Without Prejudice (34 page)

He should leave, find Anna and wait for the police, then try and rebuild the lives Duval had fractured – their own. He started to walk to the door, when a voice suddenly spoke, out of the darkness behind him.

‘I wasn’t going to hurt her, Bobby.’ There was a pleading note to the words.

Robert stopped and turned around. He peered into the darkness, then said loudly, ‘You could have fooled me. You had her tied up. And her shirt was off.’

‘I know. But I promise I wasn’t going to hurt her.’ There was a faint echo to his words. Robert realised he was up on the balcony.

‘Is that what you told Peggy Mohan, too?’

‘I thought you believed in me, Bobby.’ He sounded aggrieved. It was almost convincing. ‘Anna does. And Donna.’

‘Not for much longer, Duval. Donna Kaliski says they found your blazer.’

Silence hung in the darkness like fog. Robert’s voice sliced through it. ‘The next step would have been a DNA test. But you and I know what that would show, now don’t we?’

‘What you talkin’ about?’

‘You’d flunk the test. I know that.’

‘Then you know something nobody else does, Bobby.’

‘Except Vanetta.’

‘What’s it got to do with Vanetta?’ He sounded angry.

‘She kept the shirt, Duval. The shirt you wore that night. I’ve got it now – there’s blood all over it. Peggy Mohan’s blood.’

Duval said nothing at all. When his silence persisted, Robert peered up through the gloom. He said, ‘What I can’t understand, is why you put us through such a wild goose chase. What was the point?’

This time Duval replied. ‘When I come out of prison I didn’t want to bother you, Bobby. I just wanted to know you again. I met your family; that meant a lot to me. I even sent your wife flowers.’

So the mysterious flowers had come from Duval. Robert was dumbfounded. What had been the point? Anna hadn’t had the faintest idea who’d sent them to her.

Duval said, ‘I was trying to be nice. That’s all. I wasn’t stalking her, Bobby.’

‘But Duval, you hadn’t even met Anna when you sent those flowers. You didn’t know us at all.’

‘But I
wanted
to,’ Duval insisted, and the beseeching tone had entered his voice again. ‘I already knew Jermaine and his wife didn’t want me around. They’re family, but it didn’t mean anything to them. So I hoped I could find a life with you all instead.’ He paused. ‘But you let me down.’

‘You think
we
let
you
down. How do you figure that?’ He realised that through the far wall was the Blackstone apartment where he had grown up. And where he and Duval had played.

‘Man, it’s always been that way. It started when I was little. I had no father. He wasn’t just absent – I didn’t even know his name. With Aurelia, it could have been any one of a thousand men. Shit, Bobby, I saw two men fucking my mother when I was five years old. One of ’em caught me watching him and he started to laugh. Then my own mother saw me, and she just looked away.’

‘But you had Vanetta, Duval. You know she loved you. She
always
loved you.’ He thought of how she had kept Duval’s secret.

‘I know that, Bobby. You don’t have to tell me.’ He sounded resentful. ‘See, when I first thought I might get out – must be nine or ten years ago – I got really scared, man. Sounds funny, don’t it? Here’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for and when it looks like it might happen, my pants filled up.’

‘That’s not surprising, Duval.’ He would have been used to prison; the outside world must have seemed terrifying.

‘The one thing I hung on to is that when I got out, Vanetta would be there. This time, she was gonna let me live with her. She said so herself. If she’d only have let me live with her before I wouldn’t have got into trouble.’

‘What, you think you wouldn’t have hurt that girl?’

‘Shit, that Mohan girl, she used to be friendly, she used to say hi. Then one night I say “You look mighty fine this evening”, and after that she wouldn’t even look at me, she wouldn’t even acknowledge that I existed. Do you know how that made me feel? She was worse than Lily.’

Lily? Was Duval still nursing his weird complex about Robert’s sister? It had been almost
forty
years. He decided to ignore it. ‘Is that why you hurt the Mohan woman so bad?’

‘I don’t know, Bobby.’ His voice sobered. ‘Something just seemed to give. I can’t explain it. Don’t think I ain’t thought about it.’

There was steel in his voice now, as if he was following an argument he had carved out against the formidable opposition of his conscience and his guilt.

Duval was saying, ‘The thing was, I wanted that girl to acknowledge me. No one else did. My momma was sliding down into her hole, and I might as well have never been born as far as she was concerned. Even Vanetta didn’t understand – she said I had to stand on my own two feet, just when I felt I had no feet at all.

