Heartstone Page 6

  “I instruct the workmen to alter the entire curvature of the lens surface to form a new curve. This new curve is called the sphere.

  “Next, I instruct the workmen to alter the curve of the sphere at the point where the pupil is centered. The area of the lens that the wearer looks out of. This means that the lens will have two different adjustments on its surface: the sphere, which covers the whole lens, and the new curve, ground on the sphere, where the line of vision is. The smaller curve is called the cylinder.

  “Finally, I will instruct the workmen to grind the cylinder at a particular angle. It could be 45 degrees, 30 degrees, etc. This angle is called the axis.

  “The four numbers for comparison, then, are the basic curve, the sphere, the cylinder curve and the axis. I have a machine in my examining room that looks like a microscope. It’s called a Lensometer and I can put these glasses under it and find the prescription for you.”

  “And no two people will have the same prescription?”

  “They shouldn’t. Of course, you also have the frames. This is made by American Optical. The name is stamped on the inside of the temple. It’s a Gay Mount. That is the style. The size of this frame is 46-20 and that varies from person to person also. So you have another figure for comparison.”

  “That’s just great. I’d appreciate it if you could get that prescription for me.”

  Dr. Webber left for five minutes. When he returned, he handed Marcus a sheet of paper with a series of numbers on it.

  “This has the information you need. It will make sense to any optometrist. You will have to circulate this and get them to check their files. That is going to take some time, I’m afraid. I wish there was some quicker way.”

  “So do I, Doctor, but, right now, we have no choice.”

  3

  Three days after Richie Walters died, winter began with a vengeance. Temperatures dropped near zero. People started staying indoors and snow and wind made the price of firewood soar. And through it all the searchers went out daily hunting for Elaine Murray.

  The fact of Miss Murray’s disappearance and the police search was revealed in the Monday morning papers. The Marine, Navy and Coast Guard Reserve volunteered 125 men and the Boy Scouts rounded up forty more. During the first few days of the search the weather was still mild and the area around the meadow was cluttered with thrill seekers.

  The story dominated the headlines in the Portsmouth Herald and several of the eastern papers picked up on the “Lover’s Lane” murder and the hunt for the missing girl. The investigation turned up no new clues and the only real lead, the glasses, was kept from the public.

  On December 28, 1960, the search for Elaine Murray was officially called off. Then 1960 became 1961. A new President of the United States was sworn in and more current events took hold of the public imagination and the Murray-Walters case drifted farther back in the pages of the Herald until it disappeared.

  Roy Shindler’s six foot five inch body slumped in his favorite armchair. A book lay face down in his lap and he stared hypnotically at the cold, sleeting rain that beat against the living room window of his small, one-bedroom apartment. The apartment was tidy, yet cluttered. Shindler tried to maintain order, but often failed through lack of interest.

  The detective was a resident of the city. He had been born there and he had been raised in its poorer parts. His father had been a shoemaker at a time when nobody seemed able to afford repairs. His mother worked as a sales clerk in a department store. She was always tired. His father was always silent. His childhood, the life of his family, had been a canvas of grays, except for one spot of shining white. Abe.

  Abe had been a shooting star, always on the ascendancy. A person to be looked up to. He transcended their drab apartment, the monotony of life behind a sales counter or in the backroom of a shoe repair shop where people never came. On Saturdays, the family could watch from the stands at the high school as Abe floated downfield, avoiding outstretched arms, to stand in the end zone, ball held high above his head as the crowd screamed its adulation. In heated gymnasiums in the midst of winter, the family would join the crowd, Roy’s father more strident than any other, as it cheered on Abe, who could score a basket with the grace of a ballet dancer. He was the best in sports and a top scholar. But most of all he had been a warm, caring human being. After Abe died, everyone talked about him the way they were eulogizing Richie Walters now.

  Roy had always done well in school and, for all his lack of grace, he had been good at sports, but his father never noticed. He saw only Abe. Had Abe been someone other than the person he was Roy might have hated and resented him. But Abe was Abe and Roy worshipped his older brother.

  In the first year of college, on scholarship at an eastern university that would groom him for the medical profession, he had excelled. He had come home for intersession, at great personal expense to Roy’s father, to tell in person the tales that they had read in the sports section of the Herald. He had died in the snow returning home from an evening with his old high school friends. The detective who told them was sorry. He had been a fan, but then who hadn’t been. The detective said that the motive was robbery. The person who murdered Abe was never caught.

  When Abe died, the family died. Roy tried night school. He wanted an education, and his grades were good at first, but he wore down. He had to work all day because his father could no longer manage. He had to do the cooking and the housework. The oppressive atmosphere of the small apartment drained his resources. He found himself sleeping in class, unable to complete his assignments. He was too tired to study in the late evening, the only time he could call his own, when his father and mother were asleep and he could finally be alone in the solitude of his room.

