Free Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund by Blaize Clement Page B

both broken and rebroken most every bone they had, the glamour of flying through the air without a net had lost its allure. Now they had a business making clown costumes. Will had a workshop over the garage where he made custom-designed clown shoes, while Josephine and a string of
short-term helpers sewed baggy suspender pants and swallowtail coats made of outlandish polka dots and plaids.
    Josephine’s newest helper, an impossibly young mother named Priscilla, answered the door when I rang. I had never heard Priscilla speak, and I didn’t know whether she was mute or just painfully shy. She didn’t speak this morning either, but gave me a sweet smile with black-lipsticked lips. Priscilla had bright pink hair cut in a feathery halo and wore at least a half dozen rings around the rim of each ear. A diamond stud flashed at the edge of one nostril, and more diamonds, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, decorated her long emerald fingernails. A couple of gold rings flashed at her navel. Low-rider white Levi’s sat on her narrow hips, and her cropped top hugged breasts the size of tangerines. Her shoes had soles a good four inches thick, with heels slightly higher, so that she tilted forward at a precarious angle. If it hadn’t been for the fading yellow bruise high on her right cheekbone, she would have looked like any other teenager trying out a new identity.
    She led me down the hall to a large square room that always made me feel like a visitor in an off-brand church. Sunlight streamed through ceiling-high windows, and bolts of fabric stacked on deep shelves absorbed the sound of two sewing machines that faced each other like dueling altars. A cloth tailor’s dummy stood in the corner wearing a red-and-yellow-plaid cutaway with zoot-suit lapels and formal tails. A playpen sat next to Priscilla’s sewing center, with a big-eyed baby girl clutching its mesh sides and doing bouncy knee bends.
    Josephine was at an ironing board steaming open a seam. She looked up long enough to grin at me and then went back to steaming. Like her neighborhood, Josephine had given up on pretty a long time ago. Her long gray hair straggled over her shoulders, and not a smidgen of powder or blush colored her face. She didn’t even bother to wear her bridge anymore, just flaunted all the gaps between her teeth.
    She said, “’Cilla, do you see somebody in this room that looks like Dixie Hemingway? You remember her, the
one we haven’t seen in so long I can’t remember. Could it be that she has come to see us?”
    I hung Conrad’s coat on a metal clothes rack and helped myself to a stick of chewing gum from a selection in a hat box on a table.
    I said, “It’s been several weeks, hasn’t it?”
    “You been busy with your cats and dogs, I guess.”
    “I really am, Jo. About all I do is get up and walk dogs and clean kitty litter, and then it’s time to go back and do it all over again.”
    “Well, we love you anyway, even if we never hardly see you.”
    I chomped down on the gum and tasted its sweet juices flowing over my tongue. I hadn’t chewed gum since high school, and I wondered why I’d ever stopped. The baby gave me a toothless grin, and I went over and fluffed the blond floss on the top of her head.
    I said, “Have you heard about Conrad Ferrelli?”
    “About a million times. His brother sending his coat back?”
    The baby squealed and bounced her bottom up and down, looking up at me with wide trusting eyes.
    I said, “His wife sent the coat back. But she said to be sure and tell you how much Conrad loved it.”
    “Then why’s she sending it back?”
    Resisting the urge to pick the baby up, I said, “So somebody else can wear it.”
    “I was hoping she’d bury him in it.”
    I couldn’t tell if she meant she was glad Conrad was dead, or if she meant she’d like him to spend eternity wearing the coat she’d made for him. The baby lost her balance and plunked down hard on the playpen’s padded floor. She began to cry,