When No One Was Looking (16 page)

“But what does this have to do with Marty?”

“Well, Mr. Molina was cleaning out the pool house that morning, and he found a footprint, a sneaker print, and he cleaned it up, not thinking anything. But when the news came out about the chlorine, he showed the sponge to the cops. They have the clay sample from Molina.”

“But it could have been anyone. Why Marty?”

“Kathy, it wasn’t green clay from the club courts. It was red clay. The only courts around with red clay are at Newton, and Marty was at Newton the day before Ruth died.”

“But ... but so was I, Jody. And you for that matter, and Oliver and Mom.”

“That’s right, Kathy.”

“But, Jody. But ...

“The cops called Molina right away. They interviewed Marty right there in his office.”

“How do you know all this?”

“You know the Malones’ dressing room? Number one eighty-four? It’s right over Molina’s office. You could drop a dime through the floorboards onto his desk. Anyway, Peachy heard the whole thing. I bribed her with free ice cream from the snack bar. As much as she wants for the rest of the summer. She listened to the whole thing and told me. Marty’s in trouble, Kathy. She won’t say where she was the night before Ruth drowned. Says it’s her business. She got really mad at Molina apparently and told him he had a fat rear end and connections with the Mafia, right in front of an Italian police chief! Marty’s crazy.”

“But, Jody, they can’t prove anything. So what if they have a little bit of red clay? They don’t have an actual footprint. Even if they did, so what?”

“Kathy.”

“What?”

“Ruth’s mother is making a big deal out of this. Somebody apparently tried to harm her daughter and wound up accidentally killing her.”

“Somebody.”

“Yeah. Somebody, Kathy. Now you keep your end of the promise.”

“Okay. Shoot,” said Kathy.

“First you swear.”

“How?”

“Put your hand on my hand. Okay. Now, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God, and if you lie, may God strike you paralyzed from the neck down?”

“I swear.”

“Okay,” said Jody, releasing Kathy’s hand from a tight grip. “You remember that night before you were supposed to play Ruth at Newton? Bobby got sick, remember?”

“Yes.”

“And Mom had to go to Norwood for the prescription, and Daddy took Bobby to the clinic, and Oliver had to leave early to help with the club party?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go?”

“I went to algebra like I always do ... and practice. I went down to the public courts.”

Jody’s eyes burned. She sat upright suddenly and held up her hand as if she were about to hit Kathy in the face. “You dirty rotten liar,” she said. “You
deserve
to be paralyzed! Don’t you remember? You left without any books. I covered for you. Mrs. Diggins called up and asked where you were, and I said you were off with Daddy. That it was an emergency. I figured you just went straight to the courts to work on your serve. Then I remembered. You didn’t take your racket. Now where were you, Kathy?”

“Jody, I swear up and down I didn’t go near that pool. I didn’t dump any chlorine into anything. I swear!”

“Where
were
you then?”

“Why do you have to know? Why can’t you just believe that I didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“You know why? Because somebody might start asking questions, that’s why. Because somebody’s kid got killed, Kathy, even if it was by mistake, and it might have been over a tennis game. A
tennis game.
You had a lot to lose if Ruth beat you.”

“Oh, Jody, I know, I know.”

“Where did you go, Kathy?”

Kathy looked out the window for a moment. The rain had begun again, and it was spitting in over the sill. She got up and closed it. “Fenway,” she said. “I took the express ball park bus. The Yanks were playing the Sox.”

Jody began to laugh a little. “You idiot,” she said kindly. “I believe you.” Her teeth had started to chatter. She hugged Kathy hard and added. “I hope you have a ticket stub or something.”

“I thought you believed me.”

“Oh, Kathy,” Jody said, and shook her head. “Forget it. Never mind.”

K
ENNETH B. HAMMER WAS
a very likable man. His feet were large in their splendid brown loafers with the gold buckles. His hands were warm and dry, and his large hamlike thighs strained at the seams of his pants. His hair was a warm brown and brush cut, like a marine’s. “I hear you’re quite a little ballplayer,” he said to Kathy with a toothy grin worthy of a master politician.

