That was a lie, Georgie thought. The booth had been empty at a quarter to ten when he used it. He wondered for the first time if maybe old Martin didn’t have another girl. What a laugh that would be, with Jo stiff-arming him right now.
Lodini, a powerfully built man, a garage mechanic by trade, fire chief by the election of his peers, strode across the room. “Where’s the coffee?” he said to his wife, who plainly was hurrying to serve it. “Couldn’t you hear us coming?”
He was always irritable with himself and his men after a fire they had not been able to bring under control, and he always took it out on the women.
“Beats hell how that thing got so far out ahead of us,” he said, sitting down heavily at the table. “Rocco! Sit down here.” He gave an imperative gesture.
Georgie looked at him, and moved with deliberate slowness, saying to himself: stay loose. He wasn’t going to act like it was his fault Lodini and his men couldn’t save a house. He was tempted even to take the offensive, to let him have a complaint or two right now. After all, he didn’t have a shirt to his name now, not even the suit of his father’s, which had just been made over for him; fifteen bucks old Gerosa had charged. No wonder his wife had pots and pans and blankets and stuff to give away. Georgie looked around. Where the hell was Daley? He saw him then, getting coffee from Mrs. Gerosa. He’d be listening.
Lodini deliberately glowered up at him over the rim of his coffee mug. After a long swallow, Lodini put down the cup. “Sit,” he said to Georgie. Then he called Johanna. Georgie, with elaborate and clumsy politeness, got up to give his chair to his sister, and took the one next to her.
“Any idea how it got started?” Lodini said, looking from one of them to the other.
Johanna shook her head that she did not. She looked like a frightened rabbit, Georgie thought, like one that was caught in a trap but not dead yet.
“Georgie?” Lodini said.
“I think maybe … I don’t know, but … let me tell you what happened tonight.”
Johanna took her hands from the table and held them tightly in her lap.
“Go ahead.”
Georgie ran his tongue around his lips. His mouth had suddenly gone dry. “Well, sir … I was hanging around the Crazy Cat earlier, you know, with the kids. I was supposed to be home early. It was maybe nine-thirty, quarter to ten when I got up home, but Jo was talking with the priest, with Father Walsh, so I went down to the basement and puttered around.”
Lodini was drumming his fingers on the table, but Georgie didn’t care now. He’d got started, the spit was wetting his mouth and he was going to come out all right. He was sure of himself, just saying Father Walsh’s name, passing that part and seeing his sister take a deep breath. Man, did he know how she felt!
“… Anyway, as soon as he was gone, Jo started giving me hell. I mean, maybe she’s right. She’s over-protective—that’s what the guidance councilor at school calls it. But it always makes me sore. You know, I’m no kid …”
“Get on with what happened,” Lodini said.
“I’m coming to that. Jo was giving me hell, you know, about girls and all that jazz, and then I got on her about Martin not showing up being the reason she was sore at me. I must’ve said something I didn’t mean, ’cause all of a sudden, Jo came at me like she was going to beat me up, trying to wallop me. I was smoking a cigaret, see, and she knocked it out of my hand. I thought I stamped out the sparks, but maybe that’s how it started. Jo, she ran upstairs then, and I went back down to turn out the basement light. I was down there for a while and I smelled smoke. When I got upstairs the whole living room was full of smoke. Jo must’ve smelled it too, because she was coming down. We both ran outdoors—and I smashed open the glass on the alarm box and pulled the lever.” He shrugged. “Maybe that isn’t what started it, but it could’ve been.”
Lodini said, “Kids your age shouldn’t smoke.”
Georgie said, “I know. Jo always says it’s a bad habit of mine.”
Martin Scully, knowing the many times Georgie had tried to eavesdrop on him and Johanna through the basement vent, asked, “What were you doing in the basement that was so important, Georgie?”
Georgie wasn’t prepared for that question. “What’s it of your business?” But realizing that he couldn’t afford any mystery about himself, he took care of it in a way that would shut Martin up in a hurry. “If you gotta know, I relieve myself in the drain down there sometimes instead of going upstairs to the bathroom.”
