Judy Diamond
The three of us sat around the table after dinner. Charlie built up the fire in the other room and Walt cleaned up from dinner while I made coffee. I got a notebook to write in but couldn’t make my fingers perform the task. The winter cold was hard on my arthritis. My hands hardly worked at all from November to March. I hoped the specialist at the VA would be able to help. I didn’t want to be useless.
Charlie set up the framed picture of Judy. Walt had taken the frame apart and cleaned it within an inch of its life. He even wiped the picture very carefully before he put it back in the frame. Judy seemed much happier now that she was clean. I was glad we rescued the picture from Agnes. Charlie would appreciate it much more than she did.
I passed the notebook and pencil to him and explained. “I’ll tell you what to write down. Notes can be helpful sometimes. They help organize a case.”
“How do you want to do this? Will you ask me questions?”
“Just tell me the story of your relationship with your friend. You knew each other about a week and a half. Start at the beginning and tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out. I’m not your dad, so you don’t have to hide anything from me.”
“What’s that mean?”
The question seemed deliberately obtuse. I explained. “It means, if there was any hanky panky between the two of you, I want to know. I’m not asking because I’m a voyeur. I need to know because we’re trying to build a complete picture of her frame-of-mind to figure out why she took her own life.”
He lowered his eyes and his face filled with high color. “We…uh…did things.”
I waved to get his attention back on me. “It’s fine. I did things when I was young.”
Walt interrupted with an unwelcome comment. “We still do things.”
Charlie’s eyes flared wide in shock. I stared at Walt in amazement. “And he needs to know that why?”
He defended his comment. “I’m just trying to explain that what he did is perfectly natural. Everyone does it.”
I waved at Charlie but spoke to Walt. “Yes, everyone does it, but our young friend doesn’t need the idea of us doing it branded on his imagination. When you were his age, did you ever imagine what your grandparents did in their private moments?”
He pressed his lips together at the comparison and apologized. “I’m sorry, Charlie.”
I skipped past all that and asked Charlie to start at the beginning.
He adjusted the photo on the table and told his tale. “We were backstage at the play we saw…Hair. The first act was just about over. We left our seats because the play was super weird and none of us liked it. You and Walt were talking to Larry about something, and I was in the wings with Stephan. He was so funny. All the people on stage were doing the chant thing, ‘beads, flowers, freedom, happiness.’ They had those steps they did in time to the chant. Steph was chanting with them and pounding his fist in his palm. I guess he was watching the choreography to make sure the actors were in step. I never realized you could choreograph stuff with no music.
“Anyway, the whole group on stage was naked. There were the main people in the front and some other naked people in the background. I thought it was kinda silly, but some of ‘em were hot. The curtain came down and it was half-time…”
I laughed. “Intermission, not half-time.”
He huffed at my correction. “Whatever! The actors all came off the stage, and there was this naked chick, one of the ones from the background. She stopped to talk to Steph. I was just there and she was just there and she didn’t have any clothes on! I didn’t know where to look. I was trying to figure out how to walk away when Steph introduced me like it was nothin! He just said, ‘Judy this is my husband’s brother, Charlie. Charlie, this is Judy. She’s usually in the chorus but she’s doing double duty as an extra.’”
“She smiled at me! This naked chick just smiled at me. She said, ‘hey Charlie! You’re tall. You gay or straight?’ No one ever asked me anything like that before. I stuttered something about being straight. She smiled again and said, ‘what’da’ya say about some pie after the show? I bet you’d love some hot fresh pie. You wanna eat pie, Charlie?’”
I rubbed my face with my hands. I knew she’d been forward, but I didn’t know she was that forward. Walt noticed my face rub and asked why I did it. I explained. “When a woman offers to let you eat her pie, she wants you to go down on her.”
He was shocked. “That can’t be what she meant!” He looked at Charlie. “Tell me that’s not what she meant!”
He played with his pencil and tapped the eraser. “Uh, that’s what she meant. Remember when I said I wanted to hang around the theater for a while and that Larry and Steph would give me a ride? You guys left and she took me into this empty dressing room and…and I ate her pie. She liked the way I did it because I got her off. She said she didn’t usually get off like that. She blew me as a thank you. She was really fuckin’ good. She wouldn’t do anything else, but I didn’t care.
