Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman

Author:Dorothy Gilman [Gilman, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5182-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Pearl Street was a forgotten dirt road behind a supermarket and a movie house, obviously one of the last stops in Anglesworth on the road down. There were only six houses on the street, but any differences in their architecture had long ago been erased by the erosions of apathy: broken windows stuffed with blankets, sagging porches, peeling paint and loose garbage spilling out of rusting pails and cardboard cartons. When we drew up to number 13½ a rat slunk away from a plastic pail and gave us a sullen look over his shoulder. By the time we reached the front door of 13½ he was back again; I noticed a sizable number of empty wine and gin bottles among the refuse.

The bell wasn’t working; we knocked and then called, and after an interval a woman opened the door and said suspiciously, “Yeah?”

“Mrs. Lipton?” asked Joe. “Mrs. Daniel Lipton?”

She peered at us blurredly. Her face was a circle of desiccated flesh with heavy pouches under her eyes and chin. She was wearing a long flowered cotton skirt, a moth-eaten gray cardigan, a green sweater under that, and a black turtleneck under that. She was all layers, it was hard to define a figure behind them. Her hair was a frizzy blond with gray showing at the roots and there was a thick smear of crimson covering her mouth. “Good or bad?” she asked in a hoarse whiskey voice, and looked over Joe admiringly. “Good news, okay. Bad, come tomorrow.”

“We’re trying to trace a Mr. Daniel Lipton,” Joe told her. “Around 1965 he had some connection with Mrs. Hannah Meerloo, and witnessed a will she made in July of that year.”

“Danny?” she said and shrugged. “If you got the price of a bottle I’ll let you in.”

Joe took out a five-dollar bill and she grabbed it. “Tom?” she called over her shoulder and opened the door wider to let us in.

We walked into a cold hallway and then into a dark living room. The reason it was so dark was that venetian blinds had been drawn over each of the two windows, and the only light came from the television tube, which glowed eerily and across which a wagon train was riding at full gallop. Silhouetted against this ghostly illumination sat three men, stiffly upright. I thought at first they might be dead and propped up in their chairs, they sat so still and straight, not even turning at our arrival, but one of them slowly stirred, detached himself, and walked over to Mrs. Lipton. Wordlessly she gave him the five-dollar bill and without any change of expression he glided out of the house, closing the door behind him.

Mrs. Lipton led us to a couch with broken springs in the back of the room and we sat down. “So?” she said, staring at us.

“You’re related to the Daniel Lipton who knew Mrs. Meerloo and witnessed her last will in 1965?”

She moved her eyes from us to the wall, apparently to think about this.

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