Ed McBain - Fiddlers

Our Lady of Grace Church…

Roger Mercer Junior High…

Warren G. Harding High…

- the neighborhood was now predominately Spanish, and erstwhile natives of Jewish, Italian, or Irish descent had long ago fled for greener pastures. One holdout was a woman whose parents had owned a house here ‘when the neighborhood was still good,’ Geoffrey said, not recognizing he was slurring the people who currently lived here. She’d inherited the house when her parents died, and was still reluctant to give it up.

‘Her name is Phoebe Jennings,’ he said. ‘Her and her husband come in here all the time. I forget what her maiden name was back then. She lives in the two-story brick behind St. Mary’s.’

* * * *

Phoebe Jennings still bore a faint resemblance to the photo of the plain eighteen-year-old girl in Harding’s yearbook. She remembered Alicia Hendricks well…

‘Well, who could ever forget her?’ she said, and rolled her eyes.

They were sitting under a striped umbrella in the backyard of the house, the yearbook open in her lap. In the near distance, the bells of St. Mary’s…

Good title, Genero thought.

… chimed the hour.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

The way Phoebe remembers it…

‘My maiden name was Phoebe Mears,’ she told the detectives. ‘That’s the name in the yearbook there…’

Tapping the photo of a young girl in eyeglasses, a tentative smile on her mouth. Phoebe Jennings still wore eyeglasses, but she was not smiling as she remembered those days back in high school.

‘Alicia was the most popular girl in the class,’ she said. ‘Gorgeous, drove all the boys crazy. Well, everyone wanted to be near her. All of us. She just radiated this… glow, you know? I realize now it was a kind of hyper-sexuality… well, we were all so young, you know, so very young.’

‘How well did you know her, Mrs. Jennings?’ Parker asked.

‘Oh, not well at all. I’m sorry, did I give that impression? I was hardly in the same league as Alicia and her Chosen Few… well, look at my picture. I was what kids today call a nerd. The In Crowd wanted nothing to do with me. This tight little circle of girls, you know, maybe five or six of them? Flocked around Alicia as if she were the queen bee. Hoping some of her allure would rub off on them. Well, I hoped so, too, I admit it. I’d have given anything to be like Alicia Hendricks. And yet…”

She looked at her photo in the yearbook again.

‘You’re here because she met with a violent death. I’ve been happily married for almost thirty years now. My two daughters are married, too, both of them college graduates. My husband is a decent, faithful, hardworking man, and we live a block away from the church where we worship every Sunday. So does it matter that forty years ago I was a wallflower at Our Lady of Grace’s Friday night dances? Does it matter that the boys stood on line waiting for a chance to dance with Alicia or even one of her friends? Where are any of those other girls now? Are they as happy as I am?’

‘Would you know where any of them are now, Mrs. Jennings?’ Genero asked.

* * * *

Holding tight to her brother’s hand, the graying redhead led him up the street, Ollie a respectably invisible distance behind them. Damn if she wasn’t leading him into a small coffee shop. Were the siblings about to enjoy a good lunch, which Ollie himself could use along about now? His stomach growling in agreement, he took up a watchful position across the street, and was surprised when the pair came out some ten minutes later, each carrying a brown paper bag.

He watched.

The sister kissed Jerry on the cheek. Gave him some sisterly advice, Jerry nodding. Kissed him again in farewell, and then marched off, leaving him alone on the sidewalk.

Ollie waited.

A moment later, Jerry was in motion, brown paper bag clutched tight in his right hand. Was he heading back to the apartment? If so, Ollie would follow him right upstairs this time. No sister, no problem. But instead, he walked right past his building, and kept on walking south, crossing under the elevated-train structure on Dover Plains Avenue, and then past the next street over, something called Holman Avenue, and then to the street bordering the park, and onto a footpath leading into the park itself, Ollie some fifteen feet behind him now, and rapidly closing the distance between them. The moment Jerry found a bench and sat on it, Ollie moved in. Even before Jerry could reach into the brown paper bag, Ollie was sitting beside him.

‘Hello, Jerry,’ he said.

Jerry turned to him. Blue eyes opening wide in recognition and fear.

‘I didn’t do nothing,’ he said.

‘I know you didn’t,’ Ollie said. ‘What’ve you got there, a sandwich?’

Jerry looked puzzled for a moment. Then he realized Ollie was referring to the paper bag on his lap. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And a Coca-Cola.’

‘What kind of sandwich?’ Ollie asked.

‘Ham and cheese on a hard roll, butter and mustard,’ Jerry said by rote.

‘Wanna share it with me?’ Ollie asked. ‘I’ll buy us a few more of them later.’

‘Sure,’ Jerry said, and grinned, and reached into the bag. He unwrapped the sandwich. The roll had already been sliced in two, which made things easy. Together, they sat on the park bench, chewing. Jerry popped the can of Coke, offered it to Ollie. Ollie took a long swallow, handed it back.

‘So what is it you didn’t do?’ he asked.

‘Nothing with the father,’ Jerry said, and shook his head.

‘Father Nealy, you mean?’

‘No. Father Michael.’

Ollie nodded, bit into his half of the sandwich.

‘You knew Father Michael, huh?’ he asked.

‘Yes. When I was small.’

Forty, fifty years ago, Ollie figured. Time frame would’ve been right for when Father Michael was a pastor at Our Lady of Grace.

‘You’re investigating, right?’ Jerry said.

‘Investigating what, Jerry?’

‘What he done to us.’

‘What’d he do to you, Jerry?’

‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t know. Tell me.’

‘To both of us.’

‘Uh-huh. What’d he do, Jerry? It’s all right, you can tell me. He’s dead now.’

Jerry’s blue eyes opened wide.

‘He can’t hurt you anymore.’

‘He made me and this other kid…”

The blue eyes welled with tears. He buried his face in his hands. Shook his head in his hands. Sobbing into his hands.

‘You and another boy?’

‘Not together.’

‘Separately?’

Jerry nodded into his hands. Mumbled yes into his hands.

Ollie sat still and silent for several moments.

Then he said, ‘What was this other boy’s name?’

‘Was it Carlie?’ Jerry asked.

* * * *

In her mid-fifties, Geraldine Davies was still an attractive woman, and the detectives could easily imagine her as one of Alicia’s inner circle of friends back then in those halcyon days at Mercer Junior High and Harding High. Wearing lavender slacks and a matching cotton T-shirt, strappy low-heeled sandals, she greeted them at the door to her apartment in Majesta, offered them iced tea, and then led them out to a terrace seventeen stories above the street. There, within viewing distance of the Majesta Bridge, they sat sipping tea and enjoying the cool early afternoon breezes.

‘I was always sorry I lost touch with Alicia,’ she told them. ‘She was a very important part of my life back then. Well, all of us. Any of us who were fortunate enough to get close to her. She was a very special person. It’s a pity what happened to her. Well, getting killed the way she did, of course. But now I understand there was some sort of drug connection as well, is that right? Didn’t I see on television that she was selling drugs or something, some sort of Korean connection, was it? Is that true? If so, it’s a shame. She was so special.’