Lodini said dryly, but without intended humor, “It must’ve been a slow leak.”
Martin laughed, though he was immediately ashamed for having done it in front of Johanna, but there was nothing pleased him more than to see Georgie, who made up his hair like a girl in front of a mirror, discomfited.
Georgie got up and walked over to Daley. “Gimme a cigaret, will you?”
Daley obliged him, even started to light it for him. Georgie waited for that, a tribute to his authority.
Martin said, addressing himself to Lodini, “What’s this about MacAndrews? Somebody was saying on the truck he was dead?”
Georgie and Daley looked at each other. Georgie steadied Daley’s hand where it jerked away just as he’d struck the match.
“Keeled over and cracked his skull,” Lodini said. “That’s what I heard from Kearns. Heart attack.”
A murmur of talk picked up in the room, turning on the death of MacAndrews and what it would mean at the plant.
Georgie said, loud enough for only Daley to hear, “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
Daley looked as though he was going to bust out laughing or crying. Georgie gave him a soft punch in the ribs, a good-natured, but telling punch, and went back to his sister’s side.
Lodini said, “You’d better call your insurance man in the morning, Johanna. Got a place to stay tonight?”
Johanna roused herself, trying to throw off the numbness that had settled on her while Georgie had told his story, part right and part wrong, but what matter? What he could have told … She shuddered. “Grandma Tonelli’s,” she said.
Martin said, “I’ll take you up when you’re ready, Jo. The boys can take my gear back to the station.”
“I’ll take it down for you,” Georgie said. “Please, Marty, let me do it?” It was well known that he dearly loved to hang out around the fire station, and that night above all, he wanted to know everything that was going on.
“Okay, kid,” Scully said, like he was patting him on the head, Georgie thought.
Jo was about to protest. She wasn’t so keen on being alone with old Martin, Georgie figured, not after what happened between her and the priest. He knew his sister pretty well, a lot better than she knew him anyway, than anybody knew him. But he said ingratiatingly, “I’ll come right back, sis. I promise.”
5
JOHANNA THOUGHT SHE WANTED more than anything else just to be alone. But she didn’t want that either, she realized. Those few minutes alone after Father Walsh had gone, waiting for Georgie to come downstairs, had been too terrible. Not to understand other people—her mother, Georgie, even Martin sometimes—was bad enough, but not to understand herself was the worst of all. She had been truthful, trying to explain to Georgie—up to a point. She had meant to be entirely truthful, but when he described what he had seen, the way he put it—belly-rubbing with the priest—she knew that in his crude, sickening way, he was right. Father Walsh had put his arm around her, and she had felt … the same thing as when Martin had first kissed her.
Martin put Mrs. Lodini’s shawl about her shoulders and doing it gave her shoulders a little squeeze. She wanted to pull away from him, to run, to hide. But where?
They went out from Lodini’s, and she walked up the street, past the smoldering ruin on which the hoses were still playing water. Hell’s own fury, fire. How just and quick God’s judgment. She stumbled and recovered herself, shying away from the hand Martin extended to help her.
“Don’t look back,” Martin sa
id. “It’s like when your father died, Jo. You’ve got to look ahead and keep going that way.”
If only it could be that way, not having to look back. Martin could say that: all his sins were clean, easily told in confession, she was sure, and therefore easily forgotten. She could not help but think of all the people going back innocently to sleep, seeing the lights going out in all the houses round.
“It could have been worse, you know,” Martin said as they turned onto Mrs. Tonelli’s flagstone walk. “Going up that fast if you’d been asleep … My God, Jo!” He made her stop by himself stopping. “We’ve got each other. That’s all that counts, isn’t it?”
She nodded. The wish that what she told was not a lie was as close now as she could come to telling the truth.
