Silent Witness

by Richard North Patterson

  “True, he has been a star in three sports—football, basketball, and baseball. But much more than that, he has shown those traits that we all need in life: character, leadership, grace under pressure, strength in adversity, and, no matter what, the refusal to be distracted by anything but the task at hand.…”

  For the first time, despite everything, Tony felt a sudden stirring hope. “And yet there is more,” George Marks said solemnly. “For this young man has also endured a tragic loss. Something which, in a lesser person, might have distracted and even damaged him.…”

  Tony froze; people were turning to stare. Across from him, Sam looked stricken.

  “And so,” George Marks concluded, “the winner of the coveted Athlete of the Year award, like his late brother Joe before him, is Sam Robb.”

  Tony shut his eyes.

  When he opened them, Sam sat motionless. Then Sam stood abruptly, as if pulled from his seat, face filling with amazement and, then, something close to rapture. Sue turned from him, to Tony. And then Sam was hugging her; for an instant, she looked startled, then she hugged him back.

  Breaking away, Sam headed for the floor, two stands at a time. The cheers rose; as he walked toward George Marks, Sam’s face shone with an astonished, innocent joy. He looked, Tony thought, like a man delivered to himself.

  On another day, Tony might have been happy for him: the way Sam cried out for generosity. Even as, on some other day, this might have moved Tony to wonder about the transcendence of a single moment, the illusion—which the years would surely betray—that such a moment can change a lifetime. But what Tony felt, to his surprise and even shame, was jealousy. He could only hope that Sam Robb’s feelings lasted longer than his own.

  “Sorry,” Ernie Nixon murmured.

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  Sue, he thought, would understand. But she was smiling at Sam now, knowing what this meant to him.

  For once, there was no exultation in Sam’s posture, no showiness. He took the trophy from George Marks and gazed at it, shaking his head in wonder. Perhaps, Tony thought, this trophy had brought Sam closer to the best in him—there was something attractive, even humbled, about Sam in his moment.

  Sam turned to the stands. For a moment, Tony did not realize that Sam was coming to him, trophy in hand.

  Tony sat there, watching with a kind of fascination as Sam stopped two steps below him. As the others moved aside, Sam took the trophy and tossed it underhand, to Tony.

  “Nice catch,” Sam said.

  Tony looked up from the trophy. Taking the last two steps, Sam pulled Tony to his feet and hugged him.

  The first applause was scattered. Then the gym filled with it, as though Sam had bestowed forgiveness on Tony Lord. Tony could feel Sam’s emotions in the tightness of his embrace.

  As he leaned back to see Tony’s face, Sam’s eyes shone with tears. In a husky voice, he said beneath the white noise of the gym, “You’d have won…”

  “No. You were always going to win.”

  Sam slowly shook his head. “If we’re not friends,” he said softly, “I’d sooner have lost it.”

  Tony tried to smile. “Then we’re friends,” he said, and handed Sam the trophy. “Congratulations.”

  Their moment was over.

  Gratefully, Sam gripped Tony’s shoulder. Then he turned and walked across the gym, to Sue. Amidst the cheers, Tony was left with the sudden reversal of their roles, the sour aftertaste of Sam’s blessing, the sudden bitter knowledge that, in his pride, Tony had taken as his right that he would always be the leader and that Sam, the led, would envy him.

  When Tony looked up again, Sam was holding Sue.

  * * *

  Waiting where they had made love, Tony saw Sue appear in the grove of maples. A few feet from him, Sue stopped, and then she ran forward to kiss him.

  “I’ve missed you,” Tony said.

  “I’ve missed you too.” She took both of his hands in hers. “I’m sorry, Tony.”

  He looked at her, trying to see what she meant. Softly, he answered, “It mattered to me, after all. But maybe Sam needed something to win.”

  She tilted her head, brown eyes probing. “Am I something to win?”

  “Is that what you think?” Tony’s voice filled with feeling. “Two nights ago, we were right here. If I can’t think of you with him, it’s because of that.”

  Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “Tony, this is about a lot more than who I sleep with. It’s more about if I can sleep at all.…”

  Tony pulled her close. Resting against his shoulder, Sue murmured, “Try to understand what’s happening to me.”