“Yes, sir,” Kathy answered. She waited for him to stop shaking her hand. When he did, she sat opposite him in an uncomfortable old student’s desk, the only other place in the principal’s office to sit. She thought Mr. Hammer looked as uncomfortable as she behind the principal’s dignified mahogany desk. Evidently this was so, because he leaned back in the equally dignified mahogany chair and, clasping his big hands behind his head, propped his feet on the radiator.

“I mean, apart from your tennis,” he went on. “You did terrific down in Florida, honey, by the way. We’re all real proud of you. You went into that situation and showed the stuff a champion is made of. But what I mean is I hear you’re some kind of shortstop too.”

Oh, well,” said Kathy, feeling herself redden. “I guess I play a halfway decent shortstop.”

“Used to play a little semipro myself,” said Mr. Hammer, and he picked up a round glass paperweight containing a preserved rose and made as if to pitch it across the room. “Boy, I’d like to be your age again, honey,” he said. “What an unbelievable situation you’re in. Young, pretty, and loaded with talent. You know everybody around here thinks you’re going to go all the way?”

“Thank you,” said Kathy, wondering when he was going to hand over the dreaded algebra exam. “I’ll do my best.”

“Sure you will. You’ve got all the tools, but more important, the right attitude. So you like baseball too?”

The sunlight poured in directly behind Mr. Hammer’s head. Kathy could not see his expression well except for the continuing grin.

“I love baseball. But I’m a girl, and I’m too small and ...

“Too bad about the Sox this year.”

“Yes ...

“You play with this fellow, what’s his name, a lot?”

“You mean Oliver?”

“English. That’s the one. Little fellow. Seems like he thinks you’ve got a great arm. Thinks you can throw like a pro.”

Kathy shifted around in her one-armed seat. “I don’t know really, Mr. Hammer,” she said. “Oliver is always timing people with stopwatches. He makes up little tests for me. Yesterday I won five dollars on a bet from him because I threw to first almost as fast as Rick Burleson two times out of three.”

“It’s great, honey, but don’t do too much of that. You could tear a rotator cuff. Your arm’s your bread and butter.” Mr. Hammer stood and passed Kathy the examination papers.

“Hope it doesn’t upset your boyfriend if you quit baseball,” he said.

“Oliver’s not my boyfriend,” said Kathy. “He’s just my friend.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Hammer. “Nice boy though. Works hard. Know anything about his people?”

Kathy frowned. Something was wrong here. Why was she sweating? “No. I guess his folks are divorced and all, and he lives with an uncle.”

“Poor kid. Had a rough life,” said Mr. Hammer. He rocked back and forth on his heels, his hands in his pockets tightly. Kathy noticed that Mr. Hammer’s loafers creaked. “Seems to have straightened himself out nicely, though.”

“Oliver?” Kathy asked. “Straightened himself out?”

“Got in a peck of trouble when he was about eleven. Put big upholsterers’ tacks under his stepfather’s tires. Guy got a flat, a blowout, and nearly went off a bridge. Tried to have the kid charged on delinquency and all that, but the kid was too young. Never did anything after that.”

A warning light blinked in the back of Kathy’s mind, or so she felt. “I know all about it, Mr. Hammer,” she said as coldly as she dared. “Oliver told me about it the first night I met him. His stepfather was an addicted gambler and gambled away his mother’s hard-earned money and drank himself silly every night, also on his mother’s money, and I told Oliver I thought he was morally right to do it.”

Mr. Hammer smiled and tapped Kathy’s paper with his fingernails. “Do the best you can on this thing, honey,” he said with a comfortable chuckle. “I had old battle-ax Diggins when I was your age. She gave me a D-plus, as I remember, and whacked me once a day! Just leave it on the desk and let yourself out when you’re through. Go out the side entrance. The main entrance is locked.”

