by R.J. Ellory
“Cheap fragrance,” Travis said, his eyes still closed. “Coffee, oil, tobacco, sweat.”
Travis spent more time looking at the blood patterns on the back of the man’s shirt collar and the collar of the jacket. He asked for a magnifying glass, went through every pocket, turning it inside out and brushing whatever lint and fragments he found within onto a sheet of white paper and then viewing them closely. Every once in a while, he paused to make further notes in his book.
Though he seemed unaware of Rourke or Farley, he nevertheless glanced up at them and smiled knowingly.
“You’ve done this before, then?” Rourke said.
“No, Sheriff… First time for everything though, eh?”
Rourke looked at Farley. Farley just stood there, seemingly fascinated by the entire process.
Once Travis was done with the man’s clothes, he folded them again neatly and returned them to their respective bags.
“We’re done for the moment,” he told Rourke. “There are no manufacturers’ labels on his clothes or shoes; he walks heavier on the right than the left; he had low blood pressure; he was a heavy smoker, obsessively chewed his fingernails; low-protein diet, signs of diabetes, drank far too much alcohol for his own good—probably for anyone else’s as well—and when it came to crooners, he erred more toward Bing Crosby than Dean Martin.”
Rourke shook his head, unsure of whether Travis’s final comment was actually a joke or not. “I don’t know what to make of you.”
Travis smiled wryly. “You don’t have to make anything of me, Sheriff Rourke.”
Farley gathered up the paper bags and walked them back to the lockup.
“I’d like to go to my hotel now,” Travis said. “I want to take a shower, and then I want to head out to the carnival and begin questioning the personnel.”
“Very good,” Rourke said.
“How long do I gotta keep your friend here?” Farley said.
“A while yet,” Travis said. “We have to identify him before anything further can happen with the body. And I’ll need a copy of your autopsy report.”
“No problem. I got one ready for you.”
Farley gave Travis the report. Travis thanked him for his assistance, and then he and Rourke made their farewells and returned to the cars outside the building.
“Got you the best room the McCaffrey has,” Rourke said. “It ain’t the Plaza, but it should suffice.”
“I am sure it’ll be just fine,” Travis said.
The McCaffrey Hotel certainly wasn’t the Plaza. The young man who greeted Travis and Rourke at the desk was Danny McCaffrey, the brother of Rourke’s deputy, Lester.
“Honored to have you here, sir,” Danny told Travis. “And I hope you’ll be comfortable.” He insisted on taking both Travis’s overnight bag and his portable typewriter.
Rourke asked how long Travis would need.
“Forty-five minutes,” Travis said.
“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes precisely, then.”
Michael Travis and Danny McCaffrey made their way upstairs, taking a left along the landing toward the front of the building, and here—with seeming pride—McCaffrey showed Travis a room no more than eleven by fifteen, a single bed against the right-hand wall, a small desk and chair beneath the window, a tired armchair, a floor lamp standing sentry beside it, and a threadbare rug on the floor.
In that moment, Travis was reminded of the first time he had seen his given room in Esther Faulkner’s house.
He felt a twinge of something, something deep, something unidentifiable, and he pushed it aside. Once again, further memories floated up from the shadows of his past.
“This will do just fine,” Travis said, appreciating that he had no choice in where he stayed. To ask of the other hotel would be dismissive of the McCaffreys’ hospitality.
“Sorry to say that none of the rooms have their own bathrooms, so you’ll have to use the one down the hall. Third door on the right.”
“No problem at all,” Travis said.
“Breakfast you can have here in the morning,” Danny McCaffrey explained. “Dinner in the evening too, and we own a small diner in town, so you can take your lunch there if you wish. You’ll find my sister down there. Her name is Laura. She knows you’re expected.”
“That’s very good of you,” Travis said.
“More than welcome,” McCaffrey said. “Anything else you need, just holler.”
“Much appreciated, Mr. McCaffrey.”
“Please call me Danny,” he said.
“Danny it is,” Travis replied.
Danny left the room, closing the door gently behind him.
Travis laid out a clean shirt and underwear. He went down the hall, found the bathroom, and got undressed.
The first minute beneath the shower was bracingly cold, and then he increased the flow of hot water to a comfortable level and washed quickly.
He dried himself, redressed in his suit trousers and shirt, bundling his underwear into the towel and checking that the hallway was empty before he hurried back to his room. Once behind the door, he changed into his clean clothes, dried and combed his hair, and unpacked the remainder of his things. He set his typewriter on the small desk with a towel folded beneath it to reduce the noise. He put Farley’s autopsy report next to the typewriter. He glanced over his extensive notes, made another copy of the diagram from the back of the dead man’s knee. It was very definitely akin to a reversed question mark. He did not pause to consider it further. He would find the significance of it, but everything in its own time. Now he had to begin the process of questioning all those who worked at the carnival.
Travis checked that he had everything he needed—his notebook, his pens, his camera, the shoe outlines and prints, a photo of the victim—and then he locked the door and went on down to the lobby.
“Danny, how many keys are there to each room?” Travis asked.
