The Death in the Willows (12 page)

“I'll pay a week in advance.”

“It ain't cleaned up.”

“I want it the way it is. I'll pay two weeks in advance.”

“Forty bucks.”

Bea slipped two twenties from her wallet and winced. How many times had she criticized Lyon for spending money this way? “Can I have a receipt?” A round eyebrow was raised on a round face. “I guess it's not important.” She followed the landlady inside. The house smelled. Its inhabitants undoubtedly used hot plates, and a strange mixture of past cooking odors permeated the dimly lit hall. The landlady stopped at a rear door on the second floor and pushed it open.

“Like I said, it ain't been cleaned up or nothing. But you don't care about that, do you, honey?”

“Not really.”

“I heard of your kind. Get your kicks this way, don't you? Comin' in a dead man's room and thinking about him getting his head blown off. You're really into that, aren't you?”

Bea cocked her head and smiled. “You ought to try it sometime.”

“Weirdo. The city's full of them.” The round woman turned away in disgust and painfully made her way down the stairs.

Bea stepped into the small room and shut the door behind her. She estimated the room to be approximately fifteen feet square with a high ceiling. It had undoubtedly been divided off from a larger room when the brownstone was converted to a rooming house. Its one dirty window overlooked a refuse-filled small yard in the rear, and beyond that a slat fence separated it from a furniture warehouse. Only a small bit of sun would ever peek through the upper portion of the window. A frayed white curtain hung on each side of the window, the lower part of which was frayed, as if some prior occupant kept a cat.

The furnishings were equal to the room: an iron bedstead of ancient vintage with lumpy bedding, a bureau, and a worn overstuffed chair. She examined the top of the bureau where the contents of the drawers had been dumped. She gingerly went through the items: a few pairs of socks, handkerchiefs, a wallet-sized photograph of a two-year-old boy, and little else. She turned and began to examine minutely the remainder of the room.

In twenty minutes Bea was back downstairs knocking on the door of the parlor front apartment. “Go away. I'm watching my soaps.” She knocked again. Louder.

The door snapped open as the round woman glared at her. “Will you go back upstairs and do your kinky bit and leave me alone?”

“I want to see his other things.”

“What other things?” The round woman's eyes narrowed to tiny apertures.

“The things you took from the room.”

“I didn't take nothing. Anything's missing, the cops got it.”

“I know what the police have, and there are other belongings of Willie Shep's around here somewhere.”

“Get outa' here!” She attempted to slam the door, but Bea stuck her foot inside and winced as it caught her instep.

“I can get the police.”

“He owed me back rent.”

“I just want to look.”

“No cops?”

“No cops.”

Bea followed her into a small bedroom. With a grunt, the landlady bent and pulled a cardboard carton from under the bed. “He owed me. I ought to get something.”

Bea stooped and began to go through the box: a small portable television, cuff links, a sport jacket.

“There was a pawn ticket in there for a watch, but I sold it.”

“Why didn't you pawn the TV?”

“Don't work so good. It keeps rolling.”

Bea nodded as she opened a small metal box. Inside were several papers, the documentation of a short life: his general discharge from the Marines, unemployment compensation forms, a court service for child support. She read that one carefully. Willie Shep was charged by one Loyce Bolton Shep for back child support for one minor child in the amount of $710. Odd, the police report didn't mention a wife. She closed the box thoughtfully. “Did he ever have visitors?”

“Never. Except once a dirty blond girl came. They had an argument and were yelling so bad I had to go up there and ask her to leave.”

Bea picked up more photographs of the little boy and one of a girl with long hair. “Ever see him read anything?”

“Never. You can have the box and everything in it for twenty.”

“Thank you,” Bea said as she stood. “I'm quite finished.”

The address on the court document in Willie Shep's belongings took Bea to the West Side of Manhattan. The cab left her at the corner of Seventy-fourth and Amsterdam, and she walked a half block down Seventy-fourth. She recognized the architecture of the dwelling as Stanford White, built over eighty years ago. Its career had followed the course of the city as the neighborhood's complexion had changed.

She passed through a marble portico and rang the bell over a smudged card that read
LOYCE BOLTON
. The door immediately buzzed open and she stepped into an ornate hallway with a graceful staircase that wound toward the next floor.

A woman's voice yelled down from the top of the house. “Up here on the third floor. Leave them by the door.”

“I'm not the grocery boy.”

“Who is it?”

Bea continued plodding up the marble staircase without answering. At the second floor she glanced up to see a woman peering over the railing above. Long blond hair hung over the side of a pinched face with a pouty mouth.

“I don't know you.”

“I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes, Loyce Shep.”

“Why?”

“About your husband.”

“Oh, shit!” The face disappeared from the railing, and as Bea reached the third floor a door down the hall slammed. She knocked without answer, but continued knocking until a muffled voice called out, “We're separated. Go away!”

“You know what happened to him?”

“Go away!”

“Do you want me to announce it to the whole building?”

The door opened and slammed against the wall as a hand reached toward Bea and pulled her into the apartment. “Come on, lady. Nobody around here connects me with that guy.” The door was closed and double latched. “How'd you find me anyway?”

“The court papers.”

Loyce slapped her forehead. “I knew it. I knew it. I shouldn't have taken him to court. Fat lot of good it did me anyway.”

A single naked light bulb burned dimly in a kitchen area to the right of the doorway, and Bea had to squint in order to make out the features of Loyce Shep. She was perhaps twenty-two, although the mold of her face was already beginning to harden. The deepening crow's-feet around the corners of her eyes were nearing a permanence that in a few years would give her a perpetually petulant look. The figure was thin to the point of gauntness, with small pointy breasts poking at the T-shirt she wore tucked into spattered jeans.

