The Ragman's Memory Page 4

  And yet, the expression he was giving me harked back to long ago, when the assumption was that every word I uttered was a bald-faced lie.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked him finally.

  “No problem. I was just wondering why the personal approach for what could’ve been put into a press release or a phone call. Makes an old bloodhound curious—like there’s more to all this.”

  My mind turned to the gold tooth with the enigmatic engraving, and the traces of purple hair dye, both indicative of the complex chasm of mutual need and distrust that would forever stretch between us.

  I gave him a pitiful look. “We’ve got as many questions as you do. I just thought you’d like to have what we had before deadline. It’s up to you if you want to believe we’re sitting on Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse.”

  I stood up as Ted McDonald laughed, dissolving the brief tension. “I’ll make sure you’re kept up-to-date.”

  · · ·

  The house Gail and I bought last year was on Orchard Street, a winding, wooded, uphill drive north of the main road linking Brattleboro to West Brattleboro. It was an enormous building, with an attached barn, a garage, and a deck out back with an equally gigantic maple tree growing through it. Gail had been a Realtor for twenty years, since dropping out of the commune that had first brought her here, and this house reflected why she’d been so successful. For a childless couple long set in their ways, who had rigorously maintained separate quarters throughout their relationship, this house had all the amenities—his and hers upstairs wings, a large enough kitchen for two people to avoid traffic jams, and lots of space, inside and out, that allowed for either companionship or privacy. The only thing missing—temporarily, I hoped—was the spirit that made a home of a house.

  The rape had ended Gail’s desire, even her ability, to live alone, and had coincided with my interest to build on our relationship. But shortly after the move, she’d left for law school, and was now so busy hitting the books I barely saw her. After all that had contributed to our finally moving in together, this work-driven result had left me feeling oddly bereft. I knew my melancholy was largely selfish, and understood the forces that were driving her so hard. I also knew that with time, things would settle down, her confidence would return, and both our lives would be enriched for the changes she was making.

  But that didn’t stop me from feeling lonely now and then.

  I parked in the garage beside the barn, comforted despite these thoughts by simply being here, and crossed the driveway to the house in the bright glare of floodlights triggered by my arrival. Gail had acquired an understandable mania for security, rigging the place with lights, shutters, an alarm system, and deadbolts.

  Sadly, even in rural Vermont, this degree of self-protectiveness was looking only slightly ahead of its time. The first stop off the interstate from the overpopulated south, Brattleboro, in many people’s opinion, had slid from being gateway of Vermont to doormat in a scant thirty years. With its uninspiring but steady economy, its generous welfare checks, and its plethora of services for the poor, the town was a natural for those fleeing urban blight. We had seen an alarming growth in homeless people, youth gang members, domestic violence, and petty crime. Also, where just fifteen years ago the police department had dealt with a single murder every few years, not a twelve-month period went by now without at least one homicide and several near misses.

  Gail’s behavior might have aroused my skepticism once, regardless of her reasons. Now it never occurred to me to challenge it.

  I used two keys to enter by the kitchen door, and saw that she’d fixed a sandwich on a plate for me, with a note reading, “Come up and visit. Am contemplating suicide.”

  I peeled back the top slab of whole wheat, unsure of what lay underneath. I recognized fake bacon strips made from soy, and some lettuce and tomato, but there was another item that escaped me. Too hungry to care, I sank my teeth into it and retrieved a Coke from the fridge. Food was not an area where Gail and I shared much common ground. She was a lacto-vegetarian, and I was someone who ate anything that had stopped moving. But since I didn’t care in any case, I ended up eating well without having to think about it, while still enjoying the occasional Spam and pickle sandwich.

  I balanced the soda can on the plate and walked through the darkened house, drawn by the gentle glow from the stairwell. As I rose into the warmth and light of the second floor, I could hear a man’s muffled voice emanating from Gail’s cluster of rooms at the far end of the hall, beyond our master bedroom.

  This was where her choice of homes had been especially inspired. We each had three rooms at either end of the house that we could manage as we wished. She’d turned hers into exercise, meditation, and study areas. I’d made all of mine a Salvation Army warehouse.

  I knocked at her office door and entered. Gail was sitting in a large armchair, her feet up on an ottoman. A portable computer was in her lap, and an instructional video was running on a small TV set placed on a chair before her. A professorial type droned in front of a blackboard, pausing occasionally as the camera cut to a piece of text. Gail was fast asleep.

  I hesitated, my hand still on the doorknob, knowing she both needed the rest and would want to be woken up.

  She solved my dilemma by opening one sleepy eye and giving me a small smile. “Caught me.”

  I tilted my head toward the TV. “Must be the company you keep.”

  She located the remote by her thigh and froze the professor with his mouth open.

  I leaned over and kissed her. “Thanks for the sandwich.”

  “How did it go at the paper?” she asked, arching her back and stretching her arms high above her.

  “All right. Ted was his affable self. Katz thought we weren’t giving him all we had.”

  “Which we weren’t.”

  “Who’s your friend?” I asked of the immobilized video.

