We drove up Baldwin Street and took a right on Broadway. I smiled, knowing where we were going. He stopped the car in front of a well-kept red and white house with a wraparound porch. Large chestnut trees flanked it on both sides. It was in much better condition than when I had last seen it.
"You know this house, Cassandra?"
"No." She was leaning forward, her elbows resting on the seat between Frannie and me.
"This is where your dad lived."
"Really? He never showed it to me. Can we go look?"
We got out and stood on the sidewalk in front. "How come I've never been here before, Dad?"
"Because I haven't been back since you were born."
"But you're always telling me stories about Crane's View!"
I was about to answer when Frannie climbed up on the porch and went to the front door. "You want to look inside?" He held up a bunch of keys and jigged them to show he could get in.
"You have a key?"
"To my own house? Sure! Are you nuts?" Without waiting for our reactions, he opened the door and walked in. I caught up as he was walking into the living room. I wanted to ask a dozen questions, but also wanted simply to stand there and remember.
"You live here? You bought my house?"
"Yeah! I've had it seven years."
"What'd you pay for it?"
He looked to see if Cass was near. "None of your fuckin' business. Bought it when I was married. My wife was an executive producer at NBC so we had a lot of money then. When we split up, she gave me the house."
"Congratulations! Every time 7 got divorced, I had to check to see if I still had all my body parts after the settlement. Can we look around?"
"Sure. You want something to drink? Cassandra, you want anything?"
"Could I have a beer?"
"Sam?"
"Nothing. I'm in too much shock. Frannie McCabe owns my house. You bought it from, who, the Van Gelders?"
"Their son. They moved to Florida and gave it to him." He started for the kitchen. "You wanna look around, go ahead. Go upstairs if you want."
"Dad?" Cass looked at me expectantly.
"You go. I'm going to sit down here a little while."
Frannie was back in a few minutes with a glass of beer in one hand, a glass of milk in the other.
"Milk? You?"
"It's good stuff. Now what's with the Pauline thing? How come you want to write about her?"
"Because it's too interesting to pass up. I've been thinking about it awhile now. Why don't you think her boyfriend did it? You've got to tell me everything because I don't know a thing."
He sat down across from me and cradled his glass in both hands. "I'll show you the files. She and this Edward Durant went out the night it happened. He'd come down for the weekend to be with her. His story is, they went to the river to drink and make out. What he remembered was they drank too much and got into a bad fight. Really bad. They were hitting each other. Then they stopped and drank some more."
"Why were they fighting?"
"Because she wanted to break up. Said she didn't respect him and wanted out. Now, the last thing he remembered was her getting out of the car and him following. She went over to the water and he was right behind her. She said get away. He hit her. Slapped her across the face. She fell down and started screaming. Said all kinds of nasty things and kinda went nuts. Way over the top, even for crazy Pauline. That spooked him, so he went back to the car, hoping she'd cool off. While he was waiting, he kept drinking till he passed out.
"When he came to, it was an hour later. Eleven-thirty, because he looked at his watch. She wasn't back. He got out again and looked all around, but she was gone. He thought she'd walked home. He was so angry at what had happened that he just drove right back to his house in Bedford."
"But you said he confessed when they caught him."
"He confessed to being there alone with her, to fighting, to hitting her, to passing out. They had a lot of proof from his past that whenever he drank he got violent. They put two and two together. And that, my friend, is usually enough to convince a jury."
"But why would he admit to all those things if he did kill her? That they fought and he hit her? It makes no sense. He never actually admitted to killing her?"
"No."
"And you don't think he did it?"
"Nope." He drank the glass of milk in one slug.
"Who did?"
"We're talking off the record here?"
I held up both hands. "I'm not taking notes and I ain't wired."
"Take it easy, Sam. What do you think this is, NYPD Blue? Do you remember David Cadmus?"
Cass came back into the room. Frannie stood up and handed her the beer. "Sure you remember him. Real little guy? Hung around with Terry Walker and John Lesher?"
I thought about it until a picture from our high school yearbook came to mind: three boys standing stiffly around a 16 mm movie projector, all wearing white shirts buttoned to the top and thick black Clark Kent eyeglasses. "The worms! Sure I remember."
Frannie sat down on the couch next to Cass. "Back when we were in school, any guy who carried around a slide rule, was good in math or science and didn't take many baths was considered a jerk. We called them worms."
Cass rolled her eyes. "Worms? God, you guys were so mean."
"And proud of it. But look, Cassandra, you kids got your own terms for them now. How about geeks? Nerds? Call 'em what you like, for us they were worms.
"But I found out something I bet you didn't know, Sam: David Cadmus's father was Gordon Cadmus. The Gordon Cadmus."
"No! The gangster?"
"That's right, bud. Crane's View's very own Mafia man. We just didn't know it then. We thought he was a business guy. He owned some companies in the city. We wouldn't have teased that kid so much if we'd known who his dad was."
Cass looked at me, then Frannie. "Who was Gordon Cadmus?"
"Eleven years ago in a New York restaurant three men were having dinner: Gordon Cadmus, Jerry Kargl and George Weiser. Two men in raincoats walked into the restaurant and shot all three. Nobody in the place remembered what the shooters looked like of course, only that they were both wearing raincoats. See no evil, hear no evil. Story has it that after they finished shooting, one of the guys walked over to Cadmus's body and stuck a chocolate eclair in his eye. Then they walked out and that was that. You had something like it in one of your books, right, Sam?"
"The Tattooed City. That's how the damned story ends! My God, if I'd known one of the real victims was Cadmus's father . . . But what did he have to do with Pauline's death?"
"Pauline knew who he was back then. She had been seeing him on and off for two years."
"Frannie, she was nineteen years old when she died!"
He shrugged. "Some kids start young. Especially ones like Pauline."
The room was silent awhile. Frannie tipped his empty glass up to get the last drops. To my surprise, Cass was first to speak.
"Dad, remember the girl I told you about, Spoon? The one with the tattoo? She sounds like Pauline in a lot of ways. Her motto is 'Do it now because you might not get a chance later.'"
Frannie laughed strangely. "Exactly! When you start looking into Pauline's life, you'll see she was either fearless or totally nuts. I've never been able to figure out which."
I looked around the room where I'd spent so much time as a kid. In that corner we'd always put the Christmas tree. Over there our dog Jack used to stand on his hind legs and look out the window. Frannie had been here too. Sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a chair, utterly ill at ease talking to my parents while waiting for me to come downstairs so we could go out and make trouble.