getting exasperated. She began waving at him with each new call, showing off her nails, trying to light a fire under the boss.
For one call, her high-gloss lips got into the act as well. Eagerly they shaped a word Kit couldnât read. A, B, A, B?
Then he recognized the connection, the static. He thought again of Betteâs psychic, talking to the dead.
âMrs. Rebes?â Kit bent close to the machine.
Getting the Monsod story had required no pull, no Parker House. The first of the Five Wâs was Who, sure, and so Kit had chased down the names of the men serving sentences longer than three years. Then he chased down their families. Finally Kit found a convict in the right placeâdown in solitaryâwith a contact on the outside he could trust. The prisoner was Junior Rebes, doing thirty-five years to life. Rape, murder, narcotics. Junior seemed to spend a lot of time in solitary, in the penitentiary basement. Down there, according to what Kit could put together, the rot was worst.
The contact on the outside was Juniorâs mother. âYou got a minute for me, Missah Viddich?â
âAll the time you want.â
It still jarred him, a woman ten or twelve years his senior calling him âMister.â But she didnât like using first names. She never let him visit her apartment either. She claimed she had to keep Kit away from her other son. According to her this second son, Louie-Louie, was a better boy than Junior. But Louie-Louie would expect too much from Kit. The younger boy would expect Kit to turn the whole system around for them, get them on the TV or something.
Mrs. Rebes herself seemed to expect nothing. Today she told Kit sheâd read the piece, sheâd shown it around the coffee shop, and to hear her youâd think that Sea Levelâs few smudgy columns were the best her boy could have hoped for.
Kit had seen her shop. On the Goodwill Industries side of the South End, its floor tiles had long since run to yellow. There heâd made himself sleepless with caffeine, listening. Mrs. Rebes had revealed at last that she could show him something âa lot better than plain old letters.â Sheâd told him she had âthe actual, real cassettes. â The tapes Junior had sent from prison. After that Kit had done most of the talking. The hopped-up flow of his words however had felt unreal, intrusive, hypocritical, and itâd come to Kit that he needed to work the same transformations on himself as on this string-fingered, unhappy woman. He needed to trust his own asking. He had to know that he was beyond sheer nickel-plated ambition.
Mrs. Rebes could stare for minutes on end between question and answer. Just sit there staring in cap and apron, a still-young woman worn to shreds.
Today Kit remained close to the phone. âThereâs a certain kinda way,â the mother was saying, âitâs even better you didnât use our real name. Itâs better in the paper I mean, for someone else readinâ it.â
âIâm glad you think so, Mrs. Rebes.â
âIt opens their eyes, in a certain kinda way. When you say the name isnât real, they see it could be anybody.â
âWell ⦠thatâs the idea.â
Fine talk. To hear him youâd think a man put together a story out of nothing but angelhair and the Ten Commandments. Kitâs using an alias for Junior, however, had been as much a matter of protecting his back as anything more noble. Globe editors lurked in the bushes. And Sea Level might have suffered worse, with a single-source story. Public Relations at Monsod had stonewalled him when Kit called for confirmation. Refused to confirm or deny. A couple of the other convictsâ families had provided corroboration here and there, but for more than one crucial passage Kit was going entirely on Juniorâs cassettes. Junior was the only one who could describe the closet. So Kit had created a straw man,