by Joel Travis
“It wouldn’t be polite to make comparisons.”
“How old is she?”
“In five years she’ll be your age.”
“How’s her figure?”
“Like yours, except her breasts are more prominent.”
Crenshaw shook her head and left the study. I was delighted to see her go until I realized she’d made off with The Crooked Hinge. I decided I’d let her read it until she got near the end, then steal it back.
“By the way, Brit,” Sheila said, “I really appreciate the way you made a mess of my handbag looking for Cynthia Moreno’s address. Did you know you broke my little mirror? I hope you’re happy.”
Why would I be happy? Breaking a mirror is seven years bad luck, piled onto the thirty-five years of bad luck I’ve already had. It was a small mirror, so maybe I wouldn’t get the full seven years. Of course, I also broke the bathroom mirror in Vegas, and it was a big one. Anyway, I’m not a very superstitious person. The only thing I’m superstitious about is luck.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t mean to break anything. I only meant to steal. I’ll buy you a new mirror before you even forget what you look like.”
“Just stay out of the bag!”
“No reason to raise your voice, I’m right here.”
She stalked out of the room like people do when they know you’re watching and they’re trying to make a point about how angry they are. I’ve seen that walk so many times it doesn’t even faze me anymore.
#
I took Sunday as a day of rest, as the Good Book advises us to do. Sheila ignored that advice and went to church, eager to see Reverend Means again. Marty and Susan dropped Sheila off on the way to their own church, leaving me alone in the house with Barbara Crenshaw.
We were sitting in the study. She was reading The Crooked Hinge right in front of me, making a big production each time she turned a page, as if she couldn’t wait to see what happened next. At one point she gasped. Later she gave a brief chuckle.
“Pretty good book, eh?” I asked.
“You can have it when I’m finished,” she said without lifting her eyes from the pages. “I’m a fast reader.”
“Take your time,” I said. Waste your time, I thought, recalling my sinister plan to steal the book.
I found an old photo album of Marty’s on the bookshelf. Pictures of us as kids. There I was posing for the camera with my first baseball glove, the one Mom bought me for my eighth birthday. Mom didn’t understand that a baseball glove is supposed to be lots bigger than your hand, so she shopped all over Dallas until she found the smallest glove in the city. When I showed up at the baseball diamond, everyone laughed and told me where the handball court was.
A wave of nostalgia swept over me as I remembered the times our family had shared. And then, as often happens when I think of Mom, I recalled that tragic weekend of ten years ago.
Marty and Susan were out of town that weekend. Mom was recuperating in her apartment from a recent surgery involving one of her internal organs, I forget which one exactly. She needed someone to be with her, and that responsibility fell to her eldest son and a sickly-looking nurse who came by each morning to administer medication.
Mom was asleep ninety percent of the time, yet I sat by her bedside all day Saturday and watched television. During commercial I would glance over at Mom and make sure she was still breathing. Saturday evening I went out on the balcony to take in some fresh air. How I locked myself out I’ll never know. I had to spend the whole night out there in the nippy night air while Mom was sleeping in her comfortable bed. Morning came, and the sickly nurse let me back inside when I pounded on the glass, but the damage was done. I’d caught a cold.
I asked the nurse if she could have a quick look at me before she tended to Mom. She asked if I had a sore throat or any fever. When I told her I only had a cold she blew me off, so I terminated her employment. She left in a huff after tossing a packet of pills and some written instructions on the table.
The instructions were obviously written for someone with some medical training under their belt. I couldn’t tell which pills were which, so I didn’t give Mom any of them. When I was a kid she’d often told me that it wouldn’t kill me to go one day without something I wanted. Likewise, I didn’t think it would kill her to go one day without her pills. I guess I was wrong.
Monday morning I noticed her pulse was missing. I broke down and cried. Not only for my loss. I thought of Marty and how disappointed he would be when I told him Mom was dead.
I felt lethargic and fog-headed for the next two weeks. It usually takes me about ten days to shake a cold, but I think Mom’s death slowed my recovery. I couldn’t forget how she had died on my watch, a blot on my record in the eyes of the family. And I’ve carried the weight of Mom’s death on my shoulders ever since. Ten long years. Somehow the passage of time makes it easier to cope. The way I look at it, she was in poor health a decade ago, so I’m pretty sure she’d be dead by now anyway.
Sitting in my brother’s study with the photo album on my lap, I wondered if Mom could look down from Heaven through the roof of Marty’s house and see me, and know that I was thinking of her. If anyone could, it would be Mom. She always had an uncanny knack of knowing what I was up to. I wondered what she would think of my murder investigation. Would her heart be filled with maternal pride if she could see one of her sons bring a killer to justice?
Not if the killer was her other son.
#
I haven’t mentioned my father in this journal. My father ran off to Las Vegas on Marty’s second birthday. After he left, it was just Mom, Marty, and me living in the tenement apartment. Could that traumatic loss in my brother’s life have disturbed him psychologically, causing him to go around stealing betbooks and killing codgers? I didn’t think so. I suffered the same loss and I turned out fine. Then again, my father didn’t abandon the family on my birthday.
