Day of Wrath (4 page)

"Where's the body?" he said with a grin.

"We've been talking," Madge said with flat, uninflected
politeness. And it was as if she'd sent a wordless warning to her husband,
who stiffened suddenly and eyed me suspiciously.

"Talking, huh?" he said in his wife's flat, denatured
tone of voice. "Well, that's good, I guess."

He sat down on the arm of the sofa and patted his wife
on the shoulder. She looked up at him and for a moment they communed silently,
like two machines sending each other coded messages over the phone.

"How long you been in the business, Mr. Stoner?" the husband
said, turning back to me.

"
For about twelve years," I said.

"You handle a lot of these kind of cases? Runaways, I
mean?"

I told him I'd seen a few. He apparently wanted to see
my credentials—that had been the net effect of his wife's communications.
I wasn't the welcome visitor any more—the nice detective whose face would
be pasted in the album alongside Aunt Jen and Uncle Bill. I was a stranger
and, therefore, suspect. There couldn't be a mentality more parochial or
xenophobic than that of a suburban householder in a declining neighborhood.
I could understand it, too. To have struggled all one's life for such meagre
rewards—an Izod shirt, a stitched apron, and a house out of a television
sit-com. And to see that little ground slipping away daily. To suspect,
in the eyes of a stranger, that it wasn't worth having to begin with. That
would set anyone's teeth on edge. Plus, it had begun to dawn on the Rostows
that Robbie's disappearance could change their lives, coming, as it did,
out of the nightmare world of social and financial reversal that undermined
the seeming solidity of every middle-class neighborhood. It could happen
to their child, too. It could happen to them. Which was the reason for
the sudden cautiousness.

"You'll watch what you say when you talk to Sylvia?" the
mother said.

"Of course he will," the man said with false confidence.
"Wouldn't want to be putting the wrong ideas in anyone's head."

"Of course not," the woman said.

"I mean, this is a serious business, isn't it? This is
a bad thing."

"
A bad thing," Madge repeated.

"I blame it on the school system," Fred said. "Now they
want another mil of tax money, and they don't even look after our children
properly. Our whole society is screwed up, if you ask me. When I was a
boy, no one ran away from home. No one wanted to. Home was . . ."

"Everything," the wife said. "Exactly. Home was everything.
You lived there and you died there. And the generations passed through
your house. And you got to see people growing old, and they got to see
you growing up and another generation coming. Nobody stuck anyone else
in nursing homes, to
wither and rot. Nobody ever ran away."

"
It was all natural," Madge said.

"That's what it was. You learned to accept things—to
tolerate things. Differences. To accommodate them for the sake of the family.
You had to accept them, because you saw yourself everywhere you looked.
Like your whole life was happening at once. Bits and pieces of it. Different
stages. From birth to death. So how could you not show . .."

"Charity," Madge Rostow said.

I was moved in spite of the sentimentality of the words
and the sing-song way they'd been delivered. And in spite of the fact that
things had never really been that way. The Rostows were only voicing their
own hopes and the hopes of their beleaguered class. For them, it had all
come down to pictures in a photo album—those bits and pieces of a continuous
time.

"Well, here she is," Fred said with alarming gaiety.

"
How you doing, princess?"

Sylvia Rostow ambled into the room, plopped down on a
baize chair, and stared at us with undisguised boredom. She was a plump,
freckle-faced teenager, with her mother's dirty blonde hair and her father's
knife-blade nose and a little, bruised O of a mouth that made her look—and
would probably always make her look—as if she'd been sucking on a stick
of cinnamon candy. She had on a tartan skirt, knee socks, sneakers, and
a school-girl's white blouse. And she was chewing a wad of gum so large
that it made her pale, white cheek look swollen.

"Get rid of that gum," her mother commanded.

Sylvia pulled a long string of it out of her mouth, then
sucked it back in like a strand of spaghetti.

"
Young lady," her mother warned her.

Sylvia gave her a look, then reached inside her mouth,
pulled out the wad of gum, and plunked it down in a glass ashtray sitting
on a table beside her chair.

"
Satisfied?" she said, licking the sugar off her fingers.

"You mind your manners," the mother said.

Sylvia made a face, then stared at me. "So you're the
detective, huh?"

"I'm the detective," I said.

"
You don't look like a detective," she said. "You're too
old."

I laughed and Sylvia's mom threw her hands to her head
as if she thought she might lose her mind. Fred squirmed on the arm of
the sofa.

"
Princess," he said.

"Well, geez, Dad," Sylvia said. "I mean, how do you know
he's a real detective? He could be just anybody."

Fred looked at his wife—as if to say "she's got a point."

Sylvia plainly had him wrapped around her pudgy finger.
But the mother wasn't taken in for a second. "Stop being such a smart-aleck,
Miss," she said. "Or there's going to be trouble."

"
Geez," Sylvia groaned. "O.K. What do you want to ask
me?"

I said, "Do you know where your friend Robbie Segal's
gone?"

"She's not my friend," she said disdainfully. "Not my
real friend."

"That's not what I've been told."

"Well, you've been talking to that batty Mildred."

"That's it!" Madge Rostow said. "You're grounded for the
night."

"Oh, Mom," Sylvia said.

"And if you don't start behaving, it'll be for the week.
Your friend Robbie could be in a lot of trouble, whether you know it or
not. I want you to tell this man everything he wants to know or there's
going to be hell to pay later."

"Robbie can take care of herself," Sylvia said petulantly
and gave me an ugly look. "Anyway, I don't know where she went."

"When was the last time you saw her?" I said.

"I don't know. Four days ago, I guess."

"On Sunday?"

"Whatever," Sylvia said.

"In the morning or the afternoon?"

