by Dick Cluster
“What about his mother?” Alex was trying to understand where and when the conversation might have taken place. Behind that blue door, it would have been. Was it late in the night, post-drug-rush and/or post-orgasm? Was it late in the morning, trying to recharge depleted batteries over real or instant coffee? What had Suzanne felt for Scat, and what had he felt for her? “I mean, she was the Pepperell, not Scat’s father, right?”
“His mother, more like, had dropped it, or ran away from it. She spent most of her time in Paris. She had a French boyfriend— ran off with her ski instructor, Scat said, but later I found out the guy was from some rich old family, nobility, over there.”
“Do you think Scat felt guilty about his class?”
“Maybe.” Suzanne nodded. “To tell you the truth, that’s something I can think about now, but it wouldn’t’ve meant anything if you’d asked it to me then. When I met Scat, I didn’t know anybody knew how to be ashamed of being rich.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. He didn’t want to attract attention, lingering too long in front of Katahdin Homes unit number B-71. Yet nothing distinguished it as a place where somebody had tried to set down roots, or as a place whose owner had recently died. Well, what did you expect? Alex asked himself. A state trooper? A For Sale sign? A crepe-paper black letter D? He wondered who was inheriting Scat’s home, and who if anybody had been inside it since he died. All he could tell by looking was that evidently, owner alive or owner deceased, somebody had the job of shoveling the walk. He asked, “Do you know anybody that would have a key?”
“Better than that,” Suzanne said. “Scat kept a key hidden in the ski closet outside. It was there last weekend, I used it to lock up when we left.”
16. WITHOUT BREATH…
Alex had tried and failed to reserve a one-bedroom condo after meeting Rosemarie Davis on Tuesday night. The reservation clerk had suggested a hotel room instead, only of course they weren’t called hotels, they were called inns. All the inns were named after native New England trees. For seventy-five dollars a night, Alex had gotten the very last room in the Black Pine, which was a grade below the Sugar Maple and two grades below the Silver Birch. The Silver Birch, top of the line, had a fancy restaurant. That was the restaurant where Caroline Davis had worked.
Alex planned to start by talking to Caroline’s co-workers, but first he wanted Suzanne out of his way. The question was what Graham Johnston might have told Trevisone, and whether Trevisone would therefore guess that Alex had been headed up here. Would the sergeant have alerted the local police, and would the locals have taken the time and trouble to comb the reservation lists or put out an alert to the front desks? Alex could try re-registering under a different name, but probably there were no more rooms to be had. Possibly, considering the green Oldsmobile and “Detective Callahan,” it might be just as well for Suzanne to get caught. She might be better off in the hands of the local police.
The Black Pine Inn at Pepperell Woods looked at lot like the Days Inn in Burlington, only it had decorative wood trim, painted black. Alex parked in the lot, left Suzanne in the car, and signed his forms and collected his key without the receptionist narrowing her eyes or making any furtive calls. He gave Suzanne the key and was glad to have a chance to do Rosemarie Davis’s work on his own. He decided to go give Scat’s place a quick once-over before he started flashing Rosemarie’s letter and drawing attention to himself. He drove slowly back to Katahdin Homes, turning over in his mind that curious conversation between Scat and Suzanne about peasants and roots.
The key was in the outdoor shed as promised. It fit smoothly, and just as smoothly turned the tumblers built into the doorknob. He pushed open the dark blue door and stepped inside. By the time he’d shut the door behind him, he realized that somebody else either had been assigned or had elected to give the place a going-over.
Whoever it had been had not gone wild. They hadn’t thrown stuff around or broken anything. But neither had they taken pains to disguise their visit. In the kitchen, to Alex’s right, some cupboard doors were open and some were closed. He passed up the kitchen and headed for the living room, straight ahead, where he could see the couch cushions, pink and bare, removed from their cases.
The couch was brown and beat up— rips mended with tape, and cigarette burns on the arms. Besides this, the furniture consisted of a deep pile carpet, also burned, a big padded chair, a dark wooden cabinet holding the sound system, and two big speakers encased in the same wood. The wall decorations were framed posters— museum show announcements and female superstars, intermixed. Some of them hung crookedly on the smudged white sheetrock walls. Alex picked up one of the empty brown cases of the couch pillows. There was nothing inside but lint and grit. He turned his back on all this and headed up the carpeted stairs.