I remember asking Mom why Daddy was taking so long to come back from the store with Marty’s birthday cake. The next day, Mom called the police and reported her husband missing. Two days later, my father called her from Vegas to say that he liked it out there, that it was more exciting than living in the tenement and he wouldn’t be coming back. Whatever faults he had, my father was an honest man, and true to his word, he never returned.
When I was eight years old I made up a story to explain my father’s absence. I was playing a game called “Chicken” with some of the kids from the tenement. I don’t know if you ever played Chicken when you were a kid, so I’ll briefly describe how the game is played. It’s pretty simple. First, you find a highway. Then you stand on the curb and wait until you see a car approaching. At the last second, when you know you’ll have to run your fastest to avoid being hit, you run across the highway and see what happens. It’s most fun at night.
During a lull in the action, I told the other kids that my father was killed playing Chicken. Their eyes got big and I could tell they wanted details, so I gave them some. “He got run over by a Cadillac.” I didn’t want them to think my father was a slow runner, so I added that he would’ve easily made it across the highway, except that one of his shoes came off and he went back for it. I wasn’t sure if the kids believed my story until I saw them take off their socks and shoes. From that moment on, everyone played Chicken barefooted.
#
Sometimes I think I’m wearing too many hats. I’m the leader, the mastermind, the detective, and the prime suspect. Oh sure, being a suspect is pretty easy. Except it wears me out, having to look over my shoulder all the time. And leadership comes naturally to me, but I burn up a lot of energy trying to keep my partners from turning against me. Let’s face it, mastermind is a full-time job in and of itself. Yet I can’t be the mastermind I know I could be, because I’m also the best detective on staff and I need to be out in the field detecting clues, interrogating witnesses and whatnot. I’m the glue that holds the team together, though I’m starting to feel more like silly putty than glue
, the way I’m being pulled in every direction to cover all my responsibilities.
Monday morning I returned to Cynthia Moreno’s house to resume our interview. I didn’t want Ace to come, which presented a problem since I had no transportation. I remembered the nearby bus stop and decided to ride the three buses it would take to get me to Inwood Road. They ought to call it Long Ass Road. It took fifteen minutes to walk to Cynthia’s house from the bus stop where I was dumped off.
Andrea answered the door. She was home sick from school, or maybe just sick of school and a good faker. She said her mother was at the grocery store.
“She left you alone?”
“Mr. Enright is here. Up in his room.”
“Oh, okay. He’s looking after you while your mother is shopping.”
“He can’t look after me. He’s nearly blinded. I’m seven. I look after myself and him too.”
“I see. Will your mother be back soon?”
“Soon enough. When she gets back, she and me have to put the groceries away where they belong.”
“She and I have to put the groceries where they belong,” I said, correcting her grammar.
“Okay, you can put away the groceries. It’s not as much fun as you think.”
She extended her neck and scoped out the porch.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“The black man. I asked Mom if you and the black man would come back and she said yes. She was right about you, but I don’t see your black friend or his black car.”
“May I come in? I’d like to speak to Mr. Enright.”
“He’s up in his room. He never ever comes out of there. He’s old.”
“Can you show me where his room is?”
“Come on!” Andrea said. She scampered up two flights of stairs and led me to a door near the end of the hall.
“Is he really blind?” I asked.
“He said he can’t see past his nose.”
I knocked on his door.
“Yes?” said a booming voice.
“It’s Brit Moran,” I said, wondering if he knew who I was.
“Oh, God!” he bellowed.
Andrea crouched and giggled. I smiled, remembering how much fun it was to be a kid, to feel happy and genuinely excited over some little thing. I made a mental note to spend more time with her to see if a child’s joy was contagious.
Andrea ran off somewhere, so I entered the room alone. I was not prepared for what I saw. After hearing his commanding voice, I had pictured a robust man, not the shriveled soul who sat in a recliner with a blanket pulled up to his chin. His face was splotched with liver spots. I hadn’t seen such sorry skin since the last time I laid eyes on Cesar’s pockmarked puss.
He had bulging eyeballs. Wisps of white hair stood at attention on the blind man’s head, as if he’d been frightened by something he hadn’t seen. He would have made a suitable scarecrow. Being the Codger’s best friend, I assumed he was about the same age, yet he looked considerably older. Eighty, I would have guessed, and in pathetic condition for an octogenarian.
Two matching plaid chairs faced his recliner. I sat down on one of them, surprised to see such ugly chairs in Cynthia’s beautiful home. Of course, it made sense to put the unsightly furniture in the blind man’s room.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said. “Cynthia has asked me to cooperate. Out of respect for her, I’ll tell you what I know. But nothing more.”
I failed to see how he could tell me more than he knew, even if he wanted to. I guess he just wanted to make it clear that he was a hostile witness who intended to reveal only what he thought I needed to know, and nothing more.
I pulled a notepad and pen from my shirt pocket. “I wrote up a few questions for you.”
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll answer all three questions to the best of my ability.”
