Carnival of Shadows (22 page)

You know your problem, kiddo. You always thunk too darn much. That much thinkin’ ain’t healthy, ’cept maybe for university folks and them that writes books and suchlike. But we ain’t those kinda people, kiddo. We ain’t those kinda people at all. We’s just simple people, the kinda people who can do a fair day’s work for a fair wage, mind their own business, you know? All that thinkin’ is for college professors and whatnot.

You got what you deserved, Michael thought. It was there, right there at the forefront of his mind and he could not help thinking it.

Did I, now? Is that what you believe, kiddo? That I got what I deserved? Well, let me tell you a few home truths about your darn mother, saint that she was.

I don’t want to hear it.

Is that so? Well, it seems to me that you don’t have much of a choice, ’cause I happen to be in your head, and that’s one thing you ain’t never gonna be able to get away from. I’m in your head and I’m in your blood, boy, and blood is somethin’ you ain’t never gone escape from.

You were the worst, and you know it. You treated her like shit. She deserved better than you, and you know it.

Why you—

Jimmy Travis attempted to move then, gripped the arms of the chair and tried to push himself up. Perhaps there were rules to this game. It seemed that Jimmy could not move, forever consigned to remain there in the moment of his death.

This simple realization gave Michael the nerve he needed to take another step into the room.

Everything was at it had been left. He could see the food on the table, now overgrown with mold, cockroaches scurrying back and forth across the cutlery, the sound of their spindly legs on the ceramic as defined as Jimmy’s voice. There was a film of dust covering everything, Jimmy included, and as he moved, that dust lifted and settled, lifted and settled as if the house itself was breathing, and in the vague, tenebrous light from the window behind him, he seemed at once vague and indistinct and then as clear as daylight itself.

You think your mother would be proud of you? You think she’d be proud of you, kiddo? You done fucked her cousin’s widder. I didn’t do no worse than you’re doing right now. Hell, you are a sick kid, you know that? You think you have the right to judge me? You don’t have the right to even speak to me, let alone judge me, you self-righteous hypocritical son of a bitch! And I’ll tell you now, that ain’t never had more meaning than it does right now. Son of a bitch. You are a son of a bitch. Because she was a bitch, kiddo. She was a fucking nasty fucking bitch, and I hope she burns in hell forever…

Enough! Michael thought, shouting inside his own head. That’s enough!

Hell, kiddo, I ain’t even started.

Well, you’re in hell right now! And even if I can see you, I can only see you here. You’re stuck here forever, you crazy asshole…

Jimmy started laughing, and as he laughed, his shoulders shook, and the dust that had gathered on his clothes came off in small clouds and floated around his head. The sound of his coarse laughter sent the cockroaches scuttling back beneath the edges of plates and over the table. They dropped to the floor and hurried across the wide pool of dried blood toward the baseboard.

Got you good, kiddo! Got you good. Got you fooled. You liked my little performance there, eh?

Jimmy started to rise from the chair.

Michael watched as his dead father pushed the chair back with his knees and started around the table toward him. He was grinning, and the slack muscles on the left-hand side of his face gave his features the texture of melted wax.

Come give your old pa a big bear hug, kiddo. You knows we’s just the same inside, don’tcha? You knows you ain’t never gonna get away from your history…?

Michael stepped back, and as Jimmy Travis came within six feet of him, he let out a frightened sound, a sudden exhalation of horror that sounded like a child lost somewhere in the dark and desperately, terrifyingly alone.

“No!” he said out loud. “Don’t come anywhere near me!”

“Michael?”

He stopped suddenly. He realized his eyes were closed. He took a deep breath and opened them. Esther was standing right there in the hallway, the expression on her face one of the gravest concern.

“What happened, honey?” she said. She walked forward, reached out her hand and touched the side of his face. “Lord almighty, sweetheart, what happened? I thought I heard you talking to someone? Were you talking to someone? Look at you now… You’re deathly cold, and you’re shaking like a leaf…”

She held out her arms, and he walked toward her, grateful now for her presence, her warmth.

He knew she could not see anything, and even as she hugged him, even as she held him ever closer, Michael looked back toward the room where he had seen his father.

