Chat

by Archer Mayor

  He stayed standing there, the polite host after the party, until they’d both settled in, slammed their doors, and the dapper Francis Martin had driven halfway down the drive. Gail’s pale face was still visible through the back window as Joe finally turned on his heel and went back inside, his heart beating somewhere in between relief and sorrow.

  Sammie Martens parked her car on the street, across from the bus depot parking lot on Liberty Street, and paused before getting out, surveying the surrounding bleakness. Springfield, Massachusetts, was huge in comparison to anything in Vermont, or, as most Vermonters saw it, huge and crowded and blighted and depressing. Sammie had personal knowledge of the social troubles this area visited upon her state. She’d gone undercover in nearby Holyoke for a while in a vain attempt to stifle some of the drug flow heading north.

  Of course, she knew that her prejudice was unfair. Springfield was an oversize urban center, no more or less saddled with its ills than most places of its kind. And no bus terminal that she’d known was located in a town’s upscale section. This one was wedged against two interstate overpasses, surrounded by industrial-style low buildings and adjacent to the train terminal, which looked as though it dated back to when robber barons called the shots.

  Barely visible in the gray, flat daylight, a strung-up sign of extinguished lightbulbs was attached to the low, arching stone overpass that carried the railroad tracks between the depot and the rest of the city, to the south. The sign spelled out, “City of Bright Lights.”

  Sam popped open her door and got out into the kind of harsh cold that only miles of concrete can exude, the wind whipping between the nearby buildings and shredding the warm cocoon around her. She stood next to the car, getting her bearings and noticing the contrast between the bland, towering, modern Mass Mutual building in the distance, and the ornate, Italianate campanile beside city hall behind it—the only sign of grace within sight. Her contact had told her, on the phone, to park where she had and that everything else would become obvious.

  It did. She saw, over the tops of a row of salt-streaked, dirty parked cars, a clearly marked police van, the glimmer of some yellow tape, and several cold human shapes standing around, most nursing coffee cups. She crossed the street and walked down the length of cars to join them.

  As she drew near, a tall, white-haired, red-faced man in a down jacket that made him look like a tire company mascot broke away from the small group and approached her.

  “Agent Martens?” he asked. “Steve Wilson, Springfield PD.”

  She nodded in greeting, not bothering to shake, with everyone wearing gloves. “How’d you know?”

  A wide smile broke his craggy face. She imagined he was old-school—hard at work, hard at play, and no stranger to the bottle. Some stereotypes existed for a reason. “You walk like a cop.”

  That made her smile. A cop was all she’d ever wanted to be. She pointed to a small, dark sedan parked almost nose to nose with the police van and surrounded by the yellow tape. “Don’t tell me—that’s the car, right?”

  He laughed. “I wish I could tell you we’d wrapped the wrong one on purpose, but that’s it, all right. Good detective work.”

  Several of Wilson’s companions chuckled in the background, eavesdropping and, she knew, checking her out. Not that she minded especially. Guys she could handle. Women cops were tougher to figure out.

  She stepped up to the car’s hood and looked at the vehicle straight on—a dark blue Ford Escort, several years old, but in pretty good shape. A middle-class car, economical and dependable. Its inspection sticker was up to date and issued from Connecticut.

  “You run the registration yet?” she asked.

  Wilson nodded. “Frederick Nashman. A couple of old moving violations, nothing big. That’s assuming the car wasn’t stolen to get it here.”

  She looked at him.

  “It’s not reported stolen. I’m just saying . . .”

  “Got ya.” Sam went back to studying the car, slowly walking around it, her hands in her coat pockets. “Anybody notice it out here before we raised the alarm?”

  Wilson was walking with her. “Nah. Would’ve happened eventually, but they can be parked out here a long time.”

  She finished her tour and straightened to give him an eye-to-eye, as best their relative heights allowed. “This when you tell me you’ve gone through it all already and have everything bagged and tagged in the back of the van?”

  His eyes and eyebrows expressed theatrical shock, but his laugh gave him away. “It did cross our minds, what with the weather, but given the respect we have for . . . What do you call yourselves again?”

