Mr. X (27 page)

33

I began moving down Ferryman’s Road at the top end of triangular Merchants Park. Three-story brick buildings set back on postcard lawns lined both of the streets fanning out from the apex of the triangle. At the top of the steps before the first building in the row, a heavyset man in a tan uniform was flipping through a ball of keys. Wondering what sort of business required the services of a security guard on a Friday night in Edgerton, I looked for a sign, which did not exist. Then I noticed the legend carved on a stone headpiece over the front door:
THE COBDEN BUILDING.
I laughed out loud—here was where Stewart Hatch did whatever he did with his father’s money.

Set deep within a ravaged face the color and texture of oatmeal laced with maple syrup, the guard’s eyes fell on me. He looked too old for his job.

“A lot of keys,” I said.

“A lot of doors.” The guard continued to stare at me, not with the suspicion that would have been inevitable in Manhattan, but with an odd, expectant attentiveness. “No matter how many times I tell myself to put a piece of tape on that first one, I always forget. Here’s the little sucker.” He held up a key, and his belly strained the fabric of the uniform shirt.

“Do you work for Mr. Hatch?”

“Fifteen years.” His smile widened without getting any warmer. “You new in town?”

I told him I was there for a couple of days.

“You should take a walk around Hatchtown, see the real Edgerton.”

Ferryman’s Road reminded me of certain places I’d seen in the South, parts of Charleston and Savannah. A sense of purpose having to do with my investigations into the life of Edward Rinehart buoyed me up. In time, Joy’s irreconcilable story would fade.

My daddy had so much Otherness inside him, he didn’t care how he acted. Cruelty was his middle name. It’s nothing but a curse, that’s all. Nettie, she’s got her own views, and whatever’s Dunstan can’t be bad to her. But Nettie doesn’t know. What was in our daddy mostly came down to me, and it spoiled everything
.

At the wide end of the park, I turned right on Chester Street and walked through a neighborhood of rooming houses and apartment buildings. Loud music poured from open windows. Mothers and grandmothers perched on the stoops. Outside the tavern on the next corner, men and women in bright clothes were dipping and moving to Ray Charles on the jukebox. Brother Ray was pining for Georgia, and the neighborhood people were celebrating the arrival of the weekend. I turned the corner and walked past an alley where two guys were hauling crates out of a panel truck.

On Lanyard Street the old fancy-houses had been replaced by a shoe-repair shop, an appliance store, a mom-and-pop grocery. The three brass balls of a pawnshop hung above an empty sidewalk.

I looked through the metal grate over the window lettered in gold with
KRAFT TRU-VALUE PAWNBROKER
. Two small lights burned at the back of the shop. I pushed the bell and heard a noise like an electric drill. A rear door opened in a sudden wash of light, and Toby Kraft came into view.

He unlocked the grate and swung it outward. “Get in here, will you? What a lousy deal, makes you think there’s no justice in the world anymore, if there ever was.” Toby closed the door and shoved a police bar into place. He closed his hand around mine. “Kid, your mother was a champ.”

Toby pulled me into an embrace. “It happened this morning, did it? Were you there?”

“We were still at Aunt Nettie’s,” I said.

He smoothed his hair and wiped his hands on his trousers. “How are you doing?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” I said.

“How about a schnocker?”

“No, I just…. Yeah, why not?”

“I’m still busy, but it won’t take long.” When I looked at the counter, he said, “Your momma sure brightened up the place when she stood back there. Who’s getting your business, Spaulding?”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. “Nettie thinks I spent too much money.”

At the back of the shop, Toby waved me into a small, hot room with fluorescent lights. A metal desk heaped with papers faced out from the back wall, and a low bookcase jammed with green ledgers and a metal safe stood against a half partition dividing the office from a darker space containing rows of industrial shelving. Old calendars with pictures of naked, lushly upholstered women plastered the walls. The men I had seen in the alley were carrying boxes into the area beyond the partition. “Kraft?” one of them said.

“It’s just my grandson.” Toby turned back to me. “Don’t let those girls poor-mouth you. They have enough to get by on. When’s the funeral?”

“Wednesday morning.” I sat down on the folding chair.

Toby sighed. “One second.” He went around the gap in the partition and talked to the men. I heard the truck drive away.

“I’m glad Nettie and May have enough to get by on.”

