Day of Wrath (5 page)

"Yessir."

"I'd like to speak to him."

"
What about?"

"That's between him and me."

"Bobby ain't in no trouble, is he?" he said.

"No. I just want to ask him a few questions."

"Well, he ain't here. Matter of fact, he stepped out a
few hours ago and won't be back till supper time."

"I'll wait," I said and pushed past him into the room.
There was a television going in one corner, with a green vinyl recliner
parked in front of it and an ashtray full of butts beside the chair. The
rest of that newspaper he was holding was scattered around the room. A
piece on the couch—a hideous stained wood and plaid cloth number with
a matching coffee table in front of it stained the same tarry black. A
piece on the red, oval rug. A piece on the radiator jutting out from the
wall. And what wasn't covered with paper was littered with dirty clothes.
In fact there was a trail of them leading across the floor to an open closet.
The room was exactly what Mildred Segal had said it was. And, like Mildred,
I couldn't understand what the pretty blonde girl in the snapshot could
have found there to interest her.

I sat down on the sofa and the man went over to the green
recliner. He sat down, put his left hand to his mouth, and sucked on it
nervously. "Sometimes it still hurts me," he said. He pulled the hand away
from his mouth and held it up. There was a bump of bone where the thumb
should have been. "Lost it over to Gibson Cards" He sucked on the bump
again.

"Their damn machine's what done it to me. Their damn machines
what cost me my livelihood." He said it fiercely, as if he expected an
argument. "I told the foreman I wasn't going to work on no machine without
the proper training. Not for no lousy two-ten an hour, I wasn't. You know
what he said to me. He said, 'You don't got no goddamn choice." Pastor
Caldwell mused on the injustice of that for a moment. "That machine 'bout
tore my hand off. And I ain't been worth a goddamn ever since. Doctor says
my nerves are shot. Can't go out. Can't do no work at all.

"Sometimes I can still feel it there," he said, wriggling
the stump. "Like I never lost it nor my nerve neither."

He sighed heavily. "You know what I think, mister? I hear
the preachers on the radio shouting 'Jesus, this' and 'Jesus, that' and
send us your money. And the Holy Rollers come to my door with their whole
damn family, trying to sell me a Bible. And you know what I say to them.
I say, 'It's all a pile of shit.' That's all this life is, too, when you
can't keep yourself whole but by cutting your damn hand off for two dollars
and a dime."

But he hadn't meant that for the preachers and the Holy
Rollers. He'd meant it for me. Partly as an excuse for that catastrophic
room and the life he'd been leading in it. And partly as the reason why
he hadn't thrown me out. He'd been robbed of his job and his nerve and
now anybody who wanted to could come right in and shit all over him. There
was enough truth in what he said to make me feel disgusted with myself.

"I'm not a cop, Mr. Caldwell," I told him. "I'm a private
detective looking for a girl named Robbie Segal."

"Oh, Lord," he said uneasily. "Nothing's happened to that
girl, has it?"

"
Not that I know of. She's run away from home."

"Oh, Lord," he said again. He wiped his eyes with the
back of his hand and took another drag off` his cigarette.

"She's a good girl, that one. Come from a good home. Hell,
she'd come on over here with Bobbie and treat me like I was her own pa.
I sure hope nothing's happened to her."

"
So do I," I said softly. The room and that broken-down
man were getting to me—reminding me of another broken-down man and another
lost girl and the terrible thing that had happened to her. The memory made
me so uneasy that I stood up. Pastor Caldwell flinched, as if he thought
I might strike him.

"Have you seen her this week?" I said. "Any time since
Sunday?"

He closed his eyes, trying to remember. "Not since Sunday,
I don't think. 'Course Bobby's the one you should talk to. He worships
that girl. Worships the ground she walks on. But to answer your question—the
last time I saw her was on Sunday afternoon. Out in back with Bobby."

"What were they doing?"