  She gave him a friendly sneer. “Cute. You got the paperwork at least?”

  He nodded, adding, “And we popped the lock, just to make sure we wouldn’t be screwed after you got here. Thing opened like a soda can. No one’s been inside yet, though.”

  Sam nodded. “That was nice—I do appreciate it.”

  “No sweat,” he said, liking her more and more as this went on. He made a gesture to the people behind them before saying, “And now that you are here, we got a little extra comfort to throw you.”

  She looked over at the van as the others swung open its rear doors and pulled out a long, bulky, brightly colored tarp with bundled aluminum tubing, a generator, and an oversize space heater. She recognized the package immediately and smiled at her host. “A heated tent. Sweet.”

  Steve Wilson bowed. “We try.”

  Some 250 miles to the south, following a seven-hour drive from Vermont, a stiff and tired Lester Spinney crossed a sidewalk in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and entered the Lower Merion Police Department, where he’d been told to check in on arrival.

  “Help you?” the man behind the bulletproof glass asked.

  Les pulled out his badge and held it against the window. “I’m here to see Detective Cavallaro. Lester Spinney from Vermont.”

  He studied the man’s face, expecting the usual Vermont-directed one-liners, but got nothing for his effort. The dispatcher merely glanced at the ID, picked up a phone, and said over the tinny loudspeaker between them, “Have a seat.”

  Five minutes later, a tall woman with short-cropped hair stepped into the lobby, smiling. “Agent Spinney? Detective Cavallaro. Call me Glenda. You have a good trip?”

  He shook her hand. “Lester—Les is okay, too. And the trip was fine. More people than I’ve seen in a while, though.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “Where? On the road?”

  “The road, the streets, the towns, even the sidewalk outside. We only have about half a million in Vermont, and a third of them are clustered around one town.”

  She visibly had no appreciation for what he was saying. “Huh,” she said. “Interesting. I was born and brought up around here. Never saw it as crowded. New York—that’s bad. Most of what you drove through is tied into there, one way or the other.”

  Spinney chose to drop it. No one outside Vermont could be expected to understand a setting where starlit skies, complete silence, and empty downtown streets at four in the morning were the norm. Except maybe far out west. He’d heard that even a Vermonter could get lonely in Wyoming.

  “You want to find a motel and start on this tomorrow morning?” Cavallaro was asking him.

  Lester checked his watch. It was five o’clock. “Seems a little early,” he murmured.

  “Not a problem,” she said immediately, with enough enthusiasm that he took her word for it. “Let me get my coat and bag and we’ll head out.”

  It was barely a minute before she reappeared.

  “I can’t believe they didn’t put you on a plane instead of making you drive down,” she said, slipping into her coat as they crossed the lobby.

  “We don’t have much of a budget,” he admitted.

  “Really?” She looked at him. “The Vermont Bureau of Investigation? Sounds rich enough.”

  “Yeah—well, we’re kind of new. Still muscling our way into the
pack.”

  She turned right out of the door and headed for a parking lot to the side of the building. “Where did you work before?”

  “State police.”

  “No kidding? Didn’t like them?”

  “Loved them. But I thought I was running out of options. Numbers again.”

  She pulled keys from her pocket and aimed toward what was clearly an unmarked cruiser—the kind of thing street kids love to decorate with “Narc,” written on the dusty side panels.

  “How so?” she asked.

  “They hover around three hundred and fifty people in uniform, depending on the year and the budget,” he told her. “Upward mobility gets tight. When the Bureau came up, it looked more interesting, less bureaucratic, and now I’m working with the field force commander. Plus, I keep all my benefits and retirement.”

  She was already laughing. “Three fifty? We’ve got almost half that in this department alone.”

  She unlocked the doors and they both got in, their bodies jarred by the frozen hardness of the seats. Apparently, the car hadn’t been out all day.

  She started it up as he changed the subject. “You said on the phone that the IP address I gave you for Mr. Rockwell was an Internet café. You ever have any problems with them before?”

