Mom Among the Liars

by James Yaffe

  She turned to Mrs. Kim and translated my question. The old lady answered it in a spate of words, showing more excitement than she had till now. “She says Edna told her plenty of times to stop working, she offered to give her enough money. But my great-aunt wouldn’t take it. She said she had an honest job, and she wasn’t going to give it up so she could live off—” Madeleine Kim gave a shake of her head. “I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?”

  “If that’s how Mrs. Kim felt about her daughter’s work,” I said, “how come she accepted a house from her?”

  The question was repeated, and Mrs. Kim looked suddenly stonefaced. Her words were hard and distinct. “She needed a house to live in,” said Madeleine Kim. “She couldn’t live in Edna’s house, under the same roof with— She couldn’t live in the streets, she had to accept the house, she had no choice. But she knew it was wrong, she’s never been happy about it. And it wasn’t a gift. It was a loan. She was paying Edna back, as much as she could afford. Ten dollars a month.”

  “In other words,” I said, “everything wasn’t perfect between her and Edna? There was a lot of tension? Did they ever have any arguments, any fights?”

  The old lady’s answer came, and was duly translated. “Between daughters and mothers the road is never smooth.” A sardonic laugh broke out of the niece. “Old Oriental proverb. Charlie Chan.”

  “If the road was so rough,” I said, “why did her daughter let her have a key to her house?”

  This time the answer sounded very calm, almost matter-of-fact. “Korean children don’t lock their doors to their parents. The child’s house must always be open. She wants to know isn’t this true for white people too? Otherwise what kind of people can you be?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Mrs. Kim, is there anybody you can think of who might’ve wanted to kill your daughter? Anybody who hated her or stood to gain from her death?”

  As soon as this was translated, the old lady didn’t even pause to think about it. Her answer came in only a few words.

  “She says, Edna’s life was to give people love, not hate.”

  I saw no trace of irony on the old lady’s face. I saw no expression there at all, in fact. “What about Edna’s ex-husband—Pulaski? Was he bitter when the marriage broke up? Is he still living in town?”

  This time the old lady took much longer to answer. “She says Edna’s husband was a hardworking honest man, and he wanted Edna to give up the life she was leading. That’s why the marriage broke up, because she wouldn’t listen to him. He wasn’t bitter about it. Just sad.”

  I was about to thank her and go away, but then I remembered the second question Mom had told me to ask; I could almost hear Mom’s voice inside my head, insisting.

  “Could you tell me something about your daughter’s health?” I said. “Was she being treated for any kind of disease or condition, anything like that?”

  The old lady gave a frown at this, then she spread her hand over her chest, above her heart. After a while Madeleine Kim said, “She says her daughter had a heart condition, it was diagnosed several years ago. She’s got pills that she takes regularly, and now it seems to be under control.”

  All right, so now I knew. But what the hell did this information mean?

  I decided I’d just about worn out my welcome. “Okay, Mrs. Kim, thank you for—”

  But the old lady wasn’t through with me. Suddenly she leaned forward, and her hands, bony and creased with wrinkles, shot forward and clutched at my arm. The grip was as feeble as you might imagine, but still I found I couldn’t bring myself to pull away from it. As if I was afraid one of those fingers might break off if I did.

  She started talking. The voice rose, got loud, but not excited. She talked for a few seconds, very deliberately and intently, and then, just as suddenly, she let go of my arm and fell back in her chair. The effort seemed to have taken something out of her. She shut her eyes.

  “What she says—” Madeleine Kim frowned and creased her forehead. “‘Between me and Edna there wasn’t always love and peace. Even so, I hate the man that killed her. He has robbed me of the only joy I could still look forward to in life. For that I’ll never forgive him.’”

  I nodded and held my hand out to Mrs. Kim. She didn’t open her eyes.

