The Ragman's Memory Read online

  “Statistically? Very slim. I called Fish and Game about this. As you know, there’s a rabies epidemic going on right now in Vermont, so the state currently has a rich and current database of disease transmission routes. Of all known cases where rabies was delivered from one source to another, including human victims, every one was through an animal bite.”

  “What does that lead you to conclude?” I asked cautiously, having heard in her voice a true element of concern.

  “Nothing yet, but I’m not finished with my analysis. I’m going to examine this body with a fine-tooth comb, Lieutenant. Human death by rabies is extremely rare in this country and essentially nonexistent in urban settings. I’ll do everything I can to find out how this happened.”

  · · ·

  I had a patrol car pick up Danny and Phil and transport them to the hospital to be cleaned, inoculated, and quarantined. Not trusting them to return for the series of five shots required, the county health officials gave them no choice but to remain as wards of the state. It was a far cry from the cheap beds, ready beer, and curbside deposits of secondhand fast food they preferred. I doubted they’d ever want to set eyes on me again.

  It was mid-afternoon when I nosed my car into Arch Street, off of Main, and rolled down the steep, downhill curve that ended behind downtown’s distinctive twin row of stolid red-brick buildings parallel to the railroad tracks. Arch Street was a perfect example of Brattleboro’s unique personality. Down at the heels, littered, and ignored, it was thirty feet below and a stone’s throw east of the town’s vibrant business center, cut off by a rampart of intricately joined old buildings. And yet, just across the tracks and beyond a narrow swath of choking vegetation was a spectacular view of the glittering Connecticut River, and of towering, snow-capped Wantastiquet Mountain on the far bank—the very best scenery the town had to offer, enjoyed primarily by homeless alcoholics and dope-hungry teenagers. Both the contrast and the proximity of these settings spoke volumes about the character of a town at once embracing and bristling, seductive and cranky, charged with staunch conservatives and new liberals. It was not a place conducive to falling asleep at the wheel.

  I got out of my car, locked it, and retraced my route partway up the hill toward Main Street. There, I left the pavement, cut through the tangled weeds, jumped down a small retaining wall, and found myself in a narrow gorge where the Whetstone emptied into the Connecticut. Upstream, the brook echoed loudly under the dark and looming bridge, now high overhead.

  Picking my way carefully through the brittle underbrush along the bank, avoiding the ice-slick patches nestled among the rocks, I slowly made for the bridge’s gloomy shelter, its darkness emphasized by the dull roar of the water’s rush and the rumbling of the traffic above.

  The vegetation petered out at the shadow’s edge, making progress easier, and I walked to the midpoint under the overpass and looked north, along the axis of Main Street. Before me was a five-foot-tall cement wall, topped by a narrow ledge, with a cement and stone abutment above it reaching all the way up to the bridge’s support beams. Just as George Capullo had described it, a roughly-cut entrance, not more than four feet in diameter, was located just above the ledge, looking much like the cave of some wild animal. It was the outlet of the Main Street storm drains, and the last place Milo had called home.

  I gingerly placed both hands on the rim of the ledge, watching for broken glass, and hefted myself up. Standing amid the charred debris of Danny’s erstwhile campsite, I peered straight into the jet-black void of the tunnel, squinting against a steady breeze of surprisingly warm air.

  I dug a flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on. Some ten feet ahead of me, beyond a rough-hewn ice-encrusted lobby of sorts, there was a bifurcation, with a narrow, tile-lined, twenty-four-inch drain angling off to the right, and a much larger, forty-two-inch cement culvert straight ahead, curving up and away, paralleling the street above.

  Haunted by Phil’s harrowing images of Milo’s demented, spasmodic crawl toward the firelight, I headed for the wider of the two drains. There I came to a pleasant discovery. The misgivings I’d been harboring of a smelly, sewer-like environment were displaced by a dry, smooth, clean cement tube, wide enough for me to comfortably proceed in a low crouch.

