Riggs Park Part 12

"After that, I decided I was never going to let any wild animal take anything that belonged to me again," she said. "That includes you."

"I'm no animal," he said.

"No?" She moved to the door and opened it. "If anything happens to this house, Marcellus, I'll know who did it. I wouldn't let anybody else mess around here, either, because it would still be Marcellus on Quackenbos Street who got blamed."

"You telling me I have to guard your house?"

"If you're not too gutless." She knew what that word did to them: gutless. She pointed out the door toward the night.

The boy got up slowly, stiff-legged. He paused at the edge of the porch. "I'll see you," he muttered uncertainly.

"If you have the guts," she said. And by the way he'd moved off, in no hurry now, she'd thought maybe he did.

Now, thirty-five years later, I found the grown Marcellus in a cluttered office that had once been the garage of his house. His front yard had been turned into a parking lot. I wasn't sure exactly what I'd pictured when I tried to imagine him, but this wasn't it. Marcellus Johnson was short and wide and powerful-looking except for a round and very tame-looking potbelly that ballooned beneath his s.h.i.+rt. His weight lifter's shoulders were ma.s.sive, and he had a thick, muscular neck, but his face was a narrow surprise, high-cheekboned and intelligent, with an aquiline nose and large, slanted eyes that showed where Taneka had gotten her good looks. Though he was not yet fifty, his tight-cropped hair was salted with white, and he wore a thin black mustache that by contrast looked dyed and artificial. It rather disappointed me that he looked no more like a hood than a movie star. Not that I was any expert on what a hood ought to look like.

"I'm Barbara Cohen," I said offering my hand.

He nodded but didn't take it. "The ex-neighbor," he said.

"Yes." I stuffed my hand into my pocket.

"Looking for help with Essie," Marcellus said. "Found her more trouble than you expected."

"Yes."

He uttered a dry, humorless chuckle. "Like I said on the phone, I got jobs to check on." He gestured toward the door. "You coming?"

Two minutes later, we were bouncing along in an old Ford pickup, a well-worn relic with shocks that had known better days. Instead of discussing Essie, Marcellus was making and receiving one call after the other on the cell phone that sat between us.

Johnson's Enterprises, I soon learned from these conversations, included a rug-cleaning outfit ("Tell her you'll spot it but there's no guarantee"); a handyman service ("Sure we can stain instead of paint, but it's extra"); and, remarkably, a company that installed and sanded hardwood floors.

"A lawn-mowing service in summer, too," Marcellus informed me between calls, sure of my captive attention.

We went to three different jobs. I would have waited in the truck, but Marcellus beckoned me out, seemed to want me to observe him at work. His employees greeted him with deference. He responded to one in street talk that sounded straight off a rap record; the others he greeted in slightly black-accented lingo; and for the white homeowner having his yard cleaned up, he adopted such formal, standard grammar that I waited for him to break out in an English accent. I found it so remarkable that Marcellus was perfectly trilingual that I almost forgot my mission. We didn't get back to the subject of Essie until the return trip to his office.

"So, you saw her," he said. "Whatever it was you wanted, Essie didn't give it to you, otherwise you wouldn't be coming to see me."

"I guess not," I agreed.

"You ain't seen her for what? Thirty, forty years?" He slid into the second of his three languages, nongrammatical but clean, and wrestled the truck out of first gear.

"Essie looked different, but she seems sharp as ever," I said. "I was surprised."

The phone rang, but instead of answering, Marcellus turned it off. "So what you want from me?" he asked bluntly.

Given the opening, I tried to give my story the best possible slant. Steve had told his sister about Penny's baby. Marilyn wanted to find the now-grown child, but Essie balked at giving more information unless Marilyn was there to hear it. The catch was, Marilyn was just out of surgery (I did not say "face-lift") and couldn't travel. It was important to Marilyn, given her illness, to find her niece. As Marcellus could surely imagine.

We bounced over a railroad track and onto a road so full of potholes that my bottom promised to be sore for days. "Did Essie ever talk about Penny to you?" I asked. "Do you know what happened?"

"I know the name." Cautious now, reluctant to give me anything I didn't work for. "It was before my time."

"Not really. Not much. I'm not asking this for myself," I said. "I'm asking you to help me help a friend."

