A Place to Hang Your Hat
“What have we learned?” I asked rhetorically as David and I regained the car. I monologued my ideas aloud to listen to them as I thought them up. “We learned a few things about the man who killed Ted. We learned he knew about the privacy behind those walls of dirt. That means he knows the area down here. Doesn’t mean he lives around here. He might work around here or just come down for the races.
“We suspect he brought Ted to the lot in a car. The cold night suggests that. In the nice weather, two guys might go into a vacant lot to fuck on the ground like dogs in heat, but not in the frigid cold. From what we know about Ted, we suspect he went to the lot for sex. He might even have engaged with his murderer. We don’t know. We also don’t know whether the murder was planned or if it was a sudden impulse.”
I started the car and asked David to use the file from Scofield to find the address of the rooming house where the boys lived. David flipped the papers open but didn’t look at them. He held the file in his lap while he asked about something that bothered him. “Why does it matter? About the murder, I mean. Why does it matter if it was planned or if it was a…what did you call it, an impulse?”
I turned myself in the seat to face David while the engine idled. I explained my methods like I would to a junior detective. “We’re trying to build a picture of a murderer, like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. To build our puzzle, we need to know as much about the murderer as we can. Any detail we can add helps us to know him. The more details we have, the better the picture will be. That way, when we find the murderer, we know he’s the man we’re looking for.
“So far, we know we’re looking for a man who either owns or has access to a car. We know he’s familiar with South Philly and more specifically with these vacant lots. We know he attends the illegal street races. We also know he doesn’t mind having sex with men.
“I could venture to guess we’re looking for a younger man, someone Ted would find attractive. We also know the man needs to be strong and have good endurance. The beating Ted took would have taken a great deal of energy to deliver. No one beats a man to death, then catches their breath and beats him some more. The beating was delivered in one frantic effort. All that information provides quite a few pieces to the puzzle, but it’s not enough. Those pieces would fit the image of too many people. We need more, much more to identify our killer.”
David had turned himself in the seat as I spoke. He faced me squarely and wore such an expression of admiration that I quickly grew uncomfortable. I asked David about the look on his face. “What?”
“You’re just so smart.” David gushed with praise. “I wish I was smart like you.”
I was instantly fed up with David’s hero worship. I righted myself in the seat, stomped the clutch down, and dragged the gearshift into first. In my anger, I didn’t give the engine enough throttle and I let the clutch out too quickly. The engine tried to stall. I mashed the throttle to keep it running. The car lunged and bucked away from the non-existent curb. My head felt every motion with pain and my stomach with nausea.
I wrestled the car around the corner from 3rd onto Bigler and admonished David in an overly loud display of frustration. “Don’t start that shit again!” I bawled at the windshield. “I worked at this for twenty fucking years. I know it because I lived it, not because I’m smart.”
David apologized. His apology made me feel like shit for mouthing off. I apologized to David’s apology. “I’m in a bad mood today.” I said to explain why I’d snapped at David. “I feel lousy, and I’m mad at my husband. I’m probably going to snarl at you again. I won’t mean it then any more than I mean it now.” I made a left onto 2nd Street and pulled over to give David time to find the rooming house address.
David found the address and called it out. “2nd Street and Oregon Avenue.”
“Fuck me for being stupid.” I swore into the air over the fact that I’d even bothered to start the car. David and I were just two blocks from the rooming house. We’d been two blocks from the rooming house when we walked out of the vacant block. We’d moved further away when we went back to the car. I set the parking brake and clicked the ignition off. I got out of the car and called David after me. We walked up 2nd Street toward Oregon Avenue to find the address.
I held my crawling stomach while we walked. Because I’d admitted to David that I was angry with Walt, the admission made my mind remember the shouting match Walt and I had the night before. Walt had apologized early in the morning, but I hadn’t accepted. I wondered if I should have.
I decided I still needed to understand what was behind Walt’s accusations. He’d said if not for him, I’d be in the gutter. At the time Walt invited me into his life, that would have been true. In the years which followed, I felt like I’d become an active participant in the life Walt and I built together. I didn’t like the idea that Walt thought he was the driver of our relationship, and I was the passenger. I didn’t appreciate that he thought of me as passive. I didn’t see myself that way. I chewed my thoughts over, but I didn’t get anywhere with them. When David and I reached the rooming house, I had to set the situation aside.
