Gravewriter (11 page)

The cops had found a dead body in the same boathouse where they'd arrested Peter Shadd? Around the same time?

A
mutilated
body? Why the hell hadn't that come up at the trial?

Billy paused a moment and held his chin, thinking. Shadd's lawyer must have won a motion to exclude any mention of the body at the trial. Made sense—if the cops couldn't find a way to charge Shadd with killing a homeless man, then any mention of the body at trial could unfairly color the jury's thinking.

Just like it's coloring my thinking right now.

“Cripes!” Billy said aloud as he banged the keyboard and dispelled the story. No wonder Lady Justice wore a blindfold.

Billy glanced at his desk clock. He knew that if he stayed too long, the light of dawn would pull him up College Hill to the East Side, where he might find Maddox on his morning walk. He sighed and struggled to stand under the weight of his world pressing down on his shoulders. On his way out, Billy grabbed the janitor's mop and stood below the doomsday clock. With the mop handle, he nudged the big hand ahead to three minutes to midnight.

B
illy pulled the van to the curb on a dark and empty street and studied his map under the dome light. Aha. He was close. He headed toward the waterfront. The road cut through a field of house-size storage tanks for the petroleum industry, and then a dense cluster of duplexes and apartments houses. Billy made two quick lefts, turning onto MacKay Avenue. The street sank steeply toward the bay and then turned to soft dirt and angled gently into stinking black mud at the edge of the water—this was a boat ramp, though for nothing much bigger than a canoe.

To the right of the ramp, the shuttered and dilapidated boathouse had been built into the slope, so that the front of the building was on land and the back reached out over the water on log piles.

Billy made a clumsy six-point turn that would have gotten him flunked out of driving school. He studied the building in the driver's side mirror. The nearest streetlight was two houses away, but Billy could see that not much had changed from the picture of the boathouse in the newspaper's archive. A tattered ten-foot tail of police tape fluttered from a railing. The front door had been barricaded with
plywood, but somebody had stolen the boards over a first-floor window, leaving a black hole like a rotting cavity. The building was missing dozens of cedar shingles from its sides, and its floating dock had been dragged ashore, piled in sections, and left to rot.

The boathouse was barely half a mile from Roger Williams Park, where Peter Shadd had supposedly robbed his former cell mate. Shadd could have walked here from the park, but why come all that way just to shoot up? How had he known to come here? Had he bought heroin on the street and then staggered around at random? Would those questions be answered in court?

Billy pictured Lady Justice peeking out from behind her blindfold.

I shouldn't be here.

If caught, he'd be thrown off the jury. Billy was supposed to decide the case on the evidence he heard in court, nothing else. The problem was that justice
wasn't
blind in this case—Peter Shadd wasn't getting his fair shake. He was junkie, a convict—sentenced to jail in the first place because he
deserved
to be there for armed robberies. Billy had sensed that most of the jury already assumed Shadd was guilty of killing Garrett Nickel. They didn't care about the evidence or the circumstances. They wanted to cast their votes and go home.

His thoughts drifted. Angie had never gotten justice, either. Maybe Lady Justice needed Billy to pry open her eyes.

That's when a leg, clad in black jeans and a tall black leather boot, slid out the open window in the boathouse to the building's front porch.

Billy jammed the gearshift to drive and watched.

A woman climbed out the window. She was barely five feet tall, curvy, dressed in black. By her short spiked hair, Billy guessed she was young, mid-twenties, maybe, but he couldn't be sure. Shadows hid her face.

She watched Billy watching her for a few moments.

Then she clasped her hands above her head and gently rolled her
hips in a subtle little dance on the porch, in the dead of night, for the stranger in the van.

Billy hit the gas. The van spurted up the hill.

He hit the brake.

Why am I running away?

“Why do you do this work?” Billy asked her.

“Because my father froze on the fucking street,” she said.

“Isn't it dangerous? At night, in these places, especially for, um …” He caught himself about to put a sexist thought into the atmosphere.

She leaned back on the dirty sofa, tore off a bite of strawberry licorice, and crossed her big black boots.

