Trip Wire

by Charlotte Carter

  “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No. But so what? Selling a little grass. That’s no big-time crime. I know lots of people who do it.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I mean, he couldn’t have been a major—Wilton didn’t have a lot of money. His mother slipped him cash sometimes. And he worked sometimes at the bike shop. People who sell in a big way make thousands.”

  “You know all about it, I see.”

  “All right, Woody, don’t blow your top over this. I only meant that . . . that lots of people are into smoking marijuana. Respectable people. Wilton probably gave away as much as he sold. I mean, it’s not the same as heroin. I mean, there are some places where it isn’t even illegal.”

  No way to back out now. Oh, what a pile of shit I had stepped into. I might just as well have come out and said I smoke dope on a regular basis.

  “You see what I’m talking about, Cass? You didn’t know this fella near as well as you thought you did. Just like you didn’t know the white girl he lived with had been with that boy who’s missing.”

  “I see Jack Klaus has been bending your ear.”

  “Yes. Isn’t that what you want? Somebody on the inside who can tell us the straight story?”

  “Straight? You think he’s giving me the straight anything? I don’t trust him, Woody.”

  “That’s too bad. Because you need him.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the kind of help I need.”

  “Well, I do. If you think you’ll get anywhere without him, you’re crazy. It’s only because of Jack that the homicide man didn’t pull you in for being uncooperative. This Norris fella thinks maybe you haven’t told him everything you could.”

  To put it mildly.

  I sat tight. Norris was going to have calico kittens when he got to the apartment and heard the third-hand account of the break-in and assault on me. Most likely he was looking for me now. Cliff was the only one I’d told where I was going. I knew he wouldn’t fink on me.

  Uncle Woody wasn’t going to be thrilled that I was holding back that information from him, too. I’d tell him about the break-in, but in my own good time. If I spilled it now, he’d stop at nothing to get me out of the commune and back to Hyde Park.

  “All right, Woody. Klaus or no Klaus, everybody seems to be looking for a way to blame Wilton for what happened to him and Mia. Which is insane. I don’t care if he was Al Capone. That doesn’t make it okay for somebody to murder him. Or do you think that’s a childish notion, too?”

  “No” was what he said. Why can’t you be eleven years old again? was what I saw in his face.

  “Let’s back up here for a minute, Cass. There’s something we didn’t finish talking about.”

  “Dope, you mean. Look, Woody—”

  “No. Not that. I asked you about his friends outside of your roommates.”

  “Honest, I didn’t know about his old friends. Except somebody named Alvin.”

  “All right. Who was this fella Alvin?”

  “I couldn’t say. Wilt used to talk about him when he was kind of putting himself down. Almost like he idolized him. ‘Alvin was tough.’ ‘Alvin was a real black man.’ ‘Alvin knew what was really going on in this country.’ Things like that.”

  “But you never met the boy?”

  “No.”

  “So this Alvin is a tough young nigger who knows everything, huh? Sounds like he could have been showing your friend the ropes in the dope trade.”

  “Stop making things up. The guy isn’t a pusher. He was in Vietnam.”

  “So maybe he’s not caught up in drugs. But he still could be one of them.”

  Them. I knew what that meant. “God, Woody. Don’t go off on one of your raps about the black nationalists. Please.”

  He looked at me grimly. But he didn’t say any more. Maybe he was following Ivy’s old advice to me: When you feel like you’re losing your temper, take some deep breaths and don’t say a word until you calm down. “No last name on Alvin?” he said evenly.

  “I don’t think Wilt mentioned it. He might have, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Okay, young woman.” He started to clear the table. “You realize, don’t you,” he said, “you’ve got a duty to perform. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the decent thing to do. If you felt like you say you did about Wilton Mobley.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You should pay a call on his people. When were you planning to do that?”

  He was right. He was absolutely right. “I’ll do it now.”

  “The boy was angry at his father, you said.”

