Deadline (17 page)

I got up slowly and moved quietly to the kitchen door. I heard it again. The scrape of a shoe. I waited. Listened. Waited. Then yanked the door open.

A man in a dark overcoat was standing in the hallway. His back was to me but then he turned. And smiled.

Martin.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Didn't want to bother you, at home, at night,” he said.

So he'd just stand in the hallway until I came out?

“You're not bothering me,” I said. “You want to come in?”

“You're not doing anything?” Martin said.

“Just watching the snow.”

“Just watching the snow, huh,” he said.

What, I thought. An echo in here?

Martin was wearing a fur hat, the kind Russians wear. I'd heard that he had one, that people in town called him Khrushchev when he wore it. It was a gift from somebody, I thought, but I couldn't remember the whole story. I didn't feel like asking.

“Coffee?”

“Okay. Sure,” Martin said.

I turned the burner on and put some water in a saucepan, then took two mugs from beside the sink and put instant coffee in them from the jar. We stood and waited for the water to boil. I stayed by the stove; Martin leaned against the counter about six feet away. The water on the burner began to hiss.

“So what's up?”

“The picture.”

I waited.

“I'd really like to have it. You've got to get it for me, if you would, I mean. Could you? Just tell them you need it for the paper. I thought you could tell them that. You need it for the paper for … I don't know what for. You could think of something.”

I got the mugs and put them on the stove.

“They'd give it to you,” Martin said. “They know you.”

I felt like a priest or a politician or a Mafia don, hearing a request from a supplicant. Martin watched me for any faint glimmer of agreement.

“Martin, what's the big deal?” I said, pushing at the saucepan. “I don't understand why this is such a big thing.”

He started to speak and stopped and looked away, toward the living room. I could smell his big old overcoat. It was starting to dry and it smelled like damp wool. The water started to simmer, and I poured it into the mugs and put one on the counter beside him. It was a Mets mug, but Martin didn't notice, or at least didn't comment.

We stood for a minute. Martin hadn't moved from his spot against the counter. I looked at him. He seemed smaller and older here, out of his natural setting and in mine. The newspaper—the office, the atmosphere—added to his stature somehow. Here he seemed small and tired, so much so that I almost decided against asking him about Arthur.

Almost.

“Can I ask you something, Martin? Another topic, but I wanted to ask you. Arthur. I was wondering if, when you were working with him, if you thought he was sort of funny about things. About women and things like that.”

He looked at me.

“Martin, I can talk between us, right? Well, the cops think Arthur took pictures of women. Between us now. He took these pictures of women without their clothes on. They think Arthur hid in the bushes at night and took pictures of ladies getting undressed, that kind of thing.”

Martin looked at the floor.

“I don't know,” he mumbled, turning his hat in his hand.

“You sure he never did anything like that? Anything even sort of like that?”

He looked down. I waited. He looked some more and I waited some more. Any reporter knows that sometimes you filled the gaps in a conversation and sometimes you just waited while the person squirmed, searching for an out.

I sipped the coffee. It was awful because the water hadn't been hot enough.

“Well, hell,” Martin said.

I waited. Martin tried the coffee and ran his hand over his mouth. I wondered if he even had the words in his vocabulary: voyeur, sexually repressed, stunted social development.

“I don't know, Jack,” he said, finally. “Arthur was never much for the ladies. I don't know. The only thing I can think of is this time when there was this thing with the cheerleader girls at the high school. But that wasn't like this that you're talking about.”

“What was it?”

“Pictures of basketball cheerleaders. You know, the little girls in their little skirts and what all.”

“He took pictures of them?”

“Well, yeah. Nothing wrong with that, but he kept 'em in a book.”

“A scrapbook of cheerleader pictures?”

“Well, yeah. Like a notebook with these prints pasted in it.”

“How'd you find out about it?”

