Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  “Sometimes I can still feel it there,” he said, wriggling the stump. “Like I never lost it nor my nerve neither.” He sighed heavily. “You know what I think, mister? I hear the preachers on the radio shouting ‘Jesus, this’ and ‘Jesus, that’ and send us your money. And the Holy Rollers come to my door with their whole damn family, trying to sell me a Bible. And you know what I say to them. I say, ‘It’s all a pile of shit.’ That’s all this life is, too, when you can’t keep yourself whole but by cutting your damn hand off for two dollars and a dime.”

  But he hadn’t meant that for the preachers and the Holy Rollers. He’d meant it for me. Partly as an excuse for that catastrophic room and the life he’d been leading in it. And partly as the reason why he hadn’t thrown me out. He’d been robbed of his job and his nerve and now anybody who wanted to could come right in and shit all over him. There was enough truth in what he said to make me feel disgusted with myself.

  “I’m not a cop, Mr. Caldwell,” I told him. “I’m a private detective looking for a girl named Robbie Segal.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said uneasily. “Nothing’s happened to that girl, has it?”

  “Not that I know of. She’s run away from home.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said again. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and took another drag off his cigarette. “She’s a good girl, that one. Come from a good home. Hell, she’d come on over here with Bobbie and treat me like I was her own pa. I sure hope nothing’s happened to her.”

  “So do I,” I said softly. The room and that broken-down man were getting to me—reminding me of another broken-down man and another lost girl and the terrible thing that had happened to her. The memory made me so uneasy that I stood up. Pastor Caldwell flinched, as if he thought I might strike him.

  “Have you seen her this week?” I said. “Any time since Sunday?”

  He closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Not since Sunday, I don’t think. ‘Course Bobby’s the one you should talk to. He worships that girl. Worships the ground she walks on. But to answer your question—the last time I saw her was on Sunday afternoon. Out in back with Bobby.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Bobby was playing her some music, I think. He’s got him a little place in the garage back there where he can play, on account of the neighbors don’t want to be bothered with the noise.”

  I glanced at my watch, which was showing five-thirty. “What time do you figure he’ll be back, Mr. Caldwell?”

  “Six o’clock. He run off to Westwood to pick him up a valve grinder. He works on cars back in the back, too. Makes him a few extra dollars that way. And Lord knows, we can use them.”

  That helped explain the gold bracelet. I looked at the man, who was staring idly at the TV. “You don’t have any idea where Robbie’s gone, do you, Mr. Caldwell?”

  He shook his head and said, “You best talk to Bobby.”

  ******

  Only Bobby didn’t show up at six. Or at six-fifteen. And that worried me. Caldwell kept smoking and watching the television. And I started to wonder if he was stringing me along.

  “I thought you said he’d be back at six,” I finally said to him.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” he said placidly. “Now here comes the CBS News and he ain’t here. Somethin’ must’ve delayed him.”

  I stood up. “I’m going to go out back and wait.”

  He jerked around on the chair when I got to the door and said, “Don’t you go poking through my boy’s things, you hear? He won’t like it if you do.” Then he turned back to the TV.

  I walked down the hall to the outside door and stepped into the evening air. The street was already lit for night—gas lamps puddling brightly on the wet concrete, house lights glowing up and down the street. The rain had stopped and a chilly wind had come up from the west, pushing the big dark storm clouds across the sky and whistling through the hedges and the pines. It whipped at my hair and my jacket as soon as I stepped off the porch. I pulled the jacket close to my chest and followed a hedge row to the driveway beside the apartment house. There was enough light coming out of side and rear windows for me to make my way back to the garage—a long slat outbuilding with eight pairs of double doors, each with numbers painted on it in phosphorescent paint.

  I found 1-C and 1-D, unlatched the doors, and pulled them open. The 1-D stall was dark and empty. A Buick had recently been parked in 1-C. I could hear the engine ticking and could smell the exhaust fumes. I groped around the empty stall, looking for a light switch, and eventually walked into a string dangling from an overhead fixture. I jerked it down and the right side of the double garage was lit faintly by a forty-watt bulb.