“For a woman?” she said, finishing his thought. “Would I be safer as a man?” She laughed and lifted a thin brown eyebrow. “I realize men think their dicks have magic powers, but do they protect you from street crime?” She clicked her flashlight on and illuminated Billy's face.

Some strange emotion sizzled on Billy's cheeks. He wasn't sure what it was. Embarrassment? Not quite. She had zinged him, and he had enjoyed it.

She shut off the light and held out the open bag of licorice. Billy took another piece.

He had learned her name was Mia Elizabeth Kahn.

She was an outreach worker for the Manger, a homeless shelter in Providence. Her job was to persuade the drunk, the drugged, and the mentally ill to come in off the streets. The boathouse near the waterfront was on her regular rounds. Billy had wanted to ask her about the dead body found in the boathouse, and whether she had heard of Peter Shadd, but she wouldn't talk on the street, or in his van.

“In the house,” she had suggested, leading Billy by the hand onto the porch.

Her hands were small and strong, the skin buttery with an unscented moisturizer. What had looked like a braided bracelet around her left wrist was in fact a tattoo. Mia had slipped through the window with the grace of a cat burglar, and then had coaxed Billy through. Inside, the boathouse smelled like somebody had burned dried leaves in a gas station's rest room.

When Billy had clumsily entered through the window, invisible creatures had scurried away beneath strata of ankle-deep trash. He sat with her on a dirty sofa.

She was twenty-four, Billy guessed—younger, maybe, but no older. Her red hair was cropped short, dyed blue at the tips, and gelled straight up, like bristles of a toothbrush. Her left ear was pierced at least a dozen times, with silver hoops every quarter inch from the bottom of the lobe to the top of her ear. A tiny metal bar, like a silver tie clip, pierced her right eyebrow, and a blue gemstone twinkled from outside her left nostril.

“Why were you watching this place?” she asked. Her voice was scratchy, and a little lower than Billy might have expected. “Are you a cop?”

“No,” he said, answering the second question, the one he didn't mind answering. “What happened to your father?”

She shrugged, then took another stick of licorice and sucked on it. “When he got moody and compulsive, blowing up anytime somebody spilled Kool-Aid, we thought he was just being an asshole,” she said. “But my dad was a prepsychotic schizophrenic.” She tore into the licorice and chewed a bite down.

“Mine's just an asshole,” Billy said.

“I remember when he swung an ax at my mother and stuck the blade in the ceiling. That was the last day he lived with us. He was on the street when I was in high school. I remember him wearing a backpack with everything he owned, and empty cans dangling from it. He grew a beard down to his crotch. I never knew he smoked until I saw
him outside a movie theater picking butts off the ground and smoking what was left. Lots of people were afraid of him.”

“Were you?”

“I was more afraid of becoming whacko, like him.”

Billy leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Copper wires dangled from a hole.

She asked, “Are you afraid of being like your pop?”

“I'm already an asshole.”

She laughed, saying, “I'm not nuts yet—I'd knock on some wood, but in here I'm afraid I'd knock a hole through it.” She laughed again, loud and hearty. If her family story was difficult for her to tell, she didn't show it. “The last time I saw him was at a Softball play-off my senior season. The restraining order said he wasn't allowed within a hundred and fifty feet of me and my brother, so he watched from beyond center field. Just him. Standing out there alone. He never waved. I don't think we ever made eye contact. I pitched pretty good. We won; he left.” She shrugged again. “My brother was the last one in the family to see him—again, at a game. He played football at Cranston East.”

“Is that Craig Kahn? Playing now at Brown?”

She nodded, impressed. “You certainly know local football.”

“I know they're favored by eight against Cornell,” Billy said, a roundabout way of confessing his gambling habits. “Your brother is the best offensive tackle Brown University ever had—their whole offense runs behind him.” Bill looked her up and down, then chuckled. “How'd you end up with a brother who weighs three hundred pounds?”

“Three thirty-five,” she said. “He used to steal my dinner.”

Billy smiled, paused a moment. He was still curious about her father. “You said your pop froze to death?”

“Like a
Pop
sicle.”

