Lone Star by Ed Ifkovic Page B

lighted hallway, old wallpaper but clean, stairs swept and scrubbed; railings worn but glistening. The stink of old varnish and countless tenants, but also the astringent odor of lye soap, diligent cleaning, a battle against grime and decay and mites and spilled lives. I walked slowly up the stairs, holding onto Mercy’s arm.
    There was music coming from Carisa’s apartment, not loud but wafting gently into the hallway. Lavish violin strings, the thump of piano keys, the light air of a girl singer. Rosemary Clooney? The Boswell Sisters? I had no idea. Music from radios, especially the plaintive crooning of adenoidal female singers, always irritates me. I consider the sentimental slurring of the Andrews Sisters tantamount to treason during the last world war. But I keep such sentiments to myself. Jerome Kern, yes; Cole Porter, certainly. Witty men, clever lyricists, jaunty confections, the Broadway ditties. Yes, I thought, Rosemary Clooney. Or maybe Kate Smith?
    I didn’t like the fact that Mercy, unconsciously, was humming the tune.
    When Mercy gently rapped on the door—a little too softly, I thought—the door flew open because it had not been latched, and we stood there, staring at the body of a young girl, sprawled indecorously on the floor, her head resting in a pool of blood, her body twisted.
    I looked at Mercy, Mercy at me.
    “Is it…?” I gasped.
    Mercy nodded.
    I stepped into the room. “This is not going to make anyone happy.”
    Mercy frowned. “But maybe it solves somebody’s problem.”
    For a second I closed my eyes. In the darkness I saw zigzag, shooting shafts of bright light, and I felt the rush of blood to my temples, throbbing, throbbing. “So it begins,” I said, my voice scratchy. “So it begins.”

Chapter 7
    Late that night, long after midnight, I lay in my bed, unable to sleep. I was trying to place events in order, categorizing, shifting the facts. I sorted through the last, horrendous hours, from the moment of awful discovery of the body to our dismissal by the police, with Mercy dropping me back at the Ambassador.
    I wondered how I’d managed to stagger to the elevator, make it into my suite. In my room I’d slipped into a chair and sobbed for a half hour.
    The police: Detective Cotton. What was his first name? Xavier. Detective Xavier Cotton rushed in a half hour after the beat cops arrived, Mercy having knocked on the superintendent’s first floor apartment door, startling the old Spanish man, and sputtering: Call the cops. Then everything happened so fast. Looking back, it seemed but a matter of scant minutes before the two fat, balding cops and then Detective Cotton rushed up those stairs.
    I marveled at the detective, frankly. You saw a trim man in his late thirties, dark and wiry, short, a pointy ferret face; with weary dark brown eyes, dull and a little washed out. Baked-bean eyes, I considered them. Eyes that looked like they hid everything, the surface glazed over, disarmingly. That made me nervous. When he spotted Mercy and me waiting in the upstairs hallway, his eyes got large, as though trying to focus. That razor-lipped mouth was suddenly agape, reminding me of farcical cartoon characters registering shock. Of course, he was surprised, really. Here in this tenderloin building, this bitter, noisome outpost of Hollywood’s glitter-dome world, here stood these imposing and improbable women—both decked out in elegant silk dresses and pearls and diamond bracelets. Cotton stared at me as though I were Ma Barker dressed for a cotillion. Mercy stood at the top of the stairs, with arms folded, waiting, head down; and I stood near her, grande dame with my mane of white hair, my quizzical stare, my eyes darting, my curiosity volcanic. And wearing an over-sized sapphire-studded pin on my dress (a gift, I reminded myself, from Erle Stanley Gardner—and thus amazingly perfect). Two escapees from a decadent Hollywood party, detoured somehow into a Dickensian corner of the