Death of the Black-Haired Girl (15 page)

At the curb a few doors down, he ran into Philip Polhemus, the college’s chief of security, a highly regarded man who had retired from the U.S. Park Police. Polhemus still had a youthful, outdoorsy quality about him—longish gray-blond hair and a full bushy beard that the college would have figured would make him congenial to student-age elites. But the beard vaguely annoyed professional police officers. Polhemus was standing in the street with a camera.

“What are you taking pictures of, Philip?” Salmone asked.

Looking around, Salmone could see a few blood spatters on the curb, boot prints and a museum of tire tracks. The ones that might have been relevant were on the sidewalk, but the snow had melted and they had deteriorated. If anyone had measured or photographed the treads, he hadn’t heard about it. Amid the soiled slush lay some of the plastic instrument wrappings the medics had tossed. Television crews had left some disposable equipment stacked on one of the house rails.

“Who knows what, right?” Polhemus said. “The dean is very upset. This street was supposed to be closed for the hockey game. Somebody moved the barricade. The No Entry sign is gone.”

“That’s trouble,” Salmone said.

“He’s going to want to talk to you soon.”

“Me? Since when am I in traffic?”

“Don’t you know who the dead girl was?”

“Maud Stack,” Salmone said. “She was the daughter of a guy was my partner once in NYPD.”

Polhemus moved closer to Salmone and lowered his voice.

“She was the girl who wrote the anti-religious stuff in the
Gazette.
The stuff against the abortion protesters.”

Salmone just looked at him.

“Remember we had like a hundred demonstrators? You guys made some stops checking license plates. Well-known anti-abortion people. They came from all over. TV cameras.”

“I don’t read the
Gazette,
” Salmone said. “I remember the big demonstrations, but I was out sick.”

Salmone read neither the
Gazette
nor the daily papers. He had given up on television except for watching sports in their season. There had been some kind of anti-abortion hassle during the time he was having his gall bladder out at Whelan, and he remembered some talk in the corridors, but he had tuned it out.

“Anything to do with this Professor Brookman?”

“She was a special student of his. She died right here.” Polhemus pointed to the Brookmans’ college-owned Federal. “In front of his house.”

“Right,” Salmone said. “The dean hasn’t called me.”

“He will. I’ll be in touch.”

The police station lived in one wing of City Hall, a nineteenth-century Neo-Renaissance copy of a German
Rathaus.
There Salmone looked over the cell phone videos from the scene of the incident again. A dozen state troopers, within whose competence such things seemed to lie, had spent a large part of the day watching the videos sequentially on a wide-screen monitor, without getting a make on the car or driver.

The videos were jittery, drizzly and snow-blown. What they focused on up to the very last was a one-sided shouting match, ending in a brief scuffle between a girl recognizable as the late Maud Stack and a large, short-haired man who would have been Steven Brookman. More students insisted that Brookman had tried to save her life than said he had pushed her toward the car. But every one of the videos ended in a scattering, a rushing disorder and dissolution of images. In the end, it was impossible to determine positively what had taken place.

One student had brought a camcorder, equipped with sound, to the game and afterward had filmed some of the encounter between professor and student. The footage was disturbing. There were terrified screams, and it was just possible, if you knew how to listen, to hear a voice calling out, “He pushed her.” But the video showed no such thing. Frenzied bodies blocked any view of the speeding car. And the student statements mainly had Brookman to the rescue, too late.

The three students who claimed to have seen Brookman push her seemed very convinced and irate. Salmone decided to call them. They stuck by their stories.

“Yes,” one of them, a boy, insisted. He might have been a little overwrought. “I’m absolutely certain, he practically picked her up and put her under the wheels.” On paper, his words looked solid. On the phone, he sounded like a screwball. Still, the Brookman person troubled Salmone. He hadn’t liked the sound of the wife much either. No one, except maybe the Staties if they made the car, was going to the district attorney. Salmone thought he owed a call to Eddie Stack.