He rubbed two fingers together and winked. “I promised you a drink.” He took a liter of Johnnie Walker Black and two smudgy glasses from a bottom drawer of his desk. “Sorry about the no ice, but I never got around to putting in a fridge.” A pack of unfiltered Camels and a gold lighter came out of his shirt pocket. He poured three inches of whiskey into our glasses. “I wish it was a happier occasion. Here’s to Star.”

We clinked glasses.

“You getting on okay?”

“Pretty well,” I said. “I saw Joy today.”

“Been a long time since I did.” We drank. When he thrust the bottle toward me, I shook my head. “She and Clarence doing okay, or is that too much to ask?”

“Clarence has Alzheimer’s,” I said. “She keeps him strapped in a wheelchair and feeds him baby food.”

“I don’t suppose Clarence is much of a conversationalist anymore.”

“Joy did a lot of talking, though,” I said.

He tilted back in his chair and smiled. “You’re a smart kid, I don’t have to tell you which end is up. Joy is a very unhappy person.”

I took another swallow of whiskey and thought about what to say. “I don’t suppose a lot of Dunstan babies were born with wings and claws, but there must have been something funny about a couple of Howard’s brothers and sisters, because Clark mentioned it, too.”

Toby propped his head on the back of his chair and stared up at the fluorescent light. A plume of smoke floated toward the ceiling. “First of all …” He grabbed the bottle and leaned forward. “Have some more goddamn Scotch. You’re making me do all the work.” I offered my glass, surprised that it was almost empty. He added more to his own, set down the bottle, and considered me for a moment. This was going to be good.

“First of all, think about Nettie’s husband. I say that because being Nettie’s husband is Clark Rutledge’s full-time job. He’s the vice president of Dunstan, Incorporated, and one thing about Clark, the man loves his work. What’s the main thing about work?”

“The salary?”

“Nope. Work gives you a place in the world. Clark is Somebody because he’s a Dunstan, and he’ll milk that cow until it drops. On top of that, Clark is not on your normal wavelength. One day he’s telling you why the Jewish people, one of which is me, brought on Hitler by hoarding all the gold in Germany. The next day, the Jews are a great people because they’re the people of the Book.”

I smiled at him.

“Okay, that’s Clark, first of all. Joy, now, Joy always felt left out. You notice how she talks about her daddy all the time?”

I nodded.

“Howard was a strange guy, but him and Queenie always got along. Joy had a problem with that. Joy was one of those kids, whine, whine, whine. Gimme more, gimme more, and it’s never enough, right? Women built like that, they always want more
than what they got, because what they got is never enough. It can’t be, on account of they got it.”

Toby’s description seemed surprisingly acute.

“Queenie knew how to handle the old man, but Joy only knew how to get sore. Take what she says with all the salt in the grocery store, and then some.”

“Joy weighs about ninety pounds. Clarence is maybe one fifty, pure deadweight. She gives him a bath every night.”

“Good trick.”

“Joy says she inherited psychic powers from her father, and all that’s left of them is enough to pick Clarence out of his wheelchair, lower him into the tub, clean him up, dry him off, and move him back into the chair.”

“I’ll give her this, her stories are getting better.”

“She moved his wheelchair back and forth just by pointing at it. Then lifted her finger and made it float off the ground and swing around in midair. Clarence liked it so much, he drooled like a baby.”

Behind the thick glasses, Toby’s eyelids rattled down and up twice, like window shades. I reached for the bottle.

“That stupid fuckin’ Joy.” He heaved himself off his chair and went around the partition. I heard him check the lock on the alley door. The Camels came out of his pocket. He took out a cigarette and examined it for flaws. After he got the cigarette going, he tilted back in his chair and looked at me some more.

34

“This is what you came here to talk about?”

“It’s one of the things I came here to talk about.”

He ran a pudgy hand over his face. “I don’t even know that much to begin with.”

“You know more than I do. And everyone else refuses to say anything at all.”

“Star didn’t want you to know about this business.”

“What business is that?”

“What passed down through your family, starting with Omar and Sylvan. You heard about Omar and Sylvan?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Particularly from Joy.”

Joy’s frail voice told me,
My grandfathers, they were the surviving remnants of pagan gods and could have ruled over earthly Dominions but cared for nothing but wealth and pleasure. To build that house on New Providence Road, Sylvan had the ancestral house in England taken apart stone by stone and brick by brick, and he shipped all those stones and bricks across the sea and put them back together again exactly the way they were in the old days. He might as well have flushed his money down the toilet. My daddy was the same way. C’est dommage
.

“She could of had the decency to keep her mouth shut.”

“Because my mother didn’t want me in on the family secret. Whatever it is.”