Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  I hadn’t looked at it long, although I knew I wouldn’t forget it. You don’t forget torture slayings. They stick with you always, like your very first glimpse of death. The head had been wrapped in white adhesive tape—from crown to chin, like a mummy. Probably to prevent the boy from seeing what was going to happen to him next. There were terrible rope burns on his wrists and ankles, where he’d writhed against whatever he’d been tied to. When the cops unwrapped his head, they found a bloody dish towel stuffed in his mouth. A dish towel.

  I’d watched them lift what was left of Bobby Caldwell into a collapsible gurney, cover it with a blanket, and wheel it off to an ambulance. And when it was gone, I got up and walked back through the dark—pushing my way past cops and white-faced bystanders, until I was far enough away from that garage, far enough down the street, that what had happened there seemed like someone else’s trouble—just a cluster of ambulance lights and police cars in a driveway.

  I stood in the rain for about ten minutes, then walked slowly back to the apartment house—hands in my coat pockets. I knew there was a particular reason for what had happened to Bobby Caldwell. Bad company, cross words, a rash act. I’d find that part out, I thought. The part that was dreadfully ordinary, the part that hadn’t been scheduled years in advance on someone’s secret agenda. I’d find it out because it might lead me to Robbie Segal. Because it had become part of the job. And because I wanted to find it out.

  Most of the cops had left by the time I reached the apartment building. The bystanders had gone to sleep, if they could sleep after what they’d seen. And the street had settled into rain-soaked decrepitude. I found a police detective standing on the front lawn—or he found me. I told him the story once again, and he listened with that impassivity that cops and adolescent boys confuse with cool and courage. He was a veteran cop, this one, with a shock of white hair and a thick-jowled, heavy-lidded face and a boozer’s red, blue-veined, bulbous nose. He looked, I thought, like a short, fat Tip O’Neil. And he sounded like James Cagney—cocky, shrill, and tough. He had a pint of Johnny Walker in his overcoat, and we both took swigs from it as we walked down that miserable hallway to Caldwell’s apartment. It wasn’t until the liquor hit me that I realized how wet and cold and thoroughly played out I was.

  I sat down on the couch, while the cop, whose name was Bannock, pawed around in the dinette. The TV was still on. It was Tom Snyder time, by Pastor Caldwell’s clock. I watched that rude, impatient man bait some fool rock musician and felt the whole weight of the day fall on me like a tower. I felt like throttling Tom Synder. Instead I got up and turned off the set. Bannock came back into the living room with a stack of papers in his arms and sat down across from me on the green recliner.

  “Don’t like Tommie, huh?” he said, spreading some of the papers on the floor in front of him.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  “Bills.” He let the rest of the papers spill from his hands to the floor. “Mountains of ‘em.” He toed at the papers. “Question is—what did you find?”

  I thought about the photo I’d taken from the bench light and said, “Nothing.”

  “You sure of that, huh?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, we’ll probably find out that you’re lying,” he said lazily. “You do tell lies, don’t you? Every once in awhile?”

  “Once in awhile.”

  “Yeah, I heard that about you, boy-o.” The little man shrugged. “But what the hell do I care, huh? There are so many fingerprints in that Buick we’re bound to score somebody’s number. Probably some whacked-out biker with a grudge. They go in for these kind of theatrics.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Fucking amateurs,” Bannock said with spite. “I’m too old to be pulling this kind of duty. Too old and too fat.”

  Bannock slipped the pint bottle out of his pocket, took a swig, corked it, and tossed it over to me. “Man,” he said. “You look like shit.”

  “I feel like shit,” I said wearily and emptied the bottle.

  The little man eyed me for a moment, then said, “Go home, boy-o. Go home and forget this whole thing. It’ll make you crazy if you don’t. I know. It’ll make you fucking crazy.”

