104. Mattie Halliday walked like a warrior queen. . . .
Mattie Halliday walked like a warrior queen at the end of a bad campaign; she marched briskly with a slight limp, her hair lopsided, and scowled in a manner to frighten children. I held the door for her without comment, and she led the way downstairs to my basement apartment. Once I’d closed the flimsy latch, she looked around as though she hardly knew the place. “Hello,” I said to her. “Haven’t seen you here in a while.”
“You’ve been too busy,” she replied. “You’ve been spending all your time pumping that fat bitch.”
“These rumors do get around,” I said. “You’d probably like Julia if you got to know her. It’s just that the two of you ended up on opposite sides in this Jerome Weld thing.”
“Pah!” she said. “I can’t stand women who do nothing but wave their legs in the air like dying insects. Brush my hair, will you?”
“Julia’s hardly that,” I said. “Turn around; let’s see what you’ve done to yourself.”
I’d begun to feel proprietary about Mattie’s hair and was pained to find that it had been scorched along one quadrant; her tumble into the pyramid of books had done that. I picked at it disconsolately. “I don’t know,” I said to Mattie. “We could cut this, but I hate to try it. I haven’t had good luck helping people lately.”
“The burned ones have those tiny beads on the ends so you can’t get a brush through it. Maybe you could do something about those; we have church tonight, and I’ll feel awkward giving a Good Friday talk with my hair like this.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Let me brush you while I’m studying the problem. I wish Grace was here.”
“No offense,” Mattie said, “but I wouldn’t trust your friend to cut my hair. Hers is very odd.”
“Grace is in Las Vegas,” I said. “She went there with a police informant to play chess.” I began brushing the unburned part of her, starting at the split ends; her hair really did cry out for at least a trim.
“People lead strange lives,” Mattie observed. I couldn’t quarrel with that. I paused in my brushing long enough to start a pot of coffee, then went back to work straightening out the mess. It looked as if she hadn’t touched it since the botched demonstration. “What’s your next move against the bookstore?” I asked. Her hair smelled like burnt feathers.
“I don’t know if I should tell you, since you’re balling one of the proprietors.”
“That seems to have come to a sudden end, for reasons I’d rather not discuss,” I said. “Don’t tell me a thing if you don’t want to. I’m only making conversation like any barber.”
“I don’t care who knows what,” Mattie said sullenly. “I have to do what I have to do. I suppose the only thing now is to see if it re-opens.”
“It’ll re-open,” I said. “The cops’ve made a royally screwed-up case, and Jerome’ll never give up while there’s life in him.”
“We’ve hired a lawyer,” Mattie said. “I don’t like lawyers, but it was that or burn the place down completely. How do you make a Molotov cocktail, by the way?”
“I don’t know. Just a bottle with gasoline and a wick, I guess. You might put something extra in the gas to make it sticky. Were you planning on throwing one through the window?”
“I might.”
“Don’t count on it,” I said. “When I was an undergraduate here, I used to get drunk with some ag bozos who lived next door to a church that had plate-glass windows. We liked to throw our beer bottles at the church. The bottles would smash, but the windows never did. Plate glass is tough.”
“My, what an amusing vignette,” Mattie said. “Did you ever try it with a full bottle?”
“Are you kidding? An empty liquor bottle, yes, a time or two. No breakie.”
“Maybe it was some special kind of glass.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, if it was me I’d shoot the window out first and throw the bottle in afterwards. Speaking as an experienced vandal and arsonist.”
“This is not about vandalism! We’re making the world a safer place for women!”
“Well, excuse me,” I said. “Did you bring any decent scissors? I really think we should trim this just a bit.”
“Oh, dear,” Mattie said.
“I’ll cut it straight across the back and then angle it at the sides, to even it up with the burned part. Well, think about it while I pour us coffee. Do you take milk or sugar?”
“I take it bitter and black,” Mattie said.
While I was trimming her—I made a respectable job of it by taping her hair to her blouse and then cutting along the tape—I mentioned that I’d been invited to Strange and Justman’s. She immediately wanted to know if Ted Kemp would be there. I said I didn’t know; Mattie said that she could probably find out, and that if he was going she would like to go as my date. I waffled because I planned to test my luck with Selva. Mattie sensed that there was a woman at the root of my doubts. “I wouldn’t really be your date,” she said. “I just want to be in a situation where I can talk with Ted.”
“You can talk to Ted any time,” I said. “Call him up.”
“He’s not answering his phone,” she said. “He won’t speak to me.”
“Maybe he’s trying to tell you that it’s all over,” I said patiently.
“He can’t tell me that,” Mattie said. “I’ll kill him first.”
Because Grace would not be coming over, and because I was lonely, I cooked supper for the two of us. Mattie helped wash dishes and then put on her sweater; it was time for her to dress for her congregation. “I guess I can invite you to the party,” I said as she was leaving. “It’s true that I’m interested in someone who might be there, so you have to agree to vanish if I start to get lucky.”
“Just the sort of invitation I was hoping for,” she said, offering me a handshake. “You don’t need to tell me anything about Ted,” she added. “It’s like the bookstore: I have to do what I have to do.”
“Frankly, I hope he doesn’t show,” I said. “I wouldn’t care to be a witness at your trial, thanks very much.”
“He’ll be there,” she said, “and I’ll go home with him. You’ll see.”
“I’m going to check your purse,” I told her after I’d followed her to the top of the stairs. “If you’re carrying that shiny revolver, I’m not taking you.”
“If I’m carrying the .38,” she said, smiling, “I think you’ll take me wherever I want to go.”
I grinned back at her and shrugged. “See you. Gotta get dressed for my gig.”
“Break a testicle,” she said. “Say hi to Fat Julia. Tell her I haven’t finished with her yet. I owe her for my hair.”
“You can tell her at the party,” I said. “I expect she’ll be there.” I waved goodbye to her back; she went striding down the sidewalk in the fading light, her chestnut-colored hair fanning out like wings.
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