‘I know I was wrong, I know it. But I realise now that it wasn’t just me who had to live with what I had done. Nobody else wants to forget about it, either, even after all these years. There’re some mistakes a man can make that nobody will forgive him for.’

‘You did the time; you paid the price. They forgive you, Duval.’

‘No, they don’t,’ he snapped. Robert thought he could see him now, leaning above the balcony’s rail above the centre aisle of the church, a moving square of white. It must be his shirt.

Duval said, ‘Think about it, Bobby. ’Spose I’d said to you, “I’ve done my time, I am a changed man, let’s forget about what I did, but yes, sir, I did do it”. Would you have been so nice to me? Would you have wanted to know me? Would you have let me meet your wife and daughter?’

There was no point answering. Duval was absolutely right.

‘That’s why I lied.’ He stopped, and Robert heard a rustling noise from the balcony. Then Duval started talking again. ‘I didn’t lie to fool you or trick you. I lied so you would treat me like a normal man, I lied so you would give me a break. I lied so you wouldn’t condemn me before you had a chance to find out what I was like. I lied so you would
know
me.’

Robert said, ‘But you must have known you’d be found out, if you insisted on this innocence stuff. Why couldn’t you leave it alone?’

‘I started something I couldn’t stop. Thanks to your wife, and that woman in the centre.’ He sounded angry at them now. He suddenly lowered his voice, as if imparting a confidence, but Robert heard him clearly nonetheless. ‘Even if I’d thought it through, I would have done the same thing. Because if I said I was guilty, y’all wouldn’t want to know.’

Robert was trying to keep Duval talking until the police arrived, but part of him was enthralled. Duval didn’t sound crazy at all, even in his distorted rationales. He seemed to recognise the gulf between him and everybody else, though not that he was living in a bubble of his own. What had Bockbauer said?
When their balloon gets pricked . . . a lot of them can’t cope
. God knows, Duval hadn’t coped – or he wouldn’t be standing here in the dark on a rotting balcony, having kidnapped Robert’s wife.

‘You still there, Bobby?’

‘Of course I am. Look, Duval, it’s not too late. I went to see Bockbauer. He was pissed off, but he said he’d give you another break.’

‘Bobby, don’t fuck with me now. We both know it’s too late.’

Then a siren sounded in the distance, and it was coming closer.

‘Duval, I want you to stay right where you are. I’m sorry but that’s the cops. You know they had to come.’

‘I know.’ His voice was flat, but the white square was still there on the balcony; Duval hadn’t moved.

‘You stay right there, okay? Whatever you do don’t come down. They’re going to be scared. Just like those guards downstate. I don’t want you getting shot, Duval. You hear me?’

Robert couldn’t see him on the balcony now. He must have stepped back. ‘Duval, I said, did you hear me?’

And then he heard the one word, as if they were boys again and he was telling him to come play ball. ‘Okay.’

Robert went out and through the shitty little yard, with its plastic wrappers and a child’s toy carelessly thrown over the wall from the Dorchester Avenue side. When he turned the corner to go along the alley to the street, two figures in uniform appeared out of the dark in front of him. One of them started, his hand moving to his sidearm.

Robert shouted, ‘Don’t shoot!’ and put his hands in the air.

The cops came forward carefully. ‘Where is the guy?’ one of them demanded.

‘He’s inside.’ He sensed his voice was shaky.

‘Is he armed?’

He hesitated, thinking fast. ‘I don’t know.’ A
yes
would guarantee Duval didn’t leave the church alive. The same officer started to draw his weapon. Robert said sharply, ‘Don’t go in yet. Please.’

The cop looked at his partner, who shrugged. Robert said, ‘He’s up in the balcony, but I think he’ll come down. Let me talk to him – we grew up together.’ And before they could object he turned and went around the corner.

He walked through the rear doorway, calling, ‘
Duval! Duval!
’ as he moved forward into the dark hall, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. ‘Come on down. It will be okay. You’re safe if you come down
now
.’

The big room was silent, and he felt frightened again, worried that Duval had come down and was hiding, ready to attack him or the police. Looking up towards the empty balcony, he saw something draped over its mahogany rail. He walked quickly down the church’s aisle, kicking aside rubbish and hymn books, less afraid now, until he was only about ten feet from the bottom of the balcony.

Duval had done it very neatly. The rope was double hitched around the mahogany rail, and could have held an even greater weight. Height was not a problem, since the top of the rail must have been a good fifteen feet above the ground floor. His eyes were closed, and the look on his face seemed entirely peaceful – save for the odd tilt to his head, as if he’d slept in a funny position and was trying to work out the resulting crick in his neck. He must have broken his neck instantly when he jumped.

