“Could you identify the people you saw, Walter?”
“Well, I recognized Mrs. Spooner right off, because of that blue gown she’s got. And she must have heard me, because she twisted around, but she didn’t see me. She ducked her face kind of, and the guy looked over her shoulder, and I saw it was Mr. Coleridge.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yessir, I saw them plain as day.”
The judge knocked the gavel for silence.
I knew exactly which night it was. Mom had gone upstairs with a headache. I’d sat in the lobby for a while and then gone outside, and Peter had been walking to his car. We’d gone to the beach.
He kissed me that night.
But first, he’d kissed Mom. I remembered seeing Wally in the lobby, just getting off his shift. I’d killed at least ten minutes after that, walking around the hotel. All that time, Mom and Peter were together.
She didn’t go upstairs that night. She didn’t have a headache. She’d run out the side door, the same door I’d used so no one would see me. She’d met him under the trees. They’d arranged it beforehand. And Wally had caught them.
“What did you do next?”
“I walked away. Real quiet. I didn’t want to get in any trouble. The thing is, about hotels, my old boss, Mr. Forney, told me, whatever happens in a hotel you keep your mouth shut. Whatever you see, you keep your mouth shut. That’s the way you keep your job, he said. So I didn’t say anything.”
“Why did you come forward, Walter?”
“When I read the news, I told my dad what I saw. It was him who told me to come forward. It’s the right thing to do, he said.”
“Indeed,” the state’s attorney said in a flowery way, as if he was reciting the Gettysburg Address. “Indeed.”
He let the silence hang while he pretended to look down at his notes. We kept our eyes straight forward, because everyone in the courtroom was trying to get a good look at us.
“Now, let’s go to the early morning of September seventeenth. You were working at the hotel that night.”
Wally nodded eagerly, a question he could answer without getting anybody in trouble. “I was on bellhop and valet duty. Nobody was up yet, just a couple guests. Mr. Spooner came down and asked for his car, so I brought it around. Usually he’d just take off, but that morning he shot the breeze a little. We were all talking about the storm by then. Wondering where it would hit. And he asked about hurricane preparations for the hotel, what we did to prepare and whatnot. And then he asks about the boats, what happens to the boats.”
The courtroom was completely silent. The judge didn’t have to bang his gavel.
“Said he heard something about hurricane holes. So I tell him, sure, there are places to tie a boat, hope nothing bad happens, a kind of shelter. Bunch of them down by Lake Worth, some a little bit north. I told him about snook fishing around Munyon Island, that my dad has a boat. He’s interested in that, asks if my dad rents his boat, and I say sure, that’s what he does for a living. So he says that maybe he’d want to take it out that morning, and he’d make it worth my dad’s while. I don’t think anything about it until I hear that he found a hurricane hole for the boat. That’s all.” Wally looked at the attorney in a pleading way, waiting to be released.
I could feel it on the back of my neck. I knew the whispers would travel from those in the courtroom to those out in the hall, and then to those down the courthouse steps, and through the streets of downtown. I could feel it in the eagerness of the reporters as they jostled to get pictures of Mom.
Joe had planned it, they thought now. The whole thing. He’d planned the murder for right before the storm. He’d planned to stay out with the boat, he’d planned to hide it. Maybe he’d even done something to the engine, somehow. Whatever had happened, every single person in the courtroom now knew that Joe was a murderer, and Mom was a tramp.
They were guilty now.
We had already learned how to walk past photographers, head turned in, keep walking no matter what, don’t stop for anything, keep going toward Mr. Markel’s open car door, slip inside. Mom first, then Joe. We’d sent Grandma Glad out the back door with Miss Geiger. I was last in the car and I tripped and fell halfway inside. Joe picked me up by the wrist and hauled me in and I lay sprawled over their ankles while he slammed the door shut and Mr. Markel took off.
Joe leaned over and helped me up, and I slid between them. We didn’t talk.
I couldn’t look at my mother. I couldn’t stand the smell of her perfume. I kept myself very still so that I wouldn’t brush against her. I couldn’t bear the picture in my head of her pressed against Peter.