“After that, she took me all over the theater. She showed me the lights and the rigging up top, and the big lighting control board, and all the secret places all over. It was great! I felt like a kid playing hide and seek with a friend. When we got done, she kissed me and said she had fun. She wanted to see me again. She said we couldn’t be more than friends because she had a boy back home, but if I wanted to have some fun while I was in town, she’d have fun with me.
“I freaked out a little because of this boy she had, but she said it was cool. She said they were apart for a while, and they agreed to do whatever they wanted until they could see each other again. She laughed and teased me. ‘Besides, Char, it’s just oral!’ She said it was like a kiss, only lower, and I should just be cool. She gave me her number at the hotel, and I gave her the number of the apartment you’re letting me use. When Lar and Steph gave me a ride home, I asked them what I should do.
“Steph said as long as I was honest with her about only being in town a little while, I should have fun. Lar didn’t like the idea as much, but Steph convinced him. He said, ‘don’t be so square, it’s just oral.’ Lar was worried that Judy might be using me to get into Stephan’s good graces, but Steph wasn’t worried. He said Judy wasn’t like that. Larry said I should do whatever I wanted, but to be careful and to wear a rubber if it ever got to be more than oral. He said Judy would be welcome at their place anytime if I wanted to bring her. I asked you guys the next day, and you were cool that I made a friend, so we started hanging out.”
I shook my head. “That’s a hell of a way to meet women.”
Walt agreed. “I’ll say.”
I summarized to make sure I understood the story so far. “You met, she said you were tall and asked you to go down on her. You did a good job, and you decided to be friends.”
His face darkened into scowl. “You’re making fun.”
He wasn’t wrong and I regretted my tone. “I apologize. I don’t think very much of the whole ‘free love’ thing, but I’m a very old man. I need to remind myself that I did a lot of that kind of shit when I was in my twenties and early thirties. I don’t mean to sneer at you.”
His face smoothed and all seemed to be forgiven.
I went on. “Pretty soon you and she were inseparable. She came to dinner with us whenever she wasn’t on stage. She came to Larry and Stephan’s twice. We went to the art museum and the Franklin Institute with her. She had dinner in our apartment. I assume you and she swapped favors whenever you could.”
“Yeah, why not?”
“No reason. I’m just trying to understand.”
“Every time we could get away for a few minutes we did things. I went down on her a ton. She let me play with her tits too. We kissed a lot. She sucked me almost as much as I ate her. It was like a game.”
Walt chuckled. “Sounds like fun.”
Charlie smiled. “It was. I’ve been so fucked up because Emily ditched me. I kept trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Judy showed me there wasn’t anything wrong with me. She was great, and she didn’t want anything from me. She didn’t want to make me anything I’m not. She just wanted to hang out and have fun.”
“Did she tell you anything about her past? Did she talk about where she came from or anything like that?”
“Not really. She said she was from Scranton, but whenever I asked about her friends or anything like that, she’d clam up.”
“What did you talk about?”
He glanced at the framed photo. “She loved to listen to me talk about my family and the farm and all that. I said she should visit sometime, but she said she could never. She talked a little about what she might do if her acting didn’t work out. She said she wasn’t good at much else. I tried to say there was a million things she could do, but she always said no. I don’t think she believed in herself very much.”
I drank some coffee and thought about what I heard. I knew a little more, but not much. “What about the night before she killed herself? We had dinner at the restaurant at the Hotel Taft then we went for drinks and dessert to Larry and Stephan’s. You and she were together the whole evening. Was anything different?”
He cocked his head to the side like something bothered him and he needed to work out what it was. “Come to think of it, she seemed down. Our games weren’t as exciting as usual. We ran upstairs to the second-floor bathroom to ‘swap favors,’ like you said, but it was different. I was going down on her and she couldn’t get off. Eventually she stopped me because she said she’d never get there. She asked me to kiss her. We kissed for a while, and she offered to blow me, but she didn’t seem into it, so I told her not to.”
The story gave me some suspicions, but they were vague. My thoughts were more like notions than suspicions. Charlie tapped his eraser again. “Do you want me to write any of this stuff down?”
“Skip it. I need to think some more. We need more information. All we’ve got is hints. Judy tried to pretend she had no past. Having met her mother, I understand why she would. She talked about a boy from back home. Could that have been Johnny Spencer who’s in the VA hospital? Maybe. Is it just as likely to be someone else? Yes. Could she have made it up? Yes.”
