Final Notice (6 page)

Now, who in that crowd would have listened to that kind of thing with a straight face? For that matter, who can listen to it now? And, yet, it's true, shameless, and very possibly absurd. But it helps to explain why I left Sachs feeling elated and to point up how much of that elation was a self-congratulatory pleasure in my work. Realistically I knew that it was pure chance that Leo Sachs happened to be in the second-floor john when my Ripper was at work. And it was most certainly an accident, and a piece of outright cheek, that I'd come to Sachs in the first place. And yet I wasn't denying the accidental quality, just adding to it a kind of serendipitous contentment the way you feel when you go back over a letter or a report you've written and discover that it's phrased more clearly than you thought at the time you wrote it.

What the hell, I said to myself, as I walked down the concrete stairs to Delta Avenue. Why not just admit it? After thirtyseven years, it's still all a mystery to you. Accidental or intentional, unexpected or predictable, it still comes as a surprise. But that's the advantage of not growing too far up, of not looking too critically into your own mechanisms. Like the monkey who presses the button and gets his banana -it was that kind of circuitous satisfaction I was feeling. And, of course, I knew immediately where to go next.

Back to the Hyde Park library, which was gleaming like a chrome fender in the afternoon sun. I parked the Pinto in the little asphalt lot beside the rear door, got out, still feeling lucky, and walked up to the glass entryway.

Inside it was already beginning to look like night. The fluorescent lights were taking hold, drying out the color of the carpeting and of clothes and the woody sheen of the big card catalogues next to the door. I waved to Miss Moselle, who was perched like a night owl on a stool behind the circulation desk, and walked up the staircase to the second floor. I'd started back to the art section on the east wall when someone called my name.

"Mr. Stoner?"

I turned around and saw that the gray-haired woman behind the Juvenile Desk was smiling at me. She had lipstick on her teeth and just about everywhere else beneath her nose; but she was jolly-looking in her loose print dress cinched at the waist with one of those perforated plastic belts that are made to fit any size. I smiled back at her and she said, "Were you looking for Kate?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"I thought so." ,

She held out a chubby pink hand. There was a slip of paper in it. "She told me to give this to you, if you came in."

I plucked the paper out of her hand as if I were plucking it out of a piece of risen dough, smiled at her again because she was so obviously expecting a reward, and walked over to one of the window chairs looking out on Erie Avenue. It was beginning to irritate me that so many people seemed to be in on my case. I mean Kate Davis was one thing. In a sense, I figured I was in on her case. But Miss Moselle and her coterie of old ladies was something else. And it wasn't simply a question of my professional pride being hurt, although if I'd been being very frank with myself I suppose that would have been a good deal of it. It was a question of safety, too. In spite of the cockamamie way the library was run, the Ripper thing wasn't just another piece of gossip. He was a proven vandal and potential dynamite. And the old ladies should have known that. Ringold should have known it. And so should Kate Davis. Who, the note informed me, had walked the three blocks to Paxton Avenue to talk with Twyla Belton's parents.

I had the feeling that Kate Davis liked the Belton connection a little too well, that, like a cub reporter or a rookie cop; she wasn't going to be satisfied with the slightly crazy kid Leo Sachs had helped me come up with. Now that I knew his approximate age, he could be singled out fairly quickly. He might even be on Ringold's list. And Kate could be a help winnowing out the chaff on that list. On the other hand, I told myself cynically, maybe it's best to let her go off on her own. I wasn't used to working with a partner and the chances of her turning up anything but bad memories about Twyla were very slim.

It would be a little like sending her out for a left-handed wrench. Not a nice thing to do. But it would keep her busy. And I had the feeling that Kate Davis was never busier or more content than when she thought she was in full command, like that general she was descended from. Not like you, huh? I said to myself. And after thinking that over for a second, I walked back downstairs and out to the car.

