Spider’s Cage (3 page)

Windrow spun his desk chair around to face the window, put his feet up on the sill. The venetian blind lay in a heap in the corner, against the lower drawer of the file cabinet. He crossed his ankles one way, then another. He readjusted his sunglasses. He sighed. He let his feet down with a bang, stood, and paced to the office door, where he paused. Her guitar and case were on top of the refrigerator. He hadn't heard from her. No doubt that, now, she could afford a spare. He would have time to teach himself how to play a mazurka in E fl at before she called for this instrument. He kicked the bottom of the refrigerator. Desultory? Not at all. The thin protective grill clattered off the bottom of the refrigerator and lay at his feet. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at it. Nondesultory. Oh for a desultory mind randomly flipping from thought to thought, like a severed lizard's tail in a box of matches. Leaps. Hmph. Squat frogmind emits the lovemad croak and uncoils its rear legs, airborn, plop, into the same ontological topography as before: mud. Emotional mud.

Must be my diet, Windrow thought: short on protein and ruffage. He opened the refrigerator and inspected its contents. These amounted, in short, to a serious indictment
of his personal nutrition. From the corroded and empty shelves of the old Kelvinator he extracted the ingredients of his breakfast. He poured a dark Mexican beer into a glass and broke a brown egg into it. He garnished the sepia barm with a dilapidated sprig of flaccid parsley, and drank. Ahh. He smacked his lips, chewed the parsley, and Pow, his mind made the leap. He paced back to the window.

He'd first met Jodie Ryan on a television shoot on the Embarcadero. He'd been hired to find one of the gypsy crewmen working the production. Seeing Windrow, the startled subject fell off a pier into the bay and nearly drowned. Seeing Windrow and the shivering subject gave Jodie Ryan a distinctly bad taste for Windrow's person, and they'd had a swell time ever since. This is to say, she'd call whenever she was in town and had nothing else to do, which occurred about every three months. Every three months was just often enough to keep Windrow interested, but not often enough for the affair to get respectable. However, he'd howled at the moon from beneath Coit Tower one night, and she'd sat up in the covers of the convertible sofa early one morning and composed a song for him.

The song was titled: “Stealin' Eyes.”

So it must be love.

Right?

Windrow stared out his window, his head to one side, and blew air past his lips, making them flap. He could see a woman in the door of the grocery across Folsom Street. She was black, wore stacked heels, black mesh stockings, a bright scarlet blouse, a white skirt slit way up the front. She got a light for a long, brown cigarette from another woman, one of two who exited the grocery and joined her. Of these two, one was white, the other black, both dressed more or less similarly to the first. The second black woman held a
large package in her arms. She took leave of the other two and crossed the street. Windrow heard and felt the street door of the Scarf Building open and crash shut, two stories below.

He sipped his breakfast. The obituary yellowed on the desk behind him. The room still reeked of Scotch. After a time, the office door opened.

“It's the curtain lady, sweet thang.”

Windrow grunted.

“Oh, now, let momma look at it.” The lady from across the street put her packages down on the desk and turned Windrow's face toward her. Her fingertips pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and probed the yellowing black and blue bruise on the left side of his face. Windrow narrowed his eyes.

“Do you think I'm still handsome, baby?” he said.

Sister Opium Jade leveled her brown almond eyes with his. In her stacked heels, she stood as tall as Windrow. She moved until no parts per million separated them.

“Honey,” she said huskily, “all you got to do in the morning,” her free hand dropped to his hip and fooled around expertly, “to crack eggs is look at them.” She fellated the tip of his nose.

Windrow pushed her away, taking his wallet from her.

“There's no money in it,” he said, “but thanks for the compliment.”

Opium pouted. “Awww,” she said, laying on her thickest street accent. “Y'all wanna walk aroun with your dick in your shoe for what?”

He said nothing.

“You're supposed to say
chacun son goût
,” she said, suddenly articulate.

“Huh?”

“Dif'rent strokes.”

