Deadline (32 page)

I got down on the floor and lifted the blankets. The light showed dust and dirt and a newspaper. I pulled it out. The
Review
, before my time. Front page had a picture of kids holding posters they had drawn. A keeper.

Standing up, I picked up a pillow and shook it. Nothing fell out. I ripped the blankets and sheets off the bed and shook them, too.

Nothing.

The mattress was stained at the center. I patted it reluctantly, then lifted it up and looked underneath. The bottom was stained, too. I pulled it off the bed. Something fell to the floor, next to the wall. I bent down and reached under the bed, through the dust and grime, and pulled it out.

A white reporter's notebook.

22

T
he note was still on the table when I got home. I went in and touched Roxanne on the shoulder and she opened her eyes and grabbed the alarm clock.

“I'm late,” she said, and bounded out of the bedroom, still in her slip. I heard the shower curtain rustle and the water hiss on. I went into the kitchen and put on water for coffee and got two mugs out of the cupboard. Black for me. Milk and sugar for her. Roxanne trotted from the bathroom to the bedroom, a blue towel held loosely in front of her. It occurred to me that we hadn't made love lately. For good reason, I supposed, but damn, she was sexy.

I made the coffee and put the toast in the toaster as Roxanne came out of the bedroom, zipping a tweed skirt and trying to slide on a pair of black pumps at the same time. She scuffed across the floor and I put a spoonful of sugar in her mug.

“Take it easy,” I said.

“You'll get there.”

“I know, but this is a first meeting with this family, and they're not going to be too glad to see me in the first place. Never mind being an hour late.”

“Where is it?”

“Cumberland.”

A good hour and a half away.

“What time?” I asked.

“Family at eight. Support team at seven-fifteen.”

“So you'll be a few minutes late.”

“So I will,” Roxanne said, putting more sugar in her coffee. “Where were you? Did you go out?”

“For a while. I was awake so I went for a ride. I saw somebody come out of Arthur's place. Come out of the studio.”

Roxanne stopped in mid-sip.

“At six in the morning?” she said.

“Five-thirty-three.”

“Who?”

“Couldn't see.”

“Did you call the police?” Roxanne asked.

I looked at her. She put her mug down.

“Jack. What the hell is this? Some kind of game? You act like it is. You act like it's some kind of a game, you against somebody or something or whatever the hell it is. Well, I hope you're having fun playing detective, but I'm not. I feel like I'm in danger. I do, Jack. I feel like I'm in danger and you don't care. You're thinking of yourself or your paper or something, but you're not thinking of me.”

“But I am,” I said.

“No, you're not. If you were, you'd go to the cops; you'd do something to put an end to this foolishness. Like leave. Oh, God, I don't have time to talk about it now.”

Roxanne put her mug in the sink and went into the living room for her coat, which was long and gray. She came back with it on and I stood and went to the door. Her face was hard and grim.

“I'll tell you right out, Jack,” she said.

“I don't understand this. I don't feel like you're telling me everything—not at all. Maybe you're protecting me or something, but I just can't live like this. I want to be with you. I think maybe I'm falling in love with you. Maybe it's not even maybe. But I don't want to be here with you. Not here. Not with all this … this shit going on, Jack; I just can't.”

I waited.

“My offer still stands from last night. Effective immediately. Today. Tomorrow. Follow me home. Come to Portland. We could, I don't know—you know what I mean.”

“It would be great,” I said, “but I can't do it now.”

“When? Two weeks? Two months? Two years?”

“I don't know. I can't just run away whenever a problem comes up.”

“A problem comes up?” Roxanne said. “Do you have these problems all the time? Getting kidnapped? Getting beat up. Having your girlfriends threatened? What is this? James Bond or something? No, I don't think this is your problem. This stuff with the mill, that's the town's problem. Arthur's dead. I'm sorry it happened, but you didn't do it. Can't you see? You don't have to do all this yourself. Let somebody else worry about something.”

I opened my mouth to say something but changed my mind. Roxanne leaned over and kissed me coldly on the cheek, her lips like dry fingers on my skin.

“I've got to go,” she said, and opened the door.

“I'll call you,” I said, and she walked down the stairs, her pumps snapping on the steps. As her car swung out of the driveway, I pulled out the notebook.

It was white. Spiral-bound. Arthur had doodled long cylindrical shapes on the back cover. Inside the front cover he had written
SEPTEM
and an arrow pointing to the right. I riffled the pages; the notebook was three-quarters full.

I started at the back. The last entry said
SNO MO BANQ
.
DIX
.
THURS
. 11
O
'
CLOCK
. I remembered that one. It was a promo for a snowmobile club kick-off dinner. I'd asked Arthur to do it the last Thursday we went to the printers. Three days before he died. I flipped the pages toward the front.

A Christmas fair at the Catholic Church in Mexico. A quilt raffle at the Baptist Church in Androscoggin Center. Boy, we used a lot of this stuff. But the people wanted it. What the hell.

That same day, Arthur had noted going to a car accident on Route 17. Next to it, he had written
NU
. Not used. I remembered that one, too. Nobody had been hurt and the photo was flat. Blah. Under our agreement, Arthur got paid ten bucks for going to something like that, fifteen if we used it. If I didn't pay him for enterprise stuff, the paper would be wall-to-wall fair pictures.

The rest of the stuff looked routine.
BBALL AHS
. 3
P.M
. 11/14. Something Vern had assigned. It had been taken two weeks before Arthur had died. There was an entry for supplies purchased: $48.80 for a case of Tri-X film. More promos. Then back to football, another accident, a fire in a chimney, not used. Another ten bucks.

