by James Yaffe
The next call I made was to Roger. I relayed Mom’s dinner invitation to him. He told me she had already called him and invited him herself.
SIX
When I got to Mom’s house shortly after six, she had a sad look on her face. Indignation, contempt, triumph, joy were Mom’s most frequent looks. Sadness was seldom part of her repertoire. But as soon as she led me into the living room, I understood.
A short fat candle, dripping melted wax into a saucer, was flickering on the mantelpiece. Tomorrow was November 1, of course, Papa’s yahrzeit—the anniversary, that is, of my late father’s death, which Mom was celebrating in the traditional manner. For the last thirty-eight years she lit a candle at sunset on October 31 and kept it lit until sunset on the first of November.
“I was just looking at the album,” she said. She sat herself down on the sofa and patted the cushion next to her. “Come.”
I’d seen these pictures practically every year for thirty-eight years, but I sat down next to her anyway. It’s not such a bad idea to remind yourself every so often what the dead looked like. I don’t have an album for my wife Shirley—she’s been gone only four or five years; her death was why I gave up my job on the New York Homicide Squad and moved out here to Mesa Grande—but I have a manila envelope at home with loose snapshots in it, and I do pull them out from time to time.
The important thing is not to do it too often or make it last too long.
I was fifteen when Papa died. I have plenty of memories, of course, but the pictures in Mom’s album always seem to contradict them. I don’t remember him being such a small man. I don’t remember ever seeing that uncomfortable smile on his face—like he was feeling miserable about something but he didn’t want people to catch on because they might be offended.
Actually what I remember most clearly about him is the day he took me to the Bronx Zoo when I was thirteen. We stopped at the gorilla cage. I pointed to this huge hairy obese monster that was scratching itself behind the bars and said, “If I ever ran into anything like him on the street, I’d sure run the other way fast.”
“Sometimes it’s not so simple, my boy,” Papa answered. “Sometimes they’re wearing pants and coats and neckties, and you can’t tell them apart from people.” He gave a little sigh, which I had heard him give many times before. I’ll never forget that sigh.
Two years later, when he had barely turned fifty, he was dead from a heart attack. It wasn’t till then that I heard the story of his life: how he’d come to America from some unpronounceable place that kept switching back and forth between Russia and Poland, how he worked for years as a cutter in a ladies’ dress factory, how he finally set himself up in a small dress-manufacturing business of his own, how the business went bust toward the end of the depression when I was still a baby, how he went back to working for other people as a cutter.
His life had been a tragedy, I suppose. No less tragic because it was such a common life, because millions of men have suffered the same disappointments. But Mom never talked about it as if it were a tragedy. She went through the album, pointing out this item or that, as if she were going through the life of one of the great men of our age.
“And look at this, it’s your papa all dressed up in his best suit, we were on our way to my cousin Reba’s wedding, and I had to take a picture with my Kodak camera because I never saw your papa looking so handsome. At the wedding all the girls was falling over each other to dance with him. Even the bridegroom got jealous.”
“Did you get jealous, Mom?”
“Me?” She thought it over. “A little bit maybe. But I told myself this was foolishness. Didn’t I know what I was letting myself into when I married such a good-looking fellow? Wasn’t I ready that he should be catnap to the cats?”
The doorbell rang, and Mom quickly shut up the album. “Roger wouldn’t be interested,” she said. “Young people don’t like to look at old pictures. They don’t like to be reminded that old people were young once too.”
Roger was looking exhausted, but somehow this also made him look even younger than usual. It’s taken me a while to get used to the idea that my chief (and only) assistant investigator sometimes seems to be about twelve years old.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I’ve been tramping all over town, half the time I wasn’t talking to people at all, just trying to track them down. Doesn’t anybody stay home quietly on Sundays anymore? I didn’t even get a chance to go back to my house and take a shower.”
This was all the encouragement Mom needed. Instantly she was all over him, offering him the use of her bathroom, pushing liquid refreshment on him, urging him to take off his coat and his tie and, if he wished, his shoes. This fussing took up the next fifteen minutes or so, and when she finally had Roger comfortable to her own satisfaction, it was time for dinner.
While we ate the heavenly chicken pot pie that Mom had promised, we talked about the murder.
First Roger reported on what he had done today. He had called up all the local TV stations, and sure enough one of them had shown the old Marx Brothers movie A Day at the Races last night. It began at ten-thirty, so it definitely would have been running while Harry Stubbins was in Edna Pulaski’s bedroom.
Roger had also managed to get hold of Victor Sanchez, the cop on the beat in Edna’s neighborhood, and he confirmed that Harry had been sleeping in that alleyway since the beginning of the summer. Sanchez had kept an eye on him from time to time, but his orders were not to roust any of the bums unless they were making trouble, interfering with people. Harry Stubbins, Sanchez said, was always as good as gold; he got his nightly bottle of cheap wine and curled up in his private living quarters like any respectable householder.
