“You don’t look like an amputee to me.”
“Ticket stubs, asshole.”
When it comes to decisions about what sources I’m willing to take shit from to get a story, I usually make them on the fly. Worrying about consistency, policy, or hypocrisy was something to do in my spare time. In Billy’s case, I flicked the cigarette he had dangling out the corner of his mouth into street with the back of my hand.
“Keep a civil tongue, Billy. And talk to me in English.”
Jake had asked Billy for the ticket stubs to some alternative band concert that Billy had gone to in Indianapolis, ninety miles away.
“Why?”
“Said he needed to show his Moms, that he’d gone somewhere else but he’d told her like he was with me, the sumbitch.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I said no way. See, the band wore masks and shit and like it was pretty cool and I didn’t really want to give ‘em to him ’cause they were like a souvenir.”
“You know, Billy, I had you figured more for a rap, hip-hop concertgoer.”
“Naw, man,” he said, very seriously dropping into a ghetto rhythm he could only have heard on TV, “a guy like me, motherfucking white guy, get his ass shot off. You know what I’m saying.”
The urge to guffaw was almost overwhelming. I pulled a cigarette out of the pack in Billy’s jacket pocket, handed it to him, took his lighter from the same pocket, and lighted his cigarette.
“Why’d the band wear masks, Billy?”
I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
“’Cause the concert was the night before fucking Halloween, man.”
I pretended like it didn’t mean anything to me.
“So why does him asking you for the stubs make you think he was setting you up?
“That’s dumb fucking question.”
It is sometimes my job to ask dumb, obvious questions so I can write in the fourth person. That doesn’t mean that I like little snivelers telling me a question is dumb. I fixed Billy with a stare.
“Well, shit,” Billy said. “That’s the night those kids got whacked south of here. The cops said it was Jake’s mom’s car they saw around the old lady’s trailer. Sumbitch was like trying to make me an accessory or something.”
He pronounced it excessory. “Kind of like a necklace or a handbag,” I said, half amused at his incorrect use of a word he’d heard on television and half pissed he’d blown the quote by swearing.
He stared at me blankly then shook his head.
“What the fuck’re you talking about?”
“Maybe it would be more accurate to say he was looking to you to give him an alibi.”
He gave me a wide over-the-shoulder sweep of his arm with his fingers pointed this way and that, something he’d seen rappers do.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Could he have done it?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I don’t run with him much anymore. He found somebody else to hang out with.”
“Who?”
“Some older guy. Wouldn’t tell me who.” Billy was warmed up now, ready to talk. “Said this guy was teaching him stuff, like how to be a man, since Jake didn’t have a dad. I think he was kind of keeping this guy to himself. Maybe the guy’s like some perv preying on boys. Or maybe the guy was just scoring him dope and that’s why he wouldn’t tell me. Anyway, Jake and him were going to take off and find his old man someday. That’s what Jake said.”
“What’d did he mean when he said the guy was teaching how to be a man?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t say.”
“You think this guy was showing Jake how to use a gun, kill people?”
“No doubt.”
Like my nephew and damn near every other teenage boy I’d ever met or been, he yanked judgments out of the air and spoke them aloud, with conviction but not an ounce of thought or evidence.
“But,” I said, “he never told you that.”
Billy looked off, unwilling to answer.
“Where were they going to go? Florida?”
Billy flipped the cigarette out into the street in front of an oncoming car that jerked to avoid it. Billy smirked then frowned.
“You already know this shit,” he said, “why you asking me?”
“Where in Florida?”
“Who knows. Said the guy had ‘connections’, whatever the hell that means.”
I took Billy’s address and phone number, in case I needed to call him again.
“Cops ask you anything I haven’t?”
Billy blinked at the change of pace. “No.”
“You tell them anything you haven’t told me?”
“Nope.”
“I think I hear the bell ringing, Billy.”
I held up my wrist so that he could see my watch. He looked around and saw that no one remained at the store.
“Shit,” he said and ran back toward the school.
As I pulled away, it occurred to me that I knew more than the people I wrote for, but I didn’t know more than the cops. Everybody I’d talked to had already talked to McConegal, and that was annoying.
At the most elemental level, the thing I like best about what I do is knowing more than anybody else. Analyze that however you wish, but it is a fact and I stopped trying to justify it a long time ago.
Driving out of town, I had to admit that then I did not know more than anybody else. Maybe that’s what prompted me to pull over at the hardware store on the end of town.
The exterior was recent, metal siding on pole construction. Inside, the place looked like old times.
The interior was tall and dark, split by merchandise in the middle into two narrow aisles. It smelled of wood and metal and oil and fertilizer, and it was crammed to the ceiling. A skinny guy in a blue nylon vest greeted me from the back of the store. As he approached through the gloom, I decided he looked like Dennis the Menace’s father: middle-aged, black glasses, dark hair combed back high, pipe. I told him who I was.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “We do some advertising in your paper. You’re kind of far afield.”
