Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  “Is that Craig Kahn? Playing now at Brown?”

  She nodded, impressed. “You certainly know local football.”

  “I know they’re favored by eight against Cornell,” Billy said, a roundabout way of confessing his gambling habits. “Your brother is the best offensive tackle Brown University ever had—their whole offense runs behind him.” Bill looked her up and down, then chuckled. “How’d you end up with a brother who weighs three hundred pounds?”

  “Three thirty-five,” she said. “He used to steal my dinner.”

  Billy smiled, paused a moment. He was still curious about her father. “You said your pop froze to death?”

  “Like a Popsicle.”

  Billy groaned. Is this chick serious? “That’s sick,” he said. His disgust delighted her; he could see it in her eyes. Her delight infected him. Billy suddenly felt himself smiling. Her irreverence about death made her more alive than anybody he had met in a long time.

  “I’ve tried crying into a towel,” she explained; “it just made me feel like shit. The father I knew died years before that crazy bearded bum with a backpack. I mourned that loss long, long ago.”

  Long, long ago? What did that mean to someone so young? Five years? Billy had Tex-Mex leftovers in his refrigerator older than that.

  “Why are you here, Billy?” she asked.

  “A guy was found dead in this house about a year ago.”

  She turned toward Billy, brought her feet onto the sofa, and rested her chin on her knee. “In the attic,” she said.

  Billy leaned toward her. “You heard of him?”

  “I found him.”

  He recalled the description in the paper … a mutilated body. “Oh Jesus—I’m sorry.”

  But he wasn’t sorry. He could hardly have been more excited. Who knew what that body meant to the murder trial of Peter Shadd? Maybe nothing. Maybe there was a good reason that the jury had not been told about it. But why?

  Billy didn’t like the government to have secrets—even if they were intended for good. If the court thought the jury was too stupid to handle all the facts, how would anyone expect those dozen idiots to render a fair verdict? Billy had been an investigative reporter. Maybe his skills had eroded, and—more important—the fire in his chest had gone out, but the instincts were forever. As a reporter, he had never been very good at taking the information he was given without looking around for more.

  Mia stuffed half a stick of licorice in her mouth and then peered into the bag. “Three pieces left,” she said. “Two for you, one for me.” She reached the bag to Billy. He took two pieces. “Are you a private eye, Billy?”

  “I’m an obituary writer,” he confessed. “Not that I write them too often. I mostly just type them.”

  She slapped her thigh and laughed. “And you’re here in the middle of the night doing research, right? For a screenplay you’re writing about a murdered street bum whose ghost crosses the River Styx in a shopping cart looted from a Benny’s discount store.”

  “You’re so close,” Billy said.

  Would she understand the truth? Or would she report Billy to the court clerk?

  Naw, Billy decided. The boathouse was probably infested with rats, but Mia didn’t seem like one of them.

  “My name is Billy Povich,” he said. “I’m a juror.”

  She smiled at him, squinted a little in surprise—hadn’t thought of that one. “What’s your case, Mr. Billy Povich? What’s it got to do with this old shithole?”

  He told her.

  She listened without interrupting, then laughed and summed it up. “Are you trying to solve this case? To prove what?”

  “I have some questions that the trial isn’t answering.”

  She looked thoughtfully at him and then shook a finger. “I’m not sure if I’d want you on my jury, Billy Povich.”

  “Who was the dead guy you found here?”

  She shrugged, saying, “There are people you get to know well at the shelter because they have their stories all bunched up inside and they don’t need to be invited to spill them all over you. This guy was the other type.”

  “That would figure.”

  “He showed up at our place for the first time about, oh, maybe six months before he was killed. He’d be here a few weeks, then disappear for a while. That happened a few times. He looked about forty, but the street adds ten years, so I’d guess he was thirty. He didn’t have any identification, and he never gave his full name.

  “He said we could call him ‘J.R.,’ so that’s what we called him. I have a police, uh, acquaintance who runs names through the department database for me. He tried running those initials and a personal description against missing-person reports nationwide, but he never found anything.”

  “That’s a pretty close acquaintance, if he gives you access to internal computer records.”

  “As close as we both need,” she said, being cryptic and smiling over it.

  Billy wondered, Is she sleeping with a cop?

  Mia spun on the sofa and clunked her boots on the floor.

  Something scurried away under the trash.

  “J.R. wasn’t a junkie, not that I could tell,” she continued. “But he drank himself crazy most nights, and slept here. Spent many days at our shelter. I tried to interview him for a client work sheet—sometimes we can get them benefits they don’t know they qualify for. But he wouldn’t cooperate. Oh, he was as polite and happy to chat with me, but he never gave up much of himself. His accent was wrong, not quite Rhode Island, though he had a familiar-sounding voice, the kind that made me wonder if I’d run into him long ago and never remembered.”

  “Why did he come here?”

  She spread her hands. “He told me he came to see family,” she said. “Goddamn—are we out of licorice?”

  “Sadly so.”

  “You ate the last two pieces?”

  “You told me to,” Billy said. “J.R. said he was here for family?”

