Deadline (24 page)

“You all right, Jack?” Cindy whispered.

I nodded, holding the picture by the edges.

It was black-and-white, a five-by-seven print. It showed Roxanne leaning over the table in my apartment, the low coffee table in the living room. It was blurred, but I could see the picture on the wall in the background. An Indian on a horse.
The Scout
. Frederic Remington. Roxanne looked like she was picking something up. Her breasts were in the picture above a blurred triangle of dark hair.

I picked up the phone.

The receptionist at Human Services had a bright metallic voice, like a computer. Roxanne was in an interview. I told her it was urgent, and she said she'd get the message to her. Her tone said there was no need to discuss it further because her position was set in the stone of department policy.

I hung up and still looked. Cindy was standing as if she didn't know whether to stay or go. Roxanne was reaching for something. A plate, maybe, or a glass. Cleaning up, maybe. Vern walked over. I stuck the picture in the envelope.

“Hey, Jack,” Vern said. “You may know this, but with this basketball extravaganza that is going to pay all our salaries—don't thank me—without Arthur taking photos, we're screwed. I can't even fill the thing. What do you want? File shots or something?”

I tried to focus.

“Yeah, I guess,” I mumbled. “You mean last year's stuff?”

“Some, not all. Arthur covered two games this year before he … before he died.”

“What about that high-school kid we used for sports pictures?”

“You said his stuff was junk,” Vern said.

“I don't know. It's all relative. Call him and see if he can shoot a few for you. If he can't, you can have my camera.”

“You want to see junk.”

The envelope was in my hand. Cindy had drifted back toward the front counter, but was still looking back at me, watching. Vern went back to his desk but came back. Bug off, I thought.

He had a folder in his hand.

“Some of these guys have graduated,” Vern began, thumbing through a stack of photos that showed blue crop marks. “We have to see what we can salvage here. What we need is a cover photo. And I'm
not sure Arthur got anything usable in those first two games. Maybe. I'd have to look again. Maybe he got lucky, so to speak.”

Dammit, shut up. Shut up for once.

“These three are possibilities,” Vern went on.

He held out three photos: one of a curly-haired kid about to release a jumper, another of two guys wrestling for a rebound, the third one of an Androscoggin kid driving to the basket, frozen in midair. Arthur's best stuff, right up there with the Wonder Waitress.

“Jette, this kid here, graduated. Hell of a ballplayer. In the Marines now. This guy's not playing. Screwed-up family. He may flunk out. That's what I heard, anyway. This guy driving is a junior. Now that is a possibility. He's gonna be all-conference. Good ball handler. Real scrapper. Ballsy kid.”

“So use him then,” I said.

It sounded abrupt and Vern caught it and looked at me like something was wrong. Then he took his folder and pictures and went back to his desk. I sat down with my picture and looked again.

But Vern was back. He tossed a photo on my desk and I almost jumped.

“That's all sized and ready to go. Here's the dummy for the cover. If you want to send it down early to be shot or whatever. It's up to you. Be nice to give them a little more time to foul it up.”

“Great,” I said, in a voice that said it was anything but.

I took Vern's photo and slid the brown envelope under it. Vern went out front and I walked to the back of the office, where the baskets were set up for material to be sent to North Conway. I walked past the baskets to the hallway and into the bathroom. Behind the closed door, I took Roxanne's picture out again.

The pen had dug deep grooves in the paper, as if the word had been carved into Roxanne's body. I held the picture up to the light and tried to look at it objectively. Analytically. Roxanne. And he knew where she lived. The picture, Jack. Come on now.

It was grainy, barely in focus, with such a narrow depth of field that the rest of the room—the kitchen door, the bookshelves—weren't recognizable. That meant a long lens. A two-hundred at least.

I pictured the house and the table. By the angle of the photo, it had to have been taken from across the driveway. The embankment there. Someone could get high enough up there to be level with or above the window. And they had to use fast film. Four-hundred. From that distance, that meant a tripod.

