Day of Wrath (6 page)

I could almost hear the air going out of him. "What do
you want to make trouble for Bobby for?" he whined. "My son never did you
no harm. He never done no harm to Robbie, neither. He worships that girl.
He'd do anything for her. And she for him. Why can't you just leave
them alone?"

"Because she's fourteen years old and her mother wants
her back," I said.

He hung his head on his chest and sighed. "Her mother's
a good woman, I reckon. But she don't know shit about kids."

You can say that again, I said to myself.

"
If he were here, Bobby'd tell you that himself," Caldwell
said, warming to the subject. "I may be poor, but I've raised my boy to
speak his own mind. When something ain't right, he'll say so—straight
out. Why all he's ever tried to do is help that girl. She's so quiet and
careful-acting most of the time. Bobby just helped her to open up, that's
all—to see more of life. If she's with him—and, mind, I ain't saying
she is—but if she's with him, you can bet your bottom dollar he'll look
after her. And he'll bring her back home, too!"

I started to say something about the marijuana I'd found
in the workbench and the look on Robbie's face in the photograph I'd stolen,
but I let it pass. Caldwell would have denied it, even if I'd shown him
the evidence. And, besides, drugs were a part of growing up. At least they
were in the nineteen-eighties.

"And I wasn't lying, neither!" he went on. He'd gotten
that head of steam back and I was just too sick of the whole silly business
to prick his bubble. "Bobby did too tell me he'd be here directly at six
o'clock. He come in here 'bout the time that
Days Of Our Lives
started
and made him a phone call and then said he had to scoot on over to Westwood
Auto Parts to get a valve grinder for the V-8 in his Buick."

"He drives a Buick?" I said with surprise.

"Yep!" Caldwell said proudly. "Bought it off an old woman
up on Elbrook. Belonged to her husband. Bobby got him a good deal on that
one, I'll tell you. Only she runs a little rough, so he was going to pull
the engine and regrind the . . .I held up my hand, like a stop sign. "There's
a Buick parked in the stall next to yours right now."

Caldwell contracted his brow into furrows and rubbed violently
at his chin. "Well, that's mighty strange," he said. "Bobby must have come
back then, after 'all. The folks in 1-C don't have a car, so they let him
use their space for repair work." He sucked nervously on his stump of a
thumb. "Wonder why he didn't come in and eat. We generally have supper
'bout this time. Fact is, I asked him to pick me up some chickens on his
way home."

I sighed aloud and stared down that gloomy hallway. It
was starting to look too goddamn familiar to me. "Oh, hell," I said to
the man. "I'd better take another look. I might as well get the license
plate number while I'm out here."

"My son ain't hiding from youl" he said loudly. "I told
you he's an honest boy."

I pushed by him out the door.

It was a helluva lot darker on the second trip back. The
folks in Caldwell's building must have gone to bed very early, because
this time there was just a smattering of window lights to guide me. Plus
it had begun to drizzle again—an ice-cold rain that was being kicked
along by the wind. I was soaked through and frozen by the time I got to
the garage door.

I pulled it open, found the overhead light, and clicked
it on. The Buick was still there in the left stall—a '72 Electra painted
maroon and white, with a pair of sponge dice hanging from the rear-view
mirror and a plastic St. Christopher sitting on the dash. I walked around
to the trunk to get the license plate number, then peered in through the
passenger's side window. There was blood smeared on the seat cushion-so
much of it that it made me weak-kneed. For a moment I just gawked in disbelief.
Then I tried the handle, but the door was locked. I ran around the Buick,
yanking on the other doors. It I wasn't until I got to the rear window
on the driver's side that I saw it on the floor, wedged between the seats.
The way it had been twisted about, it hardly looked human. But then it
wasn't human any more.

I stared at it for half a second, hoping it would resolve
itself into a different shape, like a bizarre Gestalt experiment—now
a dead body, now a sack of coal. But there was too much flesh and blood
and fractured bone showing for it to be anything other than what it was.
I couldn't see the head, which was wrapped in something white. ]ust the
torso and the legs. The legs were lying at an impossible angle, flexed
backward as if the knees were on the wrong side of the joint, like an ostrich's
legs. I felt my stomach rub against my spine and backed slowly out of the
garage.

