She went on to describe the color of the car — red — and its reliability and mileage — both miraculous. I was happy to dwell on the subject of the Saturn. As Father Marcelli had predicted, meeting Marguerite Vasquez had settled any doubts I’d inherited from my editor regarding the propriety of little Tina’s fundraising. But there remained the challenge Boxleiter had tossed me as I’d left his office: proving the car had come from the Blessed Mother.
I asked Marguerite if she remembered the name of the previous owner of the Saturn, which would have appeared above hers on the title document she’d found in her mailbox.
Mrs. Donica thrust herself across the table, her arm extended, her palm flat. “Don’t tell him,” she said. “Don’t say another word. He wants to tell people it wasn’t a miracle, that it wasn’t the Virgin Mary.”
I told Marguerite what the priest had told me, that identifying the human donor wouldn’t prove that Mary wasn’t behind the miracle. The donor might even confirm that she was. But it was a waste of my time. Her mother-in-law’s outstretched arm and upturned palm had sealed her lips. I would never hear another word from Marguerite Vasquez.
I thanked them for the interview and started to leave. Then I decided to test a little theory I’d come up with. I turned and said that it was a shame Tony Donica hadn’t lived to see the good his daughter was doing.
Marguerite only nodded sadly, but Mrs. Donica made the sign of the cross for the third time.
Once outside in the cold, I started my Chevy and we sat there shaking together. While the engine warmed, I placed a call to the Star Republic, to the cubicle of Eric Neuman, once an unpromising copyboy and now the paper’s specialist in computer research, legitimate and not-so.
“Where are you?” he asked before I could say more than my name. “The Christmas parties are starting up. The one in Home Delivery is going full-bore. They’ll be dancing on their desktops by two.”
I told him I was on a special assignment for Boxleiter and that I needed to find a man named Tony Donica. The theory I’d carried away from the Altar Rosary room was that Donica was still alive. That was my interpretation of Mrs. Donica’s habit of blessing herself every time someone mentioned her son’s death. She didn’t seem the type to be praying for the repose of that black sheep’s soul. So I’d started to wonder if her signs of the cross might be little acts of contrition for an ongoing lie.
“Have you got anything besides a name?” Neuman asked. “It’s a big country, and somebody spiked my eggnog.”
I related the little I knew of Donica: He’d supposedly been in an automobile accident in Las Vegas and he’d once worked at Methodist Hospital.
“Bingo,” Neuman said. “I’ve got a buddy over at Methodist. He can get me Donica’s Social Security number. With that, it’ll be easy. Give me twenty minutes.”
I bought lunch at a drive-through White Castle on South Street, thinking as I paid of all the free food I was missing at the office pitch-ins. Before I’d finished my last burger, my mobile rang.
“Got him,” Neuman said. “He’s receiving disability payments from Social Security. But I hope he’s not trying to live on what they’re sending him.”
I asked where in Nevada the checks were being delivered, though I was secretly hoping that his address was nearer to home.
“He’s back in Indiana. In Greenfield, of all places. Maybe he’s a James Whitcomb Riley fan.”
That Hoosier poet’s hometown was a thirty-minute drive east of Indianapolis. A short drive, in other words, but long enough for me to sketch out the rest of my Christmas story. I was seeing Donica as the mystery donor of the Saturn. How he’d managed it on his disability checks, I had no idea. Maybe he’d had some money left from an insurance settlement. I also didn’t know why he was pretending to be dead. The reasons I considered included Donica’s ongoing remorse over having deserted his wife and child and the possibility that he had been horribly disfigured in the accident. I was pulling for the remorse angle because the fairy-tale ending I saw for the story was a holiday reconciliation of Tony and Marguerite, brought about by the divine intercession of the Star Republic.
The address Neuman had given me belonged to an old building not far from Greenfield’s courthouse square. The structure resembled a two-story army barracks, though it had been covered in some kind of composite material intended by its manufacturer to look like shake shingles. Extremely large and extremely flat shake shingles. The building had a fire escape on each end and other indications that it was an apartment building, but no sign giving its name. The names of the tenants appeared on a row of rural mailboxes wired to a wooden fence. Tony Donica occupied apartment 1B.
