“Nice?”
“Yeah, Ma, nice.”
“Well, it has to be a sight better than that other…”
In the pause that followed, Whitey heard a clicking sound that might have been her dentures. “Got to get to work, Ma.”
“You got yourself a job?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of job?”
“For the municipality.”
“My God, Donald. For the municipality?”
“Got to go, Ma.”
“But, Donald-when are you coming home?”
“Home?”
“Course, I’m in a different place now. Had to, ’cause of… all the fuss.”
“I know that.”
“But there’s plenty of room, for a visit, I’m talking about. And they say there’s ice on the river already-I’m on the river, did I tell you? Knowing how much you like the skating-and besides, you haven’t met Harry.”
“Who’s he?”
“My cat. He’s the funniest little cat, Donald. Why, the other day-”
“Bye, Ma.”
“Good to talk to-”
Whitey speared trash on the median, speared it angrily when he bothered to spear it at all. He was exhausted, robbed of a night’s sleep by that dickhead Rey and that asshole social worker. And the fucking sun was hotter than ever. He’d been in Florida for three years now-cheaper for New Hampshire to farm him out for the last part of his sentence-but he hadn’t got used to the heat. He saw another bullfrog and didn’t even bother; he might have if it had tried something or even looked up at him, but the frog sat there doing nothing. Then a scrap of newspaper drifted by and came to rest against the steel tip of his pole. Glancing down, Whitey saw a baldness ad and above it a short article headlined HOTEL CLERK REMAINS IN COMA. Next to the article was one of those police artist sketches of a man: an ugly son of a bitch who didn’t look like him at all, except for the hair. He stabbed the paper and buried it deep in his bright orange trash bag.
12
Wearing his black suit from Brooks Brothers, Roger took a little business trip to Lawton Center, New Hampshire, an old mill town where the mills were all boarded up and the river, a tributary of the Merrimack, flowed through unimpeded, clean and useless, as it had in the past. The river was frozen now. A vacant-eyed boy in a Bruins sweater rattled slapshots off the bridge support as Roger drove across. An ugly town-he didn’t care for the countryside either, preferred the south of France to anywhere in New England, anywhere in the United States for that matter. Why not live there? Why not buy a mas in the Vaucluse or the Alpilles? No reason at all… after. He parked in front of the public library and went inside.
The library had microfilm volumes of the Merrimack Eagle and Gazette going back to 1817. Roger found the year he was looking for, spooled the roll onto the machine, slowly scrolled his way through the arrest, trial, and sentencing of Whitey Truax.
The first thing he liked was the photograph of Whitey, age nineteen. He had crudely cut hair, very pale, eyebrows paler still, eyelashes invisible, but dark, prominent eyes; and a strong chin, slightly too long. He looked confident, crafty, and stupid: a combination Roger couldn’t have improved on if he’d invented the character.
But even better, almost startling, was the photograph of the victim, Sue Savard, accompanying her obituary. She looked like a cheap version of Francie. The resemblance amazed Roger. Staring closely at the woman’s image, he could blend it into Francie’s in his mind, the way the director in some art film Francie had dragged him to long ago had blended the faces of two actresses. At that moment, Roger realized that writing Francie’s obituary would be his responsibility. He quickly sketched it out in his mind, doing a conscientious job, dwelling on her love of art, her contributions to the artistic community, mentioning her tennis in passing. Probably wise to read Nora the rough draft when the time came, in case she had any suggestions. And Brenda, too-no doubt Brenda had a soft spot for him after that business with the lilies.
Photographs: good and better, but best of all were the details of Whitey’s crime. Rimsky’s Puzzle Club account of the crime on Little Joe Lake, a few miles to the west, had been promising; the Eagle and Gazette delivered. Whitey had been arrested at his mother’s place near the lake within an hour of the event. Sue’s husband-and there was a sidebar about him that Roger scanned quickly: a rookie cop in Lawton, apparently, and he’d caused what the paper called a disturbance when they finally brought Whitey to the station in Nashua; but not material, and Roger factored it out-the husband, driving to his cottage to celebrate their anniversary that evening, and thus discoverer of the crime, had passed Whitey’s pickup on the way out, and was able to give the police a good description. Whitey’s first story was that he’d been passing by the cottage, seen an open door, and gone to investigate, like a good neighbor, so finding the body. When the police asked him why the Savards’toaster oven was in the bed of his pickup, Whitey admitted that he’d gone there to steal but had found the body, already dead. The police then turned to the cuts and scratches on Whitey’s hands and face. Whitey should have asked for a lawyer at that point, or long before, but instead again changed his story, now claiming that the woman had attacked him in the course of the robbery, and he had struck out in fear, killing her unintentionally in self-defense. The medical examiner arrived soon after that with his preliminary report that there was evidence of rape, and other outrages not spelled out in the small-town paper. Mrs. Dorothy Truax-the whole discussion had taken place in her trailer-jumped up and shouted that Sue Savard was a well-known whore. Prompted by that cue in a direction his mother hadn’t intended, Whitey then said that the woman shouldn’t have been wandering around naked in the first place-he wasn’t made of stone, after all. If only she hadn’t threatened to sic the cops on him, no real harm would have been done. He signed a statement to that effect.
Faced with this confession, Whitey’s public defender sent him to a psychiatrist in hope of manufacturing some sort of insanity defense. The psychiatrist did his best, testifying that Whitey’s compulsive housebreaking was rooted in a desire to avenge himself for early childhood abuse by his mother, to recover the parts of his personality that had been lost, the form of the residential dwelling, with its narrow doorway leading to a mysterious interior, being essentially female. Further, when an actual female suddenly appeared, the modus of symbolic compensation was instantly destroyed, and Whitey, decompensating rapidly, descended into madness, the rape and murder being the result of an insanity that was necessarily temporary due to the uniqueness of the circumstances.
Whitey’s peers on the jury were not persuaded. After a two-hour deliberation, they found him guilty of murder in the first degree as charged. The judge, taking into account Whitey’s age, handed out fifteen to thirty years, instead of a life sentence. There was a final photograph of Whitey climbing into a police van, a silly half smile on his face, as though he’d thought of something funny.
Roger switched off the machine, rewound the spool. It was a shabby little library, with no one inside but himself and the librarian at her desk. She was looking at him now and her lips were moving.
“I said, is there anything I can help you with, sir?”
“Perhaps the local phone book,” Roger said.
She brought it to him: a smooth-skinned but gray-haired woman with fingerprint smudges on her glasses. “Looks like quite the winter we’ve got coming,” she said.
“Does it?” said Roger. He glanced out the window, saw hard little snowflakes blowing by. The librarian withdrew.
The uniqueness of the circumstances. What were the circumstances? Cottage, break-in, unexpected presence of a woman. If Whitey’s psychiatrist was right, that combination, given his background, had guaranteed the result. Roger inferred that if such a combination were to occur again, and Whitey were introduced into it, he would replay his role, unless he had changed in some fundamental way. And if the psychiatrist’s explanation was wrong, Whitey still might come through, for other reasons that might yet be fashioned, especially with that amazing