  ******

  I went home. Walked up Eastlawn Drive to the church yard, got in the Pinto, and drove away from that depressing street with its worn brick houses. When I got back to my apartment in the Delores, I drained another half-pint of Scotch and went to sleep on the living room couch. I must have gotten up during the night and found my way to the bedroom. I didn’t remember doing it when I woke up the next morning. But then I didn’t remember my dreams, either.

  8

  ONLY DREAMS have a way of lingering with you throughout the day—they resolve themselves into a mood, then someone says something or you see something and a bit of dream precipitates out into the sunlight to astonish you, like finding money on the sidewalk. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was bothering me that Thursday morning. The newspaper was full of it—pictures of the body being wheeled to the ambulance and rows of shocked faces staring at it. Those faces had been in my dreams. And when I dressed, I found the two snapshots of Robbie Segal in my sports coat and realized that she’d been in my dreams, too. She and her two middle-aged friends—the man with the cruel, fleshless face and the simpering woman with gray hair. Then Mildred called—for the first time that morning—and most of it came back to me in a rush. That brick spectrum of a street, shifting gradually from affluence to poverty. The churchyard and the boy standing in the rain. The garage with the bloody automobile. And Robbie and me and her mother standing by the workbench, while the graying woman and her evil friend wrapped the Caldwell boy in white adhesive tape—rolls of it. Then we’d cut the tape away, with those shocked bystanders looking on. But I couldn’t remember what we’d found underneath the bandages. Only that I’d been surprised at what we’d seen.

  I was sitting on the living room couch, drinking coffee and thinking about what it might have been that had surprised me, when Mildred called for the second time. The first time I’d spoken to her, I’d spent the better part of ten minutes calming her down, assuring her that Caldwell’s murder didn’t necessarily mean that anything had happened to her daughter. I wasn’t sure I believed what I was telling her, especially after what Pastor Caldwell had said about Robbie and his son. But it would have been lunacy to let the woman in on that. She’d hung up, moaning over “poor” Bobby and begging me to make Robbie’s safety my first priority. The second call, I thought, was just to make sure that the first call had had its effect. Mildred was undoubtedly one of those people who dialed a busy signal twice—to make sure she hadn’t dialed incorrectly the first time.

  “You’ll keep looking for her,” she said, after I’d spent another ten minutes soothing her.

  “I told you I would.”

  “But how? Where will you look? With Bobby dead, where will you go?”

  It was a good question. “I’ll check the shelters and vicarages,” I said. “Just in case Bobby wasn’t involved in Robbie’s disappearance. And I’ll contact the police.”

  “Yes. What else?”

  “I have some other leads, Mildred,” I said uneasily, although the photograph was my only real lead—and not a very solid one at that. “Do you know where Bobby and your daughter went when they were together?”

  “I don’t know that they ‘went’ anywhere,” she said stiffly. “It was my impression that she listened to him play the guitar. Nothing more.”

  Nothing more, I thought. I wondered, for a second, if she really believed that or if she was trying to find out what I believed. It was a hell of a way to learn what your kid was up to. But then Mildred didn’t really care about what Robbie had been up to, as long as she could get her safely back in that overstuffed room without letting the neighbors know where she’d been. Which wasn’t being entirely fair to Mildred, who did love Robbie in her own way. But then I wasn’t in a fair-minded mood.<
br />
  “I’ll call you when I have something to report,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said mournfully. “Call me. I’ll be at home. I couldn’t teach today—not after what happened to poor Bobby. Is Caldwell...how is he taking it?”

  “He collapsed,” I said. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “I think I would die,” Mildred said. “To see your only child—”

  “Stop it,” I said with disgust. “Just yesterday you were telling me what trash they both were.”

  “It may surprise you to know this, Mr. Stoner,” she said with assumed dignity, “but in spite of what I said, I didn’t wish either one of them harm. And I am truly sorry for their misfortune. But I’m certainly not going to take the blame for it. Or feel guilty for thinking what was true—that they lived like animals.”

  “They’re the ones who are taking the blame for it, right, Mildred? They got what they deserved.”

