Day of Wrath (7 page)

I was sitting on the living room couch, drinking coffee
and thinking about what it might have been that had surprised me, when
Mildred called for the second time. The first time I'd spoken to her, I'd
spent the better part of ten minutes calming her down, assuring her that
Caldwell's murder didn't necessarily mean that anything had happened to
her daughter. I wasn't sure I believed what I was telling her, especially
after what Pastor Caldwell had said about Robbie and his son. But it would
have been lunacy to let the woman in on that. She'd hung up, moaning over
"poor" Bobby and begging me to make Robbie's safety my first priority.
The second call, I thought, was just to make sure that the first call had
had its effect. Mildred was undoubtedly one of those people who dialed
a busy signal twice;—to make sure she hadn't
dialed incorrectly the first time.

"You'll keep looking for her," she said, after I'd spent
another ten minutes soothing her.

"
I told you I would."

"But how? Where will you look? With Bobby dead, where
will you go?"

It was a good question. "I'll check the shelters and a
vicarages," I said. "Just in case Bobby wasn't involved in Robbie's disappearance.
And I'll contact the police."

"
Yes. What else?"

"I have some other leads, Mildred," I said uneasily, although
the photograph was my only real lead—and not a very solid one at that.
"Do you know where Bobby and your daughter went when they were together?"

"
I don't know that they 'went' anywhere," she said stiffly.
"It was my impression that she listened to him play the guitar. Nothing
more."

Nothing more, I thought. I wondered, for a second, if
she really believed that or if she was trying to find out what I believed.
It was a hell of a way to learn what your kid was up to. But then Mildred
didn't really care about what Robbie had been up to, as long as she could
get her safely back in that overstuffed room without letting the neighbors
know where she'd been. Which wasn't being entirely fair to Mildred, who
did love Robbie in her own way. But then I wasn't in a fair-minded mood.

"I'll call you when I have something to report," I said.

"Yes," she said mournfully. "Call me. I'll be at home.
I couldn't teach today—not after what happened to poor Bobby. Is Caldwell
. . . how is he taking it?"

"He collapsed," I said. "He's in the hospital."

"I think I would die," Mildred said. "To see your only
child—"

"Stop it," I said with disgust. "Just yesterday you were
telling me what trash they both were."

"It may surprise you to know this, Mr. Stoner," she said
with assumed dignity, "but in spite of what I said, I didn't wish either
one of them harm. And I am truly sorry for their misfortune. But I'm certainly
not going to take the blame for it. Or feel guilty for thinking what was
true—that they lived like animals."

"They're the ones who are taking the blame for it, right,
Mildred? They got what they deserved."

"What a wicked thing to say!" she cried. "I'm sorry I
came to you. I'm sorry that I need you at all."

She hung up. But I knew she'd call back. She'd had her
melodramatic moment and she'd repent, like any good stock character, and
beg my forgiveness. And I'd forgive her, because, though she hadn't known
it, I didn't have much patience with people like Mildred Segal. That morning
I felt as if I'd seen enough Mildred Segal to last me a lifetime. Men and
women who assumed blithely that what they had was the best thing to have
and that there was only one way of getting it—the American way of legalized
repression and sublimation through status. If that was the way Mildred's
society was run, then she should have been forced to see all of it. To
see what I'd seen the night before in that bloody garage—the dirty little
secret at the heart of her repressions and sublimations, the violence that
would keep festering and erupting until it engulfed her whole goddamn world.
And the funny part was that she never would see it, never would understand
why the world was turning against her—just as she really didn't understand
why her daughter had run away. She was so fixed on her own values—on
maintaining what she had and on living out the lie of unruffled prosperity—that
she would never see that there wasn't room enough for that kind of prosperity
and true charity. Maybe when I'd brought her daughter back to her, kicking
and screaming, there'd be a bit of judgment, because that's what Mildred
and the Rostows and the rest of their kind needed—a day of wrath.

