The Ragman's Memory (13 page)

“Tell me something. I’m curious about Milo Douglas’s death. Did you notice any discrepancies—anything that struck you as odd?”

He stopped poking through the drawer and looked up at me carefully. “I thought that was natural causes.”

“Probably was. I’m just picking at it. I sent the body up for an autopsy.”

Thankfully, he sat back in his chair and nodded. “Yeah. They don’t usually just drop dead like that. But the AME was pretty sure of himself, and it looked solid on paper. What’ya thinking?”

“Not much. You listed Danny Soffit and Phil Duke as witnesses. Were they sober?”

“Danny was pretty useless, as usual, but Phil seemed relatively straight at the time.”

“What were they doing under the bridge? I thought both of them went indoors during the winter.”

“They do—normally. They got thrown out by the landlord that morning. Danny wanted to cook something in the room, so he lit a fire in the middle of the floor. Not much damage—the smoke alarm went off—but they ended up on the street. They were spending the night in a kind of cardboard cocoon wedged way up where the under-structure of the bridge meets the wall, as far out of the weather as they could get. They were planning to find other digs the next day. Probably have by now.”

“Where was Milo hanging out?”

“In the storm drain just under them—the one that shoots straight up Main Street. It’s clean, dry, stays the same temperature—a few of them use it year round. At the time Milo died, Danny was cooking something on the cement ledge just under the tunnel entrance.”

“And Milo was fine up to the time he had the seizure?”

“That’s what they said. Guess I shoulda’ pushed a little harder,” he finished apologetically.

“I doubt I would’ve,” I comforted him. “I’m just curious why he died so suddenly. The cardiologist he got those pills from says his heart problem wasn’t that bad.”

“I just took the AME at his word; never occurred to me to chase down the doctor listed on the pill bottle.”

I tapped the side of his leg with my foot, once again keeping my own suspicions to myself. “Relax—it’s a buddy system. We back each other up. Besides, Hillstrom’ll probably tell me I just blew a thousand bucks for nothing. Where d’you think I can find Danny and Phil?”

He looked at me again, this time with determination. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find ’em and let you know.”

· · ·

Several hours later, chained to my desk by a week’s backlog of paperwork, I found myself growing increasingly restless, wondering why George hadn’t called in yet, wanting to settle what was nagging me once and for all.

Had his death better fit his medical condition, and had his physical appearance not been so startling—to me at least—Milo’s passing wouldn’t have caused me much concern. The lives these men led—and they were mostly men—were case studies for premature death. Virtually all alcoholics, they ate rarely and poorly, were constantly exposed to disease and infection, and lived outside in all kinds of weather. In the wintertime, it was true, when the summer transients were gone, the full-time locals generally abandoned their fair-weather camps along the railroad tracks, the interstate, and up behind the Putney Road, to flock to the town’s several fleabag apartment buildings. But it wasn’t much of an improvement, and not all of them bothered. Some of the hard-core—as Milo had been—kept to themselves, and chose crannies to live in a stray dog would pass up.

It was lost in these thoughts, my pen ignored in my hand, that Sammie found me close to suppertime. “We may have a new lead on Shawna Davis. Ron’s talking to someone right now on the phone.”

Ron was just finishing as we reached him. “Thank you very much—you’ve been a big help. I hope you don’t mind if we call you later on… Right… No, I appreciate that. Thanks again.”

He hung up, still scribbling on a sheet of paper before him.

“That was a mailman—Sherman Bailey. He thought he saw Shawna at this address, maybe in late May. It belongs to Mary Wallis.”

“Bingo,” Sammie murmured. Mary Wallis was one of the town’s most outspoken advocates for the downtrodden—women, the poor, minorities, homeless animals, criminals, children, and a dozen other broad, sometimes conflicting categories.

She was well known to me personally, not only because she and Gail shared many of the same passions, but also because she’d been known to act on them to excess. When Gail was assaulted, for example, Mary Wallis took it upon herself to identify the culprit—inaccurately—and bean him on the head with her shoe.

But Wallis could also be an effective and dogged campaigner. With the zeal of a true believer, she pursued her goals with relentless energy and had been known to effect the change of an offending policy almost single-handed.

