A Comedy of Heirs (9 page)

“What do you mean by kinda in between?” I asked the sheriff.

“He's alive, but he's not in real great shape. He's about eighty-five and lives with his son, Roger,” he explained.

I snapped my fingers at Mary again. Still, she danced. I looked over and saw Uncle Jed shoving cookies in his mouth, laughing heartily at me snapping at Mary. “Really, Uncle Jed, don't encourage her.” He just kept on laughing and gumming those cookies like there was no tomorrow. Amazing how well he could eat with no teeth. Maybe that was why he was eating them warm, so they'd be softer.

“So can I go talk to him or not?” I asked.

“His son said that it was okay with him if we came and talked to his dad. He said he remembered the case, he was about ten years old when it happened.”

“When can I talk to him?” I asked.

“Anytime.”

“How about this evening, after dinner?”

“That soon?” the sheriff asked. I could hear the speculation in his voice. “I don't know what the guy would say to that.”

I forgot about Mary for the moment and tried to walk into the little alcove by the basement steps so that nobody would hear me. “Look, Sheriff, if I don't get some answers really really fast, my family will be gone. I'm down to like three of four days before people start leaving. It won't hurt to ask. If he says no, he says no.”

I walked back to the main part of the kitchen. “Hang on,” I said to him. As soon as I put the phone down, Mary took off, running into the living room. She thought she'd been had. What she didn't realize was that I was after a piece of paper and pen. I came back to the phone and picked it up. “Okay, his name was what again? Roger McCarthy?” I wrote it down. I scribbled
H's son
underneath it.

“Yeah, Roger McCarthy,” he answered. “He lives up in Southwest St. Louis, near Kingshighway and Chippewa.”

“Okay,” I said and wrote it down. “Call him and see if I can head up there this evening and call me back with the exact address.” I almost hung up the phone without thanking him.

“Thanks, Colin,” I said. “I appreciate this.”

“I'll call you right back.”

I hung up the phone. “Mary!” I yelled. I went into the living room to find her but she was nowhere to be found. I found Rachel and stopped her. She was playing jump rope with four other girls. In my living room. “Downstairs in the basement with that,” I said. “Or go outside.”

“Mom,” she said and stomped her foot. “It's cold outside.”

“Then go down to the basement, now,” I said. She gave me that look that said I was totally unfair and uncool. “Where's Mary?” I asked before she headed into the kitchen to the basement steps.

“Under the couch,” she said, still in that pouty voice. Her ponytail flopped all around in response to the exaggerated way she walked through the kitchen.

With that Mary crawled out from under the couch and ran to the front door and outside before I could get within two feet of her. With no coat. “Rudy!” I yelled.

“What?” I heard him yell from somewhere in the house. “Get Mary,” I yelled. “She went outside without a coat!”

I was so irritated I could have just spit. I walked back into the kitchen, and the piece of paper with Roger McCarthy's name on that I'd left on the table by the pile of red sprinkle stuff was nowhere to be seen.

I looked around the kitchen. Uncle Jed was gone and Aunt Charlotte still stirred fudge. I didn't want to ask her outright if she had seen who took it or where it had walked off to. I checked over by the countertop, nothing. “Huh,” I said with my hands on my hips. Either Uncle Jed or Aunt Charlotte swiped that piece of paper while I was looking for Mary or somebody else walked through the kitchen and snatched it. This did not bode well.

The phone rang and I walked over and jerked the receiver off the wall. “Hello,” I spat.

“This evening as long as it's before eight o'clock because his father gets his bath then and goes to bed.” The sheriff's voice carried that message with much caution.

“I'll be there at…” I looked over at the clock on the wall. It was five-forty. That didn't leave me much time. It took a half-hour just to drive up there. “I'll be there by seven,” I said. “You going with me?”

“If you think I'm going to let you go alone, you're nuts,” he answered.

“Fine,” I said. “Be here no later than six-thirty. Better yet, meet me at the McDonald's in Arnold. If you come here I'm going to have to answer a million questions I'm not ready to answer.”

“McDonalds, in Arnold at six-thirty. Is that Arnold proper or the one at Richardson Road in Arnold?” he asked.

