The Ragman's Memory (6 page)

Still, it was with some relief that I got a phone call from Beverly Hillstrom a half-hour later, giving me—I hoped—more than shadowy Satanists to pursue.

Voices over the phone rarely match their owners’ appearance, something blind dates discover all too often, but Beverly Hillstrom’s brought to mind the exact same tall, patrician coolness that she presented in person. A slim, blonde, immaculate middle-aged woman, her diction was grammatical and precise, her manners distinctly old-world, and her ability to put veteran cops in their place with little effort legendary. And yet there was true warmth in her toward those she trusted and respected, a group of which I thankfully was a part.

There were proprieties to be faithfully observed, however, despite a friendship that stretched back years. We never referred to our private lives, never took liberties with social decorum, and always addressed one another by our respective titles. With anyone else, I would have dismissed such unstated ground rules as snotty affectations. With Beverly Hillstrom, I sensed in them a need for order and courtesy, almost a frailty that required nurturing. It was an enigmatic character trait that allowed me to ponder the personality behind it, and occasionally amuse myself with unfounded wild images of her life away from the office.

“You sound relieved to hear from me, Lieutenant. Are you running out of options on this case?”

“You could say that. I just finished telling one of my men to check out all the local Satanists.”

“Ah—the tooth. Is that what that engraving signifies?”

“Supposedly.”

“Well, the tooth might be helpful, although perhaps not for that reason.”

“X-rays?” I blurted out, instantly regretting that I’d rushed her.

There was a telling pause at the other end of the line. “No,” she answered slowly. “X-rays have been taken, of course, and they’ve revealed a badly decayed, albeit previously treated tooth. But I can’t imagine too many dentists having the time to compare any X-rays we could send them to their patient inventories of five thousand or so cases each. It would be a near hopeless task.

“What I was referring to was the gold cap itself—which is actually gold-colored aluminum. I’ve consulted an odontologist colleague of mine up here. She tells me such devices are only rarely used, and then only as temporary stopgaps pending further work.”

When Hillstrom had something hot, she tended to drag it out—a touch of vanity I’d come to patiently accept, considering the usually rewarding results.

“They are apparently nicknamed ‘tin caps,’” she continued, “and their use has a certain psychological elegance I think you’ll find interesting. The X-rays have revealed that the tooth was previously filled—extensively—and that the old filling had failed, explaining the return trip to the dentist for the cap. According to my colleague, since the tooth was already so far gone, the dentist probably had two courses of action left to him—he could prepare the tooth for a permanent cap, as is standard, or, if the patient was too short of funds to afford the roughly six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar cost, he could put on a tin cap for one hundred and seventy-five dollars and tell the patient he or she had six months to find the money.”

“The trick,” and here I could hear the satisfaction in her voice, “is that the tin cap is not only inexpensive, it is also thin-walled, relatively fragile, and not a custom fit. It’s available only in a variety of generic sizes, and every dentist has to improve the fit with added cement, which unfortunately does not hold off further eventual decay. Sooner or later, the patient has to return to the dentist, if for no other reason than the tooth begins to hurt.

“But the plot thickens—I never thought dentists were so devious. It turns out the aluminum cap is chosen not only for its price—about ten dollars each—but because it will only last from six months to a year before the patient eventually bites through it and destroys it. This gives the dentist an even more reliable method of forcing the patient to return for more definitive care.”

I searched through the papers on my desk, quickly locating the close-ups J.P. had given me of the tooth. “So since the cap is aluminum and it hasn’t been bitten through,” I volunteered, “the implications are that a) we’re dealing with a relatively rare dental procedure, and that b) that procedure was done not too long before the victim died.”

She rewarded me with soft laughter. “Precisely. I was told that any dentist doing this kind of work would have his patient on a callback list for the next six to twelve months. So if you’re lucky, you’ll get your identification by asking all those dentists to check not their patient files but their appointment books.”

A sudden doubt checked my own pleasure at hearing this. “But do we know how long the body’s been lying around? If it’s been years, the appointment book won’t be much good.”

