The Deep End Read online

  “They didn’t say anything over the phone, either of them?”

  “Not except that they were starting back right away and would come direct to the funeral parlor here. Anything else I can give you, Sam?”

  I said, “I’ve got plenty on the kid’s athletic record, but not much about him outside of that. Have you got a lead on anybody who knew him personally that I could get in touch with?”

  “Yes, there is. Right here. Haley’s got a high school girl helping out in the office this summer, a vacation job. She knew Westphal, was in some of the same classes with him. I’ve already talked to her but maybe you’d better get it direct. I can put her on for you.”

  “Swell, but first what’s her name? And can she hear you now?”

  “Grace Smith. No, she’s in another office; she can’t hear me. But listen, be careful what you say to her, will you? This hit her pretty hard; she’s been crying and she’s still pale around the gills. Try not to set her off again.”

  “Okay. Was she the kid’s sweetheart?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’d guess she had a crush on him. Bobby-soxer stuff. Well, I guess it’s more healthy for ’em to swoon over a high school hero their own age than over some crooner old enough to be their father.”

  “All right,” I said. “Put her on.”

  About a minute later a girl’s voice said, “Hello. This is Grace Smith.” She’d been crying hard, all right; I could tell from her voice. It sounded as though it was walking a tightrope and trying not to fall off.

  I said, “This is Evans of the Herald, Miss Smith. I’m writing an article on Obie Westphal. Not about the accident, just about Obie himself. I’ll appreciate anything you can tell me about him.”

  “He was–he was tops. The best football player in the school, and good at tennis too, really good.”

  “I’ve got plenty on his athletic record–but not much else. Can you tell me what kind of student he was? How he did in his classes?”

  “Oh, he was smart. He got good grades in everything.”

  “Was he popular with his classmates? Outside of athletics, I mean?”

  “Oh, yes. Everybody was just crazy about him. It’s just–just awful that–”

  Her voice was wavering on the tightrope and I cut in quickly with a question to distract her. “What course was he taking, Miss Smith? And do you know what he intended to be?”

  “The science course. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might decide to be a d-doctor. I was in his English class last year, English Three, and in his Latin class the year before. I think he wanted to be a–you know, a laboratory doctor. The kind that does experiments and learns new things.”

  “I see. Do you happen to know how he got the nickname Obie?”

  “From his middle name. It’s Obadiah. Henry Obadiah Westphal. But nobody ever called him Henry, even the teachers. He even signed his papers Obie.”

  “Do you happen to know his family, Miss Smith?”

  “I met his father and mother once, at a school party. But I just met them; I don’t really know them. His father owns a store, I think; I don’t know what kind of store.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “N-no. Not that I know of. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t–hadn’t.”

  “Did you know him pretty well personally? Did you have dates with him?”

  “N-not exactly. But I’ve danced with him at dances at the school. S-six times.”

  The poor kid, I thought. She had it bad, to have counted those dances like pearls, to have known that it wasn’t five times or seven that she’d been that near him. Under other circumstances it could have been funny. It didn’t strike me as funny now.

  I thought of an angle. If he’d had a regular sweetheart, a steady girl, and if I could reach her by phone I might get some good sob stuff for the story. Maybe he’d even been engaged; there are plenty of puppy-love engagements in the last year or two of high school. I’d been engaged myself in my senior year–to a girl I hadn’t seen in six years now, Nina Carberry. I’d heard, though, that she was working in the office at South Side High.

  “Did Obie have a steady girl friend, Miss Smith?” I asked.

  “No, he didn’t. He–he didn’t date girls very much. He mostly came stag to school parties and dances, not always but mostly.”

  I said, “Thanks a lot, Miss Smith. Will you put Rowland back on? If he’s still there, that is.”

  “Yes, he’s still here. Just a sec.”

  When Rowland came back on I said, “Guess I got enough to do it, Harry. But keep me posted if you get anything new. Particularly if you get names of any close friends of the kid, anybody else I can call. Say, he wouldn’t have any relatives living in town outside of his parents, would he?”

  “Nope. Anyway none of Westphal’s employees at his store know of any relatives here. And they probably would. That’s how the cops found out the Westphals were visiting Mr. Westphal’s sister in Williamsburg. Say, you could get a statement from her by calling long distance, if you got to have a statement from somebody.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “Thanks for the suggestion. Hey, do you know her name?”

  “Just a minute; I can get it.”

  He came back to the phone in a minute and gave me a name and a Williamsburg address; the name was Hattie Westphal, which would make her a maiden aunt of Obie’s. And a statement from her would be the next best thing to a statement from one of the parents, and that wouldn’t he available, at least not in time for the city edition.

  I put in the long distance call and while I was waiting for the connection I cradled the phone between my shoulder and my ear and ran paper into the machine. But before I figured out my lead sentence the operator said, “That number does not answer, sir. Shall I keep trying?”

  I told her to keep trying.

  But it probably would be useless; if the aunt wasn’t home now it was more than likely that she was returning with the parents in their car.