The house which matched the address was a great, big, tumbled down monstrosity. The wood framed, three story structure with its eight-sided turret over the main entrance was completely out of place among the plain brick rowhomes of South Philly. The house fit into its surroundings about as well as a cowboy might if he found himself on a pirate ship. I remembered the architectural oddity from my many trips up and down Oregon Avenue when Mitch’s was still in operation. I had no idea it still stood.
“This was the Pritchard mansion.” I announced to David as we climbed the wide front steps to the wide front porch. “Pritchard was a big deal back in the horse and buggy days. He made his money in finance or iron or coal or something. I used to know, but I forget now. This house was built way uptown on Washington Avenue. Pritchard didn’t much like the city, so when it got close to him, he moved his house to get away from it. This house was moved twice. When the city got close the third time, he left. Moved out to the country somewhere and died.”
David was amazed that someone would move a whole house. He asked a few questions about how it would be possible to move the structure all in one piece. I got the impression he doubted my story. As proof of my claim, I pointed out the block foundation the house sat on which didn’t match the top two courses of stone which had been moved with the house. David accepted my example and didn’t ask anything more about it.
He and I crossed the porch with its flaking paint and weathered wood and stopped at the wide front door. The door was fastened with a Yale lock. The way a lot of rooming houses worked, the tenants would have one key for the front door and another for their individual rooms. Anyone who wanted to enter who wasn’t a resident would have to get permission from the manager.
Fastened to the ornate wooden trim on the knob side of the door was a black button with a plain metal surround. A twisted pair of wires were stapled to the wood and led away from the button. Above the button was a painted wooden sign which read ‘manager’ in block capitals. I pressed the button and heard a bell ring somewhere deep inside the house.
David and I waited for the door to open. While we waited, I heard a baby cry. The longer we waited, the louder the cry became. When the door opened, the siren-like wail hit me full in the face. A very pretty and very young woman in a pastel house dress answered the door. She had a kerchief tied around her head and a screaming infant in her arms. “Help you?” She asked as she tried to soothe the baby by rocking it gently back and forth.
I felt my face wince away from the infant’s remarkable volume. I tried to keep my expression neutral, but I couldn’t manage it. The noise was too loud, and my head still ached. The aspirin David gave me had started to take the edge off my hangover, but only just. The woman noticed my discomfort and apologized politely. “I’m sorry mister. He’s been fussy all morning and I can’t seem to do nothing with him. He wants his daddy, but my husband won’t be home ‘till late.”
David expressed his sympathetic understanding of the problem. “Boys are like that sometimes.” He offered his arms to the woman. “Do you mind if I try? I’ve got a lot of experience with boys.”
The woman handed the child over like she was desperate enough to try anything. David accepted the infant and cradled it to his chest. He shushed it and rocked it much more slowly than the woman had. To my complete amazement, the child settled almost immediately. David spoke over the boy’s fuzzy dark head. He talked, half to us and half to the child, while he switched back and forth between his regular speech and a cooing baby talk the boy seemed to like.
“My second son, Eddie was just like this. Sometimes, no matter what his mother did, he would howl like the dickens.” David lowered his face to the infant to share his attention with it. “Yes, he would. Yes, he would. Eddie would just fuss and fuss. Yes, he would.”
The little boy laughed and squealed with delight. David smiled pure joy back at him. David resumed his regular speech to talk to us again. “Eddie would cry until I came in from the fields for lunch. He’d be so tired by then, he’d fall asleep in my arms. Poor little guy would wear himself out crying for his dad. Used to break my heart, but I couldn’t stop my work to dry his tears. Back then, I had to work the whole farm with just me and two hired men. Every minute of every day counted.”
David nuzzled into the infant and cooed at him some more. “You have a healthy boy here, miss.” He praised the young woman. “He’s going to be tall and strong, you take my word. Look at how long he is already.” David observed as he teased the baby’s fat little legs to the boy’s giggling pleasure. “My two oldest boys were long like him, my Larry and his brother Eddie. They’re both big, strong men now.”
The woman leaned toward David like she wanted to share his vision for the future of her son. “Do you really think so, mister? My husband is tall. He’s an equipment operator for Newlin Excavating. They’re building all them houses down by the new bridge. I hope my Nathan will be healthy and strong like his daddy.”
