Mom Among the Liars

by James Yaffe

  “It’s not quite so simple. Yes, in a way, the man did make certain implications—”

  “Which you very conveniently forgot to report to his defense counsel.”

  “In my opinion, there was nothing to report. Pulaski implied he had a story that he would tell to the authorities if we made it worth his while. I told him he’d have to follow our usual procedure—give us the information, and then we’d decide if it was worth paying for. He wouldn’t go along with that, which convinced me he was lying. He had no information, he was just trying to gouge a few dollars out of us. I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t interested. I discussed it afterward with Marvin, of course, and the reason we didn’t pass all this on to you—frankly, we felt it would be a waste of your time.”

  “Whatever you felt, it was highly unethical of you not to report the conversation to me. And the way you handled the matter was also pretty damned irresponsible. By refusing to take him seriously, you probably forced him to make his proposition to the murderer. And that’s probably why he got killed. Well, one good thing has come out of this, at least from our point of view. This pretty much puts Harry Stubbins in the clear.”

  “How do you arrive at that conclusion?”

  “Harry’s not exactly the type to be a blackmail victim, is he? He hasn’t got anything for any self-respecting blackmailer to screw out of him. You and Marvin think that over, okay?”

  And then, before hanging up, she couldn’t resist one last potshot. “Incidentally, Leland, I heard this crazy rumor about the swindling case that Marvin and you handled last year. It can’t be true, can it, that Marvin read the wrong deposition and cross-examined the wrong witness?”

  A definite chill came into Grantley’s voice. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. At any rate, no harm was done, we got a conviction, if you remember. Now I really must put an end to this conversation. I’m working at home this afternoon, and any minute now I’m expecting a call from my wife in Rhode Island—”

  As she put down the phone, I could see that Ann was feeling a lot more positive about life already.

  No way I could join in with her on that though. I still had a large helping of humble pie to eat. I went to my desk and dialed Mom’s number and asked her if I could drop by for a few minutes after dinner. She said yes—which didn’t exactly fill me with elation. Even with Mom’s coffee to wash it down, that humble pie wasn’t going to taste very good.

  FOURTEEN

  The door opened, and Mom’s big welcoming smile switched off instantly.

  “What’s the matter? You’re sick! Come in, come in, lie down on the couch, I’ll get you a nice cup tea. What’ve you got, is it this bug that’s going around?”

  I let her lead me into the living room, but the tea and the couch I refused. “There’s nothing wrong with me, Mom, not physically. I’m ashamed of myself, that’s all.”

  Mom lowered her hand from my forehead and heaved a deep sigh of relief. “That’s all it is, ashamed of yourself? Thank God! A little shame never hurt anybody. It’s good for you, if you don’t overdo it. So sit, tell me.”

  But I couldn’t sit, I had to pace up and down while I got it off my chest. “I was stupid and stubborn. It’s just possible that a man is dead on account of me. Maybe he’d still be alive if only I’d listened to you, if I’d got to him sooner and asked him that question you told me to ask. I apologize to you, Mom. Not that my apology does him any good.”

  Then I poured it all out, ending up with “So go ahead and tell me what a pigheaded idiot I am. You’ve got every right. Whatever you tell me, I deserve it.” And I dropped onto the couch, breathing hard. Beating yourself is a tiring activity.

  Mom was in her chair, looking across at me. I couldn’t see anything like gloating or self-satisfaction on her face. The expression I saw was nothing but gentle worry. “Davey,” she said, “nobody died on account of you. This Pulaski fellow, isn’t it obvious why he got killed?”

  “He knew something about the murder, I suppose. He saw something when he was hanging around his wife’s house on Saturday night, and he tried to sell the information to the assistant DA. When Grantley wouldn’t pay for it, he went to the murderer. I suppose they made a deal, because his girlfriend says he was singing about Philadelphia. He told me, when I questioned him, how he hated this town and always wanted to go back to East Phillie and open his own plumbing business. I suppose he thought he was about to get the capital to swing it.”

