The Ragman's Memory (16 page)

“It’s not like we don’t have a shitload to do already, you know,” Willy reminded me.

“I realize that, so that might be a good way to use Billy. Patrol likes to do detective work. Get some of them to handle your lesser cases, and cut yourselves some slack. Shawna Davis is the priority case—bear down on anyone who admits knowing her, and keep after that inscription on the tooth. J.P., I want you to chase down the phenobarbital found in Shawna’s hair. Since it’s a prescription drug, it’ll have a paper trail. See if you can find out where it came from. Sammie, you start with the canvass of Mary’s neighborhood, then go wherever it leads you. And Ron, you take the construction project. That’ll involve a ton of paperwork. Find out if Justin Willette will help you out—he’s consulted for us before, he knows his stuff, and he’s told me several times he’s available whenever we need him.”

“I take it I can tell him what we’re up to?” Ron asked.

“Absolutely. Also, as each of you proceeds, you might end up with more or less to do. If that happens, Sammie and Harriet will act as coordinators and either get you more help, or reassign you as necessary. I’ll try to keep up on what everyone’s doing, and I’ll also be putting direct pressure on Mary Wallis."

“While I’ve got you all here,” I added, “I think I better mention something else I’m working on—something that may cause some commotion around town. As you know, Milo Douglas was found dead under the Whetstone bridge a few nights back. I had some doubts about the natural-causes ruling the Assistant ME came up with, so I sent his body to Burlington for an autopsy. I also questioned the two bums that were with him when he died. Now, I may be jumping the gun a little, since the ME hasn’t called back to confirm it, but I think Milo died of rabies.”

A small round of exclamations greeted that, which I quieted with a raised hand. “From what I’ve been told, only about two people a year die in this country from rabies, so if it turns out I’m right, there’re bound to be fireworks. I just wanted you all to know.”

“Was he bitten?” Tyler asked.

I hesitated answering, startled by the implications of the question. “I don’t know yet, but if he wasn’t, we’ll have to find out what happened.”

· · ·

Unfortunately, the ominous undertone of Tyler’s question was almost immediately given credence. Following the staff meeting, I found a note stuck to my phone to call Beverly Hillstrom “ASAP.”

“You were right,” she said when I got her on the line. “We did a brain section and found rabies.”

“Were there any bite marks?”

“No. Of course, that’s not the only way to catch rabies. He might have acquired it via saliva exposure through an abrasion or a skin lesion. There’s also the unlikely possibility of a respiratory infection—two people caught rabies by merely breathing the air of a bat-infested cave a few years ago. But that’s highly unlikely.”

I rubbed my forehead, thinking of Phil and Danny in their trailer, ignorant that I’d asked them to stay put solely to keep them isolated. “If anyone touched the body without wearing gloves, they’ll need shots, right?”

“It would be foolish to do otherwise. Saliva is the primary vehicle of transmission.”

That very point still had me worried. “Doctor, I know you don’t like to hypothesize, but what are the chances of someone catching rabies without being bitten?”

“Statistically? Very slim. I called Fish and Game about this. As you know, there’s a rabies epidemic going on right now in Vermont, so the state currently has a rich and current database of disease transmission routes. Of all known cases where rabies was delivered from one source to another, including human victims, every one was through an animal bite.”

“What does that lead you to conclude?” I asked cautiously, having heard in her voice a true element of concern.

“Nothing yet, but I’m not finished with my analysis. I’m going to examine this body with a fine-tooth comb, Lieutenant. Human death by rabies is extremely rare in this country and essentially nonexistent in urban settings. I’ll do everything I can to find out how this happened.”

· · ·

I had a patrol car pick up Danny and Phil and transport them to the hospital to be cleaned, inoculated, and quarantined. Not trusting them to return for the series of five shots required, the county health officials gave them no choice but to remain as wards of the state. It was a far cry from the cheap beds, ready beer, and curbside deposits of secondhand fast food they preferred. I doubted they’d ever want to set eyes on me again.

