Peerless Detective, page 30
In the airless hallway of Millie’s building he stood, paralyzed by indecision, and stared at her mailbox and the buzzer for her bell. The wrappers on the ice cream bars were beginning to sweat.
Now what?
He rang her bell and waited, then rang it again. Something wet ran down his arm. He stepped out onto the street and peered up at her window for signs of life. Moisture ran down his other arm. He looked at the ice cream bars, caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of her doorway—an awkward-looking guy holding ice cream bars out at arm’s length as though they might explode.
A dark-haired woman emerged from the building and gave him a curious look.
Yeah, I’d look at me too, lady.
Finally with his teeth he tore the wrapper from one of the ice cream bars and took a bite just as a large piece of chocolate began sliding down the bar. He caught the chocolate with his tongue, then licked at the bar quickly to prevent another slide of the chocolate. Ice cream dripped white and wet down over his knuckles and down the back of his hand and wrist. He looked at the second bar and saw that the wrapper was stuck to the bar like a wet shirt, and could only imagine the mess that was taking place inside.
He shook his head and began to eat his bar faster, at one point licking first the bar and then his knuckles and finally his wrist, and it was just then, as he was running his tongue across his wrist in a vain attempt to catch a wayward drop that he realized he was being watched. He turned and saw Millie. His heart was hammering in his chest.
Jesus, a guy tried to kill me with a knife and I’m terrified of this little girl.
She stared at him straight-faced, and at first he thought she might slip past him and enter her building without a word, but then he caught the dancing light in her eyes. He looked at his bar and his hand, now coated with ice cream, and made a sudden lurch to lick at the newest dripping on his fingers. He looked back at her and wondered if there had ever been a moment in his life when he’d felt so foolish. She bit her lip and looked away.
Millie started to laugh, then caught herself. He turned to face her, holding his bar out over the sidewalk, where it began to create a small brown-and-white pool, the flakes of chocolate swimming in the ice cream like tiny boats. Millie shook her head at him, and Billy tried to explain why he was standing there covered with ice cream and why he’d come back at all, but his words made a logjam in his throat. She did nothing to make it easier on him, just fixed the large gray eyes on him and waited. Billy watched her and felt the blood in his cheeks and hoped no one else was watching.
“What are you doing here, Billy?” she said. Before he could answer she added, “What a mess.”
“This one’s supposed to be yours,” Billy said, holding out the second ice cream bar, now shapeless inside its wrapper.
Millie took it, tore the top of the wrapper open with a deft movement and began licking at the ice cream. She folded the paper halfway down the bar, then made a little twist at the base, where it met the stick, and held it up to Billy.
“See, Hon? It starts coming apart on you, you just wrap it like this and it won’t come running down your hand. Oh, look at you, you’ve got ice cream all the way to your elbow. Don’t they have ice cream bars in Michigan?”
“I bought it and then I decided to get you one, and you weren’t home so there I was with two ice cream bars and—” It all sounded utterly stupid to him, so he stopped and shrugged, then took a bite of his ice cream.
Her face changed and she said, “Why are you here?”
“I don’t know.”
She nibbled at her ice cream for a moment, then held out her hand.
“You done with that mess?”
He held out the remains of his ice cream bar and she took both of them to a trash can a few feet away at the corner. She came back and stood a couple of feet away.
“What do you want, Billy?”
“I thought we should talk.”
“We talked already, we settled it,” she said.
“We talked about it, yeah, but I don’t think we settled it.”
She frowned. “What didn’t we settle? We didn’t settle it far as you’re concerned, you mean.”
She folded her arms around her, as though protecting herself. She looked at his arms and shook her head.
“Look at you, you got it all up and down your arm. There’s little tiny kids can eat an ice cream without getting it on theirselves like that.” She looked at the street, gazed up at the sky, and sighed. She shook her head.
Billy was about to leave when she said, “Come in and get yourself cleaned up. You can’t walk around like that.”
She herded Billy into her apartment like a stray pup and then sat on the edge of her chair watching him as he washed his hands and arms.
“Missed a spot. There’s chocolate on your elbow.” She shook her head.
“Thanks,” he said when he was finished.
She nodded toward the sofa. “Sit.”
He dropped himself onto it, looked at his hands, and opened his mouth to fill the silence, but she beat him to it.
“What are you doing here, Billy?”
“I was looking for you. I wanted to see you. I went by the diner.”
“Why?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Like I said. I wanted, you know, to see you.”
“No. I don’t know. Trouble is, you don’t know what you want.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t make this about me. You’re the one can’t make up his mind. So why did you come here?”
He took a moment to compose himself, and understood that what he said to her, how he phrased it, would determine everything. Even if he didn’t fully understand what he meant by “everything.”
“I wanted to see if you were still here. I had this idea you would be leaving.”
“Leaving? Why would I be leaving?”
