Instruments of Night (29 page)

“Sure, I did,” Brinker answered. “I hadn’t been mayor very long, but I knew enough to recognize the local law.”

“Local law?” Graves asked. “You mean Sheriff Gerard?”

Brinker looked as if such a possibility struck him as mildly comical. “No, not Gerard. He was sheriff, all right, but when push came to shove, he didn’t really have a lot of say about what went on in Britanny Falls. It was the State Police you went to if you needed something done. They had the right connections. All the way to Albany. And this other guy, the one who was sitting in the bar and who went over to Davies when I left, he was with the State Police. The head honcho for this area. In charge of all the big cases. The Class A felonies, I mean. Rape. Murder.”

“Dennis Portman?”

“That’s right,” Brinker said. “Portman. Big as life. Sitting at the bar. Sort of hunched over it. Wearing that ratty old rainslick. Hat too. Pulled way down, the way he wore it.”

Graves instantly envisioned the scene, Portman curled massively over the wooden bar, neon lights reflected blearily on the rumpled surface of his rainslick.

“He was waiting for me to leave, I guess,” Brinker continued, remembering. “Anyway, the minute I got to the door, Portman walked over to where Mr. Davies was sitting. He took off his hat and shook Mr. Davies’ hand. Mr. Davies was still there when I left my office later that afternoon. So was Portman. Sitting right where he’d been before, in that same booth at the front of the restaurant. It
surprised me. A meeting that long. That’s before I found out that Portman worked for Mr. Davies.”

Eleanor gave no hint of what Edward Davies had told her about his father’s relationship with Portman. “What kind of work did he do for Mr. Davies?” she asked.

“Background checks,” Brinker answered. “Mr. Davies was always concerned about security. Before he hired somebody to work for him, he liked to find out as much as he could about them. That’s what Portman did. He had access to all the records of the New York State Police. He could find out what a person had been up to. He reported stuff like that to Mr. Davies. It was just a way of making a few extra bucks. You see, Portman’s wife was sick for a long time before she died. The bills must have been pretty high. I figure doing a few jobs for Mr. Davies was just Portman’s way of making ends meet.” He sighed, then shrugged. “In those days nobody would have thought that much about it. It was just a little police moonlighting. The way cops hire out to direct traffic at a church or a private party nowadays. Nothing wrong with it. It didn’t mean the guy was on the take.”

“But is that all Portman did for Davies?” Eleanor pressed. “Just background checks?”

Brinker looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“Well, could he have done other jobs for Davies? Jobs that were less … innocent.”

Impatient, Brinker frowned. “Look, why don’t you just come right out with it. So I know what you’re talking about here.”

“Well, since Portman was in charge of the investigation of Faye Harrison’s murder, and since that investigation involved Mr. Davies, we were wondering if we should trust him.”

“Trust him how?”

“Trust him to have conducted a true investigation.”

“Instead of what?” Blinker’s tone had sharpened.

“Working for Mr. Davies.”

“You think Portman might have covered something up about that girl’s murder? Because he worked for Mr. Davies?” Blinker’s gaze shifted from Eleanor to Graves, then back to Eleanor. “Let me tell you something about Dennis Portman, miss. He worked his ass off on that case. He worked day and night on it.” Like Graves, he appeared to recall Portman in his mind, see his great hulk moving down the small streets of Britanny Falls, massive and ungainly, a giant in their placid midst. “He slept on a cot right in Sheriff Gerard’s office. For weeks. Going over everything he could find. There’s no telling how many people Dennis talked to. Walking Mohonk Trail. Floating up and down the river in that old aluminum boat of his. Talking to everybody he could find that might have seen some stranger in the woods or on the river. Somebody who might have had something to do with the murder, or seen something that had to do with it.” He stopped, and for the first time seemed to weigh his words. “To tell you the truth, Dennis went a little nuts over it.”

“Nuts?” Graves asked.

“A little nutty, yes.” Brinker nodded. “Because he started thinking that it had to have been someone at Riverwood who killed that girl. Not a stranger. Or someone from the area. But somebody from Riverwood. Someone who lived there. He was absolutely convinced of it. That’s why he never stopped looking. Until his dying day, I mean. His son told me that. Said that to the very end, Dennis just couldn’t let it go.”