"I see. To be a friend to you, to 'help you help a friend,'" he mimicked. "For old times' sake, right? Inasmuch as we lived in the same neighborhood once."

"I didn't say that."

"Yeah, but let's be clear. We lived in the same neighborhood at different times. We never met each other until right now. You and Marilyn might be friends, but not you and me. Don't make like I owe you."

Marcellus actually smiled. I drew a breath. "You like jerking me around, go ahead," I told him. "All I asked for was a simple favor. Big mistake."

Turning on his blinker, Marcellus swung onto East-West Highway near his office. "Essie's old, but she's her own woman," he said. "Even if I know something, if she don't want me to tell you, I won't."

The truck sputtered, but as if on signal Marcellus's parking lot appeared just in front of us, and the motor didn't die until he'd pulled into a s.p.a.ce. "Listen," he said as I undid my seat belt. "What if there's more to the story than you think? What if it's more involved? You still want to hear it?"

"Of course I want to hear it!" What did he take me for? How complicated could it be? Either Penny's baby was Steve's or it wasn't.

"All I'm saying is, think what you're getting yourself into." I let myself out of the truck onto the pavement. By the time I'd closed the door, he'd come around and was standing next to me.

"I'd go over to Essie's with you, if I thought it would make any difference," he said. A victorious jolt of adrenaline shot through me, but Marcellus held up a hand as if to fend me off. "But you know what I think?"

"What?"

"There ain't no way she's gonna tell you anything unless your friend goes with you. No matter what I do. Essie's no different than she ever was. Does what she d.a.m.n well pleases." He laughed dryly. "She not gonna tell you a d.a.m.n thing she don't want to. There ain't no way."

My high spirits drained in a single whoosh. Well, what did I expect? I felt like a fool. He'd probably known what I was going to ask him and known he was going to say no. And I'd let him take me-literally-for a ride.

On the way home, I drove aimlessly for a while, leaden from realizing that Marcellus was right. I wasn't going to be able to tell Marilyn anything that would give her peace of mind. How could I face her without having more to offer? Without having at least something.

By the time I pulled into the driveway, I was exhausted. But Marilyn, when she called me groggily to her room, looked more exhausted by half. The bedcovers were loosely thrown over her as she leaned against her pillow, but she was still clad in the sweats and loose blouse she'd worn home from the hospital, a chin strap circling her swollen face instead of the pressure bandage, her conditioned hair slicked flat and dull against her head. This morning she'd looked odd but sounded almost normal. Now, she still looked odd and sounded like she needed at least a week to sleep.

"Don't look so terrified," she told me. "The first day home from the hospital is always a doozy. Sit down." She patted a spot on the king-size bed.

I dropped down beside her. "What about your heart rate? Do they still have you on medicine?"

"No. I'm fine. Danger averted."

I squeezed her hand.

She sat up straighter in the bed. "So. Did you see Essie? What did she say?"

"Not half as much as I thought she would." I decided not even to mention that the baby was a girl. "Essie looks like a skeleton. She's half the size she used to be, and she has diabetes. I'm not sure her mind's what it used to be, either." Silently, I asked Essie's forgiveness for this lie. "We no sooner sat down than she fell asleep on me. I couldn't wake her up. Taneka put her in bed and then kicked me out."

Marilyn sighed as if she'd been holding her breath. "So she didn't tell you anything." It was a statement rather than a question. I didn't elaborate.

"Are you going back?" she asked suddenly.

"If Taneka lets me."

"Before you go back to North Carolina?"

"Well...sure."

"Promise?" Her tone had grown urgent.

"Promise." I squeezed her hand again. "I won't leave before I go back and find out everything you want to know. Even if it means depriving myself of Jon."

She tried to smile.

"Go back to sleep." I leaned over to kiss her swollen cheek. Where my next bright idea would come from, I had no inkling.

Out in the hallway, I heard voices coming from the kitchen. Visitors, already. What was the matter with people? I descended the stairs toward the conversation. The voices grew louder. My breath caught in my throat.

In the entryway to the kitchen, arms held out in welcome, stood the answer to my dilemma.

"Steve!" I exclaimed, and let him fold me into his arms.

CHAPTER 13.

