3
Almost as soon as they got through the door, Walter Pumo, Tina’s father, took Michael and Beevers aside and said he wanted to talk to them in private. In the dining room, the table had been heaped with food—a sliced ham, a turkey ready to be carved, vessels nearly the size of rowboats filled with potato salad, platters of coldcuts and pots of mustard, doughy little muffins and slabs of butter. A crowd circled the table, carrying plates and talking. The rest of the room seemed filled with women. Conor had been taken by the hand and introduced to a very pretty young blonde woman who had a bright distracted manner that was like a welded carapace.
“I know where we can find a little open space,” Walter Pumo told them, “at least I hope I do. Your friend seems like he’s busy with young Grace.”
He was leading them down the hallway that led to the back of the farmhouse. “If they come into this room, we’ll just heave ’em out.” He was a head shorter than both men, and as wide as the two of them together. His shoulders nearly filled the hall.
The old man poked his head through a doorway, then said, “Come in, boys.”
Michael and Beevers entered a small room crowded with an old leather sofa, a round table stacked with farming magazines, a metal filing cabinet, and an untidy desk with a kitchen chair before it. Clippings, framed photographs and certificates covered the walls. “My late wife used to call this my den. I always hated the word den. Bears have dens, badgers have dens. Call it my office, I used to say, but whenever I came in here, she’d say, ‘Going off to hide in your den?’ ” He was talking the edge off his nervousness.
Tina’s father straddled the kitchen chair backwards and waved the two younger men toward the couch. He smiled at them, and Michael found himself liking the old man very much.
“Everything changes on you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Time was, I’d be certain I knew more about my boy than anyone else in the world. Both my boys. Now I don’t even know where to begin. You met Tommy?”
Michael nodded. He could almost smell Harry’s impatience.
“Tom’s my son and I love him, but I couldn’t say I like him very much. Tommy doesn’t care if you like him or not. He’s one of those people who mainly wants what’s coming to him. But Tina—Tina went out and away, the way sons are supposed to, I guess. You two young men knew him better than I did, and that’s why I wanted to see you alone for a second.”
Michael felt uncomfortable now. Harry Beevers crossed and uncrossed his legs.
“I want to
“He was a good soldier,” Harry said.
The old man looked down, struggling with his feelings. “Look,” he said, “in the end, everything’s a kind of mystery. Listen to me, Lieutenant. This land here—my grandfather plowed it and fertilized it and watched what the weather did to it all his life, and my father did the same, and I did too, nearly fifty years. Tommy didn’t have the kind of love for it you have to have to do that kind of work, and Tina never even saw the farm at all—he was always looking out toward the world. The last time my name was in the Milburn paper they called me a real estate developer. I’m no real estate developer, but I’m not a farmer either. I’m the son of a farmer, is what I am. That’s a goddamned good thing to be.” He looked straight at Michael, and Michael felt a current of feeling go through him. “They drafted Tina. Tommy was too young to get called up, but Tina went away to that war. He was a boy—a beautiful boy. I don’t think he was a good soldier. He was ready for life. When he came back he didn’t know who he was anymore.”
“I still say he was a good soldier,” Beevers said. “He was a man. You can be proud of him.”
“You know what tells me Tina was a man? He left his property to someone who deserved it. Tommy was rarin’ up to sue, but I talked him out of it. And I talked to that girl on the phone. Maggie. I liked her. She knew what was going through my mind before I even said anything—a man might meet a woman like that in his life, if he’s lucky. She almost got killed too, you know.” He shook his head. “I’m not letting you boys talk.”
“Tina was a good person,” Michael said. “He was responsible and generous. He didn’t like bullshit and he loved his work. The war touched everybody who was in it, but Tina came out better than most.”
“Was he going to marry that Maggie?”
“He might have,” Poole said.
“I hope she would have married him.”
Michael said nothing, seeing that the old man was full of another question.
“What happened to him over there? Why did he have to be afraid?”
“He was just there,” Michael said.
“It was like—like he knew something was coming for him. He was braced for it.” He looked straight at Poole again. “My grandfather would have bribed the cop in there, taken the killer out into a field, and beaten him to death. Or at least he would have thought about it for a long while. I don’t even have a field anymore.”
“It’s a little early to bribe Lieutenant Murphy,” Beevers said.
The old man put his hands on his knees. “I thought Murphy talked to you, out at Pleasant Hill.”
“Excuse me,” said Beevers. “Pit stop.”
Pumo’s father leaned back on the seat of the chair and watched Beevers leave the room. Both men heard him turn left toward the living room. “Tina didn’t like that fella much.”
Michael smiled.
“He did like you, Doctor. Can I call you Michael?”
“I hope you will.”
“The police picked up a man this morning—Murphy told me as soon as he got here. He hasn’t been identified yet. Anyhow, they think he’s the one who killed my boy.”
Soon after they left the office and returned to the living room. A crowd of relatives surrounded Walter Pumo and began cross-talking at him. Judy frowned at Michael from across the room, where she was talking with a slightly older man.
Harry Beevers grabbed his elbow and pulled him sideways toward the arch of the entrance. In his attempt to conceal his distress he had become so stiff he hardly seemed able to bend. He hissed in Michael’s ear. “It’s terrible, Michael. They got him! He confessed!”
Over Harry’s blue pin-striped shoulder Michael saw Lieutenant Murphy bearing down on them from across the room. “Spitalny?”
“Who the fuck else?”
Lieutenant Murphy had come close enough to give them both a confidential, almost conspiratorial glance that was as good as a command.
“Calm down,” Michael said.
The big policeman stepped up beside them. “I wanted to tell you our good news. Unless you’ve already heard it from Mr. Beevers.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Beevers said.
Murphy gave him an indulgent look. “We had what looks like a good confession this morning. I haven’t seen the suspect yet, because I was on my way up here when he was apprehended on another charge. He confessed during questioning.”
“What other charge? What’s his name?”
“The man is not quite in this world, I gather, and he won’t give his real name. I hope the two of you would be willing to have a look at him for us.”
“Why do you want us to see him?” Beevers asked. “He already confessed.”
“Well, we think you might have known him in Vietnam. It’s possible he doesn’t even remember his real name. I want to be sure about who this character is, and I’d like you to help me out.”
Poole and Beevers agreed to come to a line-up at a precinct-house in Greenwich Village the following Monday.
“We arrested this guy on various charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill,” Murphy said. “The story is a little strange. This character flipped out in a Times Square movie house during a showing of