Graves pulled out his notebook. “Portman had a son?”

“Oh, yeah. Charlie lives in Kingston. Got his own little private eye business. He wanted to be like his father. A big-time crime investigator. But it’s mostly divorce work,
I hear. Anyway, it was Charlie who told me Dennis was still working that case up to the minute he passed on.” The old man shook his head in wonder at Portman’s legendary doggedness. “He’d gotten a little crazy by then, Charlie said. Kept going on about the rope. The one the killer used to strangle Faye.”

As Graves knew, nothing in Portman’s notes had ever suggested such a focus. “Why the rope?” he asked.

Brinker shrugged, clearly at a loss to fathom the twists in Dennis Portman’s mind. “Because it was missing, I guess. That’s what Dennis always looked for in the end. Something that was missing.”

G
raves thought Kingston a drab little town of squat brick buildings, old but without the charm of age, dreary, in decline, like an elderly relative whom no one wants to visit anymore. Charlie Portman’s office was on the second floor of a dingy building on Sycamore Street. A Be Back Soon sign was posted on the door. Its cardboard clock said 10:30.

It was only a short wait, but rather than linger on the street, they walked to a small café a few blocks from Portman’s office and took a booth at the front.

“Just coffee,” Eleanor said when the waitress stepped up.

Graves ordered the same, then peered out the smudged window of the diner onto a nearly deserted main street. “They say southern towns look like this now. Left behind.” It was only an idle comment, something he’d tossed in because he could think of nothing else to say. He was not used to small talk, had little idea of how it was accomplished. It was one of the deficiencies his isolation
had imposed, the sense that even with others he was alone, with no obligation to engage them, inquire into even their most superficial aspects, or to in any way reveal his own.

“You’ve never gone back for a visit?” Eleanor asked.

“No.”

“There was no one you wanted to see again?”

Mrs. Flexner’s face swam into Graves’ mind. Kind. Watching him with a patience he still could not fathom. “Only one person,” he said before he could stop himself.

Something in Eleanor’s dark eyes quickened. “Who?”

Graves felt his silence draw in around him, but not before he said, “The woman who took me in.”

“Took you in?”

Graves knew that he had no choice but to answer. “After what happened.” He decided on a course of action, then told her as much as he could. “After my sister died. We’d lived together. My parents had been killed the year before. A car accident. After that I lived with my sister. When she died, a woman took me in. Mrs. Flexner. She’s the one I mean. The one I’d like to have seen again.”

“And yet you never went back to see her?”

“I couldn’t. It would have been too difficult, I suppose.”

He could tell that Eleanor doubted him, suspected that everything he revealed left other things hidden. “You’re like a set of Chinese boxes, Paul,” she said at last. “One inside another, inside another.”

Graves tried to make a joke of it. “I wish I were that mysterious.”

She stared at him without smiling. “You don’t let anyone get close, do you? When someone tries to touch you, you pull away.”

Graves suddenly imagined her reaching out, touching him. He felt a delicate tremor run through him, a subtle
quickening that urged him to escape the enforced solitude he’d lived in for so long. It was a life that now struck him painfully as little more than a blur of eating, sleeping, writing, a noose of featureless days, each scarcely different from the one before or after. He knew it was the life Gwen’s death had fashioned, a choice he’d made to be dead as she was dead, the truth of her murder, of his appalling silence in the face of Sheriff Sloane’s relentless probing, of everything that had happened on Powder Road still hanging from him like the tatters of her bloody dress.

“Paul?”

“What?”

She nodded toward his hands.

He glanced down, saw that his fingers were trembling, and swiftly drew them into his lap, where she could not see them. “Portman may be back at his office by now,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’d better go.”

They paid at the register, then headed down the street toward Portman’s office, past pawnshops and used-furniture stores, the neighborhood Charlie Portman had chosen, or been forced to accept, as the location for his profession.

There was a bail bondsman on the bottom floor of the building. A small blinking neon light promised “personal service.” As he glanced toward the window, Graves saw an elderly man in baggy pants and suspenders sweeping bits of paper across a plain cement floor. There was a red plastic radio on the front desk. Gwen had kept one like that in her room. Kessler had turned it on during that last hour, made her dance and sway around while he clapped and stomped his foot. He’d finally partnered her with Sykes, made him spin her wildly, dip her hard, slam her head against the floor.

