by Yocum, Robin
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Travis got a job that summer working at the bakery across the street from his house. He gassed up the trucks each afternoon when they came back from their routes, then unloaded the stale loaves of bread and cupcakes that were returned. He was saving his money to buy a car, which he planned to use to drive as far from Brilliant, Ohio, and Big Frank Baron as possible, the day after he graduated high school. The recent focus of Project Amanda had been to track down Chase Tornik. Travis had no idea how to do this. Since those who had worked with Tornik spat out his name like a mouthful of soured milk, Travis reasoned that Tornik was living the life of a recluse, forever shamed by his deeds.
We sat in the back room of the Coffee Pot one late summer evening, Creedence Clearwater Revival playing on the jukebox, the rain falling in waves and flooding the gutters along Third Street. “I’ve got a plan for finding Tornik,” he said.
I said, “I’m all ears, so long as it doesn’t involve climbing into your attic or camping out at the cemetery.”
“It doesn’t. I’m going to take the money I’ve been saving for a car and hire a private investigator to track him down.”
“Really? Good plan. How much is that going to cost?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t want to spend the dough, but I figured a private investigator could find him quicker than the two of us.”
“How much money do you have?”
“I’ve saved about eighty bucks, so far.”
“I don’t know much about private investigators, Trav, but I’ll bet they charge a lot more than eighty bucks to track someone down. Why can’t we look for him?”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know. Did you try the phone book?”
He rolled his eyes. “The phone book? After what he went through, I doubt very much he’s going to be in the phone book.”
“How do you know?”
“Everyone we talked to would rather cuddle up with a leper than Chase Tornik.”
“Lepers are still allowed to have a telephone.”
“He probably doesn’t even live around here. How could you possibly live in a town where you screwed up so bad that everyone hates you?”
I shrugged. “You never know.” I went to the pay phone on the back wall and retrieved the Steubenville Area phone book from the shelf below the coin return. And there he was, snug between Torak, R. L. and Toronado, Thuman H.
Tornik, C. W. 844 E. Wheeling Ave. . . . 883-3323
“Dammit. Why didn’t you suggest that to begin with?” he asked.
“I knew it would somehow be my fault.” I shoved the phone book across the table to him. “You’re the brains of the outfit. I assumed that would have been your first move.”
He was sitting on the porch steps of a duplex, extremely neat by the standards of the neighborhood, with aluminum siding, new windows, and a porch so recently built that it had yet to be painted. On one side of the duplex was an abandoned house with waist-high weeds and gutters sagging under their own weight, and on the other was a one-story brick ranch with the screen door hanging from one hinge and dirty, shirtless kids playing on a beaten patch of ground.
It was our third trip to the south Steubenville neighborhood in search of Tornik. The first night he wasn’t home, so we parked down the street and waited for him. One of the little brats from the brick ranch pedaled his bicycle up to the driver’s-side door and asked, “What are you doin’?”
“None of your business,” I said.
“Got any money?”
“Yeah, I’ve got money, but you’re not getting any of it.”
The little turd called me an ass wipe and spit on my windshield as he pedaled off.
We waited an hour, but Tornik never showed up.
We returned two days later. Again he wasn’t home, and again we staked out the house. The same kid came pedaling straight at my car. “You spit on my car again and I swear I’ll beat the livin’ . . .”
Again, he hawked on the windshield and yelled “bite me, ass wipe,” while he pedaled away. Travis laughed. As we waited, a black kid no older than ten started chucking rocks through the windows of the abandoned two-story house on the other side of Tornik’s. This lasted until mamma came out of a house across the street, picked up a two-by-four from the yard, and started after him. He easily outran her, but the last thing I heard her say was, “Thas awright, you have to sleep sometime.”
Again, Tornik didn’t show.
He was on the porch when we drove past on this Saturday shortly before noon. The neighborhood was full of the sound of kids yelling and crying, but if this bothered Chase Tornik you couldn’t tell. He sat on the top step of his porch sipping an amber liquid from a clear glass tumbler. The morning paper lay neatly folded beside him, and his knees served as rests for a pair of sinewy forearms. A cigarette burned between the cupped fingers of his left hand, and he held the tumbler in his right. They both looked natural in his hands, as though years of constant use had made them permanent appendages. He was neatly attired in a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, pressed slacks, and polished black dress shoes. Not a hair was out of place on a coif that was slicked down and a mix of dirty blond and gray. His face was scrubbed white and pockmarked across his cheeks and neck, his nose crimson and rocky, a monument to the fluid in the tumbler. We parked just down the street and walked back. He must have thought we were either Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons hoping to save his soul because when we neared his porch he said, “Boys, if you’re trying to keep me from spending eternity in hell, I’m afraid that train’s already left the station.”
Travis frowned at me. He didn’t get it. “We’re not out saving souls today,” I said.
“Are you Chase Tornik?” Travis asked.
