by James Yaffe
Since only a few cars could park in front of the Candy house, the others lined up all along the street or simply cruised back and forth, blocking the Meyers’ driveway, making it impossible for them to escape for an hour or two. Heavy feet used their front lawn as a shortcut, trampling down Sarah’s beautiful delphiniums. Candy wrappers and soft drink cans were everywhere. So, every few days, were pools of vomit. The faithful were coming all right, and some of them brought their own Christmas spirits with them.
Abe Meyer complained to Candy, and the reverend just chuckled and told him he would feel better about it all if he’d only relax and get into the spirit of the season.
“Christmas is a time of joy and celebration,” Candy said. “Celebrate, celebrate. What do you say you let these cares and cankers drop from your shoulders and join these good people in love and worship? Oh, my mistake, you practice a different form of worship, anyways so I’ve heard. Well, that’s the greatness of this country. Religious freedom. We folks wouldn’t think of interfering with your religion, so I figure you folks’ll understand that ours is just as sacred to us.”
After a week of it, Abe Meyer called the police. He was told that nothing could be done. The Candys weren’t breaking any laws—not even anti-noise regulations, which in fact applied only between one A.M. and seven A.M., and the Candys were always careful to turn off the music at one A.M. precisely. As for the lights and the ho-hoing figures and so on, a man was allowed to decorate his house any way he pleased. His neighbors might think he had lousy taste, but in a free country taste was up to the individual. And if people chose to come from miles around to gawk at his bad taste, that was up to them; no policeman could interfere with them. The constitution guaranteed them the right to gawk.
And then, four days ago, Roger Meyer came home from Yale for his Christmas vacation. He saw what was happening to his parents, their sleepless nights, their jumpy days. He called up Candy and pleaded with him to stop. He called the police, took his anger all the way up to one of the assistant district attorneys, and got the same runaround from everyone.
So yesterday around noon Roger stamped down the road to the Candy house and rang the doorbell. Candy opened the door for him, and the two of them harangued each other in the entrance hallway. After a few minutes, Candy pulled a gun out of a drawer in the hall table and ordered Roger out of the house. In another moment, Roger was grabbing Candy’s arm, trying to take the gun away from him. It went off. Fortunately the bullet didn’t hit anyone. Meanwhile, Candy’s wife had phoned for the police, and right after Roger left the house a squad car pulled up. On Candy’s complaint Roger was arrested for trespassing, disturbing the peace, and assault with a deadly weapon.
“Why did you start fighting with him?” I asked. “As soon as he pulled the gun on you, why didn’t you get the hell out of there?”
“I don’t know.” Roger waved a hand helplessly. “That’s what I should’ve done, I guess. But it seemed to me, if I turned my back on him, that crazy son-of-a-bitch—excuse me, Mother—was going to shoot me! I thought I had to take that gun away from him. It was like something out of an old movie. You know, Peter Lorre pulls a gun on Humphrey Bogart, and Bogart grabs it. I’m a big fan of old movies. Okay, it was crazy, but it all happened so fast, I guess I just wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Nobody thinks straight when they’re looking into a gun barrel,” Ann said. She turned to me. “You have to finish up your reports on the Raminez case. But maybe you could get over to Candy’s house first thing tomorrow. See if you can get some other account of what happened. It would be nice if there were an impartial witness.”
“I don’t think anybody was there except Mr. and Mrs. Candy and me,” Roger said.
“So what happens now?” Abe Meyer said.
“Well, early next week,” Ann said, “they’ll be bringing Roger in front of a judge. Probably not till Tuesday or Wednesday, because Sunday is Christmas and Monday is still a holiday. It won’t be a trial yet—just a preliminary hearing, to determine if there’s enough evidence to go ahead with a trial. If the judge thinks there is, a trial date will be set. Probably not for a few months, depending on how crowded the calendar is.”
“But I have to go back to New Haven in January,” Roger said. “I’m finishing up my senior year.”
