Day of Wrath (8 page)

I took the first photograph of Robbie Segal out of my
jacket and handed it to him.

Bannock pinched his lower lip between his fingers and
studied the picture. "Very pretty," he said. "You want to see some of mine?"

"Her name is Robbie Segal," I said. "She's a runaway."

"Yeah, well, my heart bleeds, you know? But I got other
things on my mind." He passed the picture to me. When I told him Robbie
was Bobby Caldwell's girlfriend, he pulled his hand back and took another
look.

"His girlfriend, huh?" he said. "When did you say she'd
left home?"

"On Sunday afternoon. As far as I can make out, Caldwell
was the last person she saw that day."

"Why show this to me?" he said after a time. "Why not
go down to Missing Persons?"

"I got the impression that the Caldwell kid and Robbie
were very close."

"How close?"

"
They might have been lovers," I said. "She might have
run away to be with him."

"
There was no sign a girl had been living in the apartment,"
Bannock said.

"
She wasn't at the apartment. He must have taken her somewhere
else." I took the second photo out of my coat. "To these people, maybe."

Bannock studied the second photo. "Why them?" he said,
flicking it with his thumb.

"I don't know why," I said. "It's my guess they were friends
of Bobby's."

"This guy must be thirty-five, forty years old," Bannock
said.

"You know as well as I do that most runaways end up with
adults. Especially if the adults give them shelter and unqualified approval."

"And a few other things," Bannock said sourly. "I suppose
you know we found some pictures of this pair in that garage."

I tried to look surprised and pleased.

"
Jesus!" Bannock said with disgust. "Take it easy. I'm
not giving out awards today."

I laughed. "Who are they?"

"We don't know. Got no record of either one of them."

"Nothing connecting them with the prints you found in
the garage?"

"
Nothing, period," Bannock said. "We haven't raised a
ghost with those prints. And nobody on the street saw a getaway car or
anything else. I'm beginning to think that whoever took the Buick back
to the garage must have escaped on foot—maybe through the back yards."

"Do you have any idea why the car was driven to the garage
in the first place?"

"No," he said. "Although it was as good a place as any
to leave the body, assuming that they could get away with it. Which they
apparently have. If you hadn't gone poking around there, Caldwell could
still be sitting in the car, with nothing to connect him up with anyone.
Except those damn prints. My Lord, they're all over the place, like they
didn't give a shit what they touched."

"Amateurs,"I said.

He nodded wearily. "Rank amateurs. No criminal records.
No Army records. No FBI. No nothing. They killed the poor son-of-a-bitch
and couldn't think of anything better to do than take him home. Like it
was goddamn prom night." Bannock took another look at the picture of Robbie
Segal. "You think she was with him?"

"I think he helped her run away from home," I said carefully.
"After that, I don't know what happened, although it would be hard to believe
that the Caldwell kid hadn't been in touch with her since Sunday or that
if he thought he was in trouble he wouldn't have told her about it."

"Are you saying she could be a target, too?"

"
I don't know," I said. "It's possible."

"All right," Bannock said. "You talked me into it. I'll
put out an APB on the Segal girl, We'll list her as a material witness
to a felony. But, boy-o, if this girl comes in from the cold and I don't
hear about it—and I mean the minute after you do—I'm going to take
it mighty hard. Understand?"

"I understand." I started to get up from the chair and
Bannock grabbed me by the wrist. For a man of his size and years, he had
an extremely strong grip.

"Stoner," he said softly. "I meant what I said. If you
fuck me over on this, there's going to be trouble. I'm not like your pal,
Al Foster, boy-o. I don't turn my back if you step out of line and trust
that everything'll come out all right in the end. I expect payment for
services rendered."

I looked down into that Irish boozer's red, fleshy face
and knew that I'd underestimated him, that behind the free drinks and the
stagey patter was a dangerous man. Most cops have to learn their brand
of toughness the hard way, secreting it over the years like a kind of callus.
This one had been born with that callus. I jerked my arm loose from his
grip and said, "I told
you I understood? "

He smiled with his mouth, but the rest of his face still
looked dangerous.
 

THE DALTON STREET COMMUNITY CENTER WAS LOCATED in the
basement of an Episcopal Church on a tired block of brownstone tenements
and storefront groceries. The neighborhood it served was one of the poorest
in the city—a hodgepodge of nineteenth-century row houses and frame bungalows
jammed together wall-to-wall on crabbed, salt-whitened streets. I could
see into windows up and down the block, through the muslin curtains into
rooms where women in print housecoats bent over ironing boards and men
in T-shirts drank canned beer and gazed out impassively at the sidewalks.
Children blew noisily in and out of doors—ten and eleven year olds, with
cigarettes in their mouths and faces that were at once too shrewd and too
exhausted to belong to anyone their age.

The street looked pitifully naked in the noon sun. Not
even the buildings cast shadows, as if the walls weren't really there or
only there the way surveyor's lines are set in turf—to mark the boundaries
between inside and out. The ugly transparency of the street embarrassed
me, made me feel slightly ashamed of my own home and my own way of life.
I ducked my head to the pavement, as if by not looking at Dalton Street
I'd make it disappear, and walked briskly to the church. I didn't look
up again until I'd gotten inside. There was a floor sign by the door, with
an arrow pointing down a flight of stairs. I followed the arrow to a pair
of gym doors. A young black girl wearing a curly Afro wig was sitting at
a desk by the doors. From the blank look on her face, she might have been
sitting at the console of a space shuttle.

"Yes?" she said as I walked up to her. "Is it something
you want?"

She was probably a pretty girl when she wasn't sitting
behind that desk. But something about the job was getting to her. It filled
her face with caution and made her voice sound snippy and annoyed.