All the way up the driveway—through the wet and the
dark—I kept fighting the feeling that what I had seen wasn't real, that
I had suffered a dreadful and preposterous hallucination. Even the professional
part of me—the part that had learned to look on violent death with a
cold eye—rebelled against the fact of that body. It simply didn't belong
in that car, in that garage, in a case that had begun in Mildred Segal's
fussy living room, on a sedate and unexceptional street.

That shock and confusion must have been written on my
face because Caldwell blanched when he saw me.

"There's been some trouble," I told him. "I'm going to
have to use your phone.

"
What trouble?" he said nervously. "What's wrong? Has
something happened to my boy?"

"I don't know. Where's the phone."

A He pointed shakily toward the dinette. "On the wall,
in there."

I went into the dinette, found the phone and dialed Central
Station. Caldwell followed me in. His face had gone as white as my own.

"My boy?" he said hysterically. "Has something happened
to my boy?"

I tumed to him and said, "There's a good deal of blood
back there. It looks as if someone was badly hurt and left in the car."

He covered his mouth with his hands and began to shake
his head, very slowly. Back and forth. "Can't be," he said thickly. "Can't
be. Can't be. Lord wouldn't let this happen. Not to Bobby. Pray jesus,
not to Bobby."

"
I don't know if it is Bobby," I said and realized that
my voice sounded panicky, too.

Caldwell stopped shaking his head and his narrow eyes
popped wide open. "Oh, Lord," he whispered. "Not the girl."

"
I don't know," I said and then someone came on the line.

As soon as I turned back to the phone, Caldwell let out
an animal yelp—like the sound a dog makes when you step on its foot.
He threw both hands to his mouth as if he were afraid he might scream again,
then ran from the room—arms akimbo, hands on his mouth, eyes wide in
terror. I saw him race through the apartment door and heard him running
down the hall. When I'd finished telling the cops where we were, I ran
after him. I found him in the garage, kneeling by the car and yanking helplessly
at the door handle.
 

I DIDN'T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING FOR THE NEXT HALF hour or
so—while the forensic team did their work. Not even about the impossible
and terrible way the case had changed. A case that should have been settled
without any violence at all. A case that was as ordinary as Eastlawn Drive.
For a time, I didn't even think about Mildred or about the possibility
that what was lying in that car-a bleeding remnant—could have belonged
to her. I didn't think about Caldwell, either, who had collapsed and been
taken to a hospital when the police finally cracked open the car door and
pulled what was packed inside into the light.

I hadn't looked at it long, although I knew I wouldn't
forget it. You don't forget torture slayings. They stick with you always,
like your very first glimpse of death. The head had been wrapped in white
adhesive tape from crown to chin, like a mummy. Probably to prevent the
boy from seeing what was going to happen to him next. There were terrible
rope burns on his wrists and ankles, where he'd writhed against whatever
he'd been tied to. When the cops unwrapped his head, they found a bloody
dish towel stuffed in his mouth; A dish towel.

I'd watched them lift what was left of Bobby Caldwell
into a collapsible gurney, cover it with a blanket, and wheel it off to
an ambulance. And when it was gone, I got up and walked back through the
dark—pushing my way past cops and white-faced bystanders, until I was
far enough away from that garage, far enough down the street, that what
had happened there seemed like someone else's trouble—just a cluster
of ambulance lights and police cars in a driveway.

I stood in the rain for about ten minutes, then walked
slowly back to the apartment house—hands in my coat pockets. I knew there
was a particular reason for what had happened to Bobby Caldwell. Bad company,
cross words, a rash act. I'd End that part out, I thought. The part that
was dreadfully ordinary, the part that hadn't been scheduled years in advance
on someone's secret agenda. I'd find it out because it might lead me to
Robbie Segal. Because it had become part of the job. And because I wanted
to find it out.

