Five long years passed; five Christmases and five birthdays. And nine more men … no, ten, eleven … the Eye tried to remember.
Ten or eleven.
She married three of them. One husband was a doctor. (Just like – what was his name? Years and years ago, right after she’d killed Paul Hugo. Brice! Dr. James Brice! His bones were still buried under the thickets outside The Birdcage.) Doctor Number Two was smothered under a pillow while sleeping off the effects of his wedding champagne. After Joanna left, the Eye searched the room and found a dozen credit cards in a valise. He kept them, and for the next year they paid for all his gas and cars and meals and plane tickets. He even bought a new suit (his fourth) with one of them.
He found this to be an ideal means of economizing. So once or twice a year, on moonless nights, he would unload his .45, and on a lonely street or in a parking lot outside a bar or restaurant he would waylay someone, hold him up, and relieve him of all his cards. Thus he was always plentifully supplied with credit.
His gambling enhanced his budget, too. One New Year’s Eve, at a roulette wheel in Reno, he played the zero and it bounced up. He won all the chips on the table plus thirty-five times his own mise. This solved his financial problems for the next two years.
Joanna wasn’t quite as lucky. She lost almost continuously. In a casino in Tulsa she dropped the entire take from one of her marriages in a single night. And she was drinking much too much. She was still nimble and lovely, but she had to spend more and more time in gymnasiums and swimming pools and beauty parlors to keep herself presentable.
The names Nita Iquots, Faye Jacobs, and Paula Jason were added to the AKA list on her poster in the post offices. Because of her association with Becky, the Feds docketed her with the Finch shooting in Alta Loma and the motel cataclysm in Riverside. She was now one of the five Most Wanted Women in the United States.
They came after her slowly and massively, like a moving glacier. But they couldn’t overtake her. Although she blazed a trail, she never stopped fleeing. And because she had no direction, they were unable to intercept her.
She came to Houston, and Houston, like LA, turned a page in her life.
This was Duke Foote country, celebrated in his still famous song ‘Texas Freeways’:
On Route 59
I pine an’ I pray
Come rain or come shine
Lovelady! Are you on Route 45
Lovelady! Are you dead or alive?
Lovelady! Are you in Galveston Bay?
She met Chuck Estes, the son of oilman Bertie Estes, who had been one of President Johnson’s cronies. Chuck was forty, with a low forehead, a demented teenager’s mentality, and several million dollars. He wore tailor-made buckskin shirts, dude cowboy suits, a five-gallon hat, and spurs. His friends called him ‘Chuck Wagon.’
He picked her up at a barbecue in Liberty. He drove her back to Houston in his zebra-striped Thunderbird and they had drinks at the Longhorn Grill.
‘So you’re from LA, huh?’ His conversation was as flat and barren as a prairie. ‘That’s a jumpin’ burg all right. We got an office there now. Whole floor of a buildin’ on Sunset Boulevard. I was there last month. Flew into San Diego and I said, “Well what the devil, might as well go on up to LA and see some action.” Stayed there two and a half weeks. Stayed at the Beverley Wilshire Hotel. I saw some action all right. The walls kept shakin’. “What’s that?” I asked a feller in the elevator. “Earthquake,” he says. “The whole city’s goin’ to crack open like a watermelon one of these days.” And bango! Down in the lobby a great big hunk of the ceiling dropped on the floor! I said to myself, “Hey!” I hopped in a taxicab and drove over to the office fast. Everything was shipshape there though, except – hey, waiter! Couple more here, please! – except all the windows was busted out. Cost us fifteen hundred dollars to put in new panes. LA – no thank you. New York’s my town. Now that’s an A-A-A place, Anything, anytime, anywhere! “New York and Los Angeles,” my dad used to say. “Two bookends for a vacuum.” What’s this you’re smokin’? Grass? Gee-tans. Let me try one.’ Then his attention roved to the other side of the room to a girl in a backless dress sitting at the bar. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. And he walked over to her.
And that’s how it happened – casually and cruelly. They began laughing together. He bought her a drink.