  “The other way around. They were angry at him. They were trying to make him go back to Antioch.”

  I came in for a bit of his caustic commentary then. “Imagine that. Man spending his hard-earned money to give the boy an education, try to get him started in life. And that fool has the nerve to wipe his feet on it. Yeah, that’s the big problem these days. None of you young folks like to be told what to do. It’s always gotta be your way. You know better. We don’t know a goddamn thing.”

  He smoked without talking for a few minutes, then said, “Anyway, you get on over there to see those people. Sim will take you.”

  “Who?”

  Woody almost always used a—well, it’s more than a little pretentious to call him a chauffeur—a driver, is what I mean. The previous one, whom we called Hero, had been with him for years. He was Woody’s nephew. Hero had had more than his share of problems, among them his lengthy and wasting drug addiction; but in the end he surely lived up to his nickname. He had met that end on the street one night, killed by one of two men who attacked Woody and me. Hero died saving us.

  “Cass, this is Sim,” Woody said. “He’s helping me out these days.”

  The same kind of help Hero had provided, I presumed: accompanying Woody while he went about his business, known and unknown, all over the city. Or just waiting for him in the Lincoln while Woody lunched with his cronies. And if any kind of muscle was required for the job, it looked as if this guy Sim could handle it. Unlike undernourished Uncle Hero, he was big.

  “Hi, Sim,” I said as I got into the backseat.

  He was wearing a light-brown suede jacket and a yellow shirt. His dark hands resting on the steering wheel were huge and shapely like a basketball player’s. He turned around, eyed me for a few seconds, like he was memorizing my face or something. “How you doing?”

  Woody moved to close the door after me.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Last thing in the world I want to see is a mother who just lost her boy. Very little in the world is worse than that.”

  He should know. Aunt Ivy had miscarried twice and delivered one stillborn before they gave up trying to have children.

  “When you talk to his folks,” Woody said, “you gotta know what you’re doing, gal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’re in a position to talk to the Mobley family like the police won’t. They can’t. For one thing, they wouldn’t know how. For another, they don’t care like you do. But you have to be careful of these people’s feelings. Realize what they going through. If there’s any chance they can shed light on the killing, you gotta get them talking. The boy was theirs. They should be able to tell you who he was. And if you come to find out they didn’t really know him much better than you did, well, so be it. That’s gotta mean something, too. You understand?”

  “I think I do. You’re telling me pretty much what Jack Klaus told me. Either I want the truth to come out or I don’t. I have to find a way to stand back from Wilt. Be hard on him and be hard on myself.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Was I? I hoped it wasn’t just talk.

  2

  Hyde Park is one of a very few communities in the city that people like to describe as “integrated.”

  True and not true. Of course, the mighty University of Chicago is t
he chief explanation for the variety of colors and ethnicities on the streets. Students and faculty come there from all over the world. Mixed couples strolling with their café au lait babies don’t raise many eyebrows. And solid, well-to-do Negroes long ago established a beachhead in the area. Still, blacks not connected to university life, and even some who are, usually get shut out of the more desirable housing. The real estate guy who was so nice when he showed you the sunny two-bedroom place? You’d be ill advised to sit by the phone waiting for him to call you back.

  Wilton’s parents were not only longtime Hyde Park residents, they had crossed the neighborhood’s Maginot Line, the little enclave of Madison Park. They lived on a street so hincty that many of the realty ads for homes along its lovely, tree-shaded blocks state boldly: Physicians and professors only. Others need not apply. My great-aunt and -uncle were quite comfortable, but they had never lived like the Mobleys, and although Ivy had been introduced to Hope Mobley once or twice, she was not part of her rarefied social set.

  Sim found a parking spot near the corner of the street. I got out of the Lincoln and walked to the moss-covered house where Wilton had grown up. I took a minute to prepare myself before I rang the doorbell. I’d be entering a house of mourning where emotions would be running high. I had managed to keep myself together this far, but there was a danger of falling apart once I was face-to-face with the grieving parents.

