Authors: John McEvoy
Riders Down (4 page)
More than anything else, what Bledsoe felt was shock and a strong sense of betrayal as he walked out of the law building and took a seat on a park bench on Capitol Square, oblivious to the foot traffic going by. And it was shock that hit him hardest, simply because he had for the most part exercised complete control over his life. Smart, strong, and ruthless, Claude from early youth had shown the ability to plan, set goals, and meet them, whether it was in school, sports, scouting, or science clubs. He’d always done it with what his admiring grandmother described as “good old Bledsoe cocksuredness,” but what envious contemporaries and their parents often regarded as outright arrogance. Bledsoe abhorred surprises. Now, with the attorney Altman’s revelation about the will, he felt as if he’d been kidney kicked by a two-hundred-pound karate black belt holder.
A September breeze drifted through the square in downtown Madison, rearranging the fallen leaves. One of Bledsoe’s numerous former professors walked briskly past without saying hello. Bledsoe didn’t notice. Against his will, he was remembering two other horrendous shocks he’d suffered, memories of which he for the most part was able to repress. Not now, though, not today. Not after learning what Grandmother Bledsoe had done to him.
Sitting on the park bench, cracking his massive knuckles, Bledsoe’s earliest memory returned. On a winter night when he was just over three years old he’d been awakened in his red, wooden junior bed by the loud sounds of one of his parents’ frequent arguments. He heard his father’s baritone bellows, his mother’s shrieked responses, the sounds of glasses smashing, a face being slapped. Then his bedroom door banged open and his parents barged in, still screaming at each other. He could see the reddish imprint of his father’s hand on his mother’s otherwise pale face. He cowered in his bed, face turned away, hands over his ears. But his father grabbed the back of his sleeper and jerked Claude to his feet. The boy began to sob.
“Stand up, Claude,” his father ordered. Claude struggled to his feet, bewildered, blinking at the light that shone in from the hallway. He looked from one grim face to the other, wondering what he had done.
Speaking slowly, his words only slightly slurred by alcohol, his father said, “Your Mommy and I are going to live apart from now on. Think carefully, Claude: which one of us do you want to go and live with?” There was no answer.
“Which one?”
his father shouted, shaking him.
Between sobs the boy kept replying, “Don’t know, don’t know,” even as his father shook him again before releasing him and turning away. The boy threw himself down on the bed, burying his face in the pillow. He cried himself to sleep, aware only of his mother’s hand stroking his back before she left and the verbal battle resumed behind the slammed door of his parents’ bedroom. It was a night he would dream of for years.
Bledsoe’s parents never carried out their repeated threats to separate. Claude’s sister Emily was born a year later, his brother Edward two years after that. But the parental warfare continued sporadically. Not a night went by that Claude did not fall uneasily to sleep, fearing he’d be again awakened and confronted with the awful choice his parents had given him. This continued until Claude was nine years old. Until the mid-December night that his mother drove her Volvo, doors locked, accelerator floored, off the end of a pier leading into Lake Monona, crashing through the ice, her two younger children securely belted in the seat behind her. In the years that followed, Claude spent the school year living with his embittered, alcoholic father, the summers at the home of his doting grandmother. Only once was the boy able to bring himself to ask the question that had tormented him since his mother’s final night: “Why didn’t Mother take me, too?” In reply, his father backhanded him across the kitchen, Claude cracking his head on the edge of the stove. He never asked again.
***
Bledsoe got to his feet and began to walk slowly around the square. He passed food and crafts stands that were being set up for the weekend’s popular farmer’s market. He stepped around a man unloading pumpkins from a large wheelbarrow. All he was aware of was an overpowering sense of betrayal. How could his loving “Gram” have done this to him? He felt a rush of anger, anger of the sort he’d previously experienced just twice in his life: the lingering rage directed at his father in the wake of his mother’s suicide, and, five years later, the sudden explosion of rage directed at his cousin, Greta Prather.
Walking the Madison square this late afternoon, it came back to him in a torrent of unwanted remembrance: his fourteenth summer, that long ago August when he’d been so desperately in love with Greta; their last night together swimming in the small, spring-fed lake on their widowed grandmother’s estate in northeastern Wisconsin.
