Without Prejudice

by Unknown

  ‘Listen, it’s not that bad. It was just an argument.’

  She didn’t answer. He was starting to feel frantic; he could do nothing until he had deposited her safely with Mrs Peterson.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’re old enough to understand. Parents fight sometimes – it doesn’t mean war has been declared. It was just an argument,’ he repeated.

  He could tell she wanted to believe him, for she laughed nervously, forcing it. ‘Who won?’ she asked, then looked at him sagely and said, ‘Mom did.’

  Her laugh was sincere this time, and he tried his best to join in, then used the opportunity to get her out of the car and up to Mrs Peterson’s flat.

  A smell of stale cooking and unseasonal central heating greeted him as Mrs Peterson opened the door to their second-floor flat. She looked like a Swedish grandmother, blonde hair now turned white, cheekbones sharp as chicken wings. Sensing his urgency at once, she took Sophie by the hand. Robert saw her husband in the background, sitting in an armchair holding his stick, watching a television Robert couldn’t see.

  ‘Thanks so much, Mrs P,’ he said. He realised he sounded breathless. He bent down and spontaneously kissed his daughter. ‘See you later,’ he said.

  As he started down the steps Mrs Peterson called out, ‘When are you picking her up?’

  When I find my wife, he wanted to say. ‘I’ll call you later this morning,’ he shouted up the stairs, and kept going.

  He was still transfixed by the shirt as he drove south through light traffic on Lake Shore Drive. A breeze came in off the water, tempering the heat of late July, and already the parks were filling up with ball games and picnicking families. He could smell the charcoal fumes from the barbecues.

  What a secret for Vanetta to keep, and he cursed her now for hiding the crucial damning evidence. If the shirt had been turned over all those years ago, there would have been none of this garbage about a wrongful conviction, no crusade by Anna and this Donna Kaliski woman to overturn Duval’s conviction. Goddamn them, he thought, wanting to blame someone, and goddamn Vanetta. Yes, especially Vanetta. She should have told the police. There would have been no comeback after that, none of the I didn’t do it bullshit they had all fallen for.

  She had simply loved Duval too much – Robert could see that now, as he drove past the Point, a jutting crop of rocks by the lake where people from Hyde Park liked to swim. She’d loved him far more than Duval’s mother ever did. She couldn’t bring herself to turn the shirt in.

  But then why keep it? And in such a strange place – the basement storage of her employers’ apartment block, where it had sat for over twenty years, then been moved entirely by accident to California. She could not possibly have foreseen the circuitous trail which brought it to light, or been confident that it would ever again be recognised.

  Then she should have burned it, he thought, still angry with her. But that must have seemed equally impossible to her: the guilt she would have felt must have been massive, enough to keep her from that further irrevocable step. She had been as moral as she was maternal; in this instance, the two qualities had been at war. Part of her must have thought (maybe even hoped, however unconsciously) that one day the truth would come out. What pain her discovery must have caused her.

  What pain it was causing now, all these years later. Goddamn her, he thought again. Stupid, old, ignorant . . . what? Lady? Woman? Mother? Retainer? Servant?

  He understood now why she had lied to him that morning outside the Cloisters, when she told him Gehringer had changed his mind. All you can do is get on with your own life, she’d said, knowing all the while that Duval had done the crime.

  It was incredible to him that while her grandson faced a prison term as long as a piece of string, she had been trying to protect Robert as well. Realising this made him unable to stay angry with her now. However unusual, however much the object of other people’s condescension or scorn, their love for each other had been equal after all.

  5

  Jermaine had grown fat in his forties. Once he had been a lean, narrow-faced boy, with a sweet disposition and a natural singing voice he only reluctantly allowed to be pressed into service by Vanetta’s church choir. According to Duval back then, he missed more rehearsals than he attended, since the buffet spreads he loved were only on offer at actual performances. Fat or thin, he had always loved to eat.

  Robert found him standing warily, filling the doorway of his bungalow He nodded as Robert came up the front stairs, in acknowledgement rather than welcome. His hair was trimmed like a curly hedge kept in check.

