by Neil Plakcy
“You didn’t argue with him?” I asked. “Even innocently? Push him around?”
“There wasn’t enough room in that space for an argument,” he said. “We could both stand up, or we could both lie down. That was about it.”
“Was there someplace he could have hit his head?” Lili asked.
“I couldn’t see anything, but there was some blood congealed around his head, like he’d hit it or been hit there. I got scared. What if the police found him? I could be arrested for draft dodging, or worse, for killing him. I gathered up my stuff and climbed back out.”
“You left him there?” I asked.
“He was already dead. There was nothing I could do for him.”
Except report his death and give his family some closure after his disappearance, I thought. Then I remembered that Don Lamprey’s family had hardly missed him.
“When John came back for me that morning, I told him that Don had decided to go home. I hoped he wouldn’t look in the crawl space, at least not until I was gone. And I guess that’s what happened.”
He sat back down in the chair. “John took me to the train station in Trenton and bought me a ticket to Montreal, and I never looked back.”
“How did you change your name?” Lili asked.
“That was an accident. When I got to the border I scrawled my name and the agent misread it. I knew I was on the run so I didn’t challenge him. And I’ve been Peter Bobeaux ever since. I found a sympathetic admissions officer who helped me take the Canadian GED and get admitted to college. I did all the work for my degrees.”
“You couldn’t have been so successful if you hadn’t,” Lili said. I could tell that she’d already decided in his favor, even though at present we only had his word for what had happened that night. “You have an admirable teaching and administration record.”
“Thank you.” He smiled at her, and then he was silent for a moment.
“You have to understand, I was so scared back then. I was only a kid, and I had no idea what to do. I thought I’d put that poor boy out of my mind, but then my wife wanted to go to that Harvest Festival last month, and I recognized the Meeting House. When I heard someone say there was a body in the wall I hurried over there. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since then.”
Rochester got up and padded over to Bobeaux, then sat beside him, and Bobeaux reached down to pet his head. That decided me. Rochester was a good judge of character, so if he liked Bobeaux the man couldn’t be all bad.
“The detective investigating the case is a friend of mine,” I said. “I’ll give him a call and tell him you want to come in and talk to him.”
Bobeaux nodded, and I called Rick. I handed my phone to Bobeaux, who explained who he was, and made arrangements to drive down to the police station in Stewart’s Crossing.
After Bobeaux left Lili’s office, I looked at her. “Do you believe him?”
“I do. I might have to start to like him, now that I know what he’s been through.”
“You don’t have to go that far,” I said. “He’s still a blowhard.” I reached for Rochester and scratched behind his head. “So then who or what killed Don Lamprey? He didn’t curl up and die on his own.”
“I can’t help you with that,” she said. “I teach art, not science.”
I stood up. “Ah, but I know someone who does.”
34 – Concussion
Before I left Lili’s office, I checked the faculty schedules online. “Good deal,” I said. “Jackie Conrad has office hours now.” I leaned down to Rochester. “You stay here with Mama Lili.”
She groaned at the nickname, and I laughed. If she was going to become Rochester’s new mom, she’d have to get accustomed to being called silly names. I zipped up the gun pouch, put my messenger bag over my shoulder and walked out.
Everywhere I looked, students in T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops were taking advantage of what was probably the last warm day of the season. The guy walking in front of me had If you can read this, thank a teacher, on his back. Right below it, though, was And if you can read this in English, thank a Marine. Certainly not a shirt Don Lamprey or Peter Breaux would have worn.
As I walked to Green Hall, where the science faculty had their offices, I thought about what I needed to ask Jackie.
She had a student with her when I arrived, going over the function of the adrenal gland in preparation for an exam. When she was finished I asked, “Do you have a minute for a non-student-related question?”
“Absolutely. Come on in.” As I sat, she asked, “How’s that handsome dog of yours?”
I remembered that the first time I met her, she’d immediately figured out, from the hair on my slacks, that I had a Golden.
“He’s shaken up at the moment,” I said. “We had an incident last night.” I told her about the shooting, trying to minimize its importance, but Jackie wasn’t buying it.
“You think the person who killed that boy at the Meeting House is after you now?”
I shook my head. “He died over forty years ago, and we’re not even sure that someone killed him. His death might have been an accident.” I leaned forward. “Can you get a concussion somehow, recover, and then die from it later?”
“That’s certainly not the kind of question I get from students. You think that might have happened to this boy?”
I nodded, and explained, without using his name, what Peter Bobeaux had told me. “I’m wondering if the guy could have gotten hit on the head somewhere, but then recovered enough to go back to the Meeting House and fall asleep.”
“And never wake up,” she said.
“And never wake up.”
She turned to her computer and did some typing. “First of all, a concussion is basically a disturbance of brain function that follows a blow to the head. You said this other boy saw blood around the dead boy’s head?”
“Yes.”
“Was there an autopsy?”
“There wasn’t a lot of body left after forty years,” I said. “But there was some damage to the skull that was consistent with a head injury.”