Billy groaned.
Is this chick serious?
“That's sick,” he said. His disgust
delighted her; he could see it in her eyes. Her delight infected him. Billy suddenly felt himself smiling. Her irreverence about death made her more alive than anybody he had met in a long time.

“I've tried crying into a towel,” she explained; “it just made me feel like shit. The father I knew died years before that crazy bearded bum with a backpack. I mourned that loss long, long ago.”

Long, long ago?
What did that mean to someone so young? Five years? Billy had Tex-Mex leftovers in his refrigerator older than that.

“Why are you here, Billy?” she asked.

“A guy was found dead in this house about a year ago.”

She turned toward Billy, brought her feet onto the sofa, and rested her chin on her knee. “In the attic,” she said.

Billy leaned toward her. “You heard of him?”

“I found him.”

He recalled the description in the paper …
a mutilated body.
“Oh Jesus—I'm sorry.”

But he wasn't sorry. He could hardly have been more excited. Who knew what that body meant to the murder trial of Peter Shadd? Maybe nothing. Maybe there was a good reason that the jury had not been told about it. But why?

Billy didn't like the government to have secrets—even if they were intended for good. If the court thought the jury was too stupid to handle all the facts, how would anyone expect those dozen idiots to render a fair verdict? Billy had been an investigative reporter. Maybe his skills had eroded, and—more important—the fire in his chest had gone out, but the instincts were forever. As a reporter, he had never been very good at taking the information he was given without looking around for more.

Mia stuffed half a stick of licorice in her mouth and then peered into the bag. “Three pieces left,” she said. “Two for you, one for me.” She reached the bag to Billy. He took two pieces. “Are you a private eye, Billy?”

“I'm an obituary writer,” he confessed. “Not that I
write
them too often. I mostly just type them.”

She slapped her thigh and laughed. “And you're here in the middle of the night doing research, right? For a screenplay you're writing about a murdered street bum whose ghost crosses the River Styx in a shopping cart looted from a Benny's discount store.”

“You're so close,” Billy said.

Would she understand the truth? Or would she report Billy to the court clerk?

Naw, Billy decided. The boathouse was probably infested with rats, but Mia didn't seem like one of them.

“My name is Billy Povich,” he said. “I'm a juror.”

She smiled at him, squinted a little in surprise—hadn't thought of that one. “What's your case, Mr. Billy Povich? What's it got to do with this old shithole?”

He told her.

She listened without interrupting, then laughed and summed it up. “Are you trying to solve this case? To prove what?”

“I have some questions that the trial isn't answering.”

She looked thoughtfully at him and then shook a finger. “I'm not sure if I'd want you on
my
jury, Billy Povich.”

“Who was the dead guy you found here?”

She shrugged, saying, “There are people you get to know well at the shelter because they have their stories all bunched up inside and they don't need to be invited to spill them all over you. This guy was the other type.”

“That would figure.”

“He showed up at our place for the first time about, oh, maybe six months before he was killed. He'd be here a few weeks, then disappear for a while. That happened a few times. He looked about forty, but the street adds ten years, so I'd guess he was thirty. He didn't have any identification, and he never gave his full name.

“He said we could call him ‘J.R.,' so that's what we called him. I have a police, uh, acquaintance who runs names through the department database for me. He tried running those initials and a personal description against missing-person reports nationwide, but he never found anything.”

“That's a pretty close acquaintance, if he gives you access to internal computer records.”

“As close as we both need,” she said, being cryptic and smiling over it.

Billy wondered,
Is she sleeping with a cop?

Mia spun on the sofa and clunked her boots on the floor.

Something scurried away under the trash.

“J.R. wasn't a junkie, not that I could tell,” she continued. “But he drank himself crazy most nights, and slept here. Spent many days at our shelter. I tried to interview him for a client work sheet—sometimes we can get them benefits they don't know they qualify for. But he wouldn't cooperate. Oh, he was as polite and happy to chat with me, but he never gave up much of himself. His accent was wrong, not quite Rhode Island, though he had a familiar-sounding voice, the kind that made me wonder if I'd run into him long ago and never remembered.”