Roy had always done well in school and, for all his lack of grace, he had been good at sports, but his father never noticed. He saw only Abe. Had Abe been someone other than the person he was Roy might have hated and resented him. But Abe was Abe and Roy worshipped his older brother.
In the first year of college, on scholarship at an eastern university that would groom him for the medical profession, he had excelled. He had come home for intersession, at great personal expense to Roy’s father, to tell in person the tales that they had read in the sports section of the Herald. He had died in the snow returning home from an evening with his old high school friends. The detective who told them was sorry. He had been a fan, but then who hadn’t been. The detective said that the motive was robbery. The person who murdered Abe was never caught.
When Abe died, the family died. Roy tried night school. He wanted an education, and his grades were good at first, but he wore down. He had to work all day because his father could no longer manage. He had to do the cooking and the housework. The oppressive atmosphere of the small apartment drained his resources. He found himself sleeping in class, unable to complete his assignments. He was too tired to study in the late evening, the only time he could call his own, when his father and mother were asleep and he could finally be alone in the solitude of his room.
He was never quite certain why he had turned to police work. At first, when he was new to the tensions and danger of the job, he thought about his choice a lot. Perhaps, subconsciously, he felt that he would someday find the person who had murdered his brother. Perhaps he had joined because the job was night work and presented a justification for sleeping away the daytime when his parents roamed the apartment like lost souls, sitting silently for hours at a time, rising slowly and without reason to wander to another chair by another dust-coated window.
His father had died during his second year on the force and his mother had passed away two months later. It had been a relief to Roy. He had moved out of their apartment into another apartment just as small and just as barren.
Before they died, Roy had imagined that their passing would somehow liberate him, but it had only left a void. The patterns of a quarter of a century are difficult to change. He had re-registered at the night branch of the state university. There even had been a girl. She had been quiet and bookish. Their dates had been a series of long pauses punctuated by discussions intentionally abstract and intellectual, as if both were afraid to communicate anything resembling a true feeling. They had lived together for a short time, but the barriers had never fallen and they had parted friends for whom a closer relationship had not worked out.
Roy’s fellow officers found him strange. Intensely emotional about abstract ideas, yet cold as ice in life-and-death situations. It was as if Abe’s death had killed all personal joy for him, leaving only the hard shell of his intellectualism to shield him from life’s realities. The Walters boy reminded him of Abe in so many ways that the investigation operated like a scalpel that was peeling through the layers of his own personal wounds and baring the grief that he had believed to be long buried.
An hour ago, Shindler had tried to read, but his mind wandered and he had given up the attempt. It was the case. Several times he had even dreamed about it. He could not stop thinking about what had happened to that boy.
“You can’t let a case get to you, Roy,” Harvey had said. “If you become personally involved, you don’t do your job.”
“Intellectually, I know you’re right, but I can’t help it. It’s the things I’m learning about him. I’ve talked to dozens of people and not one has had a bad word to say. It’s not just because he’s dead, either. You can tell.
“And you know what hurts most?” he said. “I was at the house again, yesterday. His mother was beginning to handle it. Mr. Walters said she was back on her feet. They even went out to dinner. Then they got yesterday’s mail. He was accepted at Harvard. Harvard. Jesus. That kid could have been a doctor, a scientist. Anything.”
The phone rang and Roy sighed and walked into the kitchen.
“Roy?”
It was Harvey Marcus.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“I just got a call from a Dr. Norman Trembler, an optometrist in Glendale. He read the bulletin on the glasses and he thinks he’s found the person with the prescription.”
“Did you get the name and address?” Shindler asked. He could feel Marcus’s excitement. There was a certain electricity generated whenever good, solid police work paid off.
“I’ve got it. We went over everything on the phone. He sold a pair of glasses just like the ones we found to an Esther Freemont, 2219 North 82nd Street.”
The Freemont house had seen better days. The small front lawn was overgrown with weeds and no one seemed to care about cutting the grass that was left. The wood had a gray, weatherbeaten appearance. It had not been painted in some time.
Marcus and Shindler stepped over some broken toys and walked up the creaking front stairs to the porch. There were soiled curtains on the front window and over the small glass window in the upper half of the front door. A tricycle lay on its side on the porch. Marcus could hear a TV blaring inside. A baby was crying and someone was yelling. There was no doorbell so Marcus knocked loudly on the door frame.
There was someone shuffling toward the door. The curtain over the front door glass raised and a bloated face peered out. Marcus flashed his badge and the door opened warily.
The woman standing in the doorway was well over two hundred pounds. The weight was collected in rolls of fat over large thighs and sagging breasts. She wore a soiled gray dress that covered her like a tent. An apron hung over the dress. Her eyes were bloodshot and held no sign of cheer. Marcus suspected that she had been drinking. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth and medium-length graying hair straggled across her forehead.
The inside of the house was a reflection of the personality of the owner, Marcus decided. A heavy, unpleasant smell hung in the air. The rooms were dark and untidy. How could humans live this way? He was always asking questions like that and never finding the answers.
“Mrs. Freemont?”
“I was. It’s Taylor now.”
“Are you Esther Freemont’s mother?”
“What’s she done now?” she said with bored disgust. Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head and yelled angrily into the interior of the house.
“Esther, you get out here.”
A voice answered unintelligibly over the roar of applause on a TV game show.
“Turn that goddamn thing down and get out here,” Mrs. Taylor yelled.
The sound level did not diminish, but a young girl came around the corner of the living room. When she saw the two men in suits, she stopped, then continued toward them at a slower pace.
Shindler watched her walk across the room, the way a hunter watches his prey. Esther was tall for a girl. Shindler judged her to be about sixteen years old. She was wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt that covered large, swaying breasts. Shindler realized that she was braless and the excitement generated by the police investigation blended subconsciously with an undercurrent of sexual desire.
Esther’s skin was smooth and dark. Her long, dark hair was as dirty and unkempt as her mother’s. Involuntarily, Shindler began to think of her in sexual terms.
“These men want to see you. They’re police. What have you done now?”
Esther’s large brown eyes moved from her mother to the detectives without answering. She appeared to be nervous, but no more than any other person confronted by the law.