by Dick Cluster
City and suburb, Alex thought. City and suburb and mountain resort. Real-estate development, Bernie had said. Alex’s father had been a construction craftsman, plaster and carpentry, before prefabrication had pushed him out and political connections had found him a place as a shop teacher instead. Big money, he would say. You got big money killing big money. You got to expect that somewhere there’s money involved in that.
Alex reached the end of the thought, and now he was impatient with the jam-up, frustrated by the lilting, syncopated music from an island and a culture far away. He wanted to keep moving forward, taking this New England thing apart. He didn’t want to have to sit still and worry. He didn’t want to worry about Suzanne, and he didn’t want to worry about himself. Wondering loomed large in his nature, but worrying did not. Over the past year he’d worked hard to keep it that way.
At just before six on a nondescript weekday night, the Burlington Mall was not the hyped-up place it had been when Alex had rushed through it before Christmas as part of the stampede of last-minute shoppers. Santa was gone, and barely a child was to be seen. The Muzak had reverted to old show tunes in place of Better Not Pout and Ba-Rum-Pa-Bum-Dum. Alex supposed this was the emptiest hour, the time everybody was home making or serving or eating the family meal.
“I don’t want to go into Tommy’s store,” Suzanne said. “I don’t want anybody to be able to prove he saw me. He’s cute. He’s got black hair, a mustache, he’s younger than me, he’ll be shooting the shit with some girls, and if the music is good he’ll be boogying. He gets an hour off at six. Bring him down here, where we can sit and talk and not worry anybody’ll listen to what we say.”
Down here, where Suzanne had led him, was the species of place that seemed de rigeur for every enclosed shopping center from coast to coast. It was an open area full of small tables, surrounded by a ring of fast-food counters representing a dozen different national cuisines. A faint, unpleasant smell hung in the air, disinfectant, as if the brown brick floor had been mopped recently, perhaps when the late-afternoon crowd thinned out. Now the place was only about one-quarter full. Nonetheless, Suzanne was correct about the sound: the acoustics were awful. Piped music and footsteps and voice babble rebounded off hard surfaces to make a loud, perfect background din. Despite the localized name, Town Meeting was supposed to approximate an open-air plaza in a climate where people habitually sat and dined and conversed outdoors. In this plaza, everyone was well dressed, looked as if he or she had a nice home to go to, and under the fluorescent lighting showed off skin that was, conventionally speaking, white.
As Alex and Suzanne stood by the edge, a security guard under an old-fashioned Smokey the Bear hat ambled by. He had a policeman’s swaggering gait, the one that came with the knowledge you wore a uniform, a badge, and something on your hip. On his was a walkie-talkie. Alex stayed put until the guard passed. He thought that, in sending him off to find Tommy, Suzanne was stating that she had already trusted him plenty, so now he was going to have to trust her. He told her Bernie would be a studious-looking Jewish guy in heavy black-framed glasses and a three-piece suit.
When Alex had called Bernie the night before, it had been for both companionship and information. He knew Bernie loved and studied the intricacies of Boston Brahmin society the way only somebody who came from outside it could. It was like British Egyptologists, or Americans who went gaga over Indian peyote rites. Only in reverse. But now he needed Bernie in his official capacity as well, because Bernie specialized in criminal cases within the downtown firm where he worked. He said his clients might tell bald-faced lies to stay out of jail, but they were still less hypocritical than the types he’d get in commercial law.
Bernie and Alex had met soon after Bernie first passed the bar. He’d gotten Alex off when Alex was nabbed by a federal park ranger for smoking hash on the beach; later he’d also handled Alex’s side of a relatively amicable, we’ve-come-to-the-end-of-the-road divorce. In fact, Bernie had held two-year-old Maria while Alex went up to speak his lines before the judge. Maria’s shit had leaked through the Pamper and overalls onto Bernie’s three-piece suit. He’d hung on, but he’d factored the cleaning costs into his bill. Bernie’s daughter Elizabeth was the same age as Maria, and now the girls were friends. Alex kept an eye out for Bernie as he retraced his steps back to the main promenade of the mall.
