Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  Look out for any activity that requires new clothes, Thoreau wrote. I was becoming wary of any activity that required me to bathe.

  I put on jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. Outside it was foggy, bordering on drizzle, so I put on a denim jacket, also faded. I chose work boots over sneakers, because where I was going they didn’t jog or play tennis. I put the rifle in the trunk for the same reason.

  The first stop was the Albion General Store. I bought an Observer and a Boston Globe, a day old. On page one of the Observer, below the fold, was a short David Archambault story that quoted police as saying there were no new leads in the Donna Marchant case. It said they still hadn’t released the cause of death, that funeral services would be private. The rest of the story was background. It was short and didn’t jump, even with all the padding.

  Archambault hadn’t come up with anything new. Maybe the story the day before had been beginner’s luck.

  I turned to page two and there was Alphonse, his troubles laid out for the world to see. He’d be celebrity of the week on the cell block. No need to thank me.

  I skimmed the story and it appeared to have been left intact, probably because of short-staffing on the Observer rewrite desk. I opened the Globe sports, and it was mostly Red Sox stuff. But then, even Yankee fans had to know their enemy. And I had to know mine.

  I drove to Kennebec in the fog, hitting the wiper switch every few seconds. As I drove, I thought of Clair saying I was too emotional for this sort of battle. I also thought of his offer of help, and wondered if it meant more than just being there to tell me to calm down and stay home. I wondered if I’d have to take him up on it.

  So as I approached Kennebec, dreary in the mist, I took a deep breath. No emotion. Cool and calm. Figure out what you want to accomplish and the best way to accomplish it. I wanted to know who killed Donna. I wanted to help make sure that person, Jeff or Donnie or whoever it was, hanged for it. I had to help finish this business I had started.

  Cool and calm.

  I crossed the bridge just after a flight of ghoulish black cormorants, winging their way upstream. Off the bridge, I took a right and headed up along the brooding river. Five minutes later, I slowed as I passed Donna’s building. Around the next corner, halfway up the block, I pulled over and stopped.

  In my early days in New York, a homicide detective named Heneghan had explained his craft to me. He’d said the body was ground zero. The investigation moved out from there in widening circles, as if the dead guy had been dropped in a pool of water. Sometimes he had been. Sometimes he had just been shot and left on the street.

  First you did the scene, Heneghan had said. Then you did the canvass. Heneghan was doing a canvass in SoHo when we first met. I was doing a canvass too, for a Times story on a sort of famous artist fellow who’d been stabbed to death in his loft.

  “It isn’t that I have anything against you personally,” Heneghan had said. “It’s just that you keep getting in the way.”

  I’d told him it was my job to be in the way.

  It still was.

  I got out of the car and started up the block, walking slowly and eyeing the houses, which were small and looked dirty, as if the rain were water from a muddy stream.

  At the corner, there was a store. The sign said JANE’S MARKET AND REDEMPTION. I wondered if, when you went in for a six-pack, Jane also would save your soul.

  But I didn’t stop. I walked up the block, eyeing Donna’s building from a distance. It was three stories, with five electrical entrances on the wall by the driveway. That meant five apartments, though I doubted they were all occupied. The building, like the neighborhood and the town, had seen better days.

  I walked by the front door, where the yellow police tape hung in the rain like a macabre garland. On the other side of the house, the dismantled motorcycle was still propped on a concrete block. The Camaro was still there, but Donna’s Chevette was gone. Probably rooming with my truck.

  A couple of houses up, I turned and looked back. I’d have to check Donna’s building and the building to its left, which was separated by the width of the driveway. Looking up, I remembered Donna’s comment about the “old hag” who had been watching her. I scanned the windows of the building next door and wondered which one was the old woman’s.

  “Get a life,” Donna had said. Maybe the old woman had seen somebody take one.