  A small, plain woman in brown gabardine answered the door. Wilt must take after his dad, I thought at first. Then it registered: This is the maid. I gave her my name and asked if the Mobleys might have a few moments to see me.

  Hope appeared a second later, before the first woman even had time to announce me. As expected, she was long and slim and handsomely coiffed. In fact, all my predictions about her seemed to be on the money. Just as I’d thought, she was dressed in costly black wool, and she looked devastated, emptied out.

  But I hadn’t expected her to trip on the Persian carpet in the entryway. She went sprawling, and then just sat there. Her expression never changed.

  Wilton said a fair amount of drinking had been going on in the house ever since he could remember. I figured his mother must be dulling her pain with alcohol. I ran to her, reached down to help the maid help the mistress. But there was no telltale liquor breath.

  I heard the word no spoken simply and with absolute finality.

  Oscar Mobley, who had thundered that word, was suddenly at the bottom of the staircase. He was considerably shorter than his wife, but in his severe dark suit he cast a long shadow. His voice carried the same kind of spooky authority that I sometimes heard in Uncle Woody’s. But if you met Woody’s eyes when he was riled, the fire there could scorch you. Not so with Mr. Mobley. His eyes were cold glass. The name of a film Owen once took me to popped into my head. Day of Wrath. Mr. Mobley had Day of Wrath eyes.

  I backed away while he drew his wife to her feet and then led her off.

  The woman in brown showed me into a wonderful room with a fireplace and burnt-orange leather seating. Across the room was a massive console with a Grundig hi-fi setup. Hundreds of LPs filled the built-in shelving at knee level. Leontyne Price, Beethoven, and Duke Ellington seemed to be more than fairly represented. No music in the room now, of course. But no other sounds either, not anywhere in the house. No sound, no lights burning, but a faint and dimly familiar odor. White tulips in a giant urn, but they had no scent. Oh, yes, now I had it. That faint smell was furniture polish—butcher’s wax.

  Mr. Mobley had to be just as devastated and inconsolable as his wife. He had his own way of showing it. No clumsiness in him. Deliberate movements. A curt nod and a slight bow to me. Funny—the first time, he made his entrance with the word no. This time, he said “Yes?”

  He had wasted no words. But when I told him who I was, his vocabulary expanded quickly enough. I said his eyes were cold. Make that glacial . . . arctic . . . polar.

  “I see,” Oscar Mobley said. “You’re one of the doping morons he chose to throw his life away on.”

  The loathing in his voice brought to mind an incident I hadn’t thought about in years. The first time I was allowed to ride the el all on my own, I promptly got lost, found myself way the hell out around Western Avenue. Two white girls were giving me filthy looks, laughing at me behind their hands. One of them kept glancing at me and then holding her nose as if she smelled something foul.

  I guess I had about the same reaction to those bitches that I had now. Hurt, trembling humiliation turning bit by bit into impotent rage. Wanting to strike out but also wanting to crawl into a hole.

  I cleared my throat. “Wilton didn’t throw his life anywhere, Mr. Mobley. His life was taken from him.”

  “You have the audacity to be impertinent with me? At a time like this.”

  I needed to measure my words, remain respectful. I knew that. Even if he was making no sense and looked as if he wanted to rip my throat out.

  “I think you’re misinterpreting. I only meant that the police think whoever did this had some reason for targeting Wilton. It wasn’t a matter of how he lived, or where or with whom. I think so, too. Oh, never mind that now. I only wanted to tell you how sorry I am. And I thought I might be some help to you at the service.”

  “Service? You’re not coming to any service.”

  “I can’t come? But why?”

  “You will be no part of it. Stay up north with those other hooligans.”

  My God. So my last image of Wilt would be that bloody torso lashed to a chair. Boy, that hurt me so much, I nearly bent double.

  “Okay,” I said. “Forget about the funeral. But don’t you at least want to hear how much we all thought of Wilt?”

