by JJ Partridge
Carom Shot
BY
J. J. Partridge
“She came from Providence,
born in Rhode Island
Where the old world shadows
hang heavy in the air.”
“The Last Resort” written by Don Henley/Glenn Fry © 1976 Cass County Music/
Red Cloud Music ASCAP
Carom (Kăr’ em) n. In pool, a shot in which the object ball strikes
another ball and rebounds into a pocket.
Copyright © John Partridge, 2005
All rights reserved
® REGISTERED TRADEMARK – MARCA REGISTRADA
ISBN 978-1-940192-80-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The names, incidents, dialogue, and opinions expressed are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Published by Koehler Books
210 60th Street
Virginia Beach, VA 23451
212-574-7939
www.koehlerbooks.com
Publisher
John Köehler
Executive Editor
Joe Coccaro
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
PROLOGUE
She drew breaths easily. Her small, even teeth were barely visible behind puffy lips. Her expression was placid, belying the bruises on her cheeks. In her dream, she was in the cavernous Refectory and students carrying trays passed her table; some faces loomed at her while others shrank from her glare. As her killer straddled her body, the shiftings in the tired mattress provoked no reaction. She exhaled as a pillow was lowered to cover her face; when a cough didn’t clear the obstruction, her mouth opened, the pillow pushed against her teeth, her throat caught in a muffled gurgle.
A bad dream.
She awoke, more confused than alarmed, drew up her knees, and began to coil to her left side; her killer responded with a move up on to her chest that compressed her ribs and pinned her shoulders to the mattress. Resolute hands pushed the pillow into her eyes and flattened her nose. She managed to free her right hand and found the pillow—instantly, she knew what it was—but without leverage, its flimsy cover slipped from her grasp, leaving her hand to flail in empty air.
I can’t breathe!
In panic, she thrashed beneath the unyielding weight of her killer. Her collapsed lungs burned in a blast of bloody ruptures; garish sparks and dying points of light streamed behind throbbing eyes as a rushing sound, like wind emerging from a tunnel, rose in her ears.
It is not happening!
Her mouth stretched in a silent scream—Oh God, No!—and the pillow entered her gaping mouth. Its taste gave rise to a spasmodic butt of her head that allowed her hand to regain the pillow and rip it off a corner of her face so that a bruised eye opened into blackness. For seconds, she stared without seeing until a vice-like grip wrenched her wrist away and her nails raked across the pillow.
I am going to die!
Her writhing, intense and unavailing, continued until almost theatrically, her arm gave up its struggle and slumped to the mattress. Under the pillow, facial muscles trembled, cramped, retracted, and were still. All light, sound, and pain faded to vanishment as her brain shut down, leaving her stomach to convulse on its own; her heart sputtered out of rhythm.
After her last contortions, the pillow fell to the floor. The dim light from a table lamp across the room exposed a slack jaw, a trickle of blood, saliva, and vomit oozing to her chin and throat, and a single, not yet sparkless eye swelling within its socket.
A hand lifted the lacy fringe of the slip covering her breasts in a silence broken by irregular hisses of breath and distant street noises: a racing motorcycle, the squeal of brakes, a car horn. The mattress creaked as her killer straightened and began to slide off her body. Then, from the blackness behind the lamp, came the scrape of wood rubbing against a hard surface. A doorknob creaked as it was released. A finger touched her neck, feeling for a pulse.
A moan began—
CHAPTER ONE
Monday
There is something about the investigation of a murder. Especially the murder of a young woman. We bring all of our baggage, our guilty consciences, and our less than pure motives into play even as, ostensibly, we seek justice for the victim and society. A lesson of my first case.
* * *
At a minute or so before nine, I was alone in the Provost’s conference room. I ignored the coffee setup on the credenza, tossed a Uni-Ball pen and legal pad on the oblong table, and sat in a leather-backed chair facing the door to the adjoining office. I expected it to open momentarily—there were voices within and the Provost demanded punctuality from the senior staff—but it didn’t. After finger rolls of impatience on the table, I turned to the room’s only window.
Following a weekend of intermittent drizzle and fog, I could almost smell the damp. Through the lingering mist, The Green had an early winter-in-Providence quality—bleached-out sky, frost-killed grass, and shoals of dead leaves from ancient elms and oaks—against a background of the motley facades of Federal, Greek Revival, Romanesque, and Beaux Arts buildings across its expanse. Its spaciousness and the classic architecture evoked sentiments of stability and continuity appropriate for the physical center of a great university; my view from the second floor of College Hall gave no hint that the institution was in crisis, that its core was churning.
The Chapel Bell broke the calm with the first of nine dissonant clangs and classroom buildings disgorged throngs of kids with backpacks and carryalls, wearing hooded Carter U. Cats sweatshirts, quilted vests, ponchos, windbreakers, and droopy raincoats, on to puddled brick walks; skateboarders and cyclists soon weaved in and out among them like fish in eelgrass. From William Street, a white pickup pulled up; two maintenance men in yellow slickers got out and began tossing leaf bags into the back of the truck. It was, I thought, a snapshot of this time of day, this time of year, in any year, except for the huge banner strung across College Arch: “STOP THE STALKER.”
