The Wolf in Winter (9 page)

CHAPTER

XII

A couple of calls gave me the name of the detective whose name graced the file on Jude’s case. It came as both good and bad news. The good news was that I knew the detective personally. The bad news was that I had once kind of dated her. Her name was Sharon Macy, and “dated” might have been too strong a word for the history between us. She’d come into the Bear a couple of times when I was bartending, and we had dinner once at Boda, on Congress, which wasn’t far from her apartment on Spruce Street. It had ended with a short kiss, and an agreement that it might be nice to do it again sometime soon. I wanted to, and I think she did too, but somehow life got in the way, and then Jackie Garner died.

Sharon Macy was an interesting character, assuming you were content to accept the Chinese definition of “interesting” as resembling a kind of curse. Some years earlier, she was temporarily stationed on an island called Sanctuary, out in Casco Bay, when a group of hired guns with a grudge came calling, and a lot of shooting had resulted. Macy came through unscathed, but she bloodied herself along the way, and had acquired no small degree of respect as a cop with clean kills. As a result, she hadn’t been destined to stay in uniform for long, and no one was surprised by her move to detective. She worked in the Portland PD’s Criminal Invesigation Division, and was also heavily
involved in the Southern Maine Violent Crimes Task Force, which investigated serious incidents in the region.

Macy’s cell phone was off when I called her number, and I didn’t bother to leave a message. She wasn’t at her apartment when I went by, but a neighbor said that she had gone to drop off her laundry at the eco place on Danforth. The guy at the Laundromat confirmed that she’d been in, and said that he thought she might be waiting in Ruski’s while he did a fast wash-and-fold for her.

Ruski’s was a Portland institution, opening early and serving food until late. It had long been a destination for those whose working hours meant that breakfast was eaten whenever they happened to want it, which was why Ruski’s served it all day. On Sundays it was a magnet for regulars, including cops and firefighters from anywhere within an easy drive of Portland who wanted somewhere dark and friendly in which to kill an afternoon. It boasted darts, a pretty good jukebox, and a shortage of places to sit, and it never changed. It was what it was: a neighborhood bar where the prices were better than the food, and the food was good.

Macy was sitting by the window when I walked up, drinking and chatting with a patrol cop named Terrill Nix. I knew Nix a little because one of his brothers was a cop out in Scarborough. Nix was in his late forties, I guessed, and probably already thinking about cashing out. His hair was thinning, and his face had assumed a default expression of pained disappointment. The remains of a hangover special—hash, toast, eggs, home fries—lay on the plate beside him, but he didn’t look as if he was trying to beat down a hard night. His eyes were bright and clear. He could probably see all the way to retirement.

Macy looked like Macy: small, dark, with quick eyes and an easy smile. Damn. I tried to remember why I hadn’t called her again. Oh, yeah. Life, whatever that was. And some dying.

Nix spotted me before Macy did, as she had her back to the door. He nudged Macy’s left leg with his right foot to alert her. It didn’t look as though there was anything between them, just two cops who happened to cross paths in Ruski’s, where cops crossed paths with one another all the time. Anyway, Nix’s wife would have emasculated him and left him to bleed out before decorating the hood of her car with the pieces if she even caught a whiff of another woman off him, not to mention the fact that Nix’s brother had married Nix’s wife’s sister. The whole family would have helped weigh down his corpse in the Scarborough marshes.

“Charlie,” said Nix. “Detective Macy, do you know Charlie Parker, our local celebrity PI?”

Macy’s initial surprise at seeing me gave way to a lopsided grin.

“Yes, I do. We had dinner once.”

“No shit?” said Nix.

“Mr. Parker never called for a second date.”

“No shit?” Nix said again. He clucked at me like a disappointed schoolmarm. “Hurtful,” he opined.

“Uncouth,” said Macy.

“Maybe he’s here to make amends.”

“I don’t see any flowers.”

“There’s always the tab.”

“There is that,” said Macy. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I’d come in. She wasn’t flirting, but she was enjoying herself.

“So if he’s not here to apologize for blowing you off, why is he here?” said Nix.

“Yes, why are you here?” said Macy.

“He’s going to put trouble on someone’s plate,” said Nix.

“Are you going to put trouble on someone’s plate?” said Macy.

“Not if I can help it,” I said, just happy to be getting a word in at last now that Nichols and May had paused for breath. “I had a couple
of questions about the Jude case. Your name came up in connection with it.”

Nix and Macy exchanged a look, but Nix left it up to Macy to comment if she chose. She was, after all, the detective.

“Small world,” said Macy.

“Really?” I said.

“Nix was first responder,” said Macy. “And there is no ‘Jude case’—unless,” she added, “you know different.”

