Mom Among the Liars Page 13
TEN
It was after five when I got back to the courthouse. Ann wasn’t out of court yet, and Roger was at the switchboard, talking to various members of the Pulverizin’ Plumbers bowling team. He stopped for a moment to report to me that, with most of them now accounted for, nobody had failed to confirm Ron Pulaski’s alibi for the time of the murder. Then I went into my office and put in a call to Mom.
She sounded harried. “You have to talk to me quick,” she said. “I’m going out for dinner in a couple hours, and I didn’t take my bath and get dressed yet.”
“What’s the dinner, Mom?”
“It’s only a friend of mine. We’re going to a restaurant and afterward to a movie. The new one with Arnold the Schwartze. You know who I mean? This big German fellow that’s got so many muscles you think he buys them cut rate in the store.”
“I didn’t know you went in for that sort of movie. All that violence, people fighting and getting bloody.”
“To tell you the truth,” Mom answered, “I personally prefer the old Bette Davis type pictures. I like it when she’s this nasty woman, she does everybody dirt, she steals everybody’s boyfriend, she wears beautiful clothes on her, and at the end she gets religion and sacrifices herself for the man she loves. Five handkerchiefs at least I have to bring to the theater. But movies like those they don’t make anymore. And my friend who’s taking me out tonight, he’s crazy for this Schwartze fellow. He’s younger than me, so naturally his taste isn’t so old-fashioned.”
“Younger than you?” I couldn’t keep the uneasiness out of my voice.
“Five years. He’s going on seventy.” Mom’s tone of voice was perfectly casual. No way to figure out if she was putting me on.
“Who is this guy anyway?” I said.
“Only a man. At the YMCA I met him. We see each other every week at the swimming pool. Finally he asked me I should go out with him.”
“The YMCA? He isn’t Jewish?”
“Who says so? The YMCA is open to everybody that pays the membership fee. Am I a Christian? For that matter, am I young, am I a man?” She gave a laugh. “Since when do you care about such things, if people are Jewish already? It never bothered you when you were growing up. All the shiksas you went out with, and if I mentioned it to you what did I get? ‘Mom, you’re so narrow-minded!’ And what about the women you’re going out with here in this town? Did you bring one to meet me yet that knows what a circumcision looks like?”
“I married a Jewish woman, didn’t I?” But I broke off, losing heart for the argument. I didn’t feel like talking about Shirley. Not to Mom anyway, who had never liked her and made no bones about showing it. “Besides, the women I’ve gone out with aren’t the point. The point is—” But I couldn’t go on. The point was, no matter how far away I strayed from the old values and traditions, I expected my mother to uphold them. If I said this out loud, though, she’d give one of her sarcastic hoots and I’d feel like an idiot.
“Excuse me, but time is flying,” Mom said. “Are you planning to tell me what happened with the case since we had lunch—or are you planning not to tell me?”
So I went through it with Mom in detail, Roger’s information about Harry Stubbins, his confirmation of Ron Pulaski’s alibi, the confrontation Ann and I had with McBride at his campaign headquarters, my talk with Mrs. McBride and her daughter. I could imagine Mom nodding and pulling at her lower lip. When I came to a stop, she said, “It’s funny. Very funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“Believe me, I wish I knew. It’s a little something that’s inside my head, only it won’t come out.” She broke off with a little sigh. “I’m getting old, this is the problem.”
The “little something” must have been pretty annoying, because otherwise Mom never starts talking about getting old.
But a moment later she snapped out of it, and her voice was brisk and businesslike again. “Enough wasting time on things we couldn’t help yet. How about you should pay a little attention to a couple things you could help?”
“What are they, Mom?”
“The first thing is, call up the high school that this little girl, McBride’s daughter, goes to. Find out if she was really at a play rehearsal till late Saturday night.”
“Laurel McBride is a sixteen-year-old kid,” I said. “You don’t actually think she—”
“Call the school, then I’ll know what I think. Second thing—you should do please what you didn’t do today, you didn’t talk to the Pulaski girl’s ex-husband and ask him the question I told you to ask.”
“I just didn’t have any time for that.”
“No time.”
I heard Mom heaving one of her deepest sighs. “All right, all right, now I have to hang up, but tomorrow you’ll ring me up maybe, when you’ve got a few more answers.”
I made a noncommittal noise and hung up the phone. But inside my head I was telling myself: Enough already, a man your age is too old to be intimidated by his mother. When in the course of human events—
I looked up and saw Roger standing in my doorway. I supposed he had heard pretty much everything Mom had said to me. When she talks on the phone, she always shouts at the top of her voice; it’s as if she doesn’t really believe this invention will work.
“Would you like me to take care of that, Dave?” Roger said. “I could drop in on Ron Pulaski first thing tomorrow morning—”
“Why would you do that?”
“To ask that question. Did he find out about the murder from the radio news or the television news?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, I don’t know. I heard your mother saying it’s important—”
“I’ll decide what’s important in this investigation, okay? Who’s in charge anyway?”
