The Pied Piper of Death (16 page)

Rocco's manner had shifted into the nonjudgmental pitch of the police interrogation. “How did he die?”

Bea answered. “He was killed in combat during the Korean War, right?”

“Wrong,” Lyon answered. “Lance was killed at Fort Dix, New Jersey after a live ammunition exercise. The Army thought it was one of his own men who shot him in the back.”

Bea put it together. “So since the middle of the eighteenth century, the firstborn of each Piper generation has died under mysterious circumstances.”

“It's always the oldest child and always in their eighteenth year,” Lyon said.

“With the exception of the Korean War guy,” Bea added. “But that might have been an accidental omission.”

“If what you say is true, then Paula is next,” Rocco said.

“She's just turned eighteen,” Lyon said. “Markham Swan was trying to warn her the night he was killed. Swan said the answer was in the Piper Pie. He was partly right, some of the answer is here,” Lyon said with a sweeping gesture across the graves.

“What now?” Rocco asked.

Lyon sensed that the surrounding dead were speaking to him in urgent voices just beyond the realm of understanding. Those interred on this hill high above the river had lain restlessly for a hundred years. It was up to him to give them peace. “There's a set of identical circumstances in these deaths that is beyond coincidence. I think as we continue to search we're going to find more strange facts.”

“God, Lyon!” Rocco said. “Some of those crimes are over a hundred years old. If they are crimes.”

“Let's start with the latest. Bea, can you check into the Defense Department's records and see what the investigation showed about Second Lieutenant Lance Piper's death?”

“I'll have to ply government friends with favors to get fast results,” she replied.

“Please ply. And Rocco, somewhere they will still have records on Rebecca Piper's disappearance. It's possible that some archives may have information on the killing of Thomas Piper in that 1920 speakeasy raid.”

“I'll see what I can dig up,” the large police officer said. “Although I'm still not sure why we're bothering.”

“I have a gut feeling,” Lyon said, “that when we find out what's been happening, we may have a hint as to who killed Markham and why.”

“How come no one put this all together before?” Bea asked.

“There were decades between each incident,” Lyon answered. “Each death occurred under different circumstances. Only in broad retrospect do we see the similarity of family placement and age. Even with that, the pattern didn't jump out at anyone until Markham Swan began to lay it all out for his book. I'll be at the
Hartford Courant
newspaper morgue,” Lyon said.

“I'll be in Hartford too,” Rocco added, “checking in the dormant records of the Hartford police. I'll drive you up there, Lyon. You'll make better time with me since I always travel with my siren on and the bubble lights going.”

“I always suspected you did that,” Bea said.

Since Connecticut is a state with virtually no county government, Rocco knew that very old police records, if they still existed, would be in the dormant records department of the Hartford Police. A sergeant with an abundant mane of pure white hair in reception at the Morgan Street headquarters laughed when he asked directions.

“Dormant Records! Jesus, Chief, no one goes down there except when we're hazing new recruits.”

“Pretend I'm young and direct me.”

“Take the elevator to the basement,” he chortled. “I don't mean down to the firing range and locker room. I'm talking subbasement here. If you can get past the rats and the water level is low, you might find him. If you are lucky, the Beast is either home drunk or has retired.”

“The who?”

“Lieutenant ‘Beast' Langstrom is in charge of Dormant Records. That is, if he's still alive or hasn't been forcibly retired.”

“Oh, that guy,” Rocco said with a nod of recognition. “Wasn't there some incident about his exposing himself during a Saint Paddy parade and taking a piss against the reviewing stand?”

“He still claims he thought he was in the rear of the stand. But that's only cop lore shit, Chief,” the desk sergeant said. “I for one don't even know if the Beast really exists. But somebody is down there.”

“Thanks,” Rocco said as he rang for the elevator.

