Quick Pivot

by Brenda Buchanan

  The Thibodeau phone was answered by a woman with a pronounced Boston accent.

  “Mike went out to the mahket and the cah wash,” she said. “Can I take a message?”

  “I’ll call back.” I didn’t divulge my name or purpose. “When do you expect him?”

  “By noon. He’s a sticklah for lunch at twelve on the dot.”

  Gene was walking in my direction as I hung up the phone, looking for a way to help out.

  “Later today I’m going to head over to Scarborough to interview the guy who I think was hired back in the sixties to rebuild that wall in the mill’s basement. Could you do some background research on the guy? His name’s Thibodeau, Michael A. Used to be a big-shot basketball player for Portland High in the late fifties.”

  “Will do. What’s Chief Wyatt got to say for herself this morning?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out.” I tucked a fresh notebook into my back pocket and headed back to Riverside.

  The chief’s unmarked wasn’t in the station parking lot. On a hunch I drove by her house and spotted it parked inside her wide-open garage. Dressed in a sleeveless yellow dress, she stepped out her front door as I pulled to the curb, a sweating glass of lemonade in her right hand. She didn’t offer me a good morning or a cool drink when I climbed out and approached her front porch.

  “How’d you know where I live?”

  “Every reporter worth the name knows where every police chief lives.”

  “Maine is such a damn small town.” She set down her glass and walked to the edge of the porch steps. I was standing with one foot on the bottom tread, but she didn’t invite me up.

  “Busy?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Wrecker Rigoletti and the rest of the staties camped out in your office?”

  “Let’s just say it’s more functional for me to work from here.” She flashed a half smile that might have been genuine.

  “I can imagine that.”

  She finally made a gesture I took as an invitation to join her on the porch. I settled myself into a rocking chair.

  “What have you been digging up?” Wyatt’s back was flat against the back of a matching rocker, her eyes on mine.

  “I’m trying to make sense of the facts on the record. A lot was written about George Desmond’s disappearance back in ’68. I’m sifting through it with a fresh eye, now that we know he didn’t skip town because he was dead.”

  “We don’t know the bones are his, not for certain.”

  “How about we assume it, for the sake of this conversation?”

  The chief glanced up as a car passed, then back at me. “It’s clear that’s what you believe, given that the Chronicle didn’t wait for the official confirmation before going with the story that the remains might be Desmond’s.”

  “I didn’t say they were his, just that it was a possibility. I stressed that the forensic evidence isn’t in yet.”

  She didn’t belabor her point, asking instead what my theory was after having read the old stories. I sighed at her attempt to execute the old switcheroo.

  “How ’bout this? I ask the questions. You provide the answers. Or at least try to evade my questions. It doesn’t work the other way around.”

  “Perhaps we can do this both ways. If you tell me what you’re hearing in the course of your interviews, I’ll give you what I can.”

  “You’ll want to speak on background, of course.”

  “I can’t do it any other way. You know that.”

  “That street runs both ways. I may have information from other people to whom I’ve promised confidentiality. I can’t share that with you.”

  We gave each other a long look. I was guessing the sharp-elbowed Rigoletti was making it impossible for her to do her job. I’d heard male cops grumble about him manipulating investigations in order to get all the credit. Rigoletti would have even less regard for a female colleague. If she wanted to play more than a tangential role in the investigation, coordinating with me was her best option, and we both knew it.

  “You first,” I said.

  After additional reassurance that nothing she might tell me would to show up in the paper until the powers that be officially confirmed that everyone was now operating with the belief the skeleton was Desmond’s, Chief Wyatt spilled some actual facts.

  It took the crime scene technicians a day and a half to process the scene at the Saccarappa. They focused on both the wall and the narrow cavity behind it. The skeleton was angled away from the corridor wall, feet farthest from the corridor. Except for the damaged skull, there were no obvious skeletal injuries. The ME confirmed it was an adult male. A watch, a gold Omega with the initials G.W.D. etched on the back, hung from the bones of his left wrist.

  “G.W.D. As in George William Desmond?”

  Chief Wyatt shrugged.

  “Did you tell his sister that part?”

  “I haven’t spoken with her myself, but the state police interviewer said she couldn’t recall what his watch looked like.”

  “For Chrissakes, why the games? Instead of asking Helena Desmond if she could remember what kind of watch her brother wore forty-six years ago, why didn’t they just show it to her, see if she recognized it?”

  “I’m not running the investigation, remember?”

  “I’m assuming Desmond was dead before his body was stashed there?”

  “That’s the working hypothesis, for two reasons. First, the damage to the skull. The medical examiner’s doing a forensic autopsy, trying to figure out what kind of weapon would be a precise fit. The guess is a tool of some sort. Heavy. Wood or metal.”

  “The proverbial blunt object.”

  Wyatt nodded. “The ME also found a high level of alkalinity on the remains. When they scraped the floor around where the bones were found, it was easy to see why. Lime. Lots of it. Somebody wanted to cover up the smell of a decomposing body.”

