Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  I knew they were powerful people. Bedrock, anti-Roosevelt Republicans, who had solid ties with the police department and with City Hall. In any given year, a Croft might have been mayor or municipal judge or congressman from the first district. They’d been getting a lot of publicity since the Reagan election—Sunday pictorials showing Crofts in riding breeches, sipping tall, cool drinks. I simply hadn’t pictured those strict, featureless men turning to hired muscle. It seemed too B-movie for the bluebloods, although when I thought about it I realized they were a B-movie crowd—old-fashioned moralists, without shading or subtlety, except when it came to protecting one of their own. Maybe they’d thought that Lavelle was appropriate protection for their black sheep, Irene—making the guard fit the crime. Or maybe he had been some lawyer’s idea, about which the Crofts knew nothing. He could even have been a friend of the woman’s, although I had trouble seeing her in a Vegas casino. Whoever was responsible for him, he was trouble I couldn’t get around without bloodshed. Possibly my own blood.

  It occurred to me that he wouldn’t have been necessary unless someone—Irene or one of the more respectable Crofts—hadn’t thought I could be a problem. Which might have meant that Irene was implicated in Robbie Segal’s disappearance, though it seemed more likely that Clinger was implicated and that my investigation would link Irene to him and to the missing girl. So I’d been told to steer clear of Miss Irene, but Lavelle had not warned me away from Clinger. And that, I thought, was significant. It looked as if the Crofts had determined to throw Theo to the dogs, with the understanding that the family name wouldn’t come up in the aftermath.

  The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that that had been the meaning of the scene with Lavelle: stay away from Irene, and Clinger is your business. I still had to find him, with my best source of information blocked. But the situation was far from being hopeless. I could always try blonde Grace again or try to locate the boys in The Furies band. They seemed like my best bet. Grace knew who I was and what I was looking for, and she was tied to the Clinger family. It was smarter to hunt up some fresh faces, I thought, before going back to The Pentangle.

  So I shifted the Pinto into gear and drove up Celestial to St. Gregory and then down to Hill. It took me about five minutes to find Corky’s—a small, storefront bar halfway down the street with a neon Busch Beer sign blinking in the curtained window. The front door had been stopped open, and through it I could see the dark, rolled bar, gleaming with the red and blue lights of pinball machines. A couple of dozen wooden tables were arranged on the floor and what looked like a jerrybuilt stage was parked against the back wall. There was no one on the stage. I coasted down to the foot of Hill, parked beneath a budding hackberry, then walked back up to Corky’s Bar.

  I found an empty table just inside the door. While a pretty, blonde barmaid was getting me a beer, I took a leisurely look around. The place had begun to fill up a bit, which probably meant that showtime was near. I wondered who was performing and settled on a particularly large group of kids who were huddled around the tables next to the stage. It was hard to tell at that distance, since most of the light in Corky’s was coming from neon beer signs and pinball machines, but I thought that I recognized one of them. A tall, skinny boy with shoulder-length blondish hair and a cool, imperious look on his face. I thought he was the same kid who had been holding a guitar in the photograph of Bobby and his two friends.

  When the waitress came back with my beer, I asked her if she knew the kid’s name.

  She put a hand above her eyes, as if she were sighting down a fairway, and said, “That’s Roger Tomilin. He plays rhythm guitar for The Furies. You ever heard them play?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, stick around,” she said. “They’re on in about fifteen minutes.”

  “They’re good, are they?” I asked her.

  “They used to be. But their lead guitarist, Bobby, got himself killed a couple of days ago, and they’re kind of shaken up about it. Plus, the guy they got to replace him isn’t very good. That Bobby—he could really play.”

