Mabel Dorn kept her ledger on the kitchen table of the ground-floor rooms she occupied herself, and when I came down to pay what I owed her, she had it open already, like she'd been waiting to show me the numbers before I could say a word about anything else.
'You're two weeks behind, Mr. Mercer,' she said, not looking up. 'And I've had men in my hallway at two in the morning, and a stranger tied up on your floor according to what Mrs. Bell tells me, and I am not in the business of running a boardinghouse for whoever's fighting whom this season.'
I set the money on the table, all of it that I had brought, counted out from driving wages I had collected from Eddie's crew. It would not clear the two weeks. Dorn separated the bills from the coins and pushed one coin back toward me because it was Canadian. I found another in my coat. She waited with her finger on the ledger line until I put it down.
I asked whether paying the balance by Saturday would settle matters. She turned the book so I could see the subtraction, then wrote what remained below it. The figures were small enough to look manageable on paper. They represented more driving, which meant leaving my rooms in the hands of the men I needed to remove. I kept my finger beside the unpaid amount while I asked her for a receipt.
She said a receipt would acknowledge money, not excuse what had happened upstairs. I told her to write it anyway. For a moment she held the bills as though she might return them and be rid of the conversation. I wanted to take them back, too. They could buy a bed somewhere nobody knew Eddie. Instead I left my hand flat on the table until she entered the payment and tore a receipt from her book.
Then she told me what she actually wanted, which wasn't another installment. She wanted the building emptied of trouble, and if that meant emptying it of tenants who attracted trouble, she'd rather do that than keep losing sleep.
'I'm asking you and anyone connected to you to find somewhere else,' she said. 'Mrs. Bell included, since it seems her rooms are catching whatever's meant for yours.'
That put something cold in my stomach that the rent money hadn't touched. I told her Ruth Bell had nothing to do with any of it, that she was a widow paying her rent on time and keeping to herself, and punishing her for my troubles wasn't rent collection, it was just unfair.
Dorn said fair wasn't a word she could afford to use anymore, not with the state her hallway had been in. But she hadn't given me an eviction notice yet, which meant there was still room to argue, so I went up the stairs instead of out the door.
Ruth answered before I finished knocking, like she'd heard the whole exchange through the floor. 'She wants me gone because of you,' she said. It wasn't a question. 'I've moved twice in three years, Mr. Mercer. I'm not doing it again because men I've never met decided my landing was useful.'
I told her I'd talk to Dorn again, that I'd find a way to keep her rooms separate from whatever was happening to mine, and she looked at me with an expression that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite gratitude either, just tired calculation, the look of someone adding up whether my promises were worth the risk of believing them.
I went back down and told Dorn I wasn't leaving and Ruth wasn't leaving, that I'd pay double if it bought quiet, and that the next disturbance, whatever it turned out to be, wasn't going to be mine to cause. Dorn studied me for a long moment, then told me plainly that she'd give me that chance once, and only once, and that if anything else happened in her hallway she wouldn't be discussing rent with me again, she'd be discussing which of us had to go, and it wouldn't necessarily be the tenant she'd never met.