This was someone who knew something about photography. And it was someone who had the patience to sit in the dark, peering through a lens for hours, waiting for just the right moment.

Arthur.

But Arthur was dead. He'd been dead a week. When had Roxanne been in town? When had she been in my living room naked?

She'd visited twice. We had made love both times, in the bedroom. I remembered that the first time, she had worn my shirt afterwards. She had said the place was freezing. The second time I couldn't seem to remember if she had worn anything after. But Arthur had been dead then. He'd been dead for days.

I looked at the back of the photo. It was Kodak paper. That narrowed it down. I turned it over and looked at the photo again.

Who printed it? Who would or could print it? We had a darkroom. Arthur did. I'd heard Martin talk about printing pictures, but I'd always thought of that as being centuries ago. But Arthur had taught the cops. That didn't narrow it down, either.

The print wasn't great quality. Along with the blurring and the overall graininess, there were tiny marks, lines that might have been dust or scratches on the negative.

I picked up the basketball photo from the edge of the bathroom sink and held it up.

The basketball shot was cleaner. Sharper. The only blemish was a feathered line on the right edge of the print. I looked at the two prints. The basketball player was a vertical. Roxanne was a horizontal. I turned Roxanne on her side so they were both verticals.

I looked again. The same marks.

For months I'd handled Arthur's prints and I'd never noticed it. Now that I knew it was there, it jumped out as if someone had branded the prints with an iron.

I left the bathroom and went out into the back room to where the files and prints and back issues were kept in no particular order. There were boxes of photos, and I grabbed one that was relatively recent and started digging through it.

The mark was everywhere, wherever the photograph was dark. Grass on a football field. A table at the town hall. The black away uniform of the Androscoggin High basketball team.

It was about a half-inch long on a five-by-seven. A little longer on an eight-by-ten. It was always on the edge of the print and it always had the same shape: feathered, with a slight crook at the inner end, the end toward the center of the picture.

I went to my desk with a few of Arthur's prints and tried to go through the photo process in my mind.

There were any number of ways you could end up with an imperfection on a print. The camera lens could be dirty. Or the film could be scratched as it was drawn through the camera. Sometimes spots or
hairlines were caused by dust or dirt that got on the negative in the printing process. Some photographers blew the dust off with compressed air, sold in cans like deodorant spray.

But a scratch on a camera lens didn't show as a fine line on a print. If it showed at all, it would cause a little fogging on part of the picture. And dust didn't land in the same place twice, never mind over and over for months.

So where? How?

I went over the process.

In the darkroom, the negative is placed in a negative holder, a metal plate with an opening the size of a single frame. The negative holder is inserted in the enlarger, above a blank sheet of photo paper and below the condenser. The condenser, a lamp with a thick convex lens attached, throws light on the paper through the negative. The image shows on the light-sensitive paper and, after baths in the developer and fixer solutions, the print is ready.

I ran through the process in my mind as I looked at the two prints.

The common denominator had to be the enlarger. And I'd never known Arthur to use any darkroom but his own.

The jump shot. The rebound. Roxanne. All processed at Arthur's studio? By Arthur? If not Arthur, who?

I sat and fiddled with my notes for a minute and then took out the note and Roxanne's picture. After a minute, my brain made the connection that it should have made immediately.

Fishing the key out of the drawer, I unlocked the file cabinet and took a folder out of the drawer. I opened it and slid the picture of the waitress from the Pine Tree onto the desk. She lay there on the stained
oak in her underwear. I looked around to see that everyone was busy, then held the photo up to the light.

There it was.

The line was there. The same line, small and light and feathery and jabbing at me like a tiny knife.

But what did that mean? Arthur took them all? Arthur wasn't dead? No, I'd seen him dead. That someone was still using his darkroom? That—

A hand touched my shoulder.

“Jack, it's Roxanne on the phone,” Cindy said, whispering. “She says it's important.”

