The Marble Kite (11 page)

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Authors: David Daniel

BOOK: The Marble Kite
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I didn't stew long; sunshine and blue sky wouldn't allow it. I got over to the house of correction, and after a short wait Troy Pepper was led into the interview area in his orange jumpsuit. He sat across the screen from me and pushed something under it. My notebook. I fanned the virgin pages. I put it in my pocket and looked at him questioningly. I drew a breath. “You don't have to convince Fred Meecham. He's working for you regardless. Hell, you don't even need to convince me. I get paid one way or the other. But everyone else—cops, the judge, jurors—you need to sell them, and sell them good, because the way things are stacked up, you're going down for murder.”
“They can't do that.”
“Who's ‘they'? I believe ‘they' can and will. And you won't end up back at this place. It'll be Walpole, which makes life here seem like day camp.”
His face tightened, but he said nothing.
“I spoke with Lucy Colón,” I said. “Do you know her?”
He shook his head.
“She told me that Flora had been planning to tell you something. What was it?”
He didn't answer.
“Did Flora tell you something when you saw her?”
He went on not answering. When he spoke at all he bit off his words, not letting anything like emotion creep into them. It was the way that prisoners talked; even their language was in jail. I had to find a way to bust it out, just to feel I was earning what I was being paid. If the man was guilty—or a fool—I still owed him my best shot.
“Well,” I answered myself, “I'm sorry you asked that, Mr. Rasmussen. Because it stirs up a painful reminder. Flora told me that she didn't want anything to do with me anymore. Didn't say why but I think she found someone else. But you see, my sense of manhood couldn't take that.” His eyes were on me, narrowed and dark. “A tiny little woman like that telling me she didn't want me?” I went on. “Well, the hell with that. Be told off by some chippie? Me? I showed her. I
made
her love me. And afterward, I put a scarf around—”
Pepper got to the wire fast, grabbing at it the way I imagined he'd like to grab my throat, his fingers hooked through the mesh. I was glad for the barrier. I sat back down, letting my heart slow. He backed off, too, his face losing its tension again. We shared a new knowledge now, one that we probably each would rather have done without, but there it was. The man had the potential for sudden violent action. He let out a long, heavy sigh.
“Look,” I said, “I was pushing you, but I'm done listening to myself talk. If you want help on this, you've got to speak up, because we're running out of time. The clock is ticking:” I hesitated, then said,”If Sonders can't make a loan payment in a few days, he stands to lose the show.”
Some of the resistance left his face. I saw uncertainty in it now “Lose it?”
“To a couple of sharpies who think they're the General Motors of carnivals. They hold a loan on the show, and if he can't make the nut, it's all going to come due at once. It'll break him. His problem is the show's shut down, and he can't—excuse me,
won't
take it on the road. He's got some crazy notion he has to stay here to show solidarity with you.”
His brows drew together. “That's dumb,” he murmured.
“You're telling me? If I were Pop, I'd toss you over just on general principles.”
“Hey—”
“You ‘hey.' What the hell have you done to earn anyone's loyalty? Why should anybody give a rip about what happens to you, when you obviously don't care enough about it to make a case for yourself?” I drilled him with a stare. “Or to confess?”
He put his good hand across his mouth and blew a breath against it, making a sound like steam escaping from a pressure cylinder. He lowered his hand and sat still.
“You should be singing like a bird, filling me up with more details than I can ever use, instead of me having to pull them out of you one by one. Fred Meecham has got to build a case, and from what I'm seeing, he doesn't have anything to go on.”
He scowled at the floor, a restless man in a situation that gave no room to move. His eyes flicked up and met mine. “Flora and me were going to get together. Permanent. We talked about it. The show had a layover in Hartford. I took a bus up, and she met me. We walked along the river.”
“Wait.” I had the notebook out again. “When was that?”
“May, it must've been. All the trees were blooming, and there were birds. We walked and we talked and we set all the old stuff between us to rest.” With the telling, his voice had softened a little, and his body lost some of its tension. He looked at me only once in a while, and briefly, but he talked as though the events he was describing were happening right now. “We knew we wanted to be together. The idea was, when I came up this time, we'd do it and then she'd come on the road with me. She was going to ask this priest she knew. We'd get married and maybe travel with the show. Or that was the idea anyways.”