"Bobby was playing her some music, I think. He's got him
a little place in the garage back there where he can play, on account of
the neighbors don't want to be bothered with the noise."

I glanced at my watch, which was showing five-thirty.

"What time do you figure he'll be back, Mr. Caldwell?"

"Six o'clock. He run off to Westwood to pick him up a
valve grinder. He works on cars back in the back, too. Makes him a few
extra dollars that way. And Lord knows, we can use them."

That helped explain the gold bracelet; I looked at the
man, who was staring idly at the TV.

"You don't have any idea where Robbie's gone, do you,
Mr. Caldwell?"

He shook his head and said,."You best talk to Bobby."
_

Only Bobby didn't show up at six. Or at six-fifteen. And
that worried me. Caldwell kept smoking and watching the television. And
I started to wonder if he was stringing me along.

"I thought you said he'd be back at six," I finally said
to him.

"That's what I thought, too," he said placidly. "Now here
comes the CBS News and he ain't here. Somethin' must've delayed him."

I stood up. "I'm going to go out back and wait."

He jerked around on the chair when I got to the door and
said, "Don't you go poking through my boy's things, you hear? He won't
like it if you do." Then he turned back to the TV.

I walked down the hall to the outside door and stepped
into the evening air. The street was already lit for night—gas lamps
puddling brightly on the wet concrete, house lights glowing up and down
the street. The rain had stopped and a chilly wind had come up from the
west, pushing the big dark storm clouds across the sky and whistling through
the hedges and the pines. It whipped at my hair and my jacket as soon as
I stepped off the porch. I pulled the jacket close to my chest and I followed
a hedge row to the driveway beside the apartment house. There was enough
light coming out of side and rear windows for me to make my way back to
the garage—a long slat outbuilding with eight pairs of double doors,
each with numbers. painted on it in phosphorescent paint.

I found l-C and 1-D, unlatched the doors, and pulled them
open. The l-D stall was dark and empty. A Buick had recently been parked
in l-C. I could hear the engine ticking and could smell the exhaust fumes.
I groped around the empty stall, looking for a light switch, and eventually
walked into a string dangling from an overhead fixture. I jerked it down
and the right side of the double garage was lit faintly by a forty-watt
bulb.

There was an oil spot on the concrete floor, but aside
from that the cubicle was clean and orderly. A padlocked metal cabinet
stood against the rear wall, with a couple dozen pictures taped to the
doors. As I got closer, I could see that most of them were pictures of
rock musicians, cut out of magazines. But a few of them were snapshots
of a boy whom I took to be Bobby. He was a tall, skinny kid, with shoulder-length
brown hair and a little boy's face that made him look childishly sweet,
guileless, and a little simple-minded. The kind of kid who could be made
to do anything. In two of the photos he was sitting on the porch steps
of a frame house, his guitar cradled lovingly in his lap. Two other boys
were sitting beside him—both of them in their early twenties, both of
them holding musical instruments (guitar, sax) and smiling at the camera.
Like Bobby they were long-haired, bright-eyed kids in jeans and workshirts.

The most interesting photograph was taped to a fluorescent
light hung above a narrow workbench on the east wall. I didn't notice it
until I'd turned to leave. It had been taken on the same porch as the other
two photos, but Bobby wasn't in it. Robbie Segal was. She was sitting on
a stair, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. A man and a woman
were sitting on either side of her like a family portrait. The man had
a long black beard with touches of gray in it, long black hair braided
in a ponytail, a black beret slanting across his forehead, wire-rim glasses,
and a haughty, fleshless, unsettlingly cold-looking face. He was staring
so intently into the camera that it was as if he were taking the picture,
and not the photographer. On Robbie's left, a middle-aged woman with very
short gray hair, cut almost like a crew cut, and a mannish, sappy face
was grinning mindlessly at Robbie and the black-haired man. She looked
as if she were overjoyed to have been included in the picture—like a
punk house mother.

