Quick Pivot

by Brenda Buchanan

  “I think my editor will agree the feature can wait.”

  Wyatt put her hands on her hips and studied me. “I’ll personally sit down with you when there’s something to say. But right now? You’re impeding an investigation. Get out of here, and take Kimball with you.”

  The look on her face was somewhere between annoyed and furious. I swallowed an instinctive objection. The chief walked me back to where Nate was watching the technicians work.

  “Sir, you and Mr. Gale have to leave.” Chief Wyatt gestured toward DeMauro. “Please provide that officer your contact information so we’ll know how to reach you.”

  By then lights had been rigged to illuminate behind the wall. Someone hit the switch while Nate was reciting his cell phone number, allowing me a glance through the jagged hole.

  A scattering of bones surrounded by rags. A dark lump next to a skeletal foot. I could make out tread. A boot. Where was its mate? Light glinted off a shiny object. A watch face? An eyeglass lens?

  Words may be my primary stock-in-trade, but I was visualizing that shot on page one when Chief Wyatt saw me raising my phone.

  Her small, powerful hand clamped my shoulder. “Gale. Leave. Now.”

  Thanks to the police radio silence, no TV vans were in sight when Nate and I stepped outside. The reprieve wouldn’t last. Somebody would spot multiple cruisers in the parking lot of the decrepit textile mill and the buzz would begin.

  Determined to keep the inside track to myself, I spent several minutes warning Nate about the phenomenon I call a new media drive-by—Tweeters, Facebookers and freelance bloggers trumpeting the sensational aspects of a news story before rushing on to the next tidbit of infotainment. When I finished explaining how such faux reporting could undermine his condo dreams, he vowed to duck phone calls and ignore texts from everyone but me.

  I hoped to hell Nate would hold to his word. A newspaper diehard, I was tired of being scooped by amateurs. This story was mine. The wannabe reporters were going to have to fight me for it.

  Chapter Two

  Friday, July 11, 2014

  Portland, Maine

  Determined to be first up with the story, I goosed my Subaru through two red lights on the five-mile drive to Portland. Squeezing into a parking space outside the Chronicle’s back door, I bypassed the ancient elevator and jogged the four flights to the newsroom. In minutes I had a photo and a summary of the morning’s events ready to go up on the web, describing the scene at the mill in what I thought was the right level of detail.

  My editor, Leah Levin, was intrigued but skeptical.

  “You think a dead body was deliberately stashed in the basement of the mill?” She pushed her reading glasses up into her nest of graying curls.

  “At least one. And not just dead. Head smashed like a pumpkin.”

  “And some remarkably unobservant masons bricked it behind a wall?”

  “That’s how it looked.”

  “Eyes can play tricks, especially when a guy’s looking for distractions.”

  Leah was referring to the bruised heart I’d been lugging around for the past week, since my enigmatic girlfriend Megan Pratt left for a long-term medical mission gig in Cameroon. She didn’t suggest that I keep a candle burning in the window.

  While newsroom banter tends toward the sardonic, Leah’s comment was like a medicine ball hurled without warning. I fought an urge to tell her to fuck off. She noticed my clamped-jaw silence and blinked an apology. I nodded that it was accepted.

  For people who made our living with words, we tended to say a lot without them.

  “The story needs some toning down and an official peg of some sort,” she said, waving me away from her desk. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

  I ran to the java joint across the street to deal with a hellacious caffeine-deficiency headache. When I returned, my detailed account of entombed remains being unearthed in the long-shuttered mill had been sanitized into a bland, four-line web update, minus the photo, but complete with a shiny little statement that arrived in the Chronicle’s newsroom via email blast, the new fad in police public relations.

  Riverside Police are investigating the discovery this morning of a dead body inside the Saccarappa Mill. A spokesperson confirmed a single set of human remains was found by a construction crew shortly before 9 a.m. He refused to comment about whether the find is related to the eviction last winter of two homeless men said to have been squatting in the former textile factory. Kimball Development currently is planning a mixed-use redevelopment of the site.

