Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

So Salmone was left to live in the Little Italy of the college’s town, where few Italian Americans remained and where many people from the state of Durango, Mexico, lived and labored. Which had left Salmone to a dissipated and troubled small-city-constabulary middle age from which he was still recovering. That he was now standing by the corpse of the child of a man who had once been a friend, whom Salmone had been in the job with and partnered with, struck him in ways that were confusing but somehow familiar.

On his way back to the station he stopped at the scene of the accident. The scene also happened to be the area of Felicity Street directly outside the front door of the professor on whom Maud Stack had come calling on the night of her death. The responding officer’s report had described her as exiting the house, but it had turned out that she had gone there and been refused entrance by the professor and his wife. The girl was drunk, according to the professor — the toxicologist at the hospital supported him in that — so the professor had not let her inside.

Salmone had found the professor’s statement of very limited usefulness. She had come to his house, he had offered, because she was his student — his advisee. But he had shed no light on why she had come there crocked at eleven o’clock at night. Also on his reason for not letting her in on that particular night. And why exactly they were reportedly having other than friendly physical contact in the street subsequent to her visit. Among other things not illuminated.

She had raised hell and the professor had gone out to placate her or otherwise persuade her to leave. The whole ruckus had taken place in front of a crowd leaving Collier Rink after a hockey game, and the car that hit Maud had come out of that crowd, injuring a couple of other students and leaving Maud dead in the street, almost on impact. Salmone had statements, taken by other officers, from the professor and his wife. He had other statements, taken from witnesses and first responding officers, and he had spent part of the day reading them. A number of students, three particularly vociferous, claimed they saw Professor Brookman deliberately push Maud Stack into the path of the oncoming car. The city police had statements and a number of cell phone videos that might be used to support that charge. But the people in the crowd had argued about it and the majority of witnesses affirmed that what they saw was Brookman trying to pull Maud Stack out of the car’s way. A lot of the videos could equally well be interpreted to show that. Salmone decided to look at the statements and the videos again. He thought he might bring some of the witnesses in again as well.

At the curb a few doors down, he ran into Philip Polhemus, the college’s chief of security, a highly regarded man who had retired from the U.S. Park Police. Polhemus still had a youthful, outdoorsy quality about him — longish gray-blond hair and a full bushy beard that the college would have figured would make him congenial to student-age elites. But the beard vaguely annoyed professional police officers. Polhemus was standing in the street with a camera.

“What are you taking pictures of, Philip?” Salmone asked.

Looking around, Salmone could see a few blood spatters on the curb, boot prints and a museum of tire tracks. The ones that might have been relevant were on the sidewalk, but the snow had melted and they had deteriorated. If anyone had measured or photographed the treads, he hadn’t heard about it. Amid the soiled slush lay some of the plastic instrument wrappings the medics had tossed. Television crews had left some disposable equipment stacked on one of the house rails.

“Who knows what, right?” Polhemus said. “The dean is very upset. This street was supposed to be closed for the hockey game. Somebody moved the barricade. The No Entry sign is gone.”

“That’s trouble,” Salmone said.

“He’s going to want to talk to you soon.”

“Me? Since when am I in traffic?”

“Don’t you know who the dead girl was?”

“Maud Stack,” Salmone said. “She was the daughter of a guy was my partner once in NYPD.”

Polhemus moved closer to Salmone and lowered his voice.

“She was the girl who wrote the anti-religious stuff in the Gazette. The stuff against the abortion protesters.”

Salmone just looked at him.

“Remember we had like a hundred demonstrators? You guys made some stops checking license plates. Well-known anti-abortion people. They came from all over. TV cameras.”

“I don’t read the Gazette, ” Salmone said. “I remember the big demonstrations, but I was out sick.”

Salmone read neither the Gazette nor the daily papers. He had given up on television except for watching sports in their season. There had been some kind of anti-abortion hassle during the time he was having his gall bladder out at Whelan, and he remembered some talk in the corridors, but he had tuned it out.

“Anything to do with this Professor Brookman?”

“She was a special student of his. She died right here.” Polhemus pointed to the Brookmans’ college-owned Federal. “In front of his house.”

“Right,” Salmone said. “The dean hasn’t called me.”

“He will. I’ll be in touch.”

The police station lived in one wing of City Hall, a nineteenth-century Neo-Renaissance copy of a German Rathaus. There Salmone looked over the cell phone videos from the scene of the incident again. A dozen state troopers, within whose competence such things seemed to lie, had spent a large part of the day watching the videos sequentially on a wide-screen monitor, without getting a make on the car or driver.

The videos were jittery, drizzly and snow-blown. What they focused on up to the very last was a one-sided shouting match, ending in a brief scuffle between a girl recognizable as the late Maud Stack and a large, short-haired man who would have been Steven Brookman. More students insisted that Brookman had tried to save her life than said he had pushed her toward the car. But every one of the videos ended in a scattering, a rushing disorder and dissolution of images. In the end, it was impossible to determine positively what had taken place.

One student had brought a camcorder, equipped with sound, to the game and afterward had filmed some of the encounter between professor and student. The footage was disturbing. There were terrified screams, and it was just possible, if you knew how to listen, to hear a voice calling out, “He pushed her.” But the video showed no such thing. Frenzied bodies blocked any view of the speeding car. And the student statements mainly had Brookman to the rescue, too late.

The three students who claimed to have seen Brookman push her seemed very convinced and irate. Salmone decided to call them. They stuck by their stories.

“Yes,” one of them, a boy, insisted. He might have been a little overwrought. “I’m absolutely certain, he practically picked her up and put her under the wheels.” On paper, his words looked solid. On the phone, he sounded like a screwball. Still, the Brookman person troubled Salmone. He hadn’t liked the sound of the wife much either. No one, except maybe the Staties if they made the car, was going to the district attorney. Salmone thought he owed a call to Eddie Stack.

SALMONE HAD NO SUCCESS contacting Stack during the rest of the day. In between his attempts to call, he read the article in the Gazette that had caused all the trouble. It was insulting, insulting in a particularly smart-ass way, more than the simpleminded badmouthing shit a perpetrator might say and get his sentence enhanced. Why should a kid use all that education just to belittle someone’s religion when it might be all they got? Sometimes the college could be an incredibly mean place; when the kids reflected it they had the sharp language and the intelligence but no sense and no mercy.