Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-eight

I called Patterson when I got off the train at Union Station. “I’ve got a lead for you to do nothing with,” I said.

“Lovely to hear from you, Mr. Elstrom.”

“That blueberry cop I was working with up in Rambling?”

“Security guard for a growers’ association.”

“He’s not.”

“Not what?”

“Not a security guard.”

“Who is he?”

“I think he’s a Kovacs, and that he followed Carolina down to Florida. From there he, or they, tracked her to Rambling. You need to send out photos of those two brothers.”

“To whom?”

“To the cops on Windward Island. Ask them to show the photos to Dina at the Copper Scupper and the woman who runs the Gulf Watcher newspaper.” I thought for another minute, then added, “And have them send a set of photos to a Lieutenant Dillard at the sheriff’s office in West Haven, Michigan. He doesn’t see a crime yet, but he will if you do your job.”

“And a set for you?”

“Of course. I can identify which one of them is passing as Reynolds, at least.”

He said he would.

At least.

The Harold Washington Library in Chicago is modern and huge. Outside, it is home to enormous green owls at its roofline. Inside, it is home to microfilms of most Chicago newspapers, some going back to the 1850s. My shoes made loud clacking sounds as I went up the empty broad staircase to the second floor.

I started with the Chicago Tribune. Once I threaded the correct microfilm spool into a reader, it took only a few seconds to fast-forward to the right page. I knew the date better than my own birthday.

The headline for August 12 was in big type: MACHINIST MYSTERIOUSLY MURDERED. The one-column story underneath, slugged at the top with “Daughter, 16, Feared Abducted,” began with a vivid summary of the gore: At noon on August 11, Herman Mays had been found slumped onto his kitchen table, facedown in a puddle of blood. The back of his skull was caved in. His daughter, Maris, was missing. Police feared she’d been kidnapped by the murderer or murderers.

Herman Mays had been discovered by a coworker sent around after Herman had failed to punch in. A factory representative said Mays had been a top-form die and mold maker, and his work was considered vital to fulfilling a government contract the company was under great pressure to complete. After ringing the outside bell, the coworker noticed that the sidewalk door, though closed, was unlocked. He went in and found that the upstairs apartment door was also unlocked. After knocking several times, he went in and discovered Herman facedown on the kitchen table, dead.

Because nothing in the rest of the apartment appeared to have been disturbed, Rivertown police theorized Herman Mays had not been killed as the result of a robbery and were focusing their efforts to find the missing daughter through contacts the father and daughter might have had with other people. Though newly arrived in Rivertown, Herman Mays was well known to patrons of some of the bars along Thompson Avenue. All described him as a solid, sociable working man, though still grieving the death of his wife some years earlier. More promising, the Tribune reported, were witnesses who had observed Maris Mays engaged in an argument with a young man on the sidewalk outside the family’s apartment, the day before the murder and her own disappearance. Police were actively seeking the young man.

At eight in the evening on August 11, I was in the alley behind the laundry, loading plastic-bagged clothes into a truck for the next morning’s delivery, when two police officers drove up in an unmarked black Ford sedan.

The driver, a beefy guy in a long-sleeved white shirt and maroon tie, called to me from his open window. “Vlodek Elstrom?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Come on over here, son.”

I walked over, still holding several bags by their hangers.

“Do you know Maris Mays?”

Those were the last clear words I heard. My head went into a sort of sensory delay. My breaths came loud and hollow, as if I were a deep sea diver, breathing through a regulator. My heart pulsed in my ears, in rhythm with my slow, gasping lungs.

“When did you see her last, son?” the beefy man’s voice asked from far away. His face was close, less than afoot from mine. He had thin, spidery veins in his cheeks, and gray mixed in with the black of his hair. But his words were distant.

“Is she all right?” I could feel my mouth moving, but it wasn’t my voice. It was slower, like a robot making mechanical words in between the loud, hollow breaths.

“When, son?” the beefy man’s lips asked.

“Yesterday. She didn’t answer the phone today. It was yesterday, before work.”

“Got along with her all right?”

“Got?” The blood was pulsing so loud now I could barely hear myself. “You mean get. She’s my girlfriend. We get along fine. Please, is Maris all right?”

“What about her father?”

“A son of a bitch. Is Maris all right?”

The cop was looking at me like he was inspecting meat. For a moment, the only sound came from my lungs, working in and out. The rest of the world had gone away.

“How much of a son of a bitch?” he asked.

“He treats Maris like crap.”

“She’s missing,” he said.

“I just talked to her.”

“When?”

