Talking Heads

Talking Heads by John Domini Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Talking Heads by John Domini Read Free Book Online
Authors: John Domini
Tags: Talking Heads: 77
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 couldn’t read. A, B, A, B?
    Then he recognized the connection, the static. He thought again of Bette’s psychic, talking to the dead.
    â€œMrs. Rebes?” Kit bent close to the machine.
    Getting the Monsod story had required no pull, no Parker House. The first of the Five W’s 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 place—down in solitary—with 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 Junior’s mother. “You got a minute for me, Missah Viddich?”
    â€œAll the time you want.”
    It still jarred him, a woman ten or twelve years his senior calling him “Mister.” But she didn’t 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 she’d read the piece, she’d shown it around the coffee shop, and to hear her you’d think that Sea Level’s 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 he’d made himself sleepless with caffeine, listening. Mrs. Rebes had revealed at last that she could show him something “a lot better than plain old letters.” She’d told him she had “the actual, real cassettes. ” 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 it’d 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. “There’s a certain kinda way,” the mother was saying, “it’s even better you didn’t use our real name. It’s better in the paper I mean, for someone else readin’ it.”
    â€œI’m glad you think so, Mrs. Rebes.”
    â€œIt opens their eyes, in a certain kinda way. When you say the name isn’t real, they see it could be anybody.”
    â€œWell … that’s the idea.”
    Fine talk. To hear him you’d think a man put together a story out of nothing but angelhair and the Ten Commandments. Kit’s 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 convicts’ families had provided corroboration here and there, but for more than one crucial passage Kit was going entirely on Junior’s cassettes. Junior was the only one who could describe the closet. So Kit had created a straw man,

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