”He had some on his negatives one time. Five shots of the game and fifteen of the girls. I asked him, and he said it was for them, that they wanted some pictures, and he did it just to be nice. Then a couple of the kids complained to their parents and the parents called me and I had to have a talk with him. Known each other forever. I don't know if that made it any easier. But he told me he kept pictures of the kids over the years in a book sort of thing. Didn't mean any harm. This one mother said she was going to the police if he kept it up, and I told him that, and that put the fear of God in him, I'd say. I didn't hear much about it after that. But this wasn't like you're talking about.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh, five years. Maybe more. These days, when I say something was five years ago, it's more like ten.”

I took a drink of coffee and swallowed.

“That's like your picture, isn't it, Martin,” I said. “Taken without your permission, I mean.”

I said it directly and let it hang. Martin looked away and opened his mouth, then closed it. I waited. I wasn't going to help him and he knew it. He could either turn around and walk out the door or tell me. I looked right into his face, counted the pores on his red nose. He stayed.

It took a half-hour and another cup of coffee, but I got an answer—at least as much as I could expect.

He had heard she had died ten years before or more, and he hadn't seen her in forty years. He said he never knew her very well. When the picture was taken, he was thirty-five, and she was about five years younger. They were both married.

Martin called it his “episode.” Pauline never knew about it, he said, but Arthur did. Arthur knew because the woman in the picture, with the dreamy Hollywood gaze and pretty legs, was his mother. Arthur's mother. Her name was Meredith, and her husband drank and didn't come home. She was pretty and it happened. Martin pronounced her name as if it hurt.

“So we used to sit,” he said, his voice raspy. “That's what we did. Young people today don't just sit anymore. They roll around in the back of some car, and that's why you see these babies being born all over the place. But back then, you could just see somebody without getting into bed right off the bat, and that's what we did. In the afternoon, by the eddy of the river up in Byron. I told Pauline I had to go out on an assignment. I always took my notebook. It wasn't that much. We'd just sit and talk, mostly. I'd talk and she'd listen and she'd talk and I'd listen and we'd sit there and she'd … she'd hold my hand. We'd kiss and sit close together. Just sit. That's it. It wasn't this terrible thing.”

His eyes had a deadened look, as if he'd had this conversation with himself a thousand times over the years.

“Never did it before and never since,” Martin said. “Not like today, everybody and his brother having affairs and dumping the wife for a new model.”

“What about the picture?”

He flinched.

“That goddamn picture. Goddamn thing. I didn't even know there was one until a couple months ago. Oh, God. I get this letter in the mail; Pauline is downtown. It's from Arthur. I saw him every day on the street for forty years and he sends me this letter saying—oh, I couldn't believe it, still can't—saying I'm his father. His real father.”

“Where did the picture come in?”

“He said he had a picture of us in the backyard on Center Street. We sat over there one time, fools. He says in the letter he took it from the roof. What was he? Twelve? Younger? I didn't know him much then. He was in school when this went on. After all these years …”

“So what did he want?”

“I don't know, Jack. That's what was so terrible. Like torture. He never said what he wanted. Money. Or whatever it was, who knows. I just didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything.”

“And you want the picture back so Pauline won't see it?”

“It wasn't anything. Jack, today they swap wives like fishing stories. Don't like the one you have, trade her in. This was nothing.”

“But Pauline wouldn't think that?”

He shook his head.

“Did you ask Arthur for it?” I said.

“I tried to, but he'd just walk away. Wouldn't talk about it, or at least he didn't try. I didn't either, I guess. I don't think he was all right in the head. I think he was having some sort of breakdown. Imagine coming up with something like that after all these years. Who knows what went on in his mind?”

“I'd like to, but I can't give the picture back,” I said.

Martin looked stunned.

