Without Prejudice

by Unknown

  It was cold that week in February, and on Saturday morning he stayed inside. Merrill didn’t like him there, he knew, so he holed up in his father’s small study, reading while his father came in and out in his robust yet abstracted fashion throughout his showering and shaving next door. He’d been home two days now, and what Merrill didn’t know was that he might be home for another week. Robert would be speaking with lawyer Gehringer on Monday, and he was going to say he’d be happy to testify. Willing, actually; not happy. The odds now looked so stacked against Duval that Robert didn’t feel he had a choice.

  The doorbell rang, and he let Merrill answer it, not out of laziness but because she’d made it clear this was her home, not any part of his.

  ‘Why, Vanetta,’ he heard Merrill say, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m just stopping in, Miss Merrill.’ Vanetta had always resisted calling her ‘Mrs Danziger’. ‘I’ve come to see Bobby.’

  He went out to the hall, where Vanetta stood in her coat and boots. ‘Won’t you come in a minute, V?’ Merrill asked.

  Vanetta shook her head, and looked at Bobby. ‘Come for a walk with me?’

  He was puzzled – why couldn’t they talk in the apartment, where it was warm? But he got his coat from the hall closet while Merrill retreated to her room.

  Outside, it was glaringly bright, and the snow sparkled in the midwinter sun, but it was also near-Siberian with cold. At the corner the wind howled down the narrow tunnel of 58th Street. Ice lay under crusted snow on the sidewalks, where rock salt had uncovered only a thin line of concrete to walk on. Crossing Dorchester Avenue, he took Vanetta’s arm, then almost slipped himself on a thin disc of ice.

  ‘Who’s holding on to who?’ she asked, laughing. They moved along 58th Street until Vanetta stopped to catch her breath. She gazed through the black iron uprights of the fence around Jackman Field, where once Robert had played school games of soccer and softball. Today it lay buried under a frozen blanket of snow.

  ‘You warm enough?’ she asked, though it was she who was wearing a thin wool coat, while he had on a ski parka, puffed with goose down. A frayed silk scarf covered her head, a cast-off from Merrill. Without her grey hair showing, she looked years younger – her face was still smooth-skinned.

  ‘It’s not exactly Mississippi weather,’ he said.

  ‘You tellin’ me.’ She pointed to the field. ‘Hard to believe that in three months kids going to be running around in T-shirts and shorts out there.’

  ‘Do you want to go get warm somewhere?’ There was a coffee shop inhabiting the Steinways corner spot now, only two blocks away.

  ‘No. I got to go downtown, see this man Gehringer some more. But I wanted to talk to you first.’

  He waited, but she seemed in no hurry. He sensed a terrible sadness in her. She stared out again at Jackman Field. ‘You know, when I first came into your life you was a damaged little boy. I was so worried about you – and I thought, If I can show this boy the love he needs maybe he’ll be all right. I mean, I knew you would be cared for in all the other respects – your daddy wasn’t rich, but he had more money than I’d ever see. You’d always have all the food and clothes you’d ever need, and I knew you’d be going to a good school. What you didn’t have was a mama.’

  She sighed. ‘Duval had a different kind of problem. He had a mama, but his mama was no good.’ She looked at Robert dispassionately, though he knew this must hurt to say – Aurelia was her daughter, after all. ‘So I needed to help him, too, even if I couldn’t provide those other things for him. When you were little and friends with Duval, I used to dream sometimes that maybe he could go to school with you. He’d be with you at your gym time, and over in the classrooms too. He’d get himself educated, that’s what I dreamed.’ Her voice suddenly lowered. ‘I always knew it wasn’t going to be a dream come true. He didn’t get much schooling, really, nothing that prepared him for a good life. And now it’s come to this.’

  He didn’t know what to say. ‘There’s still hope, Vanetta.’

  She pursed her lips and shook her head; for a moment, he thought she would start crying. He wanted to cheer her up. ‘You know, I used to wish you’d kidnap me, Vanetta.’ When she gave a laughing snort he added, ‘I used to dream you’d stick me and Duval in your car and take us down to Mississippi.’

