The Ragman's Memory Read online

  “But the plot thickens—I never thought dentists were so devious. It turns out the aluminum cap is chosen not only for its price—about ten dollars each—but because it will only last from six months to a year before the patient eventually bites through it and destroys it. This gives the dentist an even more reliable method of forcing the patient to return for more definitive care.”

  I searched through the papers on my desk, quickly locating the close-ups J.P. had given me of the tooth. “So since the cap is aluminum and it hasn’t been bitten through,” I volunteered, “the implications are that a) we’re dealing with a relatively rare dental procedure, and that b) that procedure was done not too long before the victim died.”

  She rewarded me with soft laughter. “Precisely. I was told that any dentist doing this kind of work would have his patient on a callback list for the next six to twelve months. So if you’re lucky, you’ll get your identification by asking all those dentists to check not their patient files but their appointment books.”

  A sudden doubt checked my own pleasure at hearing this. “But do we know how long the body’s been lying around? If it’s been years, the appointment book won’t be much good.”

  “Inactive patient files get culled every two years or so, but I was told most dentists keep their appointment books. I wish I could tell you how long these bones have been exposed, and more about the victim in general, but it’s too early yet. The information I just gave you was readily available, and I wanted to pass it along quickly. Anything else will take more time, I’m afraid, depending on what tests the crime lab conducts. I can’t tell you anything definitive about sex, age, or racial origin yet, and I probably never will be able to specify time of death to your liking.”

  “That’s all right. I understand. And I appreciate the tip. We’ve been thawing the ground where we found those skull fragments. With any luck, we should be able to send you some more pieces soon.”

  “Everything helps, Lieutenant. Let me know how you fare.”

  I thanked her again and hung up, gesturing to Harriet through the open door. “Find Ron. I’ve got a telephone canvass I need him to organize.”

  · · ·

  North Adams, Massachusetts, lies just below Vermont’s southwestern corner. There are several ways of approaching it from Brattleboro, all of them taking a little over an hour, but my favorite—and the one I chose a few hours after my conversation with Beverly Hillstrom—is due west from Greenfield along Route 2, offering a single, spectacular view of North Adams from the crest of the Hoosac mountain range.

  It had once been a flourishing factory town, of textiles I supposed, although I’d never bothered to find out. It lay sprawled at the foot of the mountains, along the winding Hoosic River, like a scattering of toy blocks thrown from the observation platform I always stopped at to appreciate the scenery.

  Not that it was an attractive site, even cloaked in a mantle of sun-bleached snow. A jumble of ancient, stained, largely abandoned industrial, brick-clad monsters, enormous even from this distance, the image projected was less aesthetic than one of lasting endurance—a statement of civilization’s stubborn willfulness to make its footprints last beyond reason.

  I stood on the wooden deck alongside a decrepit souvenir shop, both of which were cantilevered over the edge of the mountain’s top, and was once again struck by North Adams’s sheer determination. Long deserted by whatever needs had created it in the first place, saddling a road leading to nowhere very important, the place nevertheless hung on, battered and weary, perpetually hopeful. Rumor had it—as rumors often do—that “things were improving.” I hoped they were, if only for the faith that had been expended on their behalf.

  Since he’d been the one to locate the dentist we were about to visit, Ron Klesczewski was keeping me company. He had saved my life once, several years back, and had stood his ground next to me in a face-to-face shoot-out last year. Yet he remained an enigmatic mixture of timidity and ambition, courage and wariness, intelligence and naïveté. I was becoming used to the idea that while he always looked like he wouldn’t make it to the end of the week, he’d probably outlast us all.

  The dentist’s office was located a few blocks off the main avenue, in a neighborhood—depending on whether the rumors were correct or not—that was either headed for a turnaround or facing a grim end. It had been the only practice we’d found where a patient had received a tin cap and yet had never returned for the permanent replacement. According to the receptionist Ron had spoken with, the patient’s name had been Shawna Davis, age eighteen, and the tin cap visit had been the only time she’d been in.