"My name's Harry Stoner," I said. "I called this morning."

"I remember," she said quickly. "I told Miss Shelley what
you said and she say to tell you to go on back."

"Through there?" I said, pointing to the doors.

"What you think?" she said irritably.

I walked through the double doors into a big, tiled rec
room. There was a platform on the back wall, with a podium and microphone
on it. About a hundred folding chairs were set up in rows in front of the
platform. The floors were clean and the chairs were neatly arranged. Apparently
the festivities weren't scheduled to begin until later in the day. Frances
was sitting behind a long, low table to the right of the platform. A plump,
gray-haired, black woman, with a spray of violets pinned to the collar
of her dress, sat beside her.

"Harry!" Frances called out. "It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you, Frances," I called back.

She tumed to the black woman and said, "Excuse me for
a minute, won't you, Mrs. Forest?" The woman nodded pleasantly. Frances
stood up and walked across the room to where I was standing. She carried
herself like an athlete—a bouncy, masculine kind of swagger that was
part tomboy, part challenge. Frances Shelley was a woman who meant business.
She looked like business, too. Brown hair cut in a wedge; blue eyes a swim
behind thick glasses; lean unmade-up face; and the petite, wiry build of
a long distance runner.

"Whati can I do for you?" she said in her exuberant voice.

"What do you think?"

"I think you're working on another runaway case," she
I said drily.

I took the photograph of Robbie and her two friends out
of my jacket and handed it to her.

"She's a very pretty girl," Frances Shelley said. "How
old is she? Thirteen? Fourteen?"

"Old enough to get herself into serious trouble," I said.

I explained the case to her, beginning with Mildred and
ending with Bobby Caldwell's murder. She shivered a little when I told
her what I'd found in the Buick.

"
Shouldn't you take this to the police?" she said.

"I've already been to the cops. They're putting out an
APB on the Segal girl. But the fact is that I don't really know how deeply
involved she was with Bobby Caldwell. Her disappearance could be totally
unrelated to his murder."

"I see," she said abstractedly. She was still staring
at the photograph of Robbie. "Well, I'll run a check for you, Harry. But
we have our own procedures. And if the girl isn't ready to go home . .

"I understand, Frances," I said. "All I want to do at
the moment is make sure she's safe."

A crowd of people began filing through the doors behind
us—elderly men and women dressed in their Sunday best. Some of them smiled
at Frances and me; and one bright-eyed old woman in a straw hat and belted
orange suit wagged her finger at us. Frances grinned.

"I don't know where they get their enthusiasm from," she
said. "Have you taken a close look at that street out there?"

"Close enough," I said.

"Most of them are living on social security in one-room
apartments. They have to contend with inflation, disease, neglect, Reaganomics,
and that street. And they still show up once a week to play bingo and listen
to a lecturer tell them about all the opportunities they're missing." Frances
stared at me solemnly. "I don't think I want to get that old, Harry. I
don't think I'm that brave."

I patted her cheek and said, "Yes, you are."

She smiled. "It's just the job, you know," she said and
gave my hand an affectionate squeeze. "I'll call you tonight after I've
run the check on your Miss Segal." She handed the photograph back to me,
started to walk away, then turned around. "I guess I better tell you something
else," she said. "The woman in that photograph—the one with the gray
hair?"

"Yes."

Frances bit her lip. "I think I know her from some place."

"Well, come on, Frances," I said. "Where the hell is that?"

"A club I used to go to," she said. "I think I've seen
her there. A club in Mt. Adams."

"What club?"

"Just a club," she said. "A club I used to go to a couple
of years ago."

"Why the mystery?" I said to her. "Finding that woman
could be important. Tell me the name of the club and I'll check it out."

"Harry," she said flatly. "It's not that easy. This is
a private club. A club for women."

"I see," I said.

"Well, don't look so shocked," she said, although I wasn't
looking particularly shocked. "I have a right to my own life."

"
Who said differently?"

"I can't really talk about it now," she said, glancing
over her shoulder at her Hook. "Tonight . . . when I call you about this
other thing, I'll explain it to you."

"
You don't need to explain," I said.

But she'd already turned away
and walked back to the table.

About thirty minutes later I was driving down Eastlawn
Drive—past the school yard, filled at that hour with children, past the
huge stone church, looking gray and grave in the afternoon sun. The shadow
of the stone crucifix above the rectory stretched across the pavement,
touching the edge of Mildred Segal's front lawn. No one stared aimlessly
out of the windows on this street. Children at play looked their ages or
a bit younger—cowed, perhaps, by the priests in their black soutanes,
who stood like dark pillars among them. Nothing was open or transparent
here—not the houses with their long brick Faces or the people who lived
inside them. It was all shade and privacy—each yard with its own maple
tree, like a maze to prying eyes. And, yet a boy from this street had been
brutally murdered. A girl from these modest houses had bolted to a different
life. And in spite of the facade there wasn't any real shade to be found,
except for the heavy, mordant shadow creeping across Mildred's lawn.

I simply couldn't get him out of my mind—Bobby Caldwell.
The way his legs had been bent back against themselves. The look on his
face when the cops had unwrapped the tape. It had shaken me through. Made
me weary of all the mean streets and all the hapless people who lived on
them. Like Frances Shelley, whose cheek I had patted, I was beginning to
think that I wasn't tough enough for the job. Or for what I might find
at the end of it. I'd been contracting myself out too long—fighting other
people's battles and braving other people's losses. I stared up at Mildred's
front door and thought, what if the girl was dead, too. What then? But
there was no one around to pat me on the cheek. No one but me.