He was just making conversation, but I didn’t feel like answering a lot of questions. I had brought the yearbook with me. I showed him Danvers’s photo and asked if he knew him.
“Sure,” the guy said. “I know most folks around town. I’ve seen this boy in here but can’t say I know him well.”
“You sell ammunition, shotgun shells?”
“Well, yeah. Over there.” He pointed to a counter behind which were a row of rifles and shotguns and stacks of ammunition boxes.
“Anybody else in town sell ammunition?”
“There’s a K-mart down near your way, but nobody else in this little town. Why? Need some shells?”
“Any age limit on who you can sell shells to?”
“You mean, does somebody have to be so old to buy them?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Nah. Just the guns. I can’t sell those to minors.”
“You ever sell any shells to this kid?”
I pointed once more to the yearbook picture. He looked at the picture for a long time. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. “I believe I did maybe two, three weeks ago.”
“That boy ever buy shells from you before?”
“Well, no, not that I can think of. Why do you ask?”
He had been straight with me; no reason not to be straight with him. I told the guy about the cops looking for Danvers and why, then I watched the color drain out of his face.
“My Lord,” he said as the implications started to sink in.
“The kid try to buy any guns, shotguns?”
“No,” he said, a little hot. “I already told you, I wouldn’t sell them to him if he wasn’t of age.”
“How ab
out adults? Was there an adult, say an older man, with him?”
He hadn’t considered that possibility. He thought about it.
“No,” he said and thought about it some more. “No, not that I remember.”
I worried him with a few more questions about the exact date of the sale, but he was preoccupied with another matter.
“Should I call the police?”
Angels did not sing the Hallelujah Chorus, but I understood the significance of his question.
“I take it the police have not talked to you.”
“No. Should I tell ‘em, you think?”
I hate getting involved in stories. I like knowing things the cops do not. I told him: “Mister, it’s your call. The cops are going to know about it sooner or later, ’cause there’ll be a story in my paper about it, but what you do is up to you.”
“But,” he said, “I mean, what would you do?”
I told him I don’t give advice, thanked him for his time, and left. The more honest answer would have been: “Jeez, I don’t know.”
And then came the days beyond counting, when the story went cold, as they sometimes do. At those times, I am prone to mischief and nobody loves me.
Early on a Sunday, I settled in against the wall at a back-corner table at the Pug. I intended to pass the morning sober, upright, and in what I rakishly imagined to be a European style: leisurely reading a full Sequoia’s worth of Sunday’s Chronicle while tucking into the Failey equivalent of crepes, a high and exquisitely fluffy stack of buckwheat pancakes. For the record, they were topped by Dot’s homemade blueberry sauce and accompanied by pot of coffee of my very own and a double rasher of the pepper bacon I had been saving room in my arteries for all week. Naomi, of course, had a way of confounding one’s intentions.
Maybe I would have seen her coming if I had not been engrossed in a review of Robert B. Parker’s latest. As it was, I was not aware of her presence until she stood glowering before me, blocking the window light and casting a rather large shadow across the page and my disposition.
She was dressed in a narrowly cut black suit over a white, silk blouse. There was no jewelry, but her makeup was heavier than the last time I’d seen her. Indeed, it was nearly at Little Sheba levels of depth and intensity.
The fact that she held rolled in one hand a copy of the Saturday edition of my paper gave me a pretty good idea what this was going to be about. In a small town, a reporter is never more than one public appearance away from reader feedback.
“Mrs. Crawford,” I said.
“I’m on my way to church.”
“Meaning this won’t take long?” I said, looking back at my paper.
“Meaning I saw you come into the restaurant.”
“That explains it,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down?”
“Would you like me to?”
“You’re being difficult.”
“Indeed,” I said, looking back up at her. “Certainly, have a seat. I want you to be comfortable while I’m being difficult.”
At the edge of my awareness, I caught hushed clucking from a nearby table of widows and spinsters. Each week, they gathered in their dark-colored winter dresses, clacking gold jewelry, and purple clouds of floral perfume for breakfast before church. I’m sure they thought a drunk owed the mother of a murdered child more respect, just as I’m sure the show gave them a thrill.
Naomi, of course, was no less aware of the bit of excitement she’d stirred. A little louder than necessary, she said: “Maybe if you spent more time on your work and less time reading the competition, you wouldn’t run shit like this.”
She threw my paper across the table at me. It fell open to the front-page story I had written, the one about how the cops had gone weeks without coming up with anything, or at least, anything they would talk about.
The cops had had no luck tracking down either the kid or the guy he had been hanging with. They talked to the few friends Jake had left, his classmates, his teachers, his neighbors. Nothing. They had Florida cops try to locate Jake’s dad. They never did. They showed the kid’s photo around the Weeki Wachee mermaid show. Zero.
