Holly

July 27, 2021

“Just look at this,” Avram Welch says. He’s wearing cargo shorts (Holly has several pairs just like them) and pointing at his knees. There are healed S-shaped scars on both. “Double knee replacement. August 31st, 2015. Hard to forget that day. Cary was at the Strike Em Out the last time I came, in the middle of August—me there just to watch, my knees were too bad by then to even think about throwing a ball—and gone the next time I went. Does that help any?”

“It absolutely does,” Holly says, although she doesn’t know if it does or not. “When was the next time you went back to the bowling alley after your op?”

“I know that, too. November 17th. It was the first round of the Over Sixty-Fives tournament. I still couldn’t play, but I came to cheer the Oldies on.”

“You have a good memory.”

They are sitting in the living room of Welch’s third-floor Sunrise Bay condominium apartment. There are boats in bottles everywhere, Welch has told her that building them is his pastime, but the place of honor is held by the framed photograph of a smiling woman in her mid-forties. She’s dressed in a pretty silk dress and wearing a lace mantilla over her chestnut hair, as if she’s just come from church.

Welch points at the picture now. “I ought to remember. It was the next day that Mary was diagnosed with lung cancer. Died a year later. And do you know what? She never smoked.”

Hearing of a non-smoker who’s died of lung cancer always makes Holly feel a little better about her own habit. She supposes that makes her a poopy person.

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Welch is a small man with a big potbelly and skinny legs. He sighs and says, “Not as sorry as I am, Ms. Gibney, and you can take that to the bank. She was the love of my life. We had our disagreements, as married people do, but there’s a saying: ‘Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.’ And we never did.”

“Althea says you all liked Cary. The Golden Oldies, I mean.”

“Everybody liked Cary. He was a Tribble. I don’t suppose you know what I mean by that, but—”

“I do. I’m a Star Trek fan.”

“Right, okay, right. Cary, you couldn’t not like him. Kind of a space cadet, but friendly and always cheerful. I suppose the dope helped with that. He was a smoker, but not cigarettes. He puffed the bud, as the Jamaicans say.”

“I think some of the other members of your team might also have puffed the bud,” Holly ventures.

Welch laughs. “Did we ever. I remember nights when we’d go out back and pass a couple of joints around, getting stoned and laughing. Like we were back in high school. Except for Roddy, that is. Old Small Ball didn’t mind us doing it, he was no crusader, sometimes he even came along, but he didn’t do pot. Didn’t believe in it. We’d smoke up, then go back inside, and do you know what?”

“No, what?”

“It made us better. Hughie the Clip especially. When he was stoned, he lost that Brooklyn hook of his, and he’d put it bang in the pocket more often than not. Bwoosh!” He flings his hands apart, simulating a strike. “Not Roddy, though. Without the magic smoke, the prof was the same one-forty bowler as he ever was. Isn’t that a riot?”

“Absolutely.”

Holly leaves the Sunrise Bay having learned just one thing: Avram Welch is also a Tribble. If he were to turn out to be the Red Bank Predator, everything she’s ever believed, both intellectually and intuitively, would fall to ruin.

Her next stop is Rodney Harris, retired professor, one-forty bowler, also known as Small Ball and Mr. Meat.

Barbara is reading a Randall Jarrell poem called “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and marveling at its five lines of pure terror when her phone rings. Only three callers can currently get through, and since her mom and dad are downstairs, she doesn’t even look at the screen. She just says “Hi, J, what do you say?”

“I say I’m staying in New York for the weekend. But not the city. My agent has invited me to spend the weekend in Montauk. Isn’t that cool?”

“Well, I don’t know. I have an idea that sex and business don’t mix.”

He laughs. She has never heard Jerome laugh so easily and frequently as he has during their last few conversations, and she’s glad for his happiness. “You can be cool on that score, kiddo. Mara’s in her late fifties. Married. With children and grandchildren. Most of whom will be there. I’ve told you all that already, but you’ve been lost in the clouds. Do you even remember Mara’s last name?”

Barbara admits she does not, although she’s sure Jerome has told her.

“Roberts. What is up with you?”

For a moment she’s silent, just looking at the ceiling, where fluorescent stars glow at night. Jerome helped her put them up when she was nine.

“If I tell you, will you promise not to be mad? I haven’t told Mom and Dad yet, but I guess once I tell you, I better tell them.”

“Just as long as you ain’t pregnant, sis.” His voice says he’s joking and not joking at the same time.

It’s Barbara’s turn to laugh. “Not pregnant, but you could say that I’m expecting.”

She tells him everything, going all the way back to her initial meeting with Emily Harris, because she was too afraid to approach Olivia Kingsbury on her own. She tells him about her meetings with the old poet, and how Olivia submitted her poems to the Penley Prize Committee without telling her, and how she’s still in the running for the prize.

She finishes and waits for jealousy. Or lukewarm congratulations. She gets neither, and is ashamed she ever felt she had to hold back. But maybe it was better that she did, because Jerome’s reaction—a babbling and excited mixture of questions and congratulations—delights her.

“So that’s it! That’s where you’ve been at! Oh my God, Ba! I wish I was there so I could hug the shit out of you!”

“That would be mondo nasty,” she says, and wipes her eyes. The relief is so great she feels she could float up to her stick-on stars, and she thinks how good her brother is, how generous. Did she forget that, or was her head so full of her own concerns that she blocked it out?

“What about the essay? Did you kill?”

“I did,” Barbara says. Thinking, You bet I did. They’ll read it and toss it in what Dad calls the circular file.

“Great, great!”

“Tell me again about the woman whose son disappeared. I can listen now. You know, with both ears. I wasn’t before.”

He tells her not just about Vera Steinman, but recaps the whole case. He finishes by saying Holly may have, purely by accident, uncovered a serial killer who operates on the Red Bank Avenue side of Deerfield Park. Or at the college. Or both.

“And I figured something out,” he says. “It was bugging the hell out of me, but it finally clicked into place. You know, like one of those inkblot pictures that you stare at and stare at, and all at once you see it’s the face of Jesus or Dave Chappelle.”

“What?”

He tells her. They talk a little more, and then Barbara says she wants to tell her mother and father about the Penley Prize.

“Before you do that, I need you to do something for me,” he says. “Go down to Dad’s old study, where I’ve been working on the book, and find the orange flash drive. It’s sitting next to the keyboard. Can you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Plug it in and send me the folder marked PIX, P-I-X. Mara is thinking the publishers will want photos in the middle of the book, and they may want to use them for promotion, too.”

“For your tour.”

“Yeah, except if Covid doesn’t go away, it’s apt to be a virtual tour on Zoom and Skype.”

“Happy to do it, J.”

“One of em’s a photo of the Biograph Theater, with Manhattan Melodrama on the marquee. The Biograph is where John Dillinger was shot. Mara thinks it would make a great cover. And Barbara…”

“What?”

“I’m so happy for you, sis. I love you.”

Barbara says she feels the same and ends the call. Then she cries. She can’t remember ever being quite this happy. Olivia has told her happy poets are usually bad poets, but right now Barbara doesn’t care.