Death at Dawn

by Arthur Day

  Doug had rehearsed this moment many times since their phone conversation but, even so, he found himself at a loss for words. He was supposed to show how urbane and sophisticated he was, but he hated any thought of those qualities. He did, in fact, hate sitting in this woman’s chair trying to make nice to her. He much preferred the pool halls, bars and strip joints that were his normal hangouts. “I thought you sounded nice on the phone,” he finally said and felt like a complete chump. He was ready to tell Bigbucks to keep his fucking blood money. This was going nowhere and as soon as he could get out of here he was going downtown and getting drunk.

  Pam smiled. “Why thank you Doug. I assure you that I had nothing to do with the sound of my voice on the phone, but it was nice of you to drop by and tell me that. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Well at least she hadn’t kicked him out right then and there. “I could use a beer,” he admitted

  “I think I have some. Glass?”

  “Bottle’s fine.”

  She went through the doorway and he heard the icebox door opening and closing. Pam reappeared a moment later carrying a Sam Adams in one hand and a glass of some greenish poisonous-looking stuff in the other. She handed me the beer and sat back down. “So now that we have met face to face what other questions do you have?”

  He could not think of one but Bigbucks would not be happy if it all ended here. “What’s that green stuff you have in your glass,” he asked in a moment of desperation.

  “Veggie shake with a touch of cayenne.”

  “Oh.” Yuchhh. Now what?

  She must have seen the expression on my face because she laughed, a low throaty sound like water tumbling over stones in a creek. “You could probably benefit from some.” She looked at his belly bulging over his belt and winked.

  She winked? Like he was a little kid? What a bitch. He felt like getting up, giving her the finger, and going back down to his car. A moment later he remembered the size of his tab at Nichols Pub and that he had just lost a load to his bookie. Fuck. “Yes, I suppose it would if I could actually drink it.” he looked doubtfully at her glass and then took a pull from his beer.

  “I remember you when you were just a little kid up at the lake during the summers. You were small and skinny and frowned a lot. You harassed me every chance you got and pissed off my parents when you slashed my tires. I’m sorry about Bitsy. I liked her but she stayed inside most of the time so I didn’t see much of her.” She actually did sound sorry and her face took on a dour expression as if she was remembering that awful time or perhaps it was his company that made her look as if she was sucking on a lemon. Doug wanted to give her something to suck on for sure.

  “Yeah well I was pretty young then.” Pretty lame but it was all he could think of to say. She sipped her green stuff and he sipped at his beer while each of them tried to figure out what the other one wanted and how to proceed. Of the two of them Pam was the more relaxed since she had no mission to complete and nothing to prove to Doug. He thought of asking for another beer but decided that might be pushing the envelope of his supposed sophistication and good manners. He swore silently that his father was going to pay big time for this. Making friends with this woman was going to be one huge pain in his ass. He had no problem hating her. “I remember you too. You were way older and had a horse that you rode along the dirt roads up there. I used to stand on the shoulder and watch you as you went by. You seemed very grownup.” He wanted to say she looked very stuck up, but common sense prevailed. This meeting was heading south rapidly, however, and he was looking for a way to make a graceful exit.

  “That’s right. I remember now.” Pam’s snapped. “You used to throw stones at the horse. You were very nasty.”

  “I’ve matured since then. Really. My folks didn’t spend a lot of time with us and I guess I was just trying to get someone’s attention.”

  “You did,” she replied tartly.

  Ooops. Now what? “Sorry about that,” he lied. “I was really young and did stupid things like that.”

  Pam smiled and seemed to relax a little. “No worries. I wasn’t the perfect child either. I doubt there is such a thing.”

  “I’d love to take you out to dinner one of these nights if you’re agreeable. We could get to know each other better. I heard that you were married at one point.”

  “At one point,” she agreed. “As for joining you for dinner, I’m going up to the lake tomorrow and won’t be back for weeks. Thank you for the invite, though.”

  Shit. That would mean that he would have to go to the lake and show up as if by accident to find the right opportunity. He hated the lake and hadn’t been there in years. Then he realized that Compton was the perfect place to do her. The police would be less likely to connect him with Pam than if she died down here and there were more places where he could do it and no one the wiser. He would have to check with Rhonda who took care of the Worth cabin to see if it was still habitable. Still, he told himself, things could be worse. Suppose she had simply gone up to the lake without telling him. Then he would have been tits-up on this whole deal. He put his empty beer bottle on the little folding table beside his chair and pushed himself to his feet. “Have a good time. I think the weather’s supposed to be nice for the next week or so. Thanks for letting me drop by like this. I really enjoyed it and hope we can do it again sometime.”

  She also got to her feet and we shook hands. “Nice to see you again little Doug. Perhaps we will do this again.” Her manner was cool, almost aloof but her words gave him hope that he had not blown the deal right from the git-go. Bookies are not known for their patience.