His face got red, and he went scurrying out the doorway.
ELEVEN
The next morning, Tuesday, I started to the office shortly before nine. My head was aching just a little, after a heavy night with this woman I was going out with; she worked as a legal paraprofessional with one of the judges in town, and her staid and formal manner on the job would never prepare you for the way she could cut loose after hours.
It was pretty cold out, and the heater in my car wasn’t operating too well. I turned on the radio. Some country music, with all the instruments and the singer sounding as if their noses were stopped up, twanged away at me, irritating me enough to keep my mind off my goose pimples. I was just turning into the downtown section, seven or eight blocks from the courthouse, when I saw something through the windshield that made me pull up quickly next to a parking meter.
Our client, Harry Stubbins, was standing on the corner. He had his hat—or the dilapidated hunk of cloth that passed for a hat—in his hand, and he was holding it out at passersby.
I got out of the car and went up to him. “What’re you doing here? You’re supposed to be at the Shelter for the Homeless! You heard the judge—”
“My dear fellow—” The words were slurred, but they came rolling out of Stubbins with a definite reverberation to them. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was drunk. Maybe he couldn’t tell the difference himself any more. “—you don’t suppose they make you huddle in their depressing barn all day long? Matter of fact, they kick you out of there shortly after you’ve had your breakfast, won’t let you back in till dinnertime.”
“That’s all right then. They did give you some breakfast before they let you loose today.”
“Ample portions of coffee, juice, and griddle cakes, made from the finest shoe leather. Kind of nourishment that sticks to the ribs. Truth is, I’m wondering if it’ll ever get unstuck.”
“You shouldn’t be out on the street begging though. It’s against the law.”
“Is it?” His bloodshot eyes blinked up at me in amazement. “Very odd law. You’d think they’d want a man to ply his trade, earn an honest living. With laws like that, they could drive a man into a life of crime. Good God, I might becom
e a stockbroker!” He gave one of his thin hacking laughs. “Not to worry, however, my dear fellow. Been doing this sort of thing in this town for years, nobody ever arrested me for it yet. Authorities have much bigger game to stalk. All those drug dealers and rapists and serial killers we’re always reading about.”
“Still, you don’t want them to run you in while you’re out on bond. It would embarrass the judge, and he could blame the public defender for it at some future date. Here, let me give you a couple of bucks so you can have lunch.”
“Much too early for my lunch.”
“I’m expecting you to hold onto it till the time comes. Meanwhile, I’ll deposit you in a nice warm place.”
He gave a deep sigh. “No such place, not for wicked old derelicts like myself. Used to sneak into the movie theaters in weather like this. But the movies don’t open till two in the afternoon.”
“You don’t have to sneak into the place I’ve got in mind. It’s free and open to the public. Come on, get into the car.”
He scrambled in. I admit it made me nervous to have him there; I had just had the seat covers cleaned. But I swallowed my qualms, like a good Samaritan, and we started west.
On the way I said, “We’re making some progress on your case. Ann may have some news for you soon.”
“Ah yes, many thanks.” He burrowed down into the seat, as if he planned to hibernate there for the rest of the winter. “My old father always said to me, ‘Make sure you’ve got a good lawyer, everything else will take care of itself.’”
“Your old father? Where was that? Where did you grow up anyway?”
One round bloodshot eye rolled up at me from the pile of rags that enveloped him. “Thought we agreed about that. No probing into the dead dark past. You don’t stick your nose into my history, I won’t stick mine into yours.”
I hesitated, then I decided there was really nothing to lose. “You should feel pretty much at home in this place we’re going to. It’s the public library.”
He didn’t say anything. The bloodshot eye was still fixed on me.
“After all, literature is your line of work, isn’t it, Professor Stubbins?”
For another moment the eye glittered, and then it rolled up and disappeared from view. After a moment a noise came from deep within the pile of rags. A soft whimpering noise.
“What’d I do to you?” The noise finally turned into words. “Did I hurt you? Why’d you steal from me?”
“What did I steal from you?”
“Privacy. Sacred right of privacy. Protected by the Constitution. Why’d you take it away from me?”
“We’re not taking anything away from you. We’re trying to keep them from taking everything away from you. We have to know who you are if we’re going to help you.”
He said nothing to that. The whimpering noise started again.
“Is this really how you want it?” I said. “Your kind of privacy—it’s nothing but wallowing in self-pity!”
“Self-pity!” The word came spitting out of him, and at the same time his head popped up from the pile of rags. His eyes were gleaming, and they seemed to be perfectly focused. “Any idea how tired we are of hearing that word?”
“We?”
“‘Self-pity’—the all-purpose anesthetic. Not for us, for you. Sure cure for feeling somebody else’s pain.”
“We want to help you get rid of your pain!”
“Who asked you?” His voice got louder. “What do you know about it anyway? Did you ever lose everything?”
He showed me a contorted face, blazing up into mine.