  We parked next to two other cars in a hand-shoveled lot and stumbled over ridges of icy debris toward a one-story, flat-roofed, cement building with spidery cracks running along its walls. Inside, the mood was brightened a bit by gentle canned music and the lingering odor of sweet mouthwash. The waiting room was forlornly empty, however, and the hopeful expression of the woman beaming at us from behind a narrow counter wilted as we showed her our identifications.

  “You must be the people I spoke to on the phone,” she said, her smile lingering as an afterthought. The nameplate on her white cardigan read Alice.

  “Yes,” Ron admitted. “We’re here about Shawna Davis.”

  “Right.” Alice rose from her seat and crossed to the back of her small work area, returning with a thick book. “I checked our patient files to see if she was still there, but we must have dumped her.” She sat back down and looked at us apologetically. “We do that pretty regularly. We don’t have room to keep them all.”

  Ron smiled back. “We understand. Were you able to talk to the dentist, to see if he remembered her?”

  “I did, but he drew a total blank. He remembered the aluminum cap—they’re pretty rare—but he told me he no longer knew if the person he’d put it in was a boy or a girl. You can ask him yourself if you want, but he’s going to be tied up for another thirty minutes probably.” She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. Dr. Williams doesn’t have much of a memory.”

  I motioned toward the thick book. “That the appointment calendar?”

  She looked down at it as if it had snuck up on her. “Oh, right.” She flipped it open to the correct page, turned it around so we could read its contents, and tapped an entry with her crimson fingernail. “That’s her—Davis, S.—that’s when she came for the cap.”

  She placed a Post-it note on the page to mark it, spun the book back around, and reopened it at a later page. “And here’s where the callback appointment shows up. There’s another one a week later, but then we gave up.” She handed the book over to us so we could study both pages at leisure.

  As Ron returned to the first entry, I asked, “Do you have any memory of her?”

  Alice made a face. “Kind of. I’ve been trying to remember ever since you called, but you know, it’s hard. We see a lot of one-timers, and I guess she just didn’t stand out much.”

  I glanced over Ron’s shoulder. “What’s the date?” I asked him softly.

  He ran his finger along the line opposite Davis’s name. November, year before last—about fourteen months ago.” He flipped to the next page mark. “And the callback was in May of last year, six months later.”

  “You have an address on her, maybe in your billing records?”

  She sat back, looking embarrassed. “We might, but with records going that far back, Dr. Williams keeps them in storage. That means they’re in his attic at home. We’re told to say ‘storage.’ Sounds better.”

  “You have a phone book?” I asked her.

  “Sure.” She handed me a medium-sized directory for North Adams and surrounding towns.

  Ron read off the number on the callback sheet as I scanned all the entries under “Davis.” I finally found a match, predictably near the bottom, next to “Wilma.” The address was local.

  “Know where this is?” I asked Alice, showing her the listing. Her face soured. “I
should. It took me years to get out of that neighborhood.”

  · · ·

  Fifteen minutes later, I was sympathizing with Alice’s appraisal of her old home ground. The street we were on looked ready to break off from the rest of the town and drift away into oblivion. It was narrow, hemmed in by snowbanks piled between haphazardly abandoned vehicles, and lined with serried ranks of sagging, gray, almost collapsing wooden buildings—remnants of worker housing dating back a hundred years. The few porches still intact were piled deep with snow-covered firewood, the windows were either curtainless, too filthy to see through, or fully boarded over. Occasional wisps of smoke trickling up from a few metal stove pipes were the sole signs of life.

  I parked opposite the address we’d found in the phone book. Actually, given the street’s condition, I just rolled to a stop and killed the engine. There was no place to park, and no traffic to avoid in any case.