“She was willing to do that?”
“She wanted to try it. I said I could give Mr. Sonders notice and quit the show, get other work. She didn't want that.”
“Did you tell anyone else about your plans?”
“You mean like Pop, or people in the show?”
“Anyone.” I almost said “relatives” but I remembered he didn't have any “Or did Flora?”
“I don't know that. I would've, when the time came. I didn't want to jinx it.”
“It'd be helpful if there were someone else who knows about this.”
“Maybe … maybe she told the priest.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.”
“What about the restraining order?” I dropped it on him. His expression grew dark. “You had to figure I'd find out. It'd have been better if you'd told me about it.”
He furrowed his brow and looked away. “It was a mistake,” he said softly
“The court system didn't think so.”
“My mistake, I mean. I shouldn't have got so mad. When she told me about the baby, and … I didn't even know. And anyways, it was too late, she'd already taken care of it. I didn't know she didn't want a baby. I gave her some money, said it was okay, we could talk when she was ready. She threw the money at me. I guess I got mad—but it was like I was mad at everything, you know? Not her. But … things.” His shoulders drooped. “She left. Didn't tell nobody where. I didn't even know she was up here till a month after. She got a court order for me to stay away, probably 'cause someone down there told her I was asking. But I wouldn't have hurt her, not ever. I loved her.”
I wondered how many maggots doing life terms had fed themselves that line. I wanted to think he was telling the truth, but wanting isn't the same as believing, and I wasn't able to decipher any subtextual meanings in his silences and body language. I still had plenty of questions and blank pages in my notebooks when the guard came in and said our time was up.
Okay, I'd gotten Troy Pepper to open up a little, maybe more than he had to anyone else so far, and yet I couldn't shake the image of him lunging at the barrier when I'd prodded him. That outburst hinted at the possibility that he had done what he was accused of. No one can push our buttons like someone we love, or believe we do. It was time to find out more about Flora Nuñez.
I drove over to the Lower Highlands and found the address where Flora Nuñez had lived. It was a triple-decker with gray asbestos siding and a sagging porch. I paused just to look, then headed back downtown.
At my office I shuffled among the papers in the file folder and found the photocopy of the restraining order again. A mistake, Pepper had called it …
his
mistake. The form was filled in and witnessed. There was Pepper's name, written in the proper space. And the reason Flora Nuñez had given for filing the request: “He's angry with me on account I don't want his babey.” She hadn't bothered to file for an extension of the order when, after six months, the term had lapsed. Significant? Perhaps, though not uncommon. Men and women fooled themselves all the time, about all sorts of things. Or maybe it was just a case of out of sight, out of mind. The signature of the witness to the document was Carly Ouellette.
I got the work number that Lucinda Colón had left and dialed it.
She sounded surprised to hear from me, and a bit cool when I said I had a few follow-up questions for her. I asked, “Did she tell you that she might get married?”
“I already told you everything what I know”
“Okay. You said that Flora seemed frightened or nervous when you spoke with her. Did you wonder why?”
“Maybe I did, but she didn't splain nothing. I just thought she was a-scared, but maybe I was wrong. We wasn't really close friends, you know? We just knew each other from night classes at the community college.”
“Did you get the idea that it was Pepper she was scared of?”
“Who else? He was her boyfriend, no? But I got to go now. The boss he don't like us taking personal calls here.”
I thanked her and hung up wondering if Flora Nuñez was the only one who was a-scared.
Courtney had commented on my investigative “method,” as though it were a protocol of careful steps and procedures. In truth, it was pretty scattershot. You thought about what you wanted to know, imagined ways you might find out, and then you made your approach. A lot of the time, I felt as if I were climbing tall, rickety ladders in the pitch dark.
There was still the option of trying to track Pepper's military service record, but in strict time-value terms, it didn't add up. I hunted in my Rolodex for a name, which I found, but there was no phone number. Only an e-mail address.
