Deadline (8 page)

“Can't do it. I'd like to but I can't. AG would have me by the balls. I'm telling ya.”

“Okay. Off the record.”

Vigue hopped off the desk, showing me that he was almost fifty but still in great shape.

“There wasn't much to see. That's the truth. That wall is all friggin' granite. Granite blocks. You don't get sneaker prints off granite blocks. Besides, there were fifty friggin' people there, including the press. Boat came in and busted the ice into a million pieces. You beginning to get the picture?”

“So you've got nothing?”

“Nothing at the scene. Except Arthur.”

“And they say nothing on him says anything except he got cold and drowned.”

“You're telling me that one,” Vigue said.

His radio went static and he fiddled with the squelch knob.

“We couldn't see anything. Couldn't even tell where he went in,” he said.

“Coffee, Lieutenant?” LeMaire, J. asked, poking his head in the door.

I could see the end was in sight.

“Okay, Lieutenant. For the record. Are you still investigating the Arthur Bertin death?”

Vigue stubbed out his cigarette. I could hear the coffee machine buzzing and rattling in the hallway.

“The death is being treated as an accidental drowning at this time,” he said, speaking as if the words were from a language he was just learning. “At this point, in light of the medical examiner's ruling,
we welcome any information from the public, but do not consider this, the incident, a suspicious death. At this point in time.”

I wrote in my notebook.

“Now let's have that in English,” I said.

“Hey, if I could tell you any more, I would. You know what I know. We're still looking into it, but unless something new comes in, it appears to be an accident. As far as what happened to him, that's anybody's guess.”

I put my notebook in my pocket.

“Just doesn't make sense,” I said.

“Hey, you're in this business as long as I am, and you know that not much makes sense.”

Not much made sense. It was a nice way to put it. Sort of backward, but it was about the way I felt. Unsettled. Uneasy. Not sure why, or even if
unsettled
or
uneasy
were the right words.

It was almost dark and the mill traffic was moving, lots of trucks backed up at the light before the bridge. I walked back to the office, checked my messages and found only one, from a lady at the regional health agency. Cindy was on the phone, Marion had left, and Vern and Paul were around, judging by the work on their desks, but not in. I looked around and got out while the getting was good. It had been a bad day and I'd had enough.

I got in the Volvo, choked it and it started, sputtering in the cold. I flipped the useless heater on and circled the block on the mill side, then inched my way up Main Street to the Food Stop, where I went in and grabbed a six-pack of Ballantine Ale from the cooler. I was the reason the store stocked Ballantine; the manager called it “rocket fuel,” and the clerks always had to stop and look up the price, while they knew Budweiser by heart.

I forgave them their ignorance.

The night started to take shape a couple of blocks from the house. I'd cook brown rice and stir-fry some vegetables, watch the national news, Peter Jennings, and listen to Dave Brubeck or Bill Evans. And I'd drink a couple of beers. Maybe I'd drink all the beers.

But then my plans changed.

The yellow Subaru was in the driveway behind the house. The smell of chili greeted me in the downstairs hallway, and Roxanne met me at the door. She handed me an ice-cold Molson ale and kissed me quickly on the lips. In that order.

I followed her into the kitchen and put my Ballantines on the counter. Roxanne opened the refrigerator and took out a bowl of guacamole dip. She was smiling, happy and excited. Neither of us had said anything; we just beamed with anticipation of chili, and more.

“I didn't expect to see you this week,” I said.

“I didn't expect to be here,” Roxanne said.

She was picking the foil from the top of a bottle of red wine.

“Were you working over this way?” I asked.

“Nope. Waterford.”

“So what brings you to scenic western Maine?”

“You.”

I took a long swallow of ale.

This was Roxanne's second visit to Androscoggin and our third meeting. She'd stopped in town the week before on her way from Burlington, Vermont, back home to Portland. I'd shown her around, and then we'd come back to the house and talked and gone to bed. I thought of it often. Until Arthur had died, it had kept me smiling like a fool.

