Cover Story

by Brenda Buchanan

“Did you know Frank?”

  “You could say that.” Brow knit tight, he kept his eyes on the game. “Everybody around here knew him. He made sure of it.”

  “Sounds like you two had a run-in.”

  Harrison swigged his beer. “You know the kind of guy who’s always had people looking out for him? That was Frank O’Rourke. His big brothers kicked the ass of anyone who pestered him in school, his Daddy paid all his speeding tickets, his high school buddies took the rap when they were caught with pot. A real goddamn golden boy.”

  “In other words, he didn’t live in the real world.”

  “Right.” Harrison took his eyes off the TV screen and pivoted his wiry frame in my direction. “In his world, mistakes disappeared. Someone made sure of it. The rest of us pay for our mistakes over and over again, and Frank was the kind of guy who made sure of that.”

  He took a deep breath and started to say something more when someone tapped my right shoulder. I spun around and came face-to-face with Willow, who was wearing a lot of eye makeup and reeked of dope.

  “Is that you, Mr. Newspaper Man? You’re looking fine tonight.” She ran her fingers through my hair, as if to make sure it was real. “Pretty sportin’. Didn’t expect to find you at the Flat.”

  “You never know where I’ll turn up.” When I stood I noticed a bearded guy with a pierced eyebrow standing behind Willow, his left hand on her hip. She pivoted halfway around so he and I were face-to-face. I stuck out my hand. “Joe Gale.”

  Willow’s companion smiled a slow smile as he shook my hand. “Billy Pickax,” he said, or at least that’s what I thought he said. It was hard to make out his last name over the blare of the jukebox.

  “Come hang with us in a booth,” Willow said.

  Jackson Harrison was heading for the door, so I grabbed my beer and followed Willow and Mr. Pickax to the center booth of the three that hugged the back wall. We ordered a pitcher of Bud and settled in, smiling at each other over the jukebox’s din. After a while, the music grew less deafening somehow, because we were able to converse without shouting, or at least it seemed that way.

  It turned out that Billy’s older brother had been Danny Boothby’s best friend in high school. He described Danny as “a shitkicker.” When I asked what he meant by that he said Danny was a fun-loving guy, but he’d stand up for himself and those he cared about, too.

  “He’s a good guy, a regular guy,” he said. “He don’t take nothing that ain’t his, and he don’t take no shit from no one, but he’s never been one to look for trouble, neither.”

  The string of clichés brought to mind those locker-room interviews with professional ballplayers after a big victory. Willow interjected that she thought it was absurd that Danny killed Frank O’Rourke.

  “Someone killed him.” Billy Pickax raised the eyebrow with the earring. “He didn’t stick that knife in his own heart.”

  “If Danny killed him, he must’ve had a reason,” Willow said.

  I contributed my developing theory about Danny not having been the stabber. Summarizing the details of Day’s testimony, I told them about his implication that someone might have stabbed O’Rourke then left the scene before Day arrived to find a despondent Danny in the dooryard. They were intrigued by this possibility.

  “A hell of a lot of people didn’t like O’Rourke,” Willow said. “He was a well-known prick about town.”

  In my buzzed condition, I imagined that as the headline on my weekend sidebar: Victim A Reputed “Prick About Town.”

  We talked about the case and also about the coming storm (they both thought it would be a bitch), the bartender’s love life (Willow said despite being a married man, he was screwing both his next-door neighbor and her cousin), and the lousy pay scale for working in the woods, which is what Billy did for a living. When the pitcher was empty Billy held it up and cocked the unpierced eyebrow, asking without words if we should order another. I said sure and put a twenty on the table because it was my turn to pay, then excused myself to go to the men’s room.

  When I left the loo a muscle-bound man with a bad complexion and a faux mohawk was heading my way. I recognized him as the cigarette-flipping wiseass from the convenience store parking lot. As we passed in the narrow hallway, his brawny left shoulder slammed into me, knocking me backward a step.

  “Hey, man. Take it easy.”

  He leaned into me, his eyes black slits. The odor of dope mixed with cheap cologne was overpowering.

  “Didn’t mean to hurt ya.” The smirk on his face made me doubt it. “You a faggot?” His voice was thick.

  I put the palm of my hand against his muscled chest and pushed him back two steps.

  “Guy like you better watch himself in a tough joint like this. I don’t much like strangers, ’specially faggot strangers who try to push me around.”

  The guy was pissing me off, and it would have felt great to throw a punch into his ugly mug. But I’m not stupid. He was huge. Big neck. Massive shoulders. Tree-trunk legs. Despite the beer I’d sucked down over the course of the evening, I wasn’t drunk enough to take his bait. So I walked away, moving at an easy cadence.

  “Hey, Gale,” he called after me. “This is a private club, and you can get the hell out. And get the hell out of town while you’re at it.”

  I ignored him and slid back into the booth. A fresh mug was on the table in front of me. “Who is that guy?”

  “A jerk you don’t need to know,” Willow said.

  “He knows me, called me by name.”

  “This is a friggin’ small town,” she said. “Everybody in this bar knows who you are.”

  The stoned bodybuilder emerged from the men’s room and strutted to the front door.