Claude had had a lingering, lacerating crush on Greta since he was a twelve-year-old sixth grader, the strongest and smartest boy in his private school class, possessed even then of a freakish physical strength and extraordinary intelligence that served to set him well apart from his classmates. He was an odd-looking youth that they referred to as The Weirdo—though never to his face, no, they weren’t brave enough for that.
Other family members became aware of Claude’s crush, especially a couple of his uncles, who kidded him frequently. For the most part Claude ignored the jibes of what he thought of as “those idiots,” concentrating instead on Greta when he saw her at family gatherings three or four times a year.
In her generous fashion, Greta was invariably kind to Claude during the summer vacations and holidays when they were together. A tall, statuesque young woman who worked part time as a model while attending Wellesley, she was used to attention and accepted it gracefully. In his wallet Claude kept a photo of Greta in her high school prom dress, the face of her date for the occasion trimmed out. He wrote letters to her reporting his progress in school and sports, what music he’d recently discovered, the books he was enjoying. He never stated his feelings for her, convinced as he was that Greta was well aware of them. He knew the right time would come in which to confirm that.
That August was one of the warmest on record in Wisconsin’s north woods. The rambling, old log house built by his paternal grandparents a half-century earlier had no air conditioning, and that summer, for the first time anyone could remember, even the protective stands of pines and birches could not thwart the heat, even after sunset.
Shortly after eleven o’clock that night, Claude heard light footsteps on the creaking staircase outside his bedroom. Minutes later he looked out his window and saw Greta walking across the lawn toward the pier and the lake. He quickly put on his swimsuit and moved quietly down the stairs and through the dark, silent house. He knew they would be alone at the lake, the other family members and guests long since retired after a long day of boating, swimming, then volleyball and croquet on the vast green lawn leading down to the shore.
Greta was in the water, floating on her back, when Claude walked out onto the pier. She smiled when she saw him and gave him a languid wave, face pointed toward the stars, her long black hair floating in the water. He dove in neatly and swam with powerful strokes fifty yards out into the cool water before turning back to join her.
Greta said the heat had kept her from sleeping. He told her he knew what she meant. Then she stood up in the water, which was less than three feet deep this close to the pier, and shook the moisture from her hair. Her tanned shoulders gleamed in the moonlight. Claude felt himself grow hard as he dog paddled toward her and rose to his feet. With a lunge he moved to her and put his arms around her. He cupped her face in one of his large hands and kissed her hard, his other hand on her back, pressing her to him. It was a moment he had long imagined.
To Claude’s enormous surprise, Greta planted her feet and tried to push him off. Her eyes were wild as she leaned away from him, fighting to free herself. He would not let her go. He barely heard her whispered protests. He pulled the strap of her swimsuit off her shoulder and grasped her left breast. He tried to kiss her again, but she turned her face to the side, her mouth tight with fright. “Stop it,” she begged. “This is a mistake. Let me go, please. We’ll just forget this ever happened.”
Even more excited now, he yanked down the top of her swimsuit and again thrust himself against her. “What’s wrong with you?” he said harshly, his lips against her neck. “We’ve been heading toward this for years. Don’t you know that?”
Greta fought harder. When she started to scream, he quickly covered her mouth with his hand, then looked down at her with a combination of astonishment and growing rage. How wrong he had been! How had he managed to so misread the situation, to misinterpret what he’d been sure was her returned love? Greta’s was now a face he barely recognized, so full of loathing were her eyes as they burned into his.
Claude knew now that Greta would never, ever forgive him for his actions this night, that her report of what he’d done could destroy him. He could not permit that.
With a sudden move, he wrapped his left leg behind her knees and kicked her feet out from under her. She was now on her back, partly under the water, and he straddled her, one hand still covering her mouth, the other clamped on her shoulder. She thrashed beneath him. His heart pounded as he pressed her head down beneath the water. For a few moments he watched her face, contorted by pain and terror. Then he turned his face to the night sky for the minutes it took until she was at last limp beneath him.
