“Oh? Where did he go?”
“He was shacked up … uh, living … with Linda. Some place on the west side.”
“Linda? Linda who?”
“We don’t ever use last names here, okay? I mean, it isn’t cool, asking about last names.”
“Thanks for telling me. I wouldn’t want to be uncool.”
She laughed again, then said, “Well, c’mon. You can meet some of the gang. If they don’t want to talk to you they’ll just walk away—or tell you to drop dead.”
He did not learn much during the next half hour. There were twenty or so kids in the dining room, all of them professing to be shocked by the crime. The consensus was that Aaron was smart and friendly. Had a temper just like everybody else. Liked good music, movies, and had a girlfriend named Linda who had moved in with him when he left Savior House. Goodman, using a singular kind of shorthand he had developed through the years, jotted down notes in a small black notebook that had become his bible.
Why did he leave?
Everybody left sooner or later.
Where was Linda now?
Nobody has seen her since the murder.
Did they think Stampler killed the bishop?
That’s what the papers said.
Why did he do it?
Nobody had a clue.
Did he and the bishop get along?
Everyone agreed that Aaron was his favorite in this community of lost children.
Who were his closest friends?
He really didn’t have any close friends. He was kind of a loner.
“I guess maybe Billy Jordan is as close to a close friend as he had,” Maggie said. “He and the other guys who were altar boys.”
“Aaron was an altar boy?”
“Not really,” one of the boys said. “He was kind of, you know, studying for it But the bishop included him in with the others anyway.”
“The others?”
“The other altar boys,” the same boy, who was short and had skin tormented by acne, said somewhat jealously. “It was like this private club, y’know. The bishop used to tape the services on his television camera, then play it back to them on TV, so they could see what they were doing wrong.”
“Him too, huh?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“The guy I work for is a video nut, too. Me? I depend on the good old little black notebook.”
“Afraid we weren’t much help,” Maggie said. “Come back in the evening. Most of the kids are here then. Maybe some of the others know more about him.”
“I’ll do that, and soon,” he said.
When he left, he stood outside in the playground for a while, huddled against the cold, remembering crisp fall days when they played touch out here, but only a few names came back to him—Sean Fitzhugh and Solly Friedman and a nasty little kid named Donny something-or-other who used to spit on the ball when he screwed up. Goodman had grown into manhood here and now it was a place for runaways and druggies and family rejects, and despite the cheery colors and the sense of family it provided, there was about the old girl a climate of melancholy that saddened him.
He did not see the huddled figure watching through fearful eyes from a window on the third floor of the old building as Goodman left the place of his youth.
Jane Venable looked up with surprise when Vail walked out of the elevator and into the madhouse outer sanctum of the D.A.’s office. She assumed he was going to see Yancey but realized quickly, as he threaded his way toward her glass cubicle, that he was coming to her office. He stood outside the door, tapped on the wooden doorjamb and she waved him in.
“My God,” she said. “Is no place sacred?”
“Just a friendly courtesy call, Counselor,” Vail said.
“Oh sure. Where are the poison darts?”
“I thought maybe we could handle this one in a civilized way.”
“You don’t know a civilized way, Vail.”
He looked outside her window, at the mass of jammed-up desks, copy machines, telephones, file cabinets and people—the paraphernalia of justice. “It lifts my heart to see the bureaucracy at work,” he said. “I have one person who can do in one day what that mob out there would take a week to screw up.”
“They’re very good,” she said defensively. “We don’t go in for a lot of show here.”
“You don’t go in for any show at all.”
“I’m busy,” she sighed. “Just what brings you to the lion’s den, anyway?”
“Lioness,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Let me tell you something, Vail, I don’t trust you. It makes me nervous when you’re in the building, let alone my office.”
He sat on the corner of her desk in the absence of an invitation to take a chair and leafed amiably through a stack of correspondence.
“What do you want?” she demanded, ripping the stack away from under his hand and moving it to the other side of the desk. “Are you just here to harass me?”
