The Marble Kite

by David Daniel

  “Not while I was here.”

  I pressed redial on his phone, and it rang through. A machine answered, and a voice that I knew from only a brief encounter identified the line as the courthouse office of Carly Ouellette. I hung up.

  Courtney turned off the lights and locked up, and we went back down the corridor to my office. I put on my desk lamp. She took the client chair, and I sat at my desk. I brought out the bottle of Wild Turkey and held it up inquiringly. “I shouldn’t,” she said. “But maybe it’ll settle the coffee. With a little water, please.”

  I poured two, adding water from a carafe. I drank mine off. She took hers in a more refined fashion, but she didn’t grimace.

  “Did you learn anything just now?” she asked.

  “From the bourbon?”

  She smiled. “From your phone call.”

  I scootched my chair in closer to the desk. “Fred apparently called Judge Travani’s office assistant.”

  “That Ouellette person?”

  “Uh-huh—who also happens to be the person who witnessed Flora Nuñez’s signature on her request for a restraining order. And whenever I’ve tried to talk to her, she runs away. Apparently she’s a one-woman flying wedge around the judge. All of which may mean nothing at all.”

  Courtney drew a pad from her purse and clicked her pen. “On the other hand?”

  “I don’t think you can bill Fred for any of this,” I said.

  “I haven’t felt this wired since my last No-Doz binge, cramming for finals. Talk.”

  “Okay, question number one. If Pepper isn’t guilty, why doesn’t he squawk?”

  “An innocent person usually protests his innocence loudly,” she agreed.

  “That’s the puzzler, isn’t it? But there might be an explanation.”

  I reminded her of Pepper’s childhood as an orphan and foster child, always looking for a family. I told her about the Asbury Park pennant.

  “And now, with the carnival, it’s like he’s been on a trial basis again,” Courtney said, a little breathlessly, connecting dots that I thought only I saw. “He didn’t want to screw up. So now he doesn’t know what to do.” She leaned closer, her smooth brow crinkling, and I had an image of her as she must’ve been in school, sitting in the front row, interested and eager and as smart as they come. “He’s learned not to speak up because it’s always tended to go bad for him. Right from childhood.”

  “It adds up. Behavioral patterns run deep. We keep making the same mistakes, ’round and around. Sometimes therapy, or a life-changing event, can help us see, but it’s tough. And it isn’t something a defense attorney could take to court with much hope of selling it.”

  “I know Mr. Meecham was struggling with that.” Courtney’s blue eyes clouded. “Do … do you think Troy Pepper killed that Flora Nuñez?”

  I hesitated, then said, “Do you want to go further with this?”

  Her turn for hesitation; then, “Yes.”

  “Hold on to that question for a bit. We’ll get there.” I gestured with the bottle. She shook her head. I poured mine again.

  “Do you drink a lot when you’re working on a case?”

  “What’s a lot?” I didn’t go into my woes. “All right—your question. I’ve grappled with that day and night since Monday morning, and I finally have my answer. I haven’t seen anything that proves it one way or the other, so it gets down to what I understand about people. That past experiences can help us predict what we might do. Pepper is an extremely sensitive person—a loner who nevertheless is looking for connection.”

  “But even a sensitive person can do something really bad,” Courtney said.

  “I know—and therein lies the key. He’s taciturn to a fault. He has a hard time even going out with his fellow workers for a beer. But if he’d done something like what he’s accused of, he’d have felt a strong need to talk about it, because it would bother him so much. A psychopath or a hardened criminal can deal—for different reasons—but they won’t crack. He would. So he’d have talked with somebody. Fred, Pop Sonders, the cops. Even me. But he hasn’t. So that’s your answer. That’s why I don’t believe he did it.”

  “But rather than protest that he’s innocent,” Courtney said, “he went even deeper inside … and he’s trapped there.”

  “I think so. But try to prove it. It’s a tall order.”

  “Was Fred right to drop this one?”

  I was slow to answer. “I’m not judging Fred. I’m sure he’s got reasons, good ones. But I don’t.”