“You sound like you’ve watched a lot of cop programs on TV,” she said drily. “Okay. So let’s assume he hit his head somehow. Now, loss of consciousness is relatively rare in concussions – only about ten percent of the time. So it’s likely he was still awake and functional after he got hit.”
“Wasn’t there an incident a while ago?” I asked. “An actress who hit her head while skiing?”
“I remember that. She went back home, didn’t she? And didn’t get treatment, and then died soon after.” She did a quick search. “It says here that she suffered blunt trauma to the head, which is consistent with your victim. In a case like hers, ‘blood from a damaged but still-pumping artery can quickly pool in the brain, creating pressure that must be relieved before irreparable damage is caused'.”
She sat back. “They call this syndrome ‘Talk and Die’,” she said. “Patients can walk and talk, without realizing how serious their injury is.”
“So that could have happened to this boy,” I said. “He could have hit his head when he was out somewhere, and then gone back to the Meeting House. He told the boy he was with that he had a headache.”
“That’s consistent,” she said.
“The boy with him said that he might have been smoking dope, too.”
“That could have contributed to his unawareness of how serious his condition was,” she said. “And as you and I have both seen, teenagers think they’re bullet-proof. He probably just shrugged the headache off.”
“So the question now is how he hit his head in the first place,” I said. “He could have been out walking in the woods around the Meeting House in the dark. Or somebody could have hit him. Either on purpose or accidentally.”
“There’s your difference,” she said, sitting back. “Between an accident and a murder.”
The word “murder” reminded me that someone had shot at me, and that I had my dad’s h
andgun in my messenger bag. I thanked Jackie and left Green Hall. Everywhere I looked I saw college students fooling around – pushing each other playfully, tackling in a pick-up football game, riding a skateboard. Had what happened to Don Lamprey been an accident?
It seemed like a good possibility. He could have gone out for a walk in the woods, knocked up against a branch and, despite the blood, thought nothing of it. He was nineteen, after all, and on the run from a different life-threatening situation.
But suppose he’d gone out to the woods for more than just a walk – to connect with a dealer who might buy the dope he’d stolen from his brothers. When I was a teenager, we had to sit through endless anti-drug movies and lectures. People who used drugs were bad, and those who sold them were even worse. Suppose one of them had knocked Don out, taken his dope and his cash?
The cash. According to his brother, Don Lamprey had stolen almost a thousand dollars he and his brothers had earned from their dope sales back in Zelienople. Where had it gone? Had it disintegrated? Or had whoever killed Don stolen it?
I stopped outside Harrow Hall and dialed Rick. “Follow the money,” I said.
“I’m right in the middle of my conversation with Breaux or Bobeaux or whatever his name is. What are you babbling about?”
“Arnold Lamprey said that his brother stole nearly a grand from him,” I said. “But there wasn’t any money with the body, was there?”
“No.”
“Ask Breaux about it. Did Don flash the cash around? Did Breaux pick his pocket after he was dead?”
“You have a ghoulish imagination,” Rick said. “But I’ll ask him.”
When I got back to Lili’s office, she was deep in conversation with a student, analyzing a black and white photo, so I grabbed my dog and waved goodbye. My car had been baking in the sun, so I had to turn the air conditioning on full blast and open the windows until it cooled down. Rochester stuck his head out his window, and I was tempted to do the same thing. Not only to cool down – but to blow away all the dark thoughts that kept popping into my head.
When I got back to Friar Lake I found an email from Mark Figueroa. He wanted to resign from doing any design work. No excuse given.
Crap. That might have pleased Joey Capodilupo but not me. Without Mark’s help I’d be lost. I called his store. “Can we talk about this, please?” I asked.
“There isn’t anything to talk about.”
“Sure there is. How about we meet for a coffee at The Chocolate Ear. Say 5:30? I’ll buy. Please?”
He sighed. “All right.”
I hung up and took Rochester for a walk around Friar Lake, checking on progress. Plumbers had begun work in the gutted dormitories, electricians were in the kitchen, and the pews had been stacked to one side of the chapel.
It was interesting to see the way the basic structure of the old buildings had been preserved: slate roof, stone buttresses, stained glass windows in the chapel. Eastern’s campus was the same way – old buildings repurposed for new uses, new ones constructed to fit into the overall look of the campus. Even the Meeting House in Stewart’s Crossing was a mix of original construction and later renovation, so that the long-ago vision of those first Quakers was still evident to today’s worshippers.
Rochester’s discovery of the tennis sneaker, only two weeks before, had shown us that what had happened back in 1969 could still have reverberations for the people who survived those years. I was still tempted to hack, and Rick’s frequent references to those activities showed me he sometimes thought of me as an unrepentant criminal.
Our romantic histories were still with us, too. My ideas about women had been formed by my marriage to Mary, and I knew I was moving more carefully with Lili because of them. She had her own past love life – two ex-husbands and various other flings. Rick’s marriage had imploded when his wife left him for a firefighter; Tamsen’s husband died a war hero; and Mark had been treated badly by boyfriends. Even Gail must have had problems with that ex-boyfriend who’d roomed with Declan.