It was mid-afternoon when I nosed my car into Arch Street, off of Main, and rolled down the steep, downhill curve that ended behind downtown’s distinctive twin row of stolid red-brick buildings parallel to the railroad tracks. Arch Street was a perfect example of Brattleboro’s unique personality. Down at the heels, littered, and ignored, it was thirty feet below and a stone’s throw east of the town’s vibrant business center, cut off by a rampart of intricately joined old buildings. And yet, just across the tracks and beyond a narrow swath of choking vegetation was a spectacular view of the glittering Connecticut River, and of towering, snow-capped Wantastiquet Mountain on the far bank—the very best scenery the town had to offer, enjoyed primarily by homeless alcoholics and dope-hungry teenagers. Both the contrast and the proximity of these settings spoke volumes about the character of a town at once embracing and bristling, seductive and cranky, charged with staunch conservatives and new liberals. It was not a place conducive to falling asleep at the wheel.

I got out of my car, locked it, and retraced my route partway up the hill toward Main Street. There, I left the pavement, cut through the tangled weeds, jumped down a small retaining wall, and found myself in a narrow gorge where the Whetstone emptied into the Connecticut. Upstream, the brook echoed loudly under the dark and looming bridge, now high overhead.

Picking my way carefully through the brittle underbrush along the bank, avoiding the ice-slick patches nestled among the rocks, I slowly made for the bridge’s gloomy shelter, its darkness emphasized by the dull roar of the water’s rush and the rumbling of the traffic above.

The vegetation petered out at the shadow’s edge, making progress easier, and I walked to the midpoint under the overpass and looked north, along the axis of Main Street. Before me was a five-foot-tall cement wall, topped by a narrow ledge, with a cement and stone abutment above it reaching all the way up to the bridge’s support beams. Just as George Capullo had described it, a roughly-cut entrance, not more than four feet in diameter, was located just above the ledge, looking much like the cave of some wild animal. It was the outlet of the Main Street storm drains, and the last place Milo had called home.

I gingerly placed both hands on the rim of the ledge, watching for broken glass, and hefted myself up. Standing amid the charred debris of Danny’s erstwhile campsite, I peered straight into the jet-black void of the tunnel, squinting against a steady breeze of surprisingly warm air.

I dug a flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on. Some ten feet ahead of me, beyond a rough-hewn ice-encrusted lobby of sorts, there was a bifurcation, with a narrow, tile-lined, twenty-four-inch drain angling off to the right, and a much larger, forty-two-inch cement culvert straight ahead, curving up and away, paralleling the street above.

Haunted by Phil’s harrowing images of Milo’s demented, spasmodic crawl toward the firelight, I headed for the wider of the two drains. There I came to a pleasant discovery. The misgivings I’d been harboring of a smelly, sewer-like environment were displaced by a dry, smooth, clean cement tube, wide enough for me to comfortably proceed in a low crouch.

Locked in the earth’s deep embrace, the tunnel radiated a steady, even temperature—cool in the summer, warm right now. And fed as it was by the gutter inlets in the street, the circulating air was clean and fresh. As I moved rapidly along its length, I had to admire Milo’s aesthetic pragmatism. Aside from the utter lack of light, this was private, protected, and comfortable.

It was also totally empty. For well over a hundred feet, I followed my flashlight’s halo, the monotony of my surroundings only occasionally punctuated by the pain of hitting my spine against the tubular roof. Mercifully, just as my legs were about to collapse from their confined range of motion, I came to a service shaft—a vertical junction of the tunnel I’d been in, and another of the same size, heading the same way, about six feet above it. A manhole blocked an outlet some fifteen feet above. A steel ladder lined one side of the small silo.

I paused to stretch and get the circulation back in my legs. I also killed my flashlight momentarily to get a feel for the dark. The sudden loss of sight was absolute, and oddly liberating. I found my hearing abruptly enhanced and became aware of new sounds that had been accompanying me from the start—the muffled thunder of a busy town going about its daily life. I could hear and distinguish the differing types of traffic, the dulled thumps of tires passing over the manhole cover, even the muted scrapings of shovels working to free the sidewalk of packed snow and ice. It was all seductively womb-like and added to the place’s aura of safety.

That, however, was because I was healthy and alert. Had I been in Milo’s condition, craving fluids while dreading the taste of my own saliva, my body racked by agonizing paroxysms and my head feeling as if it were about to explode, this haven must have seemed like a tomb, and the long crawl out of it a hopeless, frustrating, suffocating torture.

Tempered by this new insight, I climbed the ladder to the next tunnel and kept going—essentially up the middle of Main Street—alone, silent, and utterly beyond reach.