Finally, though I hadn’t given him any specific instructions about this, it had occurred to Roger that he might get some valuable information out of the four women who made up Edna Pulaski’s “team” at the massage parlor. All of them were Korean, and all of them said that, as far as they knew, Edna had no special man in her life at the moment or any particular enemies from her past. They added, though, that she had always been protective of her privacy. She didn’t usually give them the whole night off, like last night, but once or twice a week she would hole herself up in her room, telling them not to come upstairs and disturb her. They always assumed she was up there with some guy, but they didn’t get nosy, and they never actually saw who it was. If it was anybody.
All four of them seemed to be genuinely broken up about Edna’s death. She paid them well, didn’t overwork them, was sympathetic when they came down sick, as long as they didn’t overdo it, and had high standards when it came to how the customers treated her employees. A certain amount of kinkiness was okay, but not if it involved physical pain or excessive humiliation. “I don’t know what I’ll do now,” said one of the girls, “I don’t know if I can go back to working an outside job.”
In one direction, though, Roger had made no progress at all. He hadn’t been able to find out a thing about Harry Stubbins’s past life or any possible connections between him and Edna Pulaski. “The trouble is,” Roger said, “these homeless people have cut themselves off so completely from their families, friends, anybody out of their past—it’s almost as if they have no past.”
“Maybe I’ve got a suggestion for you,” Mom said. “The way this Harry Stubbins talks—the long words he uses, how he keeps mentioning things out of poems and so on—he reminds me of this English professor Davey had in college. You remember, Professor Mendenhall from the Shakespeare class, I met him at your college graduation? He had this funny little pointed beard, and he talked like an encyclopedia?”
I remembered him all right, the old prick.
“So isn’t it possible,” Mom went on, “this Harry Stubbins was at one time in his life a professor in a college? Most likely an English professor because they’re the ones that like to quote all the time from the literary classics. And these professors, don’t they have a union or some type professional organi
zation that most of them belong to?”
“The American Association of University Professors,” Roger said.
“So call them up,” Mom said. “Maybe they keep records, they’ve got a Harry Stubbins in their files from a long time ago.”
Roger made a note, and now it was dessert time. Mom brought in one of her chocolate rolls. She didn’t make them often, because they were complicated, expensive, and took a lot of time. But they had been Papa’s favorite, and she always dished them up in honor of his yahrzeit. This was the first time Roger had tasted one, so he was pretty much out of the conversation until he finished it and the second helping Mom heaped onto his plate without asking his permission.
Back in the living room, with coffee cups in our hands, we returned to the murder. I described everything I had done this afternoon: my examination of the scene of the crime, my talks with Delaney and with the people in front of Pulaski’s house, my visit to the dead woman’s mother, to Mr. Chang the pharmacist, to Ron Pulaski and his girlfriend.
I was tired and irritated, and I let it show now, raising my voice. “You know what’s the most frustrating thing about this damned case? I can’t get a fix on this dead woman, this Edna Pulaski. The business she was in—it isn’t exactly encouraging to sainthood. But the way everybody describes her, you’d think she was some kind of saint. The delivery boy from the liquor store, her great-niece, the girls who worked for her, her neighbors—all of them telling us how kind and generous she was. Even Stubbins talks about her as if she was the Whore with the Heart of Gold!”
“Both things could be the truth,” Mom said.
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s a simple question of getting Americanized. Ten years this Pulaski was in this country, so by now she learned how to be a good American businessman, with a personality that’s split in half. In your private life, you treat people nice, you give away money, you help poor old men, you pat little dogs and babies on the head. In the rest of your life, though, when profit and loss is concerned, what you do is strictly business.”
“What you’re saying is, kind and generous as she was, she was doing something on the business side of her life that made somebody kill her?”
“This you didn’t hear me say. I got some ideas, but I still need to know a few things. A couple of these things is the answers to the two questions I told you on the phone you should ask.”
“I asked them, Mom.” And I gave her all the information I had picked up about Edna Pulaski’s heart condition and her drinking habits.
Mom didn’t say anything at first. She just frowned and pulled at her lower lip.
“That doesn’t look so good for our client, does it?” Roger said. “Edna Pulaski’s phobia about people who drink, I mean.”
“What’s bad about that?” I asked.
“Because it’s all the more reason why she wouldn’t be likely to invite Harry Stubbins into her house for a cup of coffee. An old drunk like that, smelling like a brewery most of the time—wouldn’t she be too disgusted to let him in her room? Which means he wasn’t there at her invitation.”
“This is a reasonable argument,” Mom said, looking pleased, as she always looked when one of us subordinates came up with a thought of our own. “Maybe it isn’t so bad for your client as you think though. I got a little idea about that.”
“Do you really?” I said. “Or are you just saying that because you don’t have any ideas yet?”
Mom laughed. “They grow up, they move out, right away they get fresh with their parents! My little idea I didn’t work out completely, so I wouldn’t talk about it yet. On the other hand, this medicine she was taking for her heart condition—this isn’t such good news for your client.”
“In what way?”
“If I’m right, you’ll find out tomorrow when you hear about the autopsy and the lab tests. So here’s something else you should do for me—first thing tomorrow you should call up this Pulaski fellow, the dead woman’s ex-husband, and ask him a question.”
