Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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23

“You’re safe,” he told her.

“I am?”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“Look,” he said, “I didn’t save your life so that I could kill you myself. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

She looked at him, thought it over, nodded. She was older than he’d thought at first, well up in her thirties. A pretty woman, with dark hair that fell to her shoulders.

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “But you’re—”

“Yes.”

“And you’re here in New Orleans.”

“Just for today.”

“And then—”

“Then I’ll go somewhere else.” In the distance he heard the wail of a siren, but where it was headed and whether it was an ambulance or a police car was impossible to say. “We can’t just hang around here,” he said.

“No, of course not.”

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said, “and then I’ll get out of your life, and out of your city. I can’t tell you what to do, but if you could just forget you ever saw me—”

“That might be difficult. But I won’t say anything, if that’s what you mean.”

That was what he meant.

They left the park, walked along Camp Street. The siren – ambulance, police, whatever it was – had faded out somewhere in the distance. At length she broke the silence to ask where he would go next, and before he could think how to respond she said, “No, don’t tell me. I don’t even know why I asked.”

“I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to.”

“Why not? Oh, because you don’t know. I guess you have to wait until they tell you where to go next. You’re smiling, did I say something ridiculous?”

He shook his head. “I’m out here all by myself,” he said. “There’s nobody to tell me what to do next.”

“I thought you were part of a conspiracy.”

“The way a pawn’s part of a chess tournament.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, how could you? I’m not sure there’s anything to follow. Where’s your car parked?”

“In my garage,” she said. “I got restless, I went out for a walk. I live a few blocks over that way.”

“Oh.”

“And you don’t have to walk me home, really. I’ll be all right.” She laughed sharply, broke it off. “I was just about to say this is a safe neighborhood, and it is, really. You’re probably in a hurry to get… well, wherever it is you’re going.”

“I ought to be.”

“But you’re not?”

“No,” he said. It was true, he wasn’t in a hurry, and he wondered why. They fell silent, walked past another large two-story frame house with porches on both floors. A rocking chair, he thought, and a glass of iced tea, and someone to talk with.

Without planning to, he said, “Not that you’d have any reason to believe me, and not that it matters, but I didn’t kill that man in Iowa.”

She let his words hang there, and he wondered why he’d felt the need to say them. Then, softly, she said, “I believe you.”

“Why would you believe me?”

“I don’t know. Why did you just now fight that man and kill him and save my life? The police are looking for you everywhere. Why would you run such a risk?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself. From the standpoint of self-preservation, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. And I knew that, too, but that didn’t help. I just… reacted.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“So am I.”

“Are you?”

What he said, instead of answering her question, was, “Ever since the assassination in Des Moines, ever since I saw a picture of myself on CNN, I’ve been running. Driving around, sleeping in my car, sleeping in cheap motels, sleeping in movie theaters. The only person I ever really cared about is dead and the only possession I treasured is gone. All my life I’ve always figured things would work out and I’d get by, and for years they did, and I did, and it feels as though the string’s pretty much played out. Sooner or later I’ll slip up, or sooner or later they’ll get lucky, and they’ll catch up with me. And the only good thing about that is I’ll get to stop running.”

He drew a breath. “I didn’t mean to say all that,” he said. “I don’t know where it came from.”

“What difference does it make?” She stopped walking, turned to face him. “I said I believed you. That you didn’t do it.”

“And I think I said it didn’t matter. Not that you believe me, that does matter, though I don’t know why it should. But whether I did it or not, that doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does! If they framed an innocent man—”

“They framed me, all right. But it’s a hell of a stretch to call me innocent.”

“That man in the park just now. He wasn’t the first man you ever killed, was he?”

“No.”

She nodded. “You were awfully proficient at it,” she said. “It looked like something you might have done before.”

“I left New Orleans years ago. That’s unusual, most people who start out here never leave. The city gets a hold on a person.”

“I can understand that.”

“But I had to get out,” she said, “and I left. And then after Katrina, when half the city left, that’s when I came back. Trust me to get everything backwards.”

“What brought you back?”

“My father. He’s dying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So’s he. He didn’t want to go to a hospice. This is a man who wouldn’t let them evacuate him during the hurricane, and he said he’d be damned if he’d leave his house now. ‘I was born in this house, chère, and I shall damn well die in it.’ As a matter of fact he was born in a hospital, like most people, but I guess you’re allowed to exaggerate when you’re being eaten alive by cancer. And I tried to think what I had to do in my life that was more important than nursing him and letting him die at home, and I couldn’t think of a thing.”

“You’re not married.”

“Not anymore. You?”

He shook his head. “Never.”

