“Not out here either!” the chief hollered out the car window. “It’s probably just some kind of crazy… Let’s head back to town, you can check by here late this afternoon!”
Calvin walked slowly up to the chief’s open window. “You don’t think somebody shot him, do you? I mean, somebody hadda shoot them holes in his car,” Calvin reasoned.
“The bastard probably did it himself. You know Ham.”
“Yeah. Then who was it called you last night?”
“I dunno. Probably Ham. It still could’ve been Howie, but I kinda doubt it now. Probably Ham made the call, just to get me pissed.”
“Yeah,” Calvin gulped. He was shivering from the cold. The gray sky had seemed to tighten and lift a bit, and flecks of snow were drifting slowly down.
“I’ll see you later, back at the office,” the chief announced. He cranked up the window, dropped his car into reverse, and backing around Calvin’s car, entered the turnaround behind it, spun the wheel hard to the left, and fled down the long driveway to the road.
By the time he reached the center of town it was snowing hard, as if blankets of the soft flakes were being tossed against the ground. Boy, snow in February is depressing, the chief thought, and then he decided to go home for the rest of the day. He figured, with the snow and all, he’d be out on emergency calls most of the night, so he’d better catch some sleep while he could.
CHAPTER 6
Chapter Beginning as “His Second Wife Speaks of a Man She Calls ‘Your Father’ (from a Tape Recording)”
HIS SECOND WIFE speaks of a man she calls “Your Father” (from a tape recording):
“Yeah, my mother, she used to sit back in her chair and she’d clap her hands together, like this, and she’d say to me, ‘Annie, oh, Annie, you’re so pretty with that smile and those legs. With those legs, honey, you, you’re going to the top!’ She said, she said it often enough, boy, once a day at least, and she wasn’t the only one saying it, either. My God, Uncle Zack, my Aunt Harriet. I mean, even old Grover said it, old Grover the janitor in our building on East Eighty-sixth, even he said it, so by the time I was, say, oh, I dunno, twelve, thirteen, by that time I really believed it myself. I really, I believed it was gonna be true. I was going to the top. And you know what that meant to us, ‘getting to the top,’ it meant Show Business. SHOW BIZ. I guess because we were New Yorkers. You know. But also because we were all jokers, all of us, the whole family — comics, singers, mimics, like that. This was before television, of course, back in the forties and all, so to us Show Business didn’t mean TV, it meant the stage. The Musical Stage, honey, right up there in front of a live audience, people who really love ya, and you can feel ’em loving ya, nobody cares if you feel it, so you just take it in like the sun’s rays, and the more you get the better you get, no kidding, that’s how it works, Show Business. With the stage, I mean, not TV or movies. It’s different there, TV, the movies, because the audience there hates you if you look like you can feel ’em loving ya. They want to see you as if you’re all alone in the world or something, you know, as if they’re looking at you through one of those one-way mirrors that department stores have for detectives. Anyhow, to be good, really good, on the stage, you have to get special training, of course. No matter if you’re talented — talent’s as cheap as daisies and’ll do you about as much good as a dozen of ’em — unless you get the training, because you might, you maybe wouldn’t think so, but it’s not so easy to stand up there and let ’em love ya and let ’em know you can feel it, let ’em know you love it. Which of course is what keeps them doing it, loving ya. It really is not easy. I don’t care what you might think. It’s work. Hard work, honey. You wouldn’t believe — you’ve never been in show business, have you? I can tell. Never mind, I mean, I can tell from the way you walk and how you’re sitting, stuff like that, though of course you’ve got the looks, you could do it, I mean if you had the training and all, though you might be too old for it now. I was only a kid when I got started. I had the looks too, but like I said, talent’s cheap. Nothing. Nuth-ing. So I had to get started early, before I was ten, even, I got started. At first all I could do was sing, you know, like a little kid, but cute, I mean cute enough to get me on ‘Uncle Bob’s Rainbow House’ eight times in one year, and then when I started taking lessons it didn’t take long before I was good enough to sing with Major Bowes, and after that I did the ‘Rinso White’ commercial on radio. Did you ever hear that one? ‘Rinso White! Rinso White! Happy little washday song!” You’re too young for radio. Another radio show I was on was ‘Our Gal Sunday,’ where I had a singing part for thirty-six weeks running. And all this time I’m taking voice lessons, training to be heard, honey, not seen, not yet, anyhow. First things first, you know what I mean? But around the time I was eleven my mother says I ought to start getting ready to be seen, people are really starting to talk about how good-looking I am anyhow, so she starts me