“What did you like about Aaron?” asked Ryan.
“He was nice and he wanted me. Does that surprise you?”
Ryan looked away. They were still alone in the room. He closed the volume of the encyclopedia that lay before him. “Did you know his mother?” he asked.
Mrs. Porter hesitated. “She came into the pharmacy a number of times.”
“To buy things?”
“Of course.”
“What kind of things.”
“The usual things.”
“Did she buy condoms?”
“Yes.”
“Did she talk to Donald?”
“Sometimes he waited on her.”
“Did they seem friendly?”
“Not especially. They were rather cool to each other, actually.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I don’t know if I had an opinion.”
“You must have.”
She looked down at the table, then looked back at him. “She was your lover too, wasn’t she?”
Ryan felt irritated by the question. Then he almost smiled at his prissiness. “For a while.”
“Did you like her?”
“Very much.”
“She must have been an amazing person to have so many men feel so strongly about her. Do you like Aaron?”
“I find him a pain, but it’s hard for me not to like him. He looks like her.”
“Do you still think of his mother?”
Ryan leaned back. “I’m supposed to be the one asking the questions.”
Mrs. Porter clicked her tongue against her teeth, a dismissive noise. “Then ask.”
“Have you ever been involved with Donald Malloy?”
“Of course not.”
“Why ‘of course not’?”
“He’s my employer.”
“Do you find him unattractive?”
“I’ve never thought about him in that way.”
Ryan considered Mrs. Porter’s feelings about men. He had thought that women who liked sex always showed it, but Mildred Porter showed nothing. Ryan guessed he had been wrong about that as he had been wrong about other things.
“Are you going to let Aaron out of jail now?” she asked.
“Right away.”
An hour later Ryan released Aaron from jail. Ryan didn’t speak as they walked to his car. He wanted to make Aaron curious, if that was possible. The sky had clouded over and the temperature was dropping. There would be snow by evening. Aaron looked straight ahead through the windshield and said nothing.
“Tell me,” said Ryan after they had driven a few miles, “what do you see in Mildred Porter?”
“She likes sex.” Aaron continued to stare straight ahead. He was angry at Ryan for putting him in jail. His anger made the L-shaped scar on his cheek seem darker.
“She must be twenty years older than you and she’s plain.”
“Eighteen years. I fucked her body, not her face.”
Ryan was rather shocked. “You must have liked her.”
“Give me a choice between a plain woman who likes sex and a beautiful one who’s indifferent, I’ll take the plain one. I like Mildred Porter. She’s passionate and modest.”
“Will you see her again?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve already been down that road.”
“What do you know about your mother’s murder?” asked Ryan.
“No more than you do.”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
Ryan drove in silence for a moment. The fields between Potterville and Aurelius were mostly cabbage fields. At this time of year they were gray and picked over. The few heads that had been missed reminded Ryan of decomposing skulls.
“Do you think your mother’s murder is connected to these missing girls?” asked Ryan.
“I have no idea.”
“Are there men you suspect might have killed your mother?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why did you tell Harriet to have sex with me?”
“Ask her yourself.”
After Ryan dropped Aaron off downtown, he drove over to Bud’s Tavern. He wanted to explore an idea that had occurred to him. It was not quite eleven-thirty and Sheila Murphy was behind the bar washing glasses. Sheila’s red hair was piled up on top of her head and as she glanced up at Ryan she brushed a couple of loose strands away from her face. She was a large, buxom woman who, in her midtwenties, was beginning to get heavy. From the kitchen came the smell of cooking meat.
“Lunch isn’t ready yet,” said Sheila. “You want a beer?”
“I want to talk.”
Sheila looked regretful. “I’m pretty busy. Could we make it later?”
Ryan tried to look affable. “I guess I could take you back to my office and we could talk there.”
She was silent for a moment. “What d’you want to talk about?”
“Were you friends with Janice McNeal?”
“We knew each other,” said Sheila, surprised.
“I want to know more than that.” Ryan sat down on a stool.
“Like what?”
“Did you go out with men together?”
“I don’t see that it’s any of your business.” Sheila had raised her voice. She glanced quickly toward the kitchen.
“Then let’s go to my office.”
“All right, dammit.” Sheila bit her lower lip, leaving a trace of lipstick on her teeth. “Sometimes I’d visit her house. I liked her. We’d go out with men. Sort of blind dates. Either I would know the men or she would.”
“Would you have sex with these men?”
Sheila folded her towel into squares and set it on the bar. “Sometimes. If we liked them.”
“So you knew the men she’d been involved with?”
“I knew you’d been into her pants all right,” she said crossly. Sheila again pushed away a strand of hair. “I didn’t know all her men.”
“Did Aaron ask you these questions?”
“When?”
“That night in the motel when he bit you.”
“How’d you know that?”
Sheila had both her hands on the bar, leaning toward Ryan. He was turning his stool slightly to the left, then to the right. There was something almost childlike about it.
“You didn’t tell him, did you? That’s why he got mad.”
“I told him it was none of his business. And it’s none of yours either.”
“Did you tell him anything?”
