by Gerry Boyle
“What was he doing down here?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s from here, right?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“A cop.”
“Where’d he hear it?” I asked.
“From you.”
“Busybody.”
“So is he from here?” Mendoza said, still tapping on the keyboard.
“He told me he lived there years ago. Maybe ten years ago. I’m not sure.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you don’t know why he came back?”
“Nope.”
“Not even hearsay? Rumor?”
“Nope.”
Mendoza paused. He thought I was lying. I was. That was tough.
“Okay, now, Mr. McMorrow. Let me ask you a couple of questions about yourself.”
“You can ask them. A couple.”
“You string for the Globe?”
“Sometimes.”
“Other places?”
“Magazines.”
“Where do you live?”
“Maine.”
“Where in Maine?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Why not?”
“I’d rather not say that, either.”
“I can find out through the phone number. The exchange.”
“I can’t stop you from doing that.”
“But you won’t tell me?”
“Nope.”
“So what’s the problem?” Mendoza said.
“No problem.”
“You worked for newspapers? I mean, full time.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Where?”
“All over the place.”
“Where most recently?”
“A weekly in western Maine. You never heard of it.”
“Before that?”
“Here and there.”
“Like where?”
I hesitated.
“New York Times.”
“No shit?”
“Nope,” I said.
“And then you went to a weekly?”
“Yup.”
“You got a drinking problem or something?”
“No more than most people.”
“So where’d you first meet Mullaney?”
“In Maine, when he was passing out pot petitions.”
“What’s your story about?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Why’d you come down here looking for him?”
“Because I couldn’t find him in Maine.”
“How’d you know he was in Valley?”
“I still don’t know he was in Valley.”
“What?”
“I just know his car was in Valley.”
“It didn’t get down here by itself,” Mendoza said.
“Nope.”
“And it was found with a man’s body in the backseat.”
“Was it a man?”
“I, umm, I thought it was a man.”
“Did they say that yet?”
“They didn’t say anything yet. They have to compare the teeth and all that.”
“So they don’t know?”
“I guess not.”
“I wouldn’t assume anything, if I were you,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because good reporters don’t.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not even a reporter, really.”
“You’re doing pretty good so far.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah.”
“What should I do next?”
“Stay with the coroner’s office. Check around and find out who Mullaney was down there. Police record. Family.”
“How do I do that?”
“Go to the courts. The cops. Call every Mullaney in the phone book. Find high school yearbooks from years he would have been in.”
“You think I should call his wife?”
“What do you think?”
“I guess I should. But I hate that.”
“What?”
“Calling dead people’s families.”
“But you don’t know he’s dead.”
“Who the hell else could it be?” Joe Mendoza asked.
I didn’t answer.
24
I beat Joe Mendoza to it.
“Hello,” Melanie Mullaney said. Her voice was distant, weak with defeat.
“It’s Jack.”
“Oh, hi.”
“They called you?”
“The police did. From down there.”
“So what happens now?”
She breathed slowly, almost a sigh but not quite.
“I don’t know. I guess I have to call a funeral home. I don’t know. What is it you do when somebody dies? I mean, I’ve never had to be the one to do all this.”
“But they haven’t identified the body, have they?”
“No. They asked me who Bobby’s dentist was. They were gonna call and get X-rays or whatever it is.”
“But they haven’t done that yet?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve got to get going with the arrangements, I guess.”
“But Melanie,” I said. “What if it isn’t him? What if he isn’t dead?”
“McMorrow, don’t do this to me,” she shrieked. “He’s dead. They killed him, he’s dead, he’s gone.”
She started to sob.
“I’m sorry, but what if—”
“What if nothing. He’s gone. His car. His rings. His size. I mean, I can’t sit here and torture myself. Bobby’s gone, goddamn it. Goddamn it all to hell.”
She cried. I waited.
“But Melanie, listen. Just listen. I was down there.”
“I know. And Coyote was looking for the body. I haven’t heard from him. They’ll probably find him next. They probably killed both of ’em. Why did we leave there? To get away from those people. It was getting bad back then, but now, jeez, they just kill people. They just killed . . . Bobby. I got to start to deal, you know? I mean, I’ve done this denial shit before. Makes it friggin’ worse, kidding yourself, like he’s coming back, it was a homeless guy, sure it was, and Bobby’s gonna come through the door any goddamn minute and—”
“Melanie. Coyote had the car.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I talked to a guy. This old guy. He kind of looked out for this hooker. The hooker who talked about Coyote looking for the body. This guy saw Coyote with the car.”
“What car?”
“Your car. The Subaru. It came to the house once. This guy’s an eagle eye, peeking out the windows and writing stuff down. He said the guy in the car looked like Coyote. The face. The hair.”
“So?”
“So if Coyote was driving around in the car, without Bobby, and now the car’s found with the . . .”