Roxanne was refreshing, rejuvenating, energetic, uninhibited, and, unlike the last woman I'd been involved with, in New York, didn't make me feel like I was needed to act out a fantasy from the pages of
Cosmopolitan
. With Roxanne, I didn't feel like a foil. She didn't pattern herself after some abstraction of the ideal woman. Roxanne was the way she was. If you didn't like it, that was tough.

But I liked it.

Her hair was pulled back and her cheeks were flushed from cooking. She was wearing ripped Levi's and a blue-and-white-striped sailor's jersey from L.L. Bean.

“Did you wear those clothes to work?” I asked.

“I changed in the guest bedroom,” she said, pouring the wine.

We clinked bottle and glass and walked into the living room. Through the bedroom door, I could see a skirt and blouse and stockings strewn on the bed.

“So go ahead and mess up my house,” I said. “I've been cleaning all week.”

“You could clean up all year and still not make a dent in this place. I'd go crazy if I lived here.”

“I'd go crazy if you lived here.”

She put the guacamole and tortilla chips on the table and sat down on the couch. I put my beer down and eased her back on the cushions. She laughed and quickly turned to me and we kissed. I loved the taste of her, the smell of her, soap or perfume or whatever the hell it was.

“Do you want to eat now or later?” she said, pulling her mouth away.

“What are you serving?”

“You're going to smell it burning if I don't turn the stove down.”

“Turn it way down,” I said.

I grabbed my beer and her glass and went into the bedroom. Roxanne came behind me and sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off her running shoes. I unlaced my boots and tossed them toward the door.

“So how was Waterford?” I asked.

She pushed me down on the bed and rested her chin on my chest.

“If I'd wanted to talk about Waterford, I would have gone back to work,” she said.

“What do you want to talk about?” I asked.

“You,” Roxanne said. “And how good you're going to make me feel.”

“Is that an order or a prediction?”

“I brought my crystal ball.”

She pulled her shirt off over her head and slid out of her jeans as I did the same. We sat on the bed and kissed, and I leaned back a moment to look at her. She smiled and raised herself up, arching her back and lifting her breasts. I grinned.

Roxanne knew she was beautiful. She reveled in it. She knew I thought she was beautiful, that I wanted her. She turned her head to let her long dark hair fall across her shoulders. No coyness. No self-consciousness. Just that open smile, delicate white shoulders, a statue's breasts, strong smooth legs.

I shook my head as I leaned toward her.

“I think I'm developing a taste for younger women,” I said.

“Taste this younger woman,” Roxanne said.

She smiled.

I gulped.

We made love deliberately and steadily but with a gathering momentum, like a wave moving toward shore, an offshore roller. Before it broke, we were face-to-face, sitting up with her hair falling on my chest and shoulders. She was forceful. Intent. Then out of control.

When I finally reached down to the floor for my beer, it was warm. I drained it anyway, but Roxanne said she'd get me a cold one. She went over to the closet and took a faded tan chamois shirt out of the closet and put it on. I watched.

She went to the kitchen and from the bed I heard the refrigerator door open and shut. Outside, shriveled oak leaves rattled against the dormer window. Roxanne came back into the room with two bowls of chili, another Molson, the wine bottle, and two candles. The candles were lit. The flames wavered as she put the tray between us on the bed.

“That's a fire hazard,” I said.

“You're a fire hazard,” she said, smiling.

We sat and ate the chili. It was hot enough with the cumin and red pepper and chili powder to make the beer taste great but not so hot that it scalded your esophagus. We talked between bites.

“I took a funny way over today,” she said. “I think I went too far. I just kept taking signs that said north or east and I ended up in places like Temple and Madrid and Phillips. I almost ended up in Rangeley but I turned around.”

“Rangeley is nice,” I said. “We should go there sometime and rent a cabin on the lake. Maybe even leave the cabin for short periods of time. You have beautiful legs. Have I ever told you that?”

Roxanne pulled the chamois shirt down over her knees and pursed her lips disapprovingly.