“Mine lasted a year and a half. No children. All I had was a job and an apartment, and they were nothing I couldn’t walk away from. Now I do substitute teaching a couple of days a week, and hire a woman to tend to Daddy when I’m working. What I make doesn’t do much more than cover what I have to pay her, but it makes a change.”

Chère, he thought. Like the singer? Or was it short for Sharon or Sherry or Cheryl, something like that?

Like it mattered.

“That’s my house on the next block. With the azaleas and rhododendrons in front, so overgrown they’re hiding the downstairs porch. They ought to be trimmed, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“It looks nice. A little lush and untamed, but nice all the same.”

“The ground-floor sitting room’s got his bed in it, so he doesn’t have to bother with the stairs, and I made up a bed for myself in the den for the same reason. The whole second floor’s empty, and I can’t remember the last time anyone had occasion to go up there.”

“Just the two of you in that big house?”

“There’ll be three tonight,” she said, “and you’ll have the entire second floor all to yourself.”

He waited in the hallway while she saw to her father. “I’ve brought a man home, Daddy,” he heard her say.

“Well, aren’t you the little hellion.”

“Not like that,” she said. “You’re an old man with a dirty mind. This gentleman’s a friend of Pearl O’Byrne’s, he needs a place to stay. He’ll be upstairs, and if it works out he might rent that front room.”

“Just be more work for you, chère. Not saying the money won’t come in handy.”

He felt like an eavesdropper, and walked out of earshot. He was looking at a framed print of a horse jumping a fence when she emerged and led him to the kitchen.

She made a pot of coffee, and when it had dripped through she filled two large mugs and set them on the kitchen table, along with a sugar bowl and a little pitcher of cream. He said he preferred his coffee black, and she said so did she, and returned the cream to the refrigerator. They talked while they drank their coffee, and then she said he must be hungry and insisted on making him a sandwich.

Once, years ago, starved for a sounding board, he’d bought a stuffed animal, a little plush dog, and carried it around with him for a week or two just so he’d have someone to talk to. The dog had been a good listener, never interrupting, just taking everything in, but he’d been no better in the role than this woman was now. He talked until they’d finished the pot of coffee, and didn’t object when she made a second pot, and talked some more.

“I was wondering what was in the bag,” she said, when he’d told about wanting to change his appearance. He showed her the clippers and the packet of hair dye. The clippers would probably work okay, she said, although it would be hard for a person to use them on his own head. As for the hair dye, she thought he’d be taking an awful chance. It might work to turn gray or white hair the promised shade of light brown, but apply it to hair as dark as his own and you might wind up with something more in the tangerine family.

And you couldn’t really dye dark hair gray, she told him. What you could do, say for a costume ball or a theatrical role, was spray what was essentially a gray paint onto your hair. It would wash out, though, so you would have to renew it after every shampoo, or even after getting caught in the rain, and a wig would be simpler and more effective.

He said he’d thought about a wig, and ruled it out, and she agreed, saying you could always spot a man wearing a hairpiece. But could you? If it fooled you, you’d never know you’d been fooled.

“I dye my hair,” she said suddenly. “Could you tell?”

“Are you serious?”

She nodded. “I started six, seven years ago, when the first gray hairs showed up. All the women in my family go gray early, they have this magnificent silver hair and everyone says how they look like queens. I said the hell with that, and I went looking for Miss Clairol. I’ve never let it grow out, so I don’t know how gray I’d be by now if I did, and with luck I’ll never find out. You really can’t tell?”

“No,” he said, “and I’m still having trouble believing you.”

She fluffed her hair. “Well, I just touched it up last week, so it shouldn’t show, but if you look closely maybe you can see the roots.”

She leaned toward him, and he looked down into her hair. Was there some gray showing at the roots? He couldn’t really tell, it was hard to put the image into focus at that range, but what he did notice was the smell of her hair, all fresh and clean.

She straightened up, and her face looked a little flushed. All that coffee, he thought. She said, “You want to keep from being recognized, right? I have some ideas. Let me think about it, and tomorrow we’ll see what we can do.”

“All right.”

“Do you want any more coffee? Because I’ve already had more than I should.”

“I feel the same way.”

“I’ll show you to your room,” she said. “It’s a nice room. I think you’ll like it.”

24

In the morning he showered in the upstairs bathroom, then put on the same clothes and went downstairs. She had breakfast on the table, grapefruit halves and French toast with syrup, and after a second cup of coffee she got her Ford Taurus out of the garage and gave him a ride to where he’d parked the Sentra. There was a ticket on it, as she’d said there might be, but what would they do if it went unpaid? Send a summons to a broken-down farm in eastern Tennessee?