It was quiet here, with few shoppers and the muted show tunes whose melodies Alex knew, though not the names. The trees, growing out of wide wooden boxes, were the same as the ones in the make-believe plaza. They had spindly branches and light-colored bark. They reminded Alex of miniature eucalyptus with sadly stubby leaves. Looking up, he realized they grew under skylights, dark now, the only admission of an outside world that could be cold, or lightless, or cruel. He also saw exposed steel beams and sheets of plywood, alike painted in muted blue and gray. He realized that a second level was about to be added to the mall. Soon he reached a doorway from which hard-driving guitar and drums poured out. Just inside the store, Tommy Lutrello lounged behind one of the two cash registers, exactly as described. He rolled his shoulders to the beat and talked over it with two blond teenage girls. He wore a white shirt with his name on a red pin bearing the music store’s logo, and no tie. His dark hair was brushed upward in a way that reminded Alex of Paul Anka from one decade and John Travolta from another.
Tommy stood about half a foot taller than Suzanne, and looked more distracted. His face was harsher and more closed in, with a slightly pocked effect. He wasn’t a bruiser type, far from it, but Alex got more of a whiff of submerged violence from him than from his big sister. Maybe that was just a stereotype, though. Alex guessed that Tommy might be nineteen. He asked for some help and drew Tommy down an aisle of compact discs away from the pair of teenagers. “Can you figure out the price on this?” he asked vaguely, and then added, “I’m with Suzanne. She wants to see you on your break, over at the fast food.”
“Suzy?” He looked at his watch, a watch with hands, mounted on a wide pigskin strap. “I’ll be there,” he said. “Who’re you?”
“Alex. I’m a car mechanic and sometimes I look into things for people. I know that sounds like a line, but it’s a short version of the truth.” Alex asked himself why he was showing off. “I was hired to look into that auto accident Scat Johnston was in. Your sister thinks her situation will get better if I find out.”
“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. He reached down into a rack of compact discs, pulled one out, and handed it to Alex. “Well, that’s the price that’s on there,” he added loudly, and went back behind his register to pick up the conversation he had left. Alex looked at the CD, which was titled The Blind Leading the Naked, performed by a group called Violent Femmes. He looked at Tommy again. Tommy could just as easily have picked Velvet Underground or Volkswagen Tyres, the groups filed on either side. There might have been a message in the album Tommy chose, and there might not. On impulse, Alex turned to the rack of tapes across the aisle and picked out the same album on cassette. He paid the other cashier, with plastic, and left. Tommy caught up with him halfway back down the main drag of the mall. Tommy said, “Over here, you mean?” and led the way.
10. GOOD WITNESS
The black-uniformed security guard sat in a white imitation wrought-iron chair in one corner of the Town Meeting. Suzanne and Bernie sat in identical chairs at a wood-and-Formica table in the corner opposite. Suzanne was working on soup and a sandwich. Bernie was drinking coffee and looking at his watch.
The place was about as crowded, or empty, as before. Half the diners seemed to be finishing business left over from work. The men had their jackets off and their pale yellow, blue, or pink sleeves rolled up. The women kept their jackets on, but gesticulated energetically with cigarettes or pens. They would all have gotten off work in the sprawling low-rise complexes that seemed to pop up like mushrooms along the highways hereabouts. Besides the dressed-for-success set, other pairs of diners sat and chatted or munched, relaxing after a day behi
nd cash register or counter or keyboard or wheel. A few noisy clumps of teenagers flirted and showed off. Aside from having one arm under her sweater, Suzanne did not stand out here. Bernie, however, was the only customer in a downtown three-piece suit.
“That’s our lawyer,” Alex told Tommy. “Suzanne dislocated her shoulder, or somebody did it to her. So far she hasn’t told me who or why. I took her to the hospital. I’ve stuck with her and stayed away from the police.”
