The Price of Malice

by Archer Mayor

  She looked at him, recomposed for his sake. “Steve, why not? How’re we going to collect on the insurance without a police report?”

  “They’re not gonna do anything,” he protested. “They’ll just use the chance to search the boat and see if I have any drugs on board.”

  She walked up to him and took hold of both his shoulders. “Do you?” she asked, her face inches from his.

  He stared back at her angrily. “No, I do not.”

  She nodded, her mind in a turmoil. “Then let’s call them, go down there right now, and get this settled. To hell with their attitude. We need to get you up and running again, as quick as we can. What did you do about the delivery you were supposed to make?”

  “I gave it to Bobbie. He screwed up his wrist and can’t fish for a while.”

  “Good.” She pulled him off the wall and pointed him toward the door, already extracting her cell phone. “Let’s go.”

  “What about Mom?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “She’s fine. The morning-show airheads’re on. She’ll be good for hours.”

  At the dock, she prepared herself for the worst as they approached the boat, but it wasn’t until they drew abreast and could see into it that she saw the extent of the mayhem. Charts, logs, equipment, and even some wood splinters lay scattered about from shattered cabinetry, as if someone had thrown everything they found over their shoulders as they went tunneling on a scavenger hunt.

  “Jeezum,” she muttered. “What a mess.”

  “Hey there, Lyn,” an artificially jocular voice said from behind them.

  They turned to see a bearishly built detective from the Gloucester PD coming down the dock. “Hey, Brian,” she said.

  “Sergeant Wilkinson,” Steve joined in, reserved.

  Wilkinson smiled at her, but eyed Steve more coolly as he drew near. “Long time no see.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said quietly.

  Wilkinson addressed him directly. “Been keeping out of trouble?” Wilkinson had played a direct role in arresting Steve the last time—which hadn’t been the latter’s first encounter with the law.

  “That’s not the issue right now, Brian,” Lyn said clearly. “Somebody trashed our boat.”

  Wilkinson let his eyes stay on Steve just a second longer than necessary before turning to Lyn and smiling again. “Yeah, so I can see. Any ideas?”

  “None. Steve came down around nine to get ready to make a delivery and found it like this.”

  Wilkinson placed one foot on the boat’s rail and peered inside. “Anything missing?”

  “We don’t think so, but we didn’t want to disturb anything till you got here.”

  Wilkinson nodded, his professional interest gaining the upper hand and veering him away from Steve, at least temporarily.

  “Good thinking.” He snapped open the black case he was carrying and extracted a camera and a tape recorder. “Well, let’s get started.”

  Across town from where Sammie Martens was collecting DNA from Karen Putnam, Willy Kunkle parked to the side of a local trucking company’s row of loading docks and emerged into the pleasant embrace of a quintessentially New England summer day—sunny, not too hot, a gentle breeze, and the sky a brilliant blue. In other words, for him, a total bore—not that he missed either the recent heat wave or the looming winter months. Those were a pain in the ass.

  Frowning, he scanned the scene before him—a broad, flat, cinder-block warehouse, a scattering of tractor-trailers to one side and empty boxes to another. At one end of the building was an office with some men loitering outside.

  The group quieted at his approach, a couple of them knowing who he was. At this level of the employment pyramid, law-enforcement encounters tended to increase, especially during Friday and Saturday nights.

  “Detective,” one of them said, nodding.

  “Alvin Davis,” Willy acknowledged, his encyclopedic memory unhesitating. “Everything good at home? Your mom okay?”

  Davis’s wariness softened a notch at the unexpected question. “Yeah. The chemo kicked the crap out of her, but she’s doing good. Thanks.”

  One of his friends asked, “Your mom sick?”

  Alvin merely looked at him pityingly before asking Willy, “What’s up? You shopping for bad guys?”

  “Nah,” Willy reassured him. “Just doing homework—looking to talk to Dan Kravitz. I heard he was working here.”

  “He in trouble?” one of the men asked.

  Willy waved it away. “Not even close. He around?”

