He adjusted his cap on his head, hesitated, then picked up the phone and asked for Ed Seigel.
“Yeah, Chief?”
“I’m off to the house for an hour or so.”
“Sure. Look, nothing here. We’re pounding hard. Got about six slabs pulverized and nothing but dust. Not a scrap of metal.”
“Okay, Ed. Keep ’em at it.”
“Okay, Chief.”
He hung up and went out of the office, dropped to the fi rst floor in the elevator and walked into a poignant April night—a night all the more poignant because its mauve sky and balmy wind contrasted with the horrible tension Ruddy felt. Now, what could he tell Agnes? He’d have to tell her the truth, if he was going to prepare her at all. He wanted to spare her too great a shock, but he flinched at telling her of Marie. He could even now see the horror that would well into her eyes, the tears that would flow, the grieving sorrow for Tommy that would bend her forward in sobs, her trembling hands lifting to quivering lips.
When he entered his driveway, he saw a dim light glowing in the bedroom window; as silently as he could, he rolled the car into the garage, then entered the house through the back door.
The maid had gone, and he mounted to the second floor over a carpet that rendered his footsteps noiseless. An impulse to call to Agnes was checked as an idea captured him: he would look now for that .38 in his desk drawer, just to make sure that his theory
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
251
was correct; he ought to do that before speaking to Agnes. He went noiselessly to his office, entered, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and his head shot back and he gasped. The gun was there, shining dully up at him. He had been wrong. “Mother of Mary, what’s wrong with me?” he asked himself. Now that his hypothesis had been knocked, he went to the opposite extreme: Tommy was innocent. . . . What had made him think otherwise?
Then what about that stupidly pretended robbery that Tommy had staged? Where did it fit in? What about all of Tommy’s wild babbling about guilt and nonguilt? What was bothering the boy? There was no doubt that he was being goaded and driven by some surging tide of black brooding. Goddamn, that boy will drive me crazy. Then shame flooded him in a sheet of hotness.
Why was he and why had he always been so anxious to assume Tommy’s guilt, to participate in it? The guilt that he had projected out upon Tommy now rebounded and engulfed him.
Was it something universal, elementary? Was it natural that one should feel somehow guilty before one’s offspring?
Then maybe that guilt came from not really wanting them? If so, then was it the infant helplessness of those offspring that drove repulsion out of one’s mind, that replaced repulsion with compassion? Maybe it was even more elementary than that; maybe one simply resented the presence of any new appearances upon the earth, especially when those appearances assumed the physical guise of one’s own kind? Did he hate his son? Distrust him? If so, why? These vague waves of questioning realization made Ruddy’s body prickle with goose pimples.
“Ruddy?”
He started, leaped to his feet, and whirled. Agnes stood in the partly opened door.
“Oh,” she said, “You’re there. I didn’t hear you come in, didn’t hear your car . . .”
252
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Yeah,” he breathed.
“What’s the matter? God, you look pale. Ruddy, is there something wrong? Has anything happened? Where’s Tommy?
Oh, God, there is something—”
“No, Agnes.” He tried to quiet her. “Come in and sit down.”
He had to talk to her now, tell her something and yet not tell her too much. He had to sort out what was real from the thronging fantasies that were storming his mind and feelings.
“It’s Tommy!” she half sobbed. “I knew it. I felt it. I—”
“No, no, no.” He stemmed her outbreak. “Tommy’s all right,” he lied to her. “Just a bit of confusion, that ’s all.”
“But where is he?”
“He’ll be in soon.” He lied yet again, for he had no notion of what Tommy might be doing.
“Is he in trouble?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?” she demanded insistently
“Sit down,” he told her, guiding her by her right arm. “I’ll tell you everything. Now, just sit and listen. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Is Tommy all right?” she demanded, her eyes glued to his face.