  “You’re staying on, then.”

  Through the window, riding above the illuminated sign for the Sun building across the square, was the moon, small now and bleached white as a bone. “For now,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “And for now we’re done,” I said. “You, girl, did good. Very good. But you need to be on your merry way and get some rest.”

  “I think I’ll sleep fine.” She capped her pen and put her notes away. She reached for the phone. “I’ll call for a cab.”

  “I’m going that way. Let me just make one more call.”

  Her apartment was in the stretch of artists’ lofts on the lower end of Middle Street, in the block beyond Palmer. As I double-parked in front of the building that she indicated, a woman came to a tall third-floor window and looked down. Beyond the glass, she appeared to be some years older than Courtney, dark hair to her shoulders and wearing a green robe. She saw Courtney and me get out of the car and waved vaguely in our direction, probably full of questions, and probably relieved. I escorted Courtney inside the locking outer door and said good night. As I turned to go out, she said, “You ought to go home and get some sleep.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right. So what will you do?”

  I gave it a quick smile.

  “Ask a stupid question.” She chewed her lip. “When I did my honors thesis on the Bread and Roses labor movement, I realized that a lot of people, right here in this city, women and men, did a lot of brave things … stood up for things.”

  “Don’t be too quick to put me in their league. I just know myself, Courtney. If I roll over once, it’s easier the next time.”

  “Suppose there isn’t a next time? Maybe you need to weigh that in, too.”

  “There’s always a next time. And knowing what you did—or didn’t do—it sticks with you, and you feel dirty. I’m dirty enough as it is.” She was studying me intently. I wasn’t sure what her expression meant, and I wasn’t going to try to find out. If she was looking for a mentor or a philosophy course, she’d do better back at Mount Holyoke. I gave her a gentle push toward the elevator. Then I drove off, my tires buzzing on the cobblestones, and headed toward where the late-night action was.

  37

  My last phone call had been as much a shot in the dark as poking redial on Fred Meecham’s phone earlier. I’d copied the number off of the yellow legal pad on his library table. Twice and I’d probably have called it coincidence, but three made me wonder. The first mention of the nightclub had been on the book of matches on Flora Nuñez’s little hallway shrine, and in the Polaroid I’d taken from her bureau drawer. At her funeral, her friend Lucy Colón had revealed that she and Flora and some others used to go there of a late evening for drinks. And now the number on the yellow pad had been answered against a background of voices by a woman saying, “Viva!” I’d listened long enough for her to repeat it and then hung up. Maybe it was still just coincidence, but I wanted to know.

  Viva! had become a cause célèbre several years back when some of the citizenry, who had been after the club owners for years, trying to pull their license, citing public nuisance and affront to public morality, had written enough letters to editors that it became news around New England. But the owners held firm. Between payoffs and the Constitution, it’s easy enough to do.

  The area by the bar was packed deep with patrons so I had to worm through and then wait while the several bartenders set up drinks for the waitresses who jockeyed
them out to tables. On the spotlighted stage, a slender Asian pole dancer was beginning her routine. When one of the barmen came my way, I asked him over the noise if Danielle Frampton was working tonight. He asked me why I wanted to know, and I said I wanted to see her. He sounded Greek or Albanian; he took me literally, glanced at a clock, nodded, and held up five fingers. If it had been more, I’d have tried to make myself clearer, but five minutes I could wait. In a shadowy corner I found a table the size of a pie plate. A fresh-faced young waitress wearing a black vest over a white blouse, black miniskirt, and fishnet stockings appeared, and over the noise I told her a Heineken. In a pocket of her apron was a microcassette recorder. When I asked about it, she tapped it with a finger. “The pad is for orders, this I use for ideas.”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “Stuff that occurs to me. Bits of conversation, characters I meet. Images. A Silly Putty face. That came to me the other night. See the assistant manager over there? By the office door? A Silly Putty face.”

  “Bingo.”

  She looked pleased. “Think so?”