He shook his head and scowled. “She wouldn’t have lied to me.”
“She wouldn’t have lied to be mean, but women lie for all kinds of reasons. Judy spent her whole life listening to how men ruin women. She was attracted to men, and wanted to experience them, but she’s convinced that having sex would ruin her like it ruined her mother. She figures out that she can do oral and not have to worry about pregnancy. It feels good and it’s fun. She makes up the boyfriend to avoid being pressured to do more. It’s just the kind of lie a woman would tell to protect herself.”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t have lied to me.”
I don’t know why the difference of opinion became so important to me, but it did. I wanted him to see my point. “She lied to you constantly. She lied by omission. She let you tell all about yourself but she told you nothing of her life. You offered friendship and she paid you back with blow jobs, not with reciprocal friendship.”
His jaw tightened and his hands became fists on the table. He threw the pencil across the room and jumped from the chair. He strode from the kitchen, through the living room, and out of the house. The front door slammed behind him.
I rubbed my face with my palms and felt like shit. “Why am I such an asshole?”
Walt tried to say I wasn’t. “You’re just trying to make him see the truth.”
“But, why the hell does it matter that he sees things as they actually were instead of how he wants to see them? Why am I so bent on tearing this girl down?”
“I don’t think that’s what you’re doing. You’re like a doctor examining a wound. You’ve got to dig around in the flesh a little to make certain it will heal properly when you stitch it up. The process is painful, but it must be done. He asked you to do this. He’s got to let you do it. It’s bound to hurt him. He either has to accept the pain or tell you to stop.”
I got up from the table and picked up the pencil from the floor. “You’re pretty smart, you know that?”
“I thought I might be. It’s nice of you to confirm my suspicions.”
His teasing made me smile. “You’re a wiseass, too.”
He nodded. “That I cannot deny.”
I put the pencil on the table next to the notebook and picked up Judy’s photo. “We’re trying to figure out what happened young lady. He needs to know. We could use a little help. How about it?”
She didn’t answer, but I didn’t expect her to. The sixteen-year-old girl in the photo wore a practiced smile for the camera and prepared not to flinch when the flashbulb popped. She was pretty; prettier than her mother had been at sixteen, but still average pretty. Her breasts were perky and round, but modest in size. Her teeth were straight and even. Her skin was clear and smooth in spite of her adolescence. Her figure was trim with curves in the right places.
I wondered what she thought that day three years ago when the flashbulb popped. I wondered if she really expected to be an actress or if she was just making the attempt to please her mother. I wondered if she went to Philly to make it, or just to flee from Alcoholic Agnes. I wondered about the boy back home. If he was real, why not just join their lives and set up housekeeping? Was she afraid because of the lessons her mother taught about men? Was he afraid to be tied down at a young age? Maybe his parents disapproved.
Scranton wasn’t a small place, but it wasn’t a big one either. Agnes’s reputation would likely be well known amongst the town gossips. No parent would want their son married to the daughter of a woman like her. Then again, the boy back home might be a myth like I said to Charlie.
I was going to have to find out if I wanted to understand why Judy killed herself. Charlie needed to know. I was getting curious as well. I also wanted to do something for the young woman who helped my friend get over an ugly breakup. Even if it was just a bunch of oral favors swapped in stolen moments, the action gave Charlie something to look forward to. Nothing heals a young man’s heart faster than the attention of an attractive woman, or man depending upon his preferences. If lusty escapades are involved, so much the better.
I set the frame down. “Alright, young lady; keep your secrets if you can. I’ll uncover them until we know what happened. And don’t worry about Charlie; I’ll make sure he’s alright before he goes home. I pray you’re at peace, wherever you are.”
I told Walt I’d be right back and put my overcoat on. I went through the front door and looked along the road for my friend. I didn’t see him anywhere. A throat cleared behind me. I spun around to see him sprawled on the wooden bench that was on the far side of the stack of firewood. His hands were in his jacket pockets. His right leg was straight out in front of him while his left was bent with his foot just about under the bench. His tight blue jeans showed off his powerful legs. I saw why Judy approached him the way she did. There were very few men associated with the theater who were as ruggedly handsome as Charlie. Once upon a time, I might have cruised him with an offer similar to the one she made.
Since I was a very old man, and he was the very young son of a dear friend, I made a different offer, one Owen taught me to make. “You can yell at me if you need to. I can take it.”