As the sergeant had predicted, Dormant Records was located in the lowest reaches of the building. The peeling sign near the elevator door pointed past the boiler room. A dusty entrance sign announced,
RECORDS
. The general level of housekeeping proved that any files stored here were truly dormant. A musty smell seemed to rise from the damp cement floors. Ancient wooden file cabinets lined the walls, their yellowing, handwritten labels often unreadable. Naked light bulbs strung half a dozen feet too far apart were the only illumination.

“Anybody home!” Rocco yelled in a voice that echoed down the corridors.

“Who wants to know?” a gravelly voice answered.

“Chief Rocco Herbert, who hates goddamn games!” he yelled back. He attempted to follow the source of a thump-cracking noise.

“Office is closed till Tuesday,” the voice said between cracks.

Rocco slipped sideways past a high row of files that partially blocked a corner. He entered a small room dominated by a cluttered rolltop desk. File boxes reached to the ceiling like temple support columns. A lone police officer tilted precariously forward on a wide desk chair. The room's single occupant was an obese lieutenant in an unpressed uniform with a wildly askew tie stained by blotches of unknown substances. He was intently cracking walnuts with the butt of a .45 automatic.

The butt of the .45 pulverized a walnut into dozens of inedible pieces. He frowned. “See what you made me do. I told you we were closed, Herbert. Now, beat it!”

“I need information, Beast. Nineteen-twenty speakeasy killing in Hartford. Man by the name of Thomas Piper got blown away.”

Another crunch shattered a walnut into the proper bite-size fragments. Lieutenant Langstrom delicately picked at the pieces. “They never let you forget, do they?”

“You mean what happened at the Saint Paddy's Day Parade?” Rocco commiserated.

Langstrom glared. “You out to lunch, Herbert? I'm talking about the liberal press. They must be after us again about friendly fire casualties. The boys accidentally kill a civilian or two and they never let you forget it. What is it this time?”

“I'm here about a case that goes back a lot of years.”

Langstrom raised an arched eyebrow. “You sure you're a sworn officer? Or are you a constable?”

“Will you knock it off, Beast? I'm not a civilian. I got a new case piggybacking on an old one. Okay? I need information.”

“On the nineteen-twenty Park Street police raid?”

“You know the case?”

“A witness said we blew the guy away. The deceased was some rich young kid who was drinking pure grain they passed off as booze. They tried to say that we blew him away with a goddamn minié ball yet.”

“A what?” Rocco asked in astonishment.

“A Civil War piece fired the shot that killed the kid. It was found on the floor. They said one of our guys had it as a throw down. Get that, Chief. Like one of our guys is carrying a Civil War piece around as a throw down. God, they were as bad then as they are now. Some things never improve.”

“How come you remember a case that old?”

“I got nothing else to do down here. I read all the good ones.”

“Jesus, Beast! That was seventy-five years ago.”

“I keep up with the interesting ones that show possibility for the mags. I used to make a few bucks selling true crime stories to the pulps that went in for crime and gore. You know the kind. Mags like
True Private Eye
and
Crime and Punishment
. They always had a bimbo on the cover with a torn blouse and her skirt up to her waist. Some guy's menacing her with what might be a pistol. The gore was on the inside pages. You got paid according to how much blood you generated. Decaps paid the best. I sold them one piece about the Windsor Locks Decapitator. This guy put his victim's head inside the ratchet of the canal lock and when he turned …”

“The speakeasy case, Langstrom. Tell me what else you remember.” Rocco demanded.

“You paying?”

“Hell, no! I'm a cop like you.”

The Beast smiled, and Rocco wondered how a man could have teeth like that and still eat walnuts.

Langstrom leaned back in his swivel chair and belched. He laced his arms behind his neck as Rocco sat on a nearby box of records. “Well?” Rocco pressed.

“It was a high-class speak over on Park Street. You can imagine how it was. Volsted Act or not, our guys didn't touch those places as long as they paid their dues. Well, one day the Feds had a bug up them sent by parties unknown. Our guys had to put on some sort of show, so evidently the force set up a quick in and out deal to satisfy the Bible thumpers. Our people burst in with a couple of the Feds along. There's a little yelling and one shot. This Piper kid falls dead. No one's even got a weapon drawn. A civilian finds this old gun behind the bar. The kid was shot in the back. There was no way to smuggle that cannon into the place and yet we got blamed. The cover-up went down because the kid came from some rich family.”