  Alvin looked a little vague. “He sort of comes and goes, you know? Not like he’s really on the books.”

  The other man said, “He’s in the maintenance shed, working on that pile of shit in the back room—probably find a Model T at the bottom of it.” He pointed to another concrete building across the yard.

  Willy nodded his thanks, told Alvin to give his mother his best, and ambled over to where Dan Kravitz was purportedly practicing archaeology.

  Kravitz was the oddball in the Karen Putnam household—he and his daughter Sally. Only an occasional customer of the local PD—mostly for vagrancy—Kravitz kept a low profile, minded his manners, and either stayed out of trouble or never got caught. For Willy, that made him an interesting character, and a valuable informant, which he’d been for over ten years, if only sparingly used.

  The shed was cavernous, and—with cinder-block walls and a metal roof—like the inside of a drum. It was also, aside from the resonant clangs of heavy objects being thrown about, empty of life. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, Willy searched in vain for whoever was making the noise.

  He walked farther inside the building, ducking under large pieces of machinery and sidestepping piles of tools and discarded truck parts, until he spied a small opening in the back wall, which was acting like a loudspeaker for all the clatter.

  He paused on the threshold to get his bearings, the description from the group at the office suddenly taking form. A pile of unmitigated junk reached halfway to the ceiling, high enough to completely hide anyone in its midst.

  The lighting didn’t help. A couple of yoked floodlights, screwed into a single overhead outlet high above, threw a ghastly, angular glare across the jagged peaks of accumulated debris, leaving the corners and the floor shrouded in gloom.

  Willy quietly entered and followed a narrow path between precariously piled walls, eventually discovering a thin man in work clothes, clean shaven and close-cropped, who was standing like a mythical combatant in the only cleared space between metaphorical good and evil—a mountain of trash on one side, and a smaller pile of salvage on the other.

  Both men froze and stared at each other in the abrupt silence, Kravitz with a bent piece of rebar in his hand.

  “Hey, Dan,” Willy said, his voice sounding orphaned in the stillness.

  “Mr. Kunkle,” Kravitz responded.

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You taking care of yourself?”

  “Won’t complain.”

  Willy looked around. “Got a little project here, don’t you?”

  Kravitz nodded. “Guess I do.”

  Willy studied him for a few seconds, reacquainting himself with the man. Even in these surroundings, Dan was neat, tucked in, and relatively clean, aside from his hands, of course. His appearance spoke of his demeanor. Reserved and quiet to the point of being withdrawn, Kravitz could hold his own. Of unknown origin, he had slowly, almost invisibly, become a part of Brattleboro’s social fabric, if only at its edges, but it was his work ethic and moral stamina that made him stand out. He stuck to every job given to him, worked hard, and—most remarkably—had raised a daughter in the process. This despite a driving personal code that made him refuse all offers of steady employment, or stay at any job beyond its immediate completion. It was a guarantee, given this, that once the contents of this shed were sorted out, Dan Kravitz would move on. No one of Willy’s acquaintance knew what made the man tick. He was
n’t handicapped, by any means, but he certainly wasn’t part of the mainstream, placing him beyond categorization.

  “I’m not here to jam you up, Dan,” Willy told him. “But I’d like to talk to you for a bit—outside.”

  Kravitz considered that for a moment, before nodding and placing the rebar carefully on the floor. “Sure.”

  Willy stood aside to let him pass, again noting his cleanliness—a virtual hallmark. Willy hadn’t dealt with him much, and certainly didn’t know him well, but he liked the man, in part—not surprisingly—because of his nonconformity.

  They wended their way to the main room, and beyond that to the truck yard. There, Willy led them to the relative privacy of the building’s far side, where they found seats on a stack of discarded wooden loading pallets.

  “I need to ask you a few questions, Dan,” Willy began, “but not because of anything you’ve done—or Sally, for that matter.”

  Once more, Kravitz nodded. “Okay.”

  “It’s about your living situation,” Willy continued. “I hear you’re both staying with Karen Putnam.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that working out?”

  “Yes.”

  “No frictions between you and the others? It’s pretty jam-packed.”

