Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  “Were any of the letters he got unfriendly or angry or anything like that? People threatening him maybe?”

  “I never saw any letters like that. Not since I’ve been around. But I only started working for him a little more than a year ago.”

  “And how was the Reverend Chuck to work for?”

  “Not bad. I’ve had worse. Always polite, and he had a cheerful word for you at all times of the day. And forever making jokes. Sometimes they weren’t so funny, but some of them were pretty good. And he thought they were all good. And he never tried to sneak extra work out of me, by dumping a big job on me just before closing time. That’s a trick I’ve seen plenty of, but he never tried it.”

  “What about the other people working for him? Did he treat them all pretty well? Any of them feel any resentment or anger?”

  “Why should they? Most of them are these religious types. He made them feel like they were working for Jesus Himself.”

  “Did the Reverend Candy ever save you?”

  She lowered her eyes. The blasé tone deserted her for a moment. “Well, not officially. Like I never got up at the meeting or anything. I’m a pretty hard case. Where I grew up, my folks didn’t go in much for praying and all. Have you been to Newark? Okay, you know what I mean. But I’ve been listening to the Reverend Chuck. I don’t say I buy it all. Or even most of it. But I’m thinking it over. What’s the harm in thinking?”

  “And the Reverend’s family? How did they get along with him?”

  “He never asked me to his house.”

  “His wife and son both work at the church. You must see a good deal of them there.”

  “Not too much. I keep out of their way.” There was no way of reading her expression; her face might have been frozen.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you think of them,” I kept pushing. “Just a quick impression. Start with his wife.”

  “I’ve got nothing against any of them. None of them ever did me any harm. They’re real nice people.”

  “But what kind of people?”

  Connelly couldn’t answer; her mouth was filled with the last of her meatballs. Then, when that was done, she filled it over again with wine. And then she looked at her watch. “We’re sitting here pretty near an hour. My lunchtime is over, I have to get back—”

  The chance was slipping away from me. I had to be crude, or I’d miss out completely. “Why are you afraid to say anything bad about Candy’s family? What are you feeling guilty about?”

  “Who’s feeling guilty?”

  “Whose idea was it, his or yours?”

  “What idea?”

  “The affair you had with Chuck Candy.”

  She opened her mouth, but no sound came out of it. She looked as if I had hit her across the face, which in a way I had. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse. “That was over with a long time ago. If you don’t know that, you don’t know a goddamned thing.”

  I didn’t let my face show any sign that this was news to me. “How did it get started in the first place?”

  “Nothing got started. What’d we do that was wrong?” She lifted her hands in a what-the-hell gesture. “All right, we did things. But with the Reverend Chuck, it wasn’t like with anybody else. I’ve done plenty in my life—I guess you already figured that out for yourself—but with Chuck it was always, I don’t know, it was beautiful. It was like praying or something.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “Love!” The word burst out of her with contempt. “Why is everybody always talking about love? What the hell has that got to do with anything? Can’t two people have a great time with each other—”

  “But what was there about him that you found attractive? He must’ve been twenty years older than you. And it isn’t as if he was—”

  “Robert Redford? No, he sure wasn’t. And he wasn’t young either. Don’t you think I knew all that? But I had all that stuff before—young and Robert Redford, I had them with Connelly, and look what good they did me! You want to know what there was about Chuck? He showed an interest in me, that’s what.”

  “Come on, plenty of men must show an interest in you, it must happen to you all the time.”

  “Plenty of men look me over, they tell me a lot of horse manure about how beautiful and sexy I am. I’m no genius, but it doesn’t take one to know what they’re showing an interest in—it’s not me, it’s how I can make it come up for them. The Reverend Chuck—he was different.”

  “You’re telling me he was genuinely in love with you?”

  “Did I say that? God, you can’t let go of that word, can you? I’m telling you he genuinely took an interest. You knew, when he talked to you, you were the most important thing he had on his mind. He wanted you. He didn’t just want a quick lay, and who cares who with, he wanted you.” For a moment something almost like a smile was on her face. “And it wasn’t so convenient for him either, when you get right down to it. His wife was with him every night and on weekends, and he worked in the church all day.”

  “So when did the two of you—?”

  “In the afternoons mostly. When things at the church got slow. When I went into his office to take dictation.”

  “While the volunteers were manning the desk in the reception room?”

  “Why not? That way we were sure nobody would bust in on us.”

  “It’s amazing you managed to keep up with his mail.”

  “I never got behind with his mail!” She raised her chin, as if this was a point of pride with her. “On the days when there was too much of it, I took the extra ones home with me. I didn’t mind doing it. I was glad to.”

  “One thing you said before—it’s been over between you and him for a long time. Could you explain that to me?”

  “What’s there to explain? I never kidded myself about that. I knew right off, right from the start, it wouldn’t last long. A man like Chuck, with all the love he’s got to give, he wasn’t about to keep giving it to only one person. He told me that right off. He said we’d find our spiritual delight, and we’d be made better by it, and then we’d move on.”

  “So when did he move on?”

  “About three months ago. About last fall, right after Labor Day. He didn’t do any bullshitting with me, he told me straight out there was somebody new.”