  Yes, he said, he remembered Robert, and no, he didn’t sing any more. He told Robert that he was working the weekend shift at R.R. Donnelley’s, so if Robert could just tell him what it was he wanted, he’d appreciate it, since otherwise he’d be late for work.

  ‘I’m trying to find Duval.’

  ‘The parole officer is looking for him, too. But I don’t know where he’s at.’ He was speaking as if Robert were yet another kind of external authority – not a cop, perhaps, but a case worker.

  ‘I called you and left a message with Lemar. I don’t know if you got it.’

  ‘Lemar never mentioned it.’ He softened slightly. ‘Sorry about that. The boy is kinda upset on account of his car been stolen.’ He gave Robert a sideways look and pursed his lips.

  ‘Did Duval take it?’

  Reluctantly, Jermaine nodded. ‘I ain’t told Lemar that, because he’d call the police. I figure Duval’s in enough trouble without them looking for him, too.’

  ‘Could he be staying with other relatives?’ God knows, there were enough of them.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Jermaine. ‘He was only staying here because nobody else would have him.’

  ‘It was good of you to do that,’ Robert said, despite knowing Jermaine had been about to turf Duval out.

  ‘I couldn’t turn my back on him. He’s family.’

  ‘Could I see Duval’s room?’

  ‘Why?’ For the first time Jermaine sounded defensive.

  ‘I just thought there might be something to indicate where he’s gone.’

  Jermaine looked at him suspiciously. It was impossible to tell which way the decision would go. Then he turned abruptly with a beckoning hand. ‘Come on. It’s down here.’

  They went along a hallway to the kitchen, where plates stood neatly like old-fashioned LPs in a plastic rack next to the sink. The hallway continued on the far side, terminating abruptly in a bathroom. Just short of it, there was an open door on one side, and Jermaine stood there, waiting impatiently for Robert.

  Jermaine hit the switch and an overhead bulb threw out a bleak, oppressive light on a windowless room. It was tiny, sparsely furnished, with a single bed and a low painted chest of drawers. The walls were drab green, and devoid of pictures.

  Jermaine looked uncomfortable. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but it was his choice.’

  Robert said nothing. Jermaine went on. ‘We got us two spare rooms down the hall. He could have had either one. But no, this is the one he chose. I’m not telling you no lie.’

  Robert sensed the awful truth: Duval had picked the room because it was the closest he could come to what he was used to.

  ‘Do you mind if I look around in here?’ he asked.

  Jermaine shook his head. ‘Be my guest, though there ain’t much to see. I’m just going to change for work.’ And he retreated down the hallway, leaving Robert alone.

  He started with the chest of drawers, finding underwear and socks in the top drawer, three or four folded shirts and a pair of work jeans in the bottom drawer. Nothing personal like a ring or some photos, and nothing hidden, like spare cash. In the corner of the room he opened the door of a shallow closet, where a suit jacket hung from a flimsy rail, next to two pairs of trousers and a thin black tie wrapped around the neck of another coat hanger. On the floor, neatly lined up, were two pairs of shoes – cheap slip-ons, one pair black, one yellowish mock-alligator. Rober
t rummaged through the hanging clothes, but found nothing except a receipt for two packs of Winstons. Duval had never smoked in front of him.

  By the bed sat a makeshift table, an oval disk of plywood propped on a small saw horse. It held a lamp with a naked bulb, and a paperback bible, with the corners of many pages turned down. He opened the book to one of them, and found a passage underlined in the Book of Matthew:

  Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.

  He got down on all fours and looked under the bed, fishing out two magazines. He blew dust off the cover of one and opened its pages, only to find himself staring at a garish colour photo of a naked woman with reddish hair fellating an enormous penis.