  “No.”

  Willy tried for a little more eloquence. “And Sally?”

  He failed. “No.”

  Willy scratched his neck, rethinking his strategy.

  “Okay,” he said. “Do you ever say anything except yes and no?”

  “Sure.”

  Willy got up and stepped in so close, their faces were inches apart.

  He glared at him until Kravitz allowed for the tiniest of smiles.

  Willy sat back down. “I thought so, you asshole. You done fucking with me?”

  Kravitz finally conceded. “Yes, Mr. Kunkle.”

  “Describe the family to me, then, member by member.”

  Kravitz didn’t say a word for a moment, and Willy wondered if his request might actually be challenged. After all, he’d not explained why he was here.

  But apparently, Dan was merely thinking. “Karen and Todd are the parents,” he began mundanely. “Todd is a frustrated bully. He scares a lot of people by lashing out, but he lacks ambition and brains. He doesn’t know how to organize that energy and so can’t earn respect except from other losers like himself. Karen is loving, caring, and needy. She doesn’t know how to protect herself, and so she turns creature comforts like booze, sex, and cigarettes into temporary shelters from reality.”

  Willy was staring at him. “Are you shitting me?”

  Dan smiled a little wider this time. “What?”

  “You know goddamn well what, you little prick. Why do you pretend to be such a dummy when you got all that shit inside you?”

  “I don’t pretend. That’s where people put me because of my lifestyle and my manner.”

  Willy was fascinated. He sat forward. “Dan, get real. Who do you talk to like that? I mean, a lot of people know you. I have never heard anybody say you were anything other than a yup-nope kinda guy. Christ knows, that’s all you’ve ever given me.”

  “Are you going to blow my cover?”

  Willy straightened back up, caught off guard by the question. He thought carefully before answering. “No. That’s your point, isn’t it?”

  “We’re alike in some ways,” Dan told him. “People think you’re a crippled asshole who acts like a Nazi; they think I’m a retarded bum with good manners who knows how to shower. They’re wrong, but they do buy what we’re selling.”

  Willy shook his head. “Holy Christ. I thought I’d seen it all. Why open up now, after all these years?”

  Dan shrugged. “It was time.”

  “Damn.” Willy spoke wondrously. “I met an accountant like you once, living in a tent by the river. A real mental case, of course, but he’d gone to college, had a home and a family once. He just couldn’t handle it. Liked the simple life, as he called it. ’Course, he was a roaring drunk.”

  Kravitz merely shrugged. “There but for the grace of God,” he said softly.

  Willy understood all too well, his own disabilities looming large in his mind. “But you ducked the bullet,” he commented.

  “I may have seen it coming,” Kravitz said more fully.

  Willy stared off into the distance, wishing he’d had such prescience. “No shit.”

  He then looked at his companion. “Okay. You’re right. I won’t tell anybody. But thanks for telling me. That means something. Maybe someday, you’ll tell me who you used to be.”

  Kravitz smiled again. “Sure.”

  Willy straightened, back on track. “You read the papers at all?”

  “Some.”

  “You hear about the murder?”

  “Wayne? Yeah. That’s a little beyond just the papers.”

  “Okay, okay. So, you’d have to be brain-dead. But you knew the guy, right?”

  “I met him.”

  “At the trailer?”

  “Yup. He came by once, sniffing around Karen, among others.”

  Willy eyed him carefully. “Meaning?”

  “She wasn’t his only interest.”

  “The kids?”

  “The younger ones.”

  “Any in particular?”

  But there, Kravitz shook his head. “Not that I know of. I saw him window-shopping when he came by. My priority was my daughter, but she’s too old.”

  Willy pulled out a notepad and consulted one of its pages, listing the inhabitants of the Putnam trailer. “So, we’re talking Becky, Richard, Nicholas—or is he too old, too? He’s thirteen, right?”

  “Yes, but he’s also pretty immature. Physically, he looks younger. Emotionally, he’s got problems. I know more about him because my daughter sleeps with him.”

  Willy raised his eyebrows. “No shit?”

