by Ed Gaffney
Cleo jumped down and stalked out of the room. Almost immediately an orange striped cat appeared out of nowhere and followed her. “That’s Malcolm,” Irene explained. “He’s not very social. Bye, Malcolm,” she called out as the cat left without the slightest hint that there was anyone else in the house. Irene turned back to Vera. “I don’t think his first owners took very good care of him.”
Vera nodded. Irene’s cats were the last thing on her mind, but as long as the waitress was comfortable talking to her, she was happy to hear about them. Vera waited a minute, and then asked again, “So did you have any idea why Davy was alone this night, instead of eating with his usual friends? Did he do something or say something unusual? Was he acting strange in any way?”
Irene took a moment to refocus. “Oh no,” she said, “nothing like that. I mean, Davy was eating dinner—he always gets a number six—extra Swiss cheese, no pickle, with a large Coke….” She smiled, glanced down, and then looked back up at Vera, almost shyly. “My manager said I memorized the menu faster than anybody he’s ever seen. I don’t know.”
Vera smiled back and, after a moment, gently said, “So Davy was having a number six….”
“Oh yeah, silly me. He’s just having his dinner, and then all of a sudden, this other guy comes right in and sits down with him.”
What? “I thought you said Davy was alone that night.”
“Oh I’m sorry, sweetie. I thought you wanted to know if he had come in with friends. He came in alone, but he left with another man.” Irene thought for a minute. “I’d never seen him before. I remember that real well, because this man had a goatee, and I like goatees. But for some reason I didn’t like this guy. I’m sure he was perfectly nice, but I don’t know. He just gave me a funny feeling, you know?”
Now Vera reached for her pad. It had been quite a while since she’d seen one, but if she wasn’t mistaken, Ms. Irene Quarrels, career burger waitress, had just presented her with a bright, shiny lead.
SIX
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LOVELL: What is your occupation?
ROBERT SULLIVAN: I am the owner of three convenience stores in the Springfield area.
Q: Including the Nite & Day Convenience Store in New Wilton?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us how you learned about the robbery that took place at that store on March 19?
A: The police called that night and left a message. I didn’t get it until the next morning.
Q: And what did you do?
A: I went right to my store.
Q: What time was that?
A: I got there around six-thirty in the morning.
Q: What was the condition of the store when you arrived?
A: Well, first of all, Steve wasn’t there, and he should have already opened up. And besides that, it was obvious that something had happened. I mean, the place wasn’t locked up, the alarm hadn’t been set. Besides that, the door to the office was open, and the cash register was empty except for some change.
Q: Who is Steve?
A: He’s the guy that was on duty when my store got robbed. Steve Hirsch.
Q: And he was supposed to open the store the morning after the robbery?
A: Yeah. Actually, Steve wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest employee, so it wasn’t a big surprise to me that the store wasn’t locked up that morning. In fact, at first—well, I probably shouldn’t say that.
Q: Are you talking about what you said to the police?
A: Yeah.
Q: That’s okay. You can tell the jury.
A: Well, at first I told the police that I thought Steve was involved. You know. In the robbery. But that was before, you know.
(Commonwealth v. Gardiner, Trial Volume II, Pages 80–82)
July 1, 2004
EVERYBODY KNEW THAT THE SIMPLEST PLANS were the best plans, and so Elmo took a lot of pride in the way that he was hiding the body. It was so simple it was brilliant. There was no way it could go wrong.
He pulled his car into the space behind the trailer where Dewey kept his office, and got into the—whatever the fuck this was—holy shit, a Dodge Reliant—threw the cooler into the front seat, and off he went.
Elmo had made an arrangement with Dewey, a decent guy who ran a junkyard. They shared some history through the criminal justice system, which made working with Dewey easy. All Dewey knew—all Dewey needed to know—was that about twice a week Elmo would call and ask Dewey to leave some old car unlocked with the keys in it. A few days later, it would be returned to the same place with a twenty-dollar bill in the glove compartment. No questions asked, no questions answered.
