“He’s sober,” I said. “Gainfully employed.”
“How come you’re asking about him?”
“I’m investigating someone who might have counseled him,”
I said, and showed her Alderson’s picture.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Dr. Alderson.”
“Tell me about him,” I said.
We were in a large empty basement filled with cots. On each cot was a pillow and a folded blanket. In the far corner of the room was a small kitchen setup: stove, refrigerator, sink, cupboards. Something in an industrial-sized pot was simmering on the stove. A man in a white T-shirt was sweeping up. Tattoos covered his skinny arms.
“Dr. Alderson was a professor at Coyle State. Psychology. He used to come by couple evenings a week. Talk with some of the shelter folks. He spent a lot of time, I remember, with Red.”
“You pay him?” I said.
“No, no. We got no money for paying,” Cora said. “Everybody volunteers here, ’cept me. I’m full-time staff.”
“How big a staff is it?” I said.
She smiled.
“Me,” she said.
“Place looks pretty good,” I said.
“We got rules. Blankets have to be folded. Floors have to be swept. Plates and stuff have to be washed, and if you don’t take your turn, you’re out.”
“Ever have any trouble here?”
“No,” she said. “Couple of cops come in every night, have coffee, look around. I don’t tolerate no trouble.”
“What else can you tell me about Dr. Alderson?” I said.
“It’s been a while,” Cora said. “Don’t remember much to speak of. Just that he was good. He come regular. Would sit and talk with some of these people. Listen to what they had to say.”
“He save many besides Red?” I said.
“Not much that’s savable,” Cora said. “Time they here most of them pretty far down the chute. Even if you could get them straight, they got substance-abuse problems, dementia, liver problems, cancer. They not going anywhere.”
“Did he spend as much time with those kinds of people?”
“I don’t know. Evenings are pretty busy here. Helped Red, though. I can remember that.”
“Can you give me an address for Coyle State?” I said.
“Cabbie’ll know,” she said.
“I’m driving.”
“Rental car?”
“Nope, my own. I drove out here.”
“From Boston?” she said.
“Yep.”
“You ’fraid to fly?”
“Nope.”
“Why you drive here from Boston.”
“Gave me time to think,” I said.
“I’ll bet it did,” she said.
She wrote out an address on the top sheet of a small yellow pad, tore off the sheet, and gave it to me.
“You getting rich here?” I said.
She smiled again.
“Not hardly,” she said.
“So why do you do it?”
“Might as well be me,” she said.
“Nobody better,” I said, and put out my hand.
45.
Ilay on my bed in the Holiday Inn and talked with Susan on the phone.
“Hawk on the job?” I said.
“If he stayed any closer we’d be having sex,” Susan said.
“Yikes,” I said.
“Sort of a metaphor,” Susan said. “He’s very conscientious.”
“Vinnie and Chollo?”
“Right behind Hawk,” Susan said. “In truth they’re driving me crazy.”
“Good,” I said.
“I know. I’m very safe.”
We were quiet. It didn’t feel like quiet. It felt like we were saying things to each other.
After a moment, Susan said, “Progress today?”
“Yeah, some,” I said. “I found someone who knew Alderson. He was associated with a college out here. I’m going there tomorrow.”
“What college?”
“Coyle State,” I said.
“Nope,” Susan said. “Never heard of it.”
“Now you have,” I said. “You can always learn things talk ing to me.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “It’s one of the reasons I do it.”
I looked up at the ceiling. It was a standard sprayed-on ceiling. The room was generic hotel chain, generic furniture, generic rug. Nice view of the lake if I stood up. I’d been in a lot of rooms like this, mostly minus the view. They worked fi ne. They housed you, kept you warm, let you bathe and sleep and eat. They didn’t do much for the soul, but their mission had nothing to do with the soul.
“Any other reasons?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Do you know when you’re coming home?”
“No. It’ll depend a little on what I find out at the college tomorrow.”
“Have you been thinking about us?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Have you been thinking about marriage?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“We are the kind of people who marry,” I said.
“Yes.”
“On the other hand there’s nothing broken.”
“So why fi x it?” Susan said.
“Maybe,” I said.
Again the interactive quiet stretching nearly seven hundred miles across the dark fields of the republic. The fi elds were now probably darker and fewer than the ones Fitzgerald imagined, but I liked the phrase.
“And have you been thinking about why you’re so committed to this case?” Susan said.
“Most of the drive out here,” I said. “When I wasn’t thinking about marriage.”
“Any conclusions?”
“More a bunch of images,” I said. “Doherty talking about his wife. The look on his face when he listened to the tape. The way his wife seemed to feel he didn’t matter.”
“And are there any images of us that pop up?”
“We were separated,” I said. “I had to kill some people in a way I don’t feel so good about.”
