Under most circumstances, Emma would not have volunteered to spend time one on one with Maris Coleman. Maris Coleman had changed, at Vassar and in New York, and these days she didn’t do much for Emma but make her uncomfortable. This afternoon, though, Emma thought she was going to go crazy, and so she raised her arm and tried to signal at Maris coming up the street.
Maris didn’t see her. Emma watched her turn off the sidewalk into the small door that led to the little clutch of apartments where Belinda lived.
There wasn’t a single customer in the store. There had only been a single customer since she’d opened up this morning. Emma turned back and went inside again. She switched the OPEN sign to CLOSED and stepped back onto the porch. She locked the front door of the shop and then tried the knob to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake. She was sweating. She sweat when she did any sustained movement. Once, worried about her weight, she’d tried a Richard Simmons program, but she’d stopped after only three sessions with the workout tape. Each time, she’d sweat so much there had been big circles of black dampness in the armpits of her T-shirt, and more sweat down its back and on the inside of the thighs of her workout pants. She had been ashamed to look at her clothes in the mirror when she went into the bathroom to take them off. Anything at all, even weighing five hundred pounds, would be better than seeing her clothes all wet like that.
She went down her front porch steps and onto the sidewalk. She went up the sidewalk past the half-dozen little stores. She stopped just past Elsa-Edna’s, without bothering to look at the clothes in the display window. It had been a long time since she’d been able to fit into them, and when she had been able to fit into them she hadn’t been able to afford them. She suspected that she wouldn’t be able to afford them now. She went up the steep flight of steps at the side of the building, moving carefully, stopping every once in a while to take a breath. She didn’t want to give herself a heart attack just because she’d run over to Belinda’s on a whim.
When she got to the landing, the first thing she noticed was that Belinda’s apartment door was standing slightly opened. The next thing she noticed was that Maris was talking, not only out loud, but loudly. Someone thinner than Emma, who had not had to concentrate so hard on getting up the stairs, would have heard Maris from the first-floor entry.
Emma pushed inside and closed the door behind her. Maris was in the living room, her back to the kitchen and the apartment’s front door, holding the phone to her ear. It was Belinda’s phone, not a cell phone.
“ … that’s what I said,” Maris was saying. “Her mother’s dog. Right. In the garage. Eviscerated. Jimmy’s coming down this evening to make sure she’s all right. I don’t know what to make of it. I just tell you what’s going on. She’s going to be here until the end of June, unless this drives her out. I expect the usual, of course. If this gets any better, I may need a little more. Yes. Well. Yes. I’ll talk to you when I have something.”
Maris put down the phone. Emma knocked on one of the kitchen counters. Maris turned around.
“How did you get in here? I thought that door was on automatic lock.”
“You left it open,” Emma said. “What were you doing?”
Maris cocked her head and smiled. “I was talking,” she said, “to a friend of mine at the National Enquirer. We have a little arrangement.”
“You tell the National Enquirer about stuff that happens to Betsy.”
“Where do you think they get it?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “I thought they had, you know, reporters. That went and reported things. Dug things up.”
“It’s much easier to dig things up if you know where to look,” Maris said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a secret. Everybody on earth knows all about it.”
“Betsy knows all about it?” Emma shook her head. “I don’t believe that. I don’t think she’d go on giving you a job if she knew you were calling up the National Enquirer and saying she murdered Michael Houseman.”
“Well, let’s just say everybody knows, but nobody can prove it.” Maris brushed by Emma and went to the cabinet where the tumblers were kept. She got one down and opened the refrigerator. She got out a big carton of orange juice and poured the tumbler half full. “I think the deal is that Betsy Wetsy’s been told, but she just refuses to believe it. In New York I make the calls from pay phones, never anything too close to my apartment or too close to her offices. Do you know she owns a town house on the Upper East Side? She’s got an apartment on the top floor of it, but she never uses it anymore. Jimmy’s got an apartment of his own and they go there. In the afternoons. To screw.”