  But damn it, I ought to have a statement from somebody about how wonderful a boy Obie had been, somebody closer to him than Grace Smith had been, somebody whose name– The principal of the high school, of course. It took me a few seconds to remember his name and then I had it. Emerson, Paul E. Emerson. And I was fairly sure he was still principal there. I looked up his home phone number–even if there were summer classes at the school, he wouldn’t be there on Saturday–and dialed it. The phone rang but nobody answered it.

  I thought again of Nina Carberry. Working in the office of South Side High it was just possible that she could tell me where Emerson could be reached. If not, she could at least give me a fact or two about Obie, maybe the names of some of his teachers who could be reached. I looked up Nina Carberry’s number and called it. Again no answer. Some days are like that, nobody home anywhere you call.

  I’d have to write the first story without statements, but maybe that was all to the good; some suitable quotes would add up to a good peg on which to hang a follow-up story. And the Herald would follow this one up as far as it could be followed. Anyway, I had plenty of material, even without quotes.

  Sob story or no, the lead would have to bring in Whitewater Beach. I started typing. I wrote. Today under the wheels of a Whitewater Beach roller coaster …

  It went easy from there and I wrote almost as fast as I could type, but I wrote well. While you’re writing a story, you can tell, maybe by the feel of the typewriter keys, whether it’s good or not. This one was good. It had what a story took. I forgot while I was writing it that a man named Campbell who owned an amusement park was on the Herald’s s. o. b. list. I thought about a kid named Obie and I wrote it straight and the tears were there. Maybe I wasn’t crying, but my tongue wasn’t in my cheek either.

  I finished it, six pages triple-spaced, with time to spare, so I decided it might as well be accurate too. I’d carried th
e dates and the home and store addresses in my head and I might as well check them against the file clips. I’d almost finished doing that when the phone rang.

  It was Ed. He said, “Kill that story.”

  By the time it had registered the phone was dead. I put it down and stared at it a few seconds and then I got up and went into Ed’s office.

  When he looked up I asked him, “What the hell?”

  His voice was as sour as the expression on his face. “Rowland just phoned. It wasn’t the Westphal kid. It was a light-fingered juvenile delinquent from the Third Ward, with a detention home record a yard long. He’d pinched the other kid’s leather; that’s how the identification was wrong.”

  “Swell,” I said. “I’d just finished the story. Now do I start one about the poor little pickpocket?”

  He glared at me. “Hell no. We can’t run a sob on him; we’ll have to stick to the news story and an editorial and the less said about the kid himself the better.”

  “Nil nisi bonum” I said. “Speak only good of the dead. If no bonum, skipum.”

  He looked even more pained. I didn’t blame him. He said, “This is your last day before vacation, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Go out for lunch now and make it short, half an hour, and then get the hell out of here as soon as the home edition’s in at two.”

  I said, “Thanks,” and meant it. The last few hours before a vacation go slowly.

  He handed me some sheets of paper. “Here’s upstate stuff that came in late; the desk won’t have time to handle it. Put it in English as soon as you’re back from lunch. Now scram.”

  I scrammed. I got my suit coat off the back of the chair of my desk and I picked up the Obie Westphal story and made a pass at the wastebasket with it. But I didn’t let go. It had been a good story; I wanted to read it over once sometime before I threw it away. I dropped it into a drawer of my desk and closed the drawer so a copyboy wouldn’t get hold of it by mistake and take it to the composing room.

  Then I went down for a beer and a sandwich at Murphy’s, the bar across the street from the Herald, and I forgot all about Obie. I thought about the trip I was going to take with Bill and Harvey Whelan and the good time I ought to have if I could forget about the trouble with Millie. And then I found myself thinking again about Nina Carberry, whom I hadn’t thought about for years until this morning. Wondering whether, if Millie and I did split up, it might not be interesting to look up Nina sometime and see what six years had done to her, what she was like now. Nina and I had had a very important first experience together when we were in our last year of high school at South Side. But that had been a long time ago and we’d drifted apart during the first year or two after we were out of school. There’d been an argument over something that seemed ridiculous now but we’d each been too proud to give in, and then we’d each found other interests elsewhere. At least I had.

  I went back to the Herald and to my desk. I started putting the upstate copy into English and sending it, a sheet or two at a time, to the composing room.

  Harry Rowland came in and I waved him over to my desk. He sat down on a corner of it.

  “Wha’ hoppen?” I asked him. “Ed told me it was a different kid, but I didn’t ask him how they corrected the identification. Somebody who knew the Westphal kid take a look or what?”

  “Fingerprints. They’d taken them for routine, like they do on all D. O. A. cases, and they put ’em through the routine way in spite of the wallet. And the Bureau of Identification digested them and came up with the fact that the prints were on record and they belonged to a Polack kid named Chojnacki. Who’s spent most of the last couple of years, since he was fifteen, in reform school and the detention home. Which shows there’s maybe something in this routine business. It’s tough, though, that they’d already phoned the Westphals that their son was dead.”

