The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  Blessing nodded. “Yes. He’s scheduled for cleanup and embalming this afternoon.”

  I looked down at Milo for a moment, struck by a memory so lasting and powerful that it hit me with a jolt. I hesitated before saying, “Okay. We can wrap him up again.”

  Blessing worked the zipper, adding, “It’s no problem if you want to move him upstairs for a closer look. It’s warmer and we’ve got very good ventilation.”

  I shook my head, keeping my thoughts to myself. “That’s okay. I mostly just wanted to make sure it was him. Do you have any of his personal effects, by the way?”

  He led us back to the warm basement, and to a shelf lined with several brown paper bags, one of which he handed me. I poured its contents onto a nearby table and picked through an assortment of rags, bottle caps, paper clips, broken ballpoint pens, and other assorted junk until I found Dr. Jefferies’s orange plastic container of prescribed Inderal. Blessing nodded silently as I gestured putting it in my pocket. “Thanks. I’m going to see if I can get an autopsy ordered. I’d appreciate it if you held him till I let you know.”

  Blessing returned the bag to the shelf. “No problem. He’s not in anyone’s way.” I wondered if the same had been true at the end of his life.

  · · ·

  Gail was sitting at her desk, to one side of the reception area. Her tired face broke into a smile when she saw me. “Hey, stranger. You get any sleep?”

  I crossed over and kissed her. “A few hours this morning. Sorry I missed you.”

  “Not to worry. My spies told me what you were up to.” She waved at the files all around her, covering the desk and floor both. “In fact, Patty Redding is hiding here—somewhere—already. What’re you up to?”

  “Petitioning your boss for an autopsy. I wanted to tell you something about Linda Feinstein, though.” Gail’s eyebrows rose. “I won’t breach any confidentialities, but I think you ought to talk to her. She may have something to get off her chest. You can tell her I told you that much. It’s up to her if she wants to spell it out.”

  She nodded and made a notation in her desk calendar. “You got it. Did you get a decent breakfast—or dinner for that matter?”

  “Yeah,” I answered evasively. “Ron treated me.”

  Jack Derby’s door opened behind her and he beckoned me with his hand. “Come on in, Joe. You got five minutes.”

  “Life in the fast lane,” I murmured to Gail, and followed him into his office.

  “I’m heading for court, so don’t mind the distractions.” Derby was standing behind his desk, a large briefcase sitting on its edge. He was surveying a snow bank of documents, selecting from among them, and marking his choices off on a checklist by his right hand.

  I sat in his guest chair. “I’d like an autopsy ordered on Milo Douglas. He’s the bum they found under the Whetstone bridge on Main Street a couple of nights ago.”

  Derby didn’t look up. “Why? I thought he was natural causes.”

  “He might’ve been. He had a bottle of heart meds in his pocket for chest pain, but witnesses said he died after a seizure. The Assistant Medical Examiner was a GP, covering for Al Gould, who’s on vacation. He combined the cardiac history, the alcoholism, poor living habits, and the fact that Milo was in his sixties, and came up with heart failure. But nobody talked to his actual doctor—both the AME and our own investigator just checked with the hospital.”

  “And you did talk to his doctor,” Derby surmised.

  “Right. He said sudden death in such a case was pretty unlikely, and that seizures have nothing to do with what Milo was being treated for.”

  “Was he part of one of your investigations?”

  “Milo? No. I hadn’t even seen him in months. I have used him over the years, though, as a less than reliable snitch.”

  “But he was an alcoholic, right? Couldn’t he have died of the DTs? Those could look like seizures, especially given your witnesses.”

  I considered telling him of my biggest concern—the one triggered by seeing Milo at Guillaume’s—but with only my own memories to go on, I wanted some reliable confirmation. The implications of Satanism in Shawna’s death were bad enough. No need to add my own unfounded fears to that kind of fire. I opted for a compromise instead. “We’ll never know unless we check it out.”

  He stopped long enough to look me squarely in the eye. “We can’t do it all, Joe. We’ve got plenty on our plates without fishing for more.”

