A Brilliant Death (20 page)

It was a sopping hot evening in early August when I returned from the baseball game in Bridgeport. I swung through the south end of town and drove through the little patch of floodplain where Travis lived. I drove through the alley behind his house and saw him on the back stoop of his house, a bottle of Mountain Dew at his side, listening to WDEV in Pittsburgh and reading the report. With Big Frank somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, Travis felt comfortable reading the report outside.

I pulled my car alongside his house. As I exited, Travis opened up the report and splayed it on a concrete step, facing me. “Come here and look at this,” he said.

“Did you find your missing golden nugget?” I asked.

“You tell me.” Travis pointed to a name that was hardly legible, printed and circled in the margin on a page of handwritten notes. The photocopier had barely registered the name, and while it was faint, it was unmistakable. “I’ve read this report fifteen times and never saw that until tonight.”

Beneath the scrawled name were the fading initials, “BF???” and “S to D.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “BF is boyfriend?”

“That’s my guess. What’s ‘S to D’?” Travis asked.

“Scared to death?”

Travis smiled and leaned back against the steps. “How interesting,” he said. “How very interesting. Well, that’s one mystery solved.”

From the beginning of August through the first of November, the Blue Devil Touchdown Club held meetings at the high school every Monday night. Prior to football season they met to prepare for the various fundraisers they held on home Saturdays—ball raffles, fifty-fifty raffles, concessions, and program sales. After the season began, they met to watch game films and, in the words of my dad, “painfully review the debacle that had unfolded before them” the previous weekend.

This was our senior year, and we were hoping to revive the past glory of Brilliant football. Brilliant hadn’t fielded a decent football team since Alex Harmon’s senior year. At one point the Blue Devils lost twenty-three straight games and won just once in three years. We had been mercilessly pounded my freshman year, losing every game, improved to five and five when I was a sophomore, and seven and three, our first winning season in six years, as a junior. Nobody was giving us much of a chance to win more than three games my senior year. On this Monday in mid-August, we had finished our first day of conditioning and I stayed late to work on my placekicking, which wasn’t going well. My legs were wobbly from the workout, and I was shanking balls all over the field. It didn’t seem to matter how hard you worked during the summer, your legs were never quite ready for the first day of conditioning. I had set my orange “Boomer” kicking tee on the twenty-five-yard line and was working on field goals. Each scuffed kick brought a groan from the members of the Touchdown Club, who were giving the home bleachers a fresh coat of royal blue and white paint.

They didn’t dare groan too loudly, however, without risking the ire of their president, Clay Carter, who was my kicking tutor. Clay was the closest thing to a living legend in Brilliant, having quarterbacked the Blue Devils for three years when they posted a 28–1–1 record and were three-time Big Valley Athletic Conference champions and state champs in 1948 and 1949. Clay had been first-team All-State twice in football, twice in basketball, and once in baseball, which may have been his best sport. He had been a rising star in the Boston Red Sox organization, a hard-hitting third baseman, when he collided with a catcher and tore up the shoulder in his throwing arm.

The injury quickly ended his baseball career, and Clay went to work for his father, learning the ropes at Carter Chevrolet and Buick in Steubenville. Clay was just twenty-six when his dad dropped dead of a heart attack. He took over the business, and he’d made the operation a bigger success than his dad could have ever envisioned. He lived outside of Brilliant in a sprawling ranch home that sat atop a knoll overlooking Beach Flats.

Clay was in his early forties and, except for a few flecks of gray around the temples, looked like he could still suit up for the Devils. His shoulders were broad on his six-foot-five frame, his stomach flat, and his muscles solid. Clay was a successful businessman and a little embarrassed by the attention that his high school feats continued to earn him. Rarely could the Touchdown Club get through a meeting without someone asking him to recount some past heroic feat. I often felt he liked working with me on my kicking simply because it gave him an excuse to get away from the attention.

He walked down out of the stands. “How’s the height?” he asked.

“The height isn’t the problem,” I said. “It’s the width that’s killing me.”

He frowned. “The width?”

“Yeah. Everything’s going wide right by about twenty yards. My kicks have more slice than my golf drives.”

“Tee ’er up and let’s have a look,” Clay said.

I did, and promptly choked under the pressure of Clay’s critical eye. The ball sailed off the side of my toe and skidded to rest in the end zone, never getting more than about five feet off the ground. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, we’re going to have to work on that a bit.” He took one of the loose balls and squeezed it between his big hands before squaring it up on the tee. “You’re trying to kick the air out of the ball. You don’t have to kill it. It’s all about making solid contact. Your heel comes down and you drive your toe between the stripe and the middle of the ball and follow through.” Clay approached the ball, wearing dress loafers, and buried his foot into it with a resounding thud. The ball lifted and slowly rolled end-over-end, splitting the uprights. “It’s like the sweet spot on a baseball bat,” he explained, setting up a ball for me to kick. “You have to find just the right spot on the ball. When you do, it’ll sail. Keep your heel down and your toe up, and follow through.”

I did. We had been over it dozens of times. My next kick cleared the uprights with just inches to spare.

“Lower on the ball,” he said. “Drive through it. Don’t poke it.”

Travis was just coming through the gate at the far end of the field as my kick came to rest near the fence. He scooped up three of the balls and started jogging toward us. With the footballs he was carrying a brown paper bag under his left arm. Travis had that ornery look in his eyes. He awkwardly tossed one ball at me, and said, “Hey, Mitch; Mr. Carter.”

