Mr. X (28 page)

Toby took another slug of whiskey and pressed the glass against the silver fur spilling out of his shirt. “Your mother wanted to protect you. I’d say she did a pretty good job.”

I stared at him without speaking.

Toby raised his left hand and held it palm up, so the smoke curled around his fingers. The gesture said: it’s no biggie. “You were normal. There was stuff you were better off not knowing.”

“I was normal.”

“When Joy was a baby, I guess, if she didn’t get fed on time, shit went flying all over the place, windows broke…. Where with you, all that happened was, you had those fits. Which ain’t that unusual for a person. Hey, does that still happen?”

Recognitions, thoughts of a kind, began to take shape in my mind.

“I always hoped you were gonna grow out of that.”

“Toby, you just said, ‘All that happened was you had those fits.’ ”

“You did! Right there on your third birthday.”

“But everybody thought something
else
might happen to me. You were waiting to see if I was going to make things fly around the room.”

His face sagged into a trapped, gloomy frown.

“We’re talking about what passed down through the Dunstans. When it got to me, it looked ordinary enough to look normal.”

“You never should of went to college,” he said. “You listen too good.”

“How much did Howard pass down to Queenie?”

“My wife had a lot of Dunstan in her, I’ll say that much.” He pulled at his whiskey and smiled to himself. “Sometimes she’d rise up a couple feet off the bed and hang there. Sound asleep. Take the covers with her. Damndest thing you ever saw in your life. And she
knew
things.” A memory made him laugh. “The first year we were married, two different pairs of idiots walked into the shop to score some easy money. They were thinking, old lady like that, show her a gun, she’ll give it up fast. What you call a basic error in judgment.”

Toby chuckled. “Second they come in, Queenie hauls the shotgun up from behind the counter. Scares the shit out of the little bastards. ‘Lady,’ they say, ‘you’re making a mistake, put down the gun before something bad happens.’ Queenie says, ‘If you don’t get your asses out the door before I count three, you bet something bad is gonna happen, only you won’t know about it.’ Never had any more problems with stickups.”

“Good for her,” I said.

“Queenie had talent to burn. She wasn’t queen of the magpies only because of her fast hands.”

“Ah,” I said.

Toby showed his discolored teeth. “Say you’re in the kitchen, talking about this and that, and Queenie’s next to the table. You go to the fridge, get some ice. When you look back, she fell through a trap door. You go out of the kitchen and yell, ‘Queenie?’ The bedroom door opens up, and out she comes, holding a feather duster. ‘What the hell?’ you say. She says, ‘There’s a spiderweb over the kitchen window and, for your information, we keep the duster in the bedroom closet.’ You get in the mood for a new TV set and figure you shouldn’t have to pay for it, a thing like that is one hell of an advantage.”

“The girls inherited their father’s talents.”

Toby refilled both glasses. “Queenie most of all, then Joy and Nettie. But May got her share.” His eyes drifted over the collage of naked women. “When May was about thirteen, she was going down Wagon Road—that’s Cordwainer Avenue now—in Howard’s rumble seat. What Queenie told me, May saw two girls pointing at her from another car. You know, laughing at her. I always had the feeling it took more than that, because Howard’s
family couldn’t go anywhere without attracting notice. Once I asked May straight out, but she went into her vague act. Anyhow,
whatever
the hell she saw made her so mad she put on a fireworks display. Smashed windshields all up and down Wagon Road, blew out tires. Snapped the telephone lines. Everything went crazy.”

Joy’s papery voice rustled in my ear:

And my sister May created havoc on Wagon Road by setting off thunderations, even though to hear my daddy talk she was hardly a Dunstan at all, which was a nasty, untrue insult to my sister
.

Because when we were young women, a gentleman came along who showed a liking for May. Unfortunately, the gentleman did not like her in the proper way and attempted to force her to his will. Rape is what that man had in mind. May took care of that fellow through what the French would call force majeure. She came home in great agitation and told me, Joy, my young gentleman attempted to take advantage of me. I was so frightened, I found in me the power to rise up and demolish my young gentleman. After I demolished him, my young gentleman was only a stinky little green puddle I cannot bear to remember
.

I don’t know how you can be more Dunstan than that
.

“There was some business about a boy who tried to rape her,” I said.

“Good old Joy,” Toby said. “Leave no rock without first you roll it over.”

I asked if he knew anything about Star’s father.

“Queenie said Star’s father was a jazz drummer, but she didn’t tell me his name. That’s where Star’s musical ability came from, she said. I had the idea he might have been sort of like a Dunstan himself, the drummer. Truth is, I always thought Ethel Bridges, the New Orleans woman who married Sylvan after Omar got killed, was another one like that.” He grinned at me. “Didn’t you get pretty good on the guitar, up there in Naperville?”

Star had boasted about my guitar playing to Toby.

“I tried,” I said.

“A couple of times, customers came in with big band photographs, like Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman, where the musicians signed their names. I used to look at the drummers in those pictures and think, If you’re the one, you had a daughter you never knew about, but you would have been proud of her.”

