Lie Down with the Devil (17 page)

As a child he’d mispronounced that word,
compromise
, in school. Reading aloud, he’d said
compromise
and the teacher had corrected him. His cheeks had burned with crimson fire; a girl had giggled. Now he thought he’d been right about the word: an undelivered promise.

He scanned the roadside, the low trees, the cranberry bogs, the stunted, wind-scoured foliage. A square brownish sign read,
HISTORICAL SITE: NAUSETT BURIAL GROUND.
There was an arrow pointing at a diagonal to the right. He turned before he thought.

It might not be the scene of the crime, but it was the scene of the discovery of the crime. A place to begin, a sidetrip that would satisfy an itch and delay
the visit to the Nausett cop house, the questions he should have asked weeks ago and hadn’t.

The small building with the scaffolding, the one in the photos, turned out to be a church, which puzzled him. He had assumed the Indians of the Cape weren’t churchgoing Christians, but he had been wrong. They were “praying Indians,” early converts to Puritan and Pilgrim ways, he learned from a sign affixed to the boarded-up house. Beyond the scaffolding, the graveyard seemed haphazard and disorganized. No neat rows of crosses, just meandering circles of stones, clumps of trees, occasional tombstones. Few of the stones had carving; few bore names. The crime-scene tape was long gone. The rains had come and gone; the snow, too.

There was more than one circle of stones. He was scanning the trees, the small church, trying to make the scene in front of him match the photos, when a dour-looking man, wearing a heavy wool jacket, chinos, and workboots, emerged from a distant guard shack.

“He’p you any?” The man’s jaws worked a wad of gum.

“This place private?”

“Nah, open to the public, dawn to dusk. Get a lot of picture-takers, grave-rubbers, tourists. In season.”

It wasn’t exactly a question, but the man seemed curious.

“This where that woman was killed?”

The guard smiled through the gum wad. “Yep. I’m the one found her.”

Calvin Gordon. The man matched the stats in the file: sixty-three-year-old army vet; partially disabled; shoulder injury. The bad shoulder wasn’t noticeable under the heavy jacket.

“Musta been something,” Mooney said.

“Believe it.” Small and wiry, the man looked every one of his years. His seamed outdoor skin had seen too much sun.

“You mind talking about it?” Mooney said.

“You a reporter?”

“Hey, if you’ve got other stuff to do …” Mooney let the sentence die. Gordon would have to be bored, bored and cold, he thought. Talking would be better than standing around thinking about how cold it was.

“Where ya want me to start?” the man said. “The beginning? Well, ya know, this here’s a quiet place, mostly someplace tourists stop in the summer and it sure wasn’t no summer, back December. I spent my time in the guardhouse up yonder.”

“Bad night?”

“Cold, misty. Didn’t hear nothing; no kids giggling. Weren’t no beer cans in the morning. When there’s beer cans, I go right out, pick ’em up. Only respectful. Folks buried here.”

“Not much you can do about kids.”

“You got that right. They drink beer and they’re lookin’ for someplace to do it. Some of ’em like to sit on the gravestones and drink, but mostly the only trouble I have is on Halloween.”

“But the day you found the girl?”

“Can’t rightly say why I left the guardhouse when I did, but I always walk around near dawn. There ain’t no schedule to it. I don’t have none of those key-in-the-lock deals like they got over to the army barracks. Nobody comes and checks up on me if I don’t turn a key right to the minute. I wouldn’t work a place like that, where they don’t trust a man.”

While Gordon spoke, Mooney reviewed the man’s
background. Honorable discharge, he recalled. Employment history: paint factory, fishing boat, trash collection. Dismissed once for fighting, once for drunkenness.

“First off, I thought somebody drunk a few too many. Then, when I got closer— Man, it was that ribbon. That horrible face and then that loopy, curly ribbon.” The guard stopped abruptly and Mooney remembered that the guard’s footprints and vomit had contaminated the crime scene.

“Where did you find her?”

Gordon gazed at Mooney speculatively, then beckoned him to a small rectangle of out-of-the-way grass, leading him respectfully around stones and markers.

Mooney sighted on the scaffolded church, moved left till the angles lined up. Why here? he wondered. Why not behind that scrub oak? What made this the best spot to dump a body?

