A Brilliant Death

by Yocum, Robin

  “Let me tell you something, pally boy, I tagged a lot of tail in my day, but I have yet to meet the piece of ass that would make me ignore a barge full of iron ore rolling down the river shining a spotlight and blasting his foghorn.” Tornik’s voice was climbing with each syllable. “You’ve heard those foghorns. They rattle windows for miles away.”

  “The newspaper story said the barge captain saw the boat drifting in front of him.”

  Tornik pinched his temples. “First of all, in a moment of panic he probably couldn’t tell if it was drifting or moving under its own power. And, if it was drifting, why didn’t he see it before then? Someone drove that boat into the path of the barge. The boat fairy didn’t just zap it there.”

  I suspected that Tornik had gone to great lengths to get the investigative report. He had stuck his neck out for Travis, who was refusing to look at the evidence. It seemed obvious to me that Tornik had reread the case and the old investigative juices were again flowing. He knew his instincts had been right. Had he not screwed up his career and his life, he would have solved the mystery of Amanda Baron’s death. I had no doubt. Now, for whatever reason, Travis was in denial of every piece of incriminating evidence.

  Tornik rubbed his right hand over his jaw, massaging a dark shadow as he tensed. “So tell me, kid, if you’re going to ignore all this, why in the hell did you ever come to me in the first place? Just tell me that and I’ll get out of your hair, because it’s obvious that you aren’t interested in the truth. For whatever reason, you’re being protective of your old man, when you should be being protective of your dead mother.”

  Tornik threw the Styrofoam cup and the remainder of his coffee into the gravel parking lot. “Look at the copy of the bill of lading. Do you know when your dad scheduled his load? An hour before he left Steubenville. Pretty damn quick turnaround, wouldn’t you say? Read the interviews with the boat club members. Your dad’s boat wasn’t at its dock the day of the accident. Your dad was on the road, the boat’s not at its dock, yet the family automobile is in the driveway all day.”

  “Now, there’s a revelation,” Travis said. “The boat’s out on the water and the car’s in the driveway. Congratulations. That’s some dynamite detective work.”

  “How did she get to the boat that night?” Tornik whispered, barely controlling his rage. “It was a mile from where they lived to the boat club. She couldn’t drive the car or get to the boat because she was already dead.”

  “Maybe her lover gave her a ride?” Travis countered.

  “They found you in the crib. You’ve been investigating your mother. Do you think she’s the kind of woman who would have gone out with her lover and left a newborn at home? Think, junior, think! Your dad was involved.”

  Travis pushed himself away from the car and faced Tornik. “You never proved that.”

  Tornik stepped backed and laughed. “I’ve proved it to myself, kid. Let’s remember something—you came to me for help, and I’m telling you what happened. You can believe what you want to believe, but I’m done helping you.” He took two steps and slid behind the wheel of the car. He looked one more time toward Travis, shook his head, then sped out of the lot, throwing gravel and leaving us in a haze of dust.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I watched until Tornik’s taillights disappeared on Commercial Avenue and dust from his tires settled over the parking lot and my RC Cola. I turned to Travis, stared for a long moment, and asked, “Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?” He looked down and kicked at some gravel. “Now, I’m going to be late getting home because we have a three-mile hike in pitch darkness. We can either walk along the berm of Route 7 or on the railroad tracks. No chance of anything bad happening with either of those options, is there?”

  We walked south along Commercial Avenue until it dead-ended into the Penn-Central railroad yard, then followed the main line south toward Brilliant. Railroad tracks are ridiculously scary at night when the tracks begin to vibrate and the single light of the engine can be seen in the distance. We ducked off into the brush twice to let northbound trains pass. It was, in my imagination, not unlike hiding from some prehistoric beast that lumbers along, shaking the ground, only a few feet away.

