Murder and Mayhem in Muskego Page 2

  Sometimes, Eddie would be whispering to her, but I couldn’t hear.

  They were just pressed together and, when the machine wasn’t going, when no one was bowling, you could hear the rustle of their uniforms brushing against each other.

  The more he moved, the more she did and I could hear her breathing and her breath go faster and faster. He covered her and I couldn’t see her except her long hair and her long legs wound round. I was too far to see her eyes. I wanted to see her eyes. It was like he was shaking her into life.

  “Things are getting interesting,” Mrs. Schwartz was saying to my mother, who was resting against the counter, slapping around a washrag tiredly. You can lean, you can clean, Jimmy always said.

  “Don’t count on it,” my mother said.

  “She might try harder, wants to keep a man like that,” Mrs. Schwartz said. Mrs. Schwartz was the head of one of the women’s leagues. She was always there early to gossip with Diane. I think she knew Diane from the Stratton, where Mrs. Schwartz met her second husband. They liked to talk about everybody they knew and the terrible things they were doing.

  “Looks like a singer or something,” she added, twisting in her capris. “A television personality. Even his teeth. He’s got fine teeth.”

  “I never noticed his teeth,” my mother said.

  “Take note,” Mrs. Schwartz said, nodding gravely.

  Diane walked up, clipping her name tag on her uniform. No one said anything for a minute. They were watching Sherry walk into the Ladies Room, cigarette pack in hand

  “She can’t even be bothered to put on lipstick,” Mrs. Schwartz said, shaking her head. “Comb her hair more than twice a day.”

  “Her skin smells like grill,” Diane said under her breath. The two women laughed without making any noise, hands passing in front of their faces.

  Mrs. Schwartz left to meet her teammates surging into the place with their shocks of bright hair and matching shirts the color of Creamsicles.

  Diane was watching Sherry come out of the Ladies Room, tying her apron.

  “Trash,” Diane said to my mother. Then, in a lower voice, “They used to live upstate. Her father’s doing a hitch in Auburn. Got in a fight at a stoplight, beat a man with a tire iron. Man lost an eye.”

  “How do you know,” my mother said.

  “Jimmy told me. He gave her hell for making a call to State Corrections on his dime.” Diane shook her head again. “Mark my words, she’s trouble too. Trash from trash.”

  I looked over at Sherry, leaning against a ball return to tie her apron. She had her eyes on them, on all of us. She couldn’t hear, but it was like she did.

  “Mark my words,” Diane said. “Blood will tell.”

  That whole summer, I’d lie in bed at night waiting for my mother to come home from her shift waiting tables at the tavern. I’d lie in bed and think about Eddie and Carol. It was like how I used to think about Alice Crimmins, the Kew Gardens lady who killed her kids so she could be with her boyfriend. I couldn’t get her face from the newspaper out of my head. Two, three times a night, I’d run around testing all the window latches, the window gates.

  Now, though, it was all about Eddie and Carol. I’d stay under my sheets—cool from sitting in the refrigerator for hours while I watched television and ate Chef Boyardee—and think about how they looked, all flushed and pulsing, how you could feel it coming off them. You could feel it burning in them. It made my throat go dry. It made something ripple in me, like the time I rode the rollercoaster at Fairyland and thought I just might die.

  But then I’d start thinking of Sherry standing behind that counter all day. When she’d first started, she cracked gum and looked bored, went in the bathroom twice a day to wash hotdog sweat off her hands and spit out her gum in the sink.

  But lately she didn’t look bored. And, nights, she’d get into my head. Standing there like that, her head dropping, eyes lowered, watching.

  Watching so close I wondered when she was going to make her move. Was she waiting to see it for herself? Hadn’t she figured out yet when and where it was happening, right behind the wall of pin trestles she—we all—stared at every day, all day?

