Cast in Stone (23 page)

"Maybe,"
I said, sliding the book across to Carl.

"Which
one?"

"The
one with the drink in her hand." "This one?" He tapped
the face. "Uh huh."

Carl
studied the image for no more than five seconds.

"Jesus,
Leo. I hope to God you've been doing a shitload better than this over
there."

"That's
a no, then."

"Look
at the hand on this honey."

He
pivoted the book back in my direction. "We're looking for a
petite woman here, Leo. Look at the paws on this one."

I
looked. She had all five fingers. Nothing came immediately to mind.

"Look."
He tapped the page harder now. "This one has fingers longer than
our trim's whole hand. Large Marge here could palm it and take it
into the paint. Jesus. Gimme seventy-nine."

I
handed it over.

"Pay
attention, for chrissakes," he said over the top of the book. I
did the best I could. By quarter to three, my stomach was growling as
I was finishing my third annual. The faces were beginning to swim
before my eyes. The steady stream of coffee provided by the
ever-affable Pamela failed to stem the swirling tide of hopeful
faces. I was now using my finger, as if

touching
each face would somehow make it more distinct. No help. Everybody was
beginning to look like Mr. Potato Head. Grudgingly, I concluded that
we were, as Carl had suggested, wasting time.

"Maybe
we should—" I started.

Carl
sat with his arms folded over his thin chest, staring at me.

"When
I was sixteen, my mother married a drunken pipe-fitter name
Hallinan," he said.

I
waited.

"A
real asshole. One of those low-grade morons with a cutesy little
aphorism for every occasion." He paused. "So?"

"Two
of his rectal tidbits come to mind here, Leo." "Such as?"

"Whenever
I did anything right, which was none too often, he'd always say,
'Even a blind pig will occasionally root up an acorn.'"

"A
nurturing type."

"Yeah.
Big time," Carl mused. "And whenever he'd fuck up, which
was a regular Friday-night occurrence, and the old lady would have to
go down to the station house and bail his hairy ass out, he'd always
say he'd been saved because 'God protects fools and drunks, and only
the good die young.'"

I
waited for the tie-in. None was forthcoming.

"I'm
all ears," I said.

He
uncrossed his arms and held out his right hand.

"Gimme
nineteen eighty-one."

No
point in asking why. Instead, I rummaged through the pile and slid
the volume over to his side of the table.

He
consulted the index, thumbed his way about three quarters of the way
to the back, and began to slowly go through the pages.

"Maybe
we should—" I started again.

Without
looking up. "Shut up, will ya."

Pamela
made another pass, refilling our cups. Carl took no notice. After
twenty minutes, he closed the volume and slid it back over toward me.
"I think what galls me the most is the idea that that asshole
Hall-inan might have been right."

"How
so?"

"Obviously
some higher power must be in charge of looking out for hummers like
you, Leo. There's no other possible explanation."

"Oh."

"Shit
yeah. No doubt about it. We shoulda crapped out here, Leo. Big time.
If there was any justice at all, we shoulda pissed away a bunch of
old Warheads' dinero and come home with nothin' more than heartburn
from this shitty coffee." He sat back in his chair. "I
mean, we've got fourteen years times thirteen campuses, not a goddamn
thing to go on other than some half-assed idea that this twat might
have spent time at a university at some time in her life. We've got
half the books being scanned by the Helen Keller of photo
identification, who probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference
between Joan Rivers and the Lindbergh baby, and what happens?"

"Hauptmann
turns out to be innocent?"

"What
happens is, right there as big as life in the second book I look at
is daddy's little girl just staring me right in the fucking face with
that same deer-in-the-headlights look she gets whenever she spots a
camera."

"You're
kidding."

"Yeah,
I'm renowned for. being a real barrel of laughs. Ask anybody. They'll
tell ya."

He
picked up the volume nearest his left arm and worked toward the back.
"Talk about steppin' in shit. One crummy picture and Moe and
Larry manage to stumble on it. Nineteen eighty only. Nothing in
either seventy-nine or eighty-one." He tapped the book, "hist
this one."

I
walked around behind his chair. The black-and-white image was
captioned "Fall Sports Banquet." Standard-issue yearbook
photo. The flash had captured the front three and a half tables
of what the receding shadows revealed-to have been a much larger
gathering. Thick-necked young men in rented formal attire. Chiffon
off the shoulder for the young women. Grandma's jewelry. Good bones.
Good teeth. Corsages and boutonnieres. The scattered place
settings and facial expressions confirmed that dessert had long since
come and gone. This party was well into the shank of the evening.

I
studied the female faces at the center table. The stark light of the
flash had washed the edges from their features, leaving only the
man-in-the-moon eyes, nose, and mouth floating off-center in
amorphous auras of dull white. I leaned closer, nearly resting my
nose on the page. No help.

I
ventured a quick glance back Carl's way. He met my gaze. I shrugged.
Shaking his head, he placed the tip of his index finger slightly
above the coiffured head of a gorgeous brunette seated at the rear of
the center table. There, at the next table back, her face adrift now
above Carl's fingernail, was a younger, thinner, but easily
recognizable Allison Stark. A brunette back then. Caught off guard by
the flash, her expression showed neither the forced gaiety nor the
weary waxiness of those around her but instead revealed an intensity
of focus discernibly inappropriate for the occasion.