Donica was in, but not receiving visitors. When I knocked on his door, it opened only as wide as its security chain would permit, which, luckily for me, wasn’t as wide as the muzzle of the Rott-weiler that tried to bull its way out. Behind the door, in the shadows, I could just see Donica, his face a little lower than my chest, the height of a man in a wheelchair.
“What the hell do you want?” he demanded, the words so slurred I knew he was as drunk as the revelers back at the Star Republic.
I identified myself and told him I wanted to talk about his daughter. He then offered to sell me an interview. Twenty dollars for five minutes. I passed the money in.
We talked in Donica’s combination living room, dining room, and bedroom, a dank, dirty place that made me glad I hadn’t sprung for the ten-minute interview. Donica had lost both legs above the knee, and the only clear spaces in the apartment were the pathways he used to wheel his chair from his unmade bed to his cluttered table or out to his bathroom or kitchenette.
“What about Tina?” he asked to get the clock running. “Something happen to her?”
I could see a trace of the good looks that had won the hearts of Marguerite and the ill-fated, unnamed blonde, though his chin was unshaved and his hair both unwashed and uncombed.
I told him I’d come about the car Tina had prayed for and gotten for Christmas. Donica’s expression conveyed as much comprehension as that of the dog seated beside him.
“Why would a little brat need a car?”
I told him it had been a present for her mother.
“That bitch,” Donica said. “What kind of car?” And, when I’d told him, “A piece of crap. I had a Trans Am.”
He pointed to a framed photo of a gleaming black car. I looked around for a picture of Tina, but didn’t spot one.
I started to tell him about the roof Tina was praying for.
Donica cut in with, “What do you care about some church in Milwaukee?”
It was my turn to look blank.
“Milwaukee,” Donica repeated, sounding out the word as though for a child. “Where that fireman Marguerite married took her and the brat. My mother told me all about it, so don’t think I don’t know.”
By then, I was starting to realize the extent of what Donica didn’t know. He didn’t know that Tina and Marguerite were still in Indianapolis. He didn’t know about last year’s Christmas miracle or this year’s. That didn’t seem possible after all the airtime the Indianapolis television stations had devoted to the story. Their signals carried to Greenfield easily. I gave the apartment a closer examination. There was no television in sight.
When I asked Donica about that, he said, “I hate television. People on television have legs.” He added, a little defensively, “I’ve got a great stereo. With satellite radio. No commercials.”
No local news, either. That left the original newspaper story about Tina, the one that had produced the car. The Star Republic sold a suburban edition in Greenfield. I asked Donica if he ever saw the paper.
“Waste of good beer money,” he said.
When I’d first heard that Donica had chosen to settle in little Greenfield, I’d thought it was part of his plan to pass himself off as dead. Now it seemed that the remote location had to be part of someone else’s plan. Donica confirmed that when I asked him about his apartmen
t.
“My mom got me this place cheap. One of her old hen friends owns the building. If I had the money, I’d have a place in Indy. On South Meridian, where all the bars are. There isn’t a bar in this town worth wheeling myself to.”
So the same woman who had lied to her son about Marguerite marrying and moving north had tucked Donica away at a safe distance. That was to protect the lie she’d told him and the one she’d told Marguerite, namely that her son had died in Las Vegas. Without a television or a newspaper or a neighborhood bar, he was as isolated as he would have been on the moon. His mother could let her granddaughter have a week of celebrity without worrying too much about Donica finding out.
I was wondering how to break the truth to him when he said, “You never answered me. Why does your paper care about some church in Milwaukee? You said the brat’s praying for a roof. The little bitch. She’s a chip off the old bitch block, I bet. If she’s got an in with God, she should be praying for new legs for her old man. I’d shake them out of her if I could get my hands on her.