S
ALMONE HAD NO SUCCESS
contacting Stack during the rest of the day. In between his attempts to call, he read the article in the
Gazette
that had caused all the trouble. It was insulting, insulting in a particularly smart-ass way, more than the simpleminded badmouthing shit a perpetrator might say and get his sentence enhanced. Why should a kid use all that education just to belittle someone’s religion when it might be all they got? Sometimes the college could be an incredibly mean place; when the kids reflected it they had the sharp language and the intelligence but no sense and no mercy.

But the grossest thing was not the mocking tone of the article. The grossest part was the color photographs of abnormal births that abortions, Maud Stack believed, were meant to prevent. The pictures weren’t in the paper, but apparently she had meant them to be and they’d gone out online. The worst one Salmone saw was the baby with Meckel-Gruber syndrome. The big-headed one. It was really fucking ridiculous: church people, anti-church people, marching around with monster pictures to make each other sick.

At ten o’clock the next morning, he got a call from Polhemus telling him that Dean Spofford would appreciate his stopping by College Hall.

“I always have time for the dean,” Salmone told him.

It was a nasty, sleety day, the kind of day that aroused in Salmone vague fantasies of retirement in Puerto Rico, a place he had visited once with some gambling friends who liked to stay at places like the Isla Verde Sands and the El San Juan and lose their money. It was all very sleek and brassy and sunsplashed, quite unlike coastal New England, where, he was fairly certain, he was going to spend his remaining years.

Polhemus was waiting for him under the white-painted arch at the College Hall steps. The dean’s office, on the third floor, could be reached by a winding stairway lined with the portraits of collegiate notables past or, more practically, by the mandatory elevator, which was said to have entrapped a few of those notables. The former park policeman headed for the stairs but checked himself and rode up with Salmone.

“It’s a tragic thing when a young person dies,” Salmone said.

“Family to us,” said Dean Spofford, which was what he’d said the last time.

John Spofford was slight and actor handsome, though not in the least epicene. His physically unruffled appearance was a concession to his job; he would actually have been more at ease with his hair less barbered and combed, in a less well-measured and expensive suit. He would not have insisted on looking younger than fifty-one, which was his age.

“Yes sir,” said Salmone.

Everyone shook hands on it. The dean offered them chairs and said nothing, then, about the street that was supposed to have been closed.

“I understand that Maud was leaving the Brookman house,” Spofford said.

Polhemus let Salmone answer.

“She never went in the house, Mr. Spofford. They stood outside and allegedly caused a disturbance. That’s our understanding.”

“So Professor Brookman came out.”

“Correct. And his wife—Mrs. Brookman—followed him out just before the car.”

“Nothing on the car?”

“Not as yet, as far as we know.”

“The state troopers are hard at it, close on it,” Polhemus said. “We understand the governor called.”

“An alumnus,” Spofford said. “Think it was an anti-abortion fanatic?”

Salmone gave him a small shrug.

“Certainly possible. The snowstorm, the way everything happened, that’s made it very hard for us with the car.”

“An unexpected car,” said the dean. Polhemus began to answer, but Spofford interrupted him and addressed Salmone.

“So tell us about the Brookman business.”

Salmone had brought his notes.

“Approximately eleven p.m., just before the game gets out. It’s snowing. Miss Stack appears outside Mr. Brookman’s house. She yells his name. Maybe throws snow at the window. Gets him out there. He comes out. They argue in an agitated manner. Finally they’re in maybe a shoving match. She’s yelling. He’s maybe trying to calm her but he’s been drinking too. They both were intoxicated.”

“But not drinking together?” Spofford asked.

“Not at that time, because she didn’t go in the house.”

“Sounds like a lovers’ quarrel, though,” Spofford said.

Salmone said nothing.

“I mean,” said Spofford, “I guess there’s no reason to assume that. Do you think a crime might have been committed in this melee?”

“We’re pursuing the circumstances of the incident, Mr. Spofford. All the surrounding factors.”

“Going to talk to students?”

“We would normally do that. Students and faculty and staff.”

Everyone sat in silence for a moment.

“So, Mr. Polhemus,” the dean said, “you’ll help him out?”