“So what were you doing in Waterford, or can't you talk about it?”

“Sometimes I feel like I can't think about it,” Roxanne said, suddenly quiet. “Oh, let's see. Same stuff. This morning I had to go tell this four-year-old girl's mother that we're initiating an investigation. The girl came to the daycare center with a bump on her head and bruises on the backs of her legs. It was the bruises that did it. Pattern was too regular.”

“What did the mother say?”

“Not much. It's the second time we've looked at a child from the family. Different boyfriend now. The first one was inconclusive. Nobody knew anything. Kid wouldn't talk about it. This time, I don't know. The little girl is awful young, even for her age. Scared of her shadow. Chances of her talking about what happened are slim to none.”

“Think the mother will straighten out?”

“If it's her? I doubt it. She probably got the same treatment herself. Maybe still gets it. I didn't see the boyfriend.”

“They probably don't care what happens,” I said, picking at the Molson label.

“It isn't that they don't care. I don't know. So many people in this situation feel like they have no control. They just get kicked around. Lousy jobs, illiterate. When they get a chance to have some power over somebody, they get their revenge.”

“On a little kid.”

Roxanne sipped her wine.

“You know what else? She was pregnant. The mother. Seven months anyway. When she came to the door she was smoking a cigarette.”

“God,” I said. “Some of these people should be sterilized. The kids don't have a chance, and their kids won't either.”

Roxanne held her wineglass on her lap.

“You sick of talking about it?” I said.

She shook her head.

“It isn't that. I don't know. It's just that I don't like it when people say things like that. ‘They should be sterilized.' ‘Take 'em out and shoot 'em.' It means you've stopped thinking about the problem. A lot of people do that and it's—”

“I know. It's an easy out. Doesn't accomplish anything.”

She leaned over and kissed me softly on the neck.

“You're still sexy, even if you're a reactionary,” she said. “So how's the paper. Raking any good muck?”

I managed a bit of a smile.

“Nothing too juicy. We had, I guess you could call it, an unfortunate thing happen. Sort of awful, really.”

She paled.

“Not to me,” I said. “To Arthur. Arthur Bertin.”

“The little photographer guy who came up to us in that restaurant?”

“Yeah. Well, he's gone. Dead. They found him in a canal down at the mill. Near the mill. Yesterday. He was drowned.”

“My God,” Roxanne gasped.

I told her about the kids, the fire truck, the boat.

“I can't believe it. He seemed nice that day. Remember how sort of shy he was? He had been at a football game and he was having hot chocolate to warm up, and it was like he didn't want to look me right in the eye but he kept almost peeking at me.”

“He was afraid of women. Especially young, attractive ones.”

“Well, what happened?”

“I don't know. They say—the medical examiner, I mean—says it was an accidental drowning. But I don't buy it. Where he was is in the middle of nowhere, and he didn't even have a car. So what did he
do? Walk down there in the middle of the night to look at the view and get too close to the edge?”

“What do the police think?” she said.

“Accidental death until they find something that says otherwise.”

“They must have their reasons, don't you think?”

“Yeah, like they don't feel like worrying about it, like it might involve some work. It's a big rubber stamp. Bang, bang. Case closed.”

“Did he kill himself?” Roxanne asked.

“I don't know. Maybe. He seemed fine to me, though. Strange, the way he was, but happy enough. Basketball is about to start up and he really liked shooting basketball photos. It was warm, which is why he hated football. He said he had bad circulation, and he'd freeze standing around outside like that.

“But it's not just that. He wasn't the type to do something dramatic like that. I don't know. Something so final. He hemmed and hawed over everything. Which shot was better, which one to print, did I like this one, did I like that one better. Drive you crazy.”

I finished my beer and ate a spoonful of chili.

“This is really good. You don't cook bad for a sexpot.”

Roxanne sat with her legs crossed. I was glad she didn't paint her toenails.

“So what are you going to write?” she asked, fiddling in the chili with her spoon.