The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 4

  Ginny clenched her fists and stood before the dozen red roses and trembled in anger. Even Mrs. Lister, who had thought she had seen Ginny at her angriest, was frightened and moved several feet away, afraid that she might explode.

  Ginny inhaled deeply and managed to calm herself.

  She picked up the card again. She even sniffed at the flowers to prove she was once more in control.

  “Secret, huh? What secret?”

  She called the florist and wheedled out of him Maria’s new address and phone number.

  “Tell him the rest,” said Mrs. Lister. “Come on, Ginny, tell him the rest. You’re leaving out the best part of it.”

  “There was no more,” said Ginny, laughing. “That’s all there was to it. I still haven’t found out what the secret was.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Ginny. Tell him what you did then.”

  “Don’t hold out on old Bomba,” said Beef, really enjoying himself at last.

  “It was nothing. I’m surprised at you, Mrs. Lister,” she said, giggling like a girl.

  Mrs. Lister said, “She snapped at me, ‘Get out on the balcony and see if anyone’s around.’ I went out and there was no one on the balcony or in the court below. Ginny took the flowers out of the box, these dozen lovely red roses, the long ones, smelled so nice, and she took them out to the balcony and she...she...”

  Mrs. Lister was giggling now too, along with Ginny, covering her mouth with her hands. Even Beef began to laugh, with a mouth full of sandwich. He tried to remember the last time he had honestly laughed aloud, but he could not.

  “She peed on them!” yelled Mrs. Lister finally, and the two women laughed the salami right out of Beef’s mouth. He covered his mouth and signaled them to stop before he sprayed the walls.

  “All Mrs. Lister could say was, ‘Oh, my. Oh, my.’ Until I got my broom and swept it all over the side of the balcony. Remember, Mrs. Lister, ‘Oh, my. Oh, my.’”

  They laughed again. Beef was choking and slapping the table with his palms. Ginny hit him on the back repeatedly until she dislodged the food in his throat. “Sometimes I don’t know why I do the things I do,” she laughed.

  “She got a can of deodorizer,” said Mrs. Lister, “and sprayed the whole balcony! Oh my...oh, my.”

  Beef singled out the moment and said to himself, look at me, I’m laughing. See, I am happy. Impulsively, Ginny threw her arms around him from behind and kissed his cheek.

  FOUR

  Beef Buddusky’s sympathies were divided. He too had had in-law problems and was convinced that he and his wife would be together today except for her meddling mother, who had always wanted her daughter to marry a GI and get an allotment. On the other hand, this lady gave him a pair of underpants and was feeding him well and probably wouldn’t let him go away empty-handed. His loyalties were cheaply bought, consistent with hand-to-mouth living.

  “What I’d do,” he volunteered, “is get old Gordie interested in another broad, or maybe get her interested in another guy.” He smiled. “I just happen to be available.”

  “You married, Bomba?” she asked.

  “I’m divorced, about as divorced as you can get,” he said.

  “Think you’re apt to take the plunge again?”

  “Not hardly, dear missus. I ain’t cut out for it. Footloose and fancy-free, that’s me.”

  “Don’t shut the door, Bomba. I’ve been married...well, let’s say more than once. You’d get married again if the deal was right, wouldn’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “If it was a good proposition.”

  “When’s it ever a good proposition?” asked Beef.

  “Well, try this one on for size. Fifty thousand dollars.”

  He had a standard against which to measure it, his lost $6500. Damn, no one could honkytonk away $50,000.

  “What’s the story with those fifty thousand, missus?” he asked, knowing there was no way for a window washer sent by the Salvation Army to be worth $50,000 to anyone. But Beef was a man who held on to a few fantasies. After all, he did have $6500 once, which proved that a fantasy can come true.

  “Well, I have this lady friend whose husband passed on, and in his will he said the couldn’t receive his money, maybe half a million dollars, unless she got married again. Her husband was a funny guy, didn’t want his wife running around after his death. All you would have to do is marry this woman and she’ll give you fifty thousand dollars. After she gets her inheritance you get an annulment and stroll away with your big bag full of money. Nothing wrong with that, huh?”