  Locked in the earth’s deep embrace, the tunnel radiated a steady, even temperature—cool in the summer, warm right now. And fed as it was by the gutter inlets in the street, the circulating air was clean and fresh. As I moved rapidly along its length, I had to admire Milo’s aesthetic pragmatism. Aside from the utter lack of light, this was private, protected, and comfortable.

  It was also totally empty. For well over a hundred feet, I followed my flashlight’s halo, the monotony of my surroundings only occasionally punctuated by the pain of hitting my spine against the tubular roof. Mercifully, just as my legs were about to collapse from their confined range of motion, I came to a service shaft—a vertical junction of the tunnel I’d been in, and another of the same size, heading the same way, about six feet above it. A manhole blocked an outlet some fifteen feet above. A steel ladder lined one side of the small silo.

  I paused to stretch and get the circulation back in my legs. I also killed my flashlight momentarily to get a feel for the dark. The sudden loss of sight was absolute, and oddly liberating. I found my hearing abruptly enhanced and became aware of new sounds that had been accompanying me from the start—the muffled thunder of a busy town going about its daily life. I could hear and distinguish the differing types of traffic, the dulled thumps of tires passing over the manhole cover, even the muted scrapings of shovels working to free the sidewalk of packed snow and ice. It was all seductively womb-like and added to the place’s aura of safety.

  That, however, was because I was healthy and alert. Had I been in Milo’s condition, craving fluids while dreading the taste of my own saliva, my body racked by agonizing paroxysms and my head feeling as if it were about to explode, this haven must have seemed like a tomb, and the long crawl out of it a hopeless, frustrating, suffocating torture.

  Tempered by this new insight, I climbed the ladder to the next tunnel and kept going—essentially up the middle of Main Street—alone, silent, and utterly beyond reach.

  Finally, after another 150 feet, I found what I was after—a piece of plywood, laid along the tunnel floor, allowing for the occasional water to pass beneath it. Perched on its edge was the earthly sum total of a man who had slipped from this life with barely a ripple.

  Standing my flashlight on end, so that its beam reflected off the pale, curved ceiling, I removed my winter gloves, replaced them with latex ones, and carefully began dissecting Milo’s belongings.

  As with the contents of his pockets at the funeral home, there wasn’t much to see. Clothing for the most part, along with rags, towels, and blankets, in various shapes and stages of disintegration. There were several candle stubs and, surprisingly I thought, a couple of paperback books, albeit on the level of Conan the Barbarian. There was also a plastic bag filled with more personal items—letters so old and worn as to be basically illegible, photographs of people who meant nothing to me, a couple of pocketknives, one of which seemed an old and treasured heirloom. There was a stopped watch with a broken strap, a woman’s tortoiseshell barrette, a blank diary with leather covers. As I spread these items and more before me, I knew each must have been as eloquent to Milo as they were meaningless and mute to me. I imagined him occasionally laying them out by candlelight, and losing himself in reflection, tucked away in the bowels of a town that paid him no heed whatsoever.

  The bottom of the bag held less interesting debris—petrified chewing gum, rusty paper clips, stiff rubber bands by the dozen, odd scraps of paper. There was also an assortment of pencils, long and short, and a hodgepodge of cheap ballpoint pens, some of which had been dismantled as makeshift cigarette holders.

  Finally despairing of finding anything of value in all this, I began preparing to bring it to the office, where brighter light and more time m
ight yield better results. It was then, almost by happenstance, that I focused on the writing along the shaft of one of the ballpoint pens.

  Obviously a promotional giveaway, colored a bright blue, the bold yellow lettering spelled out, “Carroll Construction.”

  I froze in mid-motion, my brain suddenly filled with more questions than I could grasp. Here again, as with Mary Wallis—and perhaps through her to Shawna Davis—was a connection, however tenuous, to the fifteen-million-dollar convention center that so many hopes and incomes were riding upon.

