by Alan Glenn
Toby said, “Fine!” and clambered off the chair, heading to his bedroom. “What is up with that boy?” Sam asked. “For the past month, he’s been a handful. Notes from school, the bed-wetting, and now this. What’s going on?”
Sarah poked the crumbs on her plate and didn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know. I wish I did, Sam, I wish I did. If I could, I’d tell you.”
“Sarah, look, it’s—”
She reached over, touched the back of his hand. A nice surprise. “I’m sorry about yesterday. Sorry about not telling the truth. It won’t happen again. But … please … just tonight. I swear it’s over.”
“Sarah, Tony’s out.”
“What?” Her face grew pale. “Paroled?”
“No, escaped.”
“Oh, Sam,” she said, drawing her hand back. “That’s why you went out last night.”
“He left a signal for me. Something from our Boy Scout days. I went to see him at Pierce Island.”
She kept quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You’re not turning him in, are you?”
“For God’s sake, what do you think? I can’t believe you asked me that.”
Her eyes moistened. “I’m sorry. It’s just that … lately I don’t know what to think. There’s a teacher at the school, he has a son who’s in the National Guard, was about to get promoted. The son found some anti-Long flyers in a closet in his father’s office, and the son turned him in. Can you believe that? The son turned his own father in! Just so his promotion would go through.”
“Tony and I, we’ve had our rough patches. We’re not like those fun brothers you see at a Mickey Rooney movie. Sometimes I think I don’t even like him much. But I’d never betray him.”
“Then what’s going to happen?”
“I offered him a place to stay. He said no. He said he’d be leaving in a few days. It’s just that— Dammit, is there any way you can cancel tonight’s visitor?”
“No, I can’t, Sam. You know how dangerous phone calls can be. Messages sometimes get passed hand to hand, through couriers. There isn’t time.”
“We could lock the bulkhead door.”
“And do what?” she said. “Force him to sleep in the bushes? Try his luck at the hobo camp? Picked up, maybe, by one of your brother officers for loitering? He’s my responsibility.”
“All right. The last one. And Tony—forget I mentioned him. Officially, he’s still in prison. Any questions from anyone, that’s all you know. I’m sure the FBI or somebody will be checking up on him. You haven’t seen him, you don’t know where he is. And that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Days like this, you surprise me, Inspector. Just when I’m going to give up on you and think you’ve been seduced by Long and his people, you come back and stand up for something.”
Sam thought of Tony’s critique of him and said, “I’d rather be seduced by you than anyone else, Sarah Miller, and that includes the President. Don’t forget about that rain check.”
Sarah looked tired but pleased, may be because the argument about their upcoming guest was over. “Oh, sweetie, that’s one rain check that will never expire. Here, I’ll even show you where it’s being stored.” She brought her hands to the hem of her skirt, slowly drew it up past her thighs. He moved his hand under her skirt, on the smooth stockings. He slid his fingers up, past her thighs. Sarah played a little game with him, squeezing her thighs tight, but as he pushed ahead, past the top of the stockings and the garter snaps, she moved her legs open. The skin of her thighs was soft indeed, and he heard her take a sharp breath as he moved his hand higher and—
Toby thumped out, carrying his book bag, eyes downcast. His parents straightened up, Sam breathing hard. “I’m sorry about kicking the table, Dad. I’m ready for school. And here. See? I finished my drawing. What do you think?”
The paper showed some sort of stick figure with a big head. There was a star drawn in the middle of the torso. “See? It’s you, Dad. Do you like it?”
“I sure do,” Sam said.
“Mom?”
“You made his head too small,” Sarah said.
Sam looked at his former cheerleader. “How about his heart?”
“Not big enough,” she said, smiling back, her gaze warming him despite all that had gone on before. Still … he had the feeling that all of this had been some sort of act, from the pleadings to the upraised skirt. The cast of her eyes didn’t match the brightness of her smile.
