A Brilliant Death (15 page)

The words flew out of Travis’s mouth, and for a moment I expected Tornik to rake a backhand across his face. Tornik just frowned, bit his lower lip, and said, “You’re a bold little shit, aren’t you?” Travis just stared. “You talk to me like that again, boy, and you’re in for an ass whippin’. I don’t care how old you are.”

“Do you think that scares me? My dad is Big Frank Baron. Ass whippin’s aren’t anything new to me.”

“With a mouth like that I can understand why.” Slowly, as if to show Travis that any further conversation would be done on his terms, Tornik tilted his head and dragged hard on the cigarette, inhaling deep and exhaling slow. “Why are you so interested in your mother’s death?”

“If someone thought your mother had been murdered, wouldn’t you be interested?”

Tornik looked at Travis and nodded, blowing a plume of smoke over his head. “I suppose I would, at that.” He rolled the newspaper in his hands. “Why did I think your mom was murdered? As I recall, there were some things that just didn’t add up. Everyone thought it was an open-and-shut case. She drowned and the river never gave up her body. End of story. But your dad was out of town, so why would she go out on a boat to have a fling? She could have just had someone over to the house.”

I recalled what Captain Mathews had told us about Tornik.
He had this uncanny sixth sense for knowing who had committed a crime and how it went down. He just knew.
“That was it?” I asked. “You started a homicide investigation on a hunch?”

“Nothing wrong with a hunch,” he said. “And, as I recall, we got some information that all wasn’t as it appeared. I started talking to people who knew your mom, people from the church and . . .” Tornik squinted. “Where did she work? The library?”

“She was a volunteer at the library,” Travis said.

“That’s right. I remember that now. I talked to some people there and they all said it would have been
highly
unlike her to be out on a boat in the middle of the night with a lover—very out of character. I’m not saying your mother was a saint, and I’m not saying she didn’t have a lover, but based on the information I got from people who knew her, I think she would have had better sense than to be out in that boat in the Ohio River in the middle of the night.”

“So she had a boyfriend?” Travis asked.

Tornik shrugged. “Maybe. But if she did, he wasn’t on that boat with her.”

“You’re talking in riddles. If it wasn’t her boyfriend, who was it?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t know. I was never convinced that it was her on the boat.”

“But the barge captain saw them jump off the boat and into the water. I read that in the paper.” Tornik said nothing, taking another long hit on his smoke. “If you’re trying to confuse me, you’re doing a great job. If all these mysterious things were going on, how come no one investigated the case after you went to prison?”

He finished the liquor in one eye-watering gulp, the ice cubes pressing against his lip as he drained every drop. “No one else was interested, I guess. Actually, I think there were some other detectives who had suspicions, but I bet the real reason is that no one wanted to touch anything I had been associated with.”

“Maybe they just thought you were wrong,” Travis said. “Maybe they looked at the case and decided it was just an accident.”

He shrugged. “That’s possible. I don’t believe it for one second, and I don’t think you believe it, either. You think your mother was murdered.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do. That’s why you’re here. You’re looking for someone to confirm your suspicions. You may not know much about your mother, but you just can’t convince yourself that it was an accident. You can’t convince yourself that she would leave you at home, alone, while she went out for a rendezvous with her boyfriend. That’s why you’re talking to me.” Tornik took a breath, looked at Travis for a long moment, then dropped the bomb. “You want to know the real reason why I started looking into her death?”

Travis said, “Of course. That’s why I’m here.”

“I was asked to do it.”

“By who?”

“Your grandfather—he thought she had been murdered, too. That’s why he called me.”

“My grandfather Baron?”

Tornik winced. “What? Hell no, not your grandfather Baron. The other one. Her dad. I can’t remember his name.”

“Virdon.”