  “Exactly. Blackmail is what he was up to. It’s a dangerous business, people get killed at it all the time. Is it your responsibility this fellow was a lowlife?”

  “Maybe if I’d questioned him seriously—”

  “Maybe, maybe, life is full of maybes. If we worried about all of them we’d put ourself into an early grave.”

  Mom was up from her chair, coming over to me. “All you did was, you decided to do something without running to your mother.” Now she was on the couch next to me, holding onto my hands. “Why not? You’re a grown-up man. You did plenty things before against my advice, and they turned out fine. Like becoming a policeman, for instance. I told you don’t do it, I told you be a doctor or a lawyer. You went ahead and did it anyway, and thank God you did! As a doctor or a lawyer, you’d be miserable. Also not so good at the job. So this time what you did didn’t turn out fine, so all right, who’s perfect?” Mom gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then she was up again and bustling out to the kitchen. “Now you’ll have some tea, and I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  I would have preferred coffee, but this was no time to argue with her. In a few minutes tea and schnecken—Mom’s quicker, cheaper, and more efficient substitutes for psychoanalysis—made their appearance.

  And I have to admit it, they began to do the trick. Slowly but surely I was feeling good again. The tea was tasting delicious. The old punch had returned to Mom’s schnecken.

  “So tell me,” she said, sitting down on the couch next to me, “you don’t have the answers yet to those two questions I mentioned to you—am I right?”

  “You’re wrong. I do have the answers.” I told her what Roger had told me about Laurel McBride and her play rehearsal. And then I told her what Pulaski’s girlfriend had told me, that he had found out about the murder from the TV.

  “What is it, Mom?” I broke off suddenly. “Are you all right?”

  At first she seemed to be having a fit or something. She had one hand over her forehead and was waving the other in the air, and little yelping noises were bursting out of her. But then I realized she was expressing joy and satisfaction.

  “You’ve got the answer, Mom? You know who killed Edna Pulaski?”

  “When did I say so? All right, most of the answer I got. But there’s one more piece I need—one little piece to finish the picture.”

  “How can I help you get it?”

  “You couldn’t. Nobody can get it for me. What I have to do now is tickle my brains a little so maybe they’ll come to life. And it wouldn’t hurt to do some praying too. Darling, I’m going to be very rude. I’m asking you to go home.”

  I got out of there, excited and puzzled and frustrated as hell. I went home and looked at “L.A. Law” on the TV, and thought how nice it would be if real life was like that.

  FIFTEEN

  Wednesday was one of those days that you can look back on years later, and you suddenly find yourself groaning, just as if you were still living through it.

  It began as merely a mild disaster. The Republican American, which I read with my soft-boiled eggs and coffee, devoted the upper half of its front page to the murder of Ron Pulaski. Joe Horniman, writing the lead story, wasn’t above using phrases like “epidemic of homicide” and “serial killer” to spice things up for his readers. I could imagine Joe chuckling to himself as he dipped into his file of clichés, compiled after years of labor in the vineyards of journalism.

  The paper’s coverage of the murder reached its high point in the featured editorial, which had
stern words for “permissive judges” who granted bail to “known sociopaths,” thus sending them out into the world to slaughter yet more of their fellow citizens. Harry Stubbins’s name wasn’t mentioned, and the editor was careful to say that his remarks were not intended “to prejudice the case against any specific accused persons, who of course, on the great principle of American justice, are entitled to be presumed innocent until found guilty by a jury of their peers.” It sure gives you a warm secure feeling to know that The Republican American is standing up for American justice.

  I spent most of the morning at my desk—writing reports and filling out forms, what else?—when the day started sliding even further downhill. Ann called Roger and me into her office, her face a shade of greenish white that told me something awful was up.

  “Just got a call from the homeless shelter,” she said. “My friend who runs the place says our client made a disturbance a few hours ago, yelling and taking swings at people—none of which connected, thank God—and after breakfast ran off into the streets somewhere. The other inmates say he smuggled in a bottle of cheap wine, he’s been taking swigs of it all morning, and the drunker he got the more he’s been throwing around wild threats.”