  As we trudged south, I was doing a slow burn, upset about the trek home and the way Travis had treated Tornik. He stumbled over the ties a half-dozen times while he tried to read the report by moonlight. Following another stumble, I said, “You’re going to trip and break your neck,” I said. “Why is that so fascinating now?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding me? Why in God’s name did you have to bust Tornik’s chops like that? The guy was trying to do you a favor.”

  “If he hadn’t been such a jerk and left, we’d be home by now.”

  “If you hadn’t been such a horse’s ass to him, he wouldn’t have driven off.” I could feel the heat creeping up my neck like a rash. “There aren’t many times I feel like this, Travis, but right now, I’d like to punch you square in the teeth. All I’ve heard for the past two years is how you want to learn the truth about your mother. Then, when the one guy on this earth who knows the most about the case offers to help you, you bite his hand. I don’t get it. All of a sudden you’re protective of Big Frank. Why? You asked me a long time ago what I knew about your mother’s death, and I played dumb because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. You know what I heard? I heard that everyone in town thought your dad had something to do with her death. And you did, too, until Tornik put the evidence right in front of your nose. What’s the deal?”

  He glared at me, but did not respond. We were just north of Brilliant when we hopped off the tracks by the water filtration plant, just before a third freight train barreled past. We walked in silence the rest of the way home. When he cut across Labelle Street to LaGrange Avenue, he said, “See ya around.”

  While he claimed to doubt the veracity of its contents, Travis was captivated by the document Tornik had given him, but it caused him to struggle with an internal problem. Even though Travis hated Big Frank, in his heart he didn’t want to believe the old man had been involved in the murder of his wife and mother of his only son. Who would? But, as the circumstantial evidence against Big Frank continued to mount, Travis became extremely defensive. Any evidence showing Big Frank was somehow involved in the death of his wife only further squelched Travis’s fantasy of someday miraculously finding her alive. Travis didn’t talk much about this, but I knew he harbored that dream.

  Me? I believed she was dead. Certainly, being married to Big Frank Baron was an excellent reason to run, but I didn’t believe for a minute she would leave behind her infant son.

  Travis grew more moody as the summer wore on. His mixed emotions over the information in the report were further agitated by the fact that we had yet to hear back from Alex Harmon on the status of his search for his maternal grandfather. Travis spent hours reading and rereading the packet of information Tornik had given him. In the course of his own investigation, Travis gained a grudging respect for Tornik’s investigative skills. Even Travis had to admit that Tornik had been methodical and meticulous in his efforts. What Travis couldn’t understand is why Tornik spent so much time investigating Big Frank instead of tracking down other leads. Tornik, Travis speculated, had tunnel vision for Frank Baron, and that zeal caused him to overlook any other possibilities.

  Whenever Big Frank was on the road, Travis sat at the desk in his bedroom, poring over the pages of Tornik’s report. He had punched holes in them and slipped them into a loose-leaf binder, hiding it in plain sight in the bookcase of his bedroom, which was the last place on earth that the nearly illiterate Big Frank would ever look for anything. It was not unlike the size-fourteen dress shoe from the cemetery that Travis was still hiding. It was on the floor of his closet, mixed with other shoes and hidden amid the clutter.

  A month after our July Fourth meeting with Tornik, Travis stopped by the house after his shift at the bakery. I was in
my room getting dressed for an American Legion baseball game against Bridgeport. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’m kicking myself now for being such a jerk to Tornik,” he said.

  “There’s a rare confession,” I said.

  “I still don’t think Tornik’s interest in going after Big Frank was purely in the name of justice. I think he was going after him strictly for personal reasons.”

  “To make his star shine even brighter?”

  “Something like that. He seems like the kind of guy who always wanted to be in the spotlight.”

  “Maybe he just didn’t like Big Frank.”

  “That’s not hard to believe, but you don’t try to pin someone with murder just because you don’t like them.”

  “I wondered about that. What if Tornik didn’t like Frank and suspected he was involved in your mom’s disappearance? Would he try harder to pin it on him?”

  Travis shrugged. “Probably.” He sat down on the edge of my bed. “What do you think he was talking about when he tapped that paper in his pocket and called it ‘dessert’?”