“We were joking. At least I was. I said his mother had been laughing about a professional man. That was what she called him, ‘a professional man,’ like it was a joke. He asked who it was and I wouldn’t say. I realized he’d gone out with me just to ask these questions and it hurt my feelings. But also I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. We were wrestling. He said he’d give me the Hark treatment if I didn’t tell. I thought he was joking. I told him to fuck off. That’s when he bit me.”
“Who was this professional man?”
“I don’t want to say. I mean, I don’t know if she was ever with him.”
“Whether you want to or not, this is police business—you have to say.”
Two men entered the bar and Sheila moved toward them.
“I promise you,” said Ryan, “I’ll take you to my office.”
Sheila glared at him. “Well, the fact is, I don’t really know. But I bet it was Dr. Malloy. Are you happy now? Janice said she liked fucking doctors, they always smelled clean.”
Ryan watched her move down the bar, already greeting the two men. He recognized them as farmers but he didn’t know their names. He thought about Janice and her appetites. T
hen he left the tavern and walked back to his car. He drove over to Janice’s house on Hamilton Street.
In the next hour, Ryan talked to Janice’s neighbors, Floyd and Lois Washburn on the left side and Mrs. Winters on the right. He had talked to them immediately after Janice’s murder but now he wanted to talk to them again. His question to each was the same: Had Aaron McNeal spoken with them recently?
All three said that Aaron had visited them several times in the past few months. He had wanted to know what people they had seen entering Janice’s house around the time of the murder.
“He even asked if I’d seen you,” said Mrs. Winters. She was a retired teacher and her living room had the musty smell of old books and too many cats. “‘Did you ever see Ryan Tavich?’ That’s what he asked me. But he asked about other men as well.”
“Who?” asked Ryan. He stood in Mrs. Winters’s hallway.
“All sorts of men. No, that’s not true. He was interested in what he called ‘professional men.’ There were several lawyers, an accountant, a professor, an engineer.”
“Was the accountant Paul Leimbach?”
“Yes, it was.”
“What about the professor?”
Mrs. Winters blinked her small black eyes. “Professor Carpenter over at the college.”
“And had you seen any of these men?”
“I told him that I didn’t spend my days and nights looking to see who was visiting his mother.”
“Did he ask about Dr. Malloy?”
“Never.”
Floyd and Lois Washburn gave Ryan pretty much the same answers. They were having lunch in the kitchen and Ryan accepted a cup of coffee. Floyd repaired home appliances and wore green pants and a green shirt.
“He rattled off a bunch of names,” said Floyd. “Most I didn’t know but you were one of them. Of course I’d seen you with Janice but that was some time before she was killed.”
“You’d think we’d kept a list,” said Lois. “I mean, he seemed surprised that we hadn’t.”
“Tell you the truth,” said Floyd, “I tried not to see who was going in there. It could be embarrassing. Like your dentist—can you imagine your dentist having an illicit affair?”
“And you know for certain,” said Lois, “that he’ll be touching your mouth with the exact same hands.”
When Ryan left, he had learned scarcely more than he had in the weeks after Janice’s murder, and what he had learned concerned Aaron rather than his mother. Yet he felt good about this. It made Aaron’s behavior seem less arbitrary. Ryan drove over to the college. He wanted to talk to Sherman Carpenter in the history department, the man with whom Harriet Malcomb had gone to a motel on Halloween. Ryan had talked to him earlier in order to verify Harriet’s story. Now he had another question.
Carpenter was with a student and Ryan waited in the hall. Other students passing by looked at him curiously. He could hear Carpenter laughing and telling a story about John L. Lewis and his thick white eyebrows.
When the student left, Ryan stuck his head through the door. “One question. Did Harriet ask you anything about Janice McNeal?”
Carpenter was seated at his desk, which was covered with papers. “Come in and shut the door, will you?”
Ryan stepped into the office and shut the door. Carpenter was an athletic man in his late thirties. Ryan had nothing against him except that he looked and talked like a professor: too much tweed and facial hair.
“She asked if I’d been fucking Janice.”
“And had you?”
“A couple of times. To tell you the truth, she was too bossy. Do this, do that. I didn’t like it.”
“When was this?”
Carpenter rubbed his forehead. He looked both sheepish and ironic at the same time, as if he were embarrassed but not too embarrassed. “About a month before she was killed.”
“Did Harriet ask if Janice had ever mentioned ‘a professional man’?”
“Yes, but Janice never did. For all I know, I was the professional man. Janice and I didn’t talk much. Mostly we just got down to work, if you know what I mean.”
Ryan found himself clenching his teeth.
“Did Harriet ask if Janice had mentioned Dr. Malloy or Paul Leimbach?”
“No, she only asked about one man in particular.” Carpenter again assumed his expression of ironic embarrassment.
“And who was that?”
“She asked if Janice had ever mentioned you. I told her I only remembered one time. Janice said that the women you went out with called you Old Silent. Harriet laughed at that.”
