Abels balefully resumed the lead. “So you had no hesitation before you killed him?”
“Not after he stabbed me.”
Pause in the interrogation as, possibly, Abels regrouped and the other men measured themselves against this answer.
“All right, then. Delpha. Just for a minute setting aside what we know now, that your assailant is also the chief suspect in six murders…on the afternoon in question, you didn’t know that—”
Her lips parted. She stared straight-on at Abels and his coarse mustache with a few gray hairs in it. He would’ve been on that site, she knew it. At his rank. Case like this. Abels’d have pictures in his head of whatever was left of those young bodies in dirty plastic, he’d have putrefaction fresh in his nose.
“Nobody sets six dead boys off to the side,” she said. “You don’t.”
Abels’ head twitched like there was a bone inside he had to pop straight. There was silence. Breathing. Then, “I do not. No, ma’am.”
Ma’am. Purely a figure of speech, but there it was. First shred of respect.
As though a buzzer had sounded, Miles Blankenship checked his silver watch and glided to his feet. “I believe we’re finished here, officers,” he said pleasantly.
He turned his head and addressed the chief. “If there are further questions, sir, please direct them to me. Miss Wade, I’ll be at your disposal.”
He tilted toward her and began to ease back her chair.
Delpha grabbed the sides of the seat.
She craned back at Mr. Blankenship, who smiled kindly, murmuring Allow me. She then let go of the chair, let it be guided back from the table, but feeling embattled still, rose and scanned each in turn: met the weighing eyes of the chief, angled toward Joe Ford’s familiar bony face, then the two detectives facing her. Abels blew out a short sigh, coughed to cover it. Either Tucker winked at her, or he was afflicted by an allergic tic.
Out in the hall, some uniforms were gathered, spilling out toward the squad room. Some of them had surely seen the bodies dug up. A couple of them nodded deliberately as if in support of the woman in the bloody shirt, others gawked as at a spectacle. Delpha passed by the badged chests into the open squad room, beginning to feel a sharp pain between her shoulder blades from holding herself upright. Feeling, in a rush, her exhaustion, the twanging ache of her incision, the barb in the middle of herself, as she neared the station’s waiting room. Behind her, low conversations were commencing.
“Fuckin’ A right,” she heard, along with steak knife, motherfucker, and bite-size pieces. Somebody sniggered.
Keys jingled. Joe Ford mumbled, “See you,” and excused himself by.
Yeah, she’d see him in the parole office. Wouldn’t that be a session.
Around three p.m., Fontenot slid behind the desk again, blue eyes snapping.
“Tole you,” he sang, and Phelan knew they were cutting her loose.
His friend Joe Ford appeared first, passing Phelan with a widening of the eyes and a simultaneous twist of the jaw. Then Miles. They weren’t charging her. Likely result: finding of self-defense to be forwarded to the D.A. Miles couldn’t stick around. He was off to mediate between a feuding couple, bone of contention: an aged beagle named Betty.
“Send me your bill,” Phelan said.
“Have to, Tom. I’m on the partners’ clock.” Miles smiled wryly. “She’d’ve done OK without me. Good to finally lay eyes on you again, buddy.” He shook Phelan’s hand and strode out.
“Give you a ride,” Phelan said to Delpha when she and Abels walked out past Fontenot’s front desk. “Back to the hospital? Or home?”
“Home.”
Once in the car, Phelan asked her if she wanted a clean shirt. “Yeah, thanks,” she said, “ruther not scandalize the Rosemont.” He stopped at Gus Meyer, pulled a woman’s white shirt off a rack. In the car she put it on, leaving him with an image of a tender-looking red track across a rib, a rust-spotted cotton bra, and the curve of her breasts.
He escorted her back into the New Rosemont, through the wide lobby furnished in sheenless blue velour, floral-print chintz, fringed lamps, scratched-up side tables with aluminum ashtrays. Couches and chairs grouped for cozy conversation were at that moment occupied by elderly clientele imitating arthritic marble statues. At the foot of the stairs, they stopped. Her boss looked at her a little while, like he wanted to say a thing, or say several things, his face pained. Finally just said, “Get well, hear?”
Delpha whispered thanks and went up. She found she needed to hold to the rail.
A night nurse who’d woken her to measure temperature and blood pressure had mentioned Mr. Phelan. That your husband or your boyfriend? she’d wanted to know. He’s not wearing a ring. I like the ones with no belly fat. You let me know if he’s not your boyfriend.
He’d come to see her those days after the surgery, even during the week-long haze when she was mostly sleeping off an infection. He sat by the bed during the after-work hour, not saying much. The August sunlight through the window had picked out auburn glints in his dark hair. Getting long. His blue shirt usually looked like a chicken had ironed it. He’d been noncommittal about any new jobs, and she’d guessed there were none. She was afraid she’d ruined his business. Mr. Thomas Phelan, ex-roughneck, Worker’s Comp recipient for a lost finger, new private investigator. Employer of Delpha Wade when not another soul in Beaumont, Texas, would accept that title.
III
THE NEW ROSEMONT Retirement Hotel’s residents had picked through the Beaumont Journal’s front-page columns or watched Channel 4’s Evening Report—and spread the big story to others who hadn’t. Miss Delpha Wade, up in Room 221 at the top of the stairs, had killed a man in self-defense, and according to an astonishing paragraph farther down in the article, not her first. Why, when she’d walked into their lobby last spring, she had been fresh out of Gatesville Women’s Prison! There were dire looks and looks askance, clucking and jaws sagging below coffee-stained dentures.
Delpha had avoided putting any of them on the spot. For the last ten days, if it wasn’t raining, she’d carried her coffee outside in the mornings and sat in the open air watching the downtown pass by. Last two of those days, she’d worn a skirt and blouse suitable for office work.
Now her coffee was churning in her stomach, a mouthful gurgling back up into her throat, and again, she was dressed. The sky was lowering by the minute, a wood-handled black umbrella leaning against her hip.
Droplets splashed her hair. Delpha cast an upward glance at the big, running clouds, purple along their bottom edges, then she stood and forced the umbrella to open its black vault.
Phelan stared out the window at the rain, then at legs under an umbrella, crossing the street with less speed than might seem natural for such ugly weather. Walking deliberately in black flats. Wet black flats.
Tropical Storm Celia was now whamming into Freemont for the second time, having hit land two days ago, sucked herself back out over the Gulf to do