We all had our talents, too. Lili was an excellent photographer and teacher. Mark had design skills, Rick was a dogged investigator. Gail was a terrific baker, and Declan had managed to begin his career and get the work permit he needed to stay in the States. I knew I was a decent writer and a competent teacher – but what if my one true skill was hacking, which was illegal? How could I leave my past behind if it meant also giving up the thing I was really good at?
I wondered if we could put together a program that would explore some of the conflicts from the sixties, and the reverberations that were still with us today. Maybe a history professor could sketch out the timeline, and someone from sociology talk about the long-lasting effects of the war on our country.
I was once again excited about my job, and hurried back to my office, tugging Rochester along, so I could get back to work.
35 – Café Confrontation
By the end of the day, I had the outline of a program on “The 1960s and Beyond” prepared and I was researching recruiting faculty to carry it out. I was so caught up in ideas that it took me a minute to recognize that my cell was ringing.
“Hey, Rick,” I said, the phone cradled at my ear, still typing possibilities.
“Finished up with Dr. Bobeaux, aka Peter Breaux,” he said. “It’s an interesting story. What did you think of it?”
“Lili believes him, and I guess I do, too. Did you ask him about the cash?”
“He swears he didn’t know Lamprey was carrying any money. He said he had about a hundred bucks of his own, that’s all. And when I pressed him, he started telling me all this stuff he did in Canada to make money before his scholarships kicked in.”
“You want to compare notes on what he told you versus what he told Lili and me?”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
We made plans to meet at The Chocolate Ear for a few minutes before my rendezvous with Mark Figueroa. “Hey, did you ever get a chance to look around for shell casings where somebody shot at me last night?”
“I sent the crime scene guys. Not sure if they found anything, but I’ll check on it.”
“I also talked to a professor at Eastern about concussions,” I said. “I’ll tell you what she said when I see you.”
I kept getting program ideas that I wanted to put down, even as I knew I needed to close up and hurry to Stewart’s Crossing. I settled for using my phone as a voice recorder as I drove, which confused Rochester, who kept turning to look at me each time I started talking.
Despite my delaying, I got to The Chocolate Ear first and staked out a table on the sidewalk. I left Rochester there and went inside to order, and by the time I returned with iced coffee for Rick and myself, and a biscuit for Rochester, Rick was there with my dog.
“Tell me what Bobeaux told you,” he said, as I sat down.
I repeated it all.
“That’s the same story he gave me,” Rick said. “I’m not sure I believe him, but there doesn’t seem to be any other choice.”
“The details tie in with what we already knew,” I said. “That he and Don arrived by bus, that he met Brannigan the next morning alone. You’re sure he didn’t take the money from Don?”
“If he did, he’s a hell of an inventive liar,” Rick said. “If he had an extra grand back in 1969, he could have lived just fine until school started in the fall and he wouldn’t have had to clean toilets, pick weeds or any of the other crap jobs he told me were the only ones he could get.”
“How about fingerprints?” I asked. “Did you ever check on those?”
“Yeah. The crime scene guys lifted dozens of different prints from the inside of that room, which is consistent with the story that a number of teenagers moved through there. Most of them couldn’t be matched to anyone in the IAFIS system.”
I knew from past experience that was the master fingerprint database maintained by the FBI. “How about Bobeaux’s prints?”
“Yeah, we matched them to ones fr
om inside the room. And I got an officer in Zelienople to go out to Arnold’s house and open up a box of Don’s stuff. Managed to get some decent prints there, and used them to eliminate a bunch of the unidentified ones.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get how Don Lamprey could go to sleep and not wake up. Where’d the bang on his head come from?”
“Bobeaux says that Don went out somewhere, and that when he came back he complained of a headache. Suppose he fell, or got hit, while he was out, and had pressure building up in his brain that didn’t affect him right away.” I told Rick what Jackie Conrad had said, about Talk and Die syndrome.
“That part makes sense,” Rick said. “Say Don found the hippies and got high with them, then when he was walking in the woods in the dark, he tripped and hit his head.”
I nodded. The neurons were firing in my brain, fast and furious, and I remembered my thoughts after I spoke with Jackie. “That could make him disoriented enough to drop the cash and whatever dope he had let. But he was able to get back to the Meeting House and climb into the hidey-hole.”
“I’m liking this theory,” Rick said. “If we wipe out Dr. Bobeaux as a suspect, then what we have is a death that wasn’t a murder, which is the end of my investigation. That will make the chief happy, and the mayor, too.”
“But hold up a sec,” I said. “There’s also the chance that it might not have been an accident. Remember, the money is still missing. Bob Freehl told me that hippies used to camp in those woods, and that you could smell the dope from Main Street. Suppose Don smelled the smoke, and went looking for those hippies, hoping to sell them the dope he took from his brothers.”
“And someone robbed him?” Rick asked. “I’d have to ask Bob if there were any reports of violence out there in the woods, or if it was just some happy love hippie thing.”
“Bob said that the cops arrested those hippies a few times but could never make the charges stick. Would you guys still have those records? Maybe there’s someone you could talk to.”