Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

“You don’t have to talk to me like that, Charlie. It’s all right that you took Kally. I’m glad for her to live in your good house. I don’t have nothing like that for her.”

Charlie wipes the air with his hand and turns his face away.

“Here, have some beer. It’s imported, Charlie. I was working late and didn’t have time to wash like I should. I’ll sit downwind.”

Charlie reaches out a hand to feel the temperature of a bottle in the paper sack. Everything’s all right then, because this is the Bass Pale Ale Charlie likes. He slips one out of the sack, fumbles in his coat pocket, and asks, as always, “You got the key?”

“Charlie, does Kally ever — you know, ax you about me? How I’m doing and all?”

“Naw.” He gurgles the beer I’ve opened. “Kally don’t ax me nothing. Do not say ax ever again to me.”

“How is she?”

He shrugs.

“You used to brag on her. You used to tell me things she said.”

Charlie rubs his jaw. He hums “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He gives me a sweet, sweet smile. “Will you shut up about Kally? Will you just shut up?”

“Charlie—” The whine that I don’t want in my voice has come. “Just one more thing. Does she ask about Duchess?”

“Naw.”

“That sounds wrong. Are you sure?”

“She doesn’t, I’m telling you.”

I shake my head.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I don’t know... Yeah, Charlie, I’m calling you a liar. You’re lying, Charlie. You’re lying.” I’ve doubled up my fists. I’m thinking about all the people I know who work big cats. We know cats better than people, and care about them every bit as much.

Charlie turns on the bench and pokes his red face toward mine. His yellowish eyes bulge. Every word sounds like a hammer tap. “She — ain’t — ever — coming — back. Get Kally out of your stupid head.”

“Why, Charlie, why?” I can’t seem to stop my whine.

Charlie’s words snap like whip cracks. “ ’Cause I kicked her narrow ass out. She’s gone. She got on the bus and left town. Took her brown suitcase and that hanging bag. We broke up. We split the blanket.”

“Oh.”

“So that’s that.”

“I guess.”

“No more Kally. I don’t have to listen to you carry on about Kally. Right?”

“I guess so.” Something hurt in my chest. My throat felt tight and dry. My eyes wanted to run. I didn’t have any taste for icy, imported beer. “—I guess that’s right.”

Charlie drank the six-pack of Bass alone.

For a while after I found out Kally was gone for good, nothing seemed to matter to me. I just went through the motions of being a keeper. Charlie tried to help. “Jeez!” he’d say. “Stand up straight. You look like your damn back is broke. What do you care about that whore?”

“Kally wasn’t a whore.”

“Sure she was. Didn’t I buy her off of you?”

“You never.”

“Sure I bought her.”

“She wouldn’t do that.” I was shaking my face back and forth, hard. My cheeks and nose were swaying on my face bones. “I want you to take that back.”

“Take it easy, kid. You’re right, in a manner of speaking. A man couldn’t buy her for twenty bucks, nor forty either.”

“Not a hundred! She worked, hard work, in the cat house taking care of tigers.”

Charlie smiled. “Okay, she worked in a cat house and wouldn’t lay down for a hundred. But she could be bought, Jack L. She went for the intangibles. Offer Kally intangibles and she’d open her legs.” His voice rose to falsetto. “She’d say, ‘Take me, take me.’ ”

“Bull! What’s intangibles?”

“Stuff you can’t even see. Good will... hot air. I gave her the words she wanted to hear... pictures made up out of air. I bought her for puffery. I said, ‘Come live with me, Kally. I can’t live without you.’ That’s what she wanted to hear. Coin of the realm with women.” Charlie slapped his leg and grinned like we were equals. “You told her you loved her. She told me you did.”

Charlie wiped his hand through the air like a bear slapping bees. “Ah, you dope. If a man wants to get in a woman’s pants the first thing he says is ‘I love you.’ Maybe he does love her while he’s in heat. Or maybe he thinks he’s in love because she’s all he thinks about at first.”

“You asked her to live with you,” I argued. “You must have felt something.”

“That’s the peanut you give a monkey to do its trick. See, if a guy my age wants a young woman regular, it’s what I have to pay. It’s what I buy her with. Now do you get it?”

“You mean you lied? I get it, Charlie. I get it real good.”

He wipes his hand through the air again, then brings it down and rubs his nose. “Did I ever lie to you? I lie to people who hold their hands out asking for it, begging for it. I lie to the ones who say ‘Give me the words I want to hear. I don’t care whether they are true or not.’ ”

“It was wrong. It was wrong to bait Kally off her job and then throw her away when you was done with her.”

Charlie sighs. “Nah, kid. It was right. That explains why I’m a supervisor and you shovel cat shit. I see the world as it is. You live in a dream world where the Blind Lady’s scales tilt in favor of the dummies. That makes you as stupid as Kally.”