A Brilliant Death (21 page)

Travis shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find out.”

We parked on a side street, then hustled across Sunset Boulevard ahead of a bus, ducking into the front door of the dealership. “Service department?” Travis asked a salesman in a short-sleeve white shirt and a wide, red-and-yellow tie. He sized us up in an instant. Seeing no buying potential in either of us, he nodded toward a heavy steel door in the rear of the showroom. I opened the door, allowing the whirl of the air wrenches and the clanging of tools to escape into the quiet showroom. The service center was divided down the middle by a yellow stripe that separated the cluttered repair side from the cleaner, seemingly less hectic side where new cars were being cleaned and prepped for their owners. On the repair side, seated behind a brown particle-board counter, was a prim, silver-haired woman with her eyeglasses dangling around her neck from a gold chain, who appeared to have applied red lipstick following a three-martini lunch. She was working feverishly at the Steubenville
Herald-Star
’s crossword puzzle, but still looked as much in charge as anyone. “I was told to come back here to get an employment application for part-time janitor,” Travis said. The woman spun in her chair and reached for an application. “We need two applications, please.”

“There’s only one opening,” she said.

“I know,” Travis said. “The competition between the two of us should be fierce.”

She didn’t appear amused. “You can sit over at that picnic table and fill this out.”

“I think Mr. Carter wants to see us when we’re done,” Travis said.

“I’ve already been informed as much,” she said, her eyes dropping back to her puzzle.

We went to the picnic table next to the pop, coffee, candy, and cigarette vending machines. Travis searched out a spot that wasn’t covered with grease and sat down. It was too gross for me, so I stood and filled out the application against the side of the candy machine. As I did, Dicky Cole, the preparation supervisor at the dealership and an offensive guard on Brilliant’s championship football teams with Clay Carter, walked by and nodded at me. I returned the nod and said, “Hey, Dicky.” The creases in Dicky’s hands looked like little road maps, filled with grime, and he smelled of sweat and grease. I tried to act nonchalant. I knew Dicky and Big Frank were occasional drinking buddies at the Hillbilly Bar in Riddles Run.

“Whatta you boys doin’ up here?” Dicky asked.

“Putting in applications for the part-time janitor’s job,” I said.

“Long way to drive to push a broom for a couple of hours, ain’t it?” Dicky asked, slipping two dimes into the Coke machine.

Neither of us answered.

“Got shit in your ears?” Dicky asked, looking at me.

“It’s not that far,” I said. “It’s hard to find a job in Brilliant.”

Dicky sniffed, wrapped his filthy hands around his can of Coke, and started across the floor. Travis kept his head buried until he was out of earshot. “That’s great. He’ll tell Big Frank he saw me up here.”

“So what?” I said. “You’re filling out a job application. What’s the big deal?”

“How do I explain why I’d want a job up here when all I have to do is walk across the street to the bakery?”

“Tell him you wouldn’t give up your bakery job, but you wanted another job for some extra hours to buy a car.”

Travis nodded. “That’s good. I like that. You have good ideas. It’s too bad your Adam’s apple wiggles so bad when you lie.”

It was a simple application, and we had them completed in a few minutes. I handed mine to Travis, and he passed them over the counter to the woman, who took them as she spoke unhappily on the telephone to a clerk at a parts store. “Really? Well, sir, I can assure you that it won’t be
my
tit that gets caught in the wringer if this isn’t taken care of. It’s a bad water pump. It was bad when you sold it to us and bad when we put it on our customer’s car. Don’t expect us to eat this or we’ll just take all our business to Genuine Parts, where they don’t give me a bunch of static about replacing a defective part.” She listened and after a moment began nodding. “Very fine. We’ll expect it delivered before the close of business.” She passed the applications back to Travis. “Keep them,” she said. “Mr. Carter will see you now. Take the applications with you—top of the steps and to your right.”

Extending from the middle of the floor to a second-floor landing was a well-worn set of wooden stairs, its green paint nearly rubbed away and replaced with years of grease and oil. I followed Travis up the stairs. On the right side of the landing, down a short hall, was an oak door with a frosted glass window. On the door in black paint that was faint and chipping away was:

Eugene V. Carter
President

Clay’s father had died fifteen years earlier, but he had never bothered to have the glass repainted.

