A Nice Murder For Mom

by James Yaffe

  “I hope Bernstein behaved himself, Mom,” I said, only half joking.

  “Well—” Could that possibly be a blush on Mom’s cheek? “—he finally did.”

  A second later it was all gone, and she said, “Oh, by the way, you had a phone call, maybe an hour ago. Your boss called—Mrs. Swenson. Such a nice-sounding person. And you say she’s young and attractive?”

  “And happily married, Mom.”

  “So why not?”

  “What did she call about?”

  “We chatted a little to start off with. It was a big surprise to her that you’ve got your mother staying with you. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had her and her husband the doctor over for dinner some night—”

  “Mom, what did she call about?”

  “I’m getting there, Davie. She called to tell you that she had that talk with your client Russo and it didn’t do any good. He still says he won’t give away his book, unless the situation becomes desperate—”

  “Hold it a minute,” I broke in. “Ann got pretty talkative with you, didn’t she, on such short acquaintance? That’s confidential information about official business.”

  Mom made her helpless little hand-spreading gesture. “What could I do? You know how it is—people tell me things. There’s something about my face.”

  “Even over the phone?” But I couldn’t get mad at Ann, because I certainly did know how it was. I told Mom things myself, things I shouldn’t be telling anybody. I’d been doing it all my life.

  So I asked Mom to go on with Ann’s message.

  “All she said,” Mom went on, “was that she pointed out to your client, Russo, that today is Friday, and Zorro said he’d get rid of the evidence if he didn’t get the book tomorrow night. She asked him how bad a situation had to become, in his opinion, before it qualified for desperation. But none of this made him change his mind.”

  “College professors!” I said. “They’re so full of literature and philosophy that there’s no room left in their heads for a little common sense!”

  “You should see it from his point of view,” Mom said.

  “What do you mean by that, Mom?”

  “He’s a boy who was brought up in poverty, who found out there was only one way he could escape. With books. If it wasn’t for books, he’s asking himself, where would he be today? And this particular book, this poetry book, for him maybe it’s like a—like a—what’s the word I’m trying to think of?”

  “A symbol?”

  “Thank you kindly. A symbol, what else? A symbol for everything he’s got which, in his heart, he’s afraid he could lose again overnight. He’s thinking, maybe, if he lets the book go, everything else will disappear along with it.”

  “Mike Russo is an educated man, Mom, he’s not some superstitious peasant from the shtetl.”

  “Is that right? You think maybe everybody in the shtetl was a dummy just because they never went to college? You think maybe people who went to college don’t have down inside them somewhere their own personal superstitious peasant?”

  “All right, so he’s attached to his book. If he isn’t careful, he’ll end up reading it in the death cell!”

  “Then it’s our job, wouldn’t you agree, to think up for him a way out?”

  “Which brings us right back where we started. We thought this Vallejos kid could be a way out, but he’s strictly a dead end. Because we’ll never make his sister tell the truth.”

  “So how about making him tell the truth,” Mom said.

  “How do we do that?”

  “You talk to him when his sister isn’t around, you show him that you can see the hole in his story.”

  “What hole?”

  “The one,” Mom said, in her most patient voice, “which proves he went to see Professor Bellamy at his house on Wednesday night.”

  She explained it to me in detail then, point by point, and of course I was soon kicking myself because I hadn’t seen it all along.

  Then the front doorbell rang, and a voice called out Mom’s name. The ladies from the sisterhood had come to take her to the synagogue.

  “You’re positive you won’t come with me?” she said. I told her I couldn’t be more positive.

  “So have a nice evening,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you when I’ll be home. Don’t wait up.”

  After she left, I called Ann and told her about the hole in Luis Vallejos’ story, and how I intended to handle him. She wanted to be in on it, too, so we arranged to meet early in the morning. Then I made some other calls, in connection with what would happen tomorrow. And then I settled down to a basketball game on TV.

  The game ended at ten, but I was still awake at eleven when Mom got home.

  Her face was flushed with pleasure. “We went out after Oneg to have some ice cream,” she said. “A very nice group of people. And such stories they’ve got! Wait till I tell you the dirt about this town of yours!”

  Then a look of concern and reproach appeared on her face. “Davie, Davie—you waited up!”

  CHAPTER 20

  EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I parked my car half a block away from the gas station where Luis Vallejos worked. Ann was there ahead of me. She got out of her car and got into mine.

  The station was on a busy corner a few blocks from the college campus. It had seven or eight pumps, offering a choice of regular, unleaded, or super-leaded. I can remember when what you got at a gas station was gas, and you didn’t have to choose a flavor.

  A call to this station last night had produced the information that the Vallejos boy was supposed to be at work at eight in the morning on Saturdays. So we waited till seven-fifty, and then we saw him come walking down the street. He was wearing a leather jacket and moving his shoulders with a kind of swagger, as if to say to the world, “I’m a big shot, don’t mess with me!” We’ve all seen the type plenty of times. Chicanos don’t have a monopoly.

  I got out of the car and stood in the boy’s way.

  “How are you, Luis?” I said.