“You take my word, miss.” David insisted.
I was happy that the infant had quieted down. I was also pleased at the mention of Newlin Excavation. Newlin was the company who had employed David’s son, Larry. I assumed there was a connection and wanted to ask about it. “Miss?” I said to get the woman’s attention.
She looked at me like she was surprised I was still there. “I’m sorry, mister. Times I can be as rude as I am forgetful. Come on in.”
We went into the once-grand entryway which someone had begun to make grand again. Much of the ornate woodwork had been scraped free of its paint while the walls had been stripped of their paper. The bare yellow plaster showed white in spots where it had been patched. A wooden ladder stood in a corner with a battered toolbox at its feet. “I’m Beth Holbrooke.” The young woman said. “My mama runs this house. She’s out now, doing the shopping. I keep the house. My husband, Nate, has been fixing the place up.”
I introduced myself and David. I explained what David and I were trying to do to help Larry. Beth was glad to meet us. “I’m as pleased as I can be that someone is trying to help poor Lar. I always liked him. He used to help Nate work on the house for money off his rent. He was trying to save so he could live on his own. Him and Ted weren’t getting on. Nate did everything he could to help. Got Lar a job with Newlin. Taught him how to paint and plaster. We all liked Larry here. Nate used to call him ‘Big Lar’ because he’s so tall. None of us believed that Lar did what they said.”
I tried to take advantage of Beth’s positive attitude towards us and asked if I could see the room the boys had lived in. Beth was dubious about letting me into it. “It’s rented, you see. The people are out, but it wouldn’t be right. When the police came for Larry, we kept the room for a week. We actually kept it for two weeks ‘cause the rent was paid. After the two weeks was up, me and mama packed up the clothes and stuff and put the room for rent. We had to. We didn’t have no choice.”
Beth looked pleadingly at David as she explained why she hadn’t held Larry’s room indefinitely. David said he understood. “You did the right thing, young lady. The room rent is your livelihood. You can’t afford to have a room that’s not making money.”
Beth was visibly relieved by David’s words of understanding. She added some words to show her appreciation for David’s attitude. “If it were up to me, I’d-a left it empty until Big Lar got outta jail, but like you said, Mister, me and mama needed the money.”
David renewed his smile toward Beth and gave his attention back to the infant in his arms. I retreated into my mind to decide what to do. I hadn’t had much hope of learning anything from the room, but since we were there, I wanted to see it if I could.
I had an idea of a way to convince Beth to give me access. “Have you done the morning cleaning yet?” I asked. “If you haven’t, I could help you. You wouldn’t be doing anything wrong. You’d just be accepting some help. I bet little Nathan put you behind with his crying. Now we’re here taking your valuable time. It’s only fair I help you catch up.”
Beth inclined her head toward me. She seemed like she only needed to be convinced. David helped cinch her agreement. He nodded toward a sun-drenched sitting room in the front of the house. “If you and Law are going to be a while, I can take Nathan in there and look after him.”
Beth shook her head and laughed a pretty, lilting laugh. She put her hands on her hips and split a sweet smile between David and me. “I know I oughta say no, but I am behind, and I ain’t never seen Nathan take to anyone like he took to you, Mister David.”
Beth sized me up with a practiced eye. I assumed that a girl who had been raised in a rooming house would be well used to sizing people up. Whatever she saw must have satisfied her because she accepted my offer of help. “You know how to use a sweeper?” She asked.
I assumed when Beth said ‘sweeper,’ she meant an electric vacuum cleaner. My hungover head recoiled at the idea of the loud, droning hum of one of those machines. Noise or no noise, I wanted to see the room. I resigned myself to suffer the pain which the noise would bring. I turned my involuntary grimace into a grin and tried to sound eager. “Lead me to it.” I said.
Beth moved through the entryway and into a hall which led toward the rear of the house. She stopped at a closet and took out a ‘Fuller Brush Universal’ manual floor sweeper. She carried it to me and pointed at the wooden floor I stood upon. “Start in here, then do the front parlors on both sides, then the hall to the back of the house and the maid’s room. Lar and Ted stayed in the maid’s room. I’ll open it up for you, then I’m goin’ upstairs to do the dusting.”
