Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  “Hold it!” a woman called out from inside the house. And a Magicube went off with a blinding flash. I swiped at the spots before my eyes and heard the woman say, “Just one more!” And there was another flash. Then someone grabbed my hand and pulled me to a chair.

  When my eyes cleared, they were both sitting across from me—Fred and Madge—on a long, russet-colored sofa with teak trim. There was a glass and chrome coffee table between us, with an open box of chocolates in its center. A framed lithograph of Picasso’s Don Quixote was hung on the far wall, above a huge TV. There were several other prints on the walls—Miros and Klees, I thought, although I couldn’t be sure with all those spots still dancing before my eyes.

  “We like to take pictures,” the woman said a bit apologetically. “My mother always said she wished she’d had more pictures of us when we were children.”

  I nodded politely.

  “So she could look back on them, you see?” the man explained.

  There was an embarrassed silence, in which the Rostows took account of their lives since childhood and I sat there, on an Eames chair with vinyl cushions, and tried to keep a straight face. They were a pair, all right. The woman with taffy colored, permanently waved hair and the sort of tall, doughy, nonplussed face you see on middle-aged suburban children. And the man with his shaky, weasel’s look and his golf club outfit. The woman was wearing black wool slacks and a pearly white blouse. She had an apron tied at her waist with “I hate housework” stitched across it in red letters.

  “You might think we’re taking this lightly,” the man said after a time. “We’re not.”

  The woman shook her head so violently that her eyes crossed. “No, we’re not.”

  “We just know Robbie so well.”

  “Like our own daughter.”

  “And we know that she wouldn’t...”

  “Get in any trouble,” the woman said.

  They were finishing each other’s sentences. I didn’t know how long I could take it. As soon as they shut their mouths, I asked them if I could talk to their daughter.

  “Sure. Of course,” they said.

  The husband got up and walked out of the room, and the woman fiddled with the tassels on her apron.

  “I understand your husband is in the antique business,” I said.

  “Well, not exactly antiques. Near antiques.”

  Used furniture, I thought. It helped to explain the banality of that room.

  “You don’t think Robbie’s in any real trouble, do you?” Madge said with a look of concern that made her tall face collapse.

  The seriousness of the occasion was catching up with her, after all the hi-jinks. “I don’t know, Mrs. Rostow. You know the girl better than I do.”

  “I just can’t imagine Robbie getting into...I mean, she’s such a nice girl.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “Did I say something funny?” Madge Rostow said.

  “No,” I said in a soothing voice. “You just reminded me of someone else for a moment.”

  She nodded agreeably, but her brown eyes had grown hostile and a little confused. Never laugh at a burgher, Harry, I said to myself, they just don’t know how to take a joke.

  Madge Rostow clammed up after that. And we sat there quietly until Fred came back into the room.

  “Where’s the body?” he said with a grin.

  “We’ve been talking,” Madge said with flat, uninflected politeness. And it was as if she’d sent a wordless warning to her husband, who stiffened suddenly and eyed me suspiciously.

  “Talking, huh?” he said in his wife’s flat, denatured tone of voice. “Well, that’s good, I guess.” He sat down on the arm of the sofa and patted his wife on the shoulder. She looked up at him and for a moment they communed silently, like two machines sending each other coded messages over the phone.

  “How long you been in the business, Mr. Stoner?” the husband said, turning back to me.

  “For about twelve years,” I said.

  “You handle a lot of these kind of cases? Runaways, I mean?”

  I told him I’d seen a few. He apparently wanted to see my credentials—that had been the net effect of his wife’s communications. I wasn’t the welcome visitor any more—the nice detective whose face would be pasted in the album alongside Aunt Jen and Uncle Bill. I was a stranger and, therefore, suspect. There couldn’t be a mentality more parochial or xenophobic than that of a suburban householder in a declining neighborhood. I could understand it, too. To have struggled all one’s life for such meagre rewards—an Izod shirt, a stitched apron, and a house out of a television sit-com. And to see that little ground slipping away daily. To suspect, in the eyes of a stranger, that it wasn’t worth having to begin with. That would set anyone’s teeth on edge. Plus, it had begun to dawn on the Rostows that Robbie’s disappearance could change their lives, coming, as it did, out of the nightmare world of social and financial reversal that undermined the seeming solidity of every middle-class neighborhood. It could happen to their child, too. It could happen to them. Which was the reason for the sudden cautiousness.

