Flying Crows (18 page)

XV

RANDY

KENWOOD

1997

Randy Benton had promised a nice old retired Harvey Girl that he would deliver a message to a frail old escaped lunatic. He would tell Birdie Carlucci, “Thanks for the memories.”

That was the thin reed of justification Randy clung to for making the forty-five-minute drive south to the small town of Kenwood this Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, he only had to use his reasoning on himself, because Melissa and the kids were gone for the day on a special guided tour of the Truman library and residence in Independence. Melissa had volunteered to be one of three parents to help chaperone the twenty kids who were members of their school's history club.

The county had contracts with five or six privately owned “group residences,” mostly in nearby rural areas, where they placed feeble, destitute elderly people with mild mental problems who could not function by themselves. The program was part of a concerted effort a few years back to get homeless people off the streets.

The facility where Birdie Carlucci was living was a huge three-story white frame house that must have begun life at least a hundred years ago as somebody's mansion. Driving up and parking in the half-moon driveway, Randy figured there had to be at least twenty or twenty-five rooms in the place. The Kansas City social worker on Carlucci's case had told Randy there were eleven other in-need people living here. That meant there had to be a minimum of six or seven bedrooms, assuming there were no more than two in a room.

He was no expert on architectural styles, but the tall windows and wide porches struck him as being Victorian. There were several other houses of similar size and style in the neighborhood, all of them like this one having been converted to apartments, medical offices, and other non-single-residence uses. The telltale signs were the outside fire escapes.

A woman—fortyish, black, friendly—in a white dress greeted him from behind a small table just inside the front door and identified herself as the supervisor in charge. He had called ahead so she was expecting him.

“We've got him sitting on the big porch in back, all ready for you, Lieutenant, ” she said. “You'll have some privacy because everyone else is off on a group trip to the Southtown Mall. I have a quick question first. The social workers can't locate any family for Mr. Carlucci. In fact, we can't even find anybody with the last name of Carlucci anywhere in the Kansas City area—both sides of the line. Can you help us? Does he have any kin still around?”

“I honestly don't know. Have you asked him?”

“We have. Mr. Carlucci just shakes his head. The woman who came to see him claims she's not related and doesn't know of anybody who is.”

“A woman?”

“A very ancient woman, walks with a cane.”

“Short white hair, well groomed, thin, erect?”

“No, no. Bent over, long gray hair, plump.”

“What's her name?”

“I have it here. We make everybody sign in—including you, by the way.”

She opened a green book with the word VISITORS embossed in gold on the front and looked at the signatures. “Here she is.”

Randy looked down at a tiny, light, wavering signature of a person named Hilda McIlhenny.

“How did she know he was here?”

“You're the detective. Why don't you ask him?”

Randy signed his name in the visitors' book and then followed the woman's instructions to go through the main hallway straight through to the porch at the back of the house.

There was Birdie Carlucci. They had him ready for Randy, all right— so ready that Randy might not have recognized him in a different setting. Somebody had cut his hair and shaved off his beard and generally scrubbed him up in such a way as to completely change his appearance. He had gone from being a wild-looking, sickly, homeless bum to a clean, normally sickly, ghostly pale old man.

“Mr. Carlucci, it's me, the police officer who found you at Union Station. Good morning,” Randy said.

Birdie Carlucci was moving back and forth slowly in a white wicker rocking chair. He looked up at Randy, smiled, and said, “I'm rocking. Rocking is what they did at Somerset. That's what we were doing when I first met Josh. There wasn't a thing wrong with me but they didn't know that, so I had to do what they said. Rock, rock, rock, they said. So rock, rock, rock I did. Rocking and sweeping the floors with big heavy brooms were the main things to do there. That's what Josh said, and he was right.”

Carlucci spoke like a different man—a real person—without long pauses between words and phrases. His voice was extremely weak but what he said was firmly stated and easily understood. Whatever else, he had already learned how to talk again.

“There's another chair like mine over there,” he said to Randy. “Drag it over and join me, if you like.”

Randy liked. He grabbed the other rocking chair and moved it to a spot alongside Carlucci.

“Rock, rock, rock,” Carlucci said.

Randy began rocking in sync with the other man's slow rhythm. Both of them were facing out toward a big backyard that was filled with the laid-out wickets of a croquet game, a couple of outdoor barbecue grills, and several wooden picnic tables and chairs. Beyond a high-wire back fence there was a field of what appeared to be early growing alfalfa.

“I have a message for you, Mr. Carlucci,” Randy said, after a minute of rocking. “Janice Higgins said to tell you ‘Thanks for the memories.' She said you'd get it.”

The chair next to Randy did not change rocking speed. “She was so good to me,” Carlucci said. “At the beginning, I wouldn't have made it without her. I think I loved her, and I
know
she loved me. They all did.”

Rock, rock, rock.

“I understand you've had a woman visitor here?”

“Her name was Hilda Owens when I knew her at Somerset. She loved me too.”

“Was she a patient?”

“No, no. She volunteered to read poetry to patients. Playing around with her is what forced Josh and me to leave—to escape. I'd only been there a few days, but I had already had enough. They hit me in the head with bats and did all kinds of other awful things. I had already decided to get the hell out of there.”

Inmates didn't just decide to leave insane asylums—any more than they left jails or prisons. But Randy didn't interrupt.