“I’m sure the judge will take that into consideration. We’ll ask him to give you special permission to leave the state, as long as it’s school you’re going to. But you’ll have to come back for the trial, of course.”
“Please—Mrs. Swenson.” Sarah Meyer hadn’t been doing much of the talking, and she spoke up now in a low timid voice.
“Yes, Mrs. Meyer?”
“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it? They wouldn’t send him to jail?”
“We’ll be doing everything we can for him. Dave is a first-rate investigator, he’ll dig up all the pertinent facts if there are any to dig up. And with the kind of persecution the Candys have been subjecting you to, I’m sure we can establish that Roger’s state of mind—”
“But you didn’t answer me yet. Is it going to be all right?”
Ann was careful not to lower her eyes. “I’m no prophet, Mrs. Meyer.”
Sarah gave a little groan. “I knew it. All along, didn’t I know it? This is the big mistake we’ve been making since we came here to this town. Thinking we could be sure about the future. Thinking we could finally not worry.”
Her husband went to her and took her arm, and then looked at us over her shoulder which wasn’t hard for him, the way he towered above her. “We’ll go now,” he said. “You’ve got your work to do.”
Abe and Sarah left the room, his hand still holding tight to her arm. Roger started after them, but in the doorway he suddenly turned and spoke to me, in an eager voice, like an excited kid. “I was wondering—is there anything I can do to help you out with your investigation?”
“Like how?” I said.
“Well, if there’s any legwork you want done. Looking up things, running errands, just to leave you free for the important stuff. I’ve got four more weeks of vacation, and nothing much to do, and I know public defenders are always shorthanded. You’d be doing me a favor, actually. The fact is, I’m very interested in detective work. It’s what I’ve been most interested in all my life. My major at school is sociology, with an emphasis on criminology. I’m writing my thesis on the unreliability of fingerprint evidence.”
“That’s terrific,” Ann said. “I wish more young people had a serious interest in criminology. If Dave finds he needs any help from you, I’m sure he’ll let you know.”
She had done it as neatly and elegantly as only Ann could, and the boy left the office with a vague smile on his face. Not quite sure, I suppose, if he had just received a word of encouragement or a brush-off.
When the door had shut behind him, I turned to Ann and said, “So what are his chances, do you think?”
She gave a little shrug. “You know what I think as well as I do. A Jewish kid from an Eastern college shoots a Christian minster in his own house, because the kid’s parents object to the minister playing Christmas carols and putting a statue of the Virgin and Child on his front lawn. And this takes place in a town that has a hundred churches for every bookstore! Dave, my love, we’ve got our work cut out for us!”
* * *
There was no way for me to get started on the Roger Meyer thing in what was left of the afternoon. I had too much work to do in connection with our latest client, a Mexican-American hash-slinger who had wiped out his wife and three kids with a shotgun, which then had jammed when he turned it on himself: a very expensive accident for the state, which had to support him in jail and put him on trial, and a tragedy for himself, because all he wanted was the chance to finish the job he had botched. Ann had just talked a jury into convicting him of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, and now I had to write a report and fill out a dozen forms.
Standing orders from that alcoholic little prick M
arvin McBride, our district attorney: any move the public defender makes has to be reported downstairs in quadruplicate. McBride doen’t like us much, and who can blame him, considering how many apparently airtight convictions Ann has snatched away from him in recent years? His strategy seems to be, if he can’t beat us in court, maybe he can bury us in paperwork.
So it was nearly five-thirty when I finally got out of the office, walked through the first-floor rotunda, and went down the front steps of the courthouse.
It’s a huge building recently put up at great expense, though probably it wouldn’t have been so great if the contractor hadn’t been the mayor’s nephew. You could describe its style of architecture as Greco-Pueblo—columns and arches reminiscent of the Acropolis, mixed in with pink adobe courtyards and belltowers reminiscent of old Zorro movies. When I got to the sidewalk, I turned around to look, and saw with exasperation and disgust that the topmost belltower of all was festooned with silver confetti, like some giant penis masquerading as a Christmas tree.
