by Ed Gorman
"You didn't mention this alibi last night when we were talking," Kenmare accused.
"Maybe I had my days mixed up." Dell shrugged. "Maybe I thought it had been Monday night I had dropped in; maybe Dan had to remind me it was Tuesday."
"Maybe," Kenmare said. He looked inquiringly at his partner.
"Yeah, maybe," Garvan agreed.
"You're sure Malone's retiring?" Kenmare asked.
"Positive," Dell guaranteed.
Kenmare pulled open a desk drawer and filed the report. "See you around, Dell," he said.
"Yeah," said Garvan. "Take it easy, Dell."
Dell walked out of the squad room without looking back.
* * *
That night, when Dell came into the Three Corners Club and took his regular seat at the end of the bar, it was the owner, Tim Callan, who poured his drink and served him.
"I've missed you, Frankie," he said congenially. "How've you been?"
"I've seen better days," Dell allowed.
"Ah, haven't we all," Callan sympathized. He lowered his voice. "I'm really sorry about the young lady. Edie, was that her name?"
"Yeah, Edie." Dell felt the back of his neck go warm.
"I seen her picture in the paper and on the news. Took me a few looks to place her. Then I says to myself, 'why, that's the young lady Frankie used to bring in here. Always wanted the booth 'way in the back for privacy.' " Callan smiled artificially. "I remember that every time I loaned you the key to use the apartment upstairs, I had to make you promise to be out by midnight so's I could get the poker game started. And you never let me down, Frank. Not once. 'Course, we go back a long ways, you and me." Now Callan's expression saddened, genuinely so. "I'm really sorry, Frank, that things didn't work out between you and Edie."
"Thank you, Tim. So am I." Dell's heart hurt when he said it.
"They still don't know who did it?"
Dell looked hard at him. "No."
They locked eyes for a long moment, two old friends, each of whom could read the other like scripture.
"What was the name of that brother-in-law of yours charged with receiving stolen property?" Dell finally asked.
"Nick Santore," said Callan. "Funny you should ask. His preliminary hearing's day after tomorrow."
"I'll talk to the assistant state's attorney," Dell said. "I'll tell him the guy's going to be a snitch for me, that I need him on the street. I'll get him to recommend probation."
"Ah, Frankie, you're a prince," Callan praised, clasping one of Dell's hands with both of his own. "I owe you, big time."
"No," Frank Dell said, "we're even, Timmy."
Both men knew it was so.
S. J. Rozan
Childhood
S. J. ROZAN is the acclaimed Shamus and Anthony winning author of the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith series. She combines the serious purpose of the literary ethnic novels of the forties and fifties with the penetrating style and wit of the contemporary urban crime novel. With each book, her audience increases. She is already a major figure on the suspense scene; it's just that some people have yet to get the message. "Childhood" first appeared as part of the electronic anthology Compulsion.
Childhood
S. J. Rozan
I haunted the Maine coast that year as summer turned to fall, a restless ghost too real, footsteps too heavy on the wet, sinking sand, shape too solid moving through the fog. Long after it was over, I stood on the cliff, listening for cries long since silenced, searching the rocks and the tugging surf for floating, broken forms forever gone. I never told Ben, but over and over, maybe after dinner, maybe before breakfast, I found myself locking up my place, getting out the car. I made the long drive, six hours of highway and then the smaller roads, always knowing I had to go, always knowing I could do no good.
Those times, after, I turned straight for the shore; but that first time, when it started, I drove into town, parked in the sheriff's lot, went in to see Ben.
It was a long way to come, six states distant, but Ben and I went way back. We'd been in the navy together, both of us joining up at seventeen, both of us coming from Brooklyn, though I'd lived there not two years and Ben all his life. We met the first week in basic training and it turned out we served the whole three years together; same base, same ships. Ben was as rock steady as I was explosive, those years; any trouble I managed to stay out of, it was because Ben was there, holding me back. The difference between us: Ben liked the navy, I hated it. After discharge, we both went back to New York, me to college and Ben to the NYPD, but Ben didn't stay long. The sea was part of him now, the way it was always changing and always the same, and after a few years he headed up to Maine. In the small coastal town of Phillip's Point he found an opening in the county sheriff's office. Now, twenty years later, Ben was sheriff.
When he'd called, I wasn't surprised. That was how it went with us, a call every six, eight months from the big wooden house with the porches and gardens to my apartment in New York where the trucks rumbled over the streets outside and the stars were invisible in the night-lit sky. We'd talk, saying nothing, and sometimes he'd invite me up and if I could I'd go, spend a weekend doing nothing in Maine. The only times I'd been on a boat and liked it since the day I left the navy were times in Phillip's Point with Ben.
"Damn tourists in the summer," he'd say when you asked how life was up there. "Damn rain in winter. Damn redneck hicks in this two-bit burg." Ben loved his town and he loved his job.
But what he'd said on the phone that night, the call that started it, was, "I need help."