  Kravitz shrugged. “He’s a good boy, and Sally takes care of him. He gets the mother going in her, and she’s not looking for anything in return.”

  Willy paused, not wanting to stray too far afield.

  “Moral opinions aside,” Kravitz volunteered, settling the dilemma, “I’m a lot happier living with people who’re off the social radar. They have standards like everybody else, but they can be a lot more generous and less judgmental. Like Karen and her needs.”

  “And yours?” Willy asked, since the subject was in the air.

  “Because she and I share a bed sometimes?” Kravitz asked. “You think I’m taking advantage of her?”

  Willy realized he’d been blindsided after all by his own prejudice. He held up his hand. “Okay. My bad. I shouldn’t have gone there—and I get your point, or maybe I do. Todd would probably kill you if he knew, so you could argue that Karen’s actually taking advantage of you.”

  Kravitz smiled. “And maybe he wouldn’t.”

  Willy laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Kravitz joined in. “Yeah, I am.”

  “Okay,” Willy said afterward. “Keep on going. What about the kids?”

  “Ryan’s the oldest. Last name Hatch. He’s seventeen, hates Todd but uses him as a template, and is therefore heading down the same slope fast. You probably already know that, since I’d bet he’s all over your computer files.”

  Willy couldn’t disagree. “You think he could kill someone?”

  “Now you’re pulling my leg,” Kravitz commented.

  “Point taken. Was he around when Wayne came by?”

  “I only saw Wayne once, so I can’t say. He wasn’t there then.”

  “Was Wayne ever talked about?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know what he was doing with Karen?”

  “I assume they were sleeping together.”

  Willy looked up from his notepad. “How did you feel about that?”

  “Jealous?” Kravitz asked. “No. But I did tell her once to watch herself.”

  “Why?”

  “The body langu
age from the kids made it clear none of them liked him. Kids are like animals that way—good warning bells, if anyone’s listening.”

  “How did Karen react?”

  Kravitz chuckled. “Same as you. She said I was jealous.”

  Willy kept going, glancing at his list. “Ryan got a girlfriend?”

  “Maura Scully, aged sixteen. Nice girl, bad taste in men, likely to end up like Karen. I don’t see her as a killer, if that’s your next question.”

  “Actually,” Willy corrected him, “I was going to ask if you think Ryan would confide in her.”

  Kravitz straightened slightly. “Huh. Good question. I don’t know.”

  “Nicholas?” Willy asked next.

  “Nicholas. Right. Last name, King—none of the children are Todd’s. Aged thirteen, as mentioned. A good, quiet boy, but differently wired from the others. Sally likes him a lot—tells me that he has nightmares sometimes, and won’t tell her what they’re about. In fact, he won’t tell her much of anything—he’s reserved that way; he’ll accept what she offers, but doesn’t give anything back, which works for her, luckily. I like him, too, but he sets people off—he’s pretty compulsive, and does weird stuff, like stands too close, or walks out in the middle of a conversation. He’s manically neat, obsessively reads about baseball, is very smart but not interested in good grades. I’ve seen it before in something called subthreshold autism, but that probably doesn’t mean much.”

  “He a special ed kid?”

  The other man tilted his head to one side, considering the question. “He is special, all right, but not diagnosed, as far as I know. His big problem is Ryan—the father substitute, at least in his own eyes. He and Nick fight a lot, with Ryan usually winning. That puts Nick out of the house most of the time, and—if you ask me—probably doing a fair amount of drugs. Throw Todd into the mix and you’ve got a ton of masculine, Alpha-dog, rub-your-nose-in-it nonsense going on between those four walls, and none of it dealt with well.”

  “Richard,” Willy intoned, moving on.

  Kravitz smiled. “Ah, the exception to all that. Richard, the Dreamer. Actually,” he interrupted himself, “I should call him Richard, the Thinker, or the Wise Man. Eleven years old, last name Vial, hates being called Richie or Ricky and is called nothing but. There’s the most solid of Karen’s kids.” He added, “And no, I don’t think he’s a killer.”