Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  Frank observed Ned for a long moment. So far everything he’d said made sense, but something was still a little off.

  “How long had you been watching him?”

  Ned shrugged. “I don’t know—January, maybe.”

  “So then why did you look so puzzled when I said Lambert knew you were spying on him?”

  Ned gave an uncomfortable little laugh. “Well, I guess it was that word spying. I didn’t really think of what I was doing as spying—I was just keeping an eye peeled, driving by occasionally. Sometimes when I took the deposits to the bank in Verona, instead of going directly there on Route 9, I’d go the long way along Stony Brook Road past Lambert’s house. I just thought of it as taking a little detour.”

  “And if you happened to come upon him taking target practice in his front yard one day, just what did you plan to do?”

  Ned arched back in the chair, rubbing his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling and began to talk. “When I was a kid, we had a dog named Scamp who loved to chase squirrels. He never got tired of going after them, even though they always escaped up a tree. Then one day he caught one. You never saw a dog so surprised in your whole life. He stood there with the thing squirming around in his mouth until he couldn’t take it anymore. Then he just opened up and let him go.” Ned grinned at Frank. “I guess I’m like Scamp. The chase became like a game to me, but Lambert had nothing to fear. I wouldn’t have tried to get the money back.”

  “Oh yeah? Why not?”

  “Think about it, Frank—it’d be a public relations nightmare. Stevensons taking away the money an old man needed to live on. At the most, all I wanted was to set the record straight. To make everyone realize that it was Lambert who cheated, who played dirty, not Stevensons.”

  Frank nodded. Ned and Clyde both had a need to be right just for the sake of being right. Then he had to smile—takes one to know one. “So why didn’t you just tell me all this in Malone’s?” he asked.

  Ned plucked at a loose thread on his shirt. “I was embarrassed. You caught me totally off guard. All I could think of was to get out of there before Marge overheard us. If you hadn’t come in here today, though, I would’ve stopped by your office on the way home tonight just to get it off my chest.”

  Frank rose with a smile. “Looks like I saved you a trip.”

  Next, Frank headed out to Harlan Mabely’s petting zoo. The old man had been so hysterical at the time of Martha’s death that Frank hadn’t been able get a coherent sentence out of him. He hoped today Harlan would be calmer.

  On the way there, he thought about what Ned had told him. He’d found himself almost liking the younger Stevenson today—being caught red-handed had made Ned drop his usual air of amused superiority, and Frank found the slightly sheepish Ned a lot easier to take. He’d always known Ned couldn’t have pushed Lambert, because both Stevensons had been helping to organize the early morning search parties on Sunday when the old man had died. But if Ned had figured out that Lambert could see, then maybe the secret wasn’t so well kept after all. Did Janelle know? Had she told this Pablo character?

  Frank put that problem out of his mind as he pulled into the drive, but for once, Harlan did not run out to greet him. Frank found the old man sitting dejectedly in his little office, surrounded by yellowing postcards of the zoo, flimsy T-shirts with slightly crooked lettering, and an array of cheesy toys that today’s jaded children wouldn’t even bother to clamor for.

  “You arrest anyone yet?” Harlan asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No, I just came by to ask you a few more questions, now that you’re feeling a little better,” Frank explained. “Have you ever noticed anyone—someone from around here, I mean—showing an unusual amount of interest in your animals?”

  Harlan pondered this for a full minute, ultimately shaking his head. “I don’t get much business from locals, except every year all the grade school kids come on a field trip.”

  “And you do all the work around here yourself? You’ve never had a helper?” Frank asked.

  “It’s just me. Always has—” Harlan cut himself off in midsentence. “Wait a minute. Last fall I dislocated my shoulder, and the doctor told me no lifting for a month. So I hired this kid to haul feed and help clean out the pens. What was his name? Oh, I remember—Dennis Treve.”

  “A teenager?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah, he was always wearing those damn music things.” Harlan passed his gnarled hands around his ears. “Drove me nuts. I had to shout and wave my arms to get his attention.”

