Blunt Darts (7 page)

I slid in next to her. “I like your fatigue jacket,” I said.

Nancy DeMarco looked down into her beer. “You realize that this could cost me a job I’ve worked toward for six years?”

I ordered a screwdriver. “If it makes you meet guys like me in places like this, it can’t be such a great job.”

DeMarco looked up, but her hands kept toying with her beer mug. “It’s not, really.” She reached into a big leather tote bag and withdrew a file folder. DeMarco passed it to me. “Read. No notes. No copying.”

It took me all of three minutes. “This is everything?”

“Yup.”

“After two weeks?”

Just a nod now.

“What’s going on, Ms. DeMarco?”

“Nancy, please,” she said, more I thought from anonymity than cordiality. She took a sip of beer and began. “The case came in through Perkins himself on the thirteenth, the day after Stephen disappeared. I was assigned right away. Perkins handed me the police reports, which he’d already had copies of. After I read them, he told me I’d be on my own because the judge wanted a quiet, accent
quiet,
investigation.”

“How can you find a fourteen-year-old under that kind of restriction?”

“You can’t. Look at the file. Initial police report. Five-minute call to the housekeeper. Follow-up police report. Alert calls to airport and train-station security. One leg visit to the bus stations. End present efforts.”

“Amateurish.”

DeMarco grimaced. “Like you said back in Perkins’ office, worse. Perkins himself has loaded me with other files. I’m not complaining, but I was the operative with the most cases pre-Stephen, and I’ve gotten more than my share since. Every time I try to do something on Stephen, Perkins boosts the priority of some other case I have. I’d be embarrassed to talk with the judge—assuming my boss would let me.”

I confirmed that Smollett’s signature was on both the initial and follow-up reports before I closed the file and passed it back to her. “What do you suppose your ‘boss’ is trying to tell you?”

DeMarco put down her beer. “He’s an
uber
-professional. Which means minimal effort is intentional. And that probably means pressure from the client to keep it that way.”

I took a sip of my screwdriver. “You know anything about the judge’s wife?”

DeMarco looked surprised. “Perkins told me she was dead.”

I nodded. “Years ago. It pushed Stephen off the deep end. I was wondering if something similar pushed him again.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But then, what I don’t know about this case could fill a mini-series.”

I smiled sympathetically. “It’s not your fault, you know. You’re a professional who’s being reined in.”

“Yeah.” DeMarco finished her beer and slid off the stool. “If you need to talk to me again, which I hope you won’t, telephone me at the office and identify yourself as ‘Mr. Pembroke.’ But don’t leave a return number.”

“By the way, why did you decide to call me?” I asked.

A grim smile as she slung her bag over a shoulder. “What our agency is doing stinks. And in the office you didn’t refer to him as ‘the kid’ or ‘the boy.’ You called him by his name, Stephen.” Now the back of Nancy DeMarco’s other hand swiped quickly across her eyes. “Poor little son of a bitch.”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
bright and clear, only one cruiser in the range’s parking area. Cal was waiting for me inside the wire enclosure. He waved at the stubby wooden tower, centered just inside the range. The tower man buzzed me in through the gate. Bonham may not be a big-budget town, but Chief Calvin Maslyk knew where the money he did get was best spent.

“Been a while, John.”

“Nearly four weeks.”

We picked up some sonic muffs and wad-cutter cartridges and moved to the firing bench at the seventy-five-foot line, just left of center. Cal had already set up some traditional bull’s-eyes downrange, one target easel apart. We adjusted the muffs over our ears, and the tower man clicked on.

“Gentlemen, load five rounds.” We did so. Then the tower again. “Is there anyone down range?” A pause. Then again. “Is there anyone down range?” Another pause. “The range is clear. Ready on the right? Ready on the left?” Cal and I waved to him. “Ready on the firing line.” A pause. Then, “Fire.”

We each discharged five rounds, single-action.

“Clear your weapons.”

The chief and I opened our cylinders, ejected the expended shell casings, and slid our fingers into the gun frames so the cylinders could not close back into our revolvers.

“Is the firing line clear?” intoned the tower. Cal and I held up our weapons, cylinders out, fingers in. “The firing line is clear. You may now proceed downrange.” We began walking toward the targets.