What was so simple about the plan was that the body would never get discovered, and all Elmo had to do was a little bit of driving. That was no problem, because even before everything had gotten so crazy and he’d ended up killing that guy, Elmo would spend hours every night, usually between around midnight and four in the morning, driving all over the county on his own private patrol—with a case of Budweiser and his friend Captain Jack Daniel’s at his side. He would listen to those morons on talk radio, or sometimes he’d tune in to the lite rock station, not that rap noise and whatever the hell else passed for music these days. And sometimes he just drove in silence, figuring out what he was going to do when he finally hit the lotto.
Elmo reached into the cooler and grabbed another Bud as he passed Route 14 on his way up toward Finnesburg. He liked taking this route because even though it wasn’t that wide, it was so rarely traveled by anyone, including cops, that it didn’t matter if he drove down the middle of the road.
It was a damn good thing Elmo had come up with this new plan, because that first night he’d almost killed himself trying to bury the stupid body in the woods. He’d driven down a dirt road he’d discovered some years ago when he’d been patrolling out in the middle of nowhere, parked the car, turned the high beams on, and started digging where the car lights made it easy to see the ground.
But the goddamn rocks and roots and whatever other bullshit was all over the place made it impossible to dig a hole deep enough to bury the corpse. Exhausted, and maybe a little the worse for wear from the extra drinking he’d done—anybody would’ve needed a little more help than usual from Captain Jack on that fuckin’ day—Elmo had returned to his car and fallen asleep behind the wheel before he’d even had a chance to drive home.
That was dumb, because if anybody had found him there, he’d have been screwed. But when he woke up, after he’d had a beer to clear his head, he realized that he didn’t have to bury the body. That was good, because you always see some dog or some kid or some busybody uncovering some poor jerk who was buried in a shallow grave out in the woods.
The answer had come to Elmo in an inspirational moment just after he’d taken a leak behind that pine tree with the roots that had been such a pain in the ass the night before. As anyone knew, the safest place to keep a dead body was in the trunk of a car. But it would be too suspicious if Elmo left a car in a parking lot day after day. The cops would impound it, pop the trunk, and then the shit would really hit the fan.
The answer was to rotate cars! Elmo had been driving over these past nine—or was it ten already?—years to tons of places where he could park a car for a couple days without raising any suspicion. And Dewey’s cars were always in such shitty condition that there was no chance that anyone would ever think to steal one.
There were two slight hitches with the plan. The first was that the body was so goddamn heavy. Elmo almost threw out his back the first time he tried to pick that load up out of the trunk, and his bum knee was not getting any better.
But then he’d figured out a way to position the cars so that it wasn’t so bad—back-to-back, angled a bit so he had enough room to stand between the cars. All he had to do was hoist the body up so that one end was resting on the edge of the first car’s trunk, then he could swing the other end up and out of the first trunk and drop it into the second one. After that it was easy to lift and d
ump the other end of the body into the second car, close both trunks, and drive away, clean as a whistle.
The other hitch was that he had to choose places where his cell phone worked. Because once he ditched the car with the body in the trunk in a new location, he had to call Wally on the cell phone to taxi him back to where the first car was stashed in the last location. Then he’d drive that car to Dewey’s, drop it off, pick up his own car, and head home.
He took another slug of beer just as he veered hard right at the stupid fork off of Middleboro Street onto Sachem Drive, which was so dangerous it was almost criminal. Did somebody have to fly off the road and crash into that tree before they put up a warning sign, or what? He must have had two or three close calls himself, and he knew this road like the back of his hand.
He finished the Bud and decided to have a shot of Jack just to get the juices flowing, because this trip was going to be a little tricky. The last time he’d stashed the body—it was funny, he didn’t even remember what kind of crap car it was in—anyway, the last time he’d not only been enjoying his usual case of Bud and a few shots of Jack, but he’d also done some coke. He wasn’t proud of that, but shit. Sometimes a guy was forced to go out of his way to keep body and soul together.