Finally, after another 150 feet, I found what I was after—a piece of plywood, laid along the tunnel floor, allowing for the occasional water to pass beneath it. Perched on its edge was the earthly sum total of a man who had slipped from this life with barely a ripple.

Standing my flashlight on end, so that its beam reflected off the pale, curved ceiling, I removed my winter gloves, replaced them with latex ones, and carefully began dissecting Milo’s belongings.

As with the contents of his pockets at the funeral home, there wasn’t much to see. Clothing for the most part, along with rags, towels, and blankets, in various shapes and stages of disintegration. There were several candle stubs and, surprisingly I thought, a couple of paperback books, albeit on the level of
Conan the Barbarian
. There was also a plastic bag filled with more personal items—letters so old and worn as to be basically illegible, photographs of people who meant nothing to me, a couple of pocketknives, one of which seemed an old and treasured heirloom. There was a stopped watch with a broken strap, a woman’s tortoiseshell barrette, a blank diary with leather covers. As I spread these items and more before me, I knew each must have been as eloquent to Milo as they were meaningless and mute to me. I imagined him occasionally laying them out by candlelight, and losing himself in reflection, tucked away in the bowels of a town that paid him no heed whatsoever.

The bottom of the bag held less interesting debris—petrified chewing gum, rusty paper clips, stiff rubber bands by the dozen, odd scraps of paper. There was also an assortment of pencils, long and short, and a hodgepodge of cheap ballpoint pens, some of which had been dismantled as makeshift cigarette holders.

Finally despairing of finding anything of value in all this, I began preparing to bring it to the office, where brighter light and more time might yield better results. It was then, almost by happenstance, that I focused on the writing along the shaft of one of the ballpoint pens.

Obviously a promotional giveaway, colored a bright blue, the bold yellow lettering spelled out, “Carroll Construction.”

I froze in mid-motion, my brain suddenly filled with more questions than I could grasp. Here again, as with Mary Wallis—and perhaps through her to Shawna Davis—was a connection, however tenuous, to the fifteen-million-dollar convention center that so many hopes and incomes were riding upon.

ON A SLIDING SCALE, BRATTLEBORO'S HOUSING
is heavily weighted toward what was once called the lower middle class, a term long since eclipsed by an array of more baffling, disingenuous, but politically correct substitutes. We had our share of grand homes—and of course the odd eighteen wheeler box or two—but for the most part, we were a town that looked architecturally frozen in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when business was industry, and housing was built for a few owners, their managers, and a great many workers.

The homes of the latter had evolved over time, many of them becoming single-family dwellings, remodeled or rebuilt to look far better than the originals. Others had remained as they were—old triple-deckers, divided into as many small apartments as would fit. Depending on their condition, and where they were located, these catered to anyone from the poor to students to the burgeoning professionals.

There were finally a few housing units that reflected no historical patina, and for which no one kept any nostalgic memories—plain, shabby, decrepit buildings overlooked by most people, but all too well known to us and the town’s fire and ambulance squads, who visited them regularly to either investigate odd, threatening odors, or to cart off another piece of human wreckage to the hospital.

The one I was visiting on Elliot Street was among the worst of these, its featureless facade hiding a squirrelly tangle of gloomy staircases and narrow hallways, all servicing a vast number of small, dark, foul-smelling dens—shelters to an ever-changing population, the likes of Phil and Danny.

I was here now, in fact, on their advice, having just visited them at the hospital. After my discovery of the Carroll Construction pen among Milo’s possessions, I’d wanted to find out how and where he might have gotten it, or if nothing else, what he’d been up to the last few weeks of his life.

They hadn’t been overjoyed to see me, despite my reminding them of their current daily regimen of free food, care, and television. Most people’s misconceptions aside, bums do not lie in the gutter dreaming of such tangible comforts. The “good life” for many of them may not be what they’ve got, but anything’s an improvement over the rat race they fled. In general, Brattleboro’s “regulars” were not demented half-wits, flushed out of a state facility because of fiscal constraints. They were erstwhile inhabitants of the middle-class rush to succeed—once married and mortgaged and managed by a time clock—whose hopes and ambitions had suddenly imploded. While the Dannys of this underworld might indeed be utter victims, the Phils viewed people like me as all but trapped behind bars. An enforced return to that life—especially in a hospital setting—was no thrill to them.