Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  So we whizzed along, past the munching cows, the sagging barns and manure-spattered tractors, the mobile homes with their hay-bale skirts, drawn up like wagon trains against some faceless enemy. When we dropped out of the fields and woods and into the Kennebec valley, the river was moving slowly, as if hungover.

  I sped across the bridge and pulled into the police-station lot and parked. There was a row of blue Kennebec cruisers, one white cruiser from Winslow, and LaCharelle’s black unmarked Chevy. I shut off the car and started to say something, but Roxanne was already getting out. As she did I glimpsed her face, and it was hard and resolute. It was her business face, and I realized I’d never seen it before.

  “You ready?” I asked as we walked to the door.

  She looked at me with the same expression, unyielding with a hint of impatience.

  The hallway was dark and cool. We stopped at the window and waited for the dispatcher to look up from the radio. Roxanne looked at the posters for missing children.

  “Can you imagine?” I said.

  “I don’t have to,” she said. “I’ve got three now who’ve disappeared.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Not yet,” Roxanne said. “But maybe soon.”

  The dispatcher, a very pleasant, very made-up young woman, looked up and recognized me and smiled.

  “We need to see Detective LaCharelle,” I said.

  “They’re in the detectives’ offices,” she said, eyeing Roxanne curiously. “I’ll ring them.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll let ourselves in.”

  We went down the hall, Roxanne in her jeans and white linen blouse, me in my jeans and dark green polo shirt. We looked as if we might be a happy couple, off to spend a Saturday browsing for antiques.

  As Roxanne had said, in another life.

  The door was half open. I nudged it open the other half and there was LaCharelle sitting at a desk, his feet up on the blotter, arms behind his head. A Winslow patrolman, a young guy with big, tanned biceps, was leaning against a file cabinet.

  “So there’s blood everywhere,” LaCharelle was saying. “I mean everywhere. On the—”

  He saw me and stopped. He saw Roxanne and his eyebrows moved involuntarily upward.

  “McMorrow,” LaCharelle said, swinging his feet off the desk and getting up.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “This is Patrolman Nicholson. He made the stop last night.”

  “Many thanks,” I said. “This is Roxanne Masterson. The witness.”

  “Good morning, miss,” LaCharelle said. “Nice of you to come in. When McMorrow said he could bring the witness with him, I had no idea why he’d want to bring the witness with him.”

  Roxanne stepped farther into the room. She nodded at the patrolman, who gave his head a jiggle and looked away shyly. Roxanne held her hand out to LaCharelle. He took it and she shook his hand and looked around.

  “So where do you want to do it?” she said.

  LaCharelle’s eyes rolled, almost imperceptibly.

  “This is fine,” he said. “Have a seat. Let me get the paper.”

  Roxanne sat down. I stood and watched the patrolman watch her. She looked incongruously pretty in the drab little room. I knew it. The patrolman knew it. LaCharelle, when he came back with the forms, knew it too. He put the paper on the desk in front of Roxanne and stared at her for a moment.

  “Now, Miss Masterson, this is what we call a voluntary statement. I don’t want you to be nervous, because there’s really nothing to be—”

  “I’m not nervous, Detective,” Roxanne said. “I work for the state. I’m a Child Protective worker. I’ve given many statements over the years. This one isn’t going to bother me.”

  LaCharelle’s patronizing smile vanished.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, good. You’re a pro and I’m a pro. Let’s do it.”

  He sat at the desk across from Roxanne and took a pen from the pocket of his sport shirt. He started to date the paper, but the pen didn’t work. LaCharelle made a couple of swirls on the paper and then flung the pen into the wastebasket. He took another pen from his pocket and it worked. He asked Roxanne to spell her full name. She did. He asked her where she lived and she gave her address in South Portland.

  LaCharelle looked up.

  “I thought you were a neighbor of McMorrow’s,” he said.

  “No. I’m a friend of Mr. McMorrow’s. I live in South Portland.”

