take a fucking breath.” She lifted her chin and made for the door.

Shadow almost apologized, but decided fuck it, maybe Mad would stop trying to get to know her. She didn't want to know the girls or them to know her. In any way. They didn't know where she lived. They didn't know about Charlene or the state mental hospital. They didn't know . . .

. . . about the man in the hat . . .

about her past or future, and that's just how she wanted to keep it.

She left the empty dressing room carrying a can of lukewarm Pepsi. She sipped at it while waiting behind the curtain for her turn on stage. She occasionally peeked out at Mad, admiring how she danced. The girl was damn skinny, her breasts no larger than a boy's, and she had that unappetizing ass, but she was young enough that the music surged through her and turned her bones to jelly. She danced energetically, employing all the new dance moves. Men paid her well, as they should have.

Dragging her gaze from Mad, Shadow scoped the room. The cop wasn't there. She sighed in relief. He kept coming around, she'd go to another club. She couldn't afford getting close to a homicide officer.

Because you killed.

He had looked all right. Nice enough face. Good body with strong shoulders, a blocky sort of guy, though not short. But . . .

What if he follows you to another club?

She would tell him, then, the way she told Mad. You get out of my face, she'd tell him. You're harassing me. The department know you got the hots for exotic dancers? They know your thing for voyeurism? Don't they have a shrink on the payroll might be interested in having a little talk with a guy like you?

Still, it was interesting, a cop hanging out in titty bars not to bust girls, but to enjoy them.

He might find out you killed the man in the hat. That was ridiculous. No one would ever know. The rapist was halfway to Cuba by now. Or taken down by sharks. There had been a shark attack the summer before on Galveston's West Beach. Took a teenager's leg in its mouth and shook it like a good supper bone. Boy almost lost his leg. Stitches and miracle drugs saved it. How much better an entire human for lunch?

Mad flounced off stage. She made a wide berth for Shadow, who moved up for her cue.

“Fuckin' Ice Maiden,” Mad said below her breath.

“Get a life, Mad.” Shadow was too sorry for the girls and women she worked with to get really angry with them. They were all sisters under the skin. Bumping and humping their way to glory. Or the bank. Whatever.

The lights rose from punk violet to frosty blue as the first strains of “American Woman” belted from the speaker system.

She was on. She set the Pepsi on the floor. Air caught in her chest, was held there two beats, let out. She drew back the curtain and went into the routine she'd practiced over and over in the mansion ballroom. This was her first time coordinating a song with an outfit.

And the club went wild.

Scaring her for a split second, then rolling over her like . . .

. . . one of those gentle waves in the bay . . .

She fell into the song the way . . .

. . . the body fell into the water . . .

Easy, smooth, she worked out the moves, bending her body around the lyrics, the beats driving fast and solid as . . .

. . . her hand brought the knife down into his back . . .

She never knew how she got through her spots, but even less so this night. Her mind kept slipping off from what she wanted to think, into alien thoughts coming from somewhere else.

She took off the red-sequined jacket for the audience, the panties, revealing a white G-string beneath, and finally the bra just at the end of the song.

The lights went down softer so that a man would have to have x-ray vision to see her well, and she moved onto one of the stage arms leading into the audience. There, in G-string, garter belt, and stockings, her body rocked the men into a lullaby with a slow Billie Holiday blues song backing her up. They stuffed her garter belt with bills. Big bills.

She smiled.

She danced.

She thought of the new lock on the door leading from the garage and of murder most foul.

Fifteen

Son's mother rolled onto her side, swinging her feet to the floor. Son was busy. She could go to the bathroom by herself.

She believed this up to the moment the pains made her grimace and stopped her dead in her tracks, not two feet from the bedside.

The door seemed too far away. Another five or six steps. She couldn't just stand here, her bladder hurting this way.

It was her back, along the spine, and her hips, in the sockets. It was her elbows and her knees. Her ankles. It was everything. Her body had turned on her over the years. If she had any gumption at all, she'd do away with herself, save Son from being burdened with an old invalid mother.

The thought of suicide, even when couched in words like “do away with herself,” left a bitter taste in her mouth. She didn't believe in such things. It was a coward's way. Are you a man or a mouse? Where did that saying come from anyway? It was women who were stronger. Let some man have a baby, see the whole human race die out! She remembered when Son was born . . .

She turned slowly, like a gear in a machine needing oil, and made it to the bed again. She slumped onto it, leaning over on one arm to support herself.

She didn't want to call Son. He was working.

What a wonderfully devoted man he was and so brilliant! They had even given him an award for his mysteries, but he wouldn't leave her to go to New York City for the ceremony. They shipped the little ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe to him in a carton of Styrofoam wriggles that spilled out all over the floor of her bedroom when he lifted it out for her to see. It was a funny looking statue, but Son was inordinately proud of it, explaining what an honor this prize was in his genre. Genre. A beautiful word that made her think of French silks and Paris nights.

She hadn't seen the award since. She wondered if he put it on the shelf in his office. She never went in there. Son needed his privacy to write. She'd never invade his sanctum or interfere with his creative life.

