The Ragman's Memory (9 page)

She smiled wistfully. “Yeah. Can’t seem to concentrate. And I don’t like the bullshit. Never liked taking orders. I quit a lot.”

“And drink?”

A murmur of the old gleam returned to her eyes. “A lot.”

“You doing anything about it?”

“No.”

“You want to?”

She stretched in her seat—arching her back like an old cat. She closed her eyes briefly. “Who wouldn’t want to change this?”

It was an ambition I thought Wilma Davis had probably lost long ago. “I can help.”

She looked at me. “How? Get me into AA? Tried it. Don’t like all the God stuff.”

“Doesn’t have to be AA. I was thinking more of a one-on-one arrangement. Have someone come by to talk with you—figure out a game plan.” I cut off her darkening scowl by adding, “You don’t have to do anything about it. Just listen and see if it sounds right.”

“I let ’em in the door, I can’t get rid of ’em.”

I rose, bent forward, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She didn’t smell like roses, but interrupting her train of thought seemed worth it.

Her head straightened and her eyes fully focused for the first time. “What was that? You want to get laid?”

I laughed. “No, but I carry a mental snapshot of you in my mind—since the first time we met.”

She frowned for a moment, thinking back, and then smiled. “I flash you?”

“You did. It was a sore temptation.”

“I remember. You brought me a coffeemaker after that asshole beat me up.” She paused. “I offered you a freebie… Boy Scout.”

She looked off into the distance for a while. I kept quiet, letting her memories fill her mind—I hoped for the better.

Finally, she brought her attention back to me, laying her hands flat against the front of her bathrobe. “Okay, send me your head shrinker. I’ll talk to her… She better be good, though.”

“Thanks.”

Without moving a muscle, she seemed to gather herself together then. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

I pulled out the photograph Wilma Davis had given me and showed it to her. “When you were at Clipper’s, you worked on this girl—orange and purple dye job, shaved one side, left the other side long.”

She studied the picture carefully. “Yeah—Shawna.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “That was a long time ago.”

“She was special. I wouldn’t forget her. We talked. It was like seeing myself, a lot of years ago. The backgrounds weren’t exactly the same—but I knew where she was headed.” She waved the picture in her hand. “I guess I was right, huh?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Jesus. I didn’t even give her a decent cut. How’d she end up?”

I doubted Susan had seen a newspaper or listened to the news in months. “We’re not sure. We only found the remains. What made you think she was in trouble?”

She shook her head. “A lamb to slaughter. You know the type.”

“But nothing specific?”

A crease appeared between her eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Joe, what do I know? We talked. We never met again. End of story.”

“She didn’t mention anyone by name?” I persisted. “Where she was living? Who she was seeing?”

She surprised me again. “Mother Gert’s—at least we talked about it.”

Mother Gert’s was the street name given to the William Stanchion Home, a privately funded shelter for the temporarily homeless. “She was staying there?”

“Either staying there or planning to. I might’ve told her about it—I don’t remember. I cut her hair, said a few things, and she unloaded on me like I was a bartender. She talked about where she grew up, her mom, her friends. She was on her own, blowing her last bucks on me, changing her look. ’Course, even there, I screwed her up—not that she complained. She even tipped me.”

“But she didn’t refer to anyone local?”

She rolled her eyes. “No—nobody local—least nobody I remember. I think that’s why Gert’s came up.”

I stood up. “Okay, Susan. I appreciate it.”

I hesitated, about to give her shoulder a squeeze. From that angle, she looked diminished again, like someone dropped from an enormous height.

But she stopped me cold, reading me like an old pro. “Don’t push your luck. I’ll see whoever you send over, but it could be I’ll just throw her out. Make sure they know that.”

I nodded and crossed to the door. “I will. Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah.”

· · ·

Gert was Gertrude Simmons, a lapsed Catholic nun who had owned and operated her oddly named shelter since the sixties. William Stanchion, she’d once told me, had been an early financial backer—one of the few people from her previous life that hadn’t scorned her after she’d left the Church. As far as she knew, he’d never been to New England, much less Brattleboro, but to this day, her feelings for him made her the only person never to refer to the William Stanchion Home as Mother Gert’s.

