THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE

by Jason Whitlock

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  AFTER LEAVING Cassie, Sara returned to the station via the local McDonald’s drive-thru, where she purchased a Super-Size order of French-fries and a regular Diet Coke. Her period was coming and Sara felt compelled to bulk up on the carbohydrates, though she resented the saturated fats. Since the murder, she’d been derelict in her duty to run ten miles daily along the river (in the morning before day shift, or in the early evening before night) and forty-five minutes on the Bow-Flex. Though she was not at risk of gaining weight, Sara’s appetite, her bowels and her ability to fall quickly to sleep at night and wake refreshed in the morning had been disrupted by the change to her routine.

  While she wouldn’t characterize herself as an addict, Sara did have a fancy for McDonald fries. For a two-year stretch in the nineties, while he had been a stay at home dad and unemployed, her father had offered the treat to his youngest daughter—in exchange for her best behavior—to day-trips to the indoor mall, to the municipal swimming pool, to the park or wherever else he might take her to keep Sara distracted. At the age of thirty-eight, Matthew Pridmore had become a victim of corporate downsizing prior to the term ever having become popularized by the likes of the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.

  With her mother working and Sara attending school only half-days, her father became a surrogate companion. It accounted, she supposed, for her tomboyish athleticism and little boy cute good looks. The closeness continued until Sara reached her early teens, when, as if by sprouting breasts and pubic hair, the relationship changed, becoming somehow inappropriate, her father unwilling to encourage—though he did not openly discourage—a continued intimacy between them. Sara’s mystification at the shift in attitude and her mother’s subtle encouragement of it was among the reasons Sara left home to attend college at the age of seventeen, trailing by a full decade her elder twin-sisters. (Sara never forgot her mother’s words: You shouldn’t be looking, as if her father’s thoughts were somehow inappropriate.)

  Sara parked her vehicle and before exiting brushed salt and an errant French-fry from her slacks. Dorothy O’Rielly was at her post, manning the telephone and steadfastly chipping away at a mound of paperwork she hadn’t been able to file during the week.

  “On your own?” Sara asked.

  “Trinity has a family,” Dorothy explained. “It wouldn’t be fair to bring her in on a Saturday. Besides, the telephone has been quiet.”

  “The calls have slowed,” Sara said.

  “To a trickle, since after the third day. Everyone knows Missy is dead, and how she died. We’re only taking information, not releasing it. No gossip. I imagine with nothing to gain by calling here, people don’t.”

  Sara nodded her head in understanding. She asked Dorothy about the location of archived files. Dorothy indicated the office with a sweeping gesture of her hand. She said, “Not here; no room. Why do you ask?”

  Sara related her brief conversation with Rena Dojcsak, that there may have been events in the past which might—or might not—be relevant to the killing of Missy Bitson.

  “There was a girl, perhaps ten years ago, maybe twelve, but she was from out of town. Before that I couldn’t say. I only came here in ninety seven. If Ed thought it was important, I’m sure he would have said.”

  She advised Sara that archived files—those predating nineteen ninety—were stored at the public library for safekeeping. When they relocated to their new offices in the municipal building across town, it was likely the files would be transferred to disk and made accessible electronically there.

  At the library, Sara was directed to a lower level basement sanctuary—a utility closet really, Sara imagined—housing the complete archived files of the Warren County Sheriff’s Department, Church Falls Divisional Station. The room was musty, smelling of decayed cardboard and mold, with low-wattage overhead lighting that Sara was convinced would ruin her eyes.

  The librarian advised that the files had not been transferred to disk but were stored, rather, hard copy by date, in boxes beginning with the year nineteen sixty-three, though within each separate box individual file folders were sorted in no particular order.

  Sara blanched, regretting her initiative.

  The librarian confessed, “Before sixty-three, I couldn’t tell you.”

  Sara retrieved the first of the more than thirty containers, beginning her search with the year John F Kennedy died. She sat, making herself as comfortable as she could in the only seat available, a straight back wood chair. She rifled through manila file folders that were sorted alphabetically, which was no help to Sara since she had to review the incident sheet in each and every case to determine the nature of the crime. Soon, however, Sara got the knack of progressing more rapidly by focusing on the upper right corner of each report where there was a box titled Nature of Offense.

  The years from sixty-three to sixty-nine moved quickly. The Sheriff at the time, a man by the name of John Riggins, seemed preoccupied in his official duty with no more serious an offence than petty theft, domestic disturbance, neighborly disputes and the odd D and D—Drunk and Disorderly. During his six-year tenure there had not been one incident of major or violent crime.

  By the time Sheriff Sidney Womack inherited Riggins portfolio, Church Falls had developed into the kind of place where drugs, robbery and even assault with a deadly weapon, while not common, could nonetheless occur. In each file, Womack kept copious and careful notes. It slowed Sara’s progress considerably, but allowed her the detail she required to make or to dismiss any connection to the present, of the past.

