Death of the Black-Haired Girl (18 page)

Before they had talked very much Stack asked his dreadful question.

“You knew my brother-in-law?” Stack asked. “Charlie K.?”

“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t know him. I heard about him years ago. I guess I knew he was your in-law.”

“What did you hear about him, Sal? I have to ask this.”

“Years ago, you know. Long time. Just who he was. Who he knew. Like his exploits.”

“Listen. What I’m asking. Is there, was there—as far as you’re aware—any possibility of malice against this family? Maybe Maud paid for a mistake.”

“The mistake she made was fucking Brookman. The fucking guy Brookman, I mean. What do you mean, Charlie Kay?”

“His exploits in the thing happened downtown.”

“You mean that—”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Eddie.”

“Help that might have gone to Maud in college. Minuscule amount. Fucking minuscule. Through him as her uncle.”

Salmone was silent. Studied him.

“Never,” he told Stack. “Not a shadow. Not a whisper. Ever. Not that I would. I wouldn’t have heard such a thing. Put it out of your mind, for Christ’s sake.”

Stack was burning in front of him.

“They’ll get the driver, Eddie. They’ll give it their attention. I will.”

“I’m sorry. I’m fucked up.”

“Look, tell me. What do you know about the relationship with Brookman? Was it violent?”

“I didn’t ask her. I couldn’t ask her. I wouldn’t have asked that, Sal. Why?”

“Oh, there was a kid—a couple of kids, actually—thought they seen him push her.”

Stack stared at him.

“I couldn’t put that together,” Salmone said. “Other people said they didn’t see that. There’s no case for that.”

“No?”

“Won’t stand up. But the guy did time.”

“What the fuck?” Stack said.

“Yeah. It was . . . like it was technical. But the guy did federal time.”

“What the fuck? The guy did federal time? This professor? He’s what? He’s some ‘I was there’ writer?”

“He’s a big skinhead white guy. He was a fisherman.”

Stack endured a moment’s struggle for breath.

“Sal,” he said when he had regained control of his voice. “You gotta run this down. This could be a very bad guy, brother. Placed where he is. He could hurt a lot of kids. It sounds like these students saw something. I mean . . . you gotta run this down.”

“Eddie,” Salmone said, “rest assured, man. If this fucking guy put a hand on her, he’s going up. This is family to me. He’s our number one person of interest as of this time. If there’s more to find out, we’re gonna find it out.”

Salmone was thinking that he could hardly promise his friend Brookman’s head on a plate. Surely Eddie Stack must have a sense of how difficult, how nearly impossible, a conviction would be in the case as it seemed to stand.

“This guy,” Stack said, “this Brookman . . .” He broke off to use his inhaler.

“What if he walks away from this, Sal? He’s laughing. He’s . . . laughing.”

W
HEN OFFICER BLANKENSHIP
brought Salmone the bulletin from Boone announcing the apprehension of John Clammer, he immediately telephoned Shelby Magoffin’s dorm room. When she answered, he asked her to stay where she was. He also called Polhemus, to do what he could to control the press hordes that he suspected might be making their way to the campus.

When Salmone got to Shelby’s room, he was cross.

“Why didn’t you tell us your husband was obsessed with Maud’s piece in the
Gazette
?”

“’Cause he wasn’t. He mentioned it but he wasn’t bent out of shape or anything. The preacher down there must have been working on him. There’s this dude named Dr. Fumes likes his name in the paper. He’s been trying to work up a tabloid story about me and John.”

“You didn’t mention the protection order you had on him.”

“Look, the protection wasn’t even valid in this state. I put it in at the office here because I thought I might need it. I never thought he was a threat to Maud.”

“Well, he’s down in Kentucky confessing to Maud’s murder.”

Shell fell vertically on her sofa, landing on the seat of her pants.

“What?”

“The police down there are giving a press conference in half an hour.”

“I don’t believe it!” Shell said. “Hey, Lieutenant, John Clammer was either in jail or the hospital over that weekend. He never came around here. My mother checks up on him.”

About half an hour later the cable news station announced the cancellation of John Clammer’s press conference. He had been accounted for in custody on the night in question.

