The James Deans (16 page)

NEVER THE BEST shot on Earth, I still managed to qualify at the range. Up to that point, I had been reluctant to let Katy start inviting people to the reinstatement/promotion party she, Aaron, and my sister, Miriam, had planned. I’d just finished doing a ride-along with detectives from Midtown South and I was pretty well wired. Oh God, how I remembered that feeling, the bizarre combination of elation and exhaustion. I wanted a drink, but the detectives who’d been saddled with me all shift long had families on Long Island that needed getting home to. I decided to kill two wild turkeys with one call.

Wit was glad to hear from me and even more pleased to share a drink. Although he had not profited directly from the solution of Moira’s murder, his exposé on Brightman in this month’s
Esquire
had thrust him squarely into the limelight, a place he rather much enjoyed. He was now the subject of nearly as many interviews as Steven Brightman.

He offered to have me to the Yale Club again, but I declined. I thought we might do the Yale Club for dinner another time. Katy, I told him, was a bit of an Ivy League wannabe and would just be thrilled to enter the realm of the Elis. He told me to consider it done. I decided Pooty’s, Pete Parson’s soon-to-be former bar, would be a good place to meet. I could get that drink and invite both of them to the party.

Pooty’s was doing brisk business. Pete, wearing a rather sour puss, was working up front with a bartender who made Joey Ramone look tan and healthy. Not only was this guy sickly looking, but he moved at a pace somewhere between super slo-mo and catatonic. He aspired to lethargy. Pete’s face brightened when he noticed his two newest customers.

“You want me to jump back there and give you a hand?”

“Thanks, Moe, but don’t worry about it. Hey, Wit.” Pete reached over and shook our hands. “One Wild Turkey rocks, one Dewar’s rocks coming up.” Pete placed them on the bar and took a moment to share a Bud with us.

“Can that guy move any slower?” I asked.

“Are you kiddin'? This fucking guy’s so slow we have to scrape the moss and barnacles off him after every shift.”

Wit liked that. “Can I steal that line, Pete?”

“You, Mr. Fenn, can take anything you’d like. It’s because of you this joint is so crowded.”

“How’s that?” Wit wondered.

“Your
Esquire
article,” Pete said. “Look around and behold. This ain’t our regular crowd. When you mentioned me and my kid and this place … And it was perfect timing, too,” he chortled. “My buyout from my partners is based partially on this month’s sales.”

That got my attention. “You mentioned Pooty’s?”

“I’m crushed,” Wit said, putting a hand to his heart. “You haven’t read the piece?”

“Oops! Sorry, Wit. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. By the way, I wanted to talk to both of you about that. Katy and my brother and sister are throwing a little party for me on September 28 at Sonny’s in Brooklyn.”

Pete squinted suspiciously. “A party?”

“To celebrate your what, exactly?” Wit was curious too.

I pulled out shield number 353. “On the Monday following the party, you two will have to refer to me as Detective Prager.”

“Holy shit! Congratulations, Moe.” Pete reached across the bar and patted my back. “I know it’s what you always wanted. Okay, everybody, listen up!” Pete shouted the barroom to a hush. “Your next round is on the house. We’re celebrating.” He leaned over to Wit and me. “Excuse me, guys. I gotta help Mr. Inertia over here. I’ll join you in a few.”

Wit’s reaction was more reserved, his journalistic skepticism switch locked in the on position. “Yes, Moe, congratulations. This detective thing is sudden, isn’t it?”

I gave him a brief rundown on the offer. “I guess it was Larry Mac’s way of saying thanks. He owes me from way back and he knows how much it means to me.”

“Yes, exactly. He knows how much this means.”

“Look, Wit, I got screwed out of a shield a long time ago. Then I turned it down once. I’m a big believer in the rule of threes. If I turn it down now—”

“I’m sorry, Moe. Please forgive me. It’s just the reporter in me. I see conspiracies hidden in every good intention. An occupational hazard, I suppose.”

“That’s okay, Wit. Cops suffer from a similar syndrome. Just ask Pete.”

Wit didn’t ask Pete. Instead, he led a toast to me with the free round of drinks our host had provided. He was rather eloquent in his praise and hope for my future success, yet his skepticism had put a damper on things. Not that you could tell by how we were acting. By ten that night, Pete had performed “Danny Boy” three times, once as Donald Duck. Wit had done several card tricks and regaled the bar with stories of the rich and the dead. Not so talented as my friends, I simply drank myself silly.

DRY-MOUTHED AND nearly sober, I found myself pacing the kitchen floor at four in the morning. I would have given anything for the house to not be so quiet. When paranoia and suspicion are toying with your head, a quiet house can be your worst enemy. It wasn’t so much what Wit had said that bothered me, it was more the way he’d said it. And his face! It was evident he thought I was somehow being bought off. Now I regretted not having discussed it with him further.

