Death of the Black-Haired Girl (17 page)

He told her about the scene on the street.

“They were shoving each other.”

“Wait a minute, Lieutenant. Don’t we suspect murder by an anti-abortion fanatic?”

“That’s our leading possibility.”

“What’s it got to do with Professor Brookman?”

“We have to factor in everything.”

Jo was silent for a moment.

“So she had a bad romance with Brookman. Understand this: Maud did not go in for romances. She was like the unobtainable girl and she broke their hearts. Some of them—in this place I think it was their first rejection. The boys, the alpha boys too, really went for her. And to speak for Brookman—as a married seducer—there were plenty worse. Or better at it. Or more compulsive. Maud was smart as could be. Beautiful, smart as could be . . .”

She stopped and looked at him. It was all he could do not to slide her the box of tissues. When she came around, he took one and wiped his glasses with it.

“Why are you asking me about Brookman?”

“I have to ask you, ma’am. So she thought maybe he would leave Mrs. Brookman?”

“I don’t know about that. I know she thought it was love. Love love. She thought he adored her. He didn’t talk about his family to her. She didn’t know how married he was. How sort of devoted he was. She was quite young, she was self-absorbed. He’s smart and attractive and traveled, and she thought he was hers.”

“Permanently?”

“Oh,” Jo said, “permanently? This was a kid. Forever and a day. Fairy tale. Vain. Aging, adoring parents. An A student here. Of course the mother passed away.”

“Tell me about Brookman.”

“They used to say about Brookman he was a polished thug. A very decent, likable guy in most ways. A boozy opportunist, not enough thought for the morrow, a very intelligent wife who loved him a whole lot and was from a stand-up-for-your-man tradition.”

“Do you think he would hurt Maud?”

“No! Do you?”

“I don’t know,” Salmone said flatly.

“Frankly, I’d like to know why I’m being asked so much about him.”

“Because of the way it happened. Why do you say Mr. Brookman is a thug?”

“That’s entirely the wrong word,” Jo said. “People used to say that as a joke.”

“Yes?”

Suddenly she thought of El Doliente and her dream of him.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I should mention this priest I used to know in South America. He showed up here during the hassles that followed Maud’s
Gazette
article. He came to see me. He’s something of an anti-abortion crusader.”

“He came here? To the counseling office?”

“He was called Father Walter. Down there we used noms de guerre. I mean we used just first names. Because it was dangerous.”

Salmone wrote down what she gave him.

“Did he ask about Maud?”

“Yes. Everybody was all about poor Maud.”

“Did he threaten her? Did he seem rational?”

“Frankly, I found him frightening.”

“How so?”

“He was intense. I was frightened of him when I knew him years ago. He was a revolutionary. I guess I was too.”

“South America this was?”

“Yeah. I think he might have been traveling with some Peruvian or Bolivian kids raising money.”

“Father Walter,” Salmone said. “We’ll check him out. Did you say he threatened Maud?”

“No. But he asked about her. The night she died I had a dream about him. A very frightening dream.”

“He scared you?”

“In the dream he did.”

“We’ll check him out if we can.”

“I guess I was always scared of him,” Jo said.

“Yeah, well,” said Salmone, “some priests are like that. I think there were a lot of priests and ministers up here after that piece came out.”

When Salmone was gone, Jo leaned on her desk looking down at its worn surface. Since when, she had to ask herself, do you use the cops as your friends and confidants? Not that she had anything against Salmone, whom she had encountered at least once before. The fixation on Brookman was puzzling and disturbing. She had spoken thoughtlessly and the detective’s reaction was downright predatory. Were they going to scapegoat Brookman to cool the issue? No, she thought, surely that notion was just the ghost of her old activist conditioning. She hoped! But what had Brookman done? What had really happened? She had prattled on so thoughtlessly. It was taking place, and in a vacuum too, because the incident was so strange and shocking that partisan reaction was astonished and unformed. The week’s
Gazette
had “
ASK QUESTIONS!”
on its front page as an editorial. Jo felt on her own with Maud’s death.

She had already written and mailed a note of sympathy to Edward Stack. But since she had spoken with Stack the night of Maud’s death, she decided to call him about arrangements.