  I tucked my jersey into my baseball pants. “And there it is,” I said.

  “There what is?”

  “The reason you’re mad at yourself for showing your ass to Tornik. You want to know what else he has.”

  He shook his head and said, “Goddamn Baron temper. What irritates me most is that it’s this constant reminder that I am, without question, the son of Francis Martino Baron.”

  “Want to go to the game?”

  Travis shook his head. “No, thanks. Big Frank’s on his way to Demopolis, Alabama, wherever the hell that is, and I’m going to start back through the report.”

  “Why don’t you give it a rest? You’ve been at it for weeks.”

  “I’m hoping I find something that Tornik might have overlooked.”

  “Don’t you think you would have found it by now?”

  It was a sopping hot evening in early August when I returned from the baseball game in Bridgeport. I swung through the south end of town and drove through the little patch of floodplain where Travis lived. I drove through the alley behind his house and saw him on the back stoop of his house, a bottle of Mountain Dew at his side, listening to WDEV in Pittsburgh and reading the report. With Big Frank somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, Travis felt comfortable reading the report outside.

  I pulled my car alongside his house. As I exited, Travis opened up the report and splayed it on a concrete step, facing me. “Come here and look at this,” he said.

  “Did you find your missing golden nugget?” I asked.

  “You tell me.” Travis pointed to a name that was hardly legible, printed and circled in the margin on a page of handwritten notes. The photocopier had barely registered the name, and while it was faint, it was unmistakable. “I’ve read this report fifteen times and never saw that until tonight.”

  Beneath the scrawled name were the fading initials, “BF???” and “S to D.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “BF is boyfriend?”

  “That’s my guess. What’s ‘S to D’?” Travis asked.

  “Scared to death?”

  Travis smiled and leaned back against the steps. “How interesting,” he said. “How very interesting. Well, that’s one mystery solved.”

  From the beginning of August through the first of November, the Blue Devil Touchdown Club held meetings at the high school every Monday night. Prior to football season they met to prepare for the various fundraisers they held on home Saturdays—ball raffles, fifty-fifty raffles, concessions, and program sales. After the season began, they met to watch game films and, in the words of my dad, “painfully review the debacle that had unfolded before them” the previous weekend.

  This was our senior year, and we were hoping to revive the past glory of Brilliant football. Brilliant hadn’t fielded a decent football team since Alex Harmon’s senior year. At one point the Blue Devils lost twenty-three straight games and won just once in three years. We had been mercilessly pounded my freshman year, losing every game, improved to five and five when I was a sophomore, and seven and three, our first winning season in six years, as a junior. Nobody was giving us much of a chance to win more than three games my senior year. On this Monday in mid-August, we had finished our first day of conditioning and I stayed late to work on my placekicking, which wasn’t going well. My legs were wobbly from the workout, and I was shanking balls all over the field. It didn’t seem to matter how hard you worked during the summer, your legs were never quite ready for the first day of conditioning. I had set my orange “Boomer” kicking tee on the twenty-five-yard line and was working on field goals. Each scuffed kick brought a groan from the members of the Touchdown Club, who were giving the home bleachers a fresh coat of royal blue and white paint.

  They didn’t dare groan too loudly, however, without risking the ire of their president, Clay Carter, who was my kicking tutor. Clay was the closest thing to a living legend in Brilliant, having quarterbacked the Blue Devils for three years when they posted a 28–1–1 record and were three-time Big Valley Athletic Conference champions and state champs in 1948 and 1949. Clay had been first-team All-State twice in football, twice in basketball, and once in baseball, which may have been his best sport. He had been a rising star in the Boston Red Sox organization, a hard-hitting third baseman, when he collided with a catcher and tore up the shoulder in his throwing arm.