I forgot they now had two McDonald's in that town. “Arnold proper. You know the one at 141.”

“Okay,” he said. “See you then.”

Eleven

I pulled in to the McDonald's and to my surprise found the sheriff leaning up against his Festiva waiting for me. I pulled up next to him and rolled down my window. “Aren't you cold?” I asked.

“My heater doesn't work in the car, so I can't tell much difference between inside and out,” he answered.

“Well, in that case, I'm driving,” I said. “Get in.”

He got in to the car and we made small talk all the way up Highway 55, basically about the fact that he had the money to fix his heater but he just kept forgetting to do it, and all the reasons why he kept forgetting to do it.

We reached Loughborough and I got off the highway. We passed by one of my favorite neighborhoods in St. Louis. Older brick houses with stained glass windows sat comfortably on large lawns. These houses were built from real wood and real brick and not these shake-'n-bake plasterboard things that you see in all the new subdivisions. You can't get new houses made like the old ones.

During the day you could see the big trees that lined the sidewalks. It was dark now, though, and you could only see shadows of the trees highlighted with the dust of snow or Christmas lights. Many of the houses had candles in the windows and Christmas lights around their roofs. Having done that last year, I knew how dangerous teetering on a twelve-foot ladder in the freezing cold could be. We did not hang lights around the house this year.

I took the little jog on Gravois, and I mean little. It's not even a full block's worth of a road. It has a clock on the southbound side of the street that is perpetually set at eleven minutes till six. It's been like that for years. I made a left on Kingshighway and then followed it up ten or fifteen blocks until I reached the McCarthys' street. They were just west of Kingshighway in a two-family flat. In south St. Louis the two-and four-family flats were all basically the same. Red brick, hardwood floors and small, stained-glass windows somewhere in the living room or hallway. They also had ancient plumbing and kitchens without countertops, which sort of took away from the charm of the hardwood floors and stained-glass windows.

This area was just a few blocks south of the neighborhood known as the Hill, which was the Italian community. Talk about good food. No place better to eat Italian food than in an Italian-owned restaurant. At the turn of the century there were clay mines near this area and the newly arrived Italians found ready work. Joe Garigiola and Yogi Berra grew up on Elizabeth Street on the Hill.

I parallel parked—I think I impressed the sheriff, by the way—and we walked up to the cement front porch and rang the bell.

A man about sixty years old answered the door. He wore a plaid flannel shirt and a gray dickie, with slippers on his feet. A chain hung from his glasses, so that he could hang them around his neck if he wanted to. His eyes were a silver blue and his demeanor was calm.

“Hello, Mr. McCarthy,” the sheriff began. I'd learned to let the sheriff do the introductions. “I'm Sheriff Colin Brooke, and this is Torie O'Shea, the woman I told you about on the phone.”

Mr. McCarthy shook the sheriff's hand and then mine. “Come in,” he said.

I no longer felt guilty about all the clutter in my house once I stepped foot into his. He had large area rugs to keep the cold of a hardwood floor from invading his cozy living room. Shelves hung on the walls with knickknacks and doohickeys galore. An eighteen-inch Christmas tree stood on top of his television, with one strand of blinking lights and seven ornaments. There was no topper because it probably would have toppled the thing over.

Photographs, I assumed of family members, hung on the walls and one corner table seemed to be infested with picture frames. One photograph was a man in uniform. I assumed it was his father, Hubert, judging by the age of the photograph.

“It's so good of you to see us,” I said. The smell of fruitcake was thick in the air. I hadn't had fruitcake since Wilma accidentally made forty of them five years back. She thought Sylvia said to make forty, when Sylvia had said fourteen. We all got fruitcake that year.

“Sit down,” he said and gestured to his couch, which was covered with a busy little paisley print.

The sheriff and I sat down.

“Can I offer you anything to drink?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” I said. The sheriff shook his head.

“I'm going to get me a glass of water, if you don't mind,” Roger McCarthy said. We nodded and he went in to the kitchen.

An orange tabby cat came walking casually out of the kitchen into the living room. Sheriff Brooke instantly stiffened. “What's the matter with you?” I asked.