“Yes,” he said. “Agnes, you see, I didn’t pay too much attention to what was happening to the boy. I was running night and day with my work, I should have had a better, closer relationship with
’im. What has happened is as much my fault as his, in a way.”
“But what has happened? Please, Ruddy . . .”
“Just wait. No tragedy, darling,” he consoled her. “I can’t talk to you unless you promise me you’ll be calm and listen.
Unless you listen and understand, you won’t be able to help.
It’s an odd thing that’s happened. I didn’t tell you. There was nothing that you could have done. Now, Tommy was all set to marry . . .”
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
253
In a low mumbling tone yet speaking with fl owing fl uency, Ruddy recounted the fantastic fatality that had befallen Tommy and Marie, how stunned and numbed Tommy had been in his reactions, how morally stupefied he had felt, how he had fled the girl he had loved too maddened and grieved to speak of it to anybody, too morally repulsed even to see the girl again; and of how crushed, whimpering, and outlandishly defensive Marie had been, how she had been morally denounced by her uncomprehending mother, how her father had been the really responsible factor, how cut off and lonely the girl had been.
Ruddy managed to relate it all with a great deal of surprising matter-of-factness (his long experience as a policeman helping him amazingly here, for he had had to relate many times in his life the details of the tragedies of strangers that were just as heart-rending) that left Agnes pale and speechless.
“Oh, God . . . God, Ruddy, why on earth didn’t you tell me?” Agnes cried out in a demanding and reproving wail from behind her lifted and trembling right palm.
“Agnes, I didn’t know a word about all this until day before yesterday,” Ruddy told her.
“Poor Tommy . . . and that poor girl, that poor child!”
“It was an act of God,” Ruddy mumbled without conviction.
“Oh, Tommy must have suffered . . .”
“He was quite cut up about it, but kept a stiff upper lip.”
“We must see that child, that girl, and—”
“I’ve seen her already, Agnes.”
“How was she?”
“Numb. Sitting in a dark room . . . alone. She looked like the sky fell on her.”
“We must help her.”
“I did. I gave her some money to continue her treatments.”
“Should I go see her?”
254
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Yeah. But give her a day or so. She’s simply shattered.”
“And no wonder. Aw, for a thing like that to happen to such a good girl. It’s unbelievable. It’s a wonder she didn’t die. God, what a thing!” Unconsciously, Agnes crossed herself.
“Now you know why Tommy has been out-of-sorts. He tried to hide it by saying he had to stay. That’s why he’s been so shut off from us, so secretive, so aloof.”
“Did he come to you and tell you?”
“No. I sensed something. I kept after ’im, and fi nally he broke down and told me the whole story. Remember I kept speaking of how he was acting? I felt something was wrong and it worried me. Now, we know. ” Ruddy’s voice held a note of hollow triumph.
“We must help ’im,” Agnes swore.
“Yeah. I’m doing all I can,” Ruddy said.
“He mustn’t let this throw ’im, turn him against things in life—like marriage, girls—”
/> “That’s right. We’ve got a job to do.”
“But how can we? What should we do?” Agnes asked in a despairing whisper, her cheeks wet with tears.
“It has bothered Tommy greatly,” Ruddy said, feeling that that statement ought to cover the boy’s preoccupation with crime, with guilt and nonguilt, and also his powerfully foolish attempt this morning to have himself arrested for robbery.
“We’ve got to have patience with the boy.”
“Of course. But, Ruddy, isn’t there any hope for them to get together at all? How does Tommy feel about it? And Marie?”
“Tommy doesn’t want it, not at all. And Marie has to accept Tommy’s decision.”
There was a long silence and then Agnes whispered in a barely audible breath: “Men . . .”
“Oh, darling . . . don’t look at it like that. You can’t force
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
255
people’s feelings. What happened to that boy was a shock, a shock that neither you nor I have ever faced.”
“And what’ll happen to Marie?”
“Well, I’ll try to help her get a job later. You know, Tommy didn’t want to run any risks, see?”