I hauled down the overhead cage door of the ancient freight elevator and began a slow and clanking ascent, each deserted floor floating spectrally past. If you looked very closely into the murk of the elevator shaft, you might notice the insulated ductwork and the heavy duty electrical conduit snaking upward, but you'd have no reason to look, really; no reason to have come through the rusty portcullis into the courtyard in the first place, and certainly no reason to be headed for the roof of a dilapidated old mill.
The building was formerly part of Lamson Woolens, which had been one of the companies whose vast holdings stretched along the Merrimack River for a full mile. Prior to the Civil War, this was the epicenter of American manufacturing. Along with the Lamson, there were a dozen others, built by the city's movers and shakers.
The fortresslike design wasn't for aesthetics: Inner courtyards surrounded by high walls, coupled with the canals on the outer side, like moats, gave the image of castles, removed from the outside world, protected. Typically there was but one way in, over a footbridge and through iron gates. The gates would be locked right after the time when the original workers—the mill girls—were due to report for their twelve-hour
shifts, so that if they were late they were forced to enter through the mill agent's office. In this way, tardiness could be noted and pay docked. Repeated offenses and you were on the bricks. But that was lifetimes ago. The flesh and sinew were gone, and the Lamson mill, and what remained of most of the others, was back to bones now. The only hints of life I could detect were pigeons cooing in the upper dimness of the elevator shaft, and vague scurrying sounds beyond the walls, which made me think of rats.
When the elevator stopped and I lifted the slatted door, Randy Nguyen was standing inside an enclosed entryway waiting. He slid a heavy insulated door shut behind me. I felt an instant bath of cooled air surround me, and I had the sensation of docking at a lonely space colony on the far reaches of the solar system. The rooftop shed I walked into fit the setup, too. Despite the surrounding landscape of decaying brick, the shed's interior was modern, with an electrostatic tile floor, thermal windows, and halogen lighting. He gave my extended hand a blank, red-eyed look before apparently remembering the ancient custom and shook it. His palm was as dry as a circuit board.
“Hey,” he said by way of greeting.
Nguyen would be in his midtwenties now, I guessed, though he had the unkempt look of a college freshman coming off finals week. He wore a loose white sweatshirt with a large bar code printed across the front, and crinkled cargo pants that bloused over the tops of his Timberlands like virulent elephantiasis. On a computer screen behind him I saw that he'd been playing solitaire.
“You actually send that e-mail yourself?” he asked. “Or do you got a ghost writer does your tech work?”
“I've traded in the Underwood for a PC since I saw you last.”
“Pffft
. Ancient technology. Might as well carve symbols on stone tablets. Anyway you could've saved yourself fifty cents.”
“That's what it cost to e-mail you?”
“To park. There hasn't been a meter maid on that street since July” He nodded toward a bank of video screens built into a console along one wall. “Courtyard,” he said. “Scan left.” On one of the screens, my car appeared, sitting alone on a stretch of empty street. “Four—replay.” The vista grayed a moment and then there I was, five minutes younger, plugging
coins into the meter. “Voice-rec tech,” he said. “These keep a continuous scan of over a million square feet of empty mill space.”
“And you sit and play solitaire.”
He shrugged, gesturing for me to look around.
The room had been designed to take advantage of the rooftop height, with thermal glass panes that gave views of the river and the city. The rooftop surrounding Randy's shed sprouted sumac and small trees, the result of airborne seeds that found root in the humus of decaying wood and decades of soot, though there was purpose there, too. The random saplings camouflaged a thicket of antennas. There was nothing random, however, about the equipment Nguyen had. The bank of monitors gave crisp black-and-white images of various sectors of the mill complex, though the only movement in the landscape of broken bricks and shadowy cloisters and occasional quick glimpses of my car was the shifting of the images themselves. There wasn't a human to be seen. Lines squiggled across a set of smaller screens—oscilloscopes, I realized—which I guessed meant Nguyen had set up listening posts as well.
Why?
I thought. For what purpose? Who cared? But I said, “Any luck with what I asked you?”
