Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

  “I don’t know, George. I never met the man.” I glanced at the folder in my hands. “Chard’s name hasn’t come up in the Lessing investigation, has it?”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t heard him mentioned. Just Carnova. He’s the whole ball of wax as far as I know. Why? Is Chard a witness or something?”

  “Could be, George,” I said, slipping the folder under my arm and heading for the door.

  Or something.

  18

  I WALKED back to the Riorley Building from the Court House through the sultry September twilight. Upstairs in my office, I flipped on the desk lamp and spread the contents of George’s folder on the desk in front of me.

  At first look I could have mistaken the rap sheet for Terry Carnova’s. It detailed the same history of petty crime, the same progression from B and E’s to possession to assault. But as I scanned the charges I noticed that Tommy T. also had several aggravated batteries on his record and a rape. Even though the felonies had been dropped, it made Chard look, on paper at least, a little nastier than his pal Terry, a little more openly prone to physical violence.

  The small amount of personal history on Chard’s rap sheet suggested a miserable childhood. There was no listing for a father. His mother had died at the age of twenty-three. Chard had spent several years in an orphanage, graduating to reformatories when he was twelve. His formal schooling stopped at the fifth grade. He had no record of employment. He admitted to drug and alcohol dependency, for which he’d been treated twice. The rap sheet didn’t indicate where he’d been treated. But it would have been interesting if it had been at the Lighthouse Clinic—on Ira Lessing’s money.

  Whether he was connected to Lessing or not, Chard was virtually the same kid as Terry Carnova, a couple of years older, a couple of inches taller, a little more hardened to the ways of his world. He even looked a little like Carnova in the mug shot. Curly blond hair, cupid’s mouth, a sordid kind of handsomeness. But where Terry had seemed a demonic altar boy, this one had no boy left in him at all. His wide eyes and pale irises gave him the nervously alert, deadly stare of a big cat on the prowl.

  Chard had last been arrested, for battery, three months before, in late May. The address he had given at the time was in Price Hill, on Grand Street. I wrote it down in my notebook. Then I pulled the directory out of the desk and looked up the two clubs Tommy T. was known to frequent. I didn’t think about why I was doing it. I just did it.

  The Underground was located on Fourth Street, between Plum and Central. The Ramrod was located on Walnut between Sixth and Seventh. I couldn’t find a listing on Walnut for anyone named Coates, but Kent Holliday had said that the Deco Apartments were right across the street from the Ramrod.

  I put the phone book back in the desk drawer, clicked off the lamp, and sat there awhile longer, watching the twilight fall through the office window. Then I went out.

  ******

  It took me about ten minutes to drive across town, over the Ninth Street viaduct, into lower Price Hill. One look at the street traffic—heavy on that hot Thursday night—and you knew it was an Appalachian ghetto. The people all had the same fierce, wan, burned-out faces—faces marked in equal measure by grinding poverty and an unquenchable redneck pride.

  Boys walked by with beer cans in their back pockets, cigarettes aslant in their mouths, suspenders flapping, unhitched, at the sides of their jeans. Teenage girls—their shorts tight across their bellies, their tube tops rolled at the breast—shouted obscenities at passing cars, then scattered amid wild laughter when the drivers slowed down to stare. Men in grimy work clothes trudged home from bus stops while their women sat on the sidewalks in folding lawn chairs, staring at TV’s propped on casements and front stoops.

  Above State, where the hill began, the pedestrian traffic thinned out. Little streets veered off right and left—all of them lined with decrepit two-story frame houses. Grand Avenue was at the top of the hill. The house I wanted, the one that Chard had given as his address, was midway down the block—a two-story frame structure with a dead elm tree in a bed of mulch by the door, like a spade in a freshly turned grave.

  I parked the Pinto and walked up to the porch.

  There was a lamp on in the front room. I could see it through a seam in the drawn curtains. It was just bright enough to light the mailbox by the door. There was a name tag taped to the box. I glanced at it before I knocked—C. Miller.

