The Lime Pit (11 page)

Time to go home, Harry, I told myself. Time to take
accounts and plan tomorrow's fun. A meeting with the Jellicoes would
be in order. But a nice pressureless one. A gab session, with Harry
the Venal Detective speaking lightly of old men clients and young
missing girls and the very off-chance of some sort of unexpected
trouble cropping up. Some photos maybe. Not that it all couldn't be
smoothed over with a few dollars and a bit of cooperation. I couldn't
risk much more than a veiled threat. After what Coral had said, even
that might be too much. But it had to be done sooner or later. I
decided that I'd need the photos anyway, even if I didn't flash them
at Lance and Laurie. And since I'd exhausted my supply, that meant
another stop at the bus depot.

I turned off the expressway at Front Street and slid
down through the concrete ramping onto Columbia Parkway and
immediately nosed back up again, like a shallow-diving seal, and
broke back into the night at the Vine Street overpass. Behind me,
Riverfront Stadium glowed like a squat Japanese lantern. I turned
north in front of it and headed up into the dense wall of red brick
buildings that is the beginning of the city. Along Fountain Square
the street lamps popped on--that dried-out shade of green that's
almost white. And the store lights and office lights began to burnish
the darkening sky. I turned east at Fifth and drove back down through
Government Square to the bus terminal where I had seen Hugo off ages
before.

I was lucky enough to find a parking place on Elm.
Lucky because it was a Saturday night in July and most folks
preferred to spend it in a bar or a theater rather than at home in
front of the T.V. The sidewalks were crowded with ladies in their
pastels and their gentlemen in lightweight suits of beige and
sky-blue. I felt like a toad, hopping among them in my day-old shirt
and slacks and in my twill seersucker sports coat that looked as if
it had been scored by a truck tire. But, hell--I was too tired to
care. Except, maybe, for the ladies. I liked the ladies. I liked the
way they moved under their gauzy dresses. I liked the look of their
shoulders in the night. And of their legs as their arms brushed
against the flowing skirts. And of their dark eyes shot with white
street light or with the warm golden light of the storefronts. God
almighty! I said to myself, it has been awhile.

The bus station was what I really needed. I needed to
be jarred by the candle-power of those countless lights, so many and
from so many different angles that I don't think a giant could have
cast a shadow in the Greyhound Bus Station. And I guess I needed
another look at those merry souls waiting on the benches. Needed to
hear once again the tap dance of my feet and the rasp of the
loudspeaker--if it was a loudspeaker and not just a man who sounded
like a loudspeaker. What I needed most of all was the pimply teenage
boy who swished by me as I was getting the shoe box out of the locker
and, propping one arm coyly against the repository, gazed down at me
and pointed his foot like a dancer priming for a grand jete.

"Hi," he said sweetly.

I shook my head. "Sorry, Bruce. You're pitching
in the wrong league."

"I catch, too," he said cheerfully and
danced away.

I felt like Hugo Cratz when I got back to my feet.
Which reminded me--where the hell was Hugo Cratz? I tucked the shoe
box under my arm and went looking for a pay phone. I found one next
to a pinball arcade near the Elm Street exit. But it was one of those
half-ass, exposed stands, without doors or seat or light. I've always
felt that using one of those things was like buying a matching vest
without the suit; except for emergencies, they're useless and about
as private as a ghetto party-line.

I skulked back into the night and tried to watch the
pavement and not to think about the laughter and the perfume and the
bright-eyed ladies who were everywhere around me. Look at it this
way, Harry, I told myself, sure they look good to you now. And,
maybe, once you get past the gauze, they'd look better still. Brown
where the sun has touched them and white and furry where it
hasn't.... That line of argument was getting me nowhere. I started
thinking about Jo Riley, about the way she looked when she dropped
one knee on my bed and stretched the other out behind her in a svelte
white line. I thought about the way her hair gathered on her
shoulders and about the way her breasts swayed slightly as she
breathed. Where the sun had tanned them they looked as if they began
slightly lower on her chest than they really did, and their pink
nipples seemed off centered, set where the flesh became full and
rounded and flowed beneath them in a milk-white curve. She would
probably be off around twelve. And I hadn't eaten. And, hell,
everybody sweats when it's hot.