  He was never quite certain why he had turned to police work. At first, when he was new to the tensions and danger of the job, he thought about his choice a lot. Perhaps, subconsciously, he felt that he would someday find the person who had murdered his brother. Perhaps he had joined because the job was night work and presented a justification for sleeping away the daytime when his parents roamed the apartment like lost souls, sitting silently for hours at a time, rising slowly and without reason to wander to another chair by another dust-coated window.

  His father had died during his second year on the force and his mother had passed away two months later. It had been a relief to Roy. He had moved out of their apartment into another apartment just as small and just as barren.

  Before they died, Roy had imagined that their passing would somehow liberate him, but it had only left a void. The patterns of a quarter of a century are difficult to change. He had re-registered at the night branch of the state university. There even had been a girl. She had been quiet and bookish. Their dates had been a series of long pauses punctuated by discussions intentionally abstract and intellectual, as if both were afraid to communicate anything resembling a true feeling. They had lived together for a short time, but the barriers had never fallen and they had parted friends for whom a closer relationship had not worked out.

  Roy’s fellow officers found him strange. Intensely emotional about abstract ideas, yet cold as ice in life-and-death situations. It was as if Abe’s death had killed all personal joy for him, leaving only the hard shell of his intellectualism to shield him from life’s realities. The Walters boy reminded him of Abe in so many ways that the investigation operated like a scalpel that was peeling through the layers of his own personal wounds and baring the grief that he had believed to be long buried.

  An hour ago, Shindler had tried to read, but his mind wandered and he had given up the attempt. It was the case. Several times he had even dreamed about it. He could not stop thinking about what had happened to that boy.

  “You can’t let a case get to you, Roy,” Harvey had said. “If you become personally involved, you don’t do your job.”

  “Intellectually, I know you’re right, but I can’t help it. It’s the things I’m learning about him. I’ve talked to dozens of peopl
e and not one has had a bad word to say. It’s not just because he’s dead, either. You can tell.

  “And you know what hurts most?” he said. “I was at the house again, yesterday. His mother was beginning to handle it. Mr. Walters said she was back on her feet. They even went out to dinner. Then they got yesterday’s mail. He was accepted at Harvard. Harvard. Jesus. That kid could have been a doctor, a scientist. Anything.”

  The phone rang and Roy sighed and walked into the kitchen.

  “Roy?”

  It was Harvey Marcus.

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “I just got a call from a Dr. Norman Trembler, an optometrist in Glendale. He read the bulletin on the glasses and he thinks he’s found the person with the prescription.”

  “Did you get the name and address?” Shindler asked. He could feel Marcus’s excitement. There was a certain electricity generated whenever good, solid police work paid off.

  “I’ve got it. We went over everything on the phone. He sold a pair of glasses just like the ones we found to an Esther Freemont, 2219 North 82nd Street.”

  The Freemont house had seen better days. The small front lawn was overgrown with weeds and no one seemed to care about cutting the grass that was left. The wood had a gray, weatherbeaten appearance. It had not been painted in some time.

  Marcus and Shindler stepped over some broken toys and walked up the creaking front stairs to the porch. There were soiled curtains on the front window and over the small glass window in the upper half of the front door. A tricycle lay on its side on the porch. Marcus could hear a TV blaring inside. A baby was crying and someone was yelling. There was no doorbell so Marcus knocked loudly on the door frame.

  There was someone shuffling toward the door. The curtain over the front door glass raised and a bloated face peered out. Marcus flashed his badge and the door opened warily.

  The woman standing in the doorway was well over two hundred pounds. The weight was collected in rolls of fat over large thighs and sagging breasts. She wore a soiled gray dress that covered her like a tent. An apron hung over the dress. Her eyes were bloodshot and held no sign of cheer. Marcus suspected that she had been drinking. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth and medium-length graying hair straggled across her forehead.

  The inside of the house was a reflection of the personality of the owner, Marcus decided. A heavy, unpleasant smell hung in the air. The rooms were dark and untidy. How could humans live this way? He was always asking questions like that and never finding the answers.

  “Mrs. Freemont?”

  “I was. It’s Taylor now.”

  “Are you Esther Freemont’s mother?”

  “What’s she done now?” she said with bored disgust. Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head and yelled angrily into the interior of the house.

  “Esther, you get out here.”

  A voice answered unintelligibly over the roar of applause on a TV game show.

  “Turn that goddamn thing down and get out here,” Mrs. Taylor yelled.

  The sound level did not diminish, but a young girl came around the corner of the living room. When she saw the two men in suits, she stopped, then continued toward them at a slower pace.

  Shindler watched her walk across the room, the way a hunter watches his prey. Esther was tall for a girl. Shindler judged her to be about sixteen years old. She was wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt that covered large, swaying breasts. Shindler realized that she was braless and the excitement generated by the police investigation blended subconsciously with an undercurrent of sexual desire.

  Esther’s skin was smooth and dark. Her long, dark hair was as dirty and unkempt as her mother’s. Involuntarily, Shindler began to think of her in sexual terms.

  “These men want to see you. They’re police. What have you done now?”

  Esther’s large brown eyes moved from her mother to the detectives without answering. She appeared to be nervous, but no more than any other person confronted by the law.