T
HE LAST CLASS OF
the first semester took place after Maud’s death, before the Christmas holiday and the beginning of winter break. The meeting scheduled for that week was always a class out of time, a time for wrapping up. Sometimes it was merry, celebratory; sometimes, when people were overly busy and in a hurry, it was glum. After Maud, it was ten minutes of death in life, and if any words were spoken by anyone—by himself or any of the students—Brookman couldn’t remember. One kid, a boy, came up to him after the class with a dim procedural question. Brookman put him off, promised an e-mail he’d never send.

At the department office, the secretary, who disliked him for reasons he never understood, gave him a questionable finger-wave from a backroom. He managed not to tell her to go fuck herself.

On the street outside he noticed a tall man with a sallow fighter’s face and a gray crewcut looking at him with hard-eyed fascination. The man wore a tie, a dark red scarf and a blue overcoat. There was a shorter man with him who was also watching Brookman pass. They were not each other’s friends. They had no interest in their attractive surroundings or in the colorful characters who passed through the gate. Then it occurred to him that they were out-of-town policemen. He had seen at least one of them before but did not think it had been around the college. He passed people he knew, or who knew him, without recognition.

“You spent a lot of time at the office today,” Ellie told him when he got home after six. She looked good, but not quite as radiant as she had been during the first pregnancy—a bit pale and more tired. Otherwise, she was not showing her condition.

There was one odd thing, which was they were having more sex. Brookman found this strangely, maybe perversely, satisfying. Ellie went about indicating her inclination silently, several times a week. When she came, which was more frequently than usual, she let him know it, moaning, breathless. Sometimes her face was wet as though with grief. She had always gone to sleep quickly but slept lightly. Listening for grizzlies, he had teased her in the days before Maud—alert to the wolf stalking the fold. Sometimes now, afterward, he told her that he loved her. She said nothing back, though she would often touch him. Her touches encouraged him but made him feel sad.

As he registered every remonstration of Ellie’s, he watched Sophia with unsubtle caution for signs of resentment or withdrawal. Sophia watched him too, unconfiding, uncomfortable. She in turn was aware of his anxious observation. It was a delicate business to be conducted in such fearsome times, the guiding and nurturing of this wise, perceptive child at the cusp of adolescence. Sophia was both more and less sophisticated in certain ways than her contemporaries. Their bantering, fond relationship was a treasure of his life and he dreaded the loss of it.

During his hours in the office, he sometimes closed the curtains as he had when Maud visited. He ignored his e-mail and phone calls. Never answered his door. At times he drank, making sure that when he did, he had something to read. These were his two principal ways of controlling his guilt and grief. He had read Susanna Moodie’s memoir
Roughing It in the Bush
in the federal detention center in Homer. It was a popular book among some of his homesteading friends in the old Alaska and he had a copy in his office. He did not get far rereading it. So he turned to work like Anthony Powell’s. He read
The Quiet American
and Hemingway’s
Men Without Women
along with a history of the siege of Berlin. Often he drank, keeping strong mints handy.

“People are looking at me strangely,” he told his wife later that evening.

“Well, you’re a strange guy, eh? Aren’t you?”

Brookman went to check that Sophia was not in earshot. An afterthought. Then he went to pour himself a drink.

“Don’t you think people look at me strangely?” she asked him.

“They suspect I pushed her.”

Ellie failed to answer him at first.

“They once suspected you hit me,” she said. “You took a swing at me.”

“I’ve never hit you. And I never took a swing at you.”

“Oh, ya. Years ago. The second time I ducked. You fight like my brothers. On one foot.” After a moment she said, “Maybe they suspect me. Maybe they think we both hit her.” Brookman laughed and shuddered.

“I didn’t hit Maud, for Christ’s sake. You were right behind me.”

“Yes, I followed you out,” Ellie said. He sat down on a kitchen chair, watching her in profile as she did the washing up. Her face was very handsome, not without faults. Her long, fine nose turned up slightly at the tip. While courting her, quite in love, he had discovered that she was a woman who believed, however humbly, that her course in life was directed by God and that her choices must be made to honor Him. Naturally, she did not always tell the whole truth but she was not a good liar. “I followed you out,” she said truthfully. “Yes. The two of you.”

