Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  He nodded.

  “My name’s Stoner. I’m a private detective.”

  He blinked once and grinned. “You’re kidding?” he said. “An honest-to-God private detective?”

  I showed him my I.D.

  “Far out!” he said. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Stoner?”

  “Sylvia Rostow gave me your name. She said you were a friend of Bobby Caldwell’s.”

  Hank Lemon’s big grin died so quickly and completely it was as if he’d never learned how to smile. “I don’t really want to talk about that,” he said somberly.

  I searched his face, looking for a trace of the fear I’d seen in Sylvia Rostow’s eyes. If it was there, I couldn’t find it. Hank Lemon didn’t look frightened—just sad and, I thought, a bit angry. The way anyone would look who’d lost a friend to senseless violence.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you would talk about it, Hank,” I said. “A girl’s life could depend on it. A girl whom Bobby cared a great deal for.”

  “You mean Robbie, don’t you?” he said.

  “That’s exactly who I mean.”

  The boy reached down and pulled a red rag from a tool chest sitting on the garage floor. He stared at me as he wiped off his hands. “You’re working for her mother, aren’t you?”

  I told him yes.

  “It’s no wonder she’s the way she is,” he said after a moment. He threw the rag back into the box and kicked it shut. “What with her mother always bitching at her.”

  “What way is that?” I said.

  He shrugged and looked a bit embarrassed. “A little spacey, I guess. Bob was taking care of her, though. I think she would have been all right, if this...” He sighed heavily.

  “How was he taking care of her?” I asked him.

  “He loved her, man,” Hank Lemon said. “He looked after her. Man, he loved that chick.”

  “Do you think he would have helped her run away from home?”

  “He would have helped her do anything,” the boy said.

  “She’s been missing for five days, Hank,” I told him.

  “I didn’t know that. I hadn’t talked to Bob since last Friday.”

  “Did he say anything on Friday—anything that might explain what happened to Robbie or what happened to him?”

  Hank Lemon shook his head. “He talked about cars and he talked about his music. That’s all he ever talked about, except for Robbie. He said he’d written a couple of new songs. And he was hoping to get a gig this weekend to make enough money to finish up work on the Buick.”

  “Where did he play?” I said.

  “He had some friends on the Hill. I never met them. They’d play at small clubs, wedding receptions. That sort of thing.”

  I reached into my coat and took out the picture of Robbie and her two older friends. “Do you recognize the man or the woman?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Could they be some of Bobby’s musician friends?”

  “I suppose. I told you I never met any of them. I’m just not into making music like Bob was. I don’t hang around with that crowd. Some of them are just too spacey for me.”

  “How is that?”

  He didn’t want to spell it out. At least, he didn’t want to spell it out to me—probably because I was the law. “Just spacey, man.”

  “You mean drugs, don’t you?”

  He stiffened up and said, “I didn’t say that. You did. I don’t know what all they were into, and I didn’t want to know. That was their business, you know?”

  “Do you have any idea why Bobby was murdered?”

  He shook his head. “He was a good guy, mister. Easy going. Real laid back. All he wanted to do was play his music and work on his cars and love Robbie.” Hank Lemon’s swarthy face filled with grief. “I guess that was asking too much, huh?”

  “I guess it was,” I said heavily.

  11

  I SPENT the rest of Thursday afternoon driving through the green, hilly streets of Roselawn. The Lemon boy had given me the names and addresses of several other teenage boys—Bobby Caldwell’s friends. One by one, I found them. In yellowstone apartments and red brick colonials, in ranch houses and stucco bungalows. Each of them told me the same things about Bobby—that he’d been a gentle, likeable, unambitious kid, with a passion for stock cars and music and Robbie Segal. His Robbie. That was the way they thought of her—as Bobby Caldwell’s girl. He was taking care of her, they all said. He’d do anything for her. Anything.

