Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  DAY

  OF

  WRATH

  The Harry Stoner Series, #4

  Jonathan Valin

  TO KATHERINE

  Copyright © 1982 by Jonathan Valin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition 2012 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-318-1

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9345-8

  Cover photo © Peter Mukherjee/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS

  DAY

  OF

  WRATH

  1

  TROUBLED FACES had begun to look alike to me. And people’s troubles, too. It was a prejudice I wasn’t fully aware of until Mildred Segal walked into my office late one rainy afternoon and I found myself remembering her. Not just her air of misgiving or even the depth of trouble behind her light green eyes. I remembered her. Details of her life. Grievances, disappointments, sacrifices. Above all, sacrifices. To parents, husband, kids. Mildred Segal had been born for sacrifice, like an island princess. And I suppose I should have felt sorry for her. Only I thought I knew her too well. Thought I knew that behind the abject look was a fierce pride—a victim’s canny assurance that, come what might, she would be wronged. It was the next best thing to having a destiny. But I guess I should also have known that people who act like they have a destiny are the only true innocents in the world.

  Only I wasn’t thinking clearly that April day. I was thinking that I didn’t care to deal with the drab, familiar lady sitting in front of me. I was thinking that I wanted to go home to the Delores and drink cold beer and listen to the spring rain pattering against the windows. April just wasn’t the right month to delve into someone else’s past. Especially the last week of April.

  I listened to her anyway. With half an ear. And since I couldn’t feel the pity she felt was owed her, I made a show of being polite. I fetched sighs at all the right places. Shook hands with the notion that the world was a theater of injustice. And offered her a cigarette when I couldn’t think of anything else to offer up.

  “But I don’t smoke!” Mildred Segal replied. And then, as if that had been the last straw, she began to cry. “I can’t do anything right!” she said helplessly.

  I sat there for a moment—staring at her. And slowly, against instinct and judgment and the faint tug of the weather, I found myself feeling exactly what I should have felt the instant she’d walked through the door—deep, authentic pity. She was not an attractive woman—short, flat-chested, with a long, U-shaped, horsey face, pulled down at the mouth, like a horse’s mouth, as if she, too, were trained to hold a bit between her teeth. She’d made herself up badly, as well. She was wearing so much eyeliner that her eyes looked as if they had been drawn in ink. And then she’d dressed with awkward solicitude, in a tweed suit that looked to be at least twenty years old. Watching her cry I felt, I think, a little of what women must feel when they see grown men break down. But what finally got to me wasn’t Mildred Segal; it was my own hardness of heart. I’d pegged her for martyrdom the moment she’d walked into the office. And the fact that I’d been right depressed me. It just didn’t seem fair to Mildred to know what I already knew about her.

  So I got up and walked over to her chair—a wad of Kleenex in my right hand and my left hovering about her shoulder in a pantomime of concern. I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch her; it would have been too much like kissing a cousin. But I did offer to help—a piece of generosity that I immediately regretted.

  “I don’t even know if I can afford you,” she sobbed. “That’s how hopeless I am—coming here and wasting your time and making a fool of myself.” She blew her nose noisily, folded up the tissue as if it were a monogrammed towel, and dabbed at her pale green eyes.

  “You can afford me,” I said half-heartedly. “The question is—do you need me? You haven’t really told me why you’ve come.”

  “I haven’t?” She looked down at the floor as if she’d taken my question as a rebuke. I had the feeling that that was the way she reacted to any question. “It’s so personal,” she said in a small, dispirited voice.

  “Mrs. Segal, most of my cases are personal.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” she said. She passed a hand through her short brown hair and sighed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.” She finished drying her eyes and looked up at me with a weak smile. “I don’t really know very much about detectives—outside of what I’ve read in books or seen on TV. The fact that I’m here at all is...alarming. I had to take a sick day to do it. That’ll catch up with me,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “One of these days, that’ll catch up with me, too. I have this odd feeling that my whole life is about to catch up with me—all the mistakes.”

  Her smile began to collapse; so I changed the subject, although I wasn’t sure if any subject was exempt from her sense of tragedy. She was wired for it, like a switchboard—the remotest line of thought leading straight to her suffering heart. It occurred to me that it had taken considerable courage for a woman like this to come to me at all. It made me think better of her than I had at the start.

  “You mentioned sick days?” I said. “Where do you work?”

  “I teach school,” she said. “Elementary school. They’re quite strict about personal holidays. I’ve already taken both of mine—because of Robbie. So I had to call in sick this morning. I just hope no one saw me downtown, that’s all. I don’t think I could take any more trouble. I mean, on top of Robbie.”

  I asked her who Robbie was.

  “Why, she’s my daughter, of course,” Mildred Segal said with surprise, as if it were headline news. “Robbie’s my daughter.”

  “And the trouble she’s in?”

  She dropped her head to her breast and in a tiny, guilt-ridden voice whispered, “She’s run away from home.”