Anyway, he’d done more coke than he’d planned, and so he forgot to leave the car in a good place for the cell phone. So he’d had to walk quite a ways before he reached Wally. And now he was having a slight problem remembering exactly where he stuck the car with the body in it. He took another swallow from the pint bottle of Jack and flipped on his brights. Goddamn country roads were so dark they could be treacherous sometimes.
Anyway, it was no big deal. He knew he left the car somewhere in the town of North Borden—at least he was pretty sure it was in North Borden—because it had tons of little country roads running through lots of hills and woods with plenty of dirt path turnoffs that he could use as temporary parking places. The thing was, he always—well, almost always—took a minute to make a mental note of where he ditched the car before he called Wally to bring him to the car that he would return to Dewey’s. The thing was, the last time Elmo left the car he was a little too wasted to remember to make a mental note, so now he was just working on straight memory.
Which shouldn’t be so bad. Hell, there weren’t that many places he could have left it, were there? He passed the Welcome to North Borden sign on Route 89 and took the first right up the hill into a little rinky-dink development, and then past the entrance to the state forest.
Did he leave it in there? No way. Even though it had plenty of good places to stash a car, there was always the possibility that a state worker would stumble onto it, call the cops, and all hell would break loose. One night a couple of years ago he was patrolling around here and actually fell asleep for a second and ended up rolling off one of the dirt roads and bumping into a small tree. Good thing he wasn’t going fast and that he didn’t hit a bigger tree or he would have really fucked up his car good.
Anyway, as soon as he woke up he realized that he needed to get out of there, and about fifteen seconds after he was back on the road heading out of the state forest—and doing quite nicely, thank you very much—he passed a statie just rolling through. Man, that was close.
Now he drove another five minutes and suddenly passed a sharp turn to the right that led up a fairly steep hill. He had to stop the car and back up so he could make the turn, but there was no one in the road, so it was no problem.
He didn’t have a specific memory of taking this route, but it just felt right. As he looked both left and right, he hoped that some particular detail might jump out at him and jog his memory, but there were no streetlights, and the goddamn night was so dark he could barely see his hand in front of his face.
And then there it was. A little nothing church stuck up on the side of the hill to the right of the road. He specifically remembered thinking last time that whoever picked that location for a church must have belonged to the dumbest religion in the world. No place to park, hard to get to, not much to look at. Guaranteed that God thought it really sucked.
He pulled into the tiny lot, took a shot of Jack Daniel’s, chased it with a good belt of Bud to celebrate, and then walked around the side of the church to take a leak. As he stood there, he noticed that the paint was peeling near one of the doors. What a shithole.
But hey. Whatever. That was their problem. The real story was that now he knew he was getting close to where he’d left the body. He zipped himself up, got back into the car, and headed toward where he knew sooner or later he’d find a left turn into the woods. But then, before any left turn presented itself, he found himself at the end of the road, forced to turn right or left onto Route 44—a state highway that did not go into the woods.
That didn’t make any sense. He was sure it was a left into the woods just after passing the church. So he made a left, figuring that maybe he’d just forgotten about Route 44.
But there was no left turn into the woods off of Route 44—it turned away from the heavy forest and opened up into a small commercial area. There was a gas station, and an old broken-down diner called Mel’s Fat City, which he surely would have remembered. Shit.
He pulled into the gas station to turn around, and headed back in the opposite direction on Route 44. Maybe last time, after he passed the church he had taken a right on 44 and then made a left into the woods. That must have been it.
But it wasn’t. Off to his left were a series of streets into a residential area. Not very nice houses, but even in this crappy neighborhood he’d never have left a car with a body in the trunk. Somebody would have called somebody.
