Blunt Darts

TWELFTH

– ¦ Fordham Road was a short street of older houses three blocks from the center of town. I parked and rang the bell marked K Jacobs.

"Oh, John, I've been leaving messages for you all morning. Where have you been?" She was dressed in a halter top and shorts. Both were pastel and the colors clashed a bit.

"What's the news?"

She ran back down the hall, disappeared, then reappeared with a picnic basket and a beach bag. "I ran into Miss Pitts this morning in the market. You remember, the retired teacher who had Stephen in the fifth grade? We have to go see her right away."

She was past me and halfway to my car. I shrugged and followed after her.

The living room was filled with the kinds of things one obtains with trading stamps. Plastic-brass floor lamps, plastic-walnut cocktail tables, and plastic Hummel-like sculptures on eight separate knick-knack-holding shelf arrangements. My rocking chair, however, was built of massive pine. It must have gone for twelve and a half books, minimum.

Miss Pitts was plump and spoke in a soft purr. The three of us held teacups and coffee cakes in our hands and on our laps in a precarious balance that I've never been able to master. Miss Pitts had thus far covered her brightest class (1959), and her catlike voice was slowly putting me to sleep. I began to wonder why the hell she had the cocktail tables if she wasn't going to use them for the tea and cakes. I was giving serious consideration to cutting a fart to change the direction of the conversation, when Valerie mercifully jumped first.

"Miss Pitts, what year was it you had Stephen?"

"Ah, Stephen, Stephen. What an unfortunate story. Oh, one of today's wicked novelists would have a field day with his sad life. But the brightest boy, the absolute brightest I've ever seen. No one, not even in the class of 1959 could touch him."

"Actually, Miss Pitts," I broke in, setting my cup, saucer, and goodies on the floor, "what I'm interested in is whether anyone has touched him. In the unfriendly sense, I mean."

"Uh, quite," said Miss Pitts, a bit miffed, I thought. "Well, as I told Miss Jacobs this morning, two weeks ago, on the twelfth, I was taking my evening exercise. I used to call it my constitutional, but after the way some groups have twisted one meaning of that word, I have ceased to use it at all. In any case, while I was walking down Ballard Street, I saw Stephen ahead of me, carrying his books. No doubt he was so late in heading home-it was nearly five-thirty, you see-because he had visited the library after school. Well, seeing him I was about to call to him, when a black sedan screeched to a halt on the street beside him. He took one look at the driver and was gone."

"Did the driver go after him?" I asked.

"Hah, not likely. Stephen is as springy and quick as an antelope. That Gerry Blakey couldn't have caught him on horseback, assuming a horse could bear him any better than this town can."

"What happened then?"

"Well, Blakey, who'd gotten half out of the driver's side, muttered something, slid back in, and drove off."

I leaned back. Miss Pitts's eyes might be getting a little weak, but she wouldn't be likely to mistake Stephen, and no one could mistake Blakey.

"Why didn't you report this to the police?" I asked.

She gave me a sour look. "The police? Hmph. Will Smollett is a fool who can't even control the teenage hoodlums in this town, much less be its chief investigative officer. Besides, he's in the judge's pocket. Everyone knows that. And if Blakey was chasing Stephen, the judge was likely connected with Stephen's leaving. That's why I decided to tell Eleanor."

"You mean Valerie."

She determinedly set down her teacup and rose.

"Young man, you are smug, and you are rude. If I were to say 'Valerie' I would mean Miss Jacobs. When I say 'Eleanor,' I mean Eleanor Kinnington. I'm afraid this interview is over."

I glanced to my right. Valerie seemed as stunned at the reference to Mrs. Kinnington as I was.

I stood politely and looked at our hostess. "Miss Pitts, please accept my apology. I was rude, and I assumed you were a meandering old woman who might confuse things. I was wrong. But I've been retained to try to find a probably terrified fourteen-year-old child, and you're the first bright spot I've come across. Can we please talk a while longer?"

Miss Pitts's face softened, and she sat back down.

"He is such a dear, dear boy."

We covered the intersections of Miss Pitts's and Stephen's lives during the prior six months. Nothing was produced that sounded helpful. I decided that a quiet interlude was appropriate before we moved back to tougher ground.

"What can you tell me about Telford Kinnington, the judge's brother?"

Miss Pitts gave a bittersweet smile. "Ah, Telford Kinnington. He was three years younger than the judge, and enough unlike him to have been bought from the Gypsies. The judge, who went to public school here too, was a plodder. Everything seemed to come easily to Telford, though. A gifted student, a fine athlete at Harvard, and a true patriot, Mr. Cuddy.

Telford didn't just talk about this country, he died lighting for it. Only a few months after he'd been, home on leave, too. In fact, I still have the newspaper account of his last battle. Just a minute."

She bustled over to a stuffed bookcase and levered out a scrapbook. I feared a lengthy, unproductive tangent coming on. I thought about telling her to forget it but decided I was talking to her on borrowed time as it was.

"Let me see," she said, turning pages with agonizing slowness. "Yes, yes, here it is." She passed me the open book.

