I OPENED MY EYES Friday morning, bewildered for an instant before I recalled where I was. I rose, did a few halfhearted stretching exercises. I looked in vain for soap, washcloth, towel. I made do by sponging myself with a handkerchief dipped in water from my corner sink. As promised, it was running water. Cold. But invigorating.
I then dressed. My suit, of course, was badly wrinkled, but that seemed a minor consideration.
The owner-clerk was still in his wire mesh cage, drinking coffee from a cardboard container and reading a copy of Architectural Digest.
“When is checkout time, please?” I asked.
“Every hour on the hour,” he said. “Oh, it’s you. Checkout time for you will be around eight or nine tonight.”
I stepped outside to find the rain had ceased, but the sun was hidden behind an oysterish sky. It put a dull tarnish on the world. I walked a few blocks. It took all my optimism to keep my spirits from drooping: block after block of mean row houses, a few scrubby trees.
I finally found a luncheonette that seemed to be doing a thriving business, went in, and had a reasonably edible breakfast. When I paid my bill, I got directions to Sherman Street.
Sherman Street was absolutely no different from any other in Athens: a solid culvert of row houses, jammed together, all of the same uninspired design, all three stories high, either clapboard or covered with counterfeit brick siding.
I found 113 Sherman Street. I climbed the three steps to the stoop, pushed the bell, heard it ring inside the house, and waited.
The door opened a cautious crack.
“Miss Goldie Knurr?” I asked, taking off my hat.
“I’m not buying anything,” she said sharply.
“I don’t blame you, ma’am,” I said, smiling so widely that my face ached. “Prices being the way they are. But I’m not selling anything. It’s about your brother, Godfrey Knurr.”
The door was flung open.
“He’s dead!” the woman wailed.
“Oh no,” I said hastily. “No, no, no. Nothing like that. I saw him, uh, yesterday, and he’s healthy and, uh, in fine shape.”
“Law,” she said, pressing a fist into her soft bosom, “you gave me such a start. Come in, sir.”
She let me into a hallway, paused to lock, chain, and bolt the door, then turned to face me.
“You saw Godfrey yesterday?” she said in a voice of marvel: Robert Browning asking, “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain…?”
“I did indeed, ma’am.”
“And he’s all right?”
“As far as I could tell, he’s in excellent health. He has a beard now. Did you know?”
“A beard?” she cried. “Think of that! Did he give you a message for me?”
“Ah…no,” I said softly. “But only because I didn’t tell him I was coming to see you. May I tell you about it?”
“Of course you may!” she said loudly, recalling her duties as a hostess with a guest in the house. “Here, let me take your coat and hat, and you come into the parlor and we’ll have a nice chat. A cup of tea? Would you like a nice cup of tea?”
“Thank you, ma’am, but no. I just finished my breakfast.”
I waited while she hung my hat and coat on brass hooks projecting from an oak Victorian rack with a long, silvered mirror, lidded bench, and places for umbrellas with shallow pans to catch the dripping. Then I proffered my business card.
“Leopold Tabatchnick, ma’am,” I said, “of New York. Attorney-at-law.”
“He’s not in any trouble, is he?” she asked anxiously, scarcely glancing at the card.
“None whatsoever,” I assured her, reclaiming my card. “Please let me tell you what this is all about.”
“Oh, law,” she said, pressing a fist into her bosom again, “I’m just so discombobulated. It’s been so long since I’ve heard from Godfrey. Do come in and sit down, Mr.—what was that name?”
“Tabatchnick. Leopold Tabatchnick.”
“Well, you just come in and sit down, Mr. Leopold,” she said, “and tell me what brings you to Gary.”
She led the way into the parlor. There were the bright colors missing from outdoor Gary. Red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, orange, violet: all in chintz run wild. The sofa, chairs, pillows, even the tablecloths were flowers and birds, butterflies and sunrises. Parrots on the rug and peonies in the wallpaper. Everything blazing and crashing. Overstuffed and overwhelming. The room stunned the eye, shocked the senses: a funhouse of snapping hues in prints, stripes, checks, plaids. It was hard to breathe.
Goldie Knurr was just as overstuffed and overwhelming. Not fat, but a big, solid-soft woman, as tall as Godfrey and just as husky. She was dressed for a garden party in a flowing gown of pleats and flounces, all in a print of cherry clumps that made her seem twice as large and twice as imposing.
Sixty-five at least, I guessed, with that rosy, downy complexion some matrons are blessed with: the glow that never disappears until the lid is nailed down. I saw the family resemblance; she had Godfrey’s full, tender lips, his steady, no-nonsense brown eyes, even the masculine cragginess of his features.
Her figure was almost as broad-shouldered as her brother’s, but softened, plumpish. Her hands were chubby. The hair, which might have been a wig—although I suspected she might call it a “transformation”—was bluish-white, elaborately set, and covered with a scarcely discernible net.
She sat me down in an armchair so soft that I felt swallowed. When she came close, I smelled lavender sachet, sweetly cloying. I hoped she wouldn’t take a chair too near, but she did. She sat upright, spine straight, ankles crossed, hands clasped in her lap.
“Yes, Mr. Leopold?” she said, beaming.
“Tabatchnick, ma’am,” I murmured. “Leopold Tabatchnick. Miss Knurr, I represent a legal firm on retainer to the Stilton Foundation of New York. You’ve heard of the Stilton Foundation, of course?”
“Of course,” she said, still beaming. Her voice was warm, burbling, full of aspirates. A very young, hopeful voice.
“Well, as you probably know, the Stilton Foundation makes frequent grants of large sums of money to qualified applicants in the social sciences for projects we feel will benefit humanity. Your brother, the Reverend Godfrey Knurr, has applied for such a grant. He desires to investigate the causes of and cures for juvenile delinquency. He seems well qualified to conduct such a research project, but because the amount of money involved is considerable, we naturally must make every effort to investigate the background, competence, and character of the applicant. And that is why I am here today.”
She was dazzled. I was not sure she had quite understood everything I had thrown at her, but she did grasp the fact that her brother might be granted a great deal of money if this funny little man in the wrinkled suit lost in her best armchair gave him a good report.
“Of course,” she gasped. “Any way I can help…”
“I understand yours was a large family, Miss Knurr. Five children, and—”
“Five happy children,” she interrupted. “And five successful children. Not one of us on welfare!”
“Most commendable,” I murmured. “About Godfrey, could you tell me if—”
“The best,” she said firmly. “Absolutely the best! We all knew it. There was no jealousy, you understand. We were all so proud of him. He was the tallest and strongest and most handsome of the boys. Star of the football team, president of his high school class, captain of me debating team, good marks in every subject. Everyone loved him—and not just the family. Everyone! You’ll find that no one has a bad word to say about Godfrey Knurr. We all knew that he was destined for great things, and that’s just the way it turned out.”
She sat back, smiling, nodding, panting slightly, pleased with the panegyric she had just delivered.
But I couldn’t let it go at that. This was the woman who instinctively suspected sudden death when her brother’s name was first mentioned, who asked if he was in trouble when she learned I was a lawyer, who apparently hadn’t seen or heard from the favored brother in years. It didn’t jibe with the dream she had recalled.
“Then he was never in any, ah, trouble as a boy?”
“Absolutely not!” she said definitely, then decided to amend that. “Oh, there were a few little things you might expect from a high-spirited youngster. But nothing serious, I do assure you.”
“He had friends?”
“Many! Many! Godfrey was very popular.”
“With his teachers as well as his peers?”
“Oh, law, yes,” she said enthusiastically. “He was such a good student, you see. So quick to learn. The other boys, they talked about going into the mills and things like that. But Godfrey would never be satisfied with that. He aimed for higher things. That boy had ambition.”
It was the unreserved love of a sister for a handsome, talented younger brother. I found it hard to break through that worship.
“Miss Knurr,” I said, “about Godfrey’s choice of the ministry as a career—was he very religious as a boy?”
Lucky shot. Up to that point her answers had been prompt and glib. Now she paused before answering. She was obviously giving some thought to framing her reply, and when she spoke the timbre of her voice had changed. I thought her uncertain, if not fearful.