The building was a statuesque Greek Revival mansion on Western Avenue, the heavily traveled umbilical cord tying Brattleboro to West Brattleboro, but the house was set up and away from the road on a tree-lined embankment that offered a sense of privacy and retreat. Sammie and I drove directly there from Susan’s in silence—I lost in thought and Sammie having the sensitivity to leave me there.

The official entrance was to the back, where the original home had no doubt once received horse-drawn deliveries. The trade-off for the building’s survival beyond those days had been the carving up of its once splendid but impractical interior into a rabbit warren of offices, dorm rooms, and meeting areas—all of which had doomed the grandiose official entrance hall. It was a sacrifice part of me mourned every time I visited and saw, either hidden under the paintwork or almost covered by later remodeling, a glimpse of the original hardwood, high-ceilinged, stained-glass splendor.

It was not a subject I ever broached with Gert, however. A short, no-nonsense pragmatist, who nevertheless gave both of us the customary hug she offered all comers, Gertrude Simmons was not one to pine over past glories. If queried, I had no doubt she would have acerbically reminded me how the first owners of this house had probably treated those they’d deemed their social inferiors.

She led us into an office the size of a small bathroom and offered us the one guest chair, which I forced a reluctant Sammie to take. I closed the door behind us and leaned against its frame.

“Two of you,” Gert said, perching on an ancient tilt-back that caused her feet to swing free of the floor. “This must be big.”

“Actually,” I answered, “we’re not sure what we’re chasing.”

“Except that it led you here.”

“Maybe.” I pulled the picture from my pocket again and gave it to her. “Ring a bell?”

She looked at it and handed it back, poker-faced. “Why?”

The response was typical and expected. Maintaining the confidentiality of her many skittish guests had become one of the cornerstones of her success in this business—something they’d learned to believe in, and we’d learned to respect.

“No strings, Gert. You hear about the bits of skeleton we found? We think it’s her.”

Her expression saddened, and her response was disappointing. “I’m sorry, then. It doesn’t ring a bell. Do you have a name?”

“Shawna Davis,” Sammie said.

Gert climbed out of her chair and moved me over so she could get into a filing cabinet by the door. “Do you have any idea when she might have been here?”

Again, it was Sammie who answered. “April or May of last year, give or take.”

“Close enough,” Gert said, half to herself, and riffled through a tightly packed wad of files, eventually pulling one free from near the back. She brought it with her to her seat and opened it there, where I couldn’t see over her shoulder.

After a minute of silently reading, she looked up. “Shawna Davis. Stayed one night only—April twenty-third.”

So it looked like Susan Lucey had been the one who suggested Mother Gert’s. “Can you tell us anything about her?” I asked.

She closed the file. “What do you think happened?”

It wasn’t a question I normally answered from someone outside law enforcement—we, too, liked our secrets. With Gert, however, I didn’t hesitate. “She might’ve taken an overdose of sleeping medicine, but I’m starting to think she was murdered. I don’t have anything concrete to base that on, though.”

“Are you looking at anyone in particular?”

“We’re not looking at anyone period,” Sammie answered. “This thing’s heading nowhere unless you can give us something.”

Gert looked at her sympathetically and gestured with the folder in her hand. “This contains what we call an ‘entrance sheet,’ which everyone is asked to complete. It lists things like name, age, address, family, and all the rest, but it’s voluntary, and she only gave us the first two. It also has an evaluation form that one of our volunteer counselors fills out if he or she is allowed to by the client. Without actually showing you that form, I can tell you it also contains very little. Apparently, Shawna Davis wanted a place to spend the night, and nothing more.”

I tried one last time. “Is there a mention of anyone local, a local address?” Again, Gert shook her head. “I’m sorry, Joe. As far as we know, she came from nowhere and then disappeared.”

· · ·

I was sitting in Tony Brandt’s office, along with the State’s Attorney and Gail. Gail’s presence surprised me—traditionally, six-month clerks were kept shoveling paperwork. Jack Derby including her was either a sign he liked her, or—more likely to my cynical mind—that as a neophyte SA, he was using her connection to the police department to help smooth his initial contacts with us. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t complaining. The novelty of having her in my professional life was very appealing.

