Sitting on an elevated platform at the front of the big drawing room, facing a crowd that overflowed the space, Preble appeared as thrilled as a ten-year-old at his own birthday party. His debate opponent, a casino industry smoothie named Charlene Goodnought, may have been wearing a smile that screamed confidence but her body language betrayed tight nerves. The Downtown Club crowd wasn’t likely to be sympathetic, and Charlene appeared to be steeling herself for a hail of skeptical questions.
Parked in the middle of the front row, I stared at Preble until he felt my gaze. He shot me a wink, his lips twitching as he inclined his head ever-so-slightly toward Goodnought, saying without words that he’d make quick work of her.
Seconds after the introductions, the dukes came up. As long as the moderator’s predictable questions dovetailed with her talking points, Goodnought held her own. But when the floor was opened, the gloves came off. She parried questions about crime, drugs and the mob. She sidestepped allegations about environmental impact, protestations about morality and insinuations about payoffs. After a half hour her eyes had the desperate look of a battler who’d gone fifteen rounds and didn’t have another punch in her.
Jay Preble, too well-mannered to throw a knock-out blow, condescended instead.
“I think Ms. Goodnought has done a heck of a job trying to defend the indefensible,” he said when the last questioner lobbed a softball his way. “Maine doesn’t want mega-casinos, it doesn’t need mega-casinos, and when the voters have their say in November, I think you’ll find that there will be no mega-casinos in our beautiful state.” The closing line drew sustained applause.
Stationing myself near the door, I waited for Preble to finish the obligatory post-debate handshaking. The consensus of those streaming past me was that he’d carried the day. After fifteen minutes the crowd was gone and we were alone in the big room. Cheeks flushed and eyes shiny, Preble eased his angular frame into a wing chair.
“Did you get the handout?” he said. “It lays out all the relevant facts and figures.”
I held it up to show I did. “Can we talk on a more personal level?”
“Fire away.” He sat up straight, crossing one long leg over the other.
“You care deeply about this issue. Why is that?”
His lean face creasing like old leather, Preble tried to camouflage a pained expression.
“I’ve seen firsthand the harm gambling can do.” He gave me a long look, as if weighing my worthiness to hear the back story. Apparently, I passed his test.
“A good friend—one of my best pals from school—had a big gambling problem. Long after he should have grown out of a young man’s propensity to take risks, he was still wagering on a weekly basis. He bet on horses and ballgames, but what really got him going was poker. It almost destroyed his life.”
“How so?”
“One night he bet the farm, so to speak. After losing all night he won a couple of hands. Believing his luck was changing he did the same foolish thing family legend says someone did in a card game with my great-grandfather back in the 1890s—laid the deed to his family’s property on the table in a desperate attempt to win back all that he’d lost.”
Preble shook his head.
“My great-grandfather—a banker who could afford to lose a little money every now and then—was on the winning side of his bet. My friend, who was not well-off, lost big.”
“What was the fallout?”
“Years of heartache. A lifetime, actually.” He cleared his throat. “I hope you’ll be discreet in what you publish. He reads your paper, I’m sure. Never has recovered from the shame.”
“Do you think it’s possible for people to gamble in a moderate way?”
“Of course. Just like I think it’s possible for people to drink responsibly. More do than don’t, as a matter of fact. But the pain caused by those who become addicted is reason not to encourage it. If Maine people want to go to a mega-casino, they don’t have to drive far. Allowing one to be built here would make it too easy for vulnerable people to fall into the habit.”
“You sound downright moralistic.” I smiled to soften the charge.
Preble smiled back. “On this issue I am, and I don’t care who says so.”
After a few more minutes of casino discussion, I steered our conversation to the Desmond case, diving into the deep water without dipping a toe in first.
“You mentioned the other day you were friendly with Paulie Finnegan back in 1968 when George Desmond went missing. He quoted you a few times in stories he wrote, but reading between the lines, I’m guessing you were one of his ongoing sources. Is that true?”
In fact, it was Paulie’s notebooks that told me that, but I wasn’t about to spill those beans.
Preble studied his lap for a few seconds. When he looked up, his face was pinker than it had been. He cleared his throat. “No one’s ever come right out and asked me that before. Of course, there’s forty-some years of water over the dam, so there’s no reason for me to hedge my answer. So yes, I was indeed one of Paulie’s inside sources.”
“You filled him in on how the police were following the money?”
“That was the part I knew about,” Preble said.
“You risked the wrath of the FBI.”
“Absolutely. The FBI agent directing the investigation made no bones about it—he’d fire anyone caught leaking. He couldn’t fire me because I didn’t work for him, but I had no doubt he would have found a way to damage my career.”
“So why’d you do it?”
“We were both young then, Paulie and me. We weren’t college kids, mind you. We had a few years on the long hairs. But in the late sixties, questioning the powers that be was what people under thirty did. Paulie wasn’t buying the FBI’s pat answers, and on some level, neither was I. So I became his secret source, or one of them, anyway.”