The guard shack stood at the mouth of a narrow road. The small meetinghouse church, the scaffolding, blocked the sightlines. The guard wouldn’t be able to see this area.

“There another road over there?” Mooney nodded his head to the left. A car seemed essential.

“Yep. Through the trees. That’s how they must a come.”

“They?”

“He. Whoever. Whatever.”

The grass near the stone circle was mashed flat— by the body, by the feet of the investigators, by raccoons, for all he knew. Mooney wondered what he had thought he’d see that nobody else could see.

“You didn’t hear them? No engine, no car doors slamming?”

“Hey, I used to hear pretty good, you know? Now? Too much loud music, I guess, and I’m not really supposed to talk about this stuff. Cops already figure I’m the one blabbed about the ribbon. That ribbon shit got in all the papers.”

“Did you recognize her?”

“Hey, people don’t hardly even look like people when they’re dead like that. This wasn’t no casket viewing where they’re all prettied up. The light wasn’t good either, kind of cloudy and broken.” Gordon paused. “She wasn’t wearing clothes, none at all. But that don’t mean it was a sex thing.”

Mooney raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I figured sex, right at first, but then I said to myself if it’s some kinda sex thing, why aren’t they in some hotel or her place or his? I mean, he didn’t jump her and rape her here. No way, not with no noise, not with weather like that. And why’s he gonna dump her here? This here is an Indian burial ground, right?”

“Right,” Mooney said, because the man seemed to want an answer.

“And she sure ain’t one of them, blond girl like that. Blond all the way down, you know? I figure she was put here for a reason.”

“You do?” Mooney tried not to sound pushy, just encouraging.

“Good as saying, You live with ’em, you die with ’em. Dead girl hung with the Indians, she did, friends with the tribe. I figure that’s why the FBI took over. They do all that hate crime stuff.”

“Somebody killed her because she hung around with Indians?”

“You don’t believe me, but that’s ’cause you’re not from around here. Proposition Six, you probably don’t even know what it means.”

“You’re right there.”

“It’s no big deal, the tribe says, just is the town gonna sell them a chunk of land.”

“But you think it is a big deal.”

“Well, hell yeah. First off, where’s a bunch of poor Indians—they’re always crying poor-mouth, too— gonna get all this money to buy the land? And then, look at it, you sell the Nausett a chunk of land, you might as well say they gotta right to be a tribe. That’s one of the things they look at, the government. Does the town recognize the tribe? Selling land to ’em, that’s flat-out recognition.”

“It makes a difference, this recognition business?”

The guard gave Mooney a look like he’d just landed on the planet. “You’re not from around here, all right. Casino gambling, man! Slot machines and dice, and all the trouble that brings on this earth and in the kingdom to come. Oh, they got a church here, but take my word, most of the Indians don’t belong to any church but the holy church of money, high church of the dollar bill. They get themselves recognized as a tribe, next thing you know, this place is all gonna be a parking lot. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot. Folks round here don’t like that.”

Mooney didn’t think Calvin Gordon had just come up with the words, “holy church of money, high church of the dollar bill.” The man sounded like he was reciting lines from a speech, maybe a sermon.

“Once they get the land,” the guard said solemnly, “they’ll build a casino and it will be part of the Indian nation. It won’t even be Nausett anymore.”

Bobby Thurlow strode down the corridor into the light and Mooney knew he’d caught his break. It was the same man he had known half a lifetime ago, still slim and fit, hair shorter, flecked with gray in sharp contrast with his ebony skin. A good cop who’d seen things he didn’t want to see, started drinking a little too much, wised up, and gotten out when the getting was good. Bobby Thurlow had known who he was and how much he could take, a rare combination in a cop.

“Jesus, izzat you?” Thurlow’s bass rumble was lower than low.

“In the flesh.” They shook, Mooney’s big hand all but disappearing in Thurlow’s massive grip.

“How the hell are you?”

“Good. Fine.”

“On vacation? I heard you never took a day off.”

“I’m working, Bobby. I could use some help.” The walls were more than partitions, but less than soundproof, so Mooney kept his voice low. The young receptionist at the front desk was too close and all ears.

“Robert,” the man corrected. “Here, I’m Robert.”

“Robert,” Mooney said easily.

“Boston needs my help?”

“Me. I need your help.”