“Thanks, man,” Tommy answered. If Alex was playing hotshot hero, Tommy was playing big brother, not little one. “Do you want a taco or a hot dog or anything?”
Alex restrained himself from saying, “No nitrites.” He also restrained himself from asking, “Where were you Monday night when your sister’s no-good rich ex-boyfriend got killed?” He said. “Taco would be nice.”
* * *
“Okay,” Alex prompted. Suzanne had gotten some food inside her and introductions were done. “I want you to start about three years back, or whenever it was, when Scat was dealing you scag.”
“Scag?” Suzanne looked puzzled. She knitted her black brows as she licked the residues of soup from her Styrofoam bowl.
“Outmoded term, I guess. Natalie said he was supplying you with heroin. Whatever you call it nowadays.”
Suzanne put the bowl down and licked her teeth. “Nowadays,” she said without smiling, “I call it shit. In those days, I called Scat and what came with him a way out. My father— our father— died, okay? And our mom remarried, too soon for our taste.” She looked at Tommy, to see whether he had anything to add.
“Too dark for our taste, too.”
“Dark,” Alex said, feigning ignorance. “You mean he was shady, something like that?”
Tommy looked at Alex. He gave the impression that what he saw was somebody not quite in the real world. “She married a nigger, that’s what I mean. I wouldn’t call him that now. But who I was then, who Suzy was then, that’s what we felt, okay?”
“Tell me about him.”
“His name is Harold Simms,” Suzanne answered. “She brought him home from work one day and introduced him as Flash. He doesn’t look anything like a Flash. He’s got heavy glasses, like Bernie there. He’s got kind of a fat, baby face with a beard hiding the bottom half. He smokes a pipe. He looks like a Harold. But to her, when she brings him home, it’s easy to see he’s Flash for real.”
“For reasons you couldn’t understand at the time?”
“He was, I thought, younger than her. I didn’t trust that. He worked with her, he was an assistant manager where she worked, taking orders over the phone. She said it was one of those things where he’d always had a crush but she hadn’t been available before. She said, you know, she knew that deep down there’d always been some action between them.”
“She said that,” Tommy broke in, “but we thought it was all a crock of shit. We thought, ‘What does this dude see in her except Dad’s insurance policy and a piece of easy white ass when he doesn’t feel like running around?’ ”
Bernie had been taking notes on a yellow legal pad. Now he stopped and ran his finger around the inside of his collar, though he didn’t loosen either collar or tie. Alex bet himself he knew what Bernie was thinking. Tommy would not make a good impression on jury, calling his mother a piece of easy white ass.
“So this is ancient history, okay,” Suzanne picked up. “But you wanted to know, Alex, what I was looking for a way out from. Mom and Flash, that was one thing. Mom and Tommy, that was another.”
Alex nodded. “And your way out was Scat?”
“I was in school, part time, at Salem State. I quit. I went up to New Hampshire. I worked in a restaurant where a girlfriend of mine used to work summers. Tommy stayed at home, but it was pretty much open warfare, so I brought him up with me as much as I could. Until I met Scat. Then Tommy didn’t want much to do with me, either.”
Alex turned to him. “Because you saw what she was doing as rejecting your father, too?”
“Scat was a rich kid who had strange ideas about how he got his kicks,” Tommy said, more confidently this time. He had the same nose, straight and proud, as Suzanne. Alex wondered whether this was what was meant by a Roman nose. Tommy’s nostrils flared over the precisely cut mustache. “One day this kid shows up at our house on a big Harley, black jacket, all that shit. He says, ‘How do you do, I’m your sister’s new old man. She sent me to get you for a party.’ Then he drives up to where she is, Pepperell Woods, on that thing, me hanging on behind. It’s a bitch of a night, sleeting and shit. The party turns out to be a lot of his friends mixing coke and liquor, and some of them going off to the john to shoot up. I didn’t like my sister in that crowd, and I didn’t like her getting laid by him.”
