A Grave Talent (19 page)

Two of his teachers had moved, two had retired, and the English teacher had died in a plane crash three years ago. The coach had also retired, but lived nearby and came to all the games, to contribute his expertise to the efforts of the current coach. The secretary, whose name most horribly turned out to be Piggott, found the telephone numbers of the retired coach and teachers, and got from the district offices the last addresses of the two who had moved. Kate went back to the telephone. Ten minutes later she hung up with the information that of the local people one teacher had died, one was recovering from a stroke and could not be disturbed until at the earliest next week, and the coach would be delighted to see them any time that afternoon, and what would they drink?

Hawkin stood up.

"I'll go see him. You see what you can scrape up here, about Vaun and Lewis. You might glance at Ned Jameson's records too, out of curiosity. But first, why don't you call, what's his name, the police chief here? Webster?"

"Walker."

"Right. See if he remembers anything funny about Lewis. I know he was never arrested, but there might have been rumors. Follow your nose. 'Ferret about,' in fact. I'll see you in an hour or so."

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To Hawkin's surprise the principal seemed eager to go along, so the two of them drove off to a very solid hour of football talk, home brewed beer that tasted of plastic, and a heavy-handed determination on the part of Hawkin to fight the tide and keep the talk on Andrew Lewis.

At first wizened little Coach Shapiro could remember no Andrew Lewis, eighteen years before.

"There was a Tommy Lewis, ten years ago."

"That would be his cousin. Andy Lewis was only here for one year. You might remember him because he was older than most of your kids, came back after a couple years to finish his degree."

"We had two or three of those--wait a minute. Lewis. Yes, oh yes, Lewis, good arm, fast on his feet, but not much of a team player, wanted to stick out too much. Had to bench him a couple of times. He'd insist on trying for an impossible run instead of making a pass. Quit before the end of the season, I think."

"That sounds like him."

"There was something else, too. What was it? Never had any problem with my memory before I retired," he complained. "Now it's like running in mud. There was something he was involved in, later, some kind of trouble. Ah, got it! That girl. It was that girl, the one who killed the little Brand child and went to prison. She was Lewis's girlfriend for a while, wasn't she? Is that why you're here? It was a long time ago. Wait a minute. Where did you say you were from?"

"San Francisco," Hawkin admitted, and the coach was on it in a flash.

"Those little girls they've been finding in the mountains? Is that why you're here? You think she's done it again, and you're trying to find her through Lewis? You're wasting your time, I'd say. He's been gone for a long time."

"Yes, Mr. Shapiro, I know that." He neither confirmed nor denied the man's assumption, but retreated into a convenient, if true, formula. "We have some questions we'd like to ask Mr. Lewis; we think he can help us clear up a case we're working on. One of the problems we're having at the moment is that we don't know what he looks like, other than vague descriptions. We're trying to find a photograph of him. Would you by any chance have one?"

The old man burst into cackles, slapped his knee, and pushed himself to his feet. He gestured for Hawkin to follow him and shuffled into the next room, which had once been designed as a bedroom but was now what might be called a study, or a storage room, or a segment of primordial chaos. Filing cabinets with overflowing, unclosable drawers sat on top of dressers and chests; storage shelves, floor to ceiling, towered along the walls, in front of the window, as an island in the middle of the room. Every flat surface was laden with precarious, bulging cartons and grocery bags filled with papers, books, ribbons, trophies, and just plain debris.

"Memorabilia of forty years' teaching and coaching. Always told myself that when I retired I'd spend happy days sorting it out, but somehow I never seern to find time for it. Can't think where to begin, for one thing. My wife wouldn't even come in here, terrified something would fall on her. I used to bring a chair in here to have a smoke. Damn fool of a doctor told my wife I had to give them up, but she'd never come in here." He surveyed the incredible room with the complacent pride of a grandfather, and Hawkin's blood ran cold at the thought of what an errant spark could do. "Anyway, to answer your question, there's probably a picture of your Andy Lewis in here somewhere, but God alone knows where."

He led them back into his living room, which seemed in retrospect a paragon of tidiness and order. Hawkin drew a deep breath and prepared to spend a chunk of taxpayers' money.

"Mr. Shapiro, if I arranged some help for you, would you be willing to go through your... memorabilia... and see if you can find any photographs of Andrew Lewis?"

