Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [98]
The next day I put on the khaki suit again, along with my one good tie, and drove straight up Queens Boulevard into the neighborhood called Jamaica. There was one last thing to do. I was nervous and a little scared, and part of me thought for sure that I was being stupid. Let sleeping dogs lie, they say, but maybe there are some dogs that need to be awakened when the time comes, when their sleep has done as much good as it’s likely to do. I wasn’t sure, but I kept driving.
The cop I shot was named Edward Stuart. It was a good English name with the sound of royalty to it, but Stuart was a black man, all of twenty-nine at the time I shot him, and he had grown up in the same projects where he died. I’d been warned not to go to his funeral, but, being me, I went anyway and got the crap beat out of me by a half dozen or so of his relatives, along with one white guy, another cop, who decided he didn’t like me much either. It was a biracial beating, which shows that people can work together. I hadn’t even fought back that hard. I did just enough not to get beaten too badly. I don’t have full recall of the evening’s festivities, but I do believe it was one of Ed Stuart’s brothers who eventually drove me home.
A few weeks later I left town.
I got the Stuarts’ phone number and address from information and made the call from a phone outside a Shell station on Jamaica Avenue, half hoping that no one would be home and that I’d be able to drive home with the coward’s comfort of having tried. But still, there were some pretty good reasons for not contacting the widow of the man I had shot. Two years is not a long time, and there was no telling how far she had moved on in her life, but no matter what the answer to that question was, I would still be a sorry reminder of a terrible time. There was another question that bothered me as well: Had I come all this long, stubborn, disastrous way for Beth Stuart and her son or for Jack Vaughn?
A boy answered the phone, and I almost hung up, but then I heard a voice that didn’t quite sound like me ask if Mrs. Stuart was in. He yelled for his mother, and a woman’s agitated voice came back and asked who it was. I told him, and he shouted my name so loud it embarrassed me to be Jack Vaughn. Then I heard a silence so wide I thought I might never reach the other side of it, then the sound of footsteps.
“Hello. Who’s this?” asked Beth Stuart.
“Jack Vaughn,” a voice said.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Vaughn?”
“I’m in town for a few days. I was wondering if I could stop by for a couple of minutes.”
“What for?”
“Look, I’ve come a long way for a few minutes of your time. It won’t take long.”
“What? To apologize again? Mr. Vaughn, listen to me. I just put flowers on my husband’s grave. What can you say to that?”
“I know,” I said. “I saw them: yellow roses. I put mine next to them.”
She let out a long breath. “All right, Mr. Vaughn,” she said wearily. “You come on by.”
Beth Stuart met me at the door of her little house on a tree-lined street with a face that held more suspicion than mercy. She was a tall, good-looking woman in her early thirties, with a high forehead and bright, intelligent eyes, and she was dressed for church. She invited me into a small living room overflowing with furniture. A football sat perched in a black recliner across from a television set. I picked it up and sat down and glanced around. There were a lot of pictures on the wall, but I didn’t want to look at them. Instead I studied the football just to give my eyes something to do.
“That belongs to my son.”
“That would be Robert, right?” I said.
Beth Stuart looked at me as though I’d said something in a strange language. She was very gracious under the circumstances, but I got the feeling of some great force being held at bay by a wall of well-worn civility. She went into the kitchen and came back with a pitcher