Confession

  “Want to drive it, Slick?”

  “Hot damn!” she exclaimed and ran around the car to trade places with me. She slid behind the wheel, then peered suspiciously at me over her sunglasses, which were white plastic with mirrored lenses. Below them, her mouth was a tangerine, round and full and looking juicy. “Why do I rate this?”

  “Because you’re giving up your lunch hour for me.”

  “What would I get if I gave up dinner?” She whooped with laughter as she nudged the gearshift into first and pressed in on the clutch. Her scent, a men’s cologne, filled the front seat. She was wearing a short black cotton skirt, a plain black T with a round neck and short sleeves, and flat black sandals. She didn’t have on any earrings today. When she worked the car’s pedals, her skirt hiked up on her long, thin athlete’s legs. “You got any other errands I can do for you, Jenny? You just let me know, listen, I’ll get your groceries, run to the bank …”

  “Baby-sit,” I yelled over the roar of her acceleration.

  “Are you kidding?” She took the corner of Third Avenue and Wisconsin like Janet Guthrie at the Indy 500. “You couldn’t get me to do that for a Porsche. No car is worth that much!”

  “You sure this is the place?” I asked her.

  We were parked across the street from 500 SE Bennett, the old address Sabrina had from her files. “Better be,” she said, “’cause it didn’t occur to me to do the obvious thing and look him up in this year’s phone book.”

  “You think Judy lived here?” I asked doubtfully.

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “God. Do you think it looked this bad then?”

  “Places like this never look any better.”

  We gazed at the house across the street in mutual appalled silence.

  It was big, three stories of dingy old gray clapboard set like a rotten tooth in a nearly empty mouth: This was a decimated block, with empty lots and blowing litter. It faced north and must have been cold as a sailor’s nose on an icy winter’s night. On this day, with the temperatures in the upper nineties, we heard the laboring of air conditioners in windows. The idea of Judy Baker Mayer—or any woman—bringing a child here to live with her utterly depressed me.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why would she marry him, live here, bring David here?”

  “Love,” said Sabrina in a cynical voice.

  “You think it’s a boarding house?”

  “For an independent woman, you sure ask a lot of questions.”

  “I’m trying to avoid going over there.”

  Sabrina laughed and opened her door. “Thought so. Think we ought to put the top up on this thing and lock it?”

  “Now you’re doing it.” I got out on my side and looked over at her. “No, convertible tops are too much of a temptation to slash. This way, anybody can see there’s nothing to steal. Did you forget to wear earrings today?”

  “I left them at somebody’s house this morning.” Sabrina joined me on the street side of the car on the one-way road, making an obvious point of avoiding my eyes. “I’ve been a supervisor too long,” she said. “I should be making more house calls. I forget that tickle in your stomach that you get when you’ve got to go up and ring a doorbell in a tough part of town where you don’t know what’s on the other side of the door and who’s going to be opening it.”

  Alarmed, I said, “We’re not planning on calling on him!”

  She looked at me, surprised. “We’re not?”

  “No, Sabrina, we’re just … looking.”

  “Damn,” she said, “I thought we were going to play cop.”

  “You really do think I’m Nancy Drew.”

  “Sometimes.” She grinned as she leaned lightly against my car frame and folded her arms across her chest and crossed one leg over the other. “So what are we trying to see?”

  “Whatever’s there. Whose house, Sabrina?”

  She looked up at the yellow-blue sky. “Whose house what?”

  “You know what. The earrings this morning.”

  “Might have a new man,” she said, still gazing skyward. There were no clouds, not even any little stray puffs, no hope of rain to cool things off.

  “Hey.”

  “Then again, I might not.” Now she looked at me, and I saw in the expression in her eyes: one-night stand. Port Frederick was a very small and limited town for a woman like Sabrina. If it were the sky and men were clouds, Sabrina was in a long drought. I knew better than to ask her if she’d been careful with this new man; she’d snap my head off for asking. “You got anything against me sauntering over and looking at the names on the mailbox?”