  Willow watched me watch him. “He’s a loser,” she said. “But stay out of his way.”

  The near-confrontation killed my buzz, so after finishing my beer I pulled on my parka. “I’m heading out. Early call in court tomorrow.”

  The place had emptied out some, and the jukebox was between songs.

  “You’ve got to make sure the truth about Danny comes out.” Willow’s voice carried across the room. “Make sure he doesn’t get nailed for killing that asshole O’Rourke.”

  “Not up to me to make sure of anything.” I swallowed a belch. “I just get paid to write about what happens in the courtroom.”

  “But it’s your duty to make sure a good man doesn’t go to jail. And that Corrine doesn’t end up with no parents.”

  I shrugged, thinking there was no sense trying to explain to a drunk Willow the difference between a reporter and a person who could affect the outcome of things.

  I walked out to my Subaru, glad the inn was only three blocks away. I was halfway up the hill when blue lights flashed in my rearview mirror.

  It took the cop a minute to get out of the cruiser. I spent that time taking deep breaths and telling myself to stay calm. Jack Salisbury would be apoplectic if I got nailed for driving drunk while on an out-of-town assignment. Despite the cold, I put the window down about halfway, fished the registration out of the glove box, and tried to count how many beers I’d sucked down over the course of the evening. I heard the cruiser door slam and boots crunch on the frozen pavement, then a painfully bright flashlight was shined into my eyes. I tried to focus on a point beyond it, so I wouldn’t look like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

  “License and registration.” The cop barked the command while directing the light first into the passenger seat and then into the back seat of my car.

  I handed over the registration and said my wallet was in my hip pocket. He suggested I get out of the car before reaching for it, so I did, and found myself face to face with a paunchy guy in his late fifties, wearing the brown parka of the Washington County Sheriff’s Department.

  “You right-handed?”

>   “Yes, sir.”

  “Turn around with your back to me and use your right hand to take out your wallet.”

  I did as he directed, and turned back around, removed my license and handed it over. The deputy used his flashlight to study it, then looked back at my face.

  “Well, Mr. Gale, it smells to me like you’ve been drinking.” He spoke in a low voice.

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  The deputy sucked his teeth for a minute, then turned off his flashlight and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re the reporter from Portland.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Staying at the Easterly, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.” This is a friggin’ small town. Everybody knows who you are.

  Another few seconds of teeth sucking ensued. “I’m going to give you a break, Mr. Gale. I’m not going to ask you to walk a line or blow up one of my Breathalyzer balloons. But I’m going to make sure you leave your car right here where it is, and walk to the inn. Okay?”

  He was telling, not asking, so I nodded and thanked him. He handed back my license and registration, and waited while I locked up the car.

  “Can I offer you a bit of advice, Mr. Gale?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There are a lot of big ears in this community. Certain people are paying attention to where you’re going and who you’re talking to.” He paused and appeared to weigh his next words. “When you flap your lips, your words flow right back to them. Believe me, they’re keeping close tabs on you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “These people—who I’m not going to name—are, shall we say, powerful.”

  I shivered inside my parka.

  After a long thirty seconds he spoke. “If you were my boy, I’d tell you to watch yourself.”

  “Thank you.” I met his eyes. “I appreciate the advice.”

  “Get up the hill to bed now, before you freeze your balls off.” The deputy turned on his heel and walked back to the cruiser, its blue lights a whirling indictment of my stupidity.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thursday, January 8, 2015

  If the beer wasn’t making my head spin, the deputy’s caution would have done the trick. So the O’Rourkes were keeping an eye on my comings and goings? How the hell would the deputy know that? I lay on the bed, clothed except for my shoes, trying to calm down enough to think it through. But every time my mind began to put the logical building blocks together, a Technicolor image of the traffic stop popped back into my head. The accusatory blue lights, strobing off the snowbanks. The deputy looking into my face, caught in a moral dilemma about whether to bust me for drunk driving or tip me off. The acid in my belly when he dropped the bomb. When you flap your lips, your words flow right back to people who’re keeping close tabs on you.

  I groaned when I thought of my mouthiness in the bar, the beer talking about how Cohen sure was putting doubt in the jury’s mind about whether Danny was the one who did the stabbing, and maybe O’Rourke kind of had it coming anyway.

  Marcus Cohen’s doing a bang-up job letting them know O’Rourke wasn’t the choirboy Mansfield is claiming he was, I remembered saying at one point. Had my voice been loud enough to be heard over the jukebox? If so, who was near enough to hear? The guy with the busted plow? Whoever was sitting in the adjacent booth? And who exactly would they be telling about what I was saying?

  I’d had coffee with the state house reporter a week before leaving for Machias. She was full of Speaker O’Rourke stories, gathered in the course of years covering the legislature. If half of what she’d told me was true, it wouldn’t have been out of character for Eddie O’Rourke to hire someone to tail me. “He seems to know everything about everything and everybody,” she’d said. “It’s like he’s got feelers everywhere, gathering data day and night.”

  I thought about that for a long time. At ten till three I got up off the bed, stripped off my clothes and got under the covers. When sleep eventually stole into my room, daylight was close on its heels.

