“Are you scared?” I ask suddenly tonight as we are walking.
“You mean scared you won’t get off?” The trial looms so near, so large, that even my eight-year-old knows at once what I must mean.
“Yes.”
“Naw.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not, that’s all. It’s just a bunch of junk, right?” He squints up at me, from beneath the bill of his cockeyed baseball cap.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“They’ll have this trial, and you’ll tell what really happened, and that’ll be the end of it. That’s what Mom says.”
Oh, bursting, bursting heart: that’s what his mom says. I put my arm around my son, more amazed than ever by his faith in her. I cannot imagine the lengthy therapeutic sessions between mother and child in which she has pitched him up to this level of support. It is a miracle which Barbara alone could have achieved. As a family, we are bound together by this symmetry: in the world, I love Nat most, and he adores his mother. Even at this scrappy age, full of the furious energy of a person of eight, he softens for her as no one else. She alone is allowed to hold him at length; and they enjoy a special sympathy, communion, a dependence that goes deeper even than the unsounded depths of mother and child. He is more like her than me, high-strung and full of her driving intelligence, those dark and private moods. She equals his devotion. He is never out of her imagination. I believe her when she says she could never wrest from herself the same emotion for another child.
Neither of them parts from the other comfortably. Last summer Barbara spent four days in Detroit, visiting a college friend, Yetta Graver, who she discovered is now a professor of mathematics. Barbara called twice a day. And Nat was like a running sore, crabby, miserable. The only way I could quiet him for bed was by imagining for him precisely what his mother and Yetta were doing at that moment.
They are in a quiet restaurant, I would tell him. Each of them is eating fish. It is broiled with very little butter. They each have had a glass of wine. At dessert they will break down and eat something they find too tempting.
Pie? asked Nat.
Pie, I said.
My son, the one I always dreamed of, fell asleep thinking of his mother eating sweets.
24
“Hi,” Marty Polhemus says.
“Hi,” I answer. As I came off the landing and caught my first glimpse of the figure and the long hair, I thought it was Kemp, who I’m supposed to meet here. Instead, I find this boy, who I have not even thought about for months. We stand alone in the hallway outside Carolyn’s apartment looking at one another. Marty extends his hand and shakes mine firmly. He has no obvious reluctance, almost as if he is pleased to see me. “I didn’t expect to see you,” I finally say, casting about for some way to ask why he is here.
From his shirt pocket, he pulls a copy of Judge Lyttle’s order allowing us to inspect the premises. “I got this,” says Marty.
“Oh, I get it now,” I say out loud. “That was only a formality.” The judge ordered us to notify the lawyer for the estate, a former P.A. named Jack Buckley. Jack apparently sent the notice on to the boy. “The idea was just to let you object if you mind us going in and looking at some of Carolyn’s things. You didn’t have to be here.”
“That’s okay.” This boy sort of shucks and bows as he talks. Back and forth. He shows no sign of leaving.
I try to make conversation, ask what he is up to. “Last time we talked you were planning to flunk out and go back home.”
“I did,” he says, without ceremony. “Actually, I got like suspended. I flunked physics. And I made a D in English. I was pretty sure I was going to flunk that, too. I went home six weeks ago. I just drove back here yesterday to get together all my junk.”
I apologize and explain that from his presence I had assumed that things had worked out.
“Well, they did. Work out. I mean, so far as I’m concerned.”
“How’d your father take it?”
He shrugs.
“He wasn’t real happy. About the D especially. That like hurt his feelings. But he said I had a tough year. I’ll work for a while and go back.” Marty looks around at nothing in particular. “So anyway, when I got that thing, I thought I’d like to come by and see what it was all about.”
The psychologists have a term, ‘inappropriate.’ That is this kid. Just sort of shooting the breeze outside the apartment where his mother was killed with the guy who everybody thinks did it. For a second, I wonder if he even knows what’s going on. But the caption was right on the notice: PEOPLE VERSUS SABICH. And he could not have missed the buildup to the indictment in the papers. He has not been gone that long.
