She shrugged, sighed, and said, “Well, here I go. Out
where the nurse lived there’s a white woman in number
sixty, pretty close by. She’s got her a Monday-Thursday
cleaning woman, half days. Last Monday the cleaning
woman got there and found a note from the woman she’d
be away a week, don’t come Thursday. The woman
works in an office job. The cleaning woman didn’t work
Thursday and went there yesterday, Monday, like always.
She can tell the woman that lives there isn’t back yet, but
somebody has been in there. Friend, maybe; Somebody
lay on the bed a time. One person. Left a head mark in
the pillow, wrinkled the spread. Something was spilled,
and somebody used her mop, pail, things like that, and
didn’t put them back exactly the same. Scrubbed up part
of the kitchen floor, part of the bathroom floor, and
burned up something in the little fireplace those apartments have got, and she said to her it looked like ashes from burning cloth, and she couldn’t find some of her cleaning rags anyplace. Don’t know what good it is to you. Maybe something or nothing.”
“I suppose she cleaned the place as usual and swept out the fireplace?”
“That’s what she did. She told me the name of that woman, but I plain dumb forgot it.”
“Never mind. I can find out.”
“The cleaning woman, she said it’s not far from the kitchen door of that place to the kitchen door of the nurse place. Down the walk and around a corner, behind a fence the whole way, a big high pretty fence with little gates in it to little private yards.”
“Thanks. Did you get anything else?”
“There’s a lot of people in Southtown who plain wouldn’t tell anybody anything, black or white. Or they tell a little and hold back some if they think you want to know bad enough to lay a little bread on them. It isn’t on account of being mean. Somehow there’s never enough money to even get by on. Maybe if…”
I worked my wallet out of my hip pocket and flipped it over onto the bed by her hip. With the half-cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, head aslant to keep the smoke out of her eyes, she opened it and thumbed the corners of the bills. “Take what you think you might need.”
“And if I just take it all, man?”
“It would be because you need it.”
Bright animosity again. “Never come into your mind I was cheating you?”
“Mrs. Walker, there’s seven hundred and something in there. I’ve got to go along with the value you put on yourself, and you’ve got to go along with the value I put on myself.”
She stared at me, then shook her head. “You some kind of other thing for sure. Look. I got two hundred. Okay? Bring you change, prob’ly.”
She started to get up, undoubtedly to bring the wallet back to me, but then out of some prideful and defiant impulse, she settled back and flipped it at me. I picked it out of the air about six inches in front of my nose, and slipped it back into the hip pocket. She folded the bills and undid one button of the high-collared uniform blouse and tucked the money down into the invisible, creamy, compacted cleft between those outsized breasts. She re-buttoned and gave herself a little pat.
She made a rueful mouth. “Talk to you so long out in the back, and now I’ve been in here with the door shut too long, and I tell you that everybody working here keeps close track.”
She got up and took the ashtray she had used into the bathroom and brought it back, shining clean, and put it on the bedside table.
“Going to make me some nice problem,” she muttered.
“Problem?”
“Nothing I can’t handle. I’m kind of boss girl, right after Miz Imber. Up to me to keep them all working right. Lot of them may be older, but nobody can match me for mean. Can’t tell them why I spent all this time in here with you alone. So they’re going to slack off on me, thinking that on account of I suddenly start banging white, I lost my place. Oh, they’ll try me for sure. But they’ll find out they’re going to get more mean than they can handle from ol’ Fifty Pound.”