  “That’s the bar-review course I told you about. I either do it by mail using these things, or attend classes in Burlington or South Royalton. Not much of a choice. It’s not that bad—you just caught me at a bad time.”

  “You going to call it quits?”

  She gave a weak laugh. “Fat chance. I think I’ll give Mr. Energy here a rest, but I’ve still got a stack of discoveries to process on the Miller case from Bellows Falls. The defense is already claiming we’re stalling.”

  I bent forward and kissed her again. Her lips parted under mine and her fingers slid up the inside of my leg. My plate still precariously balanced in one hand, I slipped the other under her sweatshirt.

  She moaned softly and broke off, her face flushed and her eyes bright. She was pulling at my belt. “I think I’ve come up with a way to recharge my batteries.”

  · · ·

  There was a large skylight over our bed, tonight a frost-rimmed window onto a glittering spray of bright, hard stars. It struck me as a meaningful asymmetry—this framed picture of merciless cold and Gail’s warm naked body stretched out on top of mine. I enclosed her in a gentle bear hug, appreciative of how the day had balanced out.

  It was the wrong move to have made. Her head rose sleepily from the crook of my neck, and she peered at me through a veil of long brown hair. “Better hit the books.”

  I knew not to argue. I massaged her shoulders briefly, slid my hands down her back, and let her go. Reluctantly, she slid off me and sat on the edge of the bed, using the moonlight from above to select her clothes from among the trail of entangled pants, shirts, and underwear stretching toward the door.

  “What’s the plan for tomorrow?” she asked, crossing the room and dressing, piece by piece.

  “Resume the canvass and the search, get a preliminary list of all the hairdressers that use permanent purple dye, work the computer in detail—get the groundwork ready for when we hear back from the lab.”

  She stopped abruptly, halfway into her pants. “Damn, I forgot. I got a lead on that symbol you described. I ran it by a friend of mine who’s seriously i
nto astrology and the occult. She said your sketch looked like the symbol for the Church of Satan in San Francisco.”

  “Great,” I murmured dourly.

  “Yeah. I thought you’d like that. Supposedly, it appears in something called the Satanic Bible. I don’t know where you’d get a copy of that, or even if you’d want to. She said it was a popular symbol among teenagers—a tattoo and graffiti favorite—so your victim may have known nothing about the church.”

  She sat back down on the bed and pulled on a pair of thick woolen socks before leaning over and giving me one last kiss. “That useful?”

  “Could be. I’ll let you know next time we pass in the night.”

  She gave me a dirty laugh. “See you in twenty-four hours then,” and she vanished out the door.

  Now the skylight merely looked cold, and I gathered the covers around me. No matter how trivial or common that Satanic symbol might be, I knew it meant trouble. As soon as the press and the politicians got hold of it, the heat on this case would increase—along with the troubles we’d have conducting a nice, quiet investigation.

  4

  I HAVE ONLY FOUR PEOPLE on my detective squad. Last year the town manager chose to treat the homicide of a fifth member as a form of natural attrition, and didn’t replace him. We not only lost a friend and colleague but got saddled with his workload as well.

  Besides Sammie Martens and J.P. Tyler, our forensics man, I had Ron Klesczewski and Willy Kunkle. Ron was young, sensitive, dependable, painfully earnest, and a whiz at keeping paperwork organized and flowing—the man to have as coordinator in the middle of a big case. Originally my second-in-command, he was handicapped by enough self-doubt that he’d finally opted to return to the security of the rank and file.

  Willy was the exact opposite: arrogant, insubordinate, willful, and, I suspected, physically abusive in the field—although none of his snitches had ever complained and none of us had ever caught him. Willy kept his own hours, only reluctantly attended staff meetings, and made his contempt for most people well known—excluding J.P., whose scientific bent he both respected and depended on. He was, nevertheless, remarkably good at his job. Badly dressed, infrequently shaved, and burdened with a useless, withered left arm—the gift of a sniper years ago—Willy Kunkle lived among the derelicts he occasionally sent to jail. But I trusted what lay underneath his unappealing exterior without reserve. What drove him cut deeper than career, ambition, or even everyday morality. He was fueled by private demons so rooted and complex that I never doubted his steadiness or dependability. I was stuck with Willy for as long as I could stand him.

  It was Willy Kunkle I sought out concerning the small bombshell Gail had dropped on me late last night.

  The center of the detective squad’s main room is a cluster of four modular cubicles, constructed of head-high, interlocking, sound-absorbent panels. Each detective has space enough for a desk, a chair, and maybe a corner in which to pile paperwork—not an environment conducive to loitering. Predictably, that’s where I found Kunkle, leaning back in his chair, his feet up on an impressively littered desk, holding a mail-order weapons catalogue open before him.

  He gave me an instinctively peevish look, which I ignored. “Any Satanists around town?” I asked him, knowing an unusual initial approach was often the best way to catch his interest.

  His eyebrows rose. “There are some,” he answered with rare caution.

  “You ever seen this symbol before?” I showed him the sketch Gail had used in her research.

  He frowned slightly. “This the engraving on the tooth?” Kunkle had not been involved in yesterday’s discovery or subsequent neighborhood canvass, and yet it didn’t surprise me he had the details of the case. Knowing everything that was going on inside the department, regardless of how trivial, was second nature to the man, and a telling facet of his personality.