He followed her back home, and parked in her garage as instructed, while she left the Taurus in the driveway. “You’re going to stay here for a while,” she’d told him over breakfast, and he said he bet she was good at getting little kids to mind what she said. She said if she was being bossy that was just too bad. “I didn’t object when you saved my life,” she said. “So don’t give me grief when I return the favor, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s better,” she said. “It sounds funny, though. ‘Yes, ma’am.’”

“Whatever you say, chère. That better?”

“Now when did you turn into an Orleanean?”

“Huh?”

“Calling me chère.”

“That’s your name, isn’t it? It’s not? It’s what your father calls you.”

“It’s what everybody calls everybody,” she said. “In New Orleans. It’s French for dear. You order a po’boy for lunch, the old girl who brings it is apt to call you chère.”

“The waitress in the place I go in New York calls everybody hon.”

“Same idea,” she said.

But she didn’t say what her name was. Nor did he ask.

He sat at the round kitchen table in one of the oak captain’s chairs while she played barber. His shirt was off and she’d draped a bed-sheet over his shoulders. She was wearing faded jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and she looked a little like Rosie the Riveter in a patriotic World War II poster, only her rivet gun was the electric clippers from Walgreen’s.

Back in New York, Keller had gone to the same barber for almost fifteen years. The man’s name was Andy and he owned his own three-chair barbershop, and once a year he flew back to São Paulo to visit his relatives. That was all Keller knew about him, along with the fact that he was a heavy user of breath mints, and he didn’t suppose Andy knew very much about him, either, because his monthly visits were relatively silent affairs, and Keller almost always fell asleep in the chair and didn’t wake up until Andy cleared his throat and tapped the arm of the chair.

He didn’t expect to doze off now, but the next thing he knew she was telling him he could open his eyes. He did, and she steered him down the hall to the bathroom, where he looked long and hard at his reflection in the mirror. The face that gazed back at him was his face, that much was evident, but it looked very different from anything he’d ever seen in a mirror before.

His hair had been shaggy and now it was short, but not crew-cut short. It was just long enough to lie flat, and she’d shaped it in what had once been called an Ivy League style, or a Princeton. Add a tweed sport coat and a knit tie and a pipe and he might look almost professorial.

But she hadn’t just cut his hair, he realized. His forehead was higher, and his hairline indented at the temples. She’d used the clippers to create the illusion of a decade’s worth of male-pattern baldness, and added a good ten years to his appearance in the process. He tried different expressions, smiling and frowning, even glaring, and the effect was interesting. It seemed to him that he looked a good deal less dangerous, less like a man who could assassinate a governor and more like the trusted assistant who wrote his speeches.

He went back to the kitchen, where she was running a vacuum cleaner. She switched it off when she saw him and he told her he felt like Rip Van Winkle. “When I woke up,” he said, “I was ten years older. I looked like somebody’s lovable old uncle.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d like it. I have some ideas about the color, too, but what I’d like to do is wait a day or two so both of us can get used to it the way it is now, and then it’ll be easier to figure out what else to do.”

“That makes sense. But—”

“But it means staying here, is that what you were going to say? Last night you talked about how tired you were of running.”

“That’s true.”

“Don’t you think maybe it’s time to stop running, now that you’ve finally got a good chance? Your car’s parked off the street. No one can see it, but it’s there whenever you need it. You can have the room upstairs for as long as you want. No one else has any use for it and you’re not getting in anybody’s way up there. It’s no trouble at all cooking for one extra person, and if you start to feel guilty about imposing I’ll let you take me out for dinner every once in a while. I bet I know a restaurant or two you might like.”

“I could get new ID,” he said. “A driver’s license, even a passport. It’s trickier than it used to be, they’ve tightened up security in the past few years, but you can still do it. It takes time, though.”

“What exactly have y’all got,” she said, “besides time?”

She cleaned out the dresser and closet in his bedroom, filling two Hefty bags with clothes she swore no one had worn in twenty years. “All of this should have gone to the Goodwill ages ago,” she said. “You’ll have enough room for your things, won’t you?”

His things, everything he owned in the world, filled a small suitcase and a shopping bag. He had almost enough room to give every garment its own dresser drawer.

Later, she had to go out, and wondered if he could stay downstairs where he could hear her father if he called out. “He sleeps most of the time,” she said, “and when he’s awake he doesn’t do much but talk back to the television set. He can get to the bathroom by himself, and he doesn’t like to be helped, but if he should fall down—”

He sat in the kitchen and read the paper, and when he’d finished it he went upstairs for a book in the hall bookcase that had caught his eye earlier. It was a Loren Estleman western, about an itinerant hangman, and he sat in the kitchen reading it and drinking coffee until the old man called out.

