Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (18 page)

I prayed.

The praying turned into thinking. That happens a lot. I used to worry, thought I was praying wrong. Then Eudora Spoon told me there was no way to pray wrong. She said praying is praying.

So I thought and I prayed. Somewhere in there I started to cry.

When I finished praying, the comforter and my T-shirt were soaked. I rinsed my face, changed my shirt, stripped the bed, went downstairs, ran a load of laundry.

I watched a rerun of a World of Outlaws race while the washing machine ran. Called Charlene, got voice mail, left a message. Called Randall. Voice mail. Message.

I transferred the laundry to the dryer and was coming back to the family room when everything hit me. I felt my knees go, the way they had at the hospital. Got a hand on the wall, steadied myself. “What am I going to do?” I said out loud.

My cell rang. I squinted at the number. It was a 603 area code, which meant New Hampshire, but I didn’t recognize the number.

I clicked on but said nothing. Somebody said my name, waited, then said it again.

It came to me: the New Hampshire Statie who rolled up on me at Phigg’s place, the supersized Abe Lincoln. “McCord,” I said.

“Hell of a way to answer your phone.”

I said nothing.

“Where are you presently, Mister Sax?”

“My girlfriend’s house. Shrewsbury, Mass.”

“Been there awhile?”

“Why?”

“Been there awhile?”

“Sure.”

“Folks there with you? Anybody to back up your story?”

“Sure,” I said. “What do you want, McCord?”

Long pause. “Somebody tore the hell out of Tander Phigg’s sorry little shack,” he said. “Thrashed it and trashed it.”

“Kids?”

“Doesn’t look like it. Somebody looking for something, you ask me.”

“Looking for what?”

“You tell me,” McCord said. “I’ll be here another hour or so, keeping my blue lights on while the detectives knock around.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I made it to Jut Road just as McCord was leaving.

It hadn’t been an easy getaway. I’d had to figure out which friend Sophie was with, then call to make sure she could stay until Charlene came home from work. The mom said sure, the girls were reading pop-star magazines in the tree house and it’d take an act of Congress to get them down anyway.

Then I left a note for my dad. Then I called Charlene. I was grateful she didn’t pick up—the message was that I’d carted a derelict she’d never met from the loony bin to her home, and he was sleeping naked in her daughter’s room. Yikes.

After doing all this as fast as I could, I paused at the front door and thought about my father waking up alone at Charlene’s place.

Most drunks won’t keep booze in the house, but Charlene calls that scaredy-cat bullshit. She has business friends who enjoy a drink now and then. She keeps vodka in the basement freezer and a couple bottles of this and that high in a kitchen cabinet.

What should I do?

Decided to play it safe. I quick-stepped to the kitchen, grabbed the half-empty fifths of Scotch and bourbon, bounced to the basement, grabbed the vodka from the freezer. I stashed the works on a shelf behind a box of painting supplies.

After all that, a steady ninety miles an hour up Route 495 put me nose to nose with McCord’s green-and-copper Charger as he got set to swing out of Jut Road. He backed away to let me in.

The hottest part of the day overpowered the thin shade in this overgrown spot. Souhegan noise battled insect noise.

I said, “Sorry I took so long.” McCord waved it off and walked us toward the shack, pointing as we neared it.

“Building’s got no business still being here,” he said. “Used to be a house right over there, a big one. My old man remembers it. But the river floods every five years, and there’s a natural bowl in this spot. Real bad flood when my old man was in high school. The owners said fuck it, never came back.”

I told him I’d guessed most of that. “And Phigg was building on the same spot, more or less. Bad move?”

“Maybe not,” McCord said, but his shrug told me he thought it was. “You can see where they tried to fix the grading.”

“But a bowl next to a river is a bowl next to a river.”

He twitched his eighth-inch smile.

“Brick support piers,” I said, pointing. “That’s why this one’s still here.”

“Miracle they’re holding, uh? Place could fall any day.”

As we stepped inside I asked about the break-in. McCord folded his arms. “Local lady drove by, spotted a vehicle. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but Phigg’s the talk of the town. She called nine-one-one. I was the nearest unit. Got here twenty-one minutes after she made the call, but they were gone.”

“She see their car?”

“Black SUV, a big one she thought.”

Montreal and his black Escalade. So I’d been right—Montreal
had
pricked up his ears at Phigg’s name. I was glad my back was to McCord. I didn’t have to worry about a poker face as I clicked through possibilities, coming up with two questions: Why did Montreal care about Phigg, and should I tell McCord about the connection?

I answered the second one first: no dice. Felt guilty at the thought of jerking McCord around, but as far as I knew the cops had zero Ollie-Montreal-heroin info, and that seemed like a good thing.

The first question—What did Montreal know about Phigg?—would have to wait.

The shack didn’t smell any better. The floor still sagged beneath me. All the same crap from the other day was here. It had been thrown in different spots, maybe, but the shack was such a mess to start with it didn’t look any worse today.

“You sure it wasn’t kids?” I said. “Looks like somebody came in on a dare, tossed things around, and took off.”

“Detectives saw it that way, too,” McCord said. “They didn’t even want to come here, didn’t want to fuck up their nice clean suicide.”

“They find anything?”

He shook his head. “Showed up, bitched about the drive, smoked cigarettes, looked around a little, said I was a douche bag for hauling them out here. Then they drove back to Concord.”

“You don’t like detectives much.”

“I don’t like stupid ones.” He stepped to the shack’s northern side, where a sort of box, maybe four feet tall by two feet deep, jutted from the main wall. To me it looked like it must house a couple of axles and gears from when this was a pump house.