  I went in the side door of Donna’s building, up the landing by the driveway. These were the back stairs, dark and narrow and smelling of cats and cigarettes and stale beer. I stumbled over a bag of empty bottles but caught it before they spilled out. After the clinking there was silence, then the faint sound of a television. I kept going up the stairs, stopping every few steps to listen. At the second floor, I stopped and put my ear to Donna’s back door. The only sound was my breathing. I kept going.

  At the third floor, there was a dirty window with a sill sprinkled with dead flies. There were work boots lined up on the floor. Big ones. I stood for a moment and listened. This was the television. Somebody with big boots was watching cartoons. I steeled myself and knocked.

  I had to knock three times. Finally there was a clatter and a shuffle and the door was yanked open with a shudder. I smelled bacon and marijuana.

  “What?” the guy said.

  “Hi, I’m Jack McMorrow. I’m a reporter, and I’m talking to people about what happened downstairs. Got a sec?”

  “What?” the guy said again.

  He was young and big, maybe six two and early twenties, with a roll of flab that showed under his T-shirt. His eyes were half shut, vaguely focused and rimmed with pink.

  The guy was very stoned.

  “Did I wake you?” I said politely.

  “What? No. I just got home from work. Well, I didn’t just get home. I get home at seven. I was eating, is all.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Arno Baking.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I . . . I run the mixer. You know, put in the ingredients. Last night I did raisin bread. You know, you got to mix in all the raisins?”

  “And what’s your name?”

  “Ron,” he said.

  “I suppose the police have talked to you.”

  “Oh, yeah. The police. They came, I think it was a couple of times. Hey, I’m sorry about the girl. I mean, she was real nice. The kid was real nice too. I told the officers that. Too bad, really. No need for this around here.”

  Ron paused. He was wearing jeans and white socks. The white socks were dirty. Inside the apartment, cartoon characters were talking in nasal voices.

  “So I don’t mean to make you go through this again, but can you tell me anything about the girl or that night or whatever?”

  “The night it happened?” he said.

  No, the night before Christmas, I thought.

  “Right,” I said.

  “I was working.”

  “So you didn’t hear anything unusual or anything?”

  “Umm, I don’t know. I wasn’t here.”

  “Before you left?”

  “Well, I don’t know. She and him were fighting, but that’s not unusual.”

  “Him?”

  “Her boyfriend. I don’t know. It’s none of my business, but they was always fighting. I didn’t say nothing or anything. I mean, what am I gonna say? Hey, man, be nice to each other?”

  “What could you hear?”

  “Oh, yelling and stuff. I could hear her yelling and him yelling. And her crying. Sometimes she just yelled, but this time she was crying, too.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What did I do?” Ron said.

  “Yeah. Did you call the cops?”

  “No. I mean, it wasn’t like they were killing each other or anything.”

  I looked at him. He didn’t catch himself.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I turned it up.”

  “Turned what up?”

  “The TV. I was watching it
, so I turned it up.”

  “What were you watching?”

  “This movie. But I couldn’t hear it.”

  “Because of the crying?”

  “Yeah, but then it stopped.”

  “The crying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I turned it back down.”

  “What?” I said.

  “The TV,” Ron said. “I didn’t want to, like, bother anybody.”

  “What time did it stop?”

  “What?”

  “The crying.”

  “Oh,” Ron said. “I don’t know. Before I went to work.”

  “What time’s that?”

  “I have to be there for ten forty.”

  “And it stopped before that?”

  “Yeah, ’cause I turned the TV back down.”

  “Right. So did you hear anything after things quieted down?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  “In Donna’s apartment.”

  “Oh, no. Not really. I mean, I don’t remember much. The kid rattling around, maybe. She was up, like, too late for her age, you know? When I was little, we had to be in bed by seven thirty. That little girl, she’s up when I go to work. I’m getting in my car, she’s, like, up in the window waving to me. I’m, like, what are you doing up? Go to bed. You gotta grow. Kids don’t grow if they don’t get enough rest. They end up little and skinny. Rest is important for a kid, you know. I mean, their cells are dividing all the time.”

