by Robert Stone
“His wife was there? Of course she’s gonna fucking defend him.”
“I’m thinking this woman is a lousy liar. Even in extreme situations. I’m thinking I’m gonna know when this babe is lying to me. What he says, what she says—it’s corroborated. The early stuff was not reliable. Accusing witnesses didn’t stand up at interviews, or they weren’t really witnesses—they didn’t see it.”
“He seduced my daughter, Sal. He mocked us. He made her a whore.”
Salmone shook his head.
“Don’t talk like a meathead. I’m sorry, Eddie. Don’t destroy your life. Her memory. Her mother’s memory. Your own legacy.”
“My legacy? What the fuck is my legacy? Legacy! Some bullshit term of media correctness to perfume the shit people do? My old man could talk legacy, the Irish legacy on the docks, on the tugs. You want to talk Sicilian legacy, Sal? My legacy, my dick.”
Salmone, offended and angry, sat silently for a moment and looked around to see if anyone outside was near enough to have heard.
“This got you where you got no pride, Eddie. I feel sorry for you. I got pride if you don’t.”
“I’m talkin’ about myself, Sal. Not about anybody else.”
“All right. Get a hold of yourself, for Christ’s sake.”
“I was a mooch, a jelly,” Stack said. “You know what Kinsella said in front of me?”
Salmone folded his arms and raised his eyes.
“Don’t, Eddie, for God’s sake.”
“He’s talking, Charlie, about cops on the bag. He says some cops can take it and some can’t. If you don’t know how to take it, you shouldn’t. He said, ‘Some cops would love to take it but they don’t know how.’ He says this in front of Barbara. He was talking about me. And then, after the thing—”
“Shut up, Eddie!” Salmone shouted. “Shut the fuck up! You were honest as the day was fucking long. You were incorruptible and you were smart and everybody loved you and especially Barbara—she’s a saint in heaven—she loved you. Kinsella’s a piece of shit.”
Salmone paused and considered his old partner. “Hey,” he said, “are you carrying? Do you have a weapon?”
“No,” Stack said.
“Look,” Salmone said, “I blame myself. I didn’t like Brookman. I was pissed. I swear I was pissed at his behavior. And because I knew who Maudie was. But he didn’t push her in front of no car. I didn’t say he did, did I? I was suspicious.”
Stack watched the Christmas lights on Prospect Street switch on.
“I can tell you this too, Eddie. The Staties got a list of people reported their car stolen right after Maud died. Had work done on it. There’s gonna be an arrest soon. So there’s that.” He turned to Stack. “Eh, I think you went crazy and I think you got a weapon. I want it.”
Stack ignored him.
“You want to end up in the fuckin’ zoo at the end of your life? You want to dishonor yourself so much?”
Stack shook his head.
“Or,” Salmone said, “you want the garbage guys and the coroner sweeping up your fucking brains and the rest of your family thinking about that? And the sin.”
“Oh, fuck the sin, Sal.”
Salmone put his hand out. “I want the weapon. I’ll get it to you. You want a receipt? I’ll personally return it to you. Now I want it.”
So in the end Stack handed over the Glock. Salmone looked at his watch.
“There’s a train now every half hour. You’re gonna make the four-twenty. I’ll give you a ride.”
“I don’t want a ride,” Stack said. But he took it.
At the station, on the platform, Stack watched the four-twenty pull away. He was not going to miss his appointment with Brookman, he thought, even if it was just an announcement of things future. He leaned on his cheap walking cane. He was having more and more trouble getting over the distances his routines required. Also, he thought, he might find a variety of uses for it. He took out his phone and called Professor Brookman’s home.
36
“PROFESSOR BROOKMAN?”
He had never seen or heard Edward Stack, the bereaved, the famous cop, but he knew who it was.
“Yes?”
“Could I have a word with you? My name is Stack. I was Maud’s father.”
“I’m very sorry,” Brookman said after a moment. He supposed there was no way around saying that. “You know we saw her just before she died.”
