The Marble Kite: A Mystery (Alex Rasmussen Mysteries)

by David Daniel

  “The TVs there are bigger than mine.” We agreed on a time.

  “And now I really am on the clock, so I’ve got to run. Bye.”

  We were a new item, and part of the fun was learning each other’s little moves: on the phone and in person … maybe, in time, in a life. I tried on that scenario. Phoebe had declared herself a team player, a born lifer in whatever situation she found herself. She had married her junior high school boyfriend and insisted it would’ve been a forever thing if he hadn’t died in a car crash. She liked plugging away at the steady job, putting in the time and making grade, a cubicle by the window, maybe even retiring in it someday, with handshakes and good wishes, and the prospect of a financial pillow for the rest of her days. Not a bad trade, I suppose, for some people. It’s what Roland Cote was doing, and Ed St. Onge: one an inveterate bachelor, the other contentedly wed for years, both devoted to the job. But not yours truly. I’d once been married and had once been on the job. I told Phoebe this, going into the whole ignominy of my fall, admitting to her that it wasn’t something I liked to dwell on, and she listened and said that time was often enough to get beyond things, but not always, that occasionally it was necessary to go back and try to work through something. Was that what I needed to do? I glanced at the bottom drawer of my desk, where I kept the fat yellow file of all that had gone down, beginning with that fateful night in the courtyard behind the old hosiery mill. I started to pull open the drawer …

  I yanked the galloping horse of soul-searching to a halt midstride. I shut the drawer. I hung up my jacket and settled in to give a couple of hours to Atlantic Casualty, but the hoofbeats echoed on for a time before they faded completely.

  11

  Later that afternoon I drove over to the courthouse. Superior court for Middlesex County was a complex of large granite and limestone buildings, in the oldest of which Daniel Webster had argued cases. They were in the neoclassical style that in an earlier century gave dignity and formality to the proceedings that went on there. Now—who knew? In the late afternoon sunlight, though, they still possessed a kind of majesty. I passed through the metal detectors and let a sloe-eyed county employee massage me with an electronic wand. No bells went off, so I guessed it wasn’t love. It was after 4:00 PM. and formal sessions were done for the day, giving the vast lobby an echoey emptiness. There was an office locator on the wall beside the large center staircase, and I looked for and found Judge Martin Travani’s hearing room on the second floor. Outside the room, I whispered to a uniformed court officer that I was there to see Attorney Meecham. He opened the door for me and motioned me in. Meecham and the prosecutor, Gus Deemys, were at the front of the room, talking with the judge. They all glanced my way as I entered, and I tiptoed forward and slid in on an oak bench four rows back. Deemys, who had been speaking, frowned, cleared his throat, and resumed.

  “My argument, Your Honor, is based on the hard fact that the man has no known ties to the city—or to much else that I can determine. By the very nature of his work and personal life, he’s a vagabond. With due respect to Attorney Meecham, I would suggest that Mr. Pepper poses a high risk to flee.”

  Travani, who was a sober-looking, vaguely boyish man in his early sixties, with a round head of close-cropped gray hair, had his steel-framed glasses in his hand, twirling them by one of the bow pieces. He didn’t look impressed with anything he’d been hearing. “Come on, Mr. Deemys, a vagabond? He’s held steady employment with the carnival for some time, hasn’t he?”

  “Less than six months, Your Honor. But you’re right, not a vagabond. I misspoke. It’s fair to say, however, that his work and life have been itinerant.” It wasn’t the way I remembered Deemys talking on the job.

  The judge turned to Meecham. “Counselor?”

  “May I confer with my investigator?”

  Travani looked at me, regarding me a moment; Deemys did, too, as if I were an interloper into their cozy fraternity of Juris Doctors. I gave a little wave and went forward, where Fred Meecham drew me aside.

  “Good timing,” he whispered. “I’m not going to get bail, or at least not anything anyone is going to be able to afford. But I want to get some things on the record. Have you got anything I should add?”