  “So last night you were going—”

  “To visit Mr. McMorrow.”

  “Oh,” LaCharelle said. “Oh, I get it. Oh.”

  He looked at Roxanne, then looked at me.

  I smiled. Eat your heart out, chump.

  “Well,” LaCharelle said. “That’s nice. So, let’s see. Tell me what you saw. In your own words.”

  Roxanne told him she was pulling into the road when the black car was pulling out. As she went by, she saw the faces of the two guys and they looked very nervous. They took off fast, throwing gravel with their tires, and Roxanne decided to follow them.

  “Why?” LaCharelle said.

  “To get their license number, just in case something had happened.”

  “You were expecting something to happen?”

  “Mr. McMorrow has been threatened and assaulted over the past few days,” Roxanne said. “So if something happened, it wouldn’t be a big surprise.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t,” LaCharelle said. “Mr. McMorrow seems to have a knack for having things happen to him.”

  He looked at me. I looked at Roxanne. She was looking at LaCharelle.

  “So you followed the car. You got close enough to get the license number?”

  “Eventually. But it took a while.”

  “What was it?”

  “The number? It was 16543 A. I wrote it down. Now I’ve got it memorized.”

  “And what else did you see?”

  “Well, as I was driving behind them, I could see them throwing stuff out of the car. Shoes or something. I had the plate by then, so I stopped and went back and picked up one of the things. It was in the bushes along the road. Not very far in.”

  “And what was it?”

  “A boot. A boot that smelled like gasoline.”

  “And you’re sure it came out of that car?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “The black car with the license-plate number you just gave me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you do with the boot?”

  “I gave it to the fire chief.”

  “We have it,” the patrolman broke in. “It’s Leaman’s boot. We found the other one this morning. Gas on that one too.”

  LaCharelle wrote carefully on the form, then turned it over and started on a second. He paused and looked over both pages, then looked up and smiled.

  “Well, I guess that’ll do it,” he said. “We’ll see Mr. Leaman in eight or ten years, if he lives that long. Nice work, Miss Masterson. If you ever decide to leave Child Protective, give us a call. We can always use good female detectives.”

  The patronizing smile returned as he slid the statement over the desk to Roxanne. She scanned it and signed on the bottom of both pages.

  “So where’s he now?” I said.

  “Leaman? Kenhegan County. Who handled your assault by him?”

  “Lenny. Right here. Kennebec PD.”

  “We’ll get that report. I’d say Mr. Leaman is soon to be headed for the big house. Score one for the good guys.”

  Roxanne got up. LaCharelle got up too, and the patrolman looked uncomfortable. We all moved toward the door, but as we got to the doorway, LaCharelle said, “McMorrow” and nodded back toward the room.

  I turned. Roxanne stopped around the corner, just outside the door.

  “Two things,” LaCharelle said, lowering his voice. I took a step toward him.

  “One, I hope you understood that what I told you on the phone last night was confidential. If I see it in print, you w
on’t know what hit you.”

  I looked at him. Big and fleshy. I’d been hit by worse.

  “What’s two?” I said.

  “The apples are in the cart on Donna Marchant. I don’t want ’em upset, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying. And I think there are a few apples kicking around underfoot. If you know what I’m saying.”

  “Let ’em lie, McMorrow. We’ve got him, you hear me? Stay away from our witnesses. Stay away from Tanner. We’re gonna nail him, and he’s the right guy. If I didn’t believe that, I’d still be out there looking. But I’m not. We’ve got a warrant for Tanner and we’re looking for him. He’s gone under, but we’ll dig him out. You stay the hell away.”

  I looked at him and smiled.

  “But I thought I was one of the good guys,” I said. “I was gonna ask for a plastic badge with my name on it.”

  LaCharelle looked toward the door. I started to turn away.

  “McMorrow,” he said.

  “I thought you said two things.”