We both nodded. I wanted to run and hide, for I knew what was coming. “What’s going on, Trav?” I asked.

“Aw, not much.” He dropped the other two balls. “You know, same old stuff. Oh, here, Mr. Carter,” Travis said, handing him the sack. “This is yours.”

Clay’s brow furrowed. “Mine? What is it?”

“Something you’ve probably been looking for.”

Clay Carter peeked into the sack and promptly turned the shade of a fish belly. It was a sick white, as if the blood had drained from his face so fast that it made him nauseous. He laughed a nervous laugh and asked, “What’s this?”

“It’s your right dress shoe,” Travis answered. “The one you lost in the cemetery when you and Mitchell collided.”

Clay looked at me, then averted his eyes, staring somewhere across the river into the hills of West Virginia. It had been his name—Clay C.—that was the faded notation on the page margin that Travis had found. Once I saw the name, it made sense. It had felt like I had tackled a tank, and that was Clay Carter. He tried to swallow, and it looked as though he had a dishrag in his throat. “Travis, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Clay said. “This isn’t my shoe.”

The muscles tensed in Travis’s neck and face. It took a lot of nerve for a kid to stand up to an adult, particularly one of Clay Carter’s legendary stature. But Travis was tired of the games. “It’s yours, Cinderella,” he said. “Mitchell pulled it off your foot when he tackled you that night. How many people around here wear a size-fourteen shoe?” Travis pulled a sheet of paper from his hip pocket, unfolded it, and held it up for Clay. “Even if it’s not your shoe, maybe you can tell me why your name is on the homicide investigation report concerning my mother’s death?”

Clay took the paper and read it. By the time he handed the paper back to Travis, he was looking anything but legendary. In fact, he looked pitiful, like a schoolboy caught with a cheat sheet. “Frankly, son, this isn’t the kind of thing that I’d like to become public knowledge,” Clay said.

“Mr. Carter, the last thing I want is for this to become public. I just want to know what you know about my mom.”

I gathered up an armload of footballs and lined them up next to my tee, trying to avoid Clay Carter’s glare. It was a safe bet that my kicking instruction was over for the evening.

“You couldn’t have approached me privately?” Clay asked, agitated. “Did you have to humiliate me in front of your friend?”

“Mitchell already knew. I figured if I approached you in private that you’d deny everything and blow me off. Mitchell won’t say a word.”

His eyes narrowed, and he peered at me. “You knew about this?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir. Travis and I have been working on this for a long time.”

Clay scanned the field and glanced up toward the dozen Touchdown Clubbers who were painting the bleachers. None seemed to have noticed the encounter. “I can’t talk here.”

“Why not?” Travis asked.

“Because I’m standing in the middle of the football field with a spare right shoe,” he said, a stinging tone in his voice. “Stop by my dealership tomorrow afternoon and fill out a job application. I’ve got an opening for part-time janitor. That way nothing will look suspicious.”

“Mitchell, too?” Travis asked.

Clay Carter did not answer. He turned and walked off the field, passing by the workers he had been organizing, and headed straight for his car.

“Big mistake,” Travis said, as I drove him up Stony Hollow Boulevard to Carter Chevrolet and Buick, which was located in the Pleasant Heights section of Steubenville. “I should have just grilled him right there on the football field last night. I caught him off guard; he was on my turf; I had my nerve up. There he was, looking at his name on that report, holding that shoe in his hand. I was dealing on my terms. Now we’ve got to go see him in his office. It’s like going to the principal’s office. Goddammit. I’ll bet he won’t even talk now. He’s had too much time to think about it.”

“He asked you to come up. Of course he’ll talk to you. But let me ask you something. Why is it that everything is a frontal assault with you? Why couldn’t you have approached him in the parking lot? Why did you bring the shoe and make a scene of handing it to him?”

“He’s Clay Carter.”

“So, what’s that got to do with anything?”

“He’s a legend in town and a successful businessman. Do you think if I called him on the phone he would give me the time of day? If there’s going to be a fight, you have to take it to him.”

“That’s exactly my point. Why does it always have to be a fight? You’ve got some balls on you, Travis, I’ll say that, but we’re going to have to work on your approach.” I moved into the passing lane and blew by a coal truck that was making the long trudge up the hill and belching out exhaust that left a black plume a quarter-mile long. “If you had walked up to him in the parking lot, handed him the shoe, and said, ‘I need to talk to you about this,’ he would have done it. Otherwise, he would be worried that you’d start shooting off your mouth all over town.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I can’t. If I did, word would get back to Big Frank and he’d kick my ass up around my shoulders.”

“Mr. Carter doesn’t know that. As far as he’s concerned, we’re holding all the cards and believe me, it’s not your ass he’s worried about. He has a family, a reputation, and the biggest car dealership in the Ohio Valley. He doesn’t want to see his name dirtied up in this affair.”

The realization that Clay Carter had much to lose seemed to buoy Travis a bit. “Are you sure you want me going in with you?” I asked.

We turned onto Brady Avenue and then made a left onto Sunset Boulevard, pointing the car back toward downtown Steubenville.

“Absolutely. He knows you. It’ll make him more comfortable.”

“I doubt that.” I was nervous, but frankly, I didn’t want to miss it. The mystery man revealed. “Do you think it was Mr. Carter in the boat with your mom?”