Day of Wrath (16 page)

As soon as I got to the office, I cleaned the litter of
circulars and bills off my desk, ,took a yellow pad and pencil out of the
drawer, and began to write down a brief outline of what I knew about Robbie
Segal's disappearance.

Sunday, early afternoon: Mildred and Robbie argue
over money Robbie has taken from her purse. Mildred leaves. Returns at
4:30 to find Robbie gone.

Sunday, late afternoon: Pastor Caldwell sees
his son and Robbie in the back yard of the apartment house.

Sunday evening. Bobby and Robbie are seen at
The Pentangle Club.

If I could read him correctly—and I had the feeling
that I could, after all I'd leamed—Bobby had never intended that his
girl should take an active part in the Pentangle scene. I guessed that
he'd taken her with to the club on Sunday night because he hadn't wanted
to leave her alone on her first night away from home and because the music
he made at the bar was an important facet of his life. Maybe the most important
facet. Because he was made of music, this kid. All of his friends had said
so. Irene, Grace, even Clinger (by report) had said so, too. Music and
Robbie Segal were all he'd thought about. I could only imagine how disappointed
he must have felt when he'd discovered on Sunday evening that Bobbie was
no longer listening to what he played.

I'd sensed it all along—that this beautiful girl-child
had wanted something more than Bobby could offer her. And while the ugly
scene at the bar could have been a fluke—a combination of too much beer
and too much excitement—it could also have been a sign of things to come,
a first declaration of independence from her mother and from Bobby, as
well. Maybe it had been Clinger and The Pentangle Club that she'd been
looking for all along—a world in which she could make up her own rules
as she went along. Or maybe she hadn't known what she'd wanted, except
to taste life, as Grace had been trying to do, on its own terms. Whatever
it had been, she was getting beyond her lover by Sunday night, launching
herself on her own erratic course, with Bobby trailing somewhere behind
her, holding on for dear life. Whether the boy had been able to catch up
before Wednesday, or whether Robbie had gone off entirely on her own, I
didn't know. For her sake, I hoped she'd broken free. Because if she hadn't,
she was surely implicated in what had happened to her lover. What had happened
to him might very well have happened to her, too.

I pushed the yellow pad away from me, as if I were pushing
the thought out of my mind. But the bad feeling had already started up—the
dread. Two and a half days were scarcely enough time for Robbie to lose
the Caldwell boy entirely. Even if she'd wanted to lose him, he wouldn't
have let go that quickly. And in spite of the way I'd been speculating
about her, there was no indication that she hadn't felt an affection for
the boy who'd helped her run away. In fact, she might have loved him as
deeply as he'd loved her and still have wanted something more—some forbidden
excitement, some deep, improbable sin, to wipe out all those years of decency
and of Mildred. And if she'd loved him at all, she wouldn't have ditched
him the day after she'd left home. That would have been too cold, too calculating.
And the girl I'd been looking for—learning about and partly creating—wasn't
capable of that kind of callousness.

I stared at the pad again—at that last entry. And wrote
down one name: Clinger? I needed more information on him, and I knew where
I might be able to find a bit of it. I picked up the phone and dialed Dino
Taylor, a disc jockey at WGUC. I got through to his secretary, who told
me that Dino wouldn't be free until three o'clock. That left me two hours
to kill. And as I hung up the phone, I knew I wasn't going to be able to
spend them sitting in the office, staring at the bare, yellow walls. Not
in the mood I'd worked myself into.

So I got up and walked out the door. Took the elevator
down to the lobby and stepped into the daylight. I didn't really have a
destination in mind as I headed up Vine Street, but once I got to the Square,
I found myself walking north, amid the car sounds and the slick, made-up
faces I and the white blanketing light of the afternoon sun, toward the
Enquirer Building on Sixth. I had a few contacts on the paper—one man
in particular who wrote a weekly pop music column. I figured there was
a decent chance he could tell me something useful about Clinger.

I pushed on against the flow of afternoon shoppers, stopping
once at the dark, diamond-shaped windows of The Cricket restaurant, where
the sweet; oily smell of grilled meat and the brothy aroma of dark German
beer held me for a moment. I managed to pull myself away and walk twenty
feet farther up the sidewalk to the bronze revolving doors of the newspaper
office. Inside the lobby the elevator captain showed me to a car of my
own. And a moment later I stepped out into a paneled corridor with the
paper's logo fashioned in metal on the wall. A pretty, black-haired receptionist
in a camel-colored sweater smiled at me as if I'd been expected.

"Who did you want to see?" she said sweetly.

"Jack Leonard," I told her.

She looked at me as if I'd broken her heart. "I'm afraid
he's out of town on assignment. Is there anyone else who could help you?"

Outside of a few hooligans on the sports desk, the only
other staffer I knew well enough to mention was Marcie Shaeffer of the
society, gossip, and weddings page. And I wasn't so sure I wanted to talk
to Marcie. I'd actually done a job for her several years before, and it
had left a very bad taste. At the time she'd been divorcing her husband,
an architect named Leo Shaeffer. Her lawyers had hired me to look after
her until the legal proceedings were completed. I'd thought I'd been hired
for protection—that was certainly the impression that Marcie gave me.
In fact, I'd worked up quite a grudge against Leo by the time we met in
court. But he turned out to be a gentle, neurotic young man with the caved-in,
dark-eyed, peccant look of failure already written on his face. He sat
on the bench, head bent, vacant-eyed, listening to the lawyers as if, in
his mind, he was as guilty as Marcie had claimed he was. By the time the
hearing was over, I'd begun to think that the only thing the poor son-of-a-bitch
was truly guilty of was loving his wife.

