“You don’t need to apologize,” I told her. “You saved my life. They would have killed me.”
She looked up and started to say something—something, perhaps, in explanation. But when she saw my bruises again, she merely nodded.
There was no subtle way to ask, so I came right out with it. “I need your help again, Grace. I need some information.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. They know I know you, now. And they don’t like it. I just can’t, Harry.”
“If you can’t, then who can?” I said to her. “If you can’t, then Bobby Caldwell might as well not have lived.”
“I’m telling you they’ll kill me, Harry,” she said desperately. “I’m sorry for Bobby, but I have to think of myself.”
I studied her for a moment and couldn’t bring myself to threaten her or cajole her—not after what she’d done for me. “All right,” I said heavily. “I’ll find some other way.”
I turned to leave. I was through the door when I heard her whisper, “Wait.”
I looked back.
“You just can’t leave her there,” Grace said with a kind of exhausted compassion.
“Do you mean Robbie?”
She nodded. “I heard them talking this morning. Irene and Logan. You can’t leave her there. Theo’s all she’s got, and he’s weak.” She said it bitterly.
“You want to go somewhere and talk about it?”
She looked over at Joey, who was rinsing glasses and stacking them on the bar. “I guess we better,” she said. “But you’ve got to help me, man. You’ve got to get me out of this city.”
“I’ll get you out,” I promised her.
“To L.A.,” she said.
“All right. To L.A.”
“Then take me to that funky apartment of yours and let’s talk.”
As we walked out of the bar into the waning sunlight, I couldn’t help asking her, “Why did you change your mind?”
She looked straight ahead—at the sleepy, unpeopled street. “Why did I help you last night?” she said in a bemused voice. “Good Karma, I guess. Good for the music.”
And very good for me, I thought. And for Robbie, too.
******
When we got back to the Delores, Grace walked directly to the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the mattress. She looked considerably less resolute than she had when we’d struck the deal in Mt Adams. But then she had good reason to be afraid. If the Crofts found out about her, she might end up as another quid pro quo in Jerry Lavelle’s insurance policy. That was why I couldn’t use her as a witness. No matter what she told me, I was going to leave her out of it. It was the only certain way to keep her safe.
I walked back to the bedroom and sat down beside her on the bed. She glanced at me nervously.
“You don’t think anybody saw us, do you?” she said.
It was a thought that had bothered me—that Lavelle might have been having me watched. But I hadn’t seen anyone hanging around the lot or the building, and I was fairly certain we hadn’t been followed home.
I told her no, but her eyes stayed frightened.
“I want you to do something for me, O.K.?” she said and didn’t give me a chance to reply. “I know you’re in bad shape, but I want you to hold me. I mean, you don’t have to fuck me. Just hold me for awhile.”
I put my arms around her and she curled up beside me. Together we watched the sunlight dying in the bedroom window.
“You feel like talking?” I said to her after a time.
I felt her nod. “I guess so.”
“You said something before about Robbie needing help. What did you mean?”
Grace pulled the blanket over her legs and lay her head on my thigh. “I heard them talking,” she said. “This morning. In the kitchen. I think Logan and Irene want to get rid of her.”
“You mean kill her?”
Grace nodded.
“Why?”
“She knows,” Grace said. “She knows about what happened to Bobby. She went off with him on Wednesday afternoon, and when she came back, she was hysterical. I think she would have killed herself if Theo hadn’t been there. He’s been looking after her ever since.”
I took a breath and said, “What did happen to Bobby?”
“I don’t know it all,” she said.
“Then tell me what you do know.”
