Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  “It’s cold,” she said, hugging her shoulders through the thin dress.

  “I’ll turn on the heater in the car.”

  We got in and I experienced another awkward moment, listening to her silk stockings rustle.

  “How old are you?” I said as I started the engine.

  “Old enough,” she said drily. “I’m well past the jail bait stage, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She tucked her legs underneath her, turned in the car seat, and gave me an amused look. “What are you worried about? You’re worried about something.”

  I flipped on the heater and said, “It’s been a long day.”

  She turned one of the vents toward her. “I’m always cold. Poor circulation. Someday, when I get enough money together, I’m going to move to L.A. That’s where the music is, anyway. L.A.!” She trilled it, as if it were the top note on the scale. “Then I’ll never be cold again.”

  I shifted into first and started down St. Gregory toward the Parkway. I wasn’t really sure where I was going, but after Sophie and Irene Croft, and pal Joey, I wanted off the Hill as quickly as I could go.

  I headed southwest when I got to Columbia, along the riverfront. At that time of the morning, the streets were deserted and the city looming behind them looked as sedate and unpeopled as midnight in the suburbs. I got off the Parkway at Vine and drove through the greenish haze of street lights to Central. Nothing was moving on the sidewalks but bits of paper, chased by the wind. Nothing was lit up but the traffic lights and the arc lamps overhead. The great marble and glass skyscrapers towered up on either side of us, with no one but caretakers and janitors inside. Some cities never sleep—you can never really have them all to yourself. Cincinnati sleeps each night like it’s drugged. And coasting through it at three in the morning you can still get that small-town sense of scale, that reassuring feeling that, in spite of the marble and the brass, this is one city that’s not bigger than you are.

  When we got to Central Parkway, I turned west, skirting the half of the city above Twelfth. I still didn’t know where I was going. In a way, I suppose, I was waiting for Grace to tell me. But she just huddled in front of the heater, rubbing her hands together and humming little scat-like tunes. I figured she was content to end up wherever I took her. Which gave me the sinking feeling that she’d made this kind of trip before. Say every night at closing time. To every point on the compass. With whoever was left in the bar. I was as vain as the next man, but I certainly didn’t credit myself with attracting a girl as young and as offbeat as this one was—a girl who seemed to be habitually bopping along to the soulful sound of some old Philco, tuned to a station that only she could hear. Besides, I didn’t feel any heat coming off her. She’d been friendly, and in her own goofy way, kind of disarming; but she seemed as cold inside as she was on the outside. Which only made me more certain that what we had in common was the contents of my wallet. If she was a whore, she had a hell of an act. If she was just an oddball looking for company and a few extra dollars—which seemed more likely—she was still a strange fish.

  When we hit the Fairmount hillside, she helped bring the question into focus by skipping a beat in her songs and saying, “You live around here?”

  “Pretty close.”

  She went back to her humming, and I decided to say it outright.

  “You want to come home with me?”

  She looked up as if she’d heard the schoolbell ring. “Of course. That was the idea, wasn’t it?” She gave me a searching look and I started to feel very old.

  “What’s your problem?” she said.

  I glanced over at her and asked, “What’s my name?”

  “You’re the detective who likes Billie Holiday,” she replied, as if that were a sufficient answer. “Don’t be a goof. I like the way you look. I like this raggedy old car. And I’m going to like what happens when we go to bed.”

  “You always do what you like?”

  She stared at me as if the question made no sense. “Shit, yes. Don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer her. She kept looking at me and I kept looking at the road. She finally said, “What is your problem? Is it my age? I’m twenty-two. Or I will be in July. Want to see my driver’s license?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then what is it?” She didn’t give me a chance to reply. “I’ll tell you what your problem is. You think too much with this”—she tapped her head—“and not enough with this.” She put her hand on her groin. “I know. I used to be just like you. When I came to school here three years ago, I was all head. I went to classes and did my homework, and when a boy put his hands on my tits, I pretended I didn’t like it. I pretended I was learning about music, too, by reading books and listening to lectures. But jazz isn’t learned in a classroom. And life isn’t either. It’s got to be lived on its own terms. And you can’t do that by pretending.”