  “Tell me, all right?”

  “I think I’m falling in love with you.” She leaned back, touching his face. “We’ve always been friends, Tony. Talk to me like your friend Sue, who’s in love with a boy she isn’t sure she should love, and doesn’t know what to do.”

  Tony knelt to the grass, taking her with him. “Today, in the gym, I wanted you with me.”

  Sue closed her eyes. “I know.… I could tell. But that’s not an answer.” She looked at him again, hands resting on his shoulders. “Sam needs me too, more than you ever will. Can you understand that part?”

  Tony’s throat constricted. “I think so. But that’s not all there is.”

  Sue looked down. “You say that so easily. You must know what this would do to him, how bad it would be that it’s you.…”

  The truth of this made Tony quiet for a moment. “But what about you?”

  “Me?” Sue slowly shook her head. “I feel like I’m falling, in a dream.… I don’t know where I am, or how the dream will end.”

  “I’m not a dream, Sue.”

  “I know.” Once more, she leaned against him. “But maybe we’re one.”

  Tony held her, kissing the top of her head. Sue’s voice was a murmur. “When did I start loving you? I keep asking myself. How could I want you like that, when there’s Sam, and we’d always just been friends? What does it say about me?”

  “That you’re not in love with him.”

  Sue turned her face to his. “I can’t say that, Tony. I wish I could.” She paused again, as though struggling to find words. “All I know is that what I feel for you is so different, it could turn my life upside down.…”

  “God, Sue, I could never hurt you.…”

  “You’d never mean to, Tony.” She leaned away from him, as if to see him better. Softly, she asked, “If Alison were still here, would you have made love to me? Could you have done to her what I’ve done to Sam?”

  Tony found that he could not answer this. “Does it matter that much?”

  Tears glistened in her eyes. “That wasn’t fair, Tony. I already knew you couldn’t answer.”

  The way she said this pierced Tony’s heart. “Sue, what matters is how we feel now.…”

  “No.” The quiet firmness in her voice seemed directed at Sue herself. “How we feel isn’t the same. We’re not the same.”

  He spread his palms in entreaty. “Why not? Just tell me why.”

  “Oh, Tony…” Briefly, Sue could not speak, and then she shook her head. “Don’t you see it at all?”

  He reached out to her again, hands beneath her wrists. She looked at him with a new resolve, as though to say what must be said. “If you asked me to, I think the deepest part of me would follow you … throw away anything I’ve ever known, all the security. No matter how I felt about Sam, or felt about myself for hurting him, I’d give myself to you in a way that I never imagined giving myself to anyone. Just so I could feel the way I did two nights ago.” She paused, unable to finish, and then her voice was quiet again. “That’s why I need you to be my friend. Because I know it’s not like that for you.”

  Tony exhaled. “How can you know that?”

  “Because we are friends,” she answered softly. “And I know that my friend Tony, who I care for so much, is still in love with Alison Taylor. Because she was right for
him.”

  Tony looked at her steadily. “Part of you is still in love with Sam. It doesn’t keep me from wanting you.”

  Sue’s faint smile did not change her eyes. “If it were just Sam and Alison…” She shrugged, helpless. “But it’s not.”

  “What else is there?”

  “You. And me.” Her voice was sad and very clear. “Alison was poised and sophisticated and very smart. I’m just me.…”

  “Just you? Don’t you know what that is to me?”

  Sue shook her head. “I know what I am to you now, when you’ve lost a girl you loved, when half the town has turned against you, and when all your energy has gone into just getting through the year. And now you almost have.” As she paused, looking at Tony again, her eyes held affection and candor. “You’re not like me.… You always needed to leave here, and now you need it more. Next fall you’ll be at Harvard, meeting more girls like Alison. How can I ask you not to love one? Can you ask me to believe that you won’t?”

  Tony felt his stomach knot, and pulled Sue close to him. Silent, he stroked her hair, kissed her face. She did not resist or respond. “Please, Tony,” she murmured, “be my friend.”