She hugged herself tightly under the blanket and closed her eyes. “Bobby came to the farm on Wednesday afternoon. He’d been there every day since Sunday, when he dropped Robbie off. She’d been acting like a whore all week, sleeping with everyone. She even slept with Irene, and you had to be crazy to do that. Irene really dug it, too. I think that’s what was bothering Bobby the most—that Irene was screwing Robbie. And I mean all the time. The girl just walked around with this sort of spaced-out look on her face, like she’d wandered into a candy store and there was nobody at the register, and every time Irene or one of the guys whistled, her eyes would go kind of hard and knowing. It was weird, like she only came alive when she was being screwed. And even then, it wasn’t as if she understood what it meant. It was more of an animal thing. You could hear her screaming dirty words all over the house. At first, it was funny. Then it got old. And then it got kind of scary—especially when she was with Irene. It didn’t sound like love-making. I don’t know what it sounded like—something dirty and sick and cruel. It really got to me. And to Bobby worst of all. Man, he’d sit outside on the porch and you could just see his face crack up. I don’t know how he could stand it.”
“He loved her,” I said softly.
“He really did,” she said. “I guess he thought she’d get it out of her system. But I knew better. What’s wrong with Robbie is part of her system. She was born with it. I even tried to talk to him about it. I told him to forget her. And he got furious and said I didn’t understand her—that she’d had a hard time. I understood her, all right. Every one of us at the farm came from one screwed-up family or another. We were all outcasts and orphans. That was the beautiful thing about Theo. He gave us more than a place to stay—he gave us the home we never had. And it really was a family out there. Or it was until Irene came along.”
“When was that?”
“About six months ago,” she said. “Theo was having a bad time financially, so he told us he was going to make a sacrifice for the good of the family and take on a business partner. After that, Irene started coming out to the farm. At first it was cool. She was really devoted to Theo, following him around like a puppy. It was like this was all some kind of new life for her—a new beginning. Theo dug it, too. He was always kind of vain, and she knew how to play on his vanity for all it was worth. Pretty soon, things began to change. Irene started bringing some of her weird-ass friends out to the farm. Converts, she called them, as if Theo were a kind of god or a religion. They began to party with us. Real wild affairs, with blow and smack. When you get that cooked, you stop thinking about what you’re doing and just go with the flow. And that’s pretty much what all of us did. It got to be an ugly scene. All the music drained away, and it was just dope and sex and Irene, sitting there in her black leather pants. Theo knew it was getting out of hand. He even threatened to kick her out if she didn’t shape up. And for a while she acted meek and repentant. Then something happened a couple of weeks ago, and everything went to hell.”
“Some men came to the farm,” I said. “They threatened to kill Clinger.”
Grace looked surprised. “How did you know that?”
“A girl named Annie told me.”
“Annie!” Grace said. “Where is Annie?”
“In Denver, I think. That’s where she said she was going.”
“Annie,” she said again.
“She told me that Clinger had gotten himself involved in a drug deal and that it hadn’t worked out.”
Grace nodded. “That’s right. Irene was the one who talked Theo into the deal. She’d been feeding him money right along, but Theo had big debts. They figured
one large deal might get him back on his feet again. She was going to finance it.”
“What went wrong?” I asked her.
“Irene backed out at the last moment,” she said. “She claimed she couldn’t get the money together, but I think that was bullshit. I think she did it to show Theo who was really boss. And it worked, too. Because after that she practically moved out to the farm. And Theo didn’t say a word. It seemed like their positions had completely reversed—like it was her place instead of his. She hired Logan and another man named Reese for protection. And the place started to look like an Army camp. That’s when a lot of the family started to leave. That was the week that Robbie came.”
“What happened on Wednesday?” I said.
“Bobby blew up. He came out to the farm and told Irene and Logan to keep their hands off Robbie. There was a fight and Theo had to step in to stop it. I think Logan and Reese would have killed Bobby if he hadn’t stopped them. Robbie was crying and Theo was practically crying and Bobby was a mess. Theo really loved him, because he was so good-natured and talented. And Bobby loved Theo, too. He modeled himself after him. That was what made the scene so terrible. They were both crying and Bobby said that if Theo didn’t let Robbie come with him, he was going to the cops and tell them about the drug deal. But Theo hadn’t been keeping Robbie at the farm. She’d wanted to stay there. And Theo respected that. I don’t know if Bobby was serious or not about the cops. I think mostly he just wanted Robbie back. She was all he ever really wanted.”
