Dead Meat (22 page)

“You do think he was murdered, then,” I said.

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Somebody’s murdering people around here.”

“You’ve got a point there.”

“Unless…”

“Unless what?”

She shook her head. “It’s dumb. But I was thinking. He could have—you know, if he saw a big log or something in the water—I mean, he would see it, but…”

“You think he might have done it on purpose, you mean.”

She twitched her shoulders. “Only because of how he seemed last night.”

“Guilty, you mean.”

She nodded.

“Was he the kind of man who’d kill himself?”

She made a flip-flopping motion with her hand. “Really, no. At least I wouldn’t have said so. He thought about dying more than most people, I think. Like every time he went up in the air, which usually was a couple times a day. But it was more like fatalism. He was ready to die. But I don’t think he wanted to. It’s just that, last night, the way he seemed…”

“How late did you stay with him?”

“Oh, not late at all. Actually, we just took a walk. I got in early. I’ve been trying, ever since Phil, you know, my mother…”

I nodded. Then I gestured at the cabin at our backs. “Have you cleaned up in there yet?”

She shook her head. “Don’t tell my mother. I just haven’t had the courage.”

“So far as you know, it’s just the way it was the night Phil Rolando was killed, then?”

“If I didn’t clean it, nobody did. It’s my responsibility.”

“Can we talk about the last time you saw him?”

“Phil?”

“Yes.”

“I told you everything.”

“Can we go over it again?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. There’s not much to tell. We made love. We had candles. He talked about getting the guy who killed his brother.” She looked at me and shrugged again. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t really know. About getting whoever killed Ken. What did he say about that?”

“Just that he was going to get him. That he and I’d get him and string him up.”

“Like Bat Masterson, you said.”

She smiled. “Wyatt Earp, actually. It was so—it seemed childish. Silly. He deputized me. He was going to pin that phony badge on me, but I didn’t have any clothes on, see—”

“What badge?”

She smiled quickly. “He had this make-believe badge. I thought I told you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s dumb, anyway. He put it on my breast in its little leather holder, and—”

“What did it look like?”

“Jesus, Brady. What difference does it make? It was just a game. We were laughing about it.”

“Tell me about the badge, Polly.”

She sighed. “It was in the drawer of the bedside table. He reached across me, opened the drawer, and took it out. And he put it on my breast, like I said, and he said, ‘I hereby deputize you an officer of the law.’ Like that. Then we laughed, and he put the badge back into the drawer.” She arched her eyebrows at me. “You want to know what it looked like?”

“Please.”

She frowned. “A star, I think. I mean, I didn’t exactly examine it. But it was a star. Not a shield.”

“Did it have a circle around it?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, I think it did. A star with a circle around the outside of it.”

“And you assumed it was a toy.”

“Well, sure. It was all a joke, anyway.”

“I suppose it was,” I said. “Can you remember anything else?”

“About the badge, you mean?”

“About anything Phil said that night.”

She stared off toward the lake, which glimmered through the trees. “I know you’re trying to help,” she said softly. “And I know it was me who asked to talk to you. But I don’t like thinking about it. I told you everything. About Phil and about Gib. I feel responsible. I really do. I know that’s irrational. I can’t help it. But I’ll feel that way until I know what really happened to them. Can we—can we not discuss it anymore?”

I put my arm across her shoulders and hugged her. “Sure,” I said. “End of conversation. If you want to talk again, look me up. Okay?”

She nodded and smiled. Then she reached up and kissed my cheek. “Sure,” she said. “And thank you.” She stood up and pivoted to face me. She reached up with both hands to fluff her hair. It was pure seductiveness, the more so because I sensed that it was done without conscious calculation. She posed that way for a moment, hipshot, her breasts thrusting against the front of her blouse, her fingers in her thick hair. “Well,” she said, “are you coming?”

“Not just yet,” I answered. “You go ahead. I’ll be along in a minute.”

She smiled quickly. “Okay.”

I watched her walk away. I waited until she was out of sight before I stood up and turned to try the door to the cabin. It was unlocked. I pushed it open.