I guess I shouldn’t have cared about what Wit thought. He drank a little too much and was too attracted to the sound of his own voice, but he did have good instincts. You didn’t achieve his level of success without them. I’d gotten pretty far in my life by attaching myself to people with Wit’s feel for things. Whether it was Katy or Aaron or the cops I’d worked with who could sense trouble coming around blind corners, my attraction to these people had put me in good stead. So I was unable to dismiss Wit’s reaction.

As I was about to find out, I was right not to dismiss it. But not even Yancy Whittle Fenn could have conceived how right he had been or why. When, after my third glass of water and second dose of aspirin, I found I still couldn’t sleep, I finally opened the copy of
Esquire
Wit had sent me weeks ago. Although I was awake and nearly sober, my focus was severely lacking. I found myself drifting off, rereading the same sentences over and over again. Two things kept me at it: a picture of Joe Spivack, and something I had scanned but not processed. Then I relocated the sentence and realized my world was about to change again, forever. Just making sense of the words had changed it.

It was a throwaway sentence, a simple biographical fact that Wit or his editor might just as easily have omitted as included. This was the sentence:

Suddenly, every assumption I hid made over the past few months was called into question. Not only were those assumptions suspect, but the facts upon which they were based had, in the course of a few seconds, turned from granite to quicksand.

I HAD SPENT the rest of that early morning piecing together a rough chronology. Although a little unclear about some of the exact dates, I was confident my time line was accurate enough. Having things written out really helped me see certain causal relationships that had earlier escaped my notice. For instance, Larry Mac’s offering me my shield followed closely on the heels of my initial conversation with Sandra Sotomayor about HNJ1956. And wasn’t it convenient of Sandra to supply me with a perfectly reasonable explanation of Moira’s connection to HNJ1956 on the very same day I received my package from Media Search, Inc. This, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t asked her about it for weeks. I believe in coincidences as much as the next guy. To swallow these, however, would require more faith than I currently had on account.

There were other, far more disturbing conveniences and coincidences, but to make any sense of them I would need help. Problem was, the people I would usually go to for assistance had been compromised. They were now all so invested in keeping the stench of scandal off Steven Brightman, I couldn’t be absolutely sure I’d be able to trust them. An outsider looking at this set of circumstances might well make the same judgment about me. If I pretended to have never read Wit’s piece and forgot all about HNJ1956, I’d have my dream fulfilled. Unfortunately for the guilty party, no dream of mine or anyone else’s was worth two murders and a suicide.

I was about to attempt quite a precarious balancing act. The challenge was picking my stage assistant. There was only one candidate I could count on for the job, one who would not give me away, intentionally or otherwise. This trust was not based on something so facile or unsavory as self-interest or personal gain, but on the death of a man’s grandson. I dialed Wit’s number for the second time in two days.

THE RIDE OUT to Hallworth from Manhattan took less than half an hour. Before picking Wit up at his hotel, I’d stopped at the Brooklyn store to retrieve the clippings from Media Search, Inc. Just as on our trips to and from Long Island, we rode in near silence. Wit looked through the clippings as I drove and scanned the map. We had already discussed strategy on the phone, and what was there to say, really?

Coming into Hallworth, we crossed over a tiny one-lane bridge, the wood plank roadway sighing from the strain. Beneath us, an endless freight train lazily clanked its way along lonely tracks, blowing its mournful horn as if to announce our arrival. We were here, after all, to unbury the dead. I pictured Carl Stipe, his bicycle leaning against his hip, tossing rocks off the tiny bridge at passing trains.

Hallworth was a town of big hills, green carpet lawns, and lush, gnarly trees. Beyond the big Victorian manses scattered about the little hamlet, there was something palpably old-fashioned about this place. If you hid the cars parked in the driveways along Main Street, a time traveler might say he’d landed in 1935 instead of 1983. There was a comfortable feel to a place where bulldozers and wood chippers had yet to lay waste to vast tracts of land. Everything was grown in, grown up, or grown over. I liked that. I also liked how the asymmetry of the streets actually depended more on topography than on some greedy developer’s vision. There wasn’t an artificial cul-de-sac as far as the eye could see. Wit and I agreed that it much resembled the town we’d seen glimpses of in the clippings about Carl Stipe’s murder. It wasn’t hard to fathom how traumatic such a crime had been in a place like this.

We parked out in front of the
Hallworth Herald
offices on Terrace Street. Terrace Street seemed to be the only street in town dedicated to commerce, and that dedication was halfhearted at best. It wasn’t Rodeo Drive, not by a long shot. There was a quick mart, a pizzeria, a video store, a dentist’s office, a shrink’s, and a druggist’s.