He went in and found the man sitting up in bed, his pajama top unbuttoned, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers of his right hand. You could see the illness in his face. Keller wondered what kind of cancer the man had, and if it was smoking-related, and if he should be smoking now. Then he asked himself what difference it could possibly make at this stage.

“It’s liver cancer,” the man said, reading his mind. “Smoking’s got nothing to do with it. Well, next to nothing. You believe doctors, smoking’s to blame for every damn thing. Acid rain, global warming, you name it. My daughter around?”

“She stepped out.”

“Stepped out? You got a nice way of putting things. Not teaching her brats, is she? She usually gets this colored girl to look after me when she does.”

“I think she had some shopping to do.”

“Step over this way so I can get a better look at you. Man gets old and sick, he gets to order people around. I call that inadequate compensation, myself. You think much about dying?”

“Sometimes.”

“A man your age? I swear I never once gave it a moment’s thought, and now here I am doing it. I’ll say this, I don’t think much of it. You sleeping with her?”

“Sir?”

“Can’t be the hardest question anybody ever asked you. My daughter. Are you sleeping with her?”

“No.”

“You’re not? Y’all aren’t queer, are you?”

“No.”

“You don’t look it, but in my experience you can’t always tell. There’s people who swear they can, but I don’t believe them. You like it here?”

“It’s a beautiful city.”

“Well, it’s New Orleans, isn’t it? We get used to it, you see. I meant this house. You like it?”

“It’s very comfortable.”

“You be staying with us for a while?”

“I believe so,” he said. “Yes, I think I will.”

“I’m tired. I think I’ll get some sleep.”

“I’ll let you be.”

He was on his way out the door when the old man’s voice stopped him in midstep.

“You get the chance,” he said, “you sleep with her. Or one day you’ll be too old to do it anymore. And what you’ll do is hate yourself for every chance you let get away from you.”

The following day they were at an optometrist’s shop on Rampart Street. She’d vetoed his plan to get reading glasses, insisting they wouldn’t look right, and when he said he didn’t need regular glasses, she told him he’d be surprised. “And if your vision is almost perfect,” she said, “he’ll give you lenses with almost no correction.”

It turned out that he needed one prescription for distance and another for reading. “Two birds with one stone,” the optometrist said. “In other words, bifocals.”

Jesus, bifocals. He tried on frames, and the one he liked was of heavy black plastic. She looked at him, laughed, said something about Buddy Holly, and steered him to a less assertive metal frame, with rounded rectangular lens openings. He tried it on, and had to admit she was right.

There were shops where they made your glasses in an hour, but this wasn’t one of them. “About this time tomorrow,” the fellow said, and they stopped at Café du Monde for café au lait and beignets, and paused on their way through Jackson Square to watch a woman feeding the pigeons as if her life depended on it.

She said, “Did you see the paper? The DNA test came back. He was definitely the man who raped and killed that nurse in Audubon Park.”

“No surprise there.”

“No, but wait’ll you hear what they think happened. You know how the live oaks will have branches that come almost to the ground?”

“They’re the only tree I know that’s like that.”

“Well, see, it makes them real easy to climb. And that’s what they believe he did, climbed up into one of the trees to wait for a victim to pass by.”

“I think I can see where this is going.”

“And then, because he had a something-point-something blood alcohol level, he lost his balance and fell, and he landed on his head and broke his neck and died.”

“The world is a dangerous place.”

“But a little less so,” she said, “now that he’s not in it anymore.”

Her name was Julia Emilie Roussard. She’d written it on the fly-leaf of one of the books he picked up.

It took him two days to use it. For all the conversations they had, there was somehow never an occasion where he could fit her name into one of his sentences.

He took her out to lunch after they picked up his eyeglasses (with a complimentary leather case bearing the optometrist’s name and address, and an impregnated strip of cloth for cleaning the lenses). On the way home she reminded him that he’d talked about two losses, his best friend and his most prized possession. Who was the friend, she wondered, and what was the possession?

He answered the second part first. His stamp collection, gone when he got into his apartment.

“You’re a stamp collector? Seriously?”

“Well, it was a hobby, but I was pretty serious about it. I gave it a lot of my time, and put quite a bit of money into it.” He told her a little about his collection, and how the childhood hobby had drawn him back in as an adult.

“And the friend?”

“It was a woman,” he said.

“Your wife? No, you said you’ve never been married.”

“Not a wife, not a girlfriend. It was never physical, it wasn’t that kind of a relationship. I suppose you could say she was a business associate, but we were very close.”