“That was it. Virdon. He was a military man. I remember that. He called me and said he didn’t believe it had been an accident. He thought your mom had been murdered and then dumped off the boat to make it look like an accident.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t remember, exactly. It wasn’t too awful long after she disappeared, a couple of weeks, maybe a month. I remember that your grandfather didn’t think too highly of your dad. He said your mom was planning to leave your old man. I guess things weren’t going very well. Your grandfather believed with all his heart that she had been murdered. Frankly, I’m half surprised that he didn’t come up here looking for your dad.”

“So it was that simple, huh? He had a bad feeling and you started looking into it?”

“Pretty much. Have you talked to your grandfather?”

“He’s dead, he and my grandmother Virdon.” Travis’s eyes bored in on Tornik. I could see the flush in his cheeks. “So now we’ll never know.”

Tornik shook his head. “It’s been too long.”

Travis stood, appearing to fight back tears. “Maybe that’s what you tell yourself, that it’s been too long. But if . . .”

“If!” Tornik said, his voice climbing for the first time as he cut off Travis’s attack. “If what? If I hadn’t screwed up and gone to prison I might have solved the case? It’s water over the dam, son. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.” Chase Tornik grabbed his newspaper and stood. “If you want me to admit I screwed up? That ain’t happening. People can believe what they want about your mother, and they can believe what they want to believe about me. I don’t give a shit anymore.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The chink in Margaret Simcox’s academic armor was exposed that summer.

She could not parallel park.

Margaret had taken driver’s education through the school that summer. She botched nearly every attempt to parallel park, and though she earned her driver’s license, she also earned a “B” in the course. A half-credit “B” in driver’s education put her behind Travis in their competition to be our class valedictorian. Travis took full advantage of this and began calling her “Crash” every time they passed, and it nearly brought her to tears.

Our first football scrimmage of the year was against Harrison Local, a team made up of the sons of thick-necked Eastern European immigrants with such names as Waskiewicz, Mroczkowski, Zelkowski, Andreichuk, and Orizczak. We played them to a 12–12 tie, a moral victory for Brilliant.

I limped home from the game and found Travis sitting on the glider on my back porch, slowly rocking in the dark. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“Pretty good. We tied ’em, 12–12.” I set my equipment bag on the porch and eased onto the glider to Travis’s left.

“How’d you do?”

“Not bad. Caught three balls—one was a nifty little over-the-shoulder grab with one of their safeties hanging all over me. Unfortunately, I followed that up by letting one go right through my hands on a buttonhook. It hit me in the facemask and went about twenty feet straight up in the air and they intercepted it. So that quick . . .” I snapped my fingers. “. . . the over-the-shoulder grab was forgotten and the muff remembered. It’s going to look really bad on the films.”

“Coach Oblak will be so excited about tying Harrison Local that he won’t even remember that drop.”

“It happened on our last drive on their seven-yard line.”

Through the darkness I could see him choking back laughter. “Okay, forget what I said, the coaches might remember that one.”

“What are you up to?”

“Well, I thought you’d like to know that I had a little chat with Big Frank tonight.”

“About?”

“My mom.”

“Ka-ching. That’s interesting. What prompted you to do that?”

“Actually, I blundered into it. I got home from the bakery, made a sandwich, and turned on the TV, and the afternoon movie was
Titanic
, with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. So I’m watching it and Big Frank comes in and sits down, and it’s right at the end of the movie where the ship’s going down and people are drowning all over the place, and Big Frank says, ‘God, drowning would be an awful way to go.’ It was out of his mouth before he realized what he had said. I told him, ‘You know, Mom drowned, and you’ve never really talked to me about that. I’d really like to know more about her.’”

“Nice transition. What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Your mother was a
baldracca
.’ He said it with this guttural Italian accent, just like my Grandpa Baron used to talk when he got pissed off about something.”

“So what’s a baldracca?”

“I don’t know, but since he spat it out like a fly had flown into his mouth, it certainly can’t be good. I asked him what it meant and he just looked away. If I had to bet, it’s probably Italian for whore. But he didn’t leave. He just got this look of resignation on his face, like he was tired, and said, ‘What do you want to know?’”

