The Unquiet-CP-6 (18 page)

“And now he’s back here,” concluded O’Rourke.

“Asking after the doctor who was treating his daughter,” I said.

“Sounds like a man with a grudge. What are you going to do?”

I took out my wallet and laid some bills on the table to cover our tab. “I’m going to have him picked up.”

“Will the Clay woman press charges?”

“I’ll talk to her about it. Even if she doesn’t, the threat of imprisonment might be enough to keep Merrick off her back. He won’t want to go back to jail. Who knows, the cops may even turn up something in his car.”

“Has he threatened her at all?”

“Only verbally, and just in the vaguest of ways. He broke her window, though, so he’s capable of more.”

“Any sign of a weapon?”

“None.”

“Frank’s the kind of guy who might feel a little naked without a gun.”

“When I met him he told me he wasn’t armed.”

“You believed him?”

“I think he’s too smart to carry a gun with him. As a convicted felon, he can’t be found in possession, and he’s already attracting a lot of attention to himself. He can’t find out what happened to his daughter if he’s locked up again.”

“Well, it sounds plausible, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. The Clay woman still live in the city?”

“South Portland.”

“I can make some calls if you want me to.”

“Every little bit helps. It would be good if we could have a temporary order in place by the time Merrick is picked up.”

O’Rourke said that he didn’t think it would be a problem. I had almost forgotten about Jim Poole. I asked O’Rourke about him.

“I remember something about it. He was an amateur, a correspondence-college private eye. Liked using a little weed, I think. Cops down in Boston figured there might have been a drug connection to his death, and I guess people up here were happy enough to go along with that.”

“He was working for Rebecca Clay when he disappeared,” I said.

“I didn’t know that. It wasn’t my case. Sounds like she might be unlucky to be around. She vanishes more people than the Magic Circle.”

“I don’t imagine lucky people attract the interest of men like Frank Merrick.”

“If they do, they don’t stay lucky for long. I’d like to be there when they bring him in. I’ve heard a lot about him, but I’ve never met him face-to-face.”

His beer glass had left a circle of moisture on the table. He traced patterns in it with his index finger.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking it’s a shame you have a client who believes she’s at risk.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like clusters. Some of Clay’s patients were being abused. Merrick’s daughter was one of his patients.”

“Hence Merrick’s daughter was being abused? It’s possible, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.”

“Then Clay disappears and so does she.”

“And the abusers are never found.”

He shrugged. “I’m just saying: having a man like Merrick asking questions about old crimes might make some people worried.”

“Like the people who committed those old crimes.”

“Exactly. Could be useful. You never know who might decide to take offense and make themselves known along the way.”

“The problem is that Merrick isn’t like a dog on a leash. He can’t be controlled. I’ve got three men looking out for my client as things stand. My priority is to keep her safe.”

O’Rourke stood. “Well, talk to her. Explain what you intend to do. Then let’s get him picked up and see what happens.”

We shook hands again, and I thanked him for his help.

“Don’t get carried away,” he said. “I’m in this because of the kids. And, hey, forgive me for being blunt, but if this thing goes up in smoke, and I find you lit the fuse, I’ll arrest you myself.”

It was time for me to drive out to Joel Harmon’s house. Along the way, I called Rebecca and shared with her most of what O’Rourke had told me of Merrick and what I was hoping to do the next day. She seemed to have calmed down a little since we last talked, although she was still intent on wrapping up our business with each other as soon as possible.

“We’ll arrange a meeting, then have him picked up by the cops,” I said. “The state’s protectionfrom-harassment law says that if you’ve been intimidated or confronted three or more times by the same person, then the cops have to act. I figure that incident with the window may also fall under terrorizing, and I spotted him watching you that day at Longfellow Square, so we have him for stalking as well. Either one of those would be enough to bring us under the cover of the law.”

“Does that mean I’ll have to go to court?” she asked.

“Make the harassment report first thing tomorrow. The report has to be made before a court complaint can be filed anyway. Then we can go to the District Court and get it to issue a temporary order for emergency protection after you’ve filed the complaint. I’ve already talked to someone about this, and everything should be in place for you by tomorrow evening.” I gave her O’Rourke’s name and number. “A date and time will be set for a hearing, and the summons and complaint will have to be served on Merrick. I can do that or, if you prefer, we can get the sheriff

’s department to do it instead. If he approaches you again once the order has been served, then that’s a Class D crime with a penalty of up to one year in jail and a maximum fine of a thousand dollars. Three convictions and he’s looking at five years.”