When I got to the Pinto, I headed due north, to
Ludlow and the gray cube of the Busy Bee.

Once I'd gotten the fun part out of my system, I
remembered the other half of that argument I'd been having with
myself down by the bus depot. For there was no mistaking that she was
another person, sleeping next to me. Small beneath the sheet,
formulating and reformulating the marvelous topography of a woman's
body as she turned from her dreams and sighed an easy, peaceful sigh,
she was Jo. Jo of the coal-black hair and soft, heart-shaped,
Mediterranean face. With all of Jo's wit, and Jo's powerful laugh,
and Jo's driving independence. Jo, who could be as sweet as marzipan,
and Jo who could be as hard and unyielding as . . . as Jo. But, by
God, it had been worth it. Tickling up the stairs of the old Delores
at two in the morning, drunk and acting drunk and festive-sly, like
gate-crashers at a fabulous feast. Leaning on each other--the college
kids. Pulling away with barks of laughter--the knowing adults. Coming
in the door and staring silently, familiarly at the room and at each
other. Feeling a bit of fear, then, when it was just Jo and Harry and
no one else. And when both Jo and Harry knew full well that what was
going to happen was a beginning of something that had to end in a vow
or a broken promise. Thank God, the appetites are faster and shrewder
than the mind, or else there wouldn't have been Jo and Harry naked
and famished for each other. And a great deal of tender and
passionate embrace.

After the lovemaking, I'd sat back against the
headboard, arms behind my head, and wondered why on earth I had once
thought this would never work. Then, late in the evening, when the
air was cooled by a sudden breeze that flushed through the apartment,
I remembered why. I remembered that core of reserve, that sudden
toughness that would change her into a stranger in a place that I
shared no part of. Remembered the admiration I'd felt for that
tough-minded independence. And the guilty sense of relief, because
that reserve was like an assurance that things could only go so far
and no farther, that there would always be that piece of her I
couldn't share. A buffer zone. A moat. How good it had made me feel
until, one afternoon, I'd discovered that what she kept there, behind
the moat, was her heart.

It was the detective that did me in. Rummaging,
exploring, running hands and eyes over a drawerful of her
things--Jewelry, make-up, a heart-shaped watch on a golden chain, a
Japanese fan, some silk underwear, and, in the back, buried beneath
the panties, the hard corner of a photograph set in a cardboard
frame. I flicked it with my finger, teased it with my eye. And,
finally, I pulled it out. It was a wedding picture of a very young Jo
and of a tow-headed Marine corporal with his cap buttoned on his
shoulder and a loose grin on his face. She caught me with it in my
hand.

She walked over to the dresser and pulled the
photograph away and tucked it back in with the underwear. "Why
didn't you tell me?" I asked her.

"I suppose because I didn't want you to know."

"It doesn't make a difference."

"It does to me," she said, closing the
drawer. "We're still married."

And then I got what I'd angled for, told patiently,
unblushingly, by this strong, black-haired woman with the bridge-club
spectacles and the pretty, heart-shaped face. He was an M.I.A., her
corporal husband, whom she hadn't seen in five years and whom she
still loved enough to cry over with regret.

When she was done, I wandered off into the living
room and fumed at myself and called myself a dictionary full of dirty
names. And, in a few minutes, she came in, too, and curled up beside
me and said, "Now, you know," in her husky voice. "Can't
love anybody else. Not for awhile. Maybe not ever. Not until I've
gotten over him. You're the closest I've come, though. Real close.
Only when I think I'm almost there with you, it's not you I'm
thinking of. And that scares me."

A few weeks later we'd told each other goodbye. Both
of us, I think, feeling relieved that we wouldn't have to carry the
affair any further, that that moat wouldn't have to be crossed and
the keep inside taken by storm. Or not taken.

