It glazed her. She stared wide-eyed into the middle distance, the fat little mouth agape, exposing the gleamings of even little white teeth.
“He’s been acting so funny,” she whispered. “Jumpy. Cross all the time. And there wasn’t any other cruise he drank so much. And mean to me this trip. Nasty mean. He gave me such a thumping! The thing that started it, I asked him when we could quit. First it was going to be just three or four. Then it got up to ten. And this was number fourteen and I said to him that no matter how smooth it went, if you kept it up and kept it up, you were pushing your luck. I said I was getting sick of having such a strain all the time, and how much better everything was when there was just the two of us in the little apartment in Coral Gables, and I worked the conventions over on the Beach. That was no real reason for the thumping he gave me. He’s had lots better reasons. I’ve been with him seven years. This is big money, but… when I can’t sleep, sometimes I keep thinking about those poor guys. I just can’t believe Ans would. let them do that to me. “No, of course not. He is a very sentimental guy. He wants to keep you alive and well, so the cops can pick you up and let a whole swarm of people make identifications, so they can bring you to trial for murder first and let you make a deal with the law and help them nail everybody else. Use your head, kiddy. They know DeeDee would make a deal. Vangie would make a deal. Why should they trust the third hooker to keep her mouth shut?”
She bit down on her thumb knuckle. “Tuesday morning it was, he didn’t get back to the place until way after three. Then he sat out there drinking, and he wouldn’t come to bed. You know… I guess it would really bother him to have to do that to Tami. I guess it was hard on him.”
“And Griff is going to cry big tears when he tucks you into some swamp.
She shuddered. “Please stop doing that, huh? I have to think. God, I don’t know what to do. You can guess how much bread Ans lets me have. I don’t have a hundred dollars in the world. I’ve never been on my own at all. I’ve been with Ans since I was sixteen. I was third runner-up for Miss Oceanside Beach and he was third runner-up for Mr. Body. He was twenty-seven. We teamed up like to help each other, and we went a billion miles in that old car, I bet, just barely making out on the contests, a whole year of it, and then he got so sick there in Chicago, and I was working waitress and telling my troubles to a girlfriend, how he was in a charity ward, and the medicines so expensive, and my feet hurting all the time from those damn tile floors, and then my waitress girlfriend took me on that double date, and the guy put fifty bucks into my purse, under the table.”
She shook her head slowly, frowning. “When he found out for sure about the hustling, it racked him up. He cried and cried. When he got better we tried to make it the square way, him pumping gas, but he got an allergy and his hands swelled so bad he couldn’t work, and I went back to hustling, and it didn’t bother him so much, and finally it didn’t bother him at all.”
She frowned at me and said, “He’s weak, kind of. He’s scared. He could do that to Tami from being scared. It must be killing him inside to think I’ve got to be killed too. That’s why he’s so mean and jumpy and drinking and”
All The tiny childish voice trailed off. In the quiet of the empty lounge she sat with head lowered, hat brim concealing her face. Her hand, resting inert next to the ashtray, was small, plump, with short fingers and a thick palm, the nails nibbled so close to the quick her fingertips looked deformed. She wore a narrow gold wedding ring set with small diamond chips, and a little gold wristwatch shaped like a heart, the strap fashioned of thin black fabric cords. It had shifted from its customary position and I could see where the light tan of the wrist surrounded the pattern of a heart in the white untanned skin. The wrist of a woman and the small tidy forearm always seem to me to have some tender and touching quality, a vulnerable articulation unchanged from the time she was ten or twelve, perhaps the only part of her that her flowering leaves unchanged.