The Marble Kite (7 page)

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Authors: David Daniel

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“Another one of ours is no go, no dough. Right now I'm sitting here on my duff, so if it's all the same with you, I've got some things I've got to do to deal with this shutdown.” I wondered if this had something to do with his just-completed phone conversation, but I didn't ask. He was already feeling a little harried, and I had things to do, too. As I got to the door, he said, “Why don't you fall by this evening?”
“What have you got in mind?”
“I'm calling a meeting of my staff to talk about what we should do next. You could meet some of the others, maybe get a few answers to all those questions you got.”
I told him I would, and we agreed on a time. Outside, I saw that the police had gone. As I opened my car, Nicole called me, and I turned and saw her hurrying toward me.
“Are things going to be okay, Mr. Rasmussen?”
“Call me Alex,” I said. She nodded. I had the feeling she wanted me to assure her that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. I turned the question around.
She clenched her hands together at her chest and sent a furtive glance around, though we were the only ones there. “I wonder if people are
going to be angry with us … on account of what happened. I mean, not that we caused it—I don't think that—but that it, you know … happened here.”
Her face was a transparent screen where I watched her emotions come and go. “Nicole,” I said gently, “are you thinking that someone shot your dog on purpose?”
She lowered her eyes. “Well, only that I know sometimes people get angry and … scared over things they don't understand.”
“True. Anything else?”
“When I was walking just before I saw you, a car went by and someone yelled out the window. I won't repeat what they said. It wasn't nice.”
“For some people life is so boring, they feel they have to bother other people just so they know they're alive. Don't mind them. Just be careful, all right?”
“Okay.”
“Good,” I said, keeping my own sudden worry to myself.
“Thank you. I feel better.”
“Maybe the city will change its mind, and Pop will decide it's a good idea for the show to get back on the road and let the legal system take care of things here.”
She forced a smile through an expression of pain. “I can tell you don't know Pop very well, Mr.—Alex. He don't quit easy. But I will do like you said and be careful. You be, too.”
I watched her go back to her carnival, and I turned and headed for my car to go to mine.
Courtney approached me in the hallway as I unlocked my office. “Mr. Meecham just sat down with a woman who knew the murder victim. Can you join them?”
Flora Nuñez's acquaintance was perched on one of the client chairs in Fred Meecham's inner sanctum, looking edgy. She was a tan-skinned woman in horn-rim glasses and wearing a dark sweater with an autumn leaf pattern on it and black jeans. “Ms. Colón,” Fred said, “this is Alex Rasmussen. He's working as my investigator. Alex, Lucinda Colón.”
“Lucy, please,” she said. “It is nice to meet you.” Her fingers were cool, her grip soft.
She wasn't pretty by conventional standards—her mouth was too wide, her dark coppery hair cropped very short—but there was a fashionable glamour about her. I took a chair, and Meecham said, “Ms. Colón was just telling me that both she and Flora Nuñez came from the same town in Puerto Rico. Patillas, wasn't it?”
“Yes, but we only met when we were here. We went in a class at the community college together, and we became friends.”
“How long did you know each other?”
“For more than two years.”
“Did Ms. Nuñez ever mention Troy Pepper?” I let Meecham pose the questions.
“They knew each other in New Jersey, before Flora came to Lowell. They were in contact with each other and were planning to get together when the carnival came to town.”
“When did she tell you this, Lucy?”
“In May, I think. She said this guy that she used to date and was sometimes in love with, he was going to be in Lowell in September. They dated before, but it never got too serious.” She had a charming accent and a lively manner, though I read sadness for her friend in it, too.
“Did you ever meet Troy Pepper, or see a photograph?”
“Yes, she showed me a snapshot she had of him. But I never saw him with my own eyes.”
“When did you see Flora last?”
“Oh, not for a while. She was working at the Hilton downtown. A chambermaid. But on the telephone, we spoke often. Is very sad what happened.”
“When you talked with her the last few times, did she mention Troy Pepper?”
“She just said that she was going to tell him something. But I don't know what it was. She seemed pretty excited to see somebody, but I don't know for sure. I think it was him.”
“Were they lovers?” Meecham asked.
Her hesitation was either modesty or surprise. “I think so, you know. Once upon a time. Back in New Jersey. But since then?
Quién sabe?
Flora didn't tell me too much of her life. I think she seen other men sometimes.”
“Here in the city?”
“Maybe here, yes. But I don't know who.”
“Did you ever see her with bruises, maybe, or a swollen eye?”
“No, never.”
“Did she ever seem … frightened, or afraid?”
She hesitated. “Maybe yes. I think so.”
“Recently?”
She nodded.
“Do you know why?” Meecham asked.
“No. I don't.”
“Have you any idea?”
“No. But what I think … I think maybe it was of Troy Pepper she was afraid.”
Meecham sent a glance my way but didn't lose his rhythm. “Because of things she said, or … ?”
