Final Notice (19 page)

"Like Samson and Delilah," Miss Moselle said.

"And now that he's killed her," Ringold said. "What can we expect?"

I shook.my head and said, "I honestly don't know." Nobody said anything for a moment.

"What are the police doing about this!" Ringold said nervously. "Shouldn't we have some protection here at the library?"

"They've got an A.P.B. put on Haskell in the city and in the county," I said. "But you may be right. It might not be a bad idea to get some police protection for the ladies here at the library. He has to be feeling an enormous guilt for killing Effie Reaves -that is, if he's feeling anything at all. My guess is he's going to find someone to blame it on. And in his state I just don't know who that will be."

"I think it would be selfish to make the police guard our library," Miss Moselle said. "We must look after ourselves. And allow the officers to concentrate on searching for this man."

Ringold looked at her the way he'd looked at his office door on Monday morning, with a kind of hapless, disgusted resignation. He was licked and he knew it.

"We shall hold the fort, Harold," Jessie Moselle said stoutly. "Have no fear of that. And you must go out and find this fellow and stop him."
 
 

Kate Davis had been uncharacteristically quiet during our round-table discussion. When we got out to the parking lot, I asked her why.

"You've had a pretty hard day, Harry," she said. "Are you sure you want to hear it?"

"I guess that depends on what it is."

We got into the car and when she didn't say anything for a long moment, I started to worry. Kate was not a secretkeeper. At least, she didn't keep them for long. It went against her own liberated code of honor. Everything on the surface, everything out in the open. Even the uncertainties and the unanswerables. The things that my generation of lovers usually slid past with a smile or a kiss, the way we slide past the forgotten words of an old song. So if she were keeping quiet, it had to be for a fairly good reason -something she wanted to spare me or didn't want to admit to herself after that dreadful, violent day.

"What is it, Kate?" I said. "What do you want to say?"

She scrunched down on the car seat, pulled her coat around her neck, and propped her knees on the dash. "I did some research of my own on our six ladies today. And I'm stumped. A couple of them look vaguely like Twyla. And all of them are interested in art -that's why they took the books out in the first place. What I need is a solid clue. Some indisputable link between Haskell and the girls. But I don't know what it is. I guess that's part of what's bothering me. I guess I'm frustrated. The police are keeping an eye on all six girls .;just in case."

"That's good," I said.

"After I finished with my ladies, I started thinking about what Howell told you, so I went up to Withrow to talk with Hack's teachers. He was a pretty scarey fellow, all right. Even in high school. More interesting, though, is what the assistant principal, a man named Rogers, told me. I only talked to him for a minute -he had a meeting to go to- but he said that Hack's been seen hanging around the Withrow gym and track."

"Recently?" I said.

"Right up until a couple of weeks ago."

"That is interesting," I said half to myself. Withrow was only a stone's throw from the Lord home -close enough for a family visit. In fact, after being kicked out by Effie Reaves, Hack might not have had anywhere else to go but home. Of course, that would mean that Jake or his mother or both of them had been lying to me about not having seen Hack in better than two years. An innocent enough lie, to be sure. But a lie. I decided to take another look at the Lord home in the morning and, perhaps, do a bit of research on Mother Lord and her polite son. It wouldn't hurt to check in with Gerald Arnold, either. A man who knew a good deal about speed freaks and where they hung out.

"Rogers said that Hack looked like death itself," Kate said suddenly. "Terrible hollows under his eyes. Emaciated. Extremely nervous."

"He's a speed freak, Kate."

"I know," she said.

I looked at her face. Her blue eyes looked stunned and fearful. And I realized all at once that that was what she'd been holding back-the terrible fact that she could be as scared as I'd been in that barn or when I leaped off the metal stoop of Effie Reaves's trailer. She was terrified and she didn't want to admit it.

"Bad day, huh?" I said.

She nodded. "I know it sounds stupid. I know it's just a racket that I'm playing with my child. But when I heard about what happened to the Reaves woman, I guess I realized that Haskell Lord was a pretty dangerous man."

"Came as a surprise, did it?"

She made a face at me. "You're being a critical parent again," she said and didn't sound amused.

"Look we all have our own ways of adapting to stress. I tend to sulk, that's all. To withdraw. That's all it is, Kate."

She slapped herself on the thigh. "You're just behaving like an adopted child."

Sometimes I think that the chief problem with psychotherapy is that it teaches us to regard all feelings as problematical. I didn't tell Kate that. But I did tell her how I'd felt when I was sitting on the john in that service station -too scared to move or to think.

"Well you had a good reason to be frightened," she said.

"While you, Kate Davis, girl detective, don't?"

She made another face. "All right, so I'm scared. Does that make you feel better?"

I pulled her to me and she laid her head on my chest.

"We'll get him, Kate," I said. "We'll get him. I promise you."

She laughed spiritlessly. "Promise?" she said. "You're a born rescuer, Harry."

"That doesn't sound so hot," I said.

She laughed again, this time with pleasure, and kissed me on the lips. "In your case, it's terrific."

Late that night, with the wind shaking the windows and a little music playing faintly on the Globemaster, we made love. Not furiously, as we had the night before. But gently, slowly, as if we were both acknowledging what that day had cost us in energy, as if we were both being a little tender, a little solicitous of our wounds and weaknesses.

It wasn't as raw and exciting as it had been the night before. But it was sweeter. I knew when we'd finished and she was, lying in my arms, her hair damp and her breath warm on my chest, that I was falling in love with her. It was ludicrous after all of her talk, after all of the warnings she'd been giving out. Still I could feel it inside me like an afterglow. Not just a sexual satisfaction but a gratitude, if that's the word. A pleasure in her pleasure and in her presence. In her face and in her body and in what she had done for me.

