Free In the Slammer With Carol Smith by Hortense Calisher Page B

dispensation.’ He lifts a small, evil sliver of metal from their path. ‘Nights only. I watch until it’s light. Days, I’m on the docks—if there’s nothing for the barrow. Or on the ferry—if luck presents.’
    Does he mean—if he can pay?
    ‘Is it an open church, or a closed?’
    A splinter of glass has lodged in the heel of Mungo’s left boot. Bending, he pries it out. ‘Open for services only. And Sunday soup. Otherwise closed, with only me there. All the riffraff that’s around—that would doss down in the sanctuary? Can’t do else.’
    She wonders whether he stays for the soup.
    The long shard he tosses out of their path is amber. From the storefront window’s border. She decides not to mention this. They are almost at the shed.
    ‘Wonder how come they left it,’ Mungo says.
    A voice answers from around the shed’s side. ‘Daylight. They had to scramble.’
    It’s Jerry Guido, the cop on the beat. Who as all of them know, volunteered to walk his territory instead of riding in a police car. Who even the teenage hoods go to, in a jam. ‘That fuckin’ moneybags. She must of figured the courts won’t bother her for the demolishing, just because she’s in Florida.’ He comes round the side of the shed. ‘And how are you, my Aussie friend?’
    ‘No she wasn’t. She was here, in her mink. The morning of the accident.’
    When a cop alerts, even in chat, his hand always goes to where his gun is stashed. ‘And who are you? And what do you know about the accident?’
    Whatever is wrong with her chemistry—for of course she’s been warned there may be something—it’s also common knowledge that people like her share one of the stigmata of childhood for which they are neither cherished or thanked. Their tongues will not lie. Even if they take a daily pill.
    Fortunately, Jerry now recognizes her. ‘Why it’s you, is it? Alphonse’s Miss Boston Special. Hey there. Looka you.’ He whistles. ‘Got yourself a job, maybe? At the Rainbow Room?’
    It’s the haircut. And starting out. With the men at the bar maybe watching. She has on all her ‘other’ wardrobe. The shirt, the belt, the dungies. And Angel’s earrings.
    But when he sees the tell-tale backpack there’s that shift in his face. When it recognizes the outside. ‘Don’t get me wrong—’ he says. What he means is—he had her wrong. ‘But where are you two heading?’
    ‘She has to see the shed.’ Mungo speaks as if this is some faith he won’t question.
    ‘Does she now. And why?’
    Mungo turns to her. ‘Why?’
    When both the outside people and the inside ones want to know your reasons, their own whys become starkly clearer. Mungo’s asking only because wherever he is, he travels in circles. Answering docilely to those who hand out dispensations. And always a little at sea.
    Jerry asks because he has the eye-crinkles that come from kindliness, but also a holster somewhere.
    She says, ‘I want to keep a memory.’
    Mungo swings his head uncomfortably. He’s wearing a round collar back-to-front—his minister’s discard?—which he has fastened with paper-clips. The cop purses his mouth. If she mystifies both parties, that’s nothing new.
    ‘I don’t think maybe you ought to go in there,’ the cop says softly.
    ‘Somebody’s killed the cat?’ She could almost see it, hanging there as once the aunts’ cat had been found, strung up in the barn. No significance the aunts had murmured to one another. A word she had added to her hoard.
    ‘That moocher?’ Jerry says. ‘He’s already in the window of the woman who gives readings. She’s always had her eye on him. Maybe he’ll assist.’
    Cops never spread their arms. Jerry spreads his gut though, to relax him and you; he was once cited by the department for being too fat. It’s still a gut. ‘Well, folks—going off duty. We’ll have the lot fenced in by tomorrow.’ He stares at the airy space above, into which the clouds are sneaking as if long prevented.