Final Notice

by Jonathan Valin

  “Oh,” she said. “I know quite a number of odd facts. You can't work in a library for thirty years without picking up a great number of facts. One year I read all the way through ‘R’ in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. I would say that I'm an expert on facts through ‘R.’” She held out her hand and for a second I thought she expected me to kiss it. “I'm Jessie Moselle. Like the wine.”

  “Harry Stoner,” I said.

  “Oh, dear, that's an ‘S,’” she said with alarm. “I don't know my ‘S's. ’ It sounds like an English name, though. Randolph is an English name.”

  “Is it?” I said. “I believe I am part English. With a little Irish thrown in, too.”

  That pleased her. “Moselle is a German name. My parents were born in Lvov. That's in the Soviet Union, now. Of course, when they were born, it was part of Austria.” She blinked once, very slowly, and said, “Davis is an English name.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Oh, yes. Davis or Davies has quite a pedigree. Kate doesn't like me to mention it, but I once traced her family tree—that's a hobby of mine, tracing family trees—and she has a general in her past.”

  “Was he any good?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. He was rather impetuous, but he won many battles. He was a Leo. Kate is a Leo, too. Leo's are fiery, you know.”

  I liked Jessie Moselle. “And what sign are you?” I asked her.

  “I'm a Sagittarius. Many philosophers were Sagittarians.”

  “I'm not surprised.”

  She smiled demurely. “I have to go, now. We're picking up reserves for visible shelving.”

  As she toddled off, I thought that the morning hadn't been a complete waste. I'd made one new friend. And now, I said to myself, as I got out of that surprisingly comfortable chair, it's time to look up an old one.

  ******

  I drove west down Erie, that stately street full of red brick colonials and towering oaks, to Madison, where I turned south past the high-rises and the old yellow-brick apartments that are set above the boulevard on grassy slopes. Sun-burnt leaves were falling everywhere on the lawns and sidewalks. Red maples and orange oaks, shaped like hands, drifting down through the brisk October air, full of sunlight and the sound of the leaves in the wind. I felt like trailing a stick down those sidewalks and stirring the leaves into whirlwinds. Fall has that effect on a man not quite middle-aged. Or it has on this man. I guess I'm just not that far away from a kid with a stick. Especially on an October day with everything going to pieces of color, like a tinted mirror broken in the street.

  But I didn't get out of the car and kick at the leaves. I did the manly thing, the adult thing, and went ahead with my business, although I did stay on Madison, taking the long way to town. Through the fringes of Hyde Park, where the beer barons had built their rococo mansions. Through East Walnut Hills, itself once a rich suburb and still populated on its fringes by white-collar types—the rebuilders, the FHA renovators who want to turn their little communities into walled islands with white sand beachheads. Drove back through successive layers of money and its subsidence, until I got to the part where the money just dried up and blew away. The place where it's burning summer all year round. McMillan Street. Peebles Corner. Looted during the '68 riots and never rebuilt. A little burnt-out spot about two miles square. One of several dozen in this city that no one will ever touch again. Not even with a stick on a crisp fall day. And from there, it was just a long roller-coaster ride down Gilbert Avenue to the city and to the fresh, highly visible cash that made the trip seem like coasting into a bank.

  What they're doing to this city is a crime. The downtown money-men, I mean. With those magic wands that marbelize everything, turning good red brick into skyscrapers of polished stone and plate glass. Or maybe it isn't a crime. Maybe you're just getting old, I thought, and need something to feel bittersweet about on this fine fall day. Feeling nostalgic for demi-Gothic buildings and WPA frescoes didn't quite fit the bill. But, just the same, I was glad I was headed for the old Court House on the north side of town well away from the part of the inner city that's been torn down and rebuilt.

