Deadline (16 page)

“Old friend of mine. Nancy, I think. We were part of the same crowd, way back when.”

“How would Arthur end up with something like that, of yours?”

“Oh, you know him. Pack rat. That place out there. You know he's lucky he didn't have a fire, all that stuff in there. That way for years.”

“So he picked it up someplace?”

“Could have been anywhere. In the office. The old office, I mean. On Cross Street. Upstairs; you don't remember that.”

His voice trailed off and we stood there on the sidewalk with the cars going by and every once in a while, somebody waving. It wasn't supposed to be important, but I got the feeling that it was. That something very important was going on in this awkward little conversation.

“Pretty girl, Martin,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

He looked distressed.

“I'll just run in,” Martin said.

“I don't have it,” I said.

“But I thought you said—”

“I had to give it to the cops. I told you I was going to give it to you but I couldn't. It was part of Arthur's belongings.”

Martin stammered, “But it belongs to me. It didn't belong to him.”

“Cops don't know that. I didn't know that. It's old. They probably won't even know who it is.”

A woman walked by and said, “Hi, Mr. Wiggins.”

Martin didn't seem to hear her.

“What will they do with it?” he asked.

“I don't know. Maybe put it in with his estate. All that other stuff. Depends on how long the investigation takes. You could ask them.”

I took a couple of steps toward the office door. Martin started following me, then stopped. I said, “So long,” and went inside.

First fighting, I thought. Now lying.

More beginner's luck.

The picture was in the manila file folder in the drawer in my desk.

Young Martin and the pretty girl. Embracing and mooning at each other. A soulful gaze. Not an old buddy. And the girl was not a girl.

It was quiet in the office. Everybody had been paid and they had left, except for Cindy, who was on the phone to a friend, and Marion, who was setting copy. I sat at my desk and looked at the picture more closely.

The girl was not a girl. She was a woman. She had long slender legs and she was wearing clunky white shoes. Not shoes from the early thirties. Shoes from the forties. Postwar shoes. Martin would have been in his early thirties.

And married.

So Martin had been screwing around. That intimacy in the gaze. Complicity. Knowing eyes.

Fifty-one years, they had been together. From high school to the war, through two other wars to today. With a little something on the side, as they used to say.

I stuck the picture in the folder with the picture of Joy the Wonder Waitress, shut and locked the drawer. I was in deeper. But maybe I wasn't alone.

Martin didn't want that picture to hang on the living room wall. He knew what it was. He'd known exactly what I'd meant, even back at his house. I'd seen the look in his eyes. The look was fear and it was immediate, more immediate than it would have been if he hadn't seen this picture in forty years.

I thought of Roxanne's questions. Why would Arthur take pictures of women? For fun or blackmail? Now, why would Arthur have a picture of Martin? Why would it be in his private collection?

I got up and, with a wave to Cindy, who was still on the phone, walked out the door.

The questions were with me all evening. I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom. I picked up all the soiled clothes and put them in trash bags and brought them to a Laundromat in the Village Shopping Center, just west of town, miles from anything that resembled a village. The Very Edge of Civilization Shopping Center, maybe, but not a village.

While I was waiting for the laundry, I went two stores up to a stereo shop, walked in, and cut the clerk off before he could tell me they were closing. I said I wanted something basic and I could spend five hundred dollars. Fifteen minutes later, the backseat was filled with cartons and I was again on the road to music.

Whoever the apartment trashers were, I owed them one.

I drove home, dumped the laundry in the bedroom, and set the stereo up along the living room wall. It was higher-tech than my old one but did the same thing. It played Dave Brubeck and I cleaned. The moon was rising behind the bare trees, and in spite of the music, I felt very much alone.

Or maybe because of it.

Gerry Mulligan's sax was playing, low and soft and rippling like muscles. I put down the mop and went to the window and looked out.

It was ghostly in the moonlight, with the silhouettes of the black trunks of the trees and the black ridges that ran along to the west of the house. It got darker here than it did in the city, and it did it abruptly, always catching you off guard and leaving you thinking that the day had been abbreviated, called home early, that it had left
without a formal good-bye. In the city, when the sun was jerked down behind the next block, lights went on to replace it. Here, in this town on the edge of wilderness, there were no lights. Or maybe just one or two. A lone streetlight that flickered with the wavering branches. A faraway lamp in somebody's den that showed dim in the distance, and when that somebody pulled the shade, showed dimmer still.

I stood and looked, leaning on the windowsill, my face near the cold glass, and wondered what the hell I was doing here. It was a feeling I had gotten only once or twice before, on bad days when I was lonely. I knew more people now. I had taken a lover, taken her just that morning. But I still felt alone. And worse than that, deep down, when everything stopped and I wasn't working or talking or drinking, I felt afraid.

Staring, I tried to shake it off. It had been a lousy week. The apartment. The fight. Arthur. Only a numb fool could be unconcerned, right? But then the feeling crept back, the one that was worse than the fear itself. It was the realization that it was the same feeling I'd had in the city. The feeling I got when I saw the younger reporters passing me on their way to the far reaches of East Brooklyn and the Bronx. The same fear that had brought me to this town, where I talked to school kids and told them I had just needed a change.

The fear that I'd made some giant, irreversible mistake.

I could stay, alone with myself, or I could leave. At eight, I drove back downtown and circled Main Street. The lights were out at the
Review
and all the stores looked closed, not for hours, but for a decade. I drove around again and circled back to the police station,
parking the Volvo next to the police cruisers, where it looked like a refugee from Eastern Europe.