  She sounded twenty-one, all right. I didn’t bother to point out that you can’t discover what life’s terms are by doing everything that you want to do, either. It would have been too easy to say, and, besides, as clichéd as it was, there was a good deal of truth in what Grace had said. It wasn’t a very complicated truth, and you had to be young to feel it fully. Young and enthusiastic. Listening to her made me feel a little adolescent fire in my own veins. And it also reminded me of just how powerful and attractive the feeling of freedom can be, when you are twenty-one. Or fourteen, like Robbie Segal.

  “Well,” she said to me. “Are we going to your place? Or are we going to pretend that you’re too old to want to fuck me? And that I’m too young to want to be fucked?”

  When she put it that way, I couldn’t see where I had much of a choice.

  ******

  Afterward, I could see it. And feel it, too. Guilt, thick as ether, seeped into my body, leaving me with a numbed, heavy heart. Grace would have said, “If you couldn’t handle it, you shouldn’t have done it.” And she would have been absolutely right. I sat beside her in bed, smoking a cigarette and thinking miserably of how far I had traveled from the days when doing what you wanted to do had seemed the essence of life.

  I fell asleep, holding that melancholy thought to my breast, and woke up—a good eight hours later—to the taste of Grace’s mouth on my lips.

  From the way my body responded to that kiss, I thought, “You could have been wrong last night.” The phone saved me from sin by ringing suddenly and stridently on the bedstand.

  “Let it go,” whispered Grace.

  But I pulled away and sat up—like a soldier at reveille. Glanced at the clock, which was showing eleven-thirty, and knew at once who it was. With Grace nibbling my shoulder, I sloughed off the last of the night and picked up the receiver.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes, Mildred,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “I’ve been worried,” she said a little frantically. “I tried getting you at the office, but there wasn’t any answer.”

  I pried one of Grace’s spidery arms from my chest and said, “I overslept. I had a late night.”

  Grace fell back on the bed with a laugh. Mildred must have overheard her, because I could hear her stiffening up on the other end of the line—a sound like a rubber raft being inflated. “I see,” she said.

  “Mildred,” I said in my soberest voice, “I was looking for Robbie last night. And I may have gotten a lead.”

  “Yes?” she said and her voice became warm and eager. “She’s all right?”

  Grace said, “Who’s Robbie?” And I tossed a hand at her to shut up.

  “Harry?” Mildred said again. “Is she all right?”

  She was trying. I could hear it in her voice—a sliver of patience, put there like a tab in a shirt collar to give it shape and steadiness. I wanted desperately to give her something in return. But the best I could do was say, “I think so. I’ll find out more this afternoon.”

  She didn’t say anything. I think she was afraid to speak.

  Afraid all her fears would come tumb
ling out uncontrollably, as they had on the previous day.

  “You’re doing well,” I said to fill the silence. “You’re doing better than anyone could expect, Mildred. But you’ve got to hold on a bit longer.”

  “I don’t know—”

  I didn’t let her finish. “You’re a tough lady and you can do it.”

  “Perhaps,” she admitted. “Madge Rostow came to visit me yesterday, did you know that?”

  “I knew.”

  “I didn’t think I could talk about this with anyone but you,” Mildred said with a curious detachment. “I just didn’t think I could do it.”

  “Did talking to her help?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. Yes, I think it did. Today I don’t feel quite as alone.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Perhaps,” she said again. “I don’t like telling other people my problems. It seems so...cowardly.”

  I knew what she meant. I hadn’t been raised on a street like Eastlawn Drive for nothing. I’d absorbed some of that fierce sense of propriety, too. And I hadn’t rebelled against that propriety without picking up some of Grace’s larkish brand of selfishness. As I sat there with the girl lying beside me and Mildred searching for words on the phone, they seemed to me to be two halves of the same mysterious whole.