He answered gruffly, as she expected. She reintroduced herself.

“I wondered how you were, Mr. Stack. If there was any way we could help?”

“They told me she’s coming home,” he said. “I want to put her with her mother.”

“Yes. Well, look, would you please let us know about services? Anything that’s not strictly family where we could say goodbye to her. People here loved and admired her.”

“I heard.”

Jo let that one pass.

“Some of us would like to . . . maybe say one for her. If there’s a way. We’d like to remember her. Honor her.”

“Yeah. I don’t think she would want any church stuff. Just to be in the church where her mother is now. That would be it.”

She waited for him to say more but he seemed to be finished.

“They told me she was coming home,” he said again.

“I’ll make sure of that, Mr. Stack.”

“Hey, maybe I should make a contribution to you people. Maybe I should endow a girl’s hockey stick. A lacrosse net.”

“Mr. Stack,” she said, “please stay in touch. Let us be here for you in any way we can. Do call me and let me know how you are.”

She decided to call Lieutenant Salmone and ask about Maud’s going home.

S
ALMONE HAD NOT HAD
a call back from Eddie Stack, so he made another call of his own. He had thought a lot about it.

“I been thinking more and more we should sit down, Eddie. They must have told you this is a homicide one way or another. It may be involuntary, but it could be deliberate. Things I need to know.”

“You don’t have the driver?”

“We don’t. You know how it is up here, the Staties doing that. They’re checking out stops that night but, you know, it’s incomplete.”

“Yeah.”

“She was drinking, Eddie. Kid drinking, you know? I’m really sorry—Maud and this Brookman, they were both drinking.”

“I know about fucking Brookman. Brookman cut her loose. She was out of her mind.”

“We’re running down Brookman.”

“The fuck is married. He’s gotta be married, right?”

“Yeah, he’s married. His wife is out there when it happens. She’s fucking pregnant. They’re in front of his house. You heard that?”

“No. Not about the house. Sal? I gotta see you, man. I’ll come up.”

“If you could.”

“You’re working, Sal, I know that. I can do it.”

“If you could, Eddie. It would be the best, I think, and soon, know what I mean? And us, we’ll sit down quietly.”

“Something I have to do first. I have to put Maud with her mother.”

“That’s good, Eddie. I’m so sorry. Call me and we’ll talk.”

A
S JOHN CLAMMER DROVE THROUGH
the deep woods, the sound of his sickly engine raised inquiring lights and groans in houses off the road. This was the accursed national forest famous for its tangled kudzu, its meth reek and the outlaw lives played out on the pulses of the strong, the failing and the weak among its inhabitants. No one had been meant to actually live there.

Of that place an arguably wise man once said: “This here is the Sherwood Forest. This here is the fucking Hole in the Wall where none but the strongest minds and wills fucking prevail in.”

John drove to the Church of the Savior, where the U.S. government’s road met the county highway, a neat assembly of metallic prefabs. There was a less neat double-wide positioned beside it where Dr. Russell Fumes, the church’s pastor, lived with his young wife. The cleric’s wife was not at home for John Clammer’s visit, but Fumes himself was awake in bed, made uneasy by the sound of Clammer parking his vehicle.

“John!” the pastor exclaimed when his security lights caught Clammer about to knock on his door. “Lemme unlock it. I thought you was in the hospital, John. I thought your mother said you was under the weather.”

As they sat by a lamp in the living room section, John explained himself. The lampshade had a deer-hunting scene printed on it: a hunter in an orange hat, his scope-enabled rifle, bright green trees, some sky. As far from the hunter as possible stood a twelve-point buck, an eastern deer, flag-tail up, poised to flee. The scene was made to fit two and a half times on the amount of plastic shade around the lamp.

“No, sir,” John Clammer said. He told of how he had gone to the very so-called college his posturing wife had left him to attend. There he made an example of how the Lord would not be mocked with impunity. He had found the bitch who lived with his wife for evil writings.

“This!” he said. “Read it!” He trembled. He raised his fine eyes from the hunting scene on the lampshade and stared into the darkness under the artificial eaves. “For it is a screed! Yes, my good Reverend Fumes! A screed! But the little bitch is dead.”