  As he held her, Sue’s body shivered with silent tears. “Sue, I just can’t lose you.…”

  She hugged him fiercely. “And I don’t want to lose you, Tony. It would tear me up inside.”

  Tony’s eyes were damp. Miserably, he told her, “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  She burrowed closer to him. “Then you’ve said it, Tony. You’ve already said it. Just hold me for a while.”

  He did that. Silent, they wept for each other.

  When she was done, Sue took his face in her hands. “We’ll write, okay? I want to know all about Harvard, once you get there.”

  Tony fought back disbelief. “Of course I’ll write.…”

  “After a while, you can even tell me about the girls you meet.” She smiled a little. “Last night, I made a bet with myself. That after you graduate from Harvard, you’ll marry an heiress or a movie star.”

  He could not smile. “After you,” he said softly, “how could I marry anyone?”

  A shadow crossed her face. “That’s the question I’ve been asking—about me. But I think you will. Once you put Lake City behind you, you’ve got so many good things to do. Things you don’t even know you want yet.”

  Looking into Sue’s face, Tony could not imagine his life without her. It took all his willpower to ask, “Then what will you do?”

  The smile she gave him, pensive and sad, was one he had not seen before they had made love. “I thought I knew. Now I really don’t. I guess I’m more like you than I thought.”

  All at once, Tony felt his throat constrict. “I don’t want this, Sue. I didn’t come here to do this.…”

  There were fresh tears in her eyes. “But I knew you would. Because you’re my friend.”

  Gently, she placed her mouth to his. Her kiss was long and slow and passionate. “I love you,” she said. And then she stood, turning suddenly, and ran across the field.

  * * *

  Tony did not go to his graduation or to the party afterward. It was nothing he owed himself, and seeing Sue with Sam would have been too hard on both of them. Tomorrow he was leaving for the summer.

  In three months on an ore boat, hauling iron ore to Steelton from the Mesabi Range on Lake Superior, Tony would make enough to replace what his father had spent in legal fees. He was lucky to have the job; his uncle Joe had gotten it through the steelworkers union, and when Joe had suggested this weeks before, all that Tony could think of, besides the money, was getting out of Lake City. Now what he felt for Sue made this both a torment and a mercy.

  Tony could not sleep. The California presidential primary election was today, he remembered—Kennedy and McCarthy, with the survivor facing Humphrey for the Democratic nomination and the chance to run against Richard Nixon in the fall. At one in the morning, restless, Tony went to the basement and switched on the television.

  When Robert Kennedy came on, grinning at a crowd of well-wishers, Tony knew that Kennedy had won.

  Tony listened for a while. He did not follow politics that much, and so was not sure why he liked Bobby Kennedy—except that he was Catholic and, unlike his older brother, gave Tony the sense of being a plugger, for whom public speaking did not come easily. But now Kennedy bantered with the crowd.

  “I want to thank my brother-in-law, Steve Smith, who’s been ruthless but effective.…”

  Laughter.

  “I want to express my gratitude to my dog, Freckles.…” There were a few more thank-yous, and then Kennedy became serious:

  “I also want to thank my friends in the black community, who made such an effort in this campaign.…”

  Once more, Tony thought of Ernie Nixon. Perhaps the reason he liked Robert Kennedy lay somewhere in the last seven months—his own struggle and, through that, the things he had seen in others. On the ore boat, he would have plenty of time to think about this, and who Tony Lord might become.

  “So my thanks to all of you,” Robert Kennedy finished, “and now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”

  Blankly, Tony watched the picture become a test pattern. Before he fell asleep, still lying on the basement couch, his last thoughts were of Alison, and of Sue.

  He awoke to the sound of a newsman’s voice.

  “Senator Robert Kennedy is in critical condition after being shot in the head.…”

  Tony stared at the television, not comprehending. Only gradually did it come to him, from the newsman’s guarded comments, that Kennedy would die. The ache in his heart confused him; somehow this felt like the end of something, for others and perhaps for him. He wished that Sue were here.

  He could not bring himself to switch off the television. Numbly, he went upstairs and began to pack.