—
The day after I was visited by the Friends of Sharon Malloy, I decided to get a haircut. This was not entirely casual on my part. I mostly went to a barbershop called Jimmy’s where an elderly man by the name of Jimmy Hoblock cut my hair. Indeed, he had cut it when I was young. But I had noticed that Make Waves advertised itself as a unisex hair parlor so I decided to have Jaime Rose cut my hair. You will understand that my curiosity was getting the better of me.
I drove downtown after school and after a short wait I found myself in Jaime’s chair.
“Been a while,” he said.
I explained that I had had my hair cut the previous month.
“I mean since I laid eyes on you,” he said. Jaime had an immaculate black beard that he must have trimmed hair by hair. It wasn’t bushy but clung neatly to his cheeks. The sheet with which I was covered seemed made of black satin.
I said that I’d been busy and that in any case the awful events in our town had dissuaded me from leaving the house unless absolutely necessary. Cookie Evans was working on Brigit Daly across the room, talking constantly as she trimmed and combed.
“It’s hardly worth living here anymore,” said Jaime.
“Do you think you’ll leave?”
“I’ve thought of it. I have friends other places.” He gave a slight emphasis to “friends.” Jaime was not especially effete, but neither did he strike one as masculine.
“I can’t believe that whoever is responsible lives in Aurelius,” I said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Are you serious?”
Jaime looked at me in the mirror. He knew more about me than I cared to have him know, though we had never been together, nor were we interested in each other—in that way, I mean. On the other hand, he knew I would help him if he needed it, as I knew he would help me. I wouldn’t have felt the same way in New York, but Aurelius was a small town.
“Believe me,” he said, “I’ve known some doozies.”
“That doesn’t mean one of them might abduct a little girl.”
Jaime went back to my hair. It was the first time in my life I’d had a razor cut. I wondered what it would cost me.
“Perhaps not, but if I were to tell the police about two or three of our fellow citizens, it would make quite a squawk.”
“Who do you mean?” I asked, as mildly as I could.
Jaime winked at me in the mirror. “Don’t be pushy.”
“If you know anything about those girls,” I said firmly, “you should tell the police.”
“Of course I don’t know anything like that,” said Jaime, defensively. “I’m just saying that some people aren’t what they pretend to be. In fact, some people are quite nasty.”
I was dying to know whom he meant but I felt that I couldn’t be insistent. “We all have secrets,” I said.
Jaime sprayed something on my scalp. “Some are darker than others.” He snipped some more. “Do you know those two brothers in that Marxist group at the college?”
“Jesse and Shannon Levine?”
“That’s right.”
“Do they have dark secrets?”
“Nothing like that. I happened to speak to them at the bar at Gillian’s and they were abusive. I
was quite surprised.”
“Apparently they beat up Barry Sanders, or tried to.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. Really, I was only making small talk.” Standing behind me, Jaime put his hands on my cheeks and turned my head a little to the left, then to the right in front of the mirror. “It could stand some thickening,” he said.
“I’m afraid I’m rather past thickening.”
“What a dreadful thought,” said Jaime. “Perhaps I should leave here after all. What am I doing in such a silly town? Even Syracuse would be better.”
“Do any of these people frighten you?” I asked. “I mean the people with secrets?”
“Of course not,” he said, fluffing my hair to make it stand up a little. “I’m just making conversation.”
Shortly, I was through. Really, the whole thing was just a little blip in a long day dominated by my teaching. And even this event would have remained unimportant if it weren’t for what happened later. My claim that I visited Make Waves primarily to see Jaime Rose is probably untrue. The fact is my hair was thinning, and I was getting balder. From vanity and nothing more I thought Jaime could do something about it. And my hair looked much better, I’m sure of it, for at least several days.
Thirty-four
Ever since Meg Shiller’s disappearance, the door to the police station and the three other doors to City Hall had been under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Captain Percy was hopeful. If the same person was responsible for both disappearances, then surely he would return Meg’s clothes, just as he had returned Sharon’s.
The question raised later was how many people knew about the surveillance. Watching the doors required someone to scan four video monitors around the clock. Two of the cameras were in the stockroom of Weber’s Shoes, across the street and north of City Hall. The other two were on the second floor of Bob Moreno’s men’s haberdashery, to the south. The monitors themselves were in the basement of City Hall. Bob Moreno knew the cameras were upstairs, as did Charlie Weber. So when the question arose as to how the person who had taken the two girls knew that the police station was being watched, the answer seemed obvious. Too many people knew about it for the secret to remain a secret.
Frieda Kraus, who in the opinion of many people kept the Independent afloat, got to work at seven-thirty each morning, sometimes earlier. Franklin had been lucky to hire an insomniac with the energy of a Mack truck. If she had had any writing ability, she might have taken over the paper, but fortunately for Franklin she didn’t. She was perhaps fifty, had five Siamese cats, and a large garden. Two of the cats lived at the newspaper office because they didn’t get along with the three at home. Frieda had many boyfriends when she was younger but none stuck. It was Franklin’s opinion that she had worn them out. Now she had an ongoing relationship of convenience with a self-employed roofer who visited weekly from Norwich. Because of her energy and constant talk (mostly she described the sporting events she watched through the night on her satellite-dish TV), she was a difficult person to spend time with.
The Church of Dead Girls Page 30