“There’s a devious mind at work,” he said. “I drop by for a little prehearing sit-down and what do I get? Verbal abuse. I came to make sure we both know what the rules are.”
“Shoat sets the rules.”
“Well, it always helps for the opposing sides to make sure they have everything clear.”
“Come on, what do you really want?”
“I got on this case yesterday, okay? I just thought we could talk things over.”
Her eyes narrowed and she leaned back in her chair and chewed on the eraser of her pencil. Then she nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell you what the rules are. No plea-bargaining. No insanity plea. No change in venue and no reduced sentence for any reason. We’re going to max the kid out. Any questions?”
“That seems to cover the landscape.”
Her eyes took on a vicious twinkle. “Seen the pictures?” she asked, almost demurely.
“Inflammatory, immaterial…”
“Inflammatory my ass.”
“And a lovely ass—”
“They’re admissible across the board,” she snapped, cutting him off. “They show the heinous nature of the crime. The brutality …”
“Don’t use ‘heinous,’” he said, wiggling a finger at her. “Half the jury won’t know what you’re talking about.”
She waved her hands at him and rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay, you want to fight over the pictures? Fine. We’ll do it when the time comes.”
“Actually the pictures could make a pretty argument for insanity. Nobody in their right mind would—”
She cut him off again. “I talked to Stampler for an hour before you cut us off.”
“And you really think he did that?”
“I know he did it,” she scoffed. “He’s as sane as you and I.”
“Which is not saying a hell of a lot. Anyway, it could have been temporary.”
“I’m not discussing this case with you, Vail. Not until we’re in court and in front of the judge, got it? Not another word. You have access to anything that’s public record. Other than that, I’m not telling you a damn thing.”
“I’m not here to snoop.”
“No, you have that pretty lady from your office to do that. What’s her name?”
“Naomi Chance.”
“Where did she work before you hired her, the CIA?”
“She wants to make sure we have everything we’re entitled to.”
“I wouldn’t dare deprive you, Counselor. There’s no way you’re going into court and yell foul.”
“Shoat gave me fifty-eight days to prepare this case. You think that isn’t foul?”
“That’s between you and His Honor.”
“Hell, it’ll probably take a month just to seat the jury.”
“Well, then, we’ll just take a month. It’s going down here, period. I told you, no deals. No change of venue. No nothing! Your boy’s as guilty as Judas.”
“Christ forgave Judas,” Vail said with a smile.
“Unfortunately for you, Shoat isn’t Christ. Forg
iveness is not on his top ten list.”
“So it’s no holds barred, that it?” he asked.
“Give me a break. When did you ever bar a hold of any kind?”
“Hardball all the way?”
She smiled sweetly.
“No prisoners,” she purred.
When he left Venable’s office, Vail stopped at one of the desks in the outer office and dialed his number. The service answered. Naomi was obviously out on the range, rounding up stray bits of gossip.
“Miss Chance left you a message,” the operator said cheerfully. It says, ‘The Judge called. We got us a shrink. Name: Dr. M. B. Arrington, due to arrive tomorrow. Great credentials. Spent the last three years working with what the Judge calls aberrational behavior subjects. See you later. Naomi.’ Does all that make sense?”
“I guess,” Vail said. “Thanks.” He hung up.
Dr. M. B. Arrington, he thought to himself. Now there’s a nice wholesome American name. Why couldn’t the Judge have found someone named Steiner or Freudmetz—something German or Viennese? Foreign types always impressed juries more than homegrown psychiatrists.
Well, perhaps—Vail hoped—he would turn out to be a gray-haired, cantankerous old curmudgeon, set in his ways, arrogant to the prosecutor’s prodding. Hopefully old Doc Arrington would withstand the assaults of that merciless inquisitor Jane Venable.