  “What a wicked thing to say!” she cried. “I’m sorry I came to you. I’m sorry that I need you at all.”

  She hung up. But I knew she’d call back. She’d had her melodramatic moment and she’d repent, like any good stock character, and beg my forgiveness. And I’d forgive her, because, though she hadn’t known it, I didn’t have much patience with people like Mildred Segal. That morning I felt as if I’d seen enough Mildred Segals to last me a lifetime. Men and women who assumed blithely that what they had was the best thing to have and that there was only one way of getting it—the American way of legalized repression and sublimation through status. If that was the way Mildred’s society was run, then she should have been forced to see all of it. To see what I’d seen the night before in that bloody garage—the dirty little secret at the heart of her repressions and sublimations, the violence that would keep festering and erupting until it engulfed her whole goddamn world. And the funny part was that she never would see it, never would understand why the world was turning against her—just as she really didn’t understand why her daughter had run away. She was so fixed on her own values—on maintaining what she had and on living out the lie of unruffled prosperity—that she would never see that there wasn’t room enough for that kind of prosperity and true charity. Maybe when I’d brought her daughter back to her, kicking and screaming, there’d be a bit of judgment, because that’s what Mildred and the Rostows and the rest of their kind needed—a day of wrath.

  I went into the kitchen and fixed myself breakfast and, after a time, I calmed down. I knew it was the Caldwell boy’s murder that had awakened the intemperate Puritan in me. It wasn’t just the violence of his death. I’d seen my share of that, in the army and in my job. I could even accept it as a solution to certain problems. And I didn’t have much more patience with people who couldn’t admit that possibility as real than I had for Mildred Segal and her never-never land of hollow prosperity. It wasn’t just Mildred’s world that had homicide as its root secret. We all lived in that world—ineluctably. Some of us just lived a little closer to the core of it than others did. I guess, finally, that was what was bothering me. On that particular morning, with those bad dreams in my head, I didn’t like the life I was leading. On that particular morning, I think I would have traded it gladly for a wife and a child and steady, interesting work—although that was probably asking too much.

  I stared out the living room window at Burnet Avenue. The storm clouds had blown away during the night, and the trees and the grass and the cars parked on the street had a freshly washed bloom. It was a beautiful April day, and I felt as if I had to gird myself to go out into it—like a man in armor—weighed down by what I’d seen and by what I was trying to forget.

  I’d just finished my third cup of coffee and started for the door when Mildred called to make peace.

  ******

  I got to my office in the Riorley Building about nine-thirty and, after checking the answerphone to see if there had been any further urgent messages from Mildred, I pulled the phone book out of my desk and looked up the number of Community Services on Auburn Avenue. I wanted to talk to Frances Shelley—an aggressive young social worker whom I’d worked with before on runaway cases. But she wasn’t in.

  I got her supervisor instead—a smooth-talking customer named Allan Washington. I’d worked for Welfare myself for a couple of summers when I was in college, so I had a pretty good idea of who I was dealing with—a hard-nosed, middle-aged civil servant, who’d spent twenty years in the field getting all the pity and enthusiasm knocked out of him and whose smooth, rich, amiable voice was probably the only charitable part he had left. Frances was only twenty-six. She hadn’t bottomed out yet on all the cruelty and toadying and shameless jockeying for dollars that she’d met with in the field and in the office. She would bottom out, though. It’s an odd thing about social work—how, inevitably, the bureaucracy comes to mimic its nemesis, how it takes on the mean-spirited, stingy, transparently manipulative qualities of the worst segment of its clientele, and how the case workers end up feeling just as impotent and angry, just as fundamentally poor, as the men and women they service.