  He rifled through the magazine, finding a monoton-ous succession of other pornographic scenes – women licking ejaculate with artificial smiles, or feigning orgasmic pleasure as they were penetrated. It was tawdry stuff: the models were heavily made up and past their prime, the colour of the photos garish. Overall, the effect was of an earlier era – like the furtive skin mags of the 1950s. Which seemed peculiar in the twenty-first century, when mainstream movies showed acts of sexual congress as though they were another form of breakfast. But he supposed pornography must have been a staple of prison life; after so many years inside, Duval was probably addicted to the stuff. Perhaps, too, after an adult life spent in prison, he didn’t even want a live woman, such was the power of the fantasy sexual life he’d been forced to build during all the years when he didn’t have a real one.

  The second magazine was different. He saw right away that it went far beyond standard pornographic terrain into something darker – and violent. The women here were victims rather than colluders, handcuffed to the uprights of beds, tied up with cord, held down by two, even three men. On one page a teenage-looking blonde girl on all fours screamed in pain as a policeman’s nightstick was stuck in her anus; another page showed a pudgy woman, opening her mouth to fellate a shaven-headed man while he held a Bowie knife to her throat.

  This was about pain, not pleasure, or rather about the pleasure pain gave the perverted. Robert was repelled by the relentless sadism.

  He kicked the magazines back under the bed but took the bible, stuffing it into his jacket pocket. Out in the kitchen Jermaine was sitting at a table in the corner, eating cereal and reading the Sun Times.

  ‘Find anything?’ he asked without looking up.

  ‘Nothing that tells me where he might have gone.’ He wasn’t going to ask Jermaine’s permission to take the bible.

  ‘If you find him, tell him I can’t have him back. Not after he took Lemar’s car.’

  ‘I wonder if he’s gone to Mississippi.’

  Jermaine looked startled. ‘Why there?’

  Robert shrugged. ‘I don’t know – Vanetta always talked about it. Duval told me he’d never been; he sounded like he wished he had.’

  ‘Ain’t no family there no more.’ He tipped his bowl and spooned some milk into his mouth. Between swallows he said, ‘Can’t see it myself.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ He stood awkwardly in the doorway. ‘If you hear from him could you let me know?’ There was a message pad by the wall phone, and he wrote down all his numbers – Evanston, cell phone, work, and the dunes. ‘One of these numbers will find me.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jermaine, his eyes on the Sun Times.

  He felt an urge to get Jermaine to look at him. He asked, ‘When did Duval take Lemar’s car?’

  Jermaine stopped reading and looked annoyed. ‘Wednesday. He’d been gone by then, but he must have come back during the day and taken the keys.’

  ‘It’s an Impala, right? Maroon colour.’

  ‘That’s my car. Lemar’s got hisself a golden oldie. A Bonneville.’

  ‘A Bonneville?’ His voice had risen sharply.

  ‘That’s right.’ Jermaine stared at him like he was crazy. ‘What’s it to you?’

  But Robert was already moving towards the front door.

  Robert’s greatest fear was coming true. Duval must be with Anna. Duval had been out to the dunes – Poindexter had seen the car. In his mind’s eye an image of Anna flared up. On Anna’s face pain erupted like sizzling grease, and a knife neared her throat. Please don’t hurt her.

  Outside he ran to his car, then realised he didn’t have any idea where to go next. As he jumped in the driver’s seat, he tried to harness his racing thoughts. Down the block a car honked, and a girl ran down the front steps of a bungalow, dressed to go out. He hated living now in a parallel universe of trouble – a sealed capsule holding Duval, Anna and himself, separated from the normal lives of the people in this city. He tried to hang on to a sliver of hope that Anna was not with Duval, and that his first instinctive fear was right and she’d gone off with someone. But he knew it wasn’t true.

  He looked at the bible on the seat next to him, then picked it up and started checking the pages that had their corners turned down.

  Genesis with lines underscored in pencil: The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

  No help at all, and he moved to the next one, ripping a page in his haste. He found Isaiah, similarly marked: You will be like an oak with fading leaves, like a garden without water.

  A waste of time. Other passages were underlined throughout the book, and Robert forced himself to go through them methodically, turning the pages as fast as his fingers allowed. But the passages all seemed meaningless, and Robert felt increasingly panicked by the clock ticking in his head.

