by Sarah Graves
Now that we were here, the chances of Jim Diamond’s actually having a gun—or a knife, club, or other murderous weapon of opportunity, and the impulse to use it—loomed suddenly higher on my list of possible disasters.
“In fact, how about staying in the car?” In a sure sign of my ambivalence I hadn’t even shut off the Fiat’s ignition.
“You keep it running,” I told Ellie, “and you come get me if I wave at you from up there,” I added to my father.
Neither of them seemed unnerved by the sight of the window with the sign in it, partly open and so empty-looking . . .
So oddly vacant-appearing. But after following my gaze my father looked back at me with his pale blue eyes, and in them I saw my own thoughts as clearly as if I were reading them from a teleprompter.
The place didn’t look right. And you couldn’t fool him; guys who have been on the run thirty years don’t fool very easily, and they don’t underestimate the potential for imminent disaster, either.
He got out of the car by uncoiling his body and swinging one leg over the side, then the other, moving to stand in the shade of the ice-cream parlor’s green-striped awning. From that vantage point the sunlight didn’t glint in the glass across the street, spoiling his view.
“If you do get in, Jake, go right over to that front window,” he said. “That way I’ll be able to see you.”
He didn’t say to be careful. He already knew I would do that. It was a habit I’d inherited from him, one that had served us both pretty well one way and another. I crossed the street.
The downstairs front door of the rooming house was sandwiched between a storefront that used to be a marine-supply place and one that was being remodeled as a bookstore: old smells of engine oil and bait tanks on one side, fresh varnish on the other.
The door was unlocked. I went in, passing two rusting metal mailboxes. No names were on the boxes, but a reek of something cooked way past well-done now mingled with that of the bait tanks and paint.
So somebody lived here. “Hello?” I called up the stairs.
No answer. But now I could hear music, Led Zeppelin repeating the age-old refrain about the stairway to heaven.
It wasn’t the stairway rising up ahead of me, that was for sure. Cracked treads, bare risers wormholed with the marks of old nails and a general air of deep, bone-weary discouragement pervaded the place. Even the paint peeled off the scarred woodwork in thick curling strips, as if desperate to escape.
A bare bulb hung at the top of the stairs. I climbed toward it, hearing the risers squeak under my feet.
Finishing nails, hardwood shims, 3-IN-1 oil, I thought automatically. Fixing up and maintaining old houses had become my specialty in recent years; it was why ruined places like the ones we’d seen on the way here always caught my interest.
And in a roundabout way, why I was here now.
Pausing on the second-floor landing, I confronted a pair of doors. One had three padlocks, as if you couldn’t have bashed it in with your shoulder, the frame looked so flimsy. Hinges, latch plate, wood screws, one-by-eights, I thought.
The other door stood ajar. The burned smell was coming from somewhere behind it; also the music.
The window in the second-floor landing was open as well; it was the only way to get any cross-ventilation in what was essentially a railroad flat. Or maybe somebody had left it open fifty years ago and no one ever bothered to close it.
“Hello?” I called again, wondering if anyone was home.
By now I almost hoped no one was. After all, the door was open. A conversation might be helpful but a quiet look around could probably tell me what I wanted to know, too.
If I found anything that looked like the first draft of a threat note, for instance, I could just skip the rest of the plan and start working on getting Jim Diamond sent back to jail.
I put my head inside the doorway. “Hello? Jim?”
A muffled sound came from within, startling me. The volume on the music cranked up suddenly.
“Bye-eye-ying a stay-er-way . . .”
Jim didn’t want company, I guessed. Disappointed now that he’d turned out to be there at all, I pushed the door open wider.
“Look, I just want to ask a . . .”
Inside, a short plaster-peeling hallway led to a tiny kitchen, and in the other direction to a front room overlooking the street. The music came from there.
Nervously I followed the hall, making my way between bags of recyclable bottles and cans, a telephone—no dial tone—and a plastic hamper piled high with clothes.
