The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  I ENJOYED THAT EVENING in the Bear. Perhaps it was partly relief at not having incurred the wrath of the Fulcis, but in moving between the bar and the floor I was also able to empty my head of everything but beer taps, line cooks, and making sure that, when Dave returned the next morning, the Bear would still be standing in more or less the same condition it was in when he left it. I drank a coffee and read the Portland Phoenix at the bar while the night’s cleanup went on around me.

  “Don’t tax yourself,” said Cupcake Cathy, as she nudged me with a tray of dirty glasses. “If you strained something by helping, I don’t know how I could go on living.”

  Cathy was one of the waitstaff. If she was ever less than cheerful, I had yet to see it. Even as she let off some steam, she was still smiling.

  “Don’t make me fire you.”

  “You can’t fire me. Anyway, that would require an effort on your part.”

  “I’ll tell Dave to fire you.”

  “Dave just thinks we work for him. Don’t disillusion him by making him put it to the test.”

  She had a point. I still wasn’t sure how the Bear operated, exactly; it just did. In the end, no matter who was nominally in charge, everyone just worked for the Bear itself. I finished my coffee, waited for the last of the staff to leave, and locked up. My car was the only one left in the lot. The night was clear, and the moon bright, but already there was a layer of frost on the roof. Winter was refusing to relinquish its hold on the Northeast. I drove home beneath a sky exploding with stars.

  OVER BY DEERING OAKS, the door to Jude’s basement opened.

  “Jude, you in here?”

  A lighter flared. Had there been anyone to see, it would have revealed a man layered in old coats, with newspaper poking out of his laceless boots. The lower half of his face was entirely obscured by his beard, and dirt was embedded in the wrinkles on his skin. He looked sixty but was closer to forty. He was known on the streets as Brightboy. He once had another name, but even he had almost forgotten it by now.

  “Jude?” he called again.

  The heat from the lighter was burning his fingers. Brightboy swore hard and let the flame go out. His eyes were getting used to the dark, but the basement was shaped like an inverted “L,” which meant that the moonlight penetrated only so far. The dogleg to the right remained in darkness.

  He hit the lighter again. It was a cheap plastic thing. He’d found a bunch of them, all still full of fluid, in a garbage can outside an apartment building that was being vacated. In this kind of weather, anything that could generate heat and flame was worth holding on to. He still had half a dozen left.

  Brightboy turned the corner, and the light caught Jude’s brown boots dangling three feet above the floor. Brightboy raised the flame slowly, taking in the reddish-brown overcoat, the green serge pants, the tan jacket and waistcoat, the cream shirt, and the carefully knotted red tie. Jude had even managed to die dressed like a dandy, although his face was swollen and nearly unrecognizable above the knot in his tie, and the noose that suspended him above the floor was lost in his flesh. A backless chair was on its side beneath his feet. To its right was a wooden box that he had been using as a nightstand. His sleeping bag lay open and ready next to it.

  On the box was a plastic bag filled with bills and coins.

  The lighter was again growing hot in Brightboy’s hand. He lifted his thumb, and the flame disappeared, but the memory of its light danced before his eyes. His left hand found the bag of money. He put it carefully into his pocket, then dragged Jude’s pack into the moonlight and rifled it for whatever was worth taking. He found a flashlight, a deck of cards, a couple of pairs of clean socks, two shirts fresh from Goodwill, and a handful of candy bars just one month past expiration.

  All these things Brightboy transferred to his own pack. He also took Jude’s sleeping bag, rolling it up and tying it to the base of his pack with string. It was better than his own, newer and warmer. He didn’t even think about Jude again until he was about to leave. They had always got along okay, Brightboy and Jude. Most of the other homeless people avoided Brightboy. He was untrustworthy and dishonest. Jude was one of the few who tried not to judge him. True, Brightboy had sometimes found Jude’s obsession with his appearance to be an affectation, and he suspected that it helped to make Jude feel superior to his brothers and sisters on the streets, but Jude had been as generous with Brightboy as he had been with everyone else, and rarely had a harsh word passed between them.