  Once I hit the east side, it only took me five minutes to work my way up Court Street to the square. I parked the Pinto on one of the visitor's stalls and walked up the steps to the Court House—a huge Greek-revival temple, decked with stirring mottoes and Corinthian pilasters. Inside the lobby it was as cool and dark as a sick room. Well-fed lawyers passed mildly away, across Twelfth Street to the Traffic Court in the Alms & Doepke Building. I didn't see a familiar face until I got up to the fourth floor, and then it was all smiles and good cheer. I'd worked for the District Attorney's office for two years, right after I'd gotten out of the Army; and there were still enough old-timers around to make me feel at home. I slapped a few backs and pressed a few hands and kissed a secretary or two on the cheek and made a sweet, triumphant progress down the hallway to George DeVries's office.

  You wouldn't have been able to tell it from his face—he looks like a carrot-topped Carl Sandburg—but George DeVries was and is a very brutal man. When he first came over to the D.A.'s office from Station X, it was rumored that he'd been shuffled backstairs to avoid a shooting board. At the time I didn't believe it. But that was more than a decade ago, and I was young and fresh out of the service and just not very smart about civilian police. It didn't seem possible to me, then, that a taciturn Southerner like George DeVries, with his weathered face and antebellum good manners, could have killed two black teenagers in an Avondale apartment house simply because one of the boys had refused to kick back some narcotics money. Twelve years have gone by and I've learned to suspend my disbelief about what other human beings are capable of doing in anger or in despair, although a part of me—the Cincinnati moralist side of Harry Stoner—can still get mightily outraged when appearances and realities drift too far apart. When they loose their moorings entirely, I become just as devoted to the cosmetics of the established order as the most pious burgher. Sometimes it's useful to pretend that the world ought to be a better place than it is, even if it is an imperative founded exclusively on schoolboy good wishes and the quirks of the subjunctive mood. Deep down, I didn't approve of George DeVries's brand of toughness. On the other hand, I knew that he was a smart, well-connected cop and that he still had friends on the vice squad. And you don't have to love a Chevrolet to catch a ride in one.

  George was gazing out the window at the sunlit street when I came through the door.

  “Beautiful day, huh?” I said to him.

  He swiveled in his chair and looked up at me with surprise.

  “Well, I'll be damned.” He broke into a wrinkled grin. “Harry! How you been, boy? How's the world treating you?”

  “Good, George. Real good.”

  “Take a seat,” he said, sweeping his hand across the desk. “And tell me what's new.”

  I sat down and told him the news—about Ringold, the Hyde Park library, and the mutilated books. When I got to the books, he perked up.

  “You know something I ought to hear, George?” I said to him.

  He rubbed his chin savagely and said, “I'm not sure. Goddamn it, I must be getting old.” He tapped his forehead as if he were trying to knock something inside back in place. “I may be wrong, but I think there's an open case of homicide from a couple of years back that could tie in with this business.”

  “A murder?”

  “A real nasty murder, Harry. In Eden Park, I think.”

  Swell, I said to myself. “I guess you better find out for sure, George. I didn't tell you this, but there's a crack girl detective on the case who thinks she can handle it all by herself.”

  “And just how the hell does she plan to do that?”

  “With her hands, George,” I said wearily. “With karate.”

  “Karate!” DeVries burst into laughter. “The guy we're talking about used a forty-ounce baseball bat and a barber's razor.”

  I reached into my sports coat and pulled out Rin
gold's list. “You'd better run makes on this crew, as well.”

  DeVries took the slip of paper and looked it over. “Nobody familiar here,” he said.

  “I didn't think there would be. But run them anyway. They're people who've taken out art books over the last couple of years. Maybe you'll get lucky and come up with a ringer.”

  “All right, Harry,” he said. “I'll give you a call tonight or tomorrow about this. If you want the details of that homicide, you might go down to Central Station and talk with Al Foster.”

  “Thanks, George.”

  “Don't mention it,” he said. “Things have been too damn slow around here to suit me.”

  I didn't share his enthusiasm.

  3

  THE CINCINNATI Police Building is located rather picturesquely on Ezzard Charles Drive, where it intersects Central Parkway on the northwest side of the city. Music Hall, red as a brick kiln and domed and gabled like a mosque, sits across the Parkway from it; and on its right, going south into town, is the sleek new building which houses the local public T.V. station. There is nothing sleek about the Police Building itself, which has the grim, foreshortened look of a fifties high school. But then the men who work there don't pay a hell of a lot of attention to the color of the walls. Which are yellow, by the way, the dull, penal yellow of glazed brick.