  There was an oil spot on the concrete floor, but aside from that the cubicle was clean and orderly. A padlocked metal cabinet stood against the rear wall, with a couple dozen pictures taped to the doors. As I got closer, I could see that most of them were pictures of rock musicians, cut out of magazines. But a few of them were snapshots of a boy whom I took to be Bobby. He was a tall, skinny kid, with shoulder-length brown hair and a little boy’s face that made him look childishly sweet, guileless, and a little simple-minded. The kind of kid who could be made to do anything. In two of the photos he was sitting on the porch steps of a frame house, his guitar cradled lovingly in his lap. Two other boys were sitting beside him—both of them in their early twenties, both of them holding musical instruments (guitar, sax) and smiling at the camera. Like Bobby they were long-haired, bright-eyed kids in jeans and workshirts.

  The most interesting photograph was taped to a fluorescent light hung above a narrow workbench on the east wall. I didn’t notice it until I’d turned to leave. It had been taken on the same porch as the other two photos, but Bobby wasn’t in it. Robbie Segal was. She was sitting on a stair, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. A man and a woman were sitting on either side of her—like a family portrait. The man had a long black beard with touches of gray in it, long black hair braided in a ponytail, a black beret slanting across his forehead, wire-rim glasses, and a haughty, fleshless, unsettlingly cold-looking face. He was staring so intently into the camera that it was as if he were taking the picture, and not the photographer. On Robbie’s left, a middle-aged woman with very short gray hair, cut almost like a crew cut, and a mannish, sappy face was grinning mindlessly at Robbie and the black-haired man. She looked as if she were overjoyed to have been included in the picture—like a punk house mother.

  I spent a moment trying to decipher the look on Robbie’s face. It wasn’t a conventional look of happiness, although she seemed happy. It was more like the look she might have had as she sank into a hot tub at the end of a long day. Her eyes were vague and sleepy; her crooked mouth hung open, as if she were taking a deep, satisfied breath. I thought of the hash pipe I’d found in her room, but she looked more than high. She looked spaced-out, thick-tongued, tripping-stoned, as if she’d just done up junk in both arms. It was a drunken look of contentment, and it worried me.

  I peeled the photo off the lamp and stuck it in my pocket. Then I took a closer look at the workbench. I found some Beatles sheet music—“Blue Jay Way,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “I Am the Walrus”—in the bench drawer, along with two good-sized roaches, a box of flat picks, a nail file, a couple of pencils, a package of guitar strings, and a sheaf of Bobby’s own music written out on blank music paper. I flipped on the bench light and took a look at the lyrics. One of them was called “Robbie.” The first stanza and chorus went:

  Come out, Robbie darling, come out and play,

  Tomorrow will be a brand new day,

  We’ll share it together, come what may—

  Only promise me, darling, that you’ll stay,

  Stay by me, stay by me, stay by me.

  Don’t ever go—back into the night,

  Robbie darling, back into the night.

  I didn’t read the rest. At the bottom of the page a different hand had written the words, “You better” or �
��Your better.” I couldn’t tell which. There were also some figures jotted down in the margins. Probably the prices of auto parts.

  I put the music back where I’d found it and flipped off the bench light and the overhead fixture. It was fully dark outside. And Robbie was still lost. But, at least, I’d learned something about her friend—a romantic teenager with a sweet, insipid face who wanted to rescue his love from darkness, like Orpheus and Eurydice. I just hoped, if Robbie was with him, that he hadn’t taken her back to that black-haired man again. It was hard to tell from a single photograph, but that one had the look of a user to me—the look of a self-styled guru, who could twist an impressionable boy like Bobby around his finger. I didn’t want to think about what he could do to the girl, because if she were ripe for Bobby Caldwell’s maudlin songs, then she was ripe for picking.

