I guess I shouldn’t have cared about what Wit thought. He drank a little too much and was too attracted to the sound of his own voice, but he did have good instincts. You didn’t achieve his level of success without them. I’d gotten pretty far in my life by attaching myself to people with Wit’s feel for things. Whether it was Katy or Aaron or the cops I’d worked with who could sense trouble coming around blind corners, my attraction to these people had put me in good stead. So I was unable to dismiss Wit’s reaction.
As I was about to find out, I was right not to dismiss it. But not even Yancy Whittle Fenn could have conceived how right he had been or why. When, after my third glass of water and second dose of aspirin, I found I still couldn’t sleep, I finally opened the copy of Esquire Wit had sent me weeks ago. Although I was awake and nearly sober, my focus was severely lacking. I found myself drifting off, rereading the same sentences over and over again. Two things kept me at it: a picture of Joe Spivack, and something I had scanned but not processed. Then I relocated the sentence and realized my world was about to change again, forever. Just making sense of the words had changed it.
It was a throwaway sentence, a simple biographical fact that Wit or his editor might just as easily have omitted as included. This was the sentence:
Then, in June of 1957, Steven Brightman’s family moved across the Hudson to New York from the bucolic little town of Hallworth, New Jersey.
Suddenly, every assumption I hid made over the past few months was called into question. Not only were those assumptions suspect, but the facts upon which they were based had, in the course of a few seconds, turned from granite to quicksand.
Chapter Seventeen
I HAD SPENT the rest of that early morning piecing together a rough chronology. Although a little unclear about some of the exact dates, I was confident my time line was accurate enough. Having things written out really helped me see certain causal relationships that had earlier escaped my notice. For instance, Larry Mac’s offering me my shield followed closely on the heels of my initial conversation with Sandra Sotomayor about HNJ1956. And wasn’t it convenient of Sandra to supply me with a perfectly reasonable explanation of Moira’s connection to HNJ1956 on the very same day I received my package from Media Search, Inc. This, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t asked her about it for weeks. I believe in coincidences as much as the next guy. To swallow these, however, would require more faith than I currently had on account.
There were other, far more disturbing conveniences and coincidences, but to make any sense of them I would need help. Problem was, the people I would usually go to for assistance had been compromised. They were now all so invested in keeping the stench of scandal off Steven Brightman, I couldn’t be absolutely sure I’d be able to trust them. An outsider looking at this set of circumstances might well make the same judgment about me. If I pretended to have never read Wit’s piece and forgot all about HNJ1956, I’d have my dream fulfilled. Unfortunately for the guilty party, no dream of mine or anyone else’s was worth two murders and a suicide.
I was about to attempt quite a precarious balancing act. The challenge was picking my stage assistant. There was only one candidate I could count on for the job, one who would not give me away, intentionally or otherwise. This trust was not based on something so facile or unsavory as self-interest or personal gain, but on the death of a man’s grandson. I dialed Wit’s number for the second time in two days.
THE RIDE OUT to Hallworth from Manhattan took less than half an hour. Before picking Wit up at his hotel, I’d stopped at the Brooklyn store to retrieve the clippings from Media Search, Inc. Just as on our trips to and from Long Island, we rode in near silence. Wit looked through the clippings as I drove and scanned the map. We had already discussed strategy on the phone, and what was there to say, really?
Coming into Hallworth, we crossed over a tiny one-lane bridge, the wood plank roadway sighing from the strain. Beneath us, an endless freight train lazily clanked its way along lonely tracks, blowing its mournful horn as if to announce our arrival. We were here, after all, to unbury the dead. I pictured Carl Stipe, his bicycle leaning against his hip, tossing rocks off the tiny bridge at passing trains.