  “I don’t want to hear a goddamn thing. What are you going to tell me about? How much marijuana you smoked at those degenerate parties he was throwing? Your criminal enterprises? I know everything I need to know about all of you. You think justice will come at the point of a gun. You’d rather act the fool than put your shoulder to the wheel. You want to tear down everything we built with our blood and tears.”

  Blood and tears. Where was all the purple rhetoric coming from? His manner was flipping from heel-clicking hussar to country preacher. The guy must’ve been waiting a long time for somebody to dump all this on.

  My temper was rising like a doughnut in hot oil. “Mr. Mobley, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, the hell you don’t. You lazy, raggedy—living up north with the worst kind of decadent white do-nothings. You people have got no decency in you, no more morals than a farm animal. God knows what kind of place you’re from.”

  Okay. I’d had it.

  “I’m from a place where I was taught to have some basic kindness and manners.”

  “That much is clear,” Hope Mobley spoke as she stepped into the room. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. Please have a seat.”

  Mobley turned on her, furious at her invitation, but she just shook her head at him. “What you’re doing won’t help, Oscar. Go someplace. Go upstairs.”

  He bellowed at her, “He wasn’t welcome in this house. Now, why in hell should I have to entertain one of them?”

  She shook her head again. “Go on up,” she said mildly. “Go upstairs and hide your face. You’ll be all right.”

  She waited with her eyes lowered until he left the room.

  Wilt sometimes referred to his father as a pompous shit. I had no trouble seeing why. But that didn’t keep me from pitying the rigid, heartbroken man.

  “Will you—I’m sorry, what was your name?” Hope asked.

  “Cassandra.”

  “Will you excuse me, Cassandra, if I don’t offer you refreshments?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Yes, you seem like a nicely raised child. I thought you could understand.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I can.”

  The old fantasy had me charming the pants off the Mobleys, making peace between them and Wilt. I’d make out a case for o
ur choices: Yes, we wanted out from under their supervision and their set of morals; yes, we were impatient with the high-cost education they were underwriting; yes, we liked the idea of a handpicked family rather than a biologically determined one. But none of that meant we dishonored their generation and all its sacrifices—blood and tears, if you must. Oh, I was going to be wildly articulate, and I was going to be Exhibit A, Wilt’s lovely little friend, a nicely raised child.

  “I know I’m intruding, Mrs. Mobley. All I wanted to do was bring my condolences.”

  No wonder I mumbled those lines. I was lying. In part, anyway. I did want to show sympathy, but I was also looking for information. I hoped she had enough left to give it to me.

  She repeated my word. “Condolences.” It had the ring of a melancholy musical piece, something by Scott Joplin.

  “Can you stand to hear me out?” I asked. “And then I’ll go.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your husband talked about wild parties and criminals. Like Wilt was doing something wrong and should have expected to get hurt. What does your husband know that I don’t?”

  “What does it matter anymore?”

  “It matters. I can see you being so hurt that you can’t think about that now. But it matters to me.”

  She looked at me closely, maybe seeing me for the first time. “Did you know the girl he was living with?”

  “Mia. Yes.”

  She faltered, and I rushed in. “She was a good person. He was happy with her. Believe me.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least. All right. I’ll tell you what Oscar was ranting about, if it will do any good. My father had a home in Kent, Michigan,” she said. “It’s on the lake. We used to spend summers there. When he died, he left the property to me. We don’t get up there very often, not for the last few years. We pay a man in the town to look in on the place from time to time. My husband received a call from him a while ago. He had noticed cars parked on the property from time to time. It looked as though someone was using the place regularly, and he wanted to know if he should continue to go in and check the pipes.

  “Of course, we had no idea what he was talking about. We thought at first the house was being burglarized. But Oscar questioned Wilton and got him to admit he was the one who’d been using the place. He’d been bringing friends up for—well, I could imagine what for. I take it you weren’t one of the guests.”