  “I realize that.”

  He held my gaze a couple of seconds longer and then returned to his checklist. “All right—I’ll order an autopsy.”

  “Thanks, Jack.” I stood up and moved to the door, hesitating as I placed my hand on the knob, wondering if I should tempt fate. “Why, by the way?” I finally couldn’t resist asking.

  He stopped again and gave me an enigmatic shrug. “Maybe it’s because you’ve been at this for donkey’s years, and from what I heard, you don’t ask for special favors. Maybe it’s because I’m the new boy on the block and I don’t want to piss you off. Take your pick. Anyhow, the ME’s office pays for autopsies, so it doesn’t dent my budget in either case. Have a nice day,” he added with a smile.

  Not that my reasons weren’t entirely self-serving, but I admired the man’s style. It made me happy I’d voted for him.

  9

  JACK DERBY HAD BEEN RIGHT about the Medical Examiner’s office paying for their own autopsies—$1,000 each—but when I reached Beverly Hillstrom by phone, she voiced no opposition, despite the fact that she’d already signed off on the death certificate.

  I arranged to have Milo shipped to Burlington, but with growing misgivings. Both Derby and Hillstrom had placed their trust less on any real evidence than on my gut instinct, and even there I’d shortchanged them, keeping my worst suspicions to myself.

  I couldn’t help praying those suspicions were well-founded. George Capullo, one of our Patrol sergeants, and a veteran of more years than I could remember, had been the one called to Milo’s side the other night. He had also collected the witness statements.

  I found him preparing for the four-to-midnight shift, reviewing the prior shift’s dailies. There were only a few desks in the so-called Officers’ Room, forcing everyone to share. It was a situation that led to endless, three-times-a-day shuffles of personal belongings from desktop to allocated drawer, and—I thought—a slightly disquieting sense of impermanence. In my own squad room, I could see the imprint of its inhabitants everywhere—from the types of information they posted on the walls before them, to the little knickknacks that littered their cubicles. There was little of that in the Officers’ Room. A decades-old veteran like George left as much on its surfaces as a week-old rookie. Neither space nor budget allowed otherwise.

  I perched myself on the edge of the desk he was rummaging through searching for paper clips.

  He glanced up briefly, his first words a commentary on our department’s small size. “Hey, Joe. Nice collar on Patty Redding. He must’ve shit his pants when he saw you two at the door.”

  “Close enough.” I chose my next words carefully. As old as our friendship was, what I’d just done with Milo’s body could easily have been taken as a rebuke for shoddy work. I felt on thin enough ice as it was without damaging George’s pride.

  “Tell me something. I’m curious about Milo Douglas’s death. Did you notice any discrepancies—anything that struck you as odd?”

  He stopped poking through the drawer and looked up at me carefully. “I thought that was natural causes.”

  “Probably was. I’m just picking at it. I sent the body up for an autopsy.”

  Thankfully, he sat back in his chair and nodded. “Yeah. They don’t usually just drop dead like that. But the AME was pretty sure of himself, and it looked solid on paper. What’ya thinking?”

  “Not much. You listed Danny Soffit and Phil Duke as witnesses. Were they sober?”

  “Danny was pretty useless, as usual, but Phil seemed relatively straight at the time
.”

  “What were they doing under the bridge? I thought both of them went indoors during the winter.”

  “They do—normally. They got thrown out by the landlord that morning. Danny wanted to cook something in the room, so he lit a fire in the middle of the floor. Not much damage—the smoke alarm went off—but they ended up on the street. They were spending the night in a kind of cardboard cocoon wedged way up where the under-structure of the bridge meets the wall, as far out of the weather as they could get. They were planning to find other digs the next day. Probably have by now.”

  “Where was Milo hanging out?”

  “In the storm drain just under them—the one that shoots straight up Main Street. It’s clean, dry, stays the same temperature—a few of them use it year round. At the time Milo died, Danny was cooking something on the cement ledge just under the tunnel entrance.”