Most of the cops had left by the time I reached the apartment
building. The bystanders had gone to sleep, if they could sleep after what
they'd seen. And the street had settled into rain—soaked decrepitude.
I found a police detective standing on the front lawn—or he found me.
I told him the story once again, and he listened with that impassivity
that cops and adolescent boys confuse with cool and courage. He was a veteran
cop, this one, with a shock of white hair and a thick-jowled, heavy-lidded
face and a boozer's red, blue-veined, bulbous nose. He looked, I thought,
like a short, fat Tip O'Neil. And he sounded like James Cagney—cocky,
shrill, and tough. He had a pint of Johnny Walker in his overcoat, and
we both took swigs from it as we walked down that miserable hallway to
Caldwell's apartment. It wasn't until the liquor hit me that I realized
how wet and cold and thoroughly played out I was.

I sat down on the couch, while the cop, whose name was
Bannock, pawed around in the dinette. The TV was still on. It was Tom Snyder
time, by Pastor Caldwell's clock. I watched that rude, impatient man bait
some fool rock musician and felt the whole weight of the day fall on me
like a tower. I felt like throttling Tom Synder. Instead I got up and turned
off the set. Bannock came back into the living room with a stack of papers
in his arms and sat down across from me on the green recliner.

"Don't like Tommie, huh?" he said, spreading some of the
papers on the floor in front of him.

"What did you find?" I asked.

"
Bills." He let the rest of the papers spill from his
hands to the floor. "Mountains of 'em." He toed at the papers. "Question
is—what did you find?"

I thought about the photo I'd taken from the bench light
and said, "Nothing."

"
You sure of that, huh?"

"I'm sure."

"Well, we'll probably find out that you're lying," he
said lazily. "You do tell lies, don't you? Every once in awhi1e?".

"Once in awhile."

"Yeah, I heard that about you, boy-o." The little man
shrugged. "But what the hell do I care, huh? There are so many fingerprints
in that Buick we're bound to score somebody's number. Probably some wacked-out
biker with a grudge. They go in for these kind of theatrics."

"
Could be," I said.

"Fucking amateurs," Bannock said with spite. "I'm too
old to be pulling this kind of duty. Too old and too fat."

 
Bannock slipped the pint bottle out of his pocket,
took a swig, corked it, and tossed it over to me. "Man," he said. "You
look like shit."

"I feel like shit," I said wearily and emptied the bottle.
The little man eyed me for a moment, then said, "Go home, boy-o. Go home
and forget this whole thing. It'll make you crazy if you don't. I know.
It'll make you fucking crazy."

I went home. Walked up Eastlawn Drive to the church yard,
got in the Pinto, and drove away from that depressing street with its worn
brick houses. When I got back to my apartment in the Delores, I drained
another half-pint of Scotch and went to sleep on the living room couch.
I must have gotten up during the night and found my way to the bedroom.
I didn't remember doing it when I woke up the next morning. But then I
didn't remember my dreams, either.
 

ONLY DREAMS HAVE A WAY OF LINGERING WITH YOU throughout
the day—they resolve themselves into a mood, then someone says something
or you see something and a bit of dream precipitates out into the sunlight
to astonish you, like finding money on the sidewalk. It didn't take me
long to figure out what was bothering me that Thursday morning. The newspaper
was full of it—pictures of the body being wheeled to the ambulance and
rows of shocked faces staring at it. Those faces had been in my dreams.
And when I dressed, I found the two snapshots of Robbie Segal in my sports
coat and realized that she'd been in my dreams, too. She and her two middle-aged
friends—the man with the cruel, fleshless face and the simpering woman
with gray hair. Then Mildred called—for the first time that morning—and
most of it came back to me in a rush. That brick spectrum of a street,
shifting gradually from affluence to poverty. The churchyard and the boy
standing in the rain. The garage with the bloody automobile. And Robbie
and me and her mother standing by the workbench, while the graying woman
and her evil friend wrapped the Caldwell boy in white adhesive tape—rolls
of it. Then we'd cut the tape away, with those shocked bystanders looking
on. But I couldn't remember what we'd found underneath the bandages. Only
that I'd been surprised at what we'd seen.