Graves could feel his body tightening at the thought of it. He sank his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers
and turned away, toward the door that led up the stairs to Portman’s office.

As he opened it, Eleanor took his arm firmly. “I can do this if you’re not …”

“No, I’m fine,” he interrupted curtly, then wheeled away from her and began to make his way up the stairs.

But he was not fine. He could feel the panic building, the terror that it had never really ended, that Gwen was still stumbling right and left, struggling blearily to keep time with the frantic rhythm of Kessler’s pounding feet, leaving bloody tracks across the floor as Sykes, with both hands wrapped around her wrist, flung her brutally from wall to crushing wall.

At the top of the stairs he looked back. Eleanor had made it only halfway up by then, so he knew he’d bounded up them furiously, taken them two at a time, the way Slovak always did when Kessler seemed almost within his grasp.

Even so, what she said when she reached him at the top of the stairs surprised him.

“I don’t know what’s chasing you, Paul.” Her tone was more tender than any she had ever used with him, a voice more gentle than any he had heard since his sister’s death. “But I think you should face it very soon. Because it’s gaining fast.”

With that she stepped past him, opened the door to Charlie Portman’s office, and walked inside.

“May I help you?” a man asked, blinking rapidly, so that Graves suspected he’d been snoozing at his desk as Eleanor burst in. He got to his feet ponderously. “Charlie Portman,” he said.

Watching as he offered Eleanor his hand, Graves was struck by how closely the younger Portman resembled his dead father. He had the same slack jaws and woeful, hangdog
look, the same shrunken, melancholy eyes. There was even a clear plastic rainslick on a rack behind his desk.

“Belonged to my dad,” Portman said when he noticed Graves staring at it. He smiled and waved his hand, indicating the general disarray of the room, pages from the local newspaper scattered here and there, along with empty soda cans, one or two tin ashtrays, and a few back issues of a police equipment magazine. “Sorry about the mess. I’ve never quite gotten into the habit of picking up after myself.”

He looked to be in his early sixties, and Graves instantly conjured up the story of a young man who’d wanted desperately to be like his father, a noted figure in the State Police, but who’d possessed none of his father’s gifts, and so had ended up with a dull career of petty cases, a life like the furniture in his office, second-rate and badly used.

“Now, what can I do for you?” Portman eased himself back into the chair behind his desk. “That is, assuming it’s me you’re looking for.”

“I’m Paul Graves. This is Eleanor Stern. We’re working on a murder case your father investigated years ago.”

Portman looked at them knowingly. “I’ll bet you mean the one at Riverwood. That girl they found in the woods. Faye Harrison.”

“That’s right,” Graves said.

Eleanor went directly to the issue. “Your father met with Warren Davies the day Faye disappeared. They spent several hours together. Do you know why?”

It was obvious that nothing in what Eleanor had just said was news to Charlie Portman. “Yeah, Dad mentioned that meeting. He said Mr. Davies suspected that someone at Riverwood had been going through his papers. Looking for something. They went over all the possibilities, the people who might be doing it. Finally, Mr. Davies decided it was most likely his son. Eddie. They’d been having a lot
of trouble lately. Mr. Davies asked Dad to look into it. To keep tabs on the kid. Find out where he went when he wasn’t at Riverwood. Who his friends were. Stuff like that. Basically, he wanted to know if the boy was up to something.”

“Is that the sort of job your father would have taken?” Eleanor asked.

“If he’d had the time, he’d probably have done a little work on it. But a few days later that girl turned up dead in the woods. After that Dad had his hands full with that case. It looks to me like you two have had your hands full with it too.” Portman smiled cheerfully, the pose of a village storyteller. “Well, the way it went was this. At first Dad thought it was a guy who’d worked on the estate. Then he thought it was probably somebody the girl knew. Somebody from town or from her school. A boyfriend. Something like that. When that didn’t go anywhere, he figured it was a random thing. The girl went for a walk in the woods and somebody just swept in out of nowhere and killed her. You know, for no reason … except meanness.”