  “I suppose not.”

  When she started walking, I moved with her. She looked over at me in surprise again. “We get cloned, and I missed it?”

  I kept pace with her long stride. “I am not a chickenshit.”

  “Never said you were.” She smiled. “You’re just a middle-class white girl in a bad neighborhood, that’s all.”

  “Upper class.”

  “That right?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  We both laughed, because we both knew how utterly low rent my family could act at times, and we also both knew that Sabrina had attended Boston College on a basketball scholarship only because she deserved it and not because her folks couldn’t afford to send her, both of them being physicians retired from army practice. Slick had lived all over the world, from Polynesia to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which was why she had settled down here and never traveled anywhere anymore. When we had once accused her of being overly sophisticated, she had told us sharply, “Sophistication is nothin’ more than the ability to look cool at a cocktail party, and you want to know how I learned how to do that? By standing on ten different playgrounds at ten different schools in eight years from the time I was four till the time I was twelve pretending I didn’t care if nobody paid any attention to me. Yeah, I’m sophisticated, all right.”

  “How old was David when they lived here?” I asked her.

  “He was ten when she applied for assistance.”

  I thought about a ten-year-old, accustomed to a nice house, a good school, a bedroom probably decorated to suit him, and I thought about him leaving all that—not to mention his father—to move in here.

  “How long did Judy stay with this man?”

  “I don’t know, Jenny.”

  “Did she tell you he had a record?”

  “No, one of many things she did not say. What was he in for?”

  “Burglary, I think.”

  By that time we were standing by the curb on the other side of the street, nearest the house. Under our shoes, the asphalt was so hot it made me feel as if we were propped on a cookie sheet, baking at 350 degrees. I was beginning to feel brown and crispy around my edges. I thought of what else Sergeant Meredith had said the night before.

  “He beat her, Sabrina, did you know that?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised.”

  “That’s what put her in the chair.”

  Sabrina whistled her dismay.

  “I wonder if he beat David, too,” I said.

  “That wouldn’t surprise me either.”

  “Shit,” I said, feeling depressed.

  “How you talk,” she said in mock disapproval, but then she put an arm around my shoulders and patted me. “It’s kind of nice to see you get upset about it. I see so much of it, I get kind of inured to it.”

  “How you talk,” I said, and Sabrina took her arm away and laughed.

  “Maybe with our foundation …” I let her fill in the blanks.

  “Yeah. Maybe we can.” Suddenly she raised a long arm and pointed with a long, crimson fingernail. “Hey! Lookit that! I thought those were steps going up the side of the house!”

  There was a wide appendage with railings that was attached like a stairwell to the west side of the building going up from the yard to the second floor. Now we were close enough to see that it w
asn’t stairs at all, but instead a cleverly constructed ramp. Even as we stared at it, the grating noise of a sliding door drew our attention up to the second floor. We watched the front edge of a wheelchair and the front half of a seated body appear in a wide doorway that exited onto the top of the ramp, and then we watched as the rest of him rolled onto a small landing. He reached behind him to slide his door closed and we watched, rather fascinated, as he made his way down, zigzagging from landing to landing, to the ground. First he rolled down a gentle slope to a second landing, where he made a forty-five-degree turn that led him down a second slope to a third landing where he made another turn onto a third slope, a fourth landing, a fourth slope and then he was on the ground on an ordinary cement pathway. It was ingenious, for somebody who didn’t have an elevator, but I wondered how he got back up again.

  He rolled directly toward us.

  Sabrina stepped up onto the curb and then to the sidewalk, so she was right in his path. I hung back, a little worried about what she might be up to. When the man in the wheelchair was within earshot, Sabrina called out to him, “How come you don’t just live on the first floor?”

  “Can’t get the bastard who lives there to move out.”

  “How do you get back up that ramp?”