  6

  I MADE my way by window light back up the driveway to the front of the apartment. It was well past seven by my watch and still no sign of Bobby. He might have been keeping an eye on the Segal home, I thought, and spotted me and decided to lay low for awhile. Or Sylvia Rostow might have called him after I’d left her house. Or it might have been that he’d gotten delayed, like his father had said, and that he had no idea where Robbie Segal had gone. The fact that he had a crush on the girl and wrote love songs to her didn’t mean that she felt the same way about him—a bitter lesson I could remember learning when I was about Bobby’s age. Still, he was my best lead and I wanted the chance to talk to him.

  I ducked my head against the icy wind and decided to pay one more visit to Caldwell’s apartment before calling it a night—to put the fear of the law into Pastor C. in case Bobby did come home later that evening. So I trudged back down that dim, shadowy corridor to the rear apartment and knocked. I could hear the rustle of the newspaper and the cackle of the TV behind the door.

  “Yes?” he called out.

  “Open up,” I said.

  He opened the door. “What do you want now?” he said, staring at me coldly. He’d apparently done a bit of thinking while I’d been gone—enough to get a little of his lost nerve back.

  “The same thing I wanted before—to talk to your son.”

  “You know damn well he ain’t here.” He threw the door open and said, “Or do you want to search my place?”

  He was on the verge of making a scene—shouting and whining and bringing in the neighbors.

  I jabbed him in the chest with a forefinger and said, “You tell your son when you see him that if he doesn’t get in touch with me in the next twenty-four hours, I’m going to get a warrant for his arrest.”

  “On what charge?” he said slyly.

  “Are you kidding? Robbie Segal’s been gone for four days. She’s a genuine missing person. I can have your son up on statutory rape and felonious abduction by tomorrow night. You think you can make bail on two felony counts, Mr. Caldwell?”

  I could almost hear the air going out of him. “What do you want to make trouble for Bobby for?” he whined. “My son never did you no harm. He never done no harm to Robbie, neither. He worships that girl. He’d do anything for her. And she for him. Why can’t you just leave them alone?”

  “Because she’s fourteen years old and her mother wants her back,” I said.

  He hung his head on his chest and sighed. “Her mother’s a good woman, I reckon. But she don’t know shit about kids.”

  You can say that again, I said to myself.

  “If he were here, Bobby’d tell you that himself,” Caldwell said, warming to the subject. “I may be poor, but I’ve raised my boy to speak his own mind. When something ain’t right, he’ll say so—straight out. Why all he’s ever tried to do is help that girl. She’s so quiet and careful-acting most of the time. Bobby just helped her to open up, that’s all—to see more of life. If she’s with him—and, mind, I ain’t saying she is—but if she’s with him, you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll look after her. And he’ll bring her back home, too!”

  I started to say something about the marijuana I’d found in the workbench and the look on Robbie’s face in the photograph I’d stolen, but I let it pass. Caldwell would have denied it, even if I’d shown him the evidence. And, besides, drugs were a part of growing up. At least they were in the nineteen-eighties.

  “And I wasn’t lying, neither!” he went on. He’d gotten that head of steam back and I was just too sick of the whole silly business to prick his bubble. “Bobby did too tell me he’d be here directly at six o’clock. He come in here ‘bout the time that Days of Our Lives started and made him a phone call and then said he had to scoot on over to Westwood Auto Parts to get a valve grinder for the V-8 in his Buick.”

  “He drives a Buick?” I said with surprise.

  “Yep!” Caldwell said proudly. “Bought it off an old woman up on Elbrook. Belonged to her husband. Bobby got him a good deal on that one, I’ll tell you. Only she runs a little rough, so he was going to pull the engine and regrind the...”

  I held up my hand, like a stop sign. “There’s a Buick parked in the stall next to yours right now.”

  Caldwell contracted his brow into furrows and rubbed violently at his chin. “Well, that’s mighty strange,” he said. “Bobby must have come back then, after all. The folks in 1-C don’t have a car, so they let him use their space for repair work.” He sucked nervously on his stump of a thumb. “Wonder why he didn’t come in and eat. We generally have supper ‘bout this time. Fact is, I asked him to pick me up some chicken on his way home.”

  I sighed aloud and stared down that gloomy hallway. It was starting to look too goddamn familiar to me. “Oh, hell,” I said to the man. “I’d better take another look. I might as well get the license plate number while I’m out here.”