“Well…” she said finally, “ours was a God-fearing family. Church every Sunday morning without fail, I can tell you! I can’t say that Godfrey was any different from the rest of us children as far as religion was concerned. But when he announced he was going to study for the ministry, we were all very happy. Naturally.”
“Naturally,” I said. “And the other boys, Godfrey’s brothers, did they really go into the mills?”
“No,” she said shortly, “they never did. They were both drafted, of course, and Gaylord decided to stay in the army. Gordon owns a gas station in Kentucky.”
“And Godfrey became a minister,” I said encouragingly. “Your church is in the neighborhood?”
“Two blocks south on Versailles Street,” she said, pronouncing it “Ver-sales.” “It’s St. Paul’s. The pastor then was the Reverend Stokes. He’s retired now.”
“And who took his place?” I asked.
“Reverend Dix,” she said stonily. “A black.” Then she brightened. “Would you like to see our family album? Pictures of all of us?” She rose briefly, left the room, and returned with the album. Then she sat down on a posy-covered sofa and motioned me to sit beside her.
What is it about old snapshots that is so sad? Those moments in sunshine caught forever should inspire happiness and fond memories. But they don’t. There is a dread about them. The snapshots of the Knurr family weren’t photographs so much as memento mori.
We finished the album and I turned back to the section devoted to photographs of Godfrey.
“Who is this he’s with?” I pointed at a snapshot of two stalwart youths in football uniforms standing side by side, legs spread, hands on hips. The boy alongside Godfrey Knurr was a black.
“Oh, that’s Jesse Karp,” she said, and I thought she sniffed. “He’s principal of our high school now—would you believe it?”
“They were close friends?”
“Well…they were friends, I guess.”
“And this priest with Godfrey—is he the Reverend Stokes?”
“That’s right. He helped Godfrey get into the seminary. He helped Godfrey in so many ways. The poor man…”
I looked up.
“I thought you said he’s retired?”
“Oh, he is. But doing, ah, poorly.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You’re not planning to talk to him, are you?”
“I wasn’t planning to, no, ma’am.”
“Well, he’s not all there—if you know what I mean.”
“Ah. Too bad. Senile?”
“Not exactly,” she said, examining the pink nails on her plump fingers. “I’m afraid the Reverend Stokes drinks a little more than is good for him.”
“What a shame,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” she said earnestly. “And he was such a fine man. To end his days like that…So if you do talk to him, Mr. Leopold, please keep that in mind.”
“Tabatchnick,” I murmured. “I certainly shall.”
I turned to a page of six snapshots, each showing a young, confident Godfrey with a muscular arm about the shoulders of a different and pretty girl. The posture was possessive.
“He seems to have been popular with girls,” I observed.
“Oh law!” she cried. “You have no idea! Calling him at all hours. Hanging around outside the house. Sending him notes and all. Popular? I should say! No flies on Godfrey Knurr.”
One of the six photos showed Godfrey with a girl shorter and younger than the others. Long, long flaxen hair fell to her waist. Even in the slightly out-of-focus snapshot she looked terribly vulnerable, unbearably fragile. I looked closer. One of her legs was encased in a heavy iron brace.
“Who is this girl?” I asked casually, pointing.
“Her?” Goldie Knurr said too quickly. “Just one of Godfrey’s friends. I don’t recall her name.”
It was the first time she had actually lied to me. She was not a woman experienced in lying, and something happened to her voice; it weakened, became just a bit tremulous.
I closed the album.
“Well!” I said heartily. “That was certainly interesting, and I thank you very much, Miss Knurr, for your kind cooperation. I think I’ve learned what I need.”
“And Godfrey will get the money?” she asked anxiously.
“Oh, that isn’t my decision to make, Miss Knurr. But I’ve certainly discovered nothing today that will rule against it. Thank you for your time and hospitality.”
She helped me on with my coat, handed me my hat, went through the rigmarole of unlocking the door. Just before I left, she said…
“If you see Godfrey again, Mr. Leopold…”
“Yes?”
“Tell him that he owes me a letter,” she said, laughing gaily.
I went next to McKinley High School. It occupied an entire block with its playgrounds and basketball courts. As I marched up the front steps, the plate glass door opened and a black security guard, uniformed and armed with a nightstick, came out to confront me.
“Yes?” he said.
“Could you tell me if Mr. Jesse Karp is principal of this school?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“I’d like to talk to him if I could.”
“You have an appointment?”
“No, I don’t,” I admitted.
“Better call or write for an appointment,” he advised. “Then they know you’re coming—see? And you go right in.”
“This is about the record of a former student of McKinley High,” I said desperately. “Couldn’t you ask?”
He stared at me. Sometimes it’s an advantage to be diminutive; I obviously represented no threat to him.
“I’ll call up,” he said. “You stay here.”
He went back inside, used a small telephone fixed to the wall. He was out again in a moment.
“They say to write a letter,” he reported. “Records of former students will be forwarded—if you have a good reason for wanting them. Please enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope.”
I sighed.
“Look,” I said, “I know this is an imposition and I apologize for it. But could you make another call? Please? Try to talk to Mr. Karp or his assistant or his secretary. The student I want to ask about is Godfrey Knurr. That’s K-n-u-r-r. I’d like to talk to Mr. Karp personally about Godfrey Knurr. Please try just one more time.”
“Oh man,” he said, “you’re pushing it.”
“If they say no, then I’ll go away and write a letter. I promise.”
He took a deep breath, then made up his mind and went back to the inside telephone. This time the conversation took longer and I could see him waiting as he was switched from phone to phone. Finally he hung up and came out to me.
“Looks like you clicked,” he said.
A few moments later, through the glass door, I saw a tall skinny lady striding toward us. The guard opened the door to let me enter just as she came up.
“To see Mr. Karp?” she snapped.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, taking off my hat. “I’d like to—”
“Follow me,” she commanded.
The guard winked and I trailed after that erect spine down a waxed linoleum corridor and up two flights of stairs. Not a word was spoken. From somewhere I heard a ragged chorus of young voices singing “Frère Jacques.”
We entered a large room with a frosted glass door bearing the legend: PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE. My conductress led the way past three secretaries, typing away like mad, and ushered me to the doorway of an inner office. The man inside, standing behind a desk piled high with ledgers and papers, looked up slowly.
“Mr. Karp?” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “And you?”
I had my business card ready.
“Leopold Tabatchnick, sir,” I sang out. “Attorney-at-law. New York City.”
He took the proffered card, inspected it closely. “And you want information about Godfrey Knurr?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
I launched into the Stilton Foundation spiel. Through it all he stared at me steadily. Then he said:
“He’s in trouble, isn’t he?”
I almost collapsed. But I should have known it had to happen eventually. “Yes,” I said, nodding dumbly, “he’s in trouble.”
“Bad?”
“Bad enough,” I said.
“Had to happen,” he said.
He went to the door of his office and closed it. He took my hat and coat, hung them on an old-fashioned bentwood coat tree. He gestured me to the worn oak armchair, then sat down in a creaking swivel chair behind his jumbled desk. He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head, and regarded me gravely.
“What’s your real name?” he asked.
I decided to stop playing games.
“Joshua Bigg,” I said. “I’m not a lawyer, but I really do work for that legal firm on the card. I’m the Chief Investigator.”
“Chief Investigator,” he repeated, nodding. “Must be important to send you all the way out from New York. What’s the problem with Godfrey Knurr?”
“Uh, it involves women.”
“It would,” he said. “And money?”
“Yes,” I said, “and money. Mr. Karp, if you insist, I will tell you in detail what the Reverend Godfrey Knurr is implicated in, and what he is suspected of having done. But, because of the laws of slander, I’d rather not. He has not been charged with any crimes. As yet.”
“Crimes?” he echoed. “It’s come to that, has it? No, Mr. Bigg, I really don’t want to know. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t serious. Well…what can I tell you?”
“Anything about the man that will help me understand him.”
“Understand Godfrey Knurr?” he said, with a hard grin that had no mirth to it. “No way! Besides, I can’t tell you about the man. We lost touch when he went away to the seminary.”
“And you haven’t seen him since?”
“Once,” he said. “When he came back to visit his sister years and years ago. He looked me up and we had a few drinks together. It was not what you’d call a joyous reunion.”