“When you say business associate…”

He nodded. “She was killed by the same people who set me up. They tried to make it look as though she’d burned herself up in a fire, but they didn’t try too hard. They set a fire any rookie investigator would spot right away as arson, and they left her with two bullets in her head.” He shrugged. “They probably didn’t care what the cops called it. It’s not like anybody could do anything about it.”

“Do you miss her?”

“All the time. That’s probably the reason I talk so much. I wouldn’t ordinarily, not on such short acquaintance. There’s two reasons, actually, and one is that you’re very easy to talk to, but the other is that I’m used to talking to Dot, and she’s gone.”

“That was her name? Dot?”

“Dorothea, actually. I always thought it was Dorothy, and either I got it wrong or the papers did, because Dorothea was the way it appeared in the press coverage of the fire. But all anyone ever called her was Dot.”

“I never had a nickname.”

“People always call you Julia?” There!

“Except for the kids, who have to call me Miss Roussard. That’s the first time you’ve ever used my name, do you realize that?”

“You never told me what it was.”

“I didn’t?”

“I figured there’d be papers in the house, but I didn’t want to snoop around. You’d tell me when you wanted to.”

“I thought you knew. I just took it for granted we had that conversation. You saved my life and I got to watch you break a man’s neck and then you walked me home and we drank coffee in the kitchen. How could you not know my name?”

“I opened a book,” he said, “and there it was. Oh, for God’s sake.”

“What?”

“Well, how did I even know it was you? Maybe you bought the book secondhand, or maybe it came down in the family.”

“No, it’s me.”

“Julia Emilie Roussard.”

“Oui, monsieur. C’est moi.”

“French?”

“On my daddy’s side, Irish on my mama’s. I told you she died young, didn’t I?”

“You told me she went gray early.”

“And died early, too. Thirty-six years old, and she left the table one night and went straight to bed because she felt a little feverish, and the next morning she was dead.”

“My God.”

“Viral meningitis. She was healthy one day and dead the next, and I don’t think my daddy ever did understand what happened to him. To her of course, but also to him. And to me, and I was eleven at the time.” She looked at him. “I’m thirty-eight now. I’m two years older than she was when she died.”

“And you don’t have a single gray hair, either.”

She laughed, delighted. He said he was several years older than that, and she told him he looked it. “With your new haircut,” she said. “I think what we’ll do is bleach it, and then dye it a nice medium brown. If you’re not happy with the way it turns out, we can always dye it back to the way it is now.”

But it turned out fine. Mousy brown, Julia called it, and said that women supplied by nature with hair that color were often moved to do something about it. “Because it’s kind of blah, you know? It doesn’t attract attention.”

Perfect.

If her father even noticed the difference, he didn’t see fit to comment on it. Keller, checking the mirror, decided the lighter color went with the professorial effect, which the bifocals had reinforced big-time. The glasses, now that he was getting used to them, were a revelation. He hadn’t exactly needed them, he’d been getting along fine without them, but there was no question they improved his distance vision. Out walking on St. Charles Avenue, he could make out street signs he’d have squinted at previously.

He went for that walk on a day when Julia was teaching, and a plump brown dumpling of a woman named Lucille came to see to Mr. Roussard. When Julia got home he was waiting for her on the front stoop. “It’s all arranged,” he said. “Lucille’s agreed to stay late, so let’s you and I go to an early movie and a nice dinner.”

The movie was a romantic comedy, with Hugh Grant in the Cary Grant role. Dinner was in the French Quarter, served in a high-ceilinged room by waiters who looked almost old enough to be playing Dixieland jazz at Preservation Hall. Keller ordered a bottle of wine with dinner, and they each had a glass and agreed it was very nice, but they left the rest of the bottle unfinished.

They’d taken her car, and when it came time to drive home she handed him her keys. It was a mild night, and the air had a tropical feel to it. Sultry, he thought. That was the word for it.

Neither of them spoke on the way home. Lucille lived nearby, and wouldn’t accept a ride, and just shook her head when Keller offered to walk her home.

He waited in the kitchen while Julia checked on her father. He couldn’t sit still and walked around, opening doors, peering into cupboards. Everything’s close to perfect, he thought, and now you’re about to screw it up.

It seemed to him that she was taking forever, but then she came up behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. “All these sets of dishes,” she said. “Things accumulate when a family lives in the same place forever. There’ll be some yard sale here one of these days.”

“It’s nice, living in a place with a history.”

“I suppose.”

He turned toward her and smelled her perfume. She hadn’t been wearing scent earlier.

He drew her close, kissed her.