He glanced over at me.
“Right.” He smiled slightly. “Because he knew who we were when we walked up there, or at least he knew who I was.”
“His parents must have mentioned your visit yesterday.”
“You think that’s all he knows?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if they know about David and … me?”
“We don’t know who’s telling the truth around here, do we?”
“Nope. Can’t tell the truth tellers from the liars without a scorecard. And, Jenny, I need somebody to tell me the truth about that boy. It’s time to find out what kind of kid he is, what kind of parents they were, what kind of life he had with them and with Dennis Clemmons. You want to hear it, too?”
“You know where to go for that information?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Where?”
“Be a detective. Figure it out.”
On the way, I said, “So it’s not because she’s fat.”
“What?”
“Ginger. She doesn’t annoy you because she’s overweight. She annoys you because she’s not—your word—autonomous. She says, ‘I’m lonely,’ and you’re suggesting that’s a nonautonomous state. Autonomous people don’t get lonely?”
“Why should we? We’ve got ourselves for company.”
“You’re a humble bunch, aren’t you?”
“I sound arrogant?”
“What’s so great about yourselves, you’ll pardon my asking?”
“We’re not lonely.”
He laughed, and then I did.
“No,” I said, “but you’re really circular.”
“Actually, Jenny, I’m not so autonomous.”
“I know that.”
“Ack. I thought I had you fooled. How’d you catch on?”
“You’re the one who wants a child. Ergo: lonely.”
“I don’t agree with that at all!”
“You’re also the one who’s on his third marriage. Now you tell me: Of the two of us, who thinks he can’t make it on his own?” I probably should have stopped there. “And you work in a fishbowl. People all around you all of the time.” Even then, I wouldn’t let it drop. “I’d cope better on my own than you would, Geof.”
“Yeah, you’re meaner than I am.”
“Oh, come on! I guess some people can’t stand to get the tails of their sacred cows twitched.”
“Who you calling a cow?”
I burst out laughing, and after a second, so did he.
“All the statistics say so.” Still, I gnawed at this bone, though I lightened my tone of voice. “Given sufficient income, a middle-aged single woman without any children at home is as happy as a bear ni the woods.”
“You’re not middle-aged yet.”
“Thank you.” I waited a beat. “Unlike some people.”
“Mean!” he yelled. “I married a mean woman!”
Actually, I thought he had a point there: For somebody who was supposed to love him I was jabbing him with some awfully sharp needles. If he only knew: I’d put off telling him the truth about my reaction to his new fatherdom for three days now; I wondered how much longer I could delay it.
Forever would have suited me just fine.
“So where are we going now?” I asked him.
“You haven’t figured it out yet?”
“All right!” I said, exasperated. “I think I can guess,”
“Okay, then, tell me which way to turn to get there.”
Sometimes we played very strange games with each other.
Following my directions, we parked at the curb in front of Ron and Judy Mayer’s next-door neighbor’s house.
“We’ll make a detective of you yet,” Geof said with a smile. And then he pretended to quiz me as if he were a teacher and I, a pupil. “And why are we here?”
“Because Damon Montgomery told us that Judy Mayer was his best friend.” I added, “Sir,” and then stuck my tongue out at him. “Let me see that again,” he said and leaned over and kissed me.
19
“MOTHER WILL BE SORRY SHE MISSED YOU.”
Damon Montgomery was all smiles, as fhe’d been the day before. Dressed in red Bermuda shorts and a white polo shirt and sandals, he had a ballpoint pen in one hand and a portable telephone in the other when he answered the ring of his doorbell.
“Come on out to the porch, why don’t you?”
We followed him into a small but very pleasant screened-in porch that was, happily for us, shaded by a walnut free.
“Mother left a little while ago to pick up a few things at the grocery store. This is where I work most of the time, actually.” He dropped the phone into a cradle and looked rather helplessly at it and then over at us. “I still find myself picking it up, thinking I’ll call Judy, and then I remember that I can’t anymore.”
Overhead, a white ceiling fan was whirling fast enough to blur its blades; it had a repetitive squeak that made it sound like a record stuck in a groove. The noise should have been annoying, but in the heat, it was slightly hypnotizing instead. I sat down in a gliding porch rocker and proceeded to rock myself to the beat of the squeak of the fan into a more relaxed state of mind; Geof stretched his legs out in front of him in a yellow canvas basket chair that made him look so undignified I wanted to giggle; our host sat down on a two-cushion porch glider but only after transferring a laptop computer and some papers onto one of the cushions so that he could sit on the other. It looked as if we had interrupted him at some sort of labor. Nevertheless, he seemed happy, even eager to talk to us.
He leaned forward and rolled the pen between his palms.
“How’s David?” he inquired in his soft, gentle voice.
“Not too well,” I blurted before I thought to stop myself. I hurried on to cover my blunder. “He got fired from his job at McDonald’s.” Too late, I realized that wasn’t a good conversational gambit either, because I didn’t want him asking why. Chattering stupidly on, I added, “But there might be another job for him at the Amoco station on Jefferson if he’d get over there to apply for it …”
I appealed to Geof with my eyes, and he jumped in to save me: “Mr. Montgomery—”
“Damon, please. Or Day, that’s what Judy called me.”