  She looked at him, disbelieving. ‘That’s not a dream, child, that’s a nightmare.’

  ‘But you told me about where you grew up. All the fruit and the corn and the pond at the farm.’

  She was shaking her head.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ He was almost pleading. ‘I used to play a trick on Duval, tell him that over the wall behind the Christian Science church there was a Secret Garden.’

  ‘I know you did. He asked me once if it was true. I said of course it was.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t, you mean. It was just a little patch of dead ground. I shouldn’t have fooled him like that. But in my mind there was a Secret Garden, and that was your place in Mississippi.’

  She sighed again. ‘Baby, I told you all the nice things – the watermelons, and the peaches and such – because you were just a little boy who needed something sunny and warm to think about. You wouldn’t expect me to say anything else, now would you? I don’t want to tell you what life was really like down there. The farm owner, how bad he cheated my daddy each fall, or the white men in town who used to stand around the general store, talking their bullshit to each other. They’d call out to me – I couldn’t have been more than ten, eleven years old – askin’ things that make me blush just thinking about them. The white boys, they’d spit on the sidewalk where Alvin was about to step, just to let him know where he belonged.’ She stopped and exhaled, her breath hanging like smoke in the cold air. ‘Sometimes it seemed if a white person was nice to you, it was either ’cause they wanted something or it was an accident. Chicago ain’t been no picnic,’ she said. ‘But life down there was hell.’

  He felt as if a picture he had grown up with – his rich great-aunt’s Kandinsky, for example, that had sat above her fireplace on Astor Place – had turned out to be counterfeit, composed by some weekend painter in a shed in northern Wisconsin. It didn’t seem right.

  But Vanetta wasn’t done. ‘Listen, I wanted to talk to you because I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said simply. He could not think of anything he would not do for this woman.

  ‘I want you to go back up to the apartment, pack up your clothes, and then go out to the airport and fly back to New York. That’s what I want you to do.’

  He was stunned. ‘Why, Vanetta?’

  ‘Because I’m asking you to.’ She was no longer looking at Jackman Field, and he found himself staring into her dark brown eyes.

  ‘But I can help Duval if I stay.’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean? His lawyer wants me to testify.’

  ‘That lawyer man doesn’t want you on the witness stand. I talked to him last night.’

  ‘What changed his mind?’

  ‘He said he thought about it again and figured that your testifying might just – what’s the word? Boom something.’

  ‘Boomerang?’

  ‘That’s it. Boomerang against Duval.’

  Robert started to protest, but Vanetta hushed him with a raised hand. ‘He said he hadn’t realised you’d only known Duval for such a short time, and so long ago. You weren’t even ten years old.’

  ‘I told him that,’ Robert said crossly.

  ‘That ain’t all. He said you could sit up there and say all the nice things in the world ’bout the little boy you used to know, and the prosecutor would ask, “How did you come to know Duval?” And you’d have to say because his grandmother worked for your family.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Robert felt confused.

  ‘He says it won’t sound to anybody like you and Duval could have been real friends. They’ll just think, of course
he’d say that.’

  ‘But we were friends.’

  ‘I know that, baby. But it’s what the jury thinks that counts. That’s why the lawyer done changed his mind. You see, you and Duval – it wasn’t equal.’

  ‘If Duval goes to prison, Vanetta, I’ll never forgive myself if I could have helped. Let me call Gehringer and talk to him.’

  ‘Don’t you be bothering him.’ She spoke sharply. ‘He got enough on his plate without wasting time arguing with you. You understand?’

  He felt like she’d slapped him. ‘Okay,’ he said, feeling hurt.

  Her voice softened. ‘Listen, don’t you think we all want to help him? How do you think I feel? When he came up from St Louis, he wanted to come and live with me. I said no, Bobby.’ She looked like she was about to cry, then got hold of herself. ‘I told him, “Duval, you a grown man now. You need your own place.”’ She looked beseechingly at Robert. ‘He didn’t want to be living with an old lady like me. I thought it would be bad for him.’

