His mother would occasionally sober up enough to complain that she wasn’t going to have a pack of thieves living under her roof. Adam, now taller and stronger than the child she had beaten, no longer hid his contempt for her. He told her that he didn’t want to live with a drunken old whore, either, but they’d have to make do. If she didn’t want to live with a thief under her roof, she could damn well move.
One day she seemed to take him at his word. She told Mitch to pack up his belongings, that they were going to find another place to live. He saw that she already had an old valise half-filled with her own clothing.
“What about Adam?”
“We’re leaving Adam. That’s what.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I want to stay with Adam.”
She slapped him. “Now, you get in there and pack, or I’ll persuade you in a way you won’t like.”
To her dismay, Adam walked in the door just then. “Persuade him to do what?”
Mitch told him.
Adam looked furious for a moment, then said, “You need a drink to steady your nerves.”
He poured a glass of rye and stood by and watched as she downed it, then poured another. When she hesitated, he pushed the glass closer to her. She began crying, but drank it.
When she had downed three drinks, Adam said, “Mitch, you go into her room and unpack her bag. I’m going to take a walk with Ma and talk things over.”
Two days later, Mitch came home from school to find a policeman talking to Adam on the front porch, and felt certain that his worst fears had come to pass. He wondered if his mother, who had been sulking, had reported her own son to the police. He felt a surge of rage at the thought, rage that allowed him to overcome his dread and approach them.
The policeman’s face was sorrowful, though, and Mitch noticed that Adam seemed solemn as well.
“It’s Ma,” Adam said. “She’s dead.”
“What happened?” Mitch asked, working hard to hide what he felt-a vast relief.
“She was in an accident,” the policeman said gently.
“She was hit by a streetcar,” Adam said. “She tripped and fell right in front of it. Nothing the conductor could do.”
“Were you there?” Mitch asked.
“No,” Adam said, watching him carefully.
Mitch thought he was trying to convey some message to him. He tried to read the look and asked, “Was she drunk?”
“Now, sonny, that’s no way to think about her,” the policeman said.
Adam said, “Of course she was.”
“What’s going to happen to us now?” Mitch asked.
The policeman, not knowing his real fear, said, “You’ll be fine now. Don’t you worry.”
“Grandfather is on his way,” Adam said. “We’re going to live at his place.”
“Together?” Mitch asked.
“Always,” Adam said, ruffling his hair. “I’m not ever going to let anyone keep me away from my little brother.”
Their grandfather, Theodore Granville, proved to be a shrewd man, but not, so far as his grandsons were concerned, an unkind one. He was amused to learn that the boys referred to him as “the chief” and preferred they call him that rather than Grandfather. He had made most of his money in oil, and later in real estate, and had interests now in a variety of concerns. He was by no means a blue blood-a self-made man who had worked his own way out of poverty as a wildcatter in the oil fields, he was, Mitch came to see, not above using any means he could to gain an advantage over a rival.
For the most part, during those early years, he did not want to be troubled too often with his grandsons, an arrangement that suited the boys well. Adam cautioned Mitch that they had to do whatever the old man asked, because this good fortune could be lost as easily as it was gained. Mitch thought the chief had taken too strong a liking to Adam to kick them out, but he heeded Adam’s warnings all the same.
So they met the chief’s requirements that they be clean and well dressed and quickly learned any rule of etiquette he asked them to adhere to, and did not interrupt any gathering he held or cross the paths of his guests. He more than met their needs for food, clothing, and shelter. He provided them a generous allowance.
Adam, more easily bored than Mitch, soon involved himself in bolder adventures outside the house. Having learned that he had a knack for theft and leading toughs, he was unable to give up either pursuit. He managed to talk his grandfather into buying him a sleek boat. Later, his grandfather served as Adam’s business partner, sharing in Adam’s profits as a rumrunner.
His grandfather suffered setbacks during the Depression, but kept up appearances as much as possible. While still a teenager, Mitch learned that Adam and his grandfather had a number of shared businesses, not all of them legitimate, and each began to prepare Mitch to take his place in these concerns.
Mitch moved in higher social circles than his brother, and even gained entry to households where his grandfather had been snubbed. Not every door was open, of course. He drew the eye of Lillian Vanderveer, whose parents disapproved of him, and did their best to keep them apart.
Adam married a girl who had more looks than sense. At the chief’s insistence, Adam and his wife continued to live in the mansion. Two sons were born to them-Eric in 1934, and a year later, Ian. Mitch doted on them as if they were his own. Life seemed good.
Then, in late 1935, Adam’s luck ran out-he was arrested.
The chief used all his power, but to no avail. The papers made hay out of Adam’s arrest and trial. The old man was heartbroken. He died on New Year’s Day, 1936, and it later seemed to Mitch that he should have taken that as a sign of how terrible the year would be.
The milk was tepid now, and Mitch set the glass aside. He shut the train off and moved toward his desk. He stood for a while looking at two of the framed photos there. One was of his brother, Adam, at about the age of twenty- smiling, looking cocky as always. The other was of Mitch’s adopted son, taken when he was nine-the boy who was calling himself Max Ducane now, the boy who had so recently and so publicly renounced his ties to the Yeagers.
He reached for the photo of Kyle and stared at it.
Why had he ever given him any name at all? What did the little son of a bitch think would have happened to him if he hadn’t been adopted? Instead of letting him suffer the fate he deserved, he had given the brat his own name, and his brother’s name, and his family name, and much more. More than he himself had ever had as a boy. Put the little asshole through college-Ivy League, too. That wasn’t cheap.
He spent a moment wishing his own kids were half as bright as Kyle, but unfortunately they got their brains from their mother.
That didn’t make him feel any better about Kyle. He had, of course, always had his own reasons for anything he did on his adopted son’s behalf, but what did that matter?
The kid had betrayed him, plain and simple. Fuck him, and fuck Warren Ducane, too.
He placed the photo in a desk drawer, facedown.
He picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Have you found him yet?” he asked.
He did not get the answer he wanted.
Nothing would help him sleep tonight.
25
O ’CONNOR MANAGED TO AVOID ME FOR A WEEK. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING to make that difficult for him. He was covering Warren Ducane’s disappearance-thought to be voluntary-and the Max Ducane story, so he wasn’t in the newsroom much.
He found time to interview Bennie Lee Harmon, who had been convicted of killing two Las Piernas prostitutes back in the late 1950s. Harmon’s death penalty conviction, along with those of about a hundred other prisoners, had been commuted to life with the possibility of parole by a Supreme Court decision in 1972, and now the state parole board had set this “model prisoner” free. O’Connor did his best to get someone to give a damn about the killer’s release, but most of the people who had investigated the case were no longer living, nobody from the hookers’ families showed up at the parole hearing, and apparently Harmon didn’t plan to return to Las Piernas, so the story quickly made the journey to the back pages and then faded completely.