Without Prejudice Read online

  At Michigan and Lake Shore Drive he stood at the front awning of the Drake Hotel, watching the swimmers across the way in the small crescent of Oak Street beach. He looked up, not very far by present-day standards, and could see his grandparents’ former apartment on the twenty-second floor of their old building. He’d slept on a divan in his grandmother’s bedroom, waiting for the revolving beacon across the way to flash a pencil of light through the window.

  Not all memories were bad, he realised, thinking of his grandparents’ warmth, the card games with Gramps, the trips with his grandmother to concerts, movies, lunch in the Art Institute with her own cronies – all in their seventies but still known collectively as ‘The Girls’. Even his trip to Hyde Park with Sophie had been a pleasant surprise. The grim snow-bound, shit-filled place he remembered had seemed unexpectedly beautiful – Robie House’s sweeping prairie roof, the lush green of the lilac bushes on 58th Street, Botany Pond and the lawns of the Quadrangle.

  Yet just as he hoped to grow reconciled to his past, his present life was threatening to unravel. He wondered how things with Anna had suddenly gone so wrong, and sensed a shadow lurking somewhere that had blighted them. And then he saw, not metaphorically but as a clear image in his mind’s eye, Duval standing in the background. It was Duval who had driven a wedge between Robert and Anna. Without Duval’s re-entry in his life, Robert would have made peace with his own wounds. Instead, he felt he was being forced to bleed for Duval’s.

  7

  He heard the front door open and close, then Anna went upstairs to check on Sophie, who was almost certainly wide awake, waiting for her mother.

  ‘So how was Washington?’ he asked when she came down to the kitchen, still wearing her raincoat. He was sitting at the pine table, waiting for their supper to heat up. His voice sounded phoney to himself.

  She looked at him sharply, then shrugged. ‘Kind of dull.’

  ‘Good meeting?’

  ‘Too long. So much for British reticence.’

  ‘Nice hotel?’

  She nodded.

  He could not sustain the pretence. He flipped the magazine he was reading onto the table, where it slid, slowed, and finally toppled to the floor. ‘After you rang me last night, I tried to call you back. Your mobile was switched off, so I called the hotel. They didn’t have anyone registered in your name.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Though Philip Masters was there, so maybe you were doubling up. Saving the consulate some money.’

  She shook her head wearily, then sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, putting her hands in the pockets of the raincoat. ‘I spent the night in a Marriott off Route 128.’

  ‘Boston?’

  ‘Quincy, actually.’

  ‘That’s near my old school.’

  ‘Don’t look alarmed. I wasn’t investigating you.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Looking for Margaret Tykzinski.’ She saw the question on his face. ‘That’s her married name. She used to be known as Peggy Mohan.’

  ‘Did you find her?’ He had known Anna wouldn’t give up.

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ she said grimly. ‘Google was a succession of red herrings – so much for “intelligent search”. I tried tracing her through relatives here in Chicago, but the only one I could find was an uncle, and he wouldn’t tell me where she was.

  ‘Then I got lucky. Maggie Trumbull has a friend who works at the university hospital. I asked her to check if there was any record of a forwarding address for Mohan – she never went back to work at the hospital. One can hardly blame her. Anyway, this friend had a friend who was friends with someone in personnel – it sounds like a chain in a property deal, but this one held. I got an address.’

  ‘In Boston?’

  ‘No. In Kenosha. I drove up there last week.’

  ‘You might have told me.’

  She was unabashed. ‘I knew you wouldn’t approve. Peggy Mohan lived there for almost ten years, still working as a nurse – in an old people’s home. Then she met Mr Tykzinski and moved to Boston. She works in a hospital on the South Shore.’

  Never a keen flyer, Anna had found the landing at Logan, coming in over the bay, especially frightening. Renting a car, she had made her way through the new tunnel and joined the Southeast Expressway, getting off fifteen minutes later at the Quincy exit. She decided to check in at a motel first, giving her time to review her approach, and she found a Marriott only a few miles from the address she had in East Milton.

