Black Sheep, White Lamb Read online

  He moistened his lips. If she was dead that meant they’d called up the Crazy Cat looking for him. That meant … But Jo wasn’t crying. She was just sitting there talking—serious. They were talking about him, that’s what it was. Jo had that pious look. And Father Walsh had the look he always got when he wanted you to see things his way, maybe not as bad as you thought they were. He was a good guy for a priest—and a smooth looker. He could really send some of the girls. And, brother, didn’t he know it!

  But there they sat jazzing, and any minute the factory whistle was going to blow … Georgie took the screwdriver from his pocket and peeled the electrical tape off the handle. He balled the tape up and buried it under the leaves by the hydrangea bush. Later he’d find a place for it—the Hudson River. He threw the screwdriver under the front steps. Afterwards he’d put it back where it belonged with his father’s tools in the basement.

  Father Walsh got up then. So did Johanna. Georgie looked around to see where the priest had left his car. He saw it up a ways across the street, in front of old lady Tonelli’s. Two birds with one stone. He called on the old lady every week or so. She wouldn’t have Father de Gasso, the pastor, who could speak Italian with her. Father Walsh—she wanted the young one. What a dame she was. Christ, would he never leave? They were standing, Johanna and him, in the hall just at the living room door. What happened then Georgie could hardly believe he was seeing: his sister in the priest’s arms. They were holding onto each other, her hands at the back of his head; it was a real bubie-rubbing clinch! After the first shock of what he was seeing, thrill after thrill rocketed through Georgie’s body. He had to hang onto the windowsill. Then the priest pried Jo’s hands away. Georgie realized he was going to get himself the tightest alibi there was this side of innocence.

  Quickly and quietly he rounded the porch and went up the steps. They both started round when he threw the door open.

  “You ought to pull down the blinds sometimes, sis.” Then in mock surprise: “Oh … good evening, Father. I thought it was Martin in here with Jo … Gee, excuse me!”

  He clumped noisily up the stairs and flopped on his bed, jacket, shoes and all.

  Downstairs, Johanna said, “I’m very sorry, Father.”

  The priest took his topcoat from where it lay over the banister. He said, “Goodnight, Johanna,” and went out. He was on the steps, putting on his coat, when the siren alert for the ambulance sounded. The factory whistle had not blown yet; this was the worst hour for industrial accidents at the plant, the last of each shift. The men were tired and hurrying to finish a quota. At the Graham plant they still worked on an incentive plan.

  The priest was halfway down the hill when the ambulance passed the intersection below and following it a car the priest thought would be Dr. Tagliaferro’s. He drove into the plant grounds to see if he was needed.

  Kearns stopped him at the office door. “Looks like a heart attack,” the police chief said. “I come round my usual time and found him. I know for a fact he’s been complaining. Doc?”

  Tagliaferro was kneeling over the stricken man. “He gave his skull a hell of a crack going down, I’ll say that.”

  The two ambulance drivers waited just inside the office door, their white coats bulging over their street clothes. They were discussing the time it had taken them to make it to the plant. Outside, the circling red light from the ambulance played across the dirty building like an invisible hand daubing on paint.

  “Is he dead?” the priest asked.

  “Dead when I got here,” Kearns said. He amended, “Though it’ll take Doc to make it official.”

  “Might as well take him up now to Toby’s,” Tagliaferro said, straightening up. “Can’t do a post mortem on him here.”

  The priest turned to go. MacAndrews had not been a Catholic. “May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace,” he murmured.

  “Father, will you speak to the men with me?” Kearns said. “They’ll be coming off work and expecting their pay.”

  The two men walked across the gravel to the plant door, reaching it as the whistle blew.

  Kearns waited until the men lined up as was their custom on pay night. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Mr. MacAndrews has had an accident—his heart, I’d say.” The men watched stonily while Kearns took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Mac was a friend of mine,” he said by way of explanation. “You’ll have to wait till tomorrow for your pay. That’s all.”