  I told him what I picked up from some of Pepper’s coworkers, especially from Warren Sonders, and he went back while I resumed my seat. “We believe that Mr. Pepper is very unlikely to flee, and that the carnival staff are like a large extended family, wherein certain social sanctions obtain, and that flight would put them all in legal jeopardy.”

  “Oh, bull!” Deemys exploded with exasperation. “You’re talking about a group of carnies. Social sanctions? How about social diseases? It’s in their nature to rove, for Christ’s sake.” That was the Gus Deemys I remembered.

  Meecham and Deemys duked on awhile, raising additional points, each trying to buttress his own side of the argument while battering his opponent’s. It was fun to watch, but the clock was running. I raised my hand. “May I say something, Your Honor?”

  Travani put on his glasses and motioned me to stand. “What is it?”

  “The city licensing office has decided that the carnival shouldn’t be allowed to leave.”

  The judge glanced at the DA, who shook his head, and at Meecham, who did the same. “I hadn’t heard that,” Travani said.

  “Evidently the discussion is ongoing, but that was the word when I spoke with the carnival boss a few hours ago.”

  The judge glanced at his watch. “If there’s nothing more, I’m going to rule. Owing to the serious nature of the crime, and granting Mr. Deemys’s point that there is a risk of flight, I am going to deny bail at this time. However, as I said at the arraignment this morning, I want to move forward with the case quickly. I want no needless delays on either side. Understood?”

  And that was that.

  Outside, as Meecham and I walked together to our cars, he told me how things stood. It seemed the killing had struck a nerve with a lot of people, and the cries for swift justice were loud. The court was responding to that. We agreed to huddle in the morning. At the rapid march-step of feet, I turned and saw Gus Deemys coming our way, carrying a bloated briefcase, his tasseled lifts tapping the pavement. He pretended not to see us, but as he neared he murmured from the side of his mouth, “I tot I taw a pwivate eye.”

  I looked at Meecham. “Who’s Tweety Bird?”

  Deemys stopped and gave me a slow grin. “You know what? Holding this guy without bail is just the start. His sorry ass is grass. I’m going to eat you and your jailbird up. See you in court.” He pressed a little car alarm deactivator, which answered with a chirp, and he marched over to a smoke gray Lincoln Navigator and pulled himself up onto the running board and in. All five-foot-four of him in a two-and-a-half-ton truck.

  Back at my house, I gave some thought to unpacking a few more of the boxes that were still piled in the front room and in the kitchen, but I let it remain thought, untainted by action. The house was small but big enough, the way the place Lauren and I had on Paige Street downtown had been, our first apartment together. We listened to the Beatles and Erik Satie and drank wine and made love. We’d have been happy in a packing crate. But I was here now, I reminded myself. I’d finally gotten off memory lane.

  I put on water for pasta. I poured a premixed salad out of one of those cellophane bags—the Mediterranean special—and heated marinara sauce out of a jar. I switched on the TV for the local news, which carried a clip on Troy Pepper’s arraignment earlier that day, including footage of him being led out of court in handcuffs and looking hangdog. There was also coverage of a conviction in a gang killing in the city, with the teenage defendant, tried as an adult, being whisked off to begin the rest of his life at Cedar Junction. The pairing of the stories bothered me. As had Gus Deemys’s righteous anger. When I tried to analyze why, I didn’t have a good answer. A community’s outrage at a killing was justified, even welcome, but wasn’t it part of the legal system’s duty to put the br
akes on a little? To give reason a chance to prevail? Or was I just being oversensitive because of where my checks were coming from?

  I popped a can of beer. The weather radar showed a whirling tropical storm, Francine, which had heated up the Caribbean for a few days but was now just a lot of wind. The meteorologist went on at length about hurricane season and the prospects for anything making its way north. Meanwhile, kudos to a tropical depression that got upgraded to storm. They were calling it Gus. I shut off the tube and raised my beer. Gus. I had to love it.

  Fortunately I was able to locate a colander in one of the boxes before I found a tennis racket, so didn’t have to drain the pasta the way Jack Lemmon had in The Apartment. The meal wasn’t Jacques Pepin, but it ate just fine.

