The Cocktail Waitress (27 page)

“Thalidomide.”

He must have seen the blood rush from my face. “What is it, Mrs. White? Do you know that drug?”

“… I’ve heard of it.”

“Heard of it, I see. Have you ever been prescribed it?”

“No.”

“Ever known anyone else who was?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“How would I know?”

“If we asked your co-workers at that restaurant, do you think we’d find that one of them has a prescription?”

“I have no idea!”

“We’ll just have to ask, then.”

I exploded: “Ask all you want. You won’t find anything. Even if one of them has a prescription, she never shared it with me.” My brain, of course, was racing all the while, thinking of Hilda and the favor she’d done me, of this terrible coincidence and how it might put me in the electric chair. For of course I hadn’t crushed any of her pills and injected them into Earl’s intravenous solution—but if they found her somehow, in Texas, and she told them she’d given them to me—or if they found the remaining pills, which I’d kept in a cabinet upstairs—

I realized after a moment that Private Church was saying something and apparently had been for some time, had repeated himself with no answer from me. “Do you hear me, Mrs. White?”

“I’m sorry. I was just distracted a moment, thinking of all you’ve said.”

“As you might be. Let me ask it again, then, now that I have your attention. I said, was your
first
husband on any medication?”

I stood up then. I did more than that, I stepped forward until my face was no more than an inch from his, though he was taller, and I had to tilt my head to look directly into his eyes. He took a step back and his hand found its way to his hip, where he wore his gun. “My first husband medicated himself with one thing only, and it came in something bigger than a pill bottle. He took it orally. You’ll find it on the shelf of any liquor store or bar, and it comes without a prescription. Side effects include dizziness, inability to perform sexually, and a tendency to beat the tar out of those you love. You can see my son’s x-rays if you think I’m making it up.”

“We did see them, Mrs. White—a dislocated shoulder, if I remember correctly. Ample reason for you to leave your husband and to take your son with you. Or to go to the police and have him arrested for battery. But that’s not what happened, is it?”

“You know what happened.”

“I know he died. And I can’t help wondering if perhaps he had some help. Maybe some medication that would have made him sleepy behind the wheel? Something crushed up and added to that beer you said he kept yelling for you to bring him …?”

“Get out of my house.”

“Your house,” he said. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

I stormed past him to the front door, threw it open and waited with one hand on the knob and the other on my hip. My heart was hammering and I didn’t trust myself to speak.

He came forward, set his hat on his head, pulled his uniform jacket tighter around himself against the cold. His voice was quiet, calm and emotionless when he spoke. “You and I both know you killed your first husband, Mrs. White. We dug him up too late to find any traces, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. You served him a drink
that killed him, and now you’ve done it again, and this time I’m going to prove it, and you’re going to burn for it.”

“Get out, you son of a bitch, get out!”

I heard Araminta behind me, rushing toward the door, and from the direction of the dining room I saw Myra coming as well.

Private Church tipped his hat. “Ma’am,” he said.

I asked Myra to draw me a bath, as hot as she could stand it when she put her hand in, and I lay back in it, crying, until the water cooled.

Then I found myself dressed and standing at the front door, with no memory of having gotten myself there. I was in a fog and needed badly to clear my head. I didn’t even take the car this time, just headed off on foot, following the path Earl had taken each night and arriving at the Garden around the same time he always had. Jake saw me first, as the hatcheck booth was standing empty when I entered, and he stepped out from behind the bar to put his arms around me, a sure sign of how bad I must have looked. I tipped my head onto his shoulder and wept. Liz came out of the kitchen then, carrying a plate. “Oh, Joanie,” she said. “Let me serve this and then you and I can go back to the locker room for a good talk.” She hurried off to a corner table, the small one at the far end of the room. But when I saw who was sitting there, I knew there would be no talk in the locker room for me, not now.

I came over when he raised a hand and beckoned, and took the seat across from him as I had done once before. There was a glass on the table, drained. The mint leaves in the bottom told me it had been another smash.

“I thought I might find you here, job or no. No one likes to be alone after a death.”

