Rose & Poe

by Jack Todd

  In Coyle’s absence, the only tangible thread that might lead to something is the windshield on the black car, possibly a Cadillac, which Poe says was parked at the scene. Poe says the man he pulled off Miranda hit that windshield with enough force to shatter it. If Dunn can find the shop that repaired the windshield and track down the car, it might be enough to file charges. He’s already checked the hospitals and private clinics to see if any of them treated a man with head wounds that might have been caused by a car windshield and come up empty. Now he’s down to the windshield itself. If it was shattered, then someone had to repair it.

  The deputies are far too busy, so the investigation is Jim Dunn’s and his alone. He does most of the work on Saturdays, and he has to do it in person. Phone calls don’t work. It’s too easy for a harried garage owner to claim he hadn’t repaired any such vehicle in August and hang up. A man with a badge at the door is another matter. Long experience has taught him that few small garages are entirely above the law. Some are out-and-out chop shops for stolen cars, more operate on a cash basis for at least half their jobs. No bills, no credit cards, no taxes. The only thing they want when a lawman shows up is to make him go away.

  The big chain outfits are easy to cross off the list. They’re no less crooked than the little guys, but they stick to ripping off the customers and they keep good records: a quick check and he can move on. In Belle Coeur County, he turns up repairs on the windshields of two black cars in late August: one belongs to a female schoolteacher whose windshield had been cracked by a rock thrown up by a passing truck. The other is owned by a car salesman named Vince Wright, who has three domestic violence raps on his sheet. Wright looks like a possible suspect, but he was in Florida at the time of the attack. His windshield, it turns out, was damaged when a tree branch fell on the car during the first big storm.

  Dunn works in a widening circle from Belle Coeur to the east, west, and south, under the assumption that a guy with a shattered windshield would not have driven the vehicle into Canada. He’s surprised how many small, out-of-the-way garages operate on back roads in the country and in back alleys in small towns. A guy with some tools starts fixing cars for his family and buddies, then rents a cinder-block building somewhere, goes into hock for a hoist, and he’s in business. They aren’t in the yellow pages, they aren’t on any list of garages, but they’re out there. Any garage in a fifty-mile radius might be the one that repaired the windshield of a black automobile in August.

  On a Saturday in late April, Jim Dunn drives his daughter to the mountains for a final bout of spring skiing. He watches her make a few runs for the sheer joy of seeing the fearless way she flies down a ski hill. She’s spending the day skiing with friends and plans to ride home with them, so he leaves the slopes in mid-morning. On the way home, he runs into heavy traffic on the highway and detours south onto a two-lane blacktop road he’s never taken. Ten miles along, he sees a hand-lettered sign off to the side advertising a place called Dean’s Auto that offers bodywork and windshield repairs. Dunn pulls off the highway, parks the Jeep, and follows the sound of hammering to a concrete-block building out behind a tiny white house. When the mechanic glances up from his hammering, he flashes his badge.

  “Belle Coeur County Sheriff,” he says. “Jim Dunn’s the name. Are you Dean?”

  “That’s me. What can I do you for?”

  Dunn extends a hand. “Good to meet you, Dean. I wonder if you can help me a bit. I’m sorry to trouble you. I’m looking for a shop that might have repaired the windshield on a big black car, maybe a Caddy.”

  The mechanic squints at him through the grime that has worked its way into the creases around his eyes. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  “This would have been around the twenty-first of August. Right in the middle of that second flood we had, unless the fellow hunkered down someplace. The driver might have been cut up some himself.”

  The mechanic thinks it over. “That might fit,” he says. “I can check my receipts, if you can wait a minute.”

  “I’m in no rush. I can wait till you’ve got time to look.”

  Dean shakes his head. “Don’t matter at all to me. This is my mother-in-law’s transmission I’m working on. I don’t give a damn if she ever gets her car back.”

  The mechanic has a thick wad of receipts impaled on a spindle. He lifts them off the spindle, licks a greasy forefinger, and pages through them, frowning intently. Finally, he holds up a receipt that seems to be even greasier than the rest.