  “We have no reason to believe that your daughter has done anything wrong, Mrs. Taylor. This is just part of an investigation we’re conducting. We just want to ask your daughter a few questions.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Taylor said. Marcus thought she sounded disappointed.

  “Is there someplace we could talk?” Shindler asked.

  Mrs. Taylor looked around the cluttered living room. The couch was covered with unwashed laundry and the nearest chair was occupied by a cat. Mrs. Taylor headed toward the back of the house. They followed her into the kitchen. A portable TV was resting on the sink. A baby in a high chair stopped screaming when they entered.

  Chairs were arranged on each side of a yellow formica-topped table. Marcus and Shindler motioned Esther into one and took two of the others. Mrs. Taylor hovered over her daughter.

  “Could we?” Shindler asked, motioning toward the TV…Mrs. Taylor looked confused for a moment, then leaned over and turned the sound off. The picture remained on.

  “Esther, this is Detective Marcus and I am Detective Shindler. We are investigating the murder of Richie Walters and the disappearance of Elaine Murray, who were students at Stuyvesant.”

  Marcus was watching her. There was no trace of fear. If anything, she seemed relieved when they said that the investigation was not about her.

  “Is…is she dead?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Elaine. You said disappeared. Is she dead?”

  “We don’t know, Esther. We have men out searching, but we still haven’t found her.”

  “Gee, that’s sad. I knew Richie from school. I didn’t know him real well. He was in different classes. But…you know, being from the same school and all, it’s like he was a friend. I cried when I read about it in the papers.”

  “Do you know Elaine Murray?”

  “Well, not to talk to, but I knew her. She was…is real pretty. I hope she’s okay.”

  “We do too, Esther. Can you remember where you were on the Friday night that Richie was killed?”

  Esther looked nervously at her mother, then back to the detectives.

  “Why do you want to know where I was?”

  “This is just routine, Esther. We have to check up on everyone,” Marcus said.

  “You don’t think she had anything to do with that killing?” Mrs. Taylor asked incredulously.

  “You ain’t going to take me to detention?”

  Esther was panicky. She started to stand. Marcus laughed. It was a made-up laugh that Shindler had heard before. Esther looked confused.

  “No one is going to detention and no one thinks you killed anybody. Now just relax and tell me where you were so I can fill out my report. Okay?”

  To Shindler, Esther looked like a trapped animal. Her eyes shifted from face to face and her hands were slowly washing one another.

  “You tell them where you were,” Mrs. Taylor said, suddenly angry. “I just remembered where she was.”

  Esther hung her head and bit her lip.

  “She was drunk, that’s where she was. She come home late and puked all over the bathroom.”

  No one can look more dejected than an embarrassed adolescent girl, Shindler thought. Esther looked as if she wanted to crawl inside herself.

  “How did you get drunk?” Marcus asked.

  “You promise I won’t go to juvenile detention?”

  Marcus smiled his best fatherly interrogation smile.

  “Don’t worry about detention, Esther. We are only interested in Richie Walters’s murder. Look, I used to drink more than a wee bit myself when I was your age. So, why don’t you tell us what happened.”

  “Well, to tell the truth,” Esther said sheepishly, “I can’t remember it all. I was pretty drunk and it’s kind of hazy.”

  “Tell us what you can remember.”

  “Roger, he’s my boyfriend, and me and Bobby and Billy Coolidge went to Hamburger Heaven. Then, we went to a party. It was after the party that we got drunk.” She stopp
ed and looked pleadingly at Marcus. “Do I have to tell? I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “Answer their questions,” Mrs. Taylor barked. “I told you I didn’t want you hanging around with that Hessey. He’s no good, like the rest of those hoodlums.”

  “How did you get drunk, Esther? Don’t worry about getting anyone in trouble. We won’t tell anyone what happened,” Marcus said.

  “It was Billy. He swiped some wine while the grocer wasn’t looking at one of these all-night places. He took a few bottles. We drank it in the car. That’s where it gets fuzzy. I guess I don’t drink so well and I must have had too much, because I really don’t remember after the wine. Except I remember we drank it in the car and I think we went cruising downtown after that.”

  Shindler reached in his pocket.

  “Do you wear glasses?”

  Esther did not answer for a moment. She ran her tongue across her lips.

  “Talk up. Yeah, she has glasses to read,” Mrs. Taylor said.

  “Do you have your glasses, Esther?”

  Esther did not say anything. She stared at the table.

  “Esther, where are those glasses?” Mrs. Taylor asked menacingly. “Goddamn it, if you lost those glasses again, you ain’t getting new ones.”

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” Esther blurted out. “They were stolen. It was three months ago. I was afraid to tell you.”

  “Who stole them?” Mrs. Taylor demanded.

  “I don’t know. I swear. I was afraid you would get mad, so I didn’t tell and I thought maybe they would turn up.”

  “What was the exact day your glasses were stolen, Esther?” Shindler interrupted.

  “It wasn’t just the glasses. It was some other stuff from my purse. And I can’t remember the exact day. I just know it was in early November.”