With a smirk he drew me over to a pair of comfortable swivel chairs in his workstation.
I'd first met Randy Nguyen when I was a cop and he was a high school detention rat who'd been awarded a police department grant, ostensibly to keep him off the street and out of whatever trouble kids with a 140 IQ got into. Fast access and connectivity weren't a given in those days, and Nguyen, who was a graduate of every video arcade in town, had soon made himself indispensable. Over the year and a half he spent with the department, he got the city hooked into national crime registries and fingerprint databases and had organized police files going back decades, all of it accomplished with a minimal human interface. Digital machines were his world. Unfortunately he also dropped out of school during that time, and his grant was canceled. I'd heard he'd gone on to get a GED. He now worked for the outfit that oversaw security for a number of the abandoned mills that stretched along the eastern shore of the river like the ruined palisades of an ancient city-state. He swung into his padded spring chair. “Some ex-jarhead's service rec, right?”
“Never ex.”
“
Semper
. I'm hip. I'm surprised you couldn't locate it yourself.”
“I didn't have the hours to play Ping-Pong with forty different voices on a telephone—some of them even human.”
“Yeah, must be rough being analog these days.”
He made it sound like not being toilet trained. He said it without irony or malice—or an ounce of understanding for a world that was other than his neat on/off binary world. Guilty or innocent, black or white: It was a zone that had none of the grays of complexity that bedevil the rest of us poor souls. He turned to a computer and began commanding his minions.
“Your bosses know you pull all this juice?” I asked.
“They see the bills and don't squawk. With what they pay me, they're still way ahead of what they'd have to lay out for a fleet of rent-a-cops walking rounds.”
“Yeah, their shoes alone would add up to more than your mouse pad. But why not just do it from home? Then you wouldn't have to get out of bed.”
“I like to be out in the world. Besides, where else would I get the penthouse views and the roof garden?” He shrugged. “Print,” he said, and rolled his chair sideways, the casters moving swiftly on the Lucite carpet protector. A sheet of paper slid crisply out of a printer. Nguyen handed it to me with a “Voilà!” flourish. Before I read a word, a second sheet came out.
It was the military service file of Troy S. Pepper. I didn't bother to ask Randy how he'd done it. His answer would've been from a 1930s movie, von Stroheim going, “Ve haf our vays”—if he knew any films that weren't by Tartantino. I hoisted my wallet and gave him a questioning look. He scraped at his sparse black whiskers. “How does fifty sound?”
“A lot better than ‘One Is the Loneliest Number,' which is what I'd still be listening to on the telephone without you.” I forked over a twenty and three tens, which he tucked into the pocket of his cargo pants.
“Seriously,” he said, “I'm the only heart beating in this desolation, and the owners know it. You know how in a winter pond, there'll be one little patch of water that the ducks keep open by moving around, keeping the ice from forming? That's me in this gothic labyrinth. I'm not here to
protect against crime. Even the taggers don't waste paint on these walls—no one to see their work. Rats rule here.”
“And you're the last line of defense before total entropy.”
“I'm not kidding you. Someday, everything's going to be run by people like me sitting alone in towers, ringed by security, because, after silicon, we're going to be the most valuable resource on the planet. Wait and see.”
In his world we'd all be overwired and disconnected. I spooked a few pigeons on my way through the alcove to the elevator, which made a good old-fashioned mechanical rattling as it took me back to my world. In that world, when I phoned Pop Sonders from my office, he told me that the carnival crew had finished gathering their personal belongings and had made the move over to the Venice Hotel. He thanked me for arranging it.
“What about you?” I asked.
“I'm gonna squat here, for tonight at least.”
“Is that legal?”
“It don't feel right just leaving. Besides, I want to keep an eye on things.”
I told him I'd call him there later if I learned anything new. At my house, as I fixed dinner, I put on the TV and caught the tail end of the six o'clock news. Francine had fizzled, but tropical storm Gus seemed hot to trot, the weatherman promised, grinning like a maniac, and this one was the real deal. When I had my food on the table, I laid out the pages of Troy Pepper's service record. I felt my appetite die.

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