“I don’t get it,” I said to Helen. “Guys like this get in trouble.”
“Maybe he’s slicker than we think he is,” she said. “Maybe that neurotic personality is manufactured. Maybe he works for the G.”
“How about I figure a way to bring him in?”
“I don’t want to step on your feelings, but legally Bledsoe is the victim, not the perpetrator. Your daughter remodeled his face with her foot. He could have her up on an A and B and sue y’all cross-eyed for good measure. Count your blessings, Pops.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“I didn’t think you would,” she replied.
I WENT HOME for lunch. Alafair was in her room, working on her first attempt at a novel, tapping away on a computer she had bought at a yard sale. I had offered to buy her a better one, but she had said a more expensive computer would not help her write better. She kept a notebook on her nightstand and wrote in it before going to sleep. She had already filled two hundred pages with notes and experimental lines for her book. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down the dreams she had just had. When she awoke in the morning two scenes had already written themselves in her imagination and during the next few hours she would translate them into one thousand words of double-spaced typescript.
She often wrote out her paragraphs in longhand, then edited each paragraph before typing it on manuscript paper. She edited each typed page with a blue pencil and placed it facedown in a wire basket and began composing another one. If she caught me reading over her shoulder, she would hit me in the stomach with her elbow. The next morning she would revise everything she had written the previous day and then start in on the one thousand words she required of herself for the present day. I was amazed at how much fine work her system produced.
In high school she had been given special permission to enroll in a creative writing class taught by Ernest Gaines at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines believed she had an exceptional talent. So did the admissions boards at Reed College in Portland. She was given an academic scholarship and received a degree in English literature last spring. She also earned a graduate fellowship at Stanford University, which she would enter this coming spring. The fact that she had gotten herself into a conflict with an aberration like Ronald Bledsoe was a source of frustration I could barely constrain, particularly when I needed to discuss it with her in a forthright fashion.
“Got a second, Alf?” I said.
She rested her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead, trying to conceal her vexation at being disturbed while she was writing. “Sure, what’s going on?” she said.
I pulled up a chair by her desk. “We’ve run Bledsoe through AFIS and the National Crime Information Center, but he’s a complete blank. In some ways that’s more disturbing than finding a sheet on him. He’s obviously a geek and geeks leave shit-prints. But this guy is the exception.”
“So what’s that tell you?” she asked.
“That he’s slick or he has some juice behind him.”
“He got what he deserved. I say fuck him.”
“Do you have to talk that way?”
“He put his hand on me. I could feel his spittle in my ear. Want me to tell you what he said?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Okay, Alf.”
“Will you stop calling me that stupid name?”
“Look, one other thing, I may end up putting Otis Baylor in jail. I know you and Thelma are friends, so—”
“I got the message. How about giving me credit for having more than two brain cells?”
The years have not brought me much in the way of wisdom. But I have learned that the father of a young woman has to remember only two lessons in caring for his daughter: He must be by her side unreservedly when she needs him, and he must disengage when she doesn’t. The latter, at least for me, has been more difficult than the former.
“You have more than two brain cells?” I said.
“Have you ever been hit in the head with a basketful of manuscript paper?” she said.
I WENT BACK to the department at 1:00 p.m. Wally, our hypertensive, elephantine dispatcher and full-time departmental comedian, stopped me on the way to my office. “I was just about to put these messages in your box,” he said.
“Thanks, Wally,” I said, taking three pink memo slips from his hand.
“His first name is Bertrand. He don’t like to give his last name. He also don’t have any manners.”
“Was this a black kid?”