“Well, we have three or four as a general rule. Guests are pretty forgetful when it comes to keys.”
“Okay, if you could take any copy you have of my room key and put it in the safe, that would be appreciated.”
Danny frowned. “The safe?”
“You don’t have a safe?”
“No, sir. No safe.”
“Okay, well, put them in a lockable desk drawer or something, somewhere secure, and don’t give them to anyone but me, understand? And there will be no need to clean the room on a daily basis. I will attend to that. You can change the bedclothes on the usual schedule, but forewarn me so I can be there when it’s being done.”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
Travis glanced at his watch. Rourke had another handful of minutes before he’d be late.
“Can I get you anything, Mr. Travis?” Danny McCaffrey said, interrupting Travis’s thoughts. “A cup of coffee while you wait for Chas, perhaps?”
“No, thank you,” he replied. “I’m good.”
Travis turned back to the window. The street was empty of people, strangely so, and it reminded him of another day, another town, another empty street. That had been an important day, and though he tried not to think of it with pride, he could not help but think of it with a sense of accomplishment. Things had changed that day, and—as such—its importance could not be underestimated.
February 11, 1953, a Wednesday, a day when Michael Travis, special agent, had been mentioned in dispatches to the director himself.
But the significance of what had happened that day in February of 1953 bore a far greater weight due to the events that immediately followed the death of his father, the blunt reality of the Nebraska State Welfare Institution, and his first meeting with Anthony Scarapetto.
4
For Michael Travis, it was a change, and a hard one at that. Looking back, it was as if he had two distinct ranges of memory set ag
ainst the horizon of his mind: the before and the after. The first was dark, the second darker. Before meant the ever-present threat of liquor-fueled violence, the ferocity of his father’s outbursts, all of this tempered by the two sides of his mother, the beaten, bloodied, swollen-faced wife, possessing barely strength enough to breathe, and on the other side his real mother, loving, somehow ever-forgiving, convincing herself that all it would take was to believe enough to make it all change for the better. It never did and now never could. The after was something else entirely, though equally strange, immeasurably new, and frighteningly real.
For a long time after his father’s death, Michael did not speak. Already a quiet one, he became silent. People with letters trailing their names said he was emotionally traumatized, understandably so, and would eventually come back to reality. They asked him about his thoughts, his feelings, what was really going on inside. He did not care to answer their questions, and so he did not. He did not speak of the dreams, for there was little he could recall of them once he woke, and he would not have known what to say anyway.
Michael became a ward of the state of Nebraska: the court his father, due process his mother, and he the bastard child that fell through the gap in between.
Janette Alice Travis, a mere thirty-one years of age, was charged, arraigned, and remanded for trial. As the county prosecutor and public defender prepared their cases, she was held west of York in the State Reformatory for Women. There had already been intimations that the state would press for the death penalty. Sheriff John Baxter, if nothing else, was a man who understood law as needful for the survival of a society and thus was duty bound to relay precisely what Janette Travis had said to him upon his approaching the scene of the crime. It was to be those few words that damned her.
Was premeditated, John. No use hidin’ from the truth. Been thinkin’ about killin’ him for just the longest time…
Had she not said such a thing, there might have been a prayer, but it seemed the state prosecutor had blood on his teeth, and he wasn’t going to fall victim to pleas for clemency, mitigating circumstances, et al. The previous two governorships had seen no executions. Before them, Governor Arthur J. Weaver, back in May of ’29, had seen only one murderer pine-boxed out of death row. If Janette Travis went such a way, then it would be the first execution under the current governorship of Dwight Griswold, the first woman ever to take her place in the Big Chair up at Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln.
Maybe the state prosecutor, a bullfrog of a man called Frederick Wyatt, and the state’s DA, Lyle Samuelson, figured such a thing was worth brownie points on the old career scoring card.
Whatever went on in the minds and hearts of the bureaucratic and judicial collective responsible for the expedition of Janette Travis’s case, none of it gave a thought for Michael, even then sojourned in the inappropriately named Nebraska State Welfare Institution, for institution it may very well have been, but welfare could not have figured any less in its concerns.
State Welfare was an ex-military facility a couple of dozen miles north of St. Paul. There were no armed guards or watchtowers; there were no dogs or alarms or gun galleries. The doors were locked, and the custodians, as they were known, were uniformed and carried whistles and nightsticks. The big boss of the hot sauce during Michael Travis’s period of tenure was Warden Seymour Cordell, ex-cop, ex-penitentiary governor, head as hard as a pool ball, face like a worn-out leather mailbag, absent of pretty much any kind of feeling save a gritty and downbeat pragmatism that was doled out by the handful to anyone within arm’s reach.
Michael Travis was inducted at State Welfare on Monday, August 24, 1942, just five days after the death of his father. He had not seen or heard from his mother during those five days and had not been given any information regarding her circumstances or whereabouts. Those five days had been spent in the holding cells of the Flatwater Sheriff’s Department, simply because there was nowhere else to put him. A perfunctory inquiry into existing relatives had turned up nothing. It appeared that both maternal and paternal grandparents were deceased, as was Janette’s one maternal aunt, Clara Pardoe, herself a liquor-widow. Clara had had a son, Bernard, who was Janette’s cousin, though he was dead. Bernard had been briefly married to a woman called Esther, though she could not be easily located.
