Cast in Stone (25 page)

"What?"

"She
said—and these are her exact words—she said, just as calm as
could be, 'He shot his seed into her. I know he did. Don't ask me how
I know. I just do. He filled her up, and of course, I can't have
that.' She said it just like that. Like a schoolteacher or something.
'Of course, I can't have that.' And then she ran off up the alley.
Everybody was too stunned to do anything." "Seed?"

"I
swear." Right hand aloft again. "Jesus," Carl said.

"Jeff
was just . . . crushed. He never played football again. Went right to
some divinity school after that year. I think he was just so
embarrassed by the whole thing that he couldn't face anybody at the
university again. I mean, everybody in the place just felt so bad for
him. I really can't describe it. It was one of those moments of such
incredible embarrassment that it made people almost wish it was
happening to them." She hesitated. "You know . . . because
watching it happen to somebody like Jeff was somehow even more
painful."

"I
know what you mean," was the best I could manage.

"It
was indescribable," Janet said. "After that, the band tried
to get things going again and all, but nobody's heart was in it. They
didn't even make it through one song. People just stood around for a
few minutes looking at each other and then went looking for their
coats. Nobody even knew what to say. Within a half hour the place was
empty."

"Hell
of a night," I offered lamely.

Anne
Siemons agreed. "Even now, I can still remember the day
when I got my annual at the end of that year, the first thing I did
was check the banquet pictures, before I even looked for my own
senior picture or anything else. And this morning, the minute
Pamela called to say that a detective wanted to see if I could
identify someone in a picture from nineteen

eighty,
that was the first thing to come to mind. And even after all these
years, when I called Janet about five seconds after Pamela called me
from the alumni office, it was the first thing she thought of too."

"I
just knew," Janet Behnoud said. "I just did."

I
went for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

"Who
was she? She must have had a name?"

As
I figured, they shrugged in unison.

"Nobody
knows," said Anne.

"No
one I know ever saw her again," Janet added.

"And
this Swogger fellow didn't know her from Adam?" Carl asked.

"Never
seen her before in his life."

Carl
drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. I checked my
fingernails. After a time I said, "You said you had an address
for Jeff Swogger."

Anne
rose and headed back toward the kitchen. Janet leaned that way,
thought about following, but instead stayed put.

"That's
how come we were acting so weird before," she explained. "It's
almost like we've been waiting all these years for this thing to
somehow come home to roost, if you can understand that."

"Sure
as hell isn't something you could forget," Carl said.

"It's
more than that," she said. "It's more like being married to
a drunk for all these years. Believe me, I know all about that. When
you're married to a drunk, you spend your life waiting for the call.
The one that tells you he's been fired, or he's in jail, or he's
dead, or he's killed somebody else's family. Every time the phone
rings, your stomach flips over because you know it's inevitable,
sooner or later the call is going to come."

Anne
returned with a blue three-by-five card. She stood her ground two
paces from me. "This isn't going to be any trouble for Jeff, is
it? I mean, he's got a really wonderful life going on. He's important
to a lot

of
people. I wouldn't want to do anything that caused Jeff any trouble."

"I
don't see how it could. It's just that we just don't have anything
else to go on. We need to put a name on that girl. And what you've
told us here today is all we've got."

She
passed me the card. I had to laugh.

"What's
so funny?" Behnoud wanted to know.

I
read the card aloud. "The Reverend Jeffrey Swogger, Northwest
Christian Center, Fifteen sixty-six Northeast One forty-eighth,
Redmond, Washington."

"That's
rich," Carl snorted. "All of fifteen miles from home."

"What
goes around comes around," said Siemons gravely.

Behnoud
saved the day. "Well," she said to her friend, "vou
gave him the address, now tell him the rest."

I
waited. Carl stopped drumming his fingers. "This gets weirder,"
Siemons said. "I'm all ears," said Carl.

"You're
not the first people who ever came here asking about her."

"Connley
retired. Took his thirty years and headed for the weeds."

"When
was that?" I asked.

"Eighty-six,
eighty-seven. Somewhere in there."

Flush
with fitness. Strapping was the word for this guy. His wide
wedge-shaped body hummed beneath the hand-tailored blue uniform of
the Madison Fire Department. Small features. Dark curly hair, light
blue eyes.

"Any
idea as to Mr. Connley's current whereabouts?"

"Depends
on who wants to know," he said agreeably.

I
showed him my PI license. "I wanted to ask him about an old
case." "He'd like that." "He would?"

"Oh,
sure. He'll talk your ear off. He comes in all the time. With those
old-timers, firefighting is like in their blood. They can't help it.
He stayed away for a couple of years there. Then, when his missus
died a few years back, after a while he started coming in again.
Volunteering. Consulting. Doing whatever he could. You know. He's on
tonight over at Seventh Street." The rest was easy.

The
much-fingered business card that Anne Siemons had produced read,
"William S. Connley, Criminal Investigation Division, Madison
Fire Department." Red logo. Two phone numbers. Home and
department, I presumed. I'd tried both. Neither was still active.