  “Who did he say it was?” I could feel my curiosity rising, though I kept it out of my voice.

  “How should I know? He never told me, and I sure as hell never asked him, figuring it was none of my business. All I know is, he buttoned up that afternoon and told me this was it.”

  She put her spaghetti-filled fork down on her plate, and tears came from her eyes.

  I sat and waited, and it wasn’t long before the tears stopped coming. Then she wiped her face with a napkin, and then she gave her sarcastic grunt again. “Did you see that rum cake that just passed by? If you wanted to make it up to me, for the emotional pain and suffering you just put me through—”

  I ordered the rum cake for her, and it gave me pleasure to watch her as she polished it off to the last crumb.

  * * *

  After leaving Pasquale’s, I made my way across most of Mesa Grande to my office. Christmas music assaulted me from the radio, including one disc jockey who specialized in rock arrangements of traditional carols. You’ve never really heard “Adeste Fideles” until you’ve heard it done by the Rolling Stones.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon doing as much of the routine work, the sheer drudgery, on the case as I possibly could.

  I trotted down to the DA’s office and picked up a copy of the autopsy report and slogged my way through it. There was nothing in it that everybody hadn’t figured out already.

  I spent half an hour on the phone with Perkins, the local accountant who handled the finances of the Church of the Effulgent Apostles. He sounded scared as hell and evasive as hell, but people often do when they’re talking to investigators in a homicide case; nothing in our conversation gave me evidence that
he had something to hide. Just to double-check though, I got a court order for somebody from the City Accountancy office to take a look at the church’s books.

  I called Connelly to send me over a file of Chuck Candy’s mail, and to my horror it arrived in less than half an hour. Which meant I had to start reading my way through it. After a few hours, I had disposed of it all. Plenty of nut cases whom I had no trouble imagining as murderers or worse. But no indications that any of them had a reason to kill Chuck Candy. Still, I’d have to do some checking into the most promising ones—if they had alibis, etc.

  I called the police lab and asked if they had reports yet about the fingerprints on the murder gun and the bloody shoeprints in the hallway. Nothing yet, they told me. I didn’t think they were lying to me on Wolkowicz’s orders, either. It was the day before the Christmas weekend; nobody was in any hurry to get anything done.

  Then it was five-thirty, and I left the office and drove out to Mom’s house for dinner. My arms and shoulders were stiff, my head ached, I couldn’t stop myself from yawning. What else could I expect, spending the last four hours doing the work of three men?

  Mom was serving earlier than usual tonight, because she was planning to go to the synagogue for Sabbath services. As the rabbi had gently pointed out to me, she didn’t do this every Friday, or even particularly often, but once in awhile all that childhood brainwashing got to her.

  “So who is it, Mom?” were the first words out of my mouth as I walked through the door. “Who’s this witness the DA’s so proud of?”

  “You don’t kiss your mother any more?” she said.

  I kissed her, but she still wouldn’t let me talk about the case. She started putting food on the table, and we settled down to her pot roast; Mom’s pot roast has been one of my favorites since childhood, maybe because it used to make me feel grown-up to eat something with wine in it.

  “I’m leaving for synagogue at seven sharp,” she said. “I don’t like to get there after the services begin. The rabbi gives me dirty looks.”

  “Come on, Mom. I doubt if he even notices.”

  “You doubt it, do you? An eye like an X-ray machine that man’s got. He can have his nose in the Torah, all wound up in some long Hebrew chant, but at the same time he’s watching every door. And he lets you know about it afterwards too. You’re munching a nice piece apple pancake at the Oneg Shabbat, and suddenly he’s pushing up next to you and telling you how sorry he is you had to rush through your dinner to get here tonight.”

  “He’s always seemed like a nice man to me. People around here like him and respect him, he’s a good representative for the Jewish community.”

  Mom gave a shrug. “He’s got one big problem he can’t get over, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “He’s a rabbi. So can you eat two roast potatoes?”

  I told her I could, and set to work proving it, and at last Mom let me know she was ready to talk about the case.

  “About this witness then—”

  “We’ll discuss witnesses after you tell me what happened with this secretary at lunch.”

  Mom loves to put people in suspense. (Was Alfred Hitchcock really a Jewish mother?) But when she’s in that mood, there’s nothing you can do except go along with it. So between bites and chews, I somehow negotiated the details of my meeting this morning with Gabe Candy and my lunch with Connelly.

  I got to the end of my story, and Mom was looking pleased.

  “Very interesting, what this secretary told you. You believe her when she says she stopped being the minister’s girlfriend three months ago? There’s another one that took her place?”

  “I don’t see why she’d lie about that. By admitting that Candy dumped her, she’s giving herself a perfect motive for killing him.”

  Mom nodded. “That’s a nice piece of logical reasoning. I agree with you, she isn’t lying. She could still be the one that killed him though. She could be telling us the truth about her affair with him because she figures you’re bound to find it out eventually, the new girlfriend could come forward and make herself known, and then wouldn’t it look bad for the old girlfriend that she kept her mouth shut?”

  “Have you got any ideas about who the new girlfriend is?”