  * * *

  Madeleine Kim saw me through the crowd and out the front door. I thanked her for her help and held my hand out to her, and after a moment she shook it. And then her lips curled in a sarcastic grin. “I’ll even do you a favor,” she said. “Talk to Mr. Chang.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Raymond Chang. He runs the pharmacy on South Arizona, two houses down from Edna’s place. Actually he’s not Korean, he’s Chinese. And he’s very old.”

  “And why should I talk to him?”

  “Because the police did, everybody here knows about it.”

  I thanked her for the suggestion. Then she went back into the house, and I walked to the pharmacy whose “open all nite” sign I had noticed earlier.

  The man behind the counter was wearing a white coat and a thin white goatee. He was old all right; his face might have been a piece of parchment dug up by archeologists from some ancient tomb. But he held his shoulders straight, and his voice, though soft, didn’t have a quaver in it.

  I had no idea what I was trying to find out from him, but I phrased my questions so that he might think I knew.

  After telling him who I was, I said, “I understand you talked to the police this morning, Mr. Chang?”

  “That is correct. I have told my story several times already. First to the police officer in plainclothes. Then to the assistant district attorney. Mr. Grantley, I believe.”

  “I know the general outlines of your story, of course,” I said. “The police have to keep my office informed of anything they dig up. What you can do is fill me in on the details.”

  Mr. Chang was brief but complete; in a court of law he’d be the perfect witness. What it boiled down to was, last night Mr. Chang was alone in his pharmacy. A common state of affairs for him, because he kept the place open all night, as advertised, but after dark he was always the only one there; his assistant pharmacist came at ten in the morning, and then Mr. Chang slept till six in the evening. So, at five minutes after midnight—Mr. Chang was very precise about the time, he had carefully checked the clock on the pharmacy wall—he happened to look through the window out to the street.

  He saw a man come walking by. Shuffling indecisively would be more accurate. The man paused at the corner, under the street lamp, struggling to light a cigarette in the rain, and Mr. Chang got a clear look at him. He was a small stocky figure in jeans and a leather jacket, with a shock of thick red hair, and Mr. Chang, though he hadn’t seen this man in several years, recognized him immediately. It was Ron Pulaski, Edna’s exhusband.

  “Which direction was he walking in, Mr. Chang?”

  “One moment, let me think. Yes. He was moving from left to right. Moving north.”

  In other words, away from Edna Pulaski’s house. And five minutes after midnight was half an hour or so after Harry Stubbins went out like a light in Edna’s bedroom.

  Then something occurred to me. “Mr. Chang, you told this story to the assistant district attorney this morning?”

  “Yes. We spoke right here in this shop.”

  “Around what time was that?”

  “At eight-thirty perhaps.”

  “Is that a fact? Just one more question, Mr. Chang. Did you know Edna Pulaski?”

  “Oh yes. She was a customer of mine. I made up her heart medicine for her.” He mentioned a brand name. “It’s a common enough remedy, one of the so-called beta blockers. It stabilizes the heartbeat, reduces the risk of angina attacks.”

  “Angina was what Mrs. Pulaski suffered from?”

  “So her doctor seemed to think.”

  “What did you think of her, Mr. Chang? What kind of person was she?”

  His expression remained amiable and bland
, as he thought this over for a moment. “Her intentions were good,” he finally answered. “She was like all of us whose intentions are good.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She did terrible things.”

  * * *

  As I trudged back to the meter, a couple of blocks away, where my car was parked, my anger started boiling up in me.

  All the time Ann and I were talking to Grantley this morning, the little rat was sitting on the testimony of a witness who could’ve been a big help in our case. And since Marvin McBride had put himself in charge of the case, who could doubt that Grantley was keeping his mouth shut on McBride’s orders?

  Then it occurred to me that Chief of Detectives Pat Delaney must have known all about this witness too, even while he was being so “honest” and “open” with me. But how could I really get mad at him for it? I would’ve played it the same way myself, in the old days.