  He stopped short, and for a split second all that cool left him and I could see panic in his eyes. But he lowered the temperature again when he finally spoke.

  “What’s it about, man? I wasn’t supposed to see you again!”

  “Get in the car, Luis,” I said. “I want you to meet Mrs. Swenson, she’s my boss. She’d like to have a chat with you.”

  “I got no time for social conversation. I’m going to work, man.”

  “You’ve got time for this conversation. We have a lot of information that’s going to interest you.”

  “I don’t want to hear any of it!”

  “How about the fact that we’ve traced the earring?” Ann said.

  He looked at her, and you could see the color leaving his face.

  I opened the car door. He slid into the front seat, and I sat next to him, behind the wheel. Ann was in the back seat, leaning forward.

  “We found the store where you bought it,” Ann said. “The salesman even remembers selling it to you.”

  This was pure invention on her part, but it almost fooled me. Outright lying is something Ann has a real talent for.

  “Come on, who you bullshitting?” the boy said. “They’re all the same, those earrings!”

  “Not this one. There’s a little nick in the glass. That’s why the salesman remembers it.”

  “If I believed that, I’d believe anything!”

  “You might also be interested to know, the DA’s office called me yesterday, the lab found a fingerprint on the paperweight Bellamy was killed with. Just a smudge, somebody tried to wipe it off, but they’ve got a new test that brought it out.”

  Another outright lie. The DA’s office hadn’t called her yesterday. There is, however, a certain spy we’ve got planted there, and she had called to report that the lab in Denver hadn’t been able to get an identifiable print off the murder weapon.

  “Oh, yeah?” The boy’s eyes were fixed intently on Ann’s face. She seemed to fascinate him and hor
rify him at the same time. “You trying to tell me they’re saying it’s my print?”

  “What they’re saying is, it isn’t Professor Russo’s print and it isn’t Professor Bellamy’s print. It’s an unidentified print, as far as the cops are concerned. But they could match it up with your finger real fast—if I happened to call you to their attention.”

  “You going to do that?”

  “Why not? If you never had your hands on that paperweight, the print won’t turn out to be yours, will it? You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Ann moved her face a little closer to his. “But it will turn out to be yours, won’t it, Luis? Because we know damn well you were in Bellamy’s house Wednesday night.”

  “You can’t—How do you know that?”

  “You told me so yourself,” I said. “When you were sounding off to me yesterday about what a racist Bellamy was. ‘That big fucking collection of books he’s got—hundreds of them, all the way up to the ceiling!’ How could you know about those books, how could you know there were hundreds of them, how could you know they went all the way up to the ceiling? He didn’t keep any of them in his office. He kept them all at his house. So when you told me you’d never been inside his house, you were lying.”

  Luis moved his eyes fast to the right and left, as if he expected to find an escape hatch somewhere. “Look—it’s different from what you think. I didn’t waste that professor. He was a bastard, but I wouldn’t kill anybody.”

  Ann and I didn’t say anything. There are times when the best way to get a witness to answer your questions is not to ask any.

  “All right, I was out there that night,” Luis said. “I didn’t go back to my old man’s place and talk to Flora—not till eight-thirty. She was covering up for me when she told you it was a quarter of. But when I got there, to Bellamy’s house, he was dead already.”

  “Why did you go out there?” Ann asked.

  He wet his lips, looked to the right and left again, then said, “You know how he was trying to flunk me in his course, that racist bastard. So I was mad at him, wouldn’t you be mad at him? But the crazy thing was, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, part of my mind like couldn’t believe he’d go through with it. Nobody could be such a scumbag, not when the crunch came, you know what I mean? So I thought, if I could talk to him, just one more time talk to him, and maybe apologize for yelling at him—maybe he’d see reason, and maybe he’d back off like.”

  “You still thought he might back off, even after the things he said to you?”

  “Okay, okay, it was crazy, that’s what I’m telling you. I never saw anybody like him before, can I help it if I couldn’t believe—” He broke off with a shake of his head. “You think I’m bullshitting you. Why not? It sounds like I’m bullshitting you.”

  “What time did you drive out to his house on Wednesday night?” Ann asked.

  “It must’ve been around quarter of eight that I left this restaurant where I was having dinner and started out to his place. Yeah, seven forty-five on the nose. Like I told you before, I looked at the clock in the restaurant and set my watch by it. So he’s on Blackhawk Road, that’s out in the sticks, it took me about twenty-five minutes. Ten minutes after eight I got there.”

  “Did you park your car in front of his house?”

  “I parked it around the corner. If he heard my car pulling up and looked out the window and saw me coming, I thought maybe he wouldn’t let me in.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I rang the doorbell four, five times, and nobody answered, so I figured he’s out for the night.”

  “Even though all the lights were on?”

  “Sure. A lot of people leave the lights on when they’re out. They think it keeps the burglars from ripping them off.”

  “Why didn’t you call up first, to find out if Bellamy was home?”

  “Same reason I parked the car around the corner. Like I thought, if I called ahead of time, he’d tell me he wouldn’t talk to me. So anyway, the bell wasn’t raising anybody, so I tried the door, and it turned out it wasn’t locked, so I went inside.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from putting in a question here. “It didn’t occur to you that you were trespassing?”