In the parking lot two blocks from the courthouse, colored lights—red and green, what else?—had been strung up from the poles that marked the parking lot boundaries. I tried my hardest to ignore them as I drove my car from its usual parking place.
A block away a red light pulled me up next to the Methodist Church. The sign, planted on the grass plot in front of it, proclaimed in large black letters:
CHRISTMAS MORNING SERVICES
DR. POTTLE WILL SPEAK ON
“HOW FAR HAVE WE STRAYED FROM THE MANGER?”
I switched on my car radio, and the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus came blasting out, apparently sung by the entire population of St. Louis, Missouri, accompanied by every symphony orchestra in the United States of America. I switched it off again fast.
The light turned green, and in the next four blocks—comprising pretty much the entire downtown section of town—I counted five streetcorner Santa Clauses ringing bells and holding out receptacles to collect money. Yesterday I had counted only three of them. They were multiplying like rabbits.
As a matter of fact, the only Christmassy reminder that was missing was snow. Popular ignorance has it that we spend the winters in this section of the country up to our noses in snow, but it isn’t true. We get our share of the stuff, only it seldom comes our way before November and sometimes not until after the first of the year, and even then there’s a lot more of it in New York City and other points way east of the Rockies. The citizens of Mesa Grande may dream of a white Christmas, but what they can be sure of getting is an infinite number of White Christmas Bargain Sales.
I stopped for another red light and heard a voice quavering shrilly from the curb:
“Beware and repent, o ye sinners! Cast out thy iniquities before it’s too late!”
The voice belonged to an old man whose knotted and disheveled whiskers seemed to have come from the same ragbag as what passed for his clothing. The stick-like arms and scarecrow neck and scrawny ankles that thrust out from these rags were as grimy as the rags themselves, and the voice sounded as if it had gone through the same wringer and been trampled in the same mud.
Nobody around him paid much attention, except for a few amused side-long glances. To all of us he was a familiar sight; he’d been preaching his brand of hellfire on various downtown corners since long before my arrival in Mesa Grande. Every once in awhile the cops, for lack of anything better to do, picked him up and brought him before a judge. But there wasn’t much the judge could hold him for. He did a little bit of occasional begging, but he never blocked anybody’s way, or even touched anybody with his loathsome fingers.
And he pursued his mission only in the daytime. At night he sat quietly in various local bars, filling himself up with cheap liquor until he was on the verge of oblivion; then he crawled back to his crummy downtown hotel and presumably collapsed into bed.
“Repent, repent!” he was shouting, loud enough to make himself heard above the traffic noises. “Heed the words of the Prophet! ‘They have defiled the egg, and they shall choke on the wild yolk!’”
A young couple standing next to him on the curb snickered. Exactly what I had done once or twice when I first encountered the old man. In those days, I wasn’t used to his peculiar but basically simple religious vision: the world is a preview of hell, because we are being punished for our brutal and sadistic treatment of God’s favorite and most hallowed creation, the egg. Redemption, happiness, freedom from suffering, and eternal life will be possible for us only when we stop frying, boiling, poaching, mixing into batters, and otherwise desecrating the holy eggs around us, and start living with them in peace and harmony.
During the last few years, I didn’t snicker anymore. It made about as much sense, I decided, as any other prescription for the millennium that I had run across.
* * *
I had a date that night. Not a “hot” date exactly—because at my time of life that would be more than wishful thinking, it would be sheer fantasy—but at least pleasantly warm. I didn’t drive straight home, though. I went to Mom’s house, which is only a five-minute drive from my own, so that I could check to see if she was all right or needed any help.
Mom had moved into this house only a month or so ago, and to tell the truth I hadn’t been enthusiastic about that move. I didn’t see why she couldn’t go on living with me. My house has two or three more rooms than I need, there’s a large extra bathroom and a good kitchen, and after all, Mom was in her seventies and all alone.