  “Nailed it. Writing your memoirs?”

  “Screenplay. My mother thinks I’m nuts, a parochial school education and I’m walking around dressed like this. I quit Starbucks and came here because I wanted atmosphere.” She shook her head. “I’ve got to move on.”

  “Don’t let me keep you.”

  “No, I mean L.A. maybe, or Vancouver. It’s the same old same old here. Nothing exciting ever goes down. I mean you’re probably here tonight because you’re bored, right? Tired of four walls.”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “I’ll be twenty-one next month. It’s like I’m in an Indigo Girls song. My options are running out.”

  “We’re all being drawn down into the quicksand of time,” I said.

  “So true. Hey—is it okay if I use that?”

  “Sure, if you want cliches.”

  “That’s mostly what Hollywood stories are anymore. If you can retool them in just the right way, though, you’ve got a winner. Did you see American Beauty? You didn’t miss much. It’s nothing but clichés, with a quarter-turn twist. It won Oscars.” She murmured the moldy chestnut about quicksand into her tape recorder. Then, to me, “What did you want to drink again?”

  A few minutes later, another woman slid into the other chair. “Hello, Detective.”

  It took me a second to recognize Danielle Frampton. She was wearing a thin robe, her platinum wig picking up faint highlights, despite the dimness. At my questioning look, she nodded toward the barman, who was watching us with potential menace in his dark eyes. She gave him a wave, and he returned his attention to making drinks. “So … long time, Alex,” she said over the ambient noise. “Are you slumming?”

  “Business trip.”

  She pouted. “You didn’t come to see me?”

  “You’re the first one I asked for. Drink?”

  “Can’t, I’m on next.”

  We did a quick catch-up, and I asked about her son, who stayed with her mom nights Danielle worked. The blond wig and the stage makeup aged her a bit past her twenty-five or so, but there was something slightly different, and I wondered if she’d had cosmetic surgery. The Asian dancer had finished up to whistles and scattered applause, and a tall redheaded dancer with meaty thighs took the stage. “So what’s the business?” Danielle asked.

  “Information. I’m interested in someone who used to come in here.”

  “His name?”

  “Hers. Flora Nuñez.”

  “I’ve never heard … . Wait—the one in the paper? Killed at the carnival?” Her expression looked troubled, and slightly evasive. “What’s that got to do with here?”

  “Maybe nothing. Is there someplace where we don’t need megaphones?”

  “If you can wait ten more minutes or so, I’ve got a break.” I gave the “OK” sign, and she tapped my arm and drifted away, dematerializing into the crowd. I was there, I might as well watch the show. I turned toward the strobe-lighted stage and nursed my beer.

  Danielle was somewhere between acquaintance and friend. She’d evidently had her troubles with narcotics some years back but, as far as I knew, had gotten beyond them. She was a single mother, devoted to raising her young son. A year or so ago, a man had taken to turning up at the club every night and pestering her to go out with him. Then the phone calls began, and on a referral she asked me for advice—though she didn’t want rough stuff, she insisted. I checked the guy out and learned he was a basically harmless sad sack who worked in a muffler repair shop and lived with his widowed mother and spent his spare time hanging around Comic Book Heaven. Maybe he’d confused Danielle with one of the tawny, tights-clad sexpots who passed for superheroines in the comic books and had fixated on her, I don’t know. Getting him loose was a relatively easy job: I turned the game on him. I was reasonable with him and said, “You wouldn’t want your mother to know where you go nights, would you?” That was all it took. As far as I knew, he was back in Metropolis. As for Danielle, I admired her spunk, her desire to be a good person.

  When the redhead finally got down to her gold hoop earrings and belly button lint, the lights winked out to wolf whistles and lusty cheers. A steadier light bathed the stage, and Danielle Frampton came on with barely a pause, her platinum wig sparkling like spun sugar. She didn’t need the distractions of strobe lights or a pole. She was actually a very good dancer; she had a lithe body—no need for cosmetic surgery there—and got away with a little more suggestion and less flesh. Still, by the time the set ended, there wasn’t much I needed to imagine. I paid my tab, with a few extra bucks for the budding screenwriter. I waited by the door and soon saw Danielle coming my way, dressed in a faux leopard-fur coat and white stretch pants. We went outside and stood in the glow of the marquee lights.