I leaned back in my chair with the beer I'd opened before the phone had rung. "Guy climbs onto ten feet of fiberglass, gets sunburned and soaked, catches two fish and calls it fun? Damn right you need help."
"No," Ben said, "real help. I need you to come up here."
This was different, his voice, his tone.
"What's wrong? Are you okay? Alice, the kids?"
"Yeah, they're fine. But I got a situation up here. I need someone from outside."
"You want me to come do a job?"
"Something like that, yeah."
I shook a cigarette from the pack. "I'm not licensed up there, Ben."
"I'll put in a word for you," he grunted. "With the sheriff."
That was late at night; early the next morning I was on the road, Joe Williams in the tape deck as the tired trees of late summer slipped past me on the interstate. I pulled into Phillip's Point midafternoon, parked on Main Street. Inside the blue-shuttered, whitewashed county hall, I introduced myself to the young deputy behind the desk.
The kid jumped up from his chair, all muscles and brush-cut helpfulness. "Yes, sir, Sheriff Martin's expecting you. Let me see if he's free." He stuck his head into the office behind him, said something, and came out with a smile, visibly relieved that he had no bad news for me.
Ben came to greet me, took me behind the desk. "I told him not to ask," he grumbled, closing the door on the sheriff's private office. "I told him, just bring you in." He pointed me to a worn leather armchair. Sun streamed in the open windows. "You must've flown pretty low," Ben said. "Or gotten up with the chickens." He pressed a speaker-phone button. "Hey, Richie, see if you can scare up some coffee."
"Yes, sir!" Richie's voice crackled, attentive and efficient. Ben rolled his eyes.
"Chickens in my neighborhood sleep until noon," I said. "I told the Highway Patrol I was on a mission for the sheriff of Phillips County. They were impressed as all hell and waved me through."
Ben snorted. Richie came in, two steaming mugs in one hand, a quart of milk and half a dozen sugar packets in the other. The coffee in one mug was pale, the other black. "You want milk, sugar, anything?" Richie asked me, giving Ben the light coffee, waving his offerings in my direction.
"No," I said. "Thanks." I took the mug he handed me. Phillips County coffee was the only good-tasting cop coffee I'd ever had.
Ben sipped from his mug, made a face.
"Oh, shit," said Richie
. "Too sweet, huh? I'll get you another one."
"No, Richie, it's okay," Ben said.
"No, I can—"
"It's okay, Richie."
Richie stood for a moment, shifting from one foot to the other.
"Thanks, Richie," Ben said.
Richie grinned, lifted the milk at me again in case I'd changed my mind. When I shook my head he shrugged, turned, and left.
Ben sipped his coffee. "Three years a deputy," he said. "And every time that kid brings me coffee, it's too sweet." His chair creaked as he settled into it. Ben had put on some weight over the years, a comfortable guy in a comfortable place. "Listen, I wouldn't have called you—"
"—if you could've found someone who knew what he was doing, but you couldn't, up here in the middle of nowhere. I count on that to make a living. What's up?"
Ben drank his coffee, looked off over my shoulder for the words he wanted. "No," he said. "Really. When you hear… but I've got to do something here."
The two big windows in his office framed Main Street; beyond it, distant, the shore and the sea. Tourists in Jeep Cherokees and locals in rusted pickups rolled along; people walked the sidewalks in and out of the shade of the awnings at the hardware store, the beauty parlor.
"Little over a week ago, we had a kid killed," Ben said, sipping coffee, watching me. "Eight years old. Tom Rogers' son."
The cry of a gull floated in through the windows, answered by another, then a third. I shifted my gaze to the sky, tried to find them. This was what he'd meant, then, that he wouldn't have called me. In the long years since the navy, Ben and I had both married, and both had children. Ben and Alice's youngest son still lived with them in the big wooden house; their other two were grown and gone. My marriage had been wrong, and short, and the only good to come of it, our daughter, Annie, had died in a car crash when she was nine.
I lit a cigarette, shook out the match. I watched the sky a little longer, but it was empty. Ben knew about Annie. I didn't know what he wanted, but whatever it was, he wouldn't have called me if he'd thought he had another choice. "Killed?" I asked. "Killed how?"
"Drowned," Ben said steadily, eyes on me. I met his look. He went on. "Down at Gray's Cove. All the local kids hang out there. Looked like an accident at first." He drank his too-sweet coffee. "Still may have been. He was alive when we pulled him out of the water, died a few hours later. They did an autopsy, routine, because it's procedure in accidental death, not because we thought we'd find anything."
"But you did."
Ben nodded. "Sexual molestation." He pushed each syllable out of his mouth, drank some coffee afterward to clear the taste. "Recent."
I pulled on my cigarette. "The two could still be unrelated, Ben."
"I know. Just because someone messes with a kid, doesn't mean the kid doesn't go fishing, fall in the water. But it also could be someone threw him in, keep him quiet."
"It could."