  “One more. With a nice girl like that, what the hell are you doing, hanging around with a slider like Donna Marchant?”

  He looked at me with the faintest of leers.

  “She wasn’t. I didn’t. And I’m not,” I said. “Better hang on tight to that apple cart, Detective.”

  I turned and walked out. Roxanne was beside the door, leaning against the cinder-block wall.

  “Did you hear all that?” I said as she fell in beside me.

  “Yeah.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Roxanne said.

  “She didn’t deserve this. Believe me.”

  “I do believe you,” she said.

  “So what do you want to do now?”

  “What do you want to do, Jack?”

  “Pick up all the apples,” I said. “Every single last one.”

  27

  Roxanne moved easily in the labyrinth of dim hallways in the big apartment building on Peavey Street. She wasn’t tentative. She wasn’t shy. She had been doing this for a while.

  We climbed the stairs, Roxanne in front, me behind. We went to the second floor, stepped over trash bags, walked past muddy boots. I showed Roxanne where Miss Desrosiers’s door was, stuck away in the corner, and then I knocked and waited.

  There was a shuffling sound, a couple of clicks, then the door crept open.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Jack McMorrow. From the newspaper. We talked last week?”

  “Oh, yeah. What? You got more questions?”

  “A couple.”

  “Well, come in, then. I spent thirty-eight years on my feet, and now I like to sit myself down.”

  The door opened wide and there she was, small and neat in a blue cotton dress, as if, on a Saturday morning at five minutes before nine, she’d been expecting company.

  She led the way and we followed, through the narrow hall and into the living room, all sunlight and crochet.

  “I’m sorry about the mess, eh?”

  You could have lapped milk up off the floor.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said.

  Miss Desrosiers went to the couch and sat down, her feet, in terry-cloth slippers, barely touching the floor.

  “This your wife?”

  “No, she’s my friend. This is Roxanne Masterson.”

  “Hello,” Roxanne said.

  She smiled gently. Miss Desrosiers looked her over.

  “She’s a pretty girl, eh? You better marry her right off. You don’t want somebody else coming in, snatching her up, pretty girl like that.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “And now you’re dragging her around while you do your newspaper work? You better treat her better or she’ll find somebody else, eh? Pretty girl like that, they got all the guys coming ’round. Don’t you take her for granted there. I got a nephew. He lives out there in Arizona. He come home and he’s got this little girl, my goodness, she was a doll. I say, ‘When you gonna get married?’ He says, ‘Sometime. We don’t want to rush things.’ Rush things? Well, she’s married now, all right. To somebody else. He dillydallied and she found somebody who’d just do it, you know?”

  Roxanne looked at me and grinned. I smiled back. “Well, you’re probably right,” I said. “But the reason we stopped by was to ask you about that night again. The night Donna died.”

  The woman looked annoyed.

  “Hey, I talked about that night so much, I’m blue in my face, eh?”

  “You did? To who?”

  “To who? The detective, that’s who,” she said. “I told him. I saw that rat there, I saw him come in. I saw him go out. I didn’t see him come back, but I wouldn’t. Not if he didn’t want me to. I said, ‘What do I look like, a cat? See in the dark?’ I see him come out because the light’s on in the hallway and then the door opens and the light comes out. But if he’s sneaking around, I’m not gonna see him.”

  “So that’s what they wanted to know?”

  “I guess so. He comes in here and he’s got a gun. I know he’s got a gun because of the way he sits, you know. I think it was in the back of his pants. Some of the detectives on television hold them there. Some of them have them under the arm. Under the sport jacket. But he had on one of those little short jackets. The ones with the red plaid lining.”

  “But I was wondering about Marcia. The sister. Could you tell me again when she came and went?”

  “When she came and went? Why don’t you ask her?”

  “We will,” Roxanne said, startling me. “But she’s been away. Taking care of the little girl. It’s been very hard on her, I’m sure. Losing her mother at her age.”