“And if I hadn’t done what I did, you wouldn’t have had to kill the people you killed.”
“True.”
“Isn’t that a little hard to forgive?” Susan said.
“I’ve never thought so,” I said.
“Until this case?” Susan said.
“Doherty has to matter to someone,” I said.
“He matters to Epstein,” Susan said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I did a number of things that caused us both a lot of pain.”
“It did,” I said. “But we got past that.”
“I have never liked talking about it,” Susan said. “But I did what I had to do at the time.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Would it help if we talked about it now?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Again the rich silence across the phone connection.
“I love you,” she said. “You know that. I have always loved you. Even when I couldn’t stand to be with you, and was with someone else, I loved you.”
“It didn’t always feel quite that way,” I said.
“No, I’m sure it didn’t,” she said. “But it was true. You have to know it was true. That it is true.”
“I know,” I said.
“Don’t forget it,” she said.
After we hung up I stood in the window and looked at the dark lake stretching north to the horizon and beyond it to Canada. There was a moon, and I could see some sort of isolated bell buoy marking something a half mile from shore.
“I won’t forget it,” I said.
46.
Coyle state college was a scatter of yellow brick buildings across from a shopping center in Parma. The vice president for administration was a guy with a bad comb-over.
“Gerald Lamont,” he said when we shook hands. “Call me Jerry.”
Jerry was wearing a plaid sport coat, with a maroon shirt
and tie. It went perfect with the comb-over.
“I’m interested in a member of your faculty from ten years ago, Perry Alderson.”
“Sure,” he said.
He picked up the phone and dialed an extension.
“Sally? Could you look up a former faculty member here, from ten years ago, Perry . . .”
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Alderson,” I said.
“Perry Alderson, yeah, soon as you can. Thanks, Sal.”
He hung up.
“What’d this guy Perry do?”
“Just a name that came up in a case back in Boston,” I said.
“Red Sox Nation,” Jerry said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“It was great for you guys in 2004,” Jerry said. “I think the whole country was rooting for you.”
“It was great,” I said.
Jerry’s phone rang.
“Hi, Sal. You’re sure? How about a few years either side?
No? Okay.”
He hung up and looked at me and shook his head.
“No Perry Alderson,” he said.
“Teaching assistant?”
“We have never had a sufficient graduate program for teaching assistants.”
“The college have a program,” I said, “for counseling street people at the Church of the Redeemer, on Euclid?”
“I don’t think so,” Jerry said.
I didn’t have the sense that Jerry was on top of things here at Coyle.
“Did they ten years ago?” I said.
“Ten years ago I was working for the Ohio Department of Education,” Jerry said. “Lemme call my assistant dean. She was here then, I think.”
He picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hi. Lois? Could you come down to my office? Yes. Please. Now. Okay, thanks.”
“You don’t have this kind of information on computers?” I said.
“I’m not a computer guy,” he said.
Assistant Dean Lois came into the office. She was a great improvement on Jerry. Jerry introduced us, and explained me.
“I’m interested in a guy named Perry Alderson. Said he was a professor here about ten years ago. Psychology.”
Lois shook her head.
“I’ve been here for twenty years,” she said. “First four as a student. I was a psych major. After graduation I stayed on as an administrator. I don’t remember a Perry Alderson.”
If she was a freshman twenty years ago she’d be in her late thirties now. A fine age for a woman. I took my picture of Perry Alderson out and put it on the desk.
“Either of you recognize him?” I said.
They both looked. Jerry shook his head.
Lois said, “My God, that’s Bradley Turner.”
“Bradley Turner,” I said.
“Yes,” Lois said. “I used to date him. Though I guess I wasn’t alone in that.”
“Active ladies’ man?” I said.
“Very,” she said.
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“This place used to be a junior college,” Lois said. “Two years to an associate’s degree. Then when we joined the state collegesystem, we moved to a full four-year curriculum and added a small graduate program offering a master’s degree in social work and psychology.”
“The master’s was terminal?” I said.
“Yes. We did not, still don’t, offer a Ph.D. We don’t have the resources.”
“We’re headed in the right direction,” Jerry said. Both Lois and I nodded. I had already fi gured out what Lois had long known about Jerry.
“Was Bradley in the graduate program?”
“Yes. He was older. Said he had been deeply engaged in the peace movement for many years, but now had decided that there was a better way. He was working toward a master’s in pysch and deprivation counseling.”
“Deprivation counseling,” I said.
“It’s a program to which we lay original claim,” Jerry said.
“Working with the impoverished, those challenged by drugs and alcohol. They have special problems, and we feel that there needs to be specialized training.”
“Turner was in that program,” I said to Lois.
“Yes. I was too. That’s how I met him. We had classes together.”
“While you two are talking,” Jerry said, “I’ll go and see if Sally can dig up this guy Turner’s record.”
“Good,” I said.