Beth ran down the hall to the maid’s quarters. She unlocked the door and ran back. She winked at me, planted a kiss on the head of her baby, and hurried up the bare wood treads of the ornately carved staircase. David smiled after her. “I like her.” He said like she was going to be his daughter-in-law. “Smart and kind and pretty as a spring morning.”
“She’s shrewd too.” I observed and held up the handle of the floor sweeper. “I get what I want, and she gets the entire first floor swept.”
David offered to swap my sweeping task for his babysitting task, but I refused. I didn’t know anything about kids. I also had no doubt that the child would start screaming as soon as he was released into my arms. The manual sweeper would be more work than a vacuum cleaner, but it would be quiet. My head badly needed quiet. I set to work in the entryway. David took his tiny charge into one of the front parlors. He started to tell Nathan a fairytale as he went. “Once upon a time, there was a magical kingdom called Keystone…”
I swept the entryway and down the hall. When I reached the end, I decided to do the maid’s room next and come back for the parlors. I looked around the old house as I swept. Everything I saw was shabby and worn except for the recent repairs done by Beth’s husband, Nate. I suspected that Nate was the first man who’d been involved with the house for some time. Beth hadn’t mentioned her father. I assumed he was either dead or out of the picture and the house had fallen into disrepair in his absence.
The scale of the repairs made me think that Nate had come into the house as new blood with fresh ambition. He obviously cared how his wife and infant son were going to live and was willing to work hard to make their lives better. I praised his efforts in my mind. ‘Quite a guy,’ I thought, ‘to work all day and then come home and work some more. Good for him.’
I finished the hall and swept my way into the maid’s quarters. The room inside reminded me a little of the tiny apartment I had behind my old office in Moyamensing. The apartment the boys once occupied was a single room with a pair of pull-down beds, a frayed upholstered chair, and a dresser without a mirror. A tiny table with two wooden chairs around it was gathered against one wall. Two plain doors stood on either side of the table. One door opened into a narrow closet and the other led to a private bathroom with a shower which had been installed as an obvious afterthought.
The room had two windows. One of them looked into the alley between the house and the blind brick wall of the building next door. The other looked into a shallow backyard surrounded by a fence of warped boards. Next to the window was another door, one which was more ornate than the others. The ornate door opened onto a wooden landing and a rickety set of steps which led into the yard.
Nothing about the room was remarkable or enlightening. Seeing it in person only confirmed what Larry told us the previous day. Because of the layout of the maid’s quarters, and the fact that it offered an entryway which wasn’t through the main house, Larry had been able to enter his room late on the night of the murder without being seen by any of the other tenants.
With nothing added to my knowledge, but nothing taken away, I ran the sweeper through the room and got ready to leave it. Before I did, I had one more look. The room was small and the furniture cheap, but the old-fashioned high ceilings made it feel bigger than it was. The current occupant hadn’t decorated with any personal photographs or knick-knacks, but the lack of personalization didn’t matter. The gaudy print wallpaper kept the atmosphere from feeling too plain. The room was welcoming, a good place to hang one’s hat. I thought that Ted and Larry had been lucky to find it. I left the room and closed the door behind.
I carried the sweeper into the kitchen at the rear of the house and found a trash can to empty the dust. I took the sweeper back to the front of the house to do the parlors. The parlors had a lot of furniture in them, so there wasn’t much carpet to sweep. I made short work the first and moved to the one David was in with little Nathan.
David remained standing and rocked gently on his feet. Nathan had gone to sleep on David’s chest. David held the small boy and continued to tell him fairy stories even though the boy couldn’t hear them. I held my sweeper up to David as a way to ask him if the whirring sound of the gears and brushes would disturb the boy’s nap. David gestured his permission for me to finish my work. I ran the sweeper around the room while David whispered a story about Queen Madam and Knights of Keystone.
The story made me nostalgic for Madam Mitchell’s magical whorehouse. The time of my life when I frequented the Kingdom wasn’t a happy time, but the hedonism of Mitch’s allowed me to pretend it was. No matter how bad the day was, or how lousy I felt, I could always go to Mitch’s and feel better. When I entered the kingdom, I was surrounded by people like me, people who didn’t judge me for being queer, people who understood, people like Charlie. Mitch’s had been an escape for all of us. Scobie had said as much the previous day. I hadn’t experienced anything like it before or since.