  She shook her head sadly and walked back to the bar. I turned in my chair and studied the youngsters gathered around the tables. There were ten of them—five boys dressed in T-shirts and jeans and five girls. One of the girls was sitting with her back to the group and staring glumly at the floorboards. She didn’t look very old. None of them did, actually. But this one had a dimpled baby’s face and curly brown hair that danced about her head like loose brass bedsprings. She was wearing a denim jacket, jeans, and hiking boots; and there was a nylon backpack at her feet. From the distraught look in her eyes, I figured she was trying to make up her mind about whether or not to leave the bar. Maybe she was thinking about leaving for good—the backpack looked full. The boy sitting beside her—a short, muscular twenty year old with a walrus moustache and long, jet-black hair—glanced at her jealously then turned to the rest of the group with a frown on his face that seemed to say that his girlfriend just wouldn’t listen to reason. The four other boys seemed bored with his problems. Their minds were on the stage, where the house roadies were setting up amps and microphones. The girls seemed more sympathetic. They eyed the curly-haired girl hostilely, then looked at one another and shook their heads.

  The throng in the bar continued to grow—a young, raucous crowd dressed like refugees and speaking a hoarse variety of tongues. From the look of their audience, The Furies were new wavers, which meant they weren’t likely to have much use for a thirty-eight-year-old private detective in a sports coat. Especially if that detective started to ask them painful and embarrassing question about a murdered boy. Of course, they had been Bobby Caldwell’s friends, and that counted for something. I just wasn’t sure how much.

  The roadies began to assemble the drum set, and that meant I didn’t have much time to make up my mind about what to do. The boys would be on stage in five or ten minutes, and after that I’d have to take the chance of catching them between sets. I stared at them again. The girl with the curly hair was the one I really wanted to talk to. And it would be better still, I thought, if I could get her alone, away from her friends, where her mood might work to my advantage.

  I glanced at the kids sitting around me, sucking on beer bottles and puffing cigarette smoke out into the room. Pinball machines had begun to thump and clang along the walls. And the crowd noise was growing very loud. In a few more minutes, the place would be roaring with guitars. I decided to go ahead and give The Furies a quick try, holding the curly-haired girl in reserve if I didn’t get anywhere with the band.

  I got up and worked my way across the room—tilting chairs back and apologizing to the kids sitting in them. A boy just missed spilling a pitcher of beer on my shoes. And I just missed running into a waitress. The whole room was beginning to smell like sour beer to me. I squeezed through the last obstacles—a couple of chairs placed back-to-back—and broke free right in front of the boy named Roger. He stared at me as if I were a clumsy drunk and said, “Get lost,” in a squeaky tenor voice.

  It was a bad beginning and I needed something to put me in command of the situation. So I reached into my coat, pulled out my wallet and flashed an old special deputy’s badge in Roger’s face. It looked official. And I wanted as much of his attention as I could get.

  “He’s a cop,” one of the kids said to the girl sitting beside him.

  “Aw, man,” she said disgustedly.

  “We already talked to the cops,” Roger said.

  But the noise was so loud that I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “I want to ask you a few questions about Bobby Caldwell and Robbie Segal,” I shouted over the din.

  Roger shook his head and stood up. “What’s the matter with you people?” he shouted back at me. “I just got done talking to a cop.”

  “When?” I said. “What cop?”

  “Did you hear what he asked me?” Roger yelled to the kids at the table. “Talk about not getting your shit together!”
>
  I looped my hand through his T-shirt and pulled him to within an inch of my face. His body went limp and his eyes clouded up sullenly.

  “I asked you what cop and when?” I said between my teeth.

  He turned his head away from mine. “A couple hours ago. I don’t know his name. He had white hair and he pushed a lot harder than you do.”

  I let him go, and he fell back into his chair. “I still want to talk,” I said.

  “We got a set to do, man.”

  “Then afterwards,” I said.

  Roger said something very nasty under his breath and the rest of The Furies gave me ugly looks. Things were not working out the way I’d wanted them to. But then I’d chosen to act the part of a tough cop, thinking it would give me leverage with a bunch of punk rockers. If I had known that Bannock had been there before me, I would have taken a more sympathetic role. I should have called the son-of-a-bitch like I’d planned to do, I thought.