  He looked at me with genuine puzzlement. “The door wasn’t locked, was it?”

  I have to admit it, sometimes I just can’t connect with today’s world at all. More and more people seem to have been born without any sense of privacy. They seem to think everybody has a natural right to barge in uninvited on everybody else.

  “What did you do when you got inside?” Ann said.

  “I was in this big fucking hallway, it’s bigger than any of the bedrooms in my old man’s house. And there’s one of those rugs on the floor—you know, with the red and black circles on them, the kind of rugs people ride on in those Sinbad movies. And there’s a table with this big vase on it. A whole table, and all it’s doing there is holding up this one vase.

  “So then I went through this archway like, and I’m in this room with books on all the walls, all the way up to the ceiling, I never saw so many fucking books in my life outside of the college library. Like he could’ve opened up his own library in competition, right? And then I saw him—the professor—” Luis broke off, wetting his lips. He didn’t look particularly cocky at that moment.

  “He was lying on the floor?” Ann said.

  “On his stomach, man. And one of his legs was kind of twisted up under him. It was weird. I never saw a dead dude before.”

  “What else did you notice about him? Anything odd about his clothing? Any objects on the floor?”

  “Books, that’s all I saw on the floor. He had them there in piles, like there wasn’t room for all of them on the shelves. And the one he was holding in his hand.”

  “Which hand?”

  “His right, I think. He was holding onto it tight, like he wasn’t going to let any mother—anybody grab it away from him.”

  “Could you see what the book was?”

  “It had these red letters. And a picture.”

  “A picture of what?”

  “Who knows? Some dude. Big black dude. I’ll tell you the truth, I wasn’t looking at anything too close, you know. What I was concentrating on was trying to keep from puking on the floor. So anyway—I got down on my knees next to him—”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “It was crazy. I thought maybe he’s still breathing. So I got down by him to find out. But I could tell he wasn’t breathing. Then I saw this—I guess it’s a paperweight, heavy fucking thing looks like an open book—it was on the floor next to him. I picked it up. Don’t ask me why. Soon as I did it, I started thinking about the fucking fingerprints. So I wiped it off with my handkerchief and put the fucker down again. All of this—it didn’t take so long. Maybe two, three minutes. Then I heard a noise, it’s a car about a block away. So I decided to get the hell out of there.”

  “You didn’t think about calling the police to report the murder?”

  “I thought of it. I went up to the phone, but I didn’t pick up the receiver, I left it on the hook. I mean, I was crazy, man, but I wasn’t out of my mind. You know what the cops in this town are going to do, they find a Chicano boy inside a white man’s house, bending over his dead body? And this white man just flunked this Chicano boy in a class?”

  “Well, I see the point,” Ann said. “Go on.”

  “I jumped up and ran to the door. On the way I bumped into one of those bookcases, maybe that’s when my earring fell off. They’re always falling off.”

  “You didn’t get your ears pierced so they’d stay on?”

  “What do you think I am, a fucking faggot? So I got out the front door, I didn’t even close it behind me. And I drove like hell back to my house. And that’s the truth, no bullshit anymore, man.”

  Ann didn’t say anything more. She just looked at him.

  Finally the boy broke the silence. “So—you’re turning me over to the cops?”

>   “We’ll think about it,” Ann said. “Stay put. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “I didn’t kill the bastard—”

  I leaned across Luis and opened the door on his side of the car. He got the hint and stepped out to the sidewalk, stared at us for a second, then started walking fast toward the gas station.

  CHAPTER 21

  ANN WASN’T SURE WHAT to do about this new development. Should she turn Vallejos over to the DA, or should she save him for the trial as a surprise defense witness, a hostile one, so that Wolkowicz couldn’t tamper with his evidence ahead of time? She told me she wanted to sleep on it; meanwhile I shouldn’t tell anyone, not even our client, about what we had discovered.

  She didn’t know it, of course, but by “anyone” she wasn’t referring to my mother.

  So I got back to the house around ten that morning, and found Mom scrubbing the kitchen floor. I pointed out to her that the cleaning woman had been in yesterday and had done that job.

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” Mom said.

  As a matter of fact, though, she stopped scrubbing right away, because she wanted to hear about my talk with Luis Vallejos. When I told her what the boy had broken down and admitted, a big beaming smile spread over her face.

  “So you really threw into him a scare? He thinks you’re going to get him arrested?”

  “If he doesn’t think so, he wasn’t paying much attention.”

  “Good. Wonderful. Perfect. So you know what you should do now?”

  “That’s exactly what Ann is trying to decide.”

  “Not what she should do, what you should do. At two o’clock this afternoon, in the chapel at the college, they’re having a memorial service for the dead professor. I want you should go to it.”

  “What am I supposed to do there, Mom?”

  “You’re supposed to let people see you. Sit close to the front row. Say hello to everybody you know. After the service is over, hang around the chapel, talk to people. Remind them you’re alive in the world. Then you should come back to the house here and wait.”