Her eyes flashed in anger, and Billy found himself leaning back.
“Why would I leave? This is where I live now, for better or worse. This is my home. It’s not much, but it’s what I’ve got. I have a place to live and a job, and I have some friends here. Leaving would mean I gave up on it here.”
Just because of you, her look said.
“I guess I’m the one who probably ought to be leaving.”
“Seems to me you’ve done pretty well here.” She tilted her head to one side. “What about your girl from Michigan? That’s not gonna work out?”
“No. There was never a chance that was going to work out. And I think I knew it all along. All that time I was looking for her.”
Billy looked away. It was the truth, but hard to admit and strange to hear himself pass this judgment aloud. Strange, and embarrassing. None of this was a good idea. He forced himself to look at Millie. She said nothing, but watched him.
“Rita stopped being interested in me five years ago. She came all the way here to leave her old life behind her, and I decided—I just couldn’t mess up her life for her. And the funny thing is, after all this time looking for her, I wouldn’t even know what to say her.” He gave a short laugh at himself.
Millie blinked, shook her head.
“You never even got to talk to her?”
“I could have. I found her, I know where she lives. But I’m not gonna do that. I’m staying out of her life.”
“Poor thing,” Millie said, and Billy wasn’t sure if she meant him or Rita.
“Her life’s, you know—” Billy made a waving gesture with one arm. “She’s not for me, her life has gone in another direction. She’s not for me. Maybe you’re not either, Millie. I understand that.”
She watched him until he grew uncomfortable in her silence. It struck Billy that no matter how much he had learned, how much he’d changed, there were areas in which he was still without a clue.
Millie had turned slightly so that she was facing the far wall of her apartment. For a moment he had the sense that she’d forgotten him. He got to his feet.
“Sit down, Billy,” she said, then frowned. “You in a hurry to leave?”
“No, not at all. I have no place to be.” He did as he was told.
“You asked me if I was leaving. What if I was? Would that bother you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I am, actually.”
“Oh,” he said, and felt his stomach tighten.
She smiled. “That was mean. I’m teasing you. I’m going home for a week to see Mama. It’s been awhile. It’s always good for me to see her, help me get my head on straight.”
“I’m probably going back up to Lansing sometime soon, too. I have some things to take care of there.” She nodded, and he bit back the impulse to tell her about Josephine and his own newly discovered back story. “Things I just learned about.”
“Something bad?”
“No, not at all. And I’ll tell you all about it when we’re both back. I mean, that’s if—”
If what? You’re really smooth, Billy.
She gave him a long, frank look and then got up and went to her tiny stove to put on coffee.
She came back and sat on her sofa. He shifted in the chair and the stitches across his stomach pulled at him. He grunted.
“You okay?”
“I’ve been having adventures.”
Millie tucked her legs under her and waited for him to begin.
TWENTY-FIVE
Peerless Detective
Billy spent most of that first Monday looking over Harry Strummer’s notes and his own notes from two cases Harry had asked him to look into. The phones were dead, almost as though the world knew that Harry was “out of the office.”
He took a walk through the park at lunch, and on the way back, he saw Babe peering into a trash can. Billy caught up with him and dragged him to a small Greek diner nearby and bought him lunch. As they chatted, Billy tried to learn more about Babe’s life, but Babe showed no inclination to speak of private matters. When Billy asked him where he lived, the old man merely said, “My current lodgings are in a state of flux.”
As he made his way back to the office, he smiled at the recollection of Babe’s phrasing—“My current lodgings,” the same words he’d used in describing Moncrief’s hotel room.
And now Billy realized why he’d recognized those words. He had, of course, heard them before, in a Greyhound bus station tavern, from an old man—recently shaved and bleeding from razor cuts.
Babe!
Clean-shaven then, but still the same cackling old crazy. And simply one more cog in Harry Strummer’s reception committee for the young and very green Billy Fox.
This time Billy laughed.
• • •
That night he drove Millie to the bus station. When she got out, she leaned over and kissed him.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
She paused and looked at him and then smiled. “You hold that thought, Billy-boy.”
Billy came into the office of the Peerless Detective Agency and opened the window facing Wells Street. The cool air coming in off the lake smelled of the water, of fall, of change. He took off his sport coat, adjusted his tie, and sat down at his desk.
He popped the top off his coffee and sipped, then read the paper. Two calls came in during that first hour. The first caller was a man named Zivic who wanted to know if the agency could find a runaway boy. Billy told him to come in and talk about it. The second call came ten minutes later.
“Good morning. Peerless Detective,” Billy said.
The caller paused. Billy heard the caller’s wet breathing, uncertainty.
“Peerless Detective,” he repeated. “This is Billy Fox.”
The caller said “Hello?” in a tremulous voice.
Billy felt himself grinning. “Hello, Mrs. Ricci,” he said.
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Michael Raleigh, Peerless Detective
