A Nice Murder For Mom

by James Yaffe

  I waited another few seconds, then I slipped out of Bellamy’s office. Out in the corridor I found myself caught in the grand stampede of prisoners let loose from their confinement.

  I moved with the flow down the stairs. The people around me, all of them young and full of beans, were yelling and laughing and arguing and giggling. None of them had the slightest idea that Jimmy Valentine, the Gentleman Cracksman, was in their midst.

  CHAPTER 17

  AFTER MY HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE from Llewellyn Hall, I went to the drugstore across the street from the campus and asked to see their phone book. I looked up Vallejos. There was a whole column of them, but the number I was looking for, the number that had been printed after Luis Vallejos’ name on Bellamy’s class list, was near the top. Carlos Vallejos. As I had thought, the kid was living at home with his family.

  I decided to go right over there, without calling up first. Maybe nobody would be there, but if somebody was, it could be a great advantage to catch them by surprise, to talk to them before they had a chance to fix up a story.

  Carlos Vallejos and his family lived on Cedar Street, not the slums by any means—a very respectable neighborhood, in fact—but definitely lower grade Mesa Grande. It was mostly Chicanos who lived here, with a sprinkling of enlisted men who had families and were on the permanent staff of the army base. The houses were all small, and the lawns were even smaller, but the snowplows, I noticed, had visited the neighborhood. In Mesa Grande the Chicano population votes.

  The Vallejos house had a tiny porch, old, worn, not recently painted, but spotlessly clean. And the three or four shrubs in front of the house gave evidence of being carefully clipped and pruned. I rang the doorbell and waited a long time, and then a young man opened the door. He was small, dark, and slightly built, about nineteen or twenty. He was wearing a black leather jacket, sleek sideburns, and an undulating hairdo. His eyes were fixed on me with suspicion and hostility.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m with the public defender’s office—”

  “You don’t want me,” he said. “You want my mother and father. They’re at the restaurant, with the young ones, they won’t be back till late this afternoon.”

  I asked him what he meant by the restaurant, and he explained that his parents owned a small place that served Mexican food. His mother was the cook, his father was the manager and headwaiter, his brothers and sisters helped out.

  “But you don’t help out?” I asked.

  “I been working there since I was six years old, man,” he said, flushing just a little. “But I got a different job now, at the gas station. It pays a lot better. I have to be there in a couple of hours.”

  All this time he didn’t budge from the doorway.

  “Can I come in?” I said. “It is you I want, as a matter of fact. I’m investigating the charges against Professor Russo, and I think you may be able to help me.”

  “I don’t know anything about that professor. I never had any classes with him. I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”

  “You’ve been taking a course from Professor Bellamy, the one who got killed, haven’t you?”

  He looked at me hard, his long eyelashes hardly flickering. Finally he said, “What’s that got to do with anything, man?”

  “Maybe the fight you had with him has something to do with something. Maybe the way he was screwing you over—”

  I let my voice get louder, and he darted a couple of nervous glances out at the street in both directions. “Okay, man, you might as well come in.”

  I went in, and found myself in a small parlor with a couch and a few wicker chairs, all of this decorated in bright patterns. It was the kind of stuff that shows up on our local TV stations in advertisements for furniture sales.

  The boy waved at one of the wicker chairs, and I sat down in it. He sat down on the couch, across from me, swinging one leg over the other, putting on a carefully bored expression and scratching his left ear. In the other ear, I noticed, he was wearing an earring, a small glitter of red glass. Offhand it looked like the same kind of earring I’d found under the bookcase in Bellamy’s living room. I wondered if he had ever had a pair of them.

  “You’re saying I had some kind of fight with this Bellamy dude?” he said, keeping up the casual manner.

  “In his office, a couple of days ago. You yelled at him for what he’d done to you and told him he’d be sorry. You were overheard when you threatened him.”

  “Threat! What threat? You lose your temper at somebody, who says that means you’re going to do anything to hurt him?”

  “The people who overheard you are prepared to swear it was a definite threat. And it happened just a few days before somebody killed him.”

  “That Russo dude killed him! The one you’re working for! You want to get him off the hook by framing me!”

  “Nobody’s framing anybody. But sooner or later, you’re going to have to explain what that fight was all about. Tell me about it now, and maybe the public defender won’t have to squeeze it out of you in court.”

  He chewed his lip angrily, then he shook his head and muttered, “Shit!” Then he said, “This Bellamy, he had it in for me, man. A week ago he gives us this exam, and it’s important. You know, like if I flunk it, that son of a bitch could flunk me for the whole course. So we sat in the classroom and wrote in these blue books, and last Friday he gave them back to us. And he flunked me.”

  “Was it a tough exam?”

  “It was a pisser. One big long essay, you had two hours to do it. You had a choice, from three different questions. I did the one about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s political ideas. I proved this Hawthorne dude was a real activist. He didn’t like what was going on in his shitty society—it was worse than what we’ve got today, only there wasn’t any anti-Chicano prejudice then. There wasn’t any Chicanos, right?”

  “So he didn’t like your essay and he flunked you,” I said. “What did you do then?”

