by James Yaffe
“Your mother is still alive?”
“Yes, she’s in this retirement home in Washington Heights. I go East to visit her on my vacations. Sometimes she gets confused, doesn’t recognize me. But most of the time she’s very alert, she spends her days bragging to her friends about her college professor son.”
For a while he couldn’t go on talking, then he said, “All right, I was jealous of Stu. I was angry and frustrated. I knew damn well why Van Horn and the rest of them were giving the job to him instead of to me. Because he was a member of the club. That nice cozy little WASP, prep-school, Ivy League, true-blue American majority club they all belong to. Talk about irony, for God’s sake! I belong to a minority, so I don’t get the goodies the majority reserves for itself. But I belong to the wrong minority—I’m not a black or a Chicano or a woman—so I don’t get the leftovers the majority’s willing to toss away. It’s a crazy world we live in.
“All right, I admit it. Last night when I heard Stu was dead—Do you want me to pretend I was brokenhearted? The hell I was! I’d be getting tenure, and he got the death sentence! Excuse me—unless I get the death sentence, too.”
His voice shook a little, then he got it under control. “But what happened to him—I never wished for that. I didn’t kill him. I know you won’t believe me—what I said to Dave, I know how bad it looks—but I swear to God I didn’t kill him!”
Ann watched him a moment in silence, then got to her feet. “Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll see you at two this afternoon, you’ll be getting a hearing on your request for bail.”
“Do you think—Will they let me out on bail?”
“Who knows? Depends if you get a sympathetic judge.”
“I hope so,” he said. “Because you know—it really isn’t so great in here.”
He tried a smile, but it didn’t work too well. The pain on his face looked genuine. If only you could tell the truth about people from looking at their faces.
CHAPTER 10
AS ANN AND I emerged into the street, I blinked my eyes and took a gulp of fresh air. I am not crazy about prisons.
I asked Ann if she’d be needing me at the bail hearing this afternoon, and she said she wouldn’t. So we separated in front of the jail.
She had a lot of paperwork to do in connection with the case. That’s one of the by-products of murder: It creates paperwork the way rabbits create rabbits. And I had a lot of legwork to do. Talk to Marcus Van Horn and Samantha Fletcher about that phone conversation. Talk to people who lived near Bellamy on Blackhawk Road, in case one of them heard or saw anything. Nose around the college and find out if Bellamy had any other enemies besides Mike Russo, if there was anybody else who might have a motive for killing him.
Before I got to any of these things, though, I had a date to have lunch with Mom. We had arranged this at breakfast this morning—I would meet her at noon at Tokyo Rosie’s, a new Japanese restaurant a few blocks up from the courthouse. It was in the same location as the French place before it and the Italian place before that. There’s always a big turnover in restaurants in Mesa Grande.
It was ten minutes before noon, so I picked up the late edition of the Republican-American, went to my table in the restaurant, and ordered a cup of coffee. While I sipped it—and incidentally, it was pretty vile: Oh well, the Japanese aren’t supposed to be able to make coffee—I read the latest on the murder. A lot more detail this time, and Mike Russo, with pictures, was all over the front page.
The Republican-American—if you’re looking for understatements—is a conservative newspaper. In the 1972 presidential election, it advised its readers not to vote, because McGovern and Nixon were both too far to the left. It did support Ronald Reagan in 1980, but it’s been very upset with him lately. He’s in the White House for six years, and kids still can’t say prayers in the public schools. The editors haven’t actually called him a Communist, but they’re raising doubts about some of his advisers.
In covering the Bellamy murder, this sheet maintained its usual standard of journalistic accuracy and objectivity. This was the headline:
BLOOD BATH AT MESA GRANDE COLLEGE;
PROF KILLS PROF, SAYS DA MCBRIDE
From what followed a visitor from Mars would have learned that college professors as a class were slobbering psychopaths who continually went around murdering one another.
The paper also ran an interview with District Attorney Marvin McBride, in which he assured the citizens of Mesa Grande that the forces of justice had no intention of allowing these elitist so-called intellectuals to act as if they were above the law in this town.
I pushed this garbage aside, and thought for a while about that supreme proof of human irrationality, the success in our town of Marvin McBride.
To a lot of people around here it seems as if he’s been our district attorney forever. Every four years he goes before the voters, with his pugnacious jaw and red-veined little face, and gets himself handily reelected. And immediately settles down to another four years of the sloppy, inefficient administration that characterized his office during all his previous terms. What’s more, his high pluralities never suffer from the fact that everybody in town knows he’s a hopeless lush.
He brings off this periodic miracle by knowing the way to the heart and mind of the ordinary Mesa Grande citizen. He knows that this is a town in which fundamentalist ministers have daily television shows; in which every third car has a “Honk for Jesus” bumper sticker; in which the only newspaper is somewhat to the right of Generalissimo Franco; in which there’s one bookstore and no art movie house but at least a hundred stores that sell guns. McBride’s campaign strategy consists entirely of hinting broadly, as often as possible, that if he isn’t reelected, law and order will come to a stop and the bums, the Mafia, the college radicals, and the secular humanists will take over the city, burn the houses, rape the women, and turn our children into dope fiends and homosexuals.