  “Threats against who?” I asked.

  “Against Marvin McBride. ‘Our vicious, pernicious, malicious, and lubricious district attorney,’ that’s what Harry keeps calling him. The idea seems to have planted itself in his head that McBride is out to get him, is deliberately railroading him for Edna Pulaski’s murder, and is now trying to pin Ron Pulaski’s murder on him too.”

  “Why does he think McBride is doing all this to him?”

  “He didn’t exactly make that clear. The best those other men could figure out was, McBride hates his guts because he’s McBride’s long-lost twin brother, his exact double who’s two minutes older, and McBride is afraid he’ll come back to claim his rightful inheritance. They say he kept yelling about The Man in the Iron Mask and The Prince and the Pauper. And here’s the part that’s got me really worried—the last thing he yelled before he ran off was ‘I’ve got no choice! Have to get him before he gets me!’”

  The upshot of our client’s disappearance was that Roger and I had to put the rest of our work on hold while we went out to look for him. The hope was to find him before he had a chance to do something crazy that he’d never recover from. It wouldn’t be easy. All we could do was move from one street corner and alley to the next, from one bar to the next, in the neighborhoods where he was most likely to hang out.

  And the job was complicated by the fact that Ann, after a lot of soul-searching, decided she had to call up McBride and tell him what was happening. I didn’t think there was much chance that Stubbins would actually carry out his threats, bust into McBride’s office or charge up to him in a restaurant or anything like that; more likely Stubbins would spend the day drinking himself into a sodden mess, then slink back to the shelter with all the fight pounded out of him. Still, as long as he was on the loose, it seemed only fair that McBride should be warned to keep his eyes open.

  So Ann called him at his office, and of course, since it wasn’t lunchtime yet, he hadn’t come in. She talked to Grantley, who said he’d pass the warning on as soon as McBride arrived. In the meantime—and I guess we knew this was inevitable—Grantley felt he had to alert the police.

  “I don’t suppose,” Grantley said, “the man could conceivably get hold of some kind of lethal weapon, could he?”

  “A gun, something like that?” Ann said. “I very much doubt if he owns one. And where would he get the money to buy one?”

  “The reason why I ask,” Grantley said, “you know about the rally tonight, don’t you?”

  “What rally?”

  “Marvin is holding a big rally—for his election campaign—eight o’clock tonight, in Manitou Park, right in the center of town. In fact, he didn’t come to the office at all yesterday, he stayed home to write his speech. The park will be full of people, I expect, so if Stubbins isn’t apprehended before then—well, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to keep himself concealed in the crowd, and when Marvin appears on the platform—all alone, up above everybody—a very exposed position, if a man happened to have a gun.”

  “I’d be surprised if Harry Stubbins even knows how to fire a gun,” Ann said. “And by tonight he’ll hardly be in any condition to aim one.” But she was frowning just the same. “I don’t suppose you could persuade Marvin to call off this rally? Until we find Stubbins, I mean?

  “No, I don’t suppose you could. In his whole life Marvin never voluntarily gave up an opportunity to make a fool of himself in front of a crowd. Well, thanks anyway, Leland. We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

  * * *

  Roger and I went on looking for Stubbins all that afternoon. Roger took the north side of the city, and I took the south side, and we each made a quick odyssey of sleaze, until at sundown we met in the middle. No sign of the old man, though occasionally we talked to a bartender or a barfly who claimed to have seen him “a little while ago.”

  At six o’clock we reported to Ann by phone, and she told us to give up the search. If Stubbins was going to come up out of the ground, she decided, the most likely place would be at McBride’s political rally tonight. We agreed to meet at Manitou Park at seven-thirty, which would give us half an hour to comb the area before the rally began.

  I went home, heated up a TV dinner—chicken fricassee with rice, which always ended up either undercooked or soggy—and made a quick call to Mom. Just to keep her posted on the latest developments and to find out if that “final piece” had clicked into place for her yet.