Alex could see that— could even imagine, if he had a sister, feeling the same thing. But there was still something wrong with little brother as the arbiter of whom all the grown-up womenfolk chose to sleep with. Alex didn’t think Tommy Lutrello was as much of a redneck as he was making out. Maybe all this tough talk was not a giveaway but a ploy to divert suspicion away from his sister, to him instead.
“All right,” he said, and then stopped. The blond, ready-for-Ivy-League cashier from the soup-and-salad counter had sat down at the next table with her dinner. Now the security guard, who had used up his quota of sitting time, detoured in a slow and consciously casual way to talk to her. But Alex couldn’t make out what either of them said, so he assumed the reverse was also true. And Suzanne’s picture hadn’t been in the paper or anything. “You’re up there, and you’re hanging with his crowd,” he prompted. “Tell me about them.”
Suzanne slid her eyes toward the guard without turning her head. If she’d been spotted somehow, Alex thought, it was too late to run. Apparently she decided the same, because she shrugged and went on. The shrug brought a grimace, though.
“They were mostly pretty rich, plus some locals and some ski bums who were more like me. For a while they seemed kind of cool. They had been places, done stuff, and none of them even knew anybody black. Also, they didn’t care if I didn’t care about my future. So it all took me away from what went on at home. So I’ll skip the grisly details, okay? Sca— my boyfriend didn’t do so many drugs himself, but he kept everybody else supplied. I got hooked, and pretty soon that was all I did. After almost a year of it, I was down to eighty-five pounds. I looked like a scarecrow, and that’s how I felt, too. My boyfriend would take me places, park me like I was the car and he had the key. He’d even bring me home, you know, to visit my family. Like they had tossed me out and he had picked me up, and now he owned me and he was going to rub their noses in that.”
Alex noted the word owned, and noted she hadn’t said how she paid for the dope. All along he’d been looking for a connection to the fact that Caroline Davis knew some prostitutes who worked Pepperell Woods. He wondered whether maybe he had found it. He remembered, guiltily, thinking that Suzanne would be more attractive stretched out taller. He didn’t think starved down thinner would be the same. But he believed emaciation did turn some men on. It made the woman more of a china doll, something that it was up to them whether to take care of or break. He knew better than even to hint about any of this in front of Tommy Lutrello.
“How did that mess end?” he asked instead.
“I ran away. I mean ran. One night in the spring, mud season, I packed sneakers and a change of underwear and a couple of pictures and things that meant something to me. I stood on the road with my thumb out, at sunrise, shivering from cold and fear and my heart pounding. Time I hit Boston, I felt ready to pass out. I asked the last driver to put me in a phone booth so I could call a hotline. I got lucky. I got into a treatment program, an alternative treatment program. It was in Dorchester, but nobody— not anybody— knew where I was.”
“That was luck,” Alex said. “And guts.”
“All I wanted was to crawl in a hole and never come out. Somebody happened to match me up with the right program, and
they happened to have room. I was allowed to give out a post-office box, but no other address. The idea was to get away from all that kind of pressures— family, love interests, everybody— until we could set about liking ourself again. I was there for six months. I applied back to college, UMass this time, and I started while I still lived there, in the program. When I got out on my own, and I had this new identity, this new me, I started little by little making bridges to who I used to know. To my mom, to Tommy, to my older brothers, to my stepdad. By now I had a different idea about black and white. My counselor, well, you know her, Alex. She was my age, we had a lot in common, and she was black.”
“Natalie, you mean.” Alex had been engrossed in Suzanne’s telling, hadn’t noticed that both the cashier and the security man had gone. He looked around, bewildered. Bernie pointed at the cashier behind her counter and the guard strolling back toward the main drag of the mall. “And Scat?” he asked. “You got back in touch with him?”
“Sooner or later I had to face up to it, to him. I wouldn’t ever trust myself if I couldn’t.”
That made sense to Alex. Yet it also sounded like catechism, like a maxim learned in the drug program. From Natalie? One thing was sure: Suzanne’s story meant she had known Natalie before they ever wrote papers about their stepfathers in sociology class. Or Natalie’s story meant Suzanne’s story wasn’t true.