“It was a nice, clean hanging,” said Nix, and I knew what he meant. You took those when they came along. They were paperwork, and not much else.

I pointed at their bottles, which were mostly suds. “You want another?”

Nix was drinking a Miller High Life. There was something about Ruski’s that made people want to do strange stuff like drink High Life. Macy was on Rolling Rock. Both of them agreed to let me spend my money on them, and Nix wondered aloud if buying a drink constituted a second date in my world. I ignored the peanut gallery and ordered the drinks, along with a Rolling Rock for myself as well. I tried to remember the last time I ordered a Rolling Rock, but couldn’t. I suspected a fake ID might have been involved.

Nix, I noticed, had the sports section of the
Press Herald
beside him, open to the basketball page.

“You a fan?” I asked.

“My kid’s a Yachtsman,” he said.

The Yachtsmen were Falmouth High’s basketball team. The previous season they’d taken the kind of beating from their local rivals, Yarmouth, that usually requires years of therapy to overcome: 20–1 in the regional final. They had looked dead and buried, but so far this season they’d been beaten only once, by York, and had won their first sixteen games by an average margin of more than twenty points. Now they had the state final in their sights, and Coach Halligan, who had
also taken Falmouth to nine state soccer titles in his twenty-six-year career, was considered a candidate for sainthood.

“Better season than last,” I said.

“They got stronger kids this year,” said Nix. “My boy plays soccer too, and he skis. Kid is built like a racehorse, and he’s got another year left. He’s ready for the move to Class A.”

He took a long tug on his beer. Once again, he was leaving it to Macy to do the heavy lifting.

“So, what do you want to know about Jude?” said Macy.

“How was he found?”

“Nine-one-one call from a public phone on Congress. No name given. We figure it was one of his homeless buddies.”

“Anything odd about it?”

She looked to Nix, who thought about the question. “It was an unfinished dirt basement, L-shaped, so kind of split in two by the angle of the walls. It looked like someone else had slept in there that night. There was a depression in the earth, and we found a couple of beer caps. Whoever it was had also taken a dump, and used a copy of that day’s newspaper to clean himself off. But the ME’s report said that Jude had been dead for at least thirty-six hours when we found him. You do the math.”

“Somebody spent a night with the corpse.”

“They maybe slept with their back to it, but yeah. You know, it was wicked cold, and if you don’t have anywhere else to go . . .”

“What about his possessions?”

“Sleeping bag was gone,” said Macy. “And it looked like his pack had been rifled for valuables.”

“Any money found?”

“Money? Like what kind of money?”

“More than a hundred dollars. Not much in the normal scheme of things, but a lot to a guy like that.”

“People have died for less.”

“Amen.”

“No, there was no money. What, you think he might have been killed for it?”

“Like you said, people have died for less.”

“Sure,” said Macy, “but it’s hard to hang a man who’s struggling against it, and harder still to make it look like a suicide. The ligature marks were consistent with the downward momentum of the body, and the ME found no excessive injury to the neck. The victim did scratch at the rope, but that’s not unusual.”

“Any idea where the rope might have come from?”

“Nope. It wasn’t new, though. Like Jude, it had been around the block a couple of times. It had been cut to size to make the noose.”

“At the funeral, I heard that he had no alcohol or narcotics in his system.”

“That’s right.”

“Which
is
unusual.”

“Depends on how you read it,” said Nix. “If you’re talking Dutch courage, then, yes, you might have expected him to take something to ease the pain. On the other hand, if you’re looking for evidence of a homicide made to look like a hanging suicide, then some drugs or alcohol might be useful if you wanted to subdue the victim first.”

I let it go.

“The money is the other thing,” I said.

“How come?” said Macy. She was interested now. I could see it in her eyes. A lot of detectives wouldn’t have cared much to have a snoop question a neat, closed case, but Macy wasn’t one of them. I doubted that she had ever been that kind of cop, and whatever happened out on Sanctuary had done nothing to change her. If anything, it had simply strengthened that aspect of her character. She hadn’t told me much about what occurred on the island beyond what was in the official record, and I hadn’t pressed her on it, but I’d heard stories. Sanctu
ary was a strange place, even by the standards of this part of the world, and some of the bodies from that night had never been found.

“Jude went to a lot of trouble to collect it,” I said. “It seems that he was worried about his daughter. Her name was Annie—ex-junkie, trying to go straight, living in a shelter up in Bangor. He was trying to reestablish a relationship with her when she disappeared. He was worried about her. The money was to help him search for her. In fact, I think he might even have hoped to hire me with the cash.”

“What would it have bought him?” said Nix. “A couple of hours?”

