Deadline (10 page)

It was a three-ring binder, blue, with the Androscoggin High School seal stamped in gold on the cover.

And it was clean.

I opened the binder and took out a wrinkled manila envelope. There was white lined paper in the binder, but I flipped through it and it was blank. I put the binder down and opened the envelope. In it was a stack of prints, eight-by-tens, black-and-white. I pulled them out and froze.

A woman, naked from the waist up, her breasts silhouetted by a lamp. A couple standing beside a bed, the woman nude and the man wearing boxer shorts. They were pressed together, embracing.

A girl, fourteen or fifteen, shot in daylight as she walked beside an in-ground pool. She was naked. A towel hung from her left hand and her hair was dark and wet and slicked back behind her ears.

Another one with the figure blurred, though you could tell it was female. A woman wearing a dress, bending down. That one was blurry, too.

Arthur. Arthur the voyeur.

I felt sick. Clammy and nauseated. I stuck the pictures back in the envelope and tucked the envelope under my arm. Sticking the binder back on the shelf, I got unsteadily to my feet and headed for the curtain.

Everyone was in when I got back to the paper. Even Martin, waiting for me by the partition, a sheaf of hard copy in his hand. I walked by him and headed for the bathroom, where I stood at the sink and looked at the pictures again under the light.

They were more chilling than erotic. Ghostly, almost. I went through the whole stack and thought I recognized only one of the figures. It was a woman in a slip or something, and I was pretty sure it was one of the waitresses at the Pine Tree. She was in her thirties. Blonde and sort of tough. I looked at the picture, the figure framed by curtains, the camera pointed through the window to the lighted room. I turned off the light, opened the door, and walked to my desk, where I slid the waitress into the top middle drawer, under some papers and notebooks. The envelope still under my arm, I waved to Martin again, said I'd be right back, and walked up the street to the police station.

Charlotte the dispatcher was watching a soap opera on the television above the radio console. A blonde woman in a strapless black dress was kissing a guy in a tuxedo. Charlotte was drinking diet cola from a can. I asked her if Vigue was in and she nodded toward his office in mid-sip.

He was on the phone, a file open in front of him, photocopied checks spread out on the desk.

“Yeah, I could find him if I wanted to spend a month in Florida. I'd go in a second, but something tells me the taxpayers would see things a little different … Yeah … I know … So one of these days he'll get picked up. These guys can't stay straight. Yeah. They got asshole genes … So he'll get picked up and then we'll go after him. No, it isn't gonna happen tomorrow. Next month, I don't know. Yeah … Yup.”

He hung up the phone.

“Another happy customer,” he said.

“I've got something to show you,” I said, and dropped the envelope on the desk in front of him.

“What's this, your diploma?”

“Arthur's. Arthur Bertin's. Stuff I found at his studio.”

“Playing cop or what?”

“Somebody's got to do it. Open it up.”

He looked at me like I'd pushed him too far, then slowly picked up the envelope and opened the clasp. He pulled the prints out, with the couple embracing on top, then deliberately thumbed through them.

“So?”

“They're Arthur's. I got them at his studio. In the bedroom. I was looking for some prints he took for us. I found these.”

“Should I arrest you now or later?” Vigue muttered, but he lit a cigarette, then started thumbing through them again.

“So this is how the boy got his jollies, huh? If the girls didn't come to him, he went to them.”

“Through the bushes.”

“Better than knocking at the front door, I guess. Hey. This babe works at the Savings.”

He was looking at the picture of the couple embracing.

“Wouldn't kick her out of bed, would ya,” Vigue said.

“Anybody else you know?”

He shook his head and kept looking, stopping at each picture for a few seconds. As he looked, I told him about the narrow depth of field, the small portion of the photos that was in focus.

“Shot with a telephoto,” I said. “A two-hundred, maybe. The prints are grainy, so he probably pushed the film to sixteen-hundred. Especially shooting at night through a lighted window.”

“We get a lot of prowler calls. Maybe they'll stop.”

“Maybe Arthur took one of these too many and somebody decided to get rid of him.”

