The Traveller (42 page)

She noticed that there was a bunch of magazines littering the floor around the chair. So he tried to get his mind off things. Well, I’m sure it didn’t work. She started to cross the rooms when something struck her about the pile of magazines. She turned and looked back at them.

‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’

She focused on the one magazine dropped in her direction.

She stared, then chided herself: Out of date. Pay attention, dammit!

She stepped across and knelt by the pile. She picked up a six-month-old Life. It seemed hot in her hands. She knew what would be inside. She let the magazine waft open and she saw instantly what it was - the by-line leaped out at her: photographs by douglas jeffers. She looked at the page and saw the grainy gray of a picture. It was of an emergency-room physician staring out through the camera in exhaustion. The palpable sense of closeness between the camera and the subject struck her sharply and she had to push the page back.

I know what he was looking for, she thought. She could see the doctor brother sitting in the chair, looking into the pages, trying to see what the pictures could tell him.

She quickly spread the magazines about her, searching each for the pictures inside. People and shapes jumped out of the pages, exploding about her.

But none told her anything she did not know already.

He’s good, she thought. But we already knew that. We knew he was one of the best.

But what else is there to see?

For a moment she felt the same frustration she knew the brother had felt hours earlier. There is so much to see, she thought, but it shows so little.

She closed the magazines and arranged them in a close approximation of the positions in which she’d found them.

She complained to herself: Find something!

She crossed to the desk and looked down on it and saw the words: Doug’s apartment key. It was so obvious that for an instant she did not realize what she was staring at! Then her hand shot out, as if bidden by something other than her conscious mind, and she seized the envelope. She felt the key inside, and put back her head and barely managed to stifle the cheer welling up inside her. She stuffed the envelope into her pocket, then raised her hands above her head, balling them into fists like an athlete at the moment of victory. The exultation dissipated swiftly in the face of a quick demand for discipline: Get ahold of yourself, she thought angrily. Then, with near panic, she started to look about her. Address, address, I need the address. She looked across the room and spotted a small black book next to the telephone. She jumped to it and flipped it open. The Upper West Side of Manhattan address of the brother stared out in black ink. She looked about for a pen and scrap paper and saw none. She ripped the page from the book.

Then, feeling flush with heat, she walked to the front door, opened it, and, after looking back briefly, exited the building. She could think of nothing save the electric feeling that the stolen key in her pocket gave off.

On the street outside the apartment, she passed an elderly lady walking a small dog, carrying an old-fashioned parasol as protection against the rising sun. ‘Good morning,’ the woman said cheerfully.

‘Beautiful day,’ replied Detective Barren.

‘But hot,’ said the lady. She looked down at the Sheltie panting at the end of the leash. ‘Dog days,’ she said. ‘Too hot in the summer. Too cold in the winter. Isn’t that the nature of life?’

This was a joke and both women smiled. Detective Barren nodded in farewell and crossed the street. For a moment she was overcome by the bright late summer morning sun and the routine conversation with the woman. Everything is normal, she thought. Everything is simple

and ordinary and in its place. Birds singing. Children playing. Light breeze blowing. Temperature soaring, Woman walking her dog. Norman Rockwell America.

Simple steady rhythms and melodies.

She shook her head and thought of the dissonance in hei pocket. I’m getting closer, she thought.

Pennington faded around her and she envisioned the hard city streets of her destination.

She slid back into her car, and within seconds was heading toward New York.

The tidal flow of argument ebbed around Martin Jeffers.

He had started the session by asking the Lost Boys a

simple question: All of you have relations, he’d queried.

what do you think they think of your behavior? Do they

have any connection with your crimes? There had been a

momentary uncomfortable silence, and Jeffers knew he’d

struck a nerve within them. He knew, too, that his question,

not so innocently posed, came from within his own heart.