She gave me a knowing, sympathetic look. I reached for the receiver and punched the button.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry to pull you out of your meeting, but something's come up.”

“Yeah,” Roxanne said. “I got your message, but that's not exactly why I'm calling.”

Her voice wasn't right.

“Jack,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I got something in the mail.”

She took a breath.

“A picture.”

It was the same. Same photo. Same inscription. Same theme. They didn't need McMorrow the newspaperman and they didn't need his whore. The message had been addressed to “Roxanne Masterson, Social worker, State Department of Human Services, Portland, Maine.”

No zip.

“I don't care about the picture,” Roxanne said, her voice hesitant and hushed. “It's just the idea that he's out there. The person on the phone. He, or it, is watching me. God, Jack. They know where I live.”

She coughed back a sob, this young woman who earned her living fighting with guys who beat their kids with appliance cords. Mothers who forgot to feed their babies because they were drunk and stoned. People who, no matter what their problem, weren't thrilled to see a social worker coming, and were even less thrilled when she came with a deputy sheriff and took their children away.

Roxanne had told me she'd been spit on, threatened, and called all kinds of names, most of which had something to do with her gender and anatomy. But she was tough, a lot tougher than me in a lot of ways. She just said it was worth taking a little abuse if it saved a kid from a worse fate.

But this one had shaken her, and it was my fault. I had brought her into it. It was my responsibility.

“It's okay,” I said. “Probably some yokel from up here who has an ax to grind. With me, not you. Really. He probably couldn't even find Portland.”

“Jack, what the hell is going on? You're not telling me. You pretend to tell me, but you're not telling me anything. You're really not. Are you? Are you?”

Was I?

“I don't know,” I said. “The guy in the bar. Cormier. The one I got in the fight with. I don't know, but he said the word around town is that I'm out to shut the mill down. Try to do a balanced story on the town's biggest employer pushing for a major tax break, and they think you're out to do something. For them or against them. I guess some of them think I'm against them. But it doesn't have anything to do with you. You're just an easy way for them to try to get to me.”

“What do you mean, it doesn't have anything to do with me, Jack. Goddamn it! I'm looking at this, oh, this sick picture taken by
some god-awful cretin, and it's of me, and he knows where I live, and you say it doesn't have anything to do with me? I get a phone call from somebody who says these awful things, who was looking in the window, and you act like it's some disgruntled subscriber. Goddamn it, Jack. Somebody put a lot of time into this.”

“Yes, they did.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Roxanne, I don't know. I've got to think. I've just got to think.”

She didn't say anything.

“I'll call you this afternoon,” I said. “How long will you be there?”

“Here 'til four-thirty or so. Home after that.”

“I'll call you.”

“I'll be here or there. With the door locked.”

“Yup,” I said, and I was going to say I was sorry, but she had hung up.

Oh, man, I thought. What a mess. Going from bad to worse to even worse than that. And I couldn't let it ride. Not with all this going on. Pictures—of her, not of me. A phone call—to her, not to me. Somebody was zeroing in on Roxanne. But would they stop there? How could I know? I just couldn't let her get more involved, drag her in any more than she was already. Because it didn't have anything to do with her. Nothing. Just that she let herself get mixed up with a guy she met at a party.

No, she didn't deserve this, but what was I supposed to do? Pack up and leave town? Let myself be chased out by some crackpot? It was a legitimate story, for God's sake. At any newspaper worth anything, and some that weren't, a story like this would be standard procedure. A company wants a tax break, threatens to pull out of town, you see
if they're hearing the same stuff in the next place. Big bloody deal. What kind of a whacked-out place was this?

The phone rang before I could come up with any kind of answer.

It was Cooper Wheeler, my buddy from the
Wall Street Journal
, where he was C. Cooper Wheeler, and very good at what he did.

“Hi, Jack,” he said. “How's life with the Eskimo people?”