  2

  GEORGIE LAY ON THE bed, smoking his next-to-last cigaret, and stared at the ceiling where the paint was chipped off in the shape of a bat. What a dump. For this his father had worked all his life at the Graham plant. Twenty years it had taken him to pay for it, twenty years of spaghetti to pay off four thousand dollars. It made him die happy, knowing it was paid for. Christ!

  He listened, thinking he’d heard Johanna’s step on the stairs. He’d made up his mind to wait for her to come up to him and start explaining. But could he wait? He’d heard the single wail of the ambulance siren, going toward the plant. Then the eleven o’clock whistle. What was going on down there? Old Kearns must have found him. Somebody did. Georgie tried to see himself answering old blotchy-faced Kearns’ questions. “Yes, sir,” he’d say, and “No, sir.” If you said “sir” to Kearns you could tell him anything. Only Kearns wasn’t going to ask him questions, not unless he was going to ask maybe forty kids the same questions. Georgie didn’t trust Pekarik. He didn’t trust anybody. Except Pekarik and Daley were in on it. They’d be … accessories. Daley turned out to be a cool one. Talk about loose, kicking the safe closed like that. They could’ve grabbed a couple of envelopes first. Georgie didn’t have the price of a pack of cigarets. Or petty cash, at least. There ought to have been a few bucks for stamps in the safe.

  Georgie listened again. All he could hear was Jo’s alarm clock ticking through the wall. Like paper the walls were, stuck together with adhesive tape. He looked at his hands. He could feel a stickiness on them from the electrical tape. Tar or whatever it was. He could even smell it. Or maybe that was just nicotine. He rolled off the bed, deciding to wash his hands anyway. He took a last drag off the cigaret that burned it right down to where it yellowed his thumbnail.

  In the bathroom mirror he examined his face. Chubby, red-cheeked. Christ, it looked like a baby’s backside. But he opened his dark eyes wide and rehearsed his story: “I must’ve got home maybe ten o’clock. I know it was. Father Walsh was here and I was thinking he was out late for him, having to get up for the early Mass and everything. He was in talking with Jo so I went down to the basement for a while. I didn’t want to interrupt. I figured they were talking about her and Martin maybe. I mean, they got to get married some time …”He grinned at himself, satisfied. It would go pretty good if he could make kind of a joke out of it.

  He turned off the bathroom light and looked out in time to see the police chief’s car streak up the River Road. No sirens. Just the red light circling round and round on the top. Where the hell was he going in that direction? For Doc Tagliaferro? Doc’s car was always cracked up at the wrong time. But what did they need Doc for?

  Georgie went down the stairs. His sister was sitting in the living room, waiting like he’d waited upstairs. Only she didn’t have the right. Rubbing herself up against the priest. His sister with a priest. And there she sat knitting. Like Lady La Farge in the French Revolution. He just leaned against the door frame and watched for a couple of minutes. He couldn’t see her eyes; she didn’t dare look up at him, just the long lashes blinking, fluttering. Two red spots were burning, in her cheeks. She moistened her lips so that from where he stood they sparkled with the spittle. If there was another girl as pretty as his sister in Hillside, he’d never seen her. When the genes decided who was going to get what in this family, Johanna got there first—in more ways than one. And after him they’d quit. He’d often wondered how they’d just quit, going to church and all. Jo had tried to explain it to hi
m. Rhythm. Man, if you could believe that, you could believe anything.

  He ambled into the room and stood over his sister. He reached down and caught a strand of wool, tugged it, and pulled out her last row of stitches. Jo looked up at him. She’d been crying. And damn well she’d ought to have been crying!

  “You’re the deep one, ain’t you, sis?”

  Johanna put the knitting away. “Please don’t say anything, Georgie.”

  “Say anything! Who’s going to say it then—the priest? Hah!”

  Johanna got up and began to walk back and forth across the napless carpet. She kept rubbing her hands together as though they were cold. “It just happened in a minute. It wasn’t anything really. We’d been talking about mother—you …”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “We were, Georgie. I can’t help being worried, the way you stay out at night …”

  “I didn’t stay out long enough tonight, did I?”