“Well, can you tell me about the boy? Maybe it would help me understand what he’s become.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Mr. Bigg, when my family came up here from Mississippi, we were one of the first colored families in the neighborhood. It wasn’t easy, I do assure you. But my daddy and older brothers got jobs in the mills, so we were eating. That was something. They put me in grade school here. Mostly Irish, Polish, and Ukrainian kids. I was the only black in my class. It would have been worse if it hadn’t been for Godfrey Knurr.”
I must have looked surprised.
“Oh yes,” he said. “He saved my ass more than once, I do assure you. This was in the eighth grade, and he was the biggest, strongest, smartest, best-looking boy in school. The teachers loved him. Girls followed him down the street, passed him notes, gave him me cookies they baked in home economics class. I guess you could say he was the school hero.”
“Is that how you saw him?”
“Oh yes,” he said seriously, “I do assure you. He was my hero, too. Protected me. Showed me around. Took me under his wing, you might say. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world to have a friend like Godfrey Knurr. I worshiped him.”
“And then…?” I asked.
“Then we went to high school together—right here in dear old McKinley—and Godfrey began to call in my markers. Do you know what that means?”
“I know.”
“It started gradually. Like we’d have to turn in a theme, and he’d ask me to write one for him because he had put it off to the last minute and he wanted to take a girl to the movies. He was something with the girls. Or maybe we’d be taking a math test, and he’d make sure to sit next to me so that I could slip him the answers if he got stuck.”
“I thought you said he was smart?”
“He was. The smartest. If he had applied himself, and studied, he could have sailed through high school, just sailed, and ended up first in his class. But he had no discipline. There were always a dozen things he’d rather be doing man homework—mooning around with girls, playing a game of stickball in a vacant lot, going into Chicago to see a parade—whatever. So he began to lean on me more and more until I was practically carrying him.”
“You didn’t object to this?”
Jesse Karp swung his creaking swivel chair around until he was looking out a window. I saw him in profile. A great brown bald dome. A hard, brooding expression.
“I didn’t object,” he said in a rumbling, ponderous voice. “At first. But then I began to grow up. Physically, I mean. I really sprouted. In the tenth grade alone I put on four inches and almost thirty pounds. After a while I was as tall as Godfrey, as strong, and I was faster. Also, I was getting wiser. I realized how he was using me. I still went along with him, but it bothered me. I didn’t want to get caught helping him cheat. I didn’t want to lie for him anymore. I didn’t want to do his homework or lend him my notes or write his themes. I began to resent his demands.”
“Do you think…” I said hesitantly, “do you think that when you first came up here from the south, and he took you under his wing, as you said, do you think that right from the start, the both of you just kids, that he saw someone he could use? Maybe not right then, but in the future?”
Jesse Karp swung around to face me, to stare at me somberly.
“You weren’t raised to be an idiot, were you?” he said. “I gave that question a lot of thought, and yes, I think he did exactly that. He had a gift—if you can call it that—of selecting friends he could use. If not immediately, then in the future. He banked people. Just like a savings account that he could draw on when he was in need. It hurt me when I realized it. Now, after all these years, it still hurts. I thought he liked me. For myself, I mean.”
“He probably did,” I assured him. “Probably in his own mind he doesn’t know the difference. He only likes people he can use. The two are inseparable.”
“What you’re saying is that he’s not doing it deliberately? That he’s not consciously plotting?”
“I think it’s more like an instinct.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Anyway, after I realized what he was doing, I decided against a sudden break. I didn’t want to confront him or fight him or anything like that. But I gradually cooled it, gradually got out from under.”
“How did he take that?”
“Just fine. We stayed friends, I do assure you. But he got the message. Stopped asking me to do his themes and slip him the answers on exams. It didn’t make any difference. By that time he had a dozen other close friends, some boys but mostly girls, who were delighted to help him. He had so much charm. Even as a boy, he had so damned much charm, you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’d believe,” I said. “He’s still got it.”
“Yes? Well, in our senior year, a couple of things happened that made me realize he was really bad news. He had a job for an hour after school every day working in a local drugstore. Jerking sodas and making deliveries—like that. He worked for maybe a month and then he was canned. There were rumors that he had been caught dipping into the till. That may or may not have been true. Knowing Godfrey, I’d say it was probably true. Then, we were both on the high school football team. Competitors, you might say, because we both wanted to play quarterback, although sometimes the coach played us both at the same time with one of us at halfback. But still, we both wanted to call the plays. Anyway, in our last season, three days before the big game with Edison High, someone pushed me down the cement steps to the locker room. I never saw who did it, so I can’t swear to it, but I’ll go to my grave believing it was Godfrey Knurr. All I got out of it, thank God, was a broken ankle.”
“But he played quarterback in the big game?”
“That’s right.”
“Did McKinley High win?”
“No,” Jesse Karp said with grim satisfaction, “we lost.”
“And who ended up first in the class? Scholastically?”
“I did,” he said. “But I do assure you, if Godfrey Knurr had applied himself, had shown some discipline, there is no way I could have topped him. He was brilliant. No other word for it; he was just brilliant.”
“What does he want!” I cried desperately. “Why does he do these things? What’s his motive?”
The principal fiddled with an ebony letter opener on his desk, looking down at it, turning it this way and that.
“What does he want?” he said ruminatively. “He wants money and beautiful women and the good things of this world. You and I probably want exactly the same, but Godfrey wants them the easy way. For him, that means a kind of animal force. Rob a drugstore cash register. Push a competitor down a flight of cement steps. Make love to innocent women so they’ll do what you want. What you need. He goes bulling his way through life, all shoulders and elbows. And God help you if you get in his way. He has a short fuse—did you know that? A really violent temper. He learned to keep it under control, but I once saw what he did to a kid in scrimmage. This kid had made Godfrey look bad on a pass play. The next time we had a pileup, I saw Godfrey go after him. It was just naked violence; that’s the only way I can describe it. Really vicious stuff. That kid was lucky to come out alive.”
I was silent, thinking of Solomon Kipper and Professor Yale Stonehouse. They hadn’t come out of the pileup.
“What does he want?” Jesse Karp repeated reflectively. “I’ll tell you something odd. When Godfrey and I were kids, almost everyone collected baseball cards. You know—those pictures of players you got in a package of bubblegum. Godfrey never collected them. You know what he saved? He showed me his collection once. Models and movie stars. Yachts and mansions. Jewelry and antiques. Paintings and sculpture. He wanted to own it all.”
“The American dream?” I asked.
“Well…” he said, “maybe. But skewed. Gone bad. He wanted it all right now.”
“Why did he go into the ministry?” I asked.
He lifted his eyes to stare at me. “Why do you think?”
“To avoid the draft?”
“That’s my guess,” Jesse Karp said, shrugging. “I could be wrong.”
“Was Knurr ever married?”
“Not to my knowledge,” he said too quickly.
“I understand there is a Reverend Stokes who helped him?”
“That’s right. The Reverend Ludwig Stokes. He’s retired now.”
“Goldie Knurr hinted that he’s fuddled, that he drinks too much.”
“He’s an old, old man,” Jesse Karp said stonily. “He’s entitled.”
“Could you tell me where I might find him?”
“The last I heard he was living in a white frame house two doors south of St. Paul’s on Versailles.”
He glanced obviously at his wristwatch and I rose immediately to my feet. I thanked him for his kind cooperation. He helped me on with my coat and walked me to the door.
“I’ll let you know how it all comes out,” I told him.
“Don’t bother,” he said coldly. “I really don’t want to know.”
I was saddened by the bitterness in his voice. It had all happened so many years ago, but he still carried the scars. He had been duped and made a fool of. He had thought he had a friend who liked him for what he was. The friend had turned out to be just another white exploiter. I wondered how that discovery had changed Jesse Karp’s life.
At the doorway, I thought of something else and turned to him.
“Do you remember a girl Knurr dated, probably in high school—a short, lovely girl with long blonde hair? She had a heavy metal brace on one leg. Maybe polio.”
He stared at me, through me, his high brow rippling.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “I do remember. She limped badly. Very slender.”
“Fragile looking,” I said. “Wistful.”
“Yes, I remember. But I can’t recall her name. Wait a minute.”