He had instantly pictured his brother, then forced the

image from his mind while he listened to the men’s

memories unfold. There had been a rush of denial, almost

en masse, which he had, as always, taken as representing an

opposite reality. It was a simple formula: that which the

Lost Boys most vigorously denied was closest to the truth.

Now he waited for the voices to subside so he could

interject some comment that they would pick up and argue

more about. But his attention wandered in and out, and

he had trouble concentrating on the progress of the group.

Luckily, the Lost Boys were in active form; they needed

little input of his. He found himself nervously eyeing his

watch, hoping for the end of the session. Where is she? he

wondered.

‘You know what was funny?’ It was Meriwether speaking

in his small, reedy voice. ‘When I got busted and sent away

to this country club, my wife was more upset than I was.

I mean’ - he breathed through his nostrils with a wheezy

laughter - ‘I would have thought that she’d divorce me.

I thought she would shoot me herself. Christ, she’s

twice my size anyway, she coulda just walloped me a couple …’

All the men laughed at this.

Jeffers thought: What does she want? Arrest him? He remembered the ice in her eyes.

‘ … But she didn’t. She was crying and wringing her hands. And even while I was copping out, she was, you know, denying it. It was like she thought that neighbor’s kid I did somehow, you know, seduced me! She had to believe that.’

Meriwether hesitated.

‘Hell, the kid was only eleven …’

In the momentary pause, Jeffers’ mind worked quickly: He has always involved me! I’ve always been a part of everything he did. Always on the edge, just barely included, but connected nonetheless. He’s always wanted it that way. And he’s always gotten it the way he wanted. That’s the older brother’s prerogative. What younger brother ever refuses the older?

‘Fucking weird woman. Now she visits twice a week and bothers the parole board.’

He looked out at the group.

‘Somebody here explain it to me.’

Jeffers could think only of the words: A sentimental journey. He was suddenly suffused with a complete frustrating anger. What the hell did he mean by that? he asked himself furiously. Where has he gone? What sentiment is there in our lives? Did he visit the old family house? It’s right down the fucking road in Princeton. He could have gone and seen the old man’s drugstore. A chain owns it now. He didn’t have to take off to do that! So where’s he gone? What’s he visiting? He would never tell me anything!

A thousand dark thoughts flooded Jeffers’ mind.

Wasserman spoke quickly in reply to Meriwether’s question:

‘My mom was the same. I get a package from her every week. She wouldn’t believe anything. I coulda fucking killed some gal right under her nose and she would have looked down and said, “Well, honey, it seems you fucked

her too hard ‘cause now she’s had a heart attack and gone to heaven …” ‘

Jeffers noted that Wasserman’s usual stutter had deserted him momentarily. My brother, he thought, was always direct and cryptic. He told me only what he thought I needed to know. What he thought! And now when I need to know something, he’s left me a void. Empty! Nothing!

But then he said to himself: You do know.

He shook his head. What do you know?

Around him the men were snorting and hooting.

‘S-s-s-sometimes I thought M-m-m-Mom was crazier than I am.’

The men nodded in agreement. Jeffers heard the stutter return.

Pope spoke in his solid con-wise tone. ‘They never want I to believe. They don’t want to believe you could do it when you lift a candy bar from a store shelf. When things get worse, they just refuse harder, you know. And when you get busted for fucking, like all of us here, they won’t accept it at all. It’s easier for them to believe something else. Simpler.’

‘Not always,’ interjected Miller.

The men turned to the hard-edged professional criminal.

Miller looked about the room as if assessing a stolen jewel. ‘Think about it. There’s someone for all of us, probably a father, maybe a mother, who knew what we were and hated us for it. Someone you couldn’t con. Someone who beat you, maybe, or left you, maybe, because they couldn’t beat you. Someone who got out while the going was good …’

This comment made him laugh, but the other men had grown silent with their thoughts.

‘Maybe someone you wanted to get rid of. Maybe someone you did get rid of, only the good doc there and the proper authorities’ - he said this sneering - ‘don’t have such a good idea about.’