Marcie Shaeffer was a rich, pretty, spoiled girl who'd
been raised to believe that she had a gift for anything she put her hand
to, as if talent were one of her guaranteed rights. But like most talentless
people, her only real gift was for self-indulgence. She dabbled in everything
from water colors to modern dance, saw a shrink four times a week, and
came home to torment Leo for standing in the way of her fulfillment. The
sad part was that the poor son-of-a-bitch believed her. He'd spent six
years tripping over himself, trying to get out of Marcie's way. And one
afternoon, when he hadn't moved fast enough, she'd attempted suicide and
nearly broken him in two. She filed for divorce the next day, which was
the best thing that could have happened to Leo, although he didn't know
it. I wondered, at the time, if he ever would. She'd gone on to a career
as a gossip columnist, where she could spread the blame for her failures
more evenly among her friends. As for Leo, I didn't know what had become
of him, although as I stood there in front of the pretty receptionist,
trying to make up my mind about whether or not to ask for Ms. Shaeffer,
I wondered if he'd finally found the strength to forgive himself.

Thinking about Leo certainly didn't make me feel like
talking to Marcie. She wasn't likely to know anything about Theo Clinger,
anyway. He didn't run with her crowd, although it occurred to me that Irene
Croft probably did. Not that I considered the Croft woman a likely suspect
in Robbie's disappearance. She seemed like too big a leap for a teenage
runaway from Eastlawn Drive to make in her first days away from home. But
Irene was linked with Clinger. judging from the throb in her voice when
she'd mentioned his name and the look of rapture in her eyes in that photograph,
she was one of his most devoted followers. And if worse came to worst,
I might need someone like the Croft woman to lead me to the Lost Prince—someone
I could pressure into cooperating with me.

I sighed aloud and told the receptionist, "Marcie Shaeffer,
then. Tell her Harry Stoner."

The girl jabbed a button on her intercom, whispered my
name into a speaker, and looked up at me with a satisfied smile. A moment
later, Marcie came strolling down the hall.

She had gained a few pounds since I'd last seen her. They
added fullness to her hips and a bit of sag to her fleshy jaw. But aside
from that, she looked like the same, bitchy, self-invo1ved young woman
I'd known three years before. Rusty blonde hair, swept back in a bouffant
that hugged her round face like a tiara. Wax-red lips. Pale gray eyes shaped
like tear drops. Cleft chin. Heavily powdered and dressed to the nines,
she looked like Cincinnati's idea of royalty, although the idea was entirely
her own. She wore a gold charm bracelet on her right wrist. It tinkled
like crystal when she raised a cigarette to her lips.

"Harry?" she said in a voice as dark and sticky as damson
jelly. "What can I do for you?"

"
I'd like to talk to you for a moment."

"Why not?" She jerked the cigarette from her mouth, scattering
ashes on the receptionist, whirled on her high heels, and sauntered back
down the hall. I glanced at the receptionist before trailing after Marcie.
She was staring at her desk as if she was searching it for a weapon.

Marcie led me through a glass door to her cubicle in the
editorial section. The big white room was lit by fluorescent panels and
filled with metal desks and shirt-sleeved reporters and the faint hum of
computerized typewriters. Sitting there in that black wool skirt and gold
bodice, Marcie looked like a showroom manikin that had been dropped off
at the wrong address.

"
So what can I do for you, Harry?" she said in a tone
that was meant to suggest that I was already getting in her way—like
poor, hapless Leo—keeping her from important, fulfilling work. Three
years of independence hadn't changed her much and it depressed me.

I pretended she was human and said, "What can you tell
me about Irene Croft?"

Marcie arched an eyebrow and made a little, noiseless
"o" with her lips. "Is she a client of yours?"

I shook my head.

"You aren't fucking her, are you?" she said with malicious
delight.

I shook my head again, but she smiled knowingly.

"I could see it. She's supposed to be a pretty good piece
of tail. Or thigh. Or whip, maybe?" Her laugh was like the sound of her
bracelet. "What did you do? Pick her up in a bar down on Fourth Street?
Did she take you up to the penthouse and show you the sights?"

I let her have her laugh, then said, "It's quite a view."

Marcie's mouth dropped open in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
"You're kidding," she said. "You really did go up there with her?" She
wagged her finger at me. "Better watch out. She's too rich for your blood,
Harry, old boy. I'd advise you to stick to your cocktail waitresses and
go-go girls. This one is a Croft. And you know what that means."

"Old money," I said.

"Old money and clout," she said with an explosive "t"
at the end of clout. "They could knock you right out of this life, if they
wanted to. Better steer clear of her, Harry. You're stepping way up in
class."

"You think she's classy, Marcie?" I said drily.

She smirked at me and said, "I think she's nuts. Totally
bonkers. But she's also a Croft, even if her family would prefer to think
otherwise. They've been trying to sweep her under the rug for years. But
she just won't stay swept. They've tried to commit her. They've tried to
probate her. They've tried shipping her out of the state. But she's outsmarted
them every time. She's like a very bad penny. The Crofts can't get rid
of her, so they pretend to ignore her. At least, they do until someone
like you comes snooping along. Then all bets are off. The Crofts are a
very neat family, Harry. There's been a lot of money spent, a lot of strings
pulled to keep Irene on the sweet side of notoriety. They're the kind of
rich for whom cover-ups were invented. Old English stock. Fifteen generations
of Puritan blood. Cofounders of Ivorydale and the squeaky clean ethics
of this town. They're the closest thing to aristocracy we've got. They're
the Olympians. And all they do is sit up on that hill of theirs in Mt.
Lookout and spruce the family tree. Irene was inevitable. If she hadn't
come along, they'd have had to
invent her."