“Hilda was married to a banker in town. Josh said they would probably kill me if I didn't leave. He saved my life. Josh is a wonderful man. He witnessed a massacre over at Centralia. That's what did him in—in the head.”

Randy remained silent. There was no way he was going to tell Birdie that it was most unlikely that his friend and savior witnessed a massacre or anything else at Centralia.

“Did you find Josh and tell him where I was?”

“Not yet, Mr. Carlucci, not yet.”

Without a beat, Carlucci continued. “Hilda's husband threw her out of his house and out of town and she came back to Kansas City. I ran into her at Union Station shortly afterward. I saw her coming out of the women's waiting room on her way to catch the 3:15 Milwaukee Road to Minneapolis. She came back to see me there at the station a few times—until she married another banker. There were other women, too. Some came right off one train, like, say, the Santa Fe Chief from California, looking for something to do before catching their connecting one, say a Wabash local to St. Louis. I was their something-to-do between trains.”

Randy could not imagine how a guy could pick up women at a train station and get them onto his cot in a spice-smelling room in the basement.

“I know it's none of my business, but—I'm curious—how did Hilda Owens find out you were here at this residence?”

“I called her on the phone they have here and asked if she wanted this back.” Carlucci held up his right hand and with his left unfurled a pink kerchief. It was tattered, torn, and dirty—but intact. “She gave this to me at Somerset. When she came here she told me to keep it. In sixty-three years, I never went anywhere without it. It was in my pocket when you arrested me.”

“I didn't arrest you. I
found
you.”

“Same thing. Look at me now, sitting on a porch rocking like a Somerset lunatic. I'm not a lunatic and never was.”

Never was a lunatic, Mr. Carlucci? Sure thing, old man. What Randy said was, “You're being taken care of here, Mr. Carlucci. You weren't in very good shape when I came across you.”

“I miss Union Station.” Were those tears in the old man's eyes? Was he really crying over no longer being confined to a cramped, smelly little hole in the wall of a deserted, falling-down train station? But it hadn't always been that way.

Randy said, “I understand, Mr. Carlucci, I really do because I grew up loving Union Station too. I thought it was a magic place, an entirely different world. I always saw it a bit like going to church, a cathedral where you didn't have to keep quiet, where you could smile and yell and eat ice cream—”

Randy stopped talking when he saw that the old man had turned to stare at him. His face was literally lit up by a grin that transformed him to somebody much younger, out of place at this group residence for the sickly homeless.

“Union Station was the most exciting building in my world too,” said Birdie Carlucci. “I saw it as the place I'd go someday to get on a train that would take me on an adventure to a life far, far away from Kansas City, where there were dolls and dollars everywhere.”

The old man stopped in midsentence, turned back to the front, and resumed rocking.

“That's the reason, of course, why it was such a pleasure and an honor to call it my home for so long,” he said, his voice dropping in volume and verve.

Randy decided to ask some questions.

“What was it like at Union Station these last sixty-three years? How did you live? What did you do? Why didn't you just leave? Why did you stay there?”

Keeping his chair rocking and his eyes straight ahead, Carlucci said, “That's a lot of questions at once.”

“You're right. I'm sorry.”

“But I will answer them. It's been so long since I've really talked to anybody. I've missed that. I always enjoyed talking. I always had a lot to say. I need to have one last good spell of conversation.”

Birdie Carlucci then started talking, not really to Randy at his side but to anybody straight ahead—in the backyard or the alfalfa field or beyond.

“That first day, Janice told me some men were around asking about a couple of guys who might have been Josh and me. Josh had already gone to get the train back to the asylum. I went downstairs to hide, maybe just for a few hours until I could think of a plan. I fell asleep on the cot, and when I woke up I went through the storeroom and found plenty to eat, and there was everything I needed so I decided to spend the night. I went upstairs and used the big men's bathroom off the waiting room. I sat in the waiting room for a while, like I was a passenger on the way to somewhere, picked up some newspapers that had been left there by passengers, and took a stroll up and down to a few of the tracks to see some trains come in and out. I really loved doing that. I wanted to ask people who they were and where they were going and why, but I didn't, not that first night. The next morning I ran into Janice coming down the employees' stairs. She was so pleasant, so beautiful. She came down a while later with some coffee and a plate of pancakes just like what Josh had the morning before— when I met her with Josh and the doctor. She asked where I was going now and I told her I wasn't sure and, who knows, maybe I'd still be here that afternoon when she got off if she wanted me to be. Of course, that's what she wanted. So she came to my room and we spent some time together.”

“How did you get her to do it—just like that?” Randy asked. Something about this didn't make sense. Harvey Girls were famous for being prim and proper in accordance with strict rules that required certain ladylike behavior. For one of them to just jump into his bed—his cot, to be precise—like that seemed out of character.

“I asked her,” Carlucci said. “That's how I got her to do it.” The old man stopped rocking, looked over at Randy, and said sternly, “See here, young man, I haven't always looked the way I do now. I attracted women like mice to cheese . . . bees to honey . . . salt to fries. Believe it or don't believe it, that was the way it was.”

Randy chose to believe it.

Carlucci resumed rocking and talking.

“Two days went by of moving around Union Station, checking out the trains, and reading discarded newspapers. Between what I found in the storeroom and what people left behind around the station and what Janice brought me, I was eating very well—certainly better than at the asylum and even better than at home—”

“Home?” Randy interrupted. “Where
was
your home in Kansas City? What neighborhood were you from?”