  12

  ON A SLIDING SCALE, BRATTLEBORO'S HOUSING is heavily weighted toward what was once called the lower middle class, a term long since eclipsed by an array of more baffling, disingenuous, but politically correct substitutes. We had our share of grand homes—and of course the odd eighteen wheeler box or two—but for the most part, we were a town that looked architecturally frozen in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when business was industry, and housing was built for a few owners, their managers, and a great many workers.

  The homes of the latter had evolved over time, many of them becoming single-family dwellings, remodeled or rebuilt to look far better than the originals. Others had remained as they were—old triple-deckers, divided into as many small apartments as would fit. Depending on their condition, and where they were located, these catered to anyone from the poor to students to the burgeoning professionals.

  There were finally a few housing units that reflected no historical patina, and for which no one kept any nostalgic memories—plain, shabby, decrepit buildings overlooked by most people, but all too well known to us and the town’s fire and ambulance squads, who visited them regularly to either investigate odd, threatening odors, or to cart off another piece of human wreckage to the hospital.

  The one I was visiting on Elliot Street was among the worst of these, its featureless facade hiding a squirrelly tangle of gloomy staircases and narrow hallways, all servicing a vast number of small, dark, foul-smelling dens—shelters to an ever-changing population, the likes of Phil and Danny.

  I was here now, in fact, on their advice, having just visited them at the hospital. After my discovery of the Carroll Construction pen among Milo’s possessions, I’d wanted to find out how and where he might have gotten it, or if nothing else, what he’d been up to the last few weeks of his life.

  They hadn’t been overjoyed to see me, despite my reminding them of their current daily regimen of free food, care, and television. Most people’s misconceptions aside, bums do not lie in the gutter dreaming of such tangible comforts. The “good life” for many of them may not be what they’ve got, but anything’s an improvement over the rat race they fled. In general, Brattleboro’s “regulars” were not demented half-wits, flushed out of a state facility because of fiscal constraints. They were erstwhile inhabitants of the middle-class rush to succeed—once married and mortgaged and managed by a time clock—whose hopes and ambitions had suddenly imploded. While the Dannys of this underworld might indeed be utter victims, the Phils viewed people like me as all but trapped behind bars. An enforced return to that life—especially in a hospital setting—was no thrill to them.

  Still, life on the streets encourages tolerance, and these people, if nothing else, were experts at handling adversity, even if it came in odd shapes. So after he’d given me hell for the torture he was suffering, Phil had once more become cooperative, trying to remember if anyone might’ve known what Milo had been up to recently.

  The man he suggested, to my chagrin, currently lived in the building I was now visiting.

  I’d never heard of John Harris, but according to Phil, he was one of the few, like Milo, who actively sought his own company. Bums don’t tend to favor large groups, but as Willy Kunkle once pointed out, most of them like to know that at least somebody will be close enough—and care enough—to make sure they haven’t drowned in their own vomit overnight.

  Milo and Harris were loners. They avoided the soup kitchens, the Salvation Army-style organizations, and the summertime camps that sprouted up in the weeds behind Brattleboro’s urban facade. They lived off the land, stalking the back doors of restaurants, foraging through Dumpsters, and finding out-of-the-way nooks and crannies to sleep in. Like cats, they wandered their turfs alone, self-protective, self-absorbed, and silent.

  Which was why I wasn’t heading upstairs, toward the apartments, but down into the basement, where Phil had told me to look for anywhere warm, remote, and close to a discreet exit.

  That proved easier in theory than in fact. Stepping through a once padlocked, now shattered door, I found the building’s basement reminiscent of a laboratory-rat maze.

  The image was reinforced by the floor being dirt, the ceilings low, and the lighting nonexistent. Even with the flashlight Phil had advised me to take, I kept planting my face into cobwebs, and feeling—the farther I went—that somehow, somebody was watching and taking notes.

  The “warm” portion of Phil’s equation was the easiest to find. The entire building’s heating system, as far as I could determine, was based on the same principle applied to hot air balloons. Any radiators above me—whether functional or not—had to be playing second fiddle to the pulsating dry heat pushing up against the floorboards. For all its dank, subterranean appearance, the entire basement had the climate of a desert at high noon.