Chief Walker listened, screamed, and agreed to send a man the next day. Hawkin suggested three or four additional sorters--unemployed housewives?--and some muscular teenagers to carry and load. Walker screamed again, and Hawkin spoke the soothing words of financial responsibility and reminded him not so gently of the murdered children, to say nothing of the fire hazard. They parted, if not friends, at least colleagues.

Shapiro seemed thrilled with the arrangement, and they left him a-babbling of a show at the local historical society and pulling at Zawalski's coattails for a display of his prizes at the high school's next homecoming game.

Hawkin rode back to the school brooding darkly over the possibility of a conspiracy that reached back eighteen years, and the very absurdity of it put him into a foul mood. Kate, on the other hand, was positively bubbling over with news and had some color in her face for the first time that day.

"Al, you'll never guess what I found out."

"Oh, Christ, Martinelli, let's not play guessing games, huh?"

Her face went blank and her chin went up, and Hawkin kicked himself for a clumsy fool.

"Yes, sir. Would you like to hear the results of my--"

"Casey, stop. I'm sorry, I've been drinking bad beer, thinking bad thoughts, and I need a toilet. I'll be back in a minute, and we'll start again." He went out, and a while later there was a dim rumor of rushing water and he came back.

"Okay, now, what have you come up with?"

She eyed him cautiously, but retreated from formality.

"Walker couldn't find anything, but the town Lewis came here from is about sixty miles north of here, and Walker knows the man who was sheriff at the time. He's retired, but he still lives there. I phoned around and finally tracked him down at his daughter's house, and I explained who I was and asked him if there was a possibility that the name Andrew Lewis meant anything to him. He didn't answer at first, so I started to explain that it would have been twenty years ago and he had no record so he'd probably never even been arrested as a juvenile, but he cut me off and said in this very quiet voice that there was no need, he remembered Andrew Lewis very well, what did I want to know? I left it general, that we were looking for him for information he might have concerning a murder, but he cut me off again, and said--shall I read it to you? I got most of it." She held up her notebook, and at his nod went on.

"He said, 'I wondered how long it would take before he got caught with something.' I started to say that we were only trying to find him, but he said, 'I knew twenty-five years ago that Andy Lewis was rotten, and I knew eighteen years ago that he had something to do with that little girl's death."

"What?"
said Hawkin, incredulous.

"That's what he said."

"You mean he thinks Lewis did it?"

"He didn't say that. He was very careful not to. Just that Lewis was involved in some way. Shall I read the rest of this?"

Hawkin ran a hand through his hair, took out his cigarettes, and nodded for her to continue.

"I asked him if maybe he could explain that statement. He asked me if I had a few minutes, and I assured him that I had all the time in the world."

Kate looked back at her notes, remembering that at this point in their conversation the retired sheriff had excused himself and laid down the receiver. She had heard footsteps going across a room, followed by an unintelligible mumble, and a door closing to shut out the sounds of children. Footsteps again, the scrape of a chair, and then his voice had come again. She found her place on the page.

" 'First of all,' he said, 'I want you to know that I'm not the kind of person who sees bogeymen in the woodwork and criminal psychoses in every kid who cracks somebody over the head. I'm sure that anyone who's ever worked with me would tell you the same thing that's on my first academy evaluation: I don't have a lot of imagination, and I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.' He sounded like that, too," Kate added. "Slow and thoughtful.

" 'Andy Lewis and his mother moved here when he was nine. It's a small town, and I live here, so I'd always hear when people came in or out, you know? Well, a couple of weeks later I had a phone call from the sheriff where they used to live, down near Fresno, a guy I'd met a couple of times. He told me, just casually you understand, that if people started reporting dead pets, I should keep an eye on the Lewis kid. Yeah, I know, I thought it sounded kind of crazy too, and I told him so, and he kind of laughed and agreed with me, and that was the end of it.

" 'Then about four or five months later an old lady found her poodle strangled. She'd thrown some kids out of her yard the week before. Four months later a cat and its kittens were found strangled, two days after their owner had shouted to a gang of kids to leave them alone. That time I remembered the phone call. Andy Lewis was in the gang, he had scratches on his arms, but what kid doesn't? And his mother said he'd been home all night. About two or three times a year, after that, somebody would make Andy Lewis mad, and one morning they'd find their dog or cat dead or their bird cage opened. No sign of a breakin, but in the country people are careless about locking doors and windows. I even began checking for fingerprints, on the collars and stuff, but nothing. Never anything I could prove, and never a valuable animal or livestock, but it made me nervous, especially the way he wasn't in a hurry about it. Nothing pointed to him, there was always a gap between the insult, if that's how he saw it, and the revenge. If it hadn't been for the phone call, I don't know how long it would have taken me to put it together. As I said, it made me nervous. And when I found that he didn't go bragging to his friends, well, that made me
very
nervous.