“That,” said Naomi, reaching across the table and stabbing the story with sharp, bright red fingernail, “is negative.”
“That,” said I, poking the story with a stubby, nail-bitten forefinger, “is factual.”
“You could be more positive. Like stories about the children. How the survivors are coping.”
I probably shouldn’t have, but I smiled.
“Mrs. Crawford, I’ve written about you and your son—twice—and the Russells won’t talk.”
“Maybe another story would make someone feel bad and come forward.”
“Or not, since they haven’t done it yet. Least not that we know of.”
“You aren’t even writing about this every day. You didn’t write anything for four days before you wrote this.”
“That’s because there was nothing to say. The cops don’t have anything new. And let me assure you, I ask them every day. Sometimes twice.”
“Maybe you aren’t asking them the right questions. Maybe you aren’t asking the right people.”
“Meaning?”
“Where is this Lotty person? Why are the police trying to hide her?”
“Excellent questions. Already been asked.”
“And?”
“Her friends and neighbors don’t know where she is, and the cops won’t tell me. They want to protect her safety.”
“Well, protect her from what? Why would anybody want to hurt her?”
“Cops don’t know.”
“Don’t they? How about if she hurt the children she kept? How about if she was dealing drugs or something out of that trailer?”
“Let’s take this one bombshell out at a time. What you mean ‘hurt’ children?”
“You know.”
“No. You tell me.”
“Abuse. Hitting them. Having sex with them.”
“Who’s saying that she did?”
“People.”
“Cops?”
“They won’t give me the autopsy report.”
“And you think that’s because there’s something in there they don’t want you to see. Understand, it’s an active investigation. That’s what cops do with an active investigation. They gather information. They rarely give it out.”
“You sound like you’re on their side, like you only write what they tell you to write.”
For once, I was mature enough to set aside that truly offensive insult, her being a grieving mother and the cluckers listening intently nearby. Instead, I said, “If somebody’s saying these things about Lottie, give me a name, so I can check it out.”
She looked away.
“Who says Lottie was dealing drugs?”
She shrugged again.
“Names, addresses, and phone numbers.”
She would only look at me.
“Okay,” I said, “here’s a name I’ll bet is saying that, probably the only one. Naomi Crawford. And she’s saying it not because it’s true but because nobody’s paid her any attention lately.” I pulled my notepad from my back pocket and my pen from my shirt. “Care to comment?”
“Put that away,” she said. “This is off the record.” She twitched her head dismissively. “All I’m saying is there’s got to be a reason why the police think that woman is in danger.”
“How about because they don’t know why someone would break into her home and commit those acts?”
“Yeah,” she said, getting up to leave. “How about that? The door was unlocked.”
So much for a quiet Sunday morning in a café in the Provence of the Midwest. The old women had missed the introit, hanging as they did on every word Naomi said. If people weren’t saying thos
e things about Lotty Nusbaumer before this morning, they would be now.
I did not write the story that drew out Bobby Russell because of that, though. No, it was Marley.
One day, Marley slides forward on his elbows across his desk and says to me: “Go cover this play. Do a story on what it takes to put on a full-blown musical, with an orchestra and shit, at the junior high level.” Turns out, his kid’s in it.
I had just put the telephone to my ear to begin the first of my daily round of calls to the men and women of law enforcement. I was thus distracted.
“Pardon me?” I said, because I was pretty sure I had just heard the devil’s own voice murmuring to me from crime-reporter hell.
“You heard me,” says Marley. “Take a camera, too, get some art.”
I dropped the handset back onto the cradle.
“You’re serious.”
“Quoth the raven, nevermore so.”
“Well, that explains why you write headlines. You think either one of us ought to be making fun of Edgar? You know, him being a drunk and knowing how he died?”
“You’re not going to put me off, Clay. Get going.”
“Don’t you think this murder thing is more important?”
“Absolutely, but you done anything for me lately?”
“I can’t make stuff up.”
“You found me the Nusbaumer woman? You track down any of those wild-ass theories Campbell threw out?”
“Lottie’s become the object of your lust, journalistically speaking, hasn’t she?”
His head was cocked, and his gaze, the one he trotted out when he was confident and in repose, was mildly curious, like a Komodo dragon, only with a blond topknot in a sweater vest. He waited to see which way I would tilt, for he is the master motivator.
I leaned up close from my desk to his and said: “Next Meeting? I want to hear you address—out loud—the role of regret in the care and feeding our addictions.”
There is a row of notches along the interior edge of the paper’s front counter. A new notch appears whenever someone presents himself on the other side of that counter to complain too loudly about something that has been in the paper. Bob Marley is the samurai editor.
Fourth Person No More Page 14