“It still doesn’t sound like enough,” she said. “Can’t they just put him away immediately?”

“It’s a delicate balance,” I said. “He’s overstepped the line, but not enough to justify serving time. The thing is, I believe that doing more time is the last thing he wants to risk. He’s a dangerous man, but he’s also had years to think about his daughter. He failed her, but he wants someone else to blame. I think he’s decided to start with your father, because he heard the rumors about him and wonders if something similar might have happened to his own child while she was in his care.”

“And because my father’s not around, he’s moved on to me.” She sighed. “Okay. Will I have to be there when they arrest him?”

“No. The police may want to talk to you later, though. Jackie will stay close to you, just in case.”

“Just in case it doesn’t go the way you’ve planned?”

“Just in case,” I repeated, not committing to anything. I felt that I’d let her down, but I couldn’t see what more I could have done. True, I could have banded together with Jackie Garner and the Fulcis to beat Merrick to a pulp, but that would have been to descend to his level. And now, after my conversation with O’Rourke, there was one more thing stopping me from using force against Frank Merrick.

In a strange way, I felt sorry for him.

Chapter XI

T here were calls made that night. Perhaps that was what Merrick wanted all along. That was why he had made his presence at Rebecca Clay’s house so obvious, that was why he had left his blood on her window, and that was why he had set me on Jerry Legere. There were other incidents, too, that I did not yet know about. Four dead crows had been strung together and hung outside the offices occupied by Rebecca’s former lawyer, Elwin Stark, the previous night. Sometime that same night, the Midlake Center had been burglarized. Nothing was taken, but someone must have spent hours going through whatever files were at hand, and it would be a long time before it became clear what, if anything, had been removed from them. Clay’s former physician, Dr. Caussure, had been approached on his way to a bridge tournament by a man fitting Merrick’s description. The man had boxed in Caussure’s car, then had rolled down the window of his red Ford and asked Caussure if he liked birds and if he was aware that his late patient and friend, Dr. Daniel Clay, had consorted with pedophiles and deviants. It didn’t matter to Merrick if these individuals were involved or not. He wanted to create a climate of fear and doubt. He wanted to slip in and out of lives, sowing rumors and half-truths, knowing that, in a small city like Portland, word would spread, and the men he was hunting would soon be buzzing like bees in the presence of an imminent threat to the hive. Merrick thought that he had everything under control, or that he could deal with whatever arose, but he was wrong. He was being manipulated, just as I was, but nobody was really in control, not even Eldritch’s mysterious client.

And soon, people would start to die.

Joel Harmon lived in a big house off Bayshore Drive in Falmouth, with its own private jetty and a white yacht berthed close by. Portland used to be called Falmouth, back from the late seventeenth century when the Basque, St. Castin, led the natives in a series of attacks against the English settlements that resulted eventually in the burning of the town, until the end of the eighteenth century, when the city came into its own. Now the area that bore the old name was one of the Portland’s most affluent suburbs, and the center of its boating activity. The Portland Yacht Club, one of the oldest in the country, was located on Falmouth Fore-side, sheltered by the long, narrow Clapboard Island, which was itself home to two private estates, throwbacks to the late nineteenth century when the railroad magnate Henry Houston built a ten-thousand-squarefoot summer cottage on the island, his own small contribution to rendering the word “cottage”

meaningless in this part of the world.

Harmon’s house stood on a raised promontory from which a green lawn sloped down to the water’s edge. There were walls on either side for privacy, and a lot of rosebushes in carefully regimented and sheltered beds. June had told me that Harmon was a fanatical rose-grower, fascinated by hybridization, and that the soil in his garden was constantly monitored and adjusted to facilitate his obsession. There were said to be roses in his beds that simply did not exist elsewhere and, unlike his peers, Harmon saw no reason to share his discoveries with others. The roses were for his pleasure, and his alone.

It was an unusually mild night, a trick of the season to lull the unwary into a false sense of security, and as June and I stood in his garden with the other guests, sipping predinner drinks, I took in Harmon’s house, his yacht, his roses, and his wife, who had greeted us as we arrived, her husband being occupied elsewhere in the party. She was in her early sixties, which made her about the same age as her husband, her gray hair interwoven with carefully dyed blond strands. Up close, her skin looked like molded plastic. She seemed to have trouble stretching it into any semblance of an expression, although her surgeon had clearly anticipated this problem and had carved her mouth into a permanent half smile, so that someone could have been telling her about the systematic drowning of puppies and kittens, and she would merely have looked slightly amused at the whole affair. There was a relic of the beauty that she might once have had still visible in her face, but it had been debased by her grim determination to hold on to it. Her eyes were dull and glassy, and her conversational skills would have made a passing child seem like Oscar Wilde.

