The Missing Chapter

The weekend in Katonah could not have been improved upon. The weather was better than any New Yorker had a right to expect in mid-April: Sunny, light breezes, temperatures flirting with seventy. Lily and I rode two of her spirited Morgans for an hour or so Saturday afternoon, followed by a dip in the pool, and we dined down the road from her place at a just-opened restaurant in a two-hundred-year-old Tudor mansion. I had salmon en piperade and a few bites of her rack of lamb. Fritz would have given his blessing to both dishes. Sunday after brunch in the same restaurant, we rode some more, swam some more, and were back in town by six.

The memory of the weekend lingered pleasantly as I drove through the rain of a Monday morning in south-central Indiana, but I’m getting ahead of myself. My instructions from Wolfe on Saturday had been brief: Visit Childress’s aunts and anyone else in Mercer who could reveal anything about the man, both during his hometown years and after he went to New York. When I pressed for more direction, he gave me his “Use your intelligence guided by experience” line, which I have heard more times than I can begin to count.

After making plane and car-rental reservations, I had called Debra Mitchell to get the names of, Childress’s aunts, only one of whom — Melva Meeker — she had talked to on the telephone. “She wasn’t very communicative, to say the least,” Debra told me crisply. “My guess is that you’re wasting your time trying to phone her. And I’m sorry, but I don’t know the name of the other aunt.” I said thanks, not bothering to add that I was planning a face-to-face visit.

Maybe it was the rain, or the hills and curves and crawling farm vehicles, but it took me nearly two hours to navigate the two-lane blacktop through newly green and wooded rural countryside from the Indianapolis airport to Mercer, which trumpeted itself with a red-and-blue billboard proclaiming THE COMMUNITY WHERE HOOSIER HOSPITALITY WAS BORN — AND STILL FLOURISHES! Below it was a smaller, newer sign, in the same colors, that read CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MERCER METEORS FOR THEIR FIRST EVER STATE HIGH SCHOOL REGIONAL BASKETBALL TITLE. A few hundred yards farther down the road, I came upon a motel. The Travelers’ Haven was far from posh, but it looked decent enough — a long, white, one-story stucco building between the road and a field that appeared to this city boy to be freshly plowed. A half-dozen cars were parked nose-first on the blacktop in front of the rooms. I wheeled my rented sedan up to the office and went inside, triggering a bell when I opened the door.

“Afternoon.” A deep voice stretched it to four or five syllables, rather than the conventional three. The voice belonged to a dusty-haired, long-faced guy in baggy, gray flannel slacks and a red wool shirt who ambled through a doorway from the back, grinning and pushing wire-rimmed glasses up on the beak that was his nose. He was at least three inches over six feet, but if he weighed one-fifty, it was only because he wore his boots when he hopped on the scale.

“Afternoon,” I countered, making no attempt to elongate the word. I know my limitations. “Can I get a room for a couple of nights?”

He puckered his lips. “No reason to say no. But we do like the cash up front. We’ve never been much for credit cards here.”

“Always a good policy,” I responded, returning his sober nod. “I will pay for the first night now, and if I decide to stay a second one, you’ll get the greenbacks for that later today. Fair enough?”

He nodded again, this time with a slight grin. “Fair enough.” He quoted me a price; it was higher than I would have guessed, but I was not inclined to negotiate. I opened my billfold and peeled off the bills, which he counted twice aloud and slid into an ancient cash register before handing me a brass key. “Room one-twenty,” he twanged. “Down the line six doors on your right. Everything should be there, but if you need extra towels or another bar of soap, stop back. We’ll take care of you, count on it. A good place for breakfast is the Old Skillet downtown. Right across from the courthouse. They serve a passable dinner, too. Although the best spot for that is Bill’s Steak House, right on this road just south of town on the left — barely more’n a mile from here.”

I thanked him, stifling the urge to say “much obliged,” and walked to my room, which was a pleasant surprise. There was a king-size bed with a firm mattress and a bathroom that looked like it had recently been fitted with new fixtures and light blue tile. The TV set had a good-sized screen, although that was wasted on me: If you strung together all of the television I watch in a given year, not counting the news, the tape would not run as long as it takes me to walk from the brownstone to Lily’s apartment up on Sixty-third between Park and Madison.