  Back in my car, I headed for the nearest corner phone booth and looked up Pulaski in the book. (In Mesa Grande, you can still find phone books in the outdoor phone booths. They haven’t all been ripped off by the public yet, though who knows, in a few years we may catch up.) There was Edna and only one other; he called himself Ron, not Ronald. Typical for this section of the world, where perfect strangers address you by your first name the first time they meet you and give you a nickname the second time.

  I didn’t call the number; the address was ten minutes away, so I drove there, taking a chance he’d be in. Sometimes you waste your time doing that, but the advantage of catching people off guard is worth it.

  The state freeway cuts through the middle of Mesa Grande, separating the east side of town, which is growing rapidly, from the west side of town, which has stopped dead on account of the mountains. Pulaski lived in a west side neighborhood that huddles in the shadow of the freeway.

  This neighborhood is known as Horoscope Way and consists of half a dozen streets named after the signs of the zodiac. The houses here, put up around the time of World War I by some builder whose wife believed in astrology, are all two stories high, with identical square porches jutting out in front and identical flat slate roofs topping them off. They probably had a nice cozy feeling to them once, when they were surrounded by acres of trees and other greenery, but that was a long time ago. The cozy little houses had turned into shabby dilapidated shanties, a good deal of slate had slid off the roofs, ancient paint was flaking from the porches, and the trees and assorted greenery were long gone. Horoscope Way was now surrounded by auto repair garages and used car lots, and the dominant color had changed from green to sludge gray.

  Ron Pulaski’s house, at 10 Capricorn Street, was identical in squalidness to all the houses around it. I found Pulaski in a tiny living room, with furniture and a carpet that Goodwill had no doubt been glad to get rid of. He was short and heavyset, had thick red hair and bushy red eyebrows. He hadn’t shaved or combed his hair yet, and he was still in his underwear shirt. He was mad as hell at my dropping in without warning, but I gave him my spiel about the legal authority of the public defender’s office, and what could he do about it?

  With him was a girl, maybe in her late twenties, maybe older, shortish and squat, with long hair that was blonde but not quite to the roots. She was wearing a loose housedress that didn’t do much to modify the outlines of her breasts. She introduced herself as Brigitte Martine. “That’s not my given name,” she said. “That’s my stage name. My given name wasn’t appropriate, careerwise.”

  “You’re an actress?” I asked. “Are you in a show?”

  “Actually I’m waitressing right now. I’m between engagements. I feel it’s very important for me not to accept just any role, I have to really believe in it—”

  “Nobody’s interested,” Pulaski said. “He’s here to talk business, so why don’t you get the hell out?”

  “What am I going to do, Ronnie? I don’t go on till four.”

  “Go to a movie. Get some fresh air. How many years is it since you breathed any fresh air?”

  She whined and flounced a little more, but she got out.

  As soon as I was alone with him, Pulaski offered me a beer. I said I wasn’t thirsty, and he shrugged, padded out to the kitchen in his torn bedroom slippers, and padded back with the can in his hand. He took big slurps from it every few minutes, as the interview went on.

  He admitted that he’d been walking on his ex-wife’s street a little after midnight last night. “That’s when I got there,” he said, “well, a couple minutes before midnight. But I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t of. I got the perfect alibi.”

  “What’s that?”

  “From nine o’clock till ten minutes of twelve, I was at my weekly bowling. Out at the Sagebrush Alleys, on east Montana. I was with my team, we’re the Pulverizin’ Plumbers, there’s five of us. We were bowling a match against the Slammin’ Steamfitters. We did pretty good, beat them five frames to three. From what I hear, the guy who killed Edna got to her place at eleven-thirty—which was just about the time I was making two spares in a row to clinch the last frame.”

  “You didn’t sneak out of your bowling alley for a few minutes maybe?”

  “You think I did, talk to the people that was there. There was ten of them between the two teams, more if you include the wives and floozies. I didn’t bring mine along though, she’s working her shift till eleven. Besides, she gets on my nerves when I’m bowling, with all that jumping up and down and squealing. Anyway, all of them that were there’ll tell you I was with them the whole time. I was one of the last ones out the door.” Pulaski grinned. “That’s a pretty good alibi, wouldn’t you say? The DA’s office liked it fine.”