  Glenda Cavallaro shook her head. “Nope. And I checked every database we have. Nothing. Just for kicks, I also looked up N. Rockwell. There’re more than a few with that name, but nothing for any cyber crime or sex stuff. That’s what you’re looking for, right? Child predator shit?”

  “We think so,” Spinney answered cautiously, looking out the side window as they pulled into traffic and headed west along Lancaster Avenue.

  He watched the buildings slide by, mostly brick clad and older, few above a couple of stories tall. Soon, on the left, the view opened up, and a large, deep expanse of cold-bitten lawn appeared, with a frozen pool in the middle and a row of imposing buildings skirting its borders.

  “Haverford College,” Cavallaro explained. “Pretty good place.”

  He’d noticed it earlier, having come this way to reach the police department from the interstate. He’d also gone by both Villanova University and the village of Bryn Mawr, home to that college, where he’d also noticed dealerships for Ferrari, Hummer, and Maserati. Despite the main drag’s almost pedestrian, weathered brick appearance, there was obviously serious money lurking just beyond sight, here and there.

  Cavallaro snapped him from his reverie. “The café is up ahead.” She pulled into a shopping area parking lot and killed the engine, pointing through the windshield. “Over there.”

  They got out and crossed the asphalt to the place she’d indicated, its windows fogged by moist heat and the presence of a sizable crowd. Spinney suddenly realized that coming at this time of the early evening was probably not a good idea. His companion, however, didn’t seem fazed.

  She walked up to the counter and asked to see the manager, showing just a glimpse of her shield. As they waited, Les took in their surroundings—a sprinkling of small tables, each adorned with a computer, catered to by a counter stuffed with coffee choices and sweet comestibles. Adrenaline times three, he thought, watching the largely young crowd, the majority of them men, quietly hunched over their keyboards. The room was filled with the tinny clatter of fingertips stuttering across plastic keys.

  “May I help you?” a smooth voice said from behind him. “I’m the manager, Bruce Fellini.”

  Cavallaro was already staring at the short, goateed man in a black turtleneck who’d appeared from the back room. She displayed her shield again, along with a folded piece of paper. “I’m Detective Cavallaro of the Lower Merion PD. This is Agent Spinney of the VBI, and this”—she waved the document—“is a subpoena for the contents of one of your computers. We have reason to believe that one of your customers was using your place to sexually pursue underage girls.”

  She placed the subpoena in front of him. Fellini looked down at it, otherwise not moving.

  “How’s this work?” he finally asked. “I’ve never been involved in something like this before.”

  Both cops looked at him carefully, their instincts immediately sharpened by the line.

  Spinney removed another piece of paper from his pocket before slipping out of his coat. It was hot to stifling for him in here, although he noticed that Cavallaro hadn’t even unbuttoned hers yet. Cultural differences, once more.

  He laid the sheet beside the subpoena and placed his finger on the line that John Leppman had highlighted in yellow, back in Vermont. “This is the computer’s address, along with the time and date it was being used.”

  Fellini studied the line of type briefly. “Officers, I’d be happy to help. I’ll show you the computer and do whatever else you’d like me to, but I gotta warn you: You’re not going to find anything. Our computers get used all the time, by dozens of people a day, and that’s day after day. You might get a time-date stamp somewhere from the guy you’re after—I’m not saying that.” He tapped the sheet of paper with his finger. “But you got that already. Otherwise, that computer’s going to be blank, or covered with gibberish. We set the temp files to be overwritten immediately, and I also happen to know that the settings on that particular instant-messaging program are defaulted to wipe the record clean whenever the user exits the program. It’s what we do to keep clutter to a minimum.”

  “So you don’t want us to tear into the computer?” Cavallaro asked.

  Bruce Fellini held up both his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’ll even let you take the whole thing out of here, for as long as you want, if you give me some paperwork. We got insurance for things like this. I was just warning you, is all.”

  Spinney had lost interest in the conversation a few sentences ago and was back to surveying the room. Now he returned to the manager and asked him, “Your security camera working?”

