Death of the Black-Haired Girl (24 page)

J
O HAD LEFT HER CAR
a block and a half down the street from the counseling office. Parking regulations for the upcoming weekend required her to move it to her designated college space. Crossing one intersection, she had a view of the central campus and Cortland Hall. All but one of the windows were dark and she wondered if the lighted one was Steve Brookman’s. A minute later she saw Edward Stack heading her way on the far side of the street, advancing with the constricted gait of creeping suffocation. He guided and supported the weight of each right-footed step with the stick in his hand. Jo crossed the street to meet him.

“Hey,” she said. “You stayed awhile.”

“I stayed awhile,” Stack said. “That’s right.”

His voice had the same sly diffidence she had heard in it hours before, a certain caginess with a touch of menace. But now he was breathing with difficulty, seizing breaths between words. His jaw was trembling too. As he leaned on the cane facing her, his whole body seemed touched by tremors and she could not tell whether they reflected physical exhaustion or some emotional state. If Stack had walked all the way to Brookman’s house or to his office, he had covered a lot of ground for a man in his condition. Had there been a confrontation? Had something passed between them? The first necessity, she thought, was to get the old man off his feet.

“Bound for the station?” She looked at her watch. “You missed the peak trains.”

“Is that bad?”

“Well, you have a longer wait. Hey,” she said, “let me give you a ride.”

“I was going to the taxi line.”

“I’ll tell you what. You can wait in my office, then I’ll run you over there and you won’t have to sit around and catch pneumonia in that place.”

She saw that he was not in the mood to argue about a spot of rest. She led him back to her office, turned on the lights and showed him to the chair he had occupied earlier.

“So,” Jo asked, “did you find the scene of the accident?”

He only nodded. Jo had no idea what to say or ask next. At a loss, she thought, for follow-up questions like: How did you like it? Would you consider endowing a memorial crosswalk? Or for encouraging commentary like: We find people take comfort seeing the actual pavement. Isn’t it a great campus? And the building a block from where the car hit her was designed by Stanford White. She nodded back. She was not so tough anymore, she thought. It was a close-run thing whether she would break down and cry in front of him. He was going to die in grief, of grief. Was it too much to ask that he might have died rejoicing in his lovely daughter’s prospective bright future? Proud of her youthful achievement? Apparently.

“Your COPD,” she asked him. “Did you maybe respond on 9/11?”

She was trying to give him something to feel proud of but he looked at her more stricken than before.

“I saw Brookman,” he said after a minute. “You must of called Lou Salmone.”

It made her feel like a snitch. She had to remind herself not to be ashamed.

“Of course I did. I was afraid of the worst.”

“I guess you did what you had to do. You were right to be afraid.”

“I didn’t know you saw him.”

“Yeah. We talked.”

“So what was that like?”

He shrugged her question off.

“I saw his wife and the young kid. I saw them go in the house.”

“Nice people, Ed.”

“I’m sure,” he said.

“Listen,” Jo told him. “Lots of people around here are smart, you can figure. Some people are invaluable to the world for how they use their intelligence. I know Ellie Brookman a little. Not everybody is like her. She’s tops, Ed. All the way. She couldn’t get hurt more than she has been. Nor have her child hurt. Be hurt through the child.”

“He shouldn’t pull the shit he does. With other women. With other people’s kids.”

“Of course he shouldn’t. I think we have to suppose, perhaps, he fell in love. He never did anything to hurt her. Never meant to. He’s childish, I guess.”

“I’ve seen a lot of people go down being childish. And they went down in very bad ways over dumb shit. Being childish. Childish is no alibi with me.”

“He’s a risk taker,” Jo said. “He doesn’t mean harm. He had a pretty tough early life. He was an orphan. A guy can’t get enough mama love. I don’t know if you know what I mean.”

“There’s a lot of them like that.”

“Ed,” Jo said, “you got a right to do what you want, I guess. I mean, I don’t really believe that, but where I come from and the places I been, I kind of believe that.”

“Good,” Stack said. “I’m glad somebody does. Good.”

“But I have my hopes, you see. I have my hopes for pain—for pain cycles to stop somewhere. I’ve seen so much of it. A lot of people have seen a whole lot more but I feel like I’ve seen so much. I want to see this one stop somewhere.”

