Chapter 2: Green Dress

Frankie brought the towels on the second asking. She carried a stack of them against her chest out of the back hall and set them down on the floor and stood over them with her hands pressed together, and there were more towels in that stack than the room had any use for.

Clara took two and laid them over the cloth she already had flat on the man’s leg, and put her weight down through both palms, and the man under her hands made a sound that was mostly air.

“You’re all right,” she said. “Somebody’s coming.”

He had a wedding ring on. She looked at it, and then at the door.

From the wall, Wes Mercer said something that came out in two pieces and a mouthful of blood. He got his hand up off the floor and pointed at her, and then the hand went down again.

“Sit still,” Clara said.

The manager came up the stairs and stopped two steps below the top one, in a gray jacket with his tie pulled loose. “I’ve called,” he said. “Police and an ambulance both.”

“How long?”

“They said they’d send somebody.”

“Then keep the front door shut until they do,” Clara said. “When they come, your men carry these men down to the street. All of them, before the police start asking who’s who.”

The manager’s hands were working at each other. “There’s three in the corner I can’t do anything for.”

“Leave them where they are.”

“Somebody’s going to want a name.”

“Clara Whitaker.” She took the pencil out of his hand and wrote her name and the house number on the back of a menu card and gave it back to him. “If the one I’ve got here doesn’t make it, I want the call.”

He read the card. “You want me to say what you were doing down here?”

“No.”

He put the card in his inside pocket and went down to see about the door.

Frankie came around the table and got down on her heels beside her.

“Go up there tonight,” she said. Her voice had gone flat the way a voice does after crying has stopped. “You’re engaged to Eli Kessler. You go up to that house tonight and you tell August Kessler what his brother did to my brother’s face, and you tell him what it’s worth to him for you to keep your mouth shut about it. That’s the only thing they—“

“Frances.”

“—that’s the only thing anybody in this city understands, and you’ve got the—“

“I said no.” Clara kept her hands where they were. “Your brother’s got a gun somewhere in this room and he brought nine men with him to a birthday party. Nobody in that house is going to hear this from me tonight.”

“He’s got three teeth gone. You know what he’s going to have to do? He’s going to have to sit down in front of Chief Crane with his mouth like that and explain a room full of his own men.”

“Then take him home and put ice on it.”

“You could be out of that house by Sunday,” Frankie said. “You could be out of that house by Sunday with money in your hand and a name that’s your own, and instead you’re on the floor.”

Clara leaned harder. “Frankie. If anybody comes asking who was down on this floor when it happened, it wasn’t me. Tell them I was at the top of the stairs the whole time and I never came down.”

Frankie looked at her. “Why?”

“Because I’m asking you.”

Frankie wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and stood up and got her coat.

“Call me in the morning,” Clara said. “Before my mother’s up.”

The ladies’ room at Delaney’s had one bulb over the mirror and a cake of pink soap on the sink. The water came out cold. She put her hands in it and the water went pink and then brown and then ran clear, and she soaped her wrists and between her fingers and the quick of her right thumb, where the blood had gone in under the nail, and she used four paper towels getting it out.

Her skirt was done for at the knee. The green wool had gone dark and stiff, and there was no saving it and no cleaning it here.

She took her coat off and tied the sleeves of it around her waist, and the coat hung down over the knee, and she stood and looked at herself in the glass for a moment and then put her bag under her arm and went out through the dining room, past the tables with the napkins still folded, and the manager held the front door for her and said nothing, and she said nothing to him.

Water Street at eleven had people on it. The bars were open and the movie theater had let out and a man was selling papers at the corner under the light. Nobody on the sidewalk knew there were three men in Delaney’s second floor who were not going home, and the streetcar came along and she got on it and paid.

The blood under his cuff had dried stiff, and it rubbed at his wrist every time he moved his hand.

Bell drove. The car went north on Water and the fog off the lake lay in the low places and came apart on the windshield. The wipers went. Raymond sat with his legs out and one arm along the back of the seat.

Nine men in a rented dining room with sidearms on their hips and not one of them posted on the back stairs. That was the part he kept coming back to. He had come up those stairs himself and nobody had stopped him, and he had been in the room a full minute before anybody turned around.

The names would be on his desk in the morning, the three of them, and then there would be three funerals and the money for the funerals and a woman in each house to be seen to, and the company would pay, and the ledger would carry it under Repairs the way it carried everything else. Wes Mercer would be telling his version of it before the swelling went down. His version would have a name in it that wasn’t Wes Mercer’s.

“What time is it?” Raymond said.

“Eleven ten, Mr. Ray.”

“Bell.”

“Mr. Ray.” Bell did not turn his head.

“Find me a woman.”

“Tonight?”

“Green dress. Not one of the shy ones.”

“Yes, Mr. Ray.”

The Whitaker girl had called him Mr. Ray. He remembered that better than her face. And there had been a smell off her from a foot away, soap, the block kind that goes in with the wash.

“And soap,” he said. “Plain soap. If she comes downstairs smelling like a store, take her back.”

“Yes, Mr. Ray.”

“And Bell. The soap smell on the stairs. I don’t want to know whose it was, and neither do you.”

“No, Mr. Ray.”

Bell’s eyes did not go to the mirror. The car went on up the avenue, and the gate was iron and stood open, and the drive was gravel and made a sound under the tires all the way to the door.

At five, or a little after it, Raymond heard her on the front stairs.

Her hair was down and had not been brushed. She carried her shoes in one hand and her coat over the other arm, and the hem of a green dress showed under the coat, and she came down one step at a time with her fingers on the rail, and at the bottom Bell was waiting with his hat on, and he opened the door for her and stood aside and she went out.

The car went out through the gate and the gate shut and the porch light stayed on.

Bell came back at six. He came up the back stairs and into the hall and said, “She’s home, Mr. Ray,” and Raymond said, “All right.”

At six thirty a boy from Delaney’s came to the kitchen door with the night’s account. Raymond wrote the check at the desk in the hall standing up, for the room and the tables and the linen and the glass, and put it under the inkstand where Bell would find it.

Upstairs he took off the shirt and dropped it in the basket with the cuff still buttoned.

At eight Bell was in the hall with his hat in his hand.

“She’ll be at the house at eleven,” he said. “Green dress. She’s at the hotel on Water Street.”

“And the soap.”

“And the soap.”

Raymond put on his coat. “The dock first,” he said. “I’ll be back before eleven.”

“Yes, Mr. Ray.”