Stone Cold Dead, James Ziskin [best ebook reader android .txt] 📗

“How can I resist such a polite request? Where is this place?”

I gave him the directions, and he said he thought he could find it.

“But you’re going to be beholden to me,” he said. “And I’m not talking a peck on the cheek, either.”

“Let’s see how fast you get out here, then we’ll negotiate the payback.”

My hosts reentered the room just as I hung up. Mrs. Karl was carrying a plate of powdered-sugar cookies and a steaming pot of tea. Mr. Karl was beaming at me. Junior was nowhere to be seen.

“Thank you so much for letting me use your phone and wait in the warmth,” I said.

“Our pleasure, miss,” said Mrs. Karl.

“Parcheesi?” asked the father.

“Oh, my! Parcheesi!” I smiled. “May I use the powder room?”

“We don’t have fancy facilities,” Mrs. Karl explained as she led me back behind the kitchen. “There’s just the one john,” she said. “It’s back here behind Bobby’s bedroom.”

We passed through the kitchen, past Edna, who, tail twitching, looked ready to pounce on something in the corner. Mrs. Karl showed me into a cold, dark bedroom.

“Just through there, dear,” she said, switching on the light and pointing to a crooked door.

She left me alone. The small room, colder than the rest of the house, was fitted with a single bed, heaped with heavy blankets, rumpled and poorly made; a dim lamp on a small wooden table; an old braided rug, whose dark colors were difficult to identify in the low light; and an eerie collage, which hung on the wall behind the bed. The upper right-hand side of the three-by-four-foot work of art was decorated with 4-H clovers in felt, construction paper, and metal buttons. Intermingled with these, three pairs of shoelaces dangled from thumbtacks. I couldn’t fathom a guess. Below the laces, there was a yellowed school certificate of some kind and several black-and-white snapshots of a forsaken farm, most likely the Karl Ranch, though the photos were so dark and small it would be nearly impossible to tell. Locks of brown hair—God knows whose—were held together with a faded ribbon and taped to the collage. And there was a filthy, crumpled neckerchief, knotted and stapled to the background. A Zorro mask, a red paper poppy flower, and a tin sheriff’s badge. Several varicolored, shiny stars dotted the canvas here and there, self-awarded praise by the artist, perhaps, or a constellation as dim and odd as its maker. But the dominant feature of the collection was a hundred or so pictures of ladies in girdles, brassieres, and underwear, cut lovingly from the pages of the Sears catalog. Wrinkled from the globs of paste used to hold them captive forever, the models were arranged at different angles, with great care taken to mix sizes and shapes, presumably to lend artistic panache to the creepiness.

A shiver ran up my spine, and I was pretty sure it was the collage not the temperature of the room. I crept to the bathroom, peered inside, and thought better of it. I was going to have to wait until I reached home. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t milk my time away from the Karls for all it was worth. I stalled, staring at myself in the mottled mirror, examining my manicure, and touching up my lipstick.

When I finally opened the bathroom door, Junior was standing there, not two feet away. I quite nearly fainted. Only the certainty that he would perform unspeakable, hill-folk perversions on my person if I were to black out kept me conscious.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said, grinning as he pushed past me. “Nature calls.”

It was seven fifteen, and I was furious and frightened at the same time. I really wanted a drink, and not a glass of milk. That fat rat Fadge hadn’t shown up yet, and it seemed Mr. Karl had ideas of fixing me up with his 4-H, Zorro pervert of a son. It had reached the point where the old man wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wanted me to come for supper the next evening (afternoon, really) and then attend some kind of backwoods dance with Junior at the Town of Florida volunteer firehouse Saturday night. Finally, I took the path of least resistance and told him that, being Jewish, I wasn’t allowed to drive or dance on Saturday, our Sabbath. He blanched, his wife choked, but Junior smiled his cretin’s grin. Either he didn’t understand or didn’t care. Or maybe he’d heard Jewish girls were easy.

“But supper tomorrow sounds swell!” I said brightly, unable to resist. “I’ll bring the Mogen David wine. What time shall I come?”

“Actually, miss,” said Mr. Karl with a rueful shake of his head, “we don’t partake.”

We sat in awkward silence for ten minutes more until the lights of a car flashed through the parlor window and across the wall behind me. I jumped up off the sofa as if it were electrified and thanked my hosts once again.

“I’ll send a wrecker tomorrow for my car,” I said to the stunned couple. I wriggled into my coat. “Shalom!” The door closed behind me.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked, once I’d slid into Fadge’s Nash.

But it wasn’t Fadge at the wheel. It was his crony and old school chum, Tony Natale. Tony lived two doors down from me on Lincoln Avenue, and I often saw him at Fiorello’s. Once he’d asked me out, but I turned him down. I just couldn’t have accepted; it would have killed Fadge.

“What are you doing here, Tony? Where’s Fadge?”

“He couldn’t leave the store. Just be glad I wasn’t busy.”

“Right. What do you have to do? Address the UN?”

“You wanna walk home, Ellie?”

“Drive, Tony.”

CHAPTER FOUR

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 1961

I got an early start the next morning, phoned Dom Ornuti’s Garage to have my car towed in from the Karl farm, then met Fadge for coffee across the street. He was in a foul mood due to the persistent