  “First thing I did, right after class, I showed this essay to this friend of mine. She’s smart, she knows a lot about literature and Nathaniel Hawthorne and what these English-professor dudes are looking for. She told me it was a good essay, it deserved at least an A-minus. And why not? I knew that stuff cold. I’ll tell you a crazy thing, I even like this Hawthorne dude. So the other afternoon, I went to see this Bellamy cocksu—Professor Bellamy at his office, I asked him how come he flunked me.”

  “Then what?”

  “I sat there in his office and told him I thought my exam was pretty good, and other people thought so, too, and would he explain why it deserved to be flunked. I didn’t lose my temper. I was real polite. So what did that son of a bitch do? He laughed at me. A great big fucking horselaugh. He told me he didn’t care what I thought or what any girlfriend of mine thought about my essay. His opinion was what counted. He was saying I deserved to flunk, and that’s all there was to it.

  “So I still didn’t lose my temper. Though I’m telling you, man, I was getting pretty close. I said I understood all that, his opinion was what counted, but he still didn’t tell me what was wrong with my essay. So he laughed again, and he said there was no point telling me, because I couldn’t understand anyway, and then he said he had other appointments, so I should get the hell out of his office. He went to the door and opened it, and I started to leave, but I yelled at him a little before I left.”

  “Why would he flunk you unless he thought you deserved it?”

  “Oh, come on. You know what it is. He’s a racist. He doesn’t like Chicanos, he thinks we don’t have any right in his classroom learning about Nathaniel Hawthorne, he thinks we should stay in the kitchen where we belong, making tortillas and sticking knives in each other. And I don’t keep my mouth shut in class either. I don’t agree with something he says, I tell him so.”

  “Did he ever make any racist remarks to you?”

  “Every time he looks at me it’s a racist remark.”

  “Did he ever actually use
any racist language, in class maybe, when other people might have heard?”

  “He’s too smart for that. In class he’s just a lily-white liberal, his heart bleeds for us disadvantaged, he loves the Third World, he says isn’t it terrible nobody ever paid any attention before to this wonderful literature by blacks and Chicanos. He doesn’t come out with anything in front of witnesses. But that doesn’t change anything, man. That big fucking collection of books he’s got—hundreds of them, all the way up to the ceiling—but none of it means a damn thing!”

  I said nothing for a couple of seconds but didn’t take my eyes off his face. Silence has a way of making people feel uneasy. Finally I said, “Where were you Wednesday night, when Professor Bellamy got killed?”

  He didn’t even blink at this. Either because the question presented no problems for him, or because he’d been steeling himself for it. “What time was that when he got killed?”

  “At five minutes to eight.”

  “I was eating dinner then.”

  “At home, with your family?”

  “No, I was out at a restaurant.”

  “From when to when?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Lemme think. Yeah, I must’ve got there around six-thirty, stayed there maybe a couple hours. Then I came straight home, and I was right here the rest of the night. Maybe from eight-thirty on.”

  “But at five to eight you were still in the restaurant?”

  “That’s it. I know that because I looked at the clock in there and set my watch by it.”

  “What restaurant?”

  “This joint.”

  “What’s the name of it? Where is it?”

  “Who knows? I wasn’t even paying attention. I got hungry, I went into this joint. The kind of place it was, maybe it didn’t even have a name.”

  “What did you have to eat?”

  “Like some kind of spaghetti.”

  “Who had dinner with you?”

  “I was alone.”

  “You went out to eat in a restaurant all by yourself? You want me to believe that a sharp guy like you didn’t have a date?”

  “Why not? Sometimes you want to be alone.” He put on a grin. “You get tired of the broads chasing after you all the time.”

  “How come you didn’t have to work at the gas station that night?”

  “Because I didn’t start that job yet. I was still working at my old man’s restaurant, I didn’t start at the gas station until today. As a matter of fact, I broke it to the old man at lunch that day, I told him I was quitting. He was pretty mad—”

  “The reason you took the gas station job, it’s because you need the extra money?”

  “You ever hear of anybody who doesn’t?”

  “You didn’t think you needed it so much for the last year or so, since you started college. You’ve been satisfied to help out in the restaurant. What happened a few weeks ago to change your mind?”

  “Nothing happened. I just got sick and tired, working for my old man, working for peanuts.”

  “Is it a girl? Some new girlfriend who’s costing you a lot?”

  He shifted his eyes away. “There’s no girl.”

  “You’re sure about that? She isn’t somebody who knows a lot about literature, so she could read your exam and tell you it didn’t deserve a failing grade?”

  “I make up my own mind! She never—”

  “Who never?”

  He muttered into his lap, “Nobody.”

  “If you need money so badly, why did you go out to a restaurant Wednesday night? Wasn’t that pretty extravagant, when you could’ve eaten at home?”

  “I told you that already. The old man was mad at me, we both did a lot of yelling that afternoon. So I felt like being alone.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “What do I have to prove? You’re the one that has to prove. It’s a democratic country, right? I’m innocent till you prove I’m guilty.”