  “You weren’t happy with his work, then?” Frank probed. “Did you fire him?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that,” Harlan answered. “He knew when I took him on it was only temporary. I told him a month, but in three weeks I felt better and I thought, why pay him when I could do it better myself?”

  Suddenly Harlan seemed to grasp the drift of Frank’s questions. “Wait a minute! You think Dennis killed Martha because I let him go a week early? Why, I oughta chop one of his legs off—see how he likes it!” Harlan dug around in his pockets, finally producing a dingy handkerchief to wipe his watery eyes.

  “Don’t go jumping to conclusions—it’s not that likely. I’ll go talk to him, and let you know what happens.” Frank backed out of the office quickly. He was sure the old man was mostly bluster, but he regretted putting ideas in his head.

  “Who’s Dennis Treve?” Frank asked as he strode into the office.

  Those three words elicited complete background information. “Lives over on Valley Road,” Earl reported. “The whole family kind of keeps to themselves. We saw him in the cafeteria that day we went to talk to Mrs. Carlstadt. The kid sitting with Tommy Pettigrew, wearing the headphones. Why?”

  Frank felt a little rush of adrenaline. A connection between Martha’s death and Janelle. Tenuous, but still …. He glanced at his watch. “Five-thirty—shouldn’t you be getting home?”

  Earl studied him a moment before answering. “I guess I should. If you don’t need me for anything.”

  Frank shook his head and busied himself with some papers. He wasn’t in the mood to spell things out for Earl, although he had to admit the kid seemed to be picking up on things a little quicker these days.

  Fifteen minutes later, Frank pulled up in front of the Treve home, a ramshackle affair that had been haphazardly expanded over the years. Black paper peeled off the most recent addition, as if siding were a needless extravagance. Conveniently enough, Dennis sat in a sagging porch swing, eyes shut but foot tapping, the omnipresent headphones blocking out the sound of Frank’s arrival.

  Frank mounted the porch and stood before Dennis to no effect. Finally he reached over and pressed one of the buttons on the tape player, figuring the music would either stop or be elevated to such a shriek that even Dennis couldn’t endure it. Either way, he’d have the kid’s attention.

  Sure enough, Dennis’s eyes flew open in chagrin. “What did you do that for?”

  “I want to talk to you a minute. You heard that one of Harlan Mabely’s animals was killed?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You worked for Harlan for a while. Maybe you didn’t like it that he let you go.”

  Dennis burrowed into the corner of the swing and looked up at Frank nervously. “Nah, it stunk over there and the pay was lousy.”

  Frank eyed Dennis. The kid was so scrawny and apathetic, he hardly seemed to have the energy to kill Martha. “You know, you’re right. That petting zoo sure is smelly. But Harlan’s just crazy about those animals, isn’t he?”

  Dennis rolled his eyes. “I think it’s weird. Talking to them in baby talk like he does.”

  Frank nodded in agreement. “I bet you and Tommy Pettigrew had a few good laughs about that, huh?”

  Frank watched as Dennis’s face registered agreement, then surprise, then suspicion in rapid succession. He looked as if he wanted to lie but couldn’t quite figure out why he should. He shrugged.

  “Tommy ever meet you over ther
e?” Frank asked. “Did you ever tell him what the feeding schedule was, mention when Harlan went home?”

  As comprehension sank into his head, Dennis’s slight body went rigid. “You go talk to Tommy yourself,” he said as he scuttled toward the front door. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

  “I’m tired of saying this. I don’t know nothing about where Janelle went,” Tommy Pettigrew said as soon as he caught sight of Frank.

  After parking his car in Dorothy’s driveway, Frank had followed the sound of a power saw and discovered Tommy in the barn behind his house.

  “I believe you. Actually, I’m here about something else. I can’t spend all my time working on Janelle’s disappearance, you know.”

  Tommy just stared straight ahead, too disinterested to even ask “what?”

  Maybe a direct confrontation would provoke Tommy into talking. “I wanted to see what you knew about Harlan Mabley’s emu getting killed over at the Pettting Zoo.”