  He wanted to comfort her, but the moment passed, and she said, lifting her chin up, ‘Bobby, there ain’t nothing you can do for your friend now, I’m telling you that. All you can do is get on with your own life. At least you got one left; I ain’t going to let you waste it by staying here. You go on back to New York today.’

  She was being firm rather than hard, but there was no questioning her insistence, or the fact that he found it impossible to defy.

  ‘If I can’t help Duval, at least let me stay and try to help you.’

  ‘Baby, if you wants to help me then the best thing you can do is make me proud of you. So go on, get back to your work, and your life.’

  He was bewildered but also felt obliged, too, like a grown-up son yielding one last time to a mother’s request. ‘I love you, Vanetta,’ was all he could say.

  Her voice was muffled, for her chin was down resting on the tops of her breasts. ‘I love you, too, Bobby. Now do what I say, you hear? Go.’

  He did, flying back to La Guardia that evening, sitting in the rear of a 727 as it rode a giant tail wind above the clouds, moving him at terrific speed away from Chicago and Duval. And away from Vanetta – he sensed he was crossing another line that put even more distance between them. She had been saying goodbye to him, hadn’t she? He knew by now that however much you loved someone, circumstance and brute facts could drive you apart, even someone you loved like the mother you’d never had. In the end, maybe Gehringer was right. It wasn’t equal.

  XIII

  1

  THEY WENT TO the dunes for the weekend, where he and Anna didn’t discuss Duval or Philip or Peggy Mohan, and a fragile peace prevailed. Sometimes you could opt for the unexamined life and get away with it. For two days they did.

  He remained worried by his last conversation with Duval. He wished he had done more to help him, even if it had only been encouragement, but he had been too preoccupied with controlling his panic on the ninety-fourth floor to take in the sheer neediness of Duval.

  On Sunday morning Anna had a long phone conversation with Donna Kaliski from the centre. From what Robert could overhear of it, as he sat in the living room scanning the annual report of the university trustees, they were working flat out to find the blazer from the trial. Gehringer had been enlisted, motions filed, a formal process initiated – this after Donna’s informal efforts had failed to unearth it.

  For the first time Robert felt himself rooting for them without reservation. Overturning the conviction was the only tangible hope Duval had to make a new life for himself. Over lunch, Robert wanted to say as much to Anna, but he sensed it was too late to make a show of coming on board.

  So he proceeded indirectly. That evening as they drove back to the city he suggested they could use Duval again in Evanston. ‘I can think of three or four things he can do.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Anna. He couldn’t tell if she was sceptical that there were actually things to do, or about Robert’s show of goodwill.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘The basement’s a mess. He and I could spend a day sorting it out.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll call him. I need to talk with him anyway.’

  On Wednesday morning he cancelled the acquisitions meeting, since there was nothing on the agenda and so many people were away. Instead he had his postponed meeting with Andy Stephens and was getting ready for his next one, with the ‘legendary’ Candy Williams, when Anna phoned.

  ‘Have you heard from Duval?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s just that I left him a message on Monday, asking him to come on Saturday. But he hasn’t called back. I thought he might have called you instead. He was supposed to see Donna Kaliski in Evanston yesterday, but he didn’t show.’

  ‘Maybe he changed his mind.’

  ‘I don’t see why he would. Donna’s taken on his case, and he knows she’s very hopeful. But she can’t even raise him on his cell phone.’

  ‘I thought he didn’t have one.’

  ‘He does now.’

  Had Anna bought it? ‘Does it matter much?’

  ‘Do you know how many cases this woman has? She hasn’t got time to waste.’

  Neither do I, he thought, depressed by Anna’s snappishness. Yet troubled by the memory of his friend drifting away down Michigan Avenue, he offered to try and reach Duval.

  Reluctantly he called Information for Jermaine’s number at the house on South Cornell. Jermaine must be at work, but maybe his wife Ella would know where Duval had gone. When he phoned a man answered.

  ‘Is that Jermaine?’

  ‘No.’

  Very helpful. ‘Is Duval there?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Robert realised it was Jermaine’s son Lemar, no friendlier four years on from Vanetta’s funeral. ‘I’m a friend of his. Do you know how I could reach him?’

