by JJ Partridge
Gr-e-a-t!
With this welcomed news, I was one with the ranks of happy Rhode Islanders. A snow day Friday! It’s like recess or a pardon or winning $100 on a scratch card! I suddenly had an appetite and the kitchen soon smelled of coffee, scrambled eggs, sizzling Canadian bacon, and thick toast from Mrs. Pina’s homemade bread which I devoured while working the crossword in yesterday’s Journal. Pumped up by a second espresso, I went upstairs and only then noticed the blinking red message light on the telephone console. I punched in the required code.
“Are you coming over or not? At least call one way or the other!”
Ugh! I had completely forgotten about Nadie! It must have been her call when I was interrogating Williams. I picked up the telephone, ready to apologize, and then imagined her concern when she saw my face. I decided my apology had to be in person.
I dressed slowly and carefully; sore fingers took time to get my jeans over the corset, negotiate the restraints of a red and black checked wool shirt, and tug my Totes over slip-on loafers. A ski parka from the basement closet, gloves, a buffed up fedora, and Ray Bans completed my outfit and I left the house with all the physical mobility of a tiny tot dressed up for play by an overanxious mother.
Congdon Street hadn’t been plowed and it took painful, giant steps to get me through the snow on the front walk to the few car tracks on the street. High silky clouds barely covered a bright sun and I became aware of the quiet, rare and welcomed in the city; only the clucking of squirrels hopping through the snow and starlings rustling about in the hedges broke the stillness. I passed trees wonderfully feathered and plumed by snow and, near Angell Street was hailed by a neighbor, snow shovel in his hands, who shouted something to me about snowplows or lack thereof. His brick house, set behind a white picket fence, could have been taken from a Christmas card; all it needed was a holly wreath on its front door. I waved, keeping my face hidden, embarrassed by how I would have looked upon close inspection.
After slow progress up and over The Hill, I realized that not taking the Range Rover had been a really bad idea; I hurt and the temperature was rising quickly. I was overdressed, and perspiring. Within the shadows of College Arch, a University maintenance crew dressed sensibly in sweatshirts and jeans made loud company as they drank coffee from paper cups and leaned against idle snowblowers and shovels. I stopped to adjust the very uncomfortable corset and faced glass panels behind which “Campus Security Briefs” were posted weekly by the Security Office. Each incident of stolen property or other reported crimes including The Stalker’s assaults and rapes merited three or four lines. Next Friday, the murder of Anne Sullivan would be listed with similar terseness.
“Ugh!” I said, and my voice echoed through the Arch loudly enough to deserve a glance from several of the snow removal crew.
I left the Arch under the faded “Stop The Stalker” banner and entered The Green, not surprised that its walkways had been cleared and were already getting student traffic. On the steps of Dustin Hall, a dozen or so kids in ski sweaters, down vests, and turtleneck shirts were engaged in a wild snowball fight that didn’t get a truce when I crossed the line of fire; further on, another gang, no doubt its members thinking themselves to be particularly brazen, was finishing off two huge, anatomically correct “snowpersons.” Somehow, the antics of the kids, the stark outline of the surrounding buildings against the blue vault of the sky, and the snow-cleaned air seemed to have lifted, momentarily, the smog of foreboding that had enveloped the campus for weeks. With some buoyancy to my spirits, in the few minutes it took to reach Nadie’s apartment building, the outlandish, impractical plan that had been gelling since last evening now seemed inevitable.
I pressed the call button at the entrance to announce my arrival.
“Yes?”
“Algy.” There was no response. “It’s freezing out here,” I said, lying, since I was hot and sweaty.
A raucous buzz offered entry. I stomped the snow off my boots onto the entryway mat, climbed the stairs to the second floor, knocked on her door, and, finding that she had unlocked her two safety locks, walked into her apartment.