  “That might have been bullshit, but maybe not,” she said. “If he had come to start over and suddenly showed up with a suitcase on some second cousin’s doorstep, it’s easy to see how he could end up on the street. The week he got killed, he was in a good mood. First time I’d ever heard him talkative. He said he had come into good fortune and we might not be seeing him anymore—but that when the case of champagne arrived, we’d know it was from him.”

  “And then you found him here?”

  “Upstairs,” she said. “This place is one of my regular stops. There are about twenty places we know our clients regularly hang out. I try to persuade the reasonable ones they’d be better off in a bed. I’ll tell the delusional ones anything they want to hear—’If radio waves are scrambling your brain, we got a shelter with a lead-coated roof.’ ”

  “And that works?”

  “Just listening to them usually works,” she said. “I wouldn’t normally have gone all the way into the attic, except that the trapdoor was open and the folding ladder had been pulled down. J.R. was up there.” She bit her bottom lip.

  “Are you sure it was murder?”

  She looked away and lifted her eyebrows. “There aren’t many accidental beheadings.”

  An intense sadness pinched Billy’s windpipe. He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say.

  “I had to recognize him from his clothes and the shape of him. He had a black thumbnail—that was what clinched the identification. There was so much blood. I called an ambulance from my cell phone, and that saved the life of the other dude—the one in the basement?”

  “What other guy? You mean Peter Shadd?”

  She nodded. “I searched the rest of the building while I was waiting for the ambulance and found that skinny guy in the basement—the room that leads out to the water—facedown at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like an overdose. His lips were blue. His nervous system was shutting down. The EMTs couldn’t do anything for J.R., but they probably saved Peter Shadd.”

  Billy looked o
ut the window. “Now twelve of his peers have to vote on whether he was worth saving,” he said. “You’re probably more qualified to sit on this jury than any of us would be.”

  “None of you is his peer,” she said. “And neither am I. We could find a jury of his peers under an overpass I visited earlier tonight.”

  “At least those folks are smart enough to avoid jury duty,” he said.

  He still couldn’t understand why Peter hadn’t been charged with killing J.R.—unless there was no physical evidence. “You said there was a lot of blood upstairs. How much?”

  “Do you want to see?”

  The attic felt ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house.

  The stain on the plywood floor looked like somebody had spread a quart of dark paint with a mop.

  Billy had seen blood and bodies before as a journalist. But those bodies had been fresh, and the evidence of those crimes quickly swabbed away. This bloodstain was more than a year old. But then, in a decaying boathouse nobody seemed to care about, who would have cleaned it?

  Billy borrowed Mia’s flashlight and panned it around. The stain was roughly oval, about nine feet by fourteen. It went almost wall to wall across the width of the partially finished attic. The walls, formed by the pitched roof, angled up and met at the peak. Billy had to duck to walk around the splotch. The walls were unfinished and not insulated. Thousands of bent, rusted nails poked through the planks in straight rows, pounded there by roofers who had installed the tar paper and shingles.

  Somebody long ago had begun converting the attic into usable space. The eaves had been blocked off with short vertical walls, maybe three feet high, which created crawl spaces that ran the length of the room. Billy pointed the light down a hole into one of the crawl spaces. A mound of soup cans, soiled clothes, newspapers, and other trash had been piled up in the gap.

  Billy raised an eyebrow to Mia.

  “Yeah,” she confirmed, “people live in there.”

  She pointed to one end of the dark oval. “He was lying there. Faceup … well, I mean, he was on his back—put it that way.” She rolled her eyes at her own slip of the tongue. “The blood was still wet when I found him, and it stank, a heavy metallic smell.” Her nose wrinkled at the recollection. “There were a few footprints leading away… here.” She pointed again. Billy aimed the light. The footprints were faded and nearly gone. “I guess they’ve been trampled and worn off. They were barefoot prints. Just the front of the foot, like somebody had walked away on his tiptoes.”

  “Did you see, uh, the head?”

  “No.”

  “Someone stole his fucking head?”

  She shrugged, saying, “Once you’ve committed murder, who cares about larceny?”

  “And you said Peter was in the basement?”

  “Facedown, in the dark, at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “Was he bleeding?”

  She looked away a moment in thought. “He was bruised, as if he had fallen and whacked his forehead, but not bleeding,” she said.

  They started walking downstairs, with Billy holding the light. The stairs creaked like a rusty seesaw.

  “Are you sure he wasn’t bleeding? This must have happened fast for you.”

  “I spent an intense few minutes with him,” Mia said. “I had to check if he needed CPR. I remember unbuttoning his orange jumpsuit and putting my ear to his chest. His heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s. I would have noticed bleeding. There was no blood at all.”

  They returned to the front room, where they had entered through the broken window. A dry, scratchy drowsiness filled Billy’s eyes.

  “I can see why Peter Shadd wasn’t charged in connection to J.R.’s body,” Billy said. “No blood.”

  “Right—he didn’t have a drop of blood on him,” Mia said, her face brightening at the revelation. “So how could he have killed J.R., decapitated him, and chucked the head without staining his prison uniform?”

