Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“Don’t,” Stack said. He leaned down to face her at the open passenger-side door.

“I told your friend Brookman I was gonna get him whacked. I let him know — bad ways. He was gonna die.”

Jo stared through the windshield, not seeing the outraged cop who was remonstrating with them, brandishing a ticket pad.

“You can tell him it won’t happen. Just… it won’t happen.”

“Because you’re changing your mind?”

“Yeah. I’m changing my mind.”

He started for the station doors, favoring the drugstore stick. The cop had stopped shouting at Jo. She seemed dreadfully upset, and he was afraid he had gone too far. Stack paused on his way into the station.

“It’s all right,” he told the officer. “It was life and death.”

JO CARR HAD NO DIFFICULTY recognizing the contradictory impulses that the edifice of Holy Redeemer, as a suburban cathedral, had left unresolved. It had been built at a time when the liberalizing forces of the sixties were already being checked by embittered reaction. Plenty of the people who had moved their families from Manhattan or Brooklyn to the life of single-family, green-shuttered houses and tree-lined streets had seen enough of folk Masses and clerical protesters and girls on the altar assisting in the liturgy. The modernist design of the architect was being actively interfered with, as far as possible, by the newly promoted bishop and the forces created to empower the laity.

The white concrete exterior, enclosed by enormous aerodynamically curving buttresses, contained a huge amount of dark empty space. The gloom that in the old plan was meant to be dispelled by daylight had to be illuminated by outsize hanging lamps. The altar had been envisioned as a plain sacrificial block with minimal decoration but someone succeeded in adding a kind of reredos of gray concrete with statues of saints and the Virgin. Columns in support of nothing much went along the nave.

An old idea that had survived was the placement of crypts along the side aisles, and Barbara Stack’s remains were contained in one of them. The urn was multicolored, an art nouveau vessel of a sort that Stack suspected only McCallum and Jenkins, of all the funeral directors in the neighborhood, would offer its customers. He had intended for Maud to choose Barbara’s ciborium but decided finally that it would be too hard on her. Today they were putting Maud to rest in a similar urn, not the slate-colored casket but one with stones that recollected her black hair and blue eyes.

Jo Carr and Mary Pick had come down from Amesbury. Shelby Magoffin traveled from Manhattan via the most affordable limo service her current producers could find. She had been promoting her latest film at a press conference in a midtown hotel. Stack stood apart from them, facing the crypt, on which his own name and the names of his wife and daughter had now been lettered. Edward Jeremiah Stack, Barbara Frances Stack and Maud Mary Stack. He leaned on his drugstore walking stick and held his tweed Dannemora cap in his hand. Far from the mourners, near the church doors, stood Arthur Porgest, the sullen-looking assistant sexton, together with a large man in a tan windbreaker. Mary Pick had brought her cousin, an English priest visiting friends at Columbia University, who undertook the placing of Maud’s remains behind the glass. The priest, named Wilfrid Pick, was a very tall man with disorderly red hair. His height allowed him to reach up to the crypt and manage Maud’s interment without having to fully extend his arms.

Stack had all but forbidden prayers, but Father Pick presumed to recite the verses from 1 Corinthians about the stars differing from one another in glory, and the earthly body raised as a quickening spirit.

“May her soul and the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace,” he concluded.

Mary Pick said “Amen” and crossed herself.

“A shame about this place,” Mary Pick said when they were outside. She and Jo and Eddie Stack shook hands and he put his cap on. He accepted a hug from Jo and from Mary Pick too. He shook hands with Father Pick.

“Can’t we give you a lift, Ed?” Jo asked him.

“No. Thanks. Thanks, everybody.”

Jo Carr and Mary Pick and Wilfrid Pick watched him go down the cathedral steps and stop a passing cab. Jo began to cry.

Coming out of the cathedral doors, Shelby saw that several photographers who had been at the press conference had found their way to Nassau County and were waiting on the steps. She could not help noticing that some represented an order of paparazzi a notch or two higher — at least in professional status — than the ones who had turned out for her in the past. In the pocket of her black raincoat she had brought a camera of her own, a tiny Polaroid with which to tease the photographers while they took her picture. Her revulsion for them was partly pretense; she did not find all photojournalists physically repellent. She understood that they had a living to make, and friends, relations and habits to support. On the other hand, her distaste was partly genuine, because they were frequently carrion feeders, thriving on the disaster and ruin of people who were often not unlike Shelby herself. The paparazzi on the church steps that afternoon presented themselves in that aspect.

Smiling agreeably, she walked toward her limo while the press corps — half a dozen young men and a couple of young women — skittered around her. One youth, expensively dressed down, pierced and tattooed at the gullet, stepped imperiously into her path, smiled back at her and totally impeded her passage. At once Shelby deployed her Polaroid.

“Miss Magoffin,” the young fellow said, “do you fear for your life?”

In return she snapped his picture.

“Dude,” she cried, handing him the shot, “if I had teeth like yours, I’d brush them.”

All the photogs wailed piteously in unison, mocking her self-satisfied bitchiness. They’d all been there before. Shelby, by the time she felt able to let go, had forgotten the young journalists. Clustering around the car windows, they had the opportunity to see her cry and to take pictures of it too.

AFTER NEW YEAR’S A YOUNG woman from Taunton confessed to vehicular homicide in the case of Maud Stack. Lieutenant Salmone called Eddie on the phone. Stack’s condition had declined, and though he did not bother to be abstemious in drink, his memory was intact.

“Woman,” Salmone reported, “called Mona Carberry. White girl from Taunton, Mass. Twenty-seven years old. Single parent of a thirteen-month-old. Driving without insurance. History of minor traffic violations. Sometimes employed as a stripper. The car was her boyfriend’s.”

“Maybe he was driving?”

“We think maybe he was.”

“God. Girls still do that?”

“Sometimes. You wouldn’t believe. Guys do it for their girlfriends too.”

“Jesus,” Stack said. “There’s hope for the world.”

“You see it that way, Eddie?”

Stack grunted.

“They don’t usually follow through on it if they’re looking at time,” Salmone said. “Just about never. So we think this guy will come forward pretty soon.”

“Is there any connection with the article Maud wrote?”

“It doesn’t look like it. The girl has no connection with the college, and besides, we think her boyfriend was the driver. He better come to his girlfriend’s rescue soon or he’ll be fucking sorry.”

“Break him down,” Stack said, “the dumb fuck. He doesn’t deserve her.”

“He was in Iraq. He got a Bronze Star. He has a drug arrest and a big pill problem. The girlfriend says he didn’t want to go to the game so she went without him and got drunk. Doesn’t sound very likely.”