  I knew I wasn’t going to get the kind of help I wanted from Al Washington, not after he’d found out that I couldn’t do him any good. And I also knew that if I left a personal message for Frances it would be marked down against her. Civil servants frown on personal calls made on government time and get their jollies by catching subordinates in just those kind of lapses. It’s all a little like the peacetime army, where pettiness substitutes for discipline and grudges are paid out in monthly fitness reports. So I pretended I was still with the D.A.’s office and that I needed to talk to Frances about one of her cases. The smack of official interest got Washington’s attention.

  “Are you sure this isn’t something I could help you with?” he said with faintly oily cheer.

  I told him, no. That it really wasn’t urgent enough to justify his involvement. A minor matter, actually. A question of a record. That shut him down like a thrown switch.

  “I see,” he said curtly. “Well, Miss Shelley isn’t here. She checked out this morning at nine and probably won’t be back in the office today.”

  “Is there someplace I could reach her?” I said. “In the field?”

  “Try the Dalton Street Community Center,” he said and hung up.

  I got the number of the Community Center from the phone book. The black girl who answered my call told me that Frances wasn’t in but that she was supposed to be back around noon to supervise a senior citizen’s workshop.

  “She going to be mighty busy, though,” the girl said. “Is it something I can do for you?”

  “‘Fraid not,” I said. “Just tell her Harry Stoner called and that I need to talk to her.”

  I could hear her pencilling down the message. “Harry Sloaner got to talk to you,” she read back.

  “Close enough,” I said. “Tell her I’ll stop in around twelve-thirty.”

  “Twelfth-thirty,” she said.

  After hanging up, I spent a few minutes going through the mail and a few more minutes straightening up the desk. And when I’d finished my housekeeping, I got back to the matter at hand—the disappearance of Robbie Segal. Since the two photographs were the only evidence I had, I took them out again and studied them, hoping to spot something I’d missed the first time around—like a name tag or a street address. I wasn’t that lucky, although I did end up with a slightly different impression of the girl.

  In the first photo, she looked heart-breakingly young and pretty—a blonde teenager with a sweet, vulnerable face. She wasn’t any less pretty in the second photo, but something about her good looks had changed. The day before I’d thought that she might have been on drugs—that that was what accounted for the faraway look in her eyes and the breathlessness of her mouth. This time around, it occurred to me that it wasn’t as if something had been taken away from her expression—some conscious intensity—rather that something had been added to it, something sensuous and charged, something which made her lo
ok less childlike and vulnerable. I thought about what Sylvia Rostow had said—about Robbie no longer being a “good girl”—and wondered if that was what I was seeing: the sudden addition of sexual passion to an adolescent beauty. It made me feel vaguely chauvinist to even consider it, especially since I knew that I wouldn’t have spotted the same thing in Bobby Caldwell’s face. Maybe it was a charge that I was adding, I thought. A bit of semiconscious wish fulfillment. Because the truth was the girl was stunning-looking.

  It wasn’t hard to understand Bobby Caldwell and his songs. This was a beauty that songs were destined to be written about.

  Only thinking about Bobby Caldwell made me nervous. I had no proof that he’d helped Robbie run away. Just a strong suspicion. And no proof that his murder had anything to do with the girl, either. But if the two events were related, my blonde runaway was in very bad trouble. The possibility was ugly enough to get me going again—off that cracked leather chair and out of the office.

  I took the elevator down to the main floor, walked through the Riorley lobby—an ornate, rather dilapidated example of twenties American rococo, full of brass chevrons and marble pilasters—to Walnut Street. I picked up the Pinto in the Parkade and drove through the blue April morning, up the Parkway to the Police Building.

  It was about eleven-fifteen when I found a parking place among the crowd of cruisers on Ezzard Charles Drive. I locked the Pinto and walked up the sidewalk to that yellowish, foreshortened building, with its flagpole on the lawn and its brick and metal sign by the door. The flag was hanging at half-mast on that windless morning, curled like wet wash about the pole. Someone on the force or someone in the city government had died; and that was the memorial, a red and white banner hanging listlessly against the deep blue sky. In spite of myself, I thought of Bobby Caldwell again and carried that thought with me into the building.