The stairs led to a hallway, also white sheetrock, whose open doors showed a bathroom, a master bedroom, and a smaller bedroom set up as a sort of office. Alex chose the office, which contained a desk, metal with Formica top, and a safe— not a big safe, maybe one foot square, but authentic-looking, with a big combination dial. There was also a fold-out couch that had been opened to expose the mattress. Alex was more interested in the ladder mounted to the wall. The ladder was wooden, with wide, flat rectangular rungs. It led to a trapdoor.
Alex climbed the ladder. He found that the trapdoor was not locked, and it was hinged in such a way that it stayed open when lifted. He saw bookcases with books and magazines and papers and video and audio tapes, many of them spilled onto the floor, meaning that this loft, too, had been searched. He saw mattresses, another sound system, a TV and VCR. His first impression, standing on the ladder with his upper half through the trapdoor into the loft, was that it was very hot here. He wanted to scramble the rest of the way in and strip off his winter coat. His second impression was the faint smell of sweat.
The loft was big, running the length of the unit, with three vertical walls and a long, sloping roof on the fourth side. Skylights in this roof gave grand views of the mountains. A man was sitting on the floor, his bare back to Alex, doing sit-ups facing the mountains. The man was big and beefy, with reddish brown hair to his shoulders. Before Alex could stop staring, the man had whirled around and launched himself across the room, his big hands reaching for Alex’s wrists as Alex tried to retreat down the ladder.
Alex let go and jumped, keeping his feet, but the man landed behind him with a heavy thump. The next thump was Alex hitting the carpet, arms protecting his head. He’d been tackled expertly behind the knees. The big man’s weight was on his ass. The big man’s hands pinned his shoulders. He told himself that Suzanne would have mentioned it if “Detective Callahan” had sported shoulder-length hair. Wouldn’t she? He thought somebody else did have hair like that. He just couldn’t remember who. The man on top of him was breathing hard and loud, like a ventilation system. Alex wished he could do the same. The man leaned forward, shifting weight to his knees. The pressure on Alex’s pelvis eased, but now his shoulders were crushed to the floor. Alex concentrated on the few cubic inches between his face, the puffy arm of his coat, and the rug. Without breath, his lungs reminded him, life itself would be impossible. The carpet made what air he got smell of chemical cleaners, carcinogens he was sure. He kicked upward, hoping he could slam his heels into the man’s kidneys, but they didn’t reach that high.
“I know,” the man said. His voice was deep, which was not surprising, but gentle too. It seemed distinct from the speed and power with which he could obviously act. Alex thought of Terry Newcombe. The man said, “I know,” again, but sounded unsure, still trying to nail something down— nail it with sure strokes, but hands that could be soft. Being soft until the moment of impact, not closing off the channels but concentrating the energy, then suddenly becoming rock-hard. Terry had said something about that. Alex realized he was getting confused, blamed it on the lack of air. “You were in the church,” the man said. The big hands relaxed and Alex forced his chest up with his arms. He breathed and
then spoke, wonderingly: “So were you!”
The man stood up, stood over Alex as if he had no question about who would come out on top in another fight. Alex sat up and rested his back against the wall. The man wore jeans, waist maybe forty, forty-two. His belly bulged out of them, a deep navel surrounded by hair that was more reddish and less brown. Despite the sit-ups he was losing that battle with his belly, Alex thought. His face was clean-shaven, pink. He might be twenty-five, maybe thirty, judging by the wrinkles around his blue eyes.
“Why?” the man said. “What was your interest there?”
“Curiosity,” Alex said truthfully.
The man shook his head. The comers of his mouth turned down. “That’s a hell of thing to say.”
“I’m sorry. But don’t you read obituaries of people you don’t know?”
That was taking a chance. In fact Alex hadn’t meant to be so flip. But somehow this man struck Alex as somebody who related to the printed word. A woodsman, old-fashioned, maybe that was it. A throwback to the days when reading was respected, even if the newspaper was all you read. If that was all you had, you read it well.