  He stopped his chair, then put his hand on top of a box on one arm of the chair and jiggled something on the box. The chair moved forward a couple of inches and then backward. In the bored, exasperated voice of a man who had been asked that question many times before, he said to her, “I can work this chair manually or by electric. Going down, I roll it myself, going up, I use the switch.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that.” She meant the ramp, whose inclines were articulated gently enough to allow for just the sort of movement he’d described. “And I’ve seen a lot of handicapped access in my time. Where’d you get the idea?” She was walking toward him, looking friendly and interested and long-legged and gorgeous. I thought she could surely make a lame man walk, possibly even raise the dead, which, in this town, might be somewhat easier than finding a decent date. “Did you design it yourself? Who built it for you?”

  I remained standing where I was, thinking, Sabrina, you’re overdoing it! And what was she doing anyway? She walked a circle around his chair, making sounds as if she admired it as well as the ramp. But the man was looking resentful, intruded upon, not at all flattered by the attention of the black goddess in the short black skirt, much less the ambulatory white girl a few feet away. He looked about fifty years old, and he had a puffy, red-veined face with a sulky, martyred-looking mouth and mean little eyes. He was dressed in old jeans and a gray, wrinkled T-shirt with one of my least favorite epithets lettered on it: “You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny.” His shoulders and the arms that protruded from the short-sleeved T looked enormously strong. Black running shoes and a black baseball cap with a Western Auto logo completed his ensemble.

  Sabrina chattered on, the very essence of flirty, feather-headed, girlish charm, the very antithesis of who she was: “Was it very expensive, or did you get some sort of government assistance, or did insurance pay for it?” She stopped in front of him and gave him a toothy smile. “It’s none of my business, I know, but … do you think it’s really worth all the trouble instead of just finding a place to live on the first floor or someplace with an elevator?”

  “It ain’t my idea. Some friends built it for me. I didn’t pay for it, they did. And do you think I’d live in this shithole if I had the money to move someplace else?”

  She regarded him calmly. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You wouldn’t know about shit,” he said and rolled away from us.

  But Sabrina wouldn’t let it go. “What happened to you? ’Nam?”

  “Fuck you,” he yelled and kept rolling.

  She turned my way, posing. “Think I have a career in the diplomatic corps?”

  “Hey,” I said, walking up to her and laughing so that only she could hear me, “just because a man’s disabled, that don’t make him adorable. Why did you do that to him?”

  “Did you notice what was printed on the back of his chair?”

  “No.”

  “Property of D.C.”

  “That was him?” I was flabbergasted. “That repulsive creature was Dennis Clemmons?” I stared suspiciously at her. “How’d you know that?”

  “I didn’t, I was working up to asking him if Clemmons still lives here when I saw the back of his chair.”

  I looked up at the ratty old house, then at the man rolling away, and then at Sabrina. “I guess he’s not a burglar any more. Tell me one more time why you think she married him?”

  “Love?” Sabrina said again, but this time she also sounded doubtful.

  “You didn’t tell me he was disabled, too.”

  “That’s ’cause she didn’t tell me.” Sabrina turned on the flat heel of her right sandal, and I had to trot to keep up with her as she recrossed the street to my car. “Damn stupid woman. He was probably getting Social Security or V.A. payments, and they were hiding it from me so she could get more benefits. She should have told me the truth. I might have gotten her more help, not less.”

  “I’m finding this all very confusing,” I confessed. “Judy was supposed to have Parkinson’s, but she didn’t, she had injuries because that man beat her up. And he was supposed to be able-bodied, but he isn’t, because … we don’t know why. I’m confused, Sabrina.”

  She patted my arm. “That’s because you’re personally involved, Jenny. It’s very simple. She was a liar and he’s a thug. There’s nothing confusing about that, is there?” She arched her eyebrows at me. “So now, let’s see … first the kid, then”—she gestured toward the man in the wheelchair that was now a block away from us—“him. How do you like your new family so far, Jenny?”

  I gave her a sour look. “I guess you don’t want to drive back.”

  Sabrina held up her hands, palms out, in surrender.