I went into the kitchen and fixed myself breakfast and,
after a time, I calmed down. I knew it was the Caldwell boy's murder that
had awakened the intemperate Puritan in me. It wasn't just the violence
of his death. I'd seen my share of that, in the army and in my job. I could
even accept it as a solution to certain problems. And I didn't have much
more patience with people who couldn't admit that possibility as real than
I had for Mildred Segal and her never-never land of hollow prosperity.
It wasn't just Mildred's world that had homicide as its root secret; we
all lived in that world—ineluctably. Some of us just lived a little closer
to the core of it than others did. I guess, finally, that was what was
bothering me. On that particular morning, with those bad dreams in my head,
I didn't like the life I was leading. On that particular morning, I think
I would have traded it gladly for a wife and a child and steady, interesting
work—although that was probably asking too much.

I stared out the living room
window at Burnet Avenue. The storm clouds had blown away during the night,
and the trees and the grass and the cars parked on the street had a freshly
washed bloom. It was a beautiful April day, and I felt as if I had to gird
myself to go out into it—like a man in armor-weighed down by what I'd
seen and by what I was trying to forget.
I'd just finished my third cup of coffee and started
for the door when Mildred called to make peace.

I got to my office in the Riorley Building about nine-thirty
and, after checking the answerphone to see if there had been any further
urgent messages from Mildred, I pulled the phone book out of my desk and
looked up the number of Community Services on Auburn Avenue. I wanted to
talk to Frances Shelley—an aggressive young social worker whom.I'd worked
with before on runaway cases. But she wasn't in.

I got her supervisor instead—a smooth-talking customer
named Allan Washington. I'd worked for Welfare myself for a couple of summers
when I was in college, so I had a pretty good idea of who I was dealing
with—a hard-nosed, middle-aged civil servant, who'd spent twenty years
in the field getting all the pity and enthusiasm knocked out of him and
whose smooth, rich, amiable voice was probably the only charitable part
he had left.

Frances was only twenty-six. She hadn't bottomed out yet
on all the cruelty and toadying and shameless jockeying for dollars that
she'd met with in the field and in the office. She would bottom out, though.
It's an odd thing about social work—how, inevitably, the bureaucracy
comes to mimic its nemesis, how it takes on the mean-spirited, stingy,
transparently manipulative qualities of the worst segment of its clientèle,
and how the case workers end up feeling just as impotent and angry, just
as fundamentally poor, as the men and women they service.

I knew I wasn't going to get the kind of help I wanted
from Al Washington, not after he'd found out that I couldn't do him any
good. And I also knew that if I left a personal message for Frances it
would be marked down against her. Civil servants frown on personal calls
made on government time and get their jollies by catching subordinates
in just those kind of lapses. It's all a little like the peacetime army,
where pettiness substitutes for discipline and grudges are paid out in
monthly fitness reports. So I pretended I was still with the D.A.'s office
and that I needed to talk to Frances about one of her cases. The smack
of official interest got Washington's attention.

"Are you sure this isn't something I could help you with?"
he said with faintly oily cheer.

I told him, no. That it really wasn't urgent enough to
justify his involvement. A minor matter, actually. A question of a record.
That shut him down like a thrown switch.

"
I see," he said curtly. "Well, Miss Shelley isn't here.
She checked out this morning at nine and probably won't be back in the
office today."

"Is there someplace I could reach her?" I said. "In the
field?"

"Try the Dalton Street Community Center," he said and
hung up.

I got the number of the Community Center from the phone
book. The black girl who answered my call told me that Frances wasn't in
but that she was supposed to be back around noon to supervise a senior
citizen's workshop.

"She going to be mighty busy, though," the girl said.

"Is it something I can do for you?"

"'Fraid not," I said. "Just tell her Harry Stoner called
and that I need to talk to her."

I could hear her pencilling down the message, "Harry Stoner
got to talk to you," she read back.

"Close enough," I said. "Tell her I'll stop in around
twelve-thirty."

