Free Rainy City by Earl Emerson Page B

could teach a few quick curses to. Only one lonely little blonde Angel sitting at a table too tall for her and straining dutifully to crayon in a book she could barely reach.
    I had to stifle an urge to run across the room and give her a hug. I could see it wasn’t the thing to do. She was terrified of me. She was terrified of everything. Her face was molded into a mask of fright. I began to scout around the living room. That was me. Snoopy.
    “Ooooooh,” she said. “Ooooooooooooh.”
    When I looked, she was staring somberly at the tipped milk glass, at the growing puddle of whiteness. “Ooooooh. I’m gonna get it. I’m gonna get it. Ooooooooooooh.”
    I went over and said, “Tell you what, sweetheart. I’ll clean this up and nobody ever has to know it happened. How’s that?”
    Angel shied away from me, evaluated the plan, both pudgy little hands on her cheeks, and then evaluated me. I found a towel inside the door of an ornate buffet and used it to mop up the spilled milk. I polished off the table top, righted the glass, and crammed the sopping towel into my flight jacket. Then I patted Angel on the head and winked. A tiny, cautious grin spread across her face.
    I was entertaining the kid when Angus Crowell came in. He wore gym shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, a patina of sweat glistening on his brow. He had enough excess beef on him that a walk from the other end of the house would make him break into a sweat, though I sensed that he had been exercising.
    “Do I know your he asked, in a voice that was gruff and authoritarian. A look of suspicion blackened his thick features. He brooked no guff. His broken, stooped wife bespoke that.
    “My name is Black.”
    “So?”
    “I’m here to talk about your granddaughter.”
    Without taking his hard brown eyes off me, Angus Crowell shouted for his wife. “Muriel! Get the hell in here!”
    She came higgledy-piggledy, the original Edith Bunker, a damp dishrag dangling from her hands and a look of wrinkled concern on her face’. “Muriel, why the hell did you let this bum in here?”
    Glancing at me in sudden coerced disapproval, she said. “He looked like a nice young man, dear.” She was past fifty, but her life was not her own. She wouldn’t start living until her husband’s body was under six feet of sod. I bet she was counting the days, scratching a wall somewhere with a rusty nail.
    “Get Angie to her room! I’ve had enough of this shit!”
    Angus was several inches taller than I was, outweighed my one-eighty by a good sixty or seventy pounds, and had the look of a man who had put in years of hard labor in his youth.
    “I keep in shape,” he said. “Got my own handball court here. Unless you want to see what sort of shape, you better hustle your ass out that front door, Mr. Thomas Black.”
    I hadn’t told him my first name. The gray and reddish hairs on his eyebrows formed an interesting weave, tufted like that of an aggressive baboon. He was in his mid-sixties, I would guess, and imbued with the kingly air of a monarch who held court daily. Behind him, Mrs. Crowell scurried away, pulling her granddaughter by her arm. The frightened tot cast a sidelong look at me and smiled conspiratorially. At least I thought it was a smile.
    “I’m sure you realize that this whole deal is on shaky ground,” I said. “If the police or newspapers got ahold of this, you’d be forced to give up the child.”
    A large, hirsute paw came up and pointed a thick finger, like a gun barrel, at my face. He sighted down it, aiming it at my nose. I noticed a series of ancient, thickened scars on his hand and remembered his sister in Bellingham saying something about a run-in he’d had with a dog in his youth.
    “Somebody calls the newspapers on this and I’ll hold you personally responsible, Mr. Thomas Black. Got that?
    He wouldn’t have gotten sore if I hadn’t struck a nerve.
    A jagged scar ran down his left leg as if it had been spilled, as if one could spill hurt. Another