The Thanksgiving Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  I smiled. “Well, I’ll speak yours.”

  Suddenly the curtain in the window of the door was pulled aside. “What the hell do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you. I’m told you’re a forensic sculptor.”

  “Get outa here.” The curtain closed and I heard him walk away.

  “I need your services, Sergeant,” I said.

  “Leave me alone. You’re bothering me.”

  “It’s cold out here. Could I just come in and warm up?”

  “No!”

  I hadn’t been exaggerating. I was freezing. If he didn’t let me inside pretty soon, I was going to have to get in the car and warm myself up or drive somewhere warm. “I have something very interesting for you, Sergeant DiMartino. Would you just give me ten minutes to tell you about it?”

  In answer I saw the twin barrels of a shotgun on the other side of the window.

  —

  I backed away off to the side. Maybe he really was crazy and I had made a terrible mistake coming here. I thought he was an embittered man living alone; I hadn’t imagined he was crazy enough to shoot an unarmed stranger. It occurred to me that my car might well be within range of his gun, and if he shot out a couple of my tires, I would have one terrible hike in the cold back to the orchard.

  I leaned against the front of the house so he could not see me without opening the door. Somehow I thought he just wanted to scare me away, not come out in the cold and do me harm. I also didn’t think he really wanted to shoot through his window on a day as cold as this. Since I had come in a car, he would know I was still here as long as the car was parked in front of his windows. I thought about my next move and came up with nothing. If I drove to the road and walked back to the house, I would surprise him, but what good would that do? It was unlikely he had a phone, so going somewhere and calling was out of the question. He could wear me down much easier than the reverse. I knew he had heat inside because I had seen smoke from somewhere as I approached, and as I stood there I smelled some woodsmoke as the wind shifted. Ergo he could hold out forever while I froze to death.

  I was really cold now and I was torn between waiting for him to change his mind because of my persistence and attending to my needs. Frostbite wasn’t going to improve my life, and my fingers and toes were already complaining. I inched back to the door. The curtain was in place and there was no sign of the shotgun. He had put it aside and was ignoring me.

  “Sergeant DiMartino,” I called.

  “Get offa my property.”

  “I’m looking for a woman who’s disappeared. I need someone to make a sculpture for me and I’ve been told you’re the best.”

  “I’m retired. Leave me alone.”

  “I’m prepared to pay you well for your services.”

  There was silence. I had been prepared all along to pay him, but I had hoped he would agree to talk to me before the question of money came up. Having worked so many years for a stipend that never exceeded a hundred dollars a month, I sometimes have difficulty judging value. But this man might genuinely need money. I didn’t know the particulars of his problems with the police department, and I had no idea whether he was living on an adequate pension. Judging from his digs, he might not be.

  I waited in the silent cold, hoping he would change his mind. I gave him ten frigid minutes, but nothing happened. “Sergeant?” I called. “Can we talk about it?”

  “Come back tomorrow. I’m busy today.”

  “Will you do it then? Will you talk to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Was it the money or was it the challenge? It was already too late for me to drive back to Oakwood. I hadn’t seen the sun for hours because of the overcast sky, but now it was getting darker and I didn’t want to drive unfamiliar snowy roads at night. It looked as though I was going to have to find a motel and make a decision tomorrow about what else to do.

  Suddenly he called something, but I missed it. “What did you say?” I called back. I really hated this shouting match.

  “How much you paying?”

  “We have to talk about it.”

  “I’m not letting you in till I’m sure I want to.”

  “Tell me what you charge.”

  “Tell me what you’re paying.”

  A standoff where I’m out in the cold and he’s inside where it’s warm is not my idea of equal opportunity. I thought quickly about how much of Sandy’s money I had left. “Two hundred,” I called.

  “Forget it.”

  So we were going to have to bargain. I am not good at this, I thought miserably. What if he wanted thousands? I couldn’t commit Sandy to a fortune. “Two fifty,” I responded.

  There was silence. I waited, wondering if I would ever feel my toes again. “Three hundred,” I said, “and that’s my last offer. I’m freezing out here and I have to get somewhere warm.”

  Silence again. What am I doing here? I asked myself. This is a man who wouldn’t even let an old friend in, someone who cared enough about him to make the trip from New York. I walked over to the car and got in. From there I could see the whole front of the house, but all the windows were curtained and I couldn’t see inside. If he had some special viewing place, I couldn’t detect it. I put the key in the ignition and started the motor. The car was facing the wrong way and I would have to swing around in a U to get back on the narrow path to the road. DiMartino didn’t have that problem. I could see where his tire tracks were; he backed up and turned toward the road easily.

  I started forward, making a wide swing to my left, away from the house, pushing through snow that was fairly high. But it was too much for the car, which ground to a stop as I felt the beginnings of panic. I didn’t want to have to leave my car here as I begged for help from the orchard a mile down the road, where the farmer, if he had any sense at all, would have left for a warmer climate weeks ago.