  It took me about twenty minutes to drive over there, park, get cleared and tagged by one of the desk sergeants, and locate Lieutenant Alvin Foster, who was manning a desk in a spare dry-walled office on the second floor and not looking terribly happy about it. Al Foster seldom looks happy about anything. He is one of the least congenial men I've ever known. Between the cigarettes that dangle from his lips like a second tongue, his long dour Buster Keaton-like face, and the thatch of greasy black hair on the top of his head, he does not make a good first impression. But he's not interested in good; he's interested in lasting. And in that respect he always succeeds. I'd known him for better than a year, ever since the Hugo Cratz case. And while we were hardly close friends, we did do some friendly drinking together.

  He had a cigarette in his mouth, as usual. When he spotted me coming through the door, he made a stab at a smile, landing somewhere on my side of bare tolerance.

  “Harry,” he said in his high-pitched, achy voice.

  And I said, “Al. How you been?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  And that was it.

  I sat down on a padded metal chair across from his desk, and for a minute or two we didn't say anything. He just sat there with blue smoke crawling up his face, brooding over his desk as if he'd lost the key to the top drawer. And I examined a discolored spot on my thumbnail and stared out the window at the autumn sky.

  “You need some help, Harry?” he said after a time.

  I gave it a beat or two and said, “Yeah, Al. I could use some help.”

  He snapped the cigarette he'd been smoking into a tin ashtray, where it continued to burn, dug into his rumpled black coat, and pulled another Tareyton from his pocket like a magician plucking a dove from his sleeve.

  “Got a light?”

  I gave him a light.

  “Yeah,” he said and picked at a loose strand of tobacco on his lip. “You were saying?”

  “You know, Al,” I said to him. “You're a fun guy.”

  “Thanks, Harry. That means a lot to me, your saying that.”

  I laughed. “I need some information. George DeVries over at the D.A.'s office seems to remember an open case of homicide from about two years ago. Up in Eden Park. A real messy killing with a razor.”

  “Belton,” he said and looked at the cigarette. “Twyla Belton.”

  We sat in silence for another minute and I finally said, “All right, Al. I'll bite. Twyla Belton who?”

  “Why do you ask, Harry?”

  I told him. Why not? There was nothing confidential about what I'd been hired to do. And even if there had been, I would have spilled most of it eagerly.

  Foster listened to me without looking up, stubbed out his cigarette, pulled out another and said, “So what? So somebody's tearing up a few books.”

  “The Belton thing wasn't my idea, Al. It was DeVries who saw a connection. I told you my story, now you tell me about Twyla.”

  “Not much to tell,” he said. “Female, Cauc. About twenty-three. Was a student at Lon Aamons' commercial art school in Walnut Hills. No known enemies. You know—just your standard single girl. We found her body on the Overlook about two years ago.” He flicked the ash off his cigarette. “She'd been worked over bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “Let me put it this way, Harry. Don't ask where we found the bat.”

  “Good Lord,” I said softly and shuddered up and down my spine. “Did you have any leads?”

  “Not a one. She just wasn't a real likely target for that kind of thing. No boyfriends. Shy. Just a girl who went up to the park on the wrong day. The guy she ran into...” Foster shifted in his chair and looked up at me for the first time since I'd sat down. “I'd like to meet him sometime.”

  And I'd bet he would, too. “I don't remember anything about this in the papers. Why'd you put a lid on it?”

  “Figure it out for yourself,” he said daintily. “Dead girl. Sexually molested and then cut to ribbons. No motive. No suspects.”

  I saw what he meant. “So you thought you were up against a real psycho.”

  He nodded. “Those guys love publicity. And you know the kind of panic a newspaper story can start. What we did was dress up some of our policewomen as marks and quadruple the patrols at municipal parks. But the son-of-a-bitch never showed up again. He just vanished.”

  “That's strange,” I said. “You'd have thought he'd keep at it until he got caught.”