  A few moments went by and a man I took to be C. Miller answered. He was in his late twenties. Freckled face, red hair, knobby cheeks, with a sparse red mustache and a small tuft of hair growing in the cleft of his chin, like weeds poking through a sidewalk. He was wearing an undershirt and jeans. Through the doorway behind him I could see a chair with a newspaper draped over one of the arms.

  “Yes?” the man said. “What is it?”

  He had a hole in his mouth where his front two teeth should have been. It made his voice whistle like wind in a casement.

  “Are you Mr. Miller?”

  “Yes, I’m Cass Miller.”

  “Mr. Miller, I’m looking for Tommy Chard.”

  The man stepped back, as if I’d insulted him.

  “That son-of-a-bitch doesn’t live here anymore,” Miller said bitterly. “He hasn’t lived here since spring. I wish you cops would get that right.”

  “How do you know I’m a cop?”

  The man put his hands on his side and smirked. “Who else would come around at eight at night looking for Tommy Chard? Everybody knows we aren’t together anymore.”

  “You’re a friend of his?” I asked.

  “I used to be, until the bastard robbed me and gave me this.” He pointed to the hole in his teeth. “Once I filed charges, he ran like a jackrabbit.” Miller started to laugh. “To give the devil his due, Tommy did everything like a jackrabbit.”

  “You filed charges against him in May?”

  “I sure did, sugar. I don’t have to stand around and watch some asshole eat me out of house and home, spend my money, pawn my goods, and then beat me up when I tell him to stop. I’m not that far gone yet, I hope to tell you. I haven’t seen him since the day I called you guys.”

  “You don’t know where he moved to, do you? After he left here?”

  “Try the meat racks. That’s all the bastard’s good for anymore. Selling it to the beat freaks down on Plum and Fourth.”

  I winced a little, for poor Lessing. “Was Chard into rough trade?”

  “I wasn’t,” Miller said firmly. “But, yeah, Tommy was—professionally speaking. It’s how he made pocket money. Every week or two he’d go down to the Ramrod or Fourth and Plum and sell it to some poor john. I knew he was doing it, and I wanted him to stop. But just try and tell Tommy anything. Just try! You end up with a broken nose and a two-thousand-dollar dentist’s bill.” The man shook his head disgustedly. “I used to pity those freaks sometimes. They just didn’t know what they were in for, cruising Tommy T. When that boy was on the rag, he had the devil in him. I’m surprised no one ever got killed.”

  “Somebody did,” I said.

  The man paled. “Who are we talking about here?” he said nervously.

  “Ira Lessing.”

  “The Covington councilman?”

  I nodded.

  Miller put a hand to his mouth and pinched his lower lip until it turned a bloodless white. “You’re telling me Tommy had something to do with that?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I thought Terry Carnova had confessed to the murder.”

  “There’s some evidence that Tommy was with Carnova on the night of the killing. They were close friends, weren’t they?”

  “They knew each other.”

  The man was choosing his words more carefully now—now that he knew the stakes.

  “Did Chard ever mention Lessing to you?”

  He shook his head, no. “He didn’t tell me about his johns. I never liked to hear that sort of trash, and he knew it. That was for his other friends. His g
utter friends.”

  “Like Carnova?”

  Miller nodded grudgingly. “Yes.”

  “Has anyone else ever mentioned Lessing to you?”

  “Honey,” the man said with a long-suffering look, “there isn’t a man or boy who doesn’t get mentioned by someone, sometime. We’re just like everybody else, we like to claim them as our own.”

  “What did you hear about Lessing?”

  “I never heard he was a beat freak,” Miller said, “if that’s what you mean. Someone told me he saw Lessing with Terry Carnova once. Of course that was after Terry got arrested for his murder.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Someone at the Underground. I don’t remember who.”

  “Could I find Tommy at the Underground?”

  The man shrugged. “He might be there. Or at the Ramrod. Or out on the streets. I really don’t know.” He sighed. “Tommy was never one to stay put for very long.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a help.”

