“What would help?”
“Probably walking around. There’s a place down by the river.”
“Fine.”
“You’re not going to hustle me or anything?”
“No.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” I said.
“I’ll bet he’s scared.”
“Who?”
“Mitch.”
“Yeah.”
“Mitch isn’t real tough. That’s why I was surprised he had guts enough to go to Channel Three last night.”
“Why were you there?”
“When I figured out where he’d gone, I just wanted to go and see if he was all right and everything.”
For a time neither of us said anything. Just listened to birds in the trees, to the last bell at St. Michael’s for the day.
“I got some tapes,” she said.
I wanted to get going, but she was so precariously stoned that I didn’t want to alarm her by pushing too hard and too fast.
“What kind of tapes?”
“Of when Stephen was being interviewed about suicide.”
“When he was on TV, you mean?”
She nodded.
“Maybe you’d let me borrow them,” I said.
“If you promise to bring them back.”
“All right.” I put out my hand and touched her on the shoulder. “You need to walk around,” I said.
Maybe because we’re so landlocked out here, maybe that’s why the river plays so important a role in this city. You see people walking the shoreline even when it’s cold enough to wear a winter jacket.
We sat on a park bench that needed to be painted for the new season and looked at a speedboat perform some stunts until a police patrol boat showed up, all harsh white lights and bullhorns, and forced the guy out of the water. There was a good possibility the guy was drunk.
I had bought two big containers of coffee and, at her request, a pack of Winston Lights. She smoked and bit her nails and looked beautiful in a forlorn way.
“Curtis definitely killed him,” she said.
“Killed Stephen Chandler, you mean?”
“Yeah, and when you see the tape you’ll know what I’m talking about. He really forced him to — to talk about things Stephen didn’t want to.”
“Like what?”
“Like about getting somebody pregnant and stuff and not being able to handle it.”
“Stephen had gotten somebody pregnant?”
“Yes,” she said. “Me.”
I just watched her.
“Then Curtis kept pushing him to talk about his old man and how his old man committed suicide.”
“Stephen’s father committed suicide?”
“Yeah. He was in prison and he just couldn’t take it anymore. So one day he drank some bleach and died.”
“Why was he in prison?”
“Killed a guy who’d been sleeping with Stephen’s mother.”
“I see.”
“Kind of low rent. That’s what Stephen always called it. ‘Low rent.’ He was always real ashamed about it. But it was my fault Curtis asked him about it.”
“Your fault?”
“Umm-hmm. Curtis talked to me about Stephen. You know, about how Stephen had tried to kill himself three times in the year before he did the interview. I also told him about Stephen’s father.”
I nodded. Now I was curious about the tapes. “I guess I never understood the circumstances of Stephen’s death. How did he die?”
“OD’d.”
“On what?”
“Smack.”
“How long had he been doing heroin?”
“Maybe six months. He started when he started hanging around the apartment.”
“What apartment?” I asked.
“Downtown.”
“Whose apartment is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re losing me, Diane.” Her vagueness was starting to make me irritable. “Please tell me about the apartment, okay?”
“You getting pissed?”
“No, it’s just my old man’s crankiness.”
She didn’t laugh, of course, because for someone as young as she was, there was no irony in my line. I was indeed, for her, an old man.
“So how about the apartment?” I said.
“Stephen met these guys a while back.”
“What guys?”
“These twins.”
“They have names?” The irritation was back in my voice.
“John and Rick.”
“Last name?”
“I’m not sure. But they’re the reason we broke up, me’n Steve. John and Rick were ‘the good life,’ as Steve always said. I guess I wasn’t. He had money, clothes all of a sudden.”
“What happened when you got pregnant?”
“We found this woman.”
“You mean an abortion?”
“Yeah. This woman. Anyway it didn’t take very long. I think it bothered Steve more than me. He got really fucked up on reds and wine that night and started hitting stuff, you know, pounding his fist into stuff, and he ended up breaking two of his knuckles.”
“What about John and Rick? What do they do?”
“Have a lot of money. That’s all I know.”
“Can you tell me how to get to their apartment?”
“Sure.” She described the place. It was an expensive high-rise building west of a large city park.
“How long did Stephen know them?”
“I’m not sure. Not exactly. He only started talking about them a few months before he died.”
“Didn’t Karl Eler know Steve had become a junkie?”
She laughed unpleasantly. “Karl’s a nice guy, but he should have been a minister. That’s why his old lady up and split. She couldn’t take all his sermons. Anyway, Eler wouldn’t know enough to see that somebody was a junkie, not unless they shot up right in front of him. He’s real naive.”
For now I’d learned enough. Junkies and walking-out wives and men in prison who drank bleach and teenagers who kept trying to kill themselves until they got it done. Sometimes your mind can contain only so much. What’s the Bob Dylan line? I need a dump truck, Mama, to unload my head. I know what he means.
So for a time I just sat and watched the river and tried to imagine what the shores must have looked like in my great-grandfather’s day. There were barges then, headed for the Mississippi, and nearby there had been a dock where kids came to watch the boats. I had seen ink sketches of it all in an old book. The kids in the sketches were immortal, grinning and waving as they would always grin and wave, and the boatmen waved back for all time, too. There had never been a time like that, of course, not really, the human lot being what it is, but it was nice to think otherwise, nice to think that teenage girls hadn’t always been the shambles that Diane Beaufort was.
“He was trying to quit,” she said after a time.
“Stephen?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“A few nights before he died, he snuck into my room — Eler doesn’t want boys and girls in the same room, you know — and he started crying and he told me. He said he’d gone for four days and was going to turn himself into this rehab center.”
“You think he was serious?”
“I know he was.”
“How?”
“He asked me to meet him at this church the next day. I did. We went up to the rail, you know in front of the altar, and we said prayers together. I thought, Whoa, he’s really serious about this.”
“Did he actually go to the center?”
“I think so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Not positive.”
“May I have the name of the center?”
“Sure. The Stillman Center.”
I knew where it was. I watched the river some more but the images of the waving kids and the barges were gone. Now I smelled the factories downriver and watched a nearby robin struggle to fly. Even in the half-light of the moon you could see the damn thing was sick and dying. It would struggle that way for a long time and absolutely nobody would give a shit. Diane started watching it, too. “Poor little thing,” she said. I got up and went over to it and had a closer look to make sure it was sick, and then I raised my heel and crushed its head. When I got back, she was crying.