" 'He was cool, he was patient, and he was smart. Except for once, once that I caught him, I should say. You'll understand when I say that by the time he was a teenager I was getting more than a bit concerned about him and keeping my ears flapping and my eyes open for anything concerned with Andy Lewis. That's why I was onto him so fast when he finally stepped out of line. Only once did he just let fly without planning, and that was the end of him in this town. Tell me, have you met him?'

"I said I didn't know if I had or not and explained about the pictures.

" 'Well,' he said, 'Andy Lewis was a charmer. He'd have made a great con man. He was a con man, come to think of it, only not for money, not directly. He wanted power over other people, always moved with a group of worshippers to admire him. When he was sixteen the local preacher's daughter caught his eye, a pretty, overly protected little thing, very bright.

" 'He got her pregnant. She was fourteen, almost fifteen. She wanted him to marry her, some dream she had, but when he pushed her off she started talking about turning him in for statutory rape. He blew up, beat her so badly she nearly died, lost the baby of course and half her teeth, ruptured her insides so she couldn't have any more children. And, you know, damned if she didn't refuse to press charges against him. Partly she was scared to, but she was more than half convinced that he really loved her and hadn't meant to do it.

" 'I did something then I've never done before or since and I'll only admit to it now because I'm an old man and my deputy's dead. I took my deputy out, and we picked up the Lewis kid, and we took him out to the quarry and beat the shit out of him. Still makes me sick to think about it, the two of us and this sixteen-year-old kid, but I knew it was the only way he'd listen to me. I didn't hurt him, nowhere near what he'd done to the girl, but when I finished I told him I wanted him gone, never to set foot in my county again, or next time I wouldn't stop. The next morning he was gone. A few months later his mother moved to the town you're in now to be with her sister. The next I heard of Lewis was three, four years later, when his name came up in connection with the Adams girl. I have no idea where he was during those years. He was supposed to have been in the army, but I find it hard to imagine.

" 'Anyway, the other thing you should know is that he always had to be in control of any situation, any group. The only time he faded into the background was when something was about to happen. Now, as I understand it, the Adams girl was a brilliant artist. The whole school knew her, knew that she was going somewhere, a very large and exotic fish plunked down temporarily in their little pond. She doesn't seem to have been aware of how others looked at her, but when Lewis walked into that school--God knows why or how he did--he saw immediately that she was one of the power points of the school and he set out to take her over. And, as I said, he was a charmer.

" 'For a few months he rode around on her shoulders, making everybody think that he was dangling her, rather than she carrying him. And then she wised up. From what she said at the trial, she decided he was getting in the way of her painting, so she told him to leave and went back to her brushes. He couldn't have that--not only the rejection, but the public humiliation. She didn't bother to hide it, and apparently some of the other students saw what had happened and laughed at him.

" 'A month later the child given into her care was found dead. Strangled. With no sign of a breakin. Apparently by a girl who had just made Andy Lewis angry. And I knew that Andy Lewis was a kid with a thirst for revenge, the ability to be patient and quiet," and bright enough to keep his temper under control, most of the time.

" 'I did what I could. I went to the police there. I put it all in front of them, and they tried, but none of us could find the smallest chink in his armor. A week or two after the trial ended I went to talk with him. I guess I thought that I could threaten him into not doing anything else by letting him know that we were all watching him. He laughed at me. Laughed right in my face, and turned his back on me and walked away. I went home and I thought about it, and I realized that I had two choices: I could shoot him like I would a dog with rabies, or I could sit tight and wait until he stepped into someone else's hands and see what I could do.

" There was really no choice in the matter. I couldn't shoot him. I never even seriously considered it, although I knew that I might very well save innocent lives if I did. So I sat and waited, and I've been waiting eighteen years. I know who you are, and I know why you're calling, and all I can say is, if there's anything an old, retired sheriff with a bad conscience can do to help, I'm yours.'