He was wearing a white shirt, and the same pressed suit trousers he’d had on that day in the coffee shop when the two old friends had met for the first time in almost twenty-five years. The same trousers he’d had on in court, when Robert said he’d be back to see him again, but never had.

Why had Duval done this? Was it hopelessness, now that his guilt had been exposed? Or was it guilt, both about his lies and his crime, guilt that had been hounding him until he had finally simply given up? Either way, he must have realised he would never be allowed to lead a normal life. Whatever normal meant.

Robert would never know the answer now, or what he could have done that would have kept Duval alive. He held his breath for a moment. He thought of how through coincidence or fate, or both, Duval had emerged from prison after Robert had returned to his home town and their lives had become entwined again, like strands of wool reunited on their original spool.

He remembered the two of them as boys, playing right next door with carefree easiness, too young for disappointments, too young even for hope. It had been an Eden, after all, that small back yard, here on the South Side of Chicago, with its lone big tree, in the days before the runt and Mule had come as harbingers of a crueller life.

Not much of a life for Duval, he thought, as he stared at the pendulous figure of his dead friend. He wondered why, if there were no God, people were placed in their lives so differently, like the diverse tributaries of a river. He wondered whether, if he could have seen his own life ahead of him, he would have lived it just the same. If the dice were thrown ahead of time, would he want them rolled again, or opt to play them as they lay? He didn’t know; he only knew that whatever force commanded life, it was blind to the fate of those it consigned. There was no caring master.

‘Officer!’ he shouted, and within seconds he heard the policemen coming into the church behind him. Robert took a last long look at Duval hanging there in his final effort at peace. Then he walked to the back of the church and collected the knife from the chair. Motioning the cop to come and help, he went to cut his old friend down.

If you enjoyed
Without Prejudice
,

read on for Chapter One of
Stillriver
,

also by Andrew Rosenheim

One

As he had driven north through the high orchard country he had seen the last sliver of sun slip into Lake Michigan, but here enough light remained for him to make out the birch tree on the corner of the lot, the towering twin maples next to the house, the long expanse of white pine boards and green-shuttered windows that was the house itself. And a patrol car in the drive.

He parked his rental car and got out slowly, stretching after the drive from the little airport in Muskegon and looking around for a minute before going inside. The rough ryegrass (they had never had a silky lawn) was high – why hadn’t his brother been round to cut it? He looked across at the Wagners’, and was surprised to see four cars parked under the cedar trees there. Then he remembered it was now a bed and breakfast. Tourists up for Memorial Day, hoping that, like a rare restaurant meal served ahead of expectation, summer would come early to dispel this wet, cold weather. There was no sign of the Wagner twins.

He heard the back door groan as it opened, then slammed shut, and he turned round to see Jimmy Olds standing on the porch. He was in blue-grey uniform, and had the crescent moon shades of a motorcycle cop pushed back on his head, covering the top of his balding forehead. He was an improbable policeman – short, skinny, quite the opposite of his predecessor, Jerry Dawson, who had been a bear-like barrel of a man, an ex-marine well over six feet tall and very tough with it.

‘Hey Jimmy.’ He was trying to sound friendly but could tell his tone was merely resigned.

Jimmy nodded. ‘Michael.’

Michael walked to the porch and climbed the steps to shake hands.

‘You’ve had a long trip,’ said Jimmy.

‘You could say that.’

‘Europe, right?’ Pronounced
Yurp
. ‘How long you been over there?’

‘Almost six years.’

‘You must like it.’

Michael looked across the street, this time at Bogles. The front yard was surprisingly tidy. He nodded absentmindedly. ‘It pays the bills,’ he said.

‘That’s what counts,’ and they both nodded in mild agreement at the banal correctness of this. They were silent for a minute and Jimmy looked down at his black leather boots. ‘Well,’ he said, lifting his chin. ‘I expect you want to go inside.’

He followed Jimmy in, staring at the walnut grip of his holstered pistol. Jimmy’s father had been a local builder, not very successful, one step up really from a handyman. After high school Jimmy had joined him, until the day he announced to his father’s chagrin that he had passed the necessary exams and was joining the state police in Fennville. When Jerry Dawson died of cancer Jimmy had become the town’s policeman – actually, now one of three of them, since despite a virtual absence of serious crime, Stillriver’s governing council, flush with tourist property tax, had decided the community was under-policed. Although Jimmy was the senior officer, there was a morose quality about the man, an air of mild disappointment, as if he had expected that by stepping into Jerry Dawson’s shoes his feet would grow correspondingly. They hadn’t.

