Presumed innocent

Chapter 7

Studio B, it says outside the door. I enter a large open space the size of a small gymnasium. There is a mustardy quality to the light in here; the walls are yellow tile and they seem vaguely luminescent. The feeling is very much like Nat's grade school: a row of sinks, floor-to-ceiling compartments of white birch that are apparently student lockers. One young man is working at his easel by the windows. I spent, of course, many years around the U. probably, if I had to get down to this kind of dismal estimate, the happiest time of my life-but I doubt that I ever entered the Art Center before, especially if you do not count the adjacent auditorium, where Barbara, on occasion, brought me to attend some plays. For an instant, I am perplexed that I am here. Better to send Lipranzer, I think clearly. Then I speak.

"Marty Polhemus?"

The boy turns from the easel, some anxious sign working through his expression.

"Are you from the police?"

"P.A.'s office." I offer my hand and give my name. Marty tosses his brush down on a table where tubes of acrylic paint and round white bottles of gesso are randomly set; he picks up his shirttail to wipe his hand before he shakes. Marty is an art student, all right, a pimply kid, with lots and lots of hair, loose brass-colored ringlets; he has spots of paint all over his clothing and a gruel of paint and just plain dirt under his long fingernails.

"They said somebody else might like come to see me," Marty tells me. He is a nervous sort, eager to please. He asks if I want coffee and we go to a drip pot back near the door. Marty pours two foam cups full, then has to put them down to grope in his pockets for change. I, finally, toss two quarters in the kitty.

"Who was it," I ask, as we both stand blowing into our coffee cups, "who said someone else might see you? Mac?"

"Raymond. Mr. Horgan. He said."

"Ah." An awkward silence-although Marty is the kind of kid with whom it seems there would be many. I explain that I am the deputy P.A. assigned to the investigation of his mother's murder, and that I received his class schedule from the registrar. Tuesday, 1-2 p.m., Independent Art Studio. "I just wanted to touch base in case there's something you might be able to add."

"Sure. Right. Whatever you want," Marty says. We drift back toward his easel, and he ends up sitting on the broad ledge beneath the windows. From here, beyond the university, you can see the railroad lines, dug out and gathered over the belly of the city like a large and tangible scar. The boy is looking in that direction, and I stare for a moment, too.

"I didn't know her very well," he tells me. "You heard the story, didn't you?" As he asks this, his eyes are quick, and I am not certain if he would prefer that I say yes or no. When I admit my ignorance, he nods and looks away.

"I didn't see her for like a long time," he says simply. "My father can tell you the whole thing, if you want. Just call him. He said he'd do what he could to help."

"He's in New Jersey?"

"Right. I'll give you the phone."

"I take it they were divorced."

At that Marty laughs. "God, I hope so. He's been married to my mother-I mean Muriel, but I always call her my mother. They've been married fifteen years."

He brings his legs up onto the window ledge and looks out over the clustered campus structures as he speaks. After suggesting that I call his father, the boy, in a moment, tells me himself about what's behind him. He has no particular ease about this; his hands are wound about each other in an almost crippled fashion. But he continues without prodding. The story which Marty tells in fits and starts is one of the contemporary era. His father, Kenneth, was a high school English teacher in a small town in New Jersey, and Carolyn was his pupil.

"My father said she was, you know, like real attractive. I think he started going out with her while she was still in school. I mean, they were sneaking around or something. Which isn't Dad. At all. He's real quiet. I bet he didn't know two girls when he met her. He never said that, but I'd bet. I think it was like some big passionate thing. You know. Real romantic. On his end, anyway." Here the boy appears confounded. His estimate of Carolyn is clouded. He clearly does not know enough to even guess at her emotions.

"Her," he says. "Carolyn. You know, my mother. My real mother," says the boy, screwing up his face. "My father called her Carrie. She had all these brothers. And her father. Her mother was dead. I guess she hated all of them. I don't know. They all hated each other. Dad said her father was always beating the tar out of her. She was real happy to get away from them."

The boy abruptly leaves the ledge and approaches his painting, a swirling eye of red. He squints at it, reaches out for one of the tubes. He intends to work while we speak.

He does not, he says, know exactly how his parents broke up. When he was born, Carolyn was trying to go to college and was unhappy that she had to quit. His father just says that all hell was breaking loose in those days and Carrie got caught up in it. She had a boyfriend, Marty says, he is pretty sure of that from the way his father talks. But the father apparently does not dwell on that. The way his father put it is that because of other dissatisfactions she stopped liking the town, his father, the life she had.

"My father says she was too young when they got married, and she grew up and wanted to be something else, and just like decided to be it. Dad says it was a big mess. One day she took off. And my father, you know, says it was probably for the best. He's that kind of person. He says stuff like that and means it."

This father emerges in his son's words as a kind of Norman Rockwell figure, wise and gentle, with spectacles in his hand and the paper-the kind of man to spend long nights in thought in the parlor, a teacher who always took his students to heart. I have a son, I almost tell this boy. I would like to think that someday he would feel this way about me.

"I don't have any idea who killed her," Marty Polhemus tells me suddenly. "I mean, I assume that's why you came."

Why did I come? I wonder. To see what she was hiding, I suppose, or did not care to tell. To diminish a little further my idea of what I had thought was intimacy.

"Do you think it was somebody she knew?" he asks.

"I mean, do you have leads, or whatever you call it. Clues?"