  ‘I had thought I might say I was from the new centre for dispute reconciliation. Part of their thing is to bring together victim and perpetrator to effect “closure” – God, I do hate that term. As if anything ever ends for good. But it seemed too sneaky; besides, the whole point is that they didn’t get the right guy. In the end, I went to the house, rang the bell, and told the truth.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘She looked old. I’d have thought she was sixty, though she can’t even be fifty yet.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Other things might have aged her, you know.’

  He said nothing, and she kept talking. ‘It took her a minute to understand what I was saying – maybe it was my accent. I said I was sorry to stir up the past, but hoped she’d understand why I was there.’

  ‘How did she react?’

  Anna laughed sardonically. ‘Pretty badly. This meek, middle-aged nurse said she understood all right, then slammed the door in my face. I rang the bell again, but she didn’t answer.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  She waited for a moment before replying. ‘I was tempted to get in my car, drive to Logan and fly back with my tail between my legs. But then I thought of Duval – I couldn’t let him down without trying my hardest.’

  ‘Yes, how could you do that?’ he asked acidly.

  ‘Piss off,’ she said. She seemed determined to finish the story. ‘I went back to the car and wrote her a letter. I put it through her mail slot, went back to the motel, and prayed she’d respond. And thank God, she did.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said my purpose wasn’t to upset her, but to help an innocent man. I said that if she would just talk to me, even for ten minutes, I would never bother her again. But that if she wouldn’t, she’d have to understand I couldn’t leave it alone.’

  ‘You threatened her?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said with mock innocence. ‘Anyway, it must have worked. She rang me an hour later.’

  They met that evening at a Brigham’s ice-cream parlour on the South Shore. Peggy Mohan sat in silence while Anna made her case – that the identification, through no fault of Peggy Mohan’s, might have been questionable, swayed by a zealous cop determined to collar the obvious suspect. That if that had been the case, Peggy Mohan had not been complicit in an injustice, but a victim of one, too.

  ‘That’s clever,’ said Robert. If you couldn’t kindle compassion in the victim for the assailant, then suggest they were both victims of another crime. ‘Did she buy it?’

  Anna gave another tart laugh. ‘Not at all. She listened carefully until I was finished, then thanked me for my interest – those were her exact words – and said she had to leave. She was working the night shift and she couldn’t be late.’

  ‘So you didn’t get anywhere.’ He felt deflated, having been waiting for some coup. It seemed clear there hadn’t been one.

  ‘Not directly, no. I didn’t.’ Anna didn’t seem that let-down herself. Robert kept quiet, and she said, ‘But I made some progress in another sense. Last week, I had lunch with Charlie Gehringer, just to go through the trial in case there was anything there. You’d said to me they’d matched Duval’s blood type to blood they found on the girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. His feeling that she had been busy with all this Duval business was right – Kenosha, lunch with Charlie Gehringer, this disguised trip to Boston. What else had she got up to?

&nb
sp; Anna said, ‘That never made sense to me – why would Duval have been bleeding? When I asked Charlie about it, he said he thought it was the girl’s blood they matched – there was blood on Duval’s blazer. They found it in his apartment when they arrested him.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I got it wrong. But what difference does it make?’

  ‘It’s possible now to match the DNA on the blazer with Peggy Tykzinski’s.’

  ‘I see.’ And he did: the papers were full of DNA-enhanced discoveries, revisitations to the past that had cleared many a convict, incriminated many an over-zealous posse of policemen and prosecutors. Though you never heard about cases where convictions were simply confirmed by this hi-tech testing.

  ‘But there are two problems. The first is whether they can find the exhibit evidence. In theory, it’s stored, but God knows where.’

  ‘I’m surprised they’ve kept it so long.’

  ‘They may not have. Donna has been looking for a while – with no luck.’

