Trip Wire (8 page)

Beth pulled herself together enough to ask, “What’s taking the police so long? Where’s Norris?”

I flicked my eyes over at Cliff, who walked away from me.

“I didn’t tell the police. I’m not calling them.”

And I thought Cliff’s move on me in the bathroom had been sudden. Beth was on me faster than I could blink, not a bit interested in my theories about the intruder, why I was so certain he wouldn’t return. She grabbed the collar of my robe and shook me like I was a free bubblegum machine. “Call them now. Call them now, or I’ll do it myself.”

“The hell you will, Beth. It didn’t happen to you, did it? What are you going to say to them? How are you going to prove it?”

She broke away and snatched the kitchen telephone off the hook. I wrestled it from her hand.

“You’re fucking crazy!” she shrieked. “You want to get us all killed.”

I don’t think she meant for her nails to dig into my cheek that way. But it took that sharp pain to kick me into action. I shoved her, and she stumbled on a chair leg. Then she righted herself and immediately came at me again.
“Asshole!”
she was shouting. “You arrogant cow.” There was a lot of muscle behind all that slinkiness.

I’m no brawler. I may be kind of hefty, but I still fight like a girl. I went for her hair. Then we commenced to slapping each other. Oh, it was tawdry.

Taylor and Cliff handled us the way the refs on the Roller Derby treat those big women. I huffed and puffed from my corner of the room, all my goods hanging out of the torn bathrobe.

“The two of you,” Annabeth said in disgust to the men, “can’t you do anything with her?”

But they seemed to know better than to interfere. They only watched us, ready to break up the melee should it start again.

Finally, Annabeth was calm again. “Sandy,” she said quietly, “you have crossed the line, hon. You’re out there in space. You hear me? They took Wilton away from you, and it’s made you insane. It’s not your fault, okay? But you need help.”

I knew I needed help. And I knew what I needed help with.

“Is that how your mom talks to her maid out there in Kenilworth?” I said.

She threw up her hands then. “Fine. Be like that. But I’m not ready to die. If I don’t get murdered in my sleep, I’m going home tomorrow.”

“Oh, really? What’s your friend Norris going to say about that? He told us—”

She gave me a toss of rich-girl hair. “I don’t give a shit what Norris says. He’s got a problem with that, let him take it up with my father.”

We watched her as she slammed into her room and banged the door behind her.

Not even in my lurid imagination could I have dreamed up a scene like the one that had just taken place. Me and Beth Riegel fighting like cave women in a B movie. Another friend struck from the list.

And how was I going to make it right with Owen after what happened earlier? I couldn’t imagine facing him again, but the loss of him as a friend would be the final blow.

As I slumped in the kitchen chair, swallowing back tears and clutching at the front of that stupid robe, all at once the exhaustion came down on me like a club. I knew I had it figured right: The intruder had what he wanted and wouldn’t be back. Nobody was out to kill off this commune of hapless hippies. But I was so weary, if it turned out I was wrong, I didn’t care just then. Kill me, I thought. Go ahead. Just let me rest.

Taylor and Cliff were talking, but their voices filtered down as if they were calling to me from the top of a hill. I dragged myself out of the chair and into my room.

11

Was Cliff right? Was the end at hand, our little experiment in democracy—living right—all over? Freedom, happiness, community all finished so fast.

I lay awake, staring up at the ceiling that Mia had painted a velvety blue and then overlaid with silver stars. When I joined the commune, that pretty make-believe sky had been her welcoming gift to me.

I imagined her up on the ladder doing that for me. Perhaps Wilt had helped, in his way, standing at the base of the ladder, holding it steady with one hand, smoking a joint with the other. It made my heart ache.

“Sometimes, when you’re out with Mia, do black people ever look at you like you’re a bug? Like you give them the creeps?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s like you know what they’re thinking. It’s like, ‘How can you stand them? How could you be with one of them, after what they did to us?’ “

“And how can we?” I said.

Sleep overtook me at last.

Gently shaking me awake, Cliff interrupted a very involved dream I was having—not a good one. Bev, Jordan’s mother, was in it. She was begging Barry, who was all dressed up like a medicine man in a bad western, to give her sick baby some kind of miracle potion.

I came to with Cliff’s face looming over me. “What is it?”

“Beth called the cops,” he said.

“Shit. They’re here?”

“Not yet.”

“Damn, she had no right!”

The pressure of his hand on my shoulder slowed my movements. “Just a minute, Sandy. I know you’re mad and all. But I think Beth did the right thing. Some guy breaking in here like that—it’s nothing to be playing around with.”

