Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  “How did you know him?”

  “He came by while I was there,” I said.

  “What did he say?” LaCharelle said.

  Same tone of voice. No emotion.

  “He wanted to talk to Donna. He was mad. Some child-support thing.”

  “Why would he be mad at you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because I kicked him out.”

  “Why’d you do that?” LaCharelle said.

  “He was using vulgar language. Toward Donna, I mean. Calling her names. Generally belligerent. Bad attitude.”

  “When was this?”

  It was Kelly talking. I could see LaCharelle lean back and watch.

  “Yesterday,” I said. “Morning.”

  “Where?”

  “At her apartment.”

  “What were you doing there?” Kelly asked, an edge creeping into his voice.

  “Talking to Donna.”

  “Were you interviewing her?”

  “No. Just talking.”

  “She invited you over?” Kelly said.

  “Not exactly. Well, she did earlier. But I sort of just stopped by.”

  “On Peavey Street.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Had you been there before?”

  I hesitated again. Their detective ears practically pricked forward.

  “Not inside,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I’d been by the place before. But I didn’t go inside.”

  “But you went inside yesterday?” Kelly asked.

  “Yup.”

  “How long did you stay?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes. Maybe a little longer.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Around nine. A little after.”

  “Are you married, Mr. McMorrow?”

  It was Noel. The baton had been passed again.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She live with you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “She living with you now?” Noel asked.

  His face was hard. He didn’t look so young.

  “Not at the moment.”

  “So you’re single?”

  “No. She had to move to Portland. She got a job there. I saw her yesterday. After I saw Donna.”

  Noel’s eyebrows crinkled slightly. Knowingly. He stared at me.

  “Did you have sexual relations with Donna Marchant yesterday during your visit?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “So you talked.”

  “Right.”

  “About what?”

  “About her. Her life. Her situation, I guess you could call it.”

  “For an article?”

  “No. Just to talk. I got to know her a little and I liked her, and I felt like I sort of owed her.”

  “For what?”

  “For talking to me for the first story. It was sort of hard, even though I didn’t use her name. You see, she came to district court—”

  “We read it, Mr. McMorrow. Very tear-jerking stuff.”

  It was Lister. He was short and his hair was greasy and he was wearing a navy-blue blazer with dandruff epauletes.

  “So why did you owe her?”

  “Because her boyfriend, Tanner, didn’t like the story. The fact that she talked to me, I guess. He came after me a couple times. I’m sure it didn’t make things easier for her.”

  “Apparently not,” Lister said.

  I met his eyes. He met mine back.

  “So what was Donna Marchant doing when you left her?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Just sitting there, I guess. She was waiting for her sister to bring her daughter home. Donna’s daughter, I mean.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Staying overnight at Marcia’s. She does that a lot.”

  “So you left?” Lister asked.

  “Yeah. As I pulled out, Marcia was pulling in.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “No,” I said.

  I hesitated again. It got their attention, again.

  “She doesn’t care much for me,” I said.

  “Why not?” Lister said.

  “She thought I’d hurt her sister. Not physically, I mean. Through the publicity.”

  “Do you think you did?”

  It was LaCharelle.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t intend to. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  So it went on from there. They wanted to know what I did when I got home and I told them about pileated woodpeckers. They wanted to know where I met Roxanne and I told them about the restaurant in Camden. They wanted to know what I did after the restaurant and I told them about sitting in the car with Roxanne. They wanted to know Roxanne’s address and phone number and I gave them her address, but said she’d just moved and I didn’t have her phone number yet. They gave me that impassive look that cops get when they think someone is lying, but they didn’t say anything.

  I asked them when I could have my truck back and they said they didn’t know. They offered me a ride home, but I said I’d stay in town and try to rent a car.

  I left and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I was sitting in the stall when the door banged open and two sets of police shoes shuffled by and stopped at the urinals.

  “I told Joyce a week and we’re outta here,” a voice said.

  “Boyfriend’s gonna be a long-timer,” said the other.

  It was Kelly and Lister.

  “You think the reporter was doing her?” Kelly said.

  “Who knows? I wouldn’t’ve kicked her out of bed,” Lister said.

  “That little slider? Don’t you have any standards?”

  “Yeah, and they get lower all the time. She had all her teeth, right?”

  “Haven’t seen the ME’s report,” Kelly said. “When it comes in, I’ll check for you. How’d you do up at Moosehead?”

  “A couple of salmon. Nice fish,” Lister said, and then they flushed almost in unison. The sinks ran and then they shuffled to the door.

  “So you would’ve called this little chippie up for a date, huh?” Kelly said. “You are hard up. You know, you gotta be careful these days. . . .”

  The door closed. I sat.

  Little chippie. Little slider. Donna deserved better than this.