  I glanced down at the curly-haired girl, but she was scowling at me, too. Great, I said to myself.

  Someone on stage yelled at Roger, and he said, “All right.”

  He looked at me as if he were asking my permission to start the show. I nodded and the band got up. While they were tuning their instruments, I slunk back to my seat, sat down, and stared miserably at my glass of beer. Someone had dropped a cigarette in it—which pretty much summed up the way things were going for me that night. I felt like crawling out of the bar. Instead, I leaned an elbow on the tabletop and pretended to listen to The Furies, who proved to be very loud and not very good. They butchered “Satisfaction,” then began to work on an old blues song.

  I was thinking vaguely about Bannock—wondering how he’d gotten to the band before I had and wondering stupidly why he’d gotten rough with them—when I noticed the curly-haired girl picking up her backpack. She walked toward the rear of the bar. As soon as she’d cleared the door, I got up and followed her.

  It was close to nine o’clock and Hill Street had begun to jump. Bar doors were open up and down the street, filling the sidewalks with noise. The pedestrian traffic was fairly heavy, too. I pushed my way through it, trailing the girl as she walked north up Hill into the dark, residential side streets at the top of Mt. Adams. She was a fast walker, so it took me a couple of minutes to catch up to her. By then we were on Hatch Street, where the only lights came from gas lamps and the only noise was the sound of our footsteps on the pavement. When I got abreast of her, she glanced at me, then lowered her head like a bulldog and stepped up her pace.

  “I haven’t broken any laws, have I?” she said as we jogged along.

  “No,” I said hoarsely. Hill Street had been a forty-degree grade, and the girl was practically running.

  “Then I don’t have to talk to you,” she said.

  “It’s about Bobby Caldwell,” I panted.

  “I heard in the bar.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not really a cop. I’m a private detective hired by the mother of Bobby’s girlfriend.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Why didn’t you tell Roger that?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Judging by his looks, I didn’t think it would mean much to him.”

  “You thought right,” she said with a bitter laugh.

  She began to slow down a bit. Which was a very good thing, because my legs were starting to give out.

  “You’re not in very good shape for a detective,” she said acidly.

  “I’m not eighteen years old, either,” I said.

  “Nineteen,” she said with a touch of defiance. “I’m nineteen years old.”

  “I’m thirty-eight,” I said as if it were a kind of greeting.

  She thought things over for a second, then stopped so abruptly that I walked past her. She stared at me while I tried to catch my breath.

  “Are you really a private detective?”

  I pulled my I.D. out of my pocket and handed it to her.

  “And you’re working for Robbie’s mother?” she said.

  “You know Robbie?” I asked her.

  The girl nodded. “I know her,” she said.

  “Do you know where she is? Her mother’s going crazy with worry.”

  “Her mother’s a first-class bitch,” the girl said.

  I wanted to say something in Mildred’s defense but knew it was the wrong approach to take with this girl. So I ended up saying, “She cares about Robbie. Enough to have hired me to find her.”

  “And what will you do—if you find her?”

  I told her the truth. “I’ll take her home.” The girl gave me a searching look and I added: “I’ll take her home whether she wants to come or not, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Apparently it was exactly what she’d been wondering, because her face closed up like a dent in dough. “I don’t know,” she said slowly.

  “If I were in your position, I wouldn’t know either,” I said. “As it is, I’ve had to think about it myself—a couple of times. Runaway cases aren’t much fun for anyone.”

  She almost smiled. “I think you must be a lousy detective,” she said, handing my I.D. back.

  “Actually I’m a very good detective. This is just a lousy case.”

  She looked around us, at the dark, silent brownstones on Hatch Street. “Do you have a car?”

  I told her I did.

  “Would you give me a ride some place?”

  “Sure.”

  She adjusted one of the straps on her backpack and said, “This is kind of heavy, and I want to make it to the bus station by ten.”