Joanna waited for him to come back to the table. He didn’t. She sat there for three quarters of an hour. He never even glanced at her. He simply forgot she was there. She was white-lipped with anger. She ordered another cognac. Couples sitting at the other tables watched her, smiling.
The Eye watched, too, hoping she wouldn’t get drunk and cause a commotion. She didn’t. She just left.
And the page turned.
Lovelady on the highway
Lovelady on the byway
Lovelady ain’t thou ever comin’ my way
Down them long long empty roads.
She drove through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina, dropping a couple of grand at each stop in gambling clubs and backroom poker tables and, once in a while, at a racetrack. How much money did she have left? How much spirit and stamina? How much endurance? He watched, appalled, as the chasm opened before her.
Her car broke down in Burnsville, N.C., and it cost four hundred dollars to have it repaired. She stayed in the town of Linville trying her old hitchhiking caper on the Blue Ridge Parkway; it just wouldn’t work. On the first day she stood on the edge of the highway for three hours. Hundreds of cars passed. None stopped for her. She had lunch in a truckers’ cafe, then went back to the road in the afternoon and stayed there until nine o’clock, waving her thumb like an automaton.
On the second day it rained. A gorilla in an Alfa picked her up, drove her into a field near Deep Gap, and tried to rape her. She got away from him with only a black eye and a lost contact lens and walked in the pounding thunderstorm all the way to Blowing Rock, where her car was parked. She spent a week in bed with a fever, reading Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.
When she left Carolina she was wearing glasses.
She drove to Virginia, sold her car in Portsmouth, tried to cash a bogus check in a bank in Virginia Beach but at the last minute panicked and fled. In May her landlady evicted her from her rooming house in Norfolk, impounding her luggage.
In Newport News she began shoplifting, stealing soap and toothpaste and canned soup and pears from supermarkets. She got caught only once – trying to lift a bottle of scotch. She was in a drunken stupor for days afterwards, sleeping in parked cars and cabanas on the beach. A Pan Am stewardess on vacation picked her up in Hampton, and the two of them lived together for three weeks in a trailer camp. When the stewardess went back to work, Joanna floated up to Yorktown, where she lived in a abandoned shack in the dunes, keeping herself clean by bathing in the sea. She stole a dress from a clothesline and a pair of jeans from a sailboat anchored in the bay.
In Williamsburg the police never bothered her; the midsummer peninsula was swarming with drifters. She moved into an old boathouse on the James River. The Eye didn’t know what to do for her. He bought a carton of groceries and left them on the wharf one night, but two kids passing in a canoe swiped everything. On another night he dropped a whole pile of credit cards in the boathouse mailbox, but Joanna never opened it.
Then her behavior turned weird, and she began roaming through the streets for hours and hours every day, going nowhere, just wandering around, up one block and down the other, stooped over, peering into gutters and bushes. These endless walks frightened him. She looked like a scurrying madwoman! He couldn’t grasp what she was up to.
One afternoon she found a quarter on the sidewalk, and he finally understood.
She was looking for money!
On her next excursion he managed to drop a hundred-dollar bill on the pavement in front of her. When she saw it she just couldn’t believe it. She stood transfixed for an instant, then snatched it up and ran off with it, escaping like a bank robber to the other end of town.
Instead of spending it all on booze, as he thought she would, she had her hair cut and bought a new skirt, a blouse, and a pair of shoes.
She went to Richmond and got a job – in fact, several jobs, working in a grocery store for a while, then in a dry-cleaning place, then in a five-and-ten, then carhopping in a drive-in, and finally as a chambermaid in the Eye’s hotel.
She lived in a cheap room in a backstreet boarding-house, going to movies or to the public library on her days off. She read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Occasionally she’d go to a pool, but swimming seemed to exhaust her these days. She stopped drinking, then began again, then stopped again.
She grew old.
So did the Eye. He wore glasses now, and was plagued with rheumatism, sciatica, and a hernia. While she was working at the hotel, he spent all his days sitting in a comfortable armchair down in the lobby, doing crossword puzzles and gossiping with the house dick and bellhops. They thought he was a retired dentist from up north somewhere, in Richmond visiting his grandchildren. He was using his own name and credit card, so he had no reason to hide in corners. He enjoyed the repose. He always knew where she was, he had nothing to do but wait for her. She was going through one of her drying-out periods, and he knew she was saving her money, so there was no reason – for the moment, at least – to expect the worst.