“That opened the door.”

“Yes and no. You’ve got to know how to work Big Frank. You’ve got to pick your shots. Ask him one question, be very specific, and hope you don’t cross that line in the sand that will cause Mount Baron to blow sky high.”

“How do you know where the line is?”

“That’s always the challenge with Big Frank. The line changes from day to day, depending on his mood.”

“What did you ask him?”

“I said I wanted to know what she was like. What was her favorite food? What did she smell like? How did they decide to name me Travis? Did she want me to be a doctor or join the Navy, or what? What kind of movies did she like? I wanted to know anything like that.”

“And?”

“Nothing. I don’t think he was trying to be evasive, or that he didn’t remember. I don’t think he ever knew. He said, ‘Hell, boy, I don’t know,’” Travis said, dropping his voice several octaves to imitate Big Frank. “‘It’s been a long goddamn time. Movies. She liked movies. Don’t everybody?’ I think it was probably a little embarrassing that he didn’t know anything. I said, ‘Dad, what color were her eyes?’ He thought about it for a moment and finally said, ‘Beats the hell outta me.’”

“Green,” I said.

“Right, but he had no clue. He was telling me about getting discharged from the Navy and moving back to Brilliant. Now, mind you, he remembers driving his 1947 Mercury convertible back to Brilliant . . .” He reverted to his Big Frank voice: “‘The Merc, what a helluva car, I bought it off a guy in my unit who couldn’t keep up with the payments. That was one sweetheart of a ride, I’ll tell you that; had a three-fifty in it, damn, it was so sweet. I wish I still had that puppy.’ And he can tell you that
How High the Moon
and
The World Is Waiting for the Sunshine
by Les Paul and Mary Ford were the big songs on the radio during the trip. He probably remembers the odometer reading from every oil change he’s ever had, but he can’t remember the color of my mom’s eyes. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”

“To be real honest with you, Trav, a lot of things about Big Frank strike me as weird.”

A coal train rolled past, making the windows behind us vibrate in their panes. Its horn blasted as it neared the Penn Street crossing, echoing off the hills.

I asked, “What did he remember about the night she died?”

“He said he left Brilliant on a Thursday morning for Arkansas to take some coiled steel to a processing plant near Fayetteville. When he got there, there was a message for him to call home. When he does, my grandma Baron tells him that my mother was out on the river in the boat and drove it into a barge and they couldn’t find her. He said he was thinking there’s no way, because she hated the boat and she hated the water. He said he thought maybe someone kidnapped her and made her go out on the river. He drove all the way back. That’s when he found out that she and some guy were seen jumping off the boat. He said the boat didn’t have any running lights on and it drifted into a barge full of iron ore. It was like a bulldozer hitting a storage shed and the boat ended up in a million pieces.”

“Did you ask him if he knew who the guy was?”

“Yeah. He said he didn’t know and didn’t care. He called the guy a coward who saved himself and let my mom drown so their affair wouldn’t be known.”

“Did you ask him about the homicide investigation?”

Travis nodded. “He said there was nothing to it. He said it was just Tornik trying to add to his scrapbook. ‘Tornik being Tornik,’ is how he described it.”

“Did you tell him that we talked to Tornik and he said your grandfather Virdon had called because he suspected Big Frank of murdering your mother?”

“No, I do place some value on my life.”

I smiled. “He was pretty forthcoming.”

“Yeah, I know, he was actually pretty congenial.” Travis looked at me and frowned. “You know, I almost hate it when that happens. Big Frank’s more suited to acting like a complete bastard. When he acts like a human being it makes me think there’s something wrong in the cosmos. You know, like the world’s spinning off its axis.” I laughed. “Okay,” Travis continued, “here’s the best part. I asked him if he thought Mom drowned because she got pulled down in the undertow of the barge. And, he said, it wouldn’t have mattered because she couldn’t swim. He told me that twice, like he was really trying to emphasize it. He said, ‘Your mom couldn’t swim a lick.’”