“Who’s playing? I’m not playing, Cliff. I told you he wasn’t out to hurt me. He was looking for something in here.”

“Even so, Barry didn’t come home tonight. You’ve got to tell Norris you saw him in the Volvo. It’s getting too fucking weird.”

“I can’t help that, Cliff. Why don’t you tell Norris, or don’t tell him. Whatever. Just let me get up, will you?”

“Wait, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you get it?
I
don’t want you to go. I don’t want anything else to happen to you.”

His hand was now at the collar of my nightshirt. He leaned in to kiss me, but I stopped him. “What is this? More of what you said last night? You were serious about all that?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re fantasizing about what—you, me, and Jordan in a little cottage in the woods or something? You going to take us to Connecticut and we’ll have a boat?”

He looked away, unable to deny it. And oddly enough, now that I’d said it, in theory there was nothing so terrible about the idea. I’d never been on a boat.

He got me while I was thinking. A long kiss like the ones we’d had last night.

“Why me?” I asked. “How come you didn’t go after Beth . . . or Clea? Or somebody at school?”

“How many times do I have to say it? I want to be with you.”

“All right. But it’ll have to wait.” I pushed out of bed then. “I’m splitting.”

“Jesus Christ, Sandy. It’s one o’clock in the morning. Where are you going?”

“Home, I guess. I mean, to Woody and Ivy’s. I’ll catch a cab.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“You will not, Cliff. Now get out of here and let me get dressed.”

CHAPTER FIVE

FRIDAY

1

Woody was making me his famous apple pancakes. Which was mighty nice of him, in light of our last meeting. We had not talked since I freaked out on him and Ivy at the commune the day after the murders.

Ivy was still asleep. I had awakened the two of them at one-thirty in the morning, offering no explanation why I’d chosen that ungodly hour to come calling. I’ll explain everything tomorrow, I told them, and we had all stumbled into our respective beds.

When I awoke in my old room about 9 a.m., I could smell the sausages and coffee. I followed my nose out to the kitchen and found my uncle, fully dressed, sleeves rolled up, sifting flour into an old crockery bowl.

I hardly knew where to begin, how to apologize. After a minute of fumbling for the words, I gave up, lip trembling, willing myself not to bawl like a baby.

Woody put down his wooden spoon and came over to me, hugged me tightly. “You will always be my girl,” he said, and there may even have been a bit of wetness in his eyes.

“But,” I said when I’d brushed away the tears, “you still think I’m foolish to get all up in this murder thing, don’t you?”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Cass. But I can see you’re going to do it anyway. So I have to stand with you.”

The pancakes didn’t disappoint. They were just as delicious as I remembered. Truth was, Woody was a better cook than Ivy, who had help with the household stuff several days a week. But on lazy Sundays or holidays, Uncle Woody would prepare one of his specialties—pancakes, or pepper steak, or his sensational duckling in sweet sauce.

After eating, we sat at the kitchen table over our coffee. Woody lit a cigarette with his beloved old Zippo. “Jack tells me you came to see him.”

“Yeah, I did.” I hoped Klaus hadn’t gone whining to Woody, telling him how rude I’d been, or that I’d stormed out of his office.

“He says some things are coming to light about these two youngsters. Details about the deaths. It’s not nice, Cass.”

“I didn’t think it would be.”

“He says the boy was tortured before they killed him.” Tortured. Jack Klaus was right: That was
personal,
I thought. “But it looks like they killed the girl right off. The homicide detective thinks she might’ve just walked in on it.”

I swallowed hard, refusing to visualize any of it.

“Cass, doesn’t common sense tell you somebody was trying to get something out of that boy he didn’t want to give up?” he said.

I nodded.

“Must have been a pretty big secret he was keeping.”

“Wilt didn’t keep secrets.”

“You sure about that?”

I hesitated before answering. I was thinking about what Klaus had revealed yesterday—the old relationship between Mia Boone and Dan Zuni. That was a secret, wasn’t it? But I didn’t know whether Wilt was party to it.

Almost as if he was reading my mind, Woody said, “Cass, you were devoted to this boy. But you have to ask yourself some hard questions. You say you knew him so well. But is that really true? What kind of things was he doing when you weren’t with him? Who all was he associated with? What about his friends?”

“His friends were my friends. We all lived together.”

“I don’t mean them. The boy lived in Chicago all his life until he went to school, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he get into any kind of trouble while he was away?”

“He never told me about anything like that. Neither did Taylor. They were at school together. I’m sure the police asked him about that.”

“Maybe he had enemies here in the city, people you don’t know about.”