  And as the afternoon wore on toward sunset and all those young, shaken faces began to merge into a single, uncomprehending mask of grief, I realized that none of them could adequately explain what had happened to their friend. None of them had ever before experienced the violent death of one of their own. And if they’d already begun to turn him into a myth, into something as sweetly silly as his own songs—Bobby Caldwell, the boy who had lived for love—it was only because they didn’t know any other way to talk about what had happened. They hadn’t yet learned how to think about a death. But death is a quick study. And like sex, it carries its own vocabulary with it. In a matter of weeks, the words would come automatically and the event would shrink before them, until one day it wouldn’t mean very much at all.

  Of course, I’d sounded them out. On everything from the photographs to Bobby’s musician friends. And heard nothing new. Not even about Robbie Segal, although by the time I’d started back to Clifton that fact had begun to intrigue me.

  They didn’t really seem to know very much about her, these gangly, red-faced, unreflective boys. She was a mystery to them—an aloof, lonely young girl whom Bobby, for some reason, had taken under his wing. Of course, most girls were a mystery to them at age sixteen. And they had been Bobby’s friends rather than the girl’s. But in spite of that, I ended up thinking there was something more to their confused looks and embarrassed silences than a normal teenager’s uncertainty about the opposite sex. Something was wrong with Robbie Segal, that was the sense I got of it. They not only didn’t understand her, they didn’t like her, either. She was too strange. Too peculiar. A girl with a secret all her own.

  No one said it outright. Perhaps out of loyalty to their dead friend. The closest they got to it were the code words they used to describe her—words like “cold,” “spacey,” and “far out.” And all of them blamed Mildred for her peculiarities, as if it were self-evident that a teenager’s problems were brought on by bad parenting. They were speaking for themselves, of course. But, in this case, I detected something hollow in the explanation, as if, in spite of their disenchantment with the world of fathers and mothers, even they couldn’t quite make Robbie Segal fit the pattern. It “must have been” her parents was what they were really saying. Wasn’t it always?

  I didn’t know. But I had my doubts. And not just about Mildred, who seemed to be as much her daughter’s victim as her persecutor, although I knew perfectly well how hard it must have been for Robbie to live in that house. But then that house was no different than a hundred other houses on Canova and Elbrook and Section Road. Houses in which the boys I’d talked to lived. Grudgingly. Sometimes despairingly. But lived nonetheless. Robbie apparently didn’t fit into their world any better than she’d fit into Mildred’s. By the end of the day, as I drove back to the Delores through the blue velvet twilight, I’d begun to wonder where indeed she did fit—what that beautiful girl-child had run away to.

  The boys I’d talked to would have answered, “To Bobby Caldwell.” He’d been her protector and, almost certainly, her lover. She’d run away to be with him.

  It was the simplest and, therefore, the most likely answer. She’d gone to a place where she could be with her lover. Perhaps to the house in the photograph—the house where Bobby and his musician friends gathered on the porch to jam and to smoke dope with the man in the beret. After talking to Hank Lemon, I’d begun to think that that man might be a musician, too. It helped to explain the look on his face—that severe, heavy-lidded, devilish sta
re, which was like a whispered threat or a kind of swagger. It was the look, I thought, of an overaged prodigy. The look of a man whose talents had dissolved into mere powers. It didn’t take much imagination to spin out a scenario involving that man and Bobby and Robbie Segal. Together in that house with plenty of smoke and pills and time to kill. And sex in the air like a kind of spell. It didn’t take much imagination to see what could have happened—how violence could have erupted. But then violent crimes seldom take much imagination to execute. Just a momentary weakening of conscience. A capitulation to impulse. Made all that much simpler in an environment where impulse was probably celebrated and encouraged. I could see it, all right. Right through to its bloody end.