Windrow growled and finished his first glass of breakfast. Opium busied herself unwrapping her packages.

“My pimp's old lady beat me up once,” she said, holding a couple of yards of fabric up to the light. “Mean old thing. Tried to break my
nose
with a sock full of
sand
.” Windrow paced back to the refrigerator and refilled his glass, omitting the egg and parsley. Opium put aside the fabric and extracted a hammer and a small package of hardware from another bag. She rolled Windrow's desk chair to one corner of the window, kicked off her shoes, and climbed onto the chair, showing a lot of leg in the process. “Course,” she said, tacking a curtain rod hook onto one corner of the window, “all that
cocaine
I was doing had eat all the
bones
out it, so every time she'd
smash
with the sock my old nose would just flatten out then bounce
right back
.” The first fixture in place, she stepped down and rolled the chair to the other side of the window. “She was so
amazed
it didn't
bust
I had time to grab her by her
esophagus
. I had it 'most
tore out
before Lenny—that's the
pimp
, that pimp—hit me with a bottle on my head…”

Windrow interrupted her. “Hey O, keep talking French to me so I can't understand you, will you?” He raised his eyebrows and narrowed his eyes, so the bruise hurt differently. He dipped a forefinger in his beer and moistened the painful crow's foot behind his left eye with it. He squinted his eyes, then bulged them. “You're putting that bracket lower than the other one.” He gestured with his beerglass.

“Why honey,” said Opium. “That's because this here
Scarf
Building runs
uphill
to the
left
. Besides,” she turned and glowered at him, “if I didn't put these curtains up,
who would
?” She stuck her tongue out at him and went back to work. The hammer defied the ensuing silence.

Windrow sat on the front edge of his desk, his back turned to the window. His stomach was sore. The bruise on his face still had his left eye swollen not quite shut. He kneaded it to make it hurt differently. Gratuitous violence.

It all seemed so unnecessary.

Why had Sal been so hyperbolic about the whole thing?

Hadn't she noticed that spiriting Jodie right out from under his nose would be depressing enough? Why beat up on such a sensitive man as himself, when a little psychosexual anguish would more than serve the purpose? A lovelorn landscape overshadowed a bulldozer job any day, didn't it? In terms of temporary discomfort, at least.

Sister Opium Jade had quietly extracted six Mexican beers and a long, telescoping curtain rod from one of her shopping bags, and was back on the chair, inserting one end of the rod into the hardware she'd hung on the wall.

“Best forget her, Mr. Windrow. Easy come, easy go. She's young, beautiful, talented, smart and white—the bitch. She's on the way up, right? What's she want with somebody who forgets to shave in the morning?”

Windrow stared at the slot under the door and slowly turned his face around the axis of his gaze.

She elocuted these lines with exaggerated articulation, floating the savor of each syllable on her most whiskied voice.

She hit the rod fixture with the flat of her hand.

Her beautiful voice expertly intoned the arcane French.

Windrow had no idea what the lines meant, but their sound momentarily lulled him into distraction, a liquid jump.

“The next line's for you, blue balls,” Opium said cheerily, not turning around from her work. “I translate freely: ‘I'm constantly terrified you'll make some um, precipitous flight.' And then, ‘so that I'm sick of everything,' there's a list of things symbolic of everything, trees and shit, ‘sick of everything, alas, but you.' ” She paused. “It's called ‘Spleen.' ”

Windrow, charmed, nodded, his back still toward the window.

“Paul Verlaine,” Opium said.

Windrow opened a beer.

“Goddam faggot,” she said.

Windrow suppressed a smile and rolled his eyes.

The telephone rang. “It's for you,” Opium said, still on the chair. Windrow reached behind him and picked up the phone.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Marty.”

Windrow woke up. “Jodie.”

“Marty I'm in troub—”

The connection went dead.

“W
HO WAS THAT, BLOODCLOT?
” O
PIUM
J
ADE ASKED
sweetly.