“Inactive patient files get culled every two years or so, but I was told most dentists keep their appointment books. I wish I could tell you how long these bones have been exposed, and more about the victim in general, but it’s too early yet. The information I just gave you was readily available, and I wanted to pass it along quickly. Anything else will take more time, I’m afraid, depending on what tests the crime lab conducts. I can’t tell you anything definitive about sex, age, or racial origin yet, and I probably never will be able to specify time of death to your liking.”

“That’s all right. I understand. And I appreciate the tip. We’ve been thawing the ground where we found those skull fragments. With any luck, we should be able to send you some more pieces soon.”

“Everything helps, Lieutenant. Let me know how you fare.”

I thanked her again and hung up, gesturing to Harriet through the open door. “Find Ron. I’ve got a telephone canvass I need him to organize.”

· · ·

North Adams, Massachusetts, lies just below Vermont’s southwestern corner. There are several ways of approaching it from Brattleboro, all of them taking a little over an hour, but my favorite—and the one I chose a few hours after my conversation with Beverly Hillstrom—is due west from Greenfield along Route 2, offering a single, spectacular view of North Adams from the crest of the Hoosac mountain range.

It had once been a flourishing factory town, of textiles I supposed, although I’d never bothered to find out. It lay sprawled at the foot of the mountains, along the winding Hoosic River, like a scattering of toy blocks thrown from the observation platform I always stopped at to appreciate the scenery.

Not that it was an attractive site, even cloaked in a mantle of sun-bleached snow. A jumble of ancient, stained, largely abandoned industrial, brick-clad monsters, enormous even from this distance, the image projected was less aesthetic than one of lasting endurance—a statement of civilization’s stubborn willfulness to make its footprints last beyond reason.

I stood on the wooden deck alongside a decrepit souvenir shop, both of which were cantilevered over the edge of the mountain’s top, and was once again struck by North Adams’s sheer determination. Long deserted by whatever needs had created it in the first place, saddling a road leading to nowhere very important, the place nevertheless hung on, battered and weary, perpetually hopeful. Rumor had it—as rumors often do—that “things were improving.” I hoped they were, if only for the faith that had been expended on their behalf.

Since he’d been the one to locate the dentist we were about to visit, Ron Klesczewski was keeping me company. He had saved my life once, several years back, and had stood his ground next to me in a face-to-face shoot-out last year. Yet he remained an enigmatic mixture of timidity and ambition, courage and wariness, intelligence and naïveté. I was becoming used to the idea that while he always looked like he wouldn’t make it to the end of the week, he’d probably outlast us all.

The dentist’s office was located a few blocks off the main avenue, in a neighborhood—depending on whether the rumors were correct or not—that was either headed for a turnaround or facing a grim end. It had been the only practice we’d found where a patient had received a tin cap and yet had never returned for the permanent replacement. According to the receptionist Ron had spoken with, the patient’s name had been Shawna Davis, age eighteen, and the tin cap visit had been the only time she’d been in.

We parked next to two other cars in a hand-shoveled lot and stumbled over ridges of icy debris toward a one-story, flat-roofed, cement building with spidery cracks running along its walls. Inside, the mood was brightened a bit by gentle canned music and the lingering odor of sweet mouthwash. The waiting room was forlornly empty, however, and the hopeful expression of the woman beaming at us from behind a narrow counter wilted as we showed her our identifications.

“You must be the people I spoke to on the phone,” she said, her smile lingering as an afterthought. The nameplate on her white cardigan read Alice.

“Yes,” Ron admitted. “We’re here about Shawna Davis.”

“Right.” Alice rose from her seat and crossed to the back of her small work area, returning with a thick book. “I checked our patient files to see if she was still there, but we must have dumped her.” She sat back down and looked at us apologetically. “We do that pretty regularly. We don’t have room to keep them all.”

Ron smiled back. “We understand. Were you able to talk to the dentist, to see if he remembered her?”

