Trip Wire by Charlotte Carter Page B

wouldn’t fink on me.
    Uncle Woody wasn’t going to be thrilled that I was holding back that information from him, too. I’d tell him about the break-in, but in my own good time. If I spilled it now, he’d stop at nothing to get me out of the commune and back to Hyde Park.
    “All right, Woody. Klaus or no Klaus, everybody seems to be looking for a way to blame Wilton for what happened to him and Mia. Which is insane. I don’t care if he was Al Capone. That doesn’t make it okay for somebody to murder him. Or do you think that’s a childish notion, too?”
    “No” was what he said.
Why can’t you be eleven years old again?
was what I saw in his face.
    “Let’s back up here for a minute, Cass. There’s something we didn’t finish talking about.”
    “Dope, you mean. Look, Woody—”
    “No. Not that. I asked you about his friends outside of your roommates.”
    “Honest, I didn’t know about his old friends. Except somebody named Alvin.”
    “All right. Who was this fella Alvin?”
    “I couldn’t say. Wilt used to talk about him when he was kind of putting himself down. Almost like he idolized him. ‘Alvin was tough.’ ‘Alvin was a real black man.’ ‘Alvin knew what was really going on in this country.’ Things like that.”
    “But you never met the boy?”
    “No.”
    “So this Alvin is a tough young nigger who knows everything, huh? Sounds like he could have been showing your friend the ropes in the dope trade.”
    “Stop making things up. The guy isn’t a pusher. He was in Vietnam.”
    “So maybe he’s not caught up in drugs. But he still could be one of
them.
”
    Them. I knew what that meant. “God, Woody. Don’t go off on one of your raps about the black nationalists. Please.”
    He looked at me grimly. But he didn’t say any more. Maybe he was following Ivy’s old advice to me: When you feel like you’re losing your temper, take some deep breaths and don’t say a word until you calm down. “No last name on Alvin?” he said evenly.
    “I don’t think Wilt mentioned it. He might have, but I’ve forgotten it.”
    “Okay, young woman.” He started to clear the table. “You realize, don’t you,” he said, “you’ve got a duty to perform. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the decent thing to do. If you felt like you say you did about Wilton Mobley.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You should pay a call on his people. When were you planning to do that?”
    He was right. He was absolutely right. “I’ll do it now.”
    “The boy was angry at his father, you said.”
    “The other way around. They were angry at him. They were trying to make him go back to Antioch.”
    I came in for a bit of his caustic commentary then. “Imagine that. Man spending his hard-earned money to give the boy an education, try to get him started in life. And that fool has the nerve to wipe his feet on it. Yeah, that’s the big problem these days. None of you young folks like to be told what to do. It’s always gotta be your way. You know better. We don’t know a goddamn thing.”
    He smoked without talking for a few minutes, then said, “Anyway, you get on over there to see those people. Sim will take you.”
    “Who?”
     
    Woody almost always used a—well, it’s more than a little pretentious to call him a chauffeur—a driver, is what I mean. The previous one, whom we called Hero, had been with him for years. He was Woody’s nephew. Hero had had more than his share of problems, among them his lengthy and wasting drug addiction; but in the end he surely lived up to his nickname. He had met that end on the street one night, killed by one of two men who attacked Woody and me. Hero died saving us.
    “Cass, this is Sim,” Woody said. “He’s helping me out these days.”
    The same kind of help Hero had provided, I presumed: accompanying Woody while he went about his business, known and unknown, all over the city. Or just waiting for him in the Lincoln while Woody lunched with his