  ‘Man, I don’t care where he is. All right? Want me to spell it out? I DON’T CARE.’

  ‘When’s your father back, Lemar?’

  ‘You talking to me now – is that a problem? Who are you, anyway? You the man who was at Vanetta’s funeral?’

  ‘None other.’

  ‘Oh, good. Because let me tell you, white motherfucker, you can go and suck my dick.’ He slammed down the phone.

  Not your average publishing conversation, Robert thought, and tried to ignore his increased pulse rate while he thought about where Duval could have gone.

  He realised how little he knew of Duval’s life. He didn’t know the name of the church near 58th and Prairie, and if he did, just what would he learn? ‘Oh, yeah, that Duval was here on Sunday. What a nice voice he’s got.’ That wouldn’t help him.

  Perhaps among the myriad relatives of Vanetta, Duval had struck up a new friendship, but Robert doubted it. After their depressing rendezvous at the Hancock Building, he had a strong feeling Duval might have gone underground. It wouldn’t be hard to disappear for a while, as long as he had a little money. He could take a room in a flophouse without anyone having any idea where he was. His picture wouldn’t be on TV or in the papers: twenty-four years before, yes, but that was the past. Now no one cared.

  Except his parole officer. Robert hesitated before calling him, but there seemed no alternative. If Duval had disappeared, the State was going to hear about it sooner or later.

  This time he got through to Bockbauer almost right away. ‘I’m trying to contact a former prisoner named Duval Morgan and hoped you could help me. I wanted his address.’

  ‘I can’t give that sort of information out,’ he said tetchily.

  ‘I’m the guy who invited him out to Indiana. I sent you a form from my office.’

  ‘I still can’t talk to you on the phone. Sorry, but you could be anybody.’

  He went to see Bockbauer the next day. The parole officer was way down in the black South Side, about a mile from Jermaine. He was a big man in his thirties, and wore dark trousers and black boots and a bulletproof vest, and a 9mm handgun. Robert had been e
xpecting something softer – a graduate from a social-work school, who would be wearing a tie.

  His office was on the second floor of a low modern brick building on the corner of 80th and Cottage Grove Avenue. It had small windows that couldn’t be reached from street level, and through one of them Robert could see his car, parked at a meter, in front of a dollar store. It was not a nice neighbourhood.

  ‘Have a seat,’ said Bockbauer, sitting down behind his desk. He had blond hair, bleached to white in the sun, cropped short around his ears. Square-faced with a ruddy complexion, he looked like a German-American product of one of the working-class southwest suburbs. Doubtless a former football player.

  Bockbauer gestured at his outfit. ‘Sorry about this, but I’m going to see a parolee once we’re finished.’

  ‘Do you always wear it?’

  ‘Have to. It’s not because they’d shoot me – though plenty of them would like to – but there’re other people in their neighbourhoods who might.’

  ‘That rough, huh?’

  ‘Yep. Today I’m going to 54th and Prairie.’

  ‘I used to visit someone at 58th and Indiana,’ Robert said, realising it sounded like an effort to establish his own street cred.

  Bockbauer seemed amused. ‘Really? What do you do for a living, Mr Danziger?’

  ‘I’m a book publisher.’ He gave a small smile. ‘It was a long time ago that I went to 58th and Indiana.’

  Bockbauer laughed. ‘Must have been. Anyway, you wanted to ask me about Duval Morgan.’

  ‘That’s right. He was going to come and do some work at my house. But I haven’t heard from him.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me about this work, and he’s supposed to.’ He sounded annoyed. With all the bratwurst-and-beer bluffness, there was something unyielding. ‘I’m surprised you’re tracking me down about a no-show yard man.’

  ‘I’ve got a personal concern. Duval and I grew up together. Here on the South Side.’ He wasn’t going to explain.

  Bockbauer was surprised. He rubbed the fingertips of one hand back and across the vinyl surface of his desk. He said, ‘Duval missed his meeting with me yesterday. I go to him – that’s the way it work with parolees – but when I got to his cousin’s on Cornell he wasn’t there.