The Galton Case

Chapter 25

THE TOWN of Pitt was dark except for occasional street lights and the fainter lights that fell from the heavily starred sky. Driving along the street Ada Reichler had named, I could see the moving river down between the houses. When I got out of the car, I could smell the river. A chanting chorus of frogs made the summer night pulsate at its edges.

On the second floor of the old red house, a bleary light outlined a window. The boards of the veranda groaned under my weight. I knocked on the alligatored door. A card offering “Rooms for Rent” was stuck inside the window beside the door.

A light went on over my head. Moths swirled up around it like unseasonable snow. An old man peered out, cocking his narrow gray head at me out of a permanent stoop.

“Something you want?” His voice was a husky whisper.

“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Fredericks, the landlady.”

“I’m Mr. Fredericks. If it’s a room you want, I can rent you a room just as good as she can.”

“Do you rent by the night?”

“Sure, I got a nice front room you can have. It’ll cost you – let’s see.” He stroked the bristles along the edge of his jaw, making a rasping noise. His dull eyes looked me over with stupid cunning. “Two dollars?”

“I’d like to see the room first.”

“If you say so. Try not to make too much noise, eh? The old woman – Mrs. Fredericks is in bed.”

He must have been just about to go himself. His shirt was open so that I could have counted his ribs, and his broad striped suspenders were hanging down. I followed him up the stairs. He moved with elaborate secrecy, and turned at the top to set a hushing finger to his lips. The light from the hall below cast his hunched condor shadow on the wall.

A woman’s voice rose from the back of the house: “What are you creeping around for?”

“Didn’t want to disturb the boarders,” he said in his carrying whisper.

“The boarders aren’t in yet, and you know it. Is somebody with you?”

“Nope. Just me and my shadow.”

He smiled a yellow-toothed smile at me, as if he expected me to share the joke.

“Come to bed then,” she called.

“In a minute.”

He tiptoed to the front of the hallway, beckoned me through an open door, and closed the door quietly behind me. For a moment we were alone in the dark, like conspirators. I could hear his emotional breathing.

Then he reached up to pull on a light. It swung on its cord, throwing lariats of shadow up to the high ceiling, and shifting gleam and gloom on the room’s contents. These included a bureau, a washstand with pitcher and bowl, and a bed which had taken the impress of many bodies. The furnishings reminded me of the room John Brown had had in Luna Bay.

John Brown? John Nobody.

I looked at the old man’s face. It was hard to imagine what quirk of his genes had produced the boy. If Fredericks had ever possessed good looks, time had washed them out. His face was patchily furred leather, stretched on gaunt bones, held in place by black nailhead eyes.

“The room all right?” he said uneasily.

I glanced at the flowered paper on the walls. Faded morning-glories climbed brown lattices to the watermarked ceiling. I didn’t think I could sleep in a room with morning-glories crawling up the walls all night.

“If it’s bugs you’re worried about,” he said, “we had the place fumigated last spring.”

“Oh. Good.”

“I’ll let in some fresh air.” He opened the window and sidled back to me. “Pay me cash in advance, and I can let you have it for a dollar and a half.”

I had no intention of staying the night, but I decided to let him have the money. I took out my wallet and gave him two ones. His hand trembled as he took them:

“I got no change.”

“Keep it. Mr. Fredericks, you have a son.”

He gave me a long slow cautious look. “What if I have?”

“A boy named Theodore.”

“He’s no boy. He’ll be grown up now.”

“How long is it since you’ve seen him?”

“I dunno. Four-five years, maybe longer. He ran away when he was sixteen. It’s a tough thing to have to say about your own boy, but it was good riddance of bad rubbish.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth. You acquainted with Theo?”

“Slightly.”

“Is he in trouble again? Is that why you’re here?”

Before I could answer, the door of the room flew open. A short stout woman in a flannelette nightgown brushed past me and advanced on Fredericks: “What you think you’re doing, renting a room behind my back?”

“I didn’t.”

But the money was still in his hand. He tried to crumple it in his fist and hide it. She grabbed for it:

“Give me my money.”

He hugged his valuable fist against his washboard chest. “It’s just as much my money as it is yours.”

“Aw no it isn’t. I work myself to the bone keeping our heads above water. And what do you do? Drink it up as fast as I can make it.”

“I ain’t had a drink for a week.”

“You’re a liar.” She stamped her bare foot. Her body shook under the nightgown, and her gray braids swung like cables down her back. “You were drinking wine last night with the boys in the downstairs bedroom.”

“That was free,” he said virtuously. “And you got no call to talk to me like this in front of a stranger.”

She turned to me for the first time. “Excuse us, mister. It’s no fault of yours, but he can’t handle money.” She added unnecessarily: “He drinks.”

While her eyes were off him, Fredericks made for the door. She intercepted him. He struggled feebly in her embrace. Her upper arms were as thick as hams. She pried open his bony fist and pushed the crumpled bills down between her breasts. He watched the money go as though it represented his hope of heaven:

“Just give me fifty cents. Fifty cents won’t break you.”

“Not one red cent,” she said. “If you think I’m going to help you get the d.t.’s again, you got another think coming.”

“All I want is one drink.”

“Sure, and then another and another. Until you feel the rats crawling up under your clothes, and I got to nurse you out of it again.”

“There’s all different kinds of rats. A woman that won’t give her lawful husband four bits to settle his stomach is the worst kind of rat there is.”

“Take that back.”

She moved on him, arms akimbo. He backed into the hallway:

“All right, I take it back. But I’ll get a drink, don’t worry. I got good friends in this town, they know my worth.”

“Sure they do. They feed you stinking rotgut across the river, and then they come to me asking for money. Don’t you set foot outside this house tonight.”

