Yes, of course he had. There had been a mess with the Internal Affairs investigators, for one thing. Norman and Harley Bissington had escaped from that with their skins intact —
barely — only to discover that the slutty high-yellow gal had found herself a lawyer (a baldheaded kike ambulance-chaser, in Normanspeak) who had filed a huge civil suit on her behalf. It named Norman, Harley, the entire police department. Then, not long before Rosie’s miscarriage, Wendy Yarrow had been murdered. She was found behind one of the grain elevators on the west side of the lake. She had been stabbed over a hundred times, and her breasts had been hacked off.
Some sicko, Norman had told Rosie, and although he had not been smiling after he put the telephone down — someone at the cop-shop must have been really excited, to have called him at home — there had been undeniable satisfaction in his voice. She sat in at the game once too often and a wildcard came out of the deck. Hazard of the job. He had touched her hair then, very gently, stroking it, and had smiled at her. Not his biting smile, the one that made her feel like screaming, but she’d felt like screaming anyway, because she had known, just like that, what had happened to Wendy Yarrow, the slutty high-yellow gal.
See how lucky you are? he’d asked her, now stroking the back of her neck with his big hard hands, now her shoulders, now the swells of her breasts. See how lucky you are not to be out on the street, Rose?
Then — maybe it had been a month later, maybe six weeks — he had come in from the garage, found Rosie reading a romance novel, and decided he needed to talk to her about her entertainment tastes. Needed to talk to her about them right up close, in fact.
1985, a hell of a year.
Rosie lay in bed with her hands under her pillow, slipping toward sleep and listening to the sound of the crickets coming in through the window, so close they sounded as if her room had been magically transported onto the bandstand in the park, and she thought of a woman who had sat in the corner with her hair plastered against her sweaty cheeks and her belly as hard as a stone and her eyes rolling in their shock-darkened sockets as the sinister kisses began to tickle at her thighs, that woman who was still years from seeing the drop of blood on the sheet, that woman who had not known places like Daughters and Sisters or men like Bill Steiner existed, that woman who had crossed her arms and gripped the points of her shoulders and prayed to a God she no longer believed in that it not be a miscarriage, that it not be the end of her small sweet dream, and then thinking, as she felt it happening, that maybe it was better. She knew how Norman fulfilled his responsibilities as a husband; how might he fulfil them as a father?
The soft hum of the crickets, lulling her to sleep. And she could even smell grass — a husky-sweet aroma that seemed out of place in May. This was a smell she associated with August hayfields.
I never smelted grass from the park before, she thought sleepily. Is this what love —
infatuation, at least — does to you? Does it sharpen your senses at the same time it’s making you crazy?
Very distantly, she heard a rumble that could have been thunder. That was strange, too, because the sky had been clear when Bill brought her home — she had looked up and marvelled at how many stars she could see, even with all the orange hi-intensity streetlights.
She drifted, sliding away, sliding into the last dreamless sleep she would have for some time, and her final thought before the darkness claimed her was How can I hear crickets or smell grass? The window’s not open; I closed it before I got into bed. Closed it and locked it.
V
Crickets
1
Late that Wednesday afternoon, Rosie almost floated into the Hot Pot. She ordered a cup of tea and a pastry and sat by the window, slowly eating and drinking as she watched the endless river of pedestrians outside — most of them office-workers at this hour, headed home for the day. The Hot Pot was actually out of her way now that she was no longer working at the Whitestone, but she’d come here unhesitatingly just the same, perhaps because she had had so many pleasant after-work cups of coffee here with Pam, perhaps because she wasn’t much of an explorer — not yet, at least — and this was a place she knew and trusted.
She had finished reading The Manta Ray around two o’clock, and had been reaching under the table for her bag when Rhoda Simons had clicked through on the speaker. ‘Do you want a little break before we start the next one, Rosie?’ she had asked, and there it was, as simple as that. She had hoped she would get the other three Bell/Racine novels, had believed she would, but the relief of actually knowing could not be matched.
Nor was that all. When they’d broken at four, already two chapters into a lurid little slash-and-stalk thriller called Kill All My Tomorrows, Rhoda had asked Rosie if she would mind stepping down to the ladies’ bathroom with her for a few minutes.
‘I know it sounds weird,’ she said, ‘but I’m dying for a smoke and it’s the only place in the whole damned building I dare to sneak one. Modern life’s a bitch, Rosie.’
In the bathroom, Rhoda had lit a Capri and perched on the sink-ledge between the two basins with an ease that bespoke long familiarity. She crossed her legs, hooked her right foot behind her left calf, and looked at Rosie speculatively.
‘Love your hair,’ she said.
Rosie touched it self-consciously. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing she’d had done in a beauty-shop the previous evening, fifty dollars she could not afford . . . and had been unable not to spend. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Robbie’s going to offer you a contract, you know.’
Rosie frowned and shook her head. ‘No — I don’t know. What are you talking about?’
‘He may look like Mr Pennybags on the Monopoly Community Chest cards, but Robbie’s been in the audio-book biz since 1975, and he knows how good you are. He knows better than you do. You think you owe him a lot, don’t you?’
‘I know I do,’ Rosie replied stiffly. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going; it made her think of those Shakespearian plays where people stabbed their friends in the back and then reeled off long, sanctimonious soliloquies explaining how unavoidable it had been.
‘Don’t let your gratitude get in the way of your self-interest,’ Rhoda said, tapping cigarette ash neatly into the basin and chasing it with a squirt of cold water. ‘I don’t know the story of your life and I don’t particularly want to know it, but I know you did The Manta Ray in just a hundred and four takes, which is fucking phenomenal, and I know you sound like the young Elizabeth Taylor. I also know — because it’s just about taped to your forehead — that you’re on your own and not used to it. You’re so tabula rasa it’s scary. Do you know what that means?’
Rosie wasn’t entirely sure — something about being naive, she thought — but she wasn’t going to let on to Rhoda. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good. And don’t get me wrong, for Christ’s sake — I’m not trying to cut in on Robbie, or cut my own piece out of your cake. I’m rooting for you. So’s Rob, and so’s Curtis. It’s just that Rob’s also rooting for his wallet. Audio-books is still a brand-new field. If this were the movie business, we’d be halfway through the Age of the Silents. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’
‘Sort of.’
‘When Robbie listens to you reading The Manta Ray, he’s thinking of an audio version of Mary Pickford. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Even the way he met you adds to that.
There’s a legend about Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore. Well, Robbie’s already making a legend in his own mind about how he discovered you in his friend Steiner’s pawnshop, looking at antique postcards.’
‘Is that what he told you I was doing?’ she asked, feeling a surge of warmth for Robbie Lefferts that was almost love.
‘Uh-huh, but where he found you and what you were doing there doesn’t really matter. The fact is that you’re good, Rosie, you’re really, really talented. It’s almost as if you were born to this job. Rob discovered you, but that doesn’t give him a right to your pipes for the rest of your life. Don’t let him own you.’