There was the table, the chair, and the wide bloodstain on the wooden floor. There was the window, the ornaments, the rocker in the far corner, the wireless on the sill, the lamp, the last newspaper his father had read still there on the mantel, but Jimmy Travis was not there. Even the cockroaches had merely been a figment of his imagination.

Michael closed his eyes. He wondered again if he was crazy. He wondered if he would now forever be haunted by the ghost of his father.

I’m in your head and I’m in your blood, boy…

He started again, as if shocked by an electric pulse.

“You are just as jumpy as anything,” Esther said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’m thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“R-right,” Michael said.

“You wanna get anything from your room?”

“No, it’s okay. I just want to leave,” Michael said.

“I think that’s best. I don’t like this place one bit.”

They left together, hand in hand, and when they came through the screen and started down the steps, both Deputy Fenton and Sarge were there to meet them.

“Little shook up,” Esther explained. “He’ll be okay.”

Esther led Michael toward Sarge’s Studebaker.

Sarge shook Fenton’s hand, thanked him for taking the time to come out, said it was a pleasure talking with him.

Michael paused before he ducked back into the rear seat of the car. He took one more look at the house of his childhood—

Be seein’ you, kiddo…

—and then, with an almost imperceptible shudder, he climbed in, pushed himself back into the corner as far as he could, and tugged his jacket around himself.

He could still hear those scuttling cockroach feet over the porcelain plates. He could still see that dull silvery glint in his father’s left eye. He could still hear the coarse rasp of Jimmy Travis’s voice saying,
God darn it, boy, you sure as hell is your father’s son…

Never, he told himself. Never, never, never.

But the doubt was there. The seed of doubt was there. He felt it stretching its tentative and fragile roots into the earth of his mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

15

There were many things in Michael Travis’s life that he did not wish to remember. Some of them were recent, and some of them went right back to the furthest horizon of his memory. For those few minutes, as he sat in his Bureau-assigned late-model Ford Fairlane, he focused his attention on what he had learned, how it could assist him to progress the investigation.

In truth, he had learned very little. The devil was in the detail, however. The connection between Madeline Jarvis and Anthony Scarapetto had been a detail. A dead Hungarian and his connection to this Fekete Kutya was important. Possessive of his nationality, identification was a narrower task, but not a great deal narrower. Maybe Bishop would come back to him with something. Maybe the man was known, already on the run from the federal authorities. As a non-national, there would be records of his entering the country, unless he had entered illegally. Then? Well, then it would be the proverbial needle in a haystack.

So where had this Hungarian come from, where was he going, and why did he stop at the carnival? Had he made arrangements to meet someone in Seneca Falls? From the look of his clothes and personal effects, he was definitely not a wealthy man, but he was not a hobo. Simple and inexpensive his suit and shoes might have been, but they were neither dirty nor worn-out. This—to all intents and purposes—was a man with a life, and that life had ended. However, the mere fact that there was no driver’s license, no billfold, no wallet containing business cards, snapshots of kids, a picture of his wife, right down to the fact that manufacturer’s labels had been removed from his jacket and pants, was beyond unusual. Either he intended to carry nothing, or everything had been removed from his person before the body was dumped.

It was a mystery, for sure, and that—in and of itself—was sufficient reason to remain.

In essence, what had happened here was an example of why Travis had joined the FBI in the first place. That thirst for knowledge, that
need
to know, just as Valeria Mironescu had pointed out. Those few empty months between Esther’s death and Travis’s enrollment in the Bureau had perhaps been the strangest of his life. He’d felt as if he’d had no life. That was the only way to describe the sense of purposelessness and mental apathy he’d experienced. What reason had there been to get up? He’d had enough money left over from his army salary to support himself for another six months, another year perhaps, but doing nothing was anathema to him. And why had he chosen the Bureau? Because of the sense of order and predictability it would impose upon his thoughts, his mind, his own personality? The army had demonstrated all too clearly that a disciplined and structured environment best suited him. The ideas he had, the doubts he possessed about himself—who he was, why he was here, what would happen to him, whether he carried some diluted strain of his father’s violence in his blood—did not plague his mind when his mind was full. It was in the quiet times, the moments of aloneness when there was nothing specific to consider, that he felt those dark shadows come to life in the back of his mind. Given free rein to truly be himself, who would he be, and of what would he be capable? There were fears there, real fears, but only with the death of his father had they been sufficiently energized to impinge upon him. Was he, in essence, two people? Was he what they called
schizophrenic
? He did not believe so, but even the word unsettled him.

