The Marble Kite: A Mystery (Alex Rasmussen Mysteries)

by David Daniel

  It was the incident that Ms. Parigian at youth and family services in New Jersey had told me about, when Troy Pepper had been given an option of jail or the service. It made me feel a bit better that he had owned up, and that Pop had now, too. I got more comfortable in the chair. “Where you from, Pop?”

  “Me? Newport News, Biloxi, San Diego—here and there.”

  “Navy towns.”

  “The old man was an anchor-clanker, swore if he didn’t make chief petty officer he’d muster out. Twelve years later, he was still swabbing decks. My mother told him get out or she was going to run off and take us kids. He got used to dry land eventually, but he couldn’t sit still. He strayed into carnivals because it was a chance to move around but keep his family. Eventually he bought a piece of the action. Summers I traveled with the show. Those were good days.”

  “Is this the same show?”

  “More or less. I don’t know for how much longer, though.” He hesitated, then said, “I’ve been getting some pressure to sell.”

  “Who from?”

  “There’s an outfit called Rag Tyme Shows, with a y—a better name no one’s ever thought of. All they talk is trash. They’re medium sized, but they seem to want to become the Microsoft of carnivals. They don’t got the manners, or the nice suits, but they got the same shark values. It’s run by a couple of sharpies named Louie Hackett and Bud Spritzer.”

  “I can hear their sport coats already.”

  “As New York as an egg cream, the pair of ‘em. Few years back, they offered to buy the show—which right away means someone should be comin’ after them with a net. You got to have a screw loose to want to be in this business.”

  “You’re in it.”

  “Case in point. Anyway, I told ’em forget it. A year later, I had to make some equipment upgrades to meet new safety regs—goddamn Democrats in the statehouse. Well, dough was hard to come by. It always is. But I got a lender and borrowed against equity. Come to find out later, the lender sold the note. Guess who to?”

  “Rag Tyme, with a y.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “The juice went up ten percent. I go to Hackett—he’s the business guy—I say, ‘What the hell is this?’ Very calmly he shows me spreadsheets, and according to that, he says, with revenues flat and yadda yadda … I told him his math was bogus, and so then he hauls out the signed contract, which says that he can use his firm’s own accounting methods, and I realized he had me. I said, ‘I’ll pay you back, every dime. But don’t horse with me. I don’t want you talking to anyone, my wife’—my wife was alive at the time—‘friends, workers, no one. If I don’t give you your money by the fifteenth of each month, you can chop this off!’ And I showed ’em this.”

  He showed it to me, too. “You’ve still got the finger,” I said.

  “And a gut you could strain coffee through, not to mention four payments still due on the loan.”

  “Four months isn’t so bad. I just put on a thirty-year straitjacket.”

  “Good luck, but the way this note is written, if I miss a bounce, just one, the remaining comes due all at once.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “The whole donut. Or I forfeit the show My lawyer said it was legal. Stupid but legal.” He sighed bleakly “Now I don’t know if I’ll make it.”

  “Could you borrow?”

  “How the hell you think I got into this fix?”

  “How much are you talking?”

  “You don’t want to know. A lot more than I can afford.”

  “Sometimes selling to a hungry buyer can mean money in your pocket.”

  “Not these guys. Hungry sure. They call it mergers and acquisitions, happens all the time, right? Supposed to be good for everyone? Horse manure. The strong eat the weak, and crap out the bones of workers. Good for who?” He twisted his lips. “Fuckin’ Republicans.”

  “What are you, a Whig?”

  “A thinker. I’d have been lucky to get fifty cents on the dollar. And what they’d do if they bought me out, they’d put in people they already got on their payroll, and my workers would be on the bricks. This show maybe ain’t much in the big scheme—it ain’t Cirque du Soleil—but I put years and sweat into it. Rag Tyme is strictly a bottom feeder, looking to wipe out competition. There’s a tired show that comes through these parts in late spring—maybe you’ve seen them. Moths fly out of their equipment when they open it up, and you can hear the gears creaking in Boston. That’s one of theirs. It’s a wonder no one ends up killed on the rides, or gets ptomaine off the food. But Louie Hackett don’t seem too concerned, as long as the bottom line is in his wallet.”