“I wish I could promise you, but I can’t. I can’t promise you and I won’t.”

“I don’t expect . . . I don’t know about promises. I have my hopes. My hope is that you can take care of this for me.”

He gave her no answer.

“OK,” she said. “It’s time for the train. Sit tight, I’ll get the car.”

Behind the wheel of her Taurus, she had the collapse. She could not make herself stop sobbing. Even screaming the convulsions down failed to stifle them.

“Shit, he’s gonna miss his train,” she finally told herself aloud.

She picked him up and they drove in silence to the station. It was quite a grand station. It might even, Jo thought, have been by Stanford White. Or Richardson, or McKim, one of those guys, if one of them had done railroad stations. Only this town, with its superbo college in it, would have a station like the Baths of Caracalla or the Baths of Nero or some such baths. She pulled up in front of the huge doors that were modeled on something in somebody’s baths too. The latest wonder was that the place, after moldering for decades under industrial-strength filth, rust and pigeon shit, was actually clean.

Stack struggled out with his cane.

“I’ll get out,” she said. She turned off the ignition, though the cop in front of the station had spotted her illegal park and was on his way toward her.

“Don’t,” Stack said. He leaned down to face her at the open passenger-side door.

“I told your friend Brookman I was gonna get him whacked. I let him know—bad ways. He was gonna die.”

Jo stared through the windshield, not seeing the outraged cop who was remonstrating with them, brandishing a ticket pad.

“You can tell him it won’t happen. Just . . . it won’t happen.”

“Because you’re changing your mind?”

“Yeah. I’m changing my mind.”

He started for the station doors, favoring the drugstore stick. The cop had stopped shouting at Jo. She seemed dreadfully upset, and he was afraid he had gone too far. Stack paused on his way into the station.

“It’s all right,” he told the officer. “It was life and death.”

J
O CARR HAD NO DIFFICULTY
recognizing the contradictory impulses that the edifice of Holy Redeemer, as a suburban cathedral, had left unresolved. It had been built at a time when the liberalizing forces of the sixties were already being checked by embittered reaction. Plenty of the people who had moved their families from Manhattan or Brooklyn to the life of single-family, green-shuttered houses and tree-lined streets had seen enough of folk Masses and clerical protesters and girls on the altar assisting in the liturgy. The modernist design of the architect was being actively interfered with, as far as possible, by the newly promoted bishop and the forces created to empower the laity.

The white concrete exterior, enclosed by enormous aerodynamically curving buttresses, contained a huge amount of dark empty space. The gloom that in the old plan was meant to be dispelled by daylight had to be illuminated by outsize hanging lamps. The altar had been envisioned as a plain sacrificial block with minimal decoration but someone succeeded in adding a kind of reredos of gray concrete with statues of saints and the Virgin. Columns in support of nothing much went along the nave.

An old idea that had survived was the placement of crypts along the side aisles, and Barbara Stack’s remains were contained in one of them. The urn was multicolored, an art nouveau vessel of a sort that Stack suspected only McCallum and Jenkins, of all the funeral directors in the neighborhood, would offer its customers. He had intended for Maud to choose Barbara’s ciborium but decided finally that it would be too hard on her. Today they were putting Maud to rest in a similar urn, not the slate-colored casket but one with stones that recollected her black hair and blue eyes.

Jo Carr and Mary Pick had come down from Amesbury. Shelby Magoffin traveled from Manhattan via the most affordable limo service her current producers could find. She had been promoting her latest film at a press conference in a midtown hotel. Stack stood apart from them, facing the crypt, on which his own name and the names of his wife and daughter had now been lettered.
Edward Jeremiah Stack, Barbara Frances Stack
and
Maud Mary Stack.
He leaned on his drugstore walking stick and held his tweed Dannemora cap in his hand. Far from the mourners, near the church doors, stood Arthur Porgest, the sullen-looking assistant sexton, together with a large man in a tan windbreaker. Mary Pick had brought her cousin, an English priest visiting friends at Columbia University, who undertook the placing of Maud’s remains behind the glass. The priest, named Wilfrid Pick, was a very tall man with disorderly red hair. His height allowed him to reach up to the crypt and manage Maud’s interment without having to fully extend his arms.