  12

  The first time I heard Phoebe Kelly’s name I told her that it had a happy sound. That had been in the Registry of Deeds office, where she worked. She laughed. At Cobblestones, Phoebe was sitting at a table over drinks with three other women as they chattered away beneath a hanging Tiffany lamp. Monday Night Football wasn’t on yet; the big TVs were tuned to some kind of music awards show. Seeing me, Phoebe waved, and I joined them. “Alex, you know my coworkers—Kathy, Janelle, Roxanne.”

  We exchanged hellos. I’d met them all briefly before, in the busy office pool. There was a close-knit group of half a dozen or so who socialized together. Jennifer, the woman whose retirement dinner it had been, was gone. I saw no sign of the boss. On one of the TVs behind the horseshoe bar, a relic of the seventies glam rock scene was reading a teleprompter, trying to balance on six-inch platform soles and not put too many wrinkles in his latest face job as he presented a lifetime achievement prize to someone half his age. “I thought the music awards were on last month,” I said.

  “And next month,” Kathy said, “and the one after that. Everybody gives them these days.”

  “Yeah, you’re up for one in the running-your-mouth category,” Roxanne gibed.

  Kathy made a cat hiss and clawed the air. Even money said the boss had picked up the tab and beat a retreat for home, eager to escape the estrogen wars.

  “Do you want the game?” Phoebe asked me. “We can get the bartender to switch channels.”

  “I can wait till nine,” I said.

  “I thought maybe you’d want the pregame stuff.”

  “Jock foreplay,” Roxanne said. “Guys are wham bam in the bedroom, but they sure can delay pleasure when it comes to sports. You notice that?”

  “The Super Bowl,” said Kathy, “my boyfriend starts watching the day before.”

  “Same here, and believe me, it isn’t because he’s hoping to catch some witch flashing her titty.”

  All eyes went to me, as if I were being asked for a rebuttal. I shrugged. “What can I say? It’s the NFL Kama Sutra.”

  Topics changed, and pretty soon one of the women asked, “Are you really working for that killer from the carnival?”

  “Well, he’s the suspect.”

  “I guess it’s a job, huh?” Kathy said sympathetically. “Boy, I don’t envy you.”

  “They should throw away the key.”

  “Why don’t we have the death penalty anymore?”

  “Because it’s ‘inhumane,’” Roxanne said and rolled her eyes.

  “Life is inhumane,” said Janelle, speaking for the first time. “Our job is to make the best of it.” She was the spiritual one in the office, Phoebe had told me, always reading books by the guru of the month and going on meditation retreats. (“For her, going to ‘club med’ means sitting in a full lotus for six hours at a whack.”)

  “Forget that. People like this guy they caught aren’t human. I say fry him.”

  When the others had left, Phoebe looked chagrined. “I didn’t plan on that. I’d told them about our date last night, how nice it had been and everything, and then … that. They had a million questions. I mentioned you’d been hired. Was that okay?”

  “I didn’t take it personally. And I wasn’t really planning to watch the game. I just wasn’t man enough to admit it publicly.”

  She took my hand. “Is it tough on you, though? Working for a lawyer who wants to get that guy out of jail?”

  “Let me put it in perspective. At the Registry of Deeds, you charge a filing fee, right? When someone closes on a property?”

  “Sure. A hundred seventy-five dollars. To record the deed. The state requires it.”

  I nodded. “And some of the people are going to run into difficulty at some point—maybe for reasons they can’t help—and when they miss payments, the bank can foreclose.”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s the system.”

  “Yep. Like the right to representation and a fair trial. No?”

  She nodded slowly. “I guess.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “he won’t be getting out on bail. But enough shop talk. We’re both off the clock. How about dessert?”

  “You go ahead, I’m stuffed.”

  I ordered Black Forest cake, which came in a piece the size of a cuckoo clock, and the waitress was savvy enough to bring two forks, though Phoebe resisted until there was only one bite left on the plate. “Waste not, want not,” she said and speared it. “Appearing soon on a panty line near you.”