  Foster grunted.

  “Where'd the girl live?” I asked him.

  “On Paxton.”

  “That's in Hyde Park.”

  “So?”

  He was right. It wasn't very much.

  “She have a family?”

  “Father and mother.”

  We sat for a few moments more in silence. “You might let me know if you find anything interesting,” he said laconically.

  “You figure I'm going to follow up on this, huh?”

  “You're the type,” Al said.

  ******

  An awful lot of people know your type, Harry, I said to myself, as I walked back to the car. Which is what? Out of touch? Hopelessly old-fashioned? Naively sentimental? All of the above?

  Chances were that there was nothing to the Belton connection. Crazies generally don't turn to books after they've torn up real people. But there was a correlation—a similarity. And the girl had lived in Hyde Park. And, anyway, I'm the suspicious type. On the way down to the Riorley Building I decided to check with Ringold to find out whether Twyla Belton had belonged to the Hyde Park Library. And if so, just what kind of books she'd liked to read.

  There weren't any messages for me on the answerphone in my office. So I went down to the lobby coffee shop and had a sandwich with Jim Dugan, a lawyer with offices on the sixth floor of the Riorley. He was still upset about Pete Rose and Dick Wagner. Before he signed with the Phillies, two years ago, a motion was made in city council to have Pete named a municipal monument. That way, it was argued, the Reds would have had to sign him, since the citizens of Cincinnati would have been picking up the tab for maintenance of city property. I suppose you've got to like Cincinnatians just for that. They're small-minded and drab and about as hopelessly parochial as any large group of people can be, but they elected Carl Klinger mayor after he was caught in a Newport brothel and they tried to make Pete Rose into a city park. You explain it.

  About five o'clock I left Jim to his dark mood and took mine home with me to Clifton and the Delores—the four-story, U-shaped brownstone apartment house I've lived in for the past ten years. I drove out Reading Road because I didn't want to see what was left of that Monday afternoon through the smog that hang
s over the expressway. But smog or no smog, the day had lost some of its luster—its freshness all mixed up with torn pages and a murdered girl and a smart-ass lady detective who'd gotten my dander up. And all of a sudden I realized that I'd found that something to mourn over I'd been looking for since the start of the day. It wasn't anything new. Just one almost-middle-aged and generally-well-meaning man, who'd discovered for the umpteenth time that he couldn't even make it through a beautiful fall afternoon without stepping in it. It. The stuff that most people's bad dreams are made of, which he tracked around like fresh mud on his shoes. It's enough to drive that man to drink, I thought. So I turned west on Taft and drove myself to the Busy Bee and drank.

  ******

  The Scotch which I'd drunk neat at the dark, horseshoe-shaped bar left me feeling warm and lucid and just a bit out of kilter, as if my joints weren't quite tight enough or my skin too loose. Anyway, I was feeling fine and silly when I stepped into my two-and-a-half room apartment at about nine-thirty that night. I kicked at a Gold Toe sock that had found its way into the living room, switched the Zenith Globemaster to WGN in Chicago, made myself comfortable on my green plaid couch, and thought about Pete Rose and Dick Wagner and Three Mile Island and the Arab sheikdoms and the cost of gas and a very nice-looking blonde girl I'd seen at the Bee.

  I was just drifting off into a fat, alcoholic sleep when the phone rang. It got me up too quickly, and I sat back down hard. All that sweet, musical liquor was starting to boil, and suddenly I didn't feel so dreamy and good-tempered. I worked my way like a blind man to the roll-top desk beneath the front window and picked up the receiver.

  “Mr. Stoner?” a husky, familiar voice said.

  “A piece of him.”

  “Kate Davis, here. I hope I didn't wake you up.”

  I glanced at my watch, which was showing a little past ten, and did a slow burn. “You figure a man of my years needs his sleep, is that right, Ms. Davis?”

  She laughed prettily. “Not exactly. I just thought you might turn in early like I usually do. After a day's work, I'm bushed. And I owe it to myself and the job to be as fresh as possible in the morning.”