Stack had all but forbidden prayers, but Father Pick presumed to recite the verses from 1 Corinthians about the stars differing from one another in glory, and the earthly body raised as a quickening spirit.

“May her soul and the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace,” he concluded.

Mary Pick said “Amen” and crossed herself.

“A shame about this place,” Mary Pick said when they were outside. She and Jo and Eddie Stack shook hands and he put his cap on. He accepted a hug from Jo and from Mary Pick too. He shook hands with Father Pick.

“Can’t we give you a lift, Ed?” Jo asked him.

“No. Thanks. Thanks, everybody.”

Jo Carr and Mary Pick and Wilfrid Pick watched him go down the cathedral steps and stop a passing cab. Jo began to cry.

Coming out of the cathedral doors, Shelby saw that several photographers who had been at the press conference had found their way to Nassau County and were waiting on the steps. She could not help noticing that some represented an order of paparazzi a notch or two higher—at least in professional status—than the ones who had turned out for her in the past. In the pocket of her black raincoat she had brought a camera of her own, a tiny Polaroid with which to tease the photographers while they took her picture. Her revulsion for them was partly pretense; she did not find all photojournalists physically repellent. She understood that they had a living to make, and friends, relations and habits to support. On the other hand, her distaste was partly genuine, because they were frequently carrion feeders, thriving on the disaster and ruin of people who were often not unlike Shelby herself. The paparazzi on the church steps that afternoon presented themselves in that aspect.

Smiling agreeably, she walked toward her limo while the press corps—half a dozen young men and a couple of young women—skittered around her. One youth, expensively dressed down, pierced and tattooed at the gullet, stepped imperiously into her path, smiled back at her and totally impeded her passage. At once Shelby deployed her Polaroid.

“Miss Magoffin,” the young fellow said, “do you fear for your life?”

In return she snapped his picture.

“Dude,” she cried, handing him the shot, “if I had teeth like yours, I’d brush them.”

All the photogs wailed piteously in unison, mocking her self-satisfied bitchiness. They’d all been there before. Shelby, by the time she felt able to let go, had forgotten the young journalists. Clustering around the car windows, they had the opportunity to see her cry and to take pictures of it too.

A
FTER NEW YEAR’S A YOUNG
woman from Taunton confessed to vehicular homicide in the case of Maud Stack. Lieutenant Salmone called Eddie on the phone. Stack’s condition had declined, and though he did not bother to be abstemious in drink, his memory was intact.

“Woman,” Salmone reported, “called Mona Carberry. White girl from Taunton, Mass. Twenty-seven years old. Single parent of a thirteen-month-old. Driving without insurance. History of minor traffic violations. Sometimes employed as a stripper. The car was her boyfriend’s.”

“Maybe he was driving?”

“We think maybe he was.”

“God. Girls still do that?”

“Sometimes. You wouldn’t believe. Guys do it for their girlfriends too.”

“Jesus,” Stack said. “There’s hope for the world.”

“You see it that way, Eddie?”

Stack grunted.

“They don’t usually follow through on it if they’re looking at time,” Salmone said. “Just about never. So we think this guy will come forward pretty soon.”

“Is there any connection with the article Maud wrote?”

“It doesn’t look like it. The girl has no connection with the college, and besides, we think her boyfriend was the driver. He better come to his girlfriend’s rescue soon or he’ll be fucking sorry.”

“Break him down,” Stack said, “the dumb fuck. He doesn’t deserve her.”

“He was in Iraq. He got a Bronze Star. He has a drug arrest and a big pill problem. The girlfriend says he didn’t want to go to the game so she went without him and got drunk. Doesn’t sound very likely.”

“No.”

“Hey, listen, Eddie, how are you?”

“I’m lousy, Sal. But I’m old and sick.”

“Right.”

“I’ve lived too long already. Wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s not up to us, you know.”

“Oh, fuck that, Sal. What are you giving me? Fucking religion. I’m tired of this. I’m trying to get pills. Something reliable. I don’t like taking street shit.”