The cabin that Phil Rolando and, before him, his brother, Ken, had stayed in was similar to all the others at Raven Lake—a single room, furnished spartanly. There were no electric lights, no indoor toilet facilities. This, as Tiny often reminded me, was the way the city sports seemed to prefer it.

Against the right wall as I entered twin beds jutted into the room. “Beds,” Tiny had once told me, “are important. You don’t skimp on the beds. No matter how primitive the sports pretend they want it, by Jesus they better sleep well or they don’t come back. Good box spring, good mattress. That and good food are more important than good fishin’ for most folks.”

Against the back wall stood a ceiling-high wood cabinet with two doors. On the left was a stove and an untidy stack of firewood, with a few chairs arranged around the flat hide of a black bear that had seen better days.

One of the beds was neatly made. An open duffel bag lay on top of it. The other bed had been slept in. The covers were thrown back, as if someone had leaped out in a hurry.

I went over and sat on the unmade bed. Beside it lay a pair of moccasins and the rumpled top of a pair of striped pajamas. Rolando’s, I assumed. He was barefoot and topless when I found him floating under the dock. On the table beside the bed was a windup alarm clock, a small pile of change, a wristwatch, a flashlight, and the stubs of a pair of candles set into simple glass holders. I picked up the watch. It was a Seiko. It looked expensive. I found no inscription on the back.

I opened the single drawer in the table. Aside from a small scattering of what looked like mouse turds, it was empty.

I moved around to examine the contents of Rolando’s duffel bag. If the police had been in there ahead of me, they had treated Rolando’s belongings with unusual respect. I would have expected to find his stuff strewn all over the room. Instead, everything was more or less neatly packed away—several changes of underwear, half a dozen pairs of socks balled up together, blue jeans, a sweater, a sweatshirt, two neatly folded flannel shirts, one dress shirt in cellophane.

In the bottom I found a leather toilet kit. I unzipped it. Razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, a can of Rise shaving cream, English Leather after-shave, dental floss, a wooden hairbrush, a bottle of nonprescription cold capsules, a bottle of generic aspirin, and a well-squeezed tube of Preparation H.

I emptied each pill bottle. To my inexpert eye and taste, each contained exactly what it purported to contain.

Having emptied the duffel bag, I held it upside down over the bed and shook it. No badge fell out. Nor did I find a wallet or a lethal-looking Colt Python .357 revolver.

For that matter, no plastic baggies full of cocaine fell out, either. Or big wads of high-denomination bills.

I got down on my hands and knees to look under the beds. Under the unused one I found a small leather suitcase. I slid it out and placed it on the bed. Its contents essentially duplicated those of the duffel bag. I looked at the labels of the undershirts and compared them to those that were in the duffel bag. Those in the suitcase were large. Those in the duffel bag were medium.

So the suitcase probably had belonged to Ken Rolando. Polly had said he was taller than his brother. But I found no identification in the suitcase.

It made no sense to me that these two men should travel with no identification whatsoever. No initials on the luggage. No inscription on the watch. No papers, no wallet. No badge.

Polly had been quite definite about Phil Rolando’s badge.

It took only a modest application of intellect for me to deduce that Rolando had hidden some things. If I could find them, I might learn why he had hidden them.

I lit a cigarette and sat on the foot of the bed. I could slit open mattresses and pillows, pry up floorboards, and in general trash the place the way television spies do when they’re searching for secret documents.

Or I could open the doors to the wooden cabinet. Which I did. And found it completely empty.

I tried to imagine what Rolando might have been thinking. Had he wanted to secrete his possessions against a careful, professional search, then I had no chance. But if he simply had taken the precaution to put things out of the sight of casually prying eyes, such as those of Marge or Polly when they came around to tidy up, that was a challenge I felt up to. And if he had hidden his badge after Polly left him the night he died, then it was likely his hiding place was somewhere in this room.

My eye fell on the wood stove. It was small, dull black, cast iron on stubby legs. I went over to it and unlatched the front-opening door. A cloud of wood ash burst out at me. I went back to the bedside table and got Rolando’s flashlight, returned to the stove, and shone the light inside. The ash lay thick in the bottom. It probably hadn’t been used since the cool spring evenings, more than a month ago.

