The James Deans

“To celebrate your what, exactly?” Wit was curious too.

I pulled out shield number 353. “On the Monday following the party, you two will have to refer to me as Detective Prager.”

“Holy shit! Congratulations, Moe.” Pete reached across the bar and patted my back. “I know it’s what you always wanted. Okay, everybody, listen up!” Pete shouted the barroom to a hush. “Your next round is on the house. We’re celebrating.” He leaned over to Wit and me. “Excuse me, guys. I gotta help Mr. Inertia over here. I’ll join you in a few.”

Wit’s reaction was more reserved, his journalistic skepticism switch locked in the on position. “Yes, Moe, congratulations. This detective thing is sudden, isn’t it?”

I gave him a brief rundown on the offer. “I guess it was Larry Mac’s way of saying thanks. He owes me from way back and he knows how much it means to me.”

“Yes, exactly. He knows how much this means.”

“Look, Wit, I got screwed out of a shield a long time ago. Then I turned it down once. I’m a big believer in the rule of threes. If I turn it down now-”

“I’m sorry, Moe. Please forgive me. It’s just the reporter in me. I see conspiracies hidden in every good intention. An occupational hazard, I suppose.”

“That’s okay, Wit. Cops suffer from a similar syndrome. Just ask Pete.”

Wit didn’t ask Pete. Instead, he led a toast to me with the free round of drinks our host had provided. He was rather eloquent in his praise and hope for my future success, yet his skepticism had put a damper on things. Not that you could tell by how we were acting. By ten that night, Pete had performed “Danny Boy” three times, once as Donald Duck. Wit had done several card tricks and regaled the bar with stories of the rich and the dead. Not so talented as my friends, I simply drank myself silly.

DRY-MOUTHED AND nearly sober, I found myself pacing the kitchen floor at four in the morning. I would have given anything for the house to not be so quiet. When paranoia and suspicion are toying with your head, a quiet house can be your worst enemy. It wasn’t so much what Wit had said that bothered me, it was more the way he’d said it. And his face! It was evident he thought I was somehow being bought off. Now I regretted not having discussed it with him further.

I guess I shouldn’t have cared about what Wit thought. He drank a little too much and was too attracted to the sound of his own voice, but he did have good instincts. You didn’t achieve his level of success without them. I’d gotten pretty far in my life by attaching myself to people with Wit’s feel for things. Whether it was Katy or Aaron or the cops I’d worked with who could sense trouble coming around blind corners, my attraction to these people had put me in good stead. So I was unable to dismiss Wit’s reaction.

As I was about to find out, I was right not to dismiss it. But not even Yancy Whittle Fenn could have conceived how right he had been or why. When, after my third glass of water and second dose of aspirin, I found I still couldn’t sleep, I finally opened the copy of Esquire Wit had sent me weeks ago. Although I was awake and nearly sober, my focus was severely lacking. I found myself drifting off, rereading the same sentences over and over again. Two things kept me at it: a picture of Joe Spivack, and something I had scanned but not processed. Then I relocated the sentence and realized my world was about to change again, forever. Just making sense of the words had changed it.

It was a throwaway sentence, a simple biographical fact that Wit or his editor might just as easily have omitted as included. This was the sentence:

Then, in June of 1957, Steven Brightman’s family moved across the Hudson to New York from the bucolic little town of Hallworth, New Jersey.

Suddenly, every assumption I hid made over the past few months was called into question. Not only were those assumptions suspect, but the facts upon which they were based had, in the course of a few seconds, turned from granite to quicksand.

Chapter Seventeen

I had spent the rest of that early morning piecing together a rough chronology. Although a little unclear about some of the exact dates, I was confident my time line was accurate enough. Having things written out really helped me see certain causal relationships that had earlier escaped my notice. For instance, Larry Mac’s offering me my shield followed closely on the heels of my initial conversation with Sandra Sotomayor about HNJ1956. And wasn’t it convenient of Sandra to supply me with a perfectly reasonable explanation of Moira’s connection to HNJ1956 on the very same day I received my package from Media Search, Inc. This, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t asked her about it for weeks. I believe in coincidences as much as the next guy. To swallow these, however, would require more faith than I currently had on account.

There were other, far more disturbing conveniences and coincidences, but to make any sense of them I would need help. Problem was, the people I would usually go to for assistance had been compromised. They were now all so invested in keeping the stench of scandal off Steven Brightman, I couldn’t be absolutely sure I’d be able to trust them. An outsider looking at this set of circumstances might well make the same judgment about me. If I pretended to have never read Wit’s piece and forgot all about HNJ1956, I’d have my dream fulfilled. Unfortunately for the guilty party, no dream of mine or anyone else’s was worth two murders and a suicide.

I was about to attempt quite a precarious balancing act. The challenge was picking my stage assistant. There was only one candidate I could count on for the job, one who would not give me away, intentionally or otherwise. This trust was not based on something so facile or unsavory as self-interest or personal gain, but on the death of a man’s grandson. I dialed Wit’s number for the second time in two days.

The ride out to Hallworth from Manhattan took less than half an hour. Before picking Wit up at his hotel, I’d stopped at the Brooklyn store to retrieve the clippings from Media Search, Inc. Just as on our trips to and from Long Island, we rode in near silence. Wit looked through the clippings as I drove and scanned the map. We had already discussed strategy on the phone, and what was there to say, really?

Coming into Hallworth, we crossed over a tiny one-lane bridge, the wood plank roadway sighing from the strain. Beneath us, an endless freight train lazily clanked its way along lonely tracks, blowing its mournful horn as if to announce our arrival. We were here, after all, to unbury the dead. I pictured Carl Stipe, his bicycle leaning against his hip, tossing rocks off the tiny bridge at passing trains.

Hallworth was a town of big hills, green carpet lawns, and lush, gnarly trees. Beyond the big Victorian manses scattered about the little hamlet, there was something palpably old-fashioned about this place. If you hid the cars parked in the driveways along Main Street, a time traveler might say he’d landed in 1935 instead of 1983. There was a comfortable feel to a place where bulldozers and wood chippers had yet to lay waste to vast tracts of land. Everything was grown in, grown up, or grown over. I liked that. I also liked how the asymmetry of the streets actually depended more on topography than on some greedy developer’s vision. There wasn’t an artificial cul-de-sac as far as the eye could see. Wit and I agreed that it much resembled the town we’d seen glimpses of in the clippings about Carl Stipe’s murder. It wasn’t hard to fathom how traumatic such a crime had been in a place like this.

We parked out in front of the Hallworth Herald offices on Terrace Street. Terrace Street seemed to be the only street in town dedicated to commerce, and that dedication was halfhearted at best. It wasn’t Rodeo Drive, not by a long shot. There was a quick mart, a pizzeria, a video store, a dentist’s office, a shrink’s, and a druggist’s.

The Herald was a storefront operation with green linoleum floors, a pressed tin ceiling, and desk legs held together with nails and adhesive tape. There was a beat-up TV in one corner, and a radio, too. Each of the five desks in the office was covered in mountains of paper under which typewriters and telephones were the only recognizable features. Curled and yellowed ads and articles were thumbtacked to the walls in between framed front pages from past editions. Stories about Carl Stipe’s murder were conspicuous by their absence.

Only two of the desks were currently occupied. Seated closest to the door was a mousy woman of indistinct