“We were here last night as friends of David’s, that’s true, but I want you to know that I’m also a police officer.”
Our host’s eyebrows rose, and the pen stilled in his hands.
“David,” Geof continued, “is not satisfied with how the police department handled his parents’ deaths, and so I agreed to look into it for him. I want to tell you, too, that I knew Judy in high school. She and Ron and I were in the same graduating class. You described Judy as your best friend. I didn’t know either one of them after we got out of school … What was she like? Would you mind telling us?”
“Mind?” He smiled sadly at me, then put the pen on a side table, leaned back in the glider, and crossed one leg over the other. “I’d love to talk about her.”
Then he paused, looking at the house next door as if to gather his memories about it and about the woman who had lived there.
“There are so many things I could say … What exactly would you like to know?”
“I guess I don’t know exactly,” Geof said with an engaging smile and an air of admitting something to the other man. “I just want to get a feeling for her life and the kind of person she was, so maybe you could start by just talking about her as your friend?”
Montgomery nodded, apparently happy to begin there.
“We spent a lot of time together,” he said, turning to me as if he thought I’d be more likely to understand how it was between next-door neighbors. “We talked a lot, you could call it gossip, I guess. We drank a lot of coffee together.” He laughed A little, a sound of fondness. “It was because we both work … she worked … at home, you see. I’m a freelance writer.” That made sense of the laptop and the papers as well as of his presence in
his home during a weekday. It may also, I thought, have gone a long way toward explaining why he lived with his mother; it was my guess that most freelance writers, especially in a city the size of ours, didn’t make much money. “Annual reports, training programs, advertising, that sort of thing. And she was stuck beside that phone. Sometimes I’d call her, and we’d just talk on the phone and she’d take her business calls through call waiting. I didn’t mind. I could hang around on the phone for hours, anything to keep from going back to my own work.” He laughed a little again, and he threw a glance at his computer. “But there are a lot of times when I’m writing and I really need a break, just to get out of the house, you know, so I’d wander over next door and sit with Judy while she worked the phone.”
He smiled at me again, a melancholy smile this time.
“We had a great time. We just talked about everything, all the gossip about her clients, I mean, of course it was supposed to be confidential, but she knew I wouldn’t tell anybody. And all the latest about Ron’s crazy family and her nutty mother and all her problems with poor David, and of course I told her all my woes, too. It’s not always easy living with your own mother, as you might imagine!” Again, a little laugh. “I could go complain to Judy whenever my mother really got on my nerves. I miss that! Now I may have to kill the dear old girl, since I can’t let off steam with Judy! She knew what it was like to be surrounded by … doting … parents, like those smothering in-laws of hers.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and I saw his mouth tremble. When he opened his eyes again, he said to me, “I really loved her.” Then he turned his face toward Geof. “And I really miss her.”
Geof let a tactful moment pass, and then he asked, “What sorts of things did she tell you about her clients?”
“Oh, you know, who was cheating on their spouse—she always knew because they’d want her to lie about where they were if their spouse called. Or who was trying to avoid the IRS, that sort of thing. I really couldn’t say, not because it’s still so confidential—I mean, you are a policeman, so I guess I could tell you—but I reaUy can’t remember all the details. I never paid any attention to the names, frankly, I just loved the juicy stories.”
“Do you recall the names of any of her clients?”
“Oh, heavens, no, I have enough trouble remembering the names of my own clients!”
“What did you and your mother mean when you talked about that family being … helpless … Wasn’t that the word you used?”
“It was the word Mother used, yes, probably. Mom was always so hard in her opinions of them. Well, first there was Judy years ago, so upset when she had to leave Ron, and I held her hand through all of that, and then I had to wave her off to that terrible marriage to that awful Clemmons person. And then we had Ron just distraught over losing her and worrying about David being raised by that hoodlum, and I was over there next door all the time, trying to make him feel better, poor man. And then Judy came back, all crippled up—oh, that was so terrible, I could have killed Clemmons myself over that—and she needed a lot of help just getting used to her limitations, just making it through the day in the ordinary sorts of ways, you know. That lasted until Ron and his brothers got the house all fixed up for her, that helped her a lot, and then her own attitude improved a little when she got back to work again and as David calmed down. But how much does a teenager ever really calm down? I mean, the two of them came back to Ron just about the time that poor David’s hormones kicked in, so things were rough all over, I’ll tell you! Well, what can I say? I’ve just held a lot of hands over in that house, wiped up a lot of tears, and my mother’s cooked a good many meals for them during one emergency or another, and she’s baby-sat David more times than you could count, and, well, we’ve just tried to help, that’s all.”
I could see Geof trying to sort through all the verbiage to find the leads to unanswered questions.
“What sort of kid was David growing up?”
“Quiet, bright, we’re very fond of David.”
“Was he ever any trouble to his parents?”
