The Ragman's Memory (18 page)

Seeing Tony Brandt’s office lights on, however, I changed my mind.

He was working at his computer, smoking his ever-present pipe, filling the office with a thick cloud of smoke he’d been recently told was now strictly forbidden, under penalty of state law.

I left the door open to air the place out a bit. “Still at it?” I asked, parking myself on a low filing cabinet.

He sat back and pushed his glasses up to rub his eyes. “Yeah—budget crunching. Last year’s level funding is looking generous compared to this. I’m considering cuts I would have laughed at a few months ago.”

I didn’t answer, reconsidering the impulse that had sent me in here.

“So,” he added, seemingly out of the blue, “I guess Milo did have rabies.”

I looked at him closely. “How’d you hear about that?”

“The ME’s office released it late this afternoon, following standard protocol, and the
Reformer
picked it up, along with a lot of other people. It’s the first U.S. death of rabies in two years, the first urban death in twenty, and they’re going to paint the town with it. Between the Davis remains, the convention center rescue, and this, Stanley Katz’s subscription drive is going to go through the roof.”

His voice made it clear he didn’t share Katz’s joy. “I wish someone had asked Hillstrom to sit on the story until we had a chance to sort it out. It was a little embarrassing handing out a suitable quote when I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”

I was grateful for the mildness of his reproach. We both knew Hillstrom would’ve honored just such a request—if I’d asked her. “I didn’t even think of it. She and I talked right after the staff meeting. That’s when she confirmed it was rabies. I asked her to do some more homework on it, but it never crossed my mind she’d release what she had to the media.”

“She always does, Joe. It’s part of her job.”

“I know. I blew it. I guess I was distracted by her saying there were no animal bites. She says that’s extraordinarily rare.”

Tony gave me a quizzical look. “You think it was something other than an animal?”

“Milo had come into money recently—supposedly enough to keep him going for life—at least his kind of life. But he was very coy about its source. Point is, if someone was paying him off for some reason, they don’t have to anymore.”

Tony was skeptical, and still obviously irritated with me. “Murder using rabies? Sounds like a movie.”

“We’re already considering murder using phenobarbital.”

I gave Tony credit—he didn’t reject the comparison out of hand.

“How would you do it? Inject it?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t the slightest idea. The body’s a big place to hide a small hole, though, and that body especially had its fair share of hiding places—sores, pimples, bug bites, Christ knows what else. I suppose you could smear rabid saliva on a piece of toast.”

Tony raised his eyebrows.

“Hillstrom’s the one who wants to do more tests,” I said defensively. “And you have to admit, Milo’s death is hardly clear-cut.”

He changed the subject after a slight pause. “Your crew find anything new on any other front?”

I shook my head. “Too early, and I’ve been out of the office since this afternoon finding one of Milo’s buddies. Willy’s checking Shawna’s local contacts, such as they were, but I think if anyone’s got more to tell us, it’s Mary Wallis—assuming we can get her to open up. Her grief is real, but I think it’s connected to something she’s not telling us.”

Tony didn’t respond, presumably underwhelmed by how much guesswork I was passing off as substance.

I rose to my feet and left, unwilling to give him any more to think about.

· · ·

I wasn’t really expecting to find anyone in the squad room, but a light radiating from Sammie Martens’s small enclave came as no surprise.

I circled the workstations and leaned against the edge of her partition. She was bent over a yellow legal pad, making lists of names. “What’re you working on?”

She looked up at me, her expression keen. “Tabulating the canvass—or what I’ve got so far. Shawna Davis wasn’t just there for a few hours, Joe. I’ve got three people on Mary’s block who saw her on different days. And the contexts are interesting, too. Except for the mailman’s, all the sightings were either through a window or an open door. Nobody saw her going for a walk, or hanging out on the lawn, or riding in the car with Mary. One of them even said she asked Mary who her friend was, and Mary basically told her to mind her own business.”

I smiled at having my suspicions confirmed. “What time span are we talking about?”

