by G. M. Ford
"What?"
"She said—and these are her exact words—she said, just as calm as could be, 'He shot his seed into her. I know he did. Don't ask me how I know. I just do. He filled her up, and of course, I can't have that.' She said it just like that. Like a schoolteacher or something. 'Of course, I can't have that.' And then she ran off up the alley. Everybody was too stunned to do anything." "Seed?"
"I swear." Right hand aloft again. "Jesus," Carl said.
"Jeff was just . . . crushed. He never played football again. Went right to some divinity school after that year. I think he was just so embarrassed by the whole thing that he couldn't face anybody at the university again. I mean, everybody in the place just felt so bad for him. I really can't describe it. It was one of those moments of such incredible embarrassment that it made people almost wish it was happening to them." She hesitated. "You know . . . because watching it happen to somebody like Jeff was somehow even more painful."
"I know what you mean," was the best I could manage.
"It was indescribable," Janet said. "After that, the band tried to get things going again and all, but nobody's heart was in it. They didn't even make it through one song. People just stood around for a few minutes looking at each other and then went looking for their coats. Nobody even knew what to say. Within a half hour the place was empty."
"Hell of a night," I offered lamely.
Anne Siemons agreed. "Even now, I can still remember the day when I got my annual at the end of that year, the first thing I did was check the banquet pictures, before I even looked for my own senior picture or anything else. And this morning, the minute Pamela called to say that a detective wanted to see if I could identify someone in a picture from nineteen
eighty, that was the first thing to come to mind. And even after all these years, when I called Janet about five seconds after Pamela called me from the alumni office, it was the first thing she thought of too."
"I just knew," Janet Behnoud said. "I just did."
I went for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
"Who was she? She must have had a name?"
As I figured, they shrugged in unison.
"Nobody knows," said Anne.
"No one I know ever saw her again," Janet added.
"And this Swogger fellow didn't know her from Adam?" Carl asked.
"Never seen her before in his life."
Carl drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. I checked my fingernails. After a time I said, "You said you had an address for Jeff Swogger."
Anne rose and headed back toward the kitchen. Janet leaned that way, thought about following, but instead stayed put.
"That's how come we were acting so weird before," she explained. "It's almost like we've been waiting all these years for this thing to somehow come home to roost, if you can understand that."
"Sure as hell isn't something you could forget," Carl said.
"It's more than that," she said. "It's more like being married to a drunk for all these years. Believe me, I know all about that. When you're married to a drunk, you spend your life waiting for the call. The one that tells you he's been fired, or he's in jail, or he's dead, or he's killed somebody else's family. Every time the phone rings, your stomach flips over because you know it's inevitable, sooner or later the call is going to come."
Anne returned with a blue three-by-five card. She stood her ground two paces from me. "This isn't going to be any trouble for Jeff, is it? I mean, he's got a really wonderful life going on. He's important to a lot
of people. I wouldn't want to do anything that caused Jeff any trouble."
"I don't see how it could. It's just that we just don't have anything else to go on. We need to put a name on that girl. And what you've told us here today is all we've got."
She passed me the card. I had to laugh.
"What's so funny?" Behnoud wanted to know.
I read the card aloud. "The Reverend Jeffrey Swogger, Northwest Christian Center, Fifteen sixty-six Northeast One forty-eighth, Redmond, Washington."
"That's rich," Carl snorted. "All of fifteen miles from home."
"What goes around comes around," said Siemons gravely.
Behnoud saved the day. "Well," she said to her friend, "vou gave him the address, now tell him the rest."
I waited. Carl stopped drumming his fingers. "This gets weirder," Siemons said. "I'm all ears," said Carl.
"You're not the first people who ever came here asking about her."
16
"Connley retired. Took his thirty years and headed for the weeds."
"When was that?" I asked.
"Eighty-six, eighty-seven. Somewhere in there."
Flush with fitness. Strapping was the word for this guy. His wide wedge-shaped body hummed beneath the hand-tailored blue uniform of the Madison Fire Department. Small features. Dark curly hair, light blue eyes.
"Any idea as to Mr. Connley's current whereabouts?"
"Depends on who wants to know," he said agreeably.
I showed him my PI license. "I wanted to ask him about an old case." "He'd like that." "He would?"
"Oh, sure. He'll talk your ear off. He comes in all the time. With those old-timers, firefighting is like in their blood. They can't help it. He stayed away for a couple of years there. Then, when his missus died a few years back, after a while he started coming in again. Volunteering. Consulting. Doing whatever he could. You know. He's on tonight over at Seventh Street." The rest was easy.
The much-fingered business card that Anne Siemons had produced read, "William S. Connley, Criminal Investigation Division, Madison Fire Department." Red logo. Two phone numbers. Home and department, I presumed. I'd tried both. Neither was still active.
He was about sixty. A big man, thick everywhere, A long oval face made longer by a vast freckled dome over which he insistently combed irregular fronds of wispy gray hair. William Connley had also once been strapping. Now, even with the aluminum cane, he shuffled with an odd broken gait as his left leg threatened to disappear behind him with each step. The result was a severe list toward the maimed side, a tilt so gravity-defying that each subsequent step seemed miraculous. He settled his bulk into a chair next to Carl. We shook hands and exchanged names.
