Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  “I have to take this,” I said, staring at a spoon blackened to the color of iron, a length of tubing, and a syringe. There was a stamp-sized bag of heroin as well.

  “I sure don’t want it. Look, I know what it means, me showing you this.” He was overcome. “We can’t have everything in life. As long as Eo’s cared for . . . I just want Penny back.”

  “Any idea where she gets it?”

  Nothing.

  “From Mikey?”

  At this, he wiped his eyes and glared at me as if I was slow. “It used to be a friend would bring something back from over the border. Sometimes she was the one. Then the trade came here. Yeah, Mikey was one I knew of. I could get hurt for saying that out loud, you understand. I—she was trying to quit. She didn’t want anyone to know. I just want her back. I’ll tell you anything.”

  “Okay. But for now, dry out and get some sleep. Consider yourself under house arrest.”

  “You can’t keep me here.”

  “No, but you go anywhere, I’ll be right behind you.”

  “I’ll stay put if you help me. You’ll help me. I know you. I know you will.” Kevin looked back into his empty home, and I could see the horror wash over him. He pointed to a spot between the kitchen and the bedroom. “Her hair was right there. What I saw.”

  “Get some rest. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  I parked my truck just off the driveway near the trailer, and on foot switched back and forth all over the ridge. On the southern face, the sun had punched through to the forest floor and convinced the saplings to leaf. At times the trees were so thick that I was lost in endless green.

  I didn’t feel I could leave Kevin alone, not yet. Reclining in my truck’s bed, I got one bar on the cell phone and called the Brennans. Ed answered. I explained where I was and let him know that Kevin was home, and might or might not make it to work the next day. About Penny I said little, even when Ed asked me directly if she was all right. “Well,” said Ed, “as long as you’re on it, try to kick his ass out of bed in the morning. I need him working tomorrow.”

  “Last I knew, I wasn’t his butler.” I thought about how to say what I had in mind. “Maybe you don’t want him around right now.”

  “What else is he going to do with himself?”

  As evening fell I settled down with a book I’d been reading about the battle of Antietam, and then wished I could play my fiddle, which I often carried around in the warmer months for just such occasions. When I couldn’t read anymore I ran through tunes in my mind. If you have played long enough, you can do that and it’s just a different way to make music. For a while I let myself wander and then slipped into variations on “Ways of the World,” key of A. Most old-time tunes just have two parts and you shuffle back and forth between them, ­AABBAABB, forever. I thought of this tune in three sections, the first being the jaunty dominant melody, the second a grumble at the base of the neck, then a wild sweep down to G that added a touch of seriousness. What are you, a woodcock on your private flight? Maybe one peeper of ten thousand in a swamp? I am one of you, and you are one of me. The music rolled down the driveway in my mind, calling Penelope Pellings home so I could go home too and live my lazy spring.

  It was after ten p.m. when a Ford Mustang rolled to a stop beside my pickup. I dropped out of the bed and raised a hand for the driver to wait. I noted two silhouettes inside, and as I got closer I saw that the passenger was a woman. The driver got out of the car and I faced a bald, ruddy man in decent shape, maybe forty. Earlier that evening he had been dressed for the office, but now his tie was undone and hung from either side of his collar. His shirt was open to the second button down. He stood between me and the woman in the passenger seat, trying to shield her from my eyes. So I looked around him and saw a trim, tan woman with blond hair like she’d put her finger in a light socket. She waved.

  “Andy Swales,” the man said, and extended his hand. The mint he was shifting around in his mouth did not entirely hide the scent of gin.

  “We’ve spoken on the phone,” I said. “Henry Farrell.”

  “I don’t usually get cops up my very driveway.”

  “I’m here about your tenant, Kevin.”

  “That lunatic,” Swales said affectionately.

  “He came to us saying Penelope Pellings is missing.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about two night ago. It could help us out.”

  Swales looked uneasy and shifted his eyes toward the car. “I’ve got a visitor.”

  “Tomorrow, then?” I said.