“Right,” Martin said, and catching her hand he turned her round and pulled her into his arms. Mute and numb, she yielded to the embrace. Then fiercely, hoping an act of the will might also compel the heart, she forced herself to respond as in times past she had done so willingly. But memory of the dark moment still intruded, and even with Martin she felt degrading and degraded.
A tapping at the window above drew their attention. They looked up. The old lady was gesturing, a silhouette against the light. They went inside quickly.
“Such affairs should be conducted in private,” she said. The truth was that she loved to spy on young lovers, her petulance of the moment due to the fact that she had not been able to see well enough where they had been standing in the shadows.
From childhood Johanna had been a little afraid of Mrs. Tonelli. She could not remember her except as a wrinkled old woman who commanded what she wanted, her dark eyes fierce even when her intention was merry. There were tales in the village of how beautiful she had been as a girl, emigrating from Italy with a man her social inferior whom she drove to success. She was still elegant in manner. Her children, except for Martin’s mother who had died, had long since moved away from Hillside. She boasted of their independence whatever her true feelings about their having left her house. Now she lived alone, having only a servant who came in by day. She was parsimonious and rich by the standards of the community, and an offer of generosity from her automatically put the recipient on guard.
Mrs. Tonelli took them to the dining room first to show the clothes she had laid out on the table. The room was pungent with the smell of mothballs.
“You have kept me waiting,” she said. “You will take what you need.”
“I’m sorry,” Johanna said. “We had to stay. Mr. Lodini wanted to talk to us.”
“And where is the fat one now?” To Martin she said, “Remember your Uncle Pedro?” She indicated the boy’s clothing on the table. “He was that size at Georgie’s age, the only one, and he grew out of it.”
“Georgie will come soon,” Johanna said. “You are very kind, Mrs. Tonelli.”
“Your mother will also come here,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “She has had her operation. After her recuperation, she will come. I cannot have an invalid. Tell me, Johanna, how much insurance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your brother will know,” the old lady said with a dry laugh. “Oh, yes, he will know.” She went to the door of the room and caught up her long silk dressing gown, a graceful motion despite the rheumatic hand. “I have put out two of my nightgowns on the stairs. You will have the rooms over the kitchen.”
Johanna murmured her thanks.
“Martin, get me my cane, and then go home.”
He got her cane from where it hung near the hall door. “I’ll go in a minute, Grandma.”
Their eyes met. Their wills had clashed before. She had raised Martin after his parents’ death. She had had the means to educate him as he had wanted to be educated—in the law. But she had refused. Pharmacy, yes. She had wanted him to go into his father’s business, foreseeing him then spending out at least her lifetime in the village. At eighteen he had moved out of her house, ten years before. He visited her at least once a week, but what existed between them was a kind of armed truce. And she never failed to ask him how much closer he was now to being a lawyer.
The old lady went out, repeating mockingly, “In a minute, in a minute.”
Johanna and Martin listened to the rasp of her slippers along the floor, diminishing. When there was only silence, Martin said, “We’re going to get married, Jo. As soon as they can publish the banns.”
Johanna found herself now having to think out each thing separately as though in a thick weariness: where she was, where she was to sleep … now this—the banns of matrimony; if anyone knows just cause why Johanna Rocco and Martin Joseph Scully should not marry …
Her mind simply broke away on the thought. “I’ve got to see mother first thing in the morning and tell her what happened. Why doesn’t Georgie come?”
“Damn Georgie! Did you hear what I said to you?” Martin shook her as he might a child, gently but firmly. And she was a child in ways, or what was left of one at nineteen in Hillside.
“Yes, Martin, I heard you … thank you …”
“Don’t thank me. Do you love me, or don’t you? The world didn’t come to an end tonight. Maybe this was a good thing. You and I can start from here. Our whole lives.”
“Could we leave Hillside?” She scarcely knew she asked the question, yet it stirred in her a quickening of hope for the first time in many hours.