The impression I always get, and maybe this is a good sign, is of a transient situation. You walk into a sparsely furnished living area—its only wall decoration a framed poster of a baleful Albert Einstein with the legend: “It is impossible to prepare for war and make peace”—and practically stand in its miniscule kitchen. Nadie, in a faded blue terrycloth robe, was sitting on a stool at a counter which separated the kitchen from the living area. A towel was wrapped, turban style, around her head, suggesting a recent shower. Without make-up, her skin was pale, highlighting the natural pink of her pursed lips. Her legs were crossed; a bedroom slipper with a fluffy blue pom-pom on the toe and without a heel, dangled from her foot. She had a New Yorker propped up in front of her and the radio was tuned to a soft-rock station.
“Thanks for the call last night.” She turned a page and didn’t look up.
I closed the door behind me, took off my hat and sunglasses, waiting for her to lift her eyes to my bruises. When she didn’t, I said, “Sorry” and remained silent until she glanced up at me.
“What happened?”
“I had an unexpected visitor last night,” I responded, and with grimaces to reflect my real or imagined pain, pulled off my gloves and parka. “Lavelle Williams ..., Reverend Thomas’s kid ..., assaulted me in my garage as I was coming over here.” I grasped the counter, a bit dramatically, to lower myself on to the stool opposite her and proceeded to tell her the whole story, not scrimping on the graphic details of the fight but omitting my moment of shameful rage. Along the way, my narrative got disjointed and when I rambled on how unlikely it was that Williams could be Anne Sullivan’s murderer, that he was a punk who would never hang around to be arrested and that he had confirmed both the abortion and bank account, Nadie’s face displayed complex emotions. My big finish—the scene of an angry Jerry Franks leaving with Williams—brought expressions of dismay and disapproval.
“What has gotten into you? It’s one thing for you to perform some misguided act of noblesse oblige, or whatever it is, and another to be assaulted and get into a street fight! As for Franks, you should have called the police!”
Her reaction deflated me. Why had I bothered to slog over here!
“Latoya Chapin,” she began, “came to the Center yesterday. Wanted to talk to us—Charlene Harris and me—before she gave an interview to the Journal.” Charlene is a black colleague of Nadie’s. “Scheduled for today’s Lifetime section. It might be in the paper but it’s not online. She was depressed, scared, humiliated, and yet she wanted to go through with it. The assault was more vicious and racist than you could imagine. We let her talk it through before she left for the interview. She wasn’t doing it because of pressure ..., although there is some of that. She’s convinced that black women are always going to be subject to rape, that it’s all driven by racism. She’s saying publicly what a lot of the black women are saying among themselves. She made me feel so ... sad! That’s why I didn’t want company last night.”
Nadie searched my face for a reaction. I was too dim at that moment to deliver the required empathy so she abruptly loosened the turbaned towel, shook her hair, and began to rub it purposefully. Belatedly, I slid off the stool and stood behind her, my hands on her shoulders to gently knead her muscles. She shrugged me away but my hands remained lightly on her shoulders.
“I need you to help me,” I said softly.
Nadie stopped towelling; she must have thought that I needed a sympathetic ear because I felt her body relax.
“Look, I know it sounds absurd,” I continued, “maybe even obscene, but I want to speak to Anne Sullivan’s sister.” Her back stiffened under my fingers. “If anyone holds the key to this, it’s her. She was her confidante. Remember, it was her name in the Center’s file. She knows about the money, if there is money. She may have the bankbook. She might even know who was supporting her sister.” My
face was at her right ear as I poured it on. “Williams didn’t do it. Williams may be a punk, but not a murderer, not the kid that went to his mother when he thought he’d be arrested. He could be convicted only because he was with her that night ...,”—and I knew this would get through to her—“... and because he’s black. Unless we do something!”
She spun around, her green eyes sparkling like polished emeralds and she had difficulty controlling her voice. “Just how do you think you can invite yourself—the University’s lawyer—to have a nice little chat with her about her ‘moidered sista’?”
A heavy Brooklyn accent is a verbal weapon used when she wants to show me up. She was right; however, she failed to get the drift. “No,” I said. “I’d like you to make the call.”
Her mouth opened and her eyes became the color of martini olives. She started to say something, thought better of it, and after a disgusted shrug, walked into the bedroom. “You had better go,” she said tightly over her shoulder, “... now. Go home, fix your face, read a book, maybe Trollope, something to slow down your imagination!” The bedroom door closed behind her.