“You didn’t know Caroline?” the man asked.
Pay dirt, Alex thought. This guy was in Scat’s house, but he knew Caroline. He was the other mourner whom Rosemarie hadn’t known. Alex could tell he cared by the way he said her name. It was like the way Suzanne said Terry’s name, only much more so. Like the name had a taste to it. You couldn’t fake that. He knew Caroline and he liked her, Alex thought.
“I didn’t even know what she looked like. In fact, I still don’t. I want to. I want to know what she was like.”
“Why?”
“I want to know”— Alex shied away from “who killed her”— “I want to know why she died.”
“Right answer,” the man nodded. He pointed toward the ladder and the trapdoor.
“Up,” he said. “I’m camping out in the loft there. I can give you a warm beer, that’s about all.”
Alex stood and climbed. He liked this man. He liked Suzanne, he liked Tommy, he liked Natalie, he liked Rosemarie Sturgeon. He liked too many people in this affair.
17. LANDLORD/TENANT
Alex sipped the warm beer, Miller’s, from the golden aluminum can. He flipped through the pages of Scat’s photo album, which lay open on his lap. The album was dark blue vinyl, the same color as the front door, but gilded like the can. He knew the man who’d been doing sit-ups in Scat Johnston’s loft was studying him. He thought it would be okay to show both puzzlement and surprise.
It had surprised him that Scat kept a photo album at all. Keeping photo albums didn’t mix with dealing hard drugs, in Alex’s mind. Not that anybody distinguished between hard and soft drugs anymore. Between the ones that bound you to the torturer’s wheel and the ones that might expand your options, your mind. Anyway, Scat had sorted and stored his photographs for reminiscence or display. Alex recalled what Suzanne had said about the Opium Wars, what Bernie had said about the Johnstons and the slave trade. Those ancestors would have had albums, however unsavory their businesses. Not snapshots, though. They would have hired portrait painters.
So surprise had faded as Alex examined things from several angles. He’d flipped through the album, skimming over group shots, party scenes, photos of skiers in action, and nature shots with no people at all. None of it remarkable, nothing to show why the big man whose sit-ups he’d interrupted had chosen this of all Scat’s possessions to lay, silently, on Alex’s lap. He looked up, puzzled. The big man said, “There’s two more inside that flap in the back.”
There were— two glossies, thirty-five-millimeter shots, the same as the rest but waiting to be mounted, not yet preserved behind plastic as a piece of picture-book life. Now they never would be. One picture showed an icy surface with a round hole in it. It reminded Alex of National Geographic features about seals and polar bears, but otherwise meant nothing to him at all. The second picture caused his face to lift again in surprise. “Now you know what she looks like,” the big man said. “Her and him both.” Therefore the picture said that Scat and Caroline had been lovers. This was a possibility that had never crossed his mind.
No, he told himself. Slow down. The picture said that Scat and Caroline had sat up in a bed together, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning for the camera, naked from the waist up. Who knew? Maybe naked from the waist up was some kind of rule around here. In fact, the picture itself didn’t even say that this happy couple were Caroline and Scat. It merely showed a woman and a man of about the right ages. Surprise faded to skepticism. Alex thought it would be okay if this change, too, showed in his face. He reached for his wallet and pulled out the letter from Rosemarie.
“I guess I have to take your word for that,” he said, handing the letter over. “I’m Alex Glauberman, this says why I’m here. Anything you can tell me, I’ll be very interested to know.”
“I’m Dennis MacDonald.” The man looked over the letter and scratched the sole of one bare foot. “Kids used to call me Dennis the Menace and Old MacDonald until I grew enough that they got scared to. ’Course, some people think they’ve gotta call me Big Mac. I’ve been waiting here twenty-four hours now for something to happen. I’m tired of going through this guy’s shit. That’s him, and that’s her, and that picture is the only unusual thing in the place.”
“The only one?”