“But, Ruddy, you said that she didn’t get that illness from running around,” Agnes argued, desperately trying to save a situation in which she felt that she herself was involved. “She’s a victim. She’s innocent. She doesn’t deserve that. It’s not fair.
She inherited it.”
“I know, I know,” Ruddy quickly agreed. “It wasn’t her fault.
Yet she’s got it; she’s had it. Agnes, marriage and syphilis simply don’t go together. You can’t think of ’em in the same second.
You flinch. It doesn’t matter that she got it from her parents.”
“But you said that she said that the doctor had pronounced her as cured,” Agnes argued weakly, half doubting, yet compelled to take the side of women in troubles of this sort.
“Agnes, in matters like this, you’ve just got to take people’s feelings fully into consideration,” Ruddy said. “You can’t force things; you can’t make ’em feel what they don’t or can’t feel. That’s all. Tommy felt like he could not marry that girl. And if he had, what guarantee could anybody have that the marriage would have been successful? Couldn’t he always, if there was a tiff, throw it up at her? And couldn’t she always feel that she had come to him damaged? It’s too great a risk for the emotions of people, Agnes.”
“Yes, I guess so,” Agnes assented uneasily. Then she continued, speaking in a voice that came from her heart: “Men are strange. Hummnnn. They look for fireworks, neon lights, rainbows, and shooting rockets in love. They’re always making women something they are not and—”
“Well, you women help us,” Ruddy said, smiling. “Lipstick, rouge . . .”
256
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Aw, Ruddy, men don’t know what love is.”
“Honey, what was wrong with that girl would have killed love in nine hundred ninety-nine thousand men out of a million. Look, suppose Tommy had married the girl and they had a blind baby . . . ?”
“Mother of God,” Agnes murmured, crossing herself again.
“Look, Tommy was lucky in a sense,” Ruddy argued, more confident of himself now. “Suppose all this had happened in some of those backward Bible Belt states where they don’t ask for blood tests? Why, poor Tommy would have been had . . .”
“B-but don’t say it l-like that,” Agnes protested. “The girl didn’t mean any—”
“Yes, but she had it,” Ruddy said. “And Tommy’s children might not have had it, and it would have passed on to his grandchildren.”
“Oh, Ruddy,” Agnes half screamed, her elbows pressing in repulsion against her sides.
“Tommy was thinking about all that.” Ruddy pled his son’s case.
“But he could have waited,” Agnes contended. “The girl was sick, that was all. It was not all her fault. Why couldn’t he have given her time. Why did he rush it so? Break off so brutally?”
“Agnes, he couldn’t do anything but what he did,” Ruddy insisted. “Even I can understand that.”
“I can’t,” Agnes said. “I’m not saying that he should have married her. No, not unless he wanted to. But to leave her like that, so suddenly, all alone. And the way her family acted toward her . . .” She lowered her face into her hands. When she lifted her eyes, she asked, “But where’s Tommy now? Won’t he go with me to the mass meeting? He oughtn’t to brood and sulk off by himself. We mustn’t leave ’im too much alone, you know.”
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
257
“Oh, he’ll be along; he’ll come,” Ruddy said. “He said he would.”
“I ought to go and see that poor girl,” Agnes said. “And drop that mass meeting . . .” A look of self-accusation came into her eyes.
“No. Take Tommy to the mass meeting,” Ruddy advised.
“It’ll be good for you and him. Stick close to Tommy for a bit until he gets his bearings.”
“Oh, I will,” Agnes said in a tone that hinted of self-defense.
There was silence again. Agnes’s eyes danced with appre-hension.
“There are miracle drugs now, you know,” she said brightly.
“Agnes, it’s not the purely physical part of it that shakes you,” Ruddy explained. ”It shakes you morally, sticks in your feelings.”
The uncertainty in his voice was not being caused entirely by the facts about Marie that he was citing, or about Tommy’s moral revulsion; he was seeing in his mind as he talked those rough slabs of white concrete that were being pounded to powder in the police courtyard by the hammers of sweating prisoners clad in gray denim.