  “My son ain’t hiding from you!” he said loudly. “I told you he’s an honest boy.”

  I pushed by him out the door.

  ******

  It was a helluva lot darker on the second trip back. The folks in Caldwell’s building must have gone to bed very early, because this time there was just a smattering of window lights to guide me. Plus it had begun to drizzle again—an ice-cold rain that was being kicked along by the wind. I was soaked through and frozen by the time I got to the garage door.

  I pulled it open, found the overhead light, and clicked it on. The Buick was still there in the left stall—a ‘72 Electra painted maroon and white, with a pair of sponge dice hanging from the rear-view mirror and a plastic St. Christopher sitting on the dash. I walked around to the trunk to get the license plate number, then peered in through the passenger’s side window. There was blood smeared on the seat cushion—so much of it that it made me weak-kneed. For a moment I just gawked in disbelief. Then I tried the handle, but the door was locked. I ran around the Buick, yanking on the other doors. It wasn’t until I got to the rear window on the driver’s side that I saw it on the floor, wedged between the seats. The way it had been twisted about, it hardly looked human. But then it wasn’t human any more.

  I stared at it for half a second, hoping it would resolve itself into a different shape, like a bizarre Gestalt experiment—now a dead body, now a sack of coal. But there was too much flesh and blood and fractured bone showing for it to be anything other than what it was. I couldn’t see the head, which was wrapped in something white. Just the torso and the legs. The legs were lying at an impossible angle, flexed backward as if the knees were on the wrong side of the joint, like an ostrich’s legs. I felt my stomach rub against my spine and backed slowly out of the garage.

  All the way up the driveway—through the wet and the dark—I kept fighting the feeling that what I had seen wasn’t real, that I had suffered a dreadful and preposterous hallucination. Even the professional part of me—the part that had learned to look on violent death with a cold eye—rebelled against the fact of that body. It simply didn’t belong in that car, in that garage, in a case that had begun in Mildred Segal’s fussy living room, on a sedate and unexceptional street.
r />   That shock and confusion must have been written on my face because Caldwell blanched when he saw me.

  “There’s been some trouble,” I told him. “I’m going to have to use your phone.”

  “What trouble?” he said nervously. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to my boy?”

  “I don’t know. Where’s the phone.”

  He pointed shakily toward the dinette. “On the wall, in there.”

  I went into the dinette, found the phone and dialed Central Station. Caldwell followed me in. His face had gone as white as my own.

  “My boy?” he said hysterically. “Has something happened to my boy?”

  I turned to him and said, “There’s a good deal of blood back there. It looks as if someone was badly hurt and left in the car.”

  He covered his mouth with his hands and began to shake his head, very slowly. Back and forth. “Can’t be,” he said thickly. “Can’t be. Can’t be. Lord wouldn’t let this happen. Not to Bobby. Pray Jesus, not to Bobby.”

  “I don’t know if it is Bobby,” I said and realized that my voice sounded panicky, too.

  Caldwell stopped shaking his head and his narrow eyes popped wide open. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered. “Not the girl.”

  “I don’t know,” I said and then someone came on the line.

  As soon as I turned back to the phone, Caldwell let out an animal yelp—like the sound a dog makes when you step on its foot. He threw both hands to his mouth as if he were afraid he might scream again, then ran from the room—arms akimbo, hands on his mouth, eyes wide in terror. I saw him race through the apartment door and heard him running down the hall. When I’d finished telling the cops where we were, I ran after him. I found him in the garage, kneeling by the car and yanking helplessly at the door handle.

  7

  I DIDN’T think about anything for the next half hour or so—while the forensic team did their work. Not even about the impossible and terrible way the case had changed. A case that should have been settled without any violence at all. A case that was as ordinary as Eastlawn Drive. For a time, I didn’t even think about Mildred or about the possibility that what was lying in that car—a bleeding remnant—could have belonged to her. I didn’t think about Caldwell, either, who had collapsed and been taken to a hospital when the police finally cracked open the car door and pulled what was packed inside into the light.