Gatekeeper

by Mayor, Archer

  He thought about saying something comforting, as he would have with anyone else, but that wasn't their way. Plus, they'd both seen the girl, or what was left of her. There was little point pretending she wasn't a train wreck before Arnie Weller's bullet had torn into her skinny chest.

  Gail shook her head, her voice hardening as she stared at the floor. "What the hell was she thinking?"

  Joe felt uncomfortable. Laurie wasn't his relation. He'd only met her a couple of times. But she'd lived in Brattleboro, having moved up from suburban Connecticut at Gail's urging, and he was wondering now if he shouldn't have known that she'd fallen on hard times. He wasn't on the PD any longer, but he stayed connected. It would have been easy to keep tabs on her. Cops did that for one another's families, even extended ones.

  "Thinking probably isn't a huge prerequisite," he suggested vaguely instead. "Seems like it's usually more about dulling the pain."

  She looked up at him sharply, and he realized he'd unintentionally turned the tables on her, causing her to question her own responsibilities here.

  "Sorry," he added quickly. "I didn't mean it to come out that way."

  But Gail wasn't looking for a way out. "You're right," she admitted. "If she had been feeling any pain, I wouldn't have known about it. I didn't keep in touch—barely paid attention to her." She paused to sigh. "My sister's going to fall apart."

  "You haven't reached her yet?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "Got the answering machine. They're probably on the town. They do that a lot. It was one of the issues between them and Laurie." She paused again and then added, "Everyone thought Laurie coming to Vermont would give them all a break."

  Chapter 2

  David Spinney was having what his mom called a space cadet moment, when your thoughts are miles outside your body. Her line was that those were definitely good-news, bad-news times—good if you didn't like what you were doing; bad if you needed to be paying attention, like if you were running a table saw or something. Being a nurse, she tended toward practical thinking.

  But David wasn't worried. He was just riding around Springfield in the back of a car with friends, listening to music, complaining about teachers and girlfriends and parents, the car slipping through successive pools of light as it coasted along the cool summer darkness from streetlamp to streetlamp. It was one of the safest places he could think of to let his mind drift. Not that his mind was too far off—just a few blocks, really, to home and family, and the uncertainties he was feeling there.

  "Hey, Dave, pass the six-pack up."

  Absentmindedly, he retrieved the beer from the floorboards between his feet and dropped it onto the bench seat between the two young men up front. The older of the two, Craig Steidle, who'd bought the beer and owned the car, extracted a can for himself, handed another to Wayne, beside him, and dangled a third over his shoulder from his fingertips.

  "Take one, man."

  David shook his head at the eyes in the rearview mirror. "Maybe later."

  Craig laughed but didn't move his hand. "More for the rest of us, then. Want one, Little Chris?"

  Chris was sitting beside David, his head bopping to the music thrumming throughout the car. "Cool."

  The can arched through the air and bounced off Chris's leg, making him jump in surprise.

  "You were supposed to catch that, dumbass," Craig taunted him. "Make sure you aim it out the window when you open it."

  Chris was the youngest of them, at fifteen, although David only beat him by ten months. Nevertheless, it qualified Chris as the butt of most of their jokes, for which David was guiltily thankful. He'd once been the one catching all of Craig's flak.

  Chris opened the beer as instructed, literally holding it outside the car as Craig pulled off the road into the Zoo, the nickname for the Springfield Shopping Plaza and the primary hangout for kids from all over town. Once a marsh poking a blunt peninsula into a bend of the Black River, it was completely paved over now, lined with a string of the usual retail outlets and looking—like the rest of Springfield—a little the worse for wear.

  "Don't wave the goddamn thing around, stupid," Craig yelled back at Chris over the music. "You'll get us all busted."

  Shamefaced and confused, Chris withdrew the can, spilling some of its contents into his lap. He ducked down and took a surreptitious swig to partially restore his self-respect.