"Floor collapsed on me over in Buckeye back in eighty-five," he announced. "Broke my back. They stuck me answering the phone."
He looked speculatively at Carl.
"Car accident in seventy-seven," Carl said.
"Hughes says you guys want to talk about an old case of mine."
I kept it simple and recent. We were trying to put a name on a picture. The picture in the annual. Siemons and Behnoud and the banquet story. He absentmindedly pushed his fingers through the burn holes in the front of his soiled navy cardigan sweater while I ran it down for him. When I finished, he said, "You didn't say why."
"No, I didn't."
He waited.
"I don't mean to be impolite or anything, Mr. Connley—I mean, I'm not purposely trying to be mysterious."
"Bill," he interrupted.
"It's just such a strange deal," I continued. "I don't even know if it's a case at all. I'm not sure what to say about it."
He held up a hand. "Tell you what. I'll tell you what I know. When I get done, then you can decide what you want to tell me, okay?"
Hughes was right. Connley liked to talk. He started at the beginning, ran down his entire career, the triumphs, the tragedies, the accident, losing his wife to colon cancer, the whole thing. It seemed like he hadn't had an audience in a long time. It took him the better part of forty minutes to work his way up to 1980.
"So, back in the middle of nineteen eighty. Early July. Stan Roker and I were the whole damn arson team back then. Managed to get along without Harvard degrees too."
He looked to us for agreement and got it.
Satisfied, he went on. "We ran into anything too wild, we called the Staties. Nowadays—" He stopped himself. "Anyway, what happens is this. First coupl
e of days in July, the old Miles place burns down. By modern standards probably more of a mansion than a house. It's like three stories, twenty-five rooms, wood-frame construction, probably ninety years old at the time. Sits way back on its own ten acres inside the city limits. Not visible from the road. By the time we get an alarm and the first unit arrives, the entire structure is fully engaged and already beginning to collapse. Chief Petersen decides there's no possibility of anything being alive inside, so no sense risking anybody's life, tells the units commanders to just keep it from setting the surrounding woods on fire."
"Anything suspicious about the fire?" I asked.
"Lemme finish now," he said. "But no. Place was so far gone when we got there. That old. Wood construction. It burned itself into a heap. Anyhow, the place belonged to Victoria Miles. Everybody in town knew that. About eighty at the time. Family was one of the original settlers of the area. Her husband was Charles G. Miles. Probably don't mean much to
either of you, made his fortune in lumber, but he was real prominent around here. Died in the late sixties."
"The name rings a bell," said Carl. "Was he an art collector or something like that?"
"Yeah, good." He slapped a meaty paw down onto Carl's arm. "A collector, but not art. Other stuff. Coins. Stamps. Chinese porcelain. Crap like that."
"He used to loan the stuff out to museums," Carl said.
"Sure did. He was real famous for it."
"I saw his collection of Roman coins once back in New York. That's where I remember the name from. It was supposedly the finest collection of its kind in the world."
"That's him all right."
I stepped back and leaned against the wall.
"So," Connley continued, "when things cool down we dig one body out of the rubble. The old lady. Or that's what the coroner says. Damn near nothing left of it, but he gets a good dental match. Okay, so far so good. These things are unfortunate, but they happen. The place was a firetrap. She was an old woman. She lived alone."
He held up a meaty finger.
"Ah," prompted Carl.
"Right. Hang on now, Carl. Heh. Heh. Well, the smoke no sooner clears when we got her next of kin lightin' a fire under us. All very concerned, you know. None of 'em had seen her in years, of course, but now they're all her favorite relative. You know how it is. Truth is, everybody wanted the case cleared so they can get their piece of the pie. I guess the old lady still had the first dime her old man ever left her, which was a hell of a lot of dimes. So, at this point, her family is breathing down our necks when we get contacted by her insurance company. They're shittin' a brick. They're still carrying a two-million-dollar policy on the old man's collections."
This got the reaction he'd been looking for.
"And get this," he continued, "that wasn't the value of the collections—no sir, the collections were worth more like six or seven. Two was just all they were willing to insure them for as long as Miles insisted on keeping the stuff at home."
"At home. Like in the house?" Carl asked.
"You got it. And the only way they'd insure it at all was if he built himself a fireproof vault in the basement."
"Which, I take it, he did."
"Big as life. Fifteen by thirty, to be exact. Steel and firebrick. Took three construction cranes working in tandem six hours to get it up out of the basement."
He paused for effect. Looking at each of us in turn.
"Nothing. Bare as a baby's ass. The old lady's personal papers. Nothing else. Not an airmail stamp or a copper penny. Nothing."
"Burned up?" I asked.
"Hold your horses," Connley admonished.
Chastened, I returned to my wall.
"Some of it, the porcelain, it turned out was still out on loan to museums. About two million worth. Never for the life of me been able to imagine two mil worth of dishes, but you know, to each his own. Even with that, there should have been about three mil in coins and stamps in there. Nothing." He sliced the air with his arm. "Not one damn thing."