  “To who?” Miller said as he closed the door.

  19

  IT WAS almost nine when I got back downtown. I parked the car in a garage on Fifth and walked over to Fourth—to the Underground nightclub. It didn’t look like much on the outside—just a tinted-glass door in a brick wall with a lighted sign above it. As I stood there a young blond kid came out of the shadows on Plum Street. He was about seventeen, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He gave me a long look, then drifted back into the shadows around the corner.

  If it had been a woman hooker, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But this was a boy, selling himself openly on a downtown street corner—the same corner that Tom Chard worked. They gotta live, too, Harry, I told myself. But that didn’t make it any more palatable. I stared at the door to the club, and caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the tinted-glass—a big, sandy-haired man with a pained look on his face.

  “Fuck it,” I said out loud, and went into the club.

  ******

  At first glance the Underground looked a lot like any other downtown night spot, except that the only women there were with each other. The room was dominated by an elevated polished-wood dance floor with black, leather-trimmed booths snaking around it and a long parquet bar off to the right. Neon sculptures decorated the black flock walls; a mirrored ball lit by lasers flashed overhead.

  The dance floor was crowded with men gyrating to loud rock ‘n’ roll. A few of them were dressed like homosexual clichés, in leather vests and leather pants, with motorcycle-chain belts and Harley caps. But there was a lot more Ralph Lauren strutting its stuff than Sonny Barger. A lot of Brooks Brothers too. In fact, the dance floor looked like an undulating menswear department.

  Since all the booths were filled with happy couples hooting at the dancers and snapping their fingers to the blare of the music, I moseyed over to the bar. The bartender, a thirtyish guy with a pleasant apple-cheeked face, was filling two pitchers of beer from a tap. He grinned at me as I walked up.

  “First time at the Underground?” he said over the roar, as if he’d pegged me for a nellie just coming out of the closet.

  Some guys are like that. They’re not happy unless you come down with it too. But then it was his turf, and I guess he was entitled to his aspersions.

  I said, “Yep, it’s my first time.”

  The bartender smiled at what he assumed were my virgin’s nerves. “We’re not going to bite you, buddy. The management doesn’t allow it.”

  “Well, that’s just swell.”

  The pitchers started to overflow, and the bartender whisked them away from the spouts, nudging the taps shut with his shoulder. “Let me drop these off, and I’ll get back to you.”

  He walked down to the far end of the bar, balancing the two beer pitchers in his outstretched arms like a man carrying hot rivets in a spoon.

  I stood there wishing there was an easy way to find out what I wanted to know. I had to be careful about what I wished for because the guy beside me started brushing against my shoulder like a cat looking to get petted. Once could have been an accident. The second time I wheeled around and pushed him away.

  “Back off,” I snapped.

  He was a little guy in a tailored suit. Tortoise-shell glasses. Crew-cut. A branch manager, maybe.

  “Sorry,” he said, blanching, and moved up the bar.

  “For a fella ‘looking for someone,’ you’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

  I turned back to the bar.

  The apple-cheeked bartender was standing there again, grinning his knowing grin.

  I’d had it with the smirk. I leaned across the bar and crooked a finger at him. He dipped toward me like a debutante. Up close his breath smelled like Certs and bottled beer.

  “I didn’t come here to make new friends.”

  “Well, what exactly did you come here for, butch?”

  “I told you I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Does this lucky devil have a name?”

  “Tom Chard. Tommy T. to his pals.”

  The smile on the bartender’s face went round and round, like a spinning bow tie. When it came to a stop, it had turned into a frown. “Are you Vice?”

  He was the second guy in a row who had thought “cop” as soon as he heard Chard’s name. “Why? Is Tommy T. that bad a boy?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “A friend of mine knew Chard, and I want to talk to him.”

  “Then why don’t you ask your friend where he is?”

  “My friend is dead.”

