The Ragman's Memory (42 page)

“Joe?”

I looked up and saw Gail standing in the doorway, the smile on her face oddly fitting the tears in her eyes. We silently embraced, lost in each other’s arms—the mutual harbor we’d nurtured over the years.

She knew of my troubles as if by telepathy, and after a few moments unhooked my coat from the back of the door and said, “Let’s go home.”

“It’s the middle of the day.”

“And other people can finish it—for both of us.”

I sighed at the sense of relief that gave me and let her slip the coat over my shoulders.

Outside, I held open my passenger door for her and circled around to the other side. As I slid in behind the wheel, she handed me a large sheet of paper. “This was on the seat. What is it?”

I held it up. It was a beautifully rendered pencil sketch of the Skyview Nursing Home, huddled against a looming black mass of hills, vanishing into a star-packed sky. “I think it’s a gift.”

“Anyone I should worry about?” she asked with a smile.

I laughed and carefully placed the picture on the back seat. “No… Not in the least.”

If you enjoyed
The Ragman’s Memory
, look for
Bellows Falls
, the eighth in the Joe Gunther series.

FROM THE SIDEWALK,
Burlington’s Flynn Theatre on Main Street is at best unprepossessing. One-and-a-half stories high, it is by all appearances solid and well-built, with a white stone facade demurely but elegantly carved with its name, but in that it is no different from an old bank building or a pretentious post office. The striking thing about it is the marquee crowning its bank of front doors like a jester’s gaudy hat. Multi-hued, ornate, and speckled with hundreds of flashing colored bulbs, at night it draws in theatergoers like moths to a flame.

It was not at night that we gathered under that marquee, however, but shortly before ten o’clock the next morning, the time specified by Lenny Markham for his meeting with Duncan Fasca. We’d never considered making this a one-on-one affair, of course, but with the discovery of Jasper’s body, and of what we were presuming was one of his runners, our wariness of Lenny’s role had ratcheted up several notches. No longer were we content with merely stacking the meeting in our favor numerically. Now we were going to stake out the whole building, curious to learn what Lenny might do following our talk.

Unfortunately, our team had not grown much in size, the Burlington PD not being in a position to supply us reinforcements for a case they didn’t own. Our adjusted plan of attack, therefore, was for Fasca and me to meet with Lenny, while Audrey McGowen, Jonathon, and a single plainclothes officer Audrey had begged from Patrol kept watch on the various exits around the building. We all had portable radios, turned off until needed so Lenny wouldn’t be spooked by an inadvertent transmission.

Following some last minute detailing, therefore, Duncan Fasca and I separated from the others and entered the lobby. Like the exterior, it was tastefully low-key—terrazzo floor tiles, antique marble half walls, niched display cases, alternating with mirrors and gentle lighting. The farther we walked, the more that lighting lit the way, allowing for an elegant transition from the glare off the sidewalk. The first sign that the theater’s muted facade was in fact a charade surfaced as we passed from the lobby to the foyer. It soared overhead well in excess of two stories, dwarfing us physically, and injecting an element of wonder. The back of the building was not only taller than its entrance, but being sited on the slope of a hill, extended downward as well.

The effect of this architectural slyness reached completion upon entering the performance hall itself. Even warned of something grand by the foyer’s sneak preview, I was totally unprepared for the enormity of what we encountered. Huge, dark, cavernous, and as resonant as a tomb, the hall seemed more grotto than man-made structure. The orchestra seats swept down and away toward the enormous distant stage, taking full advantage of the site’s natural incline, while the walls, ornate in lavish Art-Deco, hurtled skyward to meet in an elaborate, graceful curved ceiling, some forty feet above our heads. It had been like entering a modest house, discovering an impressive living room, and then proceeding into a cathedral at the rear. I was so taken with the effect that despite our reason for being here, I tilted back my head, let out a quiet laugh, and said, “Jesus. This is wonderful.”

Fasca glanced at the ceiling, muttered, “Yeah, I guess,” and pointed to a staircase along the side wall. “Let’s head up and see if we can find him.”

We didn’t look far. As we reached the mezzanine, we were stopped by a teenager lounging by the guardrail, watching some 80 musicians tuning their instruments.