  Beef would marry and be a devoted husband to a one-legged orangutan for fifty grand, but he knew that no woman with that much jack has to go shopping at the thrift shop for a husband. Still, he had his fantasies.

  “I’d be pleased to meet this lady friend of yours and like talk it over.”

  “That can certainly be arranged. She’s an older woman, Bomba. Would that make a difference to you?”

  “No, missus, I sure don’t think it would.”

  “Who knows, you may be a rich man before this is all over.”

  Before what is all over? This strange day?

  They did not discuss the proposition further, but Ginny continued to talk through the afternoon about her fears for her wayward son. She certainly had no objection to his knowing a girl, she told them. One would expect a boy of his age to know several girls, perhaps well enough to take one to a movie even. But romantic involvement was dangerous. It was dangerous to his career, to his studies, to his finances, to his...health? To his mother, to be sure, because the very first thing to be discussed would be, “What are we going to do with your mother after we’re married? I won’t have her poking around my china or bunching up my doilies.” And after some research Gordon would approach her with, “Ginny Mom, I’ve found the most wonderful little home in Boulder called Leisure Life, where you’ll meet lots of people your own age and have worlds of organized recreation. You’ll love it there, Mommy, and the princess and I will drive up every Sunday and take you out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. Won’t that be keen!” No, acquaintances are fine, but loves are out of the question. There will be plenty of time for love and marriage, later.

  Beef stretched out on the floor and shut his eyes.

  “You listening, Bomba?”

  “Yes, ma’am, just resting my eyes.”

  She talked on of her son’s involvement with the psychiatric social worker. Beef rested, almost euphoric. He pressed his palms against the thick pile carpeting. Having had a big meal, he was in the best of all places to be: flat out on the living room floor. He had done this, just so, every Sunday afternoon of his youth. How it all came back to him! He loosened the laces of his brogues and pushed them off with his toes.

  He let her ramble on, catnapping, awakening to say, “Is that right? Yeah?” and falling off again to soft and easy darkness.

  He awoke with a start when he heard the door next to him open and felt the air rush in from outside. A cop stepped into the room. Panic immobilized Beef. What if the talk about lye on dead bodies and acid in the face...? What had he got himself into?

  The cop closed the door behind him and took off his cap. A newspaper was folded under his arm. He looked down at Beef and his face took on a pained, frustrated expression. Mrs. Lister turned her head and looked away from him, afraid of his presence. He stepped around Beef’s inert form and kissed Ginny on the cheek.

  “Hi, lover,” said Ginny.

  Beef began to feel his body come back to life.

  “Hello, Mother,” said the cop. “Who the hell is this?”

  Beef took a deep, comforting breath. Apart from the uniform, Gordon’s appearance surprised him. He had in mind something more to his idea of a mama’s boy, a little guy with thick glasses and curly black hair, and pudgy fingers. Gordon was tall, nearly six feet. His complexion was fair and he wore his blond hair in a crew cut, still not out of fashion with cops, Mormons, and gym teachers. He reminded Beef of many of the fraterni
ty men he used to see dashing about the Ohio State campus on endless important errands. Would such a man stay subject to a mother’s wishes? Above all, a policeman?

  “This is Bomba the Jungle Boy,” said Ginny. “He’s been washing our windows.”

  Gordon did not bother to inspect his work. “Did you pay him?”

  “Give him five dollars, will you, honey? He’s been such grand company for poor Mrs. Lister and me, cooped up here all day.”

  Gordon handed down to Beef a five-dollar bill, which he accepted as a windfall he could credit to the law of averages. His stretch of poor luck had been overlong. He got up off the floor and put the bill in his pocket “Thanks, guy,” he said. Something seemed so odd about taking money from a cop.

  “So long, Bomba,” said Gordon, as if to say the sooner the better.

  “Oh, sit down and stay for dinner.”

  “Mother!”

  “Don’t be such a snob, Gordie. Everyone has to eat.”

  “Has she mentioned the fifty thousand dollars yet?” Gordon asked Beef.

  “Now, Gordon, you zipper your lip.”