Regardless of rationale, the actual motivation for joining the Bureau, the
force majeure
, happened in a diner in Kearney just three weeks after Esther Franklin’s death. Travis had barely gathered his thoughts together after the trauma of that time, the way Esther had faded so inevitably, the words they had shared, those they had not, the certainty that the cancer that had invaded her body would never take her on any other route than to her grave, and all of this while Travis felt so impotent, so insignificant, so meaningless.

Travis was still wrestling with so much when he crossed paths with a man called Donald Gerritty on the afternoon of Thursday, February 23, 1950. Travis did not believe in coincidence, but he did believe in the power of external factors. In actuality, the entire subject of what was now being termed
situational dynamics
was under study in his own Bureau unit. There appeared to be a native and inherent personality in all people, and yet beyond this there were familial, social, environmental, cultural, and educational factors that prompted reactions and responses. What happened in Kearney was an environmental influence, the power of which could not now be underestimated. Indirectly, it was as a result of that occurrence that he was now in Seneca Falls.

Travis had never been to Kearney before, and only as a result of Esther’s dying wishes had there been any reason to go. For much of the two weeks following her death, Travis had been involved without pause in the funeral arrangements, the memorial service, attended by a mere handful of those who knew her, the burial, the resolution of Esther’s notinsubstantial debts, one of which was to a man in Kearney, just fifty or sixty miles southwest of Grand Island. Esther’s house had sold within days, literally, and the proceeds raised, once her overdue mortgage payments had been settled, were barely enough to cover her outstanding liabilities. On the face of it, it had appeared that Esther possessed no money worries at all. In reality, it had been an entirely different story. And so, following instructions that had been left with her lawyer, Michael attended to those matters in a straightforward and businesslike manner, passing on news of her death to those who needed to know, delivering checks and quantities of cash to those who were owed. There was no explanation as to why Esther Franklin owed two hundred and fifty dollars to a man in Kearney, but she did. The man’s name was Clarence Brent. Michael had spoken with him on the telephone, arranged a suitable time to visit, and had agreed to bring the money in cash. That Thursday morning, the twenty-third, Michael boarded the bus from Grand Island to Kearney with an understanding that Brent would meet him at the station, the money would exchange hands, and Michael would get on the next bus back to Grand Island. There would be a couple of hours’ wait, but the Kearney bus station was right there at the end of the main drag, and Michael could take an early lunch. And so it went as agreed. Michael arrived, met Brent, and handed over the money.

Michael had asked him one question about Esther.

“Did you know her well, sir?”

“Well enough to wait five years to get my money back,” was all Brent said, and that was that. He was neither impolite nor brusque, but he did not smile, and it seemed clear that he did not wish to discuss the matter with Michael Travis. After all, Travis was a stranger, and what business was it of his?

The delivery made, Travis left the station and headed up the main drag. He entered the first diner he saw, took a seat at the counter, ordered a cup of coffee and the blue plate special, and sat down with the intention of doing little beyond minding his own business.

Don Gerritty arrived ten minutes later. He arrived at the same time as Travis’s food. He asked if the adjacent seat was free, how the special was, ordered the same. He sat in silence, but there was just something about the man that bothered Travis enormously. Travis wouldn’t have thought twice about upping and moving to a table, but the diner was full with early lunch traffic, and there was no room. First of all, the man had a Zippo lighter, and he kept opening and snapping it shut. He did not use it to light a cigarette. He just opened it, shut it, opened it, shut it.
Click. Click. Click. Click
. Such things did not ordinarily bother Travis. No, it was not
what
the man was doing, but
how
he was doing it. It was as if he were trying to be as annoying as possible.

Eventually Travis asked him if he wouldn’t mind stopping.

“Bothering you?” the man said. “I am so sorry. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it. Have a lot on my mind, see? You know how it is.”

Travis understood then. The man was soliciting conversation. The man wanted to draw him into something. More than likely a con man. Next would come a line.
Hey, kid, if you don’t mind me asking, what line of work you in, and how’d you like to make a few extra bucks?
And then, later, if Travis questioned the motives of the man, he’d say,
But you were the one who started talking to me, kid. I was just minding my own business and you struck up a conversation with me, remember?