  2

  HOME WAS in the northside suburb of Roselawn on Eastlawn Drive, an L-shaped, residential street with a large stone church-school set in the bend of the L. Worn, two-story brick houses—each one with its own foursquare patch of lawn, low dividing hedge, narrow asphalt driveway, and maple tree planted in the center of the yard—lined the street on either side of the church. The whole neighborhood had a nervous, conformable, slightly depressed look of probation, as if the presence of that massive church had made the householders stiff and uneasy, forced them to look inside themselves each day and wonder if they’d truly arrived at respectability. From what I could see of the street on that rainy Wednesday afternoon, the time of arrival had come and gone for these families. Everything but the church looked small and haggard and thoroughly sick of pretending to be good.

  The Segal home—pitch roof, red brick facade, white colonial trim—was located across from the church on the east side of the drive. I could see a rainswept school yard from the front stoop. A small, lonely looking boy in
a knit cap, windbreaker, and jeans was standing in the rain and staring up at one of the basketball hoops as if it were another kind of crucifix. But there were so many emblems of sacrifice up and down Eastlawn Drive that I suppose I could have read an allegory in a Buick. Mildred Segal made sad sense against the backdrop of this middle-class neighborhood. She was the final product of the probationary mentality—a woman so fixed on proving herself before the neighbors that her whole life had taken on the legal, presumptive, and slightly crazy aspects of a trial by jury.

  The living room was small and sterile. The furniture—an uncomfortable couch covered with a polished cotton print of yellow flowers on a blue field, two wingback chairs in light blue velvet, a low mahogany coffee table with Queen Anne legs—looked exactly as it must have looked in the showroom. Color-coordinated, fussy, and unlived in. Mildred actually groaned when I sat down on the couch, as if I’d seated myself on an oil painting. Instead of telling me to get up, she ran off to the kitchen to make coffee. And I sat back—rather gingerly—on the sofa, stared out the front window at the boy in the rain, and asked myself what I was doing in a house where the furniture, and apparently just about everything else, was meant for show.

  I knew what I’d thought I’d be doing there—taking my own kind of inventory, measuring what it was that Robbie Segal had run away from. But it was fairly clear that I wasn’t going to learn much from the visit. At least, not much that I didn’t already know. Who wouldn’t run away from that living room? I asked myself. Or from a woman whose heart broke when you sat on her chairs? By the time she returned from the kitchen with a coffee pot in her hand, I’d begun to dislike Mildred Segal again and all the strident familiarity of her household. There weren’t going to be any surprises here.

  “Maybe you’d like some coffee?” she said timidly.

  “That would be fine.”

  “Maybe we should serve it in the kitchen?” she said with a half-strangled amiability and looked greatly relieved when I got up off her couch and walked through an arch that opened on the dining room. The cherrywood table was set with four immaculate place settings—just as it had been in Pogue’s display window. That was one meal that would never be served, I thought, and sighed. I was already beginning to feel sorry for Robbie Segal.

  I followed Robbie’s mother through another opening into the kitchen. There was a round formica table in the center of the room. Mildred Segal sat down at it abruptly. I guess we camp here, Harry, I said to myself and glanced at the woman. She had a sweet, abstracted smile on her face, as if she’d just looked up from her knitting and found me standing in front of her.

  “Do sit down, Mr. Stoner,” she said gaily. “And I’ll pour you some coffee.”

  She was happy now. She’d gotten her way. The furniture was intact and I was safely in the kitchen. Everything was swell. I sat down across from her and let her pour me a cup of coffee. Manipulative people make a habit of rewarding you when you go along with their manipulations, like animal trainers slipping a lump of sugar to their beasts.

  “Perhaps I should have used the good china,” she said, when she caught me staring moodily into the cup. “But they were my grandmother’s, and I’d hate to see any of them get chipped.”

  I felt like throwing the cup against the wall. Instead, I asked her to tell me about Robbie, and her face bunched up again.

  “For chrissake,” I said irritably. “We’re not going to get anywhere if you keep breaking down.”

  “Don’t snap at me!” she said with sudden vehemence. Then she blushed and said, “I’m sorry. I’m just used to dealing with children all day long. And then Tom, my husband, used to snap at me...I don’t like men snapping at me.”

  “Where is Tom?” I asked her.

  “Oh, he’s dead,” she said nonchalantly. “He died eight years ago. Robbie was only six. He died of a stroke in the very chair you’re sitting in. From all that snapping, probably.” She smiled rather disturbingly. “I was joking, Mr. Stoner. Every once in a while, I make a bad joke. Tom died of arteriosclerosis. For Robbie’s sake, I wish he’d survived. To be quite frank, I hadn’t bargained on raising a child all by myself. I’ve done my best, of course, but I’ve always lacked a certain empathy, if that’s the right word. I’m not sure what to call it. It runs in the family, though. My parents weren’t particularly warm people. Generous. And supportive. But not empathetic. I didn’t expect empathy from them. But this is a different generation. They expect you to communicate in different ways. Ways that I’m simply not equipped to handle. I’ve done my best, of course. But...”