  Fellini stared at him for a blank second before his brain kicked in. “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  Lester pulled out the photograph of Rockwell that they’d circulated to the newspaper, and displayed it. “This is the guy we think used your computer. He look familiar?”

  The small man shrugged. “Vaguely, I guess.”

  “How far back do you keep the security tapes?” Lester asked next.

  This time Fellini smiled, pointing to the date on Spinney’s printout. “Long enough.”

  Chapter 18

  “Butch—hand me another beer.”

  Willy reached over the side of his bedraggled armchair, flipped open the lid of the cooler parked on the floor, and fished around in the cold ice slurry for a can, which he then handed the older man.

  E. T. took it from him, peeled back the tab with a snap, and brought it to his lips in one smooth, well-practiced gesture. He didn’t put it down until it was half empty. On the wooden floor by his feet, scattered among other discarded trash, were the rattling remains of most of a twelve-pack.

  They’d settled on the unfinished but enclosed back porch of E. T.’s shambles of a house, dressed in coats, accompanied by two glowing parabolic space heaters and an old sleeping dog of confused lineage.

  They were surrounded by frosted glass on three sides and perched on the edge of an enormous gravel pit that fell away from the rear of the building like a meteor crater, revealing a snow-covered assortment of piled stones, sand, and rock, and a haphazardly parked collection of ten-wheelers, a stone crusher, and two enormous backhoes. Willy understood that this was E. T.’s working-class version of a landed lord taking some time to enjoy a small drink while surveying his hard-won worldly assets. Had the setting been conventionally staged, and the old man’s son here instead of an undercover cop pretending to be a newfound friend, the next line would have been a variation on “In a few years, my boy, all this will be yours.”

  But E. T. Griffis was not a man of conventional trappings. True to his roots, and regardless of his accumulated wealth, he was happiest—or perhaps least unhappy—when in proximity to the world th
at had given him birth: trucks, cheap beer, and the fruits of hard labor. New and shiny things, not to mention the commercial world that hawked them from all sides, were not for him, including a new roof on his house, or a truck built in the current decade, or any clothing from somewhere other than Goodwill. Money had become a way to keep score or, perhaps, to exact revenge on ancient devils Willy knew nothing about, but it was not to be used on glitzy frivolities—like insulation or central heating. Or cell phones.

  Willy had heard that E. T.’s first and only legal wife had walked out on him so long ago, few people recalled what she looked like. Now that he’d become the man’s newest drinking buddy—following a week of nightly encounters at the bar—and been allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of his home, he didn’t doubt it.

  Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t like the guy. For all his renowned faults as a father and husband, E. T. was the proverbial salt of the earth—honest, practical, hardworking, and, at long last, much to Willy’s present benefit, becoming sentimentally philosophical.

  “So, anyhow,” he was saying. “Dan’s mother wasn’t Andy’s, and Andy’s mother and me weren’t ever legal. Not that it mattered. She had the first one beat all to hell, and that was everybody’s opinion, including Dan’s.”

  “What happened to her?” Willy asked, sipping from his hip bottle of amber fluid. This was the third time they’d ended up here to share an afternoon drink—presumably in preparation for the standard evening encounters—but the first that he’d gotten E. T. to open up personally. And, as was so common with otherwise taciturn people, it seemed to Willy that he would never shut up.

  “She died,” he said simply, taking another deep swallow.

  “Must’ve been hard on the boys.”

  “Hard on Andy. He was like her. Dan didn’t give a shit. He’s like the first one.”

  Joe’s mother had described that death as a suicide. Willy now wondered if even the method had been similar for mother and son. He wasn’t about to ask E. T., but he made a note to check into it.

  Given the broad nature of Joe’s assignment to him, Willy was in the comfortable position of considering everything E. T. said to be of potential value. After all, from Andy’s fate in prison to Dan’s side business in drugs, to the car crash that had hospitalized Joe’s family, even to the true story about why Andy had pleaded guilty in the first place, Willy and his colleagues had nothing but unanswered questions.