“It’s hard to think of Wilton having enemies.”

“Don’t be childish. Everybody’s got enemies. Young men get up to things they don’t want other people to know about. Especially colored boys in these times.”

“Oh, look, Woody. Wilt was no criminal. His mother and father have money, and they sheltered him all his life. He went to the Lab School and Francis Parker. His dad is Oscar Mobley, one of the biggest, richest lawyers in the city.”

“You don’t have to tell me who Oscar Mobley is, girl. I’m the one can tell you about him. And one thing I’ll tell you is, it’s a good thing he is a smart lawyer, because he was able to get your boy out of trouble with the law.”

“What trouble?”

“Drug trouble. Wilton Mobley was arrested for selling dope to his classmates.”

“Oh.”

“You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No. But so what? Selling a little grass. That’s no big-time crime. I know lots of people who do it.”

“Is that so?”

“I mean, he couldn’t have been a major—Wilton didn’t have a lot of money. His mother slipped him cash sometimes. And he worked sometimes at the bike shop. People who sell in a big way make thousands.”

“You know all about it, I see.”

“All right, Woody, don’t blow your top over this. I only meant that . . . that lots of people are into smoking marijuana. Respectable people. Wilton probably gave away as much as he sold. I mean, it’s not the same as heroin. I mean, there are some places where it isn’t even illegal.”

No way to back out now. Oh, what a pile of shit I had stepped into. I might just as well have come out and said I smoke dope on a regular basis.

“You see what I’m talking about, Cass? You didn’t know this fella near as well as you thought you did. Just like you didn’t know the white girl he lived with had been with that boy who’s missing.”

“I see Jack Klaus has been bending your ear.”

“Yes. Isn’t that what you want? Somebody on the inside who can tell us the straight story?”

“Straight? You think he’s giving me the straight anything? I don’t trust him, Woody.”

“That’s too bad. Because you need him.”

“I don’t know if that’s the kind of help I need.”

“Well, I do. If you think you’ll get anywhere without him, you’re crazy. It’s only because of Jack that the homicide man didn’t pull you in for being uncooperative. This Norris fella thinks maybe you haven’t told him everything you could.”

To put it mildly.

I sat tight. Norris was going to have calico kittens when he got to the apartment and heard the third-hand account of the break-in and assault on me. Most likely he was looking for me now. Cliff was the only one I’d told where I was going. I knew he wouldn’t fink on me.

Uncle Woody wasn’t going to be thrilled that I was holding back that information from him, too. I’d tell him about the break-in, but in my own good time. If I spilled it now, he’d stop at nothing to get me out of the commune and back to Hyde Park.

“All right, Woody. Klaus or no Klaus, everybody seems to be looking for a way to blame Wilton for what happened to him and Mia. Which is insane. I don’t care if he was Al Capone. That doesn’t make it okay for somebody to murder him. Or do you think that’s a childish notion, too?”

“No” was what he said.
Why can’t you be eleven years old again?
was what I saw in his face.

“Let’s back up here for a minute, Cass. There’s something we didn’t finish talking about.”

“Dope, you mean. Look, Woody—”

“No. Not that. I asked you about his friends outside of your roommates.”

“Honest, I didn’t know about his old friends. Except somebody named Alvin.”

“All right. Who was this fella Alvin?”

“I couldn’t say. Wilt used to talk about him when he was kind of putting himself down. Almost like he idolized him. ‘Alvin was tough.’ ‘Alvin was a real black man.’ ‘Alvin knew what was really going on in this country.’ Things like that.”

“But you never met the boy?”

“No.”

“So this Alvin is a tough young nigger who knows everything, huh? Sounds like he could have been showing your friend the ropes in the dope trade.”

“Stop making things up. The guy isn’t a pusher. He was in Vietnam.”

“So maybe he’s not caught up in drugs. But he still could be one of
them.
”

Them. I knew what that meant. “God, Woody. Don’t go off on one of your raps about the black nationalists. Please.”

He looked at me grimly. But he didn’t say any more. Maybe he was following Ivy’s old advice to me: When you feel like you’re losing your temper, take some deep breaths and don’t say a word until you calm down. “No last name on Alvin?” he said evenly.

“I don’t think Wilt mentioned it. He might have, but I’ve forgotten it.”

“Okay, young woman.” He started to clear the table. “You realize, don’t you,” he said, “you’ve got a duty to perform. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the decent thing to do. If you felt like you say you did about Wilton Mobley.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You should pay a call on his people. When were you planning to do that?”

He was right. He was absolutely right. “I’ll do it now.”