So, five days of jail food and serge blankets later, Michael Travis was driven twenty or thirty miles upstate to Welfare, and once he had been stripped, deloused, clippered and uniformed, he found himself standing before Warden Cordell, a custodian behind him, another at the door.
Warden Cordell sat behind a beat-to-shit desk as wide as a football field. The chair within which he sat was a wooden roller, and each time he shifted, it creaked like a ship. He read through the single sheet of paper that sat in the manila file in front of him, and then he leaned back and looked at Michael for what seemed like half an eternity.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “and not a great deal younger than yourself, I did something wicked. I killed a cat. It was a mean cat, a vicious little son of a bitch, and it sat on the veranda of my folks’ house like it owned the place. I would shoo it away, kick it every once in a while, but it was a tough creature, and it just kept on coming back for more. My ma used to throw it tidbits, you know? Encourage it. I hated the thing. Hated it with a passion. But I’ll tell you this now, son, that cat was not a quitter. No matter the times I kicked it or pelted it with rocks, it would just keep on coming back for more. Seemed the urge to survive was a great deal stronger than the fear of pain.”
Cordell paused for a moment, as if caught in reverie, and then he looked back at Michael and went on talking.
“Anyways, one day, I got tired of this cat, and I coaxed it up on the veranda with a piece of chicken and then I bashed its head in with a stone. That was that. The cat was dead. And you know something? I damned well missed that son of a bitch. I missed him something bad. Real sorry that I killed him, but—”
Cordell waved his hand dismissively.
“What you gonna do, eh? The past is the past, and there ain’t no reason for cryin’ on it, right?”
Michael stood impassive, implacable. He didn’t want to say anything in case it was the wrong thing.
“Well, believe it or not, son, there’s a coupla reasons for tellin’ you that story. Firstly, like I said before, there ain’t no use cryin’ on what’s been an’ gone. Life kicks us this way and that, and kicks us good. You may think that you’re the only one who ever got kicked this hard, but I can assure you that there’s a good deal of kids here that has had it as tough, some even tougher. Okay, so your ma is up at the reformatory for killing your pa, but at least you got a ma, son. At least for a while.”
Cordell smiled like he was delivering some good news in among all this other business.
“Anyways, second reason I told you about the cat is perhaps more relevant to your present situation. I learned from that experience that cats is tough. Well, I learned from working here that kids is tough too, often tougher than cats. There is rules and reggerlations. They is ironbound and immovable. You break those rules, we gonna fix you up so you see the error of your ways. You break the rules a third time, well, that’s when we put you in the Choke Hole, and that ain’t a place you wanna go, believe me now, son. That is not a place you wanna go visit.”
Cordell paused and squinted at Michael.
“You hearin’ me, son?”
Michael nodded. “Yes, sir, I am.”
“You got nothin’ to say for yourself?”
“No, sir, I have nothing to say.”
Cordell smiled. “Polite, I’ll give you that. Respectful. I’m just sayin’ that I don’t want to have to bash your head in with a stone, you see? Figuratively speakin’, o’ course. But from what I can see, it appears we’re gonna have very little trouble gettin’ you settled in here, son.”
“No trouble at all, sir.”
&n
bsp; “Well, okay. So I done read your paperwork, I understand you had some difficulties, but seein’ as how there ain’t no one to look after you, you get us. You ain’t no thief as far as I can see. You ain’t never been in trouble with the law, right?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, let me warn you about some of these here boys. Some of them are all teeth and claws, and those you gotta watch out for. They feel threatened by change, threatened by newcomers, threatened by things only they can see, as far as I can tell. And then some of them are just noise and nothin’ else, and you don’t gotta be afraid of them. They bark, but they don’t got no teeth to bite with. Then there’s the quiet ones, and they’s the most dangerous of all. We have ourselves a couple of really crazy ones, but we keep them out of the main circulation of events, and that makes life a lot easier for everyone.”
Cordell rose from his creaking chair and walked around the desk.
“I hope you ain’t gonna be a troublesome one, son, because I just got enough on my hands without all of that. It don’t never get you nowhere ’cept the Choke Hole, or Chokey, as they see fit to call it now, and—like I said afore—that’s a place you don’t wanna go once, let alone twice. I understand you ain’t here because of some bad thing you did, but still, if you figure that our own lives are our responsibility, then you ended up here ’cause of yourself and no one else, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Cordell smiled, and for a moment his awkward leather face took on an almost avuncular warmth. He extended his hand, and Michael took it—warily at first—and then when he realized that Cordell was doing nothing but shaking his hand, Michael returned that gesture with a firm response.
“Good handshake says a lot about a man,” Cordell said. “And you done looked me in the eye while I was talkin’ to you. You ain’t no regular delinquent, son. I can see that plain as day. Don’t let them see your weaknesses. If you let them get a foothold, they climb all over you and kick you to pieces before sundown.”