Well, I wasn’t going to give up!
“Think about it. Nobody has mentioned her money! Why would Franks have gone to the trouble to involve me? Something’s not right. Maybe the sister is withholding it. If I call her, you’re right, she’s not going to speak to me. But if someone from the Women’s Center calls, trying to get a handle on what the University might have done to help her sister when she was pregnant, when she didn’t register ...?” I walked halfway to the bedroom. “Besides, you’re a woman. You could convince her.”
The bedroom door flung open and a pom-pommed slipper went whizzing past my left ear. “Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!” She stood in the doorway in black pantyhose and bra, pointing toward the door.
I made my last plea. “Okay, I am a case study. Write me up later if you want to. There’s a black kid—not a nice black kid, I know—who’s being falsely accused of murder! The cops can say they got their perp! His lawyer doesn’t care what happens so long as the kid doesn’t rat on his slimeball clients.” Then, more plaintively, deserving of a dramatic award, “Doesn’t anybody but his mother and me care what happens to this kid?”
I took a step toward her, my hands raised hip high, before she moved away to sit in front of a dressing table. She brushed her hair in long, even strokes, sweeping on the right and then on the left, her face set in a scowling stare as reflected in the mirror. I sat on a large, painted trunk at the foot of her unmade bed, and waited …, and waited.
Maybe a full two minutes later, she pointed the hair brush at my image in the mirror. “This doesn’t have much to do with ..., what’s his name ..., Williams. It’s about you, all this family obligation stuff, guilt that goes back to the days of rum, slaves, and molasses. Anyway, it’s misplaced. This is a murder, and you’re not a prosecutor anymore, or the kid’s lawyer.” Then, I saw her anger dissolve into something more thoughtful and after several long brushes, she said, hesitantly, “I’ll do it.”
Huh?
“… I’ll do it because it can end this whole fiasco right now. But,” she said, waving the brush at my reflection, “the deal is, if I can’t reach her on the first try or if she says no, that’s it! That’s the deal. One telephone call, and if I’m not successful ....”
“Agreed,” I said, not really meaning it, and stood up to kiss her hair. She ducked away and dressed quickly in stonewashed jeans and a white turtleneck sweater. With her thumbs jammed into rear pockets and fingers spread around the curves of her fanny, she stood over me, repeating that she was not going to cajole the sister; a simple “no” or any sign of reluctance on the sister’s part would end their conversation. I nodded, and she sat on the bed and used her cell phone to call the Women’s Center; I moved up on the bed next to her as she waited for someone to get the sister’s full name and telephone number from the Center’s computer. A few seconds later, Nadie was actually speaking to Patricia Sullivan, home today like all good Rhode Islanders.
Nadie was the consummate professional, making the point that while she didn’t want to intrude, she was a volunteer at the Women’s Center where her sister had been counseled, and that she wanted to speak to Patricia as her sister’s referenced confidante, ambiguous enough for anyone to surmise that Nadie needed some follow-up information for her file. As she went on, I remembered that yesterday was her sister’s funeral. Damn awkward but couldn’t be helped. She agreed to meet Nadie at two o’clock this afternoon and Nadie scribbled an address on a paper bookmark taken from her night table.
When she finished the call, Nadie said, “Obviously, I didn’t mention you. I don’t know if she will even let you into the family’s house ...,”—she referred to the note—“... Stanhope Avenue in Elmwood, wherever that is. The parents won’t be there, she says. Here’s the address.” She smiled, a little priggishly. “You wouldn’t mind waiting in the car, would you?”
“That’s ridiculous!” I protested, but I took the bookmark.
“Assuming you do get inside, I get to ask all the questions. You’re not going to interrupt, lead, or suggest anything. Absolutely and unequivocally, nothing! Clear? You are there as a witness to protect me. Then,” she said somewhat resignedly, “if there are any repercussions from all of this, at least I’ll be able to have the University Counsel as a witness that the discussions were proper. It’s my show, Algy. Understood?”
