A Child's Garden of Death

by Forrest, Richard;

  He pulled the car to a stop in front of the address the school records had indicated and beat the steering wheel in disappointment. The address, next to the Houston factory, was the General Douglas MacArthur housing development, one of the first large city projects built in the early fifties. Before him in drab alignment stretched endless rows of dull brick buildings with parking lots filled with vintage cars.

  He grimaced at the artistic development of man. After all, it took great talent and ingenuity, one had to really work at it in order to take a perfectly pleasant area and turn it into a shambles, a shambles where people lived. He started the car and eased it down the street wondering why other nations seemed to do so much better with their housing projects than this country.

  The Houston Company was completely surrounded by a high chain link fence. The entrance to the large parking lot was guarded by a sentrylike building with a movable lift gate. The gray-haired and uniformed guard at the gate handed Lyon a visitor’s pass, pointed to the executive offices, and let him pass.

  Lyon had to shake his head and remind himself that he was in another factory miles away from the aircraft plant. The young personnel assistant was practically the twin sister of the one at the other plant. Her young, intense face turned toward him with great interest as she seriously considered the problem. She left him in the small office and returned in minutes.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Wentworth. Our employment records prior to 1950, except for the men still working here, have all been destroyed. There have been so many here, our files would be Voluminous, and it does cost two dollars a year per linear foot of storage. So, you can …”

  He rose tiredly. “Thank you, I appreciate your looking.” On an impulse as he left the Houston Company he stopped at the gate and called to the security guard. “Have you worked here long?”

  “About twelve years,” the guard replied.

  “Oh, then you came in the early sixties.”

  “Right, 1961 to be exact. But I know the area pretty well, let me tell you. Used to patrol here when I was on the force.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yep. Twenty years with the Hartford P.O.”

  “Do you remember what was on that property before the housing development was built?”

  “Sure do. The company owned it. Used it for temporary housing during the war. Hell, the company was hiring people by the car load and there weren’t no place to put them. They had quonset huts and things like that.”

  “That’s interesting. What about trailers?”

  “Sure. There must have been a hundred trailers over there in the forties.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Thanks. Really, thanks a lot.”

  The guard saluted as he drove off.

  The gentle brush of warmth from cheek to folded fingers was the only measurement of time Rabbi Ben Alchium now knew. “Ten to two,” a lilting voice on the porch told him as she tucked the blanket around his legs and folded his hands. He did not believe her, for he knew that a lifetime had passed while the sun, ever so slowly, moved from cheek to finger.

  At first there was always the city of Pinsk, and he was young, and often ran sideways as children do. He could not remember the game. The child that was himself laughed, jumped and ran while others were there in the sun also. Somehow the details of the game itself were never clear. His father, a teacher also, forbidding behind the long beard, and yet often holding him tightly until the bad times came and the sun moved on.

  Hours of study in a warm room where a dark girl laughed. He knew it was his wife, but now she was gone, and the sun moved on.

  There were children, and children of children and more, and often he wasn’t sure which were which, for he was very old. As the sun warmed his fingers he stood before the group. The raven-haired girl looking toward him while the children were there with the others, and his voice was strong as he spoke, and that was his life, and as the sun moved on he lived it each day.

  The light hand on his shoulder interrupted, and that was wrong, for the sun was not yet gone. “There’s someone to see you.”

  A chair scraped, and he sensed a man near him, perhaps a child of a child, and he turned to look.

  “Rabbi Alchium.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need your help,” Lyon said.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “A man, a great many years ago, a member of your temple perhaps.”

  “There were so many, it is hard to remember.” The hand turned the chair and the sun fell on his cheek again and a child laughed and ran sideways in Pinsk. “I wonder what game we played?” the Rabbi said.

  “Pardon, sir?” Lyon asked.

  “Nothing,” the Rabbi replied. “What about the man from my temple?”

  Lyon leaned forward. “He was named Meyerson. In 1943 he was a tool maker or an engineer, married, with a little girl. He, kept an orthodox home.”

  “Yes, many did then. Now, even the children of the children do not. There were many Meyersons. So many, they all become one.”

  “This Meyerson left one day, without a farewell, without any word, and no one ever heard of him again.”

  The Rabbi leaned back and the sun was gone. He remembered such a Meyerson, and the hurt had been great. “Yes,” he said. “I remember such a man,” and there was a tear in his eye. “A faithful member of the Minyon each morning, a strong faithful man and a friend; and he left without a word.”

  “You do remember him.”

  “Yes, I must have failed him greatly. I went to where he lived, his house that moved.”

  “A trailer.”

  “Yes. And it was gone. Without a word to the temple, and someone said he moved away. I failed him.”

  Lyon Wentworth stood by the old man’s chair. “No, sir. I don’t think you failed him. In fact, I know you didn’t fail him.”

  The tentacle-like fingers clutched Lyon’s hand. “Thank you,” the old man said, and his eyes were bright.

  “JESUS, LYON,” Beatrice shouted. “Call your Congressman.”

  “Come on, Bea. You’re my State Senator.”

  “Damn it all, hon, the welfare mothers are going to streak the Governor’s mansion today unless I get some action out of committee.”

