“Take my word for it, he wasn’t gentle. How do you know him? You know his name?”
“His name is Washington. I don’t know if it’s his first or last. I’ve heard him called Eyewash, by his close friends. I used to run into him up in the Quad Cities, Davenport mostly, in any of three or four bars, bars catering to blacks, or to blacks and whites who wish to mix.”
“You still hit those clubs?”
“Once in a while. Since they moved me up from Sociology prof to desk jockey, I’ve had more responsibility on my hands than free time. I still make the rounds of the bars once a month or so, and I haven’t run into Washington in a year at least.”
“In spite of that, it does sound like the same guy.”
“Probably is. But if he’s moved from the Cities to somewhere else, it isn’t Port City, or we’d both know about it. He isn’t the kind of guy you don’t notice.”
“Anything else you can think of about him?”
“Yeah, he’s got a sister. I’m not talking soul sister, either, an honest-to-God blood sister. Rita, her name is. Very nice.”
“That so?”
“Pretty thing. Younger than her brother. ’Round twenty-five or so. I’ve seen her around some.”
“Lately?”
“Yeah, last time I was up there. She’s still around.”
“Maybe I can track her down and find Washington through her.”
“Could be.”
“How’d he lose the eye? He ever mention it?”
“I hear he lost it in a gang fight, when he was a kid. He came from Chicago originally. South Side.”
“Thought you said he was gentle.”
“Far as I know, he is. Always nice to the ladies. Saw him back down from a few fights, too. Big guy like him always has challengers, you know, and he’d just ignore any flack.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“I got no idea. He dressed well, but most of the brothers-all but me, anyway-dress to the teeth.” He got out a piece of paper and scribbled down several lines. “Here’s the names and addresses of a couple clubs you can try, to run down his sister. But Mallory…”
“Yes, Jack?”
“Watch your lily-white ass.”
I grinned. “At all times.”
He leaned back again, stabbing out his cigarette in a tray. “You know, though… if I were you I’d try a safer approach.”
“Such as?”
“Explore that Norman character. Both the old man and the son. Check it out before you go any further and see if it’s just a coincidence, this Colorado Hill thing.”
“I might just do that.”
“It ought to be fun, researching the old man. Simon Harrison Norman. Hell of a character.”
“Oh?”
“Sure, hell, didn’t you ever hear about how he raised his fortune?”
“Something to do with patent medicine, wasn’t it?”
“I’ll say! It’s one of Port City’s few lasting claims to fame. Sy Norman, back in the thirties, was the country’s leading cancer quack. Sold mineral water in a bottle as a cancer cure. Made a pile. Rumor has it he’s a silent partner back of the five major industries in this town. Look it all up. It’ll be good reading, if nothing else.”
NINE
I was hunched over, staring into the microfilm viewer at the city library, turning the crank that caused day after day of Port City Journals to glide across my vision. I’d started with January three years past, had gone through the first roll, which took me to April, and was now on the second, just into May. I was half-hypnotized by the filmed pages as they swam across my path of sight, but was shaken awake by a screaming headline: SENATOR NORMAN DIES IN CRASH. A smaller, unintentionally ambiguous headline above said WIFE AND CHILD CRITICAL.
A studio photograph of Norman, his wife and daughter, taken only a month before, was on one side of the single column story that ran down the center of the page. On the other side was a long shot of the precipice at Colorado Hill where the Norman car had gone over. The picture showed Sheriff Brennan standing at the edge, looking down over the drop-off, much as he’d been last night when John and I approached him.
According to the Journal account, the Norman family had been on the way home after spending an evening with friends in Davenport. The night had been a particularly dark one, no moon, and the senator apparently had “simply misjudged” the curve at the Hill. The account said the senator had not been speeding, and that the senator had not been drinking. This denial raised the questions it sought to suppress.
I spun the manual control on the machine and eased the next day’s front page into view. Reported there was the death of Norman’s wife, and both Mr. and Mrs. Norman’s obituaries; printing an obituary on the front page is (speaking as an ex-newspaperman) the highest honor a paper can pay a corpse. From Norman’s obit I learned nothing John’s sister Lori hadn’t already told me. I kept turning. Two Journals later I read of the young daughter’s death. Her obit was shortest and saddest.
I got up from the machine and went over to the desk where Brenda Halwin was working. Brenda is a nicely built, pretty blonde, a year ahead of me at the college, four years behind me in age. The sight and company of her could cheer me up after almost anything, and I hoped this would be no exception.
“Finished?” Brenda asked.
“I’m not sure. For right now, maybe. How far back do these microfilmed Journals go?” I’d never gone back past the early forties.
“Very far. Seventy years, I think.”
I thought about asking Brenda what she was doing tonight. I thought about the night two weeks ago when Brenda had been with me at my trailer. I thought about another blonde, almost as pretty, but with roots, and dead.
I said, “I guess you better pull out the thirties drawer for me, Brenda.”
I wasn’t cheered up; it wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to be. I just wasn’t.
Brenda started me with January, 1930, and half an hour later I was beginning January, 1931, and had yet to see the name Simon Harrison Norman in print.
“Reading the old comic strips again, Mr. Mallory?”
I looked up from the machine. It was Miss Simmons, an elderly, attractive lady who’d been head librarian for as long as I could remember. She was the kind of “old maid” who makes it difficult to understand how she got that way; in Miss Simmons’s case, so gossip went, her true love had died in the Great War. Whichever war that was.
“Frankly, Miss Simmons,” I said, “I’m trying to avoid the comics, though I find them and the old movie ads tempting. I’ve got more serious research on my mind.”
“What subject, Mr. Mallory?”
“A local recluse of sorts. Rich recluse. Simon Norman.”
“Ah, Mr. Norman.” She smiled a small, mysterious smile, a smile out of a Gothic novel, and said, “Quite a personality, our Mr. Norman. But you won’t find much of him in the pages of the Port City Journal.”
“Oh?”
“That is, outside of, perhaps, a scathing editorial or two.”
“Why’s that?”
“Mr. Norman was competition. He was publisher and editor of his own daily newspaper, the Midwest Clarion, which gave the Journal a run for the money. The Journal saw fit to exclude coverage of Mr. Norman in their pages.”
“No kidding,” I said. I looked at the microfilm machine and the box of spools beside it. “But it does present a problem for me.”
“Yes, of course. And for a long time now, Mr. Norman has displayed a distinct dislike for publicity, so recent write-ups are few and far between. You could check the Reader’s Guide for national coverage, but our magazine collection of the thirties is quite limited.”