  “Sorry,” she said, grinning in high good humor.

  I relinquished the keys to her.

  “I’m good at this!” she bragged as she got back behind the wheel. “Maybe I should go into detecting …”

  “Just follow the clues back to your office, please.” A few blocks later, I said, “Sabrina, I’ve been thinking about names for this foundation we’re putting together. What would you think of calling it the Hercules Foundation? For strength, for endurance, for—”

  “For another man, you want to name another damn foundation for another damn man? Especially when it’s a foundation we particularly want to be sensitive to the needs of women?”

  “Oh. Well, he was into labor …”

  “Very funny.”

  “Okay, scratch Hercules.”

  “Yeah, scratch Hercules and all you’ll find underneath is another damn man.”

  I glanced over at her, at the set of her jaw, at the stiffness of her posture and the jerkiness of her movement as she shifted gears, and I realized I had ruined her good mood. I did a little inductive reasoning of my own and detected that Sabrina didn’t have a very good time on her date last night.

  As we traded places again, I asked her: “Why aren’t you surprised to hear that he beat her up?”

  “Because he looks like the type.”

  “What does that type look like, Sabrina?”

  “Like Dennis Clemmons,” she yelled back to me over her shoulder as she ran back into work.

  I got back into my driver’s seat and then sat in the sun a moment thinking: It must be something about the martyred look, that air of being so aggressively aggrieved at the world, those mean little eyes. Hardly scientific. I remembered a married cop that Sabrina had played around with a few years before; he’d been a wife beater, too. So maybe what Sabrina “recognized” was something dangerously familiar: the perverse, magnetic pull of an attraction to violence. Maybe Sabrina had a bit of it. It certainly looked as if Judy Baker Mayer Clemmons Mayer had succumbe
d to that pull at least three times in her life: once to the husband who permanently injured her and twice to the one who killed her.

  “What about her attraction to Geof?” a little voice asked me.

  “Yeah, well,” I said out loud, “cops may be attracted to guns and violence, but they can work it out in a healthy way.” Some of them. Maybe.

  At breakfast, Geof had asked me if I’d drive by Port Frederick High School that day to see if David was in attendance. We didn’t know where he was living, so Geof just wanted to know if he could locate the kid whenever he wanted to fairly easily. It seemed a safe enough little errand for me to run for him in the middle of the day.

  So, next, I went looking for David Mayer.

  And I wondered in regard to the violence: like fathers, like son?

  10

  THIS LAST MONDAY IN AUGUST, A WEEK BEFORE Labor Day, also marked the first day of public school in Port Frederick. I cruised the high school parking lot looking for the old black BMW motorcycle. In the years since Geof and I and the Mayers had attended, it had changed for the better—if your priorities were an air-conditioned gymnasium and soccer fields to accompany the football field. But now there were also computers in every classroom and girls teams on the new soccer fields, and there’d been peaceful desegregation without busing, not such a difficult task when there’s only about a three percent minority population in an entire metropolitan area. All that aside, Port Frederick High was still just a big block of a red brick building where the town’s most active hormones hung out during the weekdays for nine months a year.

  I found the motorcycle parked off by itself under one of the four gargantuan Norwegian spruce trees that formed an imposing line streetside. When I was David’s age, they’d been less than half as tall as they were now. Their long needles and tapering tan-colored cones still littered the ground as they had in my day when my girlfriends and I had gathered the cones in our skirts one year to take home and work into Christmas wreaths. I wasn’t good at crafts; my wreaths had looked like dead foliage drooping from a bent hanger. Another of those quirky little nodules of memory came back to me every time I drove past those trees: a high school biology teacher telling us there was a kind of Norwegian spruce that was used to make violin sound boxes. Who cares? I’d thought then. Now, I thought: Isn’t that interesting? I wondered what it was about Norwegian spruces, specifically, that made them good for resonating sweet sounds. Ah, if only I’d had the intellectual curiosity then that I had now, but back then I was mostly curious about boys.