  Just then the front door opened, and a girl came in. She was short and slim, with a lot of long dark hair. Her resemblance to Luis was striking, though she seemed to be about three years older.

  “What’s going down? Who’s this?” She waved her arm at me angrily.

  Luis answered her with a long tirade in Spanish, and she tiraded back at him. Then she turned to me. “What’re you bothering him for? Coming into people’s houses and making accusations at them, what’s the idea?”

  I told her my name and what my job was, but I wasn’t sure she had even bothered to hear me.

  “I’m his sister Flora,” she said. “Anything you want to accuse him of, you say it in front of me.”

  Her eyes were burning. From the corner of one of mine, I could see Luis sitting back on the couch, giving a big smirk.

  “I’m waiting,” she said. “You don’t have anything you want to say? That’s what I thought! Luis is a good boy, he never got in trouble in his whole life, not with the police, not with anybody else. He always got good grades in school, and they gave him this scholarship at the college, and his first year he had a B-plus average.”

  I thought about putting in a word or two, but she was all wound up, blasting down the track. It could have been dangerous to get in her way.

  “Harvard College wanted him too, but they wouldn’t give him the room and board, only the tuition. Here at Mesa Grande he can live at home. And all his life he worked hard, helped out Mama and Papa in the restaurant since he was a kid—the restaurant isn’t such a big place, not many tables, but Mama makes the best sopapillas in town.”

  “I’d like to try them someday,” I said, carefully not mentioning my true feelings about Mexican food. Everybody in this section of the country goes into ecstasies over Mexican food; it’s safer to insult God than to say anything against enchiladas. “But that’s got nothing to do with why I came here this morning.”

  “What’re you waiting for, anyway? Tell me—why did you come here this morning?”

  “To find out where Luis was at five minutes to eight two nights ago, Wednesday night the twenty-third of March.”

  “That’s when the professor got killed?”

  “On the dot.”

  She glared at me a long time, then slowly the angry look faded from her face and was replaced by a smile. A friendly, almost insinuating smile which I didn’t believe in for a minute. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Five minutes to eight Wednesday night the twenty-third? Luis was with me.”

  I stared at her hard and said, “You’re positive of that? You couldn’t be thinking of some other night?”

  “No other night. It was when the regular waitress, Rosa, called in sick, so I quit my job early to wait tables at the restaurant.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m a beautician. I’m in the beauty parlor up at The Richelieu.”

  The beauty shop at The Richelieu is a major enterprise. It’s patronized largely by the wives of Texas oilmen, California movie men, and other assorted millionaires who make this hotel their home away from home.

  “What time were you working at the restaurant Wednesday?” I asked.

  “I filled in from five to nine-thirty. And Papa and Mama were out in the kitchen all that time, too. In case you’re thinking they need an alibi.”

  “A lot of people saw you there that night?”

  “We don’t have room for more than five tables. Four of them were full that night, so that’s maybe ten, twelve, people that saw me.”

  “Regular customers? They know who you are?”

  “All regular customers. I’ll give you their names and addresses. It’s a family place, a neighborhood place.”

  “And those people also saw Luis?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe not. He pulled up in the car, gave a honk for me, and I went out to talk to him.”

  “What about?”

  “This fight he had with Papa. How he could make it up.”

  “You knew about it already by then?”

  “Luis told me
about it earlier. Around five o’clock or so, when I got home from the beauty shop. He was waiting for me outside the house, he wouldn’t go inside because he didn’t want to see Papa. He asked me what should he do about the fight, and I told him I’ll think about it. And he said he was going out for dinner, and he needed my car, my VW bug.”

  “You let him take it?”

  “Sure I let him take it. As long as I was waiting tables that night, I wouldn’t be going anywhere. But he was back again by a quarter of eight, the latest, ten of. He honked the horn from the street, and I came out, and we sat in the car and talked for half an hour, maybe longer.”

  “What about?”

  “His fight with Papa. I was trying to tell him, he should be nice and apologize. But they’re both a couple of stubborn—”

  “You weren’t missed in the restaurant?”

  “Mama and Papa could handle it in there. They thought I just went to the john.”

  “Luis just told me he didn’t got back from dinner till eight-thirty. How come you put it forty-five minutes earlier?”

  Before she could answer that, Luis spoke up. “Hey, wait a second! I just remembered, my watch was running fast on Wednesday. If it said eight-thirty, the right time must’ve been a quarter of.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you set your watch that night from the clock in the restaurant?”

  “Did I say that? I got mixed up with a different night, man. It was a couple months ago when I set my watch from a clock in a restaurant.”

  He was grinning practically ear to ear. It wasn’t a grin I liked very much.

  His sister pushed forward. “All right, you get out now,” she said to me. “I don’t want you around in case Mama and Papa come home. You’re not going to get them upset.”

  So I got to my feet. “Thanks for your help,” I said, and suddenly turned to Luis. “I’d like to ask you just one more question. What happened to your other earring?”

  His hand flew up to his left ear, and his face flushed. Then, quick, he gave his sarcastic laugh. “What’re you talking about, man? One earring is all I wear.”