Kennedy campaign and drives a Jag. I know you like Mainwaring but he’s really a snob. And I still don’t understand how a guy who makes stuff for war can pretend to be such a liberal.”
“You think he’s pretending?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he’s just sort of blind to himself.”
“I don’t trust him. I was in a peace march in Iowa City last month and I saw him on the sidewalk talking to a guy I was pretty sure was a fed.”
“How can you tell?”
“Didn’t you read that article in Esquire about how the feds who check out peace marches dress? Short hair, T-shirts, and jeans. Hoover likes his boys to wear uniforms. And they all drive black Fords with blackwalls because Hoover gets a deal on them.”
One thing about Kenny-he’d never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. “Maybe he’s changed things because of that article.”
“I doubt it. I admit I’m being paranoid but I still don’t trust Mainwaring. I mean his business is with the federal government.” He checked his wristwatch. “Melissa’s at her grandmother’s right now. I had to leave her there while I went to have Alan check my blood pressure. He sure is a smart-ass.”
“You should’ve heard him last night when he was sewing me up.”
“He was always like that.” He slid out of the booth. “We were too mature to act like that, as I remember.”
“Right. All the times we both called his glasses Mount Palomars. Real mature.”
As if I hadn’t spoken, he said: “I’ll have some new pictures of Melissa next time I see you.”
I wanted to ask if that was a threat or a promise but I was too mature to do it.
My early boyhood was spent in the section just past the city limits called the Hills. This was where the poor white people lived. Even sociologists would have had a hard time defining the Hills because there were degrees of poverty even here. Depending on where you lived in the Hills, your home was either lower-class livable or little more than a shack. If you lived in one of the shacks, which far outnumbered the tiny one- and two-bedroom homes, you saw a lot of the local gendarmes. A fair number of men dealt in stolen property; a fair number of men couldn’t seem to stay out of bloody fights; and a fair number of men let the bottle keep them from steady jobs. In the midst of all this the more reliable people like my parents and many others tried to carry on respectable lives. Kenny lived in one of the shacks but was saved and redeemed by his early interest in books. My mother and father were both readers, Dad with his pulps and paperbacks and Mom with her magazines (one of them, The American, carried Nero Wolfe stories frequently, introducing me to mystery fiction around age eight or so), and encouraged my brother and sister to be readers as well.
The worst part of my early life was when my older brother Robert died of polio. He had been, no other word, my idol, all the things I could only hope to be. When I got old enough I drove his 1936 Plymouth. My sister Ruth was sure that Robert visited her at night in ghost form. And I remember hearing my father half whispering to my uncle Al that he was worried about my mother, that maybe she would never get over it and be herself again. We still went back to the Hills to lay fresh flowers on my brother’s grave in the cemetery where Hills people buried their dead. In the worst of my depression after losing the woman I was sure would be my wife, I found myself waking one birdsong morning next to his gravestone. I had drunkenly confided in my brother-for that matter I’m not quite sure I ever really got over his death either-hoping he’d bring me solace.
Tommy Delaney lived in one of the small houses, this one isolated by the fact that it sat on a corner. Where there should have been neighbors on the west side of his place there were only three empty tracts. The city had made an effort to destroy the worst of the houses and shacks.
I heard the voices before I’d quite closed my car door. Man and woman; husband and wife. The ugly noise of marriage gone bad. There had been a time after Robert’s death when my parents had gone at each other. As I later learned in my psych classes at the U of Iowa, this was not an uncommon reaction to the loss of a child. But their rages terrified my little sister and me. I’d take her to her tiny room and give her her doll and cover her with a blanket, anything to stop her sobbing. I’d sit on the bed till she went to sleep. They always promised, in whispers, that they’d never do it again. But they did of course. They were too aggrieved over the loss of their son not to.
The Delaney home was the size of a large garage but not as tall. The once-white clapboard was stained so badly it resembled wounds. The eaves on one side dangled almost to the ground. The two cement steps had pulled a few inches away from the front door. In addition to the screaming, a dog inside started barking, explaining the dog shit on the sunburnt grass. But not even a dog could compete with the cutting words of the argument.
There was a rusted doorbell. I tried it. Somewhere, faintly, it chimed. Not that this deterred the screamers. Either they hadn’t heard it or they didn’t care that they had company.
The door opened and there Tommy Delaney stood, massive in his Black River Warriors black T-shirt with the familiar yellow logo. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes but he was too late. I could see he’d been crying, the same way my sister had always cried when our parents had played gladiators over the body of their oldest son.
Then he suddenly stepped on the concrete stairs. His weight was enough to make them wobble. I backed down to the ground. He reached back and jerked the door shut. That was when I noticed the tic in his left eye. Kids respond differently to parental warfare. The big tough football player had developed a tic. He’d probably developed other problems, too, ones less obvious.
He blushed. Blood went up his cheeks like a rising elevator. “They’re just havin’ a little disagreement.” The tic got worse. Heavy fingers pawed at it as if they could destroy it.
“How about walking over to my car? Maybe it’ll be easier to talk there.” It wouldn’t be-not with this battle going on-but at least we wouldn’t be right next to it.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here.”
“I’m trying to find out who murdered your friend Vanessa.”
“You know who murdered her.”
“I know who people think murdered her. That doesn’t mean they’re right.”
The baby face sagged in the brutal light of a ninety-two-degree day. For all his power, he looked drained. I doubted he’d slept much. “You stick up for the hippies. I always told her not to go out there. I told her there’d be trouble. Neil Cameron was crazy. You should read some of the letters he wrote her. He belonged in a bughouse.”
“Tell me about the letters.”
The tic had slowed some. I had to give his parents one thing-they had the strength of boxers who could go fifteen rounds easy. If anything, they were louder than ever.
“I only read a couple of them. But they were nuts.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything about the letters.”
“Just the way he said stuff. That he’d kill himself if she didn’t come back to him. And that they had this sacred bond that couldn’t be broken. And that sometimes he stood on her street late at night staring up at her bedroom window and that he thought about just getting a ladder and kidnapping her.”
His father shouted a particularly ugly word at his mother. Delaney glanced over his shoulder. When he turned back to me he resembled a little boy who had just heard something terrible but mystifying. Maybe his father had never used that particular word before. The tic got bad again.
“Sorry you have to listen to that.”
“Yeah, why would you give a shit?”
“Maybe because I heard things like that for a while myself when I was young.”
“Yeah, well-” He swiped his hand across the tic again. But for the first time agitation left his eyes.
“You know the Mainwaring family.”
“Not for much longer. I think Mainwaring’s going to tell me he doesn’t want me there anymore. He liked the idea of a football hero hanging around his place but I think the novelty’s worn off.”
He was smarter and shrewder than I’d given him credit for. “Were you in love with Vanessa?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? It’s none of your damned business.” Then: “For your information, I thought I was but when I saw how she treated me and every other guy around her, I just enjoyed the free ride and let her go her own way.”
“What free ride?”