  “You’ll watch what you say when you talk to Sylvia?” the mother said.

  “Of course he will,” the man said with false confidence. “Wouldn’t want to be putting the wrong ideas in anyone’s head.”

  “Of course not,” the woman said.

  “I mean, this is a serious business, isn’t it? This is a bad thing.”

  “A bad thing,” Madge repeated.

  “I blame it on the school system,” Fred said. “Now they want another mil of tax money, and they don’t even look after our children properly. Our whole society is screwed up, if you ask me. When I was a boy, no one ran away from home. No one wanted to. Home was...”

  “Everything,” the wife said.

  “Exactly. Home was everything. You lived there and you died there. And the generations passed through your house. And you got to see people growing old, and they got to see you growing up and another generation coming. Nobody stuck anyone else in nursing homes, to wither and rot. Nobody ever ran away.”

  “It was all natural,” Madge said.

  “That’s what it was. You learned to accept things—to tolerate things. Differences. To accommodate them for the sake of the family. You had to accept them, because you saw yourself everywhere you looked. Like your whole life was happening at once. Bits and pieces of it. Different stages. From birth to death. So how could you not show...”

  “Charity,” Madge Rostow said.

  I was moved in spite of the sentimentality of the words and the sing-song way they’d been delivered. And in spite of the fact that things had never really been that way. The Rostows were only voicing their own hopes and the hopes of their beleaguered class. For them, it had all come down to pictures in a photo album—those bits and pieces of a continuous time.

  “Well, here she is,” Fred said with alarming gaiety. “How you doing, princess?”

  Sylvia Rostow ambled into the room, plopped down on a baize chair, and stared at us with undisguised boredom. She was a plump, freckle-faced teenager, with her mother’s dirty blonde hair and her father’s knife-blade nose and a little, bruised O of a mouth that made her look—and would probably always make her look—as if she’d been sucking on a stick of cinnamon candy. She had on a tartan skirt, knee socks, sneakers, and a schoolgirl’s white blouse. And she was chewing a wad of gum so large that it made her pale, white cheek look swollen.

  “Get rid of that gum,” her mother commanded.

  Sylvia pulled a long string of it out of her mouth, then sucked it back in like a strand of spaghetti.

  “Young lady,” her mother warned her.

  Sylvia gave her a look, then reached inside her mouth, pulled out the wad of gum, and plunked it down in a glass ashtray sitting on a table beside her chair.

  “Satisfied?” she said, licking the sugar off her fingers.

  “You mind your manners,” the mother said.

 
; Sylvia made a face, then stared at me. “So you’re the detective, huh?”

  “I’m the detective,” I said.

  “You don’t look like a detective,” she said. “You’re too old.”

  I laughed and Sylvia’s mom threw her hands to her head as if she thought she might lose her mind. Fred squirmed on the arm of the sofa.

  “Princess,” he said.

  “Well, geez, Dad,” Sylvia said. “I mean, how do you know he’s a real detective? He could be just anybody.”

  Fred looked at his wife as if to say “she’s got a point.” Sylvia plainly had him wrapped around her pudgy finger. But the mother wasn’t taken in for a second.

  “Stop being such a smart-aleck, Miss,” she said. “Or there’s going to be trouble.”

  “Geez,” Sylvia groaned. “O.K. What do you want to ask me?”

  I said, “Do you know where your friend Robbie Segal’s gone?”

  “She’s not my friend,” she said disdainfully. “Not my real friend.”

  “That’s not what I’ve been told.”

  “Well, you’ve been talking to that batty Mildred.”