McCord pointed at the boxed section.

I said, “What?”

He motioned me closer and tapped brick. I saw it—an eighteen-inch horizontal line in the mortar, much whiter than the brick and mortar around it.

I looked at the floor near the boxed section. The floor was such a mess it took me a few seconds, but I spotted shards of mortar. A few of them rested atop a Dunkin’ Donuts bag the detectives had tossed here the day Phigg died.

“Fresh,” McCord said.

“You’ve got a helluva good eye.”

“Wait here.”

He trotted from the shack. I heard his trunk open and close, heard him trot back. He came in with a lineman’s hammer. It was double faced, weighed maybe three pounds. It was new, the SKU sticker still on the shaft.

“Found it in the drive when I rolled up,” McCord said. “I’d say they left in a hurry, uh?”

“You think they were chiseling at this wall.”

He nodded.

“That’s the wrong tool for the job,” I said. “Why not bring an eight-pound sledge and bash right through this shitty old brick?”

“You know that. I know that.” He shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t know that. City boys, clean-hands boys.”

He was right, though I still didn’t want to tell him about Montreal the lounge lizard, who was looking more and more like a guy who could and would kill Phigg. I felt bad about holding back the info, but even a good cop is a cop. Trusting them doesn’t come easy.

“What do you think they were looking for?”

“Stand back,” he said. “We’ll find out.” McCord took a wide-legged stance and touched the hammer to the wall once, where the mortar had been chipped. Then he reared back and took a big-ass swing.

The bricks didn’t give, but the shack shook.

Another swing. When the hammer connected this time, the sound was duller—mortar giving, shifting.

Another swing did it: Mortar flew, bricks shifted and caved, a hole appeared. McCord reared back again to widen the hole.

“Wait,” I said.

He wiped his forehead.

“Listen,” I said.

Then McCord noticed it, too: The river noise was louder. It made sense. If the brick box held axles and shafts, it must be open all the way down.

I told McCord to go ahead. He began pounding out individual bricks, told me to fetch the flashlight from his Charger.

By the time I brought it he’d made a hole you could stick your head through.

McCord knelt and motioned me to stick the flashlight through the hole. He put his head inside the box. I moved the flashlight around so he could look at whatever was in there.

A full minute later he pulled his head out and brushed at his hair with both hands. “Jack diddly pooh,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“See for yourself.” We swapped. I looked while he held the light.

Imagine what it’d look like if you whanged a hole in your chimney and stuck your head inside. It was like that, but instead of a fireplace at the bottom, the Souhegan swept past. And instead of soot, I got dirt and cobwebs in my hair.

I craned my neck and decided I’d been right about the box’s original function: Gears had been housed in here. But the shafts they rode must have rusted through, and everything had long since fallen into the river.

I pulled my head out, finger-brushed my hair the way McCord had, shrugged.

We left the shack, McCord holding the lineman’s hammer near its head. It felt good to be outside. We started toward the vehicles. I glanced at the Souhegan, took a step, stopped. There was something about those piers supporting the outer side of the shack—I wanted to look again. But I didn’t want McCord to see me looking, so I caught up.

He said, “I was supposed to have my unit back”—looked at his watch—“forty minutes ago. Sorry to pull you up here for nothing.”

“You think that’s nothing? The hammer, the SUV, the chipped-out mortar?”

He popped the Charger’s trunk, tossed the hammer in, shut the trunk, stepped to the driver’s door. “You were probably right the first time. Punks. Maybe somebody looking for copper pipe. We get a lot of that around here.”

If McCord wanted to think that, fine.

I didn’t think that at all.

I also didn’t believe
he
really thought it. He was a smart guy, more complicated than he let on. I wondered what he was holding back.

He started the Charger. I stepped to his door and squatted. He looked a question at me.

I said, “Jack diddly pooh?”

I got the eighth-inch smile as he drove away.

*   *   *

I drove out, too, but only to put on a show in case McCord was watching in his rearview.

I needed a look at those piers.

I killed time on back roads, making sure McCord was really gone. Thought about that chipped-out mortar as I drove. Punks or looters, my ass. Montreal had learned Phigg’s address and had gone there looking for something. And not copper pipe.

But why had he and his muscle man attacked a useless brick box? And why had they taken off before they busted through? I hadn’t been able to say it to McCord, but muscle man was plenty strong. The only thing that made sense was that they’d heard the nosy lady drive past and had bailed.

I thought this through while I hooked a left and drove northwest on an elm-lined road that felt like it would eventually drop me back near Jut Road.

They must have attacked the bricks because they didn’t know where the hell else to look. There just wasn’t much to the shack. There was no cellar, and the rafters were open—no ceiling cavity to stash something in. The same went for the walls—plain-Jane brick, no studs or Sheetrock to create hidey-holes.

My guess: Montreal was pretty damn sure Tander had stashed something in that shack. City-boy lounge lizard that he was, though, he’d done a lousy job going after it. Bought a silly little hammer at the nearest Home Depot and started trying to bash walls in. And he couldn’t even do
that
right.

I took a left onto the road that would take me to the shack, checked my watch. It had been twenty-five minutes since McCord left.

What the hell did Tander Phigg, living on crackers and Sam’s Club soda, have that was worth hiding right up to the day he hanged himself? It looked like a dotted line ran from Montreal through Ollie to Phigg. I needed to press Ollie on that.

That made me remember some of the crap I’d found in the trunk of Phigg’s car the day he died. Wading boots, mask, and snorkel. At the time it seemed random, a scavenger’s pile of junk. Maybe not.