“You want to see Lenny?” the boy asked, visibly uncomfortable with the setting, obviously not an employee.

“Yeah,” Fasca answered.

“Follow me.”

He led us past an “employees only” sign up another set of stairs, to a landing with a steel ladder leading to a small, square opening some eight feet off the ground. “He’s up there on the grid. Make sure you don’t got nothin’ in your pockets that’ll fall out—pens, pads, stuff like that.”

The boy stood there, waiting for us to go on without him. Fasca hesitated, struck as I’d been by the meaning behind his instructions, remembering what Audrey had said about it being no place for those with vertigo.

“Where will he be?” Fasca finally asked.

“Over the stage. I gotta go.” The boy bolted downstairs and vanished.

“This setup bother you?” I asked Fasca, “knowing Lenny?”

He shrugged and grabbed the first rung of the ladder. “He’s used rug rats before.”

Beyond the square hole at the top of the ladder, there was a tiny landing, a flight of three steps, and a broad wooden catwalk running from one side of the theater to the other, high above the mezzanine, and parallel to the stage. Not that any of this was clearly visible. The lighting was like the dead of night, with only occasional glimmers casting the vaguest of shadows.

I pulled a penlight from my pocket, having ignored the boy’s warning, and turned it on.

We were enmeshed in a spider’s web of enormous steel girders, crisscrossing the air space between the roof overhead and the ceiling I’d admired from below. Shooting off from our catwalk were two others, each at a ninety-degree angle, leading to the grid over the stage. Killing my penlight for a moment, I could see the barest outline of a man, far in the distance, moving around a large, dark piece of equipment.

“I think that’s him,” Fasca muttered and headed gingerly in that direction, as conscious as I was that a fall off the narrow plank bridge would take us right through the ceiling to the seats far below. None of the catwalks had railings.

As we got nearer, I returned the penlight to my pocket. The glow from the cavern beneath us filtered up around the feet of the man ahead, revealing the source of his attention to be a large, extinguished spotlight, sharply angled to pinpoint objects on stage. It was bolted to a thick stanchion, which was attached to an open-mesh steel grate. Its dark, tapered head—an oversized parody of a monk’s cowl—peered down through an open rectangular hole in the grid, also without a rail.

The man, whom I could now see was wearing black pants and a black, long-sleeved turtleneck, turned and straightened as we reached him. In the light from below, his features were sharply highlighted, making him look like a silent movie Dracula. “Who the fuck is this, Duncan?”

His voice was an urgent whisper, incredulous that the sacrament of a cop and his snitch was being so cavalierly breached. Under our feet, through the mesh of the grid and the hole at the base of the light, a crowd of small figures, casually dressed, sat in a large semicircle of chairs, instruments in hand. The familiar sweet jumble of their tuning up revived an instant mental snapshot of the first time my mother took me and my brother to a concert. We’d both thought that initial swelling of incoherent sound was the start of the program, and we’d been entranced.

From this height, I felt like I was looking down from a low-flying airplane.

Fasca’s voice brought me back to the present. “This is Joe Gunther, Lenny. He’s from the AG’s office.”

Lenny Markham glared at me. “My pleasure. Now get the hell out of here. It’s a restricted area. No tourists allowed.”

“He knows you’re my CI.”

Markham looked at both of us in stunned silence.

“The reason I’m here,” I put in, “is that I think your life may be in danger.”

Lenny rolled his eyes heavenward. “No shit, Sherlock.” He pointed at Fasca. “You come sailing in here with a cop from Montpelier, say, ‘He knows you’re my CI, Lenny,’ and you tell me my ass is up for grabs? What kind of fucking idiot do you take me for?” He suddenly stabbed Fasca in the chest with his finger. “You being straight with me?”

Fasca looked confused. “Sure, Lenny. That’s why we came.”

“Then tell me: is this bozo the only one who knows about me?”

The answer should have been an immediate and unequivocal “Yes.” Instead, Duncan hesitated a split second and glanced at me. His “Sure,” came too late.

Markham stepped back as if we’d just exposed him to the plague. “You cocksucker. I take care of your fucking career, and you run me up the flagpole.” He shifted to me abruptly. “So who’s out to kill me, besides you two assholes?”