  “And Milo was fine up to the time he had the seizure?”

  “That’s what they said. Guess I shoulda’ pushed a little harder,” he finished apologetically.

  “I doubt I would’ve,” I comforted him. “I’m just curious why he died so suddenly. The cardiologist he got those pills from says his heart problem wasn’t that bad.”

  “I just took the AME at his word; never occurred to me to chase down the doctor listed on the pill bottle.”

  I tapped the side of his leg with my foot, once again keeping my own suspicions to myself. “Relax—it’s a buddy system. We back each other up. Besides, Hillstrom’ll probably tell me I just blew a thousand bucks for nothing. Where d’you think I can find Danny and Phil?”

  He looked at me again, this time with determination. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find ’em and let you know.”

  · · ·

  Several hours later, chained to my desk by a week’s backlog of paperwork, I found myself growing increasingly restless, wondering why George hadn’t called in yet, wanting to settle what was nagging me once and for all.

  Had his death better fit his medical condition, and had his physical appearance not been so startling—to me at least—Milo’s passing wouldn’t have caused me much concern. The lives these men led—and they were mostly men—were case studies for premature death. Virtually all alcoholics, they ate rarely and poorly, were constantly exposed to disease and infection, and lived outside in all kinds of weather. In the wintertime, it was true, when the summer transients were gone, the full-time locals generally abandoned their fair-weather camps along the railroad tracks, the interstate, and up behind the Putney Road, to flock to the town’s several fleabag apartment buildings. But it wasn’t much of an improvement, and not all of them bothered. Some of the hard-core—as Milo had been—kept to themselves, and chose crannies to live in a stray dog would pass up.

  It was lost in these thoughts, my pen ignored in my hand, that Sammie found me close to suppertime. “We may have a new lead on Shawna Davis. Ron’s talking to someone right now on the phone.”

  Ron was just finishing as we reached him. “Thank you very much—you’ve been a big help. I hope you don’t mind if we call you later on… Right… No, I appreciate that. Thanks again.”

  He hung up, still scribbling on a sheet of paper before him.

  “That was a mailman—Sherman Bailey. He thought he saw Shawna at this address, maybe in late May. It belongs to Mary Wallis.”

  “Bingo,” Sammie murmured. Mary Wallis was one of the town’s most outspoken advocates for the downtrodden—women, the poor, minorities, homeless animals, criminals, children, and a dozen other broad, sometimes conflicting categories.

  She was well known to me personally, not only because she and Gail shared many of the same passions, but also because she’d been known to act on them to excess. When Gail was assaulted, for example, Mary Wallis took it upon herself to identify the culprit—inaccurately—and bean him on the head with her shoe.

  But Wallis could also be an effective and dogged campaigner. With the zeal of a true believer, she pursued her goals with relentless energy and had been known to effect the change of an offending policy almost single-handed.

  The trade-off was that both her manner and her approach carried a high personal cost. Few people liked her, including many of those she worked so hard to support. Gail herself, after making much ado about Mary’s tenacity and value as an ally, had to admit that she could only take her in short doses.

  “He’s a little vague on the date,” Ron continued, “but he saw her in Wallis’s front yard when he was delivering the mail. The hairdo is a match, along with a studded black leather jacket with colored feathers on the sleeves both Messier and Bertin said she wore.”

  “But he can’t get any closer on the date than last spring?” Sammie asked.

  Ron shook his head. “He just remembered the weather had started to get hot.”

  Suddenly recalling one of Mary Wallis’s pet causes, I leaned forward and checked a list of telephone numbers Ron had thumb-tacked to his wall. “I have an idea how Shawna and Wallis met up.”

  I dialed Mother Gert’s, turned on the speakerphone, and waited until she got on the line. “Gert, who processed Shawna Davis the night she visited you?”

  There was a long pause as she went to consult the file. “Why?” came the predictable reply.

  I pursed my lips. “Because the girl’s dead. Surely you can break a confidence so we can find out why.”

  “Is the person who processed her a suspect?”