  “You mentioned another name, too.”

  “Bud Spritzer. The Squisher. He used to pro wrestle.”

  I knew it had sounded like more than a fizzy drink. “He goes back. Wasn’t there some controversy about him?”

  “That’s a way to put it. He kept some kind of choke hold on an opponent too long one time, guy ended up with scrambled eggs for a brain. Spritzer had to give up the ring. He knocked around the rackets for a while. He’s a businessman now.”

  “With a knuckle-crusher handshake and a specialty in hostile takeovers, I’ll bet.”

  “Hackett is the so-called brains of the outfit, Spritzer is the ball buster.”

  “Have they been around lately?”

  He tugged an earlobe. “I get your drift. The answer is no.”

  “No they haven’t been around? Or no to my drift?”

  “Both. I ain’t heard from them since May, which is jake with me. But I don’t figure them in this. Do you?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t see how”

  “Any luck, they won’t get wind of it. The carny world’s a small one. If they do hear, you can bet your britches they’ll come sniffing around, chipper as popcorn, checkbook in hand, and it’ll be two bits on the dollar now. Judas H. Priest. Listen to me. I got to get off the pity pot. Take a walk with me.”

  Outside, the moon that had shone the other night was fatter now in the indigo sky, hanging imperiously above the river, oblivious to the follies and travails of the people on the little blue planet it looked down upon. Traffic streamed by on the boulevard in long parallel glows of red and white lights, duplicated on the other side of the river and doubled by reflection in the water.

  “Look at that,” Sonders said morosely “Nice evening, a lot of them folks could be here, walking around with their families, their sweethearts, eating fried dough and corn on the cob … winning Kewpie dolls. Having fun. That’s it in a nutshell, ain’t it? Giving people a break from their lives, something a little different from what they get elsewhere. And—I’m not gonna snow you with a Mother Teresa riff—we could be doing twenty-five, thirty grand tonight … instead of sitting here dark and the season growing long.” He ran a palm across his head and looked at the moon. I half expected him to howl. “But then I think, what kind of shallow guy am I? I’ve got one of my people sittin’ in stir, could be facing hard time.” He dropped his arm. “It’s a changed world from the one I used to know”

  “Back in the good old days, when a dollar was still worth forty cents, and risque was couples sitting around the living room listening to Rusty Warren records.”

  “Hold the jokes, will you?”

  “You hold the straight lines.”

  “I wish I could.”

  I felt for him; a good old guy who was trying to do right by his people. Sonders saw a mission in what he did, and it wasn’t all about profit. The question was, had others done right by him? As though he’d read my thoughts, he called after me as I made for my car. “Hey Rasmussen. Find out, will you?” His gruffness was gone, and for the first time, standing there in the gleam of light from the parkway he looked older than his years, tired and stooped and a little lost. “Find out what really happened?”

  14

  My phone was ringing when I unlocked the door to my house. I put on a light. On the floor, among the cardboard packing crates, I found the handse
t.

  “Mr. Rasmussen?” a woman asked.

  I said it was.

  “This is Maddie Hartley director of human resources at Garden State Foods. I hope it’s not too late to be calling.” It sounded as if it might be too late for her; I thought I heard her yawn.

  “It’s fine, Ms. Hartley. Thank you for getting back to me.” I fished my notebook out of my jacket pocket.

  “You had a question about a former employee?”

  I told her the reason for my earlier call and gave her Troy Pepper’s name.

  She made a little hiss of indrawn air. “Oh dear. I’m sorry. This happened up there in Massachusetts?”

  “Last night. He was arraigned today. His attorney is gathering information for a defense.” I shoved some clutter aside and sat on the couch and switched on a table lamp.