Men’s clothes: raggedy shirts, jeans, and underwear. Past them was the living room with a small TV on a milk crate, a worn brown recliner, and a massive boom box with a CD player in it.
“Heh-vunnnnn,” Robert Plant finished, bless his repetitive little heart. I crossed toward the partly open window upon which the yellowing sign hung, secured by ancient transparent tape.
Before I got there something behind me moved stealthily; I yelped, staggering and nearly falling over the old recliner. But it was only a cat, knocking down an empty beer can while leaping from the top of the dusty boom box to the top of the dusty TV. As its paws brushed past the boom box control knobs, the volume went up another skull-cracking notch.
I reached out and switched the thing off, my heart still in my throat. “Scat,” I hissed at the animal now scampering behind an overturned wooden chair.
Prrr-utt, it replied insolently, and began washing its paw, oblivious to the mess of used paper plates, dirty coffee cups and plastic utensils, and more piles of old clothes.
All this place needed was an embroidered sampler on the wall: HOVEL SWEET HOVEL. Taking a shallow breath, I strode to the window and gave the high sign to my father, standing across the street.
Because nobody was here. The window seemed ready to fall so I propped it with still another empty beer can, noticing as I did it how loose the sash was in its wooden frame.
Felt strips, weather-stripping nails . . .
Stop that, I instructed myself. Maybe he’d just gone out for a minute, leaving the door ajar so the cat could go in and out, too. He could come back at any time, but if he did my father and Ellie would see him.
Meanwhile, whatever was burning in the kitchen smelled like canned cat food simmering to a crisp. Atop that smell floated yet another strong aroma, warm and unpleasant.
I waved down again to my father and Ellie: All quiet. Maggie had rejoined them, carrying the baby in one arm and an ice cream in her other hand.
Vanilla, it looked like. Ellie took the baby so that Maggie could manage the dripping cone, as I turned back to the room. The new smell was familiar; unpleasantly so. Like . . .
Like the smell of blood. Something moved behind me again.
“Hey, cat. I said beat it.”
A warm weight fell heavily onto my shoulder. I glanced at it and let out a shriek so loud they must’ve heard it on Campobello, nearly jumping reflexively in fright right out that window.
Because it was a hand. A big bloody hand, attached to a big hairy arm. A man’s arm.
Scrambling away, I felt the hand fall off my shoulder. Then something heavy hit the floor. The hairy arm’s owner, I figured, and when I turned I saw I was right.
He sprawled on his back, big and surly-looking even as he lay there unconscious. From the description his ex-wife had given us, I was pretty sure I was looking at Jim Diamond.
By then my father and Ellie had made it upstairs and were rushing down the hall toward me, Ellie bringing up the rear with the baby still in her arms.
“Stay there,” my father told Ellie. She managed a glimpse, then hastily shielded the baby’s eyes with her hand and backed away.
“Call nine-one-one,” I yelled after her.
“Phone’s out,” she said. “I’ll use the one in the ice-cream parlor.”
Her footsteps hurried down the creaky stairs as I crouched over Diamond’s body. From this angle I could see that he had been hit on the head
, the deep dent in the back of his skull showing all the way around nearly to his ear.
“What do we do for him?” my father asked.
My ex-husband had been a brain surgeon and my dad knew I’d learned a few head-injury first-aid tips while I was married. Preventive ones, too, like never marry a brain surgeon. That way you will be vastly less likely to inflict head injuries.
But now was no time to nurse a grudge; instead, it was time to nurse this guy. Unfortunately my expertise extended only to the kinds of accidents active youngsters may suffer: the mildly bonked noggins, superficial scalp wounds, and so on.
Also it seemed that the window of opportunity for fix-it measures was closing fast, if it hadn’t shut and locked itself already. I looked closer, hoping I was wrong.
But my first impression had been accurate. The man lying on the floor had half his skull caved in.