* * *
Toby sat next to him on the big front seat of the Packard, his school bag gripped with both hands, prattling on about a new lady at the cafeteria who kept on dropping mashed potatoes on the floor during lunchtime. Sam thought about the day ahead of him, about his John Doe, about Tony out there in the woods or maybe now in the city, and about their illegal guest coming tonight.
As they went down to the end of Grayson Street, there was movement off to the right at a house that had been empty for a month. It once belonged to the Jablonski family. One day the family vanished, just like that, and no one knew why. If anyone had seen a Black Maria come up to the house late at night, no one was talking.
There was a freight truck backed up to the house, a couple with two young boys standing nearby, huddled together, as three Long’s Legionnaires directed the movers bringing in boxes and furniture. That’s how it went sometimes, in other places. But not in Portsmouth, not until today. Somebody had been denounced to the authorities, and the denouncers got to move into the house of the deported as a reward.
Sam stopped at the yellow and black stop sign and looked into the rearview mirror, watching his new neighbors move in. Then he put the car in gear and drove on.
“Ask you something, Dad?”
“Sure, sport, go ahead.”
“You’re not a rat, are you?”
He turned. Toby looked up at him, his face serious.
“A rat? What made you ask that?”
“Oh, some of the guys at school say cops are all rats. That they put dads in jail for made-up stuff. That they take money from bad guys. Stuff like that. Some guys at recess yesterday, they said you were a rat.”
His wife, operating an Underground Railroad station in their basement. His brother, living God knew how five miles from here, and he, a sworn peace officer, letting him be. Family versus duty. Good guy versus rat. And just how did we get the money to buy our house? he thought.
“No, Toby, I don’t take money from anybody except from the city for my paycheck. I only put bad guys in jail, for real things, not made-up things.”
His son kept his mouth shut, toying with the buckles on his school bag.
“Toby, you believe me, don’t you?”
“Sure, Dad, of course I do.” Toby didn’t say anything more until Sam drove up to the squat brick building of the Spring Street School. Across from the school was a small grocery store. Glistening red on the store’s cement wall was a painted red hammer and sickle, and below that, in sloppy letters, DOWN WITH LONG. Toby looked out the window and said, “See that kid, Dad? Over there by the fence, the kid with the brown coat? That’s Greg Kennan. He told me you were a rat. I’m … I’m gonna tell him how wrong he is.”
“Don’t get into any trouble, Toby, okay?”
“I could take him, you know. If we had a fight.” The look in his eyes, the look of the devil that sometimes reminded him of Tony.
“Don’t have a fight.”
“I just want to stick up for you, that’s all.”
“And I want you to behave and do good, okay?”
Toby’s lips trembled. “I don’t like getting into trouble. I don’t. I … sometimes it happens. I can’t help it. Mom understands. Why can’t you?”
“Understand what?”
Toby opened the big door and climbed out, a little figure running toward the fenced-in asphalt courtyard. Two boys wearing short jackets and knickers were bouncing a ball off the side of the brick wall of the school. Nearby was a small parking lot for those teachers and administrators
fortunate enough to own automobiles. Three girls were on the sidewalk, playing with yo-yos. Out in the yard was Frank Kaminski, the brother of the local agitator Eric. The owner of the grocery store came out with a bucket of whitewash and a paintbrush, standing in front of the red hammer and sickle, his shoulders sagging.
“No, Toby,” Sam said to himself, shifting the Packard into drive. “I’m not a rat. And you don’t have to stick up for me.”
* * *
In the basement of the Portsmouth City Hospital, seven blocks south of the police station on Junkins Avenue, the Rockingham County medical examiner had a small office and work area next to the morgue. The walls were brick and cement block painted a dull green. The lights flickered as Sam opened the door. The medical examiner sat behind a desk covered with papers and folders, the usual debris of an overworked and underpaid county employee. On the walls hung framed photographic prints of the White Mountains, photos taken by the doctor, a hobby he was proud to show off.