  “You’re leaving town?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said a bit guardedly, as if she didn’t want to be asked why.

  “Well, come on, then,” I said. “I’m parked down the street.”

  She took another quick look at me, decided I was all right, and started walking back down to Hill. “My name’s Annie,” she said.

  “Mine’s Harry.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

  20

  IT TOOK us five minutes to get to the car and another ten to drive over to the Greyhound Bus Station on lower Gilbert Avenue. By the time we got there, Annie had begun to warm up a little. But just a little; she still wasn’t sure of me. I wasn’t sure of me, either, or of why I’d decided to give her a lift. But things had been going badly that night; and if nothing else, helping the girl had given me the chance to act like a decent human being again. Of course, it also gave me the chance to learn something more about Robbie, although I didn’t do any pushing with this one. I felt as if I’d done enough pushing in Corky’s Bar.

  When we got inside the depot, I took Annie to the coffee shop and boosted her to a Coke. The place looked like early morning in an all-night diner. It was just a quarter of ten, but the waitress was already droopy-eyed and sluggish. A handful of seedy, worn-out men were gathered around the counter, hunched miserably over coffee cups and crumpled Racing Forms. Annie and I were the only couple in the joint.

  A few of the men eyed the girl hungrily as we sat down. I could feel her shiver and tighten up. She was a smart, independent young lady, but she was no match for the Greyhound Bus Station. I wondered what she was doing there—where she had come from and where she was going—but I didn’t ask. From the beaten look of her backpack, I could see she’d been on the road before. And when she reached for the Coke, I caught a glimpse of a half-moon tattoo on her right wrist—the sort of thing that bikers’ girls decorated themselves with. She certainly didn’t sound like a motorcycle queen. She seemed to be a very intelligent kid. She might even have gone to college for a quarter or two before dropping out—like Grace. But she wasn’t as cocky as Grace had been. Or as slick and venal. She still had a kind of rough, styleless edge to her, as if she hadn’t yet settled on the type of woman she wanted to be. But then she was only nineteen, and that rough, inchoate quality suited her.

  She drank her Coke and when I got up to pay the bill, she said, “Would you mind wait
ing here with me until the bus comes? I almost got raped in a bus station once, and this place gives me the creeps.”

  I told her I’d stay.

  We wandered out of the coffee shop to the waiting area and sat down on a couple of hard plastic chairs. There was only a smattering of people waiting with us, and half of them looked as if they’d come inside to nod off. It was cheaper than a flop house.

  We sat there watching the arrival times flash on a closed-circuit TV. When a P.A.announcer said that the bus to Denver would be delayed ten minutes, Annie sighed.

  “That means half an hour,” she said unhappily.

  “You’re going to Denver?”

  She nodded. “I’m going as far away as seventy bucks will take me.”

  “Why?” I said. I felt as if I could say it now, without sounding like a detective.

  “Things,” she said gravely. “It was just a bad scene where I was living. Very bad.”

  “You mean the kid with the moustache?”

  “Larry?” she said with a laugh. “No, I wasn’t living with Larry. He might have thought I was, but I wasn’t. I was living with a bunch of people on a farm.” Annie sighed heavily. “For a while, it was beautiful.” She glanced at me guiltily, as if she’d revealed something about herself that she didn’t want known, then she looked down at the concrete floor and sighed again. “I guess I better tell you a couple things,” she said in a soft, sad voice. “Roger told the cop most of it anyway, so I guess I can tell you, too.”

  “What things?”

  “It’s about Robbie. This farm I was at—she was staying there, too. At least she was four days ago.”

  And there it was. What I’d been looking for since Wednesday afternoon.

  I felt as if I’d wandered into it by mistake, although when I thought of the photograph of Roger and Bobby and the other musician, I realized that it was perfectly reasonable. I’d thought that all three of them had been visiting the farm for the day, when the truth was that Bobby had been the only visitor. The Furies and their girls had apparently lived there as part of Clinger’s family.