They walked through the kitchen, which had always been the cosiest room in the house, with its wood-burning stove, and the radio tuned to Blue Lake while his mother bustled around and Michael sat after school reading the
Chronicle
. After she’d died, the room assumed a colder, functional air. His father would come in and make supper quickly, Michael and Gary would join him when the meal was ready and the trio would eat methodically – meat, vegetable, and potato; or stew, rice and salad; sometimes just plain stew – seated around the soft-pine kitchen table, talking only occasionally. Gary and he would do the dishes, then quickly go their separate ways, like a pair of cats let out of their carrier basket after a trip to the vet. In the rack by the sink now there was a plate, a glass, knife and fork – the only sign of his father’s last supper.

He followed Jimmy into the dining room, a large square with an old-fashioned, heavy-looking mix of dark wainscoting and cream plaster walls, like the interior of an early Frank Lloyd Wright house. An old oak table and matching chairs were grouped in the middle. When his mother was alive they would sit down formally for supper and, at weekends, for lunch as well. But now the table was bare, and dusty from disuse.

On to the living room, again tidy but cold: three soft armchairs, a sofa the colour of groundfall plums, and a maple rocking chair formed a circle around the Mojave rug. Behind the sofa stood the mahogany grandfather clock, ticking with a metronomic resonance. It was an heirloom from Michael’s mother’s family that his father had wound religiously each Sunday evening. Michael made a mental note to wind it in two days’ time – it seemed wrong even to contemplate winding it sooner.

Then to the stairwell, on one side of which was the small study where his father had taken to sitting, reserving the living room for company. Michael was pretty sure that lately there had not been much of that.

Jimmy stopped at the bottom of the stairs. ‘You know he’s not here any more, right?’

Yes, of course he’d realized that – it had been almost two days since they’d found his father – but Jimmy’s bluntness unnerved him. ‘He’s in Fennville now,’ Jimmy went on. ‘At the hospital.’

They climbed the steep stairs and Michael gripped the thin rail of the banister, worn smooth by years of little boys’ hands sliding along it. The stairs had been daunting when he was little – one family legend had him pitching down them head first, aged three, only to be caught at the bottom by his father.
Another time he saved my ass
, Michael thought wearily.

On the landing Jimmy turned left but Michael went right. Jimmy called out to him: ‘He wasn’t in the master bedroom.’

‘I know.’ His father had moved to the spare room at the back of the house during the last month of his wife’s illness, and when she had died he hadn’t moved back.
So why am I going here first?
wondered Michael. Maybe to feel some hint of his mother’s past presence in the house – there was virtually none in the cold rooms downstairs; maybe somehow to ready himself for the fact that, with his mother long dead, now his father was gone, too.

He opened the door slowly and looked in. The light outside was fading fast, but he could make out the big double bed with its high mahogany headboard, and his mother’s oval dressing table, where her set of ivory brushes was lined up carefully. Then he softly closed the door and walked down the hall to Jimmy, who was waiting outside the back bedroom.

‘Did Henry usually sleep back here?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Once my mother died.’ Michael sounded formal even to himself.

‘The room’s been sealed. I’ll open it, but don’t touch anything. We had the state police in and they’ve done the forensics – dusting fingerprints mainly – but they may want to come back.’ Jimmy peeled back a thick ribbon of yellow adhesive tape. Then he turned the door knob and, reaching in, switched the light on.

There was an armchair of cracked brown leather by the window, with a reading lamp on an adjacent small table. His father’s clothes from the day still lay on a wooden kitchen chair near the closet: trousers folded on the seat, his shirt hooked over the uprights of the chair like epaulettes on a store window mannequin. The closet door was open, and Michael could see a few pairs of shoes neatly lined up, some shirts on coat hangers, a fading sports jacket doubtless bought at Vergil’s in Fennville. There was an old man’s smell in the air – of clean but ageing clothes, of foot powder applied after a bath.

He was avoiding the bed to his right, but eventually forced himself to turn and see what was there. Not his father, he knew, and no longer any bedclothes. ‘They’ve stripped the bed,’ he commented flatly.

‘They took the sheets away for analysis.’

‘Analysis?’

Jimmy sighed. ‘Blood. They need to make sure it was just your father’s blood.’

‘Oh.’ He hadn’t thought about the blood. ‘Was there a lot of it?’

‘A fair amount,’ Jimmy said quietly.

