by Tom Bouman
“He’s a stone. You’d be wasting a day.”
Since the news report, I’d had a feeling that I’d seen the stranger somewhere before. It could have been that I was placing him where my brain wanted him to be, supplying meaning where there was none. But I didn’t think so. The man we’d arrested had short hair, but when I superimposed the stringy ponytail of the artist’s rendition from Miss Jelinski’s description, I was almost sure. I said, “What if I know the guy?”
“Henry, nobody does.”
“I mean, I’ve seen him.”
Sleight expelled a long breath. “Tell me, then.”
“At Stingy Jack’s, sitting at the bar that night. He looked at me wrong.”
“This is about more than Penny. Give it some time. At this point, she’ll keep.”
A folder thick as a magazine arrived in the mail from Binghamton’s Detective Division. The comparison between blood taken from the Schuyler County road and the stranger post-arrest was a match, a smoking gun. DNA profiles matching Vicki Jelinski and him were found in the Cadillac, as well as two more unidentified samples from the trunk. His clothes were just a lot of noise, but his coat and pants contained surprises. The techs had noted several foul-smelling stains, and the coat sleeves and trouser knees were particularly saturated with heavy metals, barium, calcium, and silicates.
Closing time, I tucked photos and sketches under my arm and took a cruise over to Airy Township to see if Mr. Buckles had returned. The leaves were still unraked in his yard, but a rented dumpster stood next to his swaybacked cottage. The curtilage had been partly cleared and as I pulled up, Sage was heaving a roll of rusted wire fencing into the bin. As I approached he said, “How can I miss you if you never leave?”
“Last we talked, I told you to stay put,” I said.
“What do I got to stay put for? I had business in Beaver.” He seized a plastic tub and threw it into the dumpster. Where it had been, insects fled the bare dirt for new cover. “Won’t be here long,” he said. “That should make you happy, finally drive a workingman out of town. Drive a strong man out. Keep the weak ones. Makes your job easy, don’t it?”
“What can I say? Good luck to you. Where you headed?”
“Selling the place. Getting it ready, anyway. I can take a hint. Since I been here, I been accused, beat, harassed, my old lady moved away, shit.”
“How is Hope these days?”
“How should I know?”
“Know where I can reach her?” If Buckles didn’t know the stranger, maybe Hope did.
Sage pried a sheet of tin off of a great lump in the yard, and seemed delighted to find half a face cord of firewood underneath. “What?”
“Hope, where is she?”
He shrugged. “You here to see her, or me?”
Sage peered once more at three images of the stranger, this time with photos accompanying the sketches, and handed them back to me. “I told you before, I’m supposed to know him? I know a million guys like him.”
“Not like this one,” I said. I listened to the silence Sage was putting out. “This one tried to kill you.”
“I got hit from behind. I didn’t see.”
“You didn’t have to see, did you? You know. You have a job, you have a house, you managed to tiptoe your way past jail time. But you’re clearing out. What kind of trouble are you in? Let me help.”
He turned away from me and unearthed a sodden computer chair missing its wheels. “I’m good. Never seen that guy before except on the news. I don’t know what happened to me up at the pad, I don’t know what people say happened. People talk a lot of shit and don’t know.”
“You ever spend any time at Stingy Jack’s?”
“Who’s that?” said Buckles, facing away. I left him to his work.
In among the stunted trees and the leaves still clutching to them, I looked from the ridgetop to Joe Blaine’s vacant country house. I left, returned that evening, and waited until after midnight. Nobody showed. The next day I did the same. The third morning, I gave that up, looked in the Internet white pages, and found a J Blaine living on Binghamton’s West Side near Main Street.
AT 7:37 A.M., the city was alive but not yet overrun with car traffic. Kids with backpacks nearly big as themselves tripped along the sidewalks to their schools. I never could walk to my school, which was miles away from the house I grew up in. I waited for a bus at the end of my dirt road by a hutch the township had built for us. When it rained or got cold, there were fights over who got to stand in it, but I knew better than to scrap over a thing I never wanted. I was happy outside in all weather, miserable in school, whether school was merely a roof in the cold, a bus, or a concrete holding pen run by teachers as mean as their students. Sitting in my truck at the end of the residential block there in town, it came back to me and my heart hurt for those kids, knowing it’d be years before they’d get out.