“Yes,” I said. I started to say more, to explain what I meant, but suddenly the words wouldn’t come out of me. I remembered those first few months, after Shirley died. I remembered being alone in that apartment, sitting there night after night. Maybe, if I’d had a bottle to keep me company— Maybe, if I hadn’t been brought up by a Jewish mother who looked down her nose at drinking— Who was I, or anybody else, to give another human being grades on how he handled his despair?
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, and thank God we got to the public library just then, and I was able to bundle the old man out of my car and into the front entrance.
* * *
I was still a little shaky when I got to the office. Roger even asked me if I was feeling all right. I ignored the question and told him to call up Laurel McBride’s high school and find out about her Saturday night play rehearsal. He gave me a look of astonishment. “She’s a sixteen-year-old kid! You don’t really think—”
He was saying pretty much what I had said to Mom over the phone yesterday. So I gave him the same treatment Mom had given me. “Call the school, then I’ll know what I think.”
Then we were interrupted by Ann buzzing for me in her office.
“I just got a call from Doris Dryden,” she said. “She’s got some information for us about the murder. She wants to talk to me right now.”
“She couldn’t talk over the phone?”
“Her information is too ‘sensitive,’ she says. That’s the word she used. ‘Phones can be tapped,’ she said. So I’m going down to her campaign headquarters, and I’d like you to come with me.”
Dryden was running her campaign from her own apartment, a condominium in a nice little building close to downtown.
In the last few years, I should explain, Mesa Grande has discovered the condominium. Half a dozen new apartment houses have sprung up; they’re constructed mostly of red brick, and what you buy are picture windows, built-in air conditioning, landscaped driveways and parking lots, and terrific views of the mountains, if you happen to be located on the expensive side of the building. Rumor has it that these apartments sell for pretty stiff prices, anyway by Mesa Grande standards.
Dryden must be doing pretty well for herself, I thought, as Ann and I drove up to her building. At the front entrance, after I had parked the car, we came up against another luxury that few apartment houses in Mesa Grande have: a doorman. He was tall, black, and dignified in his gold braid and epaulettes. He gave us a fishy look as he asked whom we had come to see. Then he rang her from his lobby switchboard, and his fishy look relaxed somewhat after she told him to send us up.
Her living room had half a dozen people in it, sitting on folding metal chairs at makeshift desks, pounding away at typewriters or barking into phones. Whatever Doris ordinarily had on her walls—reproductions of slick hard-edged abstract art, judging from the style of her furniture—it was all covered up now by campaign posters. They featured her own face, in various sizes and with various expressions: earnestness, happiness, grim determination, sympathetic concern. All of these faces illustrated her slogan, in big black letters: VOTE FOR DRYDEN: GIVE COMPETENCY AND COMPASSION A CHANCE.
She was looking over the shoulder of one of the typists, a smooth-cheeked college boy who, it seemed to me, couldn’t be older than fourteen. (On the whole her campaign workers seemed to be about one-third the age of McBride’s.) She saw Ann and me, patted the boy on the shoulder encouragingly, and waved at us to follow her. We went into a small room with a desk, a couple of chairs, and three phones in it. From the bed-sofa shoved against one of the walls, I figured this had been some kind of guest bedroom before she turned it into an office.
She shut the door behind her, blocking out some of the noise, then she told us to take a seat and flopped behind the desk with a long weary sigh. “What a zoo! It isn’t usually this hectic, but we’ve been fielding a lot of calls on account of McBride’s press conference the other day. You have to hand it to the old swindler, don’t you? He’s a total loss at enforcing the law, but when it comes to conning the public he’s P. T. Barnum and Ronald Reagan rolled into one. All he’s done with this murder case is make a big noise, but he’s already got half the world convinced he’s won some kind of big victory over me.”
“Don’t you think,” Ann asked, “that the people who are taken in by his noise would’ve voted for him even without this murder?”
She shook away her sigh and laughed again. “Did you happen to hear the latest McBride fuck-up story? Last month, in that swindling case that involved the City Procurement Department, he made the unprecedented decision to cross-examine one of the witnesses himself, instead of leaving it to Grantley. He studied this fellow’s deposition the night before—it was one of the accountants for the clothing firm that was swindling the city—and began throwing hard angry questions at him, lots of fist-shaking and finger-pointing, you know what McBride can be like when he’s suffering from the delusion that he’s Perry Mason. Well, something was obviously going wrong. The witness kept saying things like ‘I don’t know’ and ‘That’s really not my area of responsibility’ and ‘I never heard of anybody by that name.’ Until Grantley suddenly noticed that McBride—get this one please!—was cross-examining the wrong witness! The deposition he’d read was from an entirely different case, and the questions he was throwing at this swindling accountant all had to do with marijuana use. Grantley grabbed hold of McBride before anybody else in court could realize what was wrong, and practically had to pull him down into his seat, then he asked for an adjournment and explained the matter to our intrepid but confused DA—who got so flustered, he turned the whole thing over to Grantley and rushed out for a well-deserved martini.”
Ann had been joining in on Dryden’s laughter, and barely managed to get out her words. “Come on, Doris, he didn’t really—”