  BUCKMASTER

  Thank you for coming all this way just to let me in,” Buckmaster told Julie Pease as she fumbled in her little red bag and brought out a small yellow envelope staring at it nearsightedly for a moment before shaking the key out into her hand. He had to admit that, for a person her age, she was remarkably well kept. Her hair was white but neatly curled around her ears. Although her face showed the dryness and wrinkles of her age she held it well and, thought, looked ten years younger than what she must be. He had been impressed by her youthfulness when they had last talked and was even more so now.

  “Nonsense. One can go cuckoo sitting around an empty camp all day. I needed to get out and do something so here we are. I have as much if not more reason to find out what happened to Pam than you do.” She unlocked the door of Pam’s apartment and led the way up a short flight of stairs to the large living room with chairs around a gas fireplace and a couch along the front wall underneath the picture window. Everything was neutral. The walls were beige. The carpet was thick and a greyish. Maybe she was staging the apartment for a new tenant. Didn’t seem likely but the place certainly did not feel as if somebody lived there.

  All very neat, efficient, expensive and totally lacking any individual touches Buckmaster decided. There were no magazines on the coffee table, no old pair of slippers by the couch, no ashtrays and no glasses. The pictures on the walls were colorful prints but there were no pictures of family, none of her father or her ex-husband. The apartment could have been one of those model units some developers use to show prospective renters. It was that lifeless. Buckmaster opened the door by the fireplace and walked into a smallish dining room. On the left was a kitchen with a counter looking out into the dining room. Large sliders in the far wall led to a flagstone terrace with a small table and two chairs facing out into a quadrangle of other units. The dining room table was bare and polished to a high shine. He opened the GE Profile refrigerator but there was little to see: ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire sauce. Pam had gone and had not expected to be back for a while.

  “She always goes up to her cabin in June. I think a maid service comes in and keeps things clean when she is here,” Julie spoke up from the doorway to the living room.

  There was little else to see so he went back into the living room and up
another flight of stairs to the second floor where there were two bedrooms with a bathroom in between. One bedroom was obviously Pam’s for it had the bed and the dresser. Everything made up and spotless. The other bedroom was made into a study. There was a modern desk against the left wall with a device for holding a keyboard and file drawers on either side of the center hole. An older Dell desktop was alongside the desk with wires leading behind it to the various attachments. He pressed a little round button towards the bottom of the box and heard the clicking whiz of the hard drive spinning up. The DELL logo came up followed by a Windows 10 screen asking for a password. He turned and went back into the bedroom where Julie was standing looking out over the quad.

  “I don’t suppose you know the password for her computer?” he asked

  She turned. “No. Sorry. I was born too early for all this computer stuff and never took an interest in it. She left me a spare key which I thought a wise precaution but not her password.”

  Buckmaster frowned. As a society we are increasingly online and interact through social media such as Facebook and You Tube and Twitter, he thought. At our workplace we are constantly having to login to our computers if we are not active for a period of time. In our private lives every online store or service requires a password, even those for which a password makes little sense since they merely show you something and do not require any personal information. They all require passwords of varying complexity and most people use the same passwords over and over for fear of forgetting one and then having to jump through computerized hoops in order to get a new one. We have become so connected that we have become disconnected, so much a part of the hive that we feel uncomfortable if we do not have internet access through a variety of devices with our phones becoming the dominant means of interaction.

  Buckmaster typed PAM into the password box and hit ENTER. No good.

  He tried JULIE and then CARL and finally MJ. None of them was the password.

  “When was she born,” he asked Julie who had come into the study and was watching him.

  “May first nineteen sixty-one.”

  Buckmaster typed in 511961. No good. “Any pets in the family?”

  Julie looked thoughtful and then said “Try “Chuckles”

  No good but a lot of passwords required at least a number as part of the word. Buckmaster tried “Chuckles1” The screen went dark for a moment and then the Windows 10 desktop came up. He smiled softly. People did not expect to be hacked. It was foreign to the way most people thought. After all, what are the chances of “my” computer being hacked? Who would be nutty enough to go to all the trouble just to see spam emails or play pinball but Buckmaster knew that “Chuckles1” would probably work for other sites as well and maybe sites that would prove embarrassing to the owner. It was an advantage for the police and techs but also for the criminals and those forever trying to steal identities or simply get into someone else’s stuff because they could.

  He clicked on the mail icon and brought up Outlook. Most of the mail in the inbox seemed innocuous enough though he didn’t know enough about Pam to be sure. “Do any of these ring a bell with you?” he asked Julia.

  She looked at the list of email addresses in the FROM field. “No. Sorry,” she admitted.

  “Okay if I have one of the techs from Rockmarsh go through this machine?”

  “Sure, if it will help.” She reached in her pocket and brought out the key. “Here. If the rental office gives you any grief, refer them to me.” She walked around Buckmaster, picked a pen from a cup on the desk and wrote her number on a scratch pad that looked as if Pam had gotten it free from a charity. “I think I own a piece of this complex,” she told him. “Carl was really into REITs before he died, and I think he actually invested in some of the local developers. I’ll check with my bankers.”