Vigue was there, with LeMaire, J. and a couple of reserves, young kids whom I had not formally met. LeMaire, J. was sitting at a desk reading an equipment catalog and Vigue was standing, one black boot up on a chair.

“I'm not knocking it,” he said, as I came through the doorway. “Don't get me wrong.”

One kid, short and squat with a red nose, nodded.

“I'm not knocking it. I got no complaints. I'm just saying, hey, there's a few things I've learned. Like, mister, don't expect a pat on the back. You know why? 'Cause it ain't coming. No matter what you do. And it don't come in the paycheck, either. Work in this place almost twenty years and you make what they get in that mill to start. Sometimes I think I should have my head examined. ‘What do you do?' ‘I chase shitheads around, and every once in a while, one of 'em tries to take my head off.' ‘Oh, how nice.' ”

The kids shifted in their uniforms and looked unhappy.

“You know where it's got to come from?” Vigue said. “It's got to come from inside. If it doesn't, you might as well take off that badge and all that equipment and go over to that mill and fill out an application. I mean it. Take it right off tonight and go over to that mill. If you don't have it in here for this job, forget it.”

“Forty-five bucks for a little belly-band holster,” LeMaire, J. said, peering at the pages of the catalog. “Maybe I won't put in for detective after all.”

Vigue looked at me.

“And these guys,” he said. “Only two words you need to know.
No
and
comment
. Don't turn your back. They'll whack you good. Speaking of whacking, that lawyer get hold of you yet?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Cormier's. They want you to drop the assault charge. Poopsie doesn't want it on his record.”

“Tough.”

“Hey, it's up to you. Just one more dirtball. State pays for the lawyer. Lawyer gets him off. He goes out and does it again. We pay for another lawyer. He goes on welfare. System works just fine.”

“So if I don't file the complaint?”

“He gets the disorderly, Class D. Misdemeanor. Pays the hundred bucks or whatever the judge decides on. The lawyer said something about him being ready to go back to work in the woods. I guess they don't take dirtballs.”

“The rest of it just gets dropped?” I asked.

“Righto, chief. And I don't care one way or the other. I get paid every two weeks. You afraid of the guy or something, get the jitters, let him walk. But just one thing: Don't complain that the police department isn't doing anything about crime in Androscoggin. 'Cause you'll know what we're up against. Every friggin' day.”

“Second the motion,” LeMaire, J. said.

The kids looked puzzled, as if they weren't sure if I was the enemy. One made up his mind and gave me a cold stare. Vigue took a portable radio out of the charging rack and went out the door. I followed and stood behind him as he scraped the windshield.

“So anything on Bertin?” I asked.

Vigue scraped.

“Off the record?” he said.

“Sure.”

“It'll take time.”

“Talk to any of the people in those pictures?”

“I will. The ones I can make out. But don't look for much, all right? And don't come down here every day to bug me about it. Every couple days, maybe. Go easy on yourself.”

“So you're gonna track those people down?”

“Jesus, don't make such a big deal out of it. We'll make some inquiries. But they won't say much, I promise you that. I go to that waitress at the Pine Tree and say, ‘You may not have known it, but this guy you didn't know took your picture through a window when you were taking off your clothes, and now he's dead.' She says, ‘Great. What's the bad news?' ”

He put the scraper in the trunk.

“Think they knew him?”

“Doubt it. But what do you think? I told you we can't do it alone.”

“What about state cops?”

“Staties? As far as they're concerned—and this is off the record; if you print it, I'll hang you—they think Arthur is some chump who fell in the water. They've got enough real live homicides with guns and knives to worry about some jerkoff who goes for a swim in friggin' November.”

Cindy had left me a note and my messages before locking up. A lawyer named Richard Roberts had called from Auburn. Probably Cormier's court-appointed. A dirty business, that.

Somebody named Mrs. Gilbert wanted me to call her before five. It was quarter to six. I put the messages on my desk and put my feet up.

On Main Street, snow flurries showed in the strings of colored Christmas lights, and passing cars left black tracks on the whitened street. Across the street, the girl at McLaine's Fine Fashions was struggling to lock the door. She was probably swearing like a trooper, but I couldn't hear her.

Turn off the sound and the town looks quaint. Get too close and you hear the cursing, feel the hopelessness and discontent. I felt like somebody was turning up the volume, louder and louder. If I stayed very still, I could hear the sound of Arthur hitting the water.

12

I
tried to find something to do that night but nothing felt right. After looking at the
Lewiston Sun
and a day-old
Boston Globe
, I went home to the carnage and made my usual tuna sandwich, opened a can of Ballantine Ale. I ate half the sandwich and felt full. The beer tasted funny, but I forced myself to finish it as I leafed through the manuals for my new stereo equipment. The writing in the manuals was ungrammatical and depressing. I put them down and put Brubeck back on. Four guys playing a song a long time ago, plinking at a piano, tooting on horns. I turned it off.

After I cleaned up the kitchen a little more, I got another beer and stood at the counter with the unopened can in my hand. I took the phone and dialed Roxanne's number but it rang busy. A pang of jealousy came and went, a flash of some pretty-boy skier. But could he write an editorial?

I turned off the lights and pulled a kitchen chair up to the window by the table. With the lights out, I could see the snow falling behind the house. It was snowing softly and deliberately, and I sat with my feet up on the table and watched. For an hour, the only
sound was the creaking of the joints in the chair when I shifted my weight. And then I heard something in the hall.