I waited on the far side of a triangular park with coffee and donuts and a pocket scope. From my position, I could look straight to a little blue house on the corner of Schubert Street and Mendelssohn. There was a fat SUV in the driveway, and a copper-colored sport wagon parked out front. The wagon was new as of that morning. Every twenty minutes I drove away and parked somewhere else with a view. In the light of morning there wasn’t much I could do to hide; the neighbors would see me and wonder.
Yet that was how I had spent four days that week. In the early evenings after my shifts I drove back to Binghamton to follow Blaine the couple miles to Stingy Jack’s. Late into the nights I switched up my positions, watching cars as they moved in and out of the bar’s dirt lot.
Around nine that morning, a young woman trotted down Blaine’s driveway in tight jeans and a short jacket. They looked like clothes she might have worn out at night, not what she’d put on for a quiet Binghamton morning. The night before, I’d given up waiting for Blaine to leave the bar after two-thirty a.m., and hadn’t seen her go home with him; possibly she was a bartender. Stopping at the SUV, she opened a backseat door and pulled out a small duffel bag, took it with her to the car out front. I started my engine. Two blocks, two turns, and her sport wagon found Main Street, with me following a few cars behind. At Front Street she turned left to head north, and I followed, until a car swung in front of me and slowed to a crawl. I tried to pass him, but he straddled the yellow lines, blocking me. In the distance, the copper wagon drove under a trestle and onward to one of a couple highways. A black muscle car with tinted windows pulled out from behind, sped up the block, and slowed again under the bridge.
The car in front of me stopped dead. A dark-skinned hand emerged from the driver’s-side window and pointed down a side street. I followed the driver there and parked. The hand beckoned to me. I left my truck and walked slowly to meet the owner of the hand: Detective Oates of Binghamton Special Investigations.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no.”
KEVIN O’KEEFFE called my station three times that week, and I managed not to be there to answer any of them. I later recognized the Mahanoy number on my caller ID. After the final call he left me a message: three seconds of silence, then, “Who’s that on the news?”
JUST EAST of the Heights there is a roadside car dealership and junkyard climbing up a hill. A man named Cy Stokes owned and operated it. As far as I knew, he’d never sold a running automobile to anyone off of his lot; his business was scrap and parts. He’d called me once about tweakers up to his or his brother’s junkyard, yanking the best parts out of his best cars. I’d told him there was no way to help; I could never verify what trailer hitch or exhaust sytem had or had not been in his possession at one time, even if I’d found the guys. If he’d caught them red-handed, had a photograph or something with the stuff visible, maybe.
I returned from a spin around the township one morning to find Cy Stokes waiting for me at the station, a little kobold of a man dried out by work and cigarette smoke. He followed me inside and stood twisting his hat in his hands while I hung up my coat.
“Sit,” I told
him. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I seen the news,” he said. “Seen a fellow on there and it looked like I knew him from somewhere. And then I heard about the car, and I . . .”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well,” said Stokes, looking itchy. “Well. This was back in May or June? Months ago, anyhow. Long-haired man comes to my lot, early morning, he’s got a hat on but I can see he’s got the long hair under, and he’s got a truck that ain’t running good, but it does run, inspection’s overdue, registration’s about to expire, and he wants something else, a car. Something less noisy, he says.”
“A truck, you say.”
“Yessir, he had a Nissan pickup. So I take him around, show him—the truck ain’t worth a quarter, I’ll tell you what—but I show him. Says he likes an old car, a stick, he likes a Cadillac I got on the lot. I tell him straight, you buy that car off this lot today? You better put a case of steering fluid in the trunk, because the rack-and-pinion is shot. Been meaning to replace it. He don’t care, he’ll get it fixed. He wants to take the car. But the funny thing is, he don’t want me to sell the truck, he wants me to store it up on the hill there, in case he ever wants it back. Says he’ll pay a grand for me to just keep it, but if he comes back and it’s gone or anybody’s been taking parts, he ain’t going to be happy.”
