Act of God (9 page)

Her tab from New England Telephone.

I opened that. The local calls wouldn’t appear, and I’d need a court order or police intervention to get them from the company. There were a few message units early in the billing period to an exchange in Meade, a suburb southwest of Boston where I’d had a case a few years ago. No charges for anything out-of-state.

I said, “Does Roger Houle live in Meade?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it. That on there?”

She looked at the bill. “I guess that’s him.”

Wickmire kept looking at the bill even though she’d answered my question.

I said, “Something wrong?”

“No, it’s just … Well, I thought she might have charged the call she made to me, but I don’t think the statement goes that far.”

“What call?”

“Last week. Darbra called me from wherever she was, and I kind of thought she might have charged it to her home phone, you know the way you can?”

“You spoke to her while she was away?”

“That’s what I said.”

“What did she say?”

“Just the usual. How’s Tigger, what’s the weather like up there, you know?”

“When was this, Traci?”

“Well, let’s see. I went out for drinks last … Tuesday? No, Wednesday. So it was Tuesday, like she was checking up on me.”

“Checking up?”

“Making sure I was taking care of Tigger.”

“She ask you any other questions?”

“No. She didn’t even come right out and ask about me feeding the cat. Darbra’s kind of like that.”

“Like what?”

“Always being indirect. She likes to come at you from the side, or behind, if it suits her.”

“She didn’t say where she was?”

“No, just the town.”

“What?”

“I said, just the town.”

“I thought you told me before that you didn’t know where she was staying on vacation?”

“Yeah, but I meant I didn’t know
exactly
where. She went to this beach town in New Jersey, but I don’t know the motel or whatever.”

I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “Which town, Traci?”

“Sunrise. Or Sunrise Beach, if there’s a difference.”

“A difference?”

“Like with Miami and Miami Beach. She used both names.”

“Both.”

“Both Sunrise and Sunrise Beach.”

I glanced again at the current phone bill. “You figure all her old bills are in the top of the highboy?”

“I think those are just the way-back ones. The more recent things she keeps in the desk in the living room.”

Before leaving the bedroom, I went through the open suitcase. Nothing but the clothes and a toilet kit and a little sand that had sifted down into the corners of the case.

Wickmire followed me back along the corridor to the living area. At the Governor Winthrop, I lowered the drop leaf and positioned the chair for sitting. The cubby-holes held rubber bands, pencils, a Flair pen and two Bic ballpoints, a small calculator, stamps, and blank envelopes.

I raised the drop leaf. The first drawer had bundles of bills, these more current. I went through her charge card statements for the past year. Lots of clothes purchases, not much else, and no entertainment items. Either she paid cash or got treated. Same for her bank statements, but no indications of checks being deposited beyond her salary, which was only five-ten and change take-home twice monthly. It seemed she spent her money on rent and clothes and that’s it.

“Traci?”

“Yeah—Tigger, will you quit it? What?”

“Darbra have a car?”

“No. Can’t drive either.”

“Can’t or doesn’t?”

“Well, I guess I’m not sure she
can’t,
but I’ve never seen her.”

“Then how did Darbra get to New Jersey?”

When Wickmire didn’t answer, I turned around in the chair.

She said, “I don’t know.”

I went back to the bills, this time the bundle for the telephone. Over the months, more calls to Meade, including some, in fact the majority, to a different number in the same town.

“Does Darbra know anybody else in Meade?”

“Besides Old Rog?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. But he was in business out there, real estate, I think, so maybe she was calling him both places. She’s so dar-ing.”

There were no calls to any New Jersey number going back to the earliest statement in the current bundle. There was one from the middle of March to a Salem exchange, where William Proft said his aunt Darlene had her store. The other calls would take a while to sort out, probably by my calling them, if it came to that.

“Traci, I’m going to take these phone bills and the one from the bedroom as well.”

“Help your-self.”

Finishing with the other drawers, I sat at the desk a minute. There was something bothering my pants cuff.

I looked down to see the cat, looking back at me with a curious expression on his face. “I don’t know either.”

Wickmire said, “What?”