  So John Law’s in on the proposition too, Beef said to himself.

  “The abuse I take from this boy,” said Ginny to Beef. “Any other mother wouldn’t put up with it. But what am I going to do, I love the lousy guy.”

  Gordon smiled wryly; Beef laughed cautiously. The cop took off his holster and hung it in the hall closet with his cap. Beef saw the tool of his trade swing to stillness before the door was shut on it.

  “I’m going to shower and change before dinner,” said Gordon.

  “Do you have a class tonight?”

  “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Mom.”

  “Wonderful! We can all have an evening together at home.”

  “I thought I might go over to the range and get some shooting in.”

  “Surely,” said Ginny coolly, turning away from him and going to the kitchen.

  “Okay, what’s bugging you, Mom?”

  “Mrs. Lister, Gordie won’t be with us tonight. He has something he’d rather do.”

  Mrs. Lister nodded. Granted, if permission were hers to grant.

  “Well now, Mother, it’s not as if you’d be left alone. You always have Mrs. Lister, and now you have...” Gordon waved a hand in Beef’s direction.

  “Look,” said Beef. “You folks do what you want. Don’t pay no attention to me.”

  “I haven’t said a word,” said Ginny to her son. “You’ve been out every night this week and you must have noticed that I haven’t said a word.”

  “Yes, Mother, I have noticed,” he said on his way to the bedroom. “I mean, how could I not notice?” He went into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

  “You see, Bomba?” said Ginny. “You see!”

  “Well, missus,” said Beef, scratching his jaw, “I’m not really sure that I do.”

  They soon sat down to dinner, which began with a glass of prune juice. Beef downed his in one gulp, with no regrets. Mrs. Lister took her glass in both hands and brought it to her lips like a prize. Gordon would not touch it.

  “You saw the way Bomba drank his,” said Ginny. “You don’t suppose he got that big being finicky, do you?”

  “Cut it out,” said Gordon.

  “Was it so awful?” she asked Beef.

  “Tasted pretty good,” he said.

  “There,” she said to her son.

  “Mom, did it ever occur to you that I don’t like prune juice? Wouldn’t that be reason enough for me not to drink it? I mean, what if you put some octopus in front of me? Couldn’t you understand me not eating it, just because I had no taste for it?”

  “Who’s talking about octopus? We’re talking about something good for you. Just drink it down. You’re holding up dinner.”

  All three around the table looked at him and waited for him to do the simple thing and get on with the meal.

  He took the glass in his hand and said, “All right, I’ll drink it.”

  “Wonderful!” said Ginny.

  “‘Atta boy,” said Beef.

  “If you’ll do something for me,” he added.

  “Have I ever denied you anything?”

  “Promise me you won’t ever bring my lunch down to the station again.”

  For one glass of prune juice, he was asking a great deal, more, evidently, than Ginny was willing to commit.

  “Don’t drink it, then,” she said. “It would serve you right.”

  “I appreciate your going through all the trouble, but you have to stop it. Everybody acts funny around me.”

  “You know what your problem is? You’re a paranoid.”

  “The chief, the desk sergeant...”

  “I read an article about it. You imagine everybody’s making fun of you.”

  “I used to know people like that,” said Beef.

  “Of course they’re making fun of me,” said Gordon. “What do you expect them to do when they see my mother coming down to the station to blow my nose for me?”

  “Come to think of it,” said Beef, “these people I knew, they really were made fun of.”

  “I haven’t blown your nose,” said Ginny, “since you were...I don’t know, ten or eleven.”

  “It’s the same difference,” said Gordon. “Nobody ever brings a sack lunch. We always stop somewhere in the black-and-white.”

  “Yes, and what do you eat? Hamburgers, fries, Coca-Cola?”

  “Yeah, usually.”

  “No wonder you’re constipated.”

  Gordon grabbed his prune juice and drank it with an angry vengeance.

  “From one extreme to the other,” his mother observed, for the benefit of Beef and Mrs. Lister.

  The dinner itself was tongue, boiled with potatoes and parsnips. A fair compliment to the cook would be to say it was tasteless.