  “That’s it!” Madge Rostow said. “You’re grounded for the night.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Sylvia said.

  “And if you don’t start behaving, it’ll be for the week. Your friend Robbie could be in a lot of trouble, whether you know it or not. I want you to tell this man everything he wants to know or there’s going to be hell to pay later.”

  “Robbie can take care of herself,” Sylvia said petulantly and gave me an ugly look. “Anyway, I don’t know where she went.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Four days ago, I guess.”

  “On Sunday?”

  “Whatever,” Sylvia said.

  “In the morning or the afternoon?”

  “The morning.”

  “Did she talk to you about leaving home?”

  Sylvia shook her head condescendingly. “No. You could hardly blame her, though.”

  “Young lady!” the mother barked.

  “Well, geez, Mom, everybody knows Mildred’s a basket case. I don’t know how Robbie put up with her for as long as she did. Always checking up on her and all. Never letting her go out and have any fun.”

  “What kind of fun?” I said, before Madge could step in again.

  “Fun,” she said with exasperation. “You know, fun? Like going to parties and dancing and going out with guys.”

  “I thought she went out with Bobby Caldwell.”

  Sylvia laughed scornfully. “That fag. They didn’t go out, they just hung around together. That’s probably where she went—to Faggot Bobby’s house. Him and his big deal music.”

  I had the feeling that Sylvia Rostow had been interested in Bobby Caldwell herself, until Robbie had come along and claimed him. She certainly sounded like a jealous girl.

  “Did she say she’d be going to Bobby’s on Sunday?”

  “She didn’t have to say it. She’s always over there—like some groupie.”

  “Sylvia,” the mother said.

  “Well, it’s true, Mom. You’ve said it yourself. If you hang around trash, you become trashy.”

  The mother ducked her head a bit. “She does seem to spend a lot of time with those trashy people. I really can’t understand it. A nice girl like her.”

  “She’s not a nice girl, Mom,” Sylvia said with an evil little smile. “Not anymore.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Go talk to Bobby,” she said. “Ask him what it means.”

  5

  SO I went to ask Bobby. Walked trough the rain to the intersection of Losantiville Avenue, where Eastlawn Drive dipped down in a long, scythe-shaped curve before rising again at the edge of Roselawn Park. Across the intersection, the neighborhood changed character. The red brick colonials became old yellow brick apartments, with glass block set in their facades and street addresses written out in big metal numbers fastened to the brick. The apartments looked like they’d been built in the late forties, during the postwar boom—low-rent housing for the soldiers coming home from overseas. Functional, three- and four-story rectangular brick buildings, divided into sixteen two-room units with paper-thin walls and pine floors and a bare minimum of fixtures and appliances, they had never been meant for show. The developers hadn’t even planted trees in the front yards. Just an occasional hedge, running like a thin green bunting at the bases of the facades, and a few scrubby pines growing in the saw-toothed shadows between the buildings. The plain grass lawns stretched, one after another, down the hill and up to the park, separated by narrow concrete driveways and by tall, black-stemmed, white-capped gas lamps which had begun to glow a warm yellow against the late afternoon sky.

  There was no movement on the street. No cars. No kids. No bird sounds. No street noise. Nothing but the melancholy hiss of the rain and the sputtering yellow lamps and all that damp green lawn and all those mean yellow buildings. It didn’t take much exposure to that part of the street to understand Mildred Segal’s ferocious sense of propriety. Because this was precisely what she was afraid of. Not poverty, but this lower-middle-class life with the shine rubbed off, with all but the smallest pride in appearances swallowed hard.

  At one time the street had probably been home to the auto workers at G.M. and the factory workers at Hilton-Davis. But most blue-collar types were no longer willing to settle for the purely functional decency of these worn buildings. They’d moved on to Sharonville. Or to Montfort Heights. To brand new brick and drywall tenements, with built-in dishwashers and central air and a stylish veneer as thin as the chrome foil on a windshield wiper knob. Only the ones who couldn’t afford to choose lived here now. The ones who lived on fixed incomes and couldn’t move if they wanted to. The ones stepping up from poverty, for whom lower Eastlawn Drive was a first taste of respectability. And the ones like Pastor C. Caldwell, who were just hiding out.