  * * *

  The morning weather report came on while I was stepping out of the shower. It was already snowing like hell and blowing a half gale in southern coastal Maine. Central Maine Power and Bangor Hydro were gearing up for outages. School and other cancellations were scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

  Pulling on a pair of corduroys and a flannel shirt, I rooted around in my duffel for a wool sweater. If I’d had my wits about me the previous night I would have grabbed my insulated boots out of the backseat before hiking up the hill. Faced with the prospect of lugging my bags to the car, which would amount to an announcement to the whole damned town that I’d been pulled over on my way back to the inn the previous night, I decided to run down and retrieve the Subaru before breakfast.

  I was on the landing fumbling with my parka’s zipper when Emma came bounding down the stairs as if she were a teenager let loose from a tedious class.

  “Good morning, sunshine.” She squinted at me. “Or maybe not. You look like you’re not awake yet, but your coat’s on, so I’m guessing you’ve already eaten.”

  “Unfortunately, I haven’t had my first cup of coffee. I’ve got to do a little errand first. If I’m not back before you’re done, go on ahead, and I’ll catch up with you at the courthouse.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Last night. Something weird happened. I’ll fill you in later.”

  We walked in step down the stairs.

  “I had an interesting evening, too. Let’s find a corner at the first break and compare notes, okay?”

  My car was sitting right where I left it, none the worse for the wear, and no parking ticket or seagull shit on the windshield, either. I snagged a parking spot near the inn’s front door and packed as though someone had a stopwatch on me. I took two precious minutes to check email and found discouraging news on two fronts: no message from scrapper64 and a depressing one from Leah.

  Joe—The reverse directory shows no listing for the Biddeford phone number. We sidestepped official bullshit and found 283-9387 is a pay phone in a shopping plaza laundromat. So the tip is deadendsville. Sorry.—Leah

  Downstairs I filled my mug with what I hoped was caffeinated coffee, told the woman Room 14 was empty and asked her to let the owner know I’d be back Sunday night.

  * * *

  Justice Herrick had come around to being realistic about the weather. It would have been foolish to do otherwise—every meteorologist in New England was saying Downeast Maine was in the bull’s-eye. She told the jury that court would adjourn at midday.

  The judge beckoned the lawyers to the bench. I took the opportunity to smile a “good morning” at the Peabody sisters and scan the courtroom, which was less crowded than on previous days. The O’Rourke brothers were sitting shoulder to shoulder in the third row on the other side, none looking my way. The big back door swung open, and Claude and Dolores LeClair walked in. With a firm hand on his wife’s back, Claude directed her to a bench on the far aisle, halfway back.

  Mansfield called chief state police investigator Lieutenant William Shaw to the stand. Six foot two and thin as a rail, Shaw had a stubble of gray hair and a face crevassed with deep lines. As he settled into the witness chair, Shaw removed his wire-rimmed glasses and polished them with a white handkerchief. While Mansfield established Shaw’s bona fides, I looked out the window and tried to guess what time the snow would begin to fall. But I was listening.

  Shaw was a State Police VIP. In twenty-seven years, the lieutenant had gone from patrol officer to detective to commander of the major crimes unit that covered the state’s northernmost counties. He told Mansfield he’d been on the case since the moment the murder was reported.

  “I was in Augusta in a meeting with the Commissioner of Public Safety wh
en my pager went off. I left for Washington County within a half hour.”

  “When did you reach the scene?” Mansfield asked.

  “One of the state police planes was right there at the Augusta airport, so I flew to Machias, and arrived about quarter past six. I was at the scene within two hours of the first call.”

  Shaw = the Big Shot’s big shot, I scrawled in the margin of my notebook. Had the victim not been the Speaker’s kid brother, I doubted Shaw would have spent ten minutes working on a Washington County murder case, never mind being delivered to the tiny Machias airstrip in the state’s Cessna.

  “Trooper Nick Day of the state police and several deputies from Washington County Sheriff’s Department had secured the scene,” Shaw said. “They were doing what they were trained to do—making sure Mr. Boothby and his daughter were unharmed, documenting what was in plain sight, then waiting for the techs and crime scene analysts to arrive and do their work.”

  “Other than police officers, Mr. Boothby and his daughter, who was present?”

  “No one. It was a secure scene.” Shaw leaned forward in his chair, and his voice took on the tone of a professor lecturing his students. “It is essential in the early stage of a murder investigation to keep the area where the killing occurred from becoming contaminated in any way. For that reason a trooper was stationed at the end of the driveway, next to the road, to prevent civilians from coming onto the property. And on the property itself, particular areas had been taped off to make sure they would not be corrupted.”

  It was all very CSI-ish. The jury was eating it up.

  “What was your role?” Mansfield asked.

  “I was coordinating the work of our technicians, analysts, investigative staff and their counterparts from the sheriff’s department. At a major crime scene, I evaluate the data that has been gathered and decide on an ongoing basis where to focus our personnel and our attention.”

  “Do you have a counterpart in the sheriff’s department?”

  “There is a supervising detective at the sheriff’s department, but when the crime is homicide, the state police are in charge.”