  We both left the car and stood soundlessly in the street, staring at the house before us—a patched-together wooden box, single-story, its small windows opaque, a glimpse of tattered blue tarp showing through the snow covering the swaybacked roof. If Shawna Davis had once lived here, it took no great imagination to see why she might have left.

  The street was eerily bereft of the usual clatter of civilization. I could hear no dogs, no children, no cars, no voices raised in joy or anger. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like this small portion of hopeful North Adams had missed out on the dream and simply died.

  I motioned toward a narrow, crooked, shoveled trench in the snow, connecting the front door to the street. “Somebody’s been at work since the last storm.”

  We walked cautiously in single file up to the door and listened. I couldn’t hear a sound. Suddenly hesitant to make a loud noise in this funereal setting, I finally knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” The question was hostile, immediate, from just beyond the thin paneling. Its abruptness made us both jump. I noticed Ron unbutton his coat for easier access to his gun.

  “Mrs. Davis?” I said to the closed door, “My name is Joe Gunther. We’re police officers from Brattleboro, Vermont. We wondered if we could have a few words with you.”

  “What about?” The voice was cracked and hoarse, as if from underuse.

  “Do you have a daughter named Shawna?”

  “Maybe.”

  Ron and I exchanged glances. I chose my words carefully, skirting the truth of our mission. “You’re not in any trouble, Mrs. Davis, and neither is Shawna. We’re just looking for some information. No harm will come to you.”

  There was a long pause before the voice came back. “You have a warrant?”

  Ron sighed and visibly relaxed. I resisted telling Mrs. Davis that she’d been watching too much TV, and instead used her own preconceptions against her. “We don’t need a warrant for a conversation. We can get one, though, if we think you’re trying to hide something from us.”

  The lock snapped angrily and the door swung back to reveal an angular, bitter, pale woman in her thirties with a dirty face and several missing teeth. She was dressed in a pair of tight blue jeans and a red-and-white wool shirt, pulled out to disguise a malnourished, swollen stomach. The hot smell that swept out to greet us made me realize how lucky we’d been to be chatting through a barrier.

  “Fucking cops,” she said and turned her back, vanishing into the gloom.

  Ron and I tentatively followed, instinctively moving to opposite sides of the door frame once we’d entered. Both of us had spent too many years exploring similar buildings to feel any safety within them.

  I narrowed my eyes to see into the darkness, breathing shallowly until I could get used to the stench. I heard the creak of sofa springs as the woman’s dim shape folded into a dilapidated couch against the far wall. My vision improving, I saw by the live cigarette in the ashtray by her elbow that she’d been sitting there before our arrival, presumably in the dark, doing nothing.

  I didn’t bother looking for a seat, not wishing to overexpose myself to my surroundings. “You are Wilma Davis?”

  She snorted and then coughed, reaching for the cigarette.

  “You don’t even know that much? This is going to be great.”

  “And your daughter is Shawna?”

  “You already said that.”

  “She went to the dentist’s office under a year and a half ago to have a cap put on one of her teeth. Do you remember that?”

  “Sure I do. Figured she couldn’t get boyfriends if she didn’t have all her teeth. I told her men don’t give a fuck about a woman’s teeth—not what they look for anyway. Cheaper to have ’em pulled. Cost a god-damn fortune.”

  She dragged on her cigarette.

  I paused, waiting to see if she’d say more, but she’d apparently run dry. I was struck by her lack of curiosity about why we were here. “Why didn’t she go back to get the job finished?”

  “It was finished enough,” she answered disgustedly. “She got the fucking cap. Where did she think the money would come from?”

  “You paid for the cap?” I asked.

  “Who the hell else was going to? Of course I paid for it.”

  I thought for a moment, filtering her words from their meaning.

  Despite the overstated anger, she’d acquiesced to her daughter’s desire to get her tooth fixed and had obviously paid for it at great sacrifice. “You knew it was only a temporary repair—that the tooth would rot unless a permanent cap was put in?”