  Craig aimed the car for the plaza's cul-de-sac, ostensibly at a small cluster of U-Haul trucks, but in fact toward the Zoo's inner sanctum and well-known place of ill repute—a poorly lit footbridge connecting the back of the plaza to Pearl Street and the old Fellows machine-tool plant on the river's far bank. He drove slowly, checking out the social clusters of kids hanging around parked cars like shipwreck survivors clinging to flotsam. His hand dangled out the window so he could flick his fingers at those he knew in a series of studiously casual greetings. From the back seat, next to pimply-faced Chris and his self-consciously suckled beer, David granted Craig a begrudging respect—as obnoxious and transparent as he could be, Craig did have a certain hard-won bearing. Currently a resident of the town's Westview housing development, down-and-out through several generations, he'd turned his limited talents into something his peers saluted with a measure of respect. He also had a criminal record, if a minor one, which added to his luster among the younger teenagers.

  Craig slowed to a halt a dozen yards shy of the footbridge steps. These were the key attraction to the place, combined with its isolation and its escape route potential. The steps were seen by the kids as a forum, where like-minded people could privately convene. The merchants and the police saw it differently, of course—as a gathering spot for dopers and drunks and a place where at least one rape had occurred within the last few years.

  "Hey, Jenny," Craig called out to a young woman sitting half sprawled across the steps, unaware or uncaring of how her posture and her miniskirt defeated any hope of modesty.

  Jenny merely looked at him, scowling slightly.

  "Come over here." Craig made to take a swig from his beer can, pausing just long enough to add in an undertone, "Skanky bitch."

  Wayne chuckled beside him as Jenny made a show of reluctantly getting to her feet and ambling over to the car, stretching to reveal both her boredom and her bare midriff.

  "What do you want, Craig?" she asked, emphasizing the "you" as if she were addressing a bad smell.

  Craig smiled and placed his hand on her hip, his thumb flicking the silver ring piercing her navel. "What've you got?"

  She laughed but didn't move away. "More than you can handle."

  In the back seat, ignored by both of them, David watched her through the open window, at once attracted and repelled by the messages she projected. He studied the fit of her clothes, imagined her experience with men, and struggled to balance the stirrings he felt with the knowledge that were he to "get lucky" with her, he'd probably end up disappointed—if he were fortunate enough to get off so lightly.

  "You never complained," Craig was saying, his hand slipping a little lower on her hip. "You picked up some new tricks?"

  "If I did, they weren't from you."

  Craig's hand stopped, and David could see from her eyes that she feared she'd gone too far.

  "I could maybe pass them along," she added, her sultry tone sounding strained.

  But Craig had lost interest. "Yeah, along with Christ knows what kind of disease. I can live without that."

  She straightened, stung. "Fuck you, too, asshole." She turned away as if to move off.

  He laughed, letting his hand hover against the outside of the door. "I thought that's what we were just talking about. Hey, hey, come back. Lighten up, for Christ's sake. When did you get so touchy? What else you got for me?"

  She paused, and David could sense her weighing her options, which, it occurred to him, might have been a bit of a reach.

  "Why're you such a jerk?"

  Craig brushed his fingertips against the back of her hand. "Come on, J
enny. You got something good, I can ditch these assholes and you and me can find a place."

  Wayne laughed a little nervously, as if he'd been asked to do something he didn't completely understand. No one paid him any attention.

  "I maybe got something," Jenny finally admitted.

  "All right," Craig drawled. "That's my girl."

  She straightened suddenly and took a step away from the car. "Shit."

  They all followed her stare and saw a police car slowly approaching.

  "Fuck this," Craig muttered, but didn't move.

  "What d'we do?" Wayne asked plaintively.

  "We pull our guns and shoot it out, moron. What d'ya think?"

  Wayne looked crestfallen, as if now he'd catch hell for not bringing a gun.

  Their eyes tracked the cruiser as it soundlessly rolled near, the reflections from the plaza's mercury lighting making its windshield glimmer, turning its driver into a vague silhouette.

  "Who is it?" Craig asked Jenny.

  "I don't know yet. Can't make it out."