Squat steel tankers and lumbering barges, laden with kraft paper from the big mills of Minnesota and Wisconsin, lumber from the forests of northern Michigan and chemicals, pig iron and coal from New York and Pennsylvania, all skirmished winter blizzards and summer squalls to deliver their goods to the expanse of docks and warehouses known as the Region. Actually Region Street was a block removed from the lakefront, but the clang and clamor of cranes, front loaders and derricks as they dipped the cargo from the holds of the steamships created a constant din day and night. It was a muscular, noisy community of warehouses and storage bins, not a place where one would choose to live.
But on the east end of the Region, four three-story-high warehouses lay fallow and neglected like a buffer between waterfront and city. Abandoned by their owners and ignored by the banks which had ultimately inherited them, they had long ago been condemned by the city. But the wrecking balls and bulldozers of progress were busy elsewhere and so these grim, characterless squares of brick had become flophouses for the homeless and indigent. Within the windowless walls of the buildings, which their denizens called the Hollows, many of the city’s disenfranchised erected their own peculiar domiciles, usually large wooden crates gathered together like rooms to form unstructured apartments, known as “standers” to the inhabitants. The concrete floors and brick walls compromised protection from wind and snow with a damp and frigid milieu, whatever warmth was conceived in these confines soared up through the perpetual darkness and dissipated in the eaves. Since no garbage collection or sanitation was provided, the bleak and airless Hollows smelled of rotten food, unwashed bodies and feces. Echoing through the airless cavities were the sounds of human misery—coughing, sneezing, retching—and the diatribes of lonely, desolate souls venting their fury at the fates which had delivered them to this unsavory madhouse. What it must be like in the summertime was beyond Goodman’s comprehension.
He wandered through the scattered standers with a flashlight, hoping to find some clue to Stampler’s abode. The first Hollow had produced nothing. As he entered the second, his flashlight beam pointing into the darkness like a slender finger of light, a man stepped out of the gloom, startling him. The light beam revealed a bent and decrepit human wreck, his face a vista of cracks and wrinkles, a gray scraggle of a beard masking his jawline, his eyes ravaged by failure and abuse.
“Whatcha want?” he demanded in a voice cracked with age and misuse, his breath in foul concert with the environment.
“I’m looking for a stander,” Goodman said.
“Whose?”
“Name’s Aaron. Aaron Stampler. Young boy, nineteen, twenty. Pleasant-looking …”
“Shit, I know him, I know all about him,” he said, emphasizing him each time he said it.
“What about him?” Goodman demanded, surprised that he was reacting so defensively.
“Killed that priest. Ev’body knows about it. Stander’s been picked clean. Got his radio, blankets, ev’thing. Word travels fast in the Hollows.” His croak was supposed to pass for a laugh.
“Which one is it?” Goodman asked. “I’ll just take a look.”
“You kin to him?”
“I’m his uncle,” Goodman lied.
“Shit.”
Goodman took out a five-dollar bill and held it under the flashlight beam.
“Which one?” he asked again.
The old derelict eyed the bill, his lips working as if he were trying to swallow something stuck in his throat. He reached out for it with trembling, dirt-encrusted fingers that protruded through the raveled ends of an old pair of gloves. Goodman flicked the bill back into his fist.
“Show me first,” he said.
“Shit.”
The old man lurched crablike through stunted canyons of crate and cardboard to a stander near the rear of the Hollow. It was built of sheets of plywood and had about it a sense of form, a symmetry that showed it had been structured with care and at least a conscious sense of design. A flimsy door stood shattered, its lock lying broken on the floor of the warehouse.
“Didn’t take long,” Goodman said.
“He killed a priest,” the derelict snarled.
“Here,” Goodman said, shoving the five dollars into his hand. “Go buy yourself a Cadillac.”
“Asshole,” the old man said, and vanished into the darkness.
Goodman entered the stander. It had been demolished. Clothes, blankets, mattress, candles, all the basics for life in the Hollow, were gone. There was litter strewn around. A few dungs that had been passed over by the scavengers. Actually there were two rooms in Aaron Stampler’s dreary home. The second, constructed of three refrigerator crates, was like a closet. A dowel was fastened a few inches from the top of the small room, obviously for hanging clothes. Goodman could tell Aaron had built this pitiful dwelling with as much pride as possible, though it had obviously taken but a few minutes to strip it clean.
