Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

One day there arrived the man himself, Charlie Kinsella.

“Listen, Eddie, I just wanted you to know we know you got expenses, and we really thought, This man helped us and we should help him. Because I know you’re a guy who thinks, you know, and I don’t understand half the fuckin’ words you say, it was the same with Barbara, God rest her soul — educated — and the kid’s gonna be more so, right? So we wanna help.”

“I… I’m good, Charlie. Seriously, brother, I’m good. We’re good.”

Kinsella shows no sign of leaving. He looks very assured in his new clothes. He’s very assertive.

“We want to give you something. We want yez to take it.”

“Really, Charlie, I don’t want anything.”

Charlie K. makes a pained face. As one on the horns of a dilemma.

“Um,” he says, “I don’t lie to the people I work with. Everybody knows that. They know that. Never.”

“Right,” says Stack.

“Anyweez,” he says in a rollicking fashion, “I gotta be able to tell them we helped you out. You see what I mean?”

As much as to say, Stack thought, that there was no way around it.

Stack was reduced to shaking his head, as in no. Kinsella let him understand that the “something” offered was cash. “Nobody’s,” Kinsella said, which Stack inferred to mean unmarked. It was nowhere to be seen on that visit. But Stack mercifully would have no more of such packages or of the unspeakable Charlie until — until now, Maud dead.

What had happened was this. Maud’s college career indeed called for more expenses than might have been foreseen. Charlie Kinsella had a son, Michael, from his first family with Stack’s sister Gerry. Michael practiced law in Florida and might one day be a young champion of conservative forces in that state. The attorney administered a fund for the purpose of paying whatever expenses Maud Stack incurred during the term of her education and the years of her setting forth in the world. The bills and such were passed along and Michael Kinsella wrote checks to meet them in order that Maud not be denied the full enjoyment of the opportunities presented her by a fine education at a world-famous seat of learning.

Now here was Charlie suggesting some fuck saw it wrong.

“Would I know anything, Charlie?” Stack asked. “Would something come from me? What could I say, for God’s sake!”

He saw that his protestations had convinced Charlie and also curled his lip very slightly.

“Sure, Eddie,” Kinsella told him with a punch on the arm. “Yer a standup dude.”

LIEUTENANT LOU SALMONE saw her for the first time on the pathologist’s table at the hospital. The spoiled beauty of the young woman laid out there moved him in ways he could not have written down and would never dream of trying to express. The ambient smells were those usual to an autopsy room, and the mixture of mortified humanity and disinfectant somehow conveyed a judgment. The table on which she lay was made of stainless steel. It was a calamitous fall from grace. Bad luck, sure, but you could see and breathe punition and guilt. It made you suspect that what they said might be true, that somewhere in time, maybe ages before, somebody must have done something to make this happen to people the way it happened to cats and dogs.

The wise guys always pointed out how you had to have at least two people to have a murder. A famous person had said, “Character is fate.” This was the wise-guy version: A person had made a mistake, they liked to say, and somebody had to pay. They didn’t give a damn about justice, only about restoring their version of the natural order. The victim was always at a disadvantage, being dead and so often unsightly.

The kid had been lying half in the road, half on the sidewalk, her upper body wrapped to the neck in sky-blue plastic, her head turned at an impossible angle, legs twisted under, one tapering to a boot, the other stocking-footed. Everything about her position on the sidewalk had been incompatible with life. Deeply dead, she had looked.

Deeper dead now, naked on the table beside where Salmone stood. A yoke supported her neck, to hold her head up to the light. It looked distinctly like a temporary expedient to keep her facing the inquiries of the breathing world before what remained of her was put aside.

The examining pathologist was a short, neat man called Dr. Patel. Her ID, what old-time cops called an aided card, stated the victim was Maud Mary Stack, a student at the college from New York City who lived on campus. According to Dr. Patel’s preliminary record, she was six feet tall, weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, was well nourished and athletic. The hospital pictures of the corpse showed Maud’s pale freckles. The EMTs had cleared small traces of ethanol vomitus from her mouth. Her blood alcohol content was.20. Fluorescence revealed no semen on her body or her clothes.

Maud’s belongings were in a plastic evidence bag but would not give evidence of much. She had credit cards, a driver’s license, a New York MetroCard. Forty-six dollars in bills and coins. No cell phone, which was strange. There was a worn birthday card in her jeans pocket with no signature. On it was a single line in what would prove to be Maud’s handwriting: “Dear heart, how like you this?”

“Her neck was broken,” Patel said. “Skull fractured. Practically all the ribs on the left side. Vertebrae. Internal damage, so she won’t be an organ donor.”

“Freakin’ destroyed,” Salmone said.

“So how fast was this driver going?”

“What do you think?”

Patel shrugged and smiled faintly. “Nobody saw this car?”

“None of the witnesses gave much of a description. Just that it was big and fast.”

“Well,” Patel said, “the state is sending a guy down who does traffic deaths for a living. Sometimes he can make a case for a match between a specific vehicle and a specific injury without blood or tissue. For what it’s worth.”

“Tell the state’s guy to look for wounds or bruises might result from an assault,” Salmone said. “She was in an altercation just before the car hit.”

“I don’t know about that. She was knocked all up and down the street, against steps and gates, et cetera. He’ll have a look.”

Salmone was not sure he had ever seen Maud Stack on the campus; it was not a place he frequented. He did know that his friend of many years ago, Eddie Stack, had a daughter there. Salmone knew many people throughout New England, and it was not a rarity for some of them to have children at the college. In Stack’s case, though, her death touched on a friendship from the days when Salmone had started his career as a New York City patrolman, before his father had retired and the police department in Amesbury made a pitch for Salmone to take up the stick there. In fact, hizzoner the mayor himself had extended a kind of invitation. Salmone did it — a move that involved enormous economic, moral and familial complications — because he had thought it was the appropriate thing to do.

He had done it for his elderly parents and because his wife, who grew up in Amesbury, had family and friends there and disliked New York. Salmone’s mother had died soon after the move. His father had lingered long. He was a busybody, a loudmouth, an invalid, a professional Friend of the Mayor, friend here, friend there, everybody’s fucking friend, until Salmone grew to hate him. And Salmone’s wife, who had to move back to town so as not to have to bring their children up in dread in New York, walked — divorced him, turned his very children against him. Even his venal father was shocked.

“She wasn’t really Italian,” the old guy would say helpfully. “She was an Albanese, a gypsy witch. That family was from Puglia, they wasn’t even Catholics.” Whereupon he would make useful signs against the evil eye.