He went back to the glass-enclosed bookcase set against the far wall. He opened one of the shelf doors, searched, withdrew a volume bound in maroon. Plastic stamped to look like leather.
“Our yearbook,” he said, smiling shyly. “The year Godfrey and I graduated. I still keep it.”
I liked him very much then.
I stood at his side as he balanced the wide volume atop the mess at his desk and flipped through the pages rapidly. He found the section with small, individual photographs of graduating seniors, head-and-shoulder shots. Then Jesse Karp turned the pages slowly, a broad forefinger running down the columns of pictures, names, school biographies.
“Here I am,” he said laughing. “God, what a beast!”
I leaned to look: Jesse Karp, not a beast, but an earnest, self-conscious kid in a stiff white collar and a tie in a horrendous pattern. Most of the other boys were wearing suit jackets, but Karp wasn’t. I didn’t remark on it.
“Not so bad,” I said, looking at the features not yet pulled with age. “You look like it was the most solemn moment of your life.”
“It was,” he said, staring down at the book. “I was the first of my family to be graduated from high school. It was something. And here’s Godfrey.”
Directly below Karp’s photograph was that of Knurr, wearing a sharply patterned sport jacket. He was smiling at the camera, his chin lifted. Handsome, strong, arrogant. A Golden Boy. He had written an inscription in the yearbook directly below Karp’s biography: “To Jesse, my very best friend ever. Godfrey Knurr.” I guessed he had written that same sentiment in many McKinley High yearbooks.
Each student had a pithy motto or prediction printed in italic type below his biography. Jesse Karp’s said: A slow but sure winner.
Godfrey Knurr’s was: We’ll be hearing of him for many years to come.
The principal continued flipping through the pages of stamp-sized portraits. Finally his finger stopped.
“This one?” he said, looking at me.
I glanced down. It was the same girl I had seen in Goldie
Knurr’s photo album. The same pale gold beauty, the same soft vulnerability.
“Yes,” I said, reading her name. “Sylvia Wiesenfeld. Do you know anything about her?”
He closed the yearbook with his two hands, slapping the volume with what I thought was unusual vehemence. He went back to the bookcase to restore the book to its place and close the glass door.
“Why are you asking about her?” he demanded, his back to me. I thought something new had come into his voice: a note of hostility.
“Just curious,” I said. “She’s so beautiful.”
“Her father owned a drugstore,” he said grudgingly. “He’s dead now—the father. I don’t know what happened to her.”
“Was this the drugstore where Godfrey Knurr worked after school?”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
He insisted on personally accompanying me through the outer offices, down the hallways and staircases to the front entrance of McKinley High School. I didn’t know if he was being polite or wanted to make certain I didn’t loiter about the premises.
I thanked him again for his kindness and he sent me on my way. He didn’t exactly push me out the door, but he made certain I exited. I didn’t think he regretted what he had told me about Godfrey Knurr. I thought he was ashamed and angry at what he had revealed about himself. I had set the old wounds throbbing.
On the sidewalk, I turned and looked back at the high school, a pile of red brick so ugly it was impressive. I had brief and sententious thoughts of the thousands—maybe millions!—of young students who had walked those gloomy corridors, sat at those worn desks, who had laughed, wept, frolicked, and discovered despair.
I found the white frame house two doors south of St. Paul’s on Versailles Street. Perhaps it had once been white, but now it was a powdery gray, lashed by rain and wind, scoured by the sun. It looked at the world with blind eyes: uncurtained windows with torn green shades drawn at various levels. The cast-iron fence was rusted, the tiny front yard scabby with refuse. It was a sad, sad habitation for a retired preacher, and I could only wonder how his parishioners could allow their former pastor’s home to fall into such decrepitude.
I went cautiously up the front steps and searched for a bell. There was none, although I discovered four stained screwholes in the doorjamb, a larger drilled hole in the middle, and the faint scarred mark of a square enclosing them all. Apparently a bell had once existed but had been removed.
I rapped sharply on the peeling door and waited. No answer. I knocked again. Still no reply.
“Keep trying,” someone called in a cackling voice. “He’s in there all right.”
I turned. On the sidewalk was an ancient black man wearing a holey wool cap and fingerless gloves. He seemed inordinately swollen until I realized he was wearing at least three coats and what appeared to be several sweaters and pairs of trousers. He was pushing a splintered baby carriage filled with newspapers and bottles, cans, an old coffee percolator, tattered magazines, two bent umbrellas, and other things.
“Is this the home of the Reverend Stokes?” I asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” he said, nodding vigorously and showing a mouthful of yellow stumps. “What you do is you keep pounding. He’s in there all right. He don’t never go out now. Just keep pounding and pounding. He’ll come to the door by and by.”
“Thank you,” I called, but he was already shuffling down the street, a strange apparition.
So I pounded and pounded on that weathered door. It seemed at least five minutes before I heard a quavery voice from inside: “Who is there?”
“Reverend Stokes?” I shouted. “Could I speak to you for a moment, sir? Please?”
There was a long pause and I thought I had lost him. But then I heard the sounds of a bolt being drawn, the door unlocked. It swung open.
I was confronted by a wild bird of a man. In his late seventies, I guessed. He was actually a few inches taller than I, but his clothes seemed too big for him so he appeared to have shrunk, in weight and height, to a frail diminutiveness.
His hair was an uncombed mess of gray feathers, and on his hollow cheeks was at least three days’ growth of beard: a whitish plush. His temples were sunken, the skin on his brow so thin and transparent that I could see the course of blood vessels. Rheumy eyes tried to stare at me, but the focus wavered. The nose was a bone.
He was wearing what had once been a stylish velvet smoking jacket, but now the nap was worn down to the backing, and the elbows shone greasily. Beneath the unbuttoned jacket was a soiled blue workman’s shirt, tieless, the collar open to reveal a scrawny chicken neck. His creaseless trousers were some black, glistening stuff, with darker stains and a tear in one knee. His fly was open. He was wearing threadbare carpet slippers, the heels broken and folded under. His bare ankles were not clean.
I was standing outside on the porch, he inside the house. Yet even at that distance I caught the odor: of him, his home, or both. It was the sour smell of unwashed age, of mustiness, spilled liquor, unmade beds and unaired linen, and a whiff of incense as rancid as all the rest.
“Reverend Stokes?” I asked.
The bird head nodded, pecking forward.
“My name is Joshua Bigg,” I said briskly. “I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’d just like to talk to you for a few minutes, sir.”
“About what?” he asked. The voice was a creak.
“About a former parishioner of yours, now an ordained minister himself. Godfrey Knurr.”
What occurred next was totally unexpected and unnerving.
“Nothing happened!” he screamed at me and reached to slam the door in my face. But a greenish pallor suffused his face, his hand slipped down the edge of the door, and he began to fall, to sag slowly downward, his bony knees buckling, shoulders slumping, the old body folding like a melted candle.
I sprang forward and caught him under the arms. He weighed no more than a child, and I was able to support him while I kicked the door shut with my heel. Then I half-carried, half-dragged him back into that dim, malodorous house.
I pulled him into a room that had obviously once been an attractive parlor. I put him down on a worn chesterfield, the brown leather now crackled and split. I propped his head on one of the armrests and lifted his legs and feet so he lay flat.
I straightened up, breathing through my mouth so I didn’t have to smell him or the house. I stared down at him, hands on my hips, puzzling frantically what to do.
His eyes were closed, his respiration shallow but steady. I thought his face was losing some of that greenish hue that had frightened me. I decided not to call the police or paramedics. I took off my hat and coat and placed them gingerly on a club chair with a brown corduroy slipcover discolored with an enormous red stain on the seat cushion. Wine or blood.
I wandered back into the house. I found a small kitchen from which most of the odors seemed to be emanating. And no wonder; it was a swamp. I picked a soiled dishtowel off the floor and held it under the cold water tap in the scummed sink. Pipes knocked, the water ran rusty, then cleared, and I soaked the towel, wrung it out, soaked it again, wrung it out again.
I carried it back to the parlor. I pulled a straight chair alongside the chesterfield. I sat down and bent over the Reverend Stokes. I wiped his face gently with the dampened towel. His eyes opened suddenly. He stared at me dazedly. His eyes were spoiled milk, curdled and cloudy.