Hallworth was a town of big hills, green carpet lawns, and lush, gnarly trees. Beyond the big Victorian manses scattered about the little hamlet, there was something palpably old-fashioned about this place. If you hid the cars parked in the driveways along Main Street, a time traveler might say he’d landed in 1935 instead of 1983. There was a comfortable feel to a place where bulldozers and wood chippers had yet to lay waste to vast tracts of land. Everything was grown in, grown up, or grown over. I liked that. I also liked how the asymmetry of the streets actually depended more on topography than on some greedy developer’s vision. There wasn’t an artificial cul-de-sac as far as the eye could see. Wit and I agreed that it much resembled the town we’d seen glimpses of in the clippings about Carl Stipe’s murder. It wasn’t hard to fathom how traumatic such a crime had been in a place like this.
We parked out in front of the Hallworth Herald offices on Terrace Street. Terrace Street seemed to be the only street in town dedicated to commerce, and that dedication was halfhearted at best. It wasn’t Rodeo Drive, not by a long shot. There was a quick mart, a pizzeria, a video store, a dentist’s office, a shrink’s, and a druggist’s.
The Herald was a storefront operation with green linoleum floors, a pressed tin ceiling, and desk legs held together with nails and adhesive tape. There was a beat-up TV in one corner, and a radio, too. Each of the five desks in the office was covered in mountains of paper under which typewriters and telephones were the only recognizable features. Curled and yellowed ads and articles were thumbtacked to the walls in between framed front pages from past editions. Stories about Carl Stipe’s murder were conspicuous by their absence.
Only two of the desks were currently occupied. Seated closest to the door was a mousy woman of indistinct age. She had stooped shoulders and pale skin, and smoked a cigarette that seemed surgically attached to her lower lip. Toward the rear of the place was a real old-timer. He was bald on top and gray on the sides, and looked like he hadn’t eaten since a week ago last August. Maybe he was too busy sucking on his pipe to be bothered with food. Neither the cigarette nor the pipe seemed anxious to help us. I cleared my throat loudly enough to get their attention.
“Can I do something for you gentlemen?” the old guy spoke up.
We walked back to his desk, the mousy woman paying us no mind at all. When we got closer to the ancient mariner, he slipped on a pair of wire-frame glasses.
“I’m Y. W. Fenn,” Wit announced with the proper blend of conceit and humility. “This is my driver, Moe.”
“Micah Farr,” the old man stuck out his right hand, “editor in chief, reporter, copyboy, and dishwasher. To what do we owe the pleasure of a visit from the great Yancy Whittle Fenn?”
Wit and I exchanged knowing glances. We recognized Farr’s name from the Stipe murder coverage. Farr had done all the local reporting, some of his stuff getting picked up by bigger papers.
“Call me Wit.”
“Everybody calls him Wit,” I chimed in.
“Okay, Wit, what brings you to our fair hamlet?”
“Steven Brightman. I did a piece on him—”
“—in Esquire. Yeah, I read it. Good work.”
“Indeed. Thank you. My concept is to do a follow-up about what shaped and influenced Brightman, a sort of prequel to my Esquire exposé. In it, I’d delve into his early years here in Hallworth and then across the river.”
“Nice idea,” Farr agreed. “No doubt now that he’s been cleared of suspicion in that poor woman’s murder, the ambitious little bastard’s set his sights on the next Senate race. When he announces, you’ll have your piece all set to go.”
Wit winked at the reporter. “Why, how cynical of you, Mr. Farr.”
“Yeah, I guess so. By the way, call me Mike.”
“Everybody call you Mik
e?” I wondered.
“Nah, everybody who knows me calls me an old prick, but since we’re just getting acquainted, Mike’ll do for now.”
We all had a good laugh at that. Mike explained that the girl at the front desk was his niece and how she’d had the misfortune of catching the journalism bug early in life.
“Learned at her uncle’s knee, I’m afraid. Too bad. She’ll end up like me,” Farr bemoaned, “old, lonely, and forgotten.”
Wit changed subjects. “We were curious if you could take a few hours to show us around. You know, point out the old Brightman house, where he went to school. If you have any old anecdotes about him or could introduce us to some people who knew him. I’ll credit you in the piece.”
“Love to. We haven’t had a juicy story of our own since … well, not in a long long time. Not much happens around here. Which is a good thing, I suppose. Annie can hold down the fort. Can’t you, dear?” he shouted to her.