The man lifted the hand that held his cigarette and shielded his eyes from the morning sun, squinting first into the youthful face of Travis Baron, then at me. One eye squinted in the glare. “I might be. Who wants to know?”
“I do.”
The man dropped his hand and took a short hit from his cigarette. “That seems somewhat obvious. How about him?” He nodded at me. “Does he want to know, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then just who might you be?”
Travis swallowed. “This is my friend, Mitchell Malone. My name is Travis Baron.”
Slowly, the man nodded his head, the slightest of smiles pursing his lips. “Travis Baron, is it?” He had a rattling voice—dry and rough—that came from deep in his chest and sounded as if every syllable was uttered with great effort. He took a last hit from the cigarette and flicked the burning nub past my ear and into the street. “Yeah, I’m Tornik.”
“Do you know who I am?” Travis asked.
Tornik’s nod was nearly imperceptible. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.” He pulled a hard pack of Winstons from his breast pocket and used his lips to cull another smoke from the herd, never taking his eyes off Travis. He worked his jaw and, I thought, was searching for a name that hadn’t crossed his mind in years. In a tone almost as imperceptible as the nod, he said, “Amanda Baron?” Travis nodded. Tornik lit the cigarette, and a plume of blue smoke escaped from his mouth and curled around his face. “You’re Amanda Baron’s son?”
“I’m surprised that you remembered,” Travis replied.
“Remembering a name is no great feat. What can I do for you?”
“I want to talk to you about my mother.”
Tornik nodded for Travis to sit next to him on the top step. I stood by the bottom step, leaning against the handrail. “I don’t know that I can be much help. It’s been a long time. How old are you, anyway?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen!” Tornik repeated. “Christ Almighty.” He sipped his drink. “It’s been that long, huh? Hard to believe. So, what is it that you want to know about her?”
Tornik had a calm demeanor and no edge to his tone. I got the impression that he didn’t rile very easily, and I imagined that surviving seven yea
rs in prison as a former cop would make other problems seem somewhat insignificant. “I’d like to know anything that you can tell me about her, anything that you can remember.”
“You sure I’m the right person to do that? Is your dad still alive?”
“Yeah, but it’s not one of his favorite subjects. In fact, he won’t talk about it at all. He’s old-style Italian with a nasty temper, and his wife got killed while cheating on him, so it doesn’t sit very well.”
“I suspect not,” Tornik said.
“Mostly, I want to know why you thought she was murdered. I saw an article in the Herald-Star that said you were investigating her death as a homicide.”
Again, he sipped his whiskey. “That was a long, long time ago, son. I don’t remember the article. But, yeah, I was looking into her death as a possible homicide. I recall that much . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked at Travis and slowly shook his head. “I guess, now that I think about it, I don’t really remember too much about the case.”
He was lying, I thought. He was debating why he should tell her son what he knew. I could sense that he was uncomfortable with the situation. “You remembered her name without any trouble,” I said.
Tornik nodded. “Yeah, but I just don’t remember much else. I don’t think I can be much help to you boys.” He picked up his newspaper and started to stand.
“I can refresh your memory, if you like,” Travis said, standing up from the porch. I knew Travis, and I knew that tone. The conversation was about to take an ugly turn. “You were doing an investigation into my mom’s death when you got sent to prison for being a crooked cop. Does that jog your memory at all?”
The words flew out of Travis’s mouth, and for a moment I expected Tornik to rake a backhand across his face. Tornik just frowned, bit his lower lip, and said, “You’re a bold little shit, aren’t you?” Travis just stared. “You talk to me like that again, boy, and you’re in for an ass whippin’. I don’t care how old you are.”
“Do you think that scares me? My dad is Big Frank Baron. Ass whippin’s aren’t anything new to me.”
“With a mouth like that I can understand why.” Slowly, as if to show Travis that any further conversation would be done on his terms, Tornik tilted his head and dragged hard on the cigarette, inhaling deep and exhaling slow. “Why are you so interested in your mother’s death?”
“If someone thought your mother had been murdered, wouldn’t you be interested?”
Tornik looked at Travis and nodded, blowing a plume of smoke over his head. “I suppose I would, at that.” He rolled the newspaper in his hands. “Why did I think your mom was murdered? As I recall, there were some things that just didn’t add up. Everyone thought it was an open-and-shut case. She drowned and the river never gave up her body. End of story. But your dad was out of town, so why would she go out on a boat to have a fling? She could have just had someone over to the house.”
I recalled what Captain Mathews had told us about Tornik. He had this uncanny sixth sense for knowing who had committed a crime and how it went down. He just knew. “That was it?” I asked. “You started a homicide investigation on a hunch?”
“Nothing wrong with a hunch,” he said. “And, as I recall, we got some information that all wasn’t as it appeared. I started talking to people who knew your mom, people from the church and . . .” Tornik squinted. “Where did she work? The library?”
“She was a volunteer at the library,” Travis said.