“You killed somebody, John? You didn’t kill somebody.”

John Clammer laughed and handed him a copy of a tabloid-size newspaper. The
Gazette.

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes, my good doctor.”

“Take it easy, John boy,” Reverend Dr. Fumes said.

“She saw the glint of my rifle before I brought her down. And she fled me through the streets of that city screaming. She fled me. Down the nights and down the days!” John yelled, and it might have been a rebel yell or even a scream, as if in imitation of the young woman victim. “Down the labyrinthine ways!”

“Fuck sake,” the preacher said, “take it easy.” He put the newspaper aside. “What are you gonna do?”

“I’ll turn myself in. I’ll accept the penalties.”

“Jesus, John, did you really do this?” Reverend Fumes looked away from the lamp and began to turn slow circles where he stood. “O Lord, my heart is troubled. My heart is blazing.”

The reverend, a small man, was overwhelmed by John Clammer’s presence and his declarations.

“I’ll help you, John,” he said. But how? He hoped that God might be seen as glorified in the events he was hearing about. He tried hard to find the workings of the divine will. He wondered if there was some way in which he himself could be seen as an instrument of glory.

Reverend Fumes sat back down beside the deer-hunting lamp and listened breathlessly while John Clammer told and retold the story of Maud’s murder.

He presented the image of Maud clinging to his knees. After the echo of the last shot died, she had fallen at his feet in a posture of repentance. He had pitied her.

“I have forgiven the woman,” John Clammer said. “That’s what’s most important.”

John told Reverend Fumes he was in agony but would resolve it by accepting responsibility for his crime.

“Where’s your rifle, John?” Dr. Fumes asked.

He said he had disposed of it in the forest. He said he invoked John Brown. He made Reverend Fumes swear to keep the secret of his blood guilt until he had presented himself to the police. He made the reverend bless him. As John Clammer poured forth his story, the reverend reflected more and more deeply on the role in which the Almighty had placed him. It might be that God had elected him to be the medium through which the work of his dread instrument John Clammer was made manifest to a chastened world. That the reading of the sacred dice cast behind the temple veil and enacted by this boy be announced from the Church of the Savior by its humble pastor. That it must fall to John to confess his blessed vengeance from within its precincts.

When John Clammer rose to go back to his pickup, Reverend Fumes blocked his path.

“Rest, John Clammer. We’ll speak to the cops from the garden of Naboth while the dogs lick that bitch’s blood.”

He had hoped to please Clammer and persuade him that his wife or his wife’s friend would be Jezebel. And there in the land where John Brown was being respected anew in a way not necessarily associated with people of color, there might be a singing of John’s favorite hymn, “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow.” Then Fumes would be Elijah-like and the church would be Naboth’s vineyard and television’s millions would bear witness and Fumes and the church would be exalted and theirs would be the kingdom and the power and the glory and the television exposure and the publicity and maybe the reality show. Michaiahjeroboamramethgileadsabaoth.

“Call from here, John. Surrender here in God’s house. It’ll be like . . .” Fumes thought about what it would be like. “It would be like sanctuary! Yeah! It would be like sanctuary. And they’d come out and like a hostage situation, Johnny!”

But John Clammer flung him aside like an old blanket and marched out the door and drove away toward town.

So Reverend Fumes had no choice but to get on the phone and call the sheriff’s department.

“He confessed to me!” he shouted into the phone. “He’s armed to the death on the county road! He confessed that evil woman’s killing. He’s armed to the teeth and headed for town.”

S
TACK PUT OFF CALLING
Salmone and the idea of going to the college. Attacks of dizziness kept striking him down, and in his grief, in despair, he felt older than he had ever been.

Then one day Salmone called him and said, “Eddie, I owe you the trip down. We still don’t have the driver.”

In another time and season they would have gone to Belmont or Shea from Stack’s house. They had gone to those places on one or another of Salmone’s visits years before, when Maud and her mother were alive.

Stack embraced his ex-partner and said there was nothing to drink; he was doing one day at a time. So they drank coffee, which agreed with neither of them terribly well.