  The woman at the centre who worked to overturn wrongful convictions. It had been smart of Anna to bring her in – on her own, Robert couldn’t imagine she’d have got far in the bureaucracy of the State of Illinois.

  ‘But there’s another problem, too. Even if we find the blazer we still have to prove the blood belongs to Peggy Tykzinski.’

  ‘That should be easy enough. She just needs to take a blood test.’

  ‘Try telling her that. I did my best to be diplomatic, but you should have seen her hackles rise. I know now what they mean by a blanket refusal.’

  ‘What’s it to her?’

  Anna drew her arms across her, as if she were cold. Impossible, thought Robert, since it was the now-standard muggy night. He had left the windows open upstairs to let the breeze skim off the top edge of heat in the house, but it was still very warm.

  She said, ‘It’s the past, Robert. She’s tried to move on, tried to make a life for herself. Then I show up and stir it all up again. How would you feel? Nobody ever raped you, or tried to kill you. Yet you don’t even like going back to Hyde Park.’

  He thought of the runt and Mule. She was right: there was no comparison between that and what had happened to Peggy Mohan. ‘So she said no?’

  ‘Yes. A big bloody, absolute no.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Robert, sensing the frustration this must have caused. Anna had actually persuaded the woman to talk to her, only to run into a brick wall.

  She lifted her handbag by its strap from the floor. Reaching into it she took out a zipped plastic bag – a sandwich bag, he realised. It bulged from something bulky inside it. She laid it carefully, almost gently down upon the kitchen table and he stared at what looked like a coffee cup inside the plastic bag. It was a coffee cup.

  ‘Is that for me?’ he asked, trying to make a joke.

  ‘Not until the lab is done with it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He stared at the coffee cup in the bag, trying to make the connection. When he looked up at Anna, she seemed impatient.

  ‘We had coffee. That’s her cup. She went to the powder room, as you Americans insist on calling it, and I swiped it.’ She gave a small laugh in relief. ‘The only problem was, the waitress saw me. So I told her I was a private investigator, working a divorce case. I gave her twenty dollars but I don’t know if she believed me.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she? Jesus. You are a private investigator.’ He smiled at her warmly. ‘You’ve done brilliantly. This is a real breakthrough.’

  Anna grinned broadly, relaxing for the first time. Robert didn’t want her face ever to change, but it did. ‘It won’t mean anything if we can’t find the blazer.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You have to trust me, Robert,’ she said intently.

  ‘I’ve heard that before.’

  She pursed her lips crossly. ‘I’m not your ex-wife.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of her, actually.’

  XII

  HE WOULD ALWAYS remember the morning he heard because although the 104 was usually crowded, it was rarely late. But that day he had stood by the bus stop on upper Broadway for forty minutes, half-freezing as the wind whistled in from the East Side, and by the time he got to the office it was almost ten o’clock. Unacceptable to his boss, which alarmed Robert, since three years out of college this was the first job he could truly say he liked – and didn’t want to lose.

  He was working for a small, good publishing house that was owned and run by a man named Leo Nathan, an old Polish Jew who had escaped from Vichy, France, in 1940 and come to New York via Rio de Janeiro. He spoke stilted old-fashioned English, but read the language like a native. He was tight with money, and Robert was so badly paid that he struggled to afford even the grim room he rented on the Upper West Side, in a neighbourhood yet to be gentrified. But Nathan had a keen eye for a book; Robert suspected he was learning more from the old man than he would ever fully understand.

  ‘You’re late and you’ve had a phone call that is personal,’ Nathan said crossly that morning.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Somebody saying he’s your brother asks you to call him back.’

  He handed Robert a message slip. It was Mike, and Robert was alarmed. Had someone died? His father, or Lily? If it had been Merrill, Mike would have sent a cheerful telegram.

  ‘Where does this brother of yours live?’

  ‘He’s stationed in Iowa.’

  ‘Stationed?’ said the old man. ‘Ah, a soldier boy. Well, do me a favour, and call him back collect. Uncle Sam can afford personal calls better than I can.’