  “We’re not even sure there is a suspect. We’re trying to track her movements.”

  There was a moment’s silence on the other end. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Joe.”

  I took a deep breath. “Let me try it this way. Will you confirm it was Mary Wallis?”

  Gert’s short reply bristled with anger, as if I’d been playing her for a fool. “Yes,” she said, and the line went dead.

  I returned the phone gently to its cradle. “So they met that night.”

  “Maybe she went to Gert’s because she knew Wallis would be there,” Ron said.

  Sammie shook her head. “Shawna only found out about Mother Gert’s that day, at the hairdresser’s.”

  “Either way, she must’ve sought out Wallis after ripping off Patty Redding,” he concluded.

  “Looks that way,” I admitted.

  Harriet Fritter came up behind us. “Joe? There’s a call for you—George Capullo.”

  “I’ve been waiting for this,” I explained and picked up Ron’s phone again. “You find ’em, George?”

  “Yup. They’re camping in a trailer box on Old Ferry Road—Ferguson’s yard. At least that’s the latest I got. I didn’t want to risk flushing them out. I don’t know how hinky they are.”

  I glanced out the window. It was already dark. “They’re not going to freeze to death overnight, are they?”

  George chuckled. “Oh, you don’t know these guys. They give layering a whole new meaning. And if they’re there now, they’ll be there in the morning.”

  “Thanks a lot, George.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Sammie, remembering her reaction to being left out of the previous night’s action. “You ready to pay a visit to Mary Wallis with me?”

  · · ·

  Considering Wallis’s bellicose lifestyle, her home was a contradictory reflection of bland self-effacement. Tucked away on Allerton Avenue, a short, dead-end street off Western—and within a short stone’s throw of the interstate—it was of the same post–World War Two building style that had made Levittown famous and architects shudder. And given her manic concern for the environment, I found it ironic that the singsong throb of high-speed traffic permeated the surrounding air with the same dull monotony of waves crashing on a beach. It occurred to me that either Mary had come to embrace her causes after she’d moved in here—and then couldn’t afford to leave—or that she needed the stimulus of a nearby and constant enemy to keep her dander up.

  Sammie and I got out of the car, crossed the lawn where the mailman
had seen Shawna Davis, and paused at the front door. The house, though lighted inside, didn’t issue a murmur.

  But when the door swung open after I rang the bell, Mary Wallis stood before us, white-faced, tear-stained, and so visibly near collapse that I instinctively reached forward and took her by the elbow. “Mary. Are you all right?”

  She looked at me in shock and violently pulled her arm away. “What do you want?”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing—I just heard a friend of mine had died. What do you want?” Her voice was hard, almost strident.

  “Was your friend Shawna Davis?” Sammie asked. Often not the most diplomatic of questioners, there were times when her bluntness was above reproach.

  Mary Wallis looked stunned, her hand gripping the door so tightly it began to shake.

  “She was last seen here, at your house, sometime last spring.”

  Mary worked her mouth to say something, but no words came out.

  I spread my hands in a gesture of peace. “Mary, can I fix you some coffee or tea at least? Or call someone to come visit?”

  More slowly this time, I reached out, took her elbow, and made a motion to escort her indoors. She showed no resistance, and we were able to cross the threshold and cut off the freezing air that had been rapidly filling the house. Mary began shivering only after the door was shut.

  I peeled off my overcoat and draped it over her shoulders.

  “Where’s your kitchen? Let me make you something hot to drink.”

  She gestured vaguely toward the right, and I steered her ahead of me down a short hallway to a modest kitchen facing the front of the house. I sat her in a chair at a small table in the room’s center, poured some hot water into a kettle I found on the stove, and lit a fire under it.

  “Where did you and Shawna meet?” I asked, sitting opposite her.

  Sammie leaned against a counter, watching Mary’s face as she spoke.

  Her words came out slowly, or maybe carefully, I thought.

  “At Mother Gert’s. I was on duty—volunteering—when she came by looking for a bed. I took an instant liking to her.”