  The only useful part of the cop communiqué was its confirmation that a single set of bones was behind the wall. The implication that the skull came from someone who found his own way into the Saccarappa was ridiculous. While waiting for the cops to arrive, Nate had jabbered nonstop about the structural aspects of the old mill. It would have been impossible for anyone to have climbed or fallen into the narrow space behind the corridor wall, he’d said. The body had to have been placed there, deliberately bricked in.

  Leah was huddled with the managing editor. I knew better than to interrupt and gripe about my lively story being gutted. The homeless guy idea would sidetrack the rest of the working press and the so-called new media, leaving me with the jump. I dug a protein bar out of my desk drawer and headed for what the powers that be refer to as the newspaper’s data center. To me, it’s still the library. Paulie Finnegan had called it the morgue.

  Nate’s guess on the age of the newer bricks was fifty years, meaning the patch job on the wall could have been done as early as 1964. Broadening those parameters, I searched the computerized crime index for Riverside between 1950 and 1975. The computer spit back 203 hits. Typing in murder yielded five possibilities. I located the corresponding paper files and began scanning the clips in the first folder—a 1967 hunting accident that turned out to be a family grudge taken too far—before realizing my mistake.

  Nobody knew about these bones until the skull came out of the wall, so there’d be no stories about a murder. I changed the search term to missing person and got two dozen hits. After an hour or so of methodical work, I’d whittled the possibilities to one—a mill finance officer named George Desmond, who’d dropped off the face of the earth in May 1968.

  The clips about Desmond’s disappearance filled an accordion folder. Gooseflesh ran up my neck when I saw that most carried Paulie Finnegan’s byline. My mentor would have been barely thirty—two years younger than me—when he was knocking himself out covering the story. Given that Paulie’s raspy voice had been ricocheting through my head all morning, it would be Twilight Zone material if the skull turned out to be Desmond’s.

  I mowed through the pile of newsprint, scribbling names, dates and details, using the balky copier to duplicate the most pertinent stories. It was one-thirty when I returned to the newsroom, basking in the glow of good luck and instinct that put me on what I felt certain was the right track. Leah was in the afternoon meeting and the two reporters at their desks were on the phone. With no audience before which I could strut my success, I sat down at the computer and began searching for current information about George Desmond’s family. There was no phone book listing for Helena Desmond, identified in Paulie’s 1968 news stories as the missing man’s younger sister, but a quick search on the Cumberland County Registry of Deeds website told me she owned a place on Peaks Island, a Portland neighborhood in the middle of Casco Bay. Another few clicks brought up the municipal assessing records, allowing me to see a picture of Helena Desmond’s one-and-a-half-story shingle-sided cottage on Sprucewood Road. The assessing card said she’d paid $58,000 for it in November 1977.

  I was jotting the relevant details when Leah emerged from the editors’ meeting, her salt-and-pepper hair cowlicky from the scalp massage she gives herself whenever she’s stressed. I rushed her like a linebacker on a blitz.

  �
�Got a live one,” I said before her bottom hit her seat. “At the mill. The skeleton. I figured out who it is.”

  “Verified it, or relying on clairvoyance?”

  I dragged a chair over next to her desk and set the folder between us. “Check this out. On May 11, 1968, a guy named George William Desmond, 32 years old, assistant finance manager at the Saccarappa Mill, disappeared. He stopped for coffee on his way to the office. Bantered with the bakery’s proprietor about working on a beautiful spring Saturday. Left with a cup of java in one hand and a donut in the other.” I patted the clips. “Desmond was never seen again.”

  “Doesn’t mean the bones over at the mill are his,” Leah said.

  I dug down to my toes for self-control. “Can I have five minutes please?”

  She glanced at the clock and pasted a patient look on her face.

  I laid a clip between us, as though I were dealing the top card from a hot deck. “The first coverage of his disappearance was a news brief on Tuesday, May 14. Didn’t seem like a big deal. The next day, our own Paulie Finnegan wrote a front-page story loaded with details. Here it is, complete with a picture of Desmond.”