“Skip it. You think I can find Teagle in his apartment?”

She glanced out the window. “He doesn’t have a practice studio, and it’s a little early for the club scene, you know?”

“He’s a full-time musician?”

“No. He’s a part-time musician and a full-time nothing else.”

“Unemployed?”

“More like unemployable. But wait till you meet him, form your own impres-sion?”

I wasn’t sorry to be saying good-bye to Trac-i.

A
ROUND THE CORNER FROM
Unit 11 with just the single brass “1” was a narrow staircase going down steeply. My knee started to give again on the fourth step, and I felt another twinge in my left shoulder as I reflexively grabbed the bannister to steady myself.

In the basement, there was only one door that wasn’t marked BOILER-ROOM or STORAGE, and it didn’t have any brass number or letter. The noise coming from behind it was reassuring, though.

Electric guitar, doing chords in no particular order that I recognized.

I knocked on the door. With no break in the guitar-playing, a smoky male voice said, “Go away.”

I knocked harder. The voice said, “It’s the middle of the fucking afternoon. I can play now unless there’s a fire.”

“Fire” came out sounding like “far.” I knocked harder still, and the playing stopped.

The voice said, “I told you to fuck off!”

With the flat of my hand, I started banging on the door like Khrushchev with his shoe at the U.N. No more playing, but a bolt got thrown on the other side, and the door flew open.

The young guy from the photo on Darbra’s bureau stood in front of me. Six-two plus, we were eye-to-eye. He was naked to the waist, his torso and arms tanned and husky but not muscular, torn shorts with gawky but tanned legs underneath, as though upper and lower bodies had come from different people and been sewn together, then baked to an even brown.

Into my face, he yelled, “I told—who the fuck are you?”

I gave him a flash of my ID holder. “My name’s Cuddy. Darbra Proft’s brother reported her missing, and I’m here to talk with you about it.”

Teagle tried to follow the ID as I refolded its holder. There’s no badge in it, state law says there can’t be, but I already had his attention.

The eyes were wary as he looked back at me. “I don’t need no hassling from the cops.”

“Best way not to get hassled is to cooperate, Teagle.”

“I don’t got time. I’m like working here.”

“Here” sounded like “her.”

“I heard your work. We can talk now, or I can pull you off a gig somewhere when it suits me. Your choice.”

Teagle mulled that. The expression in the photo was a pose, as most photo expressions are. In real life, he had a hard time maintaining anything but an air of confused stupidity. I thought about Cross calling Abraham Rivkind’s murder “stupidicide,” and I wondered.

“Awright, awright. I’m getting a little tired anyhow.”

“Tired” came out “tarred.” As he led me into the apartment, I said, “Where are you from originally, Teagle?”

“What difference does it make?”

“That doesn’t sound like cooperation to me.”

“Fuck. I’m from Baltimore, awright?”

Ball-a-more. The inside of his apartment was low-ceilinged and sooty, probably from the wood stove in the corner. The stove didn’t look very professionally mounted on the bricks underneath it, the fireplace tools lying on the bricks instead of in their upright stand behind the stove itself. The room was a modified studio, with a king-sized bed, covers unmade, in another corner and a couple of dinette chairs grouped around some music stands near the center. There was a stack of stereo equipment next to a nineteen-inch TV with a VCR, viewable only from the bed. Spoiled smells came from a galley kitchenette, dirty pots on the range. A bathroom, with towels hung over the shower rod and wadded on the floor, was visible through a half-open door in another wall. There were no windows, and the only light fell from a faint overhead fixture and a candle burning on a heap of dark, bagged shapes.

Teagle sat in one of the dinette chairs, carefully easing into a soft-shelled black case the guitar from the photo on Darbra Proft’s bureau. “So, like what do you want?”

I took another chair and straddled it, my forearms resting on its back. “What led you to come up here?”

“What, you mean like to Boston?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I was on tour, man.”

“Tour.”

