“You lookin’ for me?”
The voice startled him. He looked toward the doorway of the house and saw a character from the comic books of childhood, a Yokum or a Snuffy Smith, a sawed-off creature in old clothes, with eyes as blue as any Polack’s, bluer than his own. “Ralph Rayball?”
“Ain’t nobody called me Ralph in years. People call me Papa.” Bakinowski approached him, identified himself, and showed his shield. Papa, stepping aside, did not bat an eye. “Come in.” Bakinowski maneuvered over a dilapidated step and entered a kitchen, where coats and jackets hung from pegs, a greasy stove stood on legs, and a younger version of the cartoon man peered up from his eating. “This is my boy Junior.”
Bakinowski, whose mother had been reared in West Virginia coal country and had passed on stories, wondered whether any Scotch-Irish blood flowed through the veins of these two. His mother’s younger brother, he had been told, had not gotten enough air at birth, and he wondered whether the same had been so with Junior. “Hello, Junior.”
“Hello, sir.” Junior ate with his face in the plate. Beans mixed in ketchup. He raised a glass, and his nose touched what he tasted, which looked like apple juice.
Papa said, “My firstborn, Clement, he’s come up from Florida. He ain’t here right now.”
“Do you know why I’m here, Mr. Rayball?”
“Sure I know. Chief Morgan thinks my boy here did somethin’.”
Junior spoke with his mouth full. “What’d I do, Papa?”
“Nothin’. You almost done eatin’?”
“Don’t rush,” Bakinowski said. His mother’s brother had operated on a short fuse but never harmed anyone, died young, and had been buried in the coal country. He watched Junior wipe his mouth and carry his plate to the sink. The refrigerator made sounds like a human.
Papa said, “You go on outside so the man and I can talk — ’less you want him to stay.”
“No, that’s all right. You go on out, Junior.” He watched him leave, pint-size like the father, in need of a haircut, his neck nappy.
“He’s a good boy,” Papa said. “Never finished school because kids picked on him.”
Papa drew up chairs, and they sat opposite each other at the table. Bakinowski said, “I’ve heard it mentioned he’s not a whole dollar.”
“That’s right. He’s maybe seventy-five cents, but that don’t give people the right, Chief included, to take advantage of him.”
“Why would the chief do that?”
“He thinks we’re trash, never liked any of us, but there’s more to it than that. Maybe you’ve heard.”
“Suppose you tell me.”
“He thinks I killed my wife. That happened a long time ago. I’ve had to live with it.”
“Did you kill her?”
“I ain’t answerin’ that anymore, I’m sick of answerin’ it. Sick of bein’ looked at for somethin’ I never did.” Papa pulled himself up in the chair. “But I’ll tell you this. My wife used to meet somebody out on the road. I always had the suspicion it was him, but I never had no proof. He’s a woman-chaser, you know.”
“I read the former chief’s report. Nothing in there about Morgan having known your wife.”
“Ain’t likely there would be. He used to kiss the old chief’s ass — that’s how he got Carr’s job, plus suckin’ up to the selectmen. He could say any thin’ he wanted for that report. Carr would’ve wrote it that way.”
Bakinowski looked toward the window. For a second he thought he saw Junior’s shadow, but then he looked beyond the window and glimpsed him near a woodpile.
“But it don’t matter no more,” Papa said. “My wife’s gone, I ain’t never pretended I was sorry. Maybe that’s why he never let up on me, on Clement neither. Tried to put words in Clement’s mouth to use against me. Now he’s trying to get at me through my youngest.”
“Could he be right about him, Mr. Rayball?”
“You saw my boy. You tell me he shot somebody.” Papa flumped a hand on the table. “You want some of that juice he was drinkin’?”
“No thanks, Mr. Rayball.”
“You know, people don’t call me Mister Rayball much. It don’t sound bad.”
Bakinowski rose, stiff in one knee. For the first time he felt the heat of the house. He loosened his necktie and opened his collar.
“You leavin’?”
“I thought I might talk to Junior first, alone. Do you mind?”