  I paused. Ron’s eyes narrowed even more. Whatever he was smoking, it was still kicking in.

  “So you heard noise down there after the crying and yelling stopped?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you hear anybody leave?”

  “Umm, not that I remember.”

  “But the yelling and crying stopped and then there were just normal noises?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what you mean by normal. There were, I think, dishes and stuff. Those kind of noises. You know that little kid can do the dishes? I thought that was pretty good. Little kid like that. Maybe her mother helps her with the knives, the sharp ones. Yeah, she probably helped her with the knives. She seemed nice. They both did. The kid still living there? No, I suppose she’d have to leave, right? She go with the sister?”

  “I think so,” I said. “So you told the police all this?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I mean, I told somebody about them fighting all the time and everything. But, umm, I thought you were the police?”

  “No, I’m a reporter.”

  Ron stood and thought about that for a moment, the new information struggling to break through the buzzing in his head.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, then, aren’t you supposed to be, like, writing all this stuff down?”

  I tapped the side of my head.

  “Photographic,” I said.

  In widening circles, the canvass continued.

  There was no answer on the first floor, and when I cupped my hands over my face and looked in a window, I could see wrappers and paper, strewn on the counter and the kitchen floor as if a hungry animal had ransacked the place. I knocked on the back door again, but there was no sound inside.

  The animal was out.

  I opened the back door and stepped out onto the steps. A Kennebec cruiser pulled up out front, passing the end of the driveway. When it was out of sight, I walked down the steps and across the driveway to the next building. There was a door out back. Beside it, black metal mailboxes were hung like dubious trophies of tenancy, proof that people paid money to live there. I opened the door and went in.

  A white cat slipped out, brushing my legs. I stepped on broken glass and it stuck in the wooden floor, next to a plastic trash can from which the cat had been feeding. I went up the stairs so I wouldn’t be blamed for the mess.

  This building was bigger than Donna’s, with doors at each landing that led to some sort of central hallway. I let myself into the hallway on the third floor and stopped and listened in the dim light. I could hear music, country-western. A baby crying. I could smell coffee and, more faintly, bacon. I walked down the hallway as though I were sneaking into somebody’s bedroom at night. At the end of the hallway, there was a beat-up stroller. I wondered who had hauled it up all those stairs. I knocked to find out.

  The door popped open. A young woman, childishly young, looked at me suspiciously. She was heavy, like a kid who ate potato chips instead of playing sports. There was a chubby kid in her arms, a fat-cheeked baby boy with a dirty face. The kid was holding a bottle.

  Probably taking after his daddy.

  “Yeah?” the woman said, her hand ready on the doorknob.

  “I’m Jack McMorrow. I was wondering if I could ask you—”

  “I already talked to you guys. So if you don’t mind, I got things I gotta do. Like change dirty—”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “A reporter.”

  “Christ,” the woman said, and slammed the door shut.

  This wasn’t going to take as long as I thought.

  I knocked one more time, but the woman didn’t answer. As I waited, I could hear the baby screech inside. No comment. I walked down the hall and found another door that looked like an entrance to an apartment. I knocked and waited. Knocked and waited some more. Finally, I turned the knob slowly and eased the door open. The room was big and dingy and empty.

  There was a TV cable dangling from the wall, a crushed Budweiser can in the middle of the floor. I walked in and saw that the adjacent room was empty too, the wall-to-wall carpet the same filthy green. I stepped into that room and it was hot and stuffy. There were faded stickers on the window—Big Bird, Oscar, Spider-Man. I looked out at Donna’s building, her front right window one floor down. The window where she had stood in tears. I let myself out and went downstairs.

  The second-floor hallway was identical but with a faint, foreign odor. Soap.

  I walked down the hall and counted three doors. I tapped on one and waited. Tapped again. There was no sound, so I turned the knob and pulled. And stared into a closet, with a broom and a mop and bucket. Recently used.

