Friday afternoon, Barberton, Ohio
Special Agent David Kelly smiled as he took the exit ramp off I-76 West and turned south toward Barberton, Ohio, one of the dozens of small towns that cluster around the Cleveland/Akron hub. Kelly, at twenty-eight, was the youngest agent in the Cleveland Field Office of the FBI. He’d been with the Bureau less than two years and still approached each assignment with the kind of eagerness and excitement that the older agents seldom exhibited.
Agent Kelly didn’t know why he’d been sent to Barberton, Ohio, in pursuit of a deep background check on Michael Schiftmann. He knew who Schiftmann was, being a regular reader of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
But he’d never read one of his novels. And when the e-mail came through from Quantico to start digging, he took his orders like the good soldier he was and went out into the field armed with his file folder full of report pages.
He already knew that Michael Schiftmann had been born in Barberton, Ohio, in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam war. Just over a year after Schiftmann’s birth, four students would be shot down by the Ohio National Guard just up the road in Kent. Michael’s father, a burned-out Vietnam combat veteran with an ever-growing and intrusive drug problem, would desert the infant and his mother and never be heard from again.
And, Kelly discovered from a check of the Summit County public assistance database, Michael’s mother, Virginia, still lived in the same two-bedroom project house in South Barberton that she’d raised him in.
Kelly looked down at his notes, then turned left into Fourth Street South, a narrow street clogged with parked cars-mostly run-down-on both sides of the curb. Even though the street was two-way, it would have been tough for two oncoming cars to maneuver around each other. He leaned over the steering wheel, looking out the windshield for house numbers. Most of the houses looked to be from the thirties, he thought, maybe early forties. They were identical shotgun duplexes, two narrow houses jammed together into one, with a narrow driveway between it and the house next door. Most needed a coat of paint. Random shutters hung askew, dotted by the occasional cracked window. There seemed to be no one around, not even kids or stray dogs.
One empty lot was marked by a rusted fifty-five-gallon oil drum set up as a stove and a couple of ratty sofas next to it.
Kind of like his old neighborhood, Kelly thought. Depressing.
He passed the Schiftmann house, but there was nowhere to park. He cruised most of the block before he found an empty slot, then pulled his government-issue Ford Taurus over and cut the engine. He sat there a moment, organizing his thoughts, then opened the car door. The dry, cold Ohio wind hit him hard in the face. He tucked his chin into his neck, slammed the car door behind him, and pulled his overcoat tighter as he walked up the street against the wind.
Virginia Schiftmann lived six houses up on the left, number 232-B. He turned off the cracked sidewalk onto another cracked walk that led up to the house. There was a door-bell button, but when he pushed it, Kelly heard nothing. He tried again, then knocked. From somewhere in the house, he heard the faint sound of a television. He knocked again, louder. His hands were so cold, it hurt to rap them against the wood. He wished he’d brought gloves, but the use of gloves was discouraged because it made the rapid drawing of a weapon difficult.
He raised his hand to knock again when the door opened a crack. An older woman, heavy, with ruddy red cheeks, wearing a gray housecoat, looked suspiciously out the door.
“What?” she said, her voice a monotone.
“Mrs. Schiftmann,” Kelly said, pulling his credentials out of his coat pocket, “I’m Special Agent Kelly of the FBI. I work out of the Cleveland Field Office. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
The old lady peered out through the crack in the door, the light dim behind her, the flickering of an old, seventies-era color television in the background. She examined his ID and his badge, then looked up into his face. Then, slowly, she opened the door wider.
Kelly stepped in, the casual smile on his face designed to be as nonthreatening as possible. He stepped into the small entrance alcove and was hit by a wave of hot, musty air. Michael Schiftmann’s mother kept the furnace going full blast.
“I won’t take up much of your time,” he offered as she closed the door behind him. She motioned toward the living room and he turned to walk.
“I got nothing but time,” she muttered.
As they entered the living room, the light got better and Kelly was able to examine the surroundings. Genteel poverty was a stretch, he realized. The carpet was worn and threadbare, with the faint odor of pet urine wafting up in the heat. The furniture was old, and even when new was pretty basic and bare. A framed photo of the pope hung on one wall over the television, partially hidden by a green vase full of ragged, dusty silk flowers.
“Have a seat,” she said, walking slowly over to the television and turning down the soap opera she’d been watching.
