Impulse

by Frederick Ramsay

  “This boy, Dexter Light, BMOC as we used to say. Corps Commander, president of his class, bound for the Naval Academy, captain of…good Lord, was there anything he wasn’t the captain of? Isn’t he the rather dissolute forty-something who brought this whole thing up? What happened between then and now, I wonder?”

  “Nobody knows. He’s an embarrassment to the school. They, that is, Darnell and the poobahs in the Admin offices, wish he’d just go away, but he pops up every year at the reunion to demonstrate that you can be a Scott graduate and a failure.”

  Frank put all the material aside and thanked her. She said the addresses of anyone he might want to contact would be in the alumni office or with Stark, if they were anywhere. He looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. He’d call Rosemary and set up lunch.

  “You wouldn’t know how to access newspapers archives, would you? I tried the paper’s web sites but couldn’t find the door in.”

  “You have to go directly to the papers, most of the time,” she said. “There’s too much material for them to post. Your best bet is either a local library, or a general search. You’d be surprised what obsesses people and they dump on the Internet.”

  “Library, of course. Thanks.”

  He stopped at the alumni office and jotted down several addresses. The human resources office gave him three more and the names of the few people still on the staff in some capacity, who had also been employed twenty-five years before. He did not visit Stark’s office. He wanted to save him for later.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Rosemary followed the hostess to a booth. The restaurant had the requisite number of artifacts and signs suspended from the ceiling and attached to the walls. This outlet, because it stood on what used to be a working farm twenty or thirty years before, had been decorated with implements, tractor parts, and feed advertisements. She surveyed the lot of them, testing herself to see if she could identify any. Rosemary knew a bit about farm life. Scott once boasted a working farm, but it had never really interested her. She thought of herself as a city girl. She recognized a scythe but only because it figured in images of death, The Grim Reaper. She also recognized a rake but did not give herself credit for that. Rakes were everywhere. She wondered what ever happened to restaurants that were just that, a place to eat, whose owners did not feel the need to evoke some geographical area, some sociological theme or historic era. If she wanted to eat in a New Orleans restaurant, she’d fly to Louisiana.

  Grumpy, grumpy. What’s got into you this afternoon?

  “Be still. I don’t need you now.”

  “Pardon me?” Her waiter hovered over her, a confused look on his face. She hadn’t noticed his arrival. He couldn’t be more than sixteen.

  Eighteen. You have to be at least eighteen to wait tables in a restaurant that serves spirits. Or is it twenty-one?

  “I’m sorry, I was daydreaming,” she said and smiled at the boy/man. “I’ll have an iced tea. I am waiting for someone to join me. We’ll order when he comes.”

  “Certainly. Will that be sweetened or unsweetened?”

  “Oh, ah…sweetened, I guess.”

  “Raspberry, mango, or strawberry?”

  “What? Just plain, please.”

  “We don’t have sweetened plain iced tea.”

  “Then bring me unsweetened iced tea, and something to sweeten it with.”

  “Sweeteners, sugar, and sugar substitutes are on the table,” he announced and swept away to attend to his other customers.

  She glanced at her watch. She’d arrived early. She rooted through her purse for a mirror, positioned it a foot or so from her face and inspected her makeup. She did not wear much—enough to cover Frank’s remembered freckles, a little blush, some eyeliner and lipstick. She sighed at the lines around her eyes. Crow’s feet. They looked more like turkey’s feet, maybe Big Bird’s feet.

  We’re not buying into the “you’re not old’’ business, are we?

  “Why do you always have to yank the fun out of everything?

  Somebody has to keep you from making a fool of yourself.

  “No, that’s wrong. You are the manifestation of my loneliness, that’s all. And that could end soon.”

  He could be a murderer.

  “I don’t care.”

  Her tea arrived. The server gave her an odd look and hustled away.

  Frank appeared in the entryway. She waved to him. He waved back, said something to the hostess, and made his way to the booth. He slid in beside her and before she could react, kissed her on the cheek.

  “I hope PDAs don’t embarrass you,” he said and smiled.

  “Sorry? PD whats?”

  “Isn’t that what they were called in your school? They were in mine—Public Displays of Affection, PDAs.”

  “Oh, those. I’d forgotten. Oh my, yes. Big trouble from headmistresses and chaperones for that. My goodness, how quaint we must seem to younger people now. My son is already worried about my granddaughter. He wants her on some contraceptive regimen. She’s only twelve, for goodness’ sake, but he tells me the whole group of them are sexually active and he can’t think how else to protect her.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I told him to teach his children to respect themselves and their families, to say no, and to wait until the experience held some meaning. He just rolled his eyes and said, ‘That’s easy for you to say, Mom,’ and changed the subject.”

  “My daughter told me one of her neighbor’s teenage girls was bugging her for breast implants. She said all the other girls were getting them for graduation presents.”

  “No. What did the mother say?”

  “She said, and I am here quoting my daughter, but I cannot reproduce the tone of her voice, she said, ‘Only if you get a B+ average.’”