  I said something about her being more courageous than cowardly. But that was beside the point.

  “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I feel as if I’ve violated a trust. Do you know what I mean?”

  I said, “You’ve stopped pretending everything was all right. And on a street like yours, that’s a hard thing to do.”

  “I feel like I’ve let them down. I could almost see it in Madge’s eyes. She was sweet and supportive, but she was frightened, too. I actually ended up telling her everything was going to be all right.” She laughed delicately. “I think that’s what made me feel better.”

  It was a strange way to find hope—to curtsey your way into it, like greeting royalty. But in that mandarin world of hers, perhaps it was the only way of finding it. Politeness, the show of neighborliness, were as much the cornerstones of Eastlawn Drive philosophy as the unreal, prideful show of prosperity. And if it took seeing Madge Rostow losing her cool for Mildred to feel obliged to recover her own stamina, that was all right, too.

  “I’ll call you when I have some news, Mildred,” I said. “You’ll be fine until then.”

  “Yes,” she said without conviction, “I’ll be all right.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to my other problem, who was lying naked beside me. She was so skinny her ribs showed through the flesh like a child’s green bones.

  “Don’t you ever eat, Grace?” I said.

  She rubbed her flat tummy. “I’m dieting.”

  I laughed out loud. “For God’s sake, why?”

  She turned on her elbow and one small breast fell against the pillow. “I don’t like to put anything into my body that isn’t natural.”

  “What about me?”

  She grinned. “That’s high-grade protein. Anyway, if I had to give that up, I’d find a different diet.”

  I gazed at her with amusement.

  “I thought we’d spend the day in bed,” she said lazily.

  “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Won’t it wait?”

  I glanced at her again and said, “I’m afraid not.”

  She sat up as if she’d been shot from a cannon. “O.K.,” she said. “I get the message. Time for Grace to go.”

  Life on its own terms apparently didn’t preclude childish displays of temper when those terms weren’t to your liking. I mentioned this to her and she snarled at me.

  “Well, what’s so goddamn important, anyway?”

  “A girl named Robbie Segal.”

  “Is she the bitch in that photograph in your coat pocket?”

  I gave her a look and she stared right back at me.

  “I went through your coat last night,” she said with brazen nonchalance. “I took some money, too.”

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing’s for free, Harry,” she said with a shrug. “And I’ve got to live.”

  “Then you owe me something,” I said, pointing a finger at her.

  “I owe you dick,” she said. “However, I like you. So I’ll do you a favor.” She pulled the sheet up to her hips and said, “That girl in the picture...I’ve seen her before. She was with some kid—a guitarist for The Furies—in The Pentangle on Sunday night. She seemed to be having a real good time,” she added a little nastily.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean she was drunk on her ass and hitting on anything wearing pants. It was almost funny, seeing how young and cherry she was. Real pretty but not too cool. The kid she was with practically had to sock her to get her out of the bar.”

  I described Bobby Caldwell to her and said, “Was he the one?”

  She nodded. “He’s a good guitarist, too. I felt bad for him. He had to cut the last set short just to keep her from taking her pants off.”

  I said, “Was Theo Clinger there, too?”

  “No,” she said.

  But she said it too quickly and forcefully, as if she’d been expecting me to ask her about Clinger and had already prepared an answer. She hadn’t liked Robbie Segal. I could hear that in her voice. Which would make lying that much easier.

  “You like Theo?” I asked her.

  “I love him,” she said passionlessly. “He’s a great musician. And he’s been very good to me. He gave me a place to live when I had nowhere else to go. He took care of me and taught me something important about life and music.”

  “And what was that?”

  “That you make it up yourself from what’s inside you.”

  “You wouldn’t want to tell me where the guru could be found, would you?”

