by James Yaffe
After dinner I did the dishes. Mom refused to let me at first, but I told her that my self-esteem as a member of the women’s-lib generation would be severely damaged if she didn’t. So she gave in, sighing and muttering about how men nowadays don’t have any backbone like they used to have. This from a woman whose husband had been firmly under her thumb, with no hope of escape, throughout their entire married life!
When I was through with the dishes, I called Ann and told her about “Zorro.” “Be careful,” was all she said.
There were still a few hours to kill after that, so Mom and I played gin rummy. She was the one who had taught me the game, when I was a kid. She skunked me as easily as ever. I lost a dollar and eighty cents to her, and don’t think she didn’t make me fork over every penny. Mother love may be the most beautiful of all human sentiments, but Mom wasn’t about to let it interfere with a legitimate gambling debt.
At a quarter of twelve, I put on my overcoat and my fur hat, wound a muffler around my neck, and went to the back door which led out of the kitchen, my car being stowed away in the garage behind the house. Mom went to the door with me.
“You’ll be warm enough?” she said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“So—I’ll see you later.”
“Don’t wait up for me, for God’s sake,” I said.
“You’re a big boy, why should I wait up?”
The snow had stopped falling by now, but the cold cut through my clothing, and the heater in my car is one of its many parts that could use a lot of improvement. I got to Manitou Park a few minutes early, just to be on the safe side.
It’s set in the middle of the downtown section of town, and all it covers is one square block. Inside it are swings and picnic tables and an area for horseshoes and shuffleboard, but not many children or horseshoe players ever use it, because in the last fifteen years it’s turned into the local haven for hobos and hippies, a place where you can buy or sell all kinds of drugs at any time of day. The Downtown Merchants Association and other civic groups are always protesting about the degeneration of Manitou Park, and the cops occasionally announce they’re staging a crackdown. But the day after the crackdown, go to the park and you’ll find what you’re looking for just as easily as before.
Now I have to admit it, this park is not a particularly savory spot at midnight. All you can see in there are a few shadowy figures, and you should probably be grateful that you can’t see their faces. I took a deep breath, said a little prayer to myself, and walked through the iron gateway.
Moving fast, I headed to the exact center of the square and stopped at the huge elm tree. It’s known as General Wagner’s elm tree because it was planted at that site—long before the park came into existence around it—by General William Henry Harrison Wagner, the hero of the Indian Wars who founded Mesa Grande in the 1880s. There’s a bench right next to it, big enough for two people. I sat down on it, trying to ignore the bitter cold that was seeping into my bones.
The chimes from the clock at the Mesa Grande National Bank Building sounded twelve times, and at that exact same moment I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I came close to jumping to my feet with a yelp, but a voice spoke sharply into my ear. “Shut up. Don’t turn around.”
The same voice I’d heard earlier over the phone. Low and muffled, talking through cloth.
I said, “This is going to be pretty tough if I can’t—”
A sharp jab in the back of my neck discouraged me from going on. Then a hand, with a thick glove on it, reached over my shoulder and thrust a piece of paper into my face.
I took it and read it, squinting in the dim light. It was written on the same word processor as the earlier letter, and it said:
I’ve got what you need. It proves Russo didn’t do the murder. I could get two or three hundred bucks for it from my usual sources. But I want something else.
Russo has a book. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, the first collection that was published in America. It’s a first edition. I’ve seen it. The cover is damaged, a lot of the pages are dog-eared, it’s not that rare, probably not worth too much. Russo says it’s the only valuable book he owns.
I want it. I’ll trade him for it.
I looked up from the letter. “How are we supposed to know this so-called evidence of yours will really do us any good? If you’d give me some idea of what it is—”
I started to turn around, then felt two hands clamping over both my ears and gripping hard as they snapped my head to the front again. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation.
This little punishment was administered in absolute silence. Then one of the gloved fingers pointed at the letter, and I understood I was being ordered to go on reading.
I’ll give you two days. Meet me here again, Saturday at midnight, same conditions. No cops. No smart-ass tricks. You bring what I want, I’ll bring what you want.
Don’t cross me up.
Captain Blood
“Hey! What’re you two doing there?”
I made out a voice, calling from a distance. It had to be a cop.
The hand clamped down on my shoulder again, not very gently.
“Don’t get paranoid,” I said. “I came here alone, I didn’t bring the cops. They patrol this park from time to time, you know.”
The hand lifted from my shoulder, and I could hear footsteps scrambling away behind me. I also heard the rustling of leaves and branches. Captain Blood, formerly Zorro, was hotfooting it into the bushes.
I just had time to shove the letter into my coat pocket when a patrolman in uniform came lumbering up to me.
Only it wasn’t a him, I realized, it was a her. In her thirties, short, stocky, and muscular, with a permanently unbelieving expression on her face.
“I lost my wallet here earlier today,” I said. “I was hoping it might still be here.”
“Who’s the guy that was just with you?”