The resting scowl smoothed from his face and he shook his head. “I don’t want to yell at you.”
“I’m just saying you can if you need to; just don’t hit. I’m so damn old, I’d probably shatter like a porcelain doll.”
“I don’t want to hit you, either.”
I went over to the bench and sat next to him. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to stop hurting.”
“The Lord says, ‘man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward, but if I were you, I would appeal to God.’ That’s from the book of Job.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I think it means, in every life a little rain must fall.”
“You think?”
I shrugged. “Hell, Charlie, I’m not a priest or a philosopher. I only remembered that Bible quote because I heard it in church and wrote it on the back of an envelope from my pocket. You had a shitty run of luck the last few weeks. You thought everything was great with Em, and then right before Christmas she announced that she’s done. That was your first breakup and I’m sure it was hard. You came here to have some fun and you met Judy. You had a lot of fun until she left you in a lurch. You must feel like your heart’s been ripped out of your ass.”
He laughed, then he strangled the laugh. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
“I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but you will get over it, and you’ll be better for it. Each day that passes, it’ll get easier until one day you’ll wake up and feel like the sun is shining just for you. You’ll move on and you’ll meet someone else and you’ll go along until life trips you up and you get hurt again. As long as you take pleasure in the good times and learn from the bad ones, your life will work out.
“I spent years shaking my fist at the sky and demanding to know why the universe insisted on kicking me in the balls every chance it got. It took a long, long time for me to realize the universe or God or whoever you want to blame, doesn’t deliberately kick anyone. Men have free will. Sometimes one man’s free will can impact another in a negative way. That’s life. Emily’s free will allowed her to end the relationship between you for her own reasons. I’m sure she didn’t do it to hurt you, but you hurt all the same. Judy took her life. Her decision had nothing to do with you. The fact that it hurt you is incidental.
“None of that means you feel it any less, but you shouldn’t take any of it personally. As for the hurt you feel, you should embrace it. To hit you with another cliché, I’ll remind you that the only way out is through. Experience the pain, cry if you need to, scream if it helps, then do your best to release it. Appeal your troubles to God like the scripture says. What the hell else can you do?”
He wiped his eyes with his fingers. “I miss her so much.”
“I know you do. What do you want to do about our investigation? Is it hurting you more to go ahead? Should we stop?”
“I don’t want to stop. I want to do this for her. If we don’t do it, no one else will. Someone should know why she died.”
“If you want to keep going, we’ll keep going.”
“Thanks, Law.”
“Sure.”
We sat for a minute in silence until I thought of something else to say. “Hey, Charlie.”
“Yeah?”
“Can we go inside now? I’m fucking freezing!”
He laughed and stood up. “How can you be cold? This is nothing. Back home it’s probably twenty below.”
“Yeah, maybe you noticed hardly anyone lives in Montana. That could be why.” I struggled off the bench and followed him back into the house.
We shed our coats and went into the kitchen. Walt warmed the coffee on the stove so it would be piping hot when we got back to it. He poured a fresh mugful for each of us. I held the scalding cup in both my hands to let the heat soak into the joints.
Charlie blew on his coffee and asked a good question. “What do we do now?”
“Tomorrow, we go back to Scranton. We’ll find the high school that served the neighborhood where Judy grew up and we’ll fan out. We’ll look for businesses that employ young people, like diners or drug stores or retail stores, and we’ll try to find people who knew her. I’ll also telephone my doctor friend and ask him to start looking into the Spencer kid. We’ll have to wait until we go back to Philly to follow up on him. He might make it back here before we’re ready to leave, but the neighbor lady with the wooden spoon seemed awfully certain the family would be away for a while.
“There isn’t much else we can do. This isn’t a crime with a perpetrator and a victim. We can’t hunt down the perpetrator and make him tell us why he did what he did. All we can do is figure out the circumstances of Judy’s life and infer her reasons for ending it. We’re here in Reading, so we need to exhaust the local resources before we leave. We’ll talk to as many people as we can find who knew her. She was only nineteen, so she can’t be more than a year or two out of high school. She might’ve kept in touch with some of these folks. We’ll find out as much as we can before we go home.”
Charlie sipped his coffee and regretted it because it was still too hot. “Makes sense.”
Walt said he would go with us to help. I thanked him. With nothing else to talk about, we retired to the living room to read by the fire until it was time for bed.
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