“Mornin’, counselor.” Bill Tuttle, Carter University’s Chief of Security, dropped a manila folder on the table and removed his raincoat and tan Kangol cap. It was Tuttle’s before dawn phone call that had summoned me to this emergency meeting. His decidedly Gaelic face was grim and pale, even his freckles seemed faded, making his kelly green tie over a white shirt too buoyant for our somber business. “Where’s everybody,” he said, more as a comment than a question, as he poured
coffee into an oatmeal colored Carter mug.
The door to the Provost’s office snapped open. Artemus Vose’s bushy eyebrows barely rose above rimless eyeglasses in acknowledgment of our presence when he folded his lanky frame into the chair at the head of the table. He has been Provost for four of the six years I’ve been here, before that a senior executive of two Fortune 500 corporations, and that’s the way he is: all business as soon as he arrives in College Hall at seven a.m. His slate gray eyes held pin-pricks of anger as he tugged at the cuffs of a blue oxford shirt; then, giving us a profile of craggy jaw, roman nose, and mane of white hair, he spun in his chair. I followed his glower and my jaw dropped. In the doorway to his office was the diminutive Leon Goldbloom, Esquire, a.k.a “Puppy Dog” Goldbloom, Providence’s City Solicitor; hulking behind him, stood an angry Dwayne McAllister, the Dean of Student Life.
Tuttle and I barely squelched comments as Puppy Dog slinked his way into the conference room like a cat seeking the protection of shadows. Since Puppy Dog is Mayor Angelo “Sonny” Russo’s lackey, his cucciolo, his political and legal lap dog, our dismay as to his presence at a cabinet level meeting had to be apparent to the Provost. Would we be able to stop ourselves from blurting out Puppy Dog’s behind-his-back nickname in surroundings where it was in common usage?
Puppy Dog’s rat-catcher eyes surveyed the conference room before he dropped a greasy poplin raincoat on a chair back, gave Tuttle and me a nod, and chose the chair to the Provost’s immediate right. The conference table hid Puppy Dog’s shiny black trousers and some of his faded green blazer but not a formerly white shirt or a stained, midnight-blue tie that almost matched the shade of a sweep of hair pasted to his balding pate. A deficient chin gave his beak-like nose a Cyrano quality. He was already into his irritating habits of impatient lip slicking and rapid eye blinking as he pointedly ignored McAllister’s scowl. That wasn’t easy because the Dean, at six-four and weighing in around two-seventy, had sat heavily opposite him, splayed his elbows on the table, and balanced his shaved, black, bullet head on the tips of two fingers. “Shazam” McAllister’s persona radiated menace as it probably did years ago when he steamrollered opposing linemen as Carter University’s All-American defensive tackle.
“The Mayor called this morning,” the Provost began, enunciating each word to get our attention. “Asked to have Leon meet with me and I invited him to sit in.” The stress was on I and his expression cautioned us to be cool. The Provost, the University’s chief administrative officer, has a lot of responsibilities—although Puppy Dog is usually my turf—so I had to take comfort that his decision was in keeping with his reputation as a sure-handed administrator as well as ocean sailor, someone who assimilates angles, speeds, and directions with preciseness and alacrity. “Okay,” he said, “the President is coming back from Washington around noon, and Larry” — meaning Information Officer Larry Gregson —“has the flu so I told him to stay home.” Since Gregson, despite, or maybe because of, years of public relations experience, had stubbornly refused my advice to bring in crisis management counsel, I was disappointed that he wouldn’t be here to squirm through another short-noticed meeting. “Bill, bring us up to speed.”
“This is what we know,” he said, referring to a yellow pad he had taken from his folder. “Her name is Anne Sullivan. Twenty years old. Lived in Hastings Hall first year and Johnson last year. Reasonable academic record, took grades second year, no fails.” He hesitated, cleared his throat, and continued. “Local girl. Graduate of St. Xavier’s Academy here in Providence. Partial scholarship and loans each of the first two years. Didn’t register for junior year.” He flipped to the next page. “Father is a Providence policeman—”
Without warning, Puppy Dog leaned so far forward that his nose barely missed the table. He straightened, sucked in a portentous breath, and addressed us in his nasally alto. “The Mayor instructed Chief McCarthy to make this homicide a priority!”
Um? Huh? What else? We waited for more. But, there wasn’t any; with his fingers laced together, he rested his hands on the table like a well-behaved first-grader. Blinking rapidly, he peered over my head and out the window.
I didn’t try to restrain my rueful expression. There is a serial crazy on the loose! For over a month, despite public and private pleas for more police support to augment our security officers, the University had virtually been ignored by the Mayor and his Police Chief, Daniel Patrick McCarthy. Not that this malfeasance was a surprise; Sonny Russo had made a career out of painting the tax-exempt University as a free-loading, snooty, drug-ridden, haven of liberal hypocrisy. Even the few additional patrol cars grudgingly assigned to the campus area on weekends and the ineffective, lackadaisical efforts of McCarthy’s less than enthusiastic Detective Division were accompanied by City Hall’s loud complaints as to the “enormous” additional burdens being placed on “the backs of Providence taxpayers.”