  Rosemary felt herself blushing as he spoke. She never did get used to talking about sex. Not because she had a problem with it. Three months into her marriage she discovered the exhilaration, the sheer exuberance of it. That was not something either her mother or her “health classes” had prepared her for. However much her friends may have thought of her as prim or prudish, she and George knew how to give and receive pleasure. But talking about it still challenged her.

  “You’re blushing,” he said.

  “Too much sun yesterday. What did you learn at the school?” She needed to change the subject fast or she might start thinking about him in other ways.

  Carnal thoughts?

  “Ah, quite a lot, actually. For example, the Director of Development, Stark—you remember the shortish man with the tallish wife?”

  “Everybody knows Stark,” she said. “Remember, I saved you from him at the dinner?”

  “Right, I forgot. I assumed everyone is as dense about who’s who as I am. I forget you have been in the flow for years and I have not. Anyway, he lived on the campus and played with those boys, in the same class with three of them. In different circumstances, he might have disappeared, too. Funny thing though, he never mentioned it. Then, the father of one of the missing boys is still on the faculty. His wife lives in Towson. Elizabeth Roulx says the father won’t talk, but the mother might. We can check her out tomorrow. There are some other people who were there at the time who we can talk to as well. Let’s see, including a bus driver, the daughter of the then head librarian, and another English teacher. What did you get from your contacts at the police?”

  “From them, nothing. Even my friend the judge couldn’t spring the reports. But, the retired cop came through for us. He had his own copies. He told me he never liked the way the investigation went and he’s been digging through the case on and off ever since.”

  “He’s working it as a cold case, I guess. Does he have a theory?”

  “No, that’s the problem. He said he looked into every conceivable angle—pedophiles, drug dealers, serial killers, you name it. He’s scoured the Internet, contacted other jurisdictions—his word. I guess he meant other police departments and—nothing. When I talke
d to him all he could do is shake his head. He made me copies of everything he had. We can read through them this afternoon. He said if we came up with something, to call him. He’s lived this mystery for a quarter of a century and wants an answer as badly as the parents, I think.”

  They ordered. While they waited, Frank shuffled through the stack of papers she handed him. He held his reading glasses up to the light, squinted at them, then polished them with his necktie. Men, she thought, never seem to have the equipment they need with them in spite of all their pockets. Women were severely limited when it came to pockets—at least women of her generation were. She remembered seeing a young girl at the mall wearing cargo shorts and envied her. The problem with men seemed to be they couldn’t remember to shift the contents of their pockets from one jacket to another. They ought to give up their macho ways and start carrying purses. The only man she’d ever met who seemed adequately supplied with whatever he needed was an artist she dated briefly right out of college who wore the same jacket every day. It smelled of turpentine and linseed oil. She couldn’t remember him in any other. He daubed Impressionist-like landscapes but didn’t sell much, and she lost touch with him when she met George Mitchell.

  She nibbled at her sandwich and sipped iced tea. Frank put down the papers and attacked his lunch. They ate in silence. On two occasions, she looked up and caught him staring at her. On the third, she put her glass down and stared back.

  “What?” he said.

  “You were studying me, I think.”

  “No, I—”

  “You were. You were sizing me up like a stamp collector trying to decide whether to invest a huge sum on a particular bit of used postage. Or would it be experienced postage?”

  “For stamps, used would be correct, and I wasn’t.”

  “Then what were you doing? I saw you, Frank. Not an ogle, not a glance either. You were giving me the once over.”

  “Okay, if you must know, I was trying to remember what you looked like when we were kids. I could have done that a few days ago. I hadn’t seen you for years and so my memories were locked in time. But now that I’ve had the pleasure of your company for a few days, the new data, so to speak, has displaced the old. So I’m studying this face so I won’t forget it later.”

  “That’s a very pretty speech and I don’t believe a word of it. I’m a stamp and you are a philatelist, admit it.”

  “What do you call someone who collects butterflies? I’m one of those if I must be anything. You are much too beautiful to be a stamp.”

  “A lepto…something…lepidopterist?”

  “The very word.”

  She examined his face in turn. Nothing butterfly-like about him. He looked weathered and—and what? Experienced. It fit him. And behind the eyes, buried deep down in there somewhere, she saw pain.

  “Are you collecting?” she asked.

  He sat back and laughed. “Well, maybe I am, at that.”

  You’re falling for this guy. Doesn’t the missing wife worry you?

  “You know what? I’m okay with that.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Maria Gutierrez tapped on Phelps’ door. “Excuse me Lieutenant, but you said you wanted to see any reports Ledezma ordered before I put them in his box.” She held a manila envelope in her hand. “It’s the ME’s preliminary report on the body they found in the desert.” She read the label on the front. “Saundra Smith, missing since May…four years ago.”

  Fresh from the police academy, Maria had been assigned as an intern to homicide, the first of her rotations through the department’s various sections and divisions. This month she was assigned to Phelps. What she really wanted was to ride right seat in a patrol car.

  “Thanks. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Make me a copy of the report and then take the original to Ledezma. Then, get on the computer and pull all the incident reports for anything that happened within two miles of where that lady lived on the day she disappeared. No, make that three miles. We have to assume she was moderately healthy and could do a long walk. Put those in one group. And then, do the same thing for up to three months before and afterward.”