I spent a moment trying to decipher the look on Robbie's
face. It wasn't a conventional look of happiness, although she seemed happy.
It was more like the look she might have had as she sank into a hot tub
at the end of a long day. Her eyes were vague and sleepy; her crooked mouth
hung open, as if she were taking a deep, satisfied breath. I thought of
the hash pipe I'd found in her room, but she looked more than high. She
looked spaced-out, thick-tongued, tripping-stoned, as if she'd just done
up junk in both arms. It was a drunken look of contentment, and it worried
me.

I peeled the photo off the lamp and stuck it in my pocket.
Then I took a closer look at the workbench. I found some Beatles sheet
music—"Blue Jay Way," "Rocky Racoon," and "I Am the Walrus"—in the
bench drawer, along with two good-sized roaches, a box of flat picks, a
nail file, a couple of pencils, a package of guitar strings, and a sheaf
of Bobby's own music written out on blank music paper. I flipped on the
bench light and took a look at the lyrics. One of them was called "Robbie."

The first stanza and chorus went:

Come out, Robbie darling, come out and play,
Tomorrow will be a brand new day,
We'll share it together, come what may—
Only promise me, darling, that you'll stay,
Stay by me, stay by me, stay by me.
Don't ever go—back into the night,
Robbie darling, back into the night.

I didn't read the rest. At the bottom of the page
a different hand had written the words, "You better" or "Your better."
I couldn't tell which. There were also some figures jotted down in the
margins. Probably the prices of auto parts.

I put the music back where I'd found it and flipped off
the bench light and the overhead fixture. It was fully dark outside. And
Robbie was still lost. But, at least, I'd learned something about her friend—a
romantic teenager with a sweet, insipid face who wanted to rescue his love
from darkness, like Orpheus and Eurydice. I just hoped, if Robbie was with
him, that he hadn't taken her back to that black-haired man again. It was
hard to tell from a single photograph, but that one had the look of a user
to me—the look of a self-styled guru, who could twist an impressionable
boy like Bobby around his finger. I didn't want to think about what he
could do to the girl, because if she were ripe for Bobby Caldwell's maudlin
songs, then she was ripe for picking.
 

I MADE MY WAY BY WINDOW LIGHT BACK UP THE DRIVEWAY to
the front of the apartment. It was well past seven by my watch and still
no signi of Bobby. He might have been keeping an eye on the Segal home,
I thought, and spotted me and decided to lay low for awhile. Or Sylvia
Rostow might have called him after I'd left her house. Or it might have
been that he'd gotten delayed, like his father had said, and that he had
no idea where Robbie Segal had gone. The fact that he had a crush on the
girl and wrote love songs to her didn't mean that she felt the same way
about him—a bitter lesson I could remember learning when I was about
Bobby's age. Still, he was my best lead and I wanted the chance to talk
to him.

I ducked my head against the icy wind and decided to pay
one more visit to Ca1dwell's apartment before calling it a night—to put
the fear of the law into Pastor C. in case Bobby did come home later that
evening. So I trudged back down that dim, shadowy corridor to the rear
apartment and knocked. I could hear the rustle of the newspaper and the
cackle of the TV behind the door."Yes?" he called out.

 
"Open up," I said.

He opened the door. "What do you want now?" he said, staring
at me coldly. He'd apparently done a bit of thinking while I'd been gone—enough
to get a little of his lost nerve back.

"The same thing I wanted before—to talk to your son."

"You know damn well he ain't here." He threw the door
open and said, "Or do you want to search my place?"

He was on the verge of making a scene—shouting and whining
and bringing in the neighbors.

I jabbed him in the chest with a forefinger and said,
"You tell your son when you see him that if he doesn't get in touch with
me in the next twenty-four hours, I'm going to get a warrant for his arrest."

"On what charge?" he said slyly.

"Are you kidding? Robbie Segal's been gone for four days.
She's a genuine missing person. I can have.your son up on statutory rape
and felonious abduction by tomorrow night. You think you can make bail
on two felony counts, Mr. Caldwell?"