Brookman did not understand what had impelled him to say it. His expensive new lawyer had been eloquent and specific on the sorts of things persons even potentially of interest in such a situation ought not to allow themselves to say. Say to anyone, let alone policemen who were members of the victim’s immediate family.
“I know that, Professor,” Stack said. “I thought it was time I reached out to you.”
“I see.”
“I think we should meet now,” Stack said.
It was strange. Just as he had heard the outer-borough inflections in Maud’s imitation of her father, so he heard Maud’s shaped schoolgirl tones in her father’s voice. It caused him a thrill of grief.
“If you would like to meet, Mr. Stack, I’ll be pleased to meet you.”
“That’s good, man.”
“You must have been,” Brookman allowed himself to say, “very proud of her.”
He listened to what sounded almost like deliberate heavy breathing on the phone. And Stack asked him:
“Why’s that?”
Brookman felt an anger rise in himself that he could hardly keep out of his voice. It had been threatening to overwhelm him since the night of her death, along with the fear, regret, disgust.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stack. Did you ask me why I think you must have been proud of Maud?”
“Yes,” Stack said. “That is what I asked you.”
“Because she was a wonderful young person. You must have known that better than anyone. Where shall we get together? When?”
“I’m in town, Professor. I’m in your town.”
“Good,” said Brookman. “Sorry I can’t ask you to the house. How about meeting in my office? I can tell you where it is.”
“I know where it is,” Stack said. “Don’t you want a public place?”
“I don’t need a public place. Let’s get together. Cortland 3A. The building’s probably locked now but I’ll open it.”
He hung up and looked out his bedroom window at the early evening. Along the parkway that ran from the Common to the football stadium the commuter traffic was light and the three streetlights that marked the first two blocks were on. He turned on the bedside lamps and went out into the upstairs hallway. Ellie was down in the living room. Sophia was in the kitchen doing homework with Brahms on her CD player. It was the kind of music she did homework to. One of the many things that made her, among faculty brats, the arch-weirdo.
He called down to his wife. She came upstairs, grim-faced.
“Was that Stack?” she asked softly.
“Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”
She shrugged.
“He’s in town,” Brookman told his wife. “He wants to meet me at the office. But he could be anywhere out there. Go down and lock up.”
She started for the steps.
“Listen,” he said to her. “I’m going up there. Lock up behind me and let nobody in here. No cop stuff or any such bullshit. Don’t open it.”
She nodded and went downstairs. Brookman went to a utility room at the end of the hall, locked himself in, turned on the light. It was the place he kept his outdoor equipment, his guns and fishing rods, his climbing gear, tents, protective clothing. One of the things he also kept there was a .38-caliber pistol, a few years old. He stuffed it in the wide pocket of an old parka and prepared to go out. When he switched off the utility room light there was a double knock at the room’s door. He opened it to Ellie. He had put on the parka in the semi-darkness. Her hand found the gun’s outline in his pocket.
“Steven! Don’t meet him wi
th that. It’s wrong. It will destroy you. Destroy us.” She was trying to keep her voice down. They both were.
“Of course I’m taking it,” he told her. “He’ll have one. While I’m out, you should load the Mossberg. The shells are on the shelf. Oil it and load it. I’m going.”
“No,” she said. “You mustn’t!”
He seized her by the shoulder.
“Don’t be a complete fool, Ellie. He means revenge. He thinks I killed his daughter. He’s coming after us.”
Brookman hurried out before Sophia had time to come out of the kitchen.
37
IT WAS ALMOST DARK when Brookman walked across the half-deserted campus to Cortland Hall. A river fog shrouded the brick college structures and reduced the town’s Christmas decorations to a distant haze of holiday colors. The building’s hallway lights were off; Brookman switched them on, left the outside door unlocked and went upstairs to his office. He left his office door unlocked as well and sat down behind his fine oak desk.