  No spark of uneasiness. “Why should I know anything about that?”

  “You’re friends with Dennis Treve.”

  “So.”

  “He used to work with Harlan. Said you two joked about the way the old man fussed over his animals.”

  “So.”

  Frank studied his suspect for a moment. Tommy showed none of the nervousness, even fear, that these questions had aroused in Dennis. Usually teenagers began to spill their guts at the first sign that the police were on to them. Some even had the disconcerting trait of confessing to more than they had done. Frank felt a perverse admiration for Tommy—he kept his composure like a practiced criminal. Either that, or he really did know nothing about the animals. But Frank wasn’t ready to concede that yet.

  “Have you ever had a pet, Tommy?” Frank changed direction abruptly.

  “Not anymore. My mom’s allergic.”

  “So maybe it bothers you when some people make such a fuss over their pets, treat them like children, call them by human names?”

  “If people want to act like assholes, it’s none of my business.” Tommy flicked the hair out of his eyes and looked longingly at the power cord Frank had unplugged when he entered the barn.

  “You know, Harlan’s emu hasn’t been the only pet to die recently. Before her there was Miss Noakes’s cat Petey, and Benjamin, the rabbit who belonged to the Maguire kid. It’s strange that these things are happening now, since Janelle has been missing.”

  “Some old lady’s cat runs away and you’re wasting time lookin’ for it? No wonder Clyde Stevenson’s talking about firing you,” Tommy said with more animation than he usually displayed.

  “Oh, Petey didn’t run away, Tom. He was killed—no doubt about it. I found his body.” Frank watched with interest as Tommy’s bravado faded into nervous picking at the rough edges of the board he’d just cut.

  “And you know where I found him?” Frank continued. “Guess.”

  Tommy only shrugged.

  “In the meadow on Stony Brook Road where Janelle disappeared. That’s a real coincidence, huh? Except I don’t believe in coincidences, do you?”

  Frank didn’t expect an answer and was satisfied with Tommy’s escalating agitation. The boy had gouged at the piece of wood so much that one of his fingers was bleeding.

  Frank decided to take a chance with an idea that had come to him. “You know what bothers me, Tom? That cat wasn’t just killed, it was torn apart, like Harlan’s emu.” He couldn’t be sure of this—the vultures had already been at work on the cat when he’d found it. But why else would the tail have been separated from the rest of the body?

  “What would make a person do that, do you think?” Frank asked, his voice growing softer as he closed in on Tommy. “It’s almost like it meant something, was some kind of ritual.”

  “Stop it!” Tommy screeched, hurling the chunk of wood he’d been holding across the barn. It sailed by Frank’s ear and crashed into a shelf full of old canning jars. In the moment of silence that followed the shattering of glass, Frank and Tommy stared at each other. Then the door flew open and Dorothy ran breathless into the barn.

  “What is it? What happened? Are you all right?”

  “It’s nothing,” Tommy answered. “Just an accident. I’ll clean it up.” But his shaking hands and trembling voice made it obvious that something was terribly wrong.

  Dorothy turned on Frank, her usual passivity replaced by a fierce protectiveness. “What’s the matter? What did you say to him?” Before Frank could open his mouth to respond, she continued, “Why do you keep bothering Tommy about what happened to Janelle? He doesn’t know anything. I won’t have him upset!”

  “Actually, I came to talk to him about something else,” Frank answered. “One of the animals at Harlan Mabely’s petting zoo was killed. I thought Tommy might know something about it.”

  “Why should he?” Dorothy’s eyes darted from Frank to Tommy, who by now had pulled himself together and was methodically sweeping up the broken glass. “Tommy, have you ever been out there?” Dorothy asked.

  “Not since third grade,” Tommy said, his eyes focused on the floor, determined not to let one shard escape his broom.

  “There,” Dorothy said with her hands on her hips. “He can’t help you.”

  “Where were you on Monday after school, Tommy?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Dorothy interrupted. “You were home with me from the time you got off the bus. You had that history test coming up and I helped you study—remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right,” Tommy affirmed, his confidence returning.