She just waved.
We put Farr in the front seat next to me. Wit sat in the back. The old reporter guided us through a series of lefts and rights, pointing out houses that he thought were particularly pretty or that had been designed by famous architects.
“These are the greenest lawns I’ve ever seen,” I said without really meaning to.
“Yeah,” Farr agreed, “the town is patrolled by lawn police. If they find any brown spots, a truck comes by that night and sprays it to match your grass.”
He took us by a country club that was rimmed by beautifully trimmed hedges. Besides their meticulous upkeep, the hedges were remarkable in that they were of varying heights, widths, and lengths. Yet from our vantage point it was impossible to discern a coherent pattern.
“They’re pretty amazing, aren’t they?” Micah Farr was almost boastful. “Word is, they’re even nicer in an aerial view. The rumor is that from above they spell out ‘No Jews.’”
“How pleasant,” Wit remarked.
“We got other country clubs let everybody in, but the hedges ain’t as pretty. Brightman’s old man used to be a member here. That’s why I showed it to you.”
“A lot of anti-Semitism in Hallworth?” I asked.
“Not really, no. Even here, it’s not true anymore. The town’s changed over the years, but not very much. That’s the glory of this place, people don’t really change it. It changes them, almost always for the better.” Farr was wistful. “It’s why I’ve stayed all my life.”
Finally, the old reporter took us to the woods by the reservoir where Carl Stipe had been murdered.
“That’s the reservoir over there.” He pointed. “There’s the pool club. That house over there, you see it? Just through the woods. That’s where Brightman lived as a kid.”
Wit spoke on cue. “You know, Mike, in the course of my background research on Brightman, I came across some rather disturbing stories about a child being—”
“Carl Stipe was his name. He was the mayor’s kid,” Farr interrupted, a mixture of dread and excitement in his voice. “He was found not five feet from where we’re standing. In fact, his house was right over there.” He pointed in the opposite direction from the old Brightman house.
“He was tortured or something as I recall, wasn’t he?” Wit played it cool.
“Sticks shoved down his throat. It was horrible.”
“You saw the body, then?” I asked.
‘I did. By the time they found him, all his blood had settled. He was white as a sheet, his eyes frozen open, staring up at the canopy.” Farr looked up at the trees. “I’m not likely to forget that.”
“If I remember correctly, a drifter did it,” Wit said.
“Nah,” Farr pooh-poohed. “That guy Martz had nothing to do with it.”
“But—”
“But nothing, Wit,” Farr insisted. “People believe stuff sometimes because it’s what they want to believe. You know that. And the people around here wanted to believe Martz did it more than anything. They wanted to get on with their lives, and that would have been impossible if they thought the killer was still roaming around out there somewhere. Or worse still, if the killer was living among them. No sirree, everybody around here was pretty well interested in hanging it on that poor sick bastard Martz.”
“Everyone except you,” I said, remembering the follow-up articles which had appeared in the Herald marking the anniversary of the murder.
“I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now.”
“Did the police ever have any other suspects beside this Martz fellow?” Wit was curious to know.
“If they did, they weren’t saying.”
“And you?” I asked.
“Me? I’m a reporter. I don’t have theories.”
“Did they ever recover the bicycle?” Wit wanted to know.
Micah Farr squinted at us suspiciously. “You two fellows seem awfully more interested in the Stipe murder than Brightman. What’s going on, boys?”
“You’re a sharp newspaperman,” Wit complimented. “I am interested in the murder, because I think it’s why the Brightmans moved to New York. I think the murder had a profound effect in shaping Steven Brightman. I think it’s an angle that will work for me in the piece.”
Farr bought it. “You’re right. A few families moved away soon after the murder. If you want more info on the murder, I’d talk to Phil Malloy over at the municipal building. He’s mayor now, but back then he was a local cop. When we get back to the Herald, I’ll put a call in to him if you’d like.”
Wit clapped Farr on the shoulder. “That would be great. Thank you. May I just ask you one or two more questions, Mike?”
“Shoot, Wit.”