“Is just what I think. I don't know very much.” That was the theme she stayed with for the rest of our questions. When she finished, he thanked her for coming in and saw her out.
“What do you think, Alex?” he asked when he came back in.
“If Pepper and the victim had a history, it could be motive, especially depending on what she was planning to tell him—if she was breaking something off, that could be motive. It could also be that she was going to tell him she wanted them to be together. Hell, it could be any number of things, some of which would support Pepper's innocence, others that would damn him.”
He pushed fingers across his forehead, as if to erase the deep creases there now. I said, “The cops seem pretty sure they've got the case on ice, but I don't know enough yet.”
He nodded. The accused hadn't given us much to form an opinion on. I'd have liked to insist that I was simply an information gatherer, as impartial as a machine, as wise as Solomon, but the reality was that believing a client was innocent, or that he'd been wronged in some way, was valuable. If it was the other way, and I was comfortably convinced that he was guilty, I had decisions to make. With Pepper, I wasn't close to anything like assuredness yet. And I realized that the only person who could help me decide was the person who seemed not to want to.
Back in my office, I had a phone message to call Phoebe Kelly at her office in the Registry of Deeds, which I was happy to do. “What are you doing?” I asked when she answered.
“Hey, it's you. I thought I heard bells ringing. I'm reading the latest issue of
People
. Don't worry, I'm not on county time.”
“You'd be getting more done than a lot of people who are. What's the deal?”
“Coffee break. What are
you
doing?”
“Sniffing out clues.”
“I'm sniffing mocha latte.”
“So much for a fascinating probing of each other about our life's work.”
“I'm sorry. I thought you were kidding. Were you finished?”
“I am kidding.”
“Okay. I'm not. The boss is taking all of us out to dinner tonight. Jennifer, the office manager—do you remember her? The older woman who has the cubicle by the window? Anyway, she's retiring. Guess who might get her desk?”
“No kidding?”
“It's not a sure thing yet. Anyway, we'll be at Cobblestones. Do you want to meet me there after, or are you going to be glued to the Pats game?”
“The TVs there are bigger than mine.” We agreed on a time.
“And now I really am on the clock, so I've got to run. Bye.”
We were a new item, and part of the fun was learning each other's little moves: on the phone and in person … maybe, in time, in a life. I tried on that scenario. Phoebe had declared herself a team player, a born lifer in whatever situation she found herself. She had married her junior high school boyfriend and insisted it would've been a forever thing if he hadn't died in a car crash. She liked plugging away at the steady job, putting in the time and making grade, a cubicle by the window, maybe even retiring in it someday, with handshakes and good wishes, and the prospect of a financial pillow for the rest of her days. Not a bad trade, I suppose, for some people. It's what Roland Cote was doing, and Ed St. Onge: one an inveterate bachelor, the other contentedly wed for years, both devoted to the job. But not yours truly. I'd once been married and had once been on the job. I told Phoebe this, going into the whole ignominy of my fall, admitting to her that it wasn't something I liked to dwell on, and she listened and said that time was often enough to get beyond things, but not always, that occasionally it was necessary to go back and try to work through something. Was that what I needed to do? I glanced at the bottom drawer of my desk, where I kept the fat yellow file of all that had
gone down, beginning with that fateful night in the courtyard behind the old hosiery mill. I started to pull open the drawer …
I yanked the galloping horse of soul-searching to a halt midstride. I shut the drawer. I hung up my jacket and settled in to give a couple of hours to Atlantic Casualty, but the hoofbeats echoed on for a time before they faded completely.
Later that afternoon I drove over to the courthouse. Superior court for Middlesex County was a complex of large granite and limestone buildings, in the oldest of which Daniel Webster had argued cases. They were in the neoclassical style that in an earlier century gave dignity and formality to the proceedings that went on there. Now—who knew? In the late afternoon sunlight, though, they still possessed a kind of majesty. I passed through the metal detectors and let a sloe-eyed county employee massage me with an electronic wand. No bells went off, so I guessed it wasn't love. It was after 4:00 PM. and formal sessions were done for the day, giving the vast lobby an echoey emptiness. There was an office locator on the wall beside the large center staircase, and I looked for and found Judge Martin Travani's hearing room on the second floor. Outside the room, I whispered to a uniformed court officer that I was there to see Attorney Meecham. He opened the door for me and motioned me in. Meecham and the prosecutor, Gus Deemys, were at the front of the room, talking with the judge. They all glanced my way as I entered, and I tiptoed forward and slid in on an oak bench four rows back. Deemys, who had been speaking, frowned, cleared his throat, and resumed.
“My argument, Your Honor, is based on the hard fact that the man
has no known ties to the city—or to much else that I can determine. By the very nature of his work and personal life, he's a vagabond. With due respect to Attorney Meecham, I would suggest that Mr. Pepper poses a high risk to flee.”