“I told you: Yesterday, about four thirty. Before I came here.”

I stepped back. The beefy cop’s partner had gotten out of the car. He was thin and had white skin. The pulsing in my ears slowed; the hollow machine-breathing quieted.

“Please,” I asked the thin cop, “what’s going on?”

They told me, after they put me in that black Ford sedan and drove me to the police station and questioned me at a metal table in a back room for over twelve hours.

“What were you arguing about?” they asked, over and over.

“Nothing,” I said, over and over.

“C’mon, kid.” The beefy cop hitched at his pants, standing over me. “She wouldn’t put out?”

I glared at him.

The beefy cop put a fake smile on his fat lips. “You got to have urges, right, Vlodek?” He drew my name out, derisively: Vah-low-dek. “Lots of girls need a little nudge.”

I lied then, lied to wipe that fat smile off his fat mouth. “I told her she was crazy to want to be a writer,” I said. “That’s what we were arguing about yesterday. I said she ought to do something sensible with her life, like other girls: be a teacher or a nurse, normal stuff that women do.” I made myself shrug, acting it out. “She got mad,” I said.

Perhaps he bought it because he was a Rivertown cop and I was a Rivertown kid, and nobody in Rivertown aspired to much of anything at all. Still it was only after the medical examiner fixed Herman Mays’s time of death at around ten o’clock the previous evening-a time, the laundry owner said, that was in the middle of my shift-that I was allowed to go home.

The story dropped off the front page the next day, but the Tribune had a paragraph on page two. “Kid’s Alibi Solid,” the little story was titled. “Police have cleared the young man seen talking with Maris Mays, the missing daughter of Herman Mays, who was found bludgeoned two days ago. The young man, a June graduate of Rivertown High School, was at work during the time the attack occurred, according to his employer.”

The Tribune hadn’t printed my name, or the name of the laundry where I worked. It didn’t matter. By the time I’d been allowed to go home, most of the people in Rivertown knew who I was.

I walked the town every morning, searching the sidewalks and the alleys; the gangways between the houses and the roads between the factories; the way from her apartment to the flower shop where she was working; and the path along the Willahock we’d taken on the way to Kutz’s, the day she’d carved our initials on his trailer. I didn’t know what I was expecting; I knew she wouldn’t be there.

Afternoons, I haunted the police station on my way to the laundry.

“What are you doing to find Maris?”

“The usual,” the desk sergeant said.

“Which is what, exactly?” I asked, louder and louder. The days were trickling by. Nothing was happening.

“We’ve notified all the surrounding police departments, as well as the state police.”

“What about getting off your asses and combing the town? What if she’s trapped in one of the abandoned factories?”

“What if you got too smart a mouth, kid?”

“She’s being held someplace.”

“You know something about that?”

“She wouldn’t have taken off without telling me.”

“What else do you know, kid?”

Then I’d leave. Cops in Rivertown had wide latitude and narrow tolerances for teen-aged kids who weren’t connected to the lizards that ran the city.

I wasn’t connected to anybody anymore.

I left on Labor Day.

Four months earlier, I’d enrolled at City College. I was thinking I would go on as before, except now I’d be taking the train into Chicago for classes. I’d still live with my mother’s sisters and, not coincidentally, hang around Rivertown for Maris’s last year of high school.

Except now Maris was gone, and I’d become the stink in the family. My aunt Rosemary suggested, if that was the word, that my days of rotating between my mother’s sisters’ couches should come to an end. She blamed it on Lillian, saying that since she was no longer around to do her share, it would be unfair to expect the two surviving sisters to continue shouldering the load. I wanted to be hurt, even get angry; I wanted to believe that the issue was about my continuing to take food and space. I knew, though, there was something else: I was a suspect, no matter how tangential, in a murder and a disappearance.

I moved to the city, into a partitioned square in the basement of a student rooming house that was mine if I shoveled the snow and fed the coal-fired furnace in the winter, put up the screens and cut the grass with a rusted push mower in the summer. I grabbed at it as if it were the last life preserver tossed off the Titanic.

I went to the school library every day, to comb the newspapers for any mention of Maris. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I called the Rivertown police. By the first of October, the desk sergeant started hanging up as soon as he recognized my voice.

Weekends, between jobs, I took the train out to Rivertown and prowled our old paths. Sometimes, if I could stand it, I’d walk to Kutz’s and go to the back of the trailer to look at the initials she’d carved there.

As November blew away the last of the leaves that had curled on the ground, I had the thought that Maris could be dead.

I never said it aloud.

And most nights, I dreamed of Maris Mays.