“It’s about time you got here,” William Saunders said. The doctor’s voice was raspy—an old throat wound from his time on the Western Front during the last world war.
“Couldn’t be helped,” Sam replied. “Yesterday both my boss and the mayor had to have a piece of my butt.”
“Hell of a thing, to be so popular,” the medical examiner said. He was tall and thin, with a thick thatch of gray hair, and as he stepped up from his chair, he remained stooped, as though working in the basement of the hospital had permanently weighed him down. “But I won’t give you any more grief, Inspector. You’ve given me a delight this fine morning.”
From a rack he pulled down a black rubber chest-high apron, which he tossed over his head and tied behind him. Sam followed him.
The examination room, like the office, was cluttered. On the far wall were three heavy refrigerator doors. Three metal tables stood centered on the tile floor, the middle one occupied by a sheet-covered lump. Saunders picked up a clipboard and started flipping through the sheets of paper. Sam imagined bits of bone, flesh, and brain tissue stuck in the cracks and grooves of the tiles and metal equipment.
“Why is it a delight?” Sam asked.
“You know what my customers are like day in, day out? A hobo from one of the encampments with a knife wound. A drunk pulled from a car crash. Or some wretched fisherman who fell into the harbor and was found a month later. Do you know how much a body in the water swells and decomposes after a month?”
“I have a hunch,” Sam said. “You still haven’t told me why this body is a delight.”
“Because the bodies I usually get are boring. They’re traditional. They’re easy. Lucky for me, no corpses have come by with their hands tied behind them and two bullets in their skull.” Saunders tapped the clipboard on the feet of the body on the metal table. “This John Doe, this one is a mystery. I’ve been with this good man for hours now, and I’ve only come up with a few crumbs of information.”
“So tell me what your crumbs are.”
“Ah, the crumbs.” Saunders tugged the sheet down. The dead man looked ghastly in the yellow basement light, the Y-shaped incision ugly on the pale skin of his sunken chest. “What we have here is a malnourished white male, approximately fifty to fifty-five years in age. There was no identification in his clothing, and his clothing had no store tags, no laundry marks.”
“Yeah, I know. I noticed that when I first examined him.”
“Something, isn’t it, Inspector? It was like someone—either him or somebody else—wanted to make sure that identifying him would be impossible. Which is probably true. But you see, this poor dead man has one distinct advantage.”
Sam really wanted Saunders to pull the sheet back over the body, but he didn’t want to show a weakness. “And what’s that?”
“He ended up in my county and faced me, that’s what. Any other county in this state, he’d be in a potter’s field. But here, not quite yet. First of all, I believe the man is European.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. One, the clothing. The stitching is different, the quality of the cloth. Second, his dental work. There’s a difference in American and European dental work—the amount of gold and how it’s used, for example.”
“Can you be more specific? French? English? German?”
“They’re all German now, aren’t they? Sorry, no way to tell which occupied land this man is from.”
“You said he’s malnourished. What do you mean by that?”
“There’s a scale you use when you have a male subject of a certain height and certain age. This gentleman should have weighed between one hundred sixty pounds and one hundred seventy pounds. He actually weighs one hundred twenty. Almost skeletal.”
“Did he have cancer or TB?”
Saunders shook his head. “Internal organs were distressed from being underweight, but there was no obvious sign of disease. I sent his blood out for analysis, but it seems to me, odd as it sounds, that your friend here hadn’t eaten a good meal in a very long time. Some of the hoboes I’ve examined over the years have been underweight, but nothing like this man. It was like he was deliberately starved. However, just to advise you, his lack of eating didn’t kill him.”
Sam felt frustrated, like he was being lectured to. “So you don’t know what killed him. Good for you. Then what was the cause of death?”
The medical examiner stepped up to the dead man’s head. “His neck was snapped.”
“Broken neck. All right, accident or homicide?”