  Her lips began to tremble again. “I want to say something,” she said heavily, “because I’m probably going to cry, in spite of your warning. And because I know how I must appear to you. I’m not as blind as you think. I know I’m fussy and old-fashioned and not terribly likeable. It is not easy, Mr. Stoner, to go through life knowing that you’re not...likeable. My marriage suffered from it, and my daughter has suffered from it. And if I may say so, I’ve suffered from it, too. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.” She looked up at me as if the thing she was looking to say was hidden in my face. “I am trying to find a way to express what I feel for Robbie.”

  “You love her,” I said.

  Tears spilled out of Mildred Segal’s green eyes. “I’m not sure,” she whispered guiltily. “I’m not at all sure that I understand what that word means.”

  I looked down into my coffee cup and said, “That’s not a problem I can help you with, Mildred.”

  But she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “I never wanted a child,” she said through her tears. “I never did! I was past thirty when I met Tom. He was fifteen years older than I was. And...well, look at me. I haven’t had many suitors. I didn’t think I wanted any. I had my own apartment. A job. My parents. That seemed sufficient. But then I turned thirty and my parents died and I was alone. A world that I thought was impregnable began to collapse around me, and for the first time in my life I needed help. So when Tom asked me to marry him, I said yes.

  “It wasn’t love,” she said with distaste. “He was well past fifty and in poor health. I just thought a few years with someone I liked, years that would help me get over the loneliness. And I’m sure he was simply looking for someone to take care of him. Which I did. Day in and day out, for eleven years. We never planned on having a family of our own.”

  She pulled a paper napkin out of a box on the table and rubbed her eyes with it. “I told you I thought my life was catching up with me,” she said in a calmer voice. “Perhaps now you can see what I mean. I’ve done my best for Robbie. I really have. Perhaps better than most mothers would have been able to do. But there’s always been something wrong between us. For some time now, I’ve felt it would end like this—abruptly, violently.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why violently?”

  “Robbie is short-tempered. Over the last two years she’s gone through puberty, and it’s made her moody and introverted. Just this week she broke a vase that my mother had given me. It took me three hours to patch it back together. She’s become a tyrant around the house. Always breaking my things and shouting at me. That is, when she deigns to speak at all. Adolescence is a kind of madness, I think. Most of the time she’s locked upstairs in her room, with that stereo blasting away. I’ve warned her that the neighbors won’t stand for it. Mr. Rostow has already begun to give me odd looks; and we’ve lived together in harmony for nineteen years. Robbie doesn’t care. She says I think too much about the neighbors and too little about her. She says I don’t understand her generation. She says I don’t understand anything.” Mildred Segal looked down at the speckled tile floor and said, “Sometimes I think she’s right.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “Four days ago. On Sunday afternoon. We had a fight about a twenty-dollar bill she’d taken from my purse. Then she ran upstairs and locked herself in her room and started playing that stereo as loudly as she could. Instead of sitting there, like I usually do
, and fuming, I went out to shop. I was gone about two hours. When I got back at four-thirty, she was gone. She didn’t even leave a note. I spent Sunday evening waiting for her to come home. And I stayed home Monday and Tuesday in case she came back during the day.”

  I took my notebook out of my jacket, flipped it open, and studied the blue lines on a blank page. “You know she’ll probably come back on her own,” I said, without looking at Mildred. “In a few days she’ll probably come back and you can patch it up with her.”

  “Can’t you see that I need to make an effort of some sort?” the woman said. “A gesture. So she’ll know that I care.”

  But the gesture wasn’t for Robbie’s sake. I knew it and so did Mildred. It was for Mr. Rostow and the nineteen years of neighborliness. It was for Eastlawn Drive and its nervous air of respectability. It was for the world at large, which in this deeply fugitive city prizes nothing more than the show of propriety and the concealment of shame. And it was a little bit for Mildred herself, who had never wanted a child and who was now facing what she thought was the guilty consequence of her own selfishness. Which was just another kind of selfishness, of course. But an understandable kind.

  I could have told her that her ambivalence toward Robbie was perfectly normal, that adolescence is a kind of madness, that these things happened every day, and that she didn’t have to spend a small fortune to prove that she and Robbie were an exceptional case. I could have told her that, but I didn’t. First of all, because she didn’t want to hear it—didn’t want to be told that she was no different than any other stiff-necked parent with a rebellious teenager on her hands. And second, because she wouldn’t have understood me if I had said it. It went against the received wisdom of Eastlawn Drive, which said that mothers and daughters must always love one another or, at least, act as if they loved one another, every minute of every day. And that any deviation from that standard was cause for shame. And third, because there was always the chance, remote as it seemed at that moment, that her daughter had run straight into trouble.