  Outside, the sky was a vivid blue, like a freshly painted bathroom wall. It was a little before nine and still cool, and even the river, roiled and swirling as it passed the empty mills, looked clean and inviting. That the day could begin so beautifully seemed like one more affront to add to Donna’s long list.

  I stood there for a minute and tried to get my bearings. A pickup rumbled past and the young girl driving looked at me as though I’d just been bailed. Then there was a long stretch with no traffic at all, just the empty river and the empty street.

  They may not have been religious in Kennebec, but they took their day of rest seriously.

  I walked around the Municipal Building, through a parking lot, and cut through an alley that came out on Main Street by a restaurant, which was closed. I broke into a trot. If Roxanne were to be awakened at nine on a Sunday morning with this news, I wanted it to be me on the phone, not a state police detective.

  So I went up Main Street, past stores that were closed and dark. In front of a florist’s shop, someone had broken an ornamental tree during the night, snapping it off three feet from the base. They had left an empty twelve-pack of Bud as compensation. Fair trade.

  I went up two blocks before I spotted a pay phone, in the brick entryway to a bank. The phone book had been yanked off the chain, but the phone worked. I dialed directory assistance on the chance that Roxanne’s phone had been put in early. The woman on the phone looked. It hadn’t. I cursed.

  For a minute, I just stood there. A skinny bearded guy trudged by with a grocery bag of empty bottles and stared at me. I’d seen h
im in court, had watched him plead to indecent exposure. He nodded, and I nodded back. We were simpatico. And I needed a ride home.

  I had turned down the cops’ offer of a ride. I figured I’d have to rent a car anyway, wherever it was in Kennebec that you did that. If the phone book had been there, I would have looked it up. Instead, I called the police department and said I was new in town and needed to rent a car cheap. The dispatcher asked if I needed it that day and I said yes, which was no lie. She gave me a number to call, which I did. The place was a Gulf station out toward the interstate. I walked.

  The rental was a brown Olds Omega with 113,000 miles on the odometer and almost as many cigarette butts on the floor. I took it for a week and the guy at the service station said it probably would run that long. If it didn’t, he had a tow truck. He gave me his home number.

  I rattled across town, feeling anonymous but not anonymous enough. When I pulled around the corner onto Peavey Street, I could see that every kid within ten blocks was gathered in front of Donna’s building. They were riding their bikes in the street in tight circles, then returning to the knot of children like pigeons fluttering back to roost. The bunch of kids was between two police cruisers, one state, one Kennebec. There were two unmarked cars and a state police van in the driveway. The dooryard was blocked with yellow police-line tape.

  I was fourth in line in the caravan of oglers. I drove by and stopped.

  The kids were giddy, the way children get when they’re confronted by a tragedy that is not their own. I stood behind them as they wheeled back and forth.

  “I heard the little kid found her,” a boy in a Raiders baseball caps was saying. “She musta, like, freaked. You remember her. That little kid who used to watch us out the window? She had this funny name, like Madrianna or—”

  “Adrianna,” I said. “What’s funny about that?”

  He turned and looked at me.

  “It’s a pretty name,” I said.

  His buddies turned and looked at me too, their caps turned around backward.

  “Right?” I said.

  “Whatever you say,” the first kid said, then wheeled off down the street.

  The other kids were quiet after that, watching the door. The police radios rasped in the cruisers. An old couple stopped across the street and stared.

  “What’s going on?” the old man called over to me. I didn’t answer.

  “Some lady got killed,” one of the boys called back.

  “It’s the goddamn welfare,” the old guy said. “Lets these people sit around and drink and smoke dope and kill each other. We’ll probably have to pay for her goddamn funeral.”

  I had turned to go when someone called my name.

  “Jack. Hey, Jack.”

  It was Archambault, getting out of a beat-up green Toyota sedan. He had a reporter’s notebook in his hand and he slammed the door and loped over to me.

  “Hey, I can’t believe I found you here,” Archambault said. “I’ve been trying you all morning at home. I was headed out there. You’re gonna find, like, ninety-three messages on your machine.”

  “Saying what?” I said, still walking toward my car.

  “Saying I need to talk to you. Man, Albert called me this morning. It was, like, six o’clock. I’m going, ‘What the hell?’ He says, ‘There’s been a murder.’ I say, ‘Where?’ He says, ‘Right here in town.’ They found the body last night and we didn’t even know about it. Not that we could have done anything even if we’d been here. Except it would have been nice to get a shot of the body coming out on the stretcher.”

  I looked at him.

  “Nice,” I said, still walking.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t believe it was the same girl you’d talked to in court there. I didn’t know that until one of the cops told me. I went out and got a Telegram and I was reading it at the doughnut shop and one of the cops came in and he was like, ‘You know who that was, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Donna something.’ He said, ‘That’s the one who took her shirt off in court. The one your new guy wrote about.’ ”

  “She didn’t take it off,” I said. “She just lifted it up to show her stomach.”

  “Right,” Archambault said.