  “Well, I do remember him. He started with us four years ago. He worked second shift, as a picker—that involves filling orders, getting items off the warehouse shelves, and putting them on pallets for delivery to supermarkets. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to cut it. He has a disfigured hand. Well, I was wrong. He never missed a shift—all in all, a reliable worker. He did have one difficulty, I recall.” She sighed, and I heard the weariness for certain this time. “A group of others on the shift, who’d been there longer, approached him one night at break and asked if maybe he was working too hard, if maybe he should take it easier. Evidently he thanked them for their concern, but he decided he didn’t like the suggestion, so he worked even faster.”

  “And the others saw the light, increased productivity and set a plant record,” I said.

  “Yeah, exactly.” There was a hint of zest in her voice that seemed to want to bubble up through the weariness. “No, they decided that telling gets more results than asking. They met him in the parking lot one night. It got physical, and he took the worst of it, but he fought them until security broke it up. The other men could’ve been terminated, but Mr. Pepper insisted it had been a misunderstanding. They worked it out, and life went on—with probably some middle course hashed out on the work-pace issue.” She sighed. “Why can’t world leaders resolve differences that smoothly? Anyway, Mr. Pepper was fine for about three years, worked his way up to forklift operator. And then he resigned. That’s the last I knew.”

  “Do you know why he left?”

  “We didn’t have a formal exit interview process in place then, but he did come in, and he was polite and all, thanked us for the opportunity, and assured me it wasn’t because he was unhappy there. But that’s about all he had to say.”

  “Would you happen to have the file right there with you?”

  “No, I’m at home. It’s in my head, though.”

  “You remember that?”

  “It’s this problem I’ve had for years. I can’t seem to forget a darn thing.”

  “That’s not a bad problem to have.”

  “It is when you can’t shake the name of every schoolteacher you ever had, every classmate you shared Valentine’s Day cards with from grade one on. If I could lose all that rummage it might free up some space on the hard drive.”

  “To do what?”

  “Good point. Anyhow, I do recall one other thing about Troy Pepper … he had this nervous way of looking at you—or avoiding looking, maybe. I got the feeling that he had things to say but couldn’t quite bring himself to say them. Well, I wish you the best, Mr. Rasmussen. Now, I’ve got another clock to punch. I’m caring for my mother, who’s in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. She can’t remember a blessed thing, including who I am. And I can’t stop remembering—and realizing that eventually each of us ends up in the cemetery flying the marble kite. Of course, if I’d known that back in the day when I was a camp follower with Springsteen’s band, I’d have done things a lot differently.”

  “Put your nose to the grindstone and started saving kite string?”

  The zest welled up finally in an honest laugh. “It only takes six feet of string to fly that puppy. No, I’d have enjoyed myself even more. Good luck to you.”

  A minute after I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Sonders. “You’ve been yapping a while,” he said. He sounded agitated. “I’m getting jerked around here. Who makes up all these chickenshit rules, anyhow?”

  I asked him to take a breath and explain. He’d spoken with Fred Meecham about resuming business, he said, but Meecham told him there wasn’t much legally he could do. “I’m allowed to keep the equipment where it is, because I’ve contracted for the field, but will they let me operate? Negatory. And if I’m not operating, no residency permit. Deal is we can flop here tonight, but that’s it. Starting tomorrow we need to find someplace else to live. I had Nicole phone up some hotels, but at those prices we’ll go bust before they have to change the linen. There’s got to be someplace cheaper, and I figured you might know where.”

  I tried to picture forty bodies camped in my four rooms but couldn’t see it. “I’ll snoop around and call you tomorrow,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  15

  On Tuesday the Boston papers were waiting in the lobby, and I scanned the front pages of both as I climbed the three flights to my office. Courtney was putting the finishing touches on an autumn display in the hallway across from the elevator. She had on a salmon silk blouse and a navy skirt, her honey brown hair done up in a French twist. It was an ability she had of looking either her actual twenty-one or like an older sophisticate—something of a young Grace Kelly or Phoebe Kelly for that matter. She’d fashioned a scarecrow for her display. “Like it?” she asked.