  The first such possibility came with the death of Shelly Hayden in nineteen seventy-one. Though ruled officially by the county coroner (the present Mayor’s father?) as being accidental, Sheriff Womack had included in his notes a suspicion that perhaps it had not been. Shelly fit the profile; thirteen years of age with a reputation for promiscuity.

  No one had been either seriously suspected let alone charged with her death, though there had been concern regarding a group of young transients who during the summer had made impromptu camp by the river. There was a reference to a group of local teens, but to Sara the file seemed redacted, or deliberately expunged.

  That a second girl, Frances Stoops, had been murdered was, at the time it happened, not open to debate. Her battered body had been discovered only months following that of the Hayden girl and like Shelly, Frances was young—fourteen years—and considered (according to Womack’s, again, abbreviated notes) even by her parents to be promiscuous. In this case, an arrest had been made. Drew Bitson had been arraigned only a day after Frances was discovered lying in a bloody heap on the banks of the Hudson.

  Though Jimmy Cromwell had mounted a spirited prosecution, the charge ultimately was dismissed for lack of evidence. Apparently, a semen sample extracted from the victim did not match the blood type of the boy. Lacking at the time sophisticated DNA matching technology, there had been no follow-up investigation or subsequent arrest. In this case, Womack had made no mention of transients or a group of local teens.

  Cassie was right; even though Drew Bitson had been charged, he hadn’t been convicted, which didn’t let his son Jordy off the hook.

  Sara sat back, replaced the file and pressed a closed fist into each eye. There wasn’t a table on which to work and she had needed to set each folder in her lap while pouring through the documentation. Her slacks were filthy, the residue and stink of ages-old file paper clinging to the material like sawdust. Her hands were yellow, the finger tips gritty and dry. Her lower back ached from the strain of bending over and her buttocks burned.

  Twenty more boxes; already it was near on five o’clock. And what had she accomplished? Precious little, she decided. Two dead girls: one a death by likely misadventure, the other an obvious homicide with a credible, though unindictable, suspect. Sara didn’t believe in coincidence, but was it significant? After thirty years, probably not, but it was inconsistent. She would give it till the end of the decade an
d perhaps, on another day, run a check in neighboring counties.

  As Sara stood to retrieve another box, a hand came down on her shoulder. Sara had been preoccupied and not heard anyone approach from behind. She started, uttering a high-pitched whelp, like a puppy dog. Ed Dojcsak stood behind her, his beefy frame backlit by a bright fluorescent light in the outer hallway.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I startled you.”

  “No, Ed,” Sara replied testily, “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Didn’t mean to. Thought you’d hear me coming down the stairs.”

  Her heart still pounding, Sara said, “Well, I didn’t. What are you doing here?”

  “I spoke to Dorothy. She told me you were here. Something about wanting to search through past files?”

  Inexplicably, Sara felt guilty, as if her initiative were a reflection on his skill. “It was something Rena said.”

  “Rena, my wife?”

  “She’s the only Rena I know, Ed.” Sara was testy, still trembling, and unwilling yet to let Dojcsak so easily off the hook. Dojcsak moved around her and into the small storage space. To her, he smelled strongly of tobacco and beer.

  “So, this is where they keep them. I’ve never been,” he said as if speaking of a visit to Walt Disney World. “Did you find anything useful?” Dojcsak continued to eye the stacked containers, placing his face inches away as if only by doing so could he make out the type on the labels.

  “Apparently, Missy Bitson is not the first girl in Church Falls to go missing and turn up dead.”

  “Oh?”

  “Shelly Hayden and Frances Stoops. Do the names mean anything to you, Ed?”

  Dojcsak answered right away. “Shelly Hayden got herself killed by falling off a high cliff. Frances Stoops was murdered. I was in high school.”

  “You didn’t think it was important enough to mention? I mean, after the death of Missy Bitson?”

  “Maybe over a beer.” Dojcsak chuckled, his chest rattling with the effort. He removed a package of cigarettes from his breast pocket and was about to light up when Sara said, “I wouldn’t, Ed. This stuff is as dry as tinder.” Dojcsak replaced the package. He said, “It was thirty years ago, Sara. Over thirty-years. There was never any real evidence to suggest who killed Frances, and as for Shelly, only my cousin ever thought it was anything but an accident.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “Sid Womack.” Dojcsak grinned. “C’mon, Sara. How do you think I got this job?”

  “You inherited it?”

  “Anyway,” he said, referring to the files, “How far along are you?”

  Sara had finally stopped trembling and smiled. “Nineteen seventy-seven. I was planning on working through to seventy-nine when you showed up.”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine,” Dojcsak said. “Year of the Disco Queen.”

  “The disco who?”

  “Donna Summer,” Dojcsak replied. “The Disco Queen. She must have had three, maybe four top ten hits that year. You’re too young to remember. Probably weren’t even born.”

  “I take it you weren’t a fan.”