taking tap and modern ballet, and three afternoons a week the accordion. Things you can do out in front of people. Not like the piano or the cello or something like that, that hides you. My mama really had it figured, she really knew what she wanted for me and how she could get it for me. She wanted me to be seen, and naturally, to be loved for it, for being seen. Oh yeah, my mama just knew it, people were going to love me for letting them see me — and I was going to let them see everything I had, too. I was going to turn myself into a beautiful girl gracefully dancing up there on the stage, long white legs shining in the lights, feet in silver shoes tapping miraculously fast in complicated rhythms while the whole upper body and the accordion would swing back and forth in a slick kind of counterpoint! That girl was going to be me! That girl up there tap-dancing and playing the accordion, her fingers and arms moving as fast and as graceful as her feet and legs, with the music of the accordion and the crackle of the taps joined by the sweet sound of her own singing—that girl was going to be me! ‘Lady of Spain I Adore You.’ Sure. I was going to become an entire musical production, with the movement, the rhythm and the melody all together in a single body placed in the exact center of an enormous stage! I mean it, she meant it. That was my mama’s dream, God rest her soul, and naturally, before I was very old, it was my dream too. I guess when, I guess you’re more likely to do that, make your parent’s dream into your own. You know, when your parent dies young. Maybe, I don’t know, to work off the guilt or something. You know. Hell, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Why, I mean. Anyhow, it sure became my dream awful fast, and especially after mama died, which was the summer I turned sixteen and was starting to take voice with Estelle Liebling — you probably know who that is, Beverly Sills studied with her, though I didn’t know her then, even though we were about the same age. I guess we had our lessons on different days or something. I could hit a high G above high C then, would you believe, and that’s as good as Beverly Sills, though like I said, talent’s cheap, you have to have a lot more than talent to be a Beverly Sills. Anyhow, when my mama died I was sixteen. Cancer. My father died when I was two. Car crash. I went to live in the next block, over on Eighty-seventh, with Uncle Zack and Aunt Harriet and just threw myself into my lessons, tap-dancing and singing and playing the accordion, all of them, practicing eight and ten hours a day, probably driving everybody in the building nuts, but no one ever complained, because just like my mother, they were all sure I was going to the top. They all knew that someday I would make it big. Big. And then they could remember when. You know how people are. They like to be able to remember you when. And if you yourself are a true believer, I mean really believe, even to the point where it’s never actually occurred to you that you might not make it big, never even once occurred to you, pretty soon everyone who knows you starts thinking the same way. It never even occurs to them either that you won’t become a star. So long as you’re not a complete idiot, of course, so long as you’ve got some kind of recognizable talent. That’s the one thing you really need talent for, to convince people you’re not crazy because you happen to believe you’re going to become a star. It’s what makes them believe. In you. People, strangers practically, would start telling me on the elevator, ‘Annie, I just know you’re going to make it big! I can already see your name up in lights on Broadway!’ they’d say to me. Stuff like that. Only, the trouble was, pretty soon I was, I not only had to live up to my poor dead mother’s expectations for me, but the expectations of everyone who lived in the building too, and all my teachers, even my friends. So if the thought ever did occur to me that I might not make it, get to the top and become a world-famous tap dancer and accordionist — or the even more horrible thought that I might not really want to become it — well, you better believe those were thoughts I put out of my head in a hurry. I can remember lying in my bed in my room on Eighty-seventh, my legs and ankles stiff and aching from ten hours of practice, and suddenly I’d be thinking, I might not make it. I might not be good enough. I might not be lucky enough. Stuff like that. And pretty soon I’d start to think that those were thoughts that were being put into my head by my poor dead mother’s restless spirit, just to sort of test me. To discipline me. No kidding, that’s how I got around any doubts I felt in those days. I just figured it was Mama, doomed to wander through purgatory or someplace until I made it to the top. Mama somewhere out there helping to guarantee my becoming a star by toughening me up with bad thoughts. So I’d give the right response, I’d say, I’d tell myself, ‘Not a chance I won’t make it, not this kid, not me, not Annie Laurie!’ And then I’d roll over and fall asleep, probably with a smile on my face…”