He
was about sixty. A big man, thick everywhere, A long oval face made
longer by a vast freckled dome over which he insistently combed
irregular fronds of wispy gray hair. William Connley had also once
been strapping. Now, even with the aluminum cane, he shuffled with an
odd broken gait as his left leg threatened to disappear behind him
with each step. The result was a severe list toward the maimed side,
a tilt so gravity-defying that each subsequent step seemed
miraculous. He settled his bulk into a chair next to Carl. We shook
hands and exchanged names.

"Floor
collapsed on me over in Buckeye back in eighty-five," he
announced. "Broke my back. They stuck me answering the phone."

He
looked speculatively at Carl.

"Car
accident in seventy-seven," Carl said.

"Hughes
says you guys want to talk about an old case of mine."

I
kept it simple and recent. We were trying to put a name on a picture.
The picture in the annual. Siemons and Behnoud and the banquet story.
He absentmindedly pushed his fingers through the burn holes in the
front of his soiled navy cardigan sweater while I ran it down for
him. When I finished, he said, "You didn't say why."

"No,
I didn't."

He
waited.

"I
don't mean to be impolite or anything, Mr. Connley—I mean, I'm not
purposely trying to be mysterious."

"Bill,"
he interrupted.

"It's
just such a strange deal," I continued. "I don't even know
if it's a case at all. I'm not sure what to say about it."

He
held up a hand. "Tell you what. I'll tell you what I know. When
I get done, then you can decide what you want to tell me, okay?"

Hughes
was right. Connley liked to talk. He started at the beginning, ran
down his entire career, the triumphs, the tragedies, the accident,
losing his wife to colon cancer, the whole thing. It seemed like he
hadn't had an audience in a long time. It took him the better part of
forty minutes to work his way up to 1980.

"So,
back in the middle of nineteen eighty. Early July. Stan Roker and I
were the whole damn arson team back then. Managed to get along
without Harvard degrees too."

He
looked to us for agreement and got it.

Satisfied,
he went on. "We ran into anything too wild, we called the
Staties. Nowadays—" He stopped himself. "Anyway, what
happens is this. First couple of days in July, the old Miles place
burns down. By modern standards probably more of a mansion than a
house. It's like three stories, twenty-five rooms, wood-frame
construction, probably ninety years old at the time. Sits way back on
its own ten acres inside the city limits. Not visible from the road.
By the time we get an alarm and the first unit arrives, the entire
structure is fully engaged and already beginning to collapse. Chief
Petersen decides there's no possibility of anything being alive
inside, so no sense risking anybody's life, tells the units
commanders to just keep it from setting the surrounding woods on
fire."

"Anything
suspicious about the fire?" I asked.

"Lemme
finish now," he said. "But no. Place was so far gone when
we got there. That old. Wood construction. It burned itself into a
heap. Anyhow, the place belonged to Victoria Miles. Everybody in town
knew that. About eighty at the time. Family was one of the original
settlers of the area. Her husband was Charles G. Miles. Probably
don't mean much to

either
of you, made his fortune in lumber, but he was real prominent around
here. Died in the late sixties."

"The
name rings a bell," said Carl. "Was he an art collector or
something like that?"

"Yeah,
good." He slapped a meaty paw down onto Carl's arm. "A
collector, but not art. Other stuff. Coins. Stamps. Chinese
porcelain. Crap like that."

"He
used to loan the stuff out to museums," Carl said.

"Sure
did. He was real famous for it."

"I
saw his collection of Roman coins once back in New York. That's where
I remember the name from. It was supposedly the finest collection of
its kind in the world."

"That's
him all right."

I
stepped back and leaned against the wall.

"So,"
Connley continued, "when things cool down we dig one body out of
the rubble. The old lady. Or that's what the coroner says. Damn near
nothing left of it, but he gets a good dental match. Okay, so far so
good. These things are unfortunate, but they happen. The place was a
firetrap. She was an old woman. She lived alone."

He
held up a meaty finger.

"Ah,"
prompted Carl.

"Right.
Hang on now, Carl. Heh. Heh. Well, the smoke no sooner clears when we
got her next of kin lightin' a fire under us. All very concerned, you
know. None of 'em had seen her in years, of course, but now they're
all her favorite relative. You know how it is. Truth is, everybody
wanted the case cleared so they can get their piece of the pie. I
guess the old lady still had the first dime her old man ever left
her, which was a hell of a lot of dimes. So, at this point, her
family is breathing down our necks when we get contacted by her
insurance company. They're shittin' a brick. They're still carrying a
two-million-dollar policy on the old man's collections."

This
got the reaction he'd been looking for.

"And
get this," he continued, "that wasn't the value of the
collections—no sir, the collections were worth more like six or
seven. Two was just all they were willing to insure them for as long
as Miles insisted on keeping the stuff at home."

"At
home. Like in the house?" Carl asked.

"You
got it. And the only way they'd insure it at all was if he built
himself a fireproof vault in the basement."

"Which,
I take it, he did."

"Big
as life. Fifteen by thirty, to be exact. Steel and firebrick. Took
three construction cranes working in tandem six hours to get it up
out of the basement."

He
paused for effect. Looking at each of us in turn.