“You said you came here because of the car she prayed for. Why? You expect me to cry for you because I didn’t get one?”
My theory seemed ridiculous now, but I’d spent twenty bucks to confirm it, so I ran it by him.
Donica laughed himself into a hacking fit. “You think I bought that car for Marguerite? You think if I had the money for a car I’d waste it on that bitch? Is she here taking care of me like a woman’s supposed to? Hell no. She’s in Milwaukee, screwing some goddamn fireman. If only I’d married her like she begged me to. Me and Zeus would have that bitch walking around here on her knees.” He rubbed the dog’s head vigorously. “Wouldn’t we, boy?”
So much for my bright idea about the Saturn. That left the Christmas miracle I’d been contemplating, the reuniting of Tina and her mother with Donica. The thought that I’d almost done that, had almost blurted out to Donica that Marguerite believed him dead, literally made me dizzy. I felt as though I were standing on the edge of a cliff with one foot in the air.
Donica snapped me out of it by saying, “Your time’s up. Get out of here or I’ll have Zeus chase you out.”
I drove back downtown, intending to join the Star Republic’s Christmas parties, now well under way. But when I got off the interstate, I drove to St. Mary’s. I still wanted to find the person who had donated the car. More than that, I wanted to hear the person say that a vision of the Virgin or a surplus of Dickensian Christmas spirit had motivated the gift. I no longer cared what the motive was, as long as it was positive. I needed something to counteract the darkness I’d found in Greenfield. But to locate the mystery donor, I had to do something dark myself.
On my earlier visit, I’d left St. Mary’s by a back door very near the rectory. I tried that door now and found it unlocked. On my way to the Altar Rosary room I worked out strategies for separating Marguerite and Mrs. Donica, but I didn’t need one. The “mother-in-law” was seated alone in the little room, knitting.
It was a picture worthy of the front of a greeting card, but when the woman looked up and saw me, her expression instantly soured and the needles she held suddenly looked as dangerous as her son’s dog.
“What are you doing back here?” she demanded.
I told her I’d just been to Greenfield, and that was enough. She was out of her seat so fast she might have stabbed me before I’d raised a hand, if she’d headed for me and not the door.
“You can’t tell Marguerite,” she said when she had it safely closed. “You can’t. She’d run to him, and that would be the end of her and her better life. I know. I lived with Tony’s father for twenty years. And Tony’s worse.” She blessed herself again. “It isn’t just his legs. It’s him. I won’t let Marguerite sacrifice herself. I won’t let little Tina live like that, maybe grow up like that herself.”
I told Mrs. Donica that it might not be necessary for me to speak to Marguerite. I only wanted the name of the previous owner of the Saturn. Mrs. Donica could tell me that herself.
She understood the bargain at once: Give me the donor’s name and let the Star Republic take some of the glitter away from the original miracle, or I would tell Marguerite everything. It was a bluff, but she didn’t call it.
“It wasn’t a person,” she said, her voice flat and tired. “It was a company. Friendly Motors. In Terre Haute.”
Halfway to the door, I turned and asked her why she’d let Tina risk a second vigil. There was always the chance some friend of Donica’s might pass him the word.
“I didn’t want it to happen again,” she said. “But I could never say no to her.”
I thought she meant Tina. Then she glanced toward an old painting of a smiling woman in blue, and I was no longer sure.
Terre Haute was farther west of Indianapolis than Greenfield was east. I tried phoning Friendly Motors from my car, got a busy signal, and decided to make the drive. If my call had gone through, I never would have learned the truth, because the man who knew the answer, Marshall Henson, owner and manager of Friendly Motors, intended to take the secret to his grave.
Henson made that clear to me before he’d finished shaking my hand. “Swore I’d never tell a soul and I never will,” he said as he ushered me into his tiny office. He was an older gentleman whose white hair and dentures shared an identical yellow tinge.