  EIGHTEEN

  For two and a half months, Tony worked as a deck watch on the Robert Milland. The monotony of the endless runs from the Mesabi to Steelton—four hours off, eight hours on, around the clock—was relieved only by bad weather, a few hours a week in some waterfront bar.

  The Robert Milland was a six-hundred-foot solid-steel tanker, built at the turn of the century to last until the boiler cracked or the boat sank in a storm. Tony lived in a four-man cabin, two bunk beds jammed in a small space, with a college kid, a Mackinaw Indian who had been cashiered from the navy for assaulting an officer, and a wizened recovering alcoholic who had been on the Great Lakes for twenty years. The captain, a fearsome Hungarian with a foul temper, would sit drinking in his cabin for three-day stretches. As the weeks passed, Tony’s life narrowed to avoiding the captain, scraping and painting the steel hull, shoveling iron ore in the holds when its weight shifted, reading any paperbacks and magazines he could find. One magazine had an article on San Francisco; looking at photographs of this city on hills, exotic and somehow Mediterranean, Tony wondered what it would be like to live in such a place. Amidst the blank nothingness of the Great Lakes, his own life in suspension, this seemed as real to Tony as anything else. He felt like a fugitive.

  The fear never left him that, at the end of his next run, a warrant would be waiting. When he thought of Alison, her image was not that of a living person; over and over, he wondered who could have killed her. With school behind him, Tony’s hatred for her murderer was unrelieved by any sense of purpose; its companion, the thought of Sam with Sue, gave him no relief. Her letters told him little.

  In the middle of August, an hour out of Steelton, the Robert Milland hit the tail end of a water spout. The sky was black, the rain drove sideways; as the boat pitched and yawed, waves covered it completely, and the steel hull bent and creaked in the storm. On the deck, Tony was linked to a web belt with five other hands, securing the hatches so that the Milland did not take on water. In the savage pounding, all that Tony could do was cling to the steel rope. Near him, he heard the college kid retching into the blackness.

&nb
sp; Tony had never before feared for his life. In the rain and storm and howling wind, as awesome as creation, his mind went dark. And then the storm passed suddenly, replaced by utter stillness, more eerie for what had gone before.

  When they saw Steelton, it was a little past eleven in the morning, and Tony’s watch was over.

  He went to his cabin, stripped off the yellow slicker, fell exhausted on his bunk. All that he could muster was a dull acceptance of what he had just passed through; it was as if he had lost his capacity to feel. Then the third mate came to tell him that a Saul Ravin was waiting for him at dockside, and Tony knew that he had not lost his capacity for dread.

  * * *

  The dingy waterfront—steel piers, giant cranes, corrugated warehouses—reflected the strange airlessness of a storm that had passed, the electric sky, the slick sheen of water on steel. Numb, Tony went to the Waterfront Bar and found Saul Ravin at a table, with two shot glasses of whiskey in front of him. In between the shot glasses was the police photograph of a black man.

  “Here he is,” Saul said without preface. “Your deliverance. Donald White, deceased.”

  Tony sat down. With a small smile, Saul said, “How are you, Tony?”

  Tony did not reach for the shot glass. “Who is this guy?”

  “The one they think killed Alison. Maybe.”

  Tony stared at the picture. Donald White had close-cropped hair, a thin face, and a look of hard abstraction, which could be fear or hatred or indifference. Tony found that he could muster no feeling.

  “Who is he, Saul?”

  “A convicted rapist. I found him through Johnny Morelli. Seven years in the Ohio pen, released in May 1967.” Saul looked up from the picture. “He’s also a suspect in two rapes last fall—October fourth in Columbus, October twenty-first in Akron. Both in parks, at night.”

  “Are there witnesses?”

  “Just the victims, both teenage girls who described a generic black man. But we know he was there; on the day of each rape, he made collect calls to a sister in Detroit.” Saul drew a breath. “On November fourth, the day after Alison was murdered, he called his sister from a pay phone outside your favorite Lake City bar. I’ve spoken to her—she remembers White saying he was in some unspecified trouble, that he was coming home. I’ve suggested to Morelli that it’s more than a coincidence.”