  Each day it seemed closer and closer. Each day you could feel it in the place, even as the clean and fresh-faced Forest Hills kids pounded their bright white tennis shoes down each alley, even as the shiny haired teenagers hunched over the pinball machines, shoving their hips, twisting their bodies, like they wanted to squirm out of their skin, even as the customers at the bar, steeled behind smoked glass by Lane 30, cocooned from the pitch of the squealing kids and mooning double dates, cool in their adult hideaway of tonic and cool beer, crushed ice and lemon rinds and low jazz and soft-toned waitress with long, snapping sheets of hair and warm smiles and a bartender who understood them and would make them happy, would know just what to do to make them happy…even with all that going on at the Lanes, it was going to happen.

  “I don’t like the way they talk about her,” Diane was whispering to my mother, leaning over my mother’s counter, tangerine nails tapping anxiously. “Sherry and Myrna and Myrna’s friends from the Tuesday league.”

  “Talk’s just talk,” my mother said, loosening her apron.

  “Listen,” she said, leaning closer. Looking over at me, trying to get me not to listen. “Listen, she deserves something. Carol does.” Her voice even lower, husky and suddenly soft. “Her mom’s at Creedmore. She’s been there a while. Took a hot iron to Carol when she was a kid. She was sound asleep when it happened. Still a scar the shape of a shield on her stomach.”

  Diane was looking at my mother, looking at her like she was asking her something. Asking her to understand something.

  My mother nodded, eyes flickering as the fluorescent light made a pop. “You got a customer, Diane,” she said, pointing toward the bar.

  I was thinking they might stop. Might take a few days off, let things cool off. But they didn’t. They only changed it up a little. From what I could tell, Carol came in the back way for her shift and met Eddie first. Met him back there before anyone even saw her. But they didn’t stop. And one day Eddie came out with a streak of Carol’s lilac lipstick on his bleach-white collar, just like in a story in a women’s magazine.

  I watched him walk across the place, lane by lane, with the stain on him. I looked over at Sherry, who was leaning against the pinball machine and watching him. I thought: this is it. She’s too far to see it, I thought to myself. But if he moved closer. If she moves closer.

  But neither of them did.

  When I saw him later, the lipstick was gone, collar slightly damp. I pictured him in the Men’s Room scrubbing it off, scrubbing her off. Looking in the mirror and thinking about what he’d done and what he couldn’t help but keep doing.

  The kids from Forest Hills High School were all over the place that afternoon, all in their summer clothes, girls with tan legs and boys freshly showered and gleaming. The rain had sent them already, some straight from lounge chairs at the club, others from lifeguarding or the tennis courts. I always noticed the fuzzy edges of my summer Keds around them. I always wondered how the girls got their hair so shiny, their clothes so crisp, their eyes so bright.

  I had a feeling it was going to happen that day. I couldn’t say why. Before Sherry even got there. But when she did I knew for sure.

  She looked like she’d been running a fever. There was this gritty film all over her skin and red blotches at her temples. Her uniform looked unwashed from the day before, a ring of grease circling her belly.

  She was late and I’d just left my post, just left the two of them. They never took their clothes off, ever, but sometimes he’d lift her skirt so high I could see flashes of her skin. I was looking for the scar, but I never saw it.

  Her fingers pinched around his neck, the rushed pitch to her voice, soft but streaming…it felt different this time. It felt like something was turning. Maybe it was something in the way his hands moved, more quiet, more careful. Maybe something in her that made her move looser, almost still.

  I got it then. And then it was for sure when I saw them break apart and each look the other way. She dropped her skirt down. He was already walking away.

  I flicked off the last piece of the strawberried scar on my knee. The skin underneath was still tender, puckered.

  And now there was Sherry. I was walking from the back and she was right in front of me, talking at me, her voice funny, toneless.

  “I saw you sitting over there yesterday. By the machine room.”

  “No one’s at concessions,” I said, wondering where my mother had gone.

  “It was the same time. I saw you come out from there at the same time yesterday.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  It was ten minutes later, no more, when we all heard the shouting. Jimmy, Myrna, Eddie, two guys putting on their bowling shoes—we all followed the sounds to the Ladies Room.

