Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  I found a desk sergeant whom I knew, got tagged, and went up to the second floor. I stopped briefly at Al Foster’s office—just to say hello—then walked down the corridor to the homicide squad room. Arthur Bannock was sitting at one of the varnished oak tables, chewing out a uniformed patrolman who was standing nervously in front of him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and rotating his cap in his hands. I waited until Bannock had finished and the patrolman had brushed by me. Someone was going to pay for that chewing out. I could see it in his eyes—a look like murder. Bannock leaned back in the chair and watched him go—his hands behind his head, the tip of a yellow toothpick bobbing in the corner of his mouth.

  “Buy you a drink?” he said, pointing to the chair beside his desk.

  “It’s a little early in the day for me.”

  He gave me a disgusted look and shook his white head. “What’s happening to our country?” he said mournfully. He pulled a handkerchief out of his coat, scrubbed his red boozer’s nose, examined the handkerchief, folded it up, pocketed it, spit out the toothpick, and pulled a pint flask from a desk drawer. He raised it like a toast glass. “The hell with you!” he said cheerfully and took a long pull of whiskey. “Now what do you want, boy-o? I know you want something for nothing, seeing that it’s too early in the day for you to drink with me.”

  I took the first photograph of Robbie Segal out of my jacket and handed it to him.

  Bannock pinched his lower lip between his fingers and studied the picture. “Very pretty,” he said. “You want to see some of mine?”

  “Her name is Robbie Segal,” I said. “She’s a runaway.”

  “Yeah, well, my heart bleeds, you know? But I got other things on my mind.” He passed the picture to me. When I told him Robbie was Bobby Caldwell’s girlfriend, he pulled his hand back and took another look.

  “His girlfriend, huh?” he said. “When did you say she’d left home?”

  “On Sunday afternoon. As far as I can make out, Caldwell was the last person she saw that day.”

  “Why show this to me?” he said after a time. “Why not go down to Missing Persons?”

  “I got the impression that the Caldwell kid and Robbie were very close.”

  “How close?”

  “They might have been lovers,” I said. “She might have run away to be with him.”

  “There was no sign a girl had been living in the apartment,” Bannock said.

  “She wasn’t at the apartment. He must have taken her somewhere else.” I took the second photo out of my coat. “To these people, maybe.”

  Bannock studied the second photo. “Why them?” he said, flicking it with his thumb.

  “I don’t know why,” I said. “It’s my guess they were friends of Bobby’s.”

  “This guy must be thirty-five, forty years old,” Bannock said.

  “You know as well as I do that most runaways end up with adults. Especially if the adults give them shelter and unqualified approval.”

  “And a few other things,” Bannock said sourly. “I suppose you know we found some pictures of this pair in that garage.”

  I tried to look surprised and pleased.

  “Jesus!” Bannock said with disgust. “Take it easy. I’m not giving out awards today.”

  I laughed. “Who are they?”

  “We don’t know. Got no record of either one of them.”

  “Nothing connecting them with the prints you found in the garage?”

  “Nothing, period,” Bannock said. “We haven’t raised a ghost with those prints. And nobody on the street saw a getaway car or anything else. I’m beginning to think that whoever took the Buick back to the garage must have escaped on foot—maybe through the back yards.”

  “Do you have any idea why the car was driven to the garage in the first place?”

  “No,” he said. “Although it was as good a place as any to leave the body, assuming that they could get away with it. Which they apparently have. If you hadn’t gone poking around there, Caldwell could still be sitting in the car, with nothing to connect him up with anyone. Except those damn prints. My Lord, they’re all over the place, like they didn’t give a shit what they touched.”

  “Amateurs,” I said.

  He nodded wearily. “Rank amateurs. No criminal records. No Army records. No FBI. No nothing. They killed the poor son-of-a-bitch and couldn’t think of anything better to do than take him home. Like it was goddamn prom night.” Bannock took another look at the picture of Robbie Segal. “You think she was with him?”

  “I think he helped her run away from home,” I said carefully. “After that, I don’t know what happened, although it would be hard to believe that the Caldwell kid hadn’t been in touch with her since Sunday or that if he thought he was in trouble he wouldn’t have told her about it.”

  “Are you saying she could be a target, too?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible.”

  “All right,” Bannock said. “You talked me into it. I’ll put out an APB on the Segal girl. We’ll list her as a material witness to a felony. But, boy-o, if this girl comes in from the cold and I don’t hear about it—and I mean the minute after you do—I’m going to take it mighty hard. Understand?”

  “I understand.” I started to get up from the chair and Bannock grabbed me by the wrist. For a man of his size and years, he had an extremely strong grip.

  “Stoner,” he said softly. “I meant what I said. If you fuck me over on this, there’s going to be trouble. I’m not like your pal, Al Foster, boy-o. I don’t turn my back if you step out of line and trust that everything’ll come out all right in the end. I expect payment for services rendered.”