I do not get a chance to probe further, because Kemp comes along then. I can hear him on the stairs. He is arguing, and when he turns the corner off the landing I see with whom—Tom Glendenning, a big cop I never much liked. Glendenning is a white man’s white man. Lots of ethnic and racial cracks. Not kidding around either. His whole sensibility revolves around the fact that he was born white and is now a cop. He treats everybody else like they’re intruders. No doubt he’ll be just as happy to view me that way. The more there are, the better Tom feels. Kemp is explaining that Glendenning may not enter while we view the apartment, and Glendenning is saying that’s not what he understands from Molto. Finally, they agree that Glendenning will go downstairs and use the phone. While he’s gone I introduce Kemp to Marty Polhemus.
“You’re right,” Glendenning says when he comes back. “That judge entered such an order.” The way he says “that,” you know what he’s thinking.
Kemp rolls his eyes. He is a good lawyer but still awfully Ivy League. He will not hesitate to let people know when he regards them as fools.
A large phosphorescent-orange notice with an adhesive backing has been applied to the door of Carolyn’s apartment. It states that this is a crime scene, sealed by order of the Superior Court of Kindle County, and that entry is forbidden. The notice overlaps the threshold so that the door cannot be opened. The locks have been filled with plastic blocks. Glendenning cuts the notice with a razor, but it takes him some time to clear the locks. When he finishes, he produces Carolyn’s key ring from his pocket. It has a large red-and-white evidence tag on it. There is a door handle lock, and a dead bolt. As I told Lipranzer a long time ago, Carolyn did not fool around.
With the keys in the lower lock, Glendenning turns and, without a word, frisks Kemp and me, then Marty. This will prevent us from planting anything. I show him a pad of paper I have in my hand. He asks for our wallets. Kemp starts to object, but I motion him to be quiet. Again, without a word, Glendenning does the same to Marty, who already has his wallet in his hand.
“Jeez,” says Marty. “Look at all this stuff. What am I ever going to do with it?” He just wanders in ahead of Kemp and me. I pass a look with Jamie. Neither of us knows if we have the authority to keep him out, or if there is any reason to bother. Glendenning calls in after him.
“Hey there. Don’t touch anything. Nothing. Just them can touch. All right?” Marty seems to nod. He drifts through the living room toward the windows, apparently to check the view.
The air in here is stale and heavy, used up and burned out by the summer heat. Something somewhere in here may be rotting; there is a faint smell. Although the temperature outside is moderate today, the apartment, with the windows sealed, never cooled after last week’s intense heat. It must be close to 85 degrees.
I never believed in ghosts, but it is unsettling to be back. I feel a little curl of strange sensation working its way down from the bottom of my spine. The apartment seems oddly settled, especially since everything has been left largely as it was found. The table and mauve seating piece are still overturned. On the light oak floor, just off the kitchen, an outline of Carolyn’s body has been chalked. But everything else seems to have acquired some added density. Beside the sofa, on another glass table, a little inlaid box remains which I had purchased for Carolyn. S
he had admired it at Morton’s the day I walked over there with her during the McGaffen trial. One of the red dragons on her Chinese screen assesses me with its fiery eye. God, I think. God, did I ever get myself in trouble.
Kemp motions to me. He is going to start looking about. He hands me a pair of plastic gloves, loose ones like Baggies with fingers. There’s no real need for this, but Stern insisted. Better not to be fighting about fingerprints Tommy Molto claims they discovered long before.
I stop a minute by the bar. It’s on the wall directly by the kitchen. I thought I could see what I’m looking for from the police photographs of the scene, but I want to be certain. I stand three feet from the glassware and count the tumblers lined up on a towel. It is on one of the glasses of this set that my prints have been identified. There are twelve of them here. I count them twice to be sure.
Jamie comes beside me. He whispers, “Where in the hell do we look?”
He wants to see whether there are accessories on hand used by Carolyn for birth control.
“There’s a john over that way,” I say quietly. “Medicine cabinet and vanity.”
I tell him I will check the bedroom. I look first inside her closet. Her smell is on everything; I recognize the clothes I saw her wear. These sights stir mild sensation, buffeting against something that wants this all suppressed. I don’t know if it is an impulse to be clinical or the sense—which I always previously seemed to check at the door here—of what is properly forbidden. I move on to her drawers.