The conversation, however, was not cheerful.

“So what you got is slightly less than zero,” Derby was saying. “A few bones, an identification, and no idea if she was murdered or not. I liked the earlier bum-who-died-of-old-age scenario better.”

“We’ve got that now, too,” Gail murmured, making me wonder what she was alluding to.

Derby ignored her. “What happens now?” he asked Brandt and me. “We better come up with something to tell the newspeople. They’re developing an appetite.”

Tony Brandt leaned back in his chair. “Why not give them everything we’ve done so far? They can write about it till they’re blue in the face, and we might get something from the publicity. We can tell them about Ron going down to Massachusetts to find Shawna’s PKU blood sample, and the lab making a definite match. Might put a slightly better light on it.”

“Should we include the etching on the tooth this time?” Gail asked.

There was a noticeable hesitation in the room. “I don’t think so,” Tony said. “I still want to keep that in reserve, along with the phenobarbital. We’re working this as a homicide, even if we can’t prove it yet.”

Derby nodded in agreement. “You want to use one of those ‘Have you seen this woman?’ approaches, with a phone number in the caption?”

I glanced at Gail. “If rumors are true that the selectmen are already leaning on us, wouldn’t that just turn up the heat? The
Reformer
’s been handling it like an interesting, low-profile mystery.”

“The rumors
are
true,” Tony answered. “Which is partly the problem. Between the politicians and the bean counters bitching about overtime, we need some kind of a jump start.” He looked at me closely. “Unless you’ve got some other suggestion.”

Reluctantly, I could only shake my head.

He rose to his feet. “All right, then. Set it up, Joe.”

The tone of Tony’s voice made it clear the debate was over. I saw his point, and knew that what Derby had suggested had worked in the past. Shawna’s fate had become personal to me by now, precisely because no one had paid it much attention when it counted. I felt badly that my best intentions alone hadn’t been enough to reveal what had happened to her.

But such quandaries were a luxury. It was Shawna’s death I had to deal with, not the wreckage of her life, and to solve it I would need all the help I could get.

RON KLESCZEWSKI FOUND ME IN MY OFFICE
after hours, catching up on paperwork. “Still at it?” he asked, pausing on the threshold.

I glanced at my watch. It was past nine. “You, too?”

“Yeah. I decided to check out those five long-distance phone numbers on Wilma’s phone bill.”

“Get lucky?”

A slow smile spread across his face. His dropping by was no casual happenstance. “Could be. One of two calls to Greenfield was to a kid named Hugh Savage. He was a grade ahead of Shawna in school, but dropped out his senior year—got another girl pregnant and had to get a job. Apparently he and Shawna were friends—‘fellow outsiders,’ according to him. He says she called him out of the blue last year and told him she was going nuts and had to get out of North Adams. She and her mother were at each other’s throats.”

“What was the date of the call?”

His smile broadened. “April twenty-first.”

The month her mother told us she’d left home. “Have a seat.”

Ron settled in and stretched his legs out. “Apparently, she angled to move in with him and his family at first, but he told her that wouldn’t work. He suggested Bratt. After he moved to Greenfield, he and his wife used to come up here for the live music at the Mole’s Eye.”

“Did he have any friends up here?”

“One—Pascal Redding, nicknamed Patty. He’s supposed to be a musician. Savage told Shawna to look him up.”

“You talk to him yet?” I asked.

He frowned. “No. I only talked to Savage a half hour ago. Since then, I’ve checked every source I can think of, but I can’t find Pascal Redding anywhere. The town clerk might have something, but that’s a dead end till morning… Too bad about that newspaper story coming out tomorrow—I’d like to creep up on this guy.”

I reached for the phone, reminded of my own discomfort at having Shawna’s picture hung below the next day’s headlines. “Don’t rub it in.”

Gail answered on the first ring. She, too, was still at work.

“How about a five-minute break? Ron and I are playing detective.”

She laughed tiredly. “What d’you have in mind?”