I glanced around. Near that overturned chair, a black iron skillet lay behind the milk crate that held up the TV. A few dark hairs clung suggestively to the bottom of the skillet, clueing me to what someone had used as a clobbering tool.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told my father helplessly. “I just know this is bad. He needs an ambulance fast.”
Because in addition to being large, the injury had obviously happened quite some while ago. Head wounds bleed, and this one had been a gusher. A large dark pool behind the recliner was the marker for where he had originally fallen.
But the blood there was mostly coagulated, which meant he’d been lying semiconscious for hours, maybe even a whole day.
A siren howled distantly, coming closer. As if at the sound Jim Diamond took a deep, hitching breath. When the siren shut off he took another. The third one came as the EMTs rushed in, and then he didn’t take any more.
We moved back to let the emergency people get at him. They did what they could to stabilize him, got him loaded and belted onto a backboard efficiently, and hauled him out of there.
So that part was over. But we still didn’t know the answer to the question we’d come all the way here to ask, so when one of the Lubec cops came up to me I stared at Ellie over his shoulder.
She took the hint and handed Leonora to my father.
“You know the guy?” the cop wanted to know from me.
Swiftly, Ellie began moving around the hideous little flat, looking at all its contents without touching anything, giving it a good once-over without appearing particularly interested.
Watching her, I found myself suppressing an appreciative smile despite the situation. It wasn’t the first crime scene we’d ever come upon; since I’d moved to Eastport, Maine, a few years earlier, Ellie and I had snooped into a number of local murders, and she was a champ at picking up small, meaningful details.
Or the absence of them. “No,” I replied to the cop. “We just came here to give him a message.”
With any luck, what we wanted would be out in plain sight. Notebook, I thought at Ellie, although she knew. A pen, or even a sample of his handwriting.
Because I wanted to be able to assure his ex-wife that the threats were over, even if it was for a reason that in spite of everything I thought she wouldn’t welcome.
“His ex has a restraining order against him so they can’t communicate directly,” I added. “And his phone’s out.”
The cop looked unimpressed. “Yeah? So what was the message?”
I searched my mind for something plausible. “Their daughter wanted to see him about something but she hasn’t been able to get hold of him, either.”
My father’s lip twitched. Yeah, I thought at him, I can feel my nose growing. But considering Diamond’s condition I already thought his ex-wife could be in big trouble.
And I didn’t want to make it worse. “I mean,” I blundered on, “it was a nice day, we were planning to take a ride anyway, so . . .”
The cop seemed to find this tissue of lies believable enough. He nodded, accepting my string of whoppers as Ellie moved from the living room to the kitchen, where whatever it was still emitted that dreadful odor.
Something on the stove. “Lucky this was turned way down or there’d have been a fire,” Ellie said. “Okay if I turn it off?”
“Yeah,” the cop told her, snapping his notebook shut. He’d already gotten our names and so on from my dad. But then another thought hit him. “That your little car outside?” he asked me.
I allowed as how it was. Maggie still stood by it, looking up anxiously. Squad cars had boxed in both ends of the street, and apparently the cops weren’t letting her into the building.
“That you here visiting in it yesterday?” the cop asked. “Reason I noticed, it’s sitting in a no-parking zone,” he added. “It was then, too.”
At which I carefully did not burst out laughing; Lubec was a pleasant place, but even in tourist season it didn’t exactly have a traffic problem.
No-parking zone, indeed. The truth didn’t even occur to me. I assured the cop that he must’ve seen a different car belonging to another visitor to Lubec and promised to move mine.
“See anyone else when you got here?” he asked.
In the apartment, he meant, or on the stairs or loitering around outside. “No. I didn’t even know he was here until he fell on me.”
Ellie slipped out of the kitchen to look around in the bedroom. Better her than me; except for Ellie herself, I didn’t know anyone whose bedroom was tidy on short notice. I had a hunch this one wouldn’t be precisely springtime fresh, either.
“The door was open,” I added, so the cop wouldn’t think I’d broken in.
“What I don’t understand,” my father offered, frowning, “is how he managed to stand up at all, he was so . . .”
