by Jan Burke
“I was talking to someone about this the other day. I remembered that he hated to write on the blackboard,” I said. “He even typed up overhead transparencies to teach his stat class.”
She nodded. “So going back to that day—he’s in this office, frantic. It’s like something from the Twilight Zone. He’s searching and searching for something to prove his innocence, and everything he looks at seems to prove his guilt. Things are missing, or they’ve been changed.”
“Who had access to the office?”
“Only a few people. The chair of the department, Lucas, Dr. Selman, another research assistant, and the custodians—who weren’t likely to be typing up fake pages to a thesis. Lucas said the chair of the department was in the clear as far as he was concerned. At first he was just plain puzzled. Figured somebody must have broken into the office. But of course there was no sign of that, and so the committee was growing openly skeptical about Lucas’s innocence.
“So Lucas asked if he could talk to the other student who had access to the room. Nadine Preston was her name. Lucas was about to graduate—at least, that’s what everyone thought—and so, at Dr. Selman’s request, Lucas had been training this Nadine to take his place on the project. Did you know her?”
“No,” I said.
“Pretty little red-haired gal.”
“Red-haired?”
“Yes.”
“She wear it in a bowl cut?”
“Yes! I thought you said you didn’t know her?”
“I didn’t. But I’ve seen a photograph of her. Quite recently.”
21
DID YOU MAIL a set of photographs to Ben Watterson?”
“Who?”
“The president of the Bank of Las Piernas.”
Before she could answer, Frank came into the kitchen. He was dressed for work, which reminded me that I needed to get myself into gear.
“Good morning,” she greeted him.
“Good morning,” he answered, and gave my shoulder a squeeze as he walked over to the coffeemaker.
He looked between us as he poured a cup of coffee, then asked, “Are you going into work today, Irene?”
“Yes, although I might go in a little late. June, what are your plans for the day?”
“I guess the first thing I’ll need to do is rent a car.”
“If you only need to get around town—”
“No, I have things to do here, but I need to get back to Riverside to… to make arrangements for the funeral and so on.”
No one said anything.
“Charles offered to drive back down here and pick me up,” she said. “But he works so hard and was up so late last night, I just hate to make him come all the way back out here. And the bus takes twice as long as driving. Besides, what it would cost to take cabs around town and then take the Greyhound home, I’d just as soon rent a car.”
“There’s a rental place downtown,” I said. “I can drop you off on the way to work.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you have any other friends in Las Piernas?” Frank asked.
“Other friends?” She laughed softly and shook her head. “No, not now. I moved away from here just after Lucas started college. Our old neighborhood doesn’t even exist anymore. I might be able to find some of the people I knew from the church. Some of those people might still be around here somewhere. I could find out where the church moved to, see if any of my old friends are still in the congregation. But I haven’t seen any of them in so long, I wouldn’t even know who to ask for.”
“What do you mean, your old neighborhood doesn’t exist?” I asked.
“I mean, you go to look for it, you won’t find it. It’s gone. You might find a lot of empty buildings and some vacant lots. That’s all. We used to live in a big old hotel that had been turned into apartments. The landlord let it get so run-down, I hated that place. It wasn’t the worst by any means, but it wasn’t where I wanted my children to live. Lord, how I wanted to move out of that old place.”
“You worked as a teacher then?”
“Yes, but that was before I had a permanent position. We moved a lot when the children were small. My late husband was a good man, but he had trouble holding down a job. And he wasn’t the money-saving kind, if you know what I mean. We never had the ends to pay the rent, nothing. By the time we were living here in Las Piernas—must have been when Lucas was six or seven years old—my husband’s health began to fail. A man can’t drink like that and not have some kind of problem. Soon as I’d get money saved, he’d go into the hospital. Even after he died, it took me a long time to pay off all the hospital bills.” She shrugged. “About the time I got free of that, I wanted to save for Lucas’s college education. As it turned out, I was able to move sooner than I planned. Lucas got those scholarships and Charles made up the rest of it.”
“Charles?”
“Yes. I told you he was in Vietnam. Charles sent his soldier’s pay to us. Lucas used some of it, and I bought a house in Charles’s and my name. I was able to move, and Lucas was able to live on campus. When Charles came back home, he lived with me in Riverside while he started his business. Later, he got his own place. Charles even helped Lucas with his graduate school expenses.”
I began to understand Charles a little better. Investing his combat pay in a brother who was kicked out of school must have caused some bitterness between them. And I began to see Lucas differently as well. The committee had denied him more than a degree. Lucas had been the bearer of dreams, the one who was supposed to make it.
“Where was your old neighborhood?” Frank asked.
She named a set of cross streets. I looked up at her.
“Do you know where that is?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I was just there a few weeks ago.”
I didn’t tell her that her son was there as well, sleeping on a bench.
I WAS RUNNING LATE by then, so I called the city desk. But before I could tell her what was going on, Lydia said, “John wants to talk to you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I’m not sure you’re in trouble. He seemed cheerful when he told me that I should transfer any calls from you to his office.”