  We were at the car. I opened the door.

  “Hey, I thought you had a truck,” Archambault said.

  “It’s . . . broken down,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, listen. Let’s go get a cup of coffee. I’ve got to write this, and I figured I’d do the girl as a sidebar. You know, what she was like. Her problems with her boyfriends. Interview the family and all that.”

  “Go to it.”

  “Yeah, so we can go and have coffee and talk about her. I mean, all I know is what I read in your story. So I need to know what she was really like, what her life was like. She had a kid, right?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, still holding the door open.

  “Didn’t your story say that? She had a little girl or something. Yeah. It was a girl, and I remember that the kid would call for help when her mom and the boyfriend started slugging it out.”

  “No, I mean I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

  Archambault looked puzzled.

  “What do you mean? You want to meet a little later?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it at all.”

  “You’re shitting me,” he said.

  “Nope.”

  Archambault stood there, notebook still in his hand.

  “Well, why not? This is a great story. Girl goes to court for a protection order ’cause her boyfriend is beating on her and, like, three days later, she gets it. I mean, this is great stuff.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “And you knew her, right? You can tell me more about her, what she was like when she went to court. Did she want to talk about it, or did you have to persuade her? Was she really afraid of this guy? I mean, did she predict that this scumbag was gonna off her one of these days? And the little rug rat. How’s she gonna feel about this? That’s got to be pretty traumatic, having your mother killed.”

  “Got to be,” I said.

  I let the door fall closed.

  “So what’s the problem?” Archambault said.

  I thought for a moment.

  “Off the record, she’s not a rug rat,” I said. “She’s a little girl. And it isn’t ‘pretty traumatic’ to lose your mother like this. It’s devastating and tragic. A woman dying like this is sad and tragic, too. And Donna wasn’t a girl, she was a woman. And it is a good story, but I don’t want to be a part of it. Any more than I already am.”

  I opened the door again. Archambault looked stunned. A couple of the bicycle kids rode by and eyed us curiously.

  “Off the record?” Archambault said. “Then what are you saying on the record?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nada. Rien. No comment.”

  “You’re stiffing me?” he asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “Jack, I thought you’d help me out. All this New York Times stuff. Goddamn, what would you do if you were me?”

  “The same thing you’re doing.”

  “So I don’t get it, McMorrow,” Archambault said.

  “I guess I’m just not you anymore,” I said.

  I got in the car and pulled the door shut. Archambault was standing there in the street, his notebook hanging at his side. His eyes were narrowed and he was staring at me, a burning cold stare. The cub reporter had claws.

  “Something’s screwy here, McMorrow,” he said. “Were you poking her or something?”

  I started the motor. It coughed and the belts squealed.

  “People around here have dirty minds,” I said.

  “Maybe the cops will talk about you, McMorrow,” Archambault said.

  “Tell ’em I said hello.”

  I put the Olds in drive and drove.

  But to where? I drove through Kennebec, past a big stone Catholic church where Mass was ge
tting out and gray-haired people were crossing the street. I almost stopped and went in, but inched along in the church traffic instead. It was as if stopping would mean I would have to confront what I had done. And I didn’t want to do that yet.

  So I drove, south along the Kennebec River, past the dignified old homes, the trailers—some hopeful, some desperate—the flimsy little businesses that sucked each breath as if they were on life support. I followed the river to Augusta and swung east on Route 3, heading in the general direction of Prosperity and home. But I passed the sign for Prosperity and continued east, then cut off on a side road and wound my way south. The roads were narrow and potholed and led to lost little villages whose reasons for existence were indecipherable.

  I was trying to elude something, outrun myself on these twisting paths through the woods. Finally, I couldn’t run anymore, and somewhere past the village of Jefferson I let the car clatter to a halt on the gravel shoulder. There was nobody around, just woods and the road and the bugs and birds, and I shut off the motor and sat there and grieved for Donna Marchant and for her daughter, and maybe even for myself. I sat there for a long time, with the trapped blackflies buzzing against the inside of the car windows, and then I wiped my unshaven face with my hand and rubbed my eyes, where tears had dried and left salt.

  That left one, and only one, next step, which was to go back and finish what I’d started.

  15

  Roxanne called at 11:13 p.m. on the digital clock. She said she’d been watching the news. A small part of the news had been about Donna. She’d gone next door to Skip’s to use the phone.

  “Jack, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I could have come up. I went shopping and then I was cleaning this place when I should have been there for you.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “There really isn’t anything you could do.”

  “Well, I am sorry. I’m very sorry. I’m sorry for her. I’m sorry for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll come right now if you want me to.”

  “That’s silly. I’m going to bed. You’ve got to get up and go to work tomorrow. Some of us need to make a living.”

  “What are you going to do?” Roxanne asked softly.

  “I don’t know. Have another beer. That’s my long-range plan.”

  “Have you talked to the police?”