I hesitated.
“With the body, then maybe Bobby wasn’t in the car. Maybe it was Coyote. I don’t mean to say that would be good news, but it would be different news. Maybe it was somebody else.”
“No. No way. I’m not gonna do that to myself. I’m not. How can you do this to me? He’s dead. Dead, dead, dead. The car. His rings. McMorrow, don’t do this. You son of a bitch, how can you do this? You talk to some old guy and he comes up with some bullshit story about—goddamn you, McMorrow. Why can’t you just leave me the hell alone?”
And she hung up.
It was good work, if you could get it. Raising grieving widows’ hopes. Spinning hypothetical webs, little rungs that the red-eyed women could hitch themselves up, hand over hand, out of the depths of despair, toward the tiny window of light, following the direction of Jack McMorrow’s pointed finger. See it? See the light? All isn’t black. Bobby Mullaney might be on the other side of that window. Your husband, who police think probably was burned into a charred bundle of potato-chip flesh and crumbling bones, might be sitting out there. He might be just fine. Sipping a beer, smoking a join
t, moving to the reggae music, mahn, as alive as you and me.
I stood there at the counter. Closed my eyes and hung my head. Was I wrong? Was I giving Melanie Mullaney false hope? Was it cruel, what I had just done? Was I preying on this poor woman, exploiting her for a news story and a week’s pay, playing a sadistic game in which her hopes were stretched further and further until they were near the breaking point and she screamed?
No.
No, I wasn’t.
There was still reason to think the body might not be Bobby’s. There was no positive ID. There was a guy who might have seen somebody else with the car. There was the unknown quantity, Coyote. Where was he? Why hadn’t he called Melanie? Was he dead? Had he set Bobby up? Who the hell was he, anyway?
I turned to the refrigerator, took out a Ballantine. I opened it and walked to the back window. It was after three and the light was starting to fade, turning the sky a darker gray. The trees waggled their leaves scoldingly. With a twinge of guilt, I thought of Roxanne in the hospital, realizing I’d forgotten her for a few minutes.
Make one woman cry. Leave the other one, who loves you, alone and forgotten in a hospital room. And, oh yeah. Get picked up for soliciting a prostitute.
Nice guy, McMorrow, a voice in my head said. Yeah, I am, another voice said back.
Because I was right.
A guy disappears, turns up in a city seventy miles from home. He’s following up on a soured drug deal and one of the dealers says he was last seen in the company of some higher-level traffickers from one of the drug armpits of New England. The implication is that the traffickers from the armpit city weren’t happy. The guy’s sidekick turns up in the armpit looking for a body. Then the guy’s car turns up burned, and sure enough, there’s a body in it, albeit a trifle overdone.
But who is it?
A homeless person, crawled into the car for the night? One of the bad guys, who underestimated Bobby and got killed? Coyote, who asked too many questions? Some kid who stole the car? A police informant? A junkie who overdosed?
Or Bobby?
If Melanie wanted to think the worst, that was her problem. I could wait. In Portland.
I emptied my dirty and bloody clothes into a laundry bag and took my duffel up to the loft. I refilled it with jeans and shirts and boxers and came back down the stairs. Opening the refrigerator, I took out tomatoes, a cucumber, a cabbage, some cheese, and a plastic container of refried beans. I put the food in a paper grocery bag and took out the remaining four cans of ale and put them in, too.
I unplugged my computer and keyboard and printer and brought them out to the truck, one by one, and put them on the seat on the passenger’s side. Then I went to the drawer by the sink, reached under the dish towels, and took out a box of Winchester .30-30 shells. The shells went in the bag. The rifle I took from the closet.
That went in the gun rack.
It was the only gun rack in Roxanne’s parking lot. When I pulled in, there was a man getting into his car in the next space. The guy was wearing round gold-rimmed glasses and his car had a bicycle on the roof. I shut off the motor in the truck. He looked over at the truck and me and the rifle.
I smiled and gave him a little salute. His doors locked with a thunk.
I took my duffel and groceries and the rifle out of the truck and went inside. If I’d brought a gas mask, I could have held off the state police for a week.
It was almost six and the condo was quiet and dusky dark. I flicked on the hall lights and listened. It was quiet.
I shut the door behind me and put the duffel and the rifle by the foot of the stairs. I listened again, then took the bag of groceries to the kitchen and put the stuff in the refrigerator alongside Roxanne’s grapefruit and yogurt. The shells didn’t need to chill. I took them out of the bag and went back to the hallway and, sitting on the bottom stair, loaded the rifle.
I was home.
Leaving the rifle leaning next to the door, I went back out to the truck and brought in the computer and printer. I set those on the dining room table, then went to the living room and looked at the answering machine. The light was flashing furiously. I hit the button. The machine whirred and beeped.