The Beast belched again and Rocco was not surprised to see him rip a beer bottle cap off with his teeth. He drank most of the bottle in a series of continuous gulps. “About a decade after the speakeasy shooting, something happened to another member of that same family,” Rocco said.

The Beast tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder. It silently disappeared into a void in the distance. “Yep. You're talking about the one who disappeared. Don't remember her first name, but it happened around the same time as the Lindbergh baby snatch. The bad guys were really into kidnapping about that time.”

“Her name was Rebecca.”

“Sounds right. I sold that one to the old
Bound and Gagged
sheet. That kept me in beers and nuts for a month or two. Seems there was this rich young girl over in the central area of the state somewhere …”

“Near Murphysville,” Rocco suggested.

“Yep. Some backwater place like that. Well, this kid just up and disappeared. Never could find a trace of her.”

“Then it was a kidnapping?”

The Beast pounded another walnut. “No ransom note or the like. State police finally dropped it. They figured she ran off with some no-account lover.”

“Do you remember any other details?”

“Weren't none. That's why I couldn't do more with the story and had to lay it off on
Bound and Gagged
. The girl was last seen one afternoon walking in the family cemetery. Good color in that, the mag said. But they had to make up an ending. You can guess what they came up with.”

“Sold into white slavery,” Rocco said.

“You musta read some of those old copies. Sold into white slavery by the yellow hordes, as I recall. Anyway, truth is that some servant of the family saw her walking in the cemetery and then nothing. It was the same family as the kid in the speak. Vipers was their name, or something like that.”

“Piper.”

“Sounds like it. I almost had a feeling there was a family curse on those people. I tried to sell that idea to
Bound and Gagged
, but by that time they were in the process of going belly up. Those good old bloody mags are gone now. People nowadays have no imagination and want to get their blood and violence on film.”

“You ever tell anyone these stories?”

“Not since I stopped selling them to the mags. In fact, now that you mention it, no one ever comes down here for anything anymore.”

Bea Wentworth wondered how many apartments, shopping centers, and condos named Wildwood there were in this country. She slowed the Saturn to turn off New Jersey's Route 129 just past the Wildwood Continuing Care Retirement Community sign. Underneath the name and above the logo was the community's marketing slogan:
WE CARE FOREVER
.

She shivered at the concept as she turned down a cul-de-sac that ended in front of the apartment units and administration building. Directly in front of the U-shaped apartment complex was a three-hole pitch-and-putt golf course. A single player, wearing wildly checked Bermuda shorts, knelt on one knee near the second pin. His ball lay a few feet out and he examined the green's tilt as thoroughly as a general analyzing enemy terrain.

She parked in a visitor's slot in front of the main building and entered a highly polished terrazzo tile entryway that led to a gleaming reception desk. “I'm looking for Colonel Squeeks,” she said. “I understand that he lives here.”

The peppy young woman behind the desk smiled automatically and spoke exuberantly. “Oh, yes, Marvel Squeeks is one of our favorite residents. In fact, you practically ran over him when you came in. He's out there on the golf course now. If you just turn right around and stomp right down you can't miss him.” She giggled. “Oops. Sorry. I call the line dancing classes on Mondays and Wednesdays and I forget myself. If you'd like a sales brochure we are opening our next section in a month. We recommend a full-living luxury apartment to begin with. When you require further care we will move you, at no cost, to our assisted-living units. If necessary, from there you can progress to our state-of-the-art skilled nursing home, available to those who need full care with their activities of daily living.”

Bea blanched. The remains of her day crumbled into a thousand shards. She looked blankly at this refugee from a cheerleading camp who still smiled from behind the reception desk. She realized that she was older than Miss Call-the-Line-Dancing—but that much older? “Do I look like a potential purchaser?” she asked in a low voice.