But, that hot July night, with Jo sleeping beside me
again after three years of absence, I suddenly felt infinitely more
valorous. Maybe it was the box of photographs sitting on the living
room coffee table. Or the thought of the totally loveless and carnal
act they pictured. Or the memory of the Jellicoes. Because those are
the folks that never cross moats and carry castles, Harry, I thought.
They're the sick by-products of a selfish and unromantic age. And you
can either line yourself up on their side and pretend indignance. Or
you can try to love the woman lying beside you and take the risk of
being hurt.

But not of being hurt like
Cindy Ann was hurt. Not brutalized like a thing. I tried to picture
that sixteen-year-old girl-child in a hiked-up skirt with white
plastic boots on her legs and a pound of pancake and mascara on her
face, hooking the tough bar rail of the Golden Deer. It was just
possible. Perhaps the Jellicoes had given up on her. Or, perhaps, she
was only acting as bait. Or, maybe, Red Bannion had an old man's eyes
and sixty years of guilty conscience and a desperate urge to make a
few amends. The morality of an old hoodlum is like a Baptist's
87notion of charity-a kind of fervent embarrassment. I touched Jo on
the shoulder and she rolled into my arms. That was best. By far. And
I fell asleep, holding her and that thought in my arms.

***

The telephone woke me at eight the next morning--far
earlier than I'd wanted to be awakened. I tried to ignore it until Jo
mumbled something about not waking her, too. So I stumbled out of
bed, stark naked, and padded into the living room. It must have been
close to ninety in the goddamn room, and it was too early to start
the day, and I heartily wished that whoever was calling me was in
hell. I got to the phone on the tenth ring and yelled, "What!"
into the receiver.

"Is this Harold ... Stoner?" a
high-pitched, uncertain voice inquired.

I sat down on the desk chair, wiped the sweat from my
face, and laughed out loud.

"Harry?"

"Yes . . . Hugo," I said. "It's me."

"Good," he said. " 'Cause for a minute
there I thought I'd dialed the wrong number. I left my specs back at
the apartment and the print in these here phonebooks is so damn
small-"

"What time is it, Hugo?"

"Why, it's eight. Or thereabouts."

"Eight in the morning?"

"Sure."

I blew a little steam out of my mouth and said,
"How's Dayton?"

"It stinks,"
Hugo said dully. "Just like I thought it would. Them snot-nosed
brats of Ralph's was up in my room every damn minute. Couldn't sleep
a wink last night. That's why I called you."

***

I guess you pay, one way or another, for what you do.
Ralph's kids wake Hugo, Hugo wakes me. At least he was in Dayton and
out of harm's way. "You'll manage," I said to him.

"Hell, yes, I'll manage. That's easy for you to
say. I'm a sick man, Harry. Last night, that youngest one kicked me
so hard in the spine, I thought I'd dropped a kidney. I won't last up
here," he said tragically. "No, sir, I'm a dead man. You're
talking to a dead man, Harry Stoner. And you're the one that sent him
to his grave."

"C'mon, Hugo. You'll make it."

"I will, will I?" He took a breath and
chuckled. "Maybe I will. But there's some others that may not.
When you going to let me come back?"

"A couple of days, maybe," I said, thinking
about what Red Bannion had told me. "It depends on how things
go."

"You talk to them Jellicoes, yet?"

"No. I spent yesterday trying to find out what
they had Cindy Ann doing."

"Did you find out?"

I hesitated for a minute before telling him and
decided that he was tough enough to hear the truth. Without it, he'd
be impossible to handle. And he was going to have to hear it, anyway,
sooner or later. "They may have her working as a prostitute in
Newport."

"Oh, God," he said faintly.

"Easy, Hugo. If she is working as a hooker, I
have friends who can spot her and get her back to us. I'll know
tonight for sure."

"You'll call me?"

"Yes."

"She ain't ... they ain't abusing her, are they?
I mean like in them pictures?"

"I don't think so," I said.