Her husband, by contrast, was the model of a perfect host, dressed casually but expensively in a blue wool blazer and gray trousers, with a red cravat to add a touch of carefully cultivated eccentricity to the whole look. He was shadowed, as he shook hands and exchanged gossip, by a beautiful Asian-American girl, young and slim with the kind of figure that caused male jaws spontaneously to unhinge. According to June, she was Harmon’s latest squeeze, although officially she was his personal assistant. He had a habit of picking up young women, dazzling them with his wealth, then dropping them as soon as a new prospect appeared on the horizon.

“Doesn’t look like his wife objects to her presence too much,” I said. “Then again, it doesn’t look like she’s aware of anything beyond the promise of her next fix of prescription medication.”

Mrs. Harmon’s empty gaze swept across the guests at regular intervals, never resting on any of them but merely bathing them in the dull light of her regard, like the beam of a lighthouse picking out the ships in its ambit. Even when she had greeted us at the door, her hand like the cold, desiccated remains of a long-dead bird in my palm, she had barely made eye contact.

“I feel sorry for her,” said June. “Lawrie was always one of those women who was destined to marry a powerful man and provide him with children, but she had no inner life, or none that anyone could detect. Now her children are all grown-up, and she fills her days as best she can. She was beautiful once, but beauty was all she had. Now she sits motionless on the boards of various charities and spends her husband’s money, and he doesn’t object as long as she doesn’t interfere with the way he lives his life.”

I felt that I had Harmon down to a T: a self-indulgent man, with money enough to enable him to pursue his appetites and to sate them, even as his needs grew greater with each bite that he took. He came from a politically well-connected family, and his father had been an adviser to the Democrats, although the failure of a number of his businesses had left enough of a whiff of scandal on him that he never managed to get close enough to the bowl to feed with the big dogs. Harmon himself had been very politically active once, working on Ed Muskie’s campaign as a young man in ’71, even traveling with him on his visit to Moscow thanks to his father’s efforts, until it became clear that not only was Muskie not going to win the nomination, but it was probably a good thing that McGovern was going to clean his clock in the primaries. Muskie couldn’t keep his temper. He railed at journalists and staffers, and he did it in public. Had he won the nomination, it wouldn’t have been long before that side of him was revealed to the voters. So Joel Harmon and his family had quickly and quietly ditched Muskie, and any political idealism that he might have had was left by the wayside as he moved on to the pressing business of accumulating wealth and making up for his father’s business failings. But according to June, Harmon was much more complex than he appeared: he gave generously to charity, not only publicly but privately. His views on welfare and social security made him almost a socialist by most American standards, and he remained a powerful, if discreet, voice in that regard, enjoying the ear of successive governors and state representatives. He was passionate about the city and state in which he lived, and it was said that his children were mildly disturbed by the ease with which he was dissipating what they considered to be their inheritance, their social conscience being considerably less well developed than their father’s. I wanted to keep my head clear, so I sipped orange juice while the other guests drank champagne. I recognized one or two of those whom Harmon had invited. There was a writer named Jon Lee Jacobs, who penned novels about lobstermen and the call of the sea. He had a big red beard and dressed like the men in his books, except he came originally from a family of accountants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was rumored to get seasick when he stepped in a puddle. The other familiar face was Dr. Byron Russell, a young shrink who made occasional appearances on Maine Public Radio and on local TV channels whenever a serious talking head was needed on matters relating to mental health. To Russell’s credit, he tended to be the voice of reason whenever he participated, often at the expense of some treacle-voiced woman with a bum degree in psychology from a college that operated out of a trailer, and who believed in the kind of touchy-feely platitudes that made depression and suicide seem like attractive alternatives to actually listening to her. Also present, interestingly, was Elwin Stark, the lawyer who had been so reluctant to speak to me earlier that week. I felt like telling him about Eldritch, who had talked to me for a lot longer, albeit without actually telling me a great deal more than I’d learned from a fraction of the time spent speaking with Stark, but initially Stark didn’t seem any happier to meet me in person than he had been to talk with me on the phone. Nevertheless, he eventually managed to be civil for a couple of minutes. He even apologized, in a way, for his earlier brusqueness. I could smell whiskey on his breath, even though he had champagne in his glass. Clearly, he had started earlier than the rest of the guests.