“Don’t mind a bit. Just let me say somethin’ ‘fore you go. Morgan, he’s thrown a lot of dirt at me, but I got an answer to that. You wanna hear it?”
Bakinowski nodded. He was tired. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“You ever go fishin’? You ever dig for bait? The darker the dirt, the whiter the worm.”
“I don’t get the meaning.”
“The meanin’ is I ain’t guilty of nothin’ and neither is my boy.”
Bakinowski opened the door, which had squeaky hinges. The screen was patched here and there, in some places left torn. Papa was at his elbow.
“Clement, he won’t be here all that long. He’s not permanent. Junior’s all I got.”
“I heard you didn’t think he was yours.”
“I reckon he is.”
Bakinowski’s arm brushed a torn part of the screen. He conjured up images of coal country girls precociously developed, the sort his mother had said got themselves in trouble. “Was your wife pretty, Mr. Rayball?”
“She was a slut. You asked, that’s what she was.”
Bakinowski stepped out into the sunshine, tramped over bright ground, and approached Junior, who was sitting on a stump with his arms wrapped around his knees. He was wearing a cap now. The name of a heavy-equipment company graced the front. Bakinowski pointed at the ground. “Isn’t that poison ivy?”
“I never catch it. I can touch it, it don’t do nothin’.”
“Where’d you get the cap?”
“Place I used to work.”
“Do you work now?”
“Not much.”
Bakinowski crouched down for a better look into Junior’s eyes. “I’m going to ask you something, and you just answer yes or no, OK? Did you shoot anybody?”
“No, sir.”
He returned to his car while removing his suit jacket, which he tossed into the back. He gave a thoughtful look at the house and then a swift one as he drove away. It reminded him of a dented tin can with the label peeled off, which was how his mother with a bitter laugh had described the houses in the coal country.
• • •
Papa Rayball watched the car leave in a cloud of gravel, took a swig of apple juice from the jug, and with a liberated swing of his arms went outside to Junior, who was still sitting on the stump, the visor of his cap pulled lower over his eyes. “You did good,” Papa said, standing over him. “You did real good.”
Junior did not look up. His shoulders were slumped. He nibbled a nail.
“Did you hear me?”
Birds chanted. Junior said, “I heard what you said about Mama.”
“You got big ears, always said that.”
“Did you kill her, Papa?”
Papa slapped him in the face, savagely. The cap flew off. Junior rolled into the poison ivy. Papa shook a fist. “Don’t ever ask me that again!”
Lying flat, Junior looked up with blotted eyes. “I betcha did.”
• • •
In his room at the motor inn Clement Rayball phoned Florida, the hotel where he had a semipermanent residence, and got hold of the desk clerk whom he knew well. “I need a favor,” he said. “Do you remember the woman I was sitting with in the patio bar the day I left. She still there?”
“Christ, Chico, you sit with a lot of’em. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know her last name. Her first name might be Esther. Big, attractive woman, frosty hair, curly. She was there with her grandson and I guess her daughter.”
“You’re talking about Dr. Rosen. I forget her first name, but
it’s not Esther. She’s a shrink, did you know that?”
“She still there or not?”
“They checked out this morning.”
“Look in the phone book, see if she’s listed. No, never mind. It’s not important.”
“Chico, when you coming back?”
“Soon, I hope,” he said and rang off.
He went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, washed his face, and slicked his hair back; then he looked at his watch. It was too early for what he had to do. He left his room and went to the bar, peering in before he entered. He did not want to run into the same woman. In his room it had taken him a half hour to calm her down, and the last look he had of her was haunting.
The bartender remembered him. “Miller, isn’t it?”
“Usually,” he said. “This time make it bourbon on the rocks.”
• • •
Lieutenant Bakinowski phoned Chief Morgan from his office in the Andover barracks. “You got your story, Ray ball’s got his,” he said. “Which am I to believe?”
“Believe what you want,” Morgan said, “I don’t give a damn.”
“I thought that might be your attitude. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You got anything more to tell me?”