The answer, I tell him, is no. I describe the equivocal state of the evidence: the unlocked windows, the glass. I spare him the description of the cords, the non-viable condition of the seminal fluid. This is, after all, his mother. Although my sense is that there is little need for care or solicitude. I doubt that Marty's look of nervous bewilderment has anything to do with recent events. Indeed, there is something that makes it seem as if he regards himself, largely, as an outsider to all of this.

"Carolyn tried a lot of rape cases," I say. "Some people think it might be someone like that."

"You don't?"

"Murders aren't usually mysterious. In this city these days, half of them are gang-related. In almost all the other cases, the victim and the killer knew each other well. About half of them are broken love affairs: marriage on the rocks, unhappy lovers, that kind of thing. Usually there's been some kind of breakup in the last six months. Generally, the motivation is pretty obvious."

"She had a lot of boyfriends," Marty volunteers.

"Did she?"

"I guess. I mean, there were a lot of times she didn't want me around. I'd call, you know, and I could tell somebody else was there. I couldn't always figure out what was going on with her. I think she liked having secrets, you know?" He shrugs. "I mean, I thought I'd get to know her. That's why I came out here. My dad kept trying to discourage me, but I thought it would be neat. I'm not so interested in school right now, anyway. I figured, you go to college, one place is as good as another. It turns out that I'm like flunking everything anyhow."

"Really?"

"Not everything. I can't understand physics, though. I really can't. I honestly am flunking that."

A girl with a T-shirt from the world tour of a rock group and a smart-looking set comes through the door and asks if he's seen somebody named Harley. Marty says he hasn't. You can hear a stereo on down the hallway when she goes in and out the door. The boy changes brushes and comes within inches of the canvas as he works. His strokes are achingly small. He goes on talking about Carolyn.

"I knew she was out here for years. I started writing her letters. Then when I could really get my courage up, I got her on the phone. It wasn't the first time I ever like talked to her or anything. She'd call up once in a while. Right after the first of the year a lot. Like she wanted to call over the holidays but she knew better than to do that. Anyway, she was nice about it. Real nice. 'Oh, well that would be lovely.' La la, ta ta. Real polite," he says, and nods to himself. "Civil. That's a word, right?"

"Right," I say.

"I'd see her. Sundays I saw her a lot. Once or twice, I met people-I guess, when it seemed to her the right thing to do. You know, that's how she introduced me to Mr. Horgan."

The emotional currents are strong here. It is best just to let the boy go, it seems, whatever my impulse to ask questions.

"I mean, she was real busy. She had her career and all. She wanted to run for prosecuting attorney someday. Did you know that?"

I hesitate longer than I should, even in this ungainly conversation. Perhaps my own expression discloses some reflex of distress, for the boy looks at me oddly. I tell him, finally, that the P.A.'s office is full of people who see that in their future. But that does not put him off.

"Did you like know her real good? I mean, did you work with her or something?"

"Now and then," I say, but I can tell from the way his glance lingers that I have failed in my effort to be oblique. "You were telling me what happened when you saw her."

He waits a moment, but he is accustomed to cooperating with grownups, and he turns his attention to his brush, rubbing it around inside a little plastic tray. His shoulders move before he speaks.

"Not much happened," he says, then rears his head of tangled brass-colored hair and looks back at me directly.

"I mean she never talked about back then," he tells me, "about when I was a kid. I suppose I expected her to. But I guess she just didn't feature that part of her life. You know? She like said nothing."

I nod, and for a moment we are silent, still looking at one another. His eyes again take on that quickened light.

"I didn't make any difference to her. You know? She was as nice as pie. Now. But like she didn't care. That's why my old man didn't want me to come out here. I mean, he spent all those years making up for her, saying that it was a time in her life, all that. He never wanted me to feel like she left because of me. But he knew what was going on." He throws his brush down. "If you want to know the truth, Mr. Horgan had to like talk me into going to the funeral. I wasn't gonna. I just really didn't feel like it. My own mother. That's pretty terrible, isn't it?"

"I don't know," I say. He takes his canvas down and stares at it, near his feet. He seems to recognize-and welcome-my close observation of him. Young, I think. There is such a tender quality to this boy's discomfort. I speak quietly.

"My mother died while I was in law school," I say. "The next week I stopped by to see my father. I never did that, but I figured under the circumstances." I motion. "Anyway, he was packing. Half the household was in boxes. I said, 'Pa, where you going?' He says, 'Arizona.' Turned out he'd bought a piece of land, a trailer. And he never said word one to me about it. If I hadn't come by that day, I'm sure he'd have left town without even saying goodbye. And it was always like that with us. Sometimes that's the way things are between parents and kids."

The boy looks toward me for a long moment, mystified by my candor or the things of which we speak.

"And what do you do about that, huh? Anything?"

"You try to grow up," I say. "In your own way. I have this son and he's the world to me."

"What's his name?"

"My son?"

"Right.'

"Nat."

"Nat," says Carolyn's son. He looks at me again. "What was she to you, anyhow? I mean, this isn't just work, right? Was she like your girlfriend, too?"

I am sure that he has seen my wedding band. His gesture toward me with his chin as he asks this question seems almost to point in that direction, but I do not feel capable of further devices with this soft, decent boy.

"I'm afraid at one point she was my girlfriend, too. Late last year," I say. "Just a little while."

"Yeah," says the kid, and shakes his head with real disgust. He's waiting to meet somebody she didn't gull, and there is nobody here who can make that claim.

"When I flunk out," he says to me, "I'm going home." This declaration has sufficient weight that it seems to me, perhaps, this matter has just now been decided. But I do not respond. He does not need me to tell him he is correct. I smile, warmly enough, I hope, to show how much I like him. Then I leave.