Vigue didn't appear to have heard me. I was about to rephrase it when he shook his head slightly, side to side.

“Nobody gets that pissed off about some guy taking his old lady's picture,” he said. “If he does, he kicks Arthur around the yard, busts his camera over his head, maybe. The wife calls the cops and we charge them both with disorderly conduct.”

“No swim in the canal?”

“Not in my book. Blow his head off from the back porch, maybe. But nothing like you're thinking,” he said.

Vigue had come back to the photo of the couple, the woman from the bank.

“What's he got that I don't got,” he said.

“So what happened?”

“You tell me, Sherlock Holmes.”

There were voices in the hall, cop voices, and then the door rattled and LeMaire, J. and a reserve kid named Kelly pushed through, laughing. Vigue stuck the pictures back in the envelope and started to hand them to me. I put my hands in my pockets.

“For your investigation,” I said, nodded to the boys, and left.

I sat at my computer terminal and ran my hand over my face. I'd missed a spot shaving, leaving a strip of stubble under my jawbone. I
ran my fingers over the spot and stared at the photograph in the top drawer of my desk.

Vigue had known the bank teller. I'd known the night waitress from the Pine Tree.

Her name was Joy and she worked the counter. I'd never paid much attention to her before, but then, I'd never seen so much of her before.

The photo was slightly out of focus and very grainy, like the rest of the stuff from the blue binder. The waitress was standing, apparently looking into a mirror. She looked like she might be saying that she didn't look bad for thirty-eight or thirty-six or whatever she was. And she didn't.

She was naked, lean and trim from all that waitressing. Lift those trays, serve those coffees. I found myself scrutinizing her figure and, for a second, wondering what she would feel like, what she would say. Was this what Arthur had felt?

I caught myself. Maybe I shouldn't have kept this one out. Maybe I should have given them all to Vigue, washed my hands of it. Or maybe I should have made copies of all of them. If I wanted some evidence for myself, why just one? Well, it was done now, but for the first time I began to feel like I was getting tangled up, that I wasn't in control. I wondered if Arthur had that feeling, too.

What made him do this? He was a strange sort of asexual guy. What did people like him do to sublimate their sex drive? Did they have one at all? Did he feel as left out as he really was?

In high school, did he have dates? He was in the service. Did he ever go with bar girls in Manila, meet a shy, sort of homely girl from the secretarial pool? Or did he always just watch?

His buddies serve their hitches and come home and get married, going on honeymoons where they flop around in heart-shaped tubs. Not Arthur. They have kids and more kids and driveways littered with broken toys. Arthur doesn't, and over the years, he does a lot of watching as women pair off with men of all shapes and sizes. If you're used to watching, maybe taking pictures of women undressing might be a logical progression.

I'd known reporters who were real wimps who were fascinated by the cop beat, sportswriters who were uncoordinated kids. We all live vicariously, some more than others.

I looked over at Vern. He was eating a cream-filled chocolate cupcake while he talked to someone on the phone. The cream was on his fingers and he wiped them on his maroon coach's jacket. He wasn't a coach. Never had been. He'd found the jacket on the ground after a football game. He'd made a halfhearted attempt to return it and now wore it every day.

Never look a gift fantasy in the mouth.

So what was mine? To be a great reporter and win a Pulitzer? From Androscoggin, Maine, even I couldn't keep that dream going. To go back to New York and save somebody from a mugging in the subway or someplace? Write a book that would put me on the cover of
The New York Times Book Review?
Marry Roxanne, build a log cabin in the woods, and live happily ever after, still having great sex at seventy?

Roxanne could be part of it. But not all of it. I'd run on country roads in the fall, ski alone for days in the White Mountains. Get home and have a fire in the fireplace. Read John D. McDonald and listen to Django Reinhardt. Drink good beer before, during, and after all of the above.

The first night we went to bed, Roxanne said I was professionally lonely. Solitary was more like it. Lonely was somebody like Arthur, making his way through the yards in the dark, standing motionless outside windows, escaping with a blurry erotic image on four-hundred-speed film.