Star When he released me from his embrace, Steve held me at arm's length and looked me up and down, a loopy, comic expression on his face. "Well, sweetie, aging very well, I see. Still the towhead. Do you bleach it now? Wash out the gray? Tell Uncle Stevie."

"Never!"

"Me, either," Steve admitted.

"What's to bleach?" I laughed. Steve's baldness was legend. "Oh, Steve, I'm so glad to see you!" I reached up to pat the s.h.i.+ny top of his head.

"An effect he achieved even without chemical intervention," said Marilyn, who startled me by appearing suddenly behind us. During Marilyn's chemotherapy, Steve had insisted that his ability to shed hair without drugs proved once again, as ever, that he was the superior sibling, and the silly joke was one of the few things that had cheered Marilyn in those days. Now, regarding us like a moonfaced specter, Marilyn said, "He came because he thought my heart would beat me to death."

"How did you know?" I felt foolish for having been afraid to call him.

"Bernie and I have an agreement that I'm to be informed about all medical developments in my beloved sister's case. Including cosmetic ones." He winked. "I came because I have to be in New York tomorrow night, and when I heard about the little complication I thought I'd drop in on the way."

"Liar," Marilyn sniffed. "He was paralyzed with worry."

Bernie came over and took Marilyn's arm. "Now I'll escort you back up to bed."

"Later." She shrugged him off.

"You're in luck," Steve told her. "I brought you a bunch of new movies you can only get if you're a big Hollywood pooh-bah like myself. You can spend the next week watching them. Starting right this minute."

"I'll watch every one. Two or three times. But not right this minute."

"You ought to rest," Bernie said.

"I tossed and turned in that bed all afternoon. How often do I see my brother? I'll go to bed early. I'll be fine. Right now I'm too antsy to sleep."

I understood. Monster that it was, fatigue could wait. After surgery, after the breakup of a romance, after many kinds of trauma, the objective was not to rest, but simply to get back to normal-to walk, to talk, to function; to come back from what might have been (but could not be allowed to be) the dark.

Bernie decided we might as well have dinner, so he set out cold cuts and bread and warmed up some vegetable soup that one of Marilyn's face-lift veteran friends had brought, knowing her jaw would still be too sore for chewing. I found myself casting worried glances across the table because without the pillows and bedcovers marking her as an invalid on her way to recovery, Marilyn looked truly awful-the chin strap like an Ace bandage holding her misshapen face in check, the mouth so pulled back that it would surely never return to normal, the cheekbones slightly purpled, masking an underlying pallor. But Marilyn had cheered up at the sight of her brother and swore that, after fasting all day yesterday and having practically nothing for lunch, she was starving.

Surrept.i.tiously, despite my concern, I was busy making a few calculations. Steve had been one of Essie's favorites, and since he was the possible father of Penny's baby, the old woman would not refuse to talk to him. I would bring him to her house in place of Marilyn, and Essie would tell us what we wanted to know. If Steve had to be in New York tomorrow night, there was no time to waste. I'd have to take him to Essie's in the morning.

Over coffee, Marilyn exclaimed over the snapshots of Steve's children, who had grown into handsome young men, three of them in college, one on the road with his band ("Oh, no," Marilyn groaned. "Another musician."). Then Bernie turned the conversation to Steve's own music business and Steve responded with an enthusiasm I didn't expect. He was on his way to New York to recruit an up-and-coming singer to record one of his songs. "A love song. I'm too old to do it."

"Too old! Oh, Steve!" Marilyn chided.

Steve patted a hint of belly under his s.h.i.+rt and grimaced. "Too paunchy for the video. Even my personal trainer has given up on me."

Marilyn snorted. Although I feared the conversation might go on all night and give me no chance to speak to Steve privately, all the same I was enjoying myself, filled anew with admiration for Steve's lack of ego after so many years in the heady air of Hollywood. Without writing drug songs or war protest songs, without being seduced by hard rock or rockabilly or rap, Steve had put his own brand of folksy, not-quite-country, not-quite-rock songs on the charts almost every year since the meteoric rise of "Bus Ride" in the seventies. He had even handled his baldness with grace, during the hairy hippie era after his manager had insisted he wear a toupee when he was performing. The "rug," as he called it, was hot and didn't look natural. Steve hated it. And finally, one night in confident defiance, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the hairpiece off in midconcert and tossed it to the audience, which reacted with wild delight. Later, when I asked him how he'd gotten the nerve, he said he'd already taken the stage name Steven Simple because he'd always been so stupid, and figured if people could stand the new name, they could put up with his cue-ball head, too.