“Cheerful. Lydia, cats are cheerful when they have feathers sticking out of their mouths.”
“Hmm,” was her only answer to that, and she transferred me.
Figuring I’d go for the “best defense is a good offense” strategy, I explained to John what had happened the night before and said that I’d be in late.
“You’re not punching a clock, are you, Kelly?” he said easily.
“Not until deadline.”
“Exactly,” he said. “See me when you get in.”
That didn’t sound too promising.
“I REMEMBER ONE PHOTOGRAPH, and a letter, now that you mention it,” June said as we drove downtown. I had asked her again about the letters to Ben Watterson. “The letter was addressed to someone at a bank, I believe. Lucas asked me to mail it for him. He called one day, said he had left it behind when he was visiting me. Left it in his bedroom.” She looked out the car window, then added, “I always had a room ready for him, whenever he wanted to stay with me. When he was in college, he’d come out there to see me all the time. Not so much—not so much later on.”
When I asked her about his last visit to Riverside, she told me he had made the two-hour bus trip to Riverside one weekend; that was a few days before the first envelope arrived in Las Piernas.
“He only asked me to mail one, but he had been sending out a lot of résumés that weekend.”
“Did he tell you they were résumés?”
She frowned. “Well, no, but he was down to the copy shop one day, and I guess I just assumed that was what he was doing. He had some copies made, then typed up letters and took them with him. But he forgot the one envelope. That was the only one I really saw for more than a minute or two.”
“Do you know what was in it?” I asked.
“Well, I t
hink so,” she said. “He asked me to write something on the back of a photograph for him—that photo of him and the man from the bank, where Lucas was receiving a scholarship from them. His own handwriting was so terrible, and I don’t think he wanted to type on the photograph. He had a letter all typed up and ready to go with it.”
“Letter? Are you sure you saw a letter?”
“Of course I’m sure. I saw him put the photo in that envelope with a letter. I figured he might be looking for a job there.”
So there was more than the scholarship photo in the first envelope, which Lucas must have mailed himself, sometime before he left Riverside. June, not knowing that first letter had been mailed, would think the second envelope—the one with the photocopy—contained the photo she wrote on.
“Did Lucas show you any other photos while he was visiting?”
“No, just the one. Why do you ask?”
“I’m just trying to figure out who he was in contact with, what kinds of things he was doing during the past six weeks. Did he make any phone calls while he was in Riverside?”
“Yes, now that you mention it, he called and talked to someone named… let’s see, what was it?” She murmured to herself for a moment. “Ed? No, Edison!”
“His last name was Edison?”
“No, his first name. I don’t know what his last name was. But Lucas called him when he was at my place. I remember because Lucas insisted on leaving some money for the call. He had spent twenty dollars to ride out to see me, didn’t hardly have a nickel to his name, but he left money for that call.”
“Was he working?”
“Nothing too steady. But he told me he took on odd jobs from the shelter—mostly handyman work—painting, carpentry, things like that. I think he was a little embarrassed to tell me that was what he was doing, but I told him, if carpentry was good enough work for the Lord, it was good enough for him.”
I wondered about the suit I had seen in the hotel room. I doubted even Jesus wore a suit to a carpentry job. I needed to talk to someone who had seen Lucas more recently.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Go over your phone bill. Try to find the number he called, the one for this Edison.”
She smiled. “You are going to help, aren’t you?”
“I would have anyway.”
I figured she already knew that, but she seemed relieved all the same.
SHE DIDN’T SAY MUCH after that, just kept looking out the car window. Soon I realized she was studying the street people. She was watching a man huddled in the entry way of a jeweler’s shop; a bone-thin woman picking at her matted hair as she sat at a bus stop, talking to herself. At one stoplight, June stared at a sleeping figure—a man in a knit cap, curled up in a ragged sleeping bag on a wooden pallet. A man about Lucas’s size. She turned to me and asked, “Where did he live?”
She meant Lucas, of course. There were so many answers to that question. I picked what I supposed was the best answer of the not-so-great alternatives. “Would you like me to take you by the shelter?”
She nodded.
I HADN’T ESPECIALLY wanted to run into Roberta, but as it happened, she was one of the first people we saw. She had her arm around a teenager. The teenager held a pale, sleepy toddler, one child seeming not much larger than the other. Roberta was walking to the door with them when we opened it from the other side, in time to hear her say, “The clinic is just three blocks away. They’ll take good care of your son—” When Roberta saw me, her arm tightened on the young mother’s shoulder, causing the woman to eye me warily.
“Irene,” Roberta said, then surprised the hell out of me by bursting into tears.
“What’s wrong?” the young woman said with sharp concern, but Roberta only moved to embrace me. I held her a little woodenly, my own exhaustion and emotional state making it hard for me not to start crying myself. The toddler beat me to it—June and the teenager were left staring at us as the boy began to wail in sympathy.