"
Twelfth-thirty," she said.

After hanging up, I spent a few minutes going through
the mail and a few more minutes straightening up the desk. And when I'd
finished my housekeeping, I got back to the matter at hand—the disappearance
of Robbie Segal. Since the two photographs were the only evidence I had,
I took them out again and studied them, hoping to spot something I'd missed
the first time around —like a name tag or a street address. I wasn't
that lucky, although I did end up with a slightly different impression
of the girl.

In the first photo, she looked heart-breakingly young
and pretty—a blonde teenager with a sweet, vulnerable face. She wasn't
any less pretty in the second photo, but something about her good looks
had changed. The day before I'd thought that she might have been on drugs—that
that was what accounted for the faraway look in her eyes and the breathlessness
of her mouth. This time around, it occurred to me that it wasn't as if
something had been taken away from her expression—some conscious intensity—rather
that something had been added to it, something sensuous and charged, something
which made her look less childlike and vulnerable. I thought about what
Sylvia Rostow had said—about Robbie no longer being a "good girl"—and
wondered if that was what I was seeing: the sudden addition of sexual passion
to an adolescent beauty. It made me feel vaguely chauvinist to even consider
it, especially since I knew that I wouldn't have spotted the same thing
in Bobby Caldwell's face. Maybe it was a charge that I was adding, I thought.
A bit of semiconscious wish fulfillment. Because the truth was the girl
was stunning-looking.

It wasn't hard to understand Bobby Caldwell and his songs.
This was a beauty that songs were destined to be written about. Only thinking
about Bobby Caldwell made me nervous. I had no proof that he'd helped Robbie
run away. Just a strong suspicion. And no proof that his murder had anything
to do with the girl, either. But if the two events were related, my blonde
runaway was in very bad trouble. The possibility was ugly enough to get
me going again—off that cracked leather chair and out of the office.

I took the elevator down to the main floor, walked through
the Riorley lobby—an ornate, rather dilapidated example of twenties American
rococo, full of brass chevrons and marble pilasters—to Walnut Street.
I picked up the Pinto in the Parkade and drove through the blue April morning,
up the Parkway to the Police Building.

It was about eleven-fifteen when I found a parking place
among the crowd of cruisers on Ezzard Charles Drive. I locked the Pinto
and walked up the sidewalk to that yellowish, foreshortened building, with
its flagpole on the lawn· and its brick and metal sign by the door. The
flag was hanging at half-mast on that windless morning, curled like wet
wash about the pole. Someone on the force or someone in the city government
had died; and that was the memorial, a red and white banner hanging listlessly
against the deep blue sky. In spite of myself, I thought of Bobby Caldwell
again and carried that thought with me into the building.

I found a desk sergeant whom I knew, got tagged, and went
up to the second floor. I stopped brieiiy at Al Foster's office—just
to say hello—then walked down the corridor to the homicide squad room.
Arthur Bannock was sitting at one of the varnished oak tables, chewing
out a uniformed patrolman who was standing nervously in front of him, shifting
his weight from one foot to the other and rotating his cap in his hands.
I waited until Barmock had finished and the patrolman had brushed by me.
Someone was going to pay for that chewing out. I could see it in his eyes—a
look like murder. Bannock leaned back in the chair and watched him go—his
hands behind his head, the tip of a yellow toothpick bobbing in  the
corner of his mouth.

"Buy you a drink?" he said, pointing to the chair beside
his desk.

"It's a little early in the day for me."

He gave me a disgusted look and shook his white head.
"What's happening to our country?" he said  mournfully. He pulled
a handkerchief out of his coat, scrubbed his red boozer's nose, examined
the handkerchief, folded it up, pocketed it, spit out the toothpick, and
pulled a pint flask from a desk drawer. He raised it like a toast glass.
"The hell with you!" he said cheerfully and took a long pull of whiskey.
"Now what do you want, boy-o? I know you want something for nothing, seeing
that it's too early in the day for you to drink with me."