“That's the way it is, Martin. It's a police case. Arthur's dead. His stuff is all evidence, and that picture was part of his stuff, his belongings. I'm sorry, but …”

“Well, Jack,” Martin said, his voice slow and hard like I'd never before heard it. “Do you know what this will do to an old lady? Do you? This whole goddamn town will know. You know what this place is like. It will be out, and that woman, after all these years, will be a laughingstock. Don't you know what this town is like? Don't you?”

I just looked at him, my mug still in my hand in front of me. I looked and he suddenly put his mug on the counter and turned and went out the door. From my place in the kitchen, I stood and listened to his footsteps on the stairs.

For a little guy who didn't say much, Arthur sure knew how to make trouble.

Maybe I should have told Martin that his secret was safe. It was locked in the drawer with the Wonder Waitress. The waitress was safe, too.

It was Saturday morning, and I was sitting at my desk looking at the two pictures, the works of a lifelong voyeur, the bookends of a long and secret career. Arthur Bertin, a retrospective.

The logical thing would have been to turn both of them over to the cops and go about my business. But it would not be that easy. Would I tell the cops about my conversation with Martin? Who would I tell? Vigue? Go over his head to some state cop who would go right to Vigue with the information? What would Vigue do? Go right to Martin and ask him? Say Jack McMorrow says you had reason to want
Arthur Bertin dead? How the hell did I get stuck in the middle of this mess?

And now Vigue wanted me to go to court, or at least that was the way it seemed. I went over the conversation again in my mind. I don't care, he said. I used to, but I don't … Go in the mill and start at what I make here after eighteen years … Scraping the snow off his car … I'll make some inquiries but don't push me … What do I do, go up to the waitress at the Pine Tree and say, Hey, some guy was taking your picture, and now he's dead, and she says—

The waitress. I looked at the picture, the shape of her thighs, the wide shoulders. The waitress.

I felt sick.

He had said
waitress
. He had said the waitress at the Pine Tree … He had said it, and I had never given him the picture. I had kept it and he had said
waitress
. I had shown him the others, the girl at the bank, but not this one. The waitress was right here in front of me, and
waitress
was what he had said.

What was going on; what was happening? I knew it. I didn't have notes, but I could remember his voice as he said it, the sound the scraper made on the windshield of the police cruiser, the sneer in his voice as he pictured walking in and saying this to the waitress.

She says, Yeah, what's the bad news?

The door slammed open.

“Hey, Jackson, baby. Dig those scoops. Unearth that news. Jackson, I see a Pulitzer in your future.”

“Hey, Vern baby,” I said. “You hung over or just glad to be alive?”

“Jackson, I love my job,” he said, hopping up on Paul's desk and sitting on top of a couple of camera-ready ads worth eighty or ninety bucks. “You know, you and me are lucky to have found stimulating
careers in journalism here in this news hot spot we call western Maine. Some people only dream of such a fate.”

“They're called nightmares.”

“Oh, Jack. Don't tell me you're feeling pangs about leaving the big city. The glitter and glamour. Dinner with the Saltzbergers.”

“That's Sulzbergers,” I said. “Them, too.”

I paused to break his stride.

“You're in rare form. What's up?” I said.

Vern swung his legs.

“Nothing much, but then again, it doesn't take much to make me embrace life on this planet. I thought I'd start my column, my basketball crystal ball. This afternoon, off to Lewiston for a round robin.”

Vern took a toothpick out of his shirt pocket.

“Mint,” he said.

“Nothing but the best,” I said.

“Nothing but.”

He sat on the desk and worked the toothpick around in his mouth.

“Martin as straight as he seems? Pillar of the community and all that?” I asked.

“Polly pure,” Vern said. “Church on Sunday, passes the plate.”

He didn't ask why I wanted to know. It was a curious thing about Vern. I could stop in the middle of a conversation about the Red Sox and ask him if he had ever been spelunking. He would say no, or yes, and we would start up with baseball where we'd left off.

“They never had kids?”

“Nope. Pauline scared the sperm cells away,” Vern said. “No, that's not nice. No, they don't have children. No, I don't know why.”