“Yet in the one story where you were quoted by name you called Desmond a slick operator and a scoundrel. Wasn’t that the FBI’s exact theory?”
“That was a bit of misdirection.” Preble’s cheeks reddened again. “Curt Wellington—he was the top G-man—made a few not so subtle comments to my father, implying my friendship with Paulie meant I was skeptical about the FBI’s theory and therefore untrustworthy. I got the message loud and clear. To quiet the dogs I told Paulie he was naïve when he insisted Desmond wasn’t the culprit, even went on the record saying harsh things about poor George Desmond.”
His regretful tone surprised me.
“You sound sorry.”
“I’m sure my statements wounded George’s family.” Preble shifted in his chair. “They were irresponsible words, and dishonest. If I was so worried that Wellington would take revenge on me, I shouldn’t have been talking to Paulie.”
He paused. I waited.
“Like I said, I was young then.”
* * *
That afternoon a text message announced the expensive but welcome news that my car was ready for pickup. The sky was dark with storm clouds when I called Rufe, who admitted he’d be happy to have his baby blue truck back. When I got to his shop he was sitting on the front step, tapping his foot to a song playing inside his head. The wind had that pre-thunderstorm keen going.
“I’ve had my butt parked in a chair all day, working on bids. What are you doing this afternoon?”
I handed him the keys. “I can’t goof off.”
“Can I tag along and be your assistant?”
I thought for a second about my loose agenda. I needed to check in with Earl. I had to call Joan Slater to ask about the theories she’d come up with after Desmond disappeared. I also wanted to track down Chief Wyatt to ask what she’d learned about Mike Thibodeau. And if I could swing it, I planned to go back to Kennebunkport to talk more with MacMahon. It wouldn’t work to have Rufe along for any of that.
“I wish I could say yes. But the people I need to interview probably would be reluctant to open up if you were there.”
“I promise not to sing,” he said, as rain began to spatter the truck’s windshield.
“Like you can get through an afternoon without singing.”
“Be on your way, big-shot reporter.”
“Next time something good is happening, I’ll call you.”
“You’re just like all the guys,” Rufe said. “Promises, promises.”
* * *
Driving toward the Mill Stream, I thought about Detective MacMahon’s belief that Ken Coatesworth was involved in Desmond’s disappearance. Earl seemed skittish around Ken and the other members of the Crew. Not intimidated so much as wary. I wanted to know why.
Earl’s battered pickup had its own space in the golf club’s unpaved parking lot, beneath an ash tree on the far side of the clubhouse. It wasn’t there when I pulled in, and a quick scan of the lot showed it wasn’t anywhere else, either. A kid minding the pro shop said Earl was taking a few days off.
The Earl St. Pierre I knew only took time off if he was stay-in-bed sick or in the middle of a significant home improvement project. Hoping his motivation was the latter, I drove by his house, a meticulously kept two-family on a tree-lined side street. There was no ladder leaning against the house, no pile of paving stones or other indication he was sprucing the place up. His truck wasn’t visible, but it could have been behind the closed doors of the garage. I took a left at the next cross street and nosed my car into the parking lot of a defunct Catholic church. Pulling a battered local phone book from under the passenger seat, I dialed Earl’s home number. He picked up on the second ring.
“It’s me, Joe,” I said. “Why are you home instead of at the Mill Stream?”
“You been over there looking for me?”
“Yup. Now I’m in the lot at the old Holy Martyrs because I thought you’d have a heart attack if I parked in front of your house.”
He paused for a moment, causing me to regret the comment.
“Leave your car there and walk down the alleyway to my place,” he said. “Come in the back gate to my kitchen door.”
Puzzling over the cloak-and-dagger instructions, I did as I was told. An exhausted-looking Earl swung the screen open before I could knock.
“Come on inside.”
“What’s going on?”
He raised his broad shoulders to his ears and let them drop. “Lotta stuff.”
Earl walked to the kitchen sink and stood looking out the window, his back to me, arms braced against the Formica countertop.
I broke the silence with an observation more than a question. “You want to talk to me, but you want to make sure no one knows about it, right?”
Turning to face me, he pushed his bottom lip up over his top and offered a quick nod.
“Are you hiding from the Crew?”
Another shrug told me I was right.
“Why?”
“Finding George’s remains dredged up a lot of bad memories.”
“Bad how?”
Another pause. The muscle in his jaw jumped as though he was working a plug of tobacco, but I knew he didn’t chew. Motioning me to a chair, he sat down himself and stared across the table at me.
“It’s hard to describe what it was like around here after the mill was ripped off. Overnight, Riverside turned into an angry, paranoid place.”
Earl clasped his hands together. I kept still.