  Lyon glanced down the hallway of the state capitol’s crowded second floor. The House and Senate were due to go into session within minutes, and the hall was crowded with legislators, lobbyists, and assorted constituents. Down the hall and marble staircase he saw the stalwart women of the Antivivisectionist League marching through the crowd, and he knew they’d make for Bea as soon as they saw her. Since none of the legislators except the majority leader had offices, a certain pecking order existed concerning the marble pillars in the hallway. Beatrice, by seniority and outspoken views, had the third pillar from the stairs, only three removed from the state chairman. So it was here that Bea met with her constituents, fellow legislators and occasionally her husband.

  The Antivivisectionist group was almost at the head of the stairs, and approaching from the other direction was Kimberly leading a covey of welfare mothers. Lyon grasped Bea’s arm and led her firmly into the Senate majority leader’s office.

  “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you for three terms, Lyon. There’s no place to screw in the Capitol. You just have to wait until I get home.”

  The young secretary looked up from her desk with bewilderment and quickly fled the office.

  “Knock it off, Bea. And get your hearing aid fixed.”

  She put her arms around his neck. “There is a large broom closet in the …”

  “Two phone calls, Bea.”

  “Two quick ones.”

  “Please. One to Washington, the Senator’s office; one to the State Banking Commission. An imperative rush. Have them call me at home this afternoon.”

  “What do you need to know?”

  He handed her the slip of paper as she resolutely picked up t
he telephone.

  “Sarge’s” Bar and Grill was never the local “in” spot. It housed a neighborhood bar in a house set back from a secondary highway with living quarters for the owner upstairs. The bar’s interior was functional in its utilitarianism—a long bar with ten stools, wooden floors, and half a dozen booths. The interior decorations, for the most part, were beer company photographs of young women in bathing suits, holding beer cans, next to canoes. On the bar were large jars filled with pickled eggs, pigs’ feet and other unappetizing assortments which no one ever seemed to eat or buy.

  The owner, Sarge Renfroe, was a heavy-set, bulbous-nosed Army veteran of twenty years who’d come to Murphysville some years before to visit Rocco Herbert, his old company commander. He had stayed on, seeming to feel that there were distinct advantages in opening a bar in a town where his old commanding officer was the chief of police. He’d been right. On countless nights Rocco had come by at closing time and taken the half-unconscious owner upstairs to his bedroom after he’d sampled too much of his own products.

  Lyon had been trying to reach Rocco all afternoon, and the only response from his office had been that he was out on a very important investigation. Requests to raise him by radio had failed, and finally, after leaving word with Kim where he’d be, Lyon had driven too fast down to “Sarge’s Place.”

  Rocco was in the far booth, a small glass of beer cuddled in his hands as he stared out the window.

  The Sarge waved at Lyon with a dirty bar rag. “I’ve heard of hidden speed traps,” Lyon said, “but this is ridiculous.”

  “I’ve got a direct view of a stop street,” Rocco replied. “Had some of my best days just sitting here.”

  A glass of sherry miraculously appeared in front of Lyon as he settled opposite Rocco in the booth. “Our time’s almost up,” Rocco continued with a glance at the large clock over the bar.

  “Rocco, you know damn well that the Sarge’s clock is the only bar clock in the state of Connecticut that runs forty minutes fast … you set it that way yourself.”

  “It takes the slob that long to close out; otherwise I’d be busting him every other night for violation of closing hours.”

  “I think I may have it,” Lyon said.

  “Thinking isn’t good enough, Lyon. I can’t sit on this thing any longer. In a few more minutes I have to see the first select-man, and we’ve got to call in the state.”

  “All right, do that. But before you do, call a press conference and release the names of the victims.”

  “Sure. We can make up what we want, any good titles … like your books. We can call them the Ghouls in the Graves, the Corpse in the Cove. Do you know what I’ve calculated? I’ll tell you what I’ve calculated. The number of traffic tickets and domestic squabbles I’m going to handle between now and retirement. It’s up in four figures. That’s a lot of people to yell at.”

  “You are depressed.”

  “Jesus, Lyon. I’m sorry. I hate self-pity. It’s just that we seemed so close.”

  The Sarge stood next to the booth with a phone in his hand. “For you, Lyon.” He handed Lyon the receiver. “Some dame claims she’s from a U. S. Senator’s office.”

  Lyon took the phone. “Yes …”

  Immediately after the call from Washington, he received the second call from the State Banking Commission. He gestured to Rocco and was handed a small pocket notebook. At the completion of the call he hung up the phone and walked slowly back to the booth.

  “We’ve got it,” he said to the expectant chief.

  “How so?”

  “Social security records indicate that a Meyer Meyerson was definitely employed by the Houston Company in 1942 and 1943. Company payments were made on his behalf. No further payments have ever been credited to his account.”

  “That’s almost enough.”

  “The Meyersons left a three-thousand-dollar savings account in the Hartford Savings Bank. The money was never claimed and eventually was turned over to the state.”

  Lyon proceeded to tell Rocco about the rabbi and the disappearance of his most devout temple member, about the address which had been a trailer park, and the school records never forwarded.

