Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (19 page)

He leaned his ass against a fallen tree trunk, wiped his face with a white handkerchief, sighed. His uniform was informal. The khaki shirt had epaulets on the shoulders and flaps over the pockets. That was about it for uniform, except for the silver badge over his heart. He sighed again, looked skyward as if for guidance. Or patience.

Crystal and I stood around waiting for him to decide something. I admit I have a problem with authority. Crystal has an open and trusting nature, so she has no problem with authority. I tend to assume those in authority are all Nazis.

“I heard from your friend Detweiler,” said Kelso, neither here nor there. “He left me a professional courtesy message. He said he
was working on a matter for you. ‘Matter,’ that’s what he called it. What would be the nature of that matter?”

I told him that someone was stalking my dog, or more precisely that someone had claimed to be stalking my dog.

He peered at me. “A nut?”

“I guess so.”

Then he peered at Crystal. She peered right back at him. “You mean to say you’re hiding out here?”

“Sort of, yes.”

He didn’t like that idea, you could tell. Maybe I wouldn’t like it either if I were him and some outlander brought psycho bait into my community. Besides, he had a vicious and very public human killing in Micmac to deal with. “Do you and Sid Detweiler know the stalker’s identity?”

“No. We’ve been getting anonymous letters.”

“Did you actually see the dogs spread the skeleton around?”

We said no.

Kelso pushed absently at a flat stone with his toe. “I wouldn’t like it if you and Sid Detweiler took measures against the stalker, should one show up here.”

I said I understood.

“I wouldn’t like it if you were luring him out here.”

“What? Luring? Absolutely not. Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know. You tell me what I should think.” He looked to Crystal.

“We’re here for the solitude,” said Crystal. “Luring crazy people is the last thing we want to do.”

“So then if you identify the stalker, what are you going to do?”

“Call you,” I said right on cue.

“I knew Sid Detweiler in New York. Well, by reputation. He solved the Ramirez case. Family of twelve shot to death execution style, including two infants. 1985. He solved it singlehanded.”

I was sorry we didn’t remember the Ramirez case. Seemed families were being murdered execution style every couple of weeks back during the Reagan years.

Kelso pushed himself away from the log and unpacked his Polaroid after rummaging for it in his nylon duffel bag. He asked us to point to the precise spots where we’d found the bones. We did, and he photographed each one. Then he labeled the photos on the back: “Arm and hand,” “leg w/ foot,” “pelvis w/ upper legs,” and so forth. I couldn’t see how the photographs would be of any use.

We stood around waiting as he worked. I was ready to get out of that place before it tainted my view of the whole island. I liked the rest of the island. I wanted to stay a while and have nice sex without old corpses turning up.

“Well, I guess you’ve heard about the night the Castle burned and Kempshall disappeared.”

We said we had.

“Yeah, you got to be in Cabot County at least fifteen minutes before you hear about that.” Kelso’s jowls hung, his trunk was thickening, but he was the same kind of urban hardass as his retired colleague Sid. “Tell me about the condition of the skull one more time.”

Crystal told him this time.

He took notes. “What sort of object would you say might cause a wound like that? Obviously, you can’t make an informed judgment, and I’m not expecting one. I’d just like to hear your opinion. Like an ax?”

We nodded, looked at each other. “Or a hatchet,” Crystal said. “Or a meat cleaver.”

“Or a sword?”

Crystal agreed. “A machete, maybe.”

It was the same general kind of weapon as killed that woman in the rest room at the Cod End. I’ll bet that’s what he was
thinking, but he didn’t say anything. “Are you close friends of Clayton Kempshall’s?” he asked instead.

I said no, we were more casual friends, business friends.

“Would you have a number where he can be reached?”

I had numbers. “He’s in California.”

“Are you going to tell him?” Crystal asked.