“You’re not going to order me around, treat me like a has-been. It ain’t my fault I can’t work, with a hole in my belly. It ain’t my fault I can’t sleep without a drink to ease the pain.”

“Scat,” she said. “Go to bed, old man.”

He shambled away, trailing his slack suspenders. The fat woman turned to me.

“I apologize for my husband. He’s never been the same since his accident.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got hurt bad.” Her answer seemed deliberately vague. Under folds of fat, her face showed traces of her son’s stubborn intelligence. She changed the subject: “I notice you paid with American money. You from the States?”

“I just drove over from Detroit.”

“You live in Detroit? I never been over there, but I hear it’s an interesting place.”

“It probably is. I was just passing through on my way from California.”

“What brings you all the way from California?”

“A man named Peter Culligan was murdered there several weeks ago. Culligan was stabbed to death.”

“Stabbed to death?”

I nodded. Her head moved slightly in unison with mine. Without shifting her eyes from my face, she moved around me and sat on the edge of the bed.

“You know him, don’t you, Mrs. Fredericks?”

“He boarded with me for a while, years ago. He had this very room.”

“What was he doing in Canada?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t ask my boarders where their money comes from. Mostly he sat in this room and studied his racing sheets.” She looked up shrewdly from under frowning brows. “Would you be a policeman?”

“I’m working with the police. Are you sure you don’t know why Culligan came here?”

“I guess it was just a place like any other. He was a loner and a drifter – I get quite a few of them. He probably covered a lot of territory in his time.” She looked up at the shadows on the ceiling. The light was still now, and the shadows were concentric, spreading out like ripples on a pool. “Listen, mister, who stabbed him?”

“A young hoodlum.”

“My boy? Was it my boy that done it? Is that why you come to me?”

“I think your son is involved.”

“I knew it.” Her cheeks shuddered. “He took a knife to his father before he was out of high school. He would of killed him, too. Now he really is a murderer.” She pressed her clenched hands deep into her bosom; it swelled around her fists like rising dough. “I didn’t have enough trouble in my life. I had to give birth to a murderer.”

“I don’t know about that, Mrs. Fredericks. He committed fraud. I doubt that he committed murder.” Even as I said it, I was wondering if he had been within striking distance of Culligan, and if he had an alibi for that day. “Do you have a picture of your son?”

“I have when he was in high school. He ran away before he graduated.”

“May I have a look at the picture, Mrs. Fredericks? It’s barely possible we’re talking about two different people.”

But any hope of this died a quick death. The boy in the snapshot she brought was the same one, six years younger. He stood on a riverbank, his back to the water, smiling with conscious charm into the camera.

I gave the picture back to Mrs. Fredericks. She held it up to the light and studied it as if she could recreate the past from its single image.

“Theo was a good-looking boy,” she said wistfully. “He was doing so good in school and all, until he started getting those ideas of his.”

“What kind of ideas did he have?”

“Crazy ideas, like he was the son of an English lord, and the gypsies stole him away when he was a baby. When he was just a little tyke, he used to call himself Percival Fitzroy, like in a book. That was always his way – he thought he was too good for his own people. I worried about where all that daydreaming was going to land him.”

“He’s still dreaming,” I said. “Right now he’s representing himself as the grandson of a wealthy woman in Southern California. Do you know anything about that?”

“I never hear from him. How would I know about it?”

“Apparently Culligan put him up to it. I understand he ran away from here with Culligan.”

“Yeah. The dirty scamp talked him into it, turned him against his own father.”

“And you say he knifed his father?”

“That very same day.” Her eyes widened and glazed. “He stabbed him with a butcher knife, gave him an awful wound. Fredericks was on his back for weeks. He’s never got back on his feet entirely. Neither have I, to think my own boy would do a thing like that.”

“What was the trouble about, Mrs. Fredericks?”

“Wildness and willfulness,” she said. “He wanted to leave home and make his own way in the world. That Culligan encouraged him. He pretended to have Theo’s welfare at heart and I know what you’re thinking, that Theo did right to run away from home with his old man a bum and the kind of boarders I get. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Look at how Theo turned out.”

“I have been, Mrs. Fredericks.”

“I knew he was headed for a bad end,” she said. “He didn’t show natural feelings. He never wrote home once since he left. Where has he been all these years?”

“Going to college.”

“To college? He went to college?”

“Your son’s an ambitious boy.”

“Oh, he always had an ambition, if that’s what you want to call it. Is that what he learned in college, how to cheat people?”

“He learned that someplace else.”

Perhaps in this room, I thought, where Culligan spun his fantasies and laid a long-shot bet on an accidental resemblance to a dead man. The room had Culligan’s taint on it.

The woman stirred uncomfortably, as if I’d made a subtle accusation:

“I don’t claim we were good parents to him. He wanted more than we could give him. He always had a dream of himself, like.”

Her face moved sluggishly, trying to find the shape of truth and feeling. She leaned back on her arms and let her gaze rest on the swollen slopes of her body, great sagging breasts, distended belly from which a son had struggled headfirst into the light. Over her bowed head, insects swung in eccentric orbits around the hanging bulb, tempting hot death.

She managed to find some hope in the situation: “At least he didn’t murder anybody, eh?”

“No.”

“Who was it that knifed Culligan? You said it was a young hoodlum.”

“His name is Tommy Lemberg. Tommy and his brother Roy are supposed to be hiding out in Ontario–”

“Hamburg, did you say?”

“They may be using that name. Do you know Roy and Tommy?”

“I hope to tell you. They been renting the downstairs room for the last two weeks. They told me their name was Hamburg. How was I to know they were hiding out?”