“That’s the only Christmas miracle I’ve been involved with since I helped General Patton lift the siege of Bastogne in ’forty-four, and I’d hate to do anything to foul it up. Not that I don’t tell the story of that Saturn to folks,” he added, gesturing toward the wall to my right. “But I never tell the name of the man who bought the car.”
The wall Henson had indicated was so cluttered with sales awards and group photos of dealership-sponsored softball teams that it took me a moment to spot something connected to Tina Vasquez. That something was a framed newspaper article describing how Tina and her mother had found the Saturn. The story was dated December 26 and carried the Star Republic’s name at the top. It was the work of a reporter I knew very well, a frustrated novelist named Joan Johnson.
“I insisted that the buyer send me a copy of whatever the Indy paper ran about the car so I’d have a memento,” Henson said. “Tell you the truth, I asked for the clipping so I’d be sure the guy hadn’t been pulling my leg. I gave him a great deal on that car because of the story about the little girl — five thousand even for a really nice car — and I wanted to be sure he wasn’t ripping me off.
“Anyway, he kept his side of the bargain, so I have to keep mine. Sorry you drove all the way over here for nothing.”
I accepted his apology, even though my drive hadn’t been for nothing. I’d seen a very rare thing, a Xerox copy of a newspaper article that had never run. Boxleiter himself had told me earlier that day that he’d personally killed the Vasquez follow-up story.
I drove back a little faster than I’d driven out. On the way, I placed a call to Joan Johnson. It took awhile for the person who answered her phone to locate Joan. While I waited out the search, I listened to loud voices and laughter and even singing. I decided the office parties were reaching their zenith, which Joan confirmed when she finally came on the line.
“Where are you? You’re going to miss all the fun. In fact, you’ve missed most of it already.”
I told her I was on my way in and asked if she remembered writing the second Tina Vasquez story.
“One of my better efforts,” Joan said, “so of course it ended up in the trash. Boxleiter gave me the assignment himself, asked me to run him off a page proof. Then he told me he’d decided not to use it.”
I asked her if she’d ever gotten her proof back.
“Why would I have wanted that? Anytime I need scrap paper, I just tear off a page of my novel. Hurry up back here. People are starting to sneak out.”
I did hurry, but Joan had been right. By the time I reached the paper’s employee parking lot, half the spaces were empty.
I nearl
y ran on my way inside. Then I did run up the stairs to the third floor, where the offices of the credit union were located. The lights were still on and two of the clerks, Dee and Lois, were still on duty, though both looked as though they’d been at the Christmas cheer.
I walked in as casually as my shortness of breath would allow, wished them a happy holiday, and mentioned that someone in Accounting had brought in a male stripper. They asked me to watch the phones and left abruptly.
So abruptly that Dee forgot to sign off her computer terminal, a serious breach of security. I sat down at it, located the records of Emanuel Noel Boxleiter, and learned that he’d made a sizable withdrawal exactly one year before. A five-thousand-dollar withdrawal.
Boxleiter was still in his darkened office, looking out at the lights of the park beneath his windows.
When he noticed me standing there, he asked, “So?”
I knew the question referred to his real concern, his reason for risking his secret by sending me out on the story. He was afraid, as the Friendly Motors man had been, that his leg had been pulled.
I told him the Vasquez family was as honest and deserving as they came. And that this was their last year in the miracle business.
He swung his chair around to face me. “What about the car? Did it come from the Virgin Mary after all?”
I shook my head. I told him it had come from St. Joseph, the guy who stood in the background and never got much credit.
Boxleiter grunted and said, “Maybe he never wanted any credit. Maybe just being a small part of some special kid’s life was enough. Punch out and have a drink.”
My Kind of Beautiful
by Robert S. Levinson
Copyright © 2006 Robert S. Levinson
Winner of third place in our 2005 Readers Award competition, Robert S. Levinson is also a rising star on the mystery book scene. His last published thriller, Ask a Dead Man (Five Star) received a starred review from PW. It will be followed up by this month’s release of Where the Lies Begin. The California author tells us that he is currently at work on a book set in the underbelly of the music industry.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006 Page 3