  “If you go to the far side of the playground in Crowell Park,” he said, “there’s a six-foot retaining wall at the top of the drop-off leading down to Beech Street. It’s a good hideout in summer—the condoms, syringes, and beer cans tell you that—but one part of the wall has a ton of this shit spray-painted on it—pentangles, upside-down crosses… This one, too.”

  “You know what it means or who put it there?”

  He shook his head. “Could’ve been the town treasurer. We got so many wackos in this town—Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, who the fuck knows. The Satanists fit right in. You think the bones were some kind of sacrifice?”

  I held up both hands. “Down, boy. I’m just looking for a connection. What kind of things do the Satanists do?”

  “Depends—they’re pretty half-assed, like most people around here. There aren’t more than six of ’em anyway. They get together and drink chicken blood or whatever. We’ve found squirrels and shit like that nailed to a front door or two, complete with some weird symbols in chalk. A few cats have disappeared that people claimed were used in rituals. But it’s hard to tell what’s real from what’s paranoia.”

  “Are there people you could ask? Find out if they’ve gotten more ambitious all of a sudden?”

  He tossed the catalogue onto his desk and sighed. “Jesus, just because of some graffiti on a tooth? Why don’t we wait’n see what the lab says? Save me asking a bunch of stupid questions. These people are just dying for a little attention, you know.”

  His reaction didn’t surprise me. “Well—run some names through your head. Think about it for a while. You come up with anything, check it out. Otherwise, we’ll wait.”

  I returned to my office, knowing I’d get what I’d asked for, and probably more. As dismissive as Willy Kunkle worked hard to appear, he was a driven man, compulsively nosy. I knew he would make damn sure he wasn’t caught by surprise; he’d have all the names and facts I wanted if and when I needed them. As did many people who’d survived lives of chaos and self-destruction, Willy held dearly to his pride and reputation. That his personality grated on everyone around him was of no consequence—what counted was that he was a cog neither easily overlooked nor replaced.

  Still, it was with some relief that I got a phone call from Beverly Hillstrom a half-hour later, giving me—I hoped—more than shadowy Satanists to pursue.

  Voices over the phone rarely match their owners’ appearance, something blind dates discover all too often, but Beverly Hillstrom’s brought to mind the exact same tall, patrician coolness that she presented in person. A slim, blonde, immaculate middle-aged woman, her diction was grammatical and precise, her manners distinctly old-world, and her ability to put veteran cops in their place with little effort legendary. And yet there was true warmth in her toward those she trusted and respected, a group of which I thankfully was a part.

  There were proprieties to be faithfully observed, however, despite a friendship that stretched back years. We never referred to our private lives, never took liberties with social decorum, and always addressed one another by our respective titles. With anyone else, I would have dismissed such unstated ground rules as snotty affectations. With Beverly Hillstrom, I sensed in them a need for order and courtesy, almost a frailty that required nurturing. It was an enigmatic character trait that allowed me to ponder the personality behind it, and occasionally amuse myself with unfounded wild images of her life away from the office.

  “You sound relieved to hear from me, Lieutenant. Are you running out of options on this case?”

  “You could say that. I just finished telling one of my men to check out all the local Satanists.”

  “Ah—the tooth. Is that what that engraving signifies?”

  “Supposedly.”

  “Well, the tooth might be helpful, although perhaps not for that reason.”

  “X-rays?” I blurted out, instantly regretting that I’d rushed her.

  There was a telling pause at the other end of the line. “No,” she answered slowly. “X-rays have been taken, of course, and they’ve revealed a badly decayed, albeit previously treated tooth. But I can’t imagine
too many dentists having the time to compare any X-rays we could send them to their patient inventories of five thousand or so cases each. It would be a near hopeless task.

  “What I was referring to was the gold cap itself—which is actually gold-colored aluminum. I’ve consulted an odontologist colleague of mine up here. She tells me such devices are only rarely used, and then only as temporary stopgaps pending further work.”

  When Hillstrom had something hot, she tended to drag it out—a touch of vanity I’d come to patiently accept, considering the usually rewarding results.

  “They are apparently nicknamed ‘tin caps,’” she continued, “and their use has a certain psychological elegance I think you’ll find interesting. The X-rays have revealed that the tooth was previously filled—extensively—and that the old filling had failed, explaining the return trip to the dentist for the cap. According to my colleague, since the tooth was already so far gone, the dentist probably had two courses of action left to him—he could prepare the tooth for a permanent cap, as is standard, or, if the patient was too short of funds to afford the roughly six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar cost, he could put on a tin cap for one hundred and seventy-five dollars and tell the patient he or she had six months to find the money.”

  “The trick,” and here I could hear the satisfaction in her voice, “is that the tin cap is not only inexpensive, it is also thin-walled, relatively fragile, and not a custom fit. It’s available only in a variety of generic sizes, and every dentist has to improve the fit with added cement, which unfortunately does not hold off further eventual decay. Sooner or later, the patient has to return to the dentist, if for no other reason than the tooth begins to hurt.