Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

He was sweating heavily by then, his bare hands aching with each blow of the sledge. At last he was tired enough to bring the argument with his dead wife to an end. Let her alone, for God’s sake. Forget it. All of it... her apartment with the picture of Judge Learned Hand and Satchmo and loving everybody and lost causes, and snapping back at racists and bullies because you loved them too and couldn’t stand to condemn them for their ignorance...

She had gone into that curve too fast, that was all, or struck a patch of slick oil in the rain. Forgive her an instant of panic, for hitting the brakes too hard, forgive her for leaving them that night in Spain without a goodbye...

Selby sat on a log, breathing slowly. The backs of his hands were pale and damp with sweat in the bright light. A fleck of blood where he’d nicked himself stood out clearly.

He had spent too much time this way, he thought, wondering about himself, judging himself...

In a magazine article he had read: “What your father made of himself may have little relation to the hereditary factors he passed on to you. He gave you, remember, only half his chromosomes. And those he gave you depended entirely on chance. You can only guess what came to you by studying any unusual traits that you and your father shared...”

Without a father to study he had been forced to study himself. Once in a supermarket in Davenport he had asked his hands to make their own choices. Without looking at the shelves he had grabbed products at random, squandering a week’s wages in an attempt to find some revealing pattern in these unbidden choices. Jars of pickles and cocktail onions, work gloves, powdered milk, breakfast foods, shoe polish, a corkscrew, paper napkins, cans of vegetables, he remembered the look of them when he spread them out on his bed in the dorm at St. Ambrose, and how anxiously he searched them for clues to his father’s character and his own, as hopeful and credulous (he’d known later) as some bare-assed savage looking for auguries in monkey dung and cloud patterns.

From the back door, Mrs. Cranston called to him. “Mr. Selby? Mr. Selby, there was a call from your brother just now. He left a number.”

Jarrell had called from a motel called the Greentree in Quinton, New Jersey. He had told Mrs. Cranston that he was using a pay phone but he would be back in his room, 119, in a few minutes and that he’d appreciate it if his brother would call him.

Selby dialed the number. A clerk connected him to room 119. The phone rang three times. A click. A voice Selby didn’t recognize said, “Yes?”

“My name’s Selby, Harry Selby. I’d like to talk to my brother. Is he there?”

“Jarrell? No, he’s not. His brother, you say?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Me? I’m Johnny Cole. I expect him back pretty soon.”

“You a friend of Jarrell’s?”

“Well, you could say that. We’ve had some drinks in the bar here, hit it off pretty good. We’re both looking for work, and we got to talking about prospects, that sort of thing. He asked me to come by tonight for a drink, a welcome notion, like the fella says.”

“When will Jarrell be back, Mr. Cole?”

“Can’t say for sure. I came by just a couple of minutes ago. His door was open and the phone was ringing. So I answered it. He must have went out to do some shopping.”

“I’ll call back in about a half hour. Would you tell him that, please, Mr. Cole?”

“I sure will, Harry.”

Selby made himself a mild drink, walked aimlessly about the study. On the hearth, his head between his paws, Blazer followed him. Checking his watch, Selby experienced a flash of memories. Summitt and the girl and the sergeant with the brown and rigidly sculpted features...

A clerk with a high, nasal voice answered his second call to the Greentree Motel. He was sorry, he told Selby, but the gent in room 119, Jarrell Selby, had just checked out without leaving a forwarding address.

No, the clerk said in answer to Selby’s questions, he couldn’t tell him anything about a Mr. Cole. There was nobody registered at the Greentree Motel by that name.

Sergeant Wilger called the following morning and told Selby he’d like to see him as soon as possible. Selby asked if there was a development in the investigation, but Wilger said, “No, it’s not that. It’s something Captain Slocum wants to check out.”

East Chester’s City Hall housed courtrooms, various municipal agencies, District Attorney Jonathan Lamb’s offices, police headquarters and Captain Walter Slocum’s detective division.

Under fluorescent lighting the division’s main squad room looked to Selby like a huge marine tank with shining green walls, smoke-blue air and weak sunlight filtered through dust-grimed windows. Computers, calculators and a bank of closed circuit TV monitors stood on wall shelving beside double doors, with Slocum’s name printed across them in black letters.

Half a dozen detectives sat at metal desks. A bald-headed man in a leather jacket was taking a statement from an elderly couple. Another detective listened with a bored but courteous expression to a young woman speaking rapidly in Spanish.

At a counter that separated the squad room from a small reception area a black woman in uniform turned the pages of a loose-leaf folder and pounded them with a rubber stamp.

“Help you, sir?” she asked without looking up.

“My name is Selby. Sergeant Wilger asked—”

“Yellow form, Mr. Selby. End of the counter.” She pointed her elbow at a metal box filled with Xeroxed sheets. “Print your name, address and don’t forget the zip code.”

Several of the detectives looked up when they heard Selby’s name. The deputy DA he had met earlier stood at a desk making notes on a legal pad. A phone was cocked between her chin and shoulder. She held a cigarette in her free hand.

Sergeant Wilger walked to the counter. “Come in, Mr. Selby. It’s an open file, Elbe,” he added as the black lady looked at him. “You can skip signing in, Mr. Selby.”

The sergeant raised a hinged section of the counter and Selby followed him to his desk, which was at the end of the room.

The deputy DA gave Selby an impersonal smile. She wore a gray denim suit. Her shoulder-length hair was dark.

Brett, he recalled, Dorcas Brett or Kelly Brett. She hadn’t recognized him; her smile was a quick reflex, but Selby nodded to her as Wilger waved him to a chair. Traffic noises sounded from the street, faint and remote in the brightly lit, overheated office. It had been clear and sunny when Selby left home, but erratic bursts of rain now streaked the dusty windows.

Wilger leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. The armpits of his beige sports shirt were dark with sweat. “The captain will be with us in a couple of minutes, Mr. Selby. So far there’s nothing to tell you about your daughter’s case. We need the kind of lead the computers just don’t cough up. Somebody in a bar hears something, we get an anonymous phone call, that’s the break we’re waiting for.”

Wilger removed a bulky file from his desk drawer. Nodding at the typed reports and handwritten notes, he said, “See, we’ve already logged better than a hundred man-hours on it. Checked the weirdo files in a dozen counties, but so far we got zilch.”

The sergeant removed his glasses and began polishing them with a square of felt he picked out of a paper clip receptacle. He said, “You talk to your daughter about what happened when she left Muhlenburg that night, Mr. Selby? Remember... I asked you about that gap in her story?”

“I talked to her, sergeant, yes. She stopped to rest for a while, that’s all she remembers.”

Wilger’s expression was politely quizzical. “That’s all? Three hours, and she draws a blank?”