  Buckmaster went through the other drawers but found nothing of interest. All the bills were marked paid and dated from weeks before. Pam obviously had her mail forwarded and paid them at the lake. Aside from bills there was little to see. One drawer held office supplies. Another a stack of DVDs. On the bottom was one marked HC. He put that into the computer’s drive and found himself looking at the picture of a naked man. Behind him, Julie made a small noise in her throat. It seemed that Pam had little in the way of male companionship and made use of porn and her five fingers. Feeling as if he had trespassed on a private part of her life, he ejected the disc and put it back in the drawer. She was far from unique, he thought and if he did not have Nicole he would probably be indulging like millions of other people facing a physical and emotional wall with few choices.

  “Carl liked that stuff as well. I found his stash once but never told him. He liked it all. Men or women.” Julie commented drily. “Must be where she got it from.”

  “Mmmrrphh,” Buckmaster muttered. He looked around the rest of the room. It was not large but there was a built-in closet on one wall. He opened that but there was nothing to see except a few clothes on hangers. Along the wall opposite the desk was a sofa that probably folded out into a bed for company. Nothing else.

  He turned and was about to leave the room and the apartment. There was nothing here, no clue to what had happened to her. Maybe the computer would yield some additional information. He would wait on the techs’ report and a run-down on the names and addresses in her email, but it didn’t seem likely. As far as he could tell, aside from porn, she had led a remarkably quiet, almost mouse-like existence. He had talked with Coots. Perhaps the neighbor on the other side could add something useful. As he turned and waved Julie to go out ahead of him, he noticed the first odd thing that he had seen in the place.

  There was paper in the trash basket. All the other waste paper baskets had been empty, even the one in the kitchen. No even a last minute frozen dinner plastic container. It was as if someone had gone through and emptied everything yet here in her study there was trash. Not much, to be sure. It looked like an envelope that had been torn in half. He pulled a set of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled out the two pieces of envelope. No return address. Nothing in the envelope and the envelope itself looked fairly old. The address had been done on a typewriter, but the police lab could confirm what type and how old. He held up the two pieces of envelope. “Mean anything to you?”

  Julie turned and came back into the room. She peered at the envelope, took a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and looked at it again. With a look of disappointment, she shook her head. “Sorry. I never saw it before.”

  He stuffed the pieces of envelope into an evidence bag as they walked down the stairs and left the apartment building. Maybe this visit had not been a waste of time after all. He would have to wait on the lab report and computer analysis. Pam must have taken whatever was in the envelope with her. Either that or thrown it in a dumpster or torn up and flushed down the toilet. The contents must have meant something to her even if she didn’t like them. Could be that the note Ethel Coots had kept was similar to the missing note but why take it with her? He looked over to Julie’s car. She turned and waved, got in and drove off. Buckmaster felt suddenly old and tired. He would drop the evidence off at the station and call it a day. Whatever the outcome, he was ever more certain that Pamela Pease was in real trouble and after all this time had passed was probably dead.

  If she had taken the contents of the envelope with her and not destroyed them then they would be up at Lake Compton along with her current partner if he was still there. He would need a search warrant but was fairly sure he could get one. It was a large place. It would take a team to search it thoroughly. Buckmaster crossed his fingers and hoped he wasn’t screwing up his budget for nothing. Still, the Pease name meant that he had to turn over every leaf. Besides, he liked and admired Julie Pease. She must be going through Hell right now with her only child missing. No ransom note. No explanation. Just gone like the morning ground fog. Yet she carried on with dignity and intelligence. If he had h
alf of what Julie had when he was her age, Buckmaster thought he would be doing very well indeed.

  McCAAL

  The drive up to Rosie Dugan’s camp was a pleasant one. Connecticut is not endowed with mountains but there is enough variation in the terrain to provide some beautiful views. The weather was perfect, a postcard to send home to parents or friends. I crested the old Junctionville Road and the lake lay before me nestled in the surrounding hills and looking so bright and fresh that it could have been a painting.

  Pam and I had known the Dugans for many years. Pat Dugan had been a contractor, a big, burly guy with a ready grin and hands the size of steam shovels. He knew and was friends with many of the politicians in Hartford and all the local building inspectors. He had an apparent inexhaustible supply of jokes, some of them even clean, and loved to sit out on his porch and watch the sunset over the lake on summer evenings. He had pretty much handed over the business to their son, Ben, when he had suffered a massive heart attack and died a couple of years before. His death had almost destroyed Rosie who vowed to follow him but had remained in the land of the living despite her desire to be elsewhere. I had not seen her in a while or even thought of her until she’d called a couple of nights before.

  “Hi MJ. It’s Rosie, Rosie Dugan. I called to say that I saw an article in the Courant and I am worried sick about Pam and I know you must be as well,” she said in a rush as if she was afraid that she might break down in the middle of the call. She sounded desperate and remote as if she had been crying and then had forced herself to stop and do something practical. They had been close, she and Pam. They would sit for hours chatting and taking long walks along the roads and paths in the woods. They had emotional connections shared by very few people so that they could know what the other felt or would say in any given situation. When we were in New York, they would have long phone conversations and when we were at Compton, the two families were always back and forth between the farm and the camp. There were times I swear when they finished each other’s sentences. They were not blood sisters but the next best thing. Pam and her family invested in Dugan’s developments to the benefit of both families.