  “How soon? How near?”

  “Shut up, you. I’ve got a black-and-blue on my ass where that crazy clown pinched me. Maybe he should be in jail.”

  Afterward, we sat in my car in the parking lot, sharing tidbits about our respective days. “That really freaked me out last night, Alex. Seeing that woman. I mean, being there and … I just never …” She pushed down the door lock.

  “It was upsetting,” I agreed. “Are you okay now?”

  She snuggled into the curve of my arm. “It set all kinds of things running through my head. Who was she? How did she get herself in a situation where that could happen? And the weird, silly stuff, too. How my mother always used to tell us to be sure we were wearing clean underwear and nylons, because you never know … Not that it matters, I suppose. The clean underwear. I don’t guess there’s a sign in the morgue that says, ‘Your failure to plan ahead is not our responsibility.’”

  “I’ve never seen one.”

  “And then I got remembering Todd and how he had just phoned me from the airport and said he was on his way home, a drive he’d made so many times, and then … It was probably the one in a thousand cases where wearing a seat belt might’ve cost a life instead of saving one. If he’d been able to get himself out—though the doctor said the heart attack probably had taken him before he even hit the tree.” She broke off. In the reflected gleam of the vapor lamps, her eyes were suddenly very bright. I turned my face into her hair and stroked her shoulder.

  She had told me about it on our first date—just to let me know, she said. Wanting me to see where she’d been and what she came with. The one other man she’d dated and had begun to like, she had not told right away. They’d dated a handful of times, and then she’d told him. “In two flips of a fish’s fin, he was history. I never heard from him again. Maybe he thought I was a black widow.” So she’d learned she needed to be right up front about her marriage. When I called her a second time, she sounded surprised, and then explained. Maybe as some show of good faith, I’d told her about Lauren, and that had led to telling about how I’d come to lose my police job—which reminded me why I tended to avoid going into any of it. It was like digging in the ground and reaching to pull up a small root only to discover it was part of a whole underground network of roots that resisted being tugged up but then came, spreading out, stirring up even the ground beneath your feet, which had seemed so solid just a moment before.

  Phoebe cleared her throat and went on. “We’d had this life plan. After we both got through college, I’d work, and Todd would study and take the exams—those endless exams—and he’d become an actuary and get a really good job. And we did. We were real penny-saved-penny-earned types. Our house here was a starter. The plan called for Concord or Li
ncoln, and a family …” She shook her head slowly and blinked, and several tears overflowed. I brushed her cheek with my thumb. “It didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. But mostly …” She cleared her throat again and drew back to look at me. “Mostly, you know what last night has had me thinking, Alex? About us.”

  “You and me?”

  “How we’re pretty different. Oh, you’re really hardworking too, I don’t mean that.”

  “Let’s not be too hasty.”

  “I was thinking that we’re both really dedicated to our jobs, but your work involves you sometimes with bad things that happen, and with the … well—”

  “The bad people who do them?”

  “I was thinking that, yeah.”

  “My job can be dull as dirt. Most of the time, in fact. Don’t tell Atlantic Casualty Insurance I said that, but it is. The people are the thing that makes it worthwhile. The rest is just … work.”

  She dabbed at her eyes again. “Well, I’m trying to keep the blinders off and see that all those other plans and dreams were only that—plans. That other lives, other dreams are possible. I’ve just got to get to where I believe it.”

  Her cell phone began to sing Beethoven’s Fifth. She answered and listened. “I’m with Alex,” she said, giving me a glance. One of her girlfriends, I gathered. She had the phone programmed to play different songs for different friends. I don’t think I’d been with her yet when someone wasn’t calling. “Yes,” Phoebe said. And “Okay.” And “Yes. Okay. I’ll call you soon.”

  Outside, we made plans to see each other on Thursday, three nights away. “The moon will be full that night,” she said. “The corn moon. You know about that? The full moon closest to the autumnal equinox is the harvest moon, but if that moon occurs in October, the September moon is called the corn moon. I think I got that right.”