  In the back seat of the car, Chris took another nervous hit from his beer can, filling the confined space with an audible slurping.

  Craig twisted around to glare at him. "Right, genius. Take a fuckin' swig right in front of the cops."

  Behind him, the darkness abruptly burst into a pulsing riot of piercing blue and white lights from the cruiser's strobes.

  Chris dropped the can. David quickly moved his feet to avoid the splash against the floorboards. After one last wilting glare, Craig turned away without a word and slouched slightly into his seat.

  Moments later, an oversized shadow came between them and the throbbing lights.

  "Hi, boys. Good evening, Jenny."

  "Up yours," she said.

  A flashlight blinded them all in turn as the police officer carefully checked them out.

  "Turn off the ignition and get out of the car, please. This side only Keep your hands where I can see them."

  Craig opened the door, resuming his earlier, surly tone. "If it ain't Officer Sam. Long time."

  "That's 'Sergeant Walker' to you, Steidle. Move over there."

  One by one, they lined up against the car. David felt like his intestines were filled with liquid and that the slightest jarring might make them spill over.

  "I suppose not one of you knows what the drinking age is," Sam Walker said. An eighteen-year veteran of the Springfield Police Department, he was working on his second and sometimes third generation of repeat offenders.

  He put his face very close to Chris's. "Tell me once and tell me straight, son. What's your name?"

  "Christopher Williams."

  "How old are you, Chris?"

  "Fifteen."

  "And here's the big one. Was that a beer I saw you drinking just now?"

  Chris's voice cracked. "Yes, sir."

  Walker smiled. "Good boy."

  He stepped back slightly and played his flashlight across David's face. "You're new. You fifteen, too?"

  "Sixteen."

  Walker remained silent a moment. David became suddenly aware of how quiet everything was. For the first time, he could hear the sound of the river water gliding by over the embankment. He felt like he was standing at center stage in an abandoned theater, sensing but not seeing dozens of eyes peering at him from a hundred nooks and crannies.

  "I know you," Walker finally said, making David's heart skip a beat. "You're Lester Spinney's kid."

  * * *

  Lester Spinney opened his eyes and stared blankly at the darkened television screen for a moment, trying to remember where he was and why he was there.

  "Les, it's the phone."

  He looked over his shoulder at his wife, Susan, still dressed in her nurse's uniform.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  "You fell asleep watching TV again. Wendy turned it off before she went to bed." Susan offered him the portable phone in her hand. "Anyhow, it's for you."

  She sounded tired, which matched her near-haggard expression. She worked at both the hospital and a local doctor's office, and the toll was beginning to show.

  He took the phone from her. "Spinney."

  "Lester, it's Sam Walker, down at the PD. I picked up your kid tonight."

  Spinney sat up, alarmed. "What happened?" Behind him, he heard Susan pause at the door, frozen by his tone of voice. In the worlds they inhabited—hers of medicine, his as a special agent for Joe Gunther and the VBI—news of this sort was seldom good.

  "It's no big deal," Walker quickly reassured him. "He was in a car with an underage drinker and one of the local bad boys—scumbag named Craig Steidle. He's not in trouble—blew double zeros on the breathalyzer. But I thought you'd like to hear about the company he was keeping. I have kids—older now—but I would've liked to have known."

  Spinney passed his hand across his forehead and then gave his wife a thumbs-up to set her at ease. "No, that's fine, Sam. I appreciate the call. I'll have a talk with him."

  Sam Walker's hesitation showed he wasn't quite finished.

  "What else?" Lester asked.

  "Well, again, it's nothing connected to Dave. I mean, he was just there. But I found some weed on Steidle and one of the others—a loser named Wayne Fontana—and when I drove up on them at the back of the Zoo, it looked like Steidle was about to score some crack with a user-dealer named Jenny Peters. She does a little hooking on the side." He paused again before adding, "I'm real sorry, Les—"

  But Spinney cut him off. "It's fine, Sam. I appreciate it. You did the right thing. Is Dave still there?"