Travis trudged down the short hall, his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nerves. I can’t work up any spit.”

“You’re in charge of the situation. Don’t talk to him like you talked to Tornik and everything will be fine. Remember, all we’re trying to do is find out what he knew about your mother.”

He rapped twice lightly on the glass.

“Come in.”

Travis pushed the door open. Clay Carter was sitting behind his desk, a pair of half-glasses on the end of his nose and piles of invoices and assorted papers stacked around him. “Come on in,” he said, waving us into the office. “I expected to see you two here first thing this morning.”

“I had to work,” Travis said.

Clay Carter stood and lifted the glasses off his nose. He looked tired, and I imagined that he hadn’t slept well the previous night. “Where are you working?”

“At the bakery.”

“That’s a good job. It’s right across the street from your house, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Clay was in a white dress shirt, his sleeves rolled up on his muscular forearms, a scarlet and navy striped tie hanging loosely around his neck, wrinkled khaki slacks cinching up around his thighs. “Sit down,” he said, motioning toward two leather chairs and a couch in the corner that surrounded a battered coffee table, on which were a half-dozen car magazines.

Travis sat in one chair; I sat on the couch and scanned the office. It was large, but quite modest. Steel file cabinets lined one wall. Files and books, all related to the dealership and selling automobiles, filled bookshelves on the other. The maroon area rug that was stretched under the chairs and coffee table was faded and tired, worn to the burlap by the thousands of shoes that had rested on it over the decades. I said, “I gotta tell you, Mr. Carter, I was expecting something a little more, uh . . .”

“Palatial?”

“That’s a good word, I guess.”

“I’ve got my den at home for escaping and relaxing. This one is for work. I try to spend as little time in here as possible. You can’t sell cars sitting behind a desk, so I don’t want to make it too comfortable.” He settled into the open chair. “So, where are we starting here?”

Travis dug his elbows into the padded armrests and pushed himself upright. “I, uh, I don’t really know exactly where to start.”

Clay’s brows arched. “You didn’t seem to be having any trouble yesterday.”

“Yes, sir, I know. I’m sorry for that. I could have handled that a little better. It’s just that Mitchell and I have been on this mission for the past couple of years trying to find out about my mother. That’s all it was at first. I just wanted to know who she was, what she was like. But after a while that wasn’t good enough. I wanted to know the identity of the mystery man from the boat and how she died. After that night in the cemetery, we figured if we could find out your identity, the mystery might be solved.”

He sat for a long moment, his fingertips pressed together. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and asked, “So, you want some answers, huh?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis said.

“I must say I admire your determination. If it had been anyone else, I would have told them to go piss up a rope. However, since you’re Amanda’s son, I feel I owe you this much. So you’ve been working on this since when—the night at the cemetery?”

“Before that,” I said.

Travis nodded. “About three years, give or take,” he offered. “We’ve heard the rumors and we’ve read the old newspaper articles, but I want to know more about her. We heard there was a memorial to her at the cemetery, and when we were checking it out we saw that someone had been putting fresh flowers on the grave.”

Clay frowned. “You heard about it? You mean you didn’t know about your own mother’s memorial until a few years ago?”

“No, sir. My mother is not a topic often discussed at my house.”

“I see. So, you saw the flowers and that’s why you were staking out the cemetery?” We nodded in unison. A faint smile crossed Clay Carter’s lips. “Good detective work,” he said. “You scared the hell out of me.” He grinned at me. “That was a nice tackle.”

“Thanks, but I paid the price. My balls were the size of lemons for two weeks,” I said.

“Sorry about that.” He didn’t sound the least bit sincere.

Travis said, “We had no idea that you were somehow involved in this until I saw your name on the investigator’s report.”

“Okay, so what do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Travis said. “Everything you can tell me from the day you met my mom until the night in the cemetery.”

Clay Carter’s brows arched. “That covers quite a bit of territory, son.” His fingertips came together in a steeple-like tower in front of his nose. After a moment he stood and called down to the woman at the parts counter. “Edna, hold my calls, please.” He slid back into the chair. “Okay, do you want to ask the questions or do you want me to just start talking?”