The
Herald
was a storefront operation with green linoleum floors, a pressed tin ceiling, and desk legs held together with nails and adhesive tape. There was a beat-up TV in one corner, and a radio, too. Each of the five desks in the office was covered in mountains of paper under which typewriters and telephones were the only recognizable features. Curled and yellowed ads and articles were thumbtacked to the walls in between framed front pages from past editions. Stories about Carl Stipe’s murder were conspicuous by their absence.

Only two of the desks were currently occupied. Seated closest to the door was a mousy woman of indistinct age. She had stooped shoulders and pale skin, and smoked a cigarette that seemed surgically attached to her lower lip. Toward the rear of the place was a real old-timer. He was bald on top and gray on the sides, and looked like he hadn’t eaten since a week ago last August. Maybe he was too busy sucking on his pipe to be bothered with food. Neither the cigarette nor the pipe seemed anxious to help us. I cleared my throat loudly enough to get their attention.

“Can I do something for you gentlemen?” the old guy spoke up.

We walked back to his desk, the mousy woman paying us no mind at all. When we got closer to the ancient mariner, he slipped on a pair of wire-frame glasses.

“I’m Y. W. Fenn,” Wit announced with the proper blend of conceit and humility. “This is my driver, Moe.”

“Micah Farr,” the old man stuck out his right hand, “editor in chief, reporter, copyboy, and dishwasher. To what do we owe the pleasure of a visit from the great Yancy Whittle Fenn?”

Wit and I exchanged knowing glances. We recognized Farr’s name from the Stipe murder coverage. Farr had done all the local reporting, some of his stuff getting picked up by bigger papers.

“Call me Wit.”

“Everybody calls him Wit,” I chimed in.

“Okay, Wit, what brings you to our fair hamlet?”

“Steven Brightman. I did a piece on him—”

“—in
Esquire.
Yeah, I read it. Good work.”

“Indeed. Thank you. My concept is to do a follow-up about what shaped and influenced Brightman, a sort of prequel to my
Esquire
exposé. In it, I’d delve into his early years here in Hallworth and then across the river.”

“Nice idea,” Farr agreed. “No doubt now that he’s been cleared of suspicion in that poor woman’s murder, the ambitious little bastard’s set his sights on the next Senate race. When he announces, you’ll have your piece all set to go.”

Wit winked at the reporter. “Why, how cynical of you, Mr. Farr.”

“Yeah, I guess so. By the way, call me Mike.”

“Everybody call you Mike?” I wondered.

“Nah, everybody who knows me calls me an old prick, but since we’re just getting acquainted, Mike’ll do for now.”

We all had a good laugh at that. Mike explained that the girl at the front desk was his niece and how she’d had the misfortune of catching the journalism bug early in life.

“Learned at her uncle’s knee, I’m afraid. Too bad. She’ll end up like me,” Farr bemoaned, “old, lonely, and forgotten.”

Wit changed subjects. “We were curious if you could take a few hours to show us around. You know, point out the old Brightman house, where he went to school. If you have any old anecdotes about him or could introduce us to some people who knew him. I’ll credit you in the piece.”

“Love to. We haven’t had a juicy story of our own since … well, not in a long long time. Not much happens around here. Which is a good thing, I suppose. Annie can hold down the fort. Can’t you, dear?” he shouted to her.

She just waved.

We put Farr in the front seat next to me. Wit sat in the back. The old reporter guided us through a series of lefts and rights, pointing out houses that he thought were particularly pretty or that had been designed by famous architects.

“These are the greenest lawns I’ve ever seen,” I said without really meaning to.

“Yeah,” Farr agreed, “the town is patrolled by lawn police. If they find any brown spots, a truck comes by that night and sprays it to match your grass.”

He took us by a country club that was rimmed by beautifully trimmed hedges. Besides their meticulous upkeep, the hedges were remarkable in that they were of varying heights, widths, and lengths. Yet from our vantage point it was impossible to discern a coherent pattern.

“They’re pretty amazing, aren’t they?” Micah Farr was almost boastful. “Word is, they’re even nicer in an aerial view. The rumor is that from above they spell out ‘No Jews.’”

“How pleasant,” Wit remarked.

“We got other country clubs let everybody in, but the hedges ain’t as pretty. Brightman’s old man used to be a member here. That’s why I showed it to you.”

“A lot of anti-Semitism in Hallworth?” I asked.

“Not really, no. Even here, it’s not true anymore. The town’s changed over the years, but not very much. That’s the glory of this place, people don’t really change it. It changes them, almost always for the better.” Farr was wistful. “It’s why I’ve stayed all my life.”