  Dojcsak acknowledged with a nod of his head. “But she was easy on the eyes.”

  “What about Drew Bitson? He was arraigned.”

  “Released for lack of evidence, Sara. And believe me, back then Jimmy Cromwell was not a champion of the movement for civil rights. If there had been enough to convict, he would have. Drew has made a decent life for himself here, which, after what he went through, is a credit to him.”

  “And his son?”

  “Jordy,” Dojcsak mused, pulling his fingers across his cheeks. “That’s another matter and one we must discuss. You know what they say, Sara: the apple never falls far from the tree.”

  “Don’t know it’s what they say, Ed, but sure is what you’ve been saying lately.”

  “If the answer is staring you in the face, Sara, why make the investigation more difficult than it needs to be?”

  “And you think it is, staring us in the face?”

  “Well,” said Dojcsak, “it isn’t staring out at us from down here.” He gestured toward the files.

  “You don’t think I should I come back Monday?” Sara asked, secretly hoping for a reprieve.

  “I wouldn’t bother. I joined the force right out of high school, in seventy-two. From seventy-nine until now, I’ve been in charge. If there was anything relevant here, I would have let you and Christopher know. Come, Sara, let me buy you a beer; you must be parched from the parchment. The solution to Missy’s death is in the present, not in the past.”

  It was good enough for Sara. She closed the overhead light and pulled the storage room door shut behind her before following Dojcsak to the stairs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  JOEL PATAKI KNEELED on all fours before the toilet, hugging the porcelain fixture, watching as his half-digested breakfast of boiled egg with bacon swirled round and round in the bowl, finally, with this last flush, disappearing down the drain like his life; a real time emulation of some hackneyed cliché.

  Pulling himself to his feet, Joel soaked his face in the sink and ran a toothbrush over his teeth. He rinsed with Listerine before returning to the living room. Anxiety spent, Joel felt the first pangs of hunger. A six-week experiment with the Atkin’s Diet had helped him to neither lose weight or to control his raging appetite. All he had earned for the effort was a foul temper, foul breath, foul farts and a case of constipation that he thought might cause cancer of the bowel in his later years. Joel had read stories of Atkin’s devotees who’d required surgery to scoop out their guts, human waste clogging their intestinal tract like clay. He shuddered at the prospect.

  On the couch, Jordy Bitson sat counting his money, dark chocolate skin standing out like a stylish accent against the tan leather. His loose fitting denims sagged to Jordy’s hips, blue stripe silk boxers showing underneath. Over a white collarless tee shirt, he wore a Syracuse Orangemen jersey, on his feet powder blue Nike trainers, which he hadn’t bothered to remove at the door. His short-cropped hair glistened, sitting atop his head like a skullcap. Jordy’s fingers shuffled the bills as if he were an expert, a casino cage attendant sorting twenties from tens, and tens from fives. His hands were small, proving to Joel Pataki, they were not a reliable indicator of size.

  “It’s all there,” Pataki said.

  Jordy looked up, all innocence, gullibility and good grace. “I’m not counting, just sorting.”

  Despite everything, Joel was drawn to this fiery young stallion, who even now was in the process of destroying life as Pataki, in a sybaritic buffet, which had yet to escalate to orgy status, had heretofore enjoyed.

  A simple allegation from the boy would be sufficient to ruin his career; proof of the photographs to earn him a stretch of federal hard time with Pataki playing prison bitch to some miscreant’s master in a role Joel was convinced he had neither the spirit nor physical resilience to endure. That Jordy had violated the relationship by surreptitiously snapping the two in flagrante delicto was moot. What was Joel thinking when he made the decision to bed down with a boy not yet half his own age? He wasn’t thinking, Pataki decided, at least not with the part of his anatomy that was capable.

  Joel didn’t regret the death of Missy Bitson. It had been she who first introduced the two, backstage following a Saturday afternoon rehearsal of Lady Be Good. It had been a miserable late autumn day, one in a succession of miserable autumn days. Dusk had come early, a temperature inversion producing an icy fog that settled motionless over the village like a quilt. Missy stayed late, working with Joel on a dance step she had mastered but wished to enhance. Jordy had walked her home through the gloom, returning later. Joel offered hot chocolate. The boy preferred something stronger, the two becoming drunk and ultimately ending up together naked in bed.

  For Joel Pataki it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Since first meeting, Jordy and he had shared the pleasure of each other’s company
twice weekly, though Joel marveled wondrously at how much more of Jordy there was to share. Pataki never once considered what the boy might be getting from the relationship, his own better judgment and his libido overtaken by a passion he hadn’t experienced in more than twenty years.

  “There is no more where that came from, Jordy,” he said after Bitson had stopped counting—sorting. “I’m tapped out.”

  Jordy allowed himself to settle back comfortably into the plush sofa cushion as if he were more than merely an invited guest. He surveyed the condominium, the furniture and the contents. Tastefully appointed if neither opulent nor large. Jordy eyed Pataki reproachfully.