The Belton house was a green frame bungalow with a mansard roof and a dormer window set like a hooded eye in the center of its second story. I sat in the Pinto staring at that eye and thinking.that I should have been back at the library, culling Ringold's list with Miss Moselle. I should have been doing my job, instead of wet-nursing a green girl detective. But when it came down to it, I didn't have it in me to send Kate Davis on a snipe hunt, even if it was her own idea. It didn't look like fun -going up there and prying her loose from what was probably a sad and embarrassing scene. But the fact was I'd begun to like the girl.

So I got out of the car, walked across the leaf-strewn street and up to the Belton's front door. A short, middle-aged man answered my knock. He had on brown, horn-rim glasses, which were slipping down his nose. And his thick black hair was salted with dandruff, like a sprinkle of fine confetti. He looked like a thousand other men I'd known. An office-worker, maybe an engineer or a draughtsman -with a face like a fingerprint on an eraser. Eyes all smudged and mouth a dark spot and blue shadows on his cheeks like a day's growth of beard. The only thing that distinguished him from the other bone-weary, middle-management types who put in their forty hours per and come home to drink and to be taken advantage of by their wives and children was the fact that this one had been crying.

I felt hurt for him that he had to be seen like that and suddenly angry at Kate Davis, because that kind of intrusion just wasn't part of anyone's job. He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and asked who I was in a mellow, grieving voice. And I didn't have a choice but to tell him.

"Come in, then, won't you?" he said politely.

It made me madder that the poor son-of-a-bitch felt he had to be polite, when he should have socked both.Kate and me in the jaw for muddying up his life for no good reason.

"Harry!" she said brightly when Belton ushered me into the living room, which was smaller than I'd expected from the look of the house but furnished in the usual eclectic fashion of middle-income homes. A chair or a lamp from every good time or bad since the house was purchased. Furniture like the leaves of a family Bible.

I gave Kate a look and she made a funny expression with her mouth -as if to say, what's bothering you? Then she looked up defiantly from behind her tortoiseshell glasses.

I didn't want to have the row that was going to come in front of poor Belton, who, God knew, had enough heartaches of his own. So I let him seat me on a green, sculpted couch that smelled of tobacco and must and listened politely as he picked it up again -the story of his Twyla.

"She didn't have many friends," the man said. "She was never real popular in school. I mean, Jill and I..." He swallowed hard. "We pushed her. You know? How parents will push? It's just that we'd seen so much loneliness ourselves as kids. Both of us were younger children from big families, where you don't really get the attention you need. That's why we decided to have only the one. Of course, now..."

He sat back on his arm chair, took off his glasses, and began to polish the lenses with his handkerchief, as if he were whetting them on a smooth, round stone.

"She liked to read," he said absently. "She was a great reader of history. It was one of her best subjects -history. History and art. She was going to the art school, you know. Lon Aamons' school. After she'd finished college, she'd gone out and taught for a year. But ... she didn't like it. Frankly, she wasn't built for teaching. She was too shy and the kids took advantage of her. So, we thought the art thing. You know, commercial art..."

Kate said, "Was she going to the school when it happened?"

He nodded. "She'd stay at Lon's place until late on most evenings. And then she had a job painting scenery at the Playhouse. She had some friends, too. Other students. They'd go out for a drink after classes. That night she'd stayed late at the school. We'd thought that she'd gone out to one of the bars in Mt. Adams. I mean that that was why she was so late. It had happened before. So ... I mean we weren't worried. We'd gone to sleep when they came to the door."

I'd had enough. I got up from the chair and said, "Thank you, Mr. Belton. We won't take up any more of your time." I walked over to Kate and said, "Let's go."

"There may be other questions I'd like to ask you," she said to Belton and gave me a disconcertingly wry look.

The man said, "I'd do anything to find out who killed my daughter." He stared me in the eye and, suddenly, his face quivered as if it were about to fly apart. "Please, mister," he said in a voice that was not quite sane. "Find that terrible bastard. And when you do," he whispered, "kill him.
 