There were two accounts, one from the Banner, a local paper, and one from the Globe. Both were dated April 11, 1969. According to the local paper, Captain Telford Kinnington had led his company in a counter-attack from an American position against a much larger Vietcong force that was engaging a separate sector of the position. He and nearly a quarter of his company (about 40 of 160) were killed or wounded, but the VC had been annihilated. The medal he'd received, however, was, in my experience, not a very substantial award for a heroic charge.

The Globe article, written a bit more tongue in cheek, implied ever so gently that his action had been unnecessary and reckless. It also indicated that he'd entered the service as a second lieutenant five years earlier and had only recently been promoted to captain-a long time to wait for his second bar in those casualty-ridden late sixties. I noted the part of the war zone involved and remembered that I knew someone from Intelligence who'd served there after I'd come home.

I then swung the conversation as delicately as I could back to the judge's late wife. Miss Pitts was reluctant at first, but once I emphasized the importance of my knowing Stephen's earlier life, our hostess lapsed into the nearly universal enthusiasm with which people discuss those who appear big but turn out to be little.

"Diane Kinnington was a terror, Mr. Cuddy, a demon from hell. The judge met her when he was in law school. At iirst she was an enchanting girl, and I served with her on several town committees just after their marriage. Diane continued to be active in town matters far into her pregnancy with Stephen. But for a while before he was bom, she began acting… well, strange. She appeared at committee meetings with alcohol on her breath. She walked past people she knew on the street as though she never saw them. She began wearing sunglasses even into the evening, and despite two servants at the big house, she sometimes slipped into Carver's, the small grocery store in Meade Center, to buy odd items. Then one September night something happened. I've never talked with anybody who knew just what. But Diane was hospitalized, and Stephen was born a few hours later, two months premature."

"Miss Pitts, can you tell me who would know what happened that night?"

She frowned. "Yes, for all the good it would do. Her obstetrician couldn't be reached in time, and Dr. Ketchum, who was the family's doctor, rushed down and delivered her of Stephen. He wouldn't talk about it, and he died a few months later. Both servants, a woman and her husband, were let go within a week, I suspected because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on her and somehow failed. They headed south somewhere. No one else that I know of was invo1ved."

"How did she get to the doctor's office?"

"Her husband."

"But surely, if she was hospitalized, there'd be records of what her trouble was."

"Oh, she was hospitalized, all right, but in a private place, if you get me."

"A sanatorium?" I decided to use the "old parlance."

"Yes, out in the Berkshires."

Coincidence? "Does the name Willow Wood ring any bells?"

"What?"

"The name Willow Wood. Was that the sanatorium Diane Kinnington was in?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. I think it was the same one Stephen stayed in."

"What do you know about the night Diane died?"

She sighed. "Even less, I'm afraid. Just the newspaper stories, and I didn't keep them. After Stephen was born, Diane seemed to… well, rally back in spirit. Then, a few years later, she began to decline again. By the time Stephen reached my class, she had declined frighteningly. If her earlier conduct was strange, her later behavior was wicked. Drunkenness, rowdiness, and…well…"

"Miss Pitts, I know this must be difficult-"

"Oh, you know nothing, young man, nothing!" she snapped. "You know I'm relatively old and therefore you 'know' that I'm patriotic and narrow-minded and a prude. Well, we may have felt strongly about some things when I was young, like love of country and order and respect. But maybe we felt differently about other things than you think we did. And maybe while we didn't go around talking about things, we nevertheless knew how to enjoy ourselves. But what we didn't do was what she did with every male that she could."

"Message received and understood, Miss Pitts," I said. She calmed down a bit, and Valerie gave me an approving smile. "What about Stephen thereafter?"

She sighed again. "He'd been so obviously affected by his mother's behavior. He had become erratic in school, and then his mother showed up roaring drunk for a student-teacher conference, with a… a man waiting for her in the car. Well, things must have been twice as bad at home. The day after Diane's accident, the judge whisked Stephen away to the sanatorium. The school records don't show it, but I'm sure that poor boy suffered a complete nervous breakdown. He returned to school the next year. He had lost a year, but he seemed to be doing so well until now."

"Do you remember anything else that might help us?" I asked.

"I'm afraid not. Although…"

"Yes?" prompted Valerie.

"Well," she looked from Valerie to me, "there was a reporter named Thomas Doucette on the Banner at the time Diane died. The rumor was that he'd been assigned to the story and, well, covered it a little too well. Anyway, no article by him appeared in the paper, and he quit the Banner a few weeks later, though most people figured he was tired. Just as well actually. He was the least gifted boy in the class of '61, and certainly not destined for the Pulitzer Prize."

"Does he still live in Meade?" I asked.

"No. No, he lives somewhere in Boston now. At least that's what I remember from his uncle's funeral, and that was, oh, two years ago. You might try his parents, though. They're retired, too, and live on Moody Street."

I had run out of topics, so I decided there was nothing to be lost by asking what was on my mind.

"One last thing, Miss Pitts. What did Eleanor Kinnington say when you told her about seeing Blakey with Stephen?"

Miss Pitts, to my great surprise, blushed and her look saddened. "Well, what could she say? She said she had suspected as much but had hoped against hope that she was wrong."

"Wrong about what?"

Miss Pitts suddenly stabbed several times at a box of tissues on the table next to her.

"Gerald Blakey is thirty years old and has never been seen in this town in the company of a woman, Mr. Cuddy. Isn't that enough to be wrong about?"

She hurried from the room, crying.