Maud had left her paperback Doctor Faustus and a plaid scarf on one of the captain’s chairs with their emblazoned motto Lux in umbras procedet. Copies of the Gazette featuring her story were stacked in a rocking chair. For some reason there was a copy of Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation on his sofa.
Brookman felt guilt and bitter regret but it was not any illusion of atonement that drove him to face her father. He had a sense of debt to the man and to his daughter’s memory but he was not offering himself in reparation. For one thing, he wanted to draw Stack’s anger away from his house and his family. But it was not remorse for the most part that moved him to face Stack. Other forces inside him, old determinants of his life and fortune, drove him. Two things were foremost in his mind: his family in the house down the hill and his shame at bringing the gun along.
He did not believe that he had killed Maud by loving her, through what had happened between them. Still, there was some kind of blood debt, something to be endured as a result of what had happened. He thought of it as something to be learned, a mystery he was compelled to live out. What brought him to the office and the meeting with Stack was akin to every other high-risk venture he had ever undertaken. Maybe the temptation of oblivion, or an obsessive curiosity about the ineluctability of fate. And an ancient anger he had been born with, an insatiable rage against himself, his cast of mind—a sense that he had been born out of line, raised wrong, lived deserving of some unknowable retribution that it was his duty and honor to face down, prevent, overcome. His yielding to the spell of Maud, the pain he had caused Ellie, his coming into the path of the unfortunate old man’s revenge, all were mysteriously part of it.
He heard the outside door open slowly. When it shut, the building sounded with an echoing hush, the magnified whispery desperation of Stack’s breathing, in discord with his footsteps and the reports of his cane against the oak floors.
Brookman sat silent and unmoving, frozen in place. In the office, he could detect a lingering savor of the girl that quickened on the thoughts of her he had spent so many days resisting. Somewhere at the center of the confusion and grief of the past weeks, he remained trapped in images from the teeming street in front of his house in the moments before the phantom car had struck. At his heart was a dreadful sense of loss, of life, of love, all lost, so wrongly, so unjustly, so in accordance with the wretched laws of life. Maud lost. And Ellie and Sophia—every loving impulse he knew, dead at the source, dead on arrival. Can I have brought down all this death in life on us, Brookman wondered, through my fondness for a pretty girl? And could Maud have been led to death through so commonplace an adolescent adventure? It was all so good, he thought, all about the beauty of a girl and of the world, of its forms, its sublimest language. He waited, despising his own fecklessness and self-pity yet offering them to fortune as his alibi. He thought of the Thomas Wyatt verse in her pocket. God have mercy on her.
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall . . .
She carried it in her wallet, he thought. Carried it for me. God have mercy on her, he thought. On us, on me. How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.
The tapping of the old man’s cane was harrowing him. Then there was the knock on his door, and it was a four-beat measure that reminded him of Maud’s signal.
“Professor Brookman?”
“It’s open, Mr. Stack.”
He heard Stack pause for breath and cursed the impulses that had led him to wait seated at the desk like some lame victim of justice. He ought, he thought suddenly, to have stood by the door and taken the old guy down, weapon and all if he had one. Brookman grew angrier and angrier. In the hurried failing breaths of the man at his door he could sense the satisfaction of an avenger, and a sense of his own justification drove his rage. He put his hands on his desk and watched Stack come into his office.
Edward Stack looked to be a hard man with a practical cop’s face. A man used to being feared. Maud had his eyes, Brookman thought; you would have paired the two of them by sight because of the eyes.
“You,” Stack said. He did not say it in an agitated manner but softly, with an edge of satisfaction. It was an intimidating way to be addressed, but it fed Brookman’s anger. As Stack said it, the cane fell from his hand, clattered on the wood floor and rolled across it. It was the kind of stick chain drugstores sold to aging cut-rate cripples. Both men looked down after it. Stack made no move to retrieve the thing.
“Were you going to hit me with that, Mr. Stack? Were you going to cane me?”
He watched the old man struggle for breath, not able after a moment to conceal his gasping.
“For God’s sake,” Brookman said.