She drew her legs onto the coverlet and lay back, sighing with pain. She could hold her water a little longer. She'd wait until Son came in to see about her before asking to be taken to the toilet.

She could do it. She had done it before. With only one or two mistakes. Out of how many times? Dozens. Hundreds. She always waited patiently when she could manage it.

She had wanted to be a writer one time, when she was younger. Somewhere in the attic she had old spiral notebooks full of her little stories. She remembered writing them when Son was small. Deep in the night after she had finished the house chores and her child slept, she hauled out a notebook and wrote about an older time, a time that had never existed for her. She thought she might have some writing talent. But of course she had also wanted to be an actress, play opposite Valentino in the silent movies. Have him bend her back and kiss her passionately on the screen.

Dreams. They were lovely things because they caused no harm. It wasn't depressing to her that she had had to work in business and make a living for her and Son. She wasn't unhappy her dreams never came true. They had for Son, and that made up for everything, for every sacrifice and lost opportunity.

She had shown her stories to Son when he first began writing. He was kind (he was her son!), but she could tell her rambling, old-fashioned prose fell short for his tastes. They were soft flowery pieces about girls in gingham dresses picking daisies in the fields outside little rural towns, about families, big families with lots of children, and parents who loved one another. They were silly old things and she shouldn't have showed such flawed work to a talented son. What was he supposed to say?

When she read his books—he never let her see them until they were published, their pages smelling crisply of new paper and their jackets splashed with bright, vibrant colors—she was taken by his imagination. When copies of the first novel came in the mail—a box of them—and she read the first chapter, she knew what she called “writing” was a far different thing from what writing really was. Son took you into new places, inside his detective's head, and he made you believe in that world so that time hung suspended.

She, certainly, had never been able to do something like that with her own pitiful scribblings.

Oh, she had led such a charmed life. It was true her husband, Son's father, was temperamental and she never understood him, but once she was out of that situation, everything had been lovely. Even when she had to hold down two jobs and pay for babysitters, she thought her life touched by magic to have a child at home waiting for her, looking up to her. Loving her.

She poured all her love into him, every ounce of it she possessed, and when he put his little arms around her neck and kissed her cheek, she nearly swooned with a mother's joy that filled her heart and overflowed to warm every corner of her being.

He was always a good boy. Never once a problem with him. Other mothers confided how their children wet the bed even into their teen years, or how they ran away from home, or took up pot smoking or some other horrible drug. Or they got pregnant or impregnated their teenaged girlfriends, became thieves, hustlers, liars and frauds. But Son made her proud. He brought home top grades. He had a paper route by the time he was nine. He attended the university and found a way to make his mark upon the world.

He listened to her.

He loved her back.

A grunt of satisfaction left her lips before she caught it. Why was it as she grew old and weak that she remembered the far past so much better than the near past? She couldn't be making it rosier than it was, could she? Just so she'd have good memories to keep her company? What an odd thought. She wished she didn't have these odd thoughts that set her off balance. Of course she hadn't embroidered the past! She'd had a wonderful life, just like that old Christmas movie said, the one with James Stewart, it was a wonderful life.

She heard Rush Limbaugh squealing from the radio. He must have been tapping the microphone because it snagged her attention. That Rush. She had to smile. He knew how to entertain, that's for sure. She didn't agree with the politics he spouted, but she suspected he didn't mean them anyway. He was playing a little game, though sometimes she thought he might really be a mean-spirited kind of person. But his little game made him famous.

Like her son.

And weren't all types of entertainment game-playing? Books, movies, television, and radio?

Now that was a question that could keep her mind engaged for another thirty minutes or so.

She tightened her legs, hoping to hold her bladder in check a while longer. She felt her tissue-thin skin wrinkle into folds as she did this, but didn't mind it. She was at home in the old body, as useless as it had become to her. After all, it was the only one she had, and she had lived in it for more than eighty years. Eight long decades and more.

If she had learned about playfulness and games maybe her writing would have blossomed the way Son's had. All she had wanted to set down to paper was an idyllic time and place and family. Wildflowers in fields nodding their heads in the breeze. Mama and Papa in the kitchen bringing dinner to the table for their many children. And those children! Their ruddy faces, hair the color of new copper, laughing like glass chimes tinkling in the wind.

Ah . . .

To have her body back now. To be able to rule it and make it obey. To have her fingers flexible enough to hold a pencil and a pad of paper. For it was certain she had lost her chance to star in silent films . . .

She had to pee!

“Son!”

Oh gawd. She hadn't wanted to do that.

“Son! Hurry!”

Or that.

He came into the room with his hair all mussed, a sheaf of typewritten pages in his hand. “What is it?”

“I think I wet myself,” she said in a small embarrassed voice.

“You should have called me earlier, Mother.”

She turned her face on the pillow to avoid seeing the disappointment and revulsion creeping into his eyes.

He was not quite the little boy she remembered. But he was good all the same. And she was a selfish old dolt with hot urine leaking from between her thighs.

She wished she might die.

~*~

He helped her take the gown off, pulling it over her head, keeping his stare firmly on the bedclothes behind her so as not to have to witness her shrunken body. He handed her the house coat, let her stand on her own and close it before leading her by the arm down the hall to the bathroom.