“I’m not sure,” said the sheriff. “Depends on how this plays out. He closed his notebook, paused. “I guess you see my problem. There still ain’t any remains. It’s tough to investigate a murder without remains.” But it wasn’t that cut and dried for him. He was troubled by something.

“So what’ll happen, Sheriff?” Crystal asked.

“Things are different here in Cabot County. In New York, there’d be supervisors and procedures. Things are different here in ways I couldn’t even imagine before I spent a couple winters. One of the ways things are different here is that what
III
think matters. By the way, Ms. Spivey, the wife and I are big fans of yours.”

“You are?”

“We installed a Brunswick Gold Crown in the basement a couple of years ago. Oh, we’re not good players or anything, but we enjoy the game. The wife just taped you on ESPN last month against Norma Jean Garth.”

Crystal moaned. “I was awful.”

“Well, you got a couple bad rolls. There’s of course nothing to say you found old Kempshall’s bones. Nothing to say he’s even dead. Now I could make a big thing of it, shake the trees, I might come up with something, but I’m not going to do that. This is on the assumption that we don’t ever see the bones again. A skeleton with its skull split open, you got to think homicide. I’d have to take steps, but not without the actual bones. However, there’s something you ought to know. Most of the people from around here already know about your find.”

“They do? How?”

“How could they?” said Crystal.

“I don’t know how. But I know from experience it’s true. I’m from away. My wife grew up here, but not out here in the islands. It’s different in the islands. Maybe you hear the rocks talk if you were born here, the waves tell you everything, I don’t know.”

“This just applies to people who live here?” asked Crystal.

“Yeah.”

“Then we’re talking abut the Selfs, aren’t we?” I asked.

“Mainly, yes,” said Kelso.

“How about a cup of coffee, Sheriff?” I offered, ready to get off that hill.

“Sounds good,” Kelso said. “Incidently, I’m deputy sheriff. But I’m the law here.”

The day was still exquisite, the air pure and undamaged. Birds sang. Small animals, much to Jellyroll’s delight, scurried and scratched in the brush as we passed. What did nature need with people?

I brewed up a pot of Zabar’s extra good, and we sat at the picnic table drinking it. Kelso seemed distracted, even morose, and I thought he was thinking about the bones up on the hill, but he wasn’t. We sipped in silence for a while, then he said, “In New York when something really savage happened, well, like the Ramirez case, I began to think it changed people for the worse. Not just the people directly involved or the dead people, but everybody in the whole city. At first I thought it was just us cops it changed, because we’re the guys who pick up the shit. But I think everybody changed because of the killing. Now this killing in Micmac—it’s going to change people.”

We sat in silence and watched the harmony of Dog Cove.

Then Crystal said, “Why now?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Why did the dogs only now find the bones?”

His beeper went off.

“Do you need a phone?” I asked.

“You brought one?”

“Yes. Come on in.” I showed him the phone, then went back out on the porch.

Crystal nodded toward the shore trail.

It was Dickie shambling along, pretending to be all loosey-goosey casual, looking around, as he headed our way. Jellyroll barked at him. Dickie walked to the foundation of the boathouse, stopped, looked up at us. Then like a Hollywood Indian he raised his right hand and said “How.” Jellyroll poked his nose through the railing. And Dickie said “How” to him.

Crystal had that “asshole” look on her face.

Dickie said, “Say, I was having a chat with my employee Hawley Self. Hawley says you enjoyed our product, and you seem like a man who appreciates plain speaking, so I wondered if you’d be interested in purchasing—”

All along I’d been pointing to the boat plainly marked POLICE resting against the flat rock twenty feet over his right shoulder blade, but he didn’t catch on.

Crystal could only shake her head.

“Wow!” exclaimed Dickie as it finally caught his eye. “Here? Shhh! Kelso’s
here? here?
Now? What is this? Some kind of setup?” Dickie started backing away. He stumbled, spun, caught himself, and began to flee headlong.