A huge cloud momentarily covered the moon as he dragged Greta’s body over to the pier. He pulled the top of her swimsuit back into place. Carefully positioning her lifeless head, he rammed it against one of the pier’s stanchions. The resulting wound on her forehead was visible to him as moonlight flooded back down. It would appear that she had somehow slipped and accidentally struck her head, then fallen into the water unconscious and drowned.
Claude trotted through the shadow of the pines to the rear entrance of the old house, then slipped silently up the stairs to his room. He felt enormously tired, yet at the same time exhilarated. Yes, it was a terrible shame what Greta had forced him to do this night. But he’d at least rid himself of what he could now recognize as a ridiculously useless obsession.
The next morning Claude helped in the search once his beautiful cousin was discovered to be missing. He pretended to break down when Greta’s body was discovered down the shoreline. Relatives comforted him for what they believed to his wrenching grief at this tragic loss of the love of his young life.
Whenever he looked back on that fateful August night, Bledsoe was always amazed and embarrassed. How could he have allowed his teenage hormonal seiche of love and lust to threaten his promising future? What regret he felt had nothing to do with Greta’s death—there was no way he could have allowed her to live, and ruin him—but was over his stupid misperception. He vowed to never again find himself in a situation he could not completely control.
Deep in thought, Bledsoe made three complete tours of Capitol Square as he pondered his plight. Make a million dollars in a year? For him, now, it was truly all or nothing at all. He knew he’d find a way.
Glancing up at the electronic clock on a bank across State Street, Bledsoe smiled. He realized he still had time to make his three o’clock class, an elective in the physical education department that he’d really begun to enjoy. He felt better already. He quickened his pace.
Later that same September afternoon in Madison, anticipation was running high at Doherty’s Den, a popular saloon on University Avenue. Seated at the long mahogany bar were a couple of dozen people, mostly men, mostly students, a few townspeople sprinkled among them, all eagerly awaiting the start of Mystery Hour, during which all drinks were sold at half-price.
Many eyes were on the three television sets spaced above the back bar showing, respectively, a Cubs-Cards baseball game, an “ESPN Classic” program on Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, and “Celebrity Poker.” The audio had been turned off on all three sets, but the volume on the battered old radio at the end of the bar was on high. The radio carried a Milwaukee sports talk show, which today had its usual contingent of contributors: mostly lifelong bachelors, or divorced men, living in the basements of their widowed mothers’ homes, all with passionate opinions on matters so slight as to hardly qualify as trivia. Two waitresses hustled food baskets from the kitchen to the worn wooden booths lining the walls of the long room. The pool table was in use, the aged pinball machine silent.
By definition, the start of Mystery Hour varied from afternoon to afternoon. It might be 1:47 or 3:21 or 5:05 or some other time, depending on the whim of the bar’s owner, a mischievous import from County Meath, Ireland, named Tim Doherty. The result of this marketing practice was a clientele that tended to nurse their drinks until bargain time arrived, then began tossing them down in torrents. Many of these customers stayed on long after Mystery Hour was over, continuing to drink and spend, which was the whole idea. Doherty referred to this busy sixty-minute period as his “liquid loss leader.” He signaled its beginning by loudly ringing a battered cowbell he said he’d brought over with him from “the ould sod.”
At 4:59, just two minutes into that day’s Mystery Hour, the front door of Doherty’s Den banged open. A wide-necked, broad-shouldered man, five feet eleven, two hundred and twenty pounds, stopped just inside the threshold. With his large shaved head and steel-framed glasses, Claude Bledsoe’s appearance was enough to cause a momentary hush, especially among people toward the front who could see that he was carrying an archery bow. Reaching over his shoulder, Bledsoe extracted an arrow from the quiver on his back. He carefully aimed it, then released the bow string. The arrow zoomed over the heads of the bar patrons before burying itself in the center of the dart board on the back wall some fifty feet away. Bull’s-eye.
“Jesus Christ!” yelped one of the students, ducking down and covering his head with his hands, in the process knocking off his Packers ball hat.