A clawed hand came up and pushed the towel aside. I folded it and laid it across his parchment brow. He let me do that and let the towel remain.
“I fainted?” he said in a wispy voice.
“Something like that,” I said, nodding. “You started to go down. I caught you and brought you in here.”
“In the study,” he whispered, “across the hall, a bottle of whiskey, a half-filled glass. Bring them in here.”
I looked at him, troubled.
“Please,” he breathed.
I went into the study, a shadowed chamber littered with books, journals, magazines: none of them new. The room was dominated by a large walnut desk topped with scarred and ripped maroon leather. The whiskey and glass were on the desk. I took them and started out.
On a small marble-topped smoking stand near the door was a white plaster replica of Michelangelo’s “David.” It was the only clean, shining, lovely object I had seen in that decaying house. I had seen nothing of a religious nature—no pictures, paintings, icons, statuary, crucifixes, etc.
I brought him the whiskey. He raised a trembly hand and I held the glass to his lips. He gulped greedily and closed his eyes. After a moment he opened his eyes again, flung the towel from his brow onto the floor. He took the glass from my hand. Our fingers touched. His skin had the chill of death.
“There’s another glass,” he said. “In the kitchen.”
His voice was stronger but it still creaked. It had an unused sound: harsh and croaky.
“Thank you, no,” I said. “It’s a little early for me.”
“Is it?” he said without interest.
I sat down in the straight chair again and watched him finish the tumbler of whiskey. He filled it again from the bottle on the floor. I didn’t recognize the label. It looked like a cheap blend.
“You told me your name?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Joshua Bigg.”
“Now I remember. Joshua Bigg. I don’t recognize you, Mr. Bigg. Where are you from?”
“New York City, sir.”
“New York,” he repeated, and then with a pathetic attempt at gaiety, he said, “East Side, West Side, all around the town.”
He tried to smile at me. When his thin, whitish lips parted, I could see his stained dentures. His gums seemed to have shrunk, for the false teeth fitted loosely and he had to clench his jaws frequently to jam them back into place. It was like a pained grimace.
“I was in New York once,” he said dreamily. “Years and years ago. I went to the theatre. A musical play. What could it have been? I’ll remember in a moment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what brings you to our fair city, Mr. Bigg?”
I was afraid of saying the name again. I feared he might have the same reaction. But I had to try it.
“I wanted to talk to you about the Reverend Godfrey Knurr, Pastor,” I said softly.
His eyes closed again. “Godfrey Knurr?” Stokes repeated. “No, I can’t recall the name. My memory…”
I wasn’t going to let him get away with that.
“It’s odd you shouldn’t remember,” I said. “I spoke to his sister, Miss Goldie Knurr, and she told me you helped him get into the seminary, that you helped him in so many ways. And I saw a photograph of you with young Godfrey.”
Suddenly he was crying. It was awful. Cloudy tears slid from those milky eyes. They slipped sideways into his sunken temples, then into his feathered hair.
“Is he dead?” he gasped.
First Goldie Knurr and now the Reverend Stokes. Was the question asked hopefully? Did they wish him dead?
I turned my eyes away, not wanting to sit there and watch this shattered man weep. After a while I heard him snuffle a few times and take a gulp from the glass he held on his thin chest. Then I looked at him again.
“No, sir,” I said, “he is not dead. But he’s in trouble, deep trouble. I represent a legal firm. A client intends to bring very serious charges against the Reverend Knurr. I am here to make a preliminary investigation…”
My voice trailed away; he wasn’t listening to me. His lips were moving and I leaned close to hear what he was saying.
“Evil,” the Reverend Ludwig Stokes was breathing. “Evil, evil, evil, evil…”
I sat back. It seemed a hopeless task to attempt to elicit information from this old man. Goldie Knurr had been right; he was fuddled.
But then he spoke clearly and intelligibly.
“Do you know him?” he asked. “Have you seen him?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I spoke to him yesterday. He seems to be in good health. He has a beard now. He runs a kind of social club in Greenwich Village for poor boys and he also counsels individual, uh, dependents. Mostly wealthy women.”
His face twisted and he clenched his jaw to press his dentures back into place. A thin rivulet of whiskey ran from the corner of his mouth and he wiped it away slowly with the back of one hand.
“Wealthy women,” he repeated, his voice dull. “Yes, yes, that would be Godfrey.”
“Reverend Stokes,” I said, “I’m curious as to why Knurr selected the ministry as his career. I can find nothing in his boyhood that indicates any great religiosity.” I paused, stared at him. “Was it to avoid the draft?” I asked bluntly.
“Partly that,” he said in a low voice. “If his family had had the money, he would have wished to go to a fashionable eastern college. That was his preference, but it was impossible. Even I didn’t have that kind of money.”
“He asked for it? From you?”
He didn’t answer.
“I understand he had good marks in high school,” I went on. “Perhaps he could have obtained a scholarship, worked to help support himself?”
“It wasn’t his way,” he said.
“Then he could have gone to a low-tuition, state-supported college. Why the ministry?”
“Opportunity,” the Reverend Stokes said without expression.
“Opportunity?” I echoed. “To save souls? I can’t believe that of Godfrey Knurr. And surely not the monetary rewards of being an ordained minister.”
“Opportunity,” he repeated stubbornly. “That’s how he saw it.”
I thought about that, trying to see it as a young ambitious Godfrey Knurr had.
“Wealthy parishioners?” I guessed. “Particularly wealthy female parishioners? Maybe widows and divorcées? Was that how his mind worked?”
Again he didn’t answer. He emptied the bottle into his tumbler and drained it in two gulps.
“There’s another in the kitchen,” he told me. “In the cupboard under the sink.”
I found the bottle. I also found a reasonably clean glass for myself and rinsed it several times, scrubbing the inside with my fingers. I brought bottle and glass back to the parlor, sat down again, and poured him half a tumbler and myself a small dollop.
“Your health, sir,” I said, raising my glass. I barely wet my lips.
“He was a handsome boy?” I asked, coughing. “Godfrey Knurr?”
He made a sound.
“Yes,” he said in his creaky voice, “very handsome. And strong. A beautiful boy. Physically.”
I caught him up on that.
“Physically?” I said. “But what of his personality, his character?”
Another of his maddening silences.
“Charm,” he said, then buried his nose in his glass. After he swallowed he repeated, “Charm. A very special charm. There was a golden glow about him.”
“He must have been very popular,” I said, hoping to keep his reminiscences flowing.
“You had to love him,” he said, sighing. “In his presence you felt happy. More alive. He promised everything.”
“Promised?” I said, not understanding.
“I felt younger,” he said, voice low. “More hopeful. Life seemed brighter. Just having him near.”
“Did he ever visit you here, in your home?”
Again he began to weep, and I despaired of learning anything of significance from this riven man.
I waited until his eyes stopped leaking. This time he didn’t bother wiping the tears away. The wet glistened like oil on his withered face. He drank deeply, finished his whiskey. His trembling hand pawed feebly for the full bottle on the floor. I served him. I had never before seen a man drink with such maniacal determination, as if unconsciousness could not come soon enough.
He lay there, wax fingers clamped around the glass on his bony chest. He stared unblinking at the ceiling. I felt I was sitting up with a corpse, waiting for the undertaker’s men to come and take their burden away.
“I understand he was in trouble as a boy,” I continued determinedly. “In a drugstore where he worked. He was accused of stealing.”
“He made restitution,” the old man said, his thin lips hardly moving. “Paid it all back.”
“You gave him the money for that?” I guessed.
I hardly heard his faint, “Yes.” Then…
“I gave him so much!” he howled in a voice so loud it startled me. “Not only money, but myself. I gave him myself! I taught him about poetry and beauty. Love. He said he understood, but he didn’t. He was playing with me. He teased me. All the time he was teasing me, and it gave him pleasure.”
I felt suddenly ill as I began to glimpse the proportions of this tragedy. Now I could understand that screeched, “Nothing happened!” And the statue of David. And the whispered, “Evil, evil, evil…”
“You loved him?” I asked gently.
“So much,” he said in a harrowed voice. “So much…”
He lifted his head to drain his tumbler, then held it out to me in a quavery hand. I filled it without compunction.
“You never married, Reverend?” I asked.