Kelso stepped out on the porch. He said, “Thanks for the phone. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to shout at this fool. Dickie,
halt!
”

Dickie halted.

“You wait right there. I want a word with you.” He turned around to Crystal and me. “This could prove to be a case of police brutality, so you better look the other way, could get real ugly. It’s an interesting question you ask, Crystal. I’ve been asking myself that same question. It just doesn’t seem reasonable that human remains have been laying around in the open all these years.”

“So what do you think?” she asked. She was getting interested. I wished she wouldn’t.

“You brought it up,” said Kelso. “What do you think?”

“The only thing I can think of is that somebody was interrupted in the middle of digging them up.”

“Interrupted by what?”

“Maybe by us coming up the trail, maybe by the dogs.”

Kelso nodded thoughtfully. “These two idiots—Hawley and Dickie—think they can grow dope right under my eyes without me knowing about it. That’s always pissed me off, even back in New York. They think I’m stupid as they are.”

Dickie had gotten tired of standing and had sat on a rock. He chucked pebbles into the water like a little boy waiting for punishment after school.

“Crystal,” I said after Kelso had gone after Dickie, “remember I told you I met Hawley up the hill and he said he’d killed Compton Kempshall?”

“Sure.”

“Did I mention that the weapon he used for the job was a hatchet?”

“No.”

Late that night after Crystal had unpacked her things in the bedroom—I was in the living room listening to Mingus’s “No Private Income Blues,” the 1959 scorcher, not missing the irony— she appeared in the bedroom doorway and said, “Look what I found.”

Crystal was naked beneath the soft flannel shirt she slept in, and it was breezing open as she approached, distracting me from what she’d found.

“This was in the bottom drawer in a shoe box. The box was falling apart. Look how sad it is.”

It was a tan teddy bear. The fur was ratty, bald in patches, faded in others. The sad thing about this teddy bear was that it
had been ripped down the front, torn or cut from under its chin down to its crotch. Someone—a child?—had attempted to patch the wound by lacing it closed. But in places the shoelace had torn through the teddy bear’s skin, and time-browned cotton stuffing protruded from its thoracic region.

“Aww,” said Crystal. “Do you think it was Clayton’s?”

EIGHTEEN

A
rtie—!” Crystal hissed. “Somebody’s out there!”

I must have heard it in my sleep, before Crystal shook my shoulder, because I was dreaming about a screen door, white paint peeling, slap-slapping in a desiccating wind that blew across an arid, cactus landscape I’d never seen before. I snapped bolt upright, but the distinction between that dreamy desert and reality was still fuzzy.

Jellyroll was barking his alarm bark—

Was this a job for the shotgun? You didn’t even have to aim to change the world…

There was enough light to see Crystal pulling a shirt over her breasts. I saw, also, that her eyes were flashing, and that argued for hauling out the firepower. Unarmed, I followed Crystal to the front door. She peeked out one corner, I peeked out the other.

“It’s me! It’s Hawley!” He proved it by shining a powerful flashlight under his chin. His scarred face looked horror-movie hideous in that light. Rainwater puddled in the scar tissue. Rain? I didn’t know it was raining, but it was. And it was windy—

I told Jellyroll to stop barking, and I opened the door. The wind yanked it out of my hands and slammed it against my bare toe. The pain paralyzed me. I waddled backward as Hawley entered.

He was bundled in black rubber boots, stiff yellow foul weather gear, and one of those
Captains Courageous
hats. Water still sluiced off it. He had to lean against the door to get it closed. The wind howled.

“The old man called on the radio. Comin’ back from Micmac in the slop, his engine quit on him. Old man’s needed a valve job since way last summer. I told him. Anyway, he got the hook down, but somehow got all twisted up in the rope and, pop, snapped his arm. So he had to cut the anchor away. He’s drift in’ for the Disappointments right now.”

I didn’t quite grasp the message here. What did he want from us? “Ah, did you call the Coast Guard? Do you want to use my phone?”