“Thank you,” Kelly said, pulling off his overcoat and draping it over the back of an overstuffed, tired chair. Tufts of white stuffing poked through the material in the corners of the seat pillow.
He pulled out his notebook and a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket. “Mrs. Schiftmann, this is nothing more than a routine background check, and it’s standard procedure to go back to a subject’s home neighborhood and just ask some questions. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”
Kelly looked at the woman and waited for some kind of response from her. As she eased onto the sofa, he realized that she was even heavier than he first thought. The skin of her face was stretched tight, and as the housecoat draped open from her knees down, he saw that the skin on her lower legs was stretched until shiny and broken in several places by networks of spidery red veins.
Then he saw, on the end table next to her, a blood sugar tester and one of those cheap, battery-operated sphygmo-manometers that were available in any drugstore or grocery nowadays. A row of amber plastic pill bottles was lined up next to the machines, stretching from one end of the table to the other.
Type 2 diabetes, Kelly thought, high blood pressure. All the earmarks of American poverty …
“Yes, well,” Kelly said after a moment, clearing his throat.
He opened his notebook and pulled out the more-or-less standard form used in these kinds of checks. “The person we’re doing the background check on, Mrs. Schiftmann, is actually your son, Michael.”
From across the room, Kelly felt the old woman stiffen.
Her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to straighten her back on the couch. He watched as her right hand gripped the armrest and her knuckles grew white.
“What’s he done?” she asked.
Wow, Kelly thought, that’s not what I expected.
“Uh, actually, Mrs. Schiftmann, I don’t think he’s done anything. This is a standard background check.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is he getting a background check?”
“I’m not actually at liberty to discuss that,” Kelly answered, thinking that even if he were, he didn’t know the answer. “But I assure you, it’s just standard procedure, all perfectly above board. These things are very routine these days.”
She eyed him nervously and relaxed her grip on the armrest. Then she looked down at the floor, her eyes darting back and forth.
“I don’t really like to talk about him,” she said softly.
“It’s just a few questions,” Kelly said. “Like, for instance, we know your son was born in 1969. Did you live here then?”
Mrs. Schiftmann shook her head. “No, my husband and I had an apartment in Portage. I moved in here with Michael after he left.”
“Which was?”
“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “It was kind of a blur.
I was working in the extrusions factory, worked the night shift. Slept during the day; it was hard.”
“Who kept the baby?”
“There was a teenage girl who lived down the way. She was thirteen.”
“So a thirteen-year-old was keeping your baby?” Kelly asked.
“I had to work.”
“And where did Michael go to elementary school?”
The old woman was silent for a few moments. “O. C. Barber Memorial,” she answered. “It was down the street just a mile or so. He could walk.”
“And how did he do in school? Was he a good student, did he enjoy school?”
Her head seemed to be shaking nervously, side to side, in a jerky, continuous motion now. “Michael is very smart. He always made good grades, especially in English and spelling. But he didn’t like school. The other children were mean to him.”
“Mean to him?”
“Because he didn’t have a father, because we were poor, because I worked in a factory … Who knows why? Kids are just mean.”
“Did he have any friends there, anyone he was close to?”
“Not really. That was a long time ago. I don’t really know.”
Kelly stared at the old lady for a moment. He wondered if she didn’t have Parkinson’s disease or something on top of everything else. He cleared his throat again.
“How about junior high and high school?”
“He got a scholarship in the ninth grade,” she said, with a hint of pride in her voice. The first he’d heard, Kelly noted.
“Went away to that expensive, private school.”
“What was the name of the school?”
“Benton School, Benton Academy … something like that.
I have trouble remembering.”
“And how did he do there?”
“It was harder than public school,” she answered, her voice lowering. “It was hard on him, being away from home, away from me. But he made it, he graduated. Barely.”
“Did he have any girlfriends, any close friends at all?”
“I don’t know. He was away. He always liked girls, but he was shy when he was younger. We didn’t go out much.”
“Mrs. Schiftmann, did your son ever get in any kind of trouble at school or anything? Were there ever any kinds of disciplinary problems, difficulties like that?”
The old woman coughed, hard, her whole body shaking as the rumble echoed through her chest. She cleared her lungs after a few hard coughs, then settled back on the sofa and panted a few times.
“No,” she said. “Never. My Michael was never in any trouble at all. He was a good boy.”