“Well, I don’t know what’s in the safe, but I can guess. When they open it they’ll keep the cash and throw the dope away. Or maybe not. The guy read westerns and sci-fi and Playboy and best-sellers. His music taste was like a top-forty chart. He didn’t hide nothing that I could find.”
“Weren’t the police or his parents or somebody here before you?”
“The police know better than to poke their noses in here, and I guess his folks aren’t in a hurry either. He didn’t die here, it’s just where his possessions are waiting around to be collected, that’s all. But I thought maybe somebody would come along that might be worried about something. Or sooner or later I’d get caught, and the cops would charge me with something, and then I could sound off about how they weren’t doing their job.”
“You’ve discussed Caroline’s death with the police, then?”
Dennis MacDonald drained his can of Miller’s as if Alex’s question was dumb enough it could be put off until after the more important swallowing of the last drop. Then he said, angrily, “I fucking-A have.”
“Tell me,” Alex said. “Because I can’t.”
“Can’t you? I wonder why, but we’ll get to that, I guess. You know the Woods, the layout here?”
“No.”
‘‘Jesus. That letter says what you’re doing but not why it’s you. We’re talking about an isolated stretch of dirt road, no speed limit posted, the motto around here is Live Free or Die. People drive like a bat out of hell on the back roads, and anybody that lives here knows it. There’s a ski trail through the woods uphill from the road, going the same way the road does. Parallel. Going parallel, till it turns down a real gentle slope to the place where you’re supposed to cross. Now there’s also an old logging road, overgrown, goes straight down the hill. They say she decided to take a shortcut, went bombing down the logging road flat out, didn’t think to snowplow, nothing that shows she tried to turn at the bottom. She went over the snowbank like she was going off a jump, right into the path of the car. They showed me the pictures they took of the tracks. And I went out and looked at them myself.”
“And?”
“The tracks showed what they said. You can’t see ’em, last night’s snow would’ve covered ’em up. But why would she do that? Why would anybody ski flat out like that onto the road?”
“You asked the cops?”
“I asked. They shrug. Tired and in a hurry, maybe, they say. They frown. Wrecked maybe, one guy says. Fucked up. Yeah? Did you do a test, I say. Sure. The driver consented to a urine test and a breathalyzer. He wasn’t squeaky clean, but he was un
der the limits. No, I say: a test of the victim. They look at me like I’m nuts. Not the victim, they say. No law against skiing under the influence. But why would she do that, I say again. They look at the floor and wiggle their tummies, embarrassed. For her, not for their own dumb asses. Kind of a mixed-up kid, they say. Dropped out of a fancy college, waiting tables at the inn instead. Coulda been suicidal.”
“So you think—?” Alex asked.
“There’s two choices. One is the cops are right, she made the tracks, and nobody’ll ever know why. The other is she didn’t make the tracks. Somebody else made the tracks, before she got hit, or right after. Somebody else made the tracks while there was a car stopped on the road, so they knew they wouldn’t get hit.”
“What happened when she got hit?”
The big man turned away and looked at the mountains. He looked back at Alex with wet eyes. “The guy, Scat, and the cops say she hit the road kind of spread-eagled, with her skis twisted upside down. He couldn’t stop the car, she couldn’t get up. Her skull got crushed right away, they guess, and a lot of bones got broke. The car went into a skid and dragged her a ways before the rear wheels went over her too. I wasn’t facing all this at first. That’s why I didn’t know how dumb I sounded, asking about autopsies and drug tests and shit. They didn’t take her to the hospital. Straight to the funeral home and shipped her out to the Coast.”
“Who was she to you?” Alex asked.
“Tenant. I mean, we shared the house, she paid some rent, did some cooking and cleaning. Old vacation cottage, I winterized it…”
Dennis MacDonald let that linger as if he wanted to say more but couldn’t or wouldn’t. Alex mentally added, “…when I first moved out here with my ex-wife and kids.” Maybe. Or else it was some other plan, some other imagined sequel that had gone wrong.
“And you think maybe she was already dead or unconscious, and the ‘accident’ destroyed the evidence of how that was done?” The big man shrugged. His chest expanded and then slumped. The extra meat on it bounced, but not for long. It was mostly muscle. It bounced like a car with nice new shocks.