  The bartender straightened up, backing away a step and holding his hands out in front of him, palms up, as if he were bringing the conversation to a halt. “Can’t help you there, buddy.”

  “My friend’s name was Ira Lessing.” I spoke loudly enough so that the people along the bar could hear me.

  The bartender folded his arms at his chest and stared at me blankly. If he recognized Ira’s name, it didn’t show in his eyes. No one else spoke up, either.

  “I told you—I can’t help you. Now, are you gonna order something or what?”

  “Draft beer,” I said.

  He drew a glass of beer from the tap and smacked it down in front of me. The knowing smile had disappeared and with it the condescending chumminess in his voice. “Find some other house to haunt. Okay? The rest of us are trying to have a good time.”

  He threw a bar towel over his shoulder and swaggered off.

  Even though the room was noisy, a definite silence settled over my spot at the bar. I sighted an empty table and took myself and the glass of beer over to it.

  I’d been sitting there a few minutes, watching the beer go flat and trying to brace myself for a trip to the Ramrod, when a guy in a wheelchair rolled up to the table. He was wearing a pea-green fatigue jacket with an Airborne emblem on the right sleeve. Without the braces on his legs he would have been a dead ringer for David Bowie, right down to the funny off-color teeth and the nasty lesbian good looks. He seemed angry, but then being a homosexual vet in a wheelchair would have ruined my day too.

  “I heard you at the bar,” he said truculently.

  I gave him an amused look. “Did somebody appoint you spokesman?”

  “Don’t get smart, Ethel,” he said, pointing a bony finger at me.

  “The name’s Harry.”

  “Mine’s Vin,” he said, wheeling a little closer to the table. “Not that it means a shit.”

  “What can I do for you, Vin?”

  He eyed my glass of beer. “You were looking for conversation, and I could use a drink.”

  I started to laugh. I guess I hadn’t figured on deadbeats cadging freebies in a queer bar. For some reason it made the place seem more human.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” Vin said in his angry voice.

  “Nothing.” I swallowed the last of my laughter and pushed the beer glass over to him. “It’s been sitting there awhile, but if you want it, take it.”
/>   He picked up the glass and drank the beer down in one slug.

  “Thanks,” he said, just as truculently as he’d said everything else. He dropped the glass back on the table.

  I pointed at the emblem on his coat sleeve. “You were Airborne?”

  He nodded. “I ain’t proud of it. I got caught in the draft and couldn’t get 4-effed. Imagine that?”

  “Why do you wear the jacket, then?”

  Vin shrugged. “I just don’t want to look like everyone else in this shithole.” He gazed around the room and curled his lip. “Bunch of yuppie faggots.”

  “If you don’t like the company, why come here?”

  “‘Cause I’m a faggot too,” he said, turning back to me. “If they didn’t have so many goddamn stairs to get down, I’d cruise the Ramrod. It’s a helluva lot more fun over there.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s more real, that’s all. None of this genteel shit.”

  Vin gave me a knowing look that was a long way from the bartender’s chummy smirk. I didn’t know what to make of it until he told me.

  “If you’re into rough trade, that’s the place to be.”

  “What makes you think I’m into rough trade?”

  “You were asking about Tommy T., weren’t you?” he said cagily.

  “You know him?”

  The guy balked. “I could use another drink.”

  I took a twenty out of my wallet and laid it on the tabletop. “Buy yourself a couple.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” He slapped at the table like a snake striking at the glass of its cage. The twenty-dollar bill disappeared in his palm.

  “Sure I know Tommy,” Vin said, pocketing the money. “I use him myself once in a while.”

  He smiled as unattractively as I’ve ever seen a man smile.

  “Where could I find him?” I asked.

  “Like I said, Ramrod’s your best bet. This place . . . it’s good for a laugh once in a while. But it’s just a Girl Scout troop. Everybody playing patty-cake and showing off their fucking new clothes. Ramrod’s a hustler’s bar. That’s where you get your hot action. And Tommy T . . . .well, he’s as hot as they get. At least around this town.”