  She crushed the cigarette out as if she wished my eye were beneath it. “I’m no fucking moron. That’s what got me so pissed off. I was playing ball with the little jerk. I was going along with the whole deal. I had the goddamn money.”

  She finished in a snarl, and hurled the dead butt into the darkness of a far corner.

  I took a guess. “But by the time the second appointment came around, Shawna was gone.”

  Instead of answering, Wilma Davis merely dug into her breast pocket for another cigarette, which she lit with trembling fingers.

  “Why did she leave, Mrs. Davis?” I asked after a few moments.

  Her voice had calmed. “Why do they all leave? I did. Everybody leaves, sooner or later.”

  “You know where she went?”

  “I was the last person she was going to tell. I came home one day, and she was gone. That was it.”

  “When was that?”

  “Late last April… What’d she do, anyway? Rob a bank?”

  Nine months ago, I thought. I ignored her belated question for the time being, sensing she’d been anticipating the worst from the start. “Did she have any friends we could talk to? Someone she might’ve kept in touch with?”

  She leaned forward in her seat, stabbing the cigarette in my direction, her question already moot in the misery clouding her mind. “I can sure as hell see you don’t have kids. They don’t talk to you; they don’t tell you their friends’ names; they don’t tell you shit. You watch their faces, looking for the child you knew, and all you see is they hate your guts. They bleed you dry, and then they drop you like shit.”

  She rose and approached me, still talking as if her rage might stave off the pain we both knew was coming. I heard Ron shift slightly, returning to the defensive. “You want to know who her friends are? Go find them yourself. ’Cause when you do, she’ll probably be there, too, doing drugs and getting fucked by men who won’t look her in the face. That’s what happens to little children, mister. I know. But you can’t do anything about it. You can kick and scream all you want, but the more you do, the more they want to leave. You tell ’em the truth—as plain as the shit on your shoe—and they tell you you’re full of it.”

  She had closed the gap between us, her face inches from mine, the cigarette forgotten in her hand. Her breath encircled my head. “You find her, policeman, you tell her I’m dead, just like she is. She won’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but she’ll find out soon enough.”

  In the twilight from th
e greasy windows, I could see the tears in her eyes—the shiny paths they left on her cheeks. “Will you do that? Will you tell her?”

  I did look her in the face and chose not to lie. “We might’ve already found her, Wilma. And if I’m right, maybe you can bury some of your grief along with her. She’s not in pain any longer.”

  She stared at me in silence for a moment and then burst out sobbing.

  5

  GAIL TOOK A BITE OF PIZZA and chewed thoughtfully for a minute. We were sitting at either end of the kitchen’s small serving island, late at night, enjoying the novelty of a shared meal, even if it was garnished, I noted wistfully, with vegetables only.

  “What did you do then?”

  “Asked to see Shawna’s room. There wasn’t anything useful—no letters or diaries—just posters and stuffed animals and what-have-you. But it was so dark and gloomy… And dirty. Tough way to live.”

  “I thought maybe Wilma’s phone records might help—give us a clue to who Shawna was calling her last few weeks at home. ’Course, that was wishful thinking—I suppose I should’ve been happy she had a phone at all, much less a filing system. I’ve got Ron pestering the phone company for it instead. We should have something tomorrow. She did have a recent snapshot she let us have.”

  I paused to eat a slice myself, watching Gail cross the kitchen to refill her glass with milk. It was during small moments like this that I was happiest we’d moved in together. Despite the crisis that had stimulated the decision, I found myself uncannily comfortable with the end result, wondering why we’d staved it off for so long.

  “After that, we went to the local high school,” I continued. “Talked to teachers, advisors, administrators—basically anyone who’d known her—and finally we chased down a couple of her old friends. But we didn’t get much—she was a loner, a dreamer, someone easily influenced by a smile and a good line. Her grades were lousy, she had zero ambition, her social skills were inept. She was plain and insecure and dying to get away. They all said her relationship with her mother was the pits.”