  Brightboy thumbed the lighter and held it aloft. Jude seemed frozen in place. His skin and his clothing were spangled with frost.

  “Why’d you do it?” said Brightboy. His left hand dipped into his pocket, as though to reassure himself that the money was still there. He’d heard that Jude had been calling in loans. Brightboy himself had owed Jude two dollars. That was one of the reasons he’d come looking for him; that and a little company, and maybe a swig of something if Jude had it to spare. Someone had said that Jude wanted the money urgently, and it was time to pay up. Jude rarely asked for anything from the rest of his kind, so few resented him calling in his debts, and those that had it paid willingly enough.

  So why would a man who had succeeded in putting together what Brightboy guessed to be at least a hundred dollars suddenly give up and take his own life? It made no sense, but then a lot of things made no sense to Brightboy. He liked his street name, but he had no conception of the irony that lay behind it. Brightboy wasn’t smart. Cunning, maybe, but his intelligence was of the lowest and most animal kind.

  Whatever had led Jude to finish his days at the end of a rope, he had no need for money where he now was, while Brightboy was still among the living. He walked to St. John Street, ordered two cheeseburgers, fries, and a soda for five dollars at the drive-through window of McDonald’s, and ate them in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. He then bought himself a six-pack of Miller High Life at a gas station, but it was so cold outside that he had nowhere to drink the beers. With no other option available, he headed back to Jude’s basement and consumed them while the dead man hung suspended before him. He unrolled Jude’s sleeping bag, climbed into it, and fell asleep until shortly before dawn. He woke while it was still dark, gathered up the bottles for their deposit, and slipped from the basement to seek out breakfast. He stopped only to make a 911 call from a public phone on Congress.

  It was the least that he could do for Jude.

  CHAPTER

  X

  Jude died without enough money to pay for his own funeral, so he was buried by the city at taxpayers’ expense. It cost fifteen hundred dollars, give or take, but there were those who resented spending even that much to give a decent burial to a man who seemed to them to have been nothing but a burden on the city for most of his life. The only consolation they could derive was that Jude was unlikely to trouble them for a handout again.

  He was interred in an unmarked grave at Forest City Cemetery, in South Portland, when the medical examiner had finished with his body. A funeral director recited a psalm as the coffin was lowered into the ground, but, unlike most city cases, Jude did not go to his rest unmourned. Alongside the cemetery workers stood a dozen of Portland’s homeless, men and women both, as well as representatives of the local shelters and help centers who had known Jude. I was there too. The least that I could do was acknowledge his passing. A single bouquet of flowers was laid on the ground above him once the grave had been filled in. Nobody lingered. Nobody spoke.

  The medical examiner’s opinion was that Jude’s injuries were consistent with asphyxiation, with no indication of a suspicious death. The investigation was ongoing, though, and the police and the attorney general were under no obligation to accept the ME’s opinion as gospel. Still, in this case it was unlikely that the Portland PD would reject it. When a homeless man died at the hands of another, it was usually in a brutal manner, and there was little mystery to it. Jude, despite the care t
hat he took with his appearance, was a troubled man. He suffered from depression. He lived from meal to meal, and handout to handout. There were more likely candidates for suicide, but not many.

  If there was anything unusual about this case, it was that the medical examiner had found no trace of drugs or alcohol in Jude’s system. He was clean and sober when he died. It was a minor detail, but one worthy of notice. Those who choose to take their own lives often need help with the final step. Either they set out with the intention of killing themselves, and find something to relax them in those last hours and minutes, or the mood induced by alcohol or narcotics is the trigger for the act. Suicide isn’t easy. Neither, whatever the song might say, is it painless. Jude would have learned that as he kicked at the air from the end of a rope. I don’t know how much help booze might have been under the circumstances, but it couldn’t have made his situation any worse.