“I didn’t hit her,” Brookman said.

“I might have,” Ellie told him. “If she had turned toward my house.”

A picture came to his mind, as vivid as though he had seen it, of snow falling past Maud’s open blue eyes, flakes piling on their dead, still pupils. On her hair. At her throat. It did not incline him against Ellie. He had no clear idea how it made him feel.

“I’m going out.”

“Taking the car? Bring in oatmeal.” Ellie watched from the kitchen. Now she would not have the Christmas holiday she had been looking forward to—since being allowed a post-Mennonite Christmas—and her life was slowly changing from the inside out.

On the road Brookman drove with a defensive reticence that annoyed his fellow motorists. At the back of his mind was that some kind of unofficial police presence was on his trail. He had left the house without a destination.

S
ALMONE HAD COME TO THE
house while Brookman was idly driving from one end of town to the other. Ellie had asked the detective to leave. Then she had telephoned him at the police station, gone in and made a brief statement describing what she had seen on the night of Maud’s death.

“What did he say when you asked him to leave?”

“Well,” Ellie said, “he didn’t like it. He said he might have to ask me more formally for a statement later.”

“Wonder what he meant by that.”

While Brookman was sorting his thoughts, Salmone called and declared that he would like to come over.

“Shall I come in instead?” Brookman asked.

“Why don’t you do that,” Salmone said.

Brookman went out in the cold rain and walked to the police station. As soon as he saw Salmone’s face he reflected on the interview Ellie must have provided. He was certain she had no idea how to favorably impress a sensitive, older, working-class detective.

He was right. Salmone was not happy with what Brookman’s wife had told him. Obviously, the lieutenant thought, she had believed what she’d said. But her loyalty and composure, rendered with imperious reserve, did not make him like either Brookman any better.

“Have a seat, sir,” Salmone said.

He let Brookman go through the details he recalled of the night in question without interrupting. He watched Brookman closely, letting him know he was being watched.

“Is it a fact, Professor, that you did time in a federal correctional institution?”

“I was a crewman on a crab boat. I was just out of the Marine Corps. Our boat was MV
Water Brothers,
out of Homer. We were over the limit on size and maturity. There were shoulder-seasonal changes I guess we weren’t aware of.”

“How come jail time?”

“We had a little petty grab-ass with the Coasties and I was up front. So I did three months in a converted prefab Air Force barracks outside Richardson. It was all fishery workers in there. They’d applied federal laws for years and then the state changed a lot of them.”

“Too bad. You’re a young kid practically. You were a veteran just out.”

“Yeah. Sentences were way excessive. Everyone says that.”

“Tough. But you did OK in later life. Here you are . . .”

“Yeah.” Brookman had the sense that Salmone was speaking to him more as an apprehended perpetrator than a college professor.

“Very sad about this young lady. Do you have some more to tell us?”

“How would I?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Brookman. Maud Stack comes to your house. It’s a blizzard outside. She’s troubled and intoxicated. But you don’t let her in. Why?”

Brookman looked at him a while before he answered.

“She was there to intimidate me. And my family.”

“Really?”

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t think you could help her?”

“Only by suggesting she leave.”

“You figured you could help her by suggesting she leave?”

“Yes.”

“Did you shove her out?”

“Shove her? Of course not.”

“Guide her back in the street?”

“I didn’t touch her.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Brookman. We have cell phone videos. You’re touching her. You’re actively touching her.”

“When we were in the street and the traffic was coming I tried to pull her back on the sidewalk. That’s what you have a record of.”

“Myself, I’m surprised you forced her out on the street in the weather.”

“I didn’t force her out on the street. I told her to go home. If she’d done what I told her, she’d have been all right.”

“But you lost your temper?”

“I didn’t lose my temper, Lieutenant Salmone. I did not lose my temper. I asked Miss Stack to go back to her dorm because I have a child in the house who I thought might be frightened.”