After Wally’s testimony, I’d felt how the mood had changed in the courtroom. Now everyone wanted to punish her. Because she was beautiful, because she was careless, because she was bad. I wanted to punish her, too.
After a minute, Joe placed his hand over mine, so gently. His hand needed my hand. I could feel it in his fingers, his worried fingers. I slipped my hand away.
Chapter 32
“I had a headache, I went out for some air, and he was there,” Mom said. “He said, come look at this palace across the street, you can’t believe it. Then he made a pass. I pushed him away, I didn’t want to be rude. I said, ‘Down, boy’ or some such. That Wally kid got it all wrong. That’s all.”
We sat together, Mom and me on the couch, Joe in the armchair. Grandma Glad sat on the edge of the bed, her arms folded.
“They’re going to hang me for it,” Joe said. He didn’t look at Mom. “That was all they needed.”
“She’s the one who should hang,” Grandma Glad said.
“That’s enough!” Mom’s voice rose on the enough. She sprang up, her fists clenched at her sides. “I’ve had it, old lady. This is my husband, not yours. I don’t need you sticking your nose in our business.”
“You need me in your business!” Grandma Glad snapped. “You see what happens when I’m not around? You see what you do to him? You can twist him around your pinky finger in your fancy nail polish, Miss High and Mighty, but I know the truth. You can put sawdust on the floor, but a fish store still stinks like fish!”
Mom looked like she wanted to leap over the coffee table and wrap her hands around Grandma Glad’s throat. “You wouldn’t know the truth if you tripped and landed in it nose first, Gladys. I love Joe and I’m not going anywhere. Unless he sends me away.” She looked Joe full in the face, and for the first time since we left the courthouse, he met her eyes.
“Unless you send me away,” she said to him. Her voice broke.
Joe stood. “Ma, could you leave us alone for a few minutes? Go on down to the lobby, order yourself some coffee.”
Grandma Glad blinked. “What?”
“They have some nice pastries down there. Have a little rest.”
“You’re kicking me out?”
Joe stood his ground. “I need to talk to my family.”
“I’m your family!”
Joe walked to the door and opened it. “Just a half hour.”
Grandma Glad couldn’t refuse. She picked up her big purse. She walked out, furious. Her face was dark red. After all these years complaining about her blood pressure, she finally had a problem.
Joe closed the door after her. He and Mom just looked at each other for the longest moment.
“This is how it’s going to be from now on,” Joe said in a dead voice. “After this is over, when we get home, we never say his name again.”
Mom nodded. “Yes, Joe.”
“The only way I can do this is if it’s like the war. I come home and I forget it.”
“Yes.”
He crossed over and put his hands on her shoulders and shook her. “You get it?” he said through his teeth.
Mom’s careful French twist came down from its pins. “Yes, Joe.”
With every exclamation, he shook her again. “And I’m going to buy us a house, and we’re going to live and be happy. That’s what’s going to happen!”
He dropped Mom’s shoulders and she fell back on the couch. I was pressed against the corner.
Joe shook his head, his eyes closed. Then he turned and walked out. The door slammed behind him.
Mom’s face was tight and scared. Her hair was half pinned up, half falling down. “Accessory to murder,” she said. “That’s what they’ll charge me with. That’s the least it will be.”
She held her head in her hands and rocked. “Do you know what this means? A trial. Disgrace and ruin and prison. And worse for Joe. They’ll hang him. What did I do?” She started to cry in jerks, her breath coming sharp and painful. “What did I do?”
I didn’t move. I sat and waited until she was almost quiet.
She crawled over to me on the couch. She put her hands on my cheeks.
“You and me,” she whispered.
I couldn’t answer her.
“Stick like glue. Stick like glue, Evie!”
I couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t give her that. I couldn’t go back to the place where we’d been.