  “They don’t know otherwise yet?”

  “No way they can be reached. They won’t know until they get back, and that won’t be before late afternoon. You know, I think Ed’s missing a bet”

  “What?”

  “He’s running the wrong story. The big human interest angle is the Westphals driving back from Williamsburg thinking their son is dead and how they’re going to feel when they find out he isn’t. I asked him if I should write that up as a separate story, at least a box item in the main story, and he said no.”

  “Why not?”

  Rowland grimaced. “Couldn’t write it without explaining why the first identification was wrong, why the cops thought it was the Westphal kid. That’d have to bring out the pickpocket angle and he doesn’t want that used. Nothing that will detract from the slaps we’re taking at Whitewater. And dear reader would feel less sympathy for Jimmy Chojnacki if they knew why he was back there behind the concession booths.”

  For a minute I didn’t get it. I asked, “Why was he?”

  ‘‘Either one of two reasons, or both of them. To take the money out of the wallet and get rid of it. Or to keep on going over the outside fence of the park, to get out without having to go along the midway. Otherwise he might run into the Westphal boy again and maybe by then the wallet would have been missed, and if Obie knew Jimmy Chojnacki’s record–”

  “Did they know one another?”

  “Probably. Anyway, they could have; Chojnacki had been in Westphal’s class at South Side High. Expelled in the middle of his sophomore year, but that’d still give them a year and a half in the same class. They’d hardly have been friends but they must have known one another by sight.”

  “It’s a pretty big school, but I guess they would. One of them famous in athletics and the other notorious for having been expelled; that’s fame, too, isn’t it? Did anyone see them together this morning at Whitewater?”

  “How the hell would I know? We’re leaving the Westphal kid out of the story so what does it matter?”

  He went on over to his own desk and put paper in the typewriter.

  I turned in the last of the upstate copy a few minutes after one o’clock. I could have made it last until two but Ed was giving me a break so I didn’t try to stall. I stuck my head in his office and told him I was caught up.

  “Good timing, Sam. Just got the word on a fire. Corner of Greenfield and Lassiter, on the south side. Get over there and phone in before deadline; you can knock off as soon as you’ve phoned.”

  I drove over in the ancient Buick–ten miles to the gallon and a quart of oil every time I get gas, but it gets me around–and got there just as the firemen were cleaning up. It hadn’t been much of a fire. I found out who owned the building, the probable extent of the damage, how the fire had started and the fact that it was covered by insurance, and I went to the nearest tavern and phoned in.

  It was only a quarter of two and I was free; my vacation had started. I could have gone home except for that phone call from Milly; she’d made it plain enough that she didn’t want me to come home and drive her to the station. I had to kill an hour or two somehow.

  I went to the bar and killed a few minutes of it by drinking a beer. It tasted good and cooled me off a little but I didn’t want a second one.

  It came to me that I was only a few blocks from Whitewater Beach. I hadn’t been there in years and there wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t take a look at it again.

  4

  It was hot on the midway at Whitewater, but there were plenty of people there. No matter how hot it gets, an amusement park draws a crowd on Saturday afternoon. The Caterpillar, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Comet and the Loop-the-Loop were all doing big business.

  The Blue Streak was closed. A cop was standing in the space between it and the next concession where, by walking back a few yards and climbing a four-foot fence, you could enter the no-man’s land between the concessions and the boundary fence, where the rides run. From one point on the midway you could see ba
ck, diagonally through the opening and over the fence, where some men were working at the bottom of the first dip of the roller coaster. There was a tight little knot of people standing at that spot peering back.

  I showed my press pass to the cop and went on back, over the four-foot fence, to within a few yards of where the men were working.

  It was muddy back there. Someone had played a hose over that part of the structure and tracks before the workmen had started; it wasn’t hard to guess why.

  The tracks, I saw, had already been straightened if anything had happened to them from the derailment. The men working now were two carpenters and one painter, the latter white-painting the boards almost before the former finished nailing them down. They were almost through. The wrecked car was gone, out of sight somewhere.

  From where I stood I could see up the high steep hill down which the car had come. I could picture it coming down there like a bat out of hell, like a juggernaut, like death, and the boy turning his head, seeing it coming … I didn’t like it. I had a hunch I might dream about it, only it would be me there on the tracks.

  The carpenters were moving away now, carrying their tools and the painter took a final white swipe and then he too, brush in one hand and can of paint in the other, followed the carpenters. I stood a minute longer and then I went back over the fence and back to the cop.

  I asked him, “They going to run the ride again now?”

  “Sure, soon as they get it fixed. Why not?”

  “They’ve got it fixed now.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah, guess they have. Well, that lets me off.”

  He walked out onto the midway. The little knot of people who’d been watching back over the fence was dispersing now that there wasn’t anything to watch back there.

  I wandered over to the front of the Blue Streak. There was something I wanted to know, but I didn’t know what it was. Something, some question, at the back of my mind that I couldn’t get hold of and bring to the front.