  It hadn’t. She told me to take care of myself. “I don’t like the idea you should be in the park at night with a man who’s got a gun,” she said.

  “He hasn’t got a gun,” I said, “and there’s going to be hundreds of people out there with me, not to mention a dozen uniformed cops.”

  But to tell the truth, I didn’t much like the idea myself.

  * * *

  The closest parking space I could find was three blocks away from Manitou Park. Very unusual for a Wednesday night in Mesa Grande. It looked as if McBride was drawing a big crowd for his rally.

  I stepped through the front gate to the park, as arranged, and looked around for Ann and Roger. At first I couldn’t spot them, on account of all the people.

  Manitou Park is the smallest and oldest park in Mesa Grande. Occupying only one square block in the middle of the downtown area, it was laid out over a hundred years ago by General William Henry Harrison Wagner himself. In the center of it is a statue of him, wearing his Civil War uniform and sitting on his horse. (He fought for the North eventually, though for a year or so, until he decided who the winner was going to be, he considered offers from both sides.) During the day the park is the playground of very young swingers—children on swings, that is—and elderly horseshoe pitchers. As soon as the sun goes down, the drunks, the homeless bench people, and the buyers and sellers of dope move in. Every once in a while our local police swoop down and haul in these antisocial types, but most of the time business, pleasure, and mere survival go on undisturbed, behind the thick hedges that grow along the park’s tall iron fence.

  Tonight, though—Wednesday night, less than a week before election—Manitou Park had been taken over by the forces of democracy. Three or four patrol cars were parked on the curbs next to both its gates, and several uniformed policemen were strolling around its shady walks. Folding chairs—brought in and set up, I felt sure, by Sanitation Department workers earning overtime from the taxpayers—filled the large cleared space in front of General Wagner’s statue. Spotlights and lamps circled the edges, shining into the crowd and especially the speakers platform. Heavy cables and wires were attached to loudspeakers, which were in turn attached to strategic trees; these arrangements, I guessed, had been implemented by the city Gas and Electric Department.

  To the general’s right was a stone p
latform that had been built five or six years ago; jazz, folk, and rock concerts were held on Thursday nights during the summer, and the sweet smell of pot mingled with the music in the evening air. Streamers were strung now from the posts of this platform, balloons were tied to the chairs that sat on it, and a huge MCBRIDE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY banner was stretched between two trees above it.

  It was only a little after seven-thirty, but a sizable audience had already gathered. Some of them had buttons in their lapels that read MCWIN WITH MCBRIDE! Some of them were waving small pennants with WE’RE STARVIN FOR MARVIN on them. I also caught a glimpse of one or two dissidents in the crowd: buttons that read DORIS IS FOR US! and COMPETENCY AND COMPASSION.

  Most of the crowd seemed to be there, though, for the fun of it rather than out of political conviction. In spite of the uniformed cops all over the place, I saw a lot of bottles that obviously didn’t contain Coca-Cola and a lot of suspiciously skinny, mangy-looking cigarettes.

  Then I saw Ann, and Roger was with her.

  “We’re meeting Marvin behind the platform in twenty minutes,” she said as I moved up to her. “That gives us some time to look through the crowd.”

  We did, each taking a different section of it, but I didn’t see anybody that looked vaguely like Harry Stubbins.

  The three of us met up again at five minutes to eight. Ann and Roger hadn’t been any more successful than I. So we went around the raised platform to a small stone structure, looking something like a shed. This was the “dressing room,” where performers or speakers holed away until it was time for them to make their entrance.

  A uniformed policeman stood outside the door, and inside were Ed Brock and Marvin, sitting at a table, and Grantley standing behind them. Marvin had a sheaf of papers in his hand, no doubt filled with purple platitudes about softness on crime and the scourge of drugs that threatened Our Young People. I noticed immediately that he was wearing his red, white, and blue necktie, with its pattern of little American flags.