  He handed me a business card that listed him as a partner in a law firm. “I’m not sure what help I can be, but stop by my office around four.”

  As the Mustang wound its way toward the big stone house, I settled back and listened to the woods creak all around me, and watched my narrow strip of sky for satellites and shooting stars. I must have trusted Kevin O’Keeffe enough that I dozed off. Then I awoke to the slap of the trailer’s screen door. You know when you convince yourself that you have had a premonition in your sleep? I was on my feet and following him into the woods before I knew what I was doing. Kev was not hard to follow, swashing about in the brush, heading for the lake. As I got closer I heard him moaning. Not exactly moaning, but mumbling, repeating, “Oh,” something-something, “oh.” He did a header over a log and got right up like nothing was wrong. I grabbed his arm, but it took some shaking before he turned. His eyes didn’t see. Then they did.

  “What am I doing?” he said.

  “Come on.”

  “She was down there.”

  “Come on.” As I turned him toward home, I noticed a plastic bottle of rail vodka where he’d fallen, empty. It wasn’t something I had seen when I went through the place before. People like him have their ways. Penny too, I guess. You had to wonder what else there was to find.

  Once I got Kevin sideways on his bed and breathing slow, and I felt reasonably confident he wasn’t going anywhere, I headed home. It wasn’t even that late, just about midnight.

  ON THE Susquehanna River between Apalachin and Owego, New York, you can kayak west to Hiawatha Island, maybe stop there to eat your lunch and hike a trail. And on this bright morning, that’s just what a couple of grad students intended to do. But as they approached the first of several towheads on the way, one of the girls spotted something snagged on a branch. She drifted up alongside it, as close as she could get in the shallow water near the gravel bar. Too shocked even to cry out, she backpaddled as quickly as she could, and with her commotion scared off a carp that had been nibbling at the wound in the middle of the corpse’s chest.

  The Tioga County Sheriff’s Department was first on the scene, bringing with them a boat to retrieve the body before the river could carry it away again. The county sent one of their coroners, but there was nothing that could be gathered or learned from the river itself. Once they’d brought the body back to the morgue and cut away what clothing remained, their sheriff began calling nearby jurisdictions.

  It wasn’t yet noon before I had found the Bradford County site where Ed had put Kevin O’Keeffe to work with a couple other guys. They were dismantling a barn, though not a particularly beautiful one—it was new enough to lack the grand architecture of the nineteenth century, but old enough that its roof was badly swaybacked. I picked Kevin out from among several men standing on the roof, guessing rightly that he was the one sporting the largest sun hat I’d ever seen, a straw disc the size of a trash can lid. I beckoned him down. Work ceased as Kevin joined me a little ways off from the structure, looking silly and frightened and tired. His face was smeared with tar.

  “What’s up, Henry?”

  “I need you to come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Tioga County. The morgue.”

  He fell to his knees and let out a sob.

  I heard one of the crew say, “Oh, shit, here we go.”

  “No,” I said. “Look, man, it’s not—”

&nbs
p; “Is it her?”

  “We need you to have a look, okay?”

  “Is it or fuckin isn’t it?”

  “You need to come along.”

  From there we had a short drive north across the state line and the river to a dreary yellow building that housed the county’s social services, coroner’s office, morgue, and so on. Seated beside me, Kevin twisted his work gloves and stared out the window.

  He recognized Sheriff Dally’s car as we rolled in. He began to take deep, huffing breaths. As we walked slowly from the patrol truck to the county building, what remained of his composure crumbled and he squatted down right there in the lot. Glad I didn’t have to keep up the half-truth anymore, I explained we were there to view not a young woman, but a dead young man.

  “You motherfucker, you fuckin prick!” Kevin started back to the patrol truck.

  “Kev, just get in there.”

  “This is your deal. You ain’t done shit for me, I ain’t helping you.”

  “All the same.”

  “Why would I look at a guy I shot? Oh, yeah, that’s him. Take me to jail now. What have you done to find Penny? Anything? I got work.”

  “Then just tell me he isn’t anybody you know and I’ll leave you alone and start on the other thing. But you’re going in, Kevin.”

