His eyes were still on the front of the nursing home.
Deep inside the building, the wild old voice I had heard that morning rose again. It faded like the cry of a seabird flying away, intermitted by wind.
“I wish I could stay with Dolly, and protect her,” Alex said.
He was a good boy.
I broached the subject of money. He gave me most of the money in his wallet. I used it to buy an airline ticket to Chicago and return, and caught a late flight from International Airport.
Chapter 19
I left the toll road, which bypassed Bridgeton, and drove my rented car through the blocks of housing tracts on the outskirts of the city. I could see the clump of sawed-off skyscrapers in the business district ahead, and off to the left, across the whole south side, the factories. It was Sunday morning, and only one of their stacks was pouring smoke into the deep blue sky.
I stopped for gas at a service station and looked up Earl Hoffman’s address in the telephone directory. When I asked the attendant how to get to Cherry Street, where Hoffman lived, he pointed in the general direction of the factories.
It was a middle-class street of substantial two-story houses which had been touched but not destroyed by the blight that creeps outward from the centers of cities. Hoffman’s house was of grimy white brick like the others, but the front porch had been painted within living memory. An old Chevrolet coupé stood at the curb in front of it.
The doorbell didn’t work. I knocked on the screen door. An old young man with more nose than chin opened the inner door and looked at me through the screen in a sad way.
“Mr. Haggerty?”
“Yes.”
I told him my name and trade and where I was from. “I was with your wife – your ex-wife – shortly before she was killed.”
“It’s a dreadful thing.”
He stood absently in the doorway, forgetting to ask me in. He had a frowzy sleepless look as if he’d been up most of the night. Though there was no gray on his head, white hairs glistened in his day-old beard. His small eyes had the kind of incandescence that goes with conscious suffering.
“May I come in, Mr. Haggerty?”
“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea. Earl’s pretty broken up.
“I thought he and his daughter had been on the outs for a long time.”
“They were. It only makes it harder for him, I think. When you’re angry with someone you love, you always expect at the back of your mind there’ll be a reconciliation some day. But now there will never be anything.”
He was speaking for his father-in-law but also for himself. His empty hands moved aimlessly at his sides. The fingers of his right hand were stained dark yellow by nicotine.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “that Mr. Hoffman isn’t feeling well. I’m afraid I’ll have to talk to him anyway. I didn’t come from California for the ride.”
“No. Obviously not. What is it you have to discuss with him?”
“His daughter’s murder. He may be able to help me understand it.”
“I thought it was already solved.”
“It isn’t.”
“Has the girl student been cleared?”
“She’s in process of being cleared,” I said with deliberate vagueness. “You and I can go into all that later. Right now I’m very eager to talk to Hoffman.”
“If you insist. I only hope you can get some sense out of him.”
I saw what he meant when he took me through the house to “Earl’s den,” as Haggerty called it. It was furnished with a closed roll-top desk, an armchair, a studio couch. Through a haze compounded of whisky fumes and smoke I could see a big old man sprawled in orange pajamas on the couch, his head propped up by bolsters. A strong reading light shone on his stunned face. His eyes seemed out of focus, but he was holding a magazine with an orange cover that almost matched his pajamas. The wall above him was decorated with rifles and shotguns and hand guns.
“When I recall the loss of all my perished years,” he said huskily.
Old cops didn’t talk like that, and Earl Hoffman looked like no exception to the rule. His body was massive, and could have belonged to a professional football player or a wrestler gone to pot. His nose had once been broken. He had a clipped gray head and a mouth like bent iron.
“That’s beautiful poetry, Bert,” the iron mouth said.
“I suppose it is.”
“Who’s your friend, Bert?”
“Mr. Archer, from California.”
“California, eh? That’s where my poor little Helen got knocked off.”
He sobbed, or hiccuped, once. Then he swung himself onto the edge of the couch, letting his bare feet fall heavily to the floor.
“Do you know – did you know my little daughter Helen?”
“I knew her.”
“Isn’t that remarkable.” He rose swaying and clasped my hands in both of his, using me to support him. “Helen was a remarkable girl. I’ve just been reading over one of her poems. Wrote it when she was just a teen-age girl at City College. Here, I’ll show you.”
He made a fairly elaborate search for the orange-covered magazine, which was lying in plain sight on the floor where he had dropped it. The name of it was the Bridgeton Blazer, and it looked like a school production.
Haggerty picked it up and handed it to him: “Please don’t bother with it, Earl. Helen didn’t write it anyway.”
“Didn’t write it? ’Course she wrote it. It’s got her initials on it.” Hoffman flipped through the pages. “See?”
“But she was only translating from Verlaine.”
“Never heard of him.” Hoffman turned to me, thrusting the magazine into my hands. “Here, read this. See what a remarkable gift poor little Helen had.”
I read:
Hoffman looked at me with one of his unfocused eyes. “Isn’t that beautiful poetry, Mr. Arthur?”
“Beautiful.”
“I only wisht I understood it. Do you understand it?”
“I think so.”
“Then keep it. Keep it in memory of poor little Helen.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Sure you can. Keep it.” He snatched it out of my hands, rolled it up, and and thrust it into my jacket pocket, breathing whisky in my face.
“Keep it,” Haggerty whispered at my shoulder. “You don’t want to cross him.”
“You heard him. You don’t want to cross me.”
Hoffman grinned loosely at me. He clenched his left fist, examined it for defects, then used it to strike himself on the chest. He walked on spraddled legs to the roll-top desk and opened it. There were botfies and a single smeared tumbler inside. He half-filled the tumbler from a fifth of bourbon and drank most of it down. His son-in-law said something under his breath, but made no move to stop him.
The heavy jolt squeezed sweat out on Hoffman’s face. It seemed to sober him a little. His eyes focused on me.
“Have a drink?”
“All right. I’ll take water and ice in mine, please.” I didn’t normally drink in the morning but this was an abnormal occasion.
“Get some ice and a glass, Bert. Mr. Arthur wants a drink. If you’re too mucky-muck to drink with me, Mr. Arthur isn’t.”