careful to aim it low lest its beam alert an insomniac neighbor. A grey cat with extremely thick fur and a flat face meowed at me and purred, rubbing itself against my ankles, and I opened the refrigerator and put some milk in its empty bowl.
I climbed the stairs and examined the bedrooms. There were three, one occupied by the adults and two others filled with the accoutrements of children, specifically boys. In the hallway were family pictures indicating that there were four of them, and in the most recent of these the boys ranged from about a gap-toothed, towheaded six to a surly, crew cut fifteen.
I returned downstairs. At the rear of the house next to the kitchen was a small room Huff had apparently been using as an office. I went through the desk and found nothing of use, and was about to leave when I saw something on the wall: It was my letter, stuck there by thumbtack, as though he had sat there contemplating it before his act of self-destruction. Unaccompanied by that letter, the photo was powerless to do me or Collins harm, and it was with an audible sigh that I tore it from the wall and stuffed it in my shirt. And then I spotted something that might have been the corner of a piece of typing paper overhanging the corner of a bookcase. I reached for it; it was stiffer than typing paper, and sure enough, flipping it over I found Huff’s picture. The inconsiderate son of a bitch had left it lying around where his wife, or one of his sons, was eventually bound to find it. I did him a favor and took it and, as I let myself out, wondered whether Merle Tessler in Kansas City would be interested in getting Wageknecht’s negatives. There was a market for everything, why not this?
FOURTEEN
ON PROPOSITIONING A WIDOW
“THERE WAS A gal I met barnstorming, had a trick snatch.” We were at Norman’s, and Collins was at the garrulous stage of his nightly inebriation. “Trick how?” Norman said, his tone full of awe. He had known nothing but standard issue pussies in his sheltered life, and even those seemed to him miraculous.
“She worked for the carnival. I’d run into her two, three times a year, and she was always up for it. Liked pilots. Liked pretty much anything in pants, probably.”
“I thought you said women who needed more’n one man were nuts,” Norman said. “Ants in the pants equals rocks in the head.”
“She was an exception,” the old man said, showing a bit of the prickliness that was sure to surface fully blown by evening’s end; I really did need to find a successor to Herman Park before long. “Her name was Carlotta, or at least that was what she was calling herself then. Probably used to be Ethel or Laverne or Myrtle until she joined the carnie. Anyhow, she could squirt cold cream out of it and hit you right in the goddamn face. Shit, if they could have sold tickets to it they could have made some real kale. And boy oh boy, fucking her was like fucking no other woman alive. She pretty much ruined me. I suppose I’ve spent the rest of my life searching for another woman like that.”
“So how’d you end up married to Mrs. Collins?” Norman asked without apparent fear of getting an earful of abuse in return. I couldn’t quite figure out whether Norman simply hadn’t learned how to avoid tetchy subjects with Collins, or whether he just didn’t mind the abuse the old geezer piled on him.
But for once Collins’s reply was gentle, rueful even. He sketched a vision of young Mrs. Collins as a beautiful Irish colleen, only a generation removed from County Mayo. Splendid to look at, with a quiet disposition he took to be shyness. At that point he was tired of barnstorming, setting the stage for the first incarnation of Collins Aircraft Company in a converted barn in Saginaw, and he thought it was time to marry. It wasn’t until after the wedding that he realized that what had seemed timidity was in fact just a generalized dislike of humanity. “I would have caught on to her before I married her except she drove me temporarily crazy.”
“Crazy how?” Norman asked.
“She wouldn’t let me touch her. ‘That’s for marriage, Everett.’ And when I say no touching I’m not talking about having her suck my cock or even getting a quick feel