Sergeant Young was in his civilian clothes and looked no more like a policeman at that moment than Jake did—yet following so close on
the heels of my encounter with Private Church, I couldn’t help feeling a moment of terror.

“I’d hoped to warn you you could expect a visit from my partner, but I see from your look it’s too late. I hope he didn’t frighten you too badly.”

“Only if you find talk of the electric chair frightening.”

“He didn’t—”

“Oh yes he did. He made it very clear what his goal is.”

“You have to understand, he’s young and aggressive. That doesn’t make him right.”

“It doesn’t matter if he’s right, does it? All that matters is what he can get a judge to believe.”

“I think what’s right matters. Most judges do, too.”

“Most. That’s some comfort.”

“I don’t say don’t take it serious. But if you’re innocent, the storm will pass.”

“Right now it just looks like it’s gaining steam.”

“Well, that’s the other reason I’m here—another thing I thought you ought to know. You’ve got someone else working against you, not just Private Church.”

“Who?”

“Same as last time,” the sergeant answered. “We got a phone call from a woman, sounded like the same one that called before, though Private Church says she made an effort this time to disguise her voice. She wouldn’t give her name, but had the same package of news.”

“… Which was?”

“That it seems funny your first husband died, so you came into a house, and now this second one died, so you came into a fortune.”

I felt like I’d never stop defending myself, for the rest of my life. It was a sensation like drowning. “My first husband died when he crashed a car, a car lent him by a friend, into a culvert wall,” I said. “My second husband died of angina, which had been diagnosed before I met him.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He was under a doctor’s care. Two doctors. Whatever chemicals might have been found, I didn’t give them to him.”

“I’m not saying I believe it. But others might. Did you hear Paul Pry today?”

“That man on the air?”

“The same. He dishes up dirt—that’s all his program is, dirt collected around recent news. And you were today’s news. He repeated, almost verbatim, what this woman told us on the phone—meaning, we’re not the only ones she called. A campaign seems to have started. I just thought you should know.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” I said. I almost wanted to ask him for help, but what could he do to help me, more than he already had? For all that he appeared to be a decent person, and concerned, he was still a police officer. Anyway Ethel was my problem to deal with; I’d known all along she would be.

I wished then that I’d brought the car, for her house was too far to walk. Instead, I headed for the hatcheck booth, drew shut the curtain, and took the telephone back as far as the cord would reach. Then I dialed the operator and had her connect me to Mrs. Jack Lucas. It rang eight times before Ethel finally answered.

“I’m sorry, Joan,” she explained, “I was just giving Tad his bath.”

“Good,” I said. “He might as well be clean before he comes home to me.”

“… Home to you?”

“I’m taking my son, Ethel. You know that. It’s why you’re trying so desperately to stop me, no matter how underhanded the method.”

“Joan!”

“I know about the calls—to the police, to the radio show. I’m here
to say it’s going to stop, and stop now. You want to fight me, fight out in the open, not cowardly, from the shadows.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“That’s O.K., you deny it all you want,” I said. “But you’ll lose either way. A boy should be with his mother, and now that I have the resources to support him, no court will favor your claim over mine.”

There was silence on the other end, for just a moment. Then: “… As long as you’re not in jail, Joan. I’d focus on that if I were you.” It was a threat, but her tone of voice made it clear that she was scared herself, as if she really believed the story she was peddling about me and thought me dangerous. Well, this was the one time it could work for me.

“Don’t make another call,” I said, keeping my voice low, “of the sort you’ve been making, or it might just be the last you ever make. Understand me?”

I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line.

“O.K.. then, you understand,” I said, and hung up.

That night I returned to my other house first, the home I’d shared with Ron, to pick up clothes for the funeral. It seemed strange to be in it once more, with everything just as I’d left it, except for a smell that it had—a stuffy, close smell, no more than you’d naturally expect, but for some reason upsetting me. I picked up the same dark suit I’d worn to Ron’s funeral, but not the same hat, as this was fall, and a satin one wouldn’t do. Fortunately, a velvet one was there, and I took that. Also, just in case, I took the veil, folding it into my bag. Then I walked back to the Garden, and from there home.