Jerry got up and went out.
“And now you’re working with the impoverished here at Coyle State?” I said.
She smiled.
“The reality of impoverishment is much nastier than the academic hypothesis,” Lois said. “I decided college administration was more my line.”
“Speaking of nasty,” I said.
“Very nasty,” she said. “But here, at least, no one has the fortitude to be really dangerous.”
I nodded.
“How old would you say he was at the time?” I said.
“Late thirties. It was part of what made him fascinating. Remember, I was like nineteen. He would talk about his adventures in the peace movement the way some men tell war stories. Haight-Ashbury. Kent State. SNCC. All that. Names. Songs. He was like a legendary fi gure.”
“So he’d be in his late fi fties now,” I said.
“Yes. Isn’t that amazing.”
“Why’d you break up?” I said.
“My tendencies are monogamous,” she said. “I got tired of sharing him.”
“Did you have to share him with many?” I said.
“Every.”
I nodded.
“When’s the last time you saw him?” I said.
“Oh, God, I don’t know,” she said. “He stuck around one more year after I graduated, working on his master’s. It was slow. He only took a few courses, like one a semester.”
“Did he ever tell you where he was from?”
“California. I think Los Angeles, or around there.”
“What had he been doing between the end of the revolution and the time you knew him?” I said.
“He would have answered that the revolution was ongoing. That the impoverished were the victims of an oppressive government.”
“No doubt,” I said. “But what was he doing?”
“He implied that he was slowly putting together the elements for a new movement,” she said. “But I don’t really know that. He was always mysterious about his past, which I loved. It made him quite exotic.”
Jerry came back into the room looking perplexed. My guess was that Jerry was often perplexed. This time, however, he appeared to have good reason.
“There’s no record,” he said, “of Bradley Turner ever being enrolled here.”
“Hot damn,” I said.
47.
Jerry had a meeting he had to attend. So we went to Lois’s office, which was smaller. We didn’t mind. We had probably used up pretty much all that Jerry had already.
“He must have just come to classes,” Lois said. “Just walked in and sat down and acted like he was a student.”
“Thirst for knowledge?” I said.
She shrugged.
“Good place to meet girls?” she said.
“Sort of a reversal of the norm,” I said.
Lois smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “Most students are enrolled and act like they’re not.”
“Do you know any other people who would remember
Turner/Alderson?” I said.
She smiled slightly.
“Women,” she said. “It would be nearly all women.”
“Names?” I said.
“Oh, God,” she said. “We’re talking about fi fteen, twenty years ago.”
I nodded. She looked at me speculatively. Then she picked up the phone and dialed.
“Ruth? Lois . . . I’m fi ne . . . absolutely . . . can you send me a list of the members of my class, when I was here? . . . yes, and maybe the class on either side o
f me? . . . yes . . . real soon . . . thank you.”
She smiled at me.
“Alumni secretary. She’ll send the names over, maybe jog my memory.”
“And maybe some current addresses,” I said.
“I’m sure,” Lois said.
She was still looking at me, like an appraiser.
“You’re not a regular police detective,” she said.
“Private,” I said.
“So people hire you,” she said.
“If they’re wise,” I said.
“Who hired you to fi nd Brad Turner?”
“It’s sort of the outgrowth,” I said, “of something else I’m working on.”
“And you’re not going to tell me what that something else is,” she said.
“Try not to,” I said.
She got a pad of blue-lined white paper out of her drawer.
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“Thanks.”
She kept looking at me.
“I suppose it’s not like on TV,” she said.
“Actually, it’s just like that,” I said.
She laughed.
“Sure it is,” she said.
She doodled a little smiley face on the pad.
“I have to say, though, you look like a private detective,” she said.
“What do they look like?” I said.
“Big, strong, intrepid, handsome, in a rough way.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s accurate.”
“And,” she said, “you’re fun.”
I nodded.
“Bubbly,” I said.
A pale young woman with red-framed eyeglasses came in and handed Lois a thick printout of names and addresses.
“Ms. Carter sent these over,” the young woman said, and hurried out as if she were escaping.
Lois looked at the paper.
“Well,” she said. “Let’s see.”
48.
Ihad bought myself a bottle of Dewar’s scotch and was having some with soda and ice, sitting on the bed in my hotel room, looking at the gray lake, talking to Susan.
“So something happened,” I said, “between the time Lois the assistant dean knew him as Bradley Turner, and the time Red met him as Perry Alderson.”
“Which is what kind of time frame?” Susan said.
“She knew him twenty years ago. Red tells me that Perry straightened him out and he’s been straight for ten years.”
“That’s a pretty big gap to fi ll,” Susan said. “Ten years.”
“I’ll narrow it, I suspect, when I’ve plowed through Lois’s list of names.”
Now and Then s-35 Page 13