And there it ended. Thursday to Sunday, the day Arthur's body was found, was a blank. I turned the notebook over and flipped through the reverse side of pages. Nothing.

So what next? Wait for something to happen? Get grabbed again and hope for everybody to break and confess.

I stood leaning against the counter and let the pages of Arthur's notebook flutter. Promo … basketball … 90th birthday … Arthur's existence. The chapter headings of his life, a series of—

The entry was toward the back, on a single page, on the reverse side. It was scrawled in big letters, at an angle—written in a hurry.

S/O
w/v.

I looked at it. Nothing came to me.

S/O
w/v.

Sheriff s office. Wide-vision. Studio office. Sports offering. Sandy Ogden. It wasn't one of the abbreviations Arthur used. I couldn't remember him using it at all. And how would I check? I didn't have any other notebooks, though I was sure Arthur kept them someplace. Looking for them would mean another visit to the studio. They had to be there because Arthur was always digging them out, looking for some piece of trivia, an answer to an offhand question nobody really cared about, or if his pay was short, which it was sometimes, usually because of something I did—

His pay.

That's what I did have. Payroll records. We had to keep them for taxes and the feds, and Arthur used the same kind of abbreviations on his pay vouchers.
BBALL
.
PROMO
.
NU
. I had them for the six months I'd been at the paper, anyway. There were more records in the basement someplace. If he had used that one, that
S/O
w/v, maybe I could find it. Then I could check with the back issues to see what assignment he was talking about. It might work. If it didn't, I wasn't any worse off.

It was snowing lightly again and the streets were greasy and slick. I eased the Volvo down the hill, trying not to ram the Jeep in front of me at the stop sign. It had fat tires and was raised up high, a macho vehicle for a guy with feelings of inadequacy, I figured. The roar from his exhaust when he pulled away confirmed it.

I headed into town, stopping at the light on the downtown side of the bridge and staring idly at the people going into LaVerdiere's.

“Hey,” somebody shouted, and I turned, startled. The light changed to green and an old blue pickup, a sixties GMC with a green passenger door, pulled alongside.

It was Cormier. He waved for me to follow and I did, as he made a U-turn in the LaVerdiere's lot and headed back over the bridge and up Penobscot Street, out of town. He drove over the hill to the White Mountain Road and took a right. I followed him a couple of miles before he pulled off onto a dirt side road. He wouldn't try the same thing again, would he? I was about to turn around and blast out of there when he pulled over, with nothing in sight but birch and poplar woods. Cormier got out and started to walk back. I got out and walked toward him.

“Hey,” he said.

“How's it going?” I said back.

“Hey, okay,” Cormier said.

We were standing beside the truck, which was rusted, with big gaping holes in the bed. Where there weren't holes, there was a gas can and a Jonsered chain saw and a few dozen beer cans, Bud talls. Maybe he just drove around until they all fell out.

Cormier was wearing a faded denim jacket, jeans, and boots. His hat was green camouflage and advertised Winchester ammunition.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “How much will that window run you? I can give you the money, but I' m not gonna be around to, like, get it fixed.”

“You got off?”

“Filed. Fifty bucks. Lawyer got it done this morning.”

“Not a bad deal.”

“What the hell,” Cormier said. “About what it was worth.”

I shrugged. He looked away again. Nobody had told him about Dale Carnegie.

“Hey, so sorry about that, or whatever,” he said.

I nodded. He picked at a piece of Bondo that was hanging like loose skin on the side of the truck.

“What you wanted to know about.”

“What?” I said.

“The picture guy. I talked to some people.”

He looked uneasy and looked even farther away from me.

“Bad news on that one, man,” Cormier said.

“What do you mean, bad news?”

“Like, leave it alone.”

“Who's saying that?”

Cormier looked at me, then away. Sniffed. Reached out and broke a twig off a birch branch that hung over the road.

“LeMaire,” I said.

He didn't say anything.

“I'm just telling you what the word is. And the word is that it's hands off. Stay the hell away. That's from up above. Coming down to the peons. Like it never happened.”

“Why would anybody say that?”

Cormier pulled at his hat and smiled.

“That's not my problem. Word is, don't touch it. Back right the hell off. In my position, that's what I did.”

He walked back to the cab of his truck and got in. I walked behind him and leaned toward the window, saw him stick an open
Bud between his legs. He turned the key and the solenoid clicked a couple of times before the starter caught and the motor roared.

He put the truck in gear and sat with his foot on the clutch.

“Listen, I mean it,” Cormier said. “Our little ruckus was fun and games, you know what I'm saying? This other stuff is serious business. You're smart, you'll forget it. Back off. Go back where you come from and take your babe with you. You don't want to end up iced, you know what I'm saying? I don't know how to tell you any more direct than that.”

“You're serious?”

“Listen, I've lived here my whole life. And there are people you just don't mess with. Make me look like a friggin' Boy Scout. You know who they are and you stay away from 'em, you know? And there are times to mess and times to walk away. You know the difference, you stay out of trouble. I'll tell you friggin' straight out. If I were you, I'd walk away. Leave it the hell alone.”

He revved the motor and pulled up the road, turning around and coming back by me with a small wave of his hand, still on the steering wheel. I stood beside the car for a minute and when Cormier had disappeared around the bend in the road, I got in the car and considered what he had said. I considered it for a millisecond before coming to the conclusion that I had been right.

The word had come down from the top. Vigue.