“I represent a woman named Rachel Wallace, Mrs. Roy. She was kidnaped. I think your son knows something about it. I spoke to him about it yesterday and said I’d come visit him today. This morning four men who knew my name and recognized me on sight were parked in a car outside your apartment. When I arrived, they beat me up.”
Mrs. Roy’s eyes looked sicker—a sickness that must have gone back a long way. A lifetime of hearing hints that her son wasn’t right. That he didn’t get along. That he was in trouble or around it. A lifetime of odd people coming to the door and Manfred hustling in and out and not saying exactly what was up. A lifetime sickness of repressing the almost-sure knowledge that your firstborn was very wrong.
“I didn’t have nothing to do with that, Ma. I don’t know nothing about a kidnaping. Spenser just likes to come and push me around. He knows I don’t like his nigger friends. Well, some of my friends don’t like him pushing me around.”
“My boy had nothing to do with any of that,” Mrs. Roy said. Her voice was guttural with tension.
“Then you ought to call the cops, Mrs. Roy. I’m trespassing. And I won’t leave.”
Mrs. Roy didn’t move. She stood with one foot in the hall and one foot in the apartment.
Manfred turned suddenly and ran back through the archway. I went after him. To the left was the kitchen, to the right a short corridor with two doors off it. Manfred went through the nearest one, and when I reached him, he had a short automatic pistol halfway out of the drawer of a bedside table. With the heel of my right fist I banged the drawer shut on his hand. He cried out once. I took the back of his shirt with my left hand and yanked him back toward me and into the hall, spinning him across my body and slamming him against the wall opposite the bedroom door. Then I took the gun out of the drawer. It was a Mauser *HSc, a 7.65mm pistol that German pilots used to carry in World War II.
I took the clip out, ran the action back to make sure there was nothing in the chamber, and slipped the pistol in my hip pocket.
Manfred stood against the wall sucking on the bruised fingers of his right hand. His mother had come down the hall and stood beside him, her hands at her side. “What did he take from you?” she said to Manfred.
I took the pistol out. “This, Mrs. Roy. It was in a drawer beside the bed.”
“It’s for protection, Ma.”
“You got a license for this, Manfred?”
“Course I do.”
“Lemme see it.”
“I don’t have to show you. You’re not on the cops no more.”
“You don’t have a permit do you, Manfred?” I smiled a big smile. “You know what the Massachusetts handgun law says?”
“I got a license.”
“The Massachusetts handgun law provides that anyone convicted of the possession of an unlicensed handgun gets a mandatory one-year jail sentence. Sentence may not be suspended nor parole granted. That’s a year in the joint, Manfred.”
“Manfred, do you have a license?” his mother said. He shook his head. All four fingers of his bruised right hand were in his mouth and he sucked at them. Mrs. Roy looked at me. “Don’t tell,” she said.
“Ever been in the joint, Manfred?”
With his fingers still in his mouth Manfred shook his head.
“They do a lot of bad stuff up there, Manfred. Lot of homosexuality. Lot of hatred. Small blond guys tend to be in demand.”
“Don’t tell,” his mother said. She had moved between me and Manfred. Manfred’s eyes were squeezed nearly shut. There were tears in the corners.
I smiled my nice big smile at his mother. Old Mr. Friendly. Here’s how your kid’s going to get raped in the slammer, ma’am.
“Maybe we can work something out,” I said. “See, I’m looking for Rachel Wallace. If you gave me any help on that, I’d give you back your Mauser and speak no ill of you to the fuzz.”
I was looking at Manfred but I was talking for his mother, too.
“I don’t know nothing about it,” Manfred mumbled around his fingers. He seemed to have shrunk in on himself, as if his stomach hurt.
I shook my head sadly. “Talk to him, Mrs. Roy. I don’t want to have to put him away. I’m sure you need him here to look after you.”
Mrs. Roy’s face was chalky, and the lines around her mouth and eyes were slightly reddened. She was beginning to breathe hard, as if she’d been running. Her mouth was open a bit, and I noticed that her front teeth were gone.
“You do what he says, Manfred. You help this man like he says.” She didn’t look at Manfred as she talked. She stood between him and me and looked at me.
I didn’t say anything. None of us did. We stood nearly still in the small hallway. Manfred snuffed a little. Some pipes knocked.
Still looking at me, with Manfred behind her, Mrs. Roy said, “God damn you to hell, you little bastard, you do what this man says. You’re in trouble. You’ve always been in trouble. Thirty years old and you still live with your mother and never go out of the house except to those crazy meetings. Whyn’t you leave the niggers alone? Whyn’t you let the government take care of them? Whyn’t you get a good job or get an education or get a woman or get the hell out the house once in awhile, and not get in trouble? Now this man’s going to put you in jail unless you do what he says, and you better the hell damn well goddamned do it.” She was crying by the time she got halfway through, and her ugly little face looked a lot worse.