  Gordon, more relaxed now, leaned back in his chair. “During the shortages of the Second World War, a man went into the neighborhood grocery store and said, ‘Give me two pounds of tenderloin.’” Here Gordon smiled, a bit nervously. Beef looked up from his plate. An anecdote or a joke was in progress. “‘Two pounds of tenderloin!’ said the shocked grocer. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on? All I’ve got is tongue and eggs today.’ Tongue!’ said the disgusted customer. ‘Do you expect me to eat something that came out of a cow’s mouth? I’ll have a dozen eggs!”

  Gordon chuckled and blotted his mouth with his napkin, looking around the table at the three stone faces waiting for a punch line.

  “Don’t you see...” he said.

  “Is the idea...” began Beef.

  “Oh, Christ, forget it,” said Gordon.

  “It wasn’t a very amusing story, Gordie,” said his mother. “His sense of humor,” she explained to Beef, “was never his strong suit. But I don’t believe, for a policeman, it’s all that necessary. If he likes really amusing stories, he should read ‘Life in These United States,’ and they’re all true too, in the Reader’s Digest.”

  “I do so have a sense of humor,” said Gordon peevishly. He pointed at Beef. “This one has an IQ of about 82, and Mrs. Lister doesn’t hear a word I say.” (Not even this one.) “And you only hear what you want to. But I know lots of funny stories.” He added pointedly, “At least some people think so.”

  The point struck home.

  “I always thought you wanted to be a cop,” said Ginny, “I never realized you had this burning desire to be a comedian, to amuse some people. Well, you’ll learn that life is not a comedy. Your father was a comedian.”

  Beef happened to be looking at Gordon. It appeared he had taken a punch. His eyes widened in shock, not so much for the pain of it, but for its speed and force.

  Beef wanted to draw attention away from Gordon. “I got a riddle,” he said. “If you’re going down the highway sideways at forty miles per hour and your canoe springs a leak, how many pancakes does it take to shingle a cathouse, true or false?”

  Gordon cast an icy glance bac
k at Beef and said very calmly, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the overhand grip on a fork.”

  Embarrassed, Beef tried to put his fork into his hand in the proper fashion. It fell into his plate. He pulled it out with two fingers and licked the food off its handle.

  Gordon shielded his eyes with his hand and shook his head. “Mother, give your boyfriend a shovel.”

  “Aw, I know when I ain’t wanted,” said Beef. He got up to leave, rolling his shoulders self-consciously.

  “Sit down, Bomba, and ignore him,” ordered Ginny. “He’s just being bratty.”

  Beef sat down to another helping. If he were Ginny, he’d want that kid married and out of the house as soon as possible.

  After dinner, out of hearing of his mother, Gordon said to Beef, “There isn’t any fifty thousand dollars. There never was.”

  “It all goes in one ear and out the other.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I’m on the road.”

  “You got a record?”

  “Long ago and in another state.”

  “Mind your ass while you’re in the Springs,” warned the cop.

  “I ain’t gonna be here long.”

  “Good idea.”

  While Ginny and Mrs. Lister set about washing the dinner dishes and cleaning the kitchen, Gordon set up a small portable typewriter and several books on the coffee table.

  “I thought you were going to the range tonight,” said Ginny.

  “I remembered a paper I have to finish for my sociology class.”

  “Yeah?” said Beef. ‘What’s it about?” He had a curiosity about all things academic.

  Gordon ignored his question and put two sheets and a carbon into the typewriter.

  “I used to go to college once,” said Beef.

  Gordon looked at him in disbelief.

  “I really did.” He turned to the kitchen. “I did. I was gonna be something. I don’t know what. Was gonna get a degree in something and all. Ah, well.”

  “Gordon doesn’t know what he wants to be yet,” said his mother. “He’s leaning toward the sociology, psychology area.” Gordon began to type, referring to his notes and textbooks. “Which for my money is worth about a dime a dozen. But I guess it could pay off if he stays with the department. There’s no real hope for advancement in law enforcement unless you have a degree. Otherwise you could spend your whole life as just another flatfoot.”