  The injury quickly ended his baseball career, and Clay went to work for his father, learning the ropes at Carter Chevrolet and Buick in Steubenville. Clay was just twenty-six when his dad dropped dead of a heart attack. He took over the business, and he’d made the operation a bigger success than his dad could have ever envisioned. He lived outside of Brilliant in a sprawling ranch home that sat atop a knoll overlooking Beach Flats.

  Clay was in his early forties and, except for a few flecks of gray around the temples, looked like he could still suit up for the Devils. His shoulders were broad on his six-foot-five frame, his stomach flat, and his muscles solid. Clay was a successful businessman and a little embarrassed by the attention that his high school feats continued to earn him. Rarely could the Touchdown Club get through a meeting without someone asking him to recount some past heroic feat. I often felt he liked working with me on my kicking simply because it gave him an excuse to get away from the attention.

  He walked down out of the stands. “How’s the height?” he asked.

  “The height isn’t the problem,” I said. “It’s the width that’s killing me.”

  He frowned. “The width?”

  “Yeah. Everything’s going wide right by about twenty yards. My kicks have more slice than my golf drives.”

  “Tee ’er up and let’s have a look,” Clay said.

  I did, and promptly choked under the pressure of Clay’s critical eye. The ball sailed off the side of my toe and skidded to rest in the end zone, never getting more than about five feet off the ground. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, we’re going to have to work on that a bit.” He took one of the loose balls and squeezed it between his big hands before squaring it up on the tee. “You’re trying to kick the air out of the ball. You don’t have to kill it. It’s all about making solid contact. Your heel comes down and you drive your toe between the stripe and the middle of the ball and follow through.” Clay approached the ball, wearing dress loafers, and buried his foot into it with a resounding thud. The ball lifted and slowly rolled end-over-end, splitting the uprights. “It’s like the sweet spot on a baseball bat,” he explained, setting up a ball for me to kick. “You have to find just the right spot on the ball. When you do, it’ll sail. Keep your heel down and your toe up, and follow through.”

  I did. We had been over it dozens of times. My next kick cleared the uprights with just inches to spare.

  “Lower on the ball,” he said. “Drive through it. Don’t poke it.”

  Travis was just coming through the gate at the far end of the field as my
kick came to rest near the fence. He scooped up three of the balls and started jogging toward us. With the footballs he was carrying a brown paper bag under his left arm. Travis had that ornery look in his eyes. He awkwardly tossed one ball at me, and said, “Hey, Mitch; Mr. Carter.”

  We both nodded. I wanted to run and hide, for I knew what was coming. “What’s going on, Trav?” I asked.

  “Aw, not much.” He dropped the other two balls. “You know, same old stuff. Oh, here, Mr. Carter,” Travis said, handing him the sack. “This is yours.”

  Clay’s brow furrowed. “Mine? What is it?”

  “Something you’ve probably been looking for.”

  Clay Carter peeked into the sack and promptly turned the shade of a fish belly. It was a sick white, as if the blood had drained from his face so fast that it made him nauseous. He laughed a nervous laugh and asked, “What’s this?”

  “It’s your right dress shoe,” Travis answered. “The one you lost in the cemetery when you and Mitchell collided.”

  Clay looked at me, then averted his eyes, staring somewhere across the river into the hills of West Virginia. It had been his name—Clay C.—that was the faded notation on the page margin that Travis had found. Once I saw the name, it made sense. It had felt like I had tackled a tank, and that was Clay Carter. He tried to swallow, and it looked as though he had a dishrag in his throat. “Travis, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Clay said. “This isn’t my shoe.”

  The muscles tensed in Travis’s neck and face. It took a lot of nerve for a kid to stand up to an adult, particularly one of Clay Carter’s legendary stature. But Travis was tired of the games. “It’s yours, Cinderella,” he said. “Mitchell pulled it off your foot when he tackled you that night. How many people around here wear a size-fourteen shoe?” Travis pulled a sheet of paper from his hip pocket, unfolded it, and held it up for Clay. “Even if it’s not your shoe, maybe you can tell me why your name is on the homicide investigation report concerning my mother’s death?”