Goodman let his light roam the walls of the main room and then the closet. There were half a dozen paperback books strewn on the floor—whoever had scavenged the stander was not interested in reading. Engrossed, he was unaware of the presence behind him, a mere movement of air in the darkness. As Goodman started to read the titles of the books, he heard a sound—a footfall on concrete, perhaps, or a subtle breath disturbing the silence—and he whirled toward it. As he spun around, he was hit on the side of the jaw. It was a glancing blow, misdirected by the darkness and Goodman’s sudden turn, but it knocked Goodman off his feet. He tried to swing the flashlight up but a hand knocked it loose and it went spinning across the stander and came to rest against the wall, its light reflecting dimly off the plasterboard. His assailant scrambled in the semidarkness, picking up books and throwing them down. Goodman jumped up and dove across the room, wrapping both arms around the attacker. Goodman swung him around, shoved him away and socked him, but his punch missed the mark in the dark. As he started to swing again, the obscure figure dove headfirst into Goodman’s midriff. Goodman’s wind whooshed out of him as a shoulder slammed into his stomach. The two surged backward, hit the flimsy wall of the stander and crashed through it, vaulting into the darkness of the Hollow. Goodman floundered in total darkness, reached out in random desperation and grabbed an ear, felt an earring dangling from its lobe and, locking his fingers around the bauble, ripped it free. His attacker screamed with pain and rolled away. Goodman got his feet under him and stood unsteadily. He was as disoriented as a blind man, crouching, his hands probing the air in front of him. He stood dead still, waiting. Then he heard footsteps echoing away from him and his adversary was absorbed into the black heart of the Hollo
w.
He groped his way back into Aaron’s stander, found his flashlight and looked at his hand. Lying in his bloody palm was an inch-long silver earring shaped like a teardrop, a bit of flesh still clinging to the clasp.
He garnered up the paperback books and headed out into the world of the living.
TWELVE
The unmarked black sedan moved slowly through the traffic on Division Street and turned right at Courthouse Square. A block away, a dozen members of the press shuffled impatiently at the foot of the steps to the courthouse, waiting for the notorious prisoner to arrive. There were four television remote trucks, including one from CNN. Stampler sat in the back seat, his hands cuffed to a thick leather belt and his feet shackled with a foot-long length of chain. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, a wine-colored tie with tiny yellow squares and penny loafers that were half a size too big, a problem Aaron had solved by stuffing newspaper in the toes. Vail was permitted to ride with him. Stampler sat in the middle between his attorney and a city marshal. There were two other marshals in front, including the driver.
“Sure drew yourself a crowd, kid,” said the marshal in the back seat.
“Circus day,” said Vail contemptuously. “Okay, Aaron, this is what’s going to happen …”
“I know what an arraignment is, Mr. Vail. That mains we go inta court and the pros’cutor for the state’ll make the charge agin’ me.”
“That’s right. She’s going to charge you with murder in the first degree.”
“Yes suh.”
“That means they’ll seek the death penalty.”
“Guard told me.”
“First with the good news, huh?”
Aaron smiled. “Reckon so.”
“I want you to understand, we could have gone in the back way, avoided the circus in front of the courthouse. But it’s time the press got a look at you. I’m sure they’re expecting the Wolfman or Dracula. We’ll give them a little surprise.”
“I thank’ee for the new suit, shoes, ’n’ all.”
“I had to guess at the pants’ length.”
“They’re perfect. Never owned a suit this good afore.”
“You look nice, Aaron,” said Vail. “I want you to be pleasant but don’t go in there smiling like you just finished a twenty-dollar T-bone. They’re going to mob you, stick microphones in your face, yell questions at you. Ignore them, don’t say a word. Not a thing. We’ll get you through the circus.”