"So her relatives are raising hell," Carl suggested.
Connley wagged his big head.
"They could give a shit. The stuff was insured. They just wanted their money. The fire just saved them the trouble of selling the stuff. Hell, as I remember, the property itself sold for three mil or so even without the house. It was the insurance company that was losing its mind. They were looking for any excuse not to pay. Negligence. Arson. Any damn thing."
He waited to see if I would interrupt again. When I didn't, he went on.
"So, about this time, Stan—my partner Stan Roker—gets off his big ass and gets around to checking with local tradesmen. You know, the old lady didn't go out, so Stan figured she must have had stuff sent in and that maybe those folks knew something. He was mostly just trying to cover our asses. Make damn sure we did everything we could—and guess what?"
He gave me a grin. "You can ask what now," he said. "What?"
"Stan turns up this kid, David Lund, who works for Hansen's Market. It's not there anymore, but at the time, it was a family market about four blocks from the old lady's house. Seems the kid had been delivering groceries and whatever else the old lady wanted for the past couple of years. The kid claims that when he first started, he used to deliver them to the old woman herself, but that since about September of seventy-nine the old lady had a live-in companion. A young girl. Dark, under twenty. Said her name was Michelle. No last name, just Michelle."
"Anybody else know about this girl?" asked Carl.
"Nary a soul. We checked them all. Meter readers, social workers, everybody. Nothing. All we got is the kid. And the kid's been in a couple of scrapes with the law, minor drug things, nothin' serious, but just enough so we're not real sure what to do with his girl story. So—to give credit where it's due, Stan, it was his idea, wants to know how the old lady went about hiring this mystery girl. I mean, as far as we know, she hasn't been in public for a couple of years. We check with the local agencies. Far as they know the old lady drove off the last housekeeper a couple of years before. None of them would have worked with her if she'd asked, which she didn't "
Connley gave an exaggerated shrug.
"The paper," Carl suggested.
"Exactamundo. First week in September seventy-nine. There it was, an ad for a live-in companion, the old lady's phone number and all."
"Oooh," I said.
"Oooh is right," Connley agreed. "So Stan and I roust the Lund kid again. He's still on probation, so we can push him pretty hard. He sticks with his story. We drag the kid down to Madison PD and run him through the mug books for a couple of days. Nothing. By this time, the family is really pressuring the department to sign off on this thing so the estate can be settled. There's a lot of heat being passed around, and most of it is coming right at Stan and me. Chief Petersen don't like this Lund kid or his story one bit. He's on our asses to tie the thing up. Anyway, as a last resort, we sit the Lund kid down with a police artist and come up with a likeness."
I overcame the urge to pull Carl's likeness from my coat pocket.
"Identikit?" asked Carl.
"Yeah. Pretty primitive compared to what they got today, but in those days, poor ignorant bastards like us thought it was the cat's ass. Sooo—-we just started passing the likeness around when the word comes down from above that the case is closed. Chief Petersen decides that we can't hold up the wheels of progress on the word of some stoner kid. Yeah, he's a bit intrigued by the newspaper ad we found, but like he says, that was then, this is now. Most likely the girl took off a long time ago. The old lady was notoriously hard on help. The Lund kid's story that the girl was there as late as two weeks before the fire don't hold water for the chief. He figures the kid is just looking to get his name in the paper. Tells us to wrap it up and submit a final report."
Connley now was visibly excited. The story had gained a momentum of its own. He wouldn't require further prompting.
"So, Stan and I are back in the office the next
day huntin'-and-peckin' up a report when the phone rings. It's the trainee of the month from over at the Seventh Street station. Been on the job all of a month - or so. Fresh out of the university. Back there in the early eighties was when you started to have to have a college degree to even apply. Nowadays, they all got degrees in Fire Science, whatever the hell that is, or forensics or some such crap. Anyway, the kid, I can't remember his name, he says he just saw the likeness on the station board and says he thinks he's seen the girl before. Well, you know, I figure the kid is just trying to make a name for himself. Draw a little limelight. That kind of thing can make quite a difference at promotion time, if the brass remember your name. So I'm on my guard, right. Well, the kid then proceeds to tell me this completely off-the-wall story about this girl losing her mind and exposing herself at this dinner he was at. This stands my ears straight up. I mean, the story was way too wacko to be made up."
"The sports banquet," I said.
"Right. He says there's a picture of her in the nineteen eighty annual. Gives me the page number and everything. So I hustle over to the university and, sure enough, it's right where he said it was. It's a pretty damn good match for the Identikit too."
Carl gave me a small nod of the head. I reached into my jacket pocket and unfolded the photographic likeness of Allison Stark. I dropped it into Connley's lap.
"Look anything like this?" I asked.
Connley fished in his shirt pocket and came out with a pair of black half glasses which he rested on the end of his nose.
"Eyes are just fine. Just need 'em for reading," he said, peering at the picture. He studied the likeness for a full minute before he spoke. "As best as I can remember—it was what, fifteen years ago—but as best as I can remember, that was pretty much her. It's hard to tell. This is a photograph, that was more like a cartoon, but it sure as hell could be the same person."