Mom appeared in the doorway of the restaurant, waving at me, then came bustling over and took a seat. For a few seconds she caught her breath, then she looked around the restaurant. “In New York, when it’s Japanese, you have to take off your shoes and sit on the floor. That’s why I never go to them. Sitting on the floor is possible maybe, but at my age the problem is getting up again.”
“I guess we just aren’t as sophisticated as New York,” I said. “We still like to sit down on chairs to eat our meals.”
The waitress, a Japanese woman in a kimono, brought us our menus, and Mom frowned over the selection for a while. When I told her that sushi was mostly raw fish, she made a face and said, “The way I was brought up, we cooked our fish. The parts we didn’t cook we fed to the cats.”
She put in an order for yakitori and hot tea, and then settled down to telling me about her morning. Mrs. Cassidy had taken her to the supermarket, and Mom had been pleasantly surprised to find that most of the products she bought in New York supermarkets were also available here. “Who’d ever expect,” she said, “that they’d have Campbell’s soup all the way up in the mountains!”
I said that it was brought in every month by mule train, and she told me I had a fresh tongue in my head, but actually she wasn’t the least bit annoyed, she was pleased at how her morning had gone and full of interest in the details of Mesa Grande life to which she’d been exposed.
“Believe it or not, they also had matzos and gefilte fish at the supermarket. I found them in the gourmet foods section.”
After she got back from her grocery shopping and filled up my icebox with “decent things to eat,” Mom had gone on a tour of the area with Mrs. Cassidy. But she didn’t see any of the usual things that tourists are urged to see, the mountain views and spectacular red-rock formations. “Julie offered,” Mom said, “but I told her rocks and mountains, you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all. I told her what interested me was people. Every person is not only a little bit different from every other person but also exactly the same. So Julie took me to this
organization she belongs to, where they’ve got activities for people who are retired or their families have moved out and they’ve got time on their hands.”
“A senior citizens’ club?”
“Senior citizens! Kindly don’t use that expression to me. I’m a person, not a citizen. Citizens are for people that have to live in Russia. And why do you say ‘senior’ when what you mean is ‘old’? So why not say it, ‘old’? Is it a dirty word or something?”
“All right, Mom, Mrs. Cassidy took you to some kind of old people’s club that she belongs to?”
“Well, I didn’t see any teenagers there. The rock and roll wasn’t coming out of the jukebox.”
“They had a jukebox?”
“Naturally. You think, once you’re over seventy, you lose your taste for music? Sometimes you can’t hear it so good anymore, but I’m lucky that’s no problem of mine. There was one room they were playing records in all the time I was there—old songs your father and I used to dance to when we were young.” Mom shut her eyes and started humming and murmuring the words. “‘The birds do it, the bees do it—’ Now those were songs. Nice sexy words to them, and you could understand what was being sung. Today everybody’s yelling, but who can figure out what the words are? It’s like this younger generation is afraid of sex. You think maybe that’s why the population isn’t exploding anymore?”
“You never used to like old people’s clubs, Mom. You told me a few years ago you’d rather spend a social evening in a leper colony.”
Mom shrugged. “Different circumstances, different feelings, am I right? The places I don’t like are in New York, they’re full of old kockers can’t do anything except tell you about their aches and pains and how their children don’t come to visit them enough. Here in this town of yours people don’t talk so much, maybe it’s because they’re Westerners, they don’t have as much inside their heads as New York people, but for a change it’s restful. Julie introduced me to a couple friends of hers, nice people, both sexes, and we carried on a civilized conversation without being interrupted every two minutes by somebody’s arthritis.”
The waitress brought our food, and then Mom said very casually, “So I’m reading in the paper this morning, they arrested your friend the English professor for the murder last night, and the public defender is taking his case.”
“That’s right, Mom.”
“So what’s the details? Do you know what kind of evidence they’ve got against him?”
To talk to Mom about the case would be strictly unprofessional, as I knew perfectly well. Still, I didn’t even go through the motions of an inner conflict. I started right in, telling her everything that had happened this morning.
“So what’s your opinion?” she said, when I had finished. “Is your boss defending a guilty client?”
“A lawyer isn’t supposed to consider such a question. Every defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Every accused person is entitled to the best legal defense he can get. That’s the American—”
“All that I know,” Mom said, brushing it away. “But even a lawyer is entitled to a personal opinion—and you’re not even a lawyer. So what’s your personal opinion?”
“I keep seesawing back and forth. Sometimes I think he’s guilty as hell. I mean, he did have a motive, and a good strong one, though Ann’ll do her damnedest to belittle it in court. It seems perfectly natural to me that a man nowadays would kill somebody to keep from losing his job.”
“Especially if it’s a job you can’t get fired from,” Mom said, nodding. “This tenure business—wonderful! Your father should’ve had such a thing in cloaks and suits when he was a young fellow.”