The trade-off was that both her manner and her approach carried a high personal cost. Few people liked her, including many of those she worked so hard to support. Gail herself, after making much ado about Mary’s tenacity and value as an ally, had to admit that she could only take her in short doses.

“He’s a little vague on the date,” Ron continued, “but he saw her in Wallis’s front yard when he was delivering the mail. The hairdo is a match, along with a studded black leather jacket with colored feathers on the sleeves both Messier and Bertin said she wore.”

“But he can’t get any closer on the date than last spring?” Sammie asked.

Ron shook his head. “He just remembered the weather had started to get hot.”

Suddenly recalling one of Mary Wallis’s pet causes, I leaned forward and checked a list of telephone numbers Ron had thumb-tacked to his wall. “I have an idea how Shawna and Wallis met up.”

I dialed Mother Gert’s, turned on the speakerphone, and waited until she got on the line. “Gert, who processed Shawna Davis the night she visited you?”

There was a long pause as she went to consult the file. “Why?” came the predictable reply.

I pursed my lips. “Because the girl’s dead. Surely you can break a confidence so we can find out why.”

“Is the person who processed her a suspect?”

“We’re not even sure there is a suspect. We’re trying to track her movements.”

There was a moment’s silence on the other end. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Joe.”

I took a deep breath. “Let me try it this way. Will you confirm it was Mary Wallis?”

Gert’s short reply bristled with anger, as if I’d been playing her for a fool. “Yes,” she said, and the line went dead.

I returned the phone gently to its cradle. “So they met that night.”

“Maybe she went to Gert’s because she knew Wallis would be there,” Ron said.

Sammie shook her head. “Shawna only found out about Mother Gert’s that day, at the hairdresser’s.”

“Either way, she must’ve sought out Wallis after ripping off Patty Redding,” he concluded.

“Looks that way,” I admitted.

Harriet Fritter came up behind us. “Joe? There’s a call for you—George Capullo.”

“I’ve been waiting for this,” I explained and picked up Ron’s phone again. “You find ’em, George?”

“Yup. They’re camping in a trailer box on Old Ferry Road—Ferguson’s yard. At least that’s the latest I got. I didn’t want to risk flushing them out. I don’t know how hinky they are.”

I glanced out the window. It was already dark. “They’re not going to freeze to death overnight, are they?”

George chuckled. “Oh, you don’t know these guys. They give layering a whole new meaning. And if they’re there now, they’ll be there in the morning.”

“Thanks a lot, George.”

I hung up the phone and turned to Sammie, remembering her reaction to being left out of the previous night’s action. “You ready to pay a visit to Mary Wallis with me?”

· · ·

Considering Wallis’s bellicose lifestyle, her home was a contradictory reflection of bland self-effacement. Tucked away on Allerton Avenue, a short, dead-end street off Western—and within a short stone’s throw of the interstate—it was of the same post–World War Two building style that had made Levittown famous and architects shudder. And given her manic concern for the environment, I found it ironic that the singsong throb of high-speed traffic permeated the surrounding air with the same dull monotony of waves crashing on a beach. It occurred to me that either Mary had come to embrace her causes after she’d moved in here—and then couldn’t afford to leave—or that she needed the stimulus of a nearby and constant enemy to keep her dander up.

Sammie and I got out of the car, crossed the lawn where the mailman had seen Shawna Davis, and paused at the front door. The house, though lighted inside, didn’t issue a murmur.

But when the door swung open after I rang the bell, Mary Wallis stood before us, white-faced, tear-stained, and so visibly near collapse that I instinctively reached forward and took her by the elbow. “Mary. Are you all right?”

She looked at me in shock and violently pulled her arm away. “What do you want?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing—I just heard a friend of mine had died. What do you want?” Her voice was hard, almost strident.

“Was your friend Shawna Davis?” Sammie asked. Often not the most diplomatic of questioners, there were times when her bluntness was above reproach.

Mary Wallis looked stunned, her hand gripping the door so tightly it began to shake.

“She was last seen here, at your house, sometime last spring.”

Mary worked her mouth to say something, but no words came out.