  “It’s circumstantial, but almost positive,” Rocco said, trying to control his rising excitement.

  “Plus other things,” Lyon continued. “No more social security payments; immigration records, police and FBI records are all negative after 1943. In 1943 the Meyerson family disappeared.”

  “Someone called the school and said they’d moved to California.”

  “And also told other people.”

  “Whoever did that wasn’t a madman.”

  “No. A very calculated move to hide their disappearance. And it worked. It worked for thirty years.”

  “Whoever pulled it off must have known the family, known where the child went to school, where the man worked, what temple, that they didn’t have relatives to ask questions.”

  “And now,” Lyon said. “I think it’s about time for you to call in the newspapers and give them what we have.”

  “And the State Police?”

  “Let them come in too. Tell them even though the bodies were found in Murphysville, they might have been killed in Hartford or places in between.”

  “And we drop out.”

  “No,” Lyon said. “We don’t drop out at all. We continue.”

  “YOU’VE GOT TO STOP IT!” Bea stood in the center of the small study, her eyes bright with conviction. “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING, LYON.”

  Lyon stood before two card tables placed along the bookcase wall and stared at their object-filled surfaces. The tables were strewn with photographs of the grave, his own aerial photos, copies of Rebecca’s school records, copies of temple records, and a picture of the leading temple elders during the early forties. There was a picture of a a temple picnic which showed the serious Meyerson standing to the far right of the somber group. A stove ring rested in the center of the table, its measurements as close as Lyon could recall to those of the small stove in the submerged trailer.

  “It’s not healthy,” Bea continued. “You’ve become obsessed with this thing.” She strode to the desk and lifted the partially completed manuscript of his book. “How long since you’ve written a word on Cat? Not a line since this business started.”

  “Did you say something, hon?” Lyon asked.

  Bea dropped the manuscript and put her arms around his neck. “I’m wondering if you’re becoming more flakey than you used to be.”

  He kissed her. “The same degree of flakiness—promise.” He kissed her again. “Hey, we have to watch Rocco on the six o’clock news. He’s making the announcement about the identification.”

  “Then that’s the end?” his wife asked.

  Lyon turned toward the card table with its multiple objects, the shape and form of the long-dead man beginning to become clear. A proud but tough man, devoted to his wife and daughter, devout in his religion. A man who’d fought to save his wife and himself from the horror of Hitler’s Germany, who’d forged ahead with a new life, and probably a meticulous and ethical craftsman. The small family unit, together now forever in death, became clear to Lyon. His research carefully placed each piece together, and a personality took form through his investigation of the dead man’s life. A savings account, carefully added to each week, old night college records showing a man’s slow but careful achievements in English and engineering … the concern for his daughter’s welfare, and a man who held his rabbi in reverence while proportioning a part of his life to the temple.

  “I know this man,” Lyon said aloud.

  “WHO KILLED HIM?” Bea asked.

  “That’s what doesn’t make sense. I know this man. I know what he was and what he wasn’t. There wouldn’t be large amounts of money in the trailer. I can’t imagine him involved in an extra-marital affair. His murder doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes, it does. It certainly does. In a senseless and insane way. You’re refusing
to draw the inescapable conclusion.”

  “Which is?”

  “A senseless thing without purpose done by a madman who’s probably long dead or senile in some institution. Isn’t that the logical answer?”

  “It could be, if it weren’t for the great care and planning to hide their bodies and identities.” Lyon remembered the first senseless mass murder he had read about as a child. He had followed the case of the poison murders in the newspapers. They had all taken place in orange drink–hot dog shops; the murderer would drop poison into the soft drink of whoever happened to be standing next to him. He’d leave and stand a short distance away to view the stricken Sailings of his victim. For weeks afterwards Lyon wouldn’t sit at a drug store counter. Senseless and haphazard, and the records were filled with countless examples of victims whose only sin had been in being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “You and Rocco have done a remarkable thing,” Bea continued. “The bodies will be interred properly, with proper headstones. No one can expect more.”

  “It’s almost time for the local news on television,” Lyon said, taking her arm and leading her through the house to where the television sat sullenly blank.

  As Bea adjusted the set, Lyon stared through the large window at the river below the hill. A brisk wind rippled its surface, and he could see a small girl in a white dress walking across the wavelets carrying a Sonja Henie doll. The sun was dimming behind the hills, and her face was diffused in the half-light.

  “If there isn’t action by the Governor, I will take this to the floor of the Senate!”

  “You don’t have to proselytize me, Bea,” he said, and then saw his wife simultaneously leaning back on the sofa and also on the television screen being interviewed by a young announcer in the hall of the Capitol. “I didn’t know you were going to be on. We could have come in earlier.”

  Bea smiled at him from the sofa as her image disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an uncomfortable Rocco Herbert. In stilted tones Rocco outlined the facts, the finding of the bodies, the investigation and the final identity of the victims. He indicated Lyon’s participation as that of a concerned citizen, without name. Rocco concluded the short interview with a request that anyone knowing the family should contact him or the State Police at once.