Chinaman’s Chance

Betty Mae was getting dressed in fits and starts that Saturday morning because she kept going to the window to inspect the car that was parked across the street. The car was a black four-door Plymouth Fury sedan. Betty Mae watched as little nine-year-old Sandy Choi sneaked up on its rear and wrote FUZZ in the dust on its trunk and then ran off giggling. Betty Mae was a little surprised that Sandy could spell that well.

She had known it was a cop car from the moment she had spotted it an hour before. But she couldn’t quite decide at first whether it was the Pelican Bay or the L.A. police. Then she put on her glasses and took a better look at the pair who sat slumped in the car’s front seat, wearing the patient, bored look of men who get paid to wait and watch.

The two men seemed to be in their forties, and because of the sour look that one of them wore Betty Mae classified them as belonging to the Pelican Bay force. Vice cops maybe, she thought. They look mean enough.

Betty Mae kept going back to the window, half dressed, to see whether she could figure out whose house the cops were watching. Maybe it’s mine, she thought, and since the notion gave her a small thrill she decided to expand on it. Maybe Santiago has killed somebody at work and they’re waiting for him to come back. She discarded the idea almost immediately, because she knew that except in bed, Santiago Suarez was one of God’s gentlest creatures.

After one final peek out her window, Betty Mae got dressed. She was wearing what she thought of as her drinking uniform. It was a teal green polyester pantsuit with a tight white nylon blouse. On her feet she wore a pair of old and comfortable huaraches that she had picked up down in Mexicali one time.

Betty Mae made sure that her front door was securely locked and then moved slowly down to the sidewalk and turned right. It was out of her way, but she wanted a better look at the two cops. As she moved past them she saw that the one at the wheel was the younger of the pair — probably forty. The other one was maybe forty-nine or fifty.

Their eyes slid over her as she went past, and Betty Mae shivered a little, wondering what the older one would be like in bed. He was a heavy-shouldered man with a big head and not much neck. He had a lot of hair, a sort of dirty gray, that he wore long at the sides to compensate for his jug-handle ears. His face seemed to have been made out of mismatched parts and then given a coat of boredom. There were a lot of jaw and nose and very little mouth, but what there was looked sour and disappointed. He had tiny slitlike eyes that seemed to have been stuck so far back into his head that almost nothing could be seen of them except their glitter. It was a seamed, cruel face, and Betty Mae shivered a little again because on Saturday nights she liked a little cruelty.

The other man in the car, the younger one, wasn’t worth a second glance in Betty Mae’s estimation. He was big and blond and pug-nosed and blue-eyed with one of those upturned mouths that Betty Mae thought probably lied easily and often.

She jaywalked behind the car and crossed Breadstone Avenue into Los Angeles. She thought she could feel the policemen’s eyes on her as she turned into the cracked cement walk that led up to Madame Szabo’s two-story frame house. A covered wooden porch ran around its front and right side. The porch, like the house, had been painted gray many years back, and Betty Mae could remember when it had boasted some rather nice wicker furniture. Now the only porch furniture was a junked Kelvinator refrigerator, its door removed, that sat next to the window with the big sign that advertised Madame Szabo’s powers. The sign was a red hand, palm outward. Down the side of the palm, in vertical red letters, ran the one word READINGS.

Betty Mae looked at her watch and then knocked at Madame Szabo’s door. It was eleven o’clock — only a little after, really — which meant that Betty Mae was almost on time. Nearly seven weeks ago Betty Mae had been fifteen minutes late for her appointment and Madame Szabo had canceled it without explanation, warning Betty Mae that in the future she must be exactly on time.

It was the book, of course, Betty Mae had decided. Madame Szabo accepted only a limited number of clients because she was writing a book that demanded nearly all of her time. The book, Madame Szabo had hinted darkly would set the scoffing scientific world on its ear. Betty Mae believed it, because Madame Szabo certainly had told her a strange thing or two. Betty Mae figured that the Madame had a little money put by, because sometimes days would go by without a single client’s visiting the gray frame house at 2221 Breadstone Avenue. Betty Mae knew because she sort of kept watch.

Of course, Madame Szabo probably made a little money off those four boarders of hers, Betty Mae had decided. They were polite kids, two boys and two girls, all of them in their mid-twenties. They were gone most of the day, Betty Mae had noted, and when they came home at night they usually stayed there, although occasionally you would see them picking up some groceries down at Patty Pow’s Markette on the corner.