“That’s right. I remember that now. I talked to some people there and they all said it would have been highly unlike her to be out on a boat in the middle of the night with a lover—very out of character. I’m not saying your mother was a saint, and I’m not saying she didn’t have a lover, but based on the information I got from people who knew her, I think she would have had better sense than to be out in that boat in the Ohio River in the middle of the night.”
“So she had a boyfriend?” Travis asked.
Tornik shrugged. “Maybe. But if she did, he wasn’t on that boat with her.”
“You’re talking in riddles. If it wasn’t her boyfriend, who was it?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t know. I was never convinced that it was her on the boat.”
“But the barge captain saw them jump off the boat and into the water. I read that in the paper.” Tornik said nothing, taking another long hit on his smoke. “If you’re trying to confuse me, you’re doing a great job. If all these mysterious things were going on, how come no one investigated the case after you went to prison?”
He finished the liquor in one eye-watering gulp, the ice cubes pressing against his lip as he drained every drop. “No one else was interested, I guess. Actually, I think there were some other detectives who had suspicions, but I bet the real reason is that no one wanted to touch anything I had been associated with.”
“Maybe they just thought you were wrong,” Travis said. “Maybe they looked at the case and decided it was just an accident.”
He shrugged. “That’s possible. I don’t believe it for one second, and I don’t think you believe it, either. You think your mother was murdered.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do. That’s why you’re here. You’re looking for someone to confirm your suspicions. You may not know much about your mother, but you just can’t convince yourself that it was an accident. You can’t convince yourself that she would leave you at home, alone, while she went out for a rendezvous with her boyfriend. That’s why you’re talking to me.” Tornik took a breath, looked at Travis for a long moment, then dropped the bomb. “You want to know the real reason why I started looking into her death?”
Travis said, “Of course. That’s why I’m here.”
“I was asked to do it.”
“By who?”
“Your grandfather—he thought she had been murdered, too. That’s why he called me.”
“My grandfather Baron?”
Tornik winced. “What? Hell no, not your grandfather Baron. The other one. Her dad. I can’t remember his name.”
“Virdon.”
“That was it. Virdon. He was a military man. I remember that. He called me and said he didn’t believe it had been an accident. He thought your mom had been murdered and then dumped off the boat to make it look like an accident.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t remember, exactly. It wasn’t too awful long after she disappeared, a couple of weeks, maybe a month. I remember that your grandfather didn’t think too highly of your dad. He said your mom was planning to leave your old man. I guess things weren’t going very well. Your grandfather believed with all his heart that she had been murdered. Frankly, I’m half surprised that he didn’t come up here looking for your dad.”
“So it was that simple, huh? He had a bad feeling and you started looking into it?”
“Pretty much. Have you talked to your grandfather?”
“He’s dead, he and my grandmother Virdon.” Travis’s eyes bored in on Tornik. I could see the flush in his cheeks. “So now we’ll never know.”
Tornik shook his head. “It’s been too long.”
Travis stood, appearing to fight back tears. “Maybe that’s what you tell yourself, that it’s been too long. But if . . .”
“If!” Tornik said, his voice climbing for the first time as he cut off Travis’s attack. “If what? If I hadn’t screwed up and gone to prison I might have solved the case? It’s water over the dam, son. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.” Chase Tornik grabbed his newspaper and stood. “If you want me to admit I screwed up? That ain’t happening. People can believe what they want about your mother, and they can believe what they want to believe about me. I don’t give a shit anymore.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The chink in Margaret Simcox’s academic armor was exposed that summer.
She could not parallel park.
Margaret had taken driver’s e
ducation through the school that summer. She botched nearly every attempt to parallel park, and though she earned her driver’s license, she also earned a “B” in the course. A half-credit “B” in driver’s education put her behind Travis in their competition to be our class valedictorian. Travis took full advantage of this and began calling her “Crash” every time they passed, and it nearly brought her to tears.
Our first football scrimmage of the year was against Harrison Local, a team made up of the sons of thick-necked Eastern European immigrants with such names as Waskiewicz, Mroczkowski, Zelkowski, Andreichuk, and Orizczak. We played them to a 12–12 tie, a moral victory for Brilliant.
I limped home from the game and found Travis sitting on the glider on my back porch, slowly rocking in the dark. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“Pretty good. We tied ’em, 12–12.” I set my equipment bag on the porch and eased onto the glider to Travis’s left.
“How’d you do?”
“Not bad. Caught three balls—one was a nifty little over-the-shoulder grab with one of their safeties hanging all over me. Unfortunately, I followed that up by letting one go right through my hands on a buttonhook. It hit me in the facemask and went about twenty feet straight up in the air and they intercepted it. So that quick . . .” I snapped my fingers. “. . . the over-the-shoulder grab was forgotten and the muff remembered. It’s going to look really bad on the films.”
“Coach Oblak will be so excited about tying Harrison Local that he won’t even remember that drop.”
“It happened on our last drive on their seven-yard line.”