  Then he reached the Song of Solomon, where Duval had put a large X in the margin. Robert scanned the lines impatiently, then suddenly stopped:

  You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.

  The garden again. He almost didn’t believe it – it was so obvious.

  He turned the key so hard the transmission made a harsh grinding sound and almost stalled. ‘Calm down,’ he shouted aloud at himself, and this time the engine caught. He pulled out so sharply he almost hit a car parked on the other side of the street.

  Stony Island was a wide boulevard, divided by a litter-filled middle strip. At 71st Street there were railroad tracks, disused he hoped, and the light went his way in any case. He remembered the cross street as lined by stores, and the location of his paediatrician until he was ten or so – Vanetta had taken him here for shots and check-ups. In the waiting room all the other kids always seemed to have their parents with them. He hadn’t cared then – Vanetta was as good as a parent as far as he was concerned.

  He let these stray memories flood in – anything to distract him from his near-panic. He was certain he was right about where Duval had gone, but he dreaded what he would find. You are a garden locked up . . . my bride.

  At 67th the McDonald’s where Vanetta had often taken him until his father intervened to limit their forays into the black South Side, was gone. Across the street the park began that stretched down to the Museum of Science and Industry, its golf course touching this corner with the fourth green, where he and Mike, sole white kids on the course, used to get nervous of the junkies gathered across the street in front of one of the neighbourhood’s crummy hotels.

  He tried to distract himself but images of Anna – writhing, crying out in pain – kept streaking through his head. He glanced leftwards as he crossed 63rd Street, once a byword for the ghetto at its worst, and thunderously noisy from the ‘L’, the city’s elevated train system, long torn down. At 60th he had to stop for a red light, perched on what had been the symbolic frontier between Hyde Park and the black ghetto. He was about to run the light when he saw a patrol car down the block.

  When the light changed the car ahead was slow to turn left, and he honked his horn, then accelerated down to the southeast edge of the Midway, turning in front of an advancing bus, being honked at himself for his careless driving.

  He was back in Hyde Park, but he felt a surreal est
rangement as he sped north along Blackstone Avenue – the English Channel, lined by houses that showed the maddening variety of American architecture a century before. Another image raced before his mind’s eye, of Anna naked, bleeding from the throat.

  At 57th he failed to break, distracted by how close he was to his intended destination, and was almost hit by a UPS van that swerved, braked, then continued with another telling-off blast of the horn. He parked by a hydrant without second thoughts, forty feet north from the old Christian Science church; he was far beyond precaution now. The blocks of pavement squares as he ran back down the street seemed tilted against him, and he wondered if it was the swelling summer heat or his imagination.

  The Church was set back from the street, fronted by grey pillars the height of the adjacent four-storey building where Robert had lived as a boy. It had a centred dome on its roof which was invisible from the front. The dark wooden front doors were disproportionately small, held shut by a locked chain wrapped through their handles. He pulled hard on them, but the chain held firm. When Robert peeked inside through the space between them he could only make out the last row of pews.

  Running to the side of the building, he started down the thin alleyway that filled the five-foot gap between the church and its neighbour, first of a row of brick houses stretching north along Blackstone Avenue. Halfway back, a high gate blocked the way, topped by barbed wire that made climbing over it impossible. He pushed against the gate in frustration, and to his surprise it gave way, its padlock falling off as the gate swung open.

  He slowed down now, walking cautiously along the side of the church, conscious of the click-click-click sound of his heels on the concrete walk. The light was indirect, but as he reached the back of the building he saw the sun falling onto the ground ahead of him, and turning south had to shield his eyes against the fierce, blinding rays.

  He was standing in a small walled yard where he had never been before. But he knew it well. The tree, now cut down, had been just across the far wall, in his own back yard. He remembered climbing it repeatedly to fetch their whiffle ball, then looking down at the little patch of overgrown grass and concrete where he now stood. He was in the Secret Garden.