  I looked down into that Irish boozer’s red, fleshy face and knew that I’d underestimated him, that behind the free drinks and the stagey patter was a dangerous man. Most cops have to learn their brand of toughness the hard way, secreting it over the years like a kind of callus. This one had been born with that callus.

  I jerked my arm loose from his grip and said, “I told you I understood.”

  He smiled with his mouth, but the rest of his face still looked dangerous.

  9

  THE DALTON Street Community Center was located in the basement of an Episcopal Church on a tired block of brownstone tenements and storefront groceries. The neighborhood it served was one of the poorest in the city—a hodgepodge of nineteenth-century row houses and frame bungalows jammed together wall-to-wall on crabbed, salt-whitened streets. I could see into windows up and down the block, through the muslin curtains into rooms where women in print housecoats bent over ironing boards and men in T-shirts drank canned beer and gazed out impassively at the sidewalks. Children blew noisily in and out of doors—ten and eleven year olds, with cigarettes in their mouths and faces that were at once too shrewd and too exhausted to belong to anyone their age. The street looked pitifully naked in the noon sun. Not even the buildings cast shadows, as if the walls weren’t really there or only there the way surveyor’s lines are set in turf—to mark the boundaries between inside and out.

  The ugly transparency of the street embarrassed me, made me feel slightly ashamed of my own home and my own way of life. I ducked my head to the pavement, as if by not looking at Dalton Street I’d make it disappear, and walked briskly to the church. I didn’t look up again until I’d gotten inside. There was a floor sign by the door, with an arrow pointing down a flight of stairs. I followed the arrow to a pair of gym doors. A young black girl wearing a curly Afro wig was sitting at a desk by the doors. From the blank look on her face, she might have been sitting at the console of a space shuttle.

  “Yes?” she said as I walked up to her. “Is it something you want?”

  She was probably a pretty girl when she wasn’t sitting behind that desk. But something about the job was getting to her. It filled her face with caution and made her voice sound snippy and annoyed.

  “My name’s Harry Stoner,” I said. “I called this morning.�
�

  “I remember,” she said quickly. “I told Miss Shelley what you said and she say to tell you to go on back.”

  “Through there?” I said, pointing to the doors.

  “What you think?” she said irritably.

  I walked through the double doors into a big, tiled rec room. There was a platform on the back wall, with a podium and microphone on it. About a hundred folding chairs were set up in rows in front of the platform. The floors were clean and the chairs were neatly arranged. Apparently the festivities weren’t scheduled to begin until later in the day. Frances was sitting behind a long, low table to the right of the platform. A plump, gray-haired, black woman, with a spray of violets pinned to the collar of her dress, sat beside her.

  “Harry!” Frances called out. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, Frances,” I called back.

  She turned to the black woman and said, “Excuse me for a minute, won’t you, Mrs. Forest?” The woman nodded pleasantly. Frances stood up and walked across the room to where I was standing. She carried herself like an athlete—a bouncy, masculine kind of swagger that was part tomboy, part challenge. Frances Shelley was a woman who meant business. She looked like business, too. Brown hair cut in a wedge; blue eyes aswim behind thick glasses; lean unmade-up face; and the petite, wiry build of a long distance runner.

  “What can I do for you?” she said in her exuberant voice.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re working on another runaway case,” she said drily.

  I took the photograph of Robbie and her two friends out of my jacket and handed it to her.

  “She’s a very pretty girl,” Frances Shelley said. “How old is she? Thirteen? Fourteen?”

  “Old enough to get herself into serious trouble,” I said.

  I explained the case to her, beginning with Mildred and ending with Bobby Caldwell’s murder. She shivered a little when I told her what I’d found in the Buick.

  “Shouldn’t you take this to the police?” she said.

  “I’ve already been to the cops. They’re putting out an APB on the Segal girl. But the fact is that I don’t really know how deeply involved she was with Bobby Caldwell. Her disappearance could be totally unrelated to his murder.”

  “I see,” she said abstractedly. She was still staring at the photograph of Robbie. “Well, I’ll run a check for you, Harry. But we have our own procedures. And if the girl isn’t ready to go home...”

  “I understand, Frances,” I said. “All I want to do at the moment is make sure she’s safe.”

  A crowd of people began filing through the doors behind us—elderly men and women dressed in their Sunday best. Some of them smiled at Frances and me; and one bright-eyed old woman in a straw hat and belted orange suit wagged her finger at us. Frances grinned.

  “I don’t know where they get their enthusiasm from,” she said. “Have you taken a close look at that street out there?”

  “Close enough,” I said.

  “Most of them are living on social security in one-room apartments. They have to contend with inflation, disease, neglect, Reaganomics, and that street. And they still show up once a week to play bingo and listen to a lecturer tell them about all the opportunities they’re missing.” Frances stared at me solemnly. “I don’t think I want to get that old, Harry. I don’t think I’m that brave.”

  I patted her cheek and said, “Yes, you are.”

  She smiled. “It’s just the job, you know,” she said and gave my hand an affectionate squeeze. “I’ll call you tonight after I’ve run the check on your Miss Segal.” She handed the photograph back to me, started to walk away, then turned around. “I guess I better tell you something else,” she said. “The woman in that photograph—the one with the gray hair?”