  And yet...and yet. Bobby Caldwell didn’t seem like a completely satisfactory reason to me. Not for this one. Not for this beautiful girl with a secret. If I’d read Bobby’s pals correctly, this one had wanted something more than a teenage boyfriend who wrote her pretty songs. This one had wanted something that even her friends couldn’t figure out. Or so I thought. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. Maybe I wanted to make her into someone stronger and more buoyant than she really was—someone who could fly above and away from the world of Eastlawn Drive. Because secretly I liked the idea that the other kids didn’t understand or approve of her. Secretly I felt a kinship to the girl I’d conjured up out of scrap and rumor and my own past. Secretly, I think, I wanted her to make her escape good—to disappear into an anonymous freedom, unhampered by Mildred or Bobby Caldwell or the man in the beret. Or by me.

  Only I also knew that, in this world, the compass of experience always points away from the heart. That true north was always tougher, less satisfying, and more ordinary than any wish or hope. In this world, banality was the rule, as drained and circumspect as a traffic fine. In this world, she was most likely sitting on that porch right now. Or buried under it.

  ******

  It was almost dark by the time I got back to the Delores—the four-story U-shaped apartment building I’d lived in for at least an eon. I parked the Pinto in the tar lot and sat there for a moment, watching the last of the sunset bleed away into the fired hilltops. Outside the night air smelled strangely of lilac and automobile exhaust—the gas-station-in-the-countryside smell of spring in Cincinnati. I walked through the bouquet, past the budding dogwoods in the front yard and the leafy rosebushes, upstairs to my two-and-a-half room apartment.

  I checked the answerphone as soon as I got inside. But there weren’t any messages for me—not even from Mildred Segal. For a second, I toyed with the idea of calling her myself, to make sure she was holding up. I toyed with the idea, then let it go. At that moment, there wasn’t anything I could do to make Mildred feel all right—except to tell her another lie. And I was too old for those kind of lies. Too old to promise anyone that I could make it better again. Not that she would have believed me, any more than she had believed me earlier that afternoon. She’d trusted the impulse behind what I’d said—the desire to help—but she hadn’t believed the words. She’d had no reason to believe them. Besides, they conflicted with her own fantasies of guilt and retribution—with her feeling that the whole affair was a punishment visited upon her for her failures as a mother.

  Mildred Segal was a shrewd, resourceful, surprisingly resilient woman who had run her life as she’d run her home—with stern, compulsive economy. For years, she’d taken comfort in the very nature of that economy—in the regular balancing of small risks and small gains. She’d lived the life of Eastlawn Drive more exactly than the best burgher could have done, putting her trust in the neat, clean display of her house and the careful ordering of her affections. It was a ledgerbook existence, kept in the neatest of hands; and it would probably have seen her through old age, if Robbie hadn’t run away. That had thrown all her accounting off. That had made her economy seem like a kind of hubris—which, in fact, it was. And now she sat like a Greek in a tragedy, waiting for the gods to punish her for her way of life. And there was nothing I could say or do to alter that judgment. To be honest, I had thought she deserved it.

  But part of me was beginning to feel a kinship to Mildred, too. Because part of me had been brought up to lead the same minimal kind of life—a life in which virtues and price tags were all jumbled together in the same box. I’d been fighting against that part since I’d come home from the war. Mostly successfully. Though, every now and then, I slipped. Who didn’t slip? It was so much easier to live a life in which you’re told the cost of every thought or act in advance, in which every idea is a received idea and every impulse is carefully weighed on the scale of public opinion before being acted on. With me, the tenets of Eastlawn Drive had been transmuted into a cranky pessimism; with Mildred, they’d become a conscious, unexceptioned creed. But we shared those tenets, nonetheless—I reacting against them, she believing in them. We were kin. Just as her daughter and I were akin in a different way.

  It was odd, I thought, how easily I acquired families—how quickly I discovered relations in the most unlikely people. Or perhaps that was just another side effect of my bachelorhood or of my job. Perhaps those “extended” families of mine were the only ones I’d ever have. At least, that was the way it was beginning to look as I got closer and closer to forty.

  I sat on the Danish sofa in my living room, sipping a cold beer and pondering that depressing thought. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and being hungry wasn’t improving my mood. Eat and forget, I told myself. I flipped on the Globemaster, walked into my cubbyhole of a kitchen, and scrambled some eggs in a cast-iron skillet. I ate them right out of the pan, with a couple more beers for chasers. But I didn’t really feel any better until Frances Shelley called at eight.