“Norm Bouch.”

Mimicking a bad melodrama, a sudden burst of orchestral music filled the air, causing both Fasca and me to instinctively look down. Lenny’s reaction was more original. He grabbed the narrow end of the spotlight and swung it with all his strength. It spun around, smacked me on the side of the head, and sent me sprawling against Fasca.

Fasca fell back against one of the steel girders. I continued past him, and stepped through the open hole in the grid.

I have often wondered at the written accounts of people in times of peril. Does time slow down? Do you suddenly reminisce? As my feet slipped past the comforting plane of the grid, and I felt the sudden lurch of abrupt acceleration, neither of those impressions struck me. All I thought, and all I managed to say, was “Shit.”

But that may have been because I wasn’t given more time. Instead of having the full distance of the drop to come up with something more satisfying, I was jarringly interrupted by my right hand grabbing onto the edge of the hole as it went by.

There was a near-mystical feeling to it all in the end, however. Hanging there by one hand, the raised teeth of the grid’s mesh cutting into my fingers, the pain from my shoulder just starting to set in, I did enjoy a moment of almost weightless euphoria. The music which had distracted me now filled the air in which I was suspended, sliding off the curved ceiling and hitting me with a wonderful, swelling vibration. I even knew the tune—the “Infernal Dance,” from Stravinsky’s Firebird—which my mother had exposed us to as children on the record player, another example of her campaign to bring us culture.

Between my dangling feet, the orchestra was hard at work, laboring over their instruments in perfect synchrony, their heads bent over the music. The conductor, in jeans and a colorful shirt, cut the air with her baton, which from here looked as large as a single shaft of straw. I felt warm, and stimulated, and washed with beauty.

I could also feel my hand getting very tired.

“Joe?”

I tilted my head back to look up, half resentful of the intrusion. The movement made me dizzy, and I suddenly remembered how the spotlight had smacked my temple. Seeing Duncan’s terror-filled eyes, I realized for the first time that I was in real trouble. Falling through a hole half-conscious hadn’t seemed all that terrifying at the time. Having interrupted the process, however, and regained an element of focus, I was now all too aware of what was about to happen.

A surge of panic hit me. “I can’t hang on much longer.”

He reached down tentatively and touched my forearm.

“You won’t be able to hold me,” I grunted, the pain in my hand becoming excruciating.

“Right, right,” he muttered. “Can you get your other hand up?”

“I don’t dare try. I can’t feel my right one anymore.”

“Shit,” he said loudly, echoing my own thoughts precisely. Then, “hang on,” and he vanished from view.

I took that last comment as literally as possible.

I no longer wanted to look down, no longer thought the music beautiful and soothing. I was drowning in it now, felt it pulling at my legs. I shut my eyes briefly and thought about letting go. The relief from the pain, even though brief, might be worth it.

Fasca’s excited voice brought me back. “I found something, it’s like a safety strap. I’ll try to get it around you.”

It looked like an oversized leash with a heavy clasp at one end. He quickly slung it around my arm, clipped it to itself, forming a lasso, and then lowered the loop to the middle of my chest.

“Put your left arm through it, so I can snug it up to your armpit.”

I did as he asked and felt the comforting bite of the strap against my body. Still looking up, I saw Fasca stand and straddle the hole, his legs braced for my weight, the strap snaking across the back of his neck and shoulders.

“Okay, now listen. When I tell you, let go with your right hand and lower that arm—fast. I don’t want this thing slipping off. Ready?”

I was intellectually, but nothing happened with my hand. I could no longer feel it, much less control it. My whole body was given over to pain and exhaustion. I shut my eyes.

“Now.”

It worked, although I don’t recall how. There was a sudden drop, a great tightening around my chest. Fasca grunted once, loudly, as if he’d been hit by a branch, and I remember swaying, as I’d enjoyed doing as a child from high in a tree.

Fasca’s strangled voice barked out, “Grab on,” moments later, and I reopened my eyes to see the edge of the hole at eye level. My right arm throbbing, I hooked my left onto the grid and began hefting myself on board. Duncan stopped pulling on the strap and quickly grabbed the back of my belt. With a final heave, he dumped me like a duffel bag at his feet.