It rained that night, all night, a soft pattering rain. There was no wind, so we kept the windows open. It must have cleared after midnight because a breeze came through, bringing the smell of the ocean, strong and tangy. I had the bed to myself. Grandma Glad had made a big show of getting her own room, to make a point that nobody cared about. So the three of us slept in the same room, or didn’t sleep, our breaths mixing all together, in and out.
It was that night.
The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast. I heard my mother inhale as she took a long pull on a cigarette. Her lips stuck on the filter, so I knew she was still wearing lipstick. She’d been up all night.
She lay on the bed next to me. I felt her fingers on my hair and I kept sleep-breathing. I risked a look under my eyelashes.
She was in her pink nightgown, ankles crossed, head flung back against the pillows. Arm in the air, elbow bent, cigarette glowing in her fingers. Tanned legs glistening in the darkness. Blond hair tumbling past her shoulders.
I breathed in smoke and My Sin perfume. It was her smell. It filled the air.
I didn’t move, but I could tell she knew I was awake. I kept on pretending to be asleep. She pretended not to know.
I breathed in and out, perfume and smoke, perfume and smoke, and we lay like that for a long time, until I heard the seagulls crying, sadder than a funeral, and I knew it was almost morning.
I tipped over the empty bottle of soda and anchored it in the sand.
I’d gone over it all in my head, and I still didn’t know. I remembered all the things I’d seen. It was all there in my head, the things that happened, the things we said.
I should stay away from you, pussycat.
Me? I’m just a softy.
I wish a lot of things, and one of them is, I wish you were back in that house, with your battle-axe Grandma Glad.
The rest of us, we have to figure out how to break the rules.
Where does she go, Evie?
I like to blow horns. Nice and loud, so everyone can hear.
Let me put it this way: I think he’d be a hell of a lot happier if I disappeared.
Tom told me I should look them up in New York. Now that I’ve got old times to talk about with them.
You’re not the type of guy to hold a grudge, are you?
What did I do?
If I could add up the clues, would I know the truth? Would I know if Joe had planned to kill Peter? Did everything that added up for Joe—jealousy and fear and spite—make him think, yeah, this was his only answer? Or maybe he hadn’t planned it. Maybe out on that pounding ocean he found his answer. Maybe Mom was “downstairs” and didn’t see it. Maybe she did. Maybe she was so mad at Peter for double-timing her with me that she helped.
No. If I knew one thing, I knew that Mom didn’t do it. She put her hands over her ears during thunderstorms.
The ashtray had flown through the air and shattered. Her face had been so blank.
How could I know what she was capable of? I’d seen what regular ordinary men could do. I’d seen newsreels of what they found after the war.
But I’d never thought about it before. The magazines and movies told me different, that the war was over and we were all okey-dokey, drinking Cokes and smoking Camels and saving up for the new Chevrolet.
Joe was part of that. He came back from the war and hit the ground running. I’d admired that, how the very next day he started making calls. I didn’t know then what he was doing, how late at night he’d talk to Gladys, both of them with glasses of whiskey, talking low. And we were all so full of happiness because he was home that nobody thought twice.
“Let them have their time,” Mom had said. “There’s plenty of Joe to go around now.”
He’d wanted success so badly that he’d stolen and he’d lied. How bad did he want to keep it?
If I lined up the reasons for Joe to be guilty, I could see them clear as morning. But if he was telling the truth, it just meant he looked guilty, not that he was. Sure, he’d asked Wally about the hurricane hole. But Joe was the type of guy who was interested in whatever he didn’t know. He was always asking the mailman about what were the most comfortable shoes, or the milkman about how he got up so early.
Would Mom stay with him if she knew he was a murderer? She didn’t seem scared of him. She seemed scared of him going away.
Could it really happen like this? That a girl like you can make me feel…
Make you feel what?
Make me feel.
What did I owe you, Peter?
Truth and justice? If judges would judge, if lawyers wouldn’t trick, if reporters would tell what really happened instead of what sold papers.
Fat chance.
Truth, justice…I always thought they were absolutes, like God. And Mom. And apple pie.
But you could make apple pie from Ritz crackers. You could make cakes without sugar. We learned how to fake things, during the war.