“I do, but I don’t think you’d hear. You got a voice in your head twenty years old that drowns out everything else. I’m sorry for you, Chief.”
The line went dead in Bakinowski’s ear. He replaced the receiver and looked at the young detective who had come into his office to scan the Lawrence paper. “I’ll give you some advice,” he said to him. “Never trust a local cop. Every one of them carries baggage.”
“That’s what I was told at the academy.”
“Then they taught you right,” Bakinowski said and locked up his desk. On his way out of the office he snatched the newspaper from the young detective’s hands and took it with him. Outside in the fenced-in parking lot he saw a Bensington cruiser parked near his car. Walking toward it, he said, “Something you want, MacGregor?”
MacGregor stepped out of the cruiser in full uniform but with nothing aggressive about him. His face was pale. “I took the polygraph, I want to know what more you want.”
Bakinowski had rolled up the newspaper and was slapping it against his leg. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”
MacGregor spoke calmly. “I wish we could change shoes, then you’d know.”
“I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a million dollars. I’d cut my feet off first.”
MacGregor did not respond. He climbed back into the cruiser and shut the door. He put his sunglasses on slowly, hanging his head one way and then the other in fixing the wire wings to his ears. His demeanor was quiet and controlled. Bakinowski stepped close to the open window.
“I knew you did it from the start. I smelled it all over you.”
“You’re wrong.”
“That’s right, I’m wrong. Florence Lapham fell dead of a mosquito bite, and her husband only fainted. Pretty soon he’s going to dig himself out of the ground. Tell that to the daughter.”
“She doesn’t need me to tell her anything anymore.”
Bakinowski pointed the newspaper at him. “I just want you to think about something. A yokel cop doing hard time. They’ll tear you apart.”
MacGregor drove away, and Bakinowski took a deep breath and felt better than he had all day.
• • •
As Reverend Stottle motored out of Bensington, the sinking sun shot red through the trees and lit every leaf as if burning heretics. He was on a mission of mercy. Mrs. Dugdale, the oldest member of his church, childless, widowed in her prime, lay dying in Lawrence General Hospital. He entered the unkempt little city with foreboding, for he knew failure. Never had he penetrated the inconsolableness of someone who had lost a mate, a child, or a parent. Untrained in marital counseling, he had made messes of several young couples’ lives. But all these years he had tried to do his duty and had never shirked a responsibility. That surely was in his favor but did not prevent a shiver as he parked in the visitors’ lot. Whose cold hand was that around his heart? The Devil’s was hot, he had been taught. These fingers must be God’s.
He did not need to ask directions to the room, though he paused near a nurses’ station to get his bearings. An older nurse was mapping out patients to an aide. Anorexic was gone. Hemorrhoids was in 202 now, and Impaired Kidney was next door. Emphysema was sharing 213 with Diabetes. The nurse looked at him. “Can I help you, sir?”
No help needed, and he strode on, time was precious. The last time he had seen Mrs. Dugdale she had been propped in a wheelchair like a rag doll, and he had had to look twice to assure himself she was breathing. Entering her room, he saw that now she was buried in bed and wired to a glinting monitor whose jagged stream of hieroglyphics looked evil. No hope, he could see that.
“It’s Reverend Stottle,” he said, leaning over her, and she seemed to hear him. “Fear nothing,” he said, aware that lately he feared everything. “You’ve had ninety-three long years, more than most people.”
Her eyelids flickered but did not open. Her voice was feeble. She asked for the time.
“God is the dispenser of time, Mrs. Dugdale. If God ceases believing in Himself, all clocks stop. The whole universe ticks down.”
Toothless, Mrs. Dugdale’s face gathered around her mouth, where the pleats ran deep. Reverend Stottle stared at the intricate network of lines girding her throat. Emotion pressed him forward, putting words into his mouth.