  I found him midway down the block, on the first floor of one of those big yellow nondescript buildings. Pastor C. Caldwell, 1-D. Scribbled in pencil on a scrap of paper stuck in a pitted mailbox. The long entry hall smelled of dry-rot. The overhead lights flickered with the current, casting irregular shadows on the patched plaster walls. It didn’t look like anyone’s idea of paradise—not even a confused and angry teenager’s.

  There was a peephole buzzer set in the door to 1-D. I pressed the button and a moment later he answered. He was wearing a fresh T-shirt and khaki slacks. No shoes. He held a section of newspaper in his right hand.

  “Yes?” he said nervously. “Could I do something for you?”

  There was a bit of the Kentucky hills in his voice and a good deal more of flat Midwestern prairie. But the predominant note wasn’t regional, unless you wanted to call hopelessness an exclusively urban sound. Pastor C. Caldwell spoke with the tired, shiftless, slightly servile voice of a man who had nothing left to lose. No pride. No property. No dreams. It was a voice that said “I just want to get by.”

  The face fit the voice. Crew-cut gray hair, diving in front to a widow’s peak. Tan, weathered skin. Cheeks hollow where the back teeth had been pulled out. Puckered mouth. Great tufted brows. Puffy eyelids that narrowed to slits and just the gleam of restless blue eyes behind them. There was a day’s growth of beard on his chin and neck. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, but given the kind of life he’d probably led, he could have been thirty-nine.

  “Could I do something for you?” he said again.

  He’d been taking me in, and I could tell from his eyes and his voice that he hadn’t quite figured me out yet—whether I could do him any harm. I decided to keep him guessing until I located his son, Bobby, because I had the feeling that he wasn’t going to do me any unpaid favors. His world was one of strict and fierce economy—you took what you could get and you took what went with it and you didn’t take or give anything else to anyone.

  “Is your name Caldwell?” I sai
d in a tough voice.

  “Yessir,” he said and shuffled his feet.

  “You have a son named Bobby?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’d like to speak to him.”

  “What about?”

  “That’s between him and me.”

  “Bobby ain’t in no trouble, is he?” he said.

  “No. I just want to ask him a few questions.”

  “Well, he ain’t here. Matter of fact, he stepped out a few hours ago and won’t be back till supper time.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said and pushed past him into the room.

  There was a television going in one corner, with a green vinyl recliner parked in front of it and an ashtray full of butts beside the chair. The rest of that newspaper he was holding was scattered around the room. A piece on the couch—a hideous stained wood and plaid cloth number with a matching coffee table in front of it stained the same tarry black. A piece on the red, oval rug. A piece on the radiator jutting out from the wall. And what wasn’t covered with paper was littered with dirty clothes. In fact there was a trail of them leading across the floor to an open closet. The room was exactly what Mildred Segal had said it was. And, like Mildred, I couldn’t understand what the pretty blonde girl in the snapshot could have found there to interest her.

  I sat down on the sofa and the man went over to the green recliner. He sat down, put his left hand to his mouth, and sucked on it nervously.

  “Sometimes it still hurts me,” he said. He pulled the hand away from his mouth and held it up. There was a bump of bone where the thumb should have been. “Lost it over to Gibson Cards.” He sucked on the bump again. “Their damn machine’s what done it to me. Their damn machine’s what cost me my livelihood.” He said it fiercely, as if he expected an argument. “I told the foreman I wasn’t going to work on no machine without the proper training. Not for no lousy two-ten an hour, I wasn’t. You know what he said to me. He said, ‘You don’t got no goddamn choice.’ ” Pastor Caldwell mused on the injustice of that for a moment. “That machine ‘bout tore my hand off. And I ain’t been worth a goddamn ever since. Doctor says my nerves are shot. Can’t go out. Can’t do no work at all.