  I backed up and tried again with no luck. I turned the motor off and got out. Thanks to Jack, I kept a small snow shovel in the trunk and a container of sand. The sand wasn’t necessary at this point, but the shovel might do the trick. I started working at it, but it was tough going and I stood back to survey the terrain and catch my breath. That’s when it occurred to me I was doing everything backward. I got in the car and backed up as nearly as I could in my own tracks till I reached the ruts DiMartino had made as he backed out of the carport. Slowly I moved the car till it nearly touched the back of his. Then I went forward in his path into the carport.

  I paused to let the system rest. It had been both physically and spiritually taxing. As I recovered, I heard something and I turned around. DiMartino was standing outside his door, waving to me. I inched the car forward to make sure I could continue and got out.

  “Come here,” he called. “What you doin’ that for?”

  “You told me to get off your property. I was getting off.”

  “Come inside before you freeze to death.”

  Thanks, I thought. I’m already three-quarters there.

  The house was one large room, more like a studio apartment in New York than a place to live in the country. And it was clearly an artist’s studio. Although there was a bed off to one side and what looked like a kitchen against the back wall, the rest of the space was covered with sculpture. I didn’t know how the man got from one piece to another, so close were they to each other. And centered in the large room was a stove with a chimney rising through the roof.

  It was actually hot inside. I waited a minute, then unbuttoned my coat with stiff fingers, pulled off my gloves, and finally took the coat off. He didn’t offer to take it, so I made my way to the bed and left it there.

  “Who are you?” DiMartino said.

  “Chris Bennett. My husband is a detective sergeant at the Sixty-fifth.”

  “The Six-five. I know the Six-five. What’s his name?”

  “Jack Brooks.”

  “Brooks. I remember him. He’s OK.”

  I thought he was a little better than that, but this wa
sn’t the time to promote the man I loved. “He said you were the best.”

  “A lot of good it did me.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Yeah.”

  That seemed the end of the conversation. DiMartino reached for an open bottle of liquor and poured some into a water glass, looking questioningly at me as he did so. When I shook my head, he drank some.

  “I drink a little,” he said.

  It didn’t come as a surprise. He settled back in his chair. I found another one next to his bed and dragged it to the center of the room. DiMartino looked like a man who had given up all those little things we take pains to do to show ourselves we are civilized human beings. His clothes were less than clean and he wore them sloppily. His hair, which was receding, was too long and choppily cut, as though he took a chunk from here and a chunk from there when it suited him or when he got tired of looking at it in the mirror. He had a gut, which must have made it hard to chop wood, and that seemed to be the fuel of choice in his stove.

  “You know what they did to me?”

  “Jack said you got a raw deal.”

  “I was always a little outspoken, said what I thought when I thought it. I had a little disagreement with my lieutenant about some evidence, and later on I got cornered by a reporter. So I told him what I thought, which wasn’t what everybody else thought, and the dummy quoted me and printed my name and it got back to the guy who runs the lab.”

  “You mean they fired you for expressing an opinion?” I could feel my ire rise.

  “Nobody fired me. They just piled up a lot of junk against me.” He had started to speak more carefully, his diction more correct, as though he might be a man not afraid to show the effects of education. It was hard for me to believe it was this same man who had shouted “Get outa here” only an hour ago. “Then one day I took a piece of evidence from the property room, checked it out with the clerk, and forgot to get it back in time. I put it in my locker overnight and the next morning they said I’d stolen it.”

  “How terrible.”

  “Right. How terrible. Something people do all the time, only that time they wanted me, so it became a violation of department rules and procedures. I had a great choice, sit in a radio car in Brooklyn for two years or retire.”

  “It really was a raw deal.”

  “So here I am. My wife left me and I’m living the life of Riley in Broome County. Sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “So you want me to help you find someone.”

  “She disappeared at the Thanksgiving Day parade the year before last. The police haven’t found her and a private detective hasn’t found her. I’m looking as a favor to her family.”

  “You have pictures?”

  “Out in the car.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  20

  It was dark when I left. The transformation that had taken over DiMartino had been wonderful to watch. As his speech had changed, so did his demeanor. Before my eyes he went from the sloppy, angry hermit to the consummate professional. He looked at the pictures with a magnifying glass he found in a desk almost hidden behind sculptures. He looked at the dentist’s report and the hair swatches I had gotten from the hairdresser. He listened to everything I had to say and took notes.

  “Probably made herself over,” he grumbled at one point. Then he went back to the pictures.

  Finally he asked if I would leave everything with him overnight and we would talk in the morning.

  “I’ll bring breakfast,” I said. “What time do you open for business?”

  He gave me the first hesitant smile of my visit. “Eight o’clock for breakfast. Work as soon as we’re finished eating. Bring an extra coffee.”

  I said I would and I drove into town and got myself a room for the night.

  —

  I was back at the stroke of eight. He had shoveled in front of the carport so there was room for me to park. As I reached the door, he opened it.

