When again Roland was able to see clearly, and to think, he saw to his horror that it was nearly six-thirty. And still the stricken girl slept on the corduroy sofa, the sound of her breathing now filling the airless room. Her head lay at a painful angle on the soiled armrest and her arms and legs were limp, loose as those of a rag doll. Except now her unseeing eyes were partly open, showing a crescent of white. Anxiously he whispered, “Babs? Wake up.” He felt panic: hearing voices in the corridor beyond the backstage area, boys’ voices, perhaps basketball players leaving practice; and Hal McCreagh was among these, or might have been, for Hal was on the team; and what would Roland do, and what would be done to Roland, if he were discovered like this, hiding, guilty-faced, with Babs Hendrick sprawled on the sofa, helpless in sleep, her hair disheveled and her clothing in disarray? Hurriedly, with shaking fingers, Roland readjusted the fuzzy angora sweater, and the pleated skirt. Whimpering, pleading for the girl to wake up, please would she wake up, yet like Sleeping Beauty in the Disney film, she would not wake up; she was under a curse; she would not wake up for him.
For the first time it occurred to the trembling boy that he might have given his sweetheart too strong a dose of the drug. What if she never woke up? (But what was too strong, he had no idea. Half the bottle of six-milligram capsules? That odorless chalky white powder?)
Panic swept over him. No, he wouldn’t think of that.
On a shelf amid the tattered copies of play scripts he found a frayed, light wool blanket to draw gently over Babs. He tucked the blanket beneath her damp chin, and spread her blond, wavy hair in a fan around her head. She would sleep until the drug wore off, and then she would wake; if Roland — “Rollie” — were very lucky, she wouldn’t remember him; and if he were unlucky, well — he wouldn’t think of that. (And he did not.) Stealthily then he fled, and was unseen. He would leave the single fluorescent light flickering. He would slip from the greenroom to the darkened backstage area and make his way out into a rear corridor, not taking the most obvious, direct route (which would have brought him into a corridor contiguous with the corridor that led to the boys’ locker room), and so, breathless, he would flee the scene of the crime, which in his heart he could not (could he?) acknowledge was a crime, even into his sixty-first year, when R__ had long replaced both Roland and “Rollie.” Contemplating then through the distorting lens of time the pale, calm-seeming doctor’s son safe in the brick house on Church Street, and safe in his room immersed in geometry homework at 8:20 that evening, the approximate time that Babs Hendrick’s heart ceased beating.
The Glass Menagerie would not be performed that spring at Indian River High.
Clifford Scales would be suspended without salary from the school, and his contract terminated soon after, during the Indian River police investigation into the barbiturate death of Seales’s seventeen-year-old student Babs Hendrick. Though not enough evidence would be gathered against him to justify a formal arrest, Seales would remain the prime suspect in the case, and his guilt taken for granted. Forty-five years later in Indian River, if you speak of Babs Hendrick’s death, you’ll be told in angry disgust that the girl’s English teacher, an alcoholic pervert who’d molested other girl students over the years, drugged her with barbiturates to perform despicable sexual acts on her, and killed her in the process. You will be told that Seales managed to escape prosecution, though of course his life was ruined, and he would die, divorced and disgraced, of a massive heart attack a few years later.
Ladies and gentlemen, you will ask: Had the Indian River police no other suspects? Possibly yes. Practicably speaking, no. Even today, small-town police departments are ill equipped to undertake homicide investigations in which neither witnesses nor informants come forward. Dusting for fingerprints in the greenroom yielded a treasure trove of prints, but all of these, even Seales’s, were explainable. DNA evidence (saliva, semen) would have convicted the guilty individual, but DNA evidence was unknown at the time. And the boy, the shy bespectacled doctor’s son, Roland, was but one of a number of high school boys, including the dead girl’s boyfriend, whom police questioned; he was not singled out for suspicion, spoke earnestly and persuasively to police officers, even defending (in his naïveté) the notorious Seales, and was never to behave in any way that might be labeled suspicious. In a state of suspended animation. No emotion, only wonder. That I, Roland, had done such a thing. I, a victim, to have wielded such power!
If my mother had ever discovered that a bottle of prescription sleeping pills was missing from her medicine cabinet, she never spoke of her discovery and what it might mean.