“Nope,” smiled Doherty, toweling off the moist surface on which the young man had spilled his glass of Old Style, “it’s Claude Bledsoe. I guess he’s taking archery this semester.”
The archer hung his equipment on a coat hook before taking a seat on one of the stools at the end of the bar. Doherty drew a pint of Bass Ale and brought it to him. “Hello, Claude,” he said. “How’re they hanging?”
“Loose and ready, Tim. And you?”
Doherty said, “Fine, Claude.” He leaned across the bar and spoke softly. “But I wish you’d leave your Robin Hood act outside. You’ve scared the bejesus out of some of my customers.”
Bledsoe’s face darkened. Quickly, Doherty added, “Just a request, is all.” He moved down the bar, his back to Bledsoe, keeping a wary eye on him in the bar mirror.
Down the bar a middle-aged man turned to the still shaken student, who was staring wide-eyed at the arrow in the middle of the dart board. “You don’t know about Claude Bledsoe?” the man said. “I guess you’re new on campus. He’s sort of a legend around here.” The student ventured a peek at Bledsoe, who was now sipping his ale and speed-reading a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
.
What the student saw was a man who looked years younger than forty-nine. He also looked different from anyone else the young man had ever seen. A weight lifter at the YMCA where Bledsoe swam laps daily once remarked that Bledsoe was built “like a hairless orangutan.” That statement was made well outside of Bledsoe’s hearing, for the same weight lifter had once seen Bledsoe, showing off, lift up the back end of a Volkswagon Beetle “as easy as you’d pull up your garage door.”
Bledsoe’s physical strength and willingness to display it were well known in downtown Madison. He had never lost an armwrestling match to a member of the Wisconsin football team,
any
Badger team in nearly three decades, embarrassing new recruits autumn after autumn at Doherty’s Den, where their knowing teammates delivered them to be humiliated.
Bledsoe had never lifted a weight in his life. His freakish strength, like his great intelligence, sprang from a gene source not apparent in his family history. The sometimes dark nature of his character was of similarly mysterious origin.
After he’d been graduated the first few times, Bledsoe was assigned a permanent academic advisor. That man, Henry Wing, met with Bledsoe before the start of each semester and recorded the degrees earned, also noting the outside interests Bledsoe said he enjoyed: several of the martial arts, skydiving, music, moutaineering, target shooting. Wing occasionally saw Bledsoe on campus or in town in the company of a woman, but never the same one twice.
Henry Wing retired the year that Bledsoe took his degree in agricultural science, accepting the diploma while wearing Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls and a John Deere cap. In the notes he left for his successor as Bledsoe’s advisor, Wing wrote, “You will find Mr. Bledsoe to be brilliant. He has also long struck me as being exceedingly strange, like those large men who wear dresses, or horned helmets and breastplates, or tasseled hats and lurid makeup, to professional football games, making one wonder what, when the games are over and night comes, they might be going home to.”
***
The man at the bar continued to enlighten the student, who had now replaced his Packers cap on his head and was working on another beer. As he understood it, the man said, Bledsoe had been a student “here since the seventies, on some kind of permanent scholarship from his family. I don’t believe he’s worked a day in his life.”
The man could not have known it, but that was not actually the case. In the long course of his scholarship years, Bledsoe had saved a sizeable chunk of his stipend, for he’d always lived modestly—decent but cheap apartments, used cars, thrift shop wardrobe, the rare gourmet dinner. But four years earlier Bledsoe, until then an extremely conservative investor of his savings, went completely out of character. The results were disastrous. Not long after he’d shifted his assets, along came the economic tsunami known as the dot com crash. Bledsoe was suddenly faced with a new reality: he needed to replace his on-its-last-legs car, a twelve-year-old Honda Civic that had begun flaking rust like dandruff. But Bledsoe had no funds to finance such a purchase.
As a result, Bledsoe offered his services as a paid tutor to the university’s athletic department, a fiefdom with impressive financial resources. With his impeccable academic record, he was immediately accepted. He was soon assigned to tutor a talented athlete from River Forest, Illinois, named Rocco Bonadio.