“How about we go for coffee? Tastes like crap from the machine I got here, swear to God, worse than that crap we chugged in the city.”

Mooney waited while Bobby—Robert, now— arranged to have an officer cover a DARE meeting on Sharp Street and reminded the receptionist to phone the school principal to reassure him that the grounds would be patrolled. The station, light and airy, painted white, seemed more like a real estate office than a police station. The lanky receptionist wasn’t even in uniform.

Mooney assumed that “coffee” meant anything from a long walk to drinks to dinner. He hoped it meant food, an early dinner, maybe a clam roll at one of those shacks near the ocean that he remembered so vividly from childhood. They probably wouldn’t be open yet, not before tourist season began.

Mooney offered his car, but Thurlow said he ought to take a cruiser, just in case something came up. The best place was within easy walking distance, always supposing an old cop like Mooney could manage to move his bones a few blocks in the cold, but Thurlow felt naked without the car. Conti’s had great atmosphere, good draft beer. You could get Sam Adams seasonals, a few smaller local brews on tap. Big fat burgers, too, although those oughta be avoided. Maybe once a week Thurlow slipped and gobbled one, but he worked it off at the gym.

Downtown Nausett was a single traffic light, church on one corner, police station on another, town hall across the way. Unmetered parking lined the quiet street. Conti’s had both a counter and booths. Bobby— Robert—Thurlow hailed the man behind the grill like a friend, ordered two tall Sam winter lagers.

They chose a booth at the back, sank onto cracked red leather.

Thurlow said, “So you want a job? I’m surprised sometimes the whole damn force doesn’t invade. It’s quiet here.”

“Pretty, too.”

“The ocean, man; I love living near the ocean.”

“You’re in charge, hiring and firing?”

“Hey, I’m the chief, but mostly I go by ‘Detective.’ Rosemary, that’s the reception girl, she hates that, likes to tell people she works for the chief, but it sounds wrong to me. I mean, it’s me and one other guy, most of the year. I hire help in the summer, deputies. And they keep telling me I’ll get to hire another full-timer some day. We could use it. I had to hire myself a part-timer to patrol the schoolyard tonight.”

A skinny brunette waitress brought their beers in frosted glasses. She offered menus, big eyes, asked whether they’d like to hear the daily specials.

“Don’t you go tempting me now, Liza.”

The waitress smiled at Thurlow’s rumbled response and subsided with a raised eyebrow.

“Besides,” Thurlow went on, “down here, ‘chief’— well, to me—sounds like I’m trying to set myself up as a kind of counterweight or something to the Indians. So you looking to work on the Cape? Security?”

“I’m looking for help on a case.”

“I thought you said personal.”

“It is.” Mooney found himself reluctant to explain.

The Nausett detective chewed his lip. “This the Wilder thing?”

Mooney nodded, sipped his beer. Thurlow wasn’t the smartest detective Mooney had ever worked with, but he was up there.

“First killing we’ve had since I came, and that makes it one more than I thought I’d see.”

“What would you say if I told you I’d heard rumors it was a hate crime?” The tall glass felt slippery in Mooney’s hand.

Thurlow smiled. “I’d say you been gabbing with Mr. Mouth down the graveyard. I’d say you shoulda talked to me first.”

“Look, I don’t want to step on your toes.”

Thurlow’s grin broadened. “Hell, this case my toes are squished so damned flat already, it don’t make much never mind.”

“What’s your gut tell you?”

“Hate crime?” Thurlow shook his head. “We got ourselves a situation here with the special election coming up. Had some busted windows, shit like that. That’s why we’re patrolling the school. But broken windows are one thing and killing is another. Hate crime? You go into any bar or café or church meeting around here, you’ll get yourself seventeen other theories.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, well, lemme see now. Wilder was pregnant by the police chief. I swear, that little gem was on this pissant local crime Web site—you know about crime Web sites, right? Print any piece of crap you want, sign it ‘anonymous.’ And what else? The vic was stealing from some old guy—I think his name was Bloomquist or Bloomberg—stealing from his trust, in it with her employer, old Hastings, except that’s a crock, too. There is no Bloomquist or Bloomberg, and Brad Hastings doesn’t need to steal any money, because he’s rolling in it already. And the vic was just a paralegal assistant, did library research, looked up deeds and crap.”

“What about casinos?”