  Tioga County employs four coroners who also serve as medical examiners. The lead was Andrea Catlin, MD, an amiable local woman with short hair and a lift in her shoulders, as if she were in an everlasting shrug at the state of the world. It was she who had trekked out to the body, as she did in most suspicious deaths. Sheriff Dally was already with her, as arranged. In the doorway of her small, tidy office, she reached to shake my hand.

  We four proceeded down to the morgue, where the body from the river lay on a silver table, uncovered and cut open. Kevin’s breathing quickened and the color faded from his face. It was rare to see a sunburned man go that white. The kid was slight, goateed, with tattoos crawling up his arms.

  “Charles Michael Heffernan,” said the sheriff. “Twenty-six.”

  Dr. Catlin pulled on gloves and began to point things out about him. “Gunshot wound here, puncturing the left lung. That lung was full of blood, and water got into the torso through the chest wound. The body didn’t have enough air to stay afloat in the river. An impact knocked it out of him. He probably tumbled along the bottom for a day or two. We took a lot of sediment out of his mouth. Some from his nose and ears. He’s got fractures on his skull here, a dislocated right shoulder, broken arm in several places, broken ribs, pelvis, suggesting he entered the river from a height. A bridge, my guess.”

  “So he drowned,” said Dally.

  “I’ll show you what killed him.” With a forceps, Catlin picked up a long sliver of bone. “This is a piece of rib that ended up in his heart. It could be from the gunshot, or it could be on impact from the fall.”

  “I don’t need to be here, Henry, man, let me go out to the car,” Kevin said, staring at a spot on the ceiling in the exact opposite direction of the body. I caught a distinct whiff of what we in law enforcement call awareness of guilt. Dally saw it too.

  “He might not have died instantly,” Dr. Catlin continued. “Chances are he’d have bled out slowly, into his lung, into, I don’t know, a towel maybe, there seems to have been some pressure on his chest. But there was no way this kid was going to survive it.” She set down the bone needle and picked up a bullet, misshapen from its journey into the body. “Nine-­millimeter, 124.”

  “What do you say, O’Keeffe?” Dally said. “You know this guy from somewhere?”

  Kevin forced himself to look directly into the battered, soft face of the corpse; you could’ve spread the dead skin onto toast with a dull knife. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. What he was really saying, he said only to me, and not out loud but with his eyes. This was the guy he’d shot. He had no reason to admit shooting him. And in the end, he wasn’t sure he cared.

  I bought Kevin lunch at a fast-food chain and we headed back to Holebrook County, passing over the hills and creeks in silence.

  “Whatever you did with the gun,” I said, “I hope it’s safe.”

  “What gun.”

  I dropped him off back at the Bradford County work site, where the crew stopped work to stare at us with naked curiosity.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON Dally called to relay what Tioga County, Broome County, and the Binghamton police knew about Charles Michael Heffernan. The basic measurements: five feet ten inches tall, weighing a buck seventy-five, twenty-six years old. His mother lived in Binghamton and cut hair, and his father was a bartender in Florida. He had a younger brother enrolled in SUNY Potsdam, but Charles himself had spent his college years working in various restaurant kitchens and building a criminal record of two assaults, four possessions including one with intent to distribute, and a DUI. For his efforts he’d spent, in aggregate, fourteen months in the New York prison system before winding up where they found him in the Susquehanna River.

  “Any connection to O’Keeffe or Pellings?” I asked, rifling the papers on my desk for something clean to write on. “What about ties down here?”

  “They’re looking into it. It’s possible. We’ll see. Tioga County is happy with O’Keeffe as the shooter and Fitzmorris as the place. They want to send it back to us.”

  “How does Ross feel?”

  “You know how he is,” Dally said. “We’ve got to hand it all right to him.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I think Kev may have done the guy. Why, and how much he meant to, I don’t know. But why haul him all the way to New York? Plenty of places to sink a body closer to home.”

  “These are deep waters, as they say.”