Mr. Hammer was gone. The room seemed actually larger without him. The sunlight hit her paper directly. Kathy squinted at it and smelled the mimeograph fluid in the purple print. To Kathy each of the neatly typed and numbered problems might have been a mile of thread, gnarled and knotted for hours by some maniacal baby. Above her a clock ticked in a blond oak frame. Every time its big hand advanced, it jumped slightly. On the top-most shelf of the oak bookcases beside her a bust of Lincoln stared down at her, blindly but judgmentally. Kathy squirmed. On the corner of the principal’s desk lay the Algebra I textbook. She wondered if Mr. Hammer had left it there to test her honesty or to allow her help during the exam. She gazed at it for one long yearning minute by the clock, then hunched herself up over the first problem. “A freight train,” she read aloud in a blandly reasonable singsong, “leaves station A for station B at two
P.M.
It is traveling at twenty miles per hour. The distance between stations is ten miles. Another freight train”—Kathy repeated this for emphasis—“
another
freight train leaves station B for station A, also at two
P.M.
It is traveling at ten miles per hour.” She wrote down 10 and underlined it. “At what time will the trains pass?” She drew an A and a B and connected them with a line filled in with tiny crosshatches representing ties on a track. After drawing both trains with smoke coming out of their stacks, she said, “Easy! At what time will they pass? Let
x
equal one train. Let
y
equal the other. Let
z
equal two
P.M.”
It doesn’t mention separate tracks, she thought. They’d crash! She decided to let this first problem sit for the moment.

The next one concerned itself with a transaction between two butchers. The third had to do with bridge spans and the fourth with a tire’s revolutions per minute.

Kathy was bathed in sunlight and in sweat. The open window allowed the sound of a tractor and the smell of newly mown grass to waft through the office.
Do they expect me to cheat? Is this a trap?
she wondered miserably as her attention switched once more to the book on the edge of the desk. In it lay the answers to all the questions on the test. Somehow Kathy’s memory was good enough to recall the trains and the tires and the two butchers because she always pictured them as in life when given a problem, and she knew practically to the page where she would find her answers. The butchers she’d pored over earlier that summer in Mrs. Diggins’s house, mentally making one Black and one Chinese to keep them separate as
x
and
y.
Motes of dust settled softly on the blue and orange cover of the book.
I will not cheat!
Kathy told herself, gripping her pencil tightly. You
already did the first time around,
said another voice.
I will not cheat. I’m better than they think I am,
she said to the book on the desk.
Not at algebra, you’re not,
said the same logical voice.

The textbook seemed to her a center of evil. Its temptations throbbed at her like an unstoppable Latin rhythm section. Kathy got up from her cramped desk. She took the large flat textbook in her right hand, and eyeing the top of the bookcase, where only a ladder could reach, she threw the book as accurately as she could and shouted, “Get out of my sight!” and called it a vile name.

It was one thing to throw the book fifteen feet in the air but quite another to get it to land flat on a shelf. After trying twice more and having the book land both times at her feet, temptingly open, Kathy succeeded in angling it right. It lay forever out of harm’s way but had ricocheted off the bust of Lincoln, which had split in two as it landed on the principal’s desk.

“You stupid dope! You dummy!” Kathy yelled at herself. “Now look what you’ve done!” Desperately she rummaged through all the drawers in the desk hoping to find some glue, paste, anything that would repair the damage. The drawers were empty save for paper clips and erasers. “Dummy,” she said again. “The bust’s probably an antique worth five hundred bucks.” Sweating and dirty from the dust she had raised, Kathy began to weep softly. She took the two sides of the bust and held them together. The break was clean and the sides held. She put Lincoln, on a low shelf and tiptoed back to her desk.

I’ve done the right thing with the book, she assured herself as she looked at the fourth problem. “If the speed of a wheel must be increased by thirty percent to reach a speed of thirty revolutions per minute,” she read in a shaky monotone, “what is the original speed of the wheel?” Kathy drew thirty circles, each to represent one revolution. “Increased by thirty percent ... she muttered. She drew a hundred more circles as quickly as she could. “Okay, a hundred circles equal a hundred percent. Therefore thirty circles equal thirty percent. Add that to the other thirty circles and you have your answer.” Kathy wrote
60
in the answer box.
It can’t be,
she thought.
Sixty is either a hundred percent more or fifty percent more, I’m not sure, but it sure isn’t thirty percent more.
She swore out loud and banged the soft end of her pencil against the desk. On the shelf the bust fell open quietly.

Miserably she looked from the bust of Lincoln to the description of two butchers who were exchanging a hundred pound side of beef worth two hundred dollars for a seventy pound side of pork worth sixty-five dollars and eighty cents.
Soap
she thought.
I’ll stick it together with soap.