  When he got through to his brother, Mike said right away, ‘Your friend Duval’s been arrested.’

  Nobody’s died then, Robert thought with relief, and wondered why Mike had rung so urgently. Robert hadn’t seen Duval for more than ten years. He knew from Vanetta that he had come back to Chicago six months before, and had been working in Hyde Park, as a security guard at the university hospital.

  ‘What’s he done?’ he asked now, wondering if it was drugs – Aurelia, Duval’s mother, had never managed to stay clean for long.

  ‘They say he raped a nurse at Billings.’

  He struggled to adjust his image of Duval to the news. He couldn’t. ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘Last night. Dad told me.’

  ‘How is Vanetta taking it?’

  ‘Hard, Bobby. You ought to call her.’

  He rang that night, unwilling to risk Nathan’s wrath with another personal call from the office. He had not spoken to Vanetta for several months and hadn’t been to Chicago in two years. When he had last seen her she’d made baked chicken and sat with him in the Cloisters apartment’s dining room while he ate. He had asked about her family and noticed she’d said nothing about Aurelia, so her daughter must have been on drugs again. Duval was still living with his mother, she’d said with a sigh, and Robert could tell she was worried about him.

  Now on the phone she sounded surprisingly calm, though insistent that Duval was innocent. Robert himself couldn’t imagine the easy-tempered boy he’d known being capable of such violence. Yet later that week when he got clippings sent by Mike from the Chicago papers, he realised things looked bad for Duval.

  The nurse had not only been raped, but knifed so badly that it was a miracle she had survived. She’d told the police that her attacker had worn the blue blazer of hospital security, and she’d picked out Duval’s photo right away from a pile of mugshots.

  The local papers played the story big, drawn no doubt partly by a white girl–black boy angle that touched a racial nerve, clichéd but persisting. Duval was being held without bail in Cook County Jail, which, as Vanetta remarked, was not a picnic for anybody – and certainly not for someone as gentle as Duval. Gentle. That was how he remembered his friend, and what made it difficult to think he’d done the crime.

  Several months passed, and Duval remained locked up. Robert thought of visiting Chicago, but there was no suggestion he could do an
ything helpful by going there. His father told him there was talk of hiring a private attorney, but that in fact the public defenders were very good, and the one assigned to Duval’s case seemed especially competent. There was a chance, Johnny added, of what he called a To Kill a Mockingbird defence: Duval’s chest had been very badly scarred in the fire when he had saved a little girl, yet the rape victim had not mentioned anything unusual about her attacker’s physique. This hope proved short-lived, however, for a week later his father reported that according to Gehringer, the public defender, the girl said Duval had never taken his shirt off during her ordeal.

  With no date set for trial, Robert put it on a mental back burner. He was working hard for Nathan, never leaving the office before seven at night, and with limitless reading of submissions to do outside work. He’d also, after two lonely years, met a woman who seemed to like him as much as he liked her. Cathy was from Long Island, yet absolutely mad about New York City, an enthusiasm she was determined Robert should share. In the helter-skelter manner of many young men in Manhattan, he led a frantically busy life, and Duval Morgan did not figure very often in his thoughts.

  He was never certain what happened to catalyse him into action, and decide he needed to make an appearance at Duval’s trial. Perhaps it was Mike’s frequent phone calls, encouraging him in turn to call Vanetta, who though stoic-sounding on the phone was clearly suffering. Or maybe it was Lily’s disdain when he mistakenly called her in California one night, thinking she would care. Or – and very potent this – possibly it was Merrill’s remark, reported by Mike, that since Duval was facing a sentence of fifty years, then, ‘Honestly, wouldn’t it be better for him to be executed than spend his whole life in prison?’. Whatever it was (and eventually he decided it was largely his enduring sense of obligation to Vanetta), he decided he had to be there.

  Leo Nathan was distinctly unsympathetic. ‘Someone you grew up with has got himself in trouble. Do I understand correctly?’