Finally, the old reporter took us to the woods by the reservoir where Carl Stipe had been murdered.

“That’s the reservoir over there.” He pointed. “There’s the pool club. That house over there, you see it? Just through the woods. That’s where Brightman lived as a kid.”

Wit spoke on cue. “You know, Mike, in the course of my background research on Brightman, I came across some rather disturbing stories about a child being—”

“Carl Stipe was his name. He was the mayor’s kid,” Farr interrupted, a mixture of dread and excitement in his voice. “He was found not five feet from where we’re standing. In fact, his house was right over there.” He pointed in the opposite direction from the old Brightman house.

“He was tortured or something as I recall, wasn’t he?” Wit played it cool.

“Sticks shoved down his throat. It was horrible.”

“You saw the body, then?” I asked.

‘I did. By the time they found him, all his blood had settled. He was white as a sheet, his eyes frozen open, staring up at the canopy.” Farr looked up at the trees. “I’m not likely to forget that.”

“If I remember correctly, a drifter did it,” Wit said.

“Nah,” Farr pooh-poohed. “That guy Martz had nothing to do with it.”

“But—”

“But nothing, Wit,” Farr insisted. “People believe stuff sometimes because it’s what they want to believe. You know that. And the people around here wanted to believe Martz did it more than anything. They wanted to get on with their lives, and that would have been impossible if they thought the killer was still roaming around out there somewhere. Or worse still, if the killer was living among them. No sirree, everybody around here was pretty well interested in hanging it on that poor sick bastard Martz.”

“Everyone except you,” I said, remembering the follow-up articles which had appeared in the
Herald
marking the anniversary of the murder.

“I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now.”

“Did the police ever have any other suspects beside this Martz fellow?” Wit was curious to know.

“If they did, they weren’t saying.”

“And you?” I asked.

“Me? I’m a reporter. I don’t have theories.”

“Did they ever recover the bicycle?” Wit wanted to know.

Micah Farr squinted at us suspiciously. “You two fellows seem awfully more interested in the Stipe murder than Brightman. What’s going on, boys?”

“You’re a sharp newspaperman,” Wit complimented. “I am interested in the murder, because I think it’s why the Brightmans moved to New York. I think the murder had a profound effect in shaping Steven Brightman. I think it’s an angle that will work for me in the piece.”

Farr bought it. “You’re right. A few families moved away soon after the murder. If you want more info on the murder, I’d talk to Phil Malloy over at the municipal building. He’s mayor now, but back then he was a local cop. When we get back to the
Herald
, I’ll put a call in to him if you’d like.”

Wit clapped Farr on the shoulder. “That would be great. Thank you. May I just ask you one or two more questions, Mike?”

“Shoot, Wit.”

“The stories said Carl Stipe was coming from a friend’s house and using these woods as a shortcut. From whose house was he coming?”

Farr pointed again. “See that house right there, the one next door to where the Brightmans lived?”

Wit and I both said that we did.

“That was Ronny Bishop’s house. That’s where the kid was coming home from. They were one of the families that left after the murder. I guess I couldn’t blame them.”

There really wasn’t very much more for us to do there in the woods between the pool club and the reservoir. We took a ride past the houses the Brightmans, Stipes, and Bishops had lived in. Carl Stipe’s mother still lived in the big Tudor on Reservoir Road. We saw her outside, collecting her mail. I stopped the car and watched her retreat back into her home. My heart ached for her. I wondered what she believed about her son’s death.

Wit treated us to lunch at a pub in a neighboring town. Here Farr gave us as much background on Brightman as he could. Which, frankly, wasn’t much. Reporters, he said, weren’t in the habit of researching eleven- and twelve-year-old kids. Steven Brightman, as it happened, had been a good student, a friendly kid who played Little League. The reporter seemed to know a great deal more about Brightman’s dad, the big-time lawyer. I asked if Farr remembered the other families who had moved away in the wake of the murder. He wrote out a list of four or five names.

As we drove the old reporter back to the
Herald
, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Although the proximity of Brightman’s house to the crime scene and the Bishop kid’s home was interesting, there was nothing in what Farr had told us to tie Brightman closer to the murder itself. Without something more substantial, all the intricate scenarios I had constructed would collapse under their own weight.

Micah Farr was good to his word and rang up the mayor on our behalf. The mayor was thrilled at the prospect of speaking to someone like Wit. Any good press for Steven Brightman was good press for him and his town. Three months ago, when Brightman’s name was still tainted by Moira Heaton’s disappearance, the mayor would probably have hung up on Farr. How quickly things change. Farr did warn the mayor that we might ask about the Stipe murder, but downplayed our interest. He told us to come ahead just the same.