“Now, could you please leave us be,” my mother pleaded. “This is aggravating my husband's heart condition.”
That was not the end of it, of course. Far from it. I could not understand why the letter went unmentioned along with the vagrant's wicked accusation
against my father and his talk of money when the alternative was interrogations and a visit to the mogue. Unless, unless...
The letter. I picked it up again. “I seen you. You kilt her with that skarf. Now you gotta pay. $1,000. Get the dough or get fingerd. No cops.
Somebody mite get hurt. Just like that hooker in Manila. Savy?”
Calamity was the word my father used when the policeman left. And now, almost a half century later with the letter in my hands, I thought I finally
understood exactly for whom.
Uncle Matt's room in East Chicago, Indiana, was in a dingy, low rent, walk-up district. I waited four days across the street for him at a diner,
filling the ashtrays,
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emptying coffee cups, and scanning words in the papers. Uncle Matt had taken up motorcycles after the printing company bribed him into early retirement
at age sixty. He spent his days cruising two-lane highways and honky-tonk saloons on his Milwaukee Iron in the company of young Neanderthals tattooed
with names like Sonny and Bull on any patch of skin that showed through the hair.
When Uncle Matt finally returned, he ushered me into a room that was musty and without sentiment. No pictures. No souvenirs. Just secondhand furniture
and dark wallpaper. And a liquor cabinet. “Drink?” he suggested. The unexpected arrival of his nephew, who also was his late brother's executor, seemed
to precipitate a certain unjustified anticipation. That changed when I asked him if he remembered the vagrant. Something hard and cold in his gray-blue
eyes frisked me, searching for just how much I knew.
“Best to leave some things alone, Chuck,” he said, eventually. He chugged a shot of Jack Daniels and pour-
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