The limousines, one for me, two I’d ordered for the servants, and the two others, for Earl’s relatives and friends who showed up and very courteously waited, were due at 11:30, and sure enough, right on the dot, here they came, up the drive, and parked out front. Through the
window, I saw the drivers get out and stand by their cars, shoulders back, rear doors open. Someone else I couldn’t see walked to the front door, oyster shells crunching underfoot, and rang the bell. Myra opened, and then she, Leora, Araminta, Jasper, Boyd and the others were there in the hall, ready to go, and they did. Then I picked up my own things and went out, closing the door behind me, and turning to the man who I knew was there to escort me. When I looked up it was Tom. “Surprised?” he asked.

It was the first I’d seen him since I’d left the note as he slept, in the motel by the airport, and I would be a liar if I said my heart didn’t leap at the sight of him.

“I asked for the job—the undertaker remembered me from before. But if you want me to blow I can get a replacement …”

“I don’t want you to blow.”

He put me in the car and got in beside me, in back. The driver looked surprised, but then touched his cap, got in himself, and started.

“Is it true,” Tom whispered to me as the road unfurled outside the tinted window, “what Liz told me one night, down there in the Garden, that you never …”

“That I never what?”

“Never consummated, with this husband of yours that you’re burying.”

“That’s none of your goddam business,” I told him, “what I did with my husband. Is that clear?”

He didn’t answer. “Is it or isn’t it?”

“… O.K.”

Perhaps a hundred people were there in the chapel, and Dr. Fisher read the service. He gave a brief sermon, of no more than five minutes, about Earl’s “exemplary, Christian character.” Then once more I was at a graveside, listening to another service, seeing another man throw earth on a coffin. And once more I was thanking the
minister, this time telling him myself, not waiting for Ethel to do it, that he would be getting his donation in the mail. Then I was back in the car with Tom. When we got to the house the servants were already there and opened for me to come in. I turned to Tom, held out my hand and said, “Thanks for coming, Tom.”

“I thought you might want to be with me, Joan.”

“I do—but I’m not asking you in. It wouldn’t … it wouldn’t be right. Or at least it wouldn’t feel right to me, which amounts to the same thing.” I was thinking, also, of how it would look to the staff—and to the police, if word got back.

“Then O.K.,” he said. “I’m off.”

Suddenly I felt weak, like I had after the incident with Lacey at the airport, and like I had then, I wanted him with me desperately. I said, “Tom, wait a minute. I
can’t
have you in here. But—hold everything.”

I went in and called to Myra that I was “going out for a little while.” I hastily threw together a bag, then stepped out the front door again, told Tom to let the car go, and led around to the garage. I got my car out, moved over to the passenger seat so he could get in behind the wheel, and told him to drive.

“And where am I driving?”

I closed my eyes and put my head back against the cushion. “Anywhere you choose, Tom. Even take me to the Wigwam again, I won’t mind. Just you decide.”

The car pulled off onto the highway and we rode along in silence, I with no more sense of where we were than a child being driven by her parents. Once, Tom put his hand on my leg and I shivered beneath it, not from excitement but from relief. It was like a cool cloth on a burn.

He pulled to a stop and bade me open my eyes. We were outside a small house with shingled roof and a little patch of lawn—nothing lavish or breathtaking, but wholly respectable, and I followed him
inside gratefully. He shut the door, and I turned to him. Closing my eyes again, I inhaled. He asked: “Joan? Are you all right?”

“… Tom, this smell.”

“I’ll open some windows—”

“No. I want to smell it. It’s you.”

Then I was in his arms, and then he was carrying me back, back to his bedroom, sliding my zippers, kissing my neck. And so, the day of my husband’s funeral, I consummated with my lover for the second time.

Once again it went on until well into the evening, what with “retakes” and a brief break for food, eaten standing in Tom’s kitchen without a stitch on, spooning scrambled eggs straight out of the pan. When we finally sank into sleep, it was not even in each other’s arms, just lying any which way across the mattress.