What did loyalty mean? Loyalty to the family, to the church, to the neighborhood, to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Why did loyalty stop there? Why didn’t it keep on going? It didn’t seem to take a spin around the whole world, that was for sure.
I wished I could get one clean breath from this humid air. I wanted the snap of autumn, blue sky clear and deep, the familiar cracks of the sidewalks, my feet jumping so surely over them, never missing. I wanted to go home so badly.
I touched the place on my temple that her lips always found, ever since I was a baby. Did everything funnel down to that one delicate place, the place where love was?
Chapter 33
Mom had bought four new dresses, all of them dark colors. I picked out a navy dress she hadn’t worn yet, with a narrow belt and a little matching jacket. I took out white and navy highheeled spectator pumps from a brand-new box. I slipped them on. They hurt.
I brushed my hair with hard strokes and drew it back off my forehead. I twisted it and put in the pins like an expert. I rolled up the tube of Fatal Apple lipstick and painted my mouth.
I looked like a doll, a dish. The image in the mirror—it wasn’t me.
If I had the clothes and the walk, I could make up a whole new person. I wasn’t who I used to be, anyway. A different me would do the thing I had to do today. The dish would do it.
“Evie?” Mom was awake now, groping for her first cigarette. She got a good look at me, and she sat straight up. “What are you doing?”
Her panicked voice woke up Joe.
I looked at them, in separate beds, the sheets tangled and twisting onto the floor. I saw a purplish bruise on Mom’s arm, right where Joe had grabbed her.
Wobbling a little bit in the too-tight shoes, I walked out.
I couldn’t explain, you see. I couldn’t tell her that I understood just a little better what Peter was talking about when he talked about war. I found out that what you think is necessary, what you have to do—well, all of a sudden, that can cover plenty of new ground.
>
It’s just a matter of what you’re willing to do.
Noise and heat slamming against my ears. Camera shutters clicking. People yelling. Sun hitting my eyes, glinting off metal like shards of glass flying.
They thought Joe was guilty now, so the sidewalk in front of the courthouse was filled. So were the stairs and the hallways. Reporters and photographers lunged forward, flashbulbs popping like gunshots.
The instructions were clear. The three of us were to link arms and walk up the stairs to the courtroom.
“Don’t stop, whatever you do,” Mr. Markel had ordered us in the car. “Don’t stop to look at anyone—just keep walking.”
We all looked at his narrow back in his brown suit as he used his shoulders and his walk to clear the way. Our pipsqueak attorney had turned into a pretty decent linebacker.
We didn’t look at each other. I had showed up at the last minute with Mr. Markel, and there was no time to talk to Mom and Joe. Their fear was in the car with us. I wouldn’t meet Mom’s scared eyes.
We walked hard and fast, our sides pressed together. My navy straw hat was pulled over my eyes, shadowing my face.
Didja do it, Joe?
Did she help you do it?
Didja love him, Bev?
Repent, sinners! There is one almighty judge and his name is Jesus!
They called us Joe and Bev and Evelyn. The photographers said, Evelyn, turn this way and Aw, come on, Bev, give us a look over here. Like we were pals.
Not even my teachers called me Evelyn. I would give them Evelyn. Someone with cool hands and a confident walk.
I tried to make the noise into one blur of sound. I thought about the Third Avenue El. We hardly ever took it because Mom was afraid of it. She didn’t like subways either—she closed her eyes almost the whole time. After all, her parents had died in a train crash. It was me who had to watch out for the stops.
I always wanted to take the El. The train raced above the avenue, and you could see right into apartment windows, especially if it was getting dark and lights were on. Just a quick look, like a snapshot someone snatches away from your hand. A man in his undershirt eating at a table. A woman putting on her hat. Someone sleeping in a chair. Down below you, noise had a shadow. Under the tracks there was the roar of the train, and then the echo of the roar, and then the bounce of it against the buildings. But you were in the middle of it, way above. You weren’t part of the city; you were cutting right through the heart of it.
What I Saw and How I Lied Page 16