That, fortunately, brought out Roberta’s caretaker instincts. “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said, straightening and pulling tissues out of a pocket. With reassuring words she sent mother and child on their way, and I finally got a chance to introduce June Monroe.
“Lucas’s mother?” Roberta asked in a strained voice.
June nodded.
Tears welled up in Roberta’s eyes, but she kept them in check this time. Roberta swallowed hard and motioned us to follow her, her face a mask of misery. We walked past a roomful of people who stood in small groups, people who were chatting amiably until the kid had started howling. We were watched with curious eyes, but no one approached us as we made our way to a staircase.
That common room was the warmest-looking of the ones we passed through. The shelter had been converted from an abandoned military warehouse and office building. The living quarters had been divided into roughly two sections, one for women and children, the other for men. A food bank, job training, and other services were carried out in common areas. There were Alcoholics Anonymous and groups for dealing with other addictions and problems meeting several times a day—you couldn’t stay at the shelter unless you were clean and sober.
The shelter had the look of most institutional buildings: cinder block painted over with thick coats of bargain colors, concrete floors occasionally covered with gray carpet that was not much softer, harsh lighting sporadically relieved by skylights and high windows, metal doors with shiny round doorknobs and scuffed kickplates.
And yet, here and there, someone had tried to make this fortress yield a little. Painted a mural on a wall. Put an artificial ficus tree in a corner. Taped up posters, some of which bore images of faraway vistas, though most were commercial reproductions of inspirational messages in pastel scrawls.
We turned down a hallway. Two men at the far end of it nodded and smiled at Roberta. “Tree planting tomorrow, Robbie,” one called out. “Guy from the nursery came through.”
“Great,” Roberta said. “We have some people working on improving the playground for the family center,” she explained to us.
As we passed a couple of open offices, I noticed the carpeting in them was thicker and less worn, but the furniture had the mix-and-match look of donated goods. A secretary looked up from a computer that sat on a battered wooden desk, saw Roberta, said “No messages,” and went back to her keyboard.
Roberta unlocked one of the metal doors and let us into her office. Neat but crowded, it had won the struggle against starkness. Fresh-cut flowers, four big chairs, a bright blue file cabinet, and a bookcase—all helped to draw my attention from the orange sherbet walls. But not much of the walls showed anyway; they were covered with drawings by children.
A range of ages and skills were represented, in colors dark and bright—as were the subjects depicted. I was first struck by the drawings of houses. Roberta saw me studying one and said, “Yes, children without homes draw houses.” Some of the houses were drawn with bars on the windows—safety or a prison? I wondered. There was a picture of a boy being stretched between a woman and a man, another of a tiny girl surrounded by four huge adults; there were pictures of Godzilla, of sharks with teeth, of boats on the water, of gravestones, of trees with big holes in them. Some depicted small figures crying big tears. Others were of hearts, flowers, smiling faces. More than one said “I love Robbie,” R’s and b’s facing whichever way they pleased.
In one corner, an easel and paints stood next to a set of shelves full of toys.
“Sit down, please,” Roberta said. She seemed to have regained her composure. “Mrs. Monroe, we were all very sad to hear of Lucas’s death. It there any way in which I can be of help?”
“I just wanted to see where he lived.”
“Of course. I’d be happy to show you around the shelter. It’s come a long way from what we started with, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.” She looked down at her hands folded in her lap, then said, “I will miss Lucas. I admired him.”
You’ve changed your tu
ne, I thought, then became angry at myself for being so critical of her. She had actually helped Lucas, while I had only run from him.
“Admired him? Why?” June asked.
Roberta looked taken aback.
“I mean,” June said, “what made him any different from any other drunk that came walking in here looking for a handout? He was just another man that couldn’t make it out there, right?”
While I sat wondering why June Monroe had decided to lower the temperature in the room, Roberta said, “He was not a failure. He spent six weeks sober before he died. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to anybody who can pass up a drink, but to people like your son, Mrs. Monroe, that was a life—” Roberta stopped, color rising to her cheeks.
“A lifetime,” June finished for her.
“Yes.”
“Roberta,” I said, “Lucas told you he was working on something, right?”
“I’m sorry, Irene, everything he told me remains confidential.”
“But now that he’s dead—” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” she insisted.
“My son talked to you?” June asked.
“Yes. But I’m afraid whatever Lucas said to me in counseling sessions is privileged.”
“Whose privilege?” June asked. “Yours?”
“No, Lucas’s. He never told me anything intending that others would know of it. Except in cases where I believe someone may be in physical danger from a client, I have to respect confidentiality. Lucas’s death doesn’t change the fact that he trusted me. It’s not up to me to judge what he would want others to know now that he’s no longer living.”
The silence which followed stretched out until I could hear the marching click of the second hand on Roberta’s quartz wall clock.
“When Roberta told me that Lucas had been missing,” I said, “I went looking for him. If not for her concern, I don’t know how long it would have been before anyone thought of searching for him.”