I liked Cal, and I liked the way he required his range to be run. I’d read about a chief on the South Shore who hadn’t taken those precautions. A nine-year-old, playing “army,” had crawled onto the range. A rookie cop who never saw him hit him twice. The boy died the next day, and the rookie resigned the day after that. The chief was forced out the following week by the board of selectmen, the governing body of the town.

Usually Cal outscores me. This time, though, he slaughtered me. “Something on your mind, John?”

“Have you got any unbreakable vows toward Meade?”

He measured me evenly. “None past neighborliness.”

“I’m trying to find Stephen Kinnington, the judge’s son. It looks to me like the judge has told the present searchers to stand down and has sealed the case against outsiders like me.”

“Unfortunate family, the Kinningtons.”

With a pencil Cal marked our bullet holes on the targets so we’d know any unmarked holes came from our next string. We walked back to the firing line.

“Feel like talking about them?” I asked.

He rubbed his chin as we approached the bench. “The judge’s brother, Telford, was killed in ’Nam, oh, 1969, maybe. The wife died four or so years ago. Went off the Swan Street bridge into the Concord. I suspected the booze caused her crash.”

“No autopsy?” I said as the tower told us to load five more.

“No body.”

“In the Concord?” I asked. “That river’s current barely pushes a fallen leaf.”

The tower man’s voice crackled in the background. Cal eased his cylinder shut. “It was early spring, John. Swollen and running hard from the snows and rain. When they pulled the car up, Mrs. Kinnington wasn’t in it. Never found her.”

“Was one of the doors open?”

Cal smiled and pulled his muffs on. The tower man finished his litany. We fired the second string double-action and again cleared our weapons.

As we moved downrange once more, Cal continued the conversation. “Smollett’s diver said he didn’t notice.”

“Did you say ‘driver’ or ‘diver’?”

“Diver, as in SCUBA.”

“Meade has its own SCUBA team?”

“Of sorts. Meade is ‘concerned about crime.’ At least I think that’s Smollett’s usual budget speech. Pretty effective pitch, too.”

“Cal, I’m told that Stephen flipped mentally soon after his mother’s death. Institutionalized. Then he was apparently fine until two weeks ago. Can you tell me anything about his disappearance?”

A frown, and his voice dropped. “Smollett never even called me to put our force on alert. I found out from one of my men whose wife works in the cafeteria in Stephen’s school. Nothing on the radio or the computer. Nothing at all.”

We reached our targets again. “Can you think of any reason the judge wouldn’t want his son found?”

Cal clucked his tongue, perhaps at the question, but more likely at my miserable shooting. “Maybe the kid just doesn’t fit into his system.” The chief began penciling our newer shots. “The judge, who by the way, this department and I have to live with, is a cold, cold man. Just the opposite of his brother, who was real personable, though in an unpredictable sort of way. But the judge … well, if you ever saw him in court, you’d know what I mean.”

“I have. I’ve also met his bodyguard.”

“‘Bodyguard’? Oh, Blakey?”

I nodded.

“Gerald Blakey,” said Cal. “He’s a bad-ass, John. On the Meade PD, then broke up this fight in a tavern a little—no, a lot—too hard. Citizens’ group managed to raise enough fuss to get him off the force, because he was still probationary. But then Kinnington hired Blakey on at the courthouse. One of those political moves that makes the judge look fearless to the law-and-order folks.”

Cal pocketed his pencil but made no move back toward the firing line. “You have a jam with him?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Watch his hands, John. He could open coconuts with them. By-the-by, if memory serves, Blakey was the officer who noticed the smashed fencing when Mrs. Kinnington went into the river.”

I perked up. “And then, sometime later, when he’s squeezed off the force, the judge gives him a job?”

Cal nodded.

“How does that add up to you?” I asked.

Cal gave me a philosophical look. “Small-town police chiefs don’t ‘add,’ John; they subtract. Every time they take a stand, they subtract from their support in the town. Support remembers only the times when you do what they
don’t
want. Enough subtractions and there’s a new chief to do the arithmetic. I don’t know what happened between his Honor, Smollett, and Blakey.”

While I decided not to push my luck any further, Cal walked over to a locker at the end of the range and came back with a stapler and two bigger cardboard targets. He stapled them onto the target easels. They were full-sized, human silhouettes.

“Why these?” I asked.

“You didn’t do real well on those first two strings, John. Never can tell when you might need to be better.” We turned and walked back toward the firing line.