“I don't like cats,” he said.

“Aw, you're not afraid of a little old kitty, are you?” I rubbed my fingers together and made a meow sound. The cat walked over to me and jumped right up on my lap. “Say hi to the nice sheriff,” I said, taking his paw and pretending I was going to touch the sheriff's arm with it.

“You touch me with that cat, and I'll throw it across the room.” His voice was calm but there was a definite edge to it. He meant business. I found this exceptionally humorous.

“Did you hear that?” I asked the cat. “Big old mean sheriff.”

Roger came back in and said, “Oh, I see you've found William.”

“He found me,” I said. “Which is the normal way things are done with cats.”

“That is so true,” he said. He gave a big sigh. “So, you want to talk to Dad about the Keith case.”

That sounded so weird. The Keith case. There had been a case named after my great-grandfather for how many years? The Keith case. That was eerie.

“Yes,” Sheriff Brooke said. “You indicated on the phone that would be all right.”

“Certainly,” Roger said. “I'll just go and get him.”

Roger McCarthy disappeared again and I petted William some more, feeling him purr deep within his chest. The sheriff looked at me as if I had a rare disease or something. Roger came back out wheeling his father in a wheelchair.

Hubert was half stooped over in his chair with an orange and yellow afghan wrapped around his legs. When he breathed, his lungs made a swishy sound. He did not wear glasses so I could see the milky film from cataracts that covered his eyes. Brown age spots covered his hands and forehead, trailing back into his thin transparent hair.

“Mr. McCarthy,” I said very loudly.

“His hearing is fine, Mrs. O'Shea,” Roger said.

I blushed and cleared my throat, embarrassed by my assumption that a decrepit-looking old man wouldn't be able to hear. “I'm sorry,” I said quietly.

“Mr. McCarthy,” Sheriff Brooke said. “This is the great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Ulysses Keith.” The sheriff looked to me to make sure that he had got my great-grandfather's name correct. “Do you remember Nathaniel Keith, from Pine Branch?”

Hubert McCarthy narrowed his eyes on me. “Which one are you?” he asked in a raspy voice.

I assumed he meant whose daughter I was. “I'm the daughter of Dwight Robert Keith. Who was the son of John Robert Keith.”

“Dwight,” he said. “The boy.”

“Yes, the boy. He was the youngest and only about eight years old when his grandfather was killed,” I said.

He made some well-that's-not-too-bad noise and rubbed his front gums together. “Why now?” he asked. “Why didn't somebody care about this twenty years ago when my mind was better? And my legs were useful.”

“Well, sir,” I said. “Nobody knew about it until now.”

“Nobody knew about it?” he asked, incredulous. “What do you mean nobody knew about it? That's horseshit if I ever smelled it. They all knew about it.”

I sat on his couch a minute and tried to let his words sink in. Unexpectedly William jumped off my lap. I let out a slight squeal and then felt completely ridiculous when I realized how on edge I was about this whole thing. “What do you mean they all knew about it? What do you mean by all of them?”

“I mean all of them. Every last one of them.”

“Not my father,” I said, more defensively than I intended.

“You believe that if you want to, but I interviewed him myself and he was at the house when it happened,” Hubert said. “Nathaniel's son John Robert, his son Granville, John's wife Della Ruth, and all the kids. Jed, Ruth, Ike, Charlotte…” he snapped his fingers trying to think of Uncle Melvin's name. I knew it was Melvin because so far he'd named them in perfect order. “Oh, what was that pugnose bugger's name … Melvin, that's it, Sissy and Dwight,” he said. “They were all there on the farm. Some were in the barn, out with the chickens, some in the house. And one of Nate's grandkids by one of his daughters was there, too.”

I was amazed at how clearly he could still recount the witnesses to this fifty-year-old case. Tears threatened to bubble up but I fought them hard. I sensed the sheriff looking at me, gauging my reaction to this. My father had sat right there at my kitchen table and told me a lie, knew he was telling me a lie, knew that I would probably find out that he was telling me a lie, and still lied to me. God, I wanted to hit him right now.