“No. Never.” He was staring at the ceiling again, seeing things that weren’t there.
“Did you tell Godfrey how you felt about him?”
“He knew.”
“And?”
“He used me. Used me! Laughing. The devil incarnate. All I saw was the golden glow. And then the darkness beneath.”
“Knowing that, Pastor, why did you help him become a man of God?”
“Weakness. I did not have the strength of soul to withstand him. He threatened me.”
“Threatened you? How? You said that nothing happened.”
“Nothing did. But I had written him. Notes. Poems. They would have ruined me. The church…”
Notes again. I was engulfed in notes, false and true…
I took a deep breath, trying to comprehend the extent of such perfidy. The pattern of Godfrey Knurr’s life was becoming plainer. An ambition too large for his discipline to contain was the motive for trading on his charm. He moved grinning from treachery to treachery, leaving behind him a trail of scars, wounds, broken lives.
And finally, I was convinced, two murders that meant no more to him than a rifled cash register or this betrayed wreck of a man.
“So you did whatever he demanded?” I said, nailing it down. “Got him out of scrapes, got him into the seminary? Gave him money?”
“All,” he said. “All. I gave him everything. My soul. My poor little shriveled soul.”
His words “shriveled soul” came out slurred and garbled, almost lost between his whiskey-loosened tongue and those ill-fitting dentures. I did not think he was far from the temporary oblivion he sought.
“Sylvia Wiesenfeld,” I said. “You knew her?”
He didn’t answer.
“You did,” I told him. “Her father owned the drugstore where Godfrey stole the money. A lovely girl. So vulnerable. So willing. I saw her picture. Did she love Godfrey, too?”
His eyes were closed again. But his lips were moving faintly, fluttering. I rose, bent over him, put my ear close to his mouth, as if trying to determine if a dying man still breathed.
“What?” I said sharply. “I didn’t hear that. Please repeat it.”
This time I heard.
“I married them,” he said.
I straightened up, took a deep breath. I looked down at the shrunken, defenseless hulk. All I could think of was: Godfrey Knurr did that.
I took the whiskey glass from his strengthless fingers and set it on the floor alongside the couch. He seemed to be breathing slowly but regularly. The tears had dried on his face, but whitish matter had collected in the corners of his eyes and mouth. Occasionally his body twitched, little moans escaped his lips like gas released from something corrupt.
I wandered about the lower floor of the house. I found a knitted afghan in the hall closet, brought it back to the parlor, and covered the Reverend Ludwig Stokes, a bright shroud for a gray man.
Then I went back into his study and poked about. I finally found a telephone directory in the lowest drawer of the old walnut desk. There was an S. Wiesenfeld on Sherman Street, not too far from the home of Goldie Knurr. It seemed strange that such tumultuous events had occurred in such a small neighborhood.
The woman who answered my ring was certainly not Sylvia Wiesenfeld; she was a gargantuan black woman, not so tall but remarkable in girth. Her features, I thought, might be pleasant in repose, but when she opened the door, she was scowling and banging an iron frying pan against one redwood thigh. She looked down at me.
“We ain’t buying,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not selling anything,” I hurriedly assured her. “My name is Joshua Bigg. I represent a legal firm in New York City. I’ve been sent out to make inquiries into the background of Godfrey Knurr. I was hoping to have a few minutes’ conversation with Miss Wiesenfeld.”
She looked at me suspiciously.
“You who?” she said. “You New York folks talk so fast.”
“Joshua Bigg,” I answered slowly. “That’s my name. I’m trying to obtain information about Godfrey Knurr. I’d like to talk to Sylvia Wiesenfeld for a few moments.”
“You the law?” she demanded.
“No,” I said, “not exactly. I represent attorneys who, in turn, represent a client who is bringing suit against the Reverend Godfrey Knurr. I’m just making a preliminary investigation, that’s all.”
“You going to hang him?” she demanded. “I hope.”
I tried to smile.
“Well…ah…” I said, “I’m sure our client would like to. May I speak to Miss Wiesenfeld for a few moments?”
She glared at me, making up her mind. That heavy cast-iron frying pan kept banging against her bulging thigh. I was very conscious of it.
“Well…” she said finally, “all right.” Then she added fiercely, “You get my honey upset, I break yo’ ass!”
“No, no,” I said hastily, “I won’t upset her, I promise.”
She stared down at me again.
“You and me,” she said menacingly, “we come to it, I figure I come out on top.”
“Absolutely,” I assured her. “No doubt about it. I’ll behave; I really will.”
Suddenly she grinned: a marvelous human grin of warmth and understanding.
“I do believe,” she said. “Come on in, lawyer-man.”
She led me into a neat entrance hall, hung my coat and hat on an oak hall rack exactly like the one in Miss Goldie Knurr’s home.
“May I know your name, please, ma’am?” I asked her.
“Mrs. Harriet Lee Livingston,” she said in a rich contralto voice. “I makes do for Miz Sylvia.”
“How long have you been with her?”
“Longer than you been breathin’,” she said.
The enormous bulk of the woman was awesome. That had to be the largest behind I had ever seen on a human being, and the other parts of her were in proportion: arms and legs like waists, and a neck that seemed as big around as her head.
But her features were surprisingly clear and delicate, with slanty eyes, a nice mouth, and a firm chin that had a deep cleft precisely in the center. You could have inserted a dime in that cleft. Her hands and feet were unexpectedly dainty, and she moved lightly, with grace.
Her color was a briar brown. She wore a voluminous shift, a shapeless tent with pockets. It was a kaleidoscope of hues: splashes of red, yellow, purple, blue, green—all in a jangling pattern that dazzled the eye.
“You stand right here,” she said sternly. “Right on this spot. I’ll tell Miz Sylvia she’s got a visitor. I takes you in without warning, she’s liable to get upset.”
“I won’t move,” I promised.
She opened sliding wooden doors, squeezed through, closed the two doors behind her. I hadn’t seen doors like that since I left my uncle’s home in Iowa. They were paneled, waxed to a high gloss, fitted with brass hardware: amenities of a bygone era.
The doors slid open again and Mrs. Livingston beckoned me forward.
“Speak nice,” she whispered.
“I will,” I vowed.
“I be right here to make sure you do,” she said grimly.
The woman facing me from across the living room was small, slight, with long silvered blonde hair giving her a girlish appearance, although I knew she had to be at least forty. I could not see a leg brace; she wore a collarless gown of bottle-green velvet, a lounging or hostess gown, that fell to her ankles.
She was a thin little thing, still with that look of tremulous vulnerability that had caught my eye in the photos in the Knurr family album and Jesse Karp’s yearbook. She seemed physically frail, or at least fragile, with narrow wrists, a white stalk of a neck, a head that appeared to be pulled backward, chin uptilted, by the weight of her hair.
She had a luminous quality: pale complexion, big eyes of bluish-green (they looked like agates), and lips sweetly bowed. I saw no wrinkles, no crow’s feet, no furrows—nothing in her face to mark the passage of years. If she had been wounded, it did not show. The smooth brow was serene, the dim smile placid.
But there was a dissonance about her that disturbed. She seemed removed. The lovely eyes were vacant, or focused on something no one else could see. That half-smile was, I soon realized, her normal expression; it meant nothing.
I recognized Ophelia, looking for her stream.
“Mr. Bigg?” she said. Her voice was young, utterly without timbre. A child’s voice.
“Miss Wiesenfeld,” I said, bowing, “I know this is an intrusion, and I appreciate your willingness to grant me a few moments of your time.”
“Oh la!” she said with a giggling laugh. “How pretty you do talk. Doesn’t he talk pretty, Harriet?”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Livingston said heavily. “Pretty. Mr. Bigg, you sit in that armchair there. I sits on the couch here. Honey, you want to rest yourself?”
“No,” the lady said, “I prefer to remain standing.”
I seated myself nervously. My armchair was close to the corner of the big davenport where Mrs. Livingston perched, not leaning back but balancing her bulk on the edge. She was ready, I was certain, to lunge for my throat if I dared upset her honey.