  "Yeah. I thought you'd like to pick him up."

  "I'll be right down."

  Spinney slowly pushed the cut-off button on the portable phone, but kept it about chest-high, as if it now contained something valuable, if ill defined.

  "What happened?" Susan asked from the doorway.

  He forced a smile. "He's not in trouble, but he is at the PD. Someone in the car he was in was underage and had a beer. Anyway, Sam said it didn't look like he'd had a drop. I'll talk to him."

  She frowned and looked at the floor. He could almost smell the guilt coming off her like a scent. Lord knows, in that, she wasn't alone, which prompted him to add, "Tough thing to avoid at his age. Sounds like he stuck to his guns, though. You have your shower. I'll go pick him up. Be back in no time."

  She left the room without a word, so that when he rose, Lester Spinney was all alone—with only the misgivings he hadn't shared with her.

  Chapter 3

  Gail paused on the sidewalk, looking up at the four-story building before her. Wooden, peeling, sagging, and vast, it was one of Brattleboro's infamous dens—an eighty-year-old maze of low-income apartments. A doper's haven, a magnet for illegal activities, and a museum of odd and offensive odors, it was also cheap, downtown, and a short stroll from the town's primary twilight-world hangout, the Harmony parking lot, where the "denizens of the night"—real and imagined—surfaced as each day's light faded to darkness.

  Which was why she'd chosen noon to visit her niece's last address. It was late enough to hope a few people might be awake, while early enough that they might not have ventured forth on their daily rounds.

  This was a slightly skewed and paranoid vision of reality, of course. For all her canniness and experience—Gail had variously been a realtor, a selectwoman, a volunteer at the women's crisis center, and a prosecutor at the state attorney's office in town—she was also a woman born to privilege. Despite her support of many and sundry causes aimed at protecting and elevating society's disadvantaged, she wasn't one of them, and had an outsider's visceral lack of ease in their company. She hated this about herself, not surprisingly, seeing it as suppressed prejudice and unworthy of her ideals, but it remained. And it sat like a lump in her throat as she eyed the apartment building's dilapidated front door.

  Taking a breath, she left the sidewalk and entered.

  Immediately, this internal social debate came under stress. The
place was dark, narrow, hot, and evil-smelling. She walked along a close-fitting hallway lined with punctured and torn drywall, stained and covered with graffiti, amid the muted murmurings of a dispossessed populace. There were shouts and arguments, small children's cries, the occasional thrumming of music muffled only by a succession of thin walls. Doors slammed somewhere overhead, footsteps could be heard echoing from afar, and yet she saw no one as she slowed to a stop, uncertain of which way to turn. Encased in an invisible turmoil of stirring humanity, she felt utterly alone.

  She looked around, wondering how to proceed. Last night, before falling asleep together at Joe's small converted Green Street carriage house just a block away, the two of them had discussed what must have happened to Laurie. Gail had been furious, her frustration and guilt fueling a rage against almost everyone and everything she could think of, from drug dealers, to lousy prevention in the schools, to society in general. She'd also gotten angry at Joe for what she thought was a fatalistic, even complacent attitude. He'd pointed out that technically, Laurie had been committing a crime here and that there was little the police could have done in any case. They had enough on their plates without trying to discover what had pushed Laurie over the edge. Besides, he'd added, not unsympathetically, it was pretty obvious from her condition what her motives had been.

  But Gail hadn't been receptive. She hadn't taken it out on him—she was practical enough to know that from his viewpoint he was right: The police were not in the business of probing some young woman's emotional or psychological problems. But Gail could be. For most of her adult life, she'd made such missions a basic tenet of who she was—a person who really did try to do something for society's semighostly population of the poor, the despairing, and the generally marginalized. And her commitment in this had usually involved total strangers, not her own niece. Guilt notwithstanding, it became clear to her that she'd have to be the one to pursue the cause of Laurie's plight. In the end, steadied by that resolve, she'd calmed down and let Joe get some sleep. And the following morning, she'd set out on her course.