'Well, yeah,' Toby said, as if I had said that having a lot of money and living in a mansion was more agreeable than scraping by on food stamps in a tenement.
'When I did come home, she must have ordered everyone to watch what they said. I wasn't supposed to know about the Dunstans.'
'She wanted you to have a regular life.'
'And her aunts didn't like that. They didn't see the point.'
Toby rested his forearms on the cluttered desk. The egglike eyes were perfectly clear. 'All the time you were a little kid, my wife and her sisters hoped you were going to show you had some Dunstan in you. When you got older, and Star put her foot down, it set up like a barrier.'
'That's why I never came back to Edgerton after I was twelve. She didn't trust Nettie and May.'
Toby poured out the last of the Johnnie Walker Black, mostly into his own glass. 'About time we wrapped this up. Before you go to bed, maybe take a couple aspirins.' He smiled at me. 'Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?'
'Just one more thing,' I said.
'Shoot.'
'Right before we left the hospital, Star managed to get out a few words. They were about my father.'
Toby's head drifted up.
'She said his name was Edward Rinehart.'
The window shades went down and up again behind the thick lenses.
'Your in-laws want me to forget the whole thing. They know something, but they're not talking.'
'What makes you so sure?'
'Star lived with the guy before she married him. Nettie would know his name.'
'You'd think,' he said.
'You know it, too, Toby.'
He smiled. “I deal with hundreds of people, day in, day out. Names go in and out of my mind.'
'You can do better than that,' I said.
He pushed himself back and walked around the desk to stand in front of a picture of a black-haired woman proffering breasts like slightly deflated beachballs on the palms of her hands. “I am not a schlub who spent his whole life behind a counter. In 1946, the year after I got out of the army, I had a white Cadillac convertible and seven thousand bucks in the bank. Important people invited me to their houses, treated me like family. I killed a man once when he didn't give me a choice, and I did six months at Greenhaven for a deal where basically I stood up for someone else. Toby Kraft is not Clark Rutledge.'
'And somewhere along the line, you met Edward Rinehart.'
He peered at me through the thick lenses. 'Star gave you that name?'
'Definally.' I tried again. 'Def-in-at-ly.' I discovered that my glass contained only half an inch of whiskey.
“I maybe remember something.' We experienced a meaningful pause. 'After the funeral, suppose you work here for a week or so. Hundred bucks a day, cash.'
'What's this, a trade-off?'
'An offer.'
“It's still a trade-off, but all right,' I said.
Toby pretended to search his memory. “I never met this Rinehart, but he got around, was my impression. From the little bit that sticks in my mind, he got into different places. A certain guy might be able to help you.' He marched behind his desk, sat down, and searched through the rubble for a pen and a pad of notepaper. He leveled an index finger at me. “I didn't give you this name.'
'Right,' I said.
He scribbled, tore the top sheet off the pad, folded it in half, and passed it to me. 'Put it in your pocket. Look at it tomorrow and decide what to do. You want to let bygones be bygones, that's okay, too.'
The office swayed like the deck of a ship.
'Hasta la vista,'Toby said, shrinking again as he stood up.
• 35
• I was okay until I heard the blare of the jukebox. The more I walked, the better I got at it. Then I moved, not too unsteadily, into the noise of Whitney Houston howling about everlasting love, and the combination of alcohol and night air struck my nervous system. As I drifted across the sidewalk, a lamp post swung toward me, and I grabbed it with both arms before it could get away.
I held on until the sidewalk stopped moving and passed through the crowd outside the bar, assisted by a gentleman who seized my arm and propelled me southward. Women young and old regarded me in great solemnity from their stoops. At last I reachedMerchantsPark and stumbled to a bench. I dropped into its embrace and fell asleep.
I awakened with a pounding head and an ache in my gut. Lamplight illuminated the words carved into the slab over the entrance of the first building in the terrace across the street.thecordwainer building.I gathered my feet under me, and the pain in my belly took solid form and flew upward. I expelled a quart of watery, red-brown stew onto the asphalt.
It was11:35. I had been passed out on the bench for at least an hour and a half. Nettie and Clark were not yet so soundly asleep that I could get to my room unheard, and I was nothing like presentable enough to pass inspection. I needed to rinse my mouth and drink a lot of water. At the far end of the park stood a good-sized drinking fountain.
A granite basin flowed into a tall, octagonal pedestal. I located a brass button on the side of the basin and rinsed my mouth, gulped water, splashed my face, and gulped more water. I looked down and noticed the inscription on the base of the pedestal.
DONATED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF STEWART HATCH. 'BY THE WATERS OFBABYLON SHALL YOU LIE DOWN AND REST.' 1990.
Before me lay an hour of free time, waiting to be filled. I straightened my necktie, buttoned the jacket of my best blue suit, and walked not all that unsteadily out of the park in search of the night-blooming Edgerton.
• 36
• Two streets vivid with neon signs and theater marquees extended eastward fromChester. A fat crimson arrow flashed like a neon finger. The darker red, vertical stripe ofhote paris hung over a smoked glass door. People in groups of three and four, most of them men, meandered down the streets.
Low Street to my left, Word Street to the right. I picked Word because it was closer, and before I had taken two steps noticed a bronze plate designed to look like a curling sheet of parchment. At the top of the scroll were the wordsold town. I moved up to peer at the legend.
Site of
The only signs of restoration I could see on Word Street were the lamp posts, two per block, which had the white glass globes of old Art Deco gas fixtures. The buildings, bars, movie theaters, liquor stores, transient hotels, and tenements had a hangdog look, as if they expected to be ordered off by a policeman. Splashes of neon light lay across dirty brick and flaking timbers. Men in worn-out clothes ducked in and out of the bars. Here and there, better-dressed people cruised up and down the sidewalks. A few residents sat out in lawn chairs, enjoying the night air.
A little way ahead, a couple straight from an advertisement for organically produced soap-free soap detoured around a drunk propped against the front of a bar. A familiar-looking rodent in a goatee and a black leather jacket slid past them and darted across the street.