  “This is it. Monday, August twenty-first. Fella in a new-model black Cadillac came in while it was raining cats and dogs, wanted it fixed pronto. I couldn’t believe he’d driven it any distance at all, the shape that windshield was in. Claimed he hit a deer, but it’s usually way worse with a deer. There was a fair bit of blood on the windshield and he was cut up some, nothing too serious. He had to wait around while I drove over to the dealership in Preston to get a new windshield, then it took me two hours to change the windshield. He paid cash and I sent him on his way.”

  “What did he do while you were working?”

  “Set around. Nothing else he could do. Didn’t say much. I could tell he didn’t want to get grease on his pants, that type.”

  “You have any kind of description?”

  Dean scratches his balding head. “Thirty, or a bit less. Blond. Trying to grow some kind of mustache, wasn’t working out too well. A little under six feet, a bit overweight. Not fat but soft, know what I mean? Like a man who never did a day’s work in his life. All decked out in this outfit, like he was an African explorer or something, all brand new. Like the car. And a hat. Bush hat, I think you call it. Kept it pulled down over his eyes.”

  “Did you get a name, a license number, anything like that?”

  “He paid cash, like I said, so I didn’t take nothing down.”

  “You happen to notice what state was on the plates?”

  “Massachusetts. Now you mention it, I remember the plate. One of them vanity plates. ANTHONY1, like that, the name Anthony and the number one.”

  Dunn takes out his notebook and jots it down in case his memory fails him. “So I’m guessing the fellow’s name is Anthony. Would you recognize him if you saw him again? If you had to point him out in a lineup, for instance?”

  “Hell, yeah. I guess he’s in some big trouble, is that it?”

  “He might have attacked a young woman over in Belle Coeur County. That’s what we’re looking into.”

  “I got no use for a man that hits a woman. My wife was married to a fella like that, knocked her around. After she told me, I went over and beat him almost to death. Guess I shouldn’t tell you that, but I just couldn’t hold back.”

  “Not my worry. I’m the sheriff in Belle Coeur County, not over here, and I’ve got even less use for men who beat women than you have. I’ve had to clean up the messes they leave behind. You’ve been a big help, Dean. If we find this guy, we’ll let you know.”

  “You happen to know what happened to the windshield, Sheriff?”

  “A man saw him attacking this girl, picked him up, and threw him off her.”

  “Threw him! That must be one strong sonofabitch. Fella who was in here with that Caddy had to weigh two hundred pounds.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Dunn jots the mechanic’s phone number in his notebook. He’s almost back to the Jeep when he thinks of one more question and heads back into the garage. “I don’t suppose you would have kept that windshield by any chance?”

  “Didn’t throw it out, if that’s what you mean. It’s somewhere out back, but it isn’t going to be easy to find.”

  They spend more than an hour digging through the leaning tower of junk that has accumulated out back of the shop. Rusted radiators, old bumpers, split rubber hoses, gas tanks with bullet holes through them, carburetors, axles, worn shock absorbers, brok
en fan belts, a chassis or two with all the windows smashed out. Dean finally locates the windshield atop an old radiator. To the sheriff’s eye, it looks as though the windshield was shattered in the shape of a man’s head and shoulders. Maybe a deer did that damage, but it sure doesn’t look like it. Dean locates a big plastic bag used to wrap tires, slips the windshield inside it, and Dunn carries it to his Jeep.

  Three days later, the Massachusetts DMV confirms that there is indeed a black Cadillac with a vanity plate reading “ANTHONY1” registered to one Anthony Coyle of Boston. The woman from the DMV provides some additional unsolicited information: Anthony Coyle is sixty-two years old, and he’s the senior partner at the biggest criminal law firm in Boston.

  ~

  Fragments shored against our ruin

  Miranda loves the old stone of New England. What began with the search for the stones to build Poe’s wall has become her passion. As she ranges farther and farther afield, she learns to identify more and more specimens and, when they aren’t too large to carry, she adds them to her personal collection: chlorite schist, white marble, Monkton Quartzite, Lake Champlain limestone, greenstone, magnetite schist, dolomite, Cheshire quartzite, serpentinite, micaceous marble. She is especially fond of the granite in all its varieties. Poe’s wall is built, for the most part, with granite and gneiss, the gneiss striated in undulating patterns, the granite like a pointillist painting, all tiny flecks of crystal that catch the light in a thousand ways.