“Why?” Martin said, for of all the dreams they had shared, foremost was Martin’s hope of doing something worthwhile for the town, of breaking the feudal hold of the Graham factory. Suddenly he was angry. “Jo, you’ve got more courage than this. What’s the matter with you? Sure, your house burned down. It’s tough, it’s hard. You lost a lot of things you loved, but you didn’t lose people. It’s people that count, not things. What the hell are things but what makes us greedy, selfish? Look around this room—that whatnot there …” He pointed to the Victorian glass cabinet, the elegant dishes and glassware gleaming behind the concave doors. “What good is it to the old lady? It’s people she needs—like you and me. Only she’d like to put us in there with all those gadgets. That’s what it means to care about things. That’s not for you and me, Jo. We’ve got work to do in this world. Haven’t we?”
“You sound like a Communist,” she said, her purpose to stop him, even to hurt him.
“I don’t care what I sound like. I know what I am and so do you. Or do you?”
“I know … nothing. Really nothing. Please go, Martin, or your grandmother will come back. Please!”
Martin just looked at her. There was the sound in the hall of a door opening, the scuffling of feet, the closing of the door.
“Is that you, Georgie?” Johanna cried out, her voice on the thin edge of hysteria.
Martin strode to the dining room door and threw it open. The boy was in the hall. He had been in front of the mirror when he heard Johanna’s voice, and turned, gaping, when Martin opened the door.
Martin said, “Your sister’s looking for you.”
Georgie shuffled toward them. “They wouldn’t let me on the truck,” he said. “Bastards.”
Martin said nothing. He went out and deliberately closed the door soundlessly behind him.
6
THERE HAD BEEN LITTLE hope of finding anything in the way of footprints by the time Bassett and the technicians reached the Graham plant. Cement and fine gravel, the latter shuffled by many feet. A number of fingerprints were lifted within the office, but Bassett knew how long a chance it was that any of them would prove significant.
Kearns, failing in his attempt to describe the position in which he had found the night manager, simulated it himself, carefully spreading his handkerchief over the spot where the murdered man’s head had struck the floor before putting his own head down. The photographer shot him from several angles. A picture for posterity, if nothing else. It could no longer be said with certainty that the swivel chair from which MacAndrews had risen—or tumbled—was in its original position. What
Bassett did note was that MacAndrews had had the time sheets open on the desk, a pad and pencil beside them. The wastebasket yielded several pieces of paper from the same pad, a few minutes’ comparison and study of which told him that MacAndrews had, during the evening, gone over the bookkeeper’s record of the men’s earnings. It told him something about MacAndrews, at least.
While Bassett was rooting in the wastebasket, Kearns was on the telephone, trying to narrow the time of MacAndrews’ death. Dr. Tagliaferro had placed it between nine and eleven. Kearns called the shop foreman. The foreman had talked with the office manager sometime around eight o’clock. He then remembered that Jack Moss had gone off work two hours early, sick. Moss had tried to hold out till quitting time, but unable to make it, had clocked out at nine.
“It would be right on the hour,” Kearns explained to Bassett, “so that he wouldn’t be docked for more than two hours’ pay.”
“Would he have come in here to MacAndrews for his pay tonight?”
“I don’t know that Mac would’ve given it to him,” Kearns said, which did not precisely answer Bassett’s question, but which again told him something about MacAndrews. “Likely he’d have gone home and had his wife come back at eleven for it.”
On a hunch, Bassett asked, “Moss lives in Moontown?”
“Yeah,” Kearns said, and taking a lead quite the opposite from Bassett’s reasoning, he went on, “Moss is a big guy, strong as an ox. Kind of sour, too.”
Bassett said, “Was his wife here at eleven?”
“Don’t remember seeing her. But that don’t mean she wasn’t here. I mean, if Moss had done this thing, he’d’ve gone home and sent his wife up anyway. You know, to cover up.”
“We’ve got a lot of ifs in there,” Bassett said. “Am I right that the men weren’t paid tonight because of what happened?”
“That’s right.”
“The payroll is still in the safe?”
Kearns nodded.
“Do you have the combination?”
Black Sheep, White Lamb Page 4