  “Yes.”

  Frances bit her lip. “I think I know her from some place.”

  “Well, come on, Frances,” I said. “Where the hell is that?”

  “A club I used to go to,” she said. “I think I’ve seen her there. A club in Mt. Adams.”

  “What club?”

  “Just a club,” she said. “A club I used to go to a couple of years ago.”

  “Why the mystery?” I said to her. “Finding that woman could be important. Tell me the name of the club and I’ll check it out.”

  “Harry,” she said flatly. “It’s not that easy. This is a private club. A club for women.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Well, don’t look so shocked,” she said, although I wasn’t looking particularly shocked. “I have a right to my own life.”

  “Who said differently?”

  “I can’t really talk about it now,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at her flock. “Tonight...when I call you about this other thing, I’ll explain it to you.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” I said.

  But she’d already turned away and walked back to the table.

  ******

  About thirty minutes later I was driving down Eastlawn Drive—past the school yard, filled at that hour with children, past the huge stone church, looking gray and grave in the afternoon sun. The shadow of the stone crucifix above the rectory stretched across the pavement, touching the edge of Mildred Segal’s front lawn. No one stared aimlessly out of the windows on this street. Children at play looked their ages or a bit younger—cowed, perhaps, by the priests in their black soutanes, who stood like dark pillars among them. Nothing was open or transparent here—not the houses with their long brick faces or the people who lived inside them. It was all shade and privacy—each yard with its own maple tree, like a maze to prying eyes. And yet a boy from this street had been brutally murdered. A girl from these modest houses had bolted to a different life. And in spite of the facade there wasn’t any real shade to be found, except for the heavy, mordant shadow creeping across Mildred’s lawn.

  I simply couldn’t get him out of my mind—Bobby Caldwell. The way his legs had been bent back against themselves. The look on his face when the cops had unwrapped the tape. It had shaken me through. Made me weary of all the mean streets and all the hapless people who lived on them. Like Frances Shelley, whose cheek I had patted, I was beginning to think that I wasn’t tough enough for the job. Or for what I might find at the end of it. I’d been contracting myself out too long—fighting other people’s battles and braving other people’s losses. I stared up at Mildred’s front door and thought, what if the girl was dead, too. What then?

  But there was no one around to pat me on the cheek. No one but me.

  Mildred answered the door on my third knock. And when she saw who it was, she ducked her head.

  “Are we still on speaking terms?” she said quietly.

  “I’m sorry about this morning,” I told her. “It was the boy’s murder. It shook me up.”

  She looked at me with surprise. “I wouldn’t think that a man like you could be upset by such things.”

  “Men like me can be upset by any number of things.”

  “You’re an odd person, Harry,” she said. “It’s taken me a while to see it, because when something’s odd, I generally assume that it’s me.” She held out her hand and said, “Truce?”

  “Truce.”

  “Well, come in then. Don’t let’s give the neighbors anything more to talk about.”

  I stepped into the room.

  “Nothing’s happened to Robbie?” she said, the moment after she’d shut the door.

  I told her no.

  “It’s only that you look...I don’t know, you look so discouraged.”

  “It’s just the job, Mildred,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I suppose it must be difficult. Have you found something out? Something new?”

  “I’ve been to the police and I’ve been to the Community Service, so there will be a lot more people looking for Robbie.”

  “But have you learned anything more about where she is?”

  I
had to tell her the truth. “No, I haven’t.”

  A sickly, stricken look crossed her face, whitening the corners of her downturned mouth and making her nostrils contract and her pale green eyes glitter. For a moment I thought she was going to pass out. When I moved to support her, she jerked away from me, folding her arms across her thin chest and hugging herself tightly. “I have this terrible feeling that she’s dead,” she said in an anguished voice. “Here.” She grabbed her blouse and twisted it with her hand. “I’m afraid my daughter is dead.”

  “We have no proof of that,” I said.

  “She was with Bobby Caldwell!” she almost shouted at me. “Isn’t that proof enough? He got her into terrible, terrible trouble. I’m sure of it.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said again.

  “I don’t think I could stand it,” Mildred said. “To see Robbie...like the Caldwell boy.” Her face had gone white and panicky.

  I moved toward her and she backed away, knocking a glass ashtray off an end table and onto the carpet.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried out and her hands fluttered about her face. “Oh, God, look at what you made me do!” She fell to her knees and cradled the ashtray to her breast. “Oh, God,” she groaned.

  “Mildred,” I said gently. “For all we know, your daughter is in a shelter.”

  She looked up at me—her red eyes streaming with tears—and shook her head. Her face had that strained, saturated look of overexposure. The look of someone who’s been out in merciless weather for far too long. She was on the edge of her own emotional limits and I had the feeling that if I didn’t say or do something to sober her up she might break down completely.

  “Wherever Robbie is,” I heard myself say, “I’ll find her and bring her home to you. I promise you, Mildred. I’ll find her.”