“And Theo let her go with him?”
“She decided to go herself.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know. She was pretty scared.”
“Do you think she loved him?” I said—mostly to myself
Grace thought about it for a second. “I think she wanted to,” she finally said.
I got off the bed and walked over, to the window. The sun was almost down. It hung above the elm trees in the back yard like a spot of blood in the sky. I stared into it and said, “Who killed Bobby Caldwell?”
“Irene,” Grace said.
“How do you know?”
“I just think she did. She and Logan and Reese.”
I turned back to the room and said, “I think she did, too.”
27
NEITHER OF us said anything to each other for a time. I stared out the window, at the elms turning colors in the sunset, and Grace curled up again beneath the blanket. After awhile, I sat down beside her.
“You don’t hate me, do you?” she said in a small unhappy voice.
“For what?”
“For being part of it? For not telling you about it the other day? I was thinking...maybe you wouldn’t have gotten beaten up, if I hadn’t lied to you before.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t hate you.”
Only I was thinking about Irene Croft, who’d told me that everyone lied. I was thinking that, in a world of liars, she’d finally come to the end of her patience and gone furiously mad. The violence must have been there all along, burning inside her—the home fires, the hearth. But she’d kept it banked for years, living off the contempt she felt for all those lies that other people told each other. Those lies had shaped the truth for her into something wicked and perverse. And somewhere in the last years or months that had led to Wednesday night, somewhere between the drugs and the liaisons and the cold mornings after, that truth had driven her crazy. Perhaps the murder had seemed like an unselfish act to her—to kill the boy who threatened her beloved Theo. Or perhaps she’d ceased to care about Theo when his lies and his world had been exposed for the illusions that they were. Perhaps she’d ceased to care about anything but the red, appetitive fury inside her. That fury was the real meaning of the murder. And I knew that it was still burning and that, having broken out once, it would take even less provocation for it to break out again. She was already planning a second killing, in the face of her family’s effort to hide the first one. Maybe that was why she was doing it—to throw their pride right back at them, soaked in Robbie Segal’s blood. I wondered if Lavelle had known that that was what she’d been planning, if that was why he’d proposed to trade Robbie for my silence about the drugs and the Caldwell killing. Maybe it was the Crofts’ way of saving the girl’s life. Because they couldn’t cover up a second killing—I simply knew too much and so did Grace and Theo and Bannock. Only Lavelle had needed a couple of days to set the conspiracy up—to pay off Clinger’s debts and enlist Bannock and talk to Pastor Caldwell. What he didn’t know was that those two days were going to be too long. That all that was standing between Robbie and a terrible death was one weak, vain man, who was hanging onto her as the last remnant of his own hopes. A little piece of hell was blazing in Clinger’s farmyard, spewing terror like smoke and turning all the man’s dreams and love into char. He wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer, and if he did, perhaps Logan and Reese and the Croft woman would kill him, too.
Grace fell asleep in my arms, exhausted by her fears and memories. And I sat there beside her and wondered what I was going to do—without police help, without enough evidence to get the FBI interested, with certain violence waiting for me at the end of that dusty farm road. I wondered if the girl was even worth saving. Because she was as mad as the world she’d run off to—my lost Robbie. And that, in the end, had been the real difference between her and Eastlawn Drive. Not my romantic projections about freedom and conformity. Those had belonged to me, to the part of me that had been prodded to life by the dismal look of that street and the pitiless pieties of its householders. As Grace had said, her mother and the Rostows and all the rest of that gray neighborhood might have played a role in distorting the girl’s character, but what was wrong with her couldn’t finally be accounted for in terms of a house or a street or a neurotic mother. If I’d been smarter, less set on living out my own adolescent gripes, I could have seen it from the start. In the gape-mouthed stupor of her photograph. In all the broken plates and dishes that Mildred had pasted so patiently back together. In the hostile vagueness of the friends who had described her. In the mad scenes in the Pentangle bar and later at the farm. Saving her now—to be brought back to the cage of Eastlawn Drive—seemed pointless and cruel. How could she go back, I asked myself, after Irene and Bobby?
