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“Do you know where Mr. Reilly is?” Mr. Levy asked her.
“All I know is he’s all over this morning’s paper. Where he oughta be is in a asylum. My nerves is shot to hell. When I moved next door to them people, I was signing my death warrant.”
“Does he live here alone? A woman answered the phone once when I called.”
“That musta been his momma. Her nerves is shot, too. She musta went to get him out the hospital or wherever they got him.”
“Do you know Mr. Reilly well?”
“Ever since he was a kid. His momma was sure proud of him. All the sisters at school loved him he was so precious. Look how he ended up, laying in a gutter. Well, they better start thinking about moving off my block. I can’t take it no more. They’ll really be arguing now.”
“Let me ask you something. You know Mr. Reilly well. Do you think he’s very irresponsible or maybe even dangerous?”
“What you want with him?” Miss A
“I’m Gus Levy. He used to work for me.”
“Yeah? You don’t say. That crazy Ignatius was sure proud of that job he had at that place. I useta hear him telling his momma how he was really making good. Yeah, he made good. A few weeks and he was fired. Well, if he worked for you, you really know him good.”
Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.
“Tell me. Hasn’t he been in trouble with the police? Doesn’t he have some kind of police record?”
“His momma had a policeman coming around her. A regular undercover agent. But not that Ignatius. For one thing his momma likes her little nip. I don’t see her drunk much lately, but for a while there she was really going good. One day I look out in the back yard and she had herself all tangled up in a wet sheet hanging off the line. Mister, it’s already took ten years off my life living next to them people. Noise! Banjos and trumpets and screaming and hollering and the TV. Them Reillys oughta go move out in the country somewheres on a farm. Every day I gotta take six, seven aspirin.” Miss A
Mr. Levy could think of no reason for her having moved to this particular location. But the Ignatius Reilly story had made him depressed, and he wished he were away from Constantinople Street.
“Well,” the woman rushed on, eager for the audience to hear her tale of suffering, “this stuff in the paper’s the last straw. Look at the bad publicity the block’s got now. If they start anything now, I’m go
She raced back into her house and slammed her shutters. Her sudden disappearance confused Mr. Levy as much as her strange biography of Mr. Reilly had. What a neighborhood. Levy’s Lodge had always been a barrier against knowing people like this. Then Mr. Levy saw the old Plymouth trying to dock at the curb, scraping its hubcaps against its moorings before finally coming to rest. In the rear seat he saw the silhouette of the big kook. A woman with maroon hair climbed down from the driver’s seat and called, “Okay, boy, get out that car!”
“Not until you clarify your relationship with that drooling old man,” the silhouette answered. “I thought that we had escaped from that degenerate old fascist. Apparently I was wrong. All along you’ve been carrying on an affair with him behind my back. You probably planted him there in front of D. H. Holmes. Now that I think of it you probably planted that mongoloid Mancuso there, too, to start this vicious cycle whirling. How unsuspecting, how ingenuous I’ve been. For weeks now I’ve been the dupe of a conspiracy. It’s all a plot!”
“Get down from that car!”
“You see?” Miss A
The rear car door swung rustily open and a bursting desert boot stepped down onto the ru
“I will not stay under the same roof with a loose woman. I’m shocked and hurt. My own mother. No wonder you’ve turned on me so savagely. I suspect that you are using me as a scapegoat for your own feelings of guilt.”
What a family, Mr. Levy thought. The mother did look like something of a floozie. He wondered why the undercover agent had wanted her.
“Shut up your dirty mouth,” the woman was screaming. “All this over a fine, decent man like Claude.”
“Fine man,” Ignatius snorted. “I knew you’d end like this when you started traveling around with those degenerates.”
Along the block a few people had come out on their steps. What a day this was going to be. Mr. Levy ran the risk of getting into a public scene with these wild people. His heartburn was spreading out to the limits of his chest.
The woman with the maroon hair had fallen to her knees and was asking the sky, “What I done wrong, God? Tell me, Lord. I been good.”
“You’re kneeling on Rex’s grave!” Ignatius shouted. “Now tell me what you and that debauched McCarthyite have been doing. You probably belong to some secret political cell. No wonder I’ve been bombarded with those witch hunt pamphlets. No wonder I was trailed last night. Where is the Battaglia matchmaker? Where is she? She must be lashed. This whole thing is a coup against me, a vicious scheme to get me out of the way. My God! That bird was doubtlessly trained by a band of fascists. They’ll try anything.”