  “I’ve run the check, Harry,” she said.

  “And?”

  “Maybe we better talk about it in person. There’s something else I want to tell you. Actually there’s someone I want you to meet.” But from the way she said it, she didn’t sound as if she were looking forward to the rendezvous.

  “If it has anything to do with your personal life, Fran...”

  “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I can handle this if you can. I’m going to introduce you to a friend of mine—a very good friend. She may be able to help you.”

  “All right,” I said. “Where do we meet?”

  “Do you know the City View Tavern in Mt. Adams?”

  I said that I did.

  “Then let’s meet there. My friend lives right up the street.”

  “I’ll meet you there in a half hour.”

  “And Harry?” she said in an unhappy voice. “My friend...she may want some money.” She almost choked on the word. “Oh, Christ, I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

  “I’ll bring some cash,” I said. “And I’ll be on my best behavior.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll see you in a half hour.”

  12

  IT WAS a short trip to Mt. Adams from the Delores—no more than fifteen minutes—and once I got above the expressway and into the park on the northeast side of the hill, I could smell the springtime in the air. The late April smells of wet earth and green, budding trees. The park was full of blue hyacinth and the grape-like clusters of flowering locust. I coasted past the reflecting pool beneath the Playhouse and up onto Ida, where the night sky was powdered with faint yellow light. Every evening, a blonde haze hung above the hill—the distillation of all the bar lights and restaurant lights and house lights on the hill’s ritzy peak. Half-way down the slope, the money stopped and the lights began to go out.

  I crossed the Ida Street viaduct, skirting the bright St. Gregory and Celestial tenderloins, and coasted down Monastery into the dark hinterlands. Oregon ran east off Monastery—a narrow, cobbled, gaslit street, heavily forested on the hillside and lined, on the city side, with boxy, two-story, frame-and-tar board apartment houses. A few of the buildings had widow’s walks on their flat tin roofs and black decorative shutters on their facades; but for the mo
st part, they were thoroughly run-down homes—poor cousins to the A-frames and high-rises on the crest of Mt. Adams.

  I found a parking spot on the hill side of the street, beneath a budding mulberry tree, locked the Pinto, and walked down the block to the City View Tavern. I hadn’t been near the City View since I was a college kid, when the combination of cheap beer, local color, and quaint surroundings had seemed irresistible. Twenty years later, the place looked exactly like what it was—a storefront bar on a run-down street. The inside hadn’t changed much since my college days: small paneled tap room, decorated with Kiwanis posters and framed photographs of the inclined railroad that used to run past the bar on its way up to Celestial Street; round metal tables with cork tops that smelled vaguely of beer and of disinfectant; small, polished wooden bar, behind which rows of whiskey bottles glowed in the overhead light; and, through the rear door, an open-air deck overlooking the city, with its own complement of tables and festoons of Christmas tree lights winking steadily through the night.

  It wasn’t a busy evening at the City View. A couple of old men in light jackets and rayon pants were sitting on the bar stools, staring into their shot glasses. And a plump teenage girl with a pugnacious face was coaxing music out of a pinball machine on the side wall. I ordered a beer from the bartender and carried it through the rear door, out onto the terrace.

  Frances Shelley was sitting with a young blonde girl at one of the tables. For a brief second, in the dim terrace light, I cherished the foolish hope that the girl was Robbie Segal. But as I walked up to her, I realized that the only thing that she and Robbie had in common was blonde hair; and even that proved to be an illusion, because this one’s hair was peroxided. It covered either side of her thin face in curly muffs, like a poodle’s ears.

  When Frances reached over to brush some of the hair from the girl’s cheek, the blonde shook her head and growled, “Cut it out, Fran!” in a husky, unpleasant voice. Frances dropped her hand immediately and glanced at me, as if she’d hoped I hadn’t noticed what had happened. The girl stared at me, too.