  Carol was hunched over, hair hanging in long panels in front of her. She looked surprised, her mouth a small “o.”

  At first, I thought Sherry’d just punched her in the stomach.

  But then I saw it in her hand. The blade was short and Sherry held it so close to her, elbows at her waist.

  The blade was short and it couldn’t have gone deep.

  Jimmy backhanded Sherry. She cracked her head on the stall door and slid slowly to the floor, one hand reaching out for Jimmy’s shirt.

  The knife fell and I saw it was one of those plastic-handled ones they used to open the hotdog packages at concessions.

  Eddie pushed past Jimmy and knelt down beside Sherry. She had a surprised look on her face. He was whispering to her, “Sherry, Sherry…”

  Carol was watching Eddie. Then she turned away and looked down at her
stomach and a tiny blotch of red against the banner blue.

  “That ain’t nothing,” Myrna said, birthmark twitching. “That ain’t nothing at all.”

  Myrna taped up Carol with the first-aid kit. Then Jimmy took all three of them to his office. I walked over to concessions, but no one was there.

  That was when Diane came running in, shouting for someone to call an ambulance.

  “We don’t need no ambulance,” Myrna said. “I hurt myself worse getting out of bed.”

  But Diane was already on the phone at the shoe rental desk.

  We all ran down the long hallway that led out of the lanes and up the stairs to the Boulevard.

  Someone must have already called because the ambulance was there.

  At first, it was like my mother had just lain down on the street. But the way her neck was turned looked funny. Like her head had put on wrong.

  Diane grabbed me from behind and pulled me back.

  That was when I saw a middle-aged man in a gray suit sitting on the curb, his face in his hands. His car door was open like he’d stumbled out to the curb. He was crying loudly, his whole body shaking. I’d never heard a man cry like that.

  Diane was telling everyone who would listen.

  “She said she saw him. She said she saw Fred Upton pass by on the 4:08 yesterday. But he’d never take a bus, would he. That’s what she said. So she wanted to watch for it at the same time today. See if it was him. You know how she always thought she was seeing him somewhere.

  “No one must’ve hit the bell because the bus didn’t stop. And she just ran out onto the Boulevard after it. That car didn’t have time to stop.”

  She looked over at the man, who started sobbing even louder.

  “Hit her like a paper doll,” Diane was saying. “Nothing but a paper doll going up in the wind and then coming down.”

  Later, I would figure it out. My mother, nights spent looking out diner windows, uniform steeped in smoke, thinking of the stretch of her thirty years, filled with glazy-eyed men stumbling into her life all with the promise of four decades of union wages like her old man, repairing refrigerators, freezers in private homes, restaurants, country clubs, office buildings for her whole life never stopping for more than one Rheingold at the corner bar before coming home for pot roast at the table with wife and three kids.

  Those men came, but never for long or they came and then turned, sometime during the first, second night in her bed into something else altogether, something that needed her, sure, but also needed the countergirl at Peter Pan bakery or four nights a week betting horses at the parking garage on Austin Street or a night watching the fights at Sunnyside Garden even it was her birthday and, yeah, maybe he needed the roundcard girl he met there too.

  There was a dream of something and maybe it wasn’t even a man like her old man or the man in the Arrow Shirt ad or the doctor she met once at the diner, the one with the big apartment in the new highrises, the view from the bedroom so great that she’d have to see it to believe it, he said. Maybe it wasn’t a man dream at all. But it was something. It was something and it was there and then it was gone.

  “Hollywood Lanes” originally appeared in Queens Noir (Akashic Books, 2007), edited by Robert Knightly.

  Back to TOC

  Pattern Recognition

  Dana Cameron

  Joel’s eyes went straight to her breasts, then lower, where they loitered. The next moment was a blur of arousal, interest and, when his brain caught up with his spinal cord, curiosity, followed by concern and building fear.