“The stories said Carl Stipe was coming from a friend’s house and using these woods as a shortcut. From whose house was he coming?”
Farr pointed again. “See that house right there, the one next door to where the Brightmans lived?”
Wit and I both said that we did.
“That was Ronny Bishop’s house. That’s where the kid was coming home from. They were one of the families that left after the murder. I guess I couldn’t blame them.”
There really wasn’t very much more for us to do there in the woods between the pool club and the reservoir. We took a ride past the houses the Brightmans, Stipes, and Bishops had lived in. Carl Stipe’s mother still lived in the big Tudor on Reservoir Road. We saw her outside, collecting her mail. I stopped the car and watched her retreat back into her home. My heart ached for her. I wondered what she believed about her son’s death.
Wit treated us to lunch at a pub in a neighboring town. Here Farr gave us as much background on Brightman as he could. Which, frankly, wasn’t much. Reporters, he said, weren’t in the habit of researching eleven- and twelve-year-old kids. Steven Brightman, as it happened, had been a good student, a friendly kid who played Little League. The reporter seemed to know a great deal more about Brightman’s dad, the big-time lawyer. I asked if Farr remembered the other families who had moved away in the wake of the murder. He wrote out a list of four or five names.
As we drove the old reporter back to the Herald, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Although the proximity of Brightman’s house to the crime scene and the Bishop kid’s home was interesting, there was nothing in what Farr had told us to tie Brightman closer to the murder itself. Without something more substantial, all the intricate scenarios I had constructed would collapse under their own weight.
Micah Farr was good to his word and rang up the mayor on our behalf. The mayor was thrilled at the prospect of speaking to someone like Wit. Any good press for Steven Brightman was good press for him and his town. Three months ago, when Brightman’s name was still tainted by Moira Heaton’s disappearance, the mayor would probably have hung up on Farr. How quickly things change. Farr did warn the mayor that we might ask about the Stipe murder, but downplayed our interest. He told us to come ahead just the same.
The municipal building was a converted school building around the corn
er from the Herald. The mayor’s office was up on the second floor. Like the rest of Hallworth, the mayor’s office was clean, well appointed, but unpretentious. Flags, portraits of past mayors, and all manner of certificates and medals were on display. After the introductions, I found my eyes searching out Mayor Stipe’s portrait. He was a handsome man with distant eyes. My guess was he’d sat for the painting while the pain of his boy’s death was still quite fresh. I thought of his wife, retrieving the mail. I felt much more sorry for her. I joined Wit across from the mayor’s desk.
Phil Malloy was a loquacious fellow in his late forties who sported a thick gray mustache and a spare tire at what had once been his waistline. He was glad we were in town, glad to be mayor, glad to help. Phil was glad about most things. Unfortunately, gladness wasn’t much of a replacement for substance. He had very little to tell us about Steven Brightman, but he would be glad to dig up his junior high school yearbook, glad to put us in touch with his old teachers, glad to give us another tour of the town.
He was slightly more informative about the Stipe murder, but not much. Within hours of finding the boy’s body, the local cops had handed off to the state police. Unlike Farr, the mayor thought Martz had done it. What else would he think? This was his town now. If he had doubts about Martz’s guilt, he wasn’t saying. He didn’t know if the state police ever considered other suspects or if they had alternate theories, but, he assured us, he would have been glad to share them if he’d known of any.
As the mayor rambled, Wit trying to seem interested, I found myself losing hope. We couldn’t afford to walk out of Hallworth empty-handed. In a town this size, word of Wit’s visit would spread fast. Even if we could count on Micah Farr not to mention it in the Herald, Malloy struck me as the kind of guy to spend the rest of the afternoon on the phone telling everyone he knew. And once word spread through town, it would spread out of town. Then we were finished. We had a one-day head start and we were on the verge of blowing it. The time for caution, I decided without consulting Wit, had passed. There was one fact about the Stipe murder that no one had mentioned: the two boys who’d seen the man ride out of the woods on a bicycle. I had a hunch and took my shot.
The James Deans Page 18