He reached for the Jack, but as he tipped it up to pour the delicious liquid into his mouth he realized that it was empty. Goddammit! He rolled down the window and fired the bottle out onto the road. Why did this crap always happen to him? He grabbed another Bud from the cooler and took a long pull.
He stayed on Route 44 rather than turning off onto a smaller road that headed back into the woods. He needed to think. He needed a plan.
Elmo knew he remembered that shitty little church. Who could forget how pathetic it was? But now that he was thinking about it, was he remembering it from the last time he ditched the body, or was it from another time he was out on patrol? Fuck.
This was not good. He took another swallow of beer. What he needed was a map. He always kept a map book in the backseat. He’d just turn to the page with the map of North Borden, and if he had to, he’d drive up and down every goddamn road in the town.
He pulled over, left the blinker flashing for safety, and got out of the car so he could check the backseat. But the ground was so crappy that he stumbled as he exited the car, and scraped his hand as he fell. At least he hadn’t hit his bad knee. But when he pulled himself up he saw that his pants were torn, and his good knee was bleeding and dirty. Shit. That was going to hurt like a motherfucker tomorrow.
He opened the back door to check for the map. But there was nothing in the car except empty beer bottles and a coffee cup. What the fuck? The backseat didn’t even look familiar.
Then he remembered. This wasn’t his car. It was one of Dewey’s. Shit. He was going to have to do this without a map.
He closed the door and got back into the car. He was beat. Maybe the best plan was to rest for a minute, then start looking again. Yeah. He’d just close his eyes for a second.
SEVEN
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LOVELL: Would you please state your name for the court?
MICHELLE KASPERIAN: Michelle Kasperian.
Q: Where do you live, Michelle?
A: 664 Old Country Road, Overton, Massachusetts.
Q: And how old are you?
A: Fourteen.
Q: What grade are you in?
A: Ninth.
Q: You go to Overton High?
A: Yeah.
Q: And last spring, were you going to Overton Middle School?
A: Yes.
Q: Ok
ay, Michelle. Now I’d like to speak to you about something that happened this past summer, sometime in July. Do you remember coming upon something unusual around that time?
A: You mean when I found that abandoned car near Shelby’s Pond?
(Commonwealth v. Gardiner, Trial Volume IV, Pages 166–170)
July 7, 2004
MARIA WANTED TO MAKE THE PERFECT IMPRESSION, so she took a lot of time getting ready for work that morning. She wore her most professional-looking outfit—black pants with her comfortable but good-looking boots, white pullover, and gray pin-striped jacket with the longish cut that managed to look both sharp and casual at the same time. She also paid extra attention to her makeup. She didn’t put on any more than usual—she was just a little more careful than on other days. She wanted to look like a serious businesswoman, but not like a sexless robot. And, of course, not like a cheap hooker.
Normally she started work a half hour early. Today she made sure that she got in to the office forty-five minutes early.
It wasn’t that Maria was trying to come on to her boss. Not that she would have had any problem if it turned out that Anthony was attracted to her. He seemed like a very decent man, and the good Lord was well aware that Maria and her family could use someone like him in their lives. But if her boss had any interest in Maria other than as an employee, he was certainly taking his time letting her know about it.
No. Maria wanted to make an especially good impression today for very non-romantic reasons.
Anthony was coming in just as she arrived. He was wearing a black turtleneck, a tweed jacket, tan pants, and loafers. “Well, you look like you’re ready for something special,” he said, opening the door for her. “Got a date tonight?”
“No,” Maria replied as they entered the office. “I was just hoping that we could talk at some time today, about, um, a few things.”
“That sounds pretty serious.” Anthony walked over to the little kitchen area and started to make a pot of coffee. One of the good things about working here was that Anthony didn’t skimp on the coffee. It tasted so good that last Wednesday Maria wasn’t paying attention, had three or four cups before she’d even noticed, and got so wired on caffeine that she spent most of that night staring at the cracks in her bedroom ceiling.