From the blood smears on my T-shirt he’d figured out that at some point recently, Jim Diamond had been upright. And now that the shock had begun fading I recalled again what the back of Diamond’s head had looked like.
And let’s just say it hadn’t resembled anything with bones in it. Or thought processes, either. You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon—or the ex-wife of one—to know that much.
“Trauma victims can do funny things,” the cop replied cheerfully. “Even the real train wrecks can surprise you.”
Which was putting it mildly. For an instant the injured man had towered over me like something resurrected out of the nearest graveyard. All he’d needed was a sound track to make the apartment resemble a stage set from Night of the Living Dead.
“I don’t know why some of ’em wake up like that at the end,” the cop added, “but they do.”
Remembering, I felt myself sway a little. My father looked sharply at me. You okay?
I nodded at him, spoke to the cop. “I’m not completely sure if this was even really the guy I was looking for. Jim Diamond?”
The cop grimaced. “Oh, yeah. It was him, all right. No real surprise, either, the kind of pals that guy had.”
Which gave me a moment of hope. “You mean you think you know who might have done this to him?”
He paused. “Well, not really,” he admitted. “Nobody in the gang he hung with has a history of crimes against persons.”
Darn. It was what I’d heard about Jim Diamond also, and one reason why I’d decided after all to risk bearding him in his den.
Diamond wasn’t a basher. But now he’d become the bashee. “State cops’ll probably have more questions,” the cop informed us.
That cheered me briefly, since it meant that at the moment he didn’t have any more himself. I wanted out of this apartment with its smells of burnt food and old blood.
I wanted it bad. “We’ll stay available,” I promised him, and was about to find Ellie and give her another eyebrow-wiggle, this one meaning let’s vamoose.
But just then the cop’s radio sputtered and he stepped out of the apartment to hear it, as if maybe it was going to transmit a top-secret national-security bulletin.
Ellie was exiting the bedroom when he returned, and he gave her a dark lo
ok. But she moved past him to take the baby from my father’s arms, and I saw the cop deciding not to comment.
Instead he kept the “Okay, let’s wrap it up” expression on his face; after all, Ellie appeared harmless enough.
Little did he know. “You can tell your friend she’s not an ex anymore,” he said as he put the radio back into its holster.
Bella Diamond, he meant; Jim’s ex-wife. She wasn’t a friend, exactly, just my housekeeper and the person whose worries we had come all this way to put an end to.
Well, they were ended now . . . I hoped.
I put my face to the window for some air. Down in the street a gaggle of onlookers had gathered, a few of the tourists taking pictures of the squad car and blood drops where the ambulance had been: What I Saw on My Maine Vacation.
“Guy died on the way to the ER,” the cop explained. “ ’S’what the radio call was. Guess that makes your friend a widow.”
I hoped that was all it made Bella. And in any case I didn’t want to be the one breaking the news to her. “She’ll get official notification?”
He looked at me impatiently. “Sure she will. State cops’ll tell her. One of the things I need to do, notify ’em right away.”
His face said he had many other tasks to accomplish as well, and that standing around gabbing with me wasn’t one of them.
“Knowing Jim, though,” he finished, “she’ll probably just go out and celebrate.”
Or maybe not; like head-injury victims, ex-wives did funny things. Glancing down at that bloody skillet, I only hoped this ex hadn’t done something a little funnier than usual.
Outside, the sky had darkened in the half hour since I had entered the apartment, the fog thickening into a cold, optimism-dampening drizzle that matched my mood.
Not that Diamond wouldn’t have been dead no matter who found him. But as I’ve mentioned, in the past couple of years dead guys had gotten into the habit of showing up on my doorstep, or me on theirs. And before I’d even gotten to Diamond’s apartment I’d had the feeling he could be trouble.
So I was in an unhappy frame of mind when, after raising the canvas top, I aimed the Fiat back toward Eastport with Ellie, the baby, Maggie, and my father all jammed into the car with me.