  “Come on in. I’ve cleared a place where we can sit.”

  The place was a table in the kitchen area. Yesterday it had been buried under what looked to me like debris, but one man’s art is another’s debris, as most of us have learned. We sat and ate a hearty breakfast with eggs and sausage and muffins, juice and coffee.

  “Better when someone else cooks it,” he said.

  “Jack sends his regards. He told me you were always nice to women.”

  “Most cops are.”

  I thought that was rather gallant, considering. “I think we have some business to conduct before we go on.” I had talked to Sandy last night, and he was willing to spend more than I had imagined on this project.

  “We’ll talk business later. I was up most of the night working. Come over here.”

  I had wanted to clean up the table first, but he had no time for that. He led me to a cloth-covered object set about shoulder height and pulled the sheet off. A white, bald-headed Natalie looked at me.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  “It needs the right wig and I don’t have one. Do you have a scarf?”

  I got the long wool scarf that I wrapped around my neck in cold weather. He put it over Natalie’s head and crossed it along the front of her neck.

  “It’s fantastic,” I said.

  “It needs some color, but I’ll take care of that later. I use white clay and I don’t fire it. If you’re going to fire it, you have to cut it open around here—” he pointed to the place where the eyebrows would be “—and scoop out the inside so it’ll dry, which takes a few weeks, and I figure you want this yesterday. You’re using this for photos, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “And I have her cosmetics. Her husband gave them to me.” I took a small plastic bag out of my shoulder bag and gave it to him. Her lipsticks were in there, her foundation, her powder.

  “This is good, gives me an idea of her color preferences.” He took the foundation and smeared it on the white clay face and it sprang to life. I half expected to see the lips move, to hear Natalie’s voice.

  “It must be the Pinocchio syndrome,” I said. “I thought I saw her move.”

  This time I got a real smile. “I live with these guys. They’re pretty quiet.”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “From here I take her back. You said you couldn’t find anything about her before five years ago. I think she made herself over, straightened her teeth, capped the bad ones, changed her hairstyle and color. I’ve been looking at that nose and I can almost give you the name of the plastic surgeon.”

  “You think she had her nose fixed?”

  “I’m almost sure of it. I think she made herself from a plain little girl, maybe even a homely little girl, into a good-looking woman.”

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “I could be off, but I’d say thirty-eight, forty.”

  That was Susan Hartswell’s guess, more or less. “What will you take her back to?”

  “Say, twenty years. The people who went to high school with her will remember her. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “I want the person who may have kidnapped her. Maybe her old high school friends can put me onto him.”

  “Can I make a suggestion you won’t like?”

  “Go on. I’ll take all the professional help I can get.”

  “Have you checked out the husband?”

  “The detective who inherited the case checked him out and seemed convinced it was a happy marriage, and there were no rumors about him. He really acts as though he wants to find her.”

  “Because he’s the guy to check out first. It could be he never took her to the parade.”

  “There’s a picture of her in the crowd.”

  “It’s easy to take a picture in a crowd. You see the strip of negatives with the balloons in the one before her and the one after her?”

  I hadn’t. I shook my head.

  “Could have been taken at a
baseball game. You have to see if the people in the crowd fit, if the clothes are right for the time of year. Little things like that can tell you a lot.”

  “I don’t think he did it,” I said. “He got a phone call the other day from someone who read the ad I put in the paper.”

  “How do you know he got a phone call? Because he told you? If I’d killed my wife, I’d tell you the same thing. But I’d come up with a better story.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

  “You’re a nice girl. Jack Brooks did himself a favor when he married you. You’ve got a good face, too, nice bone structure.”

  “Me?”

  “You. OK. The question was, where do we go from here? From here on, I work alone. You give me your phone number, and when I have something to show you, I call you. There’s nothing you can do here except look over my shoulder, and I don’t work that way.”

  “So I go home.”

  “And wait for my call.”

  “You want me to leave the pictures?”

  “I tell you what. Take the wedding album. Leave the rest. They’re safe here.”

  “Then I’ll be going.” I got my coat and put it on. Then I turned and looked at the sculpted face with the lipstick. It was about to undergo what a lot of people would sell a soul for, taking off twenty years. “You seem in a much better mood today, Sergeant,” I said.

  “It’s like Jack told you. I’m nice to women.”

  —

  I called Sandy in midafternoon when I reached home. He sounded ecstatic, almost as though his missing wife were on the verge of being delivered to his doorstep. I had very little hope that that would ever happen.

  Jack listened to my story when he came home from law school. “So it’s really remote,” he said after my description of DiMartino’s house.

  “I doubt whether he sees anyone besides the people in the supermarket and the bank.”

  “And he probably picks up his mail at the post office. Does he have a phone?”

  “I didn’t see one, but he said he’d call me when I should come back for the sculptures. Was he a drinker when you knew him?”

  “It’s not unheard-of for a guy on the job to take a sip now and then.”