Her bedside table, a chubby-looking piece with clubbed Queen Anne feet, holds the telephone. This is as likely a spot as any, but when I open the single drawer I see nothing but her panty hose. I push them around and find a phone directory, a skinny volume covered in light brown calf’s leather. The coppers always miss something. I can’t resist. I check under S. Nothing. Then I think of R. Yes. At least I made the book. My work and home numbers are listed. I graze a minute. Horgan is here. Molto is not listed by name, but there is somebody called TM, which is probably him. I realize I should see about her doctors. D is it. I write the names down and put the paper in my pocket. Outside I hear a stirring. For some reason my first thought is that it is Glendenning, who has decided to ignore the dark-skinned judge and snoop. I flip the pages on the book to protect what I have found, but when the figure passes by the door, it is only Marty wandering. He looks in and waves. The page I turned is L. “Larren,” it says right at the top. There are three numbers listed. Well, I think. That must have been a cozy group out in the North Branch. Everybody’s here. Then I think again. Not quite. I check N and D, even G. Nico never made it. I tuck the book back in under the panty hose.
Marty is lurking at the bedroom door.
“Pretty strange, huh?”
That it is. I nod sadly. He tells me that he is going to wait outside. I try to let him know that he is free to leave, but the kid is dense and doesn’t get the hint.
When I find Kemp, he is going through the living room.
“There’s nothing here,” he tells me. “No foam, no cream. I don’t even find a case for a diaphragm. Am I missing something? Do women hide that stuff?”
“Not that I know of. Barbara keeps hers in the top drawer of the dresser. I wouldn’t have any ideas about anyone else.”
“Well, if the chemist says contraceptive cream is present, and it’s not seized from the apartment,” Kemp says, “you tell me where it’s at.”
“I guess I took it,” I say, “when I grabbed the diaphragm.”
With both Kemp and Stern, I have fallen into this habit, speculating in the first person on what Nico will say I did. Jamie, especially, finds it amusing.
“Why would you do that?”
I consider for a moment. “Maybe it would hide the fact that I took the diaphragm.”
“That doesn’t make sense. It’s supposed to be rape. What difference does it make what the hell she did when she wanted to have sex?”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly. If I had been, I wouldn’t have left the glass on the bar.”
Kemp smiles. He likes the byplay, fast words.
“This helps,” he says. “There’s no way around it. I want to get hold of Berman,” he says, referring to the P.I. “He should search himself, so he can testify about it. He’ll be available in about an hour. Wait until Glendenning hears he has to wait. He’ll blow a gut.”
The four of us meet outside the apartment and watch Glendenning lock the door. He pats each one of us down again. Glendenning, as Kemp predicted, refuses to wait for Berman. Kemp tells him that he has to, the court order gives us access for the day.
“I don’t take orders from any rock ‘n’ roll defense lawyer,” says Glendenning. Even when I was on his side, I thought this guy was all charm.
“Well, let’s go see the judge, then,” Kemp says. Jamie got Glendenning’s number quick. The copper looks to the ceiling like this is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard, but by now he’s trapped. He and Kemp pound down the stairway, exchanging words. I am left with Marty Polhemus.
“Nice guy, huh?” I ask Marty.
He asks me, in all seriousness, “Which one?”
“I was talking about the policeman.”
“He seemed all right. He said that what’s-his-name, Mr. Kemp, used to be in the Galactics.” When I confirm that, the boy predictably says “Wow.” Then he goes silent. He still seems to be waiting for something.
“I talked to them, you know. The cops.”
“Did you?” I am thinking about the glassware by the bar.
“They asked me about you, you know? About when you came out to see me.”
“Well, that’s their job.”
“Yeah, they wanted to know if you like said anything about your relationship with her, I mean with Carolyn. You know?”
I have to exert control to avoid a reflex to pivot. I had forgotten. I had forgotten that I told this goddamned kid. That is Nico’s evidence, that is how he’s going to prove up the affair. A thick bilious feeling cuts deep in my throat.
“They asked me a couple of times, you know. I said—I mean, I thought we had a real talk, you know?”
“Sure,” I say.
“And I told them that you didn’t say anything about that.”
I look at the boy.
“Okay?” he asks.
I am, of course, supposed to remind him to tell the truth.
“Sure,” I say again.
“I don’t think you’re the guy who killed her.”
“I appreciate that.”
“It’s like karma,” he says. “It isn’t right.”