“Of course.” Montgomery smiled. “What teenager isn’t?”
“Anything serious?” Geof put on a half smile to pretend he was joking. “Torture any neighborhood cats, burn down any barns, steal any cars, do any drugs?”
“Don’t they all try drugs? And beer?”
To make it seem more like a conversation, less like an interrogation, I chimed in with a question.
“How did Dennis Clemmons get injured, do you know?”
“I understand he got beat up.”
I shivered, thinking what a terrible beating it must have been and what poetic justice it was.
“Who did it?” Geof asked.
“A gang of punks was what I heard, but nobody ever got caught.”
Geof nodded, but I knew he was recalling the fact that there was no police record of that beating. “Do you know when it happened?”
“Well, it was after Judy left him … Let me think about the order of events … He got arrested for robbing that house … and then he hurt her … and then Dennis went to jail, but not for long enough if you ask me, a life sentence wouldn’t have been long enough! And as soon as he left, she took David and moved back here … and then he got out, and yes, I guess that’s when it happened, right after that.”
As Damon Montgomery had talked about Dennis Clemmons, his soft voice grew harsher, word by word, and his gentle manner toughened, so that by the time he was finished, he presented the demeanor of quite a different—and angrier—person than he had before.
Geof looked down at the little notebook he was holding in his left palm and referred to something he’d written there. “You said Judy got back to work after she was injured. Do you mean she had that answering service before then? I thought she took that on as a way of finding something useful to do after—”
“No, no, that little business actually started years ago when she took the calls for the Mayer construction business. It just kind of mushroomed into her own little sideline over the years, not that the Mayers liked the idea …”
“No?”
“Oh, no!” He feigned disapproval as if he were imitating the reaction of Ron’s family to Judy’s business. “If you’re a Mayer, you’re not supposed to do anything for your own advancement, heavens no, you can only contribute to the family.”
“Then why did Ron and Judy live here?”
“Instead of over there on the Heavenly Cul-de-Sac with Saint Ronald the Elder and Saint Catherine the Martyr?” He snickered, and for a moment, I could picture him with Judy, both of them gossiping to their hearts’ content. “Well, Ron built the house for one thing. But the reason he built it is because Judy wasn’t a robot like all the other wives. She just plain refused to live there on the same street with her in-laws.” Damon smiled in proud memory of his friend. “Judy could be very stubborn when she wanted to be.”
I shifted sweatily on the cushion of the rocking chair.
A branch of the walnut tree brushed against the porch, and I looked past the screen, suddenly aware of a new breeze blowing outside. Maybe the weather was going to change, at last, maybe some rain was going to settle in and lower the temperatures.
“How did she meet Dennis Clemmons?” I asked.
“Oh, Judy’d known Dennis forever,” our host said with a wave of one hand. “He was a little older, you know, like maybe ten years or so, and he’d known her since she was a kid, because he used to work for her mother, I think, running errands or something, I don’t know. Before she married him, Judy used to laugh about this older man who’d always had a crush on her, kind of an obsession, I guess. I thought it was creepy, but she just always laughed about it. Until he made her marry him, that is!”
“He made her marry him?” Geof sounded skeptical.
“She was scared of him,” Damon Montgomery said flatly. “Obviously, with good reason, as he proved. Do you know that bastard beat her with a telephone? Can you imagine?”
“S
o why marry him?” I persisted.
“Because she was scared of what he’d do if she didn’t!”
Geof and I exchanged glances that expressed the same thought: What the hell did that mean?”
“But why was she frightened?” Geof insisted.
Montgomery looked toward the house next door. “I don’t know.”
“I thought you talked to her about everyth—”
“She wouldn’t tell me that,” he said, looking hurt. I flashed a smug told-you-so glance at my husband. Hadn’t I said that Damon might have thought of Judy as his best friend to whom he could say anything, but that didn’t necessarily mean she returned the intimacy? Montgomery added as if justifying himself, “And she wouldn’t tell Ron either.”
“Wait a minute.” Geof held up his right hand, palm out, to slow down this so-called explanation we were getting. “Are you saying that Ron Mayer knew that his wife was leaving him and taking his son and marrying another man … because she was afraid of that man? Come on!”
“Yes!” Montgomery said, looking annoyed that we’d challenged his veracity. “That’s what I’m saying! Ron had to let them go, because he was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t!”
“Happen to who?” Geof raised his voice in exasperation.
But Montgomery only shrugged, still angry about our skepticism. “I’m telling you I don’t know. To Judy, maybe. Or David. Or even to Ron. I just don’t know, because she wouldn’t tell anybody, including me and including Ron. You think Ron and I didn’t agonize over it for weeks, months, years? You think he didn’t try to find out? Why do you think he kept such close tabs on Judy and David while they lived with that bastard? Why do you think he gave the bastard employment? To try to protect them in the only ways he could, that’s why! And he did keep them safe, at least until the very end. And that’s it. That’s all I know.”
Geof’s frustration exploded: “That is the fucking weirdest divorce story I ever heard!”