Loyce pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes and shook her head. “So, what do you want?”

“To talk about your husband.”

“He's not my husband anymore. We hadn't lived together for two years, and the only reason I didn't get divorced is that I didn't have the bread.”

“There's no need now, is there?”

“It was the best news I had all week. Grab a chair or, should I say, pillow and I'll get some coffee.”

Bea stepped into the still darker living room and halted in the doorway. The walls of the room were painted black, the window was draped, and the furniture consisted of pillow groupings around a low coffee table where a candle in a red globe flickered. “It's interesting decor,” she finally said.

“It's wild when you're turned on. Hey, you want a joint?”

“Not just now, thank you.”

They sat on pillows around the coffee table as Loyce served coffee in cracked cups. A heavy scent of incense filled the room.

“I know he's dead and all that—but this widow bit is something new for me. There ought to be something in it for me somewhere.”

“Sell your story.”

Loyce leaned toward Bea over the flickering candle. “That's you, huh? You dug it up about Willie and me, and you want the inside story of how it was.”

“Yes, I want information.” There was a whimpering sound in the far corner. Bea's eyes had adjusted to the dark room, and she could now make out a playpen shoved up against the wall. A white face peered over the top bar as small fingers clenched the pen railing. “Your baby's awake.”

“The kid's always awake.”

“How long did you live with Willie Shep?”

“Two rotten years. He gave me a story, you know. When we met, he told me what a big deal he was. I was a kid and didn't know any better. We met in this disco place over in Yorkville, and he told me he was a Wall Street broker. And, the sap I am, I believed him. You know what he really did? Can you imagine? He was a runner. You know, one of those guys that go all over town carrying stock certificates in little bags. Minimum wage he was getting, and even that didn't last long until he was canned.”

“Why did he get fired?”

Loyce shrugged. “Who knows? Why did he ever get fired?”

The baby began to whimper, while Loyce looked annoyed.

“What sort of people were his friends?”

“Ha! What friends? We never had no one over except a few of my old girl friends, and later even they stopped coming.”

“Did he read anything?”

“Sure. Lots.”

Bea leaned forward. “What?”

“Comic books. Bugs Bunny, Superman, stuff like that.” The baby's whimpering became louder until Loyce got to her feet and went to the kitchen. She returned with a piece of white bread that she flipped into the playpen. “So, what else? You want to know about our sex?”

“Do his parents live in the city?”

“Both dead. He was half raised in foster homes. That's another thing. I could tell you the lies he told me about his old man that would make you bust a gut.”

Bea Wentworth did not want to know any more about the short unhappy life of Willie Shep. The day's interviews had been sufficient, and she felt this avenue of investigation was now closed. Willie, by any report she had come across, did not read radical literature, did not indulge in long talks with fellow terrorists, had few if any friends, and had lived a life of utter failure.

Bea got to her feet and automatically held out her hand. “Thank you very much for your information.”

“Hey, what about paying me for my story?” The baby began a more incessant cry.

“Is your baby a boy?”

“The kid? A boy. Looks like his father,” she said impatiently.

Bea went to the playpen and reached forward with both arms. Round eyes stared up at her from an immobile face. She reached under the armpits of the child and lifted the surprisingly light weight to her chest. She made low cooing sounds as the baby's arm wound around her neck and a wet face sniffled against her breast.

She had held her own child like this years ago, and the memories of the tiny child's arms around her neck were—and then a bicycle and a car—and she and Lyon had never returned to the house on the Green again.

“Perhaps he needs a bottle,” Bea said as she stepped around the corner of the arch into the kitchen area.

The swaying naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling hovered over the child and he blinked as Bea looked at the thin body. “Oh, my God!” The damp diaper was the only clothing over the rail-thin body. Burns dappled the skin around the upper arms and down across the stomach of the child. A misshapen arm groped for Bea.

“Gimme' the kid!” Loyce snatched the child and returned him to the playpen.

“Those are burns.”

“When he cries it annoys my boyfriend.”

“His arm …?”

“Kids fall. What's it to you?” the blond said defensively.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“The kid's all right.”

Bea fumbled with the door latch and let herself out into the hallway as quickly as possible. She clattered down the marble steps with eyes brimmed with tears.

A shrill voice called after her. “What about my story money?”

The desk sergeant looked at her without expression.

“I said a case of child abuse.”

“Try the hot line.”

“How do I do that?”

He wrote a number on a small pad and handed it to her. “There's a pay phone down the hall.”

The voice who answered the emergency number at the Child Abuse Center was a replica of the sergeant's. Bea succinctly recounted the facts concerning the Shep child followed by the address and apartment number. “Will you get someone over there within the hour?”

“Lady, I'll be lucky to get someone out there within the month.”

“The baby's in danger.”

“Try the local precinct.”

“That's where I am now.”

“I'll put an urgent on it, but we've got budget problems, you know.”

“I know,” Bea said with resignation. “Do the best you can. Someone should get over there tonight.”

“Lady, that would take a personal order from the mayor.”

Bea hung up and leaned against the wall. The day's activities rushed over her in a wave of fatigue. She left the police station and gave her waiting cab the address of the Algonquin Hotel.

Within twenty minutes she had checked into the hotel and fallen across the bed. She thought she'd sleep for an hour or two, then order a sandwich from room service and place a call to Lyon. She closed her eyes.

The look on the child grasping her neck stood before her in a clarity more sharp than the light in the black apartment. She sat up and reached for the phone, dialed the long-distance line, and then a Connecticut exchange.

The voice that answered was slightly irritable, which seemed typical of the day. “Henry, this is Bea Wentworth. Let me speak to the governor.”

An extension was picked up almost immediately. “Beatrice! How are you, hon? I was thinking about you this afternoon during a conversation with Glasgow.”