I finished my sweeping and did my best to brush the memories away from my face. I carried the sweeper into the entryway just as Beth was on her way down the steps to check on my progress. I was glad to be finished with the sweeping, but the minor task had made me feel a little better. Either that or the aspirin I’d taken had caught up with my headache.
Because I felt better, I had a silly impulse and allowed it to dictate my actions. I came to military attention and held the sweeper handle upright in front of my body like it was a rifle in the ‘present arms’ position. “Ready for inspection, Miss.” I announced when Beth paused on the landing.
Beth laughed her pretty laugh at me. She put her hands on her hips and inspected the entryway with practiced eyes. “Good job.” She praised. “Did you learn anything back there?” She finished her trip down the steps and pointed toward the maid’s quarters at the back of the house.
“Nothing I didn’t already know.” I admitted, then I asked about the things she and her mother had packed up. “Can I look through them?”
Beth took the sweeper and led the way to a storage closet under the stairs. She showed me an old steamer trunk held closed with cracked leather straps. I undid the straps and folded the lid back on creaking hinges. The inside of the trunk was half-filled with the meager belongings of two young men who had left their home with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Beth commented on the contents of the trunk. “Mama and me didn’t know what belonged to who, so we put it all in there together.”
I thanked the young lady. She went to take care of the rest of her morning chores, and I dug my hands into the trunk. I pulled out the clothes and stacked them on the floor. Most of what I removed from the trunk consisted of working clothes. I found two sizes of denim overalls, several pairs of heavy pants made of a course canvas material, and an assortment of solid color button-down shirts with long and short sleeves.
To balance the working clothes, each young man had one set of ‘better’ clothes. These were far from what many would term ‘Sunday best,’ but they were obviously of better quality and in better condition than the working clothes. I ran my hands over each garment to see if the pockets held any secrets. I didn’t find anything.
Under the clothes were two imitation-leather shaving bags, one black and one brown. I opened each. Both were of similar quality and held similar contents. Nothing about either was unique except for the fact that each held a single personal item. The black bag contained a worn Canadian quarter from the year of my birth, 1900. The brown bag contained a letter in a sealed envelope.
I took the tightly folded envelope from the shaving bag and smoothed it out on the floor. The paper of the envelope was worn at the corners and dirty in the creases, like it had been carried in a pocket for a long time before it was stored in the shaving bag. The address written on the front was so faded I couldn’t read it in the low light of the closet. There was no return address but there was postage. The upper right corner of the envelope was pasted with a crooked three cent stamp.
The stamp told me two things about the letter. The first thing was that the letter was unsent. The stamp hadn’t been cancelled, so the letter was never mailed. The other thing it told me was that the letter was at least a few years old. I couldn’t remember exactly when it happened, but postage had gone up from three cents to five sometime in the last few years.
I pocketed the letter and tossed the Canadian quarter in my hand. I put the quarter in the same pocket with the letter and rechecked the trunk. I didn’t find anything else of interest, so I repacked the trunk and fastened down its lid. I left the storage closet for the front parlor to find David in quiet conversation with Beth.
David had given little Nathan back to his mother. Beth held the sleeping child and looked upon him with tender love. “He’s beautiful.” David said to Beth about her son. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Mister David.” Beth replied with her soft, careful voice. “He’s the image of his daddy.”
David shook his head at the young mother. “He’s got your eyes though. There’s no mistaking that shade of blue.”
Beth colored slightly from embarrassment over David’s observation. She thanked him again.
I presented myself at the periphery of their conversation and waited to be acknowledged. Beth noticed me first. “Did you find what you were looking for?” She asked.
“I found something.” I admitted. “I’m not sure what it means, or if it means anything. That’s how detective work goes sometimes.” I said with a shrug.
David sensed we were getting ready to leave and changed the subject to one of finality. “I had no idea you were storing the boys’ belongings. You have to let me pay you.”
“No sir!” Beth refused sharply. “Mama would say the same. You keep your money, Mister David. Tell Big Lar I asked after him. You tell him just like that and he’ll smile for sure. Tell him to keep his head up. I wanna see him when he gets out.”
“You’re a dear.” David said to Beth. “I’m glad to know that my Larry has friends like you. I’ll make sure he comes to see you when he gets out. Don’t you worry.”
I thanked Beth for her hospitality and for letting me look around. She thanked me for doing the sweeping. David and I took our leave while Beth went to put Nathan down to finish his nap.
