“Bronson?” Lee nodded. The man took out a wallet, flipped it open and held it out. “Keefler. Parole officer.”
He sat in the other wicker chair without invitation, sighed, shoved his hat back another half inch and said, “Every day they say relief in sight. Last heat wave of the year will end. It gets hotter.”
“Is this about Dan?”
Keefler looked at him with a hard, lazy tolerance that had an undertone of cynical amusement. “So who else? Is there more than one ex-con in the family? Maybe I’m missing something.”
“I thought a man named Richardson was...”
“Rich used to have him. Now he’s mine. It’s like this, Bronson. I was a cop up to four months ago when they took off my hand. A young punk snuck his brother’s army .45 out of the house and tried to stick up a market, and lucky Keefler came along and took one right in the wrist and got it smashed too bad to save. Maybe you read about it.”
“I think I remember it. You killed the boy, didn’t you?”
“And I got a citation and a new job with the parole people and a dummy hand. Because I was a cop they’ve given me the rough cases. So now I’ve got your brother Danny. When was the last time you saw him?”
“I’ll have to think back, Mr. Keefler. He came here after he was paroled. That was last May. And I think two other times. The last time was in July. I can tell you the exact date. The twenty-fifth.”
“How come you happen to remember the exact day?”
“I remember it because it was the day after my birthday. He brought me a present.”
“What kind of a present? Expensive?”
“A leather desk set with pen and pencil and clock calendar.”
“Let’s have a look at it.”
“It’s at school, in my office.”
“What do you think it would cost?”
“About thirty dollars, I’d guess.”
“What did he have to say about how he was doing?”
“He didn’t say much. Maybe I could be more help to you if you’d tell me what you’re after.”
Keefler plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket, bent a match over in a folder of book matches and lit it with one hand. “Like that? Nurse in the hospital showed me how you do it.”
“Pretty good.”
“I can hold matches in this artificial hand. See? But its slower. Let’s get back to Danny. You’d cover for him, wouldn’t you?”
Lee looked at Bronson’s lazy, wise half smile. “Would it make any difference how I answered that?”
“It might.”
“I can’t prove I wouldn’t. I might run into a situation where I would. But I wouldn’t put myself in the bag, Mr. Keefler, unless there was a good reason. You’ve talked to Mr. Richardson.”
“He filled me in. He likes those big words. All the social workers know those big words. You and Danny and I all came from the Sink. We know the rules down there. We don’t need the big social worker words, do we?”
The Sink was the name given to thirty city blocks in Hancock. Long ago Brookton had been a separate community, a farming community outside Hancock. But the big sprawl of the lake-side city had reached out and surrounded Brookton. The Sink was the oldest part of Hancock, built when Hancock had been a small, lusty, violent lake port. The derivation of the name had been forgotten. The thirty blocks were down in the flats between the old docks and warehouses and the railroad yards. It had always been the spawning bed for Hancock’s impressive output of criminals. Slum clearance projects had removed all but a narrow fringe of the original Sink.
“It wasn’t an easy place to grow up,” Lee said.
Keefler nodded. “There was just the two of you, wasn’t there?”
“Danny and me. He’s three years older. My father was half owner of a tug. He died before I was a year old.”
Keefler grinned. “He was dead drunk and he fell between the dock and an ore freighter. He was thirty-nine and your mother was twenty-three at the time. Her maiden name was Elvita Sharon and her folks ran a hunting lodge in northern Wisconsin and your father met her there on a hunting trip and ran off with her. After Jerry Bronson died, she married Rudy Fernandez. Bronson hadn’t left her a dime. Rudy was a dock worker. He was a trouble maker. A little while after they were married, Rudy was beat half to death. That’s when you moved into the Sink. When he got back on his feet, and tried to make more trouble, they killed him. It’s still on the books. Then she hooked up with a slob named Cowley, and there isn’t any record of any marriage on the books. When you were twelve and Danny was fifteen, Cowley died of a heart attack. The three of you lived in a cold-water flat at 1214 River Street, on the third floor. Elvita was a part-time waitress and a full-time lush. Both you kids were bringing money home, just enough so you could keep going.”
Lee looked down at his right hand and closed it slowly into a fist. “You seem to have the whole story, Keefler.”
“Right out of those social worker files, boy. They have to know why a guy like Danny can’t... adjust to reality. But it seemed pretty real down there, didn’t it? Danny quit school at sixteen and went to work for Nick Bouchard. By the time he was nineteen he was bringing enough home so Elvita didn’t have to work at all. I was watching him then. He was a wise punk. I could have told all the social workers how he’d come out.”
“He was the oldest. He thought he had to...”
“He went where the fast money was. Right to Nick, the big boss man.” Keefler chuckled. “Nick took good care of the Bronson boys.”
“Not me. I wasn’t any part of it.”
Keefler’s eyes went round with surprise. “No? You were being the hotshot highschool athlete. I thought that when Danny took his first fall, that two and a half years he did for auto theft, Nick sent money to you every week.”
“He did. But it wasn’t like that. It was part of the agreement he had with Danny. It had nothing to do with me. I talked to Nick. He... he wanted me to get out of the Sink.”
“He helped you out of some trouble, didn’t he? You’re on the books, boy. Assault. And the charge was dismissed, and it was Nick’s lawyers who took care of you.”
“There wasn’t any assault, Mr. Keefler. I was working in a wholesale grocery warehouse nights. I got picked up when I was walking home. I’d barked my knuckles on a packing case. They were looking for some men who’d broken up a bar and grill.”
“Now that sounds reasonable,” Keefler said softly.
Lee looked sharply at him. Keefler looked sleepy and contented and amiable.
“Nick Bouchard wasn’t all bad,” Lee said.
“Hell, no. He helped you go through college, didn’t he? So he couldn’t be such a bad guy.”
“The way you say it, it doesn’t sound right, Mr. Keefler. I had a football scholarship. Danny used to send me money. Nick used to send some too, a twenty or a fifty, with a note telling me to live it up. I guess I was... a hobby with Nick. I played good ball the first two years. Then after my eyes went bad and they shifted me to guard, my leg went bad.”
“You say I put things the wrong way. So tell me what happened to your mother. Tell it your way.”
“Is it important?”
“Come on, boy. Put it in your words. You’ve got the education.”
“It... happened in my sophomore year. In December, Danny had moved her out of the Sink the previous spring. She... went back to the Sink to look up old friends. It was a cold night. She started drinking and she passed out in an alley, and by the time she was found it was too late. I came back for the funeral.”
Keefler nodded. “That’s just about the way it looks on the records, kid. And then the next year Nick got too big for his pants and tried to fight the syndicate so they cut him down and made it look like suicide, and a man named Kennedy came in and took over the boss job. He figured Danny had been too loyal to Nick, so Danny took his second fall.”