"You were never stupid!" I protested.

"I didn't know that then," Steve had said flatly, and I'd realized that was true.

It still made me proud to think that Steve was the only star regularly described by columnists and talk-show hosts as a "man of integrity"-a man actually reputed to be fair to his employees and faithful to his wife. The feeling that swelled up in me now reminded me how thoroughly he'd been like a brother to me, and how much I'd always missed him after he went away-how much I still did. As the only male I'd been close to where s.e.x was not an issue, he'd allowed me a kind of selfless pride in him I could have had for no other man, even Jon.

"These days I farm out almost all the new songs," Steve told Bernie now. "I almost prefer it. I record just enough to keep my name out there."

We all nodded. For the past ten years, Steve had been known as much as a songwriter as a singer.

"So why go to New York? Why not send somebody? Or talk on the phone?" Bernie asked. "Some up-and-comer, you'd think they'd be grateful to have a chance to record a Steven Simple song."

Steve turned to Marilyn and winked. "I know you think I actually came East just to witness your medical crisis, but don't flatter yourself. I always like to give the singers a look." We knew it was true. He'd been doing it for twenty-odd years. There were some decisions, he believed, that you just didn't delegate. More than most stars (not just musicians), Steve had spent his life combining celebrity with sanity and common sense.

So how was it that I was now planning to drag him to Essie's and disrupt his balance? Because Marilyn was weak? Because Steve was strong by contrast? Well, he was. The way I saw it, from the day of his fateful interview on The Sonya Show in the eighties, he'd been famous enough and strong enough to finesse whatever life handed him. Given the present circ.u.mstances, I certainly couldn't say the same for Marilyn.

It had been 1983 before Steve's life had finally taken its shape. He was forty-two years old, and in Detroit to tape a segment of The Sonya Show for USA Cable. While he was there, he planned to audition a girl named Kimberly O'Connor who aspired to become one of his s.h.i.+ksa princesses-a term he'd borrowed from Neil Sedaka to refer to his backup singers. The next day he'd fly back to L.A.

Steve always told this story with a kind of bemused wonder. He was picking out a tune on the piano in his suite at the Book Cadillac Hotel when the knock came on the door, so tentative he barely heard it. All he knew about the O'Connor girl was that his agent, Waldman, thought she might be all right. Steve always made the final selections himself. He chose the princesses leggy (like Sedaka's), and fair-complected since he himself was dark. Usually he picked blondes.

This one was a redhead. "Mr. Simple?" She was tall, white-skinned, very bright around the face. Hair wilder than he liked. A looker, though. He sensed the hairdo was not the result of a too-tight perm, but of natural curl.

"I appreciate your seeing me." She sounded more humble than her appearance warranted.

He motioned her in. She walked like a dancer, just the right sway of the hips under brown slacks, the right bounce of bosom under a beige sweater. In the show, the princesses wore neutral outfits, sometimes sequined, but always understated. Apparently she knew that.

Even so, she looked flamboyant. Her hair wasn't carroty but a true red. A neon sign, a focus. One thing he didn't need was a princess who upstaged him. Stick to blondes, Waldman said. "Blondes are safe, even when they're stunning. Chain of daisies on pale wallpaper."

Steve pointed the girl to the sofa. She hesitated, then handed him a resume. He hadn't expected that. Waldman already had one. Steve only wanted to get a look at her, talk to her. If she was good enough, he'd set up a session with the other princesses later.

But the typed pages threw him. He set them on the coffee table, stood awkwardly. If Waldman were here, he'd smooth it over. Read parts of her work history aloud. Let people see that Steven Simple's time was too valuable to waste on details. Good agents did such things. Sometimes Steve thought Waldman had figured out Steve couldn't read the resumes himself, but he didn't dwell on that. He'd been paying Waldman good money for over ten years. Besides, no one else knew; why should Waldman?