  He read the question on her face. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile. Homicide seemed to reduce the smile quotient among its members. He could joke with the squad. It wasn’t that they didn’t say funny, usually ironic things, but the response lacked the easy laughter of ordinary society. Homicide was about death. Its first victim, for those newly assigned to it, was laughter.

  “I want to see if there is any pattern in the area—any activity that might point to a reason the woman disappeared.”

  He saw she still didn’t get it.

  “Suppose other people walked away and weren’t found. This guy lived out near a retirement community. Do you have any idea how many old people walk away from home and get lost out there every year? It’s Alzheimer City. Is there any reason to suppose this is anything else?”

  Gutierrez nodded. Whether she understood or not he could not tell, but it would be her first lesson in routine digging. She needed to learn it now and from him, not the seat of the pants detective work she’d learn later.

  “Go through them and cull out any that aren’t relevant.”

  “How will I know which are relevant and which aren’t?”

  “Well, we are tracking a missing woman, so missing cats, bicycles, loud parties, that kind of thing, won’t apply. Domestic disturbances, ditto. When you’re done, copy them all and bring them to me.”

  “Copies to Ledezma and Pastorella?”

  “No, they should have already seen them.”

  “Sir, when I’m done with that, can you get me a ride?”

  “You don’t want to learn detective work?”

  “Well, yes, but….”

  “We’ll see how well you do on this project, Gutierrez. Then, maybe.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “Get me Dave Fowler on the phone.” He saw a cloud cross her eyes. “He’s the dive team leader. He left me a message to call him. That’s it for now.”

  Three minutes after she left, his phone rang.

  “Fowler, sir,” she said.

  “Thanks. What line?”

  “Three, sir.”

  He punched the third red button. “Dave, what’s up?”

  “I wanted to ask you the same thing. One of your guys had my crew tied up all Monday afternoon. I thought we were after a sinker but it’s not the way it went down.”

  “Who tied you up?”

  “Ledezma. He had us out in a lake on a golf course in the West Valley. He said he wanted to find a gun.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah. We found two, as a matter of fact, a nickel plated 1911 Colt .45 and a newer .38 caliber S and W. The .45 looked like a presentation piece and had been in the water for a long time, the .38 maybe a month or less.”

  “So what’s the problem? You found at least one piece.”

  “Ledezma kept us out there for three more hours searching for anything else we could find. Artifacts, he called them. What the Hell is an artifact?”

  “No idea. Did you find anything else?”

  “Yeah, a golf club. Looks like some guy missed a hundred dollar putt and tossed the thing in the lake.”

  “What kind of putter?”

  “I don’t know from golf, Marty. It had a funny, short name. Not a name I’d recognize.”

  “Cleveland, Taylor Made?”

  “No, short, like a sound.”

  “Ping?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. You want it? I have it right here.”

  “Sure.”

  “And that’s the lot. Two guns and a putter. Five hours, three men at time and a half, plus air tanks, setup. It could bust your budget, Marty.”

  “Thanks, Dave. I’ll talk to Ledezma. The next time someone over here calls, give me a heads up, will you? Oh, by the way, where are the guns?”

  “Crime lab.”

  He h
ung up and drummed his fingers and dialed the lab. Saul Levinson answered after ten rings.

  “You got two guns last Monday or Tuesday early from either Dave Fowler or Manny Ledezma. What can you tell me?”

  “The.45 is in bad shape, Lieutenant, Been in the water a long time. We lifted the serial number. Registered to a Frank Smith.”

  “What about the .38?”

  “Numbers filed off. We were able to fire it and get a good slug, nice lands and grooves. We put the image in the computer and we’re running it for a match for anything local. We are dabbing the filed part with acid to lift the serial number. We’ll send it to the FBI later.”

  Phelps hung up a second time and continued his drumming. So, they found the gun, but nothing else. Unless Smith had a second piece. What did Ledezma think he’d find in that pond besides a gun? The trouble with big city cops who move to small municipalities like this one, he thought, is they have no patience with grunt work. They’re used to umpteen shootings a day and so focus on the nearest suspects and grind them until they nail them or lose them. Ledezma needed to learn detective work all over again, Phelps style.

  “Maria,” he shouted, “how are you coming with those reports?”

  ***

  “Here, this is for you.” Frank slid the key card still in its paper envelope toward her.

  “What’s this?”

  “Key to the room at the motel or hotel. I’m not sure what to call it. It has a bellman, but a bad one—that makes it a hotel in my book, but there’s no restaurant so it’s a motel.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “No, I suppose not. Anyway, here’s the key to the room.”

  Well, at least he didn’t say my room.

  “Is that important? That I have a key, I mean.”

  “Not important. I just thought it might be convenient for you if I’m not around and you have something to put in the safe or want to rest or—”

  Or fool around?

  “Not likely. Well, maybe…to put things in the safe, I mean.” She took the key card and slipped it in her purse. He cocked his head to one side and stared at her quizzically. She took a deep breath.

  “Frank, I have a confession to make. I hear voices. Well, not voices, a voice, and I talk to it.”