  I brought a mug shot of Charles Michael Heffernan to the Royal Lodges to confirm with Shepcott that he was the tenant.

  “Yeah, I would say so,” Shepcott told me. “What’d he do?”

  On my way out I ran in to Casey Noonan, the white-haired old gent who once owned the buildings. The yard was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence whose black paint had flaked onto the sidewalk. Noonan was seated in the grass beside the fence with his ankles crossed, scouring rust and priming for a repaint.

  “You got ten dollars for me, I might have a spare brush in the trunk,” he said. “I’d gladly give you a stretch of fence to paint.”

  Noonan told me that he didn’t know the people who had bought him out, only that they were organized as an LLC. A lawyer from Scranton handled the deal and seemed to be a party to it as well. “Andy Swales, you know him?”

  “We’ve met,” I said.

  “I think they thought this place would be overrun by now with the gas drilling. Slowed down on them, though.”

  I showed the retired lawyer Heffernan’s photo. “You recognize this guy?”

  “I don’t know the people the way I once did. Rent comes cash, in envelopes. I deposit it for them, I fix a leak or two, I paint the fence. They give me a little scratch for my trouble and I get out of the house.”

  WHEN PEOPLE around here talk about going to “the city,” they don’t mean the glorified intersection that is Fitzmorris or other small towns like that. They’re talking about going north over the New York border and the river to the cities dotting the Southern Tier. We have a choice of either Elmira to the west, maybe Owego if you count that as a city and I don’t, or Binghamton to the east.

  Binghamton, Broome County’s rusting anchor, was once nicknamed Parlor City because they made so many cigars there. Not no more. After the cigars vanished, Endicott Johnson came with their shoe factory and cheap houses for immigrant labor, which drew folks to the area now known as the Triple Cities: Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott. The founder of the shoe factory loved carousels and set up free ones in parks all over the area. And his factory kept things humming for a while. Hand me down my peg, my peg, my peg, my awl. In the year of 1998 the last EJ plant closed for good. IBM was still around, but downsizing. Strange now to think they got their start here.<
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  I parked in a metered spot downtown, beside one of the carousel horses that the city had bolted into the sidewalks some years back when it had proclaimed itself the Carousel Capitol of the World. With so many empty buildings and storefronts, the bright statues had always seemed about as cheerful as a roadside shrine to a car wreck. This particular chestnut mare had been tagged all over with black marker. A city living on in the echo of twentieth century bustle, now tired, with most people either wishing things could be the way they were, or never knowing they had been any different. I had little use for the place beyond the odd restaurant dinner or backyard party Ed and Liz Brennan dragged me to. It had always struck me as received wisdom that there was more to do in a place just because there were more people near each other and more things to buy. A ratty man in sweatpants and no shirt ambled up the walkway from the riverside, saw me, turned, and disappeared under the Court Street bridge. Not my problem.

  Andy Swales’s employer, Carmichael & Williams, LLP, was a large law firm based in Scranton. Apparently they had the idea to open up a satellite office on the border to try to rope in clients. It’s possible they were counting on a bonanza of gas business once New York’s moratorium lifted, but we all know how that went. Anyway, back at this time, Broome County must have looked like low-hanging fruit. Swales had volunteered to act as managing partner to this particular enterprise, and had apparently been confident enough in it to build himself a mansion in Wild Thyme.

  And the firm had their pick of office space. The two partners, four associates, and six support staffers had settled into the fifth floor of a building with cast-iron trim painted sky-blue. I rode the elevator up and identified myself to the receptionist and waited. After about five minutes, Andy Swales, Esq., emerged without a trace of nervousness. He appeared to have split off midstride from a previous conversation and, without pause, gripped me by my shoulder, key-carded a glass door, and led me back to his office. After a short walk down the hall and a joke with his assistant about how she better be good because he had a cop in here, he shut the door behind us. Swales had windows that looked over on the greened dome of the Broome County Courthouse to a sparkling stretch of the Susquehanna River. Several gentle landscape paintings hung on his walls, along with two diplomas.