Okay; if this was going to come off at all, it had to be on Nadie’s terms. Of course, I was intrigued by her motivation. To end my farrago or to satisfy her own needs. “I agree, but at least let me tell you what I’m interested in. She ....”
Her hands went to her ears. “No! No! No! Let me decide what is legitimate inquiry. You’ll have to live with that or I call her right now and cancel.” She moved off the bed and led me out of the room. “Now, go home, fix your face, and pick me up around one-thirty; that will give us plenty of time to get there.”
I raised my hands in surrender. “I’m going,” I replied meekly. “I love you,” I said.
She didn’t look up.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As I began the trek home through the streets east of the campus, I was joined by parents with toddlers on sleds, older couples with shopping bags, and troops of students heading towards the Refectory and the day-off delights of Thayer Street. With most sidewalks unshoveled, slush filling the barely plowed streets, and clogged catchbasins overflowing with snow melt, we were forced to compete with trucks armed with front-end plows and splashing cars for the limited street space. Most of the kids favored bright jackets, fleece vests, layered shirts, and sweaters over jeans; many had their heads uncovered showing iPods or Walkmans, and most wore sunglasses. The racket of snowblowers’ two-cycle engines from driveways and parking lots increased as we neared Thayer Street where impatient customers, cell phones to their ears, were lined up outside of eateries like Paragon, Johnny Rockets, and Spike’s, the sidewalks were crowded with students from the University and the East Side’s private schools, and starlings and sparrows, twittering above us on utility wires, waited to swoop down to any morsel, however soggy or nasty, uncovered below. Surprising to me, ten or a dozen motorcycles were lined up in a cleared spot by the CVS, their leather clad riders aboard deep-throated Harley’s and higher pitched Yamahas and Kawasakis seemingly unfazed by snow conditions and obviously planning an expedition to some unlucky destination.
At my house, somebody in Mrs. Pina’s extended family had come and gone; the front walk and sidewalks were clear and practically dry and a trench had been cut through the mound of snow left at the curb by the belated plows. I picked up the Journal which had been placed neatly on the front step, entered, and went immediately upstairs to check my messages. The first call was from Tuttle, asking me to call back. The second was from Tramonti; he said that Franks had brought in Williams, that Williams had been released, “What’s going on?” and “Don’t you listen to anyone?”, and nothing abo
ut a bankbook or an abortion, until his time ran out. So, Franks had managed to involve me. The bastard! No doubt, he had thought of a quick payback of some sort. I should have known. And the dope in Williams’s jacket had either been ditched or he never got searched!
I made a BLT on rye and finished it with a Sam Adams while reading the Journal. The snowstorm shared the front page with a three column photo of a demonstrator on the ground facing a snarling police dog—a photo sure to be published nationally—and a line of cops with raised shields. According to the story, Kingdom wasn’t present when the police lines were threatened, the cops hadn’t used their batons but had pushed back with shields when orders to disperse were ignored, and nobody had owned up to calling in the K-9s. Carter students were prominent in inside photos, including one of the black female student in fatigues angrily yelling at the police from behind a row of sawhorses at the courthouse. A sidebar listed those arrested and while not identifying any as ours, I could tell from the ages and addresses that the Journal had it right.
All of the principals to the event, including Kingdom, got quotes: “It was provocation by the police. Howsoever it happened, it shouldn’t have. People are justifiably angry, and bringing out the dogs reminds me of Selma.” McCarthy blamed the “rioters” while Sonny’s “Carter crazies” quotes were straight from yesterday’s press conference. His challenge to Danby was “keep your spoiled brats out of our downtown!” Tramonti’s role as peacemaker-mediator merited no mention; he had refused comment, probably having figured there was nothing he could say that would be helpful one way or the other.
The Journal’s Lifetime section is a tabloid pullout; its interview with Latoya Chapin was the cover story. It started off like a feminist tract: her rape, she said, was part of a backlash against black assertiveness and the Carter Stalker was a white male instrument of repression. But when she got into the simple narrative of her rape, it was so vivid that I, like Nadie, boiled with anger and frustration.