Windrow ignored her. He jammed the receiver between his ear and shoulder and thumbed through his address book. He had a seldom-used number for Jodie Ryan that rang at her stepmother's house in Sea Cliff. He found and dialed it.

“Casa Los Altos.”

“Hello, Concepción,” said Windrow. “Favor de hablar con la señora Neil.”

“Y de quien llamar?”

“El señor Martín Windrow.”

Pause. The El Salvador woman, who spoke with a Castillan accent, placed the mouthpiece of the telephone on her left breast. Windrow very distinctly heard her ask La señora in excellent English whether she were indisposed or not. He thought the muffled answer might have been delivered in a man's voice. The mouthpiece went back to the mouth.

“La señora no esta en casa. Favor de telephonar mas tarde, después de seis o siete por la tarde, mejor mañana, por la tard—”

“Escúchame Concepción chulita,” Windrow interrupted. “Favor de informing the señora that I'm still a private investigator, and that I'm in possession of evidence indicating the existence of a last testament from Mr. Edward O'Ryan that
postdates the one she thinks is going to make her sunset years comfortable beyond the wildest dreams of her childhood in Visalia.”

Another pause, while Windrow's message was relayed back to him through the Castillana's left breast. Then she was back.

“Señor Windrow?”

“Yes?”

“La señora dice so what?”

“So I'd like to speak with her as soon as possible, to discuss the legal ramifications.”

Another pause. While he waited, the light went out of the room in front of him. He turned. New curtains draped unevenly across the window. They were calico.

“Señor Windrow?”

“Yes?”

“The señora suggests that such a complicated matter is difficult to discuss over the telephone. She asks me to request your presence here this afternoon, at three o'clock. Is that convenient?”

“You know I can't speak English. Why don't you ask me these things in Spanish, la lingua d'amor?”

The maid giggled.

“Three would be fine.”

“Of course.”

“One more thing, Señorita. Have you seen Miss Ryan lately? This development may well affect her, too. Would it be possible for Miss Ryan to join us this afternoon?”

More pectoral translation. A long pause. The phone changed hands.

“Mr. Windrow?”

Ah ha.

“Hello, Mrs. Neil.”

“How do you do, Mr. Windrow. We've not seen Jodie in several days. I was just at the point of having Concepción telephone to ask you if you'd seen her?”

“Not since Sunday, Mrs. Neil.”

“Well, that's certainly since we've seen her, isn't it Concepción. I presume she was all right, Mr. Windrow?”

“Quite all right, Mrs. Neil. A little tired, maybe. Up all night, as usual.”

“The poor dear drives herself absolutely beyond the limits of physical endurance. I don't know how she stays on her feet, warbling in front of all those sweating people night after night.”

“She must like it.”

“Yes it
is
glamorous, isn't it. Well, I really must go, Mr. Windrow. At three, then?”

“Three o'clock, Mrs. Neil.”

She rang off. Windrow hung up.

“Classy dame on the phone just now. Hates my guts.”

“Dial with your pinky,” Sister Opium suggested helpfully.

“Good idea.” Windrow dialed another of the numbers under Jodie's name with his forefinger. Opium Jade noticed.

“Tough guy,” she said.

The number rang one half of a ring.

“Lobe Theatricals,” growled an impatient voice. It sounded like a truck dumping gravel.

“Harry Lobe, please. Windrow calling.”

“Just a minute,” said the voice. After a pause, the same voice said, “Lobe here.”

“You should at least put it on hold,” Windrow said.

“You mean like this?” Lobe said. Windrow heard a click and found his ear in the middle of an orchestral arrangement of Old Man River. He waited a minute. Abruptly, the tune ended and the tape began to hiss a brassy rendition of
There's No Business (Like Show Business). He severed the connection and dialed again.

“Lobe Theatricals.”

“Mr. Lobe, please.”

“Who's calling, please?”

“Ronald Reagan.”

“Just a moment, please.” There followed a click, three seconds of Muzak, same tune, and another click.

“Ronnie! Baby! You got the part!”