  Locating a half-hidden exit was more of a challenge. Aside from the door I’d used, and which I doubted John Harris favored, since it led only to the building’s front entrance, I could find nothing that served a similar purpose. There were no windows, and the only doors I discovered merely led farther into the catacombs.

  I therefore opted for the third condition—remoteness—and began weighting my search toward those areas farthest from either the furnace, the electrical panel, or the staircase, all of which I figured Harris would avoid as being potentially too frequented.

  It was following this logic that I discovered an abandoned coal bin, littered with personal belongings and equipped with a large, waist high wooden storage box, comfortably lined with bedding. High on the outside wall, an abandoned coal chute showed signs of alternate use—a crudely built platform was strategically placed beneath it, with footprints marring its top, and the walls of the chute itself had been wiped clean, presumably by the repeated passings of a clothed body.

  There was no way of knowing if this was in fact John Harris’s lair or, assuming I’d gotten lucky, that he’d be returning anytime soon. But it obviously belonged to someone and, humble though it was, represented all that person’s worldly goods. If I had the patience to wait, I knew I’d be joined eventually.

  I removed my coat, wadded it up to make a passably comfortable backrest, and positioned myself against the wall opposite the coal chute.

  · · ·

  A police officer’s life is largely spent sitting—in a car, at a desk, outside a courtroom, even in an interrogation room, facing a suspect, using stillness to undermine the latter’s confidence. But it is during surveillance that the immobility becomes most telling—and occasionally most taxing. Whether hidden in darkness or standing in a crowd straining to pick out one face from among many, the time spent waiting for something to happen has to be made to count. It is a contest of sorts, between the cop and the hours, with each side competing to make the other wither and vanish. The hours take their toll through boredom, discomfort, sleepiness, or a steadily mounting impatience. The cop fights back with a dwindling arsenal of curiosity, endurance, and finally, coffee, cigarettes, and a growing need to pee. It is common for the hours to win.

  In the decades I’ve spent engaged in this struggle, I have tried every strategy I could think of to keep alert and have failed in various degrees, up to and including falling asleep. But over the past few years, whether through practice or some gift bestowed only on those nearing retirement, I have found a shelf on which I can park my brain, and from which I can merely observe—to the exclusion of all else. I think very little,
move even less, and gather my conscious mind around the simple, single task of watching. My claim to Gail is that I have achieved the perfect meditative level she’s been striving for her entire adult life. She says I’m merely losing my mind.

  Whatever the truth, one trade-off is that I lose track of time, so when the peaceful dull murmuring of the dark basement all around me was suddenly and raucously disturbed by a grating sound followed by a loud metallic clang, I had no idea how long I’d been waiting for just such an interruption.

  Despite my eyes being fully adjusted to the gloom, all I could see was the vaguest outline of a body slowly lowering itself through the coal chute, its feet outstretched and groping, until its toes touched the top of the platform. The bulky shadow of a man quickly followed, clambering handily down to the floor.

  This was a moment to which I’d given some considerable thought. Hermits like John Harris are not best surprised in the dark, and I had no interest in giving a man I’d never met either a heart attack or good cause to try to kill me. I had therefore decided to let him discover me, rather than force the issue, and so I stayed as silent as before, watching him place a bundle on the ground next to him, cross the room to a spot near the door, and fumble with something invisible near the low ceiling. A small, bright spark sputtered between his hands, and a lightbulb suddenly burst to life over the toolbox.

  His back still to me, he returned to the bundle, removed a six-pack of beer from its bowels, and took one step toward the toolbox.

  That’s when all my planning went down the drain. Catching sight of me, Harris screamed, jumped back, dropped the six-pack, and fell head over heels over the low platform behind him.

  I leaped to my feet to see what was left of him. He was wedged upside down, between the platform and the stone wall, with his head at an angle I didn’t think was survivable. His eyes looked about ready to explode, whether from fright or lack of oxygen, I wasn’t sure. The only thing I could tell, if only from the strangled breathing, was that he was still alive.