It would be rumored (but never printed in any newspapers or uttered on radio or TV) that “sick, disgusting things” had been done to Babs Hendrick’s helpless body before her death; only a “pervert” could have done such acts upon a comatose victim. But there would never be any arrest of this criminal, and therefore no trial. And no public revelations.
(What “sick, disgusting things” were done to my sweetheart, I don’t know. Another individual must have slipped into the greenroom between the time Roland fled and Babs died later that evening.)
The sick horror of mystery that remains unsolved.
You will ask: Did the killer never confess?
The superficial answer is no, the killer never confessed. For he did not (did he?) truly believe himself a killer; he was a good Christian boy. And he was (and is) a coward, contemptible. The more complex answer is yes, the killer confessed, and has confessed many times during his long and “distinguished” career. Each work of fiction he has written has been a confession, and an exultation. For, having committed an act of mystery in his adolescence, he understood that he’d proved himself and need never commit another; forever afterward, he would be an elegist of mystery, and honored for his style. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this new honor.
~ * ~
In the sudden silence, R__ self-consciously stacked the pages of his manuscript together to signal that “The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery” was over, as we in the audience, his friends and admirers, sat stunned, in a paralysis of shock and indecision. R__’s story had been compelling, and his delivery mesmerizing— yet, how should we applaud?
<
~ * ~
ROBERT B. PARKER
Harlem Nocturne
from Murderers’ Row
Mr. rickey was wearing a blue polka dot bow tie and a gray tweed suit that didn’t fit him very well. He took some time getting his cigar lit and then looked at me over his round black-rimmed glasses.
“I’m bringing Jackie Robinson up from Montreal,” he said.
“The other shoe drops,” I said. Mr. Rickey smiled.
“I want you to protect him,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Just like that?” Rickey said.
“I assume you’ll pay me,” I said.
“Don’t you want to know what I’m asking you to protect him from?”
“I assume I know,” I said. “People who might want to kill him for being a Negro. And himself.”
Rickey nodded and turned the cigar slowly without taking it from his mouth.
“Good,” he said. “Himself was the part I didn’t think you’d get.”
I looked modest.
“Jackie is a man of strong character,” Rickey said. “One might even say forceful. If this experiment is going to work he has to sit on that. He has to remain calm. Turn the other cheek.”
“And I’ll have to see that he does that,” I said.
“Yes. And at the same time, see that no one harms him.”
“Am I required to turn the other cheek?”
“You are required to do what is necessary to help Jackie and me and the Brooklyn Dodgers get through the impending storm.”
“Do what I can,” I said.
“My information is that you can do a lot. It’s why you’re here. You’ll stay with him all the time. If anyone asks you, you are simply an assistant to the genera
l manager. If he has to stay in a Negro hotel, you’ll have to stay there too.”
“I got through Guadalcanal,” I said.
“Yes, I know. How do you feel about a Negro in the major leagues?”
“Seems like a good idea to me.”
“Good. I’ll introduce you to Jackie.”
He pushed the switch on an intercom and spoke into it, and a moment later a secretary opened the office door and Robinson came in wearing a gray suit and a black knit tie. He was a pretty big guy and moved as if he were working off a steel spring. He was nobody’s high yellow. He was black. And he didn’t seem furtive about it. Rickey introduced us.
“Well, you got the build for a bodyguard,” Robinson said.
“You, too,” I said.
“Well, I ain’t guarding your body,’’ Jackie said.
“Mine’s not worth ten grand a year,” I said.
“One thing,” Robinson said, and he looked at Rickey as he spoke. “I don’t need no keeper. You keep people from shooting me, good. And I know I can’t be fighting people. You gotta do that for me. But I go where I want to go and do what I do. And I don’t ask you first.”
“As long as you let me die for you,” I said.
Something flashed in Robinson’s eyes. “You got a smart mouth,” he said.
“I’m a smart guy.”
Robinson grinned suddenly.
“So how come you taking on this job?”
“Same as you,” I said. “I need the dough.”
Robinson looked at me with his hard stare.
“Well,” Robinson said. “We’ll see.”
Rickey had been sitting quietly while Robinson and I sniffed around each other. Now he spoke.
