Page 48 of Hanging and Burning

I was wearing a wheat-colored suit. Reaching into the left breast pocket, I plucked out my cell phone, saying, “I’ll call him if you don’t.”

I looked up my grandmother’s friend’s number and was about to engage the call.

“Excuse me,” the bird-snake of a man said while holding up a finger to stay my hand.

“What?” This game had gone on long enough.

“What is the number you have for Mr. Babylon?”

“It’s his cell phone. He’s in a hospital in LA. Do you wanna talk to him?”

Franz needed a moment to decide. I hadn’t been sure that Arman had taken on the financial maintenance of Mrs. Macintosh, but it was a good bet. Now Pollander had to wonder how I had gotten that name. That, and why would I go to so much trouble to accost a woman who didn’t have her own money?

When the assistant manager picked up the receiver, I thought that he’d found a backbone and was going to call Grandma B’s friend.

But instead he pressed a solitary button, waited a moment, then said, “Estella, this is Mr. P. Can you come down to reception and take someone to see Mrs. Macintosh?”

Estella must have said yes because Franz cradled the phone and said to me, “If you wait just a few minutes, Mr. Oliver, someone will come down to take you where you need to go.”

He glanced over at a walnut armchair next to the door through which I had entered. But I had no intention of moving. It was a petty act. He couldn’t help the fact that he was born and raised in America, that he spent his days in a two-hundred-year-old home in a white suburb where he worked in a room filled with white workers in not quite business attire. He couldn’t help it that the outside world had changed while he listened to old records playing on a Victrola that his grandfather had given to his mother while whispering the words, “Never forget.”

11.

I STARED IDLY around the room while the assistant manager concentrated on his computer screen. I don’t think he was registering anything, just ignoring me.

“Mr. Pollander?” a woman asked.

One might have called her short, but not overly so. Her skin was the color of caramel candy, and she was what the old folks used to call stout, but not overweight. Her arms and neck were muscular, the kind of strength one develops from living a physical existence, not from daily calisthenics. Somewhere past forty, there was a vitality to the woman that was uncommon to most city dwellers in the modern world. But she wasn’t country either. She was wearing a fawn-brown one-piece dress with a purple sweater draped across her shoulders like the pelt of some fabulous prey.

“You wanted me to take somebody to see Mrs. Macintosh?” she asked.

“Yes, Estella,” he said on a relieved sigh. “Yes. This is Mr. Oliver, Mr. Joe Oliver. Uh, he’s, um, he’s been sent here by Mr. Babylon to ask Mara something about her family members.”

“Oh,” Estella uttered, studying me.

When I stood, she looked me up and down, seeming to take my measure.

“Now you know my name,” I said. “What should I call you?”

She relaxed a bit and said, “Mrs. Person.”

Franz was staring up at us, mouth agape. It looked like he felt a little left out.

“Well, Mrs. Person, shall we go see Mrs. Macintosh?”

She didn’t quite smile but at least she wasn’t frowning.

To the left side of the entrance door there was a slender passageway that led to a vast hall done all in rich wood and porcelain tiling. We crossed that expanse and entered an elevator that would accommodate three men my size. Mrs. Person pressed the button for the fifth, and top, floor.

As the lift made its progress she asked, “What do you need to know from Mara?”

“It’s about her daughter.”

“Twyla or Blythe?”

“Twyla. I didn’t even know she had another daughter.”

“Oh yes. Blythe is older. She’s a dental assistant in the Bronx. But you’re not here about her?”