  It was nicely done. Deflect and disarm.

  “Oh, a terrible thing. The little baby, she shouldn’t have seen any of the things she saw. His drinking. Hitting that poor girl. Oh, I’d like to give that guy the back of my hand. But then he’d probably hit me too. A nasty bully, and that girl there, she was defenseless, you know? Hey, she needed a couple of big brothers, come and straighten him out. I had a couple of brothers, they’re dead now, but when I was her age, anybody touched me, hey, there wouldn’t be much left of them, let me tell you. Especially my brother Harry. Oh, he was a big man, and a temper? He’d tear them limb from limb, I’m not kidding you.”

  Good for Harry, I thought. Good for him.

  “Well, I know you told me this once, off the record.”

  “I don’t want my name in the paper.”

  “It won’t be. I promise. But you said Marcia came once and left. Then came again.”

  “Right. With the little girl. I think things must’ve gotten worse. That guy must’ve snuck back in or something.”

  “And she took the girl with her?” I asked.

  “That time, yes. The second time.”

  “And then she came back again by herself?”

  “Oh, yeah. That was when the police came. Right after that. She must’ve found her and called the cops. The lights were flashing and the sirens. I said, ‘You’d think somebody’d been murdered.’ I felt bad about that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I remember you said that.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “So do you think the little girl was there when it happened?”

  “Oh, God no,” Miss Desrosiers said, her pale, translucent hands wringing on her lap. “She came and got her.”

  “And then she came back again.”

  “Yeah. But the little girl wasn’t with her. She was home. She’s married, right? The sister?”

  “Yeah. Her husband works at the mill.”

  “That’s good. So he must’ve been taking care of her.”

  “I’m sure,” Roxanne said. She smiled soothingly.

  “So was it a long time between when she picked up the girl and when she came back?” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t remember. A little while. I can’t remember, exactly. But it was after the news
when she got the little girl. Hey, I don’t know. A half hour. I was finishing my tea, and I made that as soon as the news was over. I think he waited out there in the alley until the sister and the little girl left, and then he went back in and strangled her. Well, he’ll burn in hell. See how tough he is then, eh?”

  “Probably not very,” Roxanne said. “‘Did you make that afghan yourself?”

  So Roxanne and Miss Desrosiers talked about afghans and crocheting for a few minutes. I half listened, thinking about that half hour of opportunity, about Tanner saying he hadn’t killed Donna, that she’d been just fine when he left.

  Beaten up. Drunk. Crying. Just fine.

  When I tuned back into the conversation, it was winding down. Roxanne had made a friend. She could come by anytime for tea and cookies, chat about the old days in Kennebec. When we left, Miss Desrosiers took Roxanne’s hand and told me to marry her while I had the chance. I wasn’t the only one who succumbed to Roxanne’s charm.

  “So what do you think?” I said when we got in the car.

  “I think I’m going to find a man who doesn’t dillydally.”

  “Should we go find a justice of the peace?”

  “How ’bout we start with a cup of coffee,” Roxanne said.

  “And talk about our wedding plans?”

  “How ’bout we start with a cup of coffee.”

  She smiled. Barely.

  We went to the Donut Shop, a clean, well-lighted place on Main Street, a two-minute drive from Peavey Street. The store with the lunch counter and X-rated movies was closer, but I couldn’t picture Roxanne in that setting. But then, maybe I’d have to start.

  “You’re good at this, Roxanne,” I said as we settled into our Formica and plastic booth, with its panoramic parking-lot view.

  “Good at what?” she said.

  “At talking to people.”

  “It’s what I do. I talk to people about their problems, try to figure out if something’s wrong.”

  “Do you think something’s wrong here?”

  Roxanne picked at the plastic half-and-half container, then dribbled the stuff into her coffee.

  “I think something’s strange about it,” she said. “That there was such a short period of time for Donna to be killed. If Marcia came and got the girl—”

  “Adrianna.”