I spread my hands in a gesture of peace. “Mary, can I fix you some coffee or tea at least? Or call someone to come visit?”

More slowly this time, I reached out, took her elbow, and made a motion to escort her indoors. She showed no resistance, and we were able to cross the threshold and cut off the freezing air that had been rapidly filling the house. Mary began shivering only after the door was shut.

I peeled off my overcoat and draped it over her shoulders.

“Where’s your kitchen? Let me make you something hot to drink.”

She gestured vaguely toward the right, and I steered her ahead of me down a short hallway to a modest kitchen facing the front of the house. I sat her in a chair at a small table in the room’s center, poured some hot water into a kettle I found on the stove, and lit a fire under it.

“Where did you and Shawna meet?” I asked, sitting opposite her.

Sammie leaned against a counter, watching Mary’s face as she spoke.

Her words came out slowly, or maybe carefully, I thought.

“At Mother Gert’s. I was on duty—volunteering—when she came by looking for a bed. I took an instant liking to her.”

“Did she talk about herself much?”

“Not at first. We have a form we’re supposed to fill out for every newcomer, and all I could get out of her was her name and age. Afterward, when I showed her to her room, she began to open up. We didn’t have much business that night, so I stayed with her, listening, for almost three hours.”

My mind returned to Susan Lucey, and to how she, too, had triggered Shawna’s need to share her burdens. “What did she talk about?”

Mary took a deep breath, almost a sob. “Her mother, her school, where she’d grown up. She’d had a very hard life for someone so young. She’d suffered badly at the hands of others.”

I paused for a moment, looking at the woman before me, and suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen or heard from her in a long time, not since her predictable but unsuccessful attempt to derail the convention center project on the Putney Road a half-year ago… And not since the time of Shawna’s disappearance—a coincidental piece of timing I hadn’t noticed until now.

I ventured a guess. “You must have found much in common with her.”

She’d been staring into space and now raised her eyes to meet mine. “Yes. That’s quite true.”

The kettle began whistling, and Sammie went about making tea.

“What were her plans when you met?” I asked.

Mary wiped her cheeks with one hand—a gesture of returning self-control that made me think I should have taken Sammie’s cue and pushed her harder early on. “She had the name of somebody in town—I forget who—a friend of a friend—where she could stay. But I don’t think she had any plans exactly. She just wanted to get away from home.”

“Was she fearful her mother might come after her?”

“Yes, although I told her that being eighteen, she was legally immune. But that’s not what worried her—the legal threat. She was running from her mother’s influence, and there was really no hiding from that.”

“You offered to put her up, didn’t you?”

Her wan, pale face relaxed into a small smile. “Yes—totally against the house rules and good judgment. Gert would have been furious. But Shawna wasn’t interested in any case. She didn’t want another mother figure. I wouldn’t have either, in her shoes.”

Sammie placed the teacup before her. “You want any milk or sugar?”

Mary shook her head. “No, thank you.”

Sammie took advantage of the opening to press on. “But she came back in the long run—about a month later—didn’t she?”

Mary lifted the cup to her lips and took a sip, watching us closely over the brim. She then replaced the cup and shrugged my coat from her shoulders, draping it over the chair next to her. “She came to visit once, to say thank you. It was the last time I saw her. She said she was going away… ”

Her chin began to quiver suddenly, and she dropped her head. “Poor, poor girl… ”

“The day she was here,” Sammie said, almost harshly, “she was carrying a thousand dollars of someone else’s money. She tell you about that?”

I gave Sammie a cautionary glance as Mary straightened and fixed us both with a startled expression. “What?”

“Shawna stole a thousand dollars from the man she was staying with,” I explained. “That’s why we think she was heading out of town.”

Mary’s eyebrows knit slightly. “I wondered why she was so excited.” Her voice then hardened, becoming more businesslike. “So you think that man may have killed her?”

“We were hoping you might give us some insight on that,” I said.

She took another delicate sip of tea. “She was very vague about her recent past.”

“Why would she stop here?” Sammie asked. “Hot money in her pocket—you and she had only talked for a few hours a month before. Seems kind of crazy.”