Tuttle broke the silence. “They’re going to autopsy this morning. So far, it looks like she was assaulted and murdered sometime Friday night or early Saturday morning.” Tuttle raised his eyes to the Provost, perhaps considering what details to discuss in front of Puppy Dog, and getting no reaction, returned to his notes. “Lived in an apartment on Veasey Street. No roommate. Found by her landlady on top of her bed, nude from the chest down. Slip over her head. The apartment was a mess. Probably beat her up before she was raped. No evidence of a knife.” His eyes went down the page. “Death by asphyxiation, not strangled as I was told last night. Pillow over the mouth, probably.” He pulled a photograph from the folder. “Anne Sullivan, sophomore year ID photo,” he said, and handed the photograph to me.
In the grainy blow-up, she came through as pretty, a blonde with long hair over each shoulder, square face, large, expressionless eyes, freckled nose, and generous lips around a wide mouth. I gave the photograph to the Provost. Puppy Dog looked over the Provost’s shoulder before it was passed on to McAllister. “Well,” Puppy Dog said, “she certainly doesn’t look like any of the others.”
Even the Provost shifted his eyes to McAllister who, thank God, seemed intent on the photograph and not on Puppy Dog’s hapless comment. The “others” were six black Carter women assaulted at various off-campus locations on Saturday nights during October and November.
“Immediate reaction is that the perp was The Stalker,” said Tuttle, lapsing into police-speak in a voice now edged with hostility. “Weekend night assault, Carter connection, two blocks off campus. Autopsy today, as I said. No witnesses. They also want to question a boyfriend.” He ran his hand through his clipped gray hair as though considering a further comment, but held back. “That’s it.”
“Won’t make much difference, white or black,” McAllister interjected as he tossed the photograph on the table. “She was murdered and it was the weekend and she was raped, and so what if she dropped out and stayed around campus. That’s how they’ll see it. With the kids coming back from Thanksgiving break last night and today and the news getting ’round, the place could bust wide open or shut itself down—”
The Provost interrupted. “We are not shutting down!” he said, plainly irritated that the subject had been raised in front of Puppy Dog. “The President needs options, including something that will let the kids, the parents, everyone, know that we can be in loco parentis when we have to.”
Reactions to in loco parentis varied considerably. Tuttle looked puzzled, McAllister’s forehead furled, and Puppy Dog looked on from a distant planet. Eyes shifted to me and I was caught off guard. In loco parentis—long a pejorative phrase in College Hall—essentially means a paternalistic relationship between a university and its students, a concept that died in the sixties when higher education abandoned its traditional role in regulating student life. All curfews, dress codes, parietal rules, and such were eliminated and the kids were given charge of their private lives at eighteen. McAllister, usually an advocate of leaving students alone whenever possible, pressed me. “How far can we legally go, Algy? What are
we talking about? Getting the kids back on the campus? Monitors? Room checks ...?”
The Provost responded for me. “That’s not what I mean,” he said, maybe annoyed at himself for harking back to campus rules he could remember. “I meant actions that demonstrate concern, and more importantly, show that we are doing something!”
“Ah-h-h,” said Puppy Dog, whose eyes had brightened in an expression that could only be termed pious. “Let me repeat, Artemus, it’s time for cooperative action. The Mayor is willing to join with President Danby in a major cooperative event of some kind. The University and the city! Together! You know what I’m saying? Police, administration, faculty, students ..., all together! Raise their consciousness! Get the safety message across! Get everybody to calm down ....” His voice trailed off.
Tuttle’s face didn’t bother to conceal contempt while McAllister’s, if anything, was even more grim. The Provost, however, remained poker-faced. We all recognized that Sonny Russo and Puppy Dog were tweaking us; they knew, as we did, that getting our fractious campus community into any facility would be like dropping a lighted match into a box of fireworks. Got to hand it to Sonny, though; by making the proposal, Sonny had the cover of offered cooperation in case the media asked. It was the University’s fault, not Sonny’s, if we couldn’t follow through.
We waited for the Provost to respond but he sat stolidly, and I wondered if this “cooperative event” had been discussed and dismissed earlier.
Tuttle shifted in his seat, reached into his folder, and said ominously, “We may have another problem,” as he passed out sheets of eight and a half by eleven copy paper.
I took mine, surprised that it felt damp, and studied a photograph of a stern, black face within a crudely drawn circle cut through with vertical and horizontal lines, like a gunsight’s cross hairs. The target’s name—Reverend Jesse Kingdom, the date—this Friday, the time—noon, and the place—The Green—were printed below. The same flyer, without the cross hairs, had been affixed to utility poles, tree trunks, and bulletin boards all over campus and adjoining streets for at least two weeks.