  To be honest, I let Jude slip from my mind after the funeral. I’d like to say that I was better than everybody else, but I wasn’t. He didn’t matter. He was gone.

  LUCAS MORLAND PULLED UP in front of Hayley Conyer’s home on Griffin Road. It wasn’t the biggest house in Prosperous, not by a long shot, but it was one of the oldest, and, being partly built of stone, conveyed a certain authority. Most of it dated from the end of the eighteenth century, and by rights it should probably have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but neither generations of Conyers nor the citizens of Prosperous had seen fit to nominate the house. The town didn’t need that kind of attention. The old church presented them with enough problems as it was. Anyway, the Conyer house wasn’t particularly noteworthy in terms of its situation or its design, and had no interesting historical associations. It was just old, or at least old by the standards of the state. The leading citizens of Prosperous, cognizant of their heritage, of their links to a far more ancient history back in England, took a more nuanced view of such matters.

  Hayley Conyer’s Country Squire station wagon stood in the drive. There seemed to be even more bumper stickers on it than Morland remembered: “Obama/Biden”; a “No Tar Sands in Maine” protest badge; “Maine Supports Gay Rights” over a rainbow flag; and a reminder that sixty-one percent of the electorate had not voted for the current governor of the state. (Blame the state’s Democrats for that, thought Morland; trust them to split their own vote and then act surprised when it came back to bite them on the ass. Jesus, monkeys could have handled the nomination process better.) The station wagon was so ancient that it was probably held together by those stickers. He’d heard Hayley arguing with Thomas Souleby about the car, Souleby opining that the old gas-guzzler was causing more environmental pollution than a nuclear meltdown, and Hayley responding that it was still more environmentally friendly that investing in a new car and scrapping the old one.

  Morland’s own Crown Vic had been acquired from the Prosperous Police Department back in 2010, while it was still in perfect running order. By then, Ford had announced that it would cease production of the Police Interceptors in 2011, and Morland decided to secure one of the department’s Crown Vics for himself before his officers drove the fleet into the ground. The Crown Vic had two tons of rear-wheel drive, and a V8 engine under the hood. If you crashed in a Crown Vic, you had a better chance of walking away alive than you did in a lighter patrol car, like the increasingly popular Chevy Caprice. The car was also spacious, and that meant a lot to a big man like Morland. The sacrifice was getting only thirteen miles to the gallon, but Morland reckoned the town could afford that small gesture on his behalf.

  Hayley appeared on her porch as Morland sat musing on his car. She was still a striking woman, even as she left seventy behind. The chief could remember her in her prime, when men had circled like insects, flitting around her as she went about her business and did her best to ignore them or, if they grew too persistent, swatted them away with a flick of her hand. He had no idea why she had never married. That rainbow bumper sticker on her car might have caused some folk to suggest an explanation, but Hayley Conyer was no lesbian. She was, if anything, entirely asexual. She had committed herself to the town: it was hers to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She had inherited her duty to it, for more members of the Conyer family than any other in Prosperous had served on the board. Hayley herself had been the first selectman for more than four decades now. There were those who whispered that she was irreplaceable, but Morland knew better. Nobody was irreplaceable. If that were true, Prosperous would never have thrived for so long.

  But in the dark corners of his mind Morland was starting to feel that it might be for the best if Hayley Conyer made way for another. It would take her death to do it, for she would never relinquish control while there was breath in her body, but it was time that the Conyer reign came to a close. There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one’s nature. Morland himself was still a work-in-progress after two decades of marriage, but he liked to think that his wife might be as well. Hayley Conyer, on the other hand, simply grew more resolute in her self-belief, more intransigent in her views, and more ready to embrace the use of diktats to get her way. She was helped by the rules of the board, which gave the first selectman the equivalent of two votes. It meant that, even if the board was evenly divided on an issue, Hayley’s side would triumph, and she could force a stalemate with only one other selectman on her side. It was also a simple fact that the rest of the board combined had less testosterone than she did. It was increasingly left to Morland to try to deal with Hayley, and to encourage her to moderate her behavior, but he had been having less and less success in recent months. A body left hanging in a Portland basement was testament to that.