  Dorothy turned to Frank. “You better go now—Jack will be home soon. I have to make dinner.”

  Seeing that he’d get nowhere further with Tommy tonight, Frank nodded. “Bye, Tom,” he said. Catching the boy’s eye, he added, “Be careful.”

  Frank expected the news stories showing Pablo’s picture to trigger a flood of phone calls, but he was not prepared for the steady stream of purported sightings that had to be followed up. All across upstate New York, people called to report their fifty-year-old mailman or their fifteen-year-old neighbor. Even after the obvious crackpots were weeded out, Frank and Meyerson interviewed twenty-two ponytailed, thirtyish men, none of whom turned out to be Pablo.

  But after all that work, Frank found himself no further along than he had been the day he found out about Pablo. In fact, he might be even further away from finding Pablo than before. Instead of turning the guy up, all the publicity might have alerted him to stay out of sight.

  Frank sat at his desk, considering his options, when a tentative knock disturbed his thoughts. He looked up, expecting the visitor to have entered; most people just pounded on the door and walked in. The knock came again.

  “Come in,” Frank called, and the door opened slowly. In every respect—hair, face, height, weight—the man was Jack Harvey. And yet, in some very essential way, he was not Jack.

  Sensing the change, Frank rephrased his command as an invitation. “Come on in. Sit down.”

  Jack crossed the room like someone making his first trip down a hospital corridor after surgery. He eased himself into a chair and looked at Frank as if he had forgotten why he’d come.

  Although he had spoken to Jack on the phone to tell him about Pablo and to get permission to search for the notes Janelle had made at the Trail’s End, Frank hadn’t seen him since their blowup in the office. When Frank had gone out to the Harvey home, Dorothy had let him in and watched passively as he emptied the leather backpack and examined its contents: two sticks of sugarless gum, a tube of lipstick, some crumpled tissues, a ticket stub for a movie that had been playing months ago in Lake Placid, and a dried-up black pen. Frank assumed Dorothy had told her brother that the search yielded nothing, and that he had then returned to question Tommy again. Not relishing another lecture from the irate father, he had stayed out of his way.

  Now Frank was seized with the sudden fear that Janelle had been found dead
, and that he was the last to know. “What’s the matter, Jack? Has something happened?”

  His legs splayed, Jack propped his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said softly. “Maybe you’ve been right all along. How can that be?” He raised his head sharply. “How can you know things about my daughter that I didn’t know myself?”

  Frank shifted his weight; his chair suddenly seemed uncomfortably rigid. Jack Harvey wasn’t just gradually realizing his daughter’s loss of innocence, he was having his face rubbed in it.

  Frank opened his mouth, then shut it again, uncertain of how to begin.

  “How could she have gone off to a place like the Trail’s End? I’ve never even been there. And then to talk to some low-life creep, and make plans to meet him again—why would she do that? And what the hell’s wrong with those girls, not saying anything about this ’til now?” Jack kicked halfheartedly at Frank’s battered desk. “Though what’s the point of blaming them? It’s Janelle that took up with this guy.”

  Jack slumped back in his chair. His role as the victim, outraged by a random crime, had supported him in his grief. Now that consolation was stripped away, and he was nothing but a baffled, lonely, frightened man.

  Frank went over to his file cabinets and began to rustle papers aimlessly to give Jack a moment to compose himself. He spoke cautiously. “You know, Jack, maybe there’s something that Janelle did or said that didn’t seem significant before. Can you think of anything?”

  Jack shook his head. “I’ve been going over and over everything that happened since January, but there’s nothing. But why ask me?” he snorted. “I obviously don’t know my own daughter any better than I know that girl who calls out the lottery numbers on TV.”

  Frank felt like he was inching along a branch that wouldn’t hold his weight. He seemed to have regained Jack’s trust, but he could lose it again instantly if he revealed his concerns that Janelle might be connected somehow with the animal murders and Dell Lambert’s death.