  “Ideas I’ve always got. But ideas I wouldn’t be ashamed to say out loud, those don’t come so easy. There’s something this Connelly told you—but you should give me a day or so to think about it.”

  “All right, Mom, enough beating around the bush. Even Hitchcock has to get to the last reel eventually.”

  “Who’s this Hitchcock? Somebody in the murder case you didn’t tell me about yet?”

  “Never mind that. What about the witness, the one who claims to have seen Roger Meyer go in and out of Candy’s house? You promised you’d tell me your theory about who it is.”

  “You didn’t figure it out yet by yourself?”

  “Would I be asking you if I had?”

  “There’s only one person this witness can be. The assistant district attorney told you the witness saw Roger Meyer go inside the Candy house by the front door, and come out again five minutes later by the same door. The witness said also that nobody else went in or out before or after. So what does this mean except that the witness was watching that door steady for a long time? In other words, it wasn’t somebody with business to do in the neighborhood—the newsboy delivering the paper, the postman delivering the mail, a visitor calling on somebody that lived nearby, a driver that just happened to be driving by the house. None of those types would stop for a long time and keep their eyes on the front door of that house. So who would do such a thing?”

  “One of the neighbors maybe. Somebody in the house across the street.”

  “But you told me there is no house across the street, it’s only a field with some trees and bushes in it.”

  “All right, somebody in one of the houses next door.”

  “Davie, you’re not concentrating. On one side of the Candy house, you told me, is a big empty lot, the nearest house on that side is over a block away. From such a distance, who could keep an eye on the Candy front door and recognize people coming in and out? And on the other side of the Candy house is where the Meyers live. You’re not telling me that the secret witness against the Meyer boy is his mother or father.”

  “I guess not.” I shook my head. “But all you’re proving is that nobody could be that witness.”

  “Nobody except one person. And you saw him yourself. You saw him the night before the murder, standing across the street watching the Candy house.”

  “The Prophet!”

  “Exactly. That crazy alter cocker that hangs around downtown and tells people the end of the world is coming so they should stop eating eggs. Who else could spare ten minutes, in fact a lot more than ten minutes, to do nothing but stand on a curb and watch the front door of a house? Who else hasn’t got better things to do with his time? It appealed to his imagination, something about that big Christmas show that Candy was putting on, and every chance he got he came to stare at it. So yesterday late in the afternoon he was staring and he saw the Meyer boy go in and out.”

  I don’t let myself feel optimistic very often, but this had to be one of the times for it. “If you’re right about this, it’s great news. I have to call Ann—”

  “What’s so great about it?”

  “What kind of a witness do you suppose the Prophet is going to make? Everybody in town knows he’s nuts. Not to mention half-drunk most of the time. Whatever he thinks he saw, nobody’s going to take his word for it.”

  “Even so,” Mom said, “I hope you’re going to talk to this Mr. Abernathy and find out from his own words what he saw.”

  “Abernathy? Who’s he?”

  “This crazy old man, the one you call the Prophet. His name is Luke Abernathy. He used to be some kind of teacher, in a high school somewhere, but that was a long time ago. He’s got a room in that dirty little hotel downtown, it looks like it was he
re before the town got settled, it was abandoned by the Indians—”

  “The Hotel Cochran. But for God’s sake, Mom, how do you know this old nut’s name? And where he lives?”

  “And also he’s got a married daughter that lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. She sends him fifty dollars a week, on condition he never calls her or tries to see her. Actually she sends the fifty dollars to the hotel, it’s the rent for his room. She’s afraid, if she sent it straight to him, he’d spend it all on liquor. And he himself admits she’s got a point. As for his eating, he does it at the Salvation Army soup kitchen.”

  I knew I was gaping at her throughout this recital. She knew it too, and enjoyed every minute of it. “All right, all right,” I finally got my voice back, “what’s the magical explanation? How did you manage this Sherlock Holmes bit?”

  “I’d like it you should think I did some magic trick like Sherlock Holmes. But I wouldn’t lie to you—the way I got all this information about the old man, I talked to him and he told me about himself.”

  “When did you talk to him?”

  “Plenty times. I’m shopping downtown, I’m standing next to him on the corner, the light turns red so I can’t cross the street—him and me pass the time with a little conversation.”

  I should have known it, of course. People talk to Mom. Probably because she actually does what most of us have trouble doing: she listens. She nods her head every once in awhile, she says “Yes” or “You don’t say!” or “Then what happened?” and in no time at all she’s got their life stories out of them. I could live next door to people for twenty years, and never find out as much about them as Mom finds out after going to their door to borrow a cup of sugar and chatting with them for twenty minutes.

  Don’t think it’s because she’s so warmhearted and sympathetic, though, and “loves people” or anything sloppy and sentimental like that. Actually she seldom has much good to say about the people who are so eager to open up to her. What she uses those conversations for is to file them away in her mind, in some big folder marked “The Weaknesses and Foolishnesses of Human Nature.”

  Fifteen minutes later she was ready to leave for synagogue. She locked up her house, making sure the porch lights were on, and then I walked her to her little red Toyota which was parked at the curb. “So am I ever going to see you again?” she said, through the car window.