A lonely hobby and a lonely life. And a lonely death.

“Zen and the art of weekly newspapers?”

I looked up, startled, quickly slid the drawer shut. Vern was grinning over the top of my terminal.

“I was thinking of checking for a pulse but you blinked,” he said.

I smiled and leaned back from the keyboard.

“Just a lot to think about, I guess. I'm trying to write about Arthur.”

“The news story?”

“News story. Stobit. Maybe an editorial.”

“You sending him out in a blaze of glory?”

“I don't know about that,” I said. “But God, he worked here. For a long time. I'll have to call Martin and find out just how long. But you figure everybody in town knew him, or knew him by sight. God, think of all the team pictures, the installations at the Legion. Twenty or thirty years of this stuff.”

“An institution.”

“Yeah. Just because he was a little eccentric doesn't mean he wasn't part of the fabric of the town, the community.”

“And he died unexpectedly.”

“And suspiciously.”

“You come up with something?”

Vern came around the desk and stood close.

“Not much, really,” I said. “Not that I would be the one to come up with things. But everybody else around here—the ME rubber-stamped
the thing, you know. That makes Vigue say the case is closed. ‘Until the department receives new information.' Blah, blah, blah.”

“What about off the record?”

“Not much more. He thinks it's weird, but what can he do about it? That kind of thing.”

“And if it was a homicide, state cops would handle it,” Vern said.

“But it isn't, so nobody handles it.”

“Catch-22.”

He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, big and doughy and rocking back and forth on his white high-top sneakers.

“That's funny, because it really isn't like Vigue. Guy can be a son of a bitch, but I wouldn't call him lazy.”

“No,” I agreed.

“I remember one time. Before your time. Four years ago, I guess. Kid gets shot hunting up in Roxbury or Byron, one of those places. He was from Mass., or some place, and this other out-of-state guy shoots him. The shooter was from Pennsylvania, I think. So anyway, Vigue finds the guy from Pennsylvania was related to some guy who is in the Mob, with one of those names like Johnny ‘the Homicidal Maniac' Cappaccino, so he decides that it might have been an execution. So the staties come in and they're here for two or three days, and we run all these stories that are libelous as hell about this guy, who turns out to be a schoolteacher who felt like hell already for shooting this guy. The miracle was that the guy didn't kill himself in jail. Thing wasn't cleared up for months.”

“So what happened?”

“Oh, he paid a fine and got probation or something. Turned out the other guy, the guy who got killed, was driving deer, and he had a blaze-orange handkerchief and the rest of his clothes were camouflage.”

“So he deserved it.”

“More or less. But Vigue was running around like we should reconvene the Warren Commission.”

“Nobody's reconvening anything for Arthur,” I said.

“He's not from out of state,” Vern said, now leaning against the partition.

“And the ME says it's an accident. I guess that means Vigue can't launch an all-out investigation, but Jesus. He hasn't done anything. Nobody has done anything. A guy supposedly walks two miles from anywhere in the freezing cold to a place that is nothing but rubble. Goes to the edge of this ten-foot wall and slips and falls in. And he's not suicidal, that anyone knows.”

“Just a little weird,” Vern said.

“So?”

“I know. I agree. The guy's idea of a big adventure was shooting an away basketball game. Go all the way to South Paris. If he stayed at the Pine Tree and had a third cup of coffee, we heard about it for a week.”

“It stinks,” I said.

Vigue. The pictures. The medical examiner. Why was Arthur down at the canal? Who cares? What happened? Who knows? Toss the spare parts back inside the old thoracic cavity and staple the little runt back together. We've got work to do here. Bring in the next stiff.

The front door banged and Paul stormed in, tossing his briefcase on the light table.

“That idiot knows my deadline is tonight at five, but he says he has to have it. Has to get it in. It isn't in from the agency, but he'll bring it over. He'll bring it at two minutes of five and I'll be here all night.”

He took a breath.

“Hello. Fellas,” Paul said.

“The Furniture Shoppe?”