One morning he overheard two swashbuckling traveling salesmen discussing her over their breakfast coffee.
‘What do you think of that maid up on the tenth floor? That haircut of hers rouses me.’
‘She looks like a garbage man in drag.’
‘She’d be okay if she fixed herself up some, got good legs and a fine body.’
‘What’re you talking about!’
‘You take a close look at her the next time you see her. That’s rainy afternoon ass, boy. She came into my room yesterday just when I was climbing out of the bathtub and I let her get a good look at Moe the Mole. She didn’t mind.’
‘What’d she do?’
‘Nothing. But, you know, if a determined fellow sort of grabbed her and put her down on the bed and pulled off her panties …’
‘Hoo-hooo!’
‘She probably wouldn’t say nothing, eh? Probably too afraid of losing her job to make a noise about it.’
‘Probably even go for it.’
‘Right on. Want to give it a try?’
‘Sure. Round robin.’
‘Hoo-hooo!’
The Eye went out and bought two sachets of horse from a pusher who operated around the Edgar Allan Poe shrine. He picked the lock of one of the salesmen’s rooms and hid the stuff in a shoe in the closet. Later he had a chat with his friend the house dick.
‘Say, you know those two drummers who are always cutting up in the bar?’
‘Yeah, they’re a pain in the ass. Elderly juvenile delinquents.’
‘What are they selling anyway?’
‘I dunno. Plastics or something.’
‘They’re not in the munitions business?’
‘The munitions business! What makes you think that?’
‘Well, I was eavesdropping on them in the coffee shop this morning – they didn’t know I was listening – and I wasn’t, actually, I just couldn’t help hearing what they said …’
‘Yeah?’
‘They were talking about dynamite and TNT, and one of them said it was too dangerous to keep all the powder in here in the hotel. God, I thought maybe they had bombs or something in their rooms.’
‘Yeah? Dynamite? TNT?’
‘That’s what I thought they said. I probably misunderstood.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t STP or DMT?’
‘Could be.’
That evening the two salesmen were busted for possession of drugs.
A few days later, the house dick came up to him in the lobby, quivering with excitement. ‘See that guy that just left?’
The Eye was using a new aspirin, and his aches and pains bothered him only when he moved. He’d been sitting at the window, watching the rain and dozing blissfully, dreaming of the corridor. He woke, annoyed. ‘No. What guy?’
‘A which?’
‘FBI. Checkin’ on everybody stayin’ at the hotel.’
The Eye yawned. ‘Who’s he looking for?’
‘Murder suspect.’ The dick showed him the ID composite of Joanna. ‘They call this a composite portrait. It’s made of strips, see – hair, eyes, nose, mouth and chin.’
‘“Murder most foul, strange and unnatural.”’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Is she at the hotel?’
‘Nope. But if she’s in Richmond, they’ll get her sure as shit. You can’t stay hid long from them guys.’
That afternoon the Eye visited Joanna’s boarding-house, a musty, ancient brick building on the river bank. (During the siege of Petersburg Robert E. Lee’s headquarters had been just down the street. All the cars parked along the curb had Confederate flags on their bumpers.) The poodle-faced little woman who ran the place received him in a damp parlor filled with bronze horses under glass domes.
‘Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ He showed her a badge. ‘We’re trying to locate a woman named Miss Nita Iqutos. Is she one of your tenants, ma’am?’
‘No, sir,’ she barked at him. ‘There are no fugitives from justice residing in this house.’
‘Is there anyone here from Los Angeles?’
She looked startled. ‘Why, yes – Miss Vincent is from Los Angeles.’ (Joanna had been using her old LA alias – she had a social security number in that name.)
‘Can I speak to Miss Vincent, please, ma’am?’
‘She’s at work.’
‘Seven thirty.’