“A yellow Nissan?”
Stokes fell silent.
“You got paperwork on this?” I said. “Titles? A name, even?”
“The man needed a car right then. I didn’t have the title right then. He didn’t have his title. I know it ain’t right, but at the time . . . we’re talking about two vehicles that ain’t worth a quarter. I’m telling you now because it is right: I sold this man a Cadillac de Ville car, and damned if he didn’t turn around and put a girl in the trunk of it. I seen him face-to-face. And yeah, the truck he give me was yellow as a buttercup.”
TWO FORENSIC DETECTIVES from the Binghamton Police Department’s Identification Services, a woman named Mason and a man named Riva, picked their way around Kevin O’Keeffe’s pickup where it stood in the shade of a red maple tree. Brambles had grown up around it, knee-high, and the truck looked natural among the other wrecks waiting for the crusher in the Stokeses’ yard. It was a cold, gray morning and several of us had hiked up the hill from the garage. Lieutenant Sleight wore a tracksuit and ate plain donuts one by one from a small box. Sheriff Dally and DA Ross were there, as well as a New York BCI detective named Portiss. At a distance Cy Stokes watched, accompanied by his brother Ollie, fat and soft as a wad of Kleenex, with white in his beard.
Sleight turned to the Stokes brothers. “You say you didn’t let anyone else near this thing?”
“I mean,” said the little man, “I called Henry about people snitching parts a while back. But far as I can tell, they didn’t take nothing out of the truck.” Stokes shot a look at his brother. It was in a blink, but I saw it. Sleight did too.
ID Services began their work with powder, brush, and tape. Mason crouched by the opening with an elaborate dust-buster to gather particles. From what I could see craning my neck, the truck’s cab had been swept clean. The interior panel would eventually be removed once they lifted any prints, and the steel innards of the vehicle scoured for contraband and trace evidence. I peered into the bed and saw that it, too, had been cleared of Kevin’s things.
Not until we reached the underside of the bench did the detectives perk up. The vinyl upholstery had been torn away from the seat, from the looks of it with a razor. Much of the foam had been gouged away, exposing some of the metal bones. Some of the floor rubber had been peeled back and stripped. Mason crouched with a flashlight, then waved a hand behind her, signaling for quiet. We watched as she dropped alcohol on a contact strip and pressed it to a spot on the floor beneath the seat. Then she opened a chemical applicator and tested the solution in the tube against the paper. It turned the bright blue of a gas flame.
“We need to take all of this,” she told Sleight. “We should haul this whole vehicle back to the hangar. Anything around it we find.”
The lieutenant raised his eyebrows.
“Blood,” she said.
Out front of the garage, Cy and Ollie were passing between automobile husks, opening hoods and rubbing their chins. Sleight called Cy over.
“We’ve got to take the truck,” he said.
“I thought so,” said Cy.
“Nothing in and out of this yard until we say so,” said Sleight. “You’re closed.”
Cy removed his hat and swatted his leg with it. “I got Northern Scrap expecting ten tons this week. I can’t do business that way.”
“That’s right, no business,” Sleight said. “We have questions.”
“What you see is what it is.”
“Yeah, a sale with no papers. A sale and you don’t even know the party’s name. When did the VIN come off the Cadillac? Did you do it?”
“No.”
Sleight took off his glasses, rubbed his forehead, replaced his glasses. “Jesus Christ,” he said in a rare loss of temper. “People have been killed. You didn’t think?”
“That’s why I went to Henry,” Cy said. He looked ready to cry.
“This truck is stolen; you knew it, you received it, you hid it. Theft and obstructing justice. Then you got conveying a Cadillac without title. And the VIN coming off the Caddy, the VIN thing is federal.”
Ollie Stokes had not spoken a word since we arrived. He stepped forward, and in a shaking voice said, “Sirs, this ain’t the first one.”
“Ollie—”
“Well, it ain’t, Cy.”