Brookman stood, his eyes on Stack’s, and came around the desk. Stack took a move back and put the right hand that had held his cane on the arm of the chair nearest Brookman’s desk. It was there for students’ use during office hours and Maud had sat in it often enough. Stack put his hands on the chair and eased himself into it, fighting for air.
Brookman saw that the old man had miscalculated. Whatever he had intended was beyond him, whatever havoc on Brookman he saw himself as wreaking in his mind’s eye was well past his capacity. He was settling for life and breath, propped on the chair. There were no threatening motions, no reaches for weaponry. He did not even try to talk. At first he could not bring himself to look at Brookman, and when he did, he was attempting not to show the fear he plainly felt. Brookman was ashamed.
“Are you all right?” Brookman asked him, avoiding his eyes. “Do you want oxygen? Should I get help?”
“You son of a bitch,” Stack said, breathing hard. “I came here to kill you.”
“That would have been wrong, Mr. Stack.”
Stack began to laugh. Brookman wanted to beg him to rest and be silent.
“We got to be friends over the years I was her adviser. I let it get out of hand. I was emotionally involved and she was . . .” Something in Stack’s expression made him stop.
“You . . . you phony obscene son of a bitch. You . . . bastard. She was a young child.”
“No. She was my student, Mr. Stack. I always respected her. I let the distance between us become too close.”
“Stop calling me that, you posturing fuck. Stop calling me Mr. Stack.”
“Sorry. What shall I call you?”
Stack tossed his head in what looked like a spasm of pain.
“It sounds like you’re passing yourself off as someone her age. You’re a married man, you bastard. She was a child.”
“Not to me.”
“Like you were a couple of kids, you dirty-handed son of a whore.”
“Two grown people.”
“She was younger than her age,” Stack said fiercely.
“She was a beautiful, educated young woman.”
“Oh, bullshit. She was a kid!”
“She looked that way to you.”
“You killed her, didn’t you
? That’s what it comes to.”
“She died in an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Stack insisted. He sounded as though he knew he was arguing against logic.
“She died in an accident. It could have been anyone in that street. It could have been me.” He leaned his forehead on the heel of one hand. His elbow touched the weight of the gun in his pocket and he was ashamed of having it. “It’s so cruel,” he said to Stack. “I’m sorry.”
Stack stared at him wide-eyed, his handsome ravaged face ugly with animal suffocation and his hatred.
“But emotionally,” Stack repeated, “she was younger than her age. She was a kid.”
Without meaning to, Brookman shrugged. He sat silent, to let the old man catch his breath and because he did not know how to answer.
“You say cruel,” Stack reminded him. “How about you for cruel? To crush a kid’s feelings like that. Break her heart! You act like I don’t understand. Like I don’t know what you did.” He coughed, took out his handkerchief, turned in the chair and folded his hands over the back of it.
A nice-looking man, Brookman thought, his adversary had been. But his basically lean, intelligent looks were utterly blasted, the fine eyes swollen, the fair skin flanneled and flayed, marred under his high cheekbones by sickening spidery angiomas.
“I saw your family, Professor,” Stack said. “I bet they’re good people. They weren’t enough for you? Why didn’t you leave us alone?”
“Maud was my friend and my student, Mr. Stack. I never, ever meant to hurt her. I respected her and I respect you. If you thought I was patronizing you, you were mistaken.”
“You picked her up, you seduced her, and you dropped her, and you should not have done that. I swear to God I came here to kill you.”
For that, Brookman had no answer. Only the pistol he was more and more ashamed of having.
He stood up, walked around the desk and picked up Stack’s cane. Standing over Stack’s chair, he offered him the handle. As he did, he realized that Stack had caught a glimpse of the gun in the right pocket of his parka. Stack struggled to his feet, reaching toward him, and Brookman gave him a shove that drove him toward the wall. The old man was wheezing, reaching for his inhaler. Brookman backed away. For a moment, he thought he might have killed him. But Stack caught his breath.