“Combat string!” Chief Calvin Maslyk yelled to the tower man.

F
ORDHAM ROAD WAS A
short street of older houses three blocks from the Meade center. I parked and rang the bell marked
V. Jacobs.

“Oh, John, I’ve been leaving messages for you all morning. Where have you been?” Valerie was dressed in a halter top and shorts. Both were pastel, and the colors clashed a bit.

“What’s so urgent?”

She ran back down the hall, disappeared, then reappeared with a picnic basket and a beach bag.

“I ran into Miss Pitts this morning in the market. You remember, the retired teacher who had Stephen in the fifth grade? We have to go see her right away.”

Valerie Jacobs was past me and halfway to my car. I shrugged and followed after her.

The living room was filled with the kinds of things one used to obtain with trading stamps. Plastic-brass floor lamps, plastic-walnut cocktail tables, and plastic Hummel-like sculptures on eight, separate, knicknack-holding shelf arrangements. My rocking chair, however, was built of massive pine. It must have gone for twelve-and-a-half stamp books, minimum.

Miss Pitts was plump and spoke in a soft purr. The three of us held teacups and coffee cakes in our hands and on our laps in a precarious balance that I’ve never been able to master. Miss Pitts had thus far covered her brightest class (1959), and her catlike voice was slowly putting me to sleep. I began to wonder why the hell she had the cocktail tables if she wasn’t going to use them for the tea and cakes. I was giving serious consideration to cutting a fart, toward re-channeling the direction of the conversation, when Valerie mercifully jumped first.

“Miss Pitts, what year was it you had Stephen Kinnington?”

“Ah, Stephen, Stephen. What an unfortunate story. Oh, one of today’s wicked novelists would have a field day with his sad life. But the brightest boy, the absolute brightest I’ve ever seen. No one, not even in the class of nineteen-fifty-nine, could touch him.”

“Actually, Miss Pitts,” I broke in, setting my cup, saucer, and goodies on the floor, “what I’m interested in is whether anyone
has
touched him. In the unfriendly sense, I mean.”

“Uh, quite,” said Miss Pitts, a bit miffed, I thought. “Well, as I told Miss Jacobs this morning, two weeks ago, on the twelfth, I was taking my evening exercise. I used to call it my evening ‘constitutional,’ but after the way some groups have twisted one meaning of that word, I have ceased to use it at all. In any case, while I was walking down Ballard Street, I saw Stephen ahead of me, carrying his books. No doubt he was so late in heading home—it was nearly five-thirty, you see— because he had visited the library after school. Well, seeing Stephen I was about to call out a greeting, when this black sedan screeched to a halt on the street beside him. He took one look at the driver and was gone.”

“Did the driver go after him?” I asked.

“Hah, not likely. Stephen is as springy and quick as an antelope. That Gerry Blakey couldn’t have caught him on horseback, assuming a horse could bear him any better than this town can.”

Blakey, again. “What happened then?”

“Well, Blakey, who’d gotten half out of the driver’s side, muttered something, slid back in, and drove off.”

I leaned back. Miss Pitts’s eyes might be getting a little weak, but she wouldn’t be likely to mistake somebody else for Stephen, and nobody else for Blakey.

“Why didn’t you report this to the police?” I asked.

She gave me a jaundiced look. “The police? Hmph. Josh Smollett is a fool who can’t even control the teenage hoodlums in this town, much less be its chief investigative officer. Besides, he’s in the judge’s pocket. Everyone knows that. And if Blakey was chasing Stephen, the judge was likely connected with the poor boy’s leaving. That’s why I decided to tell Eleanor.”

“You mean Valerie.”

Miss Pitts determinedly set down her teacup and stood. “Young man, you are smug, and you are rude. If I were to say ‘Valerie’ I would mean Miss Jacobs. When I say ‘Eleanor,’ I mean Eleanor Kinnington. I’m afraid this interview is over.”

I glanced to my right. Valerie seemed as stunned at the reference to Mrs. Kinnington as I was.

I rose politely and looked at our hostess. “Miss Pitts, please accept my apology. I
was
rude, and I assumed you were a meandering old woman who might confuse things. I was wrong. But I’ve been retained to try to find a probably terrified fourteen-year-old child, and you’re the first bright spot I’ve come across. Can we please talk a while longer?”