And in spite of the fact that I couldn’t answer the question, in spite of the tragedy that would certainly ensue, I knew that I was going to go get her. Because no one else would. Not Bannock or Lavelle, who were perfecting their scheme of obstruction. Or Al Foster, who couldn’t see beyond his badge. I couldn’t even bring in the state cops, for fear that a bunch of police cars might send Irene into a final, murderous spasm. It had to be me. And the reason, finally, wasn’t for her mother or for myself or for Robbie, either. It was for the boy who had loved her and died for her. If she hadn’t meant a thing to anyone else, she meant the world to him. And that made her worth saving.
The bedroom had begun to go dark. The evening sky a violet skein drawn across the window, with just a thread or two of fire woven through it. I lifted Grace’s head onto a pillow, got up, and walked into the living room. I sat down at the desk and took two envelopes out of the bottom drawer. I wrote Grace’s name on one of them, got three hundred dollars in cash out of the cash box, and put the money in the envelope. I didn’t seal it. Then I took a piece of paper from the desk and wrote down all I knew about the Robbie Segal case. When I finished, I stuck it in the second envelope.
I didn’t know who to address it to. And finally settled on Al Foster. I thought of calling Mildred—to let her know what I was going to do. But the situation was so chancy—the girl’s life so precariously balanced—that I decided she was better off not knowing that her daughter was still alive. Because in a matter of hours there was a very good chance that she wouldn’t be—if I couldn’t talk Clinger into giving her back or couldn’t pry her away by force. It would have to be one way or the other. And I didn’t have much faith in Theo, whose strength had been
sapped by years of bad luck and by Irene Croft—who had become his nemesis.
I unlocked the gun drawer in the desk and took out the two pieces—a .45 Commander and a .357 magnum. I stuck the .45 in a belt holster and the .357 in a shoulder holster and put them both on. Then I loaded five extra magazines with 230 grain hardball and stuck them in my pocket. I was wearing a good fifteen pounds of lead and brass and tempered steel, and I could feel it.
When I’d finished arming myself, I took a long look at my apartment—studying it like a detective. It wasn’t much, I thought. A few books, a few unmatched pieces of furniture, a big table radio, a desk. The man who lived there didn’t have much of a home. He didn’t care much for things. He’d lived in the spaces between his belongings—in the shadows and the corners. In the teasing, empty places that his life had never filled.
I stood up. I wanted to say goodbye to someone, but the girl was still asleep and it seemed a shame to wake her. As I was stepping out the door, George DeVries called to tell me what I already knew—that Clinger had gotten himself in trouble over a drug deal.
******
It took me half an hour to get to the Anderson Ferry. I pulled off River Road and coasted down to the dock. It was another cold night. A westerly wind was chasing dark clouds across the sky. I got out and walked over to the bell post. The signal bell made the same cracked sound it had before. And in a minute, the answering bell echoed across the dark water. There was no fog on the river this night; and even in the cold I could smell the mud, washed into the long Ohio by the spring rains.
I stood on the dock, waiting for the ferryboat. And in a few minutes, I could see the faintly lit wheelhouse, emerging from the shadows of the Kentucky hills. The same boy was standing on deck, dressed in the same clothes. When he hopped off the boat onto the landing, I saluted him. But he didn’t seem to remember me.
“Let’s get going,” he said. “We don’t have all night.”
I got into the Pinto and drove onto the barge. The deck rocked gently beneath me. I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the winch and the puttering of the engine. The river slid past, tugging at the barge with its muddy fingers. I sat there for what seemed like many minutes, lulled and buoyed by the current. Then we docked with a bump, and the engine noises died away.
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