  I slid Paulie’s story across the desk, pointing to a photograph of a dark-haired fellow wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a half smile. I waited while she skimmed the story.

  “A subtext emerged a few days later, when something else was found to be missing—a pile of money.”

  “How much?”

  “Half a million dollars. Serious money in 1968. Enough to bring the feds to town.”

  I handed her a copy of a May 21 story with a 72-point headline: Financial Records Scrutinized At Saccarappa; FBI On The Case.

  “So Desmond was an embezzler,” Leah said.

  “The quick and easy theory, but never proven,” I said. “FBI agents descended on Riverside and took over for the state police. They confirmed the money evaporated from the mill’s bank accounts around the time Desmond disappeared, but made zero progress actually tying it to him.”

  “So he stole money from the mill and moved to Louisiana or Saskatchewan, and now he’s an old man who probably still jumps every time his house creaks.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I haven’t had all of my allotted five minutes.”

  Leah settled back in her chair.

  “The Chronicle covered every conceivable angle in the weeks after Desmond’s disappearance. Half the town was interviewed, apparently by the cops and certainly by Paulie and the rest of the press. By the Fourth of July, Desmond was still missing. Calls to the FBI tip line dried up. Eventually, everyone moved on, leaving the mystery unresolved. The saga’s been dragged out of mothballs a few times since, most recently in 1993, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Desmond’s disappearance. But for all intents and purposes, the case and the story were dead. Today, they may have been resurrected.”

  “Call me unconvinced.”

  “C’mon, Leah. How likely is it Desmond could have disappeared without a trace? He was a small-town Maine guy and the FBI was on his tail. The fact he never surfaced totally supports the idea he never left Riverside.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Point two, if the skeleton in the Saccarappa isn’t Desmond, who is it? Going back to the indexes, I started in 1950 and worked forward to this year, looking for missing persons stories where the subject—or a body—was never found. There were a few, but none with even a slight connection to the mill.”

  “The cops are suggesting vagrant.”

  “It was our desk kid who tried to get them to say that.”

  “Nope. When we called to dig into the PR blast, the cop said—not for attribution, of course—that everyone’s thinking homeless drifter.”

  “There’s a reason cops don’t say stuff like that for the record.” I was up and pacing. “Nate Kimball said there’s no conceivable route behind that wall. Someone hid the body in there.”

  Leah shrugged. “What are you proposing to do?”

  “Shake the bushes. Desmond’s disappearance made him a public figure long ago. Given that the press essentially indicted him as a thief in 1968, it wouldn’t cast him in any worse light if we do a story hinting that the remains might be his.”

  “You know we can’t speculate. Without something from the cops, a sidebar about this Desmond guy’s disappearance would amount to that. If you can get Chief Wyatt to say something about Desmond on the record, we’ll run with it.”

  When I started to protest she held up her hand. “I know, I know. Save it, okay? I’m not going up the ladder with this. We don’t print conjecture about the identity of a murder victim. That’s a hard-and-fast policy, and you know it.”

  “Principles won’t stop the bloggers.”

  “So go be a blogger.”

  She spun toward her computer. I stood my ground, staring at the back of her head until she turned back to face me.

  “I didn’t say you can’t stay on the story. But before we tell the world that the skeleton behind the wall is George Desmond, we need more than a theory. What do you know about Desmond’s kin?”

  “He grew up in Riverside. His mother was alive when he disappeared, but that was forty-six years ago. He was divorced. Stories written at the time said the ex was living in Boston. But his kid sister lives on Peaks.” I held up my notebook. “I’ve got her address.”

  “You think she’ll admit her brother lived out his life on a tropical island?”

  “Who knows what she’ll say? It’ll be one of those ‘watch the body language’ type interviews.”

  The big clock on the front wall of the newsroom said it was ten minutes to three.

  Leah looked at me over her half-glasses. “If you’re right about the remains being Desmond’s, it’ll be useful to have made a connection with his sister. But we can’t publish anything yet, even if you convince her to talk.”