"
The morning."

"Did she talk to you about leaving home?"

Sylvia shook her head condescendingly. "No. You could
hardly blame her, though."

"Young lady!" the mother barked.

"Well, geez, Mom, everybody knows Mildred's a basket case.
I don't know how Robbie put up with her for as long as she did. Always
checking up on her and all. Never letting her go out and have any fun."

"What kind of fun?" I said, before Madge could step in
again.

"
Fun," she said with exasperation. "You know, fun? Like
going to parties and dancing and going out with guys."

"I thought she went out with Bobby Caldwell?"

Sylvia laughed scornfully. "That fag. They didn't go out,
they just hung around together. That's probably where she went—to Faggot
Bobby's house. Him and his big deal music."

I had the feeling that Sylvia Rostow had been interested
in Bobby Caldwell herself, until Robbie had come along and claimed him.
She certainly sounded like a jealous girl.

"Did she say she'd be going to Bobby's on Sunday?"

"She didn't have to say it. She's always over there—like
some groupie."

"Sylvia," the mother said.

"Well, it's true, Mom. You've said it yourself. If you
hang around trash, you become trashy."

The mother ducked her head a bit. "She does seem to spend
a lot of time with those trashy people. I really can't understand it. A
nice girl like her."

"She's not a nice girl, Mom," Sylvia said with an evil
little smile. "Not anymore."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Co talk to Bobby," she said. "Ask him what it means."
 

S0 I WENT TO ASK BOBBY. WALKED THROUGH THE RAIN to the
intersection of Losantiville Avenue, where Eastlawn Drive dipped down in
a long, scythe-shaped curve before rising again at the edge of Roselawn
Park. Across the intersection, the neighborhood changed character.

The red brick colonials became old yellow brick apartments,
with glass block set in their facades and street addresses written out
in big metal numbers fastened to the brick. The apartments looked like
they'd been built in the late forties, during the postwar boom—low-rent
housing for the soldiers coming home from overseas. Functional, three-
and four-story rectangular brick buildings, divided into sixteen two-room
units with paper-thin walls and pine floors and a bare minimum of fixtures
and appliances, they had never been meant for show. The developers hadn't
even planted trees in the front yards. Just an occasional hedge, running
like a thin green bunting at the bases of the facades, and a few scrubby
pines growing in the saw-toothed shadows between the buildings. The plain
grass lawns stretched, one after another, down the hill and up to the park,
separated by narrow concrete driveways and by tall, black-stemmed, white-capped
gas lamps which had begun to glow a warm yellow against the late afternoon
sky.

There was no movement on the street. No cars. No kids.
No bird sounds. No street noise. Nothing but the melancholy hiss of the
rain and the sputtering yellow lamps and all that damp green lawn and all
those mean yellow buildings. It didn't take much exposure to that part
of the street to understand Mildred Segal's ferocious sense of propriety.
Because this was precisely what she was afraid of. Not poverty, but this
lower-middle-class life with the shine rubbed off, with all but the smallest
pride in appearances swallowed hard.

At one time the street had probably been home to the auto
workers at G.M. and the factory workers at Hilton-Davis. But most blue-collar
types were no longer willing to settle for the purely functional decency
of these worn buildings. They'd moved on to Sharonville. Or to Montfort
Heights. To brand new brick and drywall tenements, with built-in dishwashers
and central air and a stylish veneer as thin as the chrome foil on a windshield
wiper knob. Only the ones who couldn't afford to choose lived here now.
The ones who lived on fixed incomes and couldn't move if they wanted to.
The ones stepping up from poverty, for whom lower Eastlawn Drive was a
first taste of respectability. And the ones like Pastor C. Caldwell, who
were just hiding out.

I found him midway down the block, on the first floor
of one of those big yellow nondescript buildings. Pastor C Caldwell, 1-D.
Scribbled in pencil on a scrap of paper stuck in a pitted mailbox. The
long entry hall smelled of dry-rot. The overhead lights flickered with
the current, casting irregular shadows on the patched plaster walls. It
didn't look like anyone's idea of paradise—not even a confused and angry
teenager's.

There was a peephole buzzer set in the door to I-D. I
pressed the button and a moment later he answered. He was wearing a fresh
T-shirt and slacks. No shoes. He held a section of newspaper in his right
hand.

"
Yes?" he said nervously. "Could I do something for you?"

There was a bit of the Kentucky hills in his voice and
a good deal more of that Midwestern prairie. But the predominant note wasn't
regional, unless you wanted to call hopelessness an exclusively urban sound.
Pastor C. Caldwell spoke with the tired, shiftless, slightly servile voice
of a man who had nothing left to lose. No pride. No property. No dreams.
It was a voice that said "I just want to get by."

The face fit the voice. Crew-cut gray hair, diving, in
front to a widow's peak. Tan, weathered skin. Cheeks hollow where the back
teeth had been pulled out. Puckered mouth. Great tufted brows. Puffy eyelids
that narrowed to slits and just the gleam of restless blue eyes behind
them. There was a day's growth of beard on his chin and neck. He looked
to be in his mid-fifties, but given the kind of life he'd probably led,
he could have been thirty-nine.

"Could I do something for you?" he said again.

He'd been taking me in, and I could tell from his eyes
and his voice that he hadn't quite figured me out yet—whether I could
do him any harm. I decided to keep him guessing until I located his son,
Bobby, because I had the feeling that he wasn't going to do me any unpaid
favors. His world was one of strict and fierce economy—you took what
you could get and you took what went with it and you didn't take or give
anything else to anyone.

"Is your name Caldwell?" I said in a tough voice.

"
Yessir," he said and shuffled his feet.

"You have a son named Bobby?"