“Miss Wiesenfeld,” I started, “I have no desire to rake up old memories that may cause you pain. If I pose a question you don’t wish to answer, please tell me so, and I will not persist. But this is a matter of some importance. It concerns the Reverend Godfrey Knurr. I represent a legal firm in New York City. One of our clients, a young woman, wishes to bring serious charges against Reverend Knurr. I am making a preliminary investigation in an attempt to discover if Knurr has a past history of the type of, ah, activities of which he is accused.”
“Pretty,” she murmured. “So pretty. It’s nice to meet someone who speaks in complete sentences. Subject, verb, object. Do all your sentences parse, Mr. Bigg?”
She said that quite seriously. I laughed.
“I would like to think so,” I said. “But I’m afraid I can’t make that claim.”
She began moving across the room in front of me. I saw then that she limped badly, dragging her left leg. Below the hostess gown I could see the foot bound in the stirrup of a metal brace.
She went close to a bird cage suspended from a brass stand. Within the cage, a yellow canary hopped from perch to perch as she approached.
“Chickie,” she said softly. “Dear, sweet Chickie. How are you today, Chickie? Will you chirp for our guest? Will you sing a lovely song? How did you find me, Mr. Bigg?”
The abrupt question startled me.
“I saw your photograph in the Knurr family album, ma’am. With Godfrey. Mr. Jesse Karp supplied your name. The Reverend Ludwig Stokes provided more information.”
“You have been busy, Mr. Bigg.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said humbly.
“The busy Mr. Bigg,” she said with her giggling laugh. “Busy Bigg.” She poked a pale finger through the bars of the cage. “Sing for Busy Bigg, Chickie. What is Godfrey accused of?”
I had determined to use Percy Stilton’s scam. The one that had worked with Bishop Oxman.
“He is accused of allegedly defrauding a young woman of her life’s savings by promising to double her money.”
“And promising to marry her?” Sylvia Wiesenfeld asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“He is guilty,” she said calmly. “He did exactly that.”
A low growl came from Mrs. Livingston.
“I’d like to have him right here,” she said in her furred contralto. “In my hands.”
“Miss Wiesenfeld,” I said, “may I ask you this: were you married to Godfrey Knurr?”
“Chickie,” she said to the bird, “why aren’t you chirping? Aren’t you feeling well, Chickie?”
She left the cage, came back to the long davenport. The housekeeper heaved her bulk and assisted Sylvia to sit in the corner, the left leg extended, covered with the skirt of her long gown. Mrs. Livingston reached out, tenderly smoothed back strands of blonde hair that had fallen about her mistress’ pale face.
“Oh la!” Miss Wiesenfeld said. “A long time ago. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Reverend Stokes told you that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It happened in another world,” she said. “In another time.”
Her beautiful eyes looked at me, but she was detached, off somewhere.
“But you were married?” I persisted. “Legally?”
“Legally,” she said. “A piece of paper. I have it.”
“How long were you married, Miss Wiesenfeld?”
She turned those vacant eyes on the enormous black woman.
“Harriet?” she said.
“Fourteen months,” Mrs. Livingston said. “Give or take.”
“And then?” I asked.
“And then?” she repeated my question, perplexed.
“Did you separate? Divorce?”
“Harriet?” she asked again.
“He cleared out,” Mrs. Livingston told me furiously. “Just took off. With everything of my honey’s he could get his hands on. But her daddy was too smart for him. He left my honey some kind of a fund that cur couldn’t touch.”
I tried to remember when I had last heard a man called a “cur.” I could not recall ever hearing it.
“So you are still married to Godfrey Knurr?” I asked softly.
“Oh no,” Sylvia Wiesenfeld said with her disturbingly childish laugh. “No, no, no. I have a paper. Don’t I, Harriet? So much paper. Paper, paper, paper.”
I looked beseechingly at Mrs. Livingston.
“We got us a letter from a lawyer-man in Mexico,” she said disgustedly. “It said Godfrey Knurr had been granted a divorce from his wife Sylvia.”
I turned to Miss Wiesenfeld in outrage.
“Surely you went to an attorney, ma’am?” I said. “I don’t know divorce law all that well, but the letter may have been fraudulent. Or Mexican divorces without the consent of both parties might not have been recognized in the state in which you were married. I hope you sought legal advice?”
She looked at me, eyes rounding.
“Whatever for?” she asked in astonishment. “I wanted him gone. I wanted him dead. He hurt me.”
I swallowed.
“Physically, ma’am?” I said gently.
“Once,” Mrs. Livingston said in a deadly voice. “I told him he puts hands to her again, I kill him. I told him that. But that’s not what she means when she says he hurt her. He broke my honey’s heart.”
She was speaking of her mistress as if she was not present. But Miss Wiesenfeld did not object. She just kept smiling emptily, face untroubled, eyes staring into the middle distance.
“Oh la!” she said. “Broke poor Sylvia’s heart.”
I was not certain of the depth of her dementia. She seemed to flick in and out, sometimes in the same sentence. She was lucid in speech and controlled in manner, and then suddenly she was gone, flying.
“Ma’am,” I said, hating myself, “what did Godfrey Knurr do with your money? When you were married?”
“Ohh,” she said, “bought things. Pretty things.”
Mrs. Livingston leaned toward me.
“Women,” she said throatily. “High living. He just pissed it away.”
That “pissed” shocked me. It was hissed with such venom that I thought Godfrey Knurr fortunate to have escaped the vengeance of Mrs. Harriet Lee Livingston. She would have massacred him.
“Harriet,” Sylvia said in a petulant, spoiled child’s voice, “I want to get up again.”
“Sure, honey,” the housekeeper said equably, lurching to her feet. She helped her mistress stand. Miss Wiesenfeld dragged her leg back to the bird cage.
“Chickie?” she said. “Chirp for me?”
There were other questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to probe deeper, explore the relationship between Sylvia and Knurr, discover how the marriage had come about, when, and why it had dissolved. But I simply didn’t have the stomach for it.
It seemed to me that all day I had been poking through the human detritus Godfrey Knurr had left in his wake. I was certain Roscoe Dollworth would have persevered in this investigation, but I lacked the ruthlessness. He had told me never to let my personal feelings interfere with the job, but I couldn’t help it. I liked all these victims, shared their misery, their sad memories, and I had heard just about all I could endure. Probing old wounds was not, really, a noble calling.
When I departed from the living room, Sylvia Wiesenfeld was still at the bird cage. Her forefinger was reaching through the bars. “Chickie?” she was saying. “Dear, sweet Chickie, sing me a song.”
I didn’t even thank her or say goodbye.
Out in the hallway, Mrs. Livingston helped me on with my coat.
“You going to mash him?” she demanded.
I stared at her a moment.
“Will you help?” I asked.
“Any way I can.”
“I need that marriage license,” I said. “And the letter from the Mexican lawyer, if you can find it. But the marriage license is most important. I’ll try to get copies made this afternoon and bring the originals back to you. If I can’t get copies made, I want to take the originals to New York with me. I’ll return them; I swear it.”
“How do I know?” she said mistrustfully.
“I’ll give you money,” I said. “I’ll leave fifty dollars with you. When I return the license, you return the money.”
“Money don’t mean nothing,” she said. “You got a pawn that means something to you?”
I looked down at myself.
“My wristwatch!” I said. “My aunt and uncle gave it to me when I was graduated from school. It means a lot to me. But it’s a cheap watch. Not worth even fifty dollars.”
“I’ll take it,” she said. “You bring the marriage license back, or mail it back, and you gets your watch back.”
I agreed eagerly and slipped the expansion band off my wrist. She dropped the watch into one of her capacious pockets.
“You wait right here,” she commanded. “Don’t move a step.”
“I won’t,” I said, and I didn’t as I watched her climb the carpeted steps to the second floor. That was really a leviathan behind.
She came stepping down in a few minutes, carrying two folded documents. I took a quick look at them. A marriage license issued to Sylvia Wiesenfeld and Godfrey Knurr by the State of Indiana, dated February 6, 1959, and a letter from a Mexican attorney dated fourteen months later, informing Sylvia that a divorce had been granted to Knurr. I refolded both documents, slid them into my inside jacket pocket.
“You’ll get them back,” I promised once more.
“I got your watch,” she said, and then grinned again at me: that marvelous, warm, human smile of complicity.
‘Thank you for all your help,” I said.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “but I trusts you. You play me false, don’t never come back here again—I tear you apart.”