Kate Davis, I said to myself. I held her tightly, cupping her breast in my hand and listening to the sound of her breathing as it slowed into sleep. And then I was asleep, too. And that terrible day was finally over.
 

SHE WAS up before I was on that Friday morning. Fixing eggs and bacon in the little cubicle that the realty company calls a kitchen. Humming old songs. And just generally acting spry and domestic. At eight-thirty, she popped her head through the bedroom door and announced that breakfast was served. Then she served it. On a black tray that I used to hold a couple of potted geraniums. The eggs smelled like geraniums and potting soil. We dined au naturel. And when we finished, I rolled over on the blanket and ran my fingertip across her breasts and down that flat, downy belly. Her eyes grew soft and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me on top of her.

"You know this could get to be a habit," she said.

She ran her hand down my belly. Then there wasn't any sound but the Globemaster and the soughing of the mattress springs and the sounds of our lovemaking.
 
 

"I used to live in an apartment on Ohio Avenue," Kate said, as we lay together afterward watching the sunlight spill through the bedroom windows. "It was right after my divorce and I was all bent out of shape and terribly unhappy. This was a big apartment  with fifteen-foot ceilings and no soundproofing.

  Every noise that the neighbors made washed through it like the sounds of a sea. Have you ever read
The Enormous Radio
? That's what it was like. I heard all the squabbling and cursing, all the bickering that I'd lived with for three years. All the ways Ed and I had failed before I lost my nerve and left him. And it weighed on me, Harry, because I was really in love with him. Married fresh out of high school. Sweethearts at the ripe age of eighteen. My God, there can't be love that's much more intense than that.

"Anyway, I was sinking. Alone in that cave with all those voices battering at each other. And then, one night, I heard the creak of a bedspring from upstairs. You know, the oldfashioned kind of bedsprings that look like something you might distill liquor with? And it squeaked and it squeaked, until I realized that whoever was living above me was making love. After awhile I stopped listening and started wondering who it was up there making the noise. Because he had a real nice sense of rhythm. Now slow. And then so fast the springs started to sing like a tea kettle."

I tousled her hair. "Did you ever find out who it was?"

"One night I went up there and knocked on the door. He wasn't good-looking, it turned out. Skinny with a beard and dark, soulful eyes. But I was enchanted by the sound of those bedsprings. I honestly think they were what brought me back to life. Plus a little help from my shrink. I didn't waste any time. When you're just starting therapy you don't, you know. If you think I'm impetuous now, you should have seen me then. I was as devoted to candor as a high school valedictorian. No more holding things in for Kate. All sunny surface and uninhibited instincts. I was a real asshole. That's step one in therapy, Harry. The asshole stage. So I said to the guy, 'I live downstairs and I'd like to make love to you.' His eyes got as big as gumballs. 'Sure thing,' he said. Then I told him it was only for that once, that I wasn't looking to become involved, just to gratify a whim. Because I'd spent a long time not gratifying whims. He licked his chops and said, 'Sure thing.' So we made love. And you wouldn't have believed it, but it was really wonderful, lying there and listening to those bedsprings sigh and sing."

Kate laughed at herself. "Stupid story, huh?"

"No," I said.

She looked a little embarrassed. After all, she was the girl who thought the past was sad and small, as if real life were
invariably huge and happy. So I told her of one of my own misadventures. Told her about Jo Riley, the black-haired lady with the heart-shaped face, whom I'd loved and lost. And about the nights I'd spent after she was gone, trying to convince myself and everyone else that it was still O.K. with old Harry. Mornings when I'd get out of bed and, maybe a half hour later, the girl who I'd picked up in some bar would get up, too. Only there wasn't any breakfast in bed in those days. Just some small, sad silences while we dressed. And a kiss at the door that was as personal as a handshake. And when she'd gone, I'd go into the bathroom and count the circles under my eyes like I was counting the rings on a tree trunk. And it would always come up the same sad, small number. That kind of addition only has one sum. And it's depressing.

"You never found her?" Kate said. "You never found Jo?"

"No," I said. "Which is funny. Because that's my business, finding things that people have lost and want back."

She propped herself on an elbow and looked at me sympathetically. "She was a fool," Kate said.

I laughed at her. "Well she didn't have your fine sense of my virtues. She didn't have the heart for this kind of life."

Kate sat back in the bed. "In spite of what I said last night, I do. And I'm going to prove it to you."

"And how do you plan to do that?" I asked.

"By helping to catch the Ripper," she vowed solemnly.
 
 

We got dressed and around ten o'clock we walked out to the parking lot.

"Where are we going?" Kate said in a chipper voice.

I thought over that "we" for a second and decided, why not?

"First to the Lord house. Then to an old friend of mine who knows a bit about speed freaks and where they hang out."

"All right," Kate said. "Lead on."

We took Taft to the expressway, got off at Dana, then went north on Madison to Stettinius. I pulled up in front of the Lord home at ten-thirty. After filling Kate in on what we could expect from the mother and from the loyal brother, we hopped out of the car and walked up the cut-stone pathway to the front door. The maple trees along the street had been stripped bare by the storm, and that sweet anise-smell of goldenrod was almost gone. It felt like winter on the street -a bright blue cold that should have gone with snow and the rigors of December, not with the burnt-orange of an October morning.

With Kate beside me, I walked up to the stoop and rang the doorbell.

Jake answered again, in another turtle-neck sweater and loose khaki pants, with a look of exhaustion on his tow-headed, choir-boy's face. I realized that the police had probably paid the Lords a call the night before, after I'd talked with A1 Foster. And hearing the bitter truth about his brother, hearing what he was wanted for, could easily have made for a sleepless night.