  “Any trace evidence? Clothing or other objects?”

  “The shirt had disintegrated. Plastic buttons were intact, but the fibers are too far gone for anything but a microscopic examination. He was wearing jeans. Some of that fabric held up over time. Stains appear to be embedded in the fibers, so the lab has something to work with.”

  “It’d be logical that the victim’s blood was on the pants.”

  “You never know whose blood we might find.”

  “The motive had to be money, so who’s in your spotlight?”

  “I wish I could tell you we had a theory. No surprise here, but the Riverside PD records from 1968 are scant, Rigoletti’s hogging whatever he has, and the FBI records are under lock and key somewhere.”

  I cocked an eyebrow, asking without words for more.

  “The Riverside chief at the time was Armand Fecteau. He joined the force out of high school, went up the ladder without much training. A classic story. I’m guessing he had the good sense to know his limitations, because there’s nothing in his reports that imply any tension with the state police investigators or the feds. He tied up what he had with a nice red ribbon and handed it over, happy to be done with it.”

  “And Rigoletti is being Rigoletti?”

  “Yup. I have no idea what they have but it can’t be much because yesterday Wrecker was on a tear about cold case evidence not being preserved. Problem was, because it was classified as an unsolved embezzlement, not a murder, it wasn’t on the cold case squad’s radar.”

  “No copies of the FBI reports in your files, huh?”

  “Those were the J. Edgar Hoover days. The term ‘interdepartmental cooperation’ hadn’t been invented. Not that there’s much actual cooperation now. We just pay lip service to it.”

  Especially if you’re not one of the old boys. “What’s the process to get those old reports?”
/>
  “I’ve been asking that question for days. You could make a Freedom of Information request, and a few months from now receive some heavily redacted reports. On my end, they keep saying we’ll have them in a week, but that’s too long. We’re in day four of the investigation. If whoever stowed the corpse behind the wall is still alive, every day we waste gives the perp another day to see us coming.”

  The chief leaned forward and peered onto her compact front lawn, as if the guilty party might be standing there.

  “Now it’s your turn.” She picked up a pen and notebook from a side table. “I know you well enough to know you’ve been turning over your own set of rocks.”

  After considering the implications for a moment, I told her Helena had provided me with George Desmond’s secretary’s name and that I’d tracked Joan Slater down in Durham.

  “She loathed an FBI agent named Wellington. He was convinced she was Desmond’s girlfriend, which she denies.”

  Wyatt looked up from her note taking.

  “That’s one report that is in the Riverside file. The FBI kept track of Ms. Slater after she moved to New Hampshire. She gave birth to a baby boy that winter. Put him up for adoption. The FBI arranged for the hospital to give them a blood sample. Blood-typing was the technology of the day. Pretty basic, but enough to rule out Desmond as the father.”

  I kept a neutral look on my face as she spoke, not about to betray Joan Slater’s midnight confession that it was Paulie Finnegan’s son.

  “I found a guy who worked on the mill’s construction crew, retired now, living out of state. I tracked him down yesterday. He says the work on the basement wall was done in the mid-to late-sixties, but it was hired out.” I told her the details Parker had related and that I hoped to connect with Mike Thibodeau that afternoon. I asked if there was a way I could reach her confidentially.

  She stared me down as she recited her personal cell phone number.

  “For emergency use only,” she said. “If you give it to anyone else, our little arrangement is off.”

  * * *

  Gene was standing next to the printer when I entered the air-conditioned newsroom. The details of my conversation with Chief Wyatt lit him up.

  “Good work, man. But it’s all on background, so you’ve got to find another source to verify it.”

  “Rigoletti’s not going to give me squat, so I’m going to have to twist some crime scene tech’s arm, maybe squeeze someone in the M.E.’s office.”

  “When you come up with a plan, let me know how I can help. In the meantime, I found some background on Thibodeau. Google turned up two hits, not bad for a guy in his seventies. He’s involved in the local chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Seems to be a perennial volunteer at MS fundraising events. He also made the Maine Sports Hall of Fame, inducted in 1979 for his prowess on the basketball court twenty years earlier.”

  “Parker said he was a great point guard. He play in college?”

  “Doesn’t look like he went to college. The reverse directories say he worked for DiRenzo Brothers, a masonry company, from 1959 until the late sixties. The secretary of state’s website shows him as president of a corporation called Casco Bay Stonework. Formed in 1967, still in existence.”

  “Does he have money?”

  “No more than he should. He lives in a nice subdivision at Pleasant Hill. Valued at about $350k.”

  “Nothing like online databases to tell you everything you want to know about somebody, and then some.”

  “Scary, if you think about it,” Gene said.

  “Every breath you take, every move you make. Someone sure as hell will be watching you.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Saturday, May 25, 1968

  Riverside, Maine

  MacMahon didn’t know for sure that his telephone line or Paulie’s was tapped, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Their conversations lasted just long enough for the big statie to tell Paulie when and where to show up.