He paused, and Jeffers saw that he was delighting in his ‘ opinion and the dampening effect it had on the other men.

‘There’s always someone who can see just exactly what

we all are inside. It’s no big deal, really. You just got to handle that person a bit differently, huh? But they’re out there. We all know it.’

The room filled with murmuring, then subsided into silence.

Jeffers tried to prevent himself at that moment of quiet from asking the question that seared across his imagination, but was unable. His words were like his thoughts: runaway, out of control, embodied by a purpose of their own. They frightened him terribly. But he was powerless at that moment. So he asked:

‘Well, turn it around for a moment. What would you do if you learned that someone you loved, a family member, was committing crimes? How would you act?’

There was a short hesitation, as if all the Lost Boys had inhaled at the same time. Then he was quickly enveloped in a cacophony of opinion.

Detective Mercedes Barren drove north, passing up the exit on the New Jersey Turnpike for the Holland Tunnel, which would have been a more direct route. She headed toward the George Washington Bridge, with its great gray bulk stretching across the Hudson. She made her decision to avoid the tunnel consciously, despite the press of excitement and the furious sensation that time was growing shorter, compressing around her; she always avoided tunnels as much as possible. Ever since she was a child, she worried about the weight of the water pressing down on the tiles and cement just above her head. She could still see it, with that same child’s imaginative vision, cracking and buckling and the dark water suddenly pouring in on top of her. The confinement of the tunnel caused her breath to grow short and her palms to dampen unpleasantly. It’s like a kind of little claustrophobia, she thought. It’s not that terrible. Indulge it.

As she accelerated across the bridge, she looked back quickly over her shoulder, glancing up at the Palisades. She saw the cliff faces tumbling precipitously into the water. Sunlight glinted on the surface of the river and she caught

a glimpse of white sails plying back and forth. She had always understood, especially on bright clear days, why old Henry Hudson was convinced when first he steered up the great river that he had discovered the Northwest Passage. It seemed reasonable to her, when you removed the buildings and boats and saw the river and the cliffs without progress littering them, that anyone would believe that around the first or second bend would be China.

She stared at the city, with its massive phalanx of skyscrapers standing stiffly, like a great army at attention. She clutched the address paper in her hand and wove aggressively in and out of traffic. She stared dead ahead as she entered Manhattan, refusing even to look in the rearview mirror, pointing singularly for her destination.

To her surprise she discovered a legal parking place on the street barely a block from the apartment. But before approaching the apartment, she stopped in a local delicatessen and purchased a haphazard bag of groceries. Carrying the bag and holding the key, she headed toward Douglas Jeffers’ home.

He lived in a midsized, older brick building on West End Avenue. There was an ancient doorman who held the door open for her as she breezed through.

‘You’re going to see?’ he asked in a cigarette rasp.

‘Just staying at my cousin’s while I take in the sights. He’s out of town,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Doug Jeffers. He’s the best photographer…’

The doorman smiled.

‘Four-F,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she replied, tossing him a smile. ‘See you.’

She boarded an old elevator, closing the door firmly and punching up four. She saw the doorman had already turned back to his vigil. The elevator creaked as it carried her up slowly. It seemed to bounce into place and she stepped out carefully.

To her great relief, the hallway was empty.

She swiftly found 4-F and set the grocery bag down. She put the key in her left hand and pulled the 9-millimeter

from her pocketbook. For an instant she listened, but she could hear no sounds through the thick black door.

She took a deep breath and said: Go!

She thrust the key into the lock and turned it. She heard the deadbolt release and she pushed hard.

The door fell open and she crouched and jumped in.

She swung the pistol up, still bent over, aiming, letting the pistol barrel guide her sight. She swung right, left, center, and saw no one. She waited. No sound. She straightened up and lowered the gun. Then she retrieved the bag of groceries and set them on the floor inside the apartment. She closed and locked the door behind her, putting the chain on as well.