  “She’ll talk to me,” I said. “Tide’s running my way today.”

  Chapter Three

  Thursday, May 16, 1968

  Riverside, Maine

  Paulie Finnegan fished a dime out of his trouser pocket with his right hand and pulled the phone booth door closed with his left. He set his notebook on the narrow metal shelf and dialed the city desk, keeping an eye on the action in the cop shop corridor until he heard Jake Stuart’s bark at the other end of the line.

  “Finnegan here,” Paulie said.

  “Whaddaya got?”

  “Five days down the road and still no sign of Disappearing Act Desmond. But I picked up some muttering that he might have pocketed some of the mill’s change before he blew town.”

  “Anybody telling you that on the record?”

  “Not yet. I have a few fresh details though. Who’s up? I’m ready to dictate.”

  “Rewrite will pick up in a minute. You planning to stick around there for a while?”

  Paulie watched an Associated Press photographer stow his camera in a canvas bag and head for the door.

  “I’ll probably swing over to the Warp. The mill guys will be in their cups by now. Maybe I’ll pick up some dirt.”

  “Don’t get drunk,” Jake said. “I’m shorthanded tonight. Might need you someplace else.”

  After dictating a thin update to the rewrite man, Paulie buttonholed Police Chief Armand Fecteau in the hallway but came away with nothing new. Shoving his notebook in his hip pocket, he headed for the millworkers’ after-work hangout, a squat wood-frame joint one block south of the hulking Saccarappa. The sign outside the Warp and Weft said it was a tavern, but it really was a barroom, a no-frills place for guys to blow off steam at the end of the workday. It wasn’t officially off-limits for ladies, but Paulie had never seen one there.

  At six o’clock on a Thursday night, the Warp was crowded with two kinds of men. There were hardcore boozers, who’
d been there since the first shift let out at three. Paulie knew better than to waste his time talking with them. Then there were guys who’d gone home, mowed the lawn, presided over supper with the wife and kids and slipped out the kitchen door while the dishes were being done. If there were interviews to be had, these were the ones to cultivate.

  He found a perch at the corner of the bar, straddled a stool and sipped a draft while watching gestures and listening for tones of voice. It didn’t take long to tune in to the theories being exchanged by two men leaning against a narrow shelf opposite the bar.

  “I can’t believe he hasn’t shown up yet,” a long-limbed man in his early thirties said.

  “Fishing trip turned into something more maybe,” said his buddy, a wiry chain smoker in a plaid shirt.

  Paulie strolled over to the pair, shifting his mug to his left hand.

  “You guys know George Desmond?” He met the tall guy’s eyes and put out his hand. “Paul Finnegan, reporter at the Chronicle. I’ve been picking up bits and pieces all day, looking for help putting it together.”

  The man’s smile dimmed a bit, but he shook Paulie’s hand.

  “Earl St. Pierre,” he said.

  The other man seemed friendlier.

  “Sonny DiGeronimo.” He sized Paulie up. “You Mike Finnegan’s brother?”

  Paulie nodded. “How do you know Mike?”

  “We were in grade school together at St. Pat’s. He was a smart-ass. The nuns sure made him pay.”

  “He’s still a smart-ass. Only now it’s his wife making him pay.” Paulie gestured at the empty mugs held by the man and his companion. “Can I buy you guys a beer?”

  By the time Paulie returned with a pitcher of beer his newfound friends had commandeered a table. Over the next hour he learned a lot about the assistant finance manager who nobody had seen since the previous Saturday.

  Earl had grown up with Desmond on the south side of Riverside. Their bond remained solid after Desmond left for college, leaving Earl to work his way from a lowly starting job to a decent spot in the mechanical division at the Saccarappa Mill. Earl was skittish about discussing Desmond’s disappearance, but Sonny was keen to share his opinions. Between drags on his cigarette he described the finance manager as all business until he got a few drinks in him. Then he turned into a Romeo with a penchant for other men’s women.