  “Noon today. Pearl Street, between Fore and Middle. Behind the warehouse that got condemned last month. Be invisible, okay?”

  Paulie knew the Maine State Police had a strict policy against unofficial communication with reporters and figured that went double for the feds. If the state police brass wrote you up for talking to the press, the FBI probably cut your balls off. So he drove over to Pearl Street, wearing Ray-Bans and a Red Sox cap.

  MacMahon was late. For almost an hour Paulie slouched in the front seat of his car, counting the plywooded windows of a crumbling warehouse two blocks from the Portland waterfront. Finally an unmarked Chevy Biscayne slid alongside. MacMahon gestured for Paulie to join him.

  “Had to be sure I didn’t have a tail. Stay down, okay?”

  “Cops and robbers,” Paulie muttered.

  “Worse,” MacMahon said. “Cops and cops.”

  He drove up the Fore Street hill, took a left onto Vesper Street and pulled into a cracked parking lot next to a trio of wooden tenements. Smart choice, Paulie thought. He knew the Munjoy Hill neighborhood and its ways. Anyone alert enough to spot an unmarked cop car would go to ground, not tell the FBI about it. MacMahon backed into a space next to a lilac bush loaded with blooms, a vantage point from which he could watch every passing car. Leaving the windows down, he turned off the ignition.

  “You know a guy named Ken Coatesworth?”

  “Met him the other day.”

  “Tell me your impression.”

  Paulie swiveled his back against the passenger door so he could see MacMahon’s face. “A rich kid. At first I thought stuck up, but that might be unfair.” Paulie waited a few beats. “What do you care about him?”

  “Been checking out the white-collar guys at the mill. Something about the Desmond evidence is too goddamn neat, if you know what I mean. We’re playing with the idea someone set him up to take the fall.”

  “You think Ken Coatesworth stole a bunch of money and knocked off Desmond?”

  “As of now, that’d be a big jump. But an anonymous letter showed up two days ago, pointing us in his direction.”

  “Naming him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “For Chrissakes, Tommy. You’re not gonna use me to troll for evidence. I’m not gonna write a story based on bullshit so you can see if it unnerves Coatesworth or any of the other junior execs over at the Saccarappa.”

  “Calm down. I’m not suggesting you write anything. As a matter of fact, I don’t want you to write a word. Like all of our conversations, this is background only.”

  “What do you want?”

  “In exchange for the ongoing background briefings, I want you to ask around about him and let me know what people say.”

  Paulie bit his tongue for ten seconds so he wouldn’t spit out a barb about not being a law enforcement lackey. “Why would I even consider doing such a thing?”

  MacMahon’s eyes flicked toward some kids dribbling a basketball down the sidewalk before trolling the bait. “On Thursday a note arrives in the mail, addressed to ‘Desmond Investigative Team, Maine State Police.’ Plain white paper. Typewritten.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and paged through it. “It said, and I quote, ‘He who lives by the mill dies by the mill. GD hasn’t gone far. Like in prep school, some boys have all the answers.’”

  “And the relevance to Coatesworth is?”

  “The Saccarappa doesn’t have many employees who went to prep school. There’s only one, in fact. Kenneth Pennington Coatesworth. He’s an Exeter man.”

  “That’s it? Some screwy note that could have been typed up by a prankster?”

  MacMahon flicked his big hand in Paulie’s direction as if to rap him on the side of the head. “You’ve got to learn patience, Finnegan. You’re worse than my kids.”

  He pulled a pack of Pall Malls
out of his shirt pocket, lit one with a Zippo and exhaled a lungful of smoke. “After we figured out Coatesworth was likely the prep school boy in question, we took a good hard look at him. He went to college in Lewiston. Bates College, studied economics, graduated with honors. But in between the all-night bull sessions and the dorm pranks, he crammed in experiences most of his classmates didn’t have.”

  MacMahon took another pull on his cigarette. Paulie waited him out.

  “Young Kenny somehow learned his way around the rough parts of Lewiston. You’ve seen him. He’s in his mid-twenties now, but still looks like he’s about sixteen.” The big statie squinted at a car pulling away from the curb across the street. “He looked even younger when he was a college kid. Sitting in the front row at the Armory at the big-time fights, or slipping behind the track at the Raceway, he looked as out of place as a nun in a brothel.”

  MacMahon flicked his cigarette ash out the window. “After graduation he went to Harvard for a business degree. Must have done some extracurricular work, because when he came back to Maine he was on a first-name basis with the hard cases who run the local gambling racket.”

  Paulie thought about his sense that Coatesworth was out of place at the boxing gym.

  “I don’t cover the mob,” he said. “They operate out of barrooms or what?”

  “In Lewiston, it depends on what slice of the pie they control. Numbers get run out of a couple of junkyards. The horserace guys use a garage behind a family restaurant as their home base. The card players and their loan shark cousins hang at a boxing club.”