  “They pulled you in for questioning?”

  “The hell they did. I went down there on my own steam. Soon as I heard about Edna on the eleven o’clock news. I’m a good citizen, you know what I mean?”

  “You talked to the DA?”

  “One of his assistants. I was with him for an hour, till around noon. He checked up on my story, called up a lot of names I gave him—I’ll give ’em to you too—and all he could do was let me go.”

  “Why did you go to your ex-wife’s street after the bowling match? A cold night—raining—seems like a pretty strange thing to do.”

  “Who knows? It just come over me. I wanted to take a look at the place, and it’s only five or six blocks from the alleys. You’re married to somebody a few years, you get curious what’s doing with her, you wanna take a look, you know what I’m saying?”

  I asked him about his marriage and his divorce.

  “I was a dumb kid from East Phillie,” Pulaski said. “I just got out of the marines, I had a couple hitches after high school. I ended up here in this town because I had some buddies that came from here, they got discharged the same time as me. I met Edna—okay, I met her at her place, my buddies took me there for a ‘massage,’ you know what I’m saying? I fell for her hard. She was older than I was, five, six years, but that didn’t matter none. The way I saw her, she was like a little girl. She was so—like delicate, you know what I mean? Not exactly the type I’m shacked up with right now, right? Sure, I knew Edna was a hooker, but she told me she was gonna give up all that, on account of she loved me she was gonna turn into a new woman.”

  Pulaski laughed. He was trying for a good-natured, regretful laugh, but it had an edge to it that I don’t think he meant me to pick up on. Not bitterness exactly. More like excitement, as if something in this situation was peculiarly stimulating and arousing to him.

  “Okay, I told you I was a dumb kid, didn’t I? Well, like I said, it lasted a couple years, but the last year and a half was pretty rough. So we decided to call it quits.”

  “You were pretty mad at her, were you?”

  “No, I wasn’t mad at her. I don’t hold no grudges. People are gonna be what they are, you know? You can’t change them. You can’t fix them with a wrench, like somebody’s toilet. That’s what I do for a living, I’m a plumber.”
r />   “You have any ideas about who killed your ex-wife? Do you know of any enemies she ever made?”

  “She didn’t make no enemies,” Pulaski said. “She was a good kid. She never held on to her money, she gave it all away. Buying things for people. Guys mostly. There’s always slime-balls and assholes that latch on to a woman like Edna.”

  “If there were a lot of different men in her life, isn’t it possible that one of them might’ve got mad at her for breaking up with him?”

  “Maybe so,” Pulaski said. “But how’re you gonna find out which one it is? You gonna go through the phone book, calling up every guy in town who’s over fourteen? About half of them, I’ll bet, never even heard of her.”

  He laughed again. Trying to suggest maybe that his wisecrack had been good-natured.

  I told Pulaski I was through with him, and I stood up and started for the door.

  Pulaski called after me, “Listen, do you happen to know—how long do they usually go on, these investigations? How long before the cops let you leave town?”

  “You’re planning to leave town?” I gave him a harder look than before.

  “I sure as hell am. I hated this goddamn town for ten years. If I could’ve gone back to East Phillie a long time ago, I would’ve. Set myself up in my own plumbing business—if it wasn’t for Edna being here. Well, that ain’t keeping me here no more.”

  “And you’ve got the money to set yourself up now?”

  “When did I say that? All I said was, since Edna won’t be around no more—”

  He broke off and lowered his head.

  I could see he wasn’t going to do any more talking, so I left.

  * * *

  It was after four, and I had nothing waiting for me back at the office, so I went home.

  The first call I made was to Ann, at her house. She told me she had got her bail hearing scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning. Then I told her how McBride had been holding out on us about Ron Pulaski. I expected her to be mad as hell. She didn’t disappoint me.

  “We’ll bring the matter up to Mr. McBride first thing tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe we can make the little worm squirm a little.”