“Never saw him before. He was sitting here, and he helped me look for it. I guess you scared him away.” I tried to make my voice casual. “You got a good look at the guy, did you?”
“In this light? All I saw was a hat and a long overcoat.” She kept peering at me for a while, then she said, “It all sounds pretty fishy to me. But I haven’t got anything on you, so get the hell out of here. This is no place to hang around in, night or day.”
“Thank you, Officer, good night,” I said, and moved away from her as fast as I could.
Driving home, shivering in the freezing cold, I tried to figure out what had actually happened, who the mysterious voice belonged to, what it all meant anyhow. I couldn’t come to any conclusions at all.
It was almost one o’clock when I got back to my house. Mom was still up, rocking.
“So you want a nice cup of tea, a drink, maybe?”
Tea sounded good. While I drank it and my bones thawed out, I told her what had happened to me in the park.
“And you didn’t get even one quick look at who it was?”
“Not a chance,” I said. “I can’t even tell you if it was a man or a woman. And the voice spoke only a few words.”
Mom shook her head. “I don’t like it when people act that way.”
“What way?”
“Unselfish. Like they’re not interested in money. This person you just met in the park—Captain Blood? Zorro?—it’s supposed to be a student who makes ends meet by doing a little stealing on the side, right?”
“That’s what he wrote in his letter.”
“So is it common with students these days, I wonder, they prefer a rare book to three hundred dollars in cash? And a book they won’t even be able to tell people about or sell, a book they’ll have to keep hidden away? Such a love of literature yet! This generation of students is certainly different from the ones that were around when you went to college.”
“Okay, it’s unusual. But it did happen. So what’s the explanation?”
“At this time of night, who has explanations? Personally
I’m going to bed. You should go to bed, too, you need your sleep, you’re a growing—” She stopped herself in the middle of the old formula, with an embarrassed little grin.
CHAPTER 15
IN THE MORNING Mom made pancakes—light, thin buttermilk pancakes. I wallowed in a sense of childish contentment. I wondered if it was good for my character. For about three seconds I wondered, then I had some more pancakes.
I asked her what she was doing today, and she reminded me that Mr. Bernstein, the retired clothing-store owner, would be picking her up shortly, and since the weather seemed to be nice again he would drive her up into the mountains. It occurred to me I should phone the office that I’d be late, so I could wait around and get a look at Bernstein. After all, Mom was an old lady, in a strange place surrounded by strange people, and I was the only protection she had in the world.
I pushed that foolish thought away pretty damned quick. Mom could take care of herself. From the day of her birth.
I left the house right after breakfast, and at nine o’clock Ann and I met Mike Russo in her office. She had called him first thing this morning to set up the meeting.
He was looking drawn and anxious, and who could blame him? Nobody wants to be the star attraction in a murder trial. Especially in a town like Mesa Grande, where the newspaper hasn’t got much else of local interest to titillate the sadistic impulses of the citizenry.
Not that murder is all that rare out here. We’ve got an army camp outside of town, a red-light district, an above-average rate of unemployment, a thriving trade in illegal chemical substances: Proportionately, we produce at least as much blood and gore per year in the shadow of the Rockies as my old hometown produces in the shadow of the Empire State Building. But this kind of murder we’re not used to. Nice respectable people, college professors, upstanding members of the middle class, bashing one another over the head. The Republican-American would have it on the front page for the next week, and the headlines would burst out all over again when the trial began.
I started off our conference with an account of my conversation with Van Horn and his story about the student who had threatened Bellamy. I explained why it seemed to me this student was probably a Chicano. (I didn’t bother to attribute my logic to Mom, I’m afraid, but of course she never wants to take the credit.) Then I described my encounter with the mysterious student-thief last night. When I came to the part about The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, Mike gave a little gasp. “Son of a bitch!” he said.
“This Zorro claims to have seen your book,” Ann said. “How many people have you ever shown it to? If we could narrow it down—”
“I’ve shown it to a lot of people, I’m afraid,” Mike said. “When I teach Emily Dickinson—and I teach her poetry in three or four classes every year—I always bring the book in to let my students look at it.”
“What about your colleagues in the English department, have any of them ever seen it?”
“I’ve shown it to most of them.”
“How did you happen to get hold of it in the first place?”
“I ran across it in a secondhand store in New Haven. Six or seven years ago, when I was still in grad school. I was browsing in there, and I saw ‘First Edition’ on the flyleaf, and the store was selling it for some ridiculously low price, so I grabbed it.”
“Any idea what it’s really worth?”
“A few hundred dollars maybe—that’s what a rare-book dealer here in town told me. But it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to sell it.” His face grew a little paler than before. “And I’m not going to give it away either. Not to some crummy extortionist.”
“Not even,” Ann said, “if that’s the only way to get yourself out from under this murder charge?”
“Well, we don’t know that, do we? This may be some kind of con game, this Zorro person may be lying. But even if he isn’t, even if he really has some evidence that can help me—I’m damned if he’s getting that book out of me! It means a lot to me, and I’m just not going to throw it away!”