“Right now, I wouldn’t stick my neck out further than four days. People don’t remember dates. I had to ask most of them what they were doing at the time, so they could pin it to a day of the week, but it hasn’t been a total success. Two solids are a guy who swears he saw her on a Tuesday; the woman who actually talked to Mary says she saw Shawna on her way to play bridge, which is always a Friday. That gives us the four days, but with no guarantees that Shawna was there throughout, or even that those memories are a hundred percent. Still, the odds of four neighbors witnessing someone visiting for a few hours only are pretty slim. A week or so is more likely.”

“I think you’re right. How did they say Mary was acting?”

Sammie made a face. “Fine. Totally normal. They all said that, including the one who was told to bug off. Two of them claimed she even seemed happy. Hardly the lurking conspirator.”

“She may’ve been telling the truth about the thousand dollars.”

Sammie didn’t look convinced. “I suppose, but then why the effort to keep Shawna under wraps?”

I straightened and checked my watch. A little after eleven—not a bad time to catch someone off balance. “Maybe I’ll let you know.”

· · ·

My plan had been to get Mary out of bed, putting her at a psychological disadvantage. But as I drew even with her house, I could see her lights were still on.

The response to my knock, however, was a long time coming. And when the door finally opened, her face was neither mournful, sleepy, nor conspiratorial. It was plainly frightened.

“Are you all right?” I blurted, looking over her shoulder into an empty hallway.

Her expression quickly switched to an all-too-familiar anger. “What do you mean, am I all right? It’s almost midnight. What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“Ask my neighbors. I’m sure there’re a couple you missed.”

“Maybe so,” I answered, making no apologies. “They’ve already made a liar out of you.”

Her mouth opened in astonishment, and she made to close the door in my face. I stopped it with my hand. “We know Shawna was here for several days, Mary. We can talk about that now, or I can make it official—and cause you a world of trouble.”

She looked at my face and finally stood aside. “You people are costing me a fortune in heating bills.”

I stepped inside and removed my coat.

“Don’t make yourself comfortable, Joe. You’re not staying that long. So what if she was here? Is there something illegal in that?”

“There might be if you knew you were harboring a criminal.”

“I didn’t. I told you that.”

I was struck at how different she was from the first time we’d talked. Then, she’d floated somewhere between wistful, mournful, and deceptive. It had only been at the end that she’d started breathing fire. This time, the hostility was immediate, but fueled, I sensed, by the anxiety I’d glimpsed as she’d opened the door. Talking to the neighbors may have been even more constructive than Sammie believed.

“We told you she’d stolen some money. Why didn’t you tell us the truth then, Mary? A lot of people think you’re hiding something.”

She buried her fingers in her hair, looking down at the floor, and then walked toward an open archway beyond the hall.

I followed her into a living room not designed for entertainment or relaxation, but more as an ongoing command center equipped with several long tables holding stacks of leaflets, documents, posters, and books. There were two computers, both turned off, a printer, a copier, a postage meter, and an array of paper cutters and layout tools for making newsletters, announcements, and picket signs, all of which I’d seen her and her colleagues employ in the past. Covering the walls were posters, pictures, and framed newspaper headlines touting over a dozen disparate causes.

Mary Wallis headed for the sole piece of furniture built for comfort—a battered La-Z-Boy recliner—and sank into it with an effort, her eyes closed, her head back. I noticed a bottle of beer and a telephone next to her on a small table.

I straddled an upright chair I pulled out from under one of the conference tables, sensing a small window of vulnerability I wasn’t about to let slip by. I kept my voice low and quiet. “What was going on between you and Shawna?”

She opened her eyes and smiled weakly. “I don’t really know. Maybe an aging woman’s fantasy.”

“Seeing yourself in a troubled girl?”

“Partly.”

“Did you know she’d broken the law?”

“Not specifically. I didn’t know about the money. But it was clear she was hiding.”

“From what?”

“She said it was her mother. I guess we know now it was the man she stole from.”

I wondered if that was wishful thinking, an attempt to mislead me, or truly what she believed. “You think she was telling the truth about her mother?”