"Sure
enough," was all I could think to say. "What else do you
notice?" he asked. "Why don't we just save time and have
you tell me." "Go on, look."

I
looked. I was about to plead for mercy when it struck me. "She's
sitting between two women."

"Good,
Leo. Very good. Notice how at every other table we can see the
seating order is like it ought to be—boy girl, boy girl. Except
right there where our girl is, suddenly it's three girls in a row."

"No
empty seats, either," I said.

"Not
a happy camper."

"Look
at the dress."

This
one was easy.

"She
seems lost in it."

"Yeah,"
he said. "It's way too big for her. Way out of style too."

As
usual, Carl was right. The voluminous dress with what appeared to be
fabric roses sewn onto the shoulders reminded me of one of those
thirties nightclub movies.

"Maybe
she just had bad taste," I suggested.

"More
likely she borrowed the dress."

We
sat in silence staring at the picture. Finally, Carl sat back in his
chair and cast a glance at the door.

"Shall
we?" he asked.

"You
think you can stand all that affability?" "I'll grin and
bear it," I said. We called in unison, "Pamela!"

State
route 78 weaves two lanes through the smooth green hills of southern
Wisconsin, through Daleyville, past the cutoff to Forward, and south
to Blanchardville, where you either turn west toward the shores of
Yellowstone Lake or stay on 78 as it continues south down toward
Illinois. The blustery morning wind had climbed above the trees. Thin
shards of cloud, low in the bright blue sky, kept pace as we drove
south. Summer had lingered here. The leaves on the native oaks and
maples had only just begun to turn color at the tips. Under different
circumstances, it could have been a scenic trip. Not today.

Forty
miles of log trucks and motor homes had sapped what minuscule
patience Carl had started with. We'd been stuck behind a load of
small cedar logs for the past twenty miles. The truncated front end
of the van, when combined with Carl's maniacal tailgating, reduced me
to stomping imaginary brakes as he simultaneously chain-smoked and
manipulated the hand controls like a deranged railroad engineer.

"How
much farther?" he groused, inching even closer to the logs. I
could count the growth rings. Metal cutouts of naked women undulated
on the swaying mudflaps. A hail of loosened bark and kicked-up gravel
ticked rhythmically off the van. Again, I involuntarily pumped the
brakes like a dog scratching dream fleas.

"Four
or five miles and we should be on the outskirts of beautiful Argyle,
Wisconsin."

"I'll
gird my loins for the excitement."

For
the umpteenth time, he slipped a foot of the van out into the
northbound lane only to be very nearly vaporized by oncoming traffic.

"Assholes,"
he muttered as a blue-and-white tour bus whizzed by, nearly taking
the mirror.

"Yeah,"
I agreed. "Bastards got some nerve driving north."

"Stuff
it, Leo. You hear me. You got me out here followin' these fuckin'
Lincoln Logs up the road from the twelfth century to see a broad
whose sole claim to fame is being the Badger alumni chairperson for
nineteen-eighty. Yeah, I'm betting the ranch on this one."

"You
never know till you try. All we want her to do is put a name on a
face for us."

"Yeah,
from a fifteen-year-old dinner party."

"We'll
show her the composite you made. Maybe that will help."

"Maybe
pigs will fly."

"She's
not only alumni chairperson, she's also in the picture. What else
could we ask for."

"Trust
me, Leo, right about now I got a hell of a list of other things I
could ask for."

"It's
worth a try. People let themselves get appointed alumni
chairpersons because they want an excuse to keep their noses in other
people's business. They just have to know what's going on. They know
who's having a baby, who's getting a divorce. They send just the
right little card for each occasion. They like that crap. That's why
they do it."

"So
you keep telling me."

"Maureen
Hennesey is the alumni liaison for my class."

Car]
shot me a sideways look.

"The
charity dame with the Margaret Thatcher hair?" "The very
same."

Maureen
had, as they say, married well. While her husband, Lester, busied
himself at the task of massaging the family millions, she
divided her time between a series of short-lived affairs with sundry
instructors and serving on the boards of nearly every charitable
institution in King County. No solvent business-person had been
spared Maureen's tireless fund-raising efforts. Her grandiose style
of coercive insistence was legendary. I had his attention now.

"Really,"
he said.

"No
shit."

"Last
time she hit me up for the opera"—he removed both hands from
the wheel, pointing his palms at the headliner—"like I give a
shit about the opera. I tried to poor-mouth it, you know, like
business was off, I was cutting back my charities, that sort of
shit. She's real polite and understanding and all. And then proceeds
to read me chapter and verse of every gift I've made in the past year
and a half. She even knew about some bags of cement I'd donated to
the neighborhood Pony League. I mean stuff I bought on my own and had
Mark deliver. She even knew about that, for chrissakes."

"Maureen
knows everything. See?"

"Hmmm,"
was as close as he got to agreeing.

We
travelled the last three miles in silence.

It
took some doing to get Carl inside. The three steps up to the front
door were out of the question. Reading my mind, Carl stepped out of
character and tried to make things easy.