The Concrete River (24 page)

He noticed the bottle was half empty. Then, with the pressure against his leg, he experienced a flush of sexuality and thought about Marlena Cruz. How promiscuous the imagination was, he thought. Only an hour earlier he'd been pleading for Eleanor Ong, and now he wanted Marlena Cruz, thinking about the delicious abandon of her heavy body, the tenderness that would well over him to blot out thoughts of anything else. He looked at the scotch bottle and decided there was enough left to introduce her to the peaty glories of unblended.

“Loco, want to eat a lapdog?”

*

Her car was there. He parked at the corner and left Loco in the back sleeping. He felt rain as he approached her door and glared suspiciously up at the cloudless blue sky. It came again, just a teasing on his bare arms. He glanced down and saw tiny pale spots spreading like colonies of bacteria on his dark shirt. He watched in fascination as more dots appeared and groped outward, then he snapped his head around and caught a glimpse of the small boy fleeing, a big pump squirt rifle chugging at his side. Bleach, he thought.

He had hid in the bushes as a child to send a spray across the windshield of cars stopped at a red light, but that had been harmless water. It had been one of his favorite shirts, but no great loss in the run of the universe.

He felt for his key ring. She had given him a key but he decided to be gentlemanly and knock. A sexual thickness welled in him and he tried out smiles to offer her, tender greetings. It was a heavy dense door and he wasn't sure the knock carried, but he waited a few moments before ringing the bell so he wouldn't seem peremptory. He could feel the touch of her skin.

He thought he heard a footstep inside, though it might only have been house noise, one of those creaks caused by board and batten absorbing heat differentially. He rapped once more and the door opened a crack. He could just see her face thrust against the opening.

“Oh.”

“Hi, Marlena.”

“You should tell me you're coming.”

“Sorry. I wasn't near a phone.” He felt wronged; he'd gone out of his way not to open the door with his own key. Something tragic was in her voice and he felt his smile stiffening. She wore a bathrobe, her hand clutching it closed high up at the neck and he reached in slowly to try to slide his hand in at breast level, hoping an intimate touch would reestablish some of his sexual tenderness. But everything was topsy-turvey. She backed away from his hand in a panicky way, pulling the door open farther.

The man stood across the living room, sawing the ends of the tie through his collar. The uniform shirt itself was only half-buttoned.

Jack Liffey found himself blinking a couple of times, as if he could make the terrible apparition go away.

“He was axing about Consuela Beltran,” she said, a pretext so lame that the words clogged in her throat. The man whistled to himself, letting his shoulders ripple a little as he fiddled with the tie.

“I'm sure Sergeant Quinn always leaves his shirt over the chair when he conducts police business.”

It was the best he could do, short of shooting Quinn.

“You got some sort of trouble, fella?”

“Not with you. Good night, Marlena.”

“Jack…”

But he was outside, feeling his cheeks on fire. It wasn't even night. Later, he thought, he would laugh at all this, but not now. He clutched the half bottle of unblended scotch, and when he opened car door, Loco woke with a start and obviously didn't know him. The dog snarled and the two of them sat for a time glaring at one another, yoked together in a silent world.

*

The dog gnarred several times as Jack Liffey tugged it across the condo complex, past the scent trails of Persian Cats and German Shepherds and toy poodles. Someone had dumped a big parcel of rags on his doorstep. It sat there in the shadows and the dog hung back instinctively, forelegs stiff. Then he noticed what it was and hid the Scotch bottle behind his back. She was sitting on the rope doormat with her arms clasped around her knees and her head down.

“Honey, what's wrong?”

“Oh, Daddy, I miss you so.”

She jumped up and hugged him. Her head only came to his belly, and it rooted against his shirt. In a moment one of her hands accidentally found the bottle and she pulled back.

“You're not drinking again?”

He brought the bottle into plain sight, eyed the label that said twelve years old—three years older than she was—and then decapped it and stuffed it upside down into the dirt of the piggy-back plant. “Maeve, meet Loco.”

She and the dog cocked their heads at one another, as if sizing up for a duel.

“What happened to your key?”

“Mom took it. She said I could't come over till you pay up. Where'd you get Loco from?”

“My last client had to abandon him. He's half coyote or half Mexican wolf.”

With a last disapproving frown at the bottle she took his hand and tugged him inside.

“I'm going to have to call your mom, but maybe she'll let you stay tonight.”

“Couldn't you just wait and call her when it's too late to go home?”

Loco sniffed from room to room, half sideways, investigating like a cat.

“She'll be worried, Maeve. We can't do that. Have you eaten?”

“I got a fish sandwich up at Dan's.”

“On the cuff?”

“Huh?”

“Did you pay for it?”

“He said you'd be good for it.”

“Why don't you set up the board and I'll call.”

From the kitchen, as he was calling, he watched the gangly girl bustle away the place settings and hunt in the brown Scrabble box for one particular tile. In her very movements he saw quotes of Kathy's body language, and his own, a way she frowned in concentration, biting her cheek, and a way she held herself stiffly and wriggled one shoulder.

“Hello.”

“Kathy, this is Jack. Maeve is here with me.”

“Oh,
dammit
, Jack. I was petrified.”

“I just got home. She's okay. Couldn't you let her stay for tonight? I know the deal. I think I could come up with one month's child support. I hate to beg, but she really wants to stay.”

“You're nine months behind.” She paused. He knew she wasn't really a hardass about it, but her lawyer was pushing her.

“The kid went out of her way, and she's setting up Scrabble right now.”

“Oh, Jack, you could always talk your way around me.”

“No, I couldn't. You saw through me.”

“Are you drinking?”

He hesitated. “If she hadn't shown up, I would be. I had a bad day but I'm okay now.”

“You'll have her back by noon?”

“I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

As he was waiting for the final okay he put a bowl of water and an old dish of stew on the floor for Loco, and the dog glared at them with black almond-shaped eyes. The dog would have to learn to like table scraps. Life was like that.

“Okay, but I want to talk to you when you drop her off. We've get to get her straight on obeying me.”

“I'll talk to her now. Thanks, Kath. You're a princess.”

He set the phone down and watched Maeve laboriously turning the tiles blank side up, one by one, as if each required a slightly different manipulation of her wrist. He was amazed at how quickly his mood could shift. From despair and humiliation only a few minutes ago, he was filled with love—and with the anxiety he always felt at her delicacy. Her arms were so frail it looked like the weight of the air in the room was enough to crush them. How would she ever survive adolescence? How did she exist in the same world with the deadly Cowboy and Las Vegas mobsters?

She laughed and stuck out her tongue. “Daddy, you'll never go first. I drew a B.”

Never grow up, never grow up, he pleaded. His cheeks burned and then he realized he was crying.