“The boy was angry at his father, you said.”

“The other way around. They were angry at him. They were trying to make him go back to Antioch.”

I came in for a bit of his caustic commentary then. “Imagine that. Man spending his hard-earned money to give the boy an education, try to get him started in life. And that fool has the nerve to wipe his feet on it. Yeah, that’s the big problem these days. None of you young folks like to be told what to do. It’s always gotta be your way. You know better. We don’t know a goddamn thing.”

He smoked without talking for a few minutes, then said, “Anyway, you get on over there to see those people. Sim will take you.”

“Who?”

Woody almost always used a—well, it’s more than a little pretentious to call him a chauffeur—a driver, is what I mean. The previous one, whom we called Hero, had been with him for years. He was Woody’s nephew. Hero had had more than his share of problems, among them his lengthy and wasting drug addiction; but in the end he surely lived up to his nickname. He had met that end on the street one night, killed by one of two men who attacked Woody and me. Hero died saving us.

“Cass, this is Sim,” Woody said. “He’s helping me out these days.”

The same kind of help Hero had provided, I presumed: accompanying Woody while he went about his business, known and unknown, all over the city. Or just waiting for him in the Lincoln while Woody lunched with his cronies. And if any kind of muscle was required for the job, it looked as if this guy Sim could handle it. Unlike undernourished Uncle Hero, he was big.

“Hi, Sim,” I said as I got into the backseat.

He was wearing a light-brown suede jacket and a yellow shirt. His dark hands resting on the steering wheel were huge and shapely like a basketball player’s. He turned around, eyed me for a few seconds, like he was memorizing my face or something. “How you doing?”

Woody moved to close the door after me.

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Last thing in the world I want to see is a mother who just lost her boy. Very little in the world is worse than that.”

He should know. Aunt Ivy had miscarried twice and delivered one stillborn before they gave up trying to have children.

“When you talk to his folks,” Woody said, “you gotta know what you’re doing, gal.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re in a position to talk to the Mobley family like the police won’t. They can’t. For one thing, they wouldn’t know how. For another, they don’t care like you do. But you have to be careful of these people’s feelings. Realize what they going through. If there’s any chance they can shed light on the killing, you gotta get them talking. The boy was theirs. They should be able to tell you who he was. And if you come to find out they didn’t really know him much better than you did, well, so be it. That’s gotta mean something, too. You understand?”

“I think I do. You’re telling me pretty much what Jack Klaus told me. Either I want the truth to come out or I don’t. I have to find a way to stand back from Wilt. Be hard on him and be hard on myself.”

“Now you’re talking.”

Was I? I hoped it wasn’t just talk.

2

Hyde Park is one of a very few communities in the city that people like to describe as “integrated.”

True and not true. Of course, the mighty University of Chicago is the chief explanation for the variety of colors and ethnicities on the streets. Students and faculty come there from all over the world. Mixed couples strolling with their café au lait babies don’t raise many eyebrows. And solid, well-to-do Negroes long ago established a beachhead in the area. Still, blacks not connected to university life, and even some who are, usually get shut out of the more desirable housing. The real estate guy who was so nice when he showed you the sunny two-bedroom place? You’d be ill advised to sit by the phone waiting for him to call you back.

Wilton’s parents were not only longtime Hyde Park residents, they had crossed the neighborhood’s Maginot Line, the little enclave of Madison Park. They lived on a street so hincty that many of the realty ads for homes along its lovely, tree-shaded blocks state boldly: Physicians and professors only. Others need not apply. My great-aunt and -uncle were quite comfortable, but they had never lived like the Mobleys, and although Ivy had been introduced to Hope Mobley once or twice, she was not part of her rarefied social set.

Sim found a parking spot near the corner of the street. I got out of the Lincoln and walked to the moss-covered house where Wilton had grown up. I took a minute to prepare myself before I rang the doorbell. I’d be entering a house of mourning where emotions would be running high. I had managed to keep myself together this far, but there was a danger of falling apart once I was face-to-face with the grieving parents.

A small, plain woman in brown gabardine answered the door. Wilt must take after his dad, I thought at first. Then it registered: This is the maid. I gave her my name and asked if the Mobleys might have a few moments to see me.

Hope appeared a second later, before the first woman even had time to announce me. As expected, she was long and slim and handsomely coiffed. In fact, all my predictions about her seemed to be on the money. Just as I’d thought, she was dressed in costly black wool, and she looked devastated, emptied out.

But I hadn’t expected her to trip on the Persian carpet in the entryway. She went sprawling, and then just sat there. Her expression never changed.