Cy held up his hands, weary. “We’ll tell you what we know. You want to charge this and that, I can’t stop you. But I came to Henry on my own. We never knew what we’d got into. Have you tried to make a buck out here?”
The first such “trade-in” between the stranger and Cy Stokes took place a year prior, and concerned a Japanese sedan with over a hundred thousand miles and light rust on the doors’ edges. The man had brought it in early morning and exchanged it for another mid-sized. Cy didn’t say this, but we guessed that the transaction had to have been unbalanced in the Stokeses’ favor, and in cash. The car Cy had bought was clean enough to put on the lot, but the stranger did not want it sold, he wanted it destroyed, so when he passed by the Stokeses’ used car lot and found the sedan out for sale, he paid a visit to the brothers and made that clear. They’d crushed the car the next day and sold it to Northern Scrap. There had been two more, both sedans, both exchanged for the same money, the same arrangement. Why the fellow had wanted the truck saved, Cy could not say.
“Them cars were clean,” Ollie maintained. “Whatever he used them for, them cars were clean when we got them.”
“Smelled like Clorox,” said Cy. “Except the truck.”
Sheriff Dally took Sleight and the Stokes boys to his department to wring every detail out of them. They were shown photographs of both the stranger and Kevin O’Keeffe into the bargain. Cy pointed to the stranger, but could not say for certain.
Lee Hillendale, the sheriff, and I drove south to visit Kevin O’Keeffe in Mahanoy. His face had further sharpened and turned to stone. I guess Kevin had general instructions from Lee to say nothing to the police, and he did not, raising an eyebrow and leaning back in his chair, asking a question we still couldn’t answer. Had he ever done any business with the Stokes brothers? No, he didn’t know them. Once again, did he know the man pictured here? No, only from the news. Who was he?
Binghamton ID Services hauled the truck north. In Holebrook County, we were content to send it all up north to the investigation in New York and trust that it’d come back down to us. But the look on DA Ross’s face when he saw the match between Penny Pellings and the blood found in O’Keeffe’s truck said what was on his mind. Kev was still in play for Penny’s murder, and always had been.
SEVEN O’CLOCK Friday evening, I parked under a crisscross of bare oak limbs with orange streetli
ghts shining down through them, near the Civil War memorial on the square in Fitzmorris, PA. I had a dinner engagement, and with forty-five minutes to go, I was at a loose end. Around the corner from the courthouse was a tavern called the Low Road. I took the four concrete steps down from the sidewalk and ducked into the door. The bar was beneath what was once a four-story hotel, now empty. Staring in the bar’s mirror, I noted that though I had attempted to comb my hair and beard, I still looked like a dead Civil War general. At the jukebox I punched a few Alan Jackson tunes and returned to the bar. After forty minutes ticked by, I stood, ate a breath mint, and went out to meet my doom.
Night had settled over Fitzmorris. Around the corner stood a building that used to be a feed and hardware store. The interior was well lit and conversation spilled out the windows. I stood at the door for a moment, and then I went in. Of course, everyone was at pains to say it wasn’t a date; who goes on those anymore. Yet it was something. A distinct pairing-off.
The new restaurant, called Dry Goods and Sundry, was full of unfamiliar people—natural gas management, folks from over the border in New York. I slipped through to where Ed, Liz, and Julie Meagher sat. Julie smiled. I smiled back and reminded myself not to start talking unless I had something to say. Sitting at a table was not like baking a pie. Though—again—I had no particular reason for it, my mouth was dry and my heart thudded.
With a glass of syrupy Finger Lakes wine in hand, I unclenched my mind and drank enough to where I could talk without stammering. Ed, Liz, and Julie handled most of the conversation. I hardly tasted my brick chicken and braised greens. The restaurant was new, and the idea of it was farm and field to table, meaning as much local, game, and wild food as they could get, they’d serve to the public. Julie had ordered the venison ragout, but I had decided against it, reasoning in my mind that I didn’t deserve it, having gone out with the bow only twice in October and come back empty-handed. Rifle season started the end of the month, and I was already scouting. I found myself asking Miss Julie did she hunt at all.