say it cost, Jon?” She had spent an hour scrubbing at the bottle with test tube brushes a former roommate had left behind.
“Fifty cents,” Mercer lied. “I think what probably happened was that old Morny got mugged, and the rats got to him before they found his body.”
“That’s really nice,” Linda judged. “I mean the bottle.” Freckled arms akimbo, sleeves rolled up on an old blue workshirt, faded blue jeans, morning sun a nimbus through her whiskey-colored close curls, eyes two shades darker than the azure star.
Mercer remembered the half-smoked joint on the hall balustrade, struck a match. “God knows there are rats big enough to do that to a body down under the kudzu. I’m sure it was rats that killed Midnight last spring.”
“Poor old tomcat,” Linda mourned. She had moved in with Mercer about a month before it happened, remembered his stony grief when their search had turned up the mutilated cat. “The city ought to clear off these weed-lots.”
“All they ever do is knock down the houses,” Mercer got out, between puffs. “Condemn them so you can’t fix them up again. Tear them down so the winos can’t crash inside.”
“Wasn’t that what Morny was doing? Tearing them down, I mean?”
“Sort of.” Mercer coughed. “He and Gradie were partners. Gradie used to run a second-hand store back before the neighborhood had rotted much past the edges. He used to buy and sell salvage from the old houses when they started to go to seed. The last ten years or so, after the neighborhood had completely deteriorated, he started working the condemned houses. Once a house is condemned, you pretty well have to pull it down, and that costs a bundle—either to the owner, or, since usually it’s abandoned property, to the city. Gradie would work a deal where they’d pay him something to pull a house down—not very much, but he could have whatever he could salvage.
“Gradie would go over the place with Morny, haul off anything Gradie figured was worth saving—and by the time he got the place, there usually wasn’t much. Then Gradie would pay Morny maybe five or ten bucks a day to pull the place down— taking it out of whatever he’d been paid to do the job. Morny would make a show of it, spend a couple weeks tearing out scrap timber and the like.
Then, when they figured they’d done enough, Morny would set fire to the shell. By the time the fire trucks got there, there’d just be a basement full of coals. Firemen would spray some water, blame it on the winos, forget about it. The house would be down, so Gradie was clear of the deal— and the kudzu would spread over the empty lot in another year.”
Linda considered the roach, snuffed it out and swallowed it. Waste not, want not. “Lucky they never burned the whole neighborhood down. Is that how Gradie got that mantel you’ve been talking about?”
“Probably.” Mercer followed her into the front parlor. The mantel had reminded Linda that she wanted to listen to a record.
The parlor—they used it as a living room—was heavy with stale smoke and flat beer and the pungent odor of Brother Jack’s barbecue. Mercer scowled at the litter of empty Rolling Rock bottles, crumpled napkins and sauce-stained rinds of bread. He ought to clean up the house today, while Linda was in a domestic mood—but that meant they’d have to tackle the kitchen, and that was an all-day job—and he’d wanted to get her to pose while the sun was right in his upstairs studio.
Linda was having problems deciding on a record. It would be one of hers, Mercer knew, and hoped it wouldn’t be Dylan again. She had called his own record library one of the wildest collections of curiosa ever put on vinyl. After half a year of living together, Linda still thought resurrected radio broadcasts of “The Shadow” were a camp joke, Mercer continued to argue that Dylan couldn’t sing a note. Withal, she always paid her half of the rent on time. Mercer reflected that he got along with her better than with any previous roommate, and while the house was subdivided into a three-bedroom apartment, they never advertised for a third party.
The speakers, bunched on either side of the hearth, came to life with a scratchy Fleetwood Mac album. It drew Mercer’s attention once more to the ravaged fireplace. Some Philistine landlord, in the process of remodelling the dilapidated Edwardian mansion into student apartments, had ripped