  “If he’s looking for a brain, the hunt is over.”

  “Oh, your.” I couldn’t tell whether the incandescent smile was something they learned at Mount Holyoke or if she’d brought it with her from Duluth. Either way it worked; there was more behind her expression than the headline of any newspaper.

  “Is your boss in?” I asked.

  Meecham, in a dark gray pinstripe with suspenders and a gold bow tie, waved me in. “I just got off the phone with the DA. He’s sounding more and more confident. He says he’s going to show a pattern of threat and intimidation going back over time. He’s got Pepper’s run-in with the law and that 209-A the victim filed when she got here.”

  “But didn’t bother to refile when it lapsed,” I said.

  “Deemys claims that’s because Pepper didn’t know her whereabouts and she felt safe. Evidently he’s spoken with the woman we talked with yesterday—Lucinda Colón—and I think she’s going to be a prosecution witness. The idea is Pepper planned the murder in advance, that he’d finally located where the victim was living, and when the carnival came to town, he got in touch, lulled her with a visit on Saturday, and then strangled her on Sunday afternoon. The unlicensed handgun figures in there as a backup plan.”

  “So he kills her with a scarf he’s given her and puts her in the field, where he’d be the instant suspect. Where’s the premeditation in that?”

  “Stupidity doesn’t rule out a plan, Alex.”

  “Or prove one.”

  “If I can anticipate the prosecution’s case, they’ll claim expediency. The field rather than just leaving her in his trailer. Later he was going to dump her somewhere. Put her in the river, maybe. Or drive her up to the New Hampshire woods.”

  “How was he going to get her there? His camper is set up in an encampment.”

  “Bury her there behind the site, then. I don’t know. I’m just trying to think like the DA.”

  “That could be a strain.”

  He grinned. I mentioned Pop Sonders’s claim that the carnival people wouldn’t enter a trailer uninvited. Meecham said he’d have to think more about that. Courtney came in with a legal pad and took a seat. We talked through what we knew about the case so far, and then went to what our strategy ought to be. Meecham said that he was going to concentrate on getting Troy Pepper to provide answers to key questions that remained. I suggested that we also look into Flora Nuñez’s
life in the days and hours before her death, to see if any suggestion of a motive other than what the DA was promoting might exist. Meecham assigned me the task.

  Courtney lowered her reading glasses. “Won’t the police do that anyway?”

  “They’ll get around to it,” I said, “but at the moment, where’s their incentive? They’re too focused on slamming the cell door on Pepper.”

  At Courtney’s look of dismay, Meecham said, “Alex’s years as a police detective in this fair city have given him a certain hardening of the attitude.”

  “Or dose of reality,” I said. “Drive by a road repair project. The cop’s been there for hours, waving traffic past. He’s bored. He’s drinking a coffee, jawing with the job boss, yet he looks at your vehicle, then at you. Cops are alert, they see things. Sometimes they’re wrong, but once they’ve got the idea you did something, they don’t let it go easily. They’ve got Pepper in their sights.”

  Meecham said, “I see our defense growing out of shaking the DA’s contention of premeditation. Absent Pepper giving us something clear, I’m looking at a crime of passion. Pepper in a sudden rage strangles her, panics, and dumps her in the field. That’s what you might find out, Alex. Was there something Flora Nuñez might have done to provoke him? Was she seeing somebody else? Let’s learn more.”

  “I’d like to get a look at her apartment,” I said.

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to. I broached it with Deemys. It’s not considered a crime scene. The police don’t have to let us in.”

  “If you can get the charge dropped to second degree,” Courtney said, “and he’s convicted, he’d still get a long sentence, wouldn’t he?”

  “Better than life without parole. First we’ve got to find the evidence to support it, or no one’s going to buy it. Even so, whatever we come up with will have to convince a jury, and you can never predict how a jury will react. But the fact that the victim lived here and he doesn’t—and there’s his occupation—” He let out a small breath of frustration. “Even the most fair-minded jurors have notions about things, biases that can run deep.”