  The university has given her a year to recover from her injuries, but she has already decided that she will not return. Studying law at Harvard, she understands now, was always her father’s ambition, not hers. Instead, she has already applied to study geology at the University of Vermont, where she can be close to home, close to her father, and immersed in her passion at the same time.

  As she recovers and the weather improves, Miranda spends more and more time hiking — searching for new varieties of stone, searching for herself. On the first really fine day of spring, she leaves the house shortly after daybreak, carrying a backpack with a large bottle of water, an apple, and a tuna sandwich. Somehow, it is only while she is hiking that she finds it possible to recover bits and pieces of the things that happened to her in August. Fragments of memory come to her like strobe lights in the darkness: a quick flash and then it’s gone, but the fragments accumulate. She recalls a detail or a scene and then pieces it together with something else. She’s begun writing down what she remembers so that it can’t be lost again. It’s hard to be patient when it’s so important for her to understand what happened, but she can’t force it. When she tries to pin down the fragments that have come to her, they vanish, only to return when she’s thinking of something else. Somewhere, she’s convinced, her memory of that time remains intact, just beneath the surface.

  She hikes on, enjoying the day without paying attention to where she is, until she reaches a rocky outcrop next to the trail. When she pauses to rest, she sees an empty bottle someone has cast aside. She picks it up in disgust. That’s exactly the kind of thing Sebastian would do, she thinks. He’s so careless about the world we live in, as though it’s his to spoil.

  She has to brace herself against the rock to keep from falling. It’s exactly the kind of thing Sebastian would do, because Sebastian was here. Precisely here. He was here, waiting for her, watching her through his binoculars. She was furious with him. They quarreled. She had looked up and seen her father watching them. She pretended she hadn’t seen him and turned and hiked away in the opposite direction, walking quickly so that her father couldn’t catch them, forcing Sebastian to jog to keep up. That was exactly how it had happened.

  The rest of it comes back to her in waves. Her mind is racing, putting it all together. How she had called Sebastian’s cell to break it off with him and found that he was still staying at the motel. How he wanted to meet at a breakfast spot, but she suggested the old gravel pit because she didn’t want to be seen with him. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would be in danger if she met him in a place where there were no witnesses. He stalked off and left her sitting alone. When he returned, he attacked her.

  Miranda falls to her knees and vomits until her body shakes. She sees the gravel pit as though it’s right in front of her. She’s lying on a blanket, sipping a glass of wine. Then she feels very dizzy, and Sebastian is on top of her. She can’t push him away. Why not? She’s stronger than he is, why can’t she fight him off? Her arms and legs feel like water, as though she can’t control them.

  She remembers how odd her voice sounded when she tried to speak. Her tongue was thick, she was slurring her words. Now she understands: she was drugged. Of course. Sebastian had slipped something into her wine. She had no control over her limbs. He bore her down and she couldn’t fight him off. When she did try to fight, he punched her. He held her down and unbuttoned her dress, and when she managed to knee him in the groin, he punched her harder. Once, twice, more. She remembers trying to twist away from the punches, his knee forcing her legs open, the moment when she knew it was going to happen because she didn’t have the strength to fight him off — then everything goes black.

  What else? She tries to remember, but it’s as though someone has pulled a string and yanked the scene offstage. She can recall nothing else. But Poe was telling the truth. He had thrown Sebastian off her. Everything happened exactly as Poe had said, but almost no one believed him. He had saved her.

  Miranda digs the water bottle out of her pack, washes her face and hands, rinses out her mouth, then drinks deeply. She’s still shaking, but she can walk. She has to tell Sheriff Dunn. She has wondered for months why Sebastian had disappeared after the attack. It wasn’t like him. Even after she told him it was over, he would have kept pestering her. She hikes quickly back to the house, repeating over and over to herself, Sebastian, you bastard. You absolute bastard. You’re going to pay.