“Say, I’ve got to get back to the office,” Ruddy said. “When Tommy comes in, give me a ring, hunh? Just call up and say that Ed Seigel wants me to call him. Then I’ll know that he got in all right.”
“Yes, I understand,” Agnes whispered.
“And go easy on Tommy,” Ruddy counseled. “Don’t get ’im worked up. I think it’s best, for the time being, not to let on that you even know.”
“Why?”
“He begged me not to say anything to you about it at all,”
Ruddy told her.
258
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Oh. All right. But I wish I could talk to ’im.”
“If you take time and try to get really close to ’im, maybe he’ll open up on his own,” Ruddy explained. “That’s the best way in things like this.”
“I’ll try,” Agnes pledged.
When he went to her, she rose and kissed him gravely.
“Don’t worry too much,” she said to him.
“I won’t,” he said. “Be easy with Tommy. ’Bye, now.”
“ ’Bye, darling.”
As he drove, he felt more relaxed than he had felt for many days. The lamps flashed on in the early evening streets. Yet he knew that had solved nothing really. But he had at least brought out into the open the problem—that is, some of it, with Agnes.
And that was something. He had to admit that her attitude had surprised him; she had been horrified, but she had en-compassed the horror with the maternal instincts of a woman.
“Those little soft women are really very strong,” he said to himself as he passed the first roadblock that he had ordered thrown up. He glanced at his watch; it was a bit past eight. Gosh, that damned mass meeting would be getting under way in another hour. But where in hell was Tommy? Why had he not gone home as he had promised? No, he should have known better than to have let that boy go out alone like that. Jesus, it is hard to make decisions about your own fl esh and blood. Though infi -
nitely relieved, Ruddy knew that he had not solved anything.
There was a solution to these gathering shadows that lay just beyond the rim of his mind; there was some way of juggling these slippery facts and making hard sense out of them, the kind of sense that he had
learned in the police school he had attended. He could see clear now, he thought, why Ed’s queer notions had had so deep an effect upon him; it was because he was at a loss, at sea, and, above all, because his own blood kin
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
259
had been involved. Yet . . . yet that was not exactly true. Ed had ferreted out of Tommy, before his very eyes, the fact that the boy had pretended to participate in a holdup. That had been no illusion. Goddamnit, Tommy could tell me. But how could he make ’im tell? And where was he? Despite the fact that he had told Agnes to “go easy” on Tommy, he was resolved now that when he got his hands on that boy, he would squeeze him dry, open his little stomach and see what was bothering him.
As he swung into the big gate leading into the police courtyard, he saw Ed Seigel standing under the offi cial parquet where only squad cars were allowed to halt. Ed waved to him and came rushing forward and was at the window of his car as it stopped.
“We got the murder gun,” Ed reported.
Captain Snell moved forward, grinning. “Chief, that was a hunch in a million,” the captain said.
“Chief, most of that gun was buried in the first two slabs of concrete we broke up,” Ed said. “Now, I’ve jumped the gun a bit and—”
“What do you mean?” Ruddy asked.
“I’ve sent the chamber and barrel on to the lab for compari-sons,” Ed said. “All the bullets fired in all four murders came from that gun we’ve got!”
“Well, we’ve got that far,” Ruddy sighed. “But we’ve got to trace that gun—”
“The order’s in.” Captain Snell grinned.
“Good,” Ruddy approved. Yet he was still far from his goal.
The gun found could not definitely be traced or connected, as yet, with the gun missing from Detective Heard’s home. And Ruddy’s gun was still in his desk drawer.
“Any report yet from the lab on those two batches of concrete sent over?” he asked.
260
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Not yet. But we’ll hear any minute now,” Ed promised.
“Boy, we got a break in a year-old mystery. We’ll crack this case; I’m confident of that now.”