Kelly leaned back in the chair and studied her for a moment. “Mrs. Schiftmann, if you don’t mind my saying so, it seems like you and Michael had a lot of obstacles to overcome. A tough time … But my question, I guess, is how did Michael go from being apparently a lonely but bright kid to being a famous, wealthy writer? I mean, this guy’s on magazine covers now. How did that happen?”
When Michael Schiftmann’s mother finally looked back up at Kelly, he could see a shiny film of tears in her eyes.
Her hands shook as she raised a finger and pointed at him.
“Because Michael was willing to do what it takes to get what he wants. Once he wanted something, nobody in heaven or hell could stop him.”
Kelly made a couple of notes on his legal pad and looked at the form. There were a few other questions he could ask, but they probably didn’t apply here. He could tell Mrs.
Schiftmann was starting to get upset. So, on impulse, he closed his notebook and stuck his pen in his pocket.
“Thank you, Mrs. Schiftmann. I think I’ve got just about everything I need. If there’s anything else, I’ll give you a call. And while there’s certainly no legal requirement for you to do so, we always ask that you keep this just between us. If you don’t mind, there’s no need to say anything to Michael about this.”
Kelly stood and reached for his coat. The old lady looked up at him, her eyes filling even more. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We haven’t spoken in years.”
Kelly looked around at the tattered living room, the peel-ing wallpaper, the general sense of decay, deterioration.
He almost said something about that explaining why, even though her son was rich and famous, she still lived this way, but then he held his tongue. He stood, threw his overcoat over his arm, and closed his notebook.
Mrs. Schiftmann struggled to pull herself up off the couch.
“Please, don’t bother,” Kelly said. “I can find my way out.”
He took two steps toward the door, then stopped. He turned, faced the old woman as she sat there staring at him.
“Mrs. Schiftmann, this really isn’t part of the check, but I’m curious. If you don’t mind my asking, how did you and your son become estranged?”
She stared at him through rheumy, bloodshot eyes for a few moments without answering. The silence continued, and Kelly realized he wasn’t going to get an answer. He turned and walked toward the door.
Outside, the sky had abruptly clouded over in the short few minutes he’d been in the Schiftmann home. He walked to the sidewalk, pulling his coat around him as the wind picked up. The air felt heavy, as if snow were imminent. After a few years around the Great Lakes, one learned to feel the weather as much as observe it.
He stopped on the sidewalk, thinking. The interview with Michael Schiftmann’s mother had been frustrating. He didn’t know if she was withholding or if she was just unable to focus. He wondered if he should knock on a few doors, but his supervisor in the Cleveland Field Office had told him not to take any more time than he had to. There were other things on his plate.
Kelly stood there for a few moments, appearing to be almost in a kind of trance. Behind him, at the end of the block, a car drove past with a bad muffler. A siren wailed in the distance. He was about to turn and head back to his car when the front door of the house next door to Mrs. Schiftmann’s opened.
An elderly, thin man, gaunt and balding, wearing a pair of dirty khakis and a large sweatshirt, stepped out onto his porch. Kelly looked up and noticed the man’s right sleeve was empty, folded in the middle and pinned at the shoulder.
His left hand held a cane that looked carved from a thick tree limb.
“Can I help you?” the man said suspiciously. Well-dressed strangers standing on the sidewalk were not common in this part of town.
Kelly looked at the man, then decided to take a chance.
He strode over to the sidewalk and smiled at the man. “Yes sir, maybe you can. Have you lived here a long time?”
The man looked at him for a moment before answering.
“About thirty years,” he said.
“So you’ve known the Schiftmanns for a while.”
The man scowled. “Who are you?”
Kelly smiled. “I’m sorry. Forgot my manners.” He pulled out his badge case and ID and held it out to the man. “I’m Special Agent Kelly, FBI. I’m doing a routine background check and I’m trying to get some information on a Michael Schiftmann. Could I ask you a few questions?”
The old man nodded toward the Schiftmann house. “She help you?”
Kelly smiled. “Little. Not much.”
The man snorted. “I’m not surprised. She’s as crazy as he is.”
“Crazy?” Kelly asked.
“Kid was the craziest little psycho bastard I ever seen.
Good thing he moved away. I’d have probably had to shoot him, one way or another.”
Kelly smiled even more broadly. “Would it be okay if I came in and we talked a bit?”
The old man shrugged, then pivoted on one foot and turned for the door, leaning heavily on the cane with his one good arm.
“Sure,” he said. “C’mon in.”