  “I was just admiring your car,” said Morland.

  “You going to tell me that I need to replace it too?” she said.

  “Not unless pieces of it start coming off on the highway and injuring folk, although that’s starting to seem increasingly likely.”

  She folded her arms over her chest, the way she did at meetings when she wanted to let people know that she had done listening to their arguments and her decision was made. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, and her breasts hung low beneath her shirt. With her flowered skirt and her sandaled feet, and her long gray hair held back by a scarf, she came across as the typical earth mother, all bean sprouts and wheatgrass and organic milk. It wasn’t entirely inapt, even if it didn’t hint at the hardness beneath.

  “It’s mine,” she said, “and I like it.”

  “You’re only holding on to it because the Thomas Soulebys of this world keep telling you to get rid of it,” he said. “If they started stroking it and admiring it, you’d sell it for scrap in a heartbeat.”

  Her scowl softened. Morland had a way of disarming her that few others could lay claim to. His father had enjoyed the same gift. Daniel Morland’s relationship with Hayley Conyer had been almost flirtatious, at least when his wife wasn’t around. Whether Hayley chose to embrace sexual activity or not, she was an attractive woman, and Alina Morland wasn’t about to stand by and let her husband play patty-cake with her just to ensure the smooth running of the town. Neither had Alina been concerned by the power that Hayley wielded as chief selectman, because that was all politics and this was about a wife and her husband. The town could have decided to make Hayley Conyer its official queen, and Alina would have knocked her crown off for stirring even the slightest of sexual feelings in her husband.

  This demonstrated one of the curious truths about Prosperous: in most things it ran pretty much like any other town of similar size. It had its rivalries, its intrigues. Men cheated on their wives, and wives cheated on their husbands. Hugo Reed didn’t talk to Elder Collingwood, and never would, all because of an incident with a tractor and a garden gate some forty years earlier. Ramett Huntley and Milisent Rawlin, although superficially polite to each other, were obsessed with
their bloodlines, and both had made regular pilgrimages back to the northeast of England over the years in an effort to trace their lineages to royalty. So far neither had been successful, but the search went on. In Prosperous, business as usual was the order of the day. The town differed in only one crucial way from the rest, and even that had become a version of normal over the centuries. It was surprising what folk could accustom themselves to, as long as they were rewarded for it in the end.

  “You want some tea, Lucas?” said Hayley.

  “Tea would be good.”

  In Prosperous, you were more likely to be offered tea than coffee. It was a hangover from the Old Country. Ben Pearson was probably the only store owner for fifty miles who regularly ran out of loose-leaf Earl Grey and English Breakfast, and Yorkshire Tea teabags. And, damn, was there trouble when he did.

  Inside, Hayley’s home resembled a Victorian house museum: dark-wood antique furniture, Persian rugs, lace tablecloths, overstuffed chairs, and wall upon wall of books. The chandeliers were late-nineteenth-century reproductions by Osler & Faraday of Birmingham, based on classic eighteenth-century Georgian design. Morland thought them excessively ornate, and ill suited to the house, but he kept that opinion to himself. Still, sitting at Hayley’s dining table always made him feel as if he were preparing for a séance.

  Hayley boiled some water and set the tea to brew. The teapot was sterling silver, but the tea would be served in mismatched mugs. China would have been too much of an affectation. She poured milk into each of the mugs, not bothering to ask Morland how much he wanted, or whether he might prefer to do it himself. By now she knew his habits and preferences almost as well as his wife did. She added the tea, then found some shortbread biscuits and emptied four onto a plate. Biscuits, not cookies; it said so on the packaging, which was also decorated with Highland cattle, tartans, and ancient ruins.