I smile. I lift my hand to direct him to the landing, and just like that it hits me. It’s like running into a wall, the recognition and the panic. I am so frightened that my legs begin to give out, actually buckle, and I reach for the railing. You fool, I think, you fool. He’s wired. He is wearing a tape recorder. Nico and Molto wired him up. That is what he’s doing here, that’s why he does not seem right. He isn’t. He follows us into the apartment and watches everything we do, then gets me out here to suborn him. And I’ve just convicted myself. I’m gone. I feel that I am going to faint. I falter again, but this time I turn backward.
Marty extends his hand. “What is it?”
When I look at him I know I’m crazy. Absurd. He is dressed for the season, a tight T-shirt and shorts. Not even a belt. Nobody can hide equipment under that. I watched Glendenning frisk him. And it’s not there in his eyes either. All I see is this spaced-out kid, kindly, timid, terribly lost.
I have suddenly sweated through my shirt. I am wrung out now and weak. My pulse is beating far up in my arms.
“I’m okay,” I tell him, but Marty takes my elbow anyway as we start down the stairs. “It’s the place,” I say. “It does bad things to me.”
25
Three a.m. When I awake my heart is racing and cool traces of sweat are abrading my neck, so that in the idiocy of sleep I am trying to loosen my collar. I grope;
then lie back. My breath is short, and my heartbeat thunders intermittently in the ear against the pillow. My dream is still clear to me: my mother’s face in agony; that worn cadaverous image as she neared the end, and worse, her look of lost, unspeaking terror.
When my mother became sick, and quickly died, she was in the most peaceful period of her adult life. She and my father were no longer living together, although they still worked side by side each day in the bakery. He had moved in with a widow, Mrs. Bova, whose urgent bearing when she came into the shop I can remember even from the years before her husband died. For my mother, whose life with my father had been a dominion of fear, this arrangement became a kind of liberation. Her interest in the world outside her suddenly increased. She became one of the first of the regular callers on those listener-participation talk shows. Tell us what you think about interracial dating, legalizing marijuana, who killed Kennedy. She stacked the dining-room table with old newspapers and magazines, pads and index cards on which she made notations to herself, preparing for tomorrow’s programs. My mother, who was phobic about venturing beyond our apartment building or the shop, who had to begin her preparations early in the morning if she was going to depart her home sometime that afternoon, who from the time I was eight sent me to the market so that she could avoid leaving the house—my mother became a local personality of sorts for her outspoken views about various worldly controversies. I could not reconcile this development with the accommodations I had made long before with myself to accept her wildly verging eccentricities, or the narrow margins of her former life.
She had been twenty-eight, four years my father’s senior, when they were married, the sixth daughter of a Jewish union organizer and a lass from Cork. My father wed, I’m sure, for her savings, which allowed him to open up the shop. Nor was there ever any sign that my mother had married for love. She was an old maid and, I would guess, far too peculiar to gather other suitors. Her behavior, as I witnessed it, was apt to be excessive and ungovernable, with manic tours from pinnacles of rosy hilarity to hours of brooding looks. Sometimes she became frantic. She was forever running to ransack her crowded dresser drawers, rummaging in her sewing box as she made high-pitched excited noises. Because she seldom left home, her sisters made it a habit to look after her. This was a brave endeavor. When my aunts visited, my father would assail them in loud conversation with himself as busybodies, and he was not above actual threats of violence if they came when he was drunk. The two who ventured most often, my Aunts Flo and Sarah, were both bold, determined women, their father’s daughters, and they were apt to control my father with stern looks and fearless demeanor, not much different than if they were confronting some barking cur. They were undeterred in their unannounced mission to protect the meek—Rosie (my mother) and, especially, me. For me these sisters were a hovering presence throughout my childhood. They brought me candies; they took me for haircuts and bought my clothes. They supervised my upbringing in such routine fashion that I was in my twenties before I recognized their intentions—or their kindness. And somehow, without ever realizing it had happened, I grew to know there were two worlds, my mother’s and the other one dwelled in by her sisters, the one to which I eventually recognized I, as well, belonged. It was a fixed star of my youth to think that my mother was not, as I put it to myself, regular; to know that my adoration of her was a purely private matter, unintelligible to others and beyond my power to explain.