But she had turned down that offer flat. “It wouldn’t be a good idea,” she had said. “You’ll drive me crazy with all your fussing. I wouldn’t feel like I had any freedom.”
“Freedom for what, Mom? You’re planning to throw wild parties? You’re planning to have men stay the night?”
“I wouldn’t say I was planning. But suppose for the sake of an argument such a possibility came up, how would you react? You know I’d never hear the end of it. So better we should live in separate houses.”
“But it isn’t a possibility!”
“With you around it certainly isn’t.”
Nobody ever succeeded in winning an argument with Mom. So I gave in more or less gracefully, and I admit the house she found for herself could have been a lot worse. It had only one story, which saved her walking up and down stairs; it was small but with all the modern conveniences; and it was on a nice tree-lined street in one of the new sections of town, not too far from the supermarket.
No sooner did I get used to the house than Mom hit me with a new anxiety. She bought a car, a sporty new two-door Toyota, colored bright red.
“For God’s sake, Mom, in New York you never even knew how to drive!”
“Build a subway here, like any civilized city, and I wouldn’t have to know.”
“But it could be dangerous. At your time of life.”
“Don’t you read the statistics? The danger is for teenagers. Practically nobody over seventy ever gets into a car accident.”
Very reassuring.
Nevertheless, between the house and the car, I made a point of dropping in on her for a few minutes before dinner three or four times a week.
“What a surprise!” she said, opening the door for me. “Step in, look around, make your inspection. The house is clean. I hung up my clothes. No junk food in the icebox. No marijuana cigarettes in the ashtrays.”
“All right, Mom, very funny,” I said, as I kissed her.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It’s nice to have a son who worries about me. It drives me crazy, but it’s also nice.”
We went into her small living room, where the TV set was on. “So tell me, any interesting murders today?”
I settled onto her sofa, which she had picked up secondhand at Good Will and transformed, after a little cleaning and sewing, into an exact replica of the thick, soft faded sofas she used to have in her apartment in the Bronx. Leaning back in it made me feel like a schoolboy again.
“No murde
rs,” I said. “But we’ve got an interesting assault-with-a-deadly-weapon.”
I couldn’t tell her about it just yet though. We were distracted momentarily by the TV. It was the local news, and the mayor of Mesa Grande, the honorable Willard A. Butterfield, suddenly filled the screen: short, skinny, fifty-ish, with a dry grating voice that was made for grinding out platitudes. He had a flourishing real estate business and had been chairman of the Board of Realtors before he became mayor, but he gave up that job after election, “in order to avoid any conflict of interest,” he said. Since then he had supported every single real estate boondoggle, every proposal for annexation, tax relief, water rights, or other special privilege that had come before the Council. Which led some people—unfortunately not a majority—to say that he still had his old job; he had simply changed titles.
But here he was now, on the TV screen, sitting in a big armchair, surrounded by unhappy-looking children of both sexes, with a book open in his lap. The newscaster’s voice accompanied this peculiar spectacle: “Mayor Butterfield, in what has become an annual Christmas tradition, appeared at the city-operated halfway house for children earlier today to read Charles Dickens’ classic tale A Christmas Carol. The children were delighted and enthralled—”
Close-up of His Honor, his face contorted in a broad politician’s smile, his voice quavering with emotion, or maybe he was just having trouble with the long words.
Close-up of a small boy expressing his delight and enthrallment by inserting a grubby finger into his nose.
Mom switched off the TV. “You’ll stay for dinner?” she said. “I’ve got a beef stew, I’m heating it up from my dinner party last Sunday.”
“I didn’t know you gave a dinner party last Sunday.”
“Don’t be hurt, you would’ve been insulted if I invited you. It was my afternoon canasta ladies and their husbands. We were celebrating how we got second place in the statewide tournament.”
Mom had been in town about three months now, and already she was playing in canasta tournaments. I had been living here for three years, and until this minute my offhand opinion would have been that canasta was a game nobody ever heard of outside of New York City, Miami Beach, and Beverly Hills.
