Slack-jawed, I let Madeleine point me into a small sitting room. The walls were covered with framed photographs; the floor space was taken up by the three other Spragues in matching easy chairs. They all looked up; nobody stood up. Smiling without exposing my teeth, I said, “Hello.” Madeleine made the introductions while I gawked down at the still-life ensemble.
“Bucky Bleichert, may I present my family. My mother, Ramona Cathcart Sprague. My father, Emmett Sprague. My sister, Martha McConville Sprague.”
The ensemble came to life with little nods and smiles. Then Emmett Sprague beamed, got to his feet and stuck out his hand. I said, “A pleasure, Mr. Sprague,” and shook it, eyeing him while he eyed me. The patriarch was short and barrel-chested, with a cracked, sun-weathered face and a full head of white hair that had probably once been sandy colored. I placed his age as somewhere in his fifties, his handshake as the grip of someone who’d done a good deal of physical labor. His voice was cut-glass Scottish, not the broad burr of Madeleine’s imitation: “I saw you fight Mondo Sanchez. You boxed the pants off him. Another Billy Conn you were.”
I thought of Sanchez, a built-up middleweight stiff I’d fought because my manager wanted me to get a rep for creaming Mexicans. “Thanks, Mr. Sprague.”
“Thank you for giving such a dandy performance. Mondo was a good boy, too. What happened to him?”
“He died from a heroin overdose.”
“God bless him. Too bad he didn’t die in the ring, it would have spared his family a lot of grief. Speaking of families, please shake hands with the rest of mine.”
Martha Sprague stood up on command. She was short, plump and blonde, with a tenacious resemblance to her father, blue eyes so light that it looked like she sent them out to be bleached and a neck that was acned and raw from scratching. She looked like a teenaged girl who’d never outgrow her baby fat and mature into beauty. I shook her firm hand feeling sorry for her; she caught what I was thinking immediately. Her pale eyes fired up as she yanked her paw away.
Ramona Sprague was the only one of the three who looked like Madeleine; if not for her I would have thought the brass girl was adopted. She possessed a pushing-fifty version of Madeleine’s lustrous dark hair and pale skin, but there was nothing else attractive about her. She was fat, her face was flaccid, her rouge and lipstick were applied slightly off center, so that her face was weirdly askew. Taking her hand, she said, “Madeleine has said so many nice things about you,” with a trace of a slur. There was no liquor on her breath; I wondered if she was jacked on drugstore stuff.
Madeleine sighed, “Daddy, can we eat? Bucky and I want to catch a nine-thirty show.”
Emmett Sprague slapped me on the back. “I always obey my eldest. Bucky, will you entertain us with boxing and police anecdotes?”
“Between mouthfuls,” I said.
Sprague slapped my back again, harder. “I can tell you didn’t catch too many in the cabeza. Like Fred Allen you are. Come on, family. Dinner is served.”
We filed into a large, wood-paneled dining room. The table in the middle of it was small, with five place settings already laid down. A serving cart was stationed by the door, leaking the unmistakable aroma of corned beef and cabbage. Old Man Sprague said, “Hearty fare breeds hearty people, haute cuisine breeds degenerates. Dig in, lad. The maid goes to her voodoo revival meetings on Sunday nights, so there’s no one here but us white folks.”
I grabbed a plate and piled it with food. Martha Sprague poured the wine and Madeleine dished herself out a small portion of each item and sat down at the table, motioning for me to sit beside her. I did, and Martha announced to the room: “I want to sit opposite Mr. Bleichert so I can draw him.”
Emmett caught my eye and winked. “Bucky, you are in for a cruel caricaturing. Martha’s pencil never flinches. Nineteen years old she is, and a high-paid commercial artist already. Maddy’s my pretty one, but Martha’s my certified genius.”
Martha winced. She placed her plate directly across from me and sat down, arraying a pencil and a small sketch pad beside her napkin. Ramona Sprague took the adjoining seat and patted her arm; Emmett, standing by his chair at the head of the table, proposed a toast: “To new friends, prosperity and the great sport of boxing.”
I said, “Amen,” forked a slice of corned beef into my mouth and chewed it. It was fatty and dry, but I put on a yum-yum face and said, “This is delicious.”
Ramona Sprague gave me a blank look; Emmett said, “Lacey, our maid, believes in voodoo. Some sort of Christian variation on it. She probably put a spell on the cow, made a pact with her nigger Jesus so the beast would be nice and juicy. Speaking of our colored brethren, how did it feel to shoot those two jigaboos, Bucky?”
Madeleine whispered, “Humor him.”
Emmett caught the aside and chuckled. “Yes, lad, humor me. In fact, you should humor all rich men pushing sixty. They might go senile and confuse you with their heirs.”
I laughed, exposing my choppers; Martha reached for her pencil to capture them. “I didn’t feel much of anything. It was them or us.”
“And your partner? That blond lad you fought last year?”
“Lee took it a bit harder than I did.”
Emmett said, “Blonds are overly sensitive. Being one, I know. Thank God I’ve two brownies in the family to keep us pragmatic. Maddy and Ramona have that bulldog tenacity that Martha and I lack.”
Only the food I was chewing kept me from braying outright. I thought of the spoiled sewer crawler I was going to screw later that night and her mother smiling numbly across the table from me. The impulse to laugh came on stronger and stronger; I finally got my mouthful swallowed, belched instead of howled and raised my glass. “To you, Mr. Sprague. For making me laugh for the first time in a week.”
Ramona gave me a disgusted look; Martha concentrated on her artwork. Madeleine played footsie with me under the table and Emmett toasted me back. “Rough week you had, lad?”
I laughed. “In spades. I’ve been detached to Homicide to work on the Black Dahlia thing. My days off have been cancelled, my partner’s obsessed with it, and the crazies have been coming out of the woodwork. There’s two hundred cops working a single case. It’s absurd.”
Emmett said, “It’s tragic, is what it is. What’s your theory, lad? Who on God’s earth could have done a thing like that to another human being?”
I knew then that the family didn’t know about Madeleine’s tenuous connection to Betty Short, and decided not to press for her alibi. “I think it’s a random job. The Short girl was what you might call easy. She was a compulsive liar with a hundred boyfriends. If we get the killer, it’ll be a fluke.”
Emmett said, “God bless her, I hope you get him and I hope he gets a hot date with that little green room up at San Quentin.”
Running her toes up my leg, Madeleine pouted, “Daddy, you’re monopolizing the conversation and you’re making Bucky sing for his supper.”
“Shall I sing for mine, lassie? Even though I’m the breadwinner?”
Old Man Sprague was angry—I could see it in his rising color and the way he hacked at his corned beef. Curious about the man, I said, “When did you come to the United States?”
Emmett beamed. “I’ll sing for anyone who wants to hear my immigrant success story. What kind of name is Bleichert? Dutch?”
“German,” I said.
Emmett raised his glass. “A great people, the Germans. Hitler was a bit excessive, but mark my words that someday we’ll regret not joining forces with him to fight the Reds. Where in Germany are your people from, lad?”
“Munich.”
“Ah, München! I’m surprised they left. If I’d grown up in Edinburgh or some other civilized place I’d still be wearing kilts. But I came from godawful Aberdeen, so I came to America right after the first war. I killed a lot of your fine German countrymen during that war, lad. But they were trying to kill me, so I felt justified. Did you meet Balto out in the parlor?”