‘Would you tell her I’ll be back at –’ He glanced at his watch. ‘No, I can’t make it this evening. Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow night around eight o’clock. Thank you, ma’am.’
He checked out of the hotel, said goodbye to the house dick, tipped the bellhops, and took a cab back to the boardinghouse at seven thirty-five. Joanna came out the front door at eight ten, carrying only her purse. But she was bulky and moved with padded awkwardness, which meant that she was wearing all her clothes under her raincoat.
He followed her to the railroad station. She bought a ticket to Washington.
Amblin’, strayin’
Ramblin’, prayin’
I walk in the April sun
High wayin’, laughin’ an’ cryin’
Bywayin’, livin’ an’ dyin’
It’s spring again on Route 61.
She stayed in Washington for two months, living on her savings, changing her name, wearing a new wig, emerging from her crust of slatternliness, blossoming again. And she met Yale Cyril Polk at a YMCA barn dance. He was sixty-two, a retired National Gallery curator, a hearty, scholarly bachelor, the author of a book called From King Tut to the Men’s Room, a Study of Mural Erotica.
He took her to Kennedy Center to see Aïda, Der Fliegende Holländer, and the New York Ballet’s production of ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore. They went to movies and Chinese restaurants, to a folk song festival, a table tennis tournament, a baseball game, and an all-female wrestling match. They spent a weekend together (but in separate rooms) in Ocean City.
A woman followed them there.
The Eye, who had grown not only rheumatic but also careless during these last few years, almost missed her. When he finally spotted her, he hobbled to cover, cursing himself.
She sat in her car outside the motor court for two nights. When Joanna and Yale Cyril Polk went strolling on the boardwalk, she spied on them from the dunes. When they danced and dined and played liars’ dice in a bar, she watched them through the windows. When they drove back to Washington, she was a half-mile behind them all the way.
She was in her fifties, handsome, pert, and furious. It was her anger that convinced the Eye she couldn’t possibly be a Bureau agent. She was too high-strung for that. He trailed her to an apartment house in Laurel. Her name was (Mrs.) Maybelle Danzig. She was a math teacher in a prep school in Rockville. Until just a few weeks ago she had been Yale Cyril Polk’s steady girlfriend. The D.C. wags called them Ma and Pa.
The Eye’s radar, after a long sleep, was panting like a tea kettle, picking up storm warnings everywhere. He pilfered one of her love letters from Yale’s mailbox.
Be assured of one thing, you are mine, all mine, and I mean that. You know, Yale, I do not joke about such things with levity and I will not let this vulgar little slut come between us. I know you have a ‘roving eye’ and that has always amused me but this latest escapade is just too outrageous for words and I will not tolerate it. Be assured of one thing I am not the kind of woman one just ‘ditches’, no sir! My late husband, God rest his soul, is probably ‘turning over in his grave’ at the spectacle of my humiliation. But you may be assured of one thing, your heartlessness will not go unpunished Yale & there will be a reckoning!
Maybelle
On a warm afternoon in May Yale Cyril withdrew eight thousand dollars from his bank account. He picked up Joanna on K Street and they drove along the Potomac to Harpers Ferry where a justice of the peace married them. They had dinner in Frederick. They were to spend their honeymoon night in a motel near Westminster, then drive to Philadelphia and New York.
However, there was a change of plans.
Maybelle Danzig was waiting for them at the motel. It was time for the reckoning. She had a Lüger.
‘I love you!’ she screamed. And she shot Yale Cyril once in the leg and once in the back of the shoulder. She shot a hole in Joanna’s valise. A man coming out of one of the units to see what all the noise was about was hit in the hip by a stray bullet. Another bullet killed a barking police dog. ‘I love you, I love you!’ she shrieked again and again, and tried to fire a shot into her temple, but the gun jammed.
Joanna managed to escape in Yale Cyril’s car. She drove to Baltimore, abandoned the car, threw her wig away, and walked to the Greyhound terminal.
She sat for hours in the waiting room, just staring at the floor.
Rain began splashing on the windows. She opened her valise, took out a raincoat, pulled it on over her wedding dress.
Then she bought a ticket for Trenton, N.J.