  I handed her the snapshot that I had found in Flora Nuñez’s apartment. She looked at it and nodded. “I remember that. It was taken in the spring.” She pointed out the other three women sitting with her around the table. “There’s like a crew of us that got to know each other.”

  “And the guys?”

  “They’re off-duty cops.”

  “City cops?”

  She didn’t miss my surprise. “I think so. They come in sometimes on their nights off. They’re okay.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  “First names.”

  “How about this one?” I indicated the guy lifting his glass.

  “Bob, maybe. Or Paul?”

  “How about Paul Duross?”

  “That sounds right. I haven’t seen him in a while. Or any of them, actually.”

  I wanted time to think, to try to make sense of the details that were swarming like wet snow, but Danielle was restless to get back inside. She had begun to shiver in the cooling night. “What about Flora Nuñez? Did she come here often?”

  “Only sometimes. I got to know her and some others when we took night classes. But this is the only other place I saw them. We weren’t tight or anything.”

  “Did she ever mention someone named Troy Pepper?”

  “The guy who killed her? No, I don’t remember her ever mentioning him. The newspaper is the only place I ever heard of him. Why? What’s this about? Are you working on that case?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I am slumming.” I thanked her and touched her cheek. “Wrap up warm when you go home.”

  38

  The wind gusted fitfully, as though uncertain of what it might become if it put its mind to it. Maybe it had heard about its big cousin Hurricane Gus and was getting ideas; but except for some scattered clouds, the sky was clear. Above the silhouetted buildings, the moon was a smoky cat’s-eye.

  Short of waking up people with phone calls, there wasn’t much I could do to get answers. It was that time of night when the city’s aching heart could rest for a little while, and I knew that I should rest, too. Courtney had been right. The thought train had been gathering speed, building momen
tum, rising toward some sharp blind drop-off, but now I discovered that some time in the past hour my energy had begun to run down. Try as I might, I couldn’t coax out a single useful thought. If I didn’t get some sleep soon, I was going to start hearing the streetlights talking to me. I remembered that I still had groceries in my trunk, too. Yet I didn’t want to go home to cardboard boxes, my plastic-sheeted window, and the same nonanswers I had now.

  A twenty-four-hour diner on Dutton drew me. I strolled past the high swivel chairs at the chrome counter to a booth in the back and slid in on ruby-colored Naugahyde, already stirred by the aromas of food.

  “Hi, hon,” the waitress greeted me, and though I knew I was one of a thousand, it still felt personal somehow. She had STEL stitched in pink above the breast of her white blouse. “Coffee?”

  I dug a folded copy of the Sun from the corner of the booth and flopped it open and let my eye stray down the front page. There was an archive story on a demonstration from thirty-odd years ago, when university students had staged a peace march through downtown. Arriving in front of city hall, carrying Viet Cong flags and chanting “Ho … Ho … Ho Chi Minh,” they had been met by construction workers. It was a working-class Democrat city, but when that old chestnut “patriotism” was in the fire, everything took two steps to the right. The beleaguered police chief had to call in the National Guard to keep hard hats from beating up the kids and torching their flags. I put the paper down. Stel sidled over on tired feet with my coffee and her pad. I ordered corn chowder. It came in a thick white mug, and as I was about to dip my spoon, I noticed there was a faint lipstick ring on the rim that the dishwasher had missed. I was about to complain, but I paused, wondering if I should keep quiet, if it might be the closest I got to a woman’s lips that night. The point was moot. One spoonful told me the chowder was a lot better as an idea than a reality. I pushed it aside. In the lull, Stel came over and sat on the edge of the bench across the table from me. She unsnapped a little cloth cigarette case and took one out. She looked at me. “Mind?”