Travani, who was a sober-looking, vaguely boyish man in his early sixties, with a round head of close-cropped gray hair, had his steel-framed glasses in his hand, twirling them by one of the bow pieces. He didn't look impressed with anything he'd been hearing. “Come on, Mr. Deemys, a vagabond? He's held steady employment with the carnival for some time, hasn't he?”
“Less than six months, Your Honor. But you're right, not a vagabond. I misspoke. It's fair to say, however, that his work and life have been itinerant.” It wasn't the way I remembered Deemys talking on the job.
The judge turned to Meecham. “Counselor?”
“May I confer with my investigator?”
Travani looked at me, regarding me a moment; Deemys did, too, as if I were an interloper into their cozy fraternity of Juris Doctors. I gave a little wave and went forward, where Fred Meecham drew me aside.
“Good timing,” he whispered. “I'm not going to get bail, or at least not anything anyone is going to be able to afford. But I want to get some things on the record. Have you got anything I should add?”
I told him what I picked up from some of Pepper's coworkers, especially from Warren Sonders, and he went back while I resumed my seat. “We believe that Mr. Pepper is very unlikely to flee, and that the carnival staff are like a large extended family, wherein certain social sanctions obtain, and that flight would put them all in legal jeopardy.”
“Oh, bull!” Deemys exploded with exasperation. “You're talking about a group of carnies. Social sanctions? How about social diseases? It's in their nature to rove, for Christ's sake.” That was the Gus Deemys I remembered.
Meecham and Deemys duked on awhile, raising additional points, each trying to buttress his own side of the argument while battering his opponent's. It was fun to watch, but the clock was running. I raised my hand. “May I say something, Your Honor?”
Travani put on his glasses and motioned me to stand. “What is it?”
“The city licensing office has decided that the carnival shouldn't be allowed to leave.”
The judge glanced at the DA, who shook his head, and at Meecham, who did the same. “I hadn't heard that,” Travani said.
“Evidently the discussion is ongoing, but that was the word when I spoke with the carnival boss a few hours ago.”
The judge glanced at his watch. “If there's nothing more, I'm going to rule. Owing to the serious nature of the crime, and granting Mr. Deemys's point that there is a risk of flight, I am going to deny bail at this time. However, as I said at the arraignment this morning, I want to move forward with the case quickly. I want no needless delays on either side. Understood?”
And that was that.
Outside, as Meecham and I walked together to our cars, he told me how things stood. It seemed the killing had struck a nerve with a lot of people, and the cries for swift justice were loud. The court was responding to that. We agreed to huddle in the morning. At the rapid march-step of feet, I turned and saw Gus Deemys coming our way, carrying a bloated briefcase, his tasseled lifts tapping the pavement. He pretended not to see us, but as he neared he murmured from the side of his mouth, “I tot I taw a pwivate eye.”
I looked at Meecham. “Who's Tweety Bird?”
Deemys stopped and gave me a slow grin. “You know what? Holding this guy without bail is just the start. His sorry ass is grass. I'm going to eat you and your jailbird up. See you in court.” He pressed a little car alarm deactivator, which answered with a chirp, and he marched over to a smoke gray Lincoln Navigator and pulled himself up onto the running board and in. All five-foot-four of him in a two-and-a-half-ton truck.
 
 
Back at my house, I gave some thought to unpacking a few more of the boxes that were still piled in the front room and in the kitchen, but I let it remain thought, untainted by action. The house was small but big enough, the way the place Lauren and I had on Paige Street downtown had been, our first apartment together. We listened to the Beatles and Erik Satie and drank wine and made love. We'd have been happy in a packing
crate. But I was here now, I reminded myself. I'd finally gotten off memory lane.
I put on water for pasta. I poured a premixed salad out of one of those cellophane bags—the Mediterranean special—and heated marinara sauce out of a jar. I switched on the TV for the local news, which carried a clip on Troy Pepper's arraignment earlier that day, including footage of him being led out of court in handcuffs and looking hangdog. There was also coverage of a conviction in a gang killing in the city, with the teenage defendant, tried as an adult, being whisked off to begin the rest of his life at Cedar Junction. The pairing of the stories bothered me. As had Gus Deemys's righteous anger. When I tried to analyze why, I didn't have a good answer. A community's outrage at a killing was justified, even welcome, but wasn't it part of the legal system's duty to put the brakes on a little? To give reason a chance to prevail? Or was I just being oversensitive because of where my checks were coming from?
I popped a can of beer. The weather radar showed a whirling tropical storm, Francine, which had heated up the Caribbean for a few days but was now just a lot of wind. The meteorologist went on at length about hurricane season and the prospects for anything making its way north. Meanwhile, kudos to a tropical depression that got upgraded to storm. They were calling it Gus. I shut off the tube and raised my beer. Gus. I had to love it.
Fortunately I was able to locate a colander in one of the boxes before I found a tennis racket, so didn't have to drain the pasta the way Jack Lemmon had in
The Apartment.
The meal wasn't Jacques Pepin, but it ate just fine.

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