“Homicide, without a doubt. Here”—Saunders pointed to the neck and jaw with a pencil—“and here, there are bruises that indicate to me your John Doe was forcibly grabbed from behind. He had his neck snapped. By someone taller and stronger than he. Left-handed, I have no doubt. To be fair, in his frail and malnourished state, a teenage boy could have probably killed him. There you have it. One older European male, neck snapped, and dropped right in your lap.”
“There was a tattoo on his wrist. A bunch of numbers. Did you see any other tattoos?”
“Not a one,” Saunders said. “But it’s intriguing, isn’t it?” He lifted up the left arm. “Six digits in a row. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Any guess what it can mean?”
“Who knows? Mother or girlfriend’s birth date. A safe combination or a bank account number. Like I said, intriguing. In the meantime, I’ll write up a preliminary report and have it sent over this afternoon. I won’t officially put down the cause of death—I want to wait for blood work—but you can be sure it was murder.”
Despite his earlier frustration, Sam was pleased. Saunders could be a pain in the ass with his lecturing style, but he knew his job. “Appreciate the work, Doc.”
“Let me know how this one turns out before it appears in the newspapers. Half-starved European with a broken neck dropped off in our fair city. Before you go, would you care for a bit of advice from someone who’s been on the job longer than he should have been?”
“Depends on the advice, I guess.”
Saunders slowly tucked the sheet back into place, as tenderly as if preparing the dead man for a long nap. “This is an unusual case, and unusual cases tend to have something sinister attached to them. Be careful, Sam. So many think that the story ends here, with a dead man on a slab. More often than not, this is where the story begins.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back at his desk at the police station, Sam typed up another memo, in triplicate, while Mrs. Walton sat glumly nearby, working at her own typewriter.
TO: City Marshal Harold Hanson
FROM: Inspector Sam Miller
An autopsy performed by Rockingham County Medical Examiner DR. WILLIAM SAUNDERS has determined the cause of death for the unidentified male found last night by the B&M railroad tracks to be a HOMICIDE. According to DR. SAUNDERS, his autopsy results have not yet been finalized, although he is confident in his finding of HOMICIDE. No progress has yet been made on the victim’s identification, alth
ough the investigation continues.
It was time to notify the state. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general was brought in for all homicide cases, and for the first time in his career—feeling just a bit nervous, despite the giddiness of having a murder case before him—Sam picked up the phone, got an operator, and placed the call to Concord.
A bored-sounding woman on the other end of the line informed him that all available assistant attorney generals were at court, with the state police, or otherwise engaged. She promised a return phone call later today or perhaps tomorrow. Depending.
Sam hung up the phone, feeling oddly satisfied. Fine. He would continue the investigation on his own, which suited him perfectly. Next to his typewriter was a manila envelope with the return address of the Portsmouth Herald. Opening the envelope, he slid out a handful of black-and-white photographs of his John Doe, sprawled on that bare stretch of mud. How in hell did he get there? Dropped? Thrown? From where? And why?
He picked up the phone again and dialed a four-digit number from memory. In seconds, he was talking to Pat Lowengard, the station manager in town for the Boston & Maine railroad.
“Sam, how are you today?” Pat’s voice was smooth and professional, as though it belonged over a station’s PA system.
“Fine, Pat, fine. Looking for a bit of information.”
“Absolutely. What do you need?”
Sam picked up his fountain pen. Pat and the cops had a long and cooperative relationship. The department and its officers got a break on ticket prices to Boston and New York, and the railroad station got a break from automobiles parked illegally on side streets.
“What trains did you have come by two nights ago?” Sam asked.
“Can you narrow it down a bit?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” He looked at his notes. “Anytime before six P.M.”
“Just a sec. Let me check that day’s schedule.”
Sam leaned back in his chair until Pat came on the line again. “Got two in the afternoon. One at two-fifteen P.M., the other at five forty-five P.M.”