moment, organizing his thoughts, then opened the car door. The dry, cold Ohio wind hit him hard in the face. He tucked his chin into his neck, slammed the car door behind him, and pulled his overcoat tighter as he walked up the street against the wind.
Virginia Schiftmann lived six houses up on the left, number 232-B. He turned off the cracked sidewalk onto another cracked walk that led up to the house. There was a door-bell button, but when he pushed it, Kelly heard nothing. He tried again, then knocked. From somewhere in the house, he heard the faint sound of a television. He knocked again, louder. His hands were so cold, it hurt to rap them against the wood. He wished he’d brought gloves, but the use of gloves was discouraged because it made the rapid drawing of a weapon difficult.
He raised his hand to knock again when the door opened a crack. An older woman, heavy, with ruddy red cheeks, wearing a gray housecoat, looked suspiciously out the door.
“What?” she said, her voice a monotone.
“Mrs. Schiftmann,” Kelly said, pulling his credentials out of his coat pocket, “I’m Special Agent Kelly of the FBI. I work out of the Cleveland Field Office. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
The old lady peered out through the crack in the door, the light dim behind her, the flickering of an old, seventies-era color television in the background. She examined his ID and his badge, then looked up into his face. Then, slowly, she opened the door wider.
Kelly stepped in, the casual smile on his face designed to be as nonthreatening as possible. He stepped into the small entrance alcove and was hit by a wave of hot, musty air. Michael Schiftmann’s mother kept the furnace going full blast.
“I won’t take up much of your time,” he offered as she closed the door behind him. She motioned toward the living room and he turned to walk.
“I got nothing but time,” she muttered.
As they entered the living room, the light got better and Kelly was able to examine the surroundings. Genteel poverty was a stretch, he realized. The carpet was worn and threadbare, with the faint odor of pet urine wafting up in the heat. The furniture was old, and even when new was pretty basic and bare. A framed photo of the pope hung on one wall over the television, partially hidden by a green vase full of ragged, dusty silk flowers.
“Have a seat,” she said, walking slowly over to the television and turning down the soap opera she’d been watching.
“Thank you,” Kelly said, pulling off his overcoat and draping it over the back of an overstuffed, tired chair. Tufts of white stuffing poked through the material in the corners of the seat pillow.
He pulled out his notebook and a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket. “Mrs. Schiftmann, this is nothing more than a routine background check, and it’s standard procedure to go back to a subject’s home neighborhood and just ask some questions. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”
Kelly looked at the woman and waited for some kind of response from her. As she eased onto the sofa, he realized that she was even heavier than he first thought. The skin of her face was stretched tight, and as the housecoat draped open from her knees down, he saw that the skin on her lower legs was stretched until shiny and broken in several places by networks of spidery red veins.
Then he saw, on the end table next to her, a blood sugar tester and one of those cheap, battery-operated sphygmo-manometers that were available in any drugstore or grocery nowadays. A row of amber plastic pill bottles was lined up next to the machines, stretching from one end of the table to the other.
Type 2 diabetes, Kelly thought, high blood pressure.
“Yes, well,” Kelly said after a moment, clearing his throat.
He opened his notebook and pulled out the more-or-less standard form used in these kinds of checks. “The person we’re doing the background check on, Mrs. Schiftmann, is actually your son, Michael.”
From across the room, Kelly felt the old woman stiffen.
Her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to straighten her back on the couch. He watched as her right hand gripped the armrest and her knuckles grew white.
“What’s he done?” she asked.
“Uh, actually, Mrs. Schiftmann, I don’t think he’s done anything. This is a standard background check.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is he getting a background check?”
“I’m not actually at liberty to discuss that,” Kelly answered, thinking that even if he were, he didn’t know the answer. “But I assure you, it’s just standard procedure, all perfectly above board. These things are very routine these days.”
She eyed him nervously and relaxed her grip on the armrest. Then she looked down at the floor, her eyes darting back and forth.
“I don’t really like to talk about him,” she said softly.
“It’s just a few questions,” Kelly said. “Like, for instance, we know your son was born in 1969. Did you live here then?”
Mrs. Schiftmann shook her head. “No, my husband and I had an apartment in Portage. I moved in here with Michael after he left.”
“Which was?”
“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “It was kind of a blur.
I was working in the extrusions factory, worked the night shift. Slept during the day; it was hard.”
“Who kept the baby?”
“There was a teenage girl who lived down the way. She was thirteen.”
“So a thirteen-year-old was keeping your baby?” Kelly asked.
“I had to work.”
“And where did Michael go to elementary school?”
The old woman was silent for a few moments. “O. C. Barber Memorial,” she answered. “It was down the street just a mile or so. He could walk.”
“And how did he do in school? Was he a good student, did he enjoy school?”
Her head seemed to be shaking nervously, side to side, in a jerky, continuous motion now. “Michael is very smart. He always made good grades, especially in English and spelling. But he didn’t like school. The other children were mean to him.”
“Mean to him?”
“Because he didn’t have a father, because we were poor, because I worked in a factory … Who knows why? Kids are just mean.”
“Did he have any friends there, anyone he was close to?”
“Not really. That was a long time ago. I don’t really know.”
Kelly stared at the old lady for a moment. He wondered if she didn’t have Parkinson’s disease or something on top of everything else. He cleared his throat again.
“How about junior high and high school?”
“He got a scholarship in the ninth grade,” she said, with a hint of pride in her voice. The first he’d heard, Kelly noted.
“Went away to that expensive, private school.”
“What was the name of the school?”
“Benton School, Benton Academy … something like that.
I have trouble remembering.”
“And how did he do there?”
“It was harder than public school,” she answered, her voice lowering. “It was hard on him, being away from home, away from me. But he made it, he graduated. Barely.”
“Did he have any girlfriends, any close friends at all?”
“I don’t know. He was away. He always liked girls, but he was shy when he was younger. We didn’t go out much.”
“Mrs. Schiftmann, did your son ever get in any kind of trouble at school or anything? Were there ever any