“I did, but he drew a total blank. He remembered the aluminum cap—they’re pretty rare—but he told me he no longer knew if the person he’d put it in was a boy or a girl. You can ask him yourself if you want, but he’s going to be tied up for another thirty minutes probably.” She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. Dr. Williams doesn’t have much of a memory.”

I motioned toward the thick book. “That the appointment calendar?”

She looked down at it as if it had snuck up on her. “Oh, right.” She flipped it open to the correct page, turned it around so we could read its contents, and tapped an entry with her crimson fingernail. “That’s her—Davis, S.—that’s when she came for the cap.”

She placed a Post-it note on the page to mark it, spun the book back around, and reopened it at a later page. “And here’s where the callback appointment shows up. There’s another one a week later, but then we gave up.” She handed the book over to us so we could study both pages at leisure.

As Ron returned to the first entry, I asked, “Do you have any memory of her?”

Alice made a face. “Kind of. I’ve been trying to remember ever since you called, but you know, it’s hard. We see a lot of one-timers, and I guess she just didn’t stand out much.”

I glanced over Ron’s shoulder. “What’s the date?” I asked him softly.

He ran his finger along the line opposite Davis’s name. November, year before last—about fourteen months ago.” He flipped to the next page mark. “And the callback was in May of last year, six months later.”

“You have an address on her, maybe in your billing records?”

She sat back, looking embarrassed. “We might, but with records going that far back, Dr. Williams keeps them in storage. That means they’re in his attic at home. We’re told to say ‘storage.’ Sounds better.”

“You have a phone book?” I asked her.

“Sure.” She handed me a medium-sized directory for North Adams and surrounding towns.

Ron read off the number on the callback sheet as I scanned all the entries under “Davis.” I finally found a match, predictably near the bottom, next to “Wilma.” The address was local.

“Know where this is?” I asked Alice, showing her the listing. Her face soured. “I should. It took me years to get out of that neighborhood.”

· · ·

Fifteen minutes later, I was sympathizing with Alice’s appraisal of her old home ground. The street we were on looked ready to break off from the rest of the town and drift away into oblivion. It was narrow, hemmed in by snowbanks piled between haphazardly abandoned vehicles, and lined with serried ranks of sagging, gray, almost collapsing wooden buildings—remnants of worker housing dating back a hundred years. The few porches still intact were piled deep with snow-covered firewood, the windows were either curtainless, too filthy to see through, or fully boarded over. Occasional wisps of smoke trickling up from a few metal stove pipes were the sole signs of life.

I parked opposite the address we’d found in the phone book. Actually, given the street’s condition, I just rolled to a stop and killed the engine. There was no place to park, and no traffic to avoid in any case.

We both left the car and stood soundlessly in the street, staring at the house before us—a patched-together wooden box, single-story, its small windows opaque, a glimpse of tattered blue tarp showing through the snow covering the swaybacked roof. If Shawna Davis had once lived here, it took no great imagination to see why she might have left.

The street was eerily bereft of the usual clatter of civilization. I could hear no dogs, no children, no cars, no voices raised in joy or anger. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like this small portion of hopeful North Adams had missed out on the dream and simply died.

I motioned toward a narrow, crooked, shoveled trench in the snow, connecting the front door to the street. “Somebody’s been at work since the last storm.”

We walked cautiously in single file up to the door and listened. I couldn’t hear a sound. Suddenly hesitant to make a loud noise in this funereal setting, I finally knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” The question was hostile, immediate, from just beyond the thin paneling. Its abruptness made us both jump. I noticed Ron unbutton his coat for easier access to his gun.

“Mrs. Davis?” I said to the closed door, “My name is Joe Gunther. We’re police officers from Brattleboro, Vermont. We wondered if we could have a few words with you.”

“What about?” The voice was cracked and hoarse, as if from underuse.

“Do you have a daughter named Shawna?”

“Maybe.”

Ron and I exchanged glances. I chose my words carefully, skirting the truth of our mission. “You’re not in any trouble, Mrs. Davis, and neither is Shawna. We’re just looking for some information. No harm will come to you.”