  Grace stared at me for a moment, then wormed away across the bed and reached down and picked up her skimpy bra and panties. Silently she began to dress. I watched her for a second and felt a little bad that we were ending like this—like two strangers in a hotel room with folding money on the dresser. And then thought that this was probably the only way it could have ended with Grace. Her face told me that. She was so used to this scene that she didn’t even look disappointed. Just a little restless and abstracted, like a workman packing up his tools at the end of a bad day.

  16

  IT WAS almost twelve-thirty when I dropped Grace off on the sunny Mt. Adams sidewalk. We hadn’t said much to each other as I drove. She’d quickly lost herself in that private world of hers—humming a bar of jazz, improvising a snatch of lyrics, drumming her fingers on the black straw purse. And I had been too busy thinking about Robbie Segal to pay this other lost girl much attention. It wasn’t until I actually dropped her off on Monastery and watched her walking away in her feathered hat and tight print dress—her skinny legs wobbling on tall black heels—that I realized that I hadn’t said goodbye to her. I thought about calling her back, but deep down and in spite of the way she’d helped me, I knew that I didn’t really want to be involved any further with Grace. So I let her go without a word. Watched her drift up Monastery to St. Gregory’s—skimming her hand across the glistening metal tops of the parking meters—and when I lost her in the heavy, black shadows of the monastery, I slipped the Pinto back into gear and drove down the hill to town. As soon as I got to the office, I cleaned the litter of circulars and bills off my desk, took a yellow pad and pencil out of the drawer, and began to write down a brief outline of what I knew about Robbie Segal’s disappearance.

  Sunday, early afternoon: Mildred and Robbie argue over money Robbie has taken from her purse. Mildred leaves. Returns at 4:30 to find Robbie gone.

  Sunday, late afternoon: Pastor Caldwell sees his son and Robbie in the back yard of the apartment house.

  Sunday evening. Bobby and Robbie are seen at The Pentangle Club.

  I put the pencil down.

  I only ha
d one day partially filled in, with Monday and Tuesday still complete blanks. But that was a good deal more than I’d had the day before. Plus, I was now certain that Bobby Caldwell had helped my runaway escape from Eastlawn Drive. Judging from the photograph of her and Clinger, and from the Pentangle T-shirt and the other drug- and sex-related paraphernalia that Bobby had given her, I figured that the Caldwell boy had spent the past few months priming Robbie to run away—convincing her to “come out and play,” as he’d asked her to do in the love song. Only young Robbie had apparently taken what Bobby Caldwell had said to heart. On Sunday night, she’d begun to play in earnest. And Bobby hadn’t liked it one bit.

  If I could read him correctly—and I had the feeling that I could, after all I’d learned—Bobby had never intended that his girl should take an active part in the Pentangle scene. I guessed that he’d taken her with him to the club on Sunday night because he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone on her first night away from home and because the music he made at the bar was an important facet of his life. Maybe the most important facet. Because he was made of music, this kid. All of his friends had said so. Irene, Grace, even Clinger (by report) had said so, too. Music and Robbie Segal were all he’d thought about. I could only imagine how disappointed he must have felt when he’d discovered on Sunday evening that Robbie was no longer listening to what he played.

  I’d sensed it all along—that this beautiful girl-child had wanted something more than Bobby could offer her. And while the ugly scene at the bar could have been a fluke—a combination of too much beer and too much excitement—it could also have been a sign of things to come, a first declaration of independence from her mother and from Bobby, as well. Maybe it had been Clinger and The Pentangle Club that she’d been looking for all along—a world in which she could make up her own rules as she went along. Or maybe she hadn’t known what she’d wanted, except to taste life, as Grace had been trying to do, on its own terms. Whatever it had been, she was getting beyond her lover by Sunday night, launching herself on her own erratic course, with Bobby trailing somewhere behind her, holding on for dear life. Whether the boy had been able to catch up before Wednesday, or whether Robbie had gone off entirely on her own, I didn’t know. For her sake, I hoped she’d broken free. Because if she hadn’t, she was surely implicated in what had happened to her lover. What had happened to him might very well have happened to her, too.