‘Tell me,’ he said, keeping his back to Jimmy, ‘was there any sign of a struggle?’

‘If it’s any comfort, Michael, I doubt he knew what hit him.’

‘So he was asleep when it happened?’

‘Well, he had sat up in the bed. We’re pretty sure of that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he got hit right on top of his head. If he’d been lying down he wouldn’t have got hit that way.’

‘And that’s what killed him?’

Jimmy was silent for a moment. ‘He got hit more than once.’

Since he’d first been told, on his mobile phone as he sat in a rowboat inspecting the beam encasing under Anfernachie Bridge, through the hours and hours of travel that got him here, all Michael had been able to imagine was his father’s body, inert on the bed. It was the stillness of the image, a snapshot, which held firm in his mind’s eye.

But now he could visualize his father startled from sleep, sitting up in surprise, turning towards the door and seeing, seeing exactly what? His killer? Heading towards him, weapon already raised, perhaps already descending – which would leave just enough time for his father to understand that he was about to be hit, about to be killed, in fact. Just enough time to feel the bone-shaking panic of a man about to die.
Christ
.

He had seen enough. He turned around and faced Jimmy. ‘What did he get hit with?’

Jimmy shrugged. ‘We don’t know. So far there’s been nothing. No prints, no sign of forced entry—’

‘He never locked the back door.’

‘The doctor thought it might have been a lead pipe. Something heavy.’

‘Doctor Fell?’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘He’s retired. There’s no doctor in town now. This is some guy from Burlington.’

As they left the room Michael switched off the light and closed the door, then watched as Jimmy patched back the strip of yellow tape. They went down the stairs and walked through the ground floor until they again stood under the covered porch side by side as rain and mist came down in a fine, almost invisible mix. The air felt moist and heavy, and the lights from the Wagners’ house seemed to quiver like buoys bobbing at sea.

‘Is Gary coming by?’ asked Jimmy.

Michael shook his head. ‘I told him to come round in the morning.’

‘Come here?’ Jimmy sounded surprised.

‘I’ll sleep here tonight. I don’t imagine they want to kill me, too.’

Jimmy looked so shocked at this that Michael almost laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll lock the door.’ But then suddenly his studied diffidence dissolved. ‘Who would have done this, Jimmy?’

Jimmy took a stick of gum from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds. ‘They told me to ask you, did your dad have any enemies?’

Me, when I was a mixed up kid
, he wanted to say, but instead replied with exasperation, ‘Jesus Christ, Jimmy, he was a retired schoolteacher.’

‘Told ’em that. Taught me three years running. Or tried to anyway.’

‘So what do they think – he flunked Oscar Peters twenty years ago and made a lifelong enemy?’

‘Oscar’s dead.’

Oscar Peters had been the town’s closest approximation to a village idiot. ‘You know what I mean.’

Jimmy said nothing and when Michael spoke again, his voice was softer. ‘All right. I know what they’re thinking. Obviously
somebody
didn’t like him. But I can’t think of anyone obvious. How could I? I haven’t been here in six years. Anyway, when was the last murder in this town? I’ve never even
heard
of one.’

Jimmy looked pensive. ‘There was Andy Everitt.’

‘That was a mercy killing, as you know perfectly well. He just put her out of her misery. What did he end up serving anyway? Two years?’

Jimmy shrugged. ‘Something like that.’ He chewed some more on his gum. ‘Ronald Duverson
tried
to kill somebody once. That I know for a fact.’ He turned and looked blank-eyed at Michael.

Michael heard his heart start to thump like thunder in his ears. He tried to sound calm, almost nonchalant. ‘Is that right?’

Jimmy nodded. ‘But he’s in Texas now. Safe and sound.’

‘How do you know?’ He tried to keep the urgency out of his voice.

‘Because he’s sitting in the penitentiary. Down there he
did
manage to kill somebody.’

‘Well, that rules him out,’ Michael said, his voice pitched high enough for Jimmy to look at him again. ‘Seems to me,’ he said, his natural deeper tones reasserting themselves, ‘that you’re looking for a loony.’

‘Or fanatic.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Hang here a minute.’ Jimmy walked down the porch steps and went to his patrol car. When he came back he held a heavy black flashlight in his right hand. ‘Come look at this.’

Michael followed him around to the side of the house, where a bough of the peach tree extended almost to the wall. He could smell the incense of the cedars that, mixed with mulberry trees, formed a hedge separating the lot from the Jenkinses next door. Jimmy stopped and swung the flashlight’s beam on to the white boards. Michael moved closer to look.