  Naked, was the first word that came to him. Then girl, dirty, crazy.

  She was naked, save for a scarf draped over her head. She stood on a rickety wooden chair in the middle of the room, skinny arms outstretched wide before her, shaking with the effort of holding them up. Her brown hair was long and tangled and she looked like something out of National Geographic.

  Joel felt a rumbling beneath his feet; maybe it was the train passing nearby.

  Her eyes finally opened, wide and unfocused, as if he’d wakened her from a dream. She glanced around, looked right through Joel as if he wasn’t even there, then mumbled something.

  “Didn’t catch that,” he said, wondering if reaching for his cell phone would set her off. She didn’t look like much, he thought, but you couldn’t be too careful. Not with a killer on the loose.

  “Thought it would work,” she said, swallowing. “This time.”

  He pretended to look around, shook his head. “Nope. I guess not.”

  He didn’t want to know who she was, didn’t want her to be his problem. He held out a hand, hoping she’d get down and leave.

  It halfway worked. She climbed off the chair, but then sat down.

  He stepped toward her and his foot slipped. When he looked down, he saw olive oil covering the floor. All over her arms, dripping down her legs, the empty container in the corner, as if it had been flung away.

  Joel tamped down burgeoning panic as he tried not to think of the ridiculously expensive olive oil. It had been one of the last things he and Lenore had argued about before she left.

  The anxiety that plagued him so constantly—had he locked the door? Had he been offensive to the waitress? Had he really cut someone off in traffic?—was somewhat at bay because he’d just come from therapy. Maybe this was one of those opportunities his shrink had mentioned, about climbing out of his own head to help someone else. Not her words exactly, but…

  “You got a name?” he said, flinching. He hadn’t meant the question to come out so brusquely.

  “I don’t think so.” She stood, and to Joel’s relief, went over to a pile of clothing on the floor, just out of range of the pool of oil that was being sucked into the hungry, rough wood planks. “This isn’t your place.” She seemed fine now, blotting herself with the scarf, as if she remembered nothing of standing naked in a stranger’s presence. As if she’d suddenly realized how cold and drafty the room was.

  “No.” The apartment was his cousin’s, loaned to him on condition he admit the bead shop staff downstairs every day and lock up at night. “It’s not yours either,” he said. Not aggressive, really, he thought. Maybe a little nudge, a hint of assertiveness. Nothing anyone could take offense at, surely?

  She didn’t seem so dangerous now, in an old pair of cargo pants, a hoodie and Docs. The sodden scarf was wrapped around her neck, forgotten.

  “No. I…” She faltered for the first time, looked around her. “I don’t know where I am.”

  “How about we get someone to come pick you up?” Joel was emboldened by the idea of his authority. It had been a while. “Is there someone we can call?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then shut it. After half a minute, she said, “I don’t think so. I think I’m trying to hide.”

  No shit. I would, too, if I was crazy as you, he thought. He flinched at the uncharitable thought. “Um…okay. We won’t let anyone hurt you. I’ll call a friend of mine.” The more he thought about calling Dr. Steuben, the more it seemed like a good idea. “She’ll be able to help you sort things out.”

  And if not, she can check you into the cracker factory.

  “Okay.” She went over to the window, looked out into the winter dusk and shivered. “This is Salem?”

  Joel fumbled with his phone. And I’d been so close to taking the doctor off speed-dial, he thought. “Uh, yeah. Massachusetts. March 14, 20—”

  “Yeah, thanks, I got it.” She interrupted him with a frown that said “asshole.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one standing naked on chairs,” he said then immediately regretted it. What if he set her off? What if she got violent? He of all people should be more sympathetic. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know…what else you didn’t know.”

  She shrugged. “Me, neither.”

  Luckily, Dr. Steuben answered just then. Joel told his story and after confirming neither one of them was injured—as far as he could tell the woman was perfectly fine, just lost in thought—Dr. Steuben asked, “Did you ask if she knew your cousin? If she’d been given a key of her own?”