"Tom Rogers thinks it does." Ben clunked his coffee mug onto his desk. "Never much of a father, Tom. He and Agnes drink. Their four kids raised themselves. This kid, Frankie, was their youngest." Outside, the sun glinted off the windows of a truck. Ben glanced that way. "Nice kid, Frankie. Always looking for someone to say a good word to him, that's all. Father's an asshole, doesn't mean the kid deserves—" Ben broke off, maybe worried about what he'd said. But what he'd said was true.
"He have an alibi?"
"Who, Tom? Listen, Tom's always been an asshole, but not like that. But," Ben shrugged, "I've always been a cop. So yeah, I checked. He went straight to Grogan's after work. Agnes was already there. They were still there at midnight when I went looking, to tell them about Frankie." Ben picked up his coffee, but he didn't drink. "Tom said I was a lying s.o.b., just trying to scare him into going home. When I said I wasn't he stared at me, sort of froze. Then he had another drink. Like he always does, anything happens. Like it ever works."
The truck pulled away. I watched a tourist couple stroll through the sunlight and shadows. "I still don't see why I'm here."
Ben nodded. "The problem's this. We got a guy here, out by the county line. Bob Hurst. Been living here three, four months. Did seven years in Maine State Correctional for sodomy and solicitation. We don't have a law here, these guys don't have to register, but I got a heads-up from the state when he got out."
"Underage victim?"
"Eight-year-old boy."
I picked up my coffee again.
Ben said, "And that's the conviction, Smith. Families of four other boys swearing out complaints, but the prosecutor didn't try to make those cases. And God knows how many others they never heard from."
"Sodomy and solicitation," I said. "Five complainants, none for assault, no other violence?"
"No," Ben said, reluctance in his voice. "But now Hurst's spent seven years in state, because some kid testified. Could be he doesn't want to go back."
"You talk to him? Hurst?" But of course he had; Ben knew his job.
"Three times. No idea what I'm talking about. Never saw the kid. He's through with all that. Rehabilitated. Has a job, reports to his parole officer, lives a quiet life."
"You believe him?"
Ben's eyes held mine. "I swear as I'm sitting here, Smith, he killed that boy."
The scent of the sea drifted back in on a changing breeze. Cars stopped for each other, moved again along Main Street.
"How do you see it?" I asked.
"Hurst works at Ralph's Auto Repair out on Route Three. We got a park out there across the road from Ralph's. Peewee League softball plays there. Frankie would have been out there two, three times a week all summer."
"Anyone see him and Hurst together?"
"No. But the thing about Frankie, Tom and Agnes could never be bothered to take him out there, pick him up, anything like that. Sometimes he'd hitch a ride with some other kid's mom, but mostly he rode his bike."
"And you're thinking a guy like Hurst would notice that."
"All summer, Smith. Game's over, this kid's alone. All summer."
I pushed out my cigarette. "Alibi?"
"The day this happened, Hurst told Ralph he had some business to take care of, left work early."
"How early?"
"Before the ballgame ended. He stopped for a drink at the Trap, his usual hole, like he told us, but later, at his usual time. He's got about an hour and a half unaccounted for."
"What does he say?"
"Went to the outlet mall on Twenty-seven and to Home Depot. We checked, but no one remembers him."
"Places like that, they don't remember anyone."
Ben nodded. "And if I wanted a bullshit alibi, that's a good one."
"What does he say he was buying?"
"Roofing nails, roll roofing, Tyvek. Get his place ready for winter."
"You see any of that stuff at his place?"
Ben nodded. "But nothing to say when it was bought. Says he didn't know he was going to need the damn receipts to show some damn cop."
"Okay. Anything else?"
"I got a witness saw a blue car like Hurst's at Gray's Cove, but she can't swear it was Hurst's. I got someone saw a blond kid on a bike there, but he can't swear it was Frankie."
Ben took out a blue bandanna, wiped sweat from his face. The day was hot, but with an openness to it, not the stifling heat of the city.
"One other thing, one reason I called you. I got a nut lives up there, Gray's Cove, name of Larry Crandall. Lost a son to that water, years back. Last time anyone drowned, up here." Ben paused. He could have been thinking of that time, or of the quiet years between. "Larry never got over it."
"Blames himself?"
Ben looked at me, maybe knowing why I asked that. "Shit, no. Everyone else."
"Everyone, who?"
"Well, me, for one. Thinks I didn't respond fast enough, when the call came in. And Richie, out there? He was a kid himself, twelve, thirteen. Swam out, pulled Larry's boy from the water, but too late. Everyone called him a big hero, but he
wouldn't hear it. Said a hero would've saved the kid. That's why he joined the department. Still trying to make up for that, be that hero."
The same as everyone, I thought wearily. Trying to be that hero, now, too late.
"Anyway," Ben said, "Larry agrees. Thinks someone, Richie, me, the guy on the ambulance, someone should have saved that kid. What's really going on, he was supposed to be watching the kid and he wasn't. Nine years later, he still won't talk to us."