  “Whoever did that thing upstairs had to have been drenched in blood,” Billy agreed. He slouched on the sofa, sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “The cops have tests to pick up the slightest trace of blood on a person. Peter must have been clean.” He shrugged. “I’m more confused that I was before.”

  “How’s that?” she asked, vaulting over the arm of the sofa and landing with a whump. “You figured out why Peter Shadd wasn’t charged with killing J.R.—he’s not connected to it.”

  Billy had been a reporter too long to believe in coincidence. “If somebody finds you overdosing in the basement of a crack house, it’s possible you might not be connected to a headless body upstairs,” he said with a bitter little laugh. “Unless you just escaped from prison, and your cell mate is found shot to death in the river about ten minutes from here.”

  They sat in silence awhile. There seemed to be nothing more to say, either about J.R. or Peter Shadd’s trial. Billy worried that Mia might leave. He studied her profile in the dim light from the street. Their conversation had been so intimate; he couldn’t stand to let it end.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” he said.

  They whispered through the night.

  Over the next few hours, he told Mia about how his career had begun to unravel at the dog track, and how divorce had crushed whatever journalist had been left inside him.

  “I did not accept that she no longer loved me,” he confessed.

  “Who says you have to accept it?”

  “She shacked up with another guy.”

  “So maybe she loved him, too.”

  “That, I really don’t accept.”

  “Just because she couldn’t stand to be around you doesn’t mean she should join a convent,” Mia argued. “Don’t you think she could have loved more than one man?”

  Billy said nothing.

  “Tell me more,” she insisted.

  He told her about Maddox, about the crash that had killed Angie. He did not tell Mia about his dreams. She was, after all, still a stranger, and a crack house was not a confessional. But mostly he did not tell her because he did not want to scare her away.

  She told him about watching her father drift into paranoia and madness, of learning to love a stepfather, and about her job poking through basements for people dying of self-neglect. Billy wondered what part of her story she might have kept from him.

  She stretched on the sofa, rested her head on his lap, and closed her eyes. He could smell her hair, like lavender. Billy took her hand and lightly rubbed it, until he could not stay awake any longer and fell into a contented sleep.

  Billy woke alone on the sofa.

  Dawn had broken. He rose stiffly and shuffled through trash to the window. A breeze off the bay ruffled the sugar maples along the sidewalk. Sunlight slanted through their leaves and tousled with the shadows on the street.

  “Oh shit,” he muttered, checking his watch. If he didn’t hurry, he’d be late for court.

  Billy looked around for a note, a message—anything.

  There was no sign Mia had even been there. His gut tightened with disappointment.

  Poking his head out the window, he could hear the morning commute in the distance. He climbed from the boathouse and pounded heavy-legged down the porch, heading toward his van.

  A squadron of squawking geese soared overhead in a V formation. Billy shielded his eyes and watched them turn with military precision toward the bay.

  He could find Mia at the shelter, he reminded himself. He knew where she worked. He could walk to her office from his in ten minutes. Of course, she could reach Billy at the obituary desk nearly any night of the week.

  He climbed into the van, caught a glance of himself in the rearview mirror, and shrieked.

  “What the fuck!”

  He looked more closely and laughed out loud.

  Across Billy’s forehead was a telephone number, inked on his skin with a felt-tip pen.

  How considerate of her, Billy thought, to write the number backward so that I can read it in the m
irror.

  fourteen

  Martin handed Carol his leather oxfords, then padded in stocking feet across his office to his desk and collapsed in his chair. It had been another long day at trial. His arches ached. He rubbed them.

  “Is it smart for me to hide your leather shoes at my house?” Carol teased. “Somebody could get the wrong idea.”

  “You know how crazy my wife is about animal rights,” Martin replied. “I’d rather she think wrongly that I was putting my pecker in my assistant than think rightly that I was putting my feet inside a dead cow.” He gazed out the window, to the brick wall outside.

  She snickered, then encouraged him: “You made the best of your opening statement the other day.”

  Martin waved off the compliment. “So unprofessional, to attack the opposing lawyer,” he said. “Not something I could get away with again. Let’s see the art while it’s fresh. Please.”

  Carol opened a folder of eight-by-ten sketches of the jurors and began taping them to the wall. She arranged them in two rows of seven, in the order the jurors sat in the courtroom. With just a few strokes of charcoal and rough shading in colored pencil, the artist had accurately represented each juror, seven women and seven men.

  “Frankie does good work,” Martin said, looking over the drawings. “When he draws me for the newspaper, he always shaves off twenty pounds.”

  “Must save him a lot of ink.” She winked at Martin.

  Ignoring the dig, Martin nodded to the drawings and asked, “After two innings, what’s our score?”

  “Twelve to two, against us.”

  “Jesus!”

  “With our rotten luck, we’ll lose the two when they dismiss the alternates.”

  “I need six open minds to plant reasonable doubt,” Martin said, scanning over the faces on the wall. “Gimme the bad news first.”