Rocco was at the university on a football scholarship. As Bledsoe soon discovered, his brawny, amiable, dark-haired pupil had little interest in, and even less acumen for, his studies. Rocco was in Madison solely to block for Badger glory, drink as much beer as possible, and screw as many coeds as he could. Bledsoe told Harriet Okey, his girlfriend that semester, that Rocco was “so dumb he can hardly make an ‘O’ with a glass. He’s got a hairline that nearly coincides with his eyebrows.”
After learning more about Rocco’s background, Bledsoe showed more interest in him. Rocco, it turned out, was the only son of Chicago Outfit boss Fifi Bonadio, a man of such authority that, in the words of one of his lieutenants, “when he comes home at night his wife stands at attention and the parakeet and goldfish try to look busy.”
Fifi Bonadio was extremely proud of Rocco’s athletic exploits, but even prouder that the Bonadio clan finally had its first college student. And the mob boss was determined that Rocco emerge from Madison with a degree. Primarily as a result of Bledsoe’s efforts, this happened. Bledsoe wrote all of Rocco’s papers for the courses in his major, criminal justice. That was the tuck-away bin into which many scholastically challenged jocks were funneled, the irony of which, in Rocco’s case, was not lost on either Fifi or Bledsoe. Because of the young man’s “learning disability,” Bledsoe arranged for Rocco to take all of his quizzes and tests while being monitored only by Bledsoe. He thus managed to guarantee the much desired diploma for the Bonadio family wall.
“Had Rocco ever gotten a grade higher than C in any course,” Bledsoe confided to Harriet, “there would have been grounds for a full-scale NCAA investigation. I massaged him through just at the right level, work good enough to earn passing grades but not good enough to raise any red flags over the thick cranium of this dolt.”
Appreciative of Bledsoe’s efforts, Fifi Bonadio, during a festive dinner at an upscale Madison restaurant the night before Rocco’s graduation, tapped Bledsoe on the arm. Several glasses of wine earlier, he had begun to smile benevolently at Bledsoe, who was seated beside him, addressing him fondly as Professor. “You did good with my boy,” Fifi said softly, nodding toward his beaming son. “I know it wasn’t easy. He’s a great kid and a damned good football player. But he’s got his mother’s brains. Nice people, good looking, her family, but they’re not much smarter than the goats they used to herd in Calabria.
“So, I toast you Mr. Bledsoe,” Bonadio said, raising his wine glass.
“Salud
. And,” reverting to his softer voice, he added, “I owe you. You ever need anything, any time, you call me.” Bonadio slipped Bledsoe a card with a business phone number along with whopping cash bonus.
***
Bledsoe smiled to himself whenever he thought of that night. But he never thought he would have occasion to call in the favor offered—until now, with Grandma Bledsoe’s deadline looming less than a year away.
Late that same September week, two days after his meeting with lawyer Altman and two years, three months after Rocco Bonadio’s graduation dinner, Bledsoe dialed Big B Construction and Paving, Cicero, Illinois, and left a message on the answering machine. Fifi Bonadio called back an hour later. “Professor, how are you? What can I do for you, my friend?”
Bledsoe said he was fine, but he needed some advice. “I’m working on a paper about horse race gambling in America,” Bledsoe lied. “I’d like to talk to someone who has been involved in it, who knows a great deal about it. I don’t need to use his name, I just need information he could provide. Mr. Bonadio, would you happen to know anyone like that?”
Bonadio’s laughter flowed through the phone. “Are you shitting me?” he chortled. “I’ve got the guy for you. He worked for us for a long, long time, making our betting lines. Brilliant guy, a genius. We called him the Wizard of Odds. He could move numbers around in his head like an Einstein.
“When we finally let him retire,” Bonadio continued, “he said he wanted to keep his hand in by making a little book on his own. Fine, we said. He’d earned the right. Believe it or not, Professor, that was about twenty-five years ago! He’s the oldest bookmaker in town, maybe in the whole fuckin’ world.” Bonadio laughed. “Name’s Bernie Glockner. I’ll give you his address and phone number.
“Tell the Wizard I said for you to call. Tell him hello from me.”