“Nothing is deeper and darker than aloneness,” he said, with thoughts of episodes in his own life. Mrs. Dugdale’s lids shuddered, and he gathered up one of her tiny hands, a mess of bones gloved in loose skin speckled like a tiger lily. Touch was important. Sometimes it was the only way two human beings could connect. “Life, Mrs. Dugdale, is the light leading to the final darkness, where we shall each lie alone.”
Her lids went still. He released her hand and stepped back. In the subdued light her face shone luridly. With another rush of emotion prickling his skin, he pressed a button on a cord and waited. Two minutes that seemed like twenty passed before the nurse who had spoken to him appeared.
“I think she’s gone,” he said.
The nurse pushed past him and bent over the bed. Her bottom was substantial, and the pink of her underwear blossomed through the white nylon of her trousers. He started to look away and then did not.
“No, Reverend, she’s just asleep.”
“Are you certain?”
“Quite.”
He rode the elevator to the ground level and, around the corner in the lobby, went into the public lavatory. At the urinals he stood wedged between a burly security guard and a slender Hispanic and relieved himself with a dash of dignity he found lacking in them. Afterward at the double sink he splashed his hands with much ado when he saw that they were not going to wash theirs. Then, watching them leave, he wondered whether Jesus had always washed his. In those days feet got the greater attention.
He was on his way into the cafeteria when he saw a familiar figure on its way out. It was Lydia Lapham, stark and lovely in her whitest of whites. His eyes played tricks on him because she seemed no more substantial than mist over water. He stepped in her path, startling her.
“Lydia. We must talk. Soon.” He felt in his own head what must be going on in hers, a terrible effort not to succumb to despair. With a moist grip on her slim wrist, he said, “Some things cannot be faced alone.”
“Yes, soon,” she said sharply and pulled away. “Not now.”
• • •
Clement Rayball drove to the residence of Gerald Bowman, a great, fancy house but no grander than others in Oakcrest Heights, which surprised him until he remembered his reading of the man: self-righteous and self-denying, stiff in his thinking and dedicated to his causes. A tight ass. He rang the bell.
The housekeeper, who was on her way out, a pocketbook hanging from the crook of her arm, answered the door, and he smil
ed at her in a way that might have charmed a less haggard woman who had not been on her feet all day. He asked for Bowman, admitted he was not expected, gave no name, and argued, “I’m sure he’ll see me.”
“You’ll have to wait here,” the woman said and closed the door in his face. He waited, it didn’t matter, he wasn’t insulted. He turned around in the dying sunlight and breathed in the spiced air, which raised a memory of a squad tent with wooden sides and a concrete floor. His long-ago military training had been in Georgia.
Finally the door reopened, and the woman brushed past him, her pocketbook bumping him. In the doorway was Gerald Bowman, whose stare had the effect of an ice pick.
“What is it?”
“You don’t know me, Mr. Bowman, but your name rings a bell with me. I used to do work for the government.”
“So?”
“We had patrons. I thought you might’ve been one.”
“I doubt it.”
“I could be wrong.”
“I guarantee it. What’s your name?”
“Chico.”
“You’re right, I never heard of you.”
Bowman started to close the door, and Clement spoke fast. “I’ve got something to tell you, confidential. You don’t want to hear it, it’s no skin off my ass.”
Bowman’s ice-pick stare went deeper. Then he let the door hang loose and stepped back. “You’ve got five minutes. Come in.”
Clement was directed into a large room and told to sit. Bowman sat well away from him in a more comfortable chair. Drapes of heavy brocade both dimmed and cooled the room. Clement stared at a table whose cabriole legs tapered to elegant hooves.
Bowman said, “What are you doing in this town?”
“I have family here.”
“I always figured guys like you didn’t have any. All right, what do you want to tell me?”
“It’s tender,” Clement said. “It could be something you don’t want to hear.”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“It concerns the police chief in town, name of Morgan, maybe you know him.”
“I know we have one. Go on.”
Clement’s eyes shifted to the doorway and his head nodded as a woman stepped into the room. So this was the wife. Striking. Skin color was bone china, hair glossy black. He had expected nothing less. Her voice, wonderfully low, had body, strength, and insinuation.
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