“I’d have given him a discount.”

“Even so.”

“Yeah.”

Nix took another hit on his beer. “Well, chances are that whoever slept in the basement and cherry-picked Jude’s possessions also took the money. I don’t think they’d have gone to the trouble of trying to stage it as a suicide, though. A homeless person would have been more likely to use fists, or a blade. It wouldn’t have taken much to put Jude down. He wasn’t a strong guy.”

“It still doesn’t explain,” I said, “why a man who has gone to the trouble of calling in his debts, and who’s concerned about his daughter, should end it all in a basement and leave her to whatever trouble she was in. And, as you said, Jude wasn’t a strong man. A breeze could have lifted him off the street. A big man, or two big men, could have held him long enough to hoist him up on a chair, put a rope around his neck, and kick the chair out from under him. They’d have left marks on his body, I guess. Couldn’t not have.”

I was thinking aloud now. Macy set aside her beer unfinished.

“You got a couple of minutes?” she said to me.

“Sure.”

“You want to head down to Rosie’s, I’ll join you there for one more. I got some laundry to pick up along the way.”

Nix decided to stay at Ruski’s for another beer. He knew better than to tag along, regardless of any history between Macy and me. If she chose to share more about Jude’s death with a PI, then that was her business. He didn’t want, or need, to know.

I did cover his tab, though, including his drink for the road. He sighed theatrically as I left.

“And I bet you won’t even call,” he said. “I just feel so . . .
used
.”

CHAPTER

XIII

Harry and Erin Dixon were deep in discussion when they heard the car approach.

“We have to leave,” said Erin.

“And go where?” said Harry.

“I don’t know. Anywhere. We could promise not to tell if they just let us go and didn’t follow.”

Harry tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t stop himself. The idea that Prosperous had survived for so long just by allowing those who were uncomfortable with its edicts to leave was so preposterous as to be beyond belief. Erin, of all people, should have known that. They had hunted her father, Charlie Hutton, for years, and they had never given up. He had been clever, and lucky. He was also a teller at the bank, and he didn’t leave with his pockets empty: he raided the town’s discretionary fund before he ran. The money bought him time, and some room to maneuver. It allowed him to set himself up with a new identity and a new life, but Harry was sure that he spent his days fearing every knock on the door and searching the faces on the street for the gaze that lingered too long.

Charlie hadn’t been afraid that they’d set the police on him. That wasn’t the way Prosperous worked. Anyway, the money that he stole didn’t officially exist, and the fund was used for purposes about which
it was better that the law knew nothing. What had always stayed with Harry was that Erin’s father had never told. He could have gone to the police and tried to explain the nature of Prosperous, but it was so fantastic that he would have risked being dismissed as a madman. Even if they had chosen to believe him, there were no bodies to which he could point, no shallow graves to be dug up and bones to be exhumed. Harry wondered how deep you’d have to go to find the victims of Prosperous, if anything of them truly remained at all. Any searchers would have given up long before they first struck rock, and some of the bodies probably lay even deeper than that. And then there was the fact that rarely did it happen more than once every twenty or thirty years, and those responsible kept the secret of it to themselves. To descry any kind of pattern would be almost impossible, and the names of those who had been taken were forgotten as soon as they were ­belowground. In many cases, they had never been known at all.

But there was another probable reason that Erin’s father had remained silent, a deeper reason: he was bound to Prosperous, and one didn’t slough off one’s loyalties to a place so old, and so strange, with any ease. He stayed loyal to the town even as he sought to put as much distance between him and it as possible, for he couldn’t deny the truth, even if he wanted no further part in it.

But the town learned from what had happened with Charlie, and steps were taken to ensure that it wouldn’t occur so easily again. It kept a close watch on its inhabitants in the guise of caring for their well-being, and it bound them together with bonds of matrimony, familial and business loyalties, and fear.

“You want to be like your father?” said Harry, once his laughter had ceased. He hadn’t cared much for the sound of it. It held a distressingly lunatic tone. “You want to be hunted all your life?”

“No,” she said softly. “But I don’t want to stay here either.”

But Harry wasn’t listening to her. He was on a roll now.

“And he had money. We have nothing. You don’t think they’re
watching our spending habits, our patterns of deposits and withdrawals? They
know
, or at least they suspect. We’re vulnerable, and that means they’re concerned about how we might act. No, we have no choice. We have to wait this out. We have to hope that our situation improves. When it does, we can start putting money away. We can plan, just like Charlie must have done. You don’t leave Prosperous on a whim. You don’t—”

And then there came the sound of the car. Lights washed over the house, and the words died in Harry Dixon’s mouth.