“Yeah. Me and some of my buddies from the old group were opening for this mega-band. Maybe you heard of it.” He named the band; I hadn’t. “Anyways, we went all around the northeast, playing tight and getting raves, man, raves. But their drummer, he like OD’ed one night doing a college gig up here, and the manager stiffed
us
on the bread, like it was our fault their drummer couldn’t balance his shit. My buddies kind of freaked, but I’d saved my money and stayed on up here when they went back to Maryland.”

Murl-lind. “They leave you their equipment?”

“Huh?”

I inclined my head toward the heap of bagged shapes. “The instruments?”

“Oh, not. Those are for my new group, man. Bass, drum kit, and keyboard. I’m lead.”

“Lead guitar.”

“And vocals.”

I looked at the heap again. “Seems like a lot of cases for just instruments.”

“It’s not just the instruments, man. We got to bring our own amps and effects rack and all when we play a club. House just provides monitors and mikes.”

“Monitors?”

“Like the speakers, you know?”

“You play a lot around here, Teagle?”

He got cagey. “We do awright. What’s this got to do with Darbra?”

“Never know till I ask. And you answer.”

Teagle worked his jaw. “I did answer, man. You asked me if we play a lot, and I said we do awright.”

“How’d you spend this past weekend?”

“Spend it? I went out Friday night.”

“Where?”

“No place in particular. We could of had a gig Friday night, but we turned it down.”

“Why?”

“Aw, it was at this queer place.”

“A gay bar, you mean?”

“Yeah, only they try to pass it off like it ain’t. It’s mostly married guys from the ’burbs come into it, buying the hustlers drinks like they were big brothers to them, counseling them instead of feeling them up. It’s disgusting, you ask me. That’s why we call it the ‘Fag Dad Café.’ Got the nickname from that weird movie like a couple of years ago about the diner in the desert.”

“
Baghdad Café?
”

“Yeah.”

“They also made a television series from it.”

“You say so. I don’t watch TV.”

I looked over at the nineteen-incher. “What’s that?”

“Oh, I just like use it for tapes, maybe check out what the hot groups are doing for videos.”

Teagle smirked at me for no apparent reason.

I said, “And Saturday?”

“Huh?”

“What’d you do this past Saturday.”

“Oh, we had a gig at this place in Kenmore.”

“Kenmore Square?”

“Right. We were boss, man.”

“You see Darbra when she got back from her trip?”

Teagle stopped. If my jumping around threw him, he wasn’t making much effort to cover it. “No. Like I said, I was out.”

“So you don’t know if she did get back?”

“Huh?”

“She left a week ago Saturday, and supposedly came back this past Saturday. You didn’t see her, you don’t know if she’s back or not.”

Teagle worked his jaw again. “Sure I do, man.”

“She called you?”

A pause. “No. No, she like left me a note.”

“A note.”

“Yeah. Under my door here.”

“What’d it say?”

Another pause. “Not much. Just like, ‘I’m back, call me. Darb,’ you know?”

“Can I see it?”

“See what, man?”

“The note.”

“Oh, man, I didn’t like keep it. What for?”

“You threw it away?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Would it still be in your trash?”

“My trash?”

“Yes.” I looked to the messy kitchen. “Doesn’t seem like you’ve taken out the garbage for a while.”

Teagle was clearly trying to think his way through something. “I, like, I didn’t throw it away here.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, man. I took it with me upstairs, and knocked on her door, then pitched it outside when she didn’t answer.”

“Pitched it where?”

“In the street, man. You gonna get me for littering?”

He tried, but like one of Traci Wickmire’s lines, the light tone just didn’t quite come off.

“When did Darbra leave you the message?”

“I don’t know, man. She didn’t like time-stamp it or anything.”

“When did you notice it?”

Again he seemed to be thinking something through. “After I got up.”

“Which day?”

“Saturday, man. I was a little hung from Friday.”

“Hung over.”

“Right, right. So I didn’t get up till like maybe two in the afternoon, and there it was.”

“Could it have been there when you came in the night before?”

Teagle smiled, like he’d been smarter than he thought. “Yeah, yeah. Coulda been. I was kinda lit coming home.”

“Friday.”

“Friday.”

“After your clubbing.”

“Right.”

“Did Darbra tell you she was going away on vacation?”