“How about you just talk?” Travis said.

He nodded. “Before we start, I think we need to discuss some ground rules. I need your word that anything discussed in this room stays in the room. I have a family and would prefer that my wife not know that I’m putting flowers on another woman’s memorial.”

“I won’t say a word,” Travis said.

“Me, neither,” I said.

“Okay, I’m taking you at your word.” He took a breath, straightened himself, and began. “I had been playing baseball in the Boston Red Sox organization—double-A ball in Birmingham—when I tore up my shoulder. We rehabbed it for almost a year. When I went to spring training the next year they moved me from third to second base for the shorter throw. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t even make the short throw from second to first. They cut me and that quick . . .” He snapped his fingers. “. . . I went from being the future phenom to pushing a broom down in the garage. I was just kickin’ around, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought about having another surgery and trying to make a comeback, but every doctor I went to said the shoulder was shot. I took a few accounting classes at the Business Institute of Pittsburgh, but ultimately decided to stay on here. Dad wanted me to learn the business and take over for him when he retired; I decided that was my best option. I spent most of my time learning to sell on the floor and reading management manuals in a little office at the other end of the landing. That was my life for the next year. In truth, I was hiding more than anything. I didn’t have any control over the injury, but I always felt like I was a disappointment to everyone in Brilliant. They thought I was going to be the first guy out of Brilliant to make it to the big leagues. When my career went belly up, I thought I was a failure. I buried myself in work until I met your mother, which was the spring after I washed out.”

“Where did you meet her?” Travis asked.

He smiled. “Church. Easter Sunday, 1951. I was a twice-a-year man as far as church was concerned—Easter and Christmas Eve, and the only reason I went that often was because my mom would have had a coronary if I hadn’t. I didn’t actually meet her that day. I just stared at her from across the church. God, she was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. I was in love with her from the instant I laid eyes on her. She made me a church-going man.” He laughed. “I didn’t miss any Sundays after that. A couple of weeks after Easter they had a dinner in the basement after church—one of those potlucks—and I finagled a seat across from her.”

“Wasn’t my dad there?” Travis asked, then immediately realized the folly of his question. “Right. Silly question. Sorry. Go on.”

“I had asked a couple of my buddies about her. I knew she was unhappy in her marriage, and there was a rumor going around that she was going to leave your dad and move back to Virginia. I was afraid that if I didn’t tell her how I felt that she would leave and I would never see her again. We hadn’t had many opportunities to talk, but when we did I thought there was something there, a little spark. You know, hardly anything goes on in that church that someone doesn’t see. So I wrote her a letter and slipped it to her in a hymnal at church.” He took a moment to compose his thoughts. “I asked her to call me at the office, and she did.” Clay shrugged. “That’s how it started. We were seeing each other when your father was out of town. It was all very innocent. This went on for about a year. She was trying to summon up the courage to leave your dad when she got pregnant. I was crushed, and that’s when we quit seeing each other.”

“Whose decision was that?”

“It was mutual. We both knew it couldn’t go anywhere as long as she was pregnant.”

“She wasn’t pregnant when she died,” Travis said. “Were you seeing each other again?”

“I was hoping that we could get it rekindled, and I stopped by one night to see her. We talked, and there was no doubt in my mind that her feelings for me were as strong as mine were for her.”

“Were you the mystery man on the boat?” I asked.

Clay winced. “No. Of course not.”

“Who was it? Do you know?”

“I wish I did. It was very confusing, because your mom was definitely going to leave your dad. Did you know that?”

“I’d heard.”

That was a lie, I thought. Travis had never heard any such thing, but he wanted Clay to think he knew most of the story.

“Your mom loved me, Travis. I’m sorry if that hurts you. But the plan was for her to take you and move out. I had already found her a little place not far from here, someplace where she would be safe while she started the divorce proceedings. She was going to wait until your dad was out of town on a trip and then make the move. We were planning to make a life for ourselves and you. That’s why I will never believe she was out on that boat with another man. For a long time I thought maybe she had faked her death to get away from your dad. You know, when it’s someone you love, you’ll hold on to any shred of hope.”