“Until then, the Saccarappa was more than a workplace. It was the heart of the community, where you connected with everyone you needed to see. Buddies from the softball team. Uncles and cousins. At Christmas we’d deck the whole place out in lights, even the big smokestack. We’d have a huge party for the kids, with Santa and elves. It was a real community, you know?”
I didn’t take my eyes off his face, even when his own filled with tears.
“After George disappeared, everything changed. Supervisors would get on our backs for bantering, bark at us to focus on our work. Overtime became a thing of the past. Then the shift cutbacks began, and the layoffs. There was a lot of finger-pointing. People were scared and angry.”
“It must have been hard on you, having been so tight with George.”
“I shut my ears the best I could to the awful things people said about him, but plenty of it penetrated.”
He pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and mopped the tears running down his face.
“I’m so ashamed,” he said. “That’s why I’m hiding out.”
“What do you have to be ashamed of?”
“I let the bastards get to me. I stopped standing up for George, even though I knew in my heart that he didn’t steal all that money and skip town.”
“When he wasn’t found, what were you supposed to do?” I said. “At a certain point, silence on your part was a matter of self-preservation.”
“That sounds like a big fat excuse to me. Friends are loyal. I wasn’t.”
I sat back and looked at him, eyes still leaking, hands clenching the handkerchief so hard I thought he was going to rip it in half.
“You know, don’t you, that the mill didn’t go out of business because somebody stole a half a million bucks in 1968, right?”
Earl shrugged.
“You know the Saccarappa and a lot of family-owned mills like it were sold to corporations around that time, and in the seventies and eighties those big companies moved manufacturing jobs to places where they didn’t have to contend with unions.”
“Yeah, I know about that. And I know a lot of those jobs have now been moved offshore, where there’s no such thing as minimum wage, or time-and-a-half after eight hours. I do keep up with the news.”
“Then you realize those who blamed George Desmond for killing the Saccarappa were wrong-headed idiots.”
Earl’s laugh sounded more like a cough. “There were a hell of a lot of wrong-headed idiots in this town. They wanted a scapegoat, and George was it.”
“But you’re ducking the Crew, not your old coworkers. Why are they so shook up?”
He wiped his eyes again. “Ken was one of the up-and-comers at the time, and not too many years after George disappeared he was the big boss. When the bad news about the mill’s future started rolling in, he and the other shirt-and-tie guys took a lot of guff about not having kept their eyes open back in 1968.”
“Isn’t that why the management guys get paid the big bucks? To take the heat when something goes wrong?”
“It got really hot,” Earl said. “I heard Ken’s family was threatened.”
“Threatened how?”
“Some kind of pipe bomb was thrown on his lawn. Maybe some phone threats. Never heard all the details. Leo was a big strong kid back then, tough as nails. Ken hired him to help protect his family. Leo’s lack of seniority at the mill meant he didn’t get much overtime, so he was happy to moonlight as Ken’s muscle.”
“How would that have put him in the know about Desmond?”
“Probably six months after George disappeared the head of security retired, and Ken pulled the strings that got Leo hired as his replacement. So in a half a year, he went from being a strong back on the floor to wearing a suit to work and having access to every internal report ever written.”
“The cops interviewed him this week, but I got the sense from Chief Wyatt that Leo didn’t have anything relevant to say.”
“What Leo says and what he knows are two different things.”
I thought about that for a few beats. “Speaking of people in the know, until I read the Chronicle accounts of Desmond’s disappearance, I didn’t realize Jay Preble was working hand-in-hand with the FBI.”
“I’d forgotten about that. I guess he knew t
he bank side of things, helped them figure out how the embezzling was done.”
“Of course, now we know it wasn’t George Desmond who did the embezzling,” I said. “I’ve talked with Preble a couple of times about this, including earlier today. He said the cops thought it was possible a con man somehow used George to steal the money, then killed him.”
“I’m not sure I ever heard that particular theory, but it’s no wilder than some of what was said at the time. The discovery of George’s remains has thrown everyone into a spin, and just like before, everyone’s got an opinion.”
“Including the Crew?”
Earl’s face reddened. “Leo came looking for me right after your story came out saying the skeleton could be George’s. He wanted to know if the police had called me. I said they hadn’t. He warned me about going to them, asked what I remembered from when George disappeared and repeated three times that I could wind up hurting innocent people if I were to get any facts wrong.”
“Leo said that?”
“He was practically yelling at one point, saying my memories are as old as I am, and probably unreliable, so I ought to just tell the cops I can’t remember any details, that too many years have passed.”
“Is that true?”
“I can’t swear to some of it, but I know George had found some irregularities in the books, and in his quiet, diligent way, he was gathering evidence.”
“Who did he suspect?”
“He never told me. But he said a scandal was going to come to light, and it was going to shock people.”
“When did he tell you that?”
Earl pulled his lips taut, as though he was bracing himself for a blow. “About a week before he disappeared.”
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