The Kind One Read Free Page A

the first bungalow on the left. Edna Dean opened the door. She was the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court manager. She had a long face with a sharp chin and she wore glasses with wire frames. She smiled and showed a set of teeth that were way too bright and perfect to be real.
    “Oh hi, Danny. I got the place all ready for you. Let me get the key.”
    A sour smell wafted out the door. I assumed Mr. Dean was in there somewhere. When I was here before, he never said a word, but just sat in a chair with a filthy blanket over his lap. A fly was buzzing around the room, and Mr. Dean followed it with his watery blue eyes. He needed a shave, and he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks. Mrs. Dean explained that he’d been laid up for the last few years after an accident at a mackerel cannery in San Pedro. He looked baffled as he watched the fly, like he couldn’t figure out how his life had come to such a pass that he didn’t have anything better to do than watch a fly buzzing around.
    Mrs. Dean came back out. She was wearing a drab dress that hung on her like a gunnysack and she had booze on her breath. “Nice day, isn’t it? I hope you like it here. It’s a pretty nice group of people, I guess, but they come and they go. You’ve come. You’ll go. Just don’t have any wild parties or play your radio too loud and we’ll get along just fine.”
    We headed up the sidewalk.
    “Did you hear about Dillinger?” she said. “It was just on the radio. They had him and his gang cornered in Wisconsin, but they all escaped in a blaze of gunfire. They killed one federal agent and an innocent bystander. I’m just scared to death of gangsters. Nobody’s safe these days.”
    A little girl, maybe ten or eleven, was squatting on the sidewalk, drawing hopscotch squares with a piece of chalk.
    “Hi, Sophie,” said Mrs. Dean. “Meet your new neighbor, Mr. Landon. Danny, this is Sophie Gubler.”
    The girl winced. “You
said
it.”
    “Said what?”
    “My
last name
. You know I hate it.”
    “Oh Sophie, there’s not a thing wrong with your last name. Gubler’s a perfectly fine name.”
    The girl winced again.
    “What would you like your last name to be?” I asked.
    She liked that question. “Well in school we studied this French queen, she told her people to eat cake so they cut off her head. Her name was Marie Antoinette.”
    “You’d like to be Sophie Antoinette?”
    She shrugged. Her knees were poking up from under her cheap print dress and were scraped up pretty good and blotched red with Mercurochrome. I said: “What happened to your knees?”
    “I was skating down the street and this dope opened his car door right in front of me. What happened to your leg?”
    “My leg?”
    “Yeah. I saw you limping on your leg. You hurt it or something?”
    “Sophie,” frowned Mrs. Dean, “that’s a personal question.”
    “My
knees
are personal. He asked me about my
knees
.”
    “I got hit in the head. With a lead pipe. See?”
    I took my hat off and inclined my head. Sophie stood up to get a better look at my dent. “Gosh. And you got hit in the leg too?”
    “Nah. But it mashed my brain, and it made it so’s my left leg and my left arm don’t work so hot anymore. But they’re getting better.”
    Sophie nodded, looking me over, not feeling sorry for me, just interested. But Mrs. Dean looked embarrassed. “Let’s go, Danny,” she said quietly.
    We walked on toward my bungalow, the last one on the right. In front of the third on the right a guy was kneeling and weeding in front of a carefully tended flower bed. He was wearing brown trousers, a loose white shirt, a big sombrero, and gardening gloves. A black and white cat was keeping him company. He gave us a friendly, gap-toothed grin over his shoulder as we walked by.
    “That’s Mr. Dulwich,” said Mrs. Dean as she nodded at him genteelly. “An Englishman. A real gentleman, too. I’ve had nary a lick of trouble from Mr. Dulwich.”
    Mrs. Dean unlocked the door