  When she strides into Jim Dunn’s office half an hour later, he smiles. “I was just about to call you,” he says. “I located the mechanic who repaired the windshield on a black Cadillac the day after you were attacked. I have a description of the guy who I think attacked you, and the plate number on the vehicle. It’s registered to an Anthony Coyle, of Boston.”

  ~

  The suspect

  On his return from Asia two months later, Sebastian Coyle is arrested at Logan Airport and held until Sheriff Jim Dunn arrives to question him. After two hours in an interrogation room with the younger Coyle and two of his lawyers, Dunn decides that it’s just as well he’s about to retire, because after three decades and a spotless record, he’s as close to striking a suspect as he has ever been.

  Coyle has longish dirty-blond hair and a wisp of mustache that doesn’t suit him. The only surprise is that Coyle doesn’t deny having sex with Miranda. Instead, he brags about it. Apparently, this is going to be his defense. Miranda loves sex, he claims, and she loves it rough. She likes to be slapped and spanked. What happened, in Coyle’s version, is simple.

  “Miranda and I were about to have sex. I had unbuttoned her dress, I remember that. Poe must have been watching us from up in that tower and he got jealous. I knew that she was friendly with that big freak, and I had warned her about him, that he could be dangerous. I saw him through my binoculars while he was working on the wall, but I had no idea how big he is. All of a sudden, I heard this terrible roar, and here was this big freaking ape, coming after me. I tried to fight him off, but he picked me up and just threw me. I landed hard on the hood of my car. My head slammed into the windshield. I must have been knocked out because when I came to, there was no one around. Miranda was gone, the big freak was gone. He must have taken advantage of her while I was out.”

  “So what did you do when you came to?”

  “There was a terrible storm coming. I picked up the blanket and the picnic stuff and I got in the car. I could see enough to drive because my head hit the passenger side of the
windshield. I was bleeding some, but I thought I was okay. I got to the highway just in time to see the sheriff’s cruisers and the ambulance heading the other way.”

  “If Poe had attacked you, why didn’t you follow us into town so you could tell me what happened? Why try driving your car with a smashed windshield when the closest mechanic was in Belle Coeur?”

  “I figured Miranda would tell you what happened. I just wanted to get out of there before the storm hit, and I wanted to get away from that monster. My head hurt like hell. I probably had a mild concussion, and I was feeling confused. I went the other way, and in the first town of any size I came to, I found a twenty-four-hour clinic where I got stitched up. I checked into a motel until the storm was over, got the windshield fixed the next day, and went on my way.”

  “So a man injured you seriously enough that you needed stitches, and he damaged your car, but you didn’t want to see him arrested?”

  “Sure I did. But Miranda had seen what happened. I figured she would tell you all about it. You didn’t need me.”

  “And what about her injuries? She was so badly beaten that she was unconscious for a week. How did that happen?”

  “Well, Poe did it, obviously. I didn’t hurt her. He must have done it while I was unconscious. I didn’t even know she was injured.”

  Dunn leans back and studies this child of wealth and privilege. If this is how they turned out, he is pleased that he never had the money to spoil his offspring in this way. He leans forward.

  “Your story doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. If Poe attacked you for no reason at all, you would have wanted us to charge him with assault. If you weren’t guilty as hell, you would have had your car window repaired right here in Belle Coeur. There are a dozen holes in your story that I can think of right off the top of my head, and that yarn about how she liked rough sex isn’t going to fly: she was examined at the hospital after the attack. Miranda is a virgin, so you can drop that one now. Her memory is crystal clear. You attacked her, most probably after drugging her. We didn’t test for date-rape drugs, because it’s a new thing and we haven’t made it standard procedure in the county yet, but we will. It doesn’t matter, because we have Miranda’s testimony. And we have Poe’s testimony, an eyewitness who saw you assault her. Now, you talk it over with your lawyers, son, but if you want to take a piece of advice from an old country sheriff, you’ll plead guilty and save all of us a whole lot of trouble. If you make that young woman face a courtroom and tell the world what you did to her, I’ll make it my personal business to see that you don’t walk out of that prison until you’re old and stooped and gray. I should think that a young man of your attractions wouldn’t suffer unduly from loneliness in jail, but I wouldn’t know. That decision is up to you.”