  As I closed the closet door, another door opened behind me.

  “Can I help you?” a woman’s voice said.

  I turned and grinned.

  “Looking for the apartments,” I said.

  “Oh?” the woman said.

  She was in her early sixties, short and stocky, wearing blue sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt. Perhaps I’d interrupted her television workout.

  “Yeah,” I said, moving toward her. “I’m Jack McMorrow. I’m from the Observer, and I’m talking to people in the building about what happened—”

  “Didn’t see nothin’,” the woman said. “Didn’t hear nothin’. Just know what I read in the newspaper. And I don’t want to be in it.”

  The door clicked closed.

  I stood there like somebody who’d been turned down for a dance. The Jack McMorrow charm; it hadn’t faded a bit.

  The hallway was quiet. I could hear the country-western music from upstairs, the little boy still crying. I wondered if the woman in sweatpants was old enough to be considered a hag. I pictured Donna as she had said it, that the old hag was watching her. She had been looking across, not up or down. The woman in sweats was on the wrong side of the hall, but this apartment was empty.

  I started for the stairs, then turned back. There were two doors past the closet, six feet apart, one with a lock, one without. I knocked on the one with a lock and waited. Nothing. I stepped over to the door without a lock and tapped on that too. Still nothing. I turned the knob. It was dark inside. An umbrella and a pair of old white sneakers. Another door, with light showing through the jamb.

  I left the outer door open and moved forward. Hesitated, my arm up, then knocked. Two taps. Two more. I waited and listened. Still waited. Then I heard a toilet flush somewhere inside. I knocked again. There were
footsteps, then a rush of light as the door opened.

  I blinked. A very short old woman peered out.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  Her accent was very French.

  “I hope so,” I said. “My name is Jack McMorrow.”

  The door did not slam shut.

  18

  I sat on a faded blue wing chair with pink-and-white crocheted things on the arms. She sat on the couch, which was also blue and also had the pink-and-white crocheted things on the arms. Even the television, an old console, was draped with a crocheted strip, like a small, narrow afghan.

  She had asked to see identification, so I’d given her my driver’s license, my Times ID, even my card from the New York Public Library. She peered at each of them, then peered up at me.

  “Okay, okay,” she said finally, and invited me to take a seat.

  “This place is a mess. I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I didn’t expect company.”

  The room was small and scoured.

  “Sorry not to give you any warning.”

  “That’s okay. Hey, you can’t go around sending out invitations, right? Huh? You gotta write your stories. I saw the one about that poor little missy over there. You didn’t put her name in there, but I read that, I knew right away. The sister and all that? I said, ‘That’s her.’ Oh, her sister was there a lot. Good thing for that little girl, huh?”

  She was short but square, her hair done in a tight perm, makeup all in place. Her feet barely touched the floor from her position on the couch, and she was wearing stockings with light gray soft leather shoes and beige slacks. Her hands were folded on her lap.

  Only a distraught young woman could call her a hag.

  “So you knew Donna?” I asked.

  “Oh, did I know her? Well, yes. I knew her. I’ve lived here for eleven years. I know a lot of them. I see them move in. I see them move out. I see them have their boyfriends, their babies, eh? That little girl, she has one long row to hoe, I’ll tell you.”

  “Because of the boyfriend?”

  “Oh, yeah, some boyfriend. I could hear them, you know. In the summer, with the windows open? Eh, Christ. I hear them when they’re all, you know, lovey-dovey. I turn on the television. I don’t need to hear all that huffing and puffing, a woman my age. But it didn’t last long. Then they were fighting most of the time. I call the police and they come and things are quiet, then one night later, two nights later, he’s drunk again and he’s screaming at her, hitting her. I call the police again. I don’t give my name. I just say, ‘Fifteen Peavey. He’s hitting her again.’ And I hang up.”