  His sister pressed her teeth into her lip and tried to look at him without letting the tears come out of her eyes. “You stayed out too long,” she said. “If you’d been home …”

  He interrupted. “Now don’t start blaming me, Jo. It so happens I was home. Early. When I saw you and the priest in here I went down to the basement. I didn’t think he was ever going to leave. Didn’t you hear me down there?”

  “No,” she said. “I never hear you down there.” The words were bitter. She well knew he was in the habit of trying to hear what she and Martin were saying, listening at the ventilator. But he’d got across exactly what he wanted.

  He felt that he could afford to be tolerant. “I don’t exactly blame you, Jo, him being that good-looking. I know a lot of girls who’d like to go into a clinch with him.”

  Johanna’s head shot back, her eyes flashing.

  “Well, that’s what you did, didn’t you?” Georgie said.

  “You make it sound so dirty.”

  “I make it! Look, sis, it was you and him—like that.” Georgie put his hands together, flat, and then rubbed one of them against the other. “If that ain’t dirty, what is, for Christ sake?”

  “Don’t Georgie, please.”

  “I got a right, Jo. I’m your brother. And ma in the hospital. What about old Martin?”

  “Georgie, understand something. Just try … maybe the way I try to understand you …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will you just listen for a minute?” She drew a deep breath, trying to compose herself. “Father Walsh said something tonight—just as we were standing out there. He said, ‘We are all at the mercy of God as well as of one another. And for that we can be grateful. He has so much more of it than we have.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means … I don’t know how to explain if you don’t understand it. But when he said it—after what we’d been talking about—about how cruel people are, even if they don’t intend to be—it hurt me inside seeing all of a sudden how much he understood, and couldn’t do anything. Even him. And that’s his life. Alone. It was just like a great, hollow cave out there, and him standing at the end of it. I swear to you, Georgie, what I wanted to do just at that minute, was run to meet him, to help him. But he was right there, next to me. He didn’t know. It must have been a terrible shock to him. Temptation—that’s what it must have been to him. But it all happened in just a few seconds, and it was all over. I was ashamed as I’ve never been in my life.”

  “What about old Martin? You going to tell him about it?”

  Johanna shook her head. Her eyes were closed. “I don’t want ever to have to tell anyone about it, ever again in my life.”

  “I wish I could get away with things like that,” George said. Everything was going the way he wanted, but the moment it did, he wanted more, the personal inside gratification that came of being ahead in the game. “I mean, talk about making excuses for yourself. That’s what you’re always telling me I’m doing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not making excuses—not for myself. I’m deeply, heartily sorry it ever happened.” Her eyes were wide on his again.

  Georgie wet his lips. “I thought you said nothing happened, huh? How about it? You’re always wanting me to tell the truth, Jo. How about trying it on yourself for a change? You liked it, didn’t you—right smack belly-rubbing with a priest?”

  Johanna stared at him with fear or hate or something in her eyes he couldn’t just dig. Or maybe he’d got to her in a way he’d never been able to before. Then she turned her back on him and hid her face in her hands, just sobbing but not making any noise.

  Georgie took his last cigaret from his pocket and lit it. When Jo lifted her head and turned to face him again, he said, “I mean with old Martin, Jo … but with the priest. That’s spooky.”

  Jo flew at him, her temper raging. She hammered him with her fists about the shoulders and arms where he threw them up to protect his hair. But she got to it anyway, and having knocked the cigaret from his hand, she dug her fingers into his hair, pulling and shaking his head with all her strength.

  Georgie broke her grip, striking out at her with both his arms. She stumbled backwards halfway across the room. He had to look around to find his cigaret and then to stamp it out where it was burning the rug, his last cigaret.