Mary raised her eyebrows. “Just because a girl’s eighteen doesn’t erase the fear her family might come after her. The law hasn’t done her much good in the past—why should she trust it now? You probably know a little about my background. When I ran from home, I was scared to death about exactly that, even though I knew damn well nobody was going to come after me. Maybe the paranoia comes from hoping somebody’ll actually care enough to chase you—who knows?”

“How long was Shawna here?”

“A week, more or less.”

“Why did she leave?”

Mary looked at me for a moment, weighing her answer. I realized then I hadn’t been so clever. She’d allowed me a perception of honesty because we’d been treading safe ground. Her next words told me this was no longer the case. “I think my expectations were one-sided. Shawna wasn’t like me after all—and she didn’t share my hopes for her.”

“You had a falling out?”

“Not exactly. She just left one day. I’d been out doing something, and she was gone when I returned.”

I read in a book once that a visitor to Paris a hundred years ago stepped out into the street early one winter morning and was surprised to see that the road wasn’t sheeted in frost, but rather criss-crossed by narrow, frozen bands, running at all angles. His companion—a native—explained that the bands of frost were reflections of the slightly warmer sewer lines and drains running under the street, and that given the first glimmer of sun, all evidence of them would vanish. It was an image I’d never forgotten—and one which returned to me now, watching Mary’s placid face.

“Can you describe Shawna’s teeth?”

Her eyebrows knitted briefly before she said, “About average.”

I was struck not by her bland choice of words, but by the fact she’d answered at all. Surely such a bizarre non sequitur would have normally produced a less measured response. The image of underlying calculation sharpened. “Any peculiarities?”

“She had a gold tooth.” Mary touched her upper jaw without actually baring her own teeth. “About here.”

“Was it decorated in any way?”

This time her slight bafflement seemed genuine. “Decorated? No—it was just a gold tooth. Like a cap or something.”

“She ever show any interest in Satanism or devil worship?”

Her mouth opened slightly. “What? No—of course not.”

“One last question,” I said, slowly getting to my feet. “What was Shawna going to do after she left town? Did she mention where she might go, or any people she might visit?”

Mary remained poker-faced. “She was born and brought up in North Adams. It was all she knew. The whole world outside of there looked good to her.”

I walked toward the front hall. “Mary, I’ll be honest with you. I still don’t think you’re being entirely straight with us. I don’t know why that is, but I hope you’re not into anything too deep. Because we’re going to keep digging until we find out what it is.”

She surprised me then by the softness in her voice and the sadness in her face. “I know.”

· · ·

I closed Mary Wallis’s front door behind me and took a deep breath of cold air. I frequently interviewed people who were less than candid. Most of the time, I understood their motivations—they were usually lowlifes who knew that talking with me could either put them in jail or cost them dearly in some other way.

But Mary was not one of those. She was a decent person who saw life as a cliff to be scaled, whose grim determination paradoxically fueled her vitality. As absurd as I’d seen her be, she thrived in her element.

Tonight, I sensed that cliff had gotten the better of her, but that instead of being part of the obstacle, I represented a helping hand she felt incapable of accepting.

Not that such insight was of any practical use. While it was nice to think she might be suffering from some outside influence—it was just as possible she was a nut in denial who’d seen Shawna as some historical alter ego and had killed her.

· · ·

I had just touched my car door handle when a shadow slid up beside me.

“Get anything?” Willy Kunkle asked.

“A small heart attack just now. What the hell’re you doing here?”

“Got a tip on the inscription you’re not going to like.”

I opened the door. “Get in. I’ll start up the heater.”

He circled around and got into the passenger seat. “I just heard the paper’s running an article identifying the tooth inscription tomorrow, quoting some of the local Satanists on its meaning. My source is a devil worship groupie who says her pals’re licking their chops over the potential PR.”

I adjusted the heater to its highest setting. “Why? The paper’ll probably make them out to be kooks.”

“To these people, no publicity is bad publicity. Any notoriety—the worse the better—is like a free recruiting poster. Besides, this slant is pretty good. Implications of virgin sacrifice? It’ll have ’em coming out of the woods to sign up.”