I picked up a stick of kindling from the stack beside the stove and poked around in the ashes. I prodded something solid. Squinting my eyes against the billowing dust, I reached in and pulled out a plastic bag. It had been knotted. It was too dusty for me to see what it contained. I undid the knot.

Two wallets. Two thin black leather folders. Two weapons—one was indeed a Colt Python .357 revolver. The other one was a big-bored automatic.

The black folders fell open to reveal identical silver badges. Five-pointed stars surrounded by a circle.

Both Rolando men had been, as I suspected, U.S. marshals.

One wallet contained a variety of credit cards, licenses, and other documents belonging to someone named Kenneth Sadowski from Albany, New York. The second had ridden in the pocket of one Philip Genetti. Also of Albany.

Polly was right. The Rolando brothers hadn’t been brothers.

Nor had they been Rolandos.

But they had both been federal marshals, and I knew enough to realize that the job of federal marshals is to chase down fugitives. It hadn’t changed since the days of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.

Of course, I reminded myself, U.S. marshals had every right in the world to take fishing vacations in the Maine wilderness.

But I doubted that they routinely traveled under assumed names when they went fishing. Nor did they normally disappear or get themselves murdered and scalped while on vacation.

I returned the items to the plastic bag, knotted it, shoved it back into the wood stove, and pushed the ashes over it with my hand. Then I closed the door to the stove.

I stepped back and brushed my hands on my pants. A thick film of wood ash lay on the pine-plank floor. I picked up the corner of the bearskin and dragged it back and forth over the dirty area. When I slid it back to its original spot, the floor looked reasonably clean.

I went over to the bed and repacked the duffel bag and the suitcase. I slid the suitcase under the bed. I left the duffel bag where I found it.

I stepped back and stood by the door. To my eye, the room looked exactly the way it did when I had first entered. I went back outside, closed the door, and sat on the step.

What had I learned? A U.S. marshal named Kenneth Sadowski, but calling himself Rolando, had come to this place. On business, I had to assume. Within a couple days, he disappeared. Tiny Wheeler dutifully notified the man he assumed was the missing man’s next of kin. A brother, he was supposed to believe, but in reality probably Sadowski’s partner. This second man, whose real name was Philip Genetti, came to Raven Lake, claiming to be concerned about his missing brother. Shortly thereafter he was fatally wounded in the neck with an arrow, scalped, and dumped into Raven Lake.

I also knew that sometime earlier the law firm of Boggs and Kell had tendered an offer to Vern Wheeler to purchase the lodge and all the land that went with it. This, I concluded, just might not be an unrelated fact.

Then my friend, the Indian guide named Woodrow Wilson Pauley, was neatly framed for the murder of Phil Genetti, aka Phil Rolando, the U.S. marshal. And who should take Woody’s case but the law firm of Boggs and Kell.

Then an airplane exploded in the middle of Raven Lake. The pilot was killed. Gib had seemed to both me and Polly Wheeler to be a man burdened with a guilty conscience. He wanted me to go with him on his airplane, to help him with what he called “lawyer-type” problems. Polly thought he had been doing something illegal in Canada.

As far as I knew, nobody else possessed all of these seemingly separate pieces of information.

Except, probably, the murderer.

I got up and went back inside the cabin. I reassured myself that I had left behind no evidence that I had searched the place. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to disguise it. But I did realize two things.

I didn’t know who I could trust.

And I was in over my head.

M
IDAFTERNOON THAT SAME DAY
the police seaplane buzzed overhead and splashed down in the middle of Raven Lake. Tiny and I walked down to the dock to watch it taxi in.

A bulky state trooper climbed out first and made fast. Then Thurl Harris, the sheriff, slouched out, followed by Asa Danforth, the assistant district attorney. Danforth wore a dark green blazer identical to the ones they give the winners of the Master’s golf tournament every year. Otherwise, he didn’t look much like Jack Nicklaus.

We shook hands all around and headed up to the lodge. “So how’s the fishin’ been?” Harris said to Tiny as we walked.