"THAT WAS just swell, Kate," I said to her, as we walked down the sidewalk to the street. "Real good detective work."

She gave me another amused look and said, "Don't you trust your partner, Harry?"

But I was too caught up in my angry mood to hear the laughter in her voice. Mostly because I could see myself, or some inchoate version of me, in Twyla Belton's father. In that breadbox of a house, with the furniture like mismatched plates. And it had scared me.

"You don't go stirring up people's lives without a good reason. "

"Oh?" she said mildly. "I thought you did."

I grabbed her by the arm and spun her around. She was only five-feet six, so I had to bend down a little to look in her pretty face, which was sassier than ever beneath its mop of curls. "Why does your nose always look like it's pressed against a window?"

She snorted with laughter. "I've been made love to in nicer ways."

"I'm not making love, Kate. I'm angry."

"If you'd give me a chance, Harry," she said, "I might be able to explain, but we'll have to go back to the library."

"This better be good," I said.

"Or what?" she asked me. "Let's face it. I've got you hooked. Number one, you like the way I look and want to see more of it. Number two, you like the fact that I'm a rookie and make a rookie's mistakes. Number three, my personality prickles you and you see me as a challenge. Should I go on? No, there's no question about it. Sooner or later you're going to fall in love with me, just like Jessie said."

I gawked at her.

"Just being honest, Harry. I decided to be honest with you this morning. Well, last night, really. You see," she said as she turned toward the Pinto, "I'm going to fall in love with you, too."

She got in the passenger side door and said, "Are you coming?"

"I don't know," I said and meant it.
 
 

I kept examining her as I drove back to the library to see if she was sprouting a tri-cornered hat and battle ribbons. I've never been much of a determinist. It takes all the fun out of meeting someone for the second time. But by God, that girl was a general's great-granddaughter if I'd ever met one. And I wasn't sure I liked some very tender parts of my life being deployed by such a precise hand.

She liked it. No question about that. Every time she looked over at me she grinned in a new way. And once she threw her blonde head back and smiled at the roof, as if we were just coming home, drunk and festive, from a New Year's Eve party.

"Lighten up, Kate," I said to her. "People will think I've been beating you."

She laughed. "You're too tense, Harry. You've got a critical parent on your back. I guess that's my fault for laying it on you all at once. I just don't believe in playing games with people I like. When we get back to the library, I'll get you a copy of Creative Intimacy and you can do a little research on yourself."

"Are you serious?"

"I don't know? Am I? Greenwald's got a lot of interesting things to say about adult relationships. You know, toxic patterns and toxic individuals?"

"I've had quite a dose of you at this point," I said. "And I don't believe in making love out of a book."

"No?" She put a serious look on her face and said, "That's a critical parent comment, Harry, if I've ever heard one. You're letting old tapes destroy your enjoyment of the present. Did your father ever beat you for reading a book?"

"Keep it up, Kate."

She giggled and said, "We're going to get along, all right. I'll have to whip you into shape. But we're going to get along."

I wonder, I said to myself.
 
 

It was four-thirty when we pulled into the library lot. Kate was out of the car before I turned off the ignition. She trotted up the red-brick sidewalk to the big glass-and-chrome doors and glanced back at me over her shoulder before walking inside. It was a lovely look, full of self-deprecating irony and just a touch of real affection, as if she were letting me know that t shouldn't take all of that hokum she'd been spouting -that rare blend of Jessie Moselle's astrology and Eric Berne's transactionalism and her own brand of liberated sexuality- completely seriously. That look made me feel a little saner. Kate Davis's zany brand of lovemaking was affecting, all right. But I was glad to know, or to think I knew, that the brazen manner and T.A. terminology weren't all there was to the real Kate. Of course, you could be wrong, Harry, I told myself.. She might be exactly what she seems to be. And what, pray tell, are you going to do with someone like that?