“We’ve set up some interviews,” Polhemus told him.

“Experience shows—I believe—that they’re more comfortable if we go to them.”

“To dorms?”

“To dorms and college locations.”

“If possible,” Salmone said.

Later that day, Polhemus accompanied him to a student lounge where they could talk privately with Shelby Magoffin. Dean Spofford went off to deal with the media effects of Maud’s death, which everyone knew would complexify as the hours passed. Salmone was grateful that the media fallout would devolve, for a while, on the Staties, who handled road accidents as a matter of routine.

Salmone’s encounters with Dean Spofford always refreshed his current understanding of how things stood in Amesbury. The city force had endured a few embarrassing scandals over the years and did not enjoy total confidence in the high places with which most college students connected. There were also some confusions of history, different perspectives on the class struggle. Many people thought the issues dated from some violent incidents in the sixties, but in fact the hostility went much further back. Nearly a century before Vietnam, students in Brooks Brothers tweed had gathered to throw snowballs at the cops marching in Amesbury’s St. Patrick’s Day parade or some other celebration. Pranks the rich kids thought droll roused ancient hatreds in the immigrant-descended police. The town-and-gown business in the city had always been bitter, and was more so when the factories closed.

The city obliged the college beyond the limits of necessity, but the old pols who could not learn the diction of enlightenment disappeared from public life. The college was the only thing in town left standing and was increasingly less polite about having its way. Distinctions of class and identity persisted. Lieutenant Salmone had grown up in a police family and understood all this well.

The public had the impression that screwy things did not happen around the college end of town, but any officer knew better. You could ask the campus cops about the weirdness they dealt with. There were bomb threats and threats of other kinds. Bad fistfights, duels, accusations and denials of date rape, unquestioned rape, thefts. Occasionally grand larcenies like the priceless Persian carpet removed from the dean’s office, a particular embarrassment. The museum once lost an oil by a fairly well-known follower of the Hudson River school.

Most of the campus cops’ reports, however, were the stuff of amusing stories. The unamusing ones were conveyed to parents through Dean Spofford, who was assigned to deliver grim tidings. The substance of these were along the lines of: Your son was on acid; he thought he could fly. Or: Your daughter OD’ed on smack, pills, vodka. Sometimes the news would be too bizarre or tragically ludicrous to be explained over the phone, in which case Spofford would find a way to duck it.

When a student was murdered, an event that occurred once or twice a decade, the perpetrator was often what the thoughtful referred to as a young community male. The police referred to such people as dirtbags. A dirtbag might be a crackhead from one of the dead mill towns up the valley, or a ghetto kid from the far side of any street that took you anywhere. He might even be from one of the old neighborhoods like Salmone’s. The new century was short on promise for townies. Some dirtbags were solitaries but most of them ran in packs. They tended to get loaded and talk too much, whereupon the dime, as the old expression had it, would drop. Salmone would get the call and usually the state would get a conviction. The less said about that, the better.

When the suspect, usually the killer, was a student, circumstances differed. The college maintained a pretty professional security service that often knew a surprising amount of what was going on around campus. Normally the officers made use of less than they knew. Most of the problems they had to deal with were trivial kid stuff. Sometimes things got serious, as in the theft of the carpet—a prank theft by nihilist art students but nevertheless grand larceny of an object worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Intramural murder was something else. Law enforcement had to tread carefully, and rarely even in the bad old days did a city cop take the end of a telephone book to a student suspect. And no more rubber hoses, even for dirtbags.

The Common was no longer under snow as Salmone and Polhemus walked across it. They followed the path that was being cleaned by men in Day-Glo vests, chiefly offenders performing their community service. The sleet had given way to a pale blue sky edged with cirrus clouds; the lower storm clouds were heading inland for the hills. It was getting noticeably colder again.

They talked about the weather most of the way across. Polhemus, it turned out, knew about all sorts of weather—tropic, arctic, subtropic, subarctic. The park service had kept him on the move, having to relocate his family almost every two years, and there were parks in every climate zone. He told Salmone he had started out as a ranger but transferred early to the park police to keep his job.