  Johanna ran from the room and up the stairs. He heard the squeal of the casters when she threw herself on the bed. He went to the mantel where a framed picture of his father stood, and turned it so that he could use the glass as a mirror. With his pocket comb he restored his hair to the two meticulous crests in which he wore it. If he’d had the price of a package of cigarets he’d have gone down to the Comfort Tavern. They wouldn’t let him inside the door for anything else. Instead he picked up the one he had stepped on, reshaped it, and lit it. He sat for a while and enjoyed it after the first ashy drag. It was some night … to have come out on top of. But Johanna and Padre Walsh. It’d be a lot of Christian Doctrine old Walsh would teach him after this. He thought then what it would be like to go and tell the priest in confession about what he’d done that night, earlier. MacAndrews. He began to get excited just thinking about it. And that had been nagging at him all night back of his mind, having to tell some priest. But he probably couldn’t trust Walsh—after what he’d seen him doing. If Walsh could slip like that with a girl, how could you be sure he wouldn’t slip on something else? Like the seal of the confessional? It was a hell of a thing if you couldn’t depend on a priest even.

  Georgie pulled at his cigaret. Nothing. It was dead, the ember gone. He leaped out of the chair, realizing that the burning end of it had fallen somewhere. He could smell it then, the smell of burnt cloth. He dug out the faded cushion and saw where it was burning its way into the upholstery at the side of the chair. He watched it, fascinated. His imagination caught fire much faster—the drama of a fire alarm at that hour breaking on top of whatever was already happening down in the village. He saw himself publicly accounting his version of what had happened in the house that night, his sister having to confirm it … the way he told it. Nobody would even think of connecting him then with the MacAndrews business. And if Pekarik and Daley knew he was safe, they’d be sewed up for good. Daley would ride with the engine, and Georgie would see to it he heard him tell his story. And what the hell worth was the house, always getting the money that should have been spent on the family who lived in it? It was insured. Like some people—worth more dead than alive.

  Georgie could not wait for the slow charity of an accident. He struck a match and held it to the window drapery where it hung in ancient and brittle folds behind the chair. The flames slithered upward. The catch was instantaneous, almost too quick even for him. He ran outdoors and got the screwdriver from beneath the porch steps. He took it down to the basement and put it on the rack; it was the only one of his father’s tools to have been taken from its place since the old man’s death. Georgie forced himself to wait. A few seconds, just, he told himself, to be sure it got a good start. When he cou
ld smell the smoke he ran around the house and up the stairs, shouting to his sister. Johanna, coming down, met him in the hall. The living room was already churning with yellow smoke and the red, darting flames. They left the house together, but Georgie ran ahead. He had dreamed as long as he’d known what the box was for of turning in a fire alarm. But just as he broke the glass, the town siren began to wail. Someone had already called the fire department.

  3

  COUNTY DETECTIVE RAYMOND BASSETT was about ready to turn off the lights and go upstairs when the phone rang. It was after one o’clock. His wife and the four children had a good part of their night’s sleep behind them. But he had got home late from a meeting at the D.A.’s office, one of those noisy, ill-disciplined meetings of politicians, citizen representatives, and local police chiefs where everybody wanted to be heard but nobody spoke to the point. He was not a good sleeper at best, and after these affairs he had to, so to speak, read himself out of them when he got home. He picked up his tie from the table and used it as a bookmark while he answered the phone.

  “That you, Bassett? This is Harry Toby.”

  Toby had been one of the few sensible men present at the meeting tonight. It was an odd thing about undertakers, Bassett thought: They were generally sensible, sound-reasoning men. It no doubt came of their dealing with the ultimate fact of life.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve had a report of MacAndrews’ death,” Toby went on. “He was the night manager at the Graham plant in Hillside. Remember, we were talking about him tonight?”

  “Yes,” Bassett said. The meeting had been called over reports of gambling in the county. MacAndrews, though not present, had been one of the complainants. Kearns, the Hillside police chief, had made an ass of himself at the meeting, first denying that he knew of any gambling in the village and then admitting that MacAndrews had complained of it several times to him. Kearns had had to leave the meeting early: pay night at the plant.