“There’s more than three.”
“You said ‘a few’ questions. A few is three where I come from.”
“Why the antagonistic attitude?” I asked Enright outright. “I’m trying to find out what happened to your best friend. I would think you’d want to cooperate with my investigation.”
He sneered at me. Then he laughed derisively as he withdrew a bony hand from under the blanket and waved me off. He laughed again, followed it up with another sneer, and turned his head away, as if I wasn’t worthy of his attention.
I studied his profile. Just as I suspected, he had a pointy nose like the man who’d been sitting in Hedgeway’s car in the photograph. Considering his uncooperative attitude, I wished I could consider him a suspect. However, the fact that he was in the photo actually cleared him. The photographer had planted the photos in my apartment to frame me. Since Enright was in one of the photos, I knew he wasn’t the photographer. Blind men seldom take up photography.
“Your investigation!” he said. “That’s a laugh. You are the subject of the investigation, not the investigator.”
“You’ve spoken to the police.”
“That’s right, Moran.”
I pressed on. “How long have you been friends with Melvin Hedgeway?”
“We’re old army buddies. He’s my oldest friend.”
“How old a friend is he?”
“I think he’s sixty-seven.”
“I mean, how long have you known him?”
He scrunched up his shriveled face, as if squinting his blind eyes would enable him to see into the past. “I hadn’t been in the Army long when Melvin enlisted.”
“When did he enlist?”
“When his parents got tired of him sitting around the house. They told him to go out in the world and make something of himself. He made himself into a damn fine soldier.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“I don’t guess you ever served your country, did you, Moran?”
“Please, call me Brit.”
“Dodged the draft, did you, Brit?”
“I was an infant when they did away with the draft.”
“No one had to draft me. I stepped forward when my country needed me. I sacrificed the best years of my life for my country.”
I’d heard that one before—people claiming that they gave up the best years of their lives. I always wondered how they knew that the years they’d sacrificed would have been their best. Strangely enough, I’ve never heard anyone say that they gave up the worst years of their life. I can only conclude that while people will sacrifice their best years under certain conditions, under no circumstances will they forfeit their worst years.
Although John Enright and Melvin Hedgeway had been friends for many years, I thought it an odd arrangement that Enright lived in Hedgeway’s home. A blind man surely required others to look after him. I’d have thought he’d be imposing on a close relative.
“How did you come to live in this house?” I asked.
“I came in a cab. When I lost my sight, I lost my driver’s permit.”
“So when you lost your vision, Melvin invited you to take a room in his home.”
“Yes. He was concerned about me and there were plenty of rooms available.”
“Do you pay rent?”
“I pull my weight.”
“Do you pull and pay, or just pull?”
“I pay when I’m able,” he said. “That’s all any of us can do.”
Somehow I doubted my apartment manager would see it that way when I couldn’t pay my December rent in a few days.
“Do you enjoy living here?” I asked.
“Why are you asking me that? Does Cynthia want to get rid of me now that Melvin is gone? What did she tell you? I must know!”
Blood rushed to his face. He pounded the chair with his fists as a spasm overtook him. His body went limp and I noticed a stream of spittle on his chin.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “If another time would be better …”
“I must know!” he said.
“John, Cynthia hasn’t said anything about you, except that you’re Melvin’s best friend and you live here.”
“Oh.” He sighed in relief. “I shouldn’t get worked up over nothing.”
“If I were you I wouldn’t get worked up over anything. I thought you were suffering a fatal stroke.”
“Me too,” he said. “I should close my eyes for awhile.”
“I wish you would,” I said, having seen enough of the bulging eyeballs.
“Come back when I’ve gathered my strength,” he said. “Tell me your cell number. I’ll memorize it and call you when I’m ready.”
He seemed all too eager to be rid of me. I wondered if he had pulled a clever ruse by feigning the spastic attack. Nice touch with the spittle, quite realistic.
I had another reason to be suspicious. Andrea told me he couldn’t see past his nose. How could he call me if he couldn’t see the buttons on his phone? I put that question to him.
“It’s true,” he said, “that I cannot see further than an inch or two. If I hold the phone up against my face, I can see the buttons. However, if I move the phone away from my face to allow room to dial, I can no longer see them. Yet one learns to adapt. I simply press the buttons with my nose.”
Ingenious. His pointy nose was perfect for precise dialing.
“Lucky for you,” I said, “that you don’t have a rotary phone.”
“How is that lucky?”
“If you had a rotary phone you’d have to put your nose in the hole and move your head in a circular motion. Ten times for every call.”
“I’d never thought of that.”
“I’ll tell you something else you never thought of. You should use your nose to press zero and then tell the operator to dial the number for you, instead of pecking out the whole number yourself.”
“Is there a charge for that service?”
“Tell the operator you’re blind as a bat and she won’t charge you a cent. You know, John, you really ought to start taking advantage of your blindness.”
“I never thought of blindness as an advantage.”
“Well, it is. Did you know you can make a volunteer come to this room and read to you?”
“Really?”