“What question?”
“It’s something very important. When he woke up yesterday, how did he find out about his ex-wife’s murder? He told you he heard about it on the eleven o’clock news, but what you should ask him is, was it the radio news or the television news?”
“What difference does it make? Pulaski didn’t kill her. I told you, he has an airtight alibi for the time of the murder.”
“That’s nice for him,” she said. “But do me a favor, ask him this question anyway.”
“Why don’t you tell me why? I just can’t imagine—”
“That’s true. You can’t. So give me his answer, and I’ll do it for you.”
“All right, I will.” Privately, though, I was saying to myself that there was no hurry about it. Maybe I’d ask Mom’s pointless question, maybe I wouldn’t. In any case, I’d make up my own mind, I’d trust my own judgment.
Then Mom remembered that McBride was supposed to make a statement to the press about the murder in about fifteen minutes. One of the local stations would be interrupting its regular programming to cover it.
She turned on the TV. We were in time to catch the buildup to McBride’s press conference. We saw the crowds milling around Edna Pulaski’s house, identified by the TV voice as “the scene of the crime, where murder and massages mingled.” Then we saw McBride at his office desk, looking grim to a room full of reporters. He made one of his feisty-bulldog speeches about how the case had been solved, through the quick action of our splendid police force and the district attorney’s office, and how he personally intended to bring this brutal killer to justice, by supervising every aspect of the investigation and carrying straight through to the trial.
“The victim wasn’t an exemplary character,” McBride said, “she belonged to the lowest element of society. She lived in a squalid neighborhood, she sold sex under the most shocking conditions—ladies and gentlemen, it would make you sick to see the room where she was killed, those Oriental landscapes that turn out to be dirty pictures, garish neon signs with Chinese letters on them flashing through the windows—but all of that is beside the point when it’s a question of justice—”
“You’re not suggesting, are you, Mr. DA,” Joe Horniman broke in from the first row of reporters, “that Asian people have a greater tendency to belong to the lowest element in our town than other groups?”
McBride drew himself up. People are supposed to look taller on TV than they do in real life. For a moment you could have sworn that McBride was a giant. It helped, of course, that he was sitting down. “That’s a lie, sir! That’s a vicious implication you’re throwing around there! Anything I just said about this particular woman was certainly not meant to cast any reflection on the members of our fine law-abiding Ori—Asian community. These people have made an outstanding record in our town. They come here not talking the language, most of them, but they make their kids learn it, they want their kids to get an education, they keep their noses to the grindstone, and a lot of those kids end up beating out our own American kids at school, and going to high-class colleges that our own kids can’t get in to—
“The point I’m making is, there are bad apples in every barrel. But we in America, with our God-given sense of fair play and justice, would never hold it against the other apples! What’s more, my record on racial and minority issues in this town is well known to everybody. I’ve made it my personal business to see that plenty of minority policemen, not just O—sians but blacks and Mexicans too, get hired by the police department. Every Christmas I give block parties down there where the Asians live, and also in black neighborhoods, Hispanic neighborhoods—turkey and cranberry sauce, the works, and toys for all the little kids—strictly at my own personal expense! And for the last three years, though it’s not generally known, since I’m not the type to blow my own horn, I’ve attended the Hannakuh dinner at the Jewish synagogue—
“Now if I could get back to the subject at hand, meaning this murder case.
And my point is, justice is blind, the law protects every one of us, both the small and the big. Nobody can be allowed to get away with murder, even if society might be better off without the victim. That’s why I’ve put this case under my personal supervision—”
“In other words,” Joe Horniman said, “it has nothing to do with your political opponent’s recent charges that you never try any cases yourself, you let your assistants do all the work?”
“That question isn’t even worth dignifying with an answer,” McBride said. “The public record will show that I’m not being any more active in the fight against crime right now than I’ve ever been. I love this town. I settled here right after I got out of law school, and I made up my mind I would devote myself to the welfare of Mesa Grande. That’s what I’ve always done, that’s what I’m doing now, that’s why the criminal element will go to any length to defeat me in this coming election. But they’re not going to do it, I can tell you that. A week from Tuesday the voters will make their choice—and my prediction is, they’ll choose me, they’ll give me their mandate to go on prosecuting this vicious killer and all other vicious killers who might come along in the future.”
The press conference ended, and the TV station cut to a brief closeup of Doris Dryden, commenting on it. “Actually,” she said, “I’m glad to hear that District Attorney McBride is finally taking charge of a case. Now we all have to hope he won’t bungle it because he’s so out of practice.”
Mom turned off the television. She was frowning a little.
Roger was shaking his head and gasping. “But he does turn over most of his cases to his assistants! He knows he does! How can he have the nerve to look people in the eye and tell such lies?”
“Why not?” I said. “The garbage dump is full of retired politicians who made the mistake of telling the truth. The last thing that most people want to hear is the truth.”
“Mrs. Dryden is telling them the truth, and they seem to be liking it. Who knows, there may be a groundswell that’ll sweep her into office!”