On the early evening New York-bound airliner, a Scotch-and-water in my hand, I relaxed gratefully. The seats on both sides of me were empty, and I could sprawl in comfort. I emulated the passenger across the aisle and removed my shoes.
I wiggled my stockinged toes, a pleasurable sensation at 33,000 feet, and planned the defeat of Godfrey Knurr.
It seemed to me that our original assessment of the situation had been correct; in the absence of adequate physical evidence the only hope of bringing the Kipper and Stonehouse cases to satisfactory solutions was to take advantage of the individual weaknesses of the guilty participants. If we had failed so far in trying to “run a game” on them, it was because we did not have sufficient leverage to stir them, set one against the other, find the weakest link and twist that until it snapped.
By the time we started our descent for LaGuardia Airport in New York, I thought I had worked out a way in which it might be done. It would be a gamble, but not as dangerous as the risks Godfrey Knurr had run.
Also, it would require that I mislead several people, including Detective Percy Stilton.
I was sorry for that, but consoled myself by recalling that at our first meeting he had given me valuable tips on how to be a successful liar. Surely he could not object if I followed his advice.
I arrived home at my apartment in Chelsea shortly after 11:00 P.M. It looked good to me. I was desperately hungry, and longing for a hot shower. But first I wanted to contact Percy Stilton while my resolve was still hot. I had rehearsed my role shamelessly, and knew I must be definite, optimistic, enthusiastic. I must convince him, since as an officer of the law he could add the weight of his position to trickery that would surely flounder if I tried it by myself.
I called his office, but they told me he was not on duty. I then called his home. No answer. Finally I dialed the number of Maybelle Hawks’ apartment. She answered:
“Hello?”
“Miss Hawks?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Joshua Bigg.”
A short pause, then:
“Josh! So good to hear from you. How are you, babe?”
“Very well, thank you. And you?”
“Full of beans,” she said. “Literally. We just finished a pot of chili. Perce said you went to Chicago. You calling from there?”
“No, I’m back in New York. Miss Hawks, I—”
“Belle,” she said.
“Belle, I apologize for calling at this hour, but I’m trying to locate Percy. Is he—”
“Sure,” she said breezily, “his majesty is here. You got something to tell him about those cases?”
“I certainly do,” I said heartily.
“I’ll put him on,” she said. “Mind if I listen on the extension?”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s good news.”
“Great,” she said. “Just a minute…”
There was a banging of phones, voices in the background, then Stilton came on the line.
“Josh?” he said. “How you doing?”
“Just fine. Sorry to disturb you.”
“I’m glad you did. Lousy dinner. Dull broad.”
“Up yours,” Maybelle Hawks said on the extension.
“Got some good news for you, Josh. They reopened the Kipper case. Your bosses swung some heavy clout.”
“Good,” I said happily. “Glad to hear it. Now listen to what I’ve got…”
I kept my report as short and succinct as I could. I told him Goldie Knurr really was Godfrey’s sister. I gave a brief account of my meeting with Jesse Karp and what he had told me of the boyhood of Godfrey Knurr. I went into more detail in describing the interviews with the Reverend Ludwig Stokes and Sylvia Wiesenfeld. I told Stilton I had returned with the original marriage license. I did not mention the letter from the Mexican attorney.
They didn’t interrupt my report, except once when I was describing Knurr’s physical abuse of Sylvia Wiesenfeld, which I exaggerated. Maybelle Hawks broke in with a furious “That bastard!”
When I finished, I waited for Stilton’s questions. They came rapidly.
“Let’s take it from the top,” he said. “This priest—he’s how old?”
“About seventy-five. Around there.”
“And Knurr has been blackmailing him for twenty-five years?”
“About.”
“Why didn’t he blow the whistle before this?”
“Personal shame. And what it would do to his church.”
“What did Knurr take him for?”
“I don’t know the exact dollar amount. A lot of money. Plus getting Knurr into the seminary. And performing the marriage ceremony, probably without the bride’s father’s knowledge.”
“And you say this Stokes is willing to bring charges now?”
“He says so. He says he’s an old man and wants to make his peace with God.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of a guy is he? Got all his marbles?”
“Oh yes,” I said, and found myself crossing my fingers, a childish gesture. “He’s a dignified old gentleman, very scholarly, who lives alone and has plenty of time to think about his past life. He says he wants to atone for his sins.”
“He may get a chance. All right, now about the wife…The marriage license is legit?”
“Absolutely.”
“No record of a divorce, legal separation—nothing like that?”
“She says no. She’s living on a trust fund her father left her. After the way Knurr treated her, she was glad to get rid of him and assume her maiden name.”
“He deserted her?”
“Right,” I said definitely. “She was happy to find out where he is. I don’t think it would take much to convince her to bring charges. The reasons are economic. That trust fund that seemed like a lot of money twenty years ago doesn’t amount to much now. She’s hurting.”
“And what kind of a woman is she? A whacko?”
“Oh no,” I protested. “A very mature, intelligent woman.”
There was silence awhile. Then Detective Stilton said: “What we’ve got are two out-of-state possibles. Charges would have to be brought in Indiana, then we have extradition. If that goes through, we’ve lost him on the homicides.”
“Correct,” I agreed. “The blackmail and desertion charges are just small ammunition. But the big guns are that marriage license—and his affair with Glynis Stonehouse.”
He knew at once what I meant.
“You want to brace Tippi Kipper?” he said.
“That’s right, Perce. Be absolutely honest with her. Lay out all we’ve got. Show her the marriage license. I think she’ll make a deal.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Maybe. Belle, what do you think? Will it work?”
“A good chance,” she said on me extension. “I’ll bet my left tit he never told her he was married. A guy like him wouldn’t be that stupid. And when you tell her about Glynis Stonehouse, it’ll just confirm what she read in that poison-pen letter Josh sent her. She’ll be burning. He played her for a sucker. She’s a woman who’s been around the block twice. Her ego’s not going to let him make her a patsy. I’m betting she’ll pull the rug on him.”
“Yeah,” Stilton said slowly. “And we can always try the publicity angle on her, just happen to mention we know about her prostitution arrest. She’s a grand lady now; she’d die if that got in the papers.”
“Let’s go after her,” I urged. “Really twist.”
He made up his mind.
“Right,” he said, “we’ll do it. Go in early before she’s had a chance to put herself together. Josh, I’ll meet you outside the Kipper place at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Got that? Bring all the paper, especially that marriage license.”
“I’ll be there,” I promised.
“We’ll break her,” he said, beginning to get excited by the prospect. “No rough stuff. Kid gloves. Very sincere and low-key. Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore. Who said that, Josh?”
“I’m not sure. It sounds like Lord Chesterfield.”
“Whoever,” he said.
“If you believe that, Perce,” Maybelle Hawks said, “it makes me a lady.”
We all laughed, talked for a moment of how we should dress for our confrontation with Tippi Kipper, and then said goodnight.
I went immediately to my kitchen and began to eat ravenously. I cleaned out the refrigerator. I had three fried eggs, a sardine and onion sandwich, almost a quart of milk, a pint of chocolate ice cream. Then, still hungry, I heated up a can of noodle soup and had that with two vanilla cupcakes and half a cucumber.
Belching, I undressed and went into the shower. The water was blessedly hot. I soaped and rinsed three times, washed my hair, shaved, and doused myself with cologne.
Groaning with contentment, I rolled into bed about 1:00 A.M. It may have been my excitement, or perhaps that sardine and onion sandwich, but I did not fall asleep immediately. I lay on my back, thinking of what we would do in the morning, what we would say to Tippi Kipper, how important it was that we should break her.
I did not pray to God because, although I am a religious man, I did not much believe in prayer. What was the point—since God must know what is in our hearts? But I felt my lies and low cunning would be pardoned if they succeeded in bringing down Godfrey Knurr.
He was an abomination. As Jesse Karp had said, Knurr went bulling his way through life, all shoulders and elbows. He just didn’t care; that was what I could not forgive. He exemplified brute force and brute morality. I felt no guilt for what I was trying to do to him.
Just before I fell asleep, I remembered Cleo Hufnagel. I realized, groaning, that she had been out of my thoughts for days. I felt guilt about that.