He stopped talking, then he lowered his eyes, and his voice was a lot less determined. “Besides, there’s a good chance, isn’t there, that we won’t need this evidence this Zorro claims he’s got? I mean, the Chicano student who was fighting with Stu, isn’t that a pretty promising lead?”
“Most leads don’t keep their promises,” Ann said.
She let this sink in until Mike’s face was properly crestfallen. Then she stood up. “You’re the client, it’s your decision. We’ll just have to do the best we can.”
CHAPTER 16
I HAD A LOT of morning ahead of me, so I decided to go up to the college and get Bellamy’s current class lists from the registrar. I intended to pick out all the Mexican-sounding names from those lists, track those people down, and find out if any of them could be the student who yelled at Bellamy in his office last Monday.
I drove up to the college, taking it slow and easy, because last night’s snow was freezing on the streets and my car is a great little skidder. The sun was bright, and the white was sparkling from lawns and roofs and tree-tops. And the mountains, when you glimpsed them from the ends of the cross streets, looked like white-haired giants. Patriarchs from some old-fashioned illustrated edition of the Bible. On a day like this, it wasn’t quite as hard as usual to understand why the people in this area are so obsessed with God, get such a kick out of honking for Jesus.
Llewellyn Hall seemed deserted as I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Classes were in progress, and everyone was inside the classrooms, I supposed, hanging on their teacher’s words—or hanging on their own yawns. The registrar’s office was in the front of the building, and I started in that direction. But then I got a better idea.
It was nearly half past ten. Classes wouldn’t break for twenty-five minutes or so. Stuart Bellamy’s office was just a few yards down the hall. His current class lists would undoubtedly be in that office somewhere. And other things—who knew what?—might be in that office too. And in my pocket, suddenly feeling very heavy, was this bunch of keys I always carry. Very useful, versatile keys.
I hurried down the hall to Bellamy’s office, took a quick look over my shoulder to make sure nobody was in sight, and started trying keys in the door. The third one worked.
Shutting the door behind me, I took a few seconds just to look over the room, get some feel for it. It was very different from the living room in Bellamy’s house, where his body had been lying. There were no books in this office at all. Bare shelves and just a couple of neat piles of paper on the desk. The walls were undecorated except for a blown-up framed photograph of Scott Fitzgerald. A famous photograph, with the head tossed back, the hair unruly, the shirt open at the collar: the Author as Every Schoolgirl’s Romantic Dream.
Everything else about this office suggested that Bellamy didn’t spend much of his time here, so why did he keep the photograph here, why not back at his house with his books, his Hemingway, his Faulkner?
The answer, I decided, was that he had to spend some time in this office, talking to students, whether he liked it or not. And it had been necessary to him, during those hours of enforced drudgery, to have this image on the wall to look at now and again. To identify with maybe?
I looked through the piles of papers on his desk. Nothing significant about any of them. Xeroxed notices from the college mostly. About as impersonal as you could get. But one of the piles had what I was looking for, three official class lists, printed out from the registrar’s computer. English 104: Introductory Fiction. English 332: The Nineteenth-Century American Novel. English 333: The Twentieth-Century American Novel.
There were about eighty or ninety names among the three lists, and three of them looked Mexican to me. One of these three was a woman—Bertha Alvarez, a freshman. The other two were men—Luis Vallejos, a sophomore (The Nineteenth-Century American Novel), and Tomas Trujillo, a senior (The Twentieth-Century American Novel). And the registrar couldn’t have been kinder and more a
ccommodating to a hardworking investigator: After each name was a phone number.
The number after Luis Vallejos’ name was a private phone in town, the number after Tomas Trujillo’s name was an extension in one of the college dorms. So I used the phone in Bellamy’s office to call that extension. A tired male voice answered after seven or eight rings: Somebody had had a long, hard night. I asked for Tomas Trujillo, and the voice said, “I’m his roommate, he isn’t in right now. I think he’s at basketball practice.”
“He’s on the basketball team?”
“That’s right. You want to leave a message?”
“Never mind.” I hung up the phone. The short slight boy that Van Horn had described wasn’t on anybody’s basketball team.
I was about to dial the college operator for an outside line to Luis Vallejos’ number when I heard a noise. It was coming from about two inches away from me, it seemed. Then I realized it was coming from the office on my left. Somebody moving around in there, opening and closing a drawer. These walls were as thin as paper.
Whose office was it next door anyway? I shut my eyes and tried to visualize the corridor, with the names. It was Samantha Fletcher’s office. What was she doing here now when she ought to be teaching a class?
Then I heard another noise, which answered my question. The buzzer that signals the end of class, coming at me faintly from the corridor. I had no problem recognizing it: How many hours during my own college days had my whole heart and soul and mind been fixed on waiting for that buzzer?
I waited in Bellamy’s office—cowered might be more accurate, because I could imagine the field day our district attorney would have if I were caught breaking and entering!—until I heard the door to Fletcher’s office open and close.