But no, there was no such line. In fact, the man just set down the lighter and went back to his own thoughts.

That, in all honesty, was somehow worse.

“Some difficulty you’re in?” Travis asked, unable to restrain himself. There it was again—the
need
to know, the compulsion to find out.

The man smiled, sort of half laughed. “Nothing that should trouble you, son, and certainly nothing you could help with.”

The man was perspiring. Travis hadn’t noticed that before. His brow was varnished with sweat, and the routine with the lighter had not been simple distraction at all, but nervousness. The man looked at Travis, and there was a real flash of fear in his eyes.

“You sure you’re okay, mister?” Travis asked.

The man turned back to the counter as his food arrived. He looked at it as if he couldn’t even remember ordering it, and he nodded his head.

“I’m fine, kid. I’m fine. You just go on with your lunch, okay? Don’t let me interrupt your meal.”

But the meal was interrupted, and there seemed to be no going back to it.

“If there’s something you need help with…” Travis said, leaving the statement unfinished.

“Look, kid, I don’t know what the deal is here, but there really is nothing you can do. I don’t mean to be rude, but this isn’t something you should be getting involved in, okay?”

And then whatever anxiety might have been present in the man’s face became something akin to abject terror. He appeared frantic and yet unable to move.

A car had pulled up outside the diner, and from it emerged two men, both suited, both wearing hats, and they paused for just a moment before approaching the building.

“Oh no,” the man said, and he came down off the stool and headed for the diner restrooms.

The first of the two suited men came through the front door and flashed a badge.

“Please remain calm, ladies and gentlemen. There is no need to panic. We are federal agents, and we are looking for a man who was reported as having entered this building.”

Travis stood up.

The first agent looked at him. “You have something to say, sir?”

“Restroom,” Michael said.

The first agent nodded, indicated for the second to follow him. As they passed the lunch counter, the first agent asked for Travis’s name.

Travis told him.

“I want you to get these people out of here, Michael. You think you can do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Orderly, calmly, get them all out of here and over to the other side of the street, all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get going.”

The two agents headed for the corridor that led back down to the restrooms while Travis corralled the diners and directed them out and across the street as quickly and quietly as possible.

He waited with them while the federal agents dealt with the man they were looking for.

It was little more than five minutes before a shot was fired.

It was a single shot, unmistakable as anything else, and the gathered diners started asking Travis questions as if there were something he knew beyond the immediately evident facts.

After another minute, the first agent came out of the diner and waved Travis over.

“Son, I need you to assist the owner of this establishment. I need you to help him bring everyone’s coats and hats out of the diner and over to them on the sidewalk. Tell them they will not able to return to their meals.”

Travis complied without further questions. He and the owner started gathering up peoples’ hats and coats and bags and ferrying them over the street.

On the first trip back, the owner of the diner asked if Travis knew anything about the guy in the restroom.

“No idea,” Travis replied.

“He shot himself in the freakin’ head in my restroom. Can you believe that?”

“Really?”

“Sure thing. Those two Feds show up, he goes out back, they ask him to come on out, and he shoots himself in the head. Crazy, huh? Wonder what he did.”

That was it then.

That was the moment.

Later, years ahead, after his move to Kansas and those first few months of tentative research into a field that was termed behavioral science, they started to use that phrase:
situational dynamics
. Why did one man want to help and another want to harm? Why did two people—ostensibly from almost identical backgrounds and personal circumstances—become wildly different people?

Crazy, huh?
Wonder what he did
.

After Travis and the owner had returned all the coats and bags and hats and scarves, those same diners did not want to leave. They wanted to know too.

Travis listened to them.

Maybe he was a gangster. Maybe he was on the run. Maybe he killed someone.

To Travis, that nervous and frightened man did not seem to be a gangster at all. He was terrified, and if what the diner owner had said was true, if the man had actually shot himself, then dying right then and there in a restroom must have seemed an awful lot more appealing than whatever fate he believed awaited him at the hands of the Feds.

Travis stayed back across the road and he just observed.

More Feds arrived, then the coroner. At last the dead man was stretchered out and put into the back of the coroner’s wagon. The agent who had first spoken to Travis crossed the street and told the hangers-on that it was all over, that there was nothing further to see, that they should all go home.

He did stop to share a few words with Travis and thanked him for his assistance.