“And he can’t account for himself when the murder was being committed,” I went on. “That story about oversleeping—I can imagine what George Wolkowicz will do to him if he tells that in court. The fact is, nobody saw him for five hours or so. He had plenty of time to drive out to Bellamy’s place, kill him at five to eight, drive back to his house, change his clothes if he happened to get any blood on them, and show up at the party a little after nine. And the clincher, of course, is that his car was parked down the street from Bellamy’s house some time after four o’clock when the new tire was put on it. Motive, opportunity, and he’s been placed at the scene of the crime. What else could anyone ask for, short of his committing the murder in front of a room full of people?”
“Which he practically did, in a way,” Mom said. “But you say you’re seesawing. What’s the opposite side of the seesaw?”
“A couple of things. The line Ann is planning to take, obviously, is that somebody’s framing Mike for the murder. Somebody who knows about his motive managed to steal his keys and get them duplicated, then slipped into his house and put some kind of knockout drops into his mint-chip ice cream, then drove his car out to Blackhawk Road, parked it where the tire marks were sure to be discovered, killed Bellamy, and brought the car back.”
“And how do you feel about this idea?”
“Well, it does take care of one of the peculiarities you pointed out last night. Why did the murderer kill Bellamy while Bellamy was talking over the phone? Why take the chance that his victim might have time, before he lost consciousness, to blurt out his murderer’s name to the party at the other end of the line?
“The answer is, if the murderer was trying to frame Mike, then he—or she, I suppose—would want Bellamy to make that phone call. Because what would have happened if there hadn’t been any phone call? The exact time of the murder wouldn’t have been established, Mike wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd as somebody who didn’t have an alibi, a new snowstorm—which, as a matter of fact, it looks as if we’re about to get—would have covered up the tire marks that put Mike at the scene of the crime. In other words, the whole frame-up against Mike depended on Bellamy getting killed while he was talking on the phone.”
Mom was beaming at me. “That’s good,” she said. “You’ve still got a brain in your head, even with this mountain air.”
I actually found myself blushing when she said these words. Like a little kid getting a compliment from a grown-up.
“One point about your reasoning, though,” Mom went on. “Like you said, Bellamy could have called out the murderer’s name over the phone. This is quite a risk for the murderer to run, only for the purpose of framing somebody. Can you explain that, I wonder?”
“Maybe this murderer really has it in for Mike, hates him and Bellamy.”
“Possible,” she said, and for a moment there was a puzzled frown on her face.
We were finished eating, so I paid the check and we went out to the street. “Let me drive you home, Mom,” I said.
“You don’t have to. I’m taking a walk, it’s only a couple blocks, to the YMCA where I’m meeting Julie Cassidy. They’ve got a bridge tournament there this afternoon, the two of us are thinking maybe we’ll be partners.”
“The YMCA, Mom? You know what those letters stand for, don’t you? The Young Men’s Christian Association.”
“So? Your point is, I’m not young, I’m not a man, I’m not a Christian? Julie says the YMCA don’t care about any of those things. She’s not young or a man either, and she’s always been a lousy Christian. All they care is, can you play bridge? So tell me, darling, what’s your next step? What are you planning to do this afternoon?”
“I thought I’d go out to Blackhawk Road and talk to some of Bellamy’s neighbors. Maybe somebody noticed something—another car parked in front of the house, a visitor—”
“Can I make a suggestion for something else you could do if you go out there?”
“Any suggestion is welcome, Mom.”
“Go inside this Bellamy’s house. Give it a good looking over. Especially the room where the murder happened. And especially the telephone.”
“If there’d been any evidence in that room, Mom—if there was anything wrong with the phone—I’m sure the police would’ve found it. They’re pretty efficient.”
“You should never be so sure about how efficient people are. I had a cleaning woman for twenty years, every Thursday she came in, I swore by her. Last year she retired on account of water on her knee, and I got a new cleaning woman, and you know what was the first thing she found out? In all those years my old cleaning woman never once ran a rag along the back of the toilet cabinet, where it was a half-inch away from the wall. What we found on the back of that toilet cabinet! If this Japanese chicken you’ve got me eating wasn’t so delicious, I’d be sick to my stomach remembering it.”
“All right, Mom,” I said, and couldn’t keep from smiling, “I’ll go inside that house and give it as much of a search as I can. Especially the phone—and the toilet cabinet.”
“Thank you for humoring an old lady,” she said.
She gave me a peck on the cheek, and I watched her marching down the street until she disappeared around the corner.
CHAPTER 11
FOR THE SECOND TIME in two days, I found myself heading out to Blackhawk Road.
In the sunlight, Bellamy’s house looked like a bright gleaming freshly painted oasis in a desert of drab. I parked in front of it, and a uniformed patrolman, gray haired, close to retirement, came down the walk to meet me. He was starting to order me out of there, but as soon as I told him I was an investigator for the public defender, he offered to accompany me inside. The public defender—in theory, at any rate—is supposed to have the same access to evidence as the district attorney. Convictions have been overturned on appeal when it was proved that free access had been denied.
I entered the large hallway and peered around at the Oriental rug, the tall fat Chinese vase, the antique table it was standing on. What was I looking for? God knows. Mom had told me to give the place a “looking over,” and mine but to do or die.