“That’s lovely,” I said, struck by his tenderness. “I guess people have the wrong idea about pawnbrokers.”

“You know what we are? Protection for people who need protection. Or we used to be, before the banks started handing out credit cards right and left.”

I felt the clarity of a long-overdue understanding. “Oh, boy.” My skin was tingling. “I just
got
it. My mother had me put into foster care to protect me from her family.”

“Well, yeah,” Toby said, as if I had said that having a lot of money and living in a mansion was more agreeable than scraping by on food stamps in a tenement.

“When I did come home, she must have ordered everyone to watch what they said. I wasn’t supposed to know about the Dunstans.”

“She wanted you to have a regular life.”

“And her aunts didn’t like that. They didn’t see the point.”

Toby rested his forearms on the cluttered desk. The egglike eyes were perfectly clear. “All the time you were a little kid, my wife and her sisters hoped you were going to show you had some Dunstan in you. When you got older, and Star put her foot down, it set up like a barrier.”

“That’s why I never came back to Edgerton after I was twelve. She didn’t trust Nettie and May.”

Toby poured out the last of the Johnnie Walker Black, mostly into his own glass. “About time we wrapped this up. Before you go to bed, maybe take a couple aspirins.” He smiled at me. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

“Just one more thing,” I said.

“Shoot.”

“Right before we left the hospital, Star managed to get out a few words. They were about my father.”

Toby’s head drifted up.

“She said his name was Edward Rinehart.”

The window shades went down and up again behind the thick lenses.

“Your in-laws want me to forget the whole thing. They know something, but they’re not talking.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Star lived with the guy before she married him. Nettie would know his name.”

“You’d think,” he said.

“You know it, too, Toby.”

He smiled. “I deal with hundreds of people, day in, day out. Names go in and out of my mind.”

“You can do better than that,” I said.

He pushed himself back and walked around the desk to stand in front of a picture of a black-haired woman proffering breasts like slightly deflated beachballs on the palms of her hands. “I am not a schlub who spent his whole life behind a counter. In 1946, the year after I got out of the army, I had a white Cadillac convertible and seven thousand bucks in the bank. Important people invited me to their houses, treated me like family. I killed a man once when he didn’t give me a choice, and I did six months at Greenhaven for a deal where basically I stood up for someone else. Toby Kraft is not Clark Rutledge.”

“And somewhere along the line, you met Edward Rinehart.”

He peered at me through the thick lenses. “Star gave you that name?”

“Definally.” I tried again. “Def-in-at-ly.” I discovered that my glass contained only half an inch of whiskey.

“I maybe remember something.” We experienced a meaningful pause. “After the funeral, suppose you work here for a week or so. Hundred bucks a day, cash.”

“What’s this, a trade-off?”

“An offer.”

“It’s still a trade-off, but all right,” I said.

Toby pretended to search his memory. “I never met this Rinehart, but he got around, was my impression. From the little bit that sticks in my mind, he got into different places. A certain guy might be able to help you.” He marched behind his desk, sat down, and searched through the rubble for a pen and a pad of notepaper. He leveled an index finger at me. “I didn’t give you this name.”

“Right,” I said.

He scribbled, tore the top sheet off the pad, folded it in half, and passed it to me. “Put it in your pocket. Look at it tomorrow and decide what to do. You want to let bygones be bygones, that’s okay, too.”

The office swayed like the deck of a ship.

“Hasta la vista,”
Toby said, shrinking again as he stood up.

35

I was okay until I heard the blare of the jukebox. The more I walked, the better I got at it. Then I moved, not too unsteadily, into the noise of Whitney Houston howling about everlasting love, and the combination of alcohol and night air struck my nervous system. As I drifted across the sidewalk, a lamp post swung toward me, and I grabbed it with both arms before it could get away.

I held on until the sidewalk stopped moving and passed through the crowd outside the bar, assisted by a gentleman who seized my arm and propelled me southward. Women young and old regarded me in great solemnity from their stoops. At last I reached Merchants Park and stumbled to a bench. I dropped into its embrace and fell asleep.

I awakened with a pounding head and an ache in my gut. Lamplight illuminated the words carved into the slab over the entrance of the first building in the terrace across the street.
THE CORDWAINER BUILDING.
I gathered my feet under me, and the pain in my belly took solid form and flew upward. I expelled a quart of watery, red-brown stew onto the asphalt.

It was 11:35. I had been passed out on the bench for at least an hour and a half. Nettie and Clark were not yet so soundly asleep that I could get to my room unheard, and I was nothing like presentable enough to pass inspection. I needed to rinse my mouth and drink a lot of water. At the far end of the park stood a good-sized drinking fountain.

A granite basin flowed into a tall, octagonal pedestal. I located a brass button on the side of the basin and rinsed my mouth, gulped water, splashed my face, and gulped more water. I looked down and noticed the inscription on the base of the pedestal.

Before me lay an hour of free time, waiting to be filled. I straightened my necktie, buttoned the jacket of my best blue suit, and walked not all that unsteadily out of the park in search of the night-blooming Edgerton.

36