The first message was somebody from Channel 13. The second was from Channel 8. The third was from the Portland Press Herald, and the fourth was the mother.
“Where are they? Masterson, you’re dead. I’ll find them and I’ll find you. You better stay in that hospital the rest of your friggin’ life, lady, ’cause you’re dead. I’ll kill you right there. I’ll be the night nurse. Think about that. ’Cause you’re dead, lady. Give me my kids. You can’t take my kids, you can’t, I’ll kill you, I’ll friggin’ kill you.”
Five calls from her. All in a row, all expounding on the same theme. Between threats, she took a swallow of something that probably wasn’t Pepsi. Her voice became more and more hysterical until, in the last call, she started to sob and then lapsed into a long wail.
A mother in drunken mourning.
I popped the tape and grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Portland police. I asked the dispatcher for somebody assigned to the assault on Roxanne Masterson, the Human Services social worker. He told me to hang on and I did for a long minute.
“Detective Briggs,” a man’s voice said.
I told him who I was. I told him what I had.
“I need that tape, Mr. McMorrow.”
“I’ll bring it to you.”
“I’m going home at six,” he said. “You can put it in an envelope with my name on it and leave it with the dispatcher. Tell him it’s evidence. I’ll tell him to expect you.”
“You’re going home?”
“Yessir. I’m going home. I’ve been here fourteen hours. I’ve got a wife and kid who forget what I look like.”
“Well, where’s the mother?”
“She was released on personal recognizance bail this morning at ten o’clock.”
“But these calls were made sometime this afternoon. What were the conditions of her bail?”
“No contact with victim.”
“So pull her back in. This is contact.”
“We’re already looking for her. The DHS area supervisor gave us the tape from earlier in the day.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“We can’t find her.”
“You can’t find her? She’s a stumbling-drunk crackhead junkie. How hard can she be to find?”
“Hard,” the detective said.
“Christ almighty, she’s no rocket scientist. Knock on some doors. Shake down some of her junkie friends. Put somebody up against a goddamn wall and tell ’em to produce her or you’ll put ’em away.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. He was waiting for me to finish.
“I know you’re upset, Mr. McMorrow.”
“Of course I’m upset. This loony’s threatening to kill somebody, and you’re waiting to pull her over with a taillight out, for God’s sake.”
“No, we’re not. There’s a detective looking for her as we speak.”
“I’ll find her,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. McMorrow.”
“Yeah, well—”
“Listen, Mr. McMorrow. I know how you feel. If it was my wife, I’d feel the same way. But let me tell you something: The best thing you can do for her is to present her with a calm and reassuring demeanor and leave the police work to us.”
“They teach you that at the police academy?”
“Yessir.”
“Well—”
“They teach us that because it’s right,” the detective said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose it is.”
So I went out to the truck with the rifle held close to my left leg. I slid it into the slot in the back of the truck seat and drove downtown to the Portland police station. While I waited at the window, two officers brought in a drunk driver. He swayed between them and they helped him through a door with benign detachment. The d
ispatcher finally looked at me and I explained who I was and what I had. I slid it through the dish at the bottom of the window and he put it in an envelope and wrote “Att: Det. Briggs” in black marker. Then he went to the wall and opened a locked metal cabinet and put the tape in.
I watched it disappear and left.
There was a different officer on duty at Roxanne’s door. She was young and pink-cheeked and looked like she was dressed as a cop for the high-school Halloween dance. When I approached she stood and faced me and looked older. I told her who I was and she asked for ID. I supplied it and then she told me to stand against the far wall and spread my legs. She ran a metal-detector wand over me and it clicked like a Geiger counter on my keys. I took them out and she waved the magic wand again and then said okay and told me to wait. Then she went into the room and I stood there like a suitor.
She slowly opened the door. “This him?” she asked Roxanne.
“Yeah,” Roxanne said, from the bed. “That’s him.”
“You can go in, sir,” the officer said.
“Thanks,” I said. “And I mean that.”
She nodded.
I went in and pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. Roxanne looked up at me and smiled. Around the room, there were flowers on every available flat surface.
“How’s things in the boonies?” Roxanne asked.
“Fine. How’s things in the big city?”
“Fine. They all came from the office. You see the flowers? I feel like I’m at my own funeral. Lying in state.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Oh, don’t be so bossy.”
“I’m not. I just don’t like you to talk like that.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
She looked up at me, big dark eyes against white sheets.
“How are your druggie buddies?”
I thought of the detective’s textbook advice.
“They’re fine, I guess. Valley was a different world, though. Small and cramped and sort of hopeless. Like people living among ruins. How are you feeling?”
“The same. My leg aches but they keep me supplied with narcotics.”
“Drugs, drugs everywhere . . .”
“The universal desire to be opiated,” Roxanne said. “Overwhelms even maternal instincts.”
“You having some of those?”