“You can’t ever let down,” he said. He was looking at Robinson, but I knew I was included. “You’re under a microscope. You can’t drink. You can’t be sexually indiscreet. You can’t have opinions about things. You play hard and clean and stay quiet. Can you do it?”
“With a little luck,” Robinson said.
“Luck is the residue of intention,” Rickey said.
He talked pretty good for a guy who hit .239 lifetime.
~ * ~
It didn’t take long to pick up the way it was going to be.
Peewee Reese was supportive. Dixie Walker was not. Everyone else was on the spectrum somewhere between.
In St. Louis, a base runner spiked Robinson at first base. In Chicago, he was tagged in the face sliding into second. In St. Louis, somebody tossed a black cat onto the field. In Cincinnati, he was knocked down three times in one at bat. In every city we heard the word nigger out of the opposition dugout. None of this was my problem. It was Robinson’s. There was nothing I could do about it. So I sat in my corner of the dugout and did nothing.
My work was off the field.
There was hate mail. I couldn’t do anything about that, either. The club passed the death threats on, but there were so many of them that it was mostly a waste of time. All Robinson and I could do about those was be ready. I began to look at everybody as if they were dangerous.
After a double header against the Giants, I drove Robinson uptown. A gray two-door Ford pulled up beside us at a stoplight, and I stared at the driver. The light changed and the Ford pulled away.
“I’m starting to look at everybody as if they were dangerous,” I said.
Robinson glanced over at me and smiled the way he did. The smile said, Pal, you have no idea.
But all he said was, “Uh-huh.”
We stopped to eat at a place on Lennox Avenue. When we came in everyone stared. At first I thought it was Robinson. Then I realized they hadn’t even seen him yet. It was me. I was the only white face in the joint.
“Sit in the back,” I said to Robinson.
“Have to, with you along,” he said.
As we walked through the place, they recognized Robinson and somebody began to clap, then everybody clapped. Then they stood and clapped and hooted and whistled until we were seated.
“Probably wasn’t for me,” I said.
“Probably not.”
Robinson had a Coke.
“You ever drink booze?” I said.
“Not in public,” Robinson said.
“Good.”
I looked around. Even for a hard case like me it was uncomfortable being in a room full of colored people. I was glad to be with Robinson.
We both ordered steak.
“No fried chicken?” I said.
“No watermelon, either,” Robinson said.
The room got quiet all of a sudden. The silence was so sharp that it made me hunch a little forward so I could reach the gun on my hip. Through the front door came six white men in suits and overcoats and felt hats. There was nothing uneasy about them as they came into the colored place. They swaggered. One of them swaggered like the boss, a little fat guy with his overcoat open over a dark suit. He had on a blue silk tie with a pink flamingo hand-painted on it.
“Frank Digiacomo,” Robinson said. “He owns the place.”
Without taking off their hats or overcoats, the six men sat at a large round table near the front.
“I hear he owns this part of Harlem,” I said.
Robinson shrugged.
“When Bumpy Johnson was around,” I said, “the Italians stayed downtown.”
“Good for colored people to own the businesses they run,” Robinson said.
A big guy sitting next to Digiacomo stood and walked over to our table. Robinson and I were both close to two hundred, but this guy was in a different class. He was thick bodied and tall, with very little neck and a lot of chin. His face was clean shaved and sort of moist. His shirt was crisp white. His chesterfield overcoat hung open, and he reeked of strong cologne.
“Mr. Digiacomo wants to buy you a bottle of champagne,” he said to Robinson.
Robinson put a bite of steak in his mouth and chewed it carefully and swallowed and said, “Tell Mr. Digiacomo, no thank you.”
The big guy stared at him for a moment.
“Most people don’t say no to Mr. Digiacomo, Rastus.”
Robinson said nothing but his gaze on the big man was heavy.
“Maybe we can buy Mr. Digiacomo a bottle,” I said.
“Mr. Digiacomo don’t need nobody buying him a bottle.”
“Well, I guess it’s a draw,” I said. “Thanks for stopping by.”
The big guy looked at me for a long time. I didn’t shrivel up and blow away, so after a while he swaggered back to his boss. He leaned over and spoke to Digiacomo, his left hand resting on the back of Digiacomo’s chair. Then he nodded and turned and swaggered back.
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