The Price of Malice (21 page)

“Be right back, Mom.”

Steve was still in the kitchen, rummaging in the fridge. He straightened, bearing a can of beer. It was nine in the morning.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

“I’m having a beer, all right?” he said belligerently.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I feel like it.” He took a swig.

Steve was an alcoholic. Sadly, their mother had seen to that, making him her teenage drinking buddy after Abílo and José had been
taken. But he’d never attended AA, had taken only whatever prison counseling he’d been obliged to, and had otherwise relied on Lyn and his own reborn sense of responsibility to stay straight. It had been a lumpy, uneven ride, even if lately she’d believed he’d put the worst of it behind him.

Until now.

She reached out gently and laid a hand on his wrist, stopping him from taking another drink. “Talk to me, Steve,” she urged quietly. “What happened?”

“I was ripped off,” he said angrily. “I got to the boat this morning to make a delivery, and it was trashed—totally torn apart. What the hell is up with that, huh? What the hell did I do to anybody?” He pulled away from her, tried to drink from the can and missed, spilling some of it onto his shirt.

“
Fuck
,” he yelled, and threw the can into the sink. It bounced back out, hit the cabinet overhead, and landed on the floor. Lyn quickly grabbed it and dropped it back into the sink, where it seethed like a school science project.

She took a paper towel and knelt down to clean the floor, not showing how worried she was by his news. All she could think of was Dick Brandhorst and his goons.

“Was it vandalism, or did they really steal something?” she asked the floor.

Steve leaned against the wall, his arms slack by his sides, dejected. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anything missing.”

“So the electronics are okay?” she asked. “The gear? Toolbox?”

He cut her off. “Yeah, yeah. It’s there.”

She rose from her knees and threw the towel out. “What did the cops say?”

“Nuthin’. I didn’t call them.”

She looked at him, recomposed for his sake. “Steve, why not? How’re we going to collect on the insurance without a police report?”

“They’re not gonna do anything,” he protested. “They’ll just use the chance to search the boat and see if I have any drugs on board.”

She walked up to him and took hold of both his shoulders. “Do you?” she asked, her face inches from his.

He stared back at her angrily. “No, I do not.”

She nodded, her mind in a turmoil. “Then let’s call them, go down there right now, and get this settled. To hell with their attitude. We need to get you up and running again, as quick as we can. What did you do about the delivery you were supposed to make?”

“I gave it to Bobbie. He screwed up his wrist and can’t fish for a while.”

“Good.” She pulled him off the wall and pointed him toward the door, already extracting her cell phone. “Let’s go.”

“What about Mom?” he asked over his shoulder.

“She’s fine. The morning-show airheads’re on. She’ll be good for hours.”

At the dock, she prepared herself for the worst as they approached the boat, but it wasn’t until they drew abreast and could see into it that she saw the extent of the mayhem. Charts, logs, equipment, and even some wood splinters lay scattered about from shattered cabinetry, as if someone had thrown everything they found over their shoulders as they went tunneling on a scavenger hunt.

“Jeezum,” she muttered. “What a mess.”

“Hey there, Lyn,” an artificially jocular voice said from behind them.

They turned to see a bearishly built detective from the Gloucester PD coming down the dock. “Hey, Brian,” she said.

“Sergeant Wilkinson,” Steve joined in, reserved.

Wilkinson smiled at her, but eyed Steve more coolly as he drew near. “Long time no see.”

“Yeah,” Steve said quietly.

Wilkinson addressed him directly. “Been keeping out of trouble?” Wilkinson had played a direct role in arresting Steve the last time—which hadn’t been the latter’s first encounter with the law.

“That’s not the issue right now, Brian,” Lyn said clearly. “Somebody trashed our boat.”

Wilkinson let his eyes stay on Steve just a second longer than necessary before turning to Lyn and smiling again. “Yeah, so I can see. Any ideas?”

“None. Steve came down around nine to get ready to make a delivery and found it like this.”

Wilkinson placed one foot on the boat’s rail and peered inside. “Anything missing?”

“We don’t think so, but we didn’t want to disturb anything till you got here.”

Wilkinson nodded, his professional interest gaining the upper hand and veering him away from Steve, at least temporarily.

“Good thinking.” He snapped open the black case he was carrying and extracted a camera and a tape recorder. “Well, let’s get started.”

Across town from where Sammie Martens was collecting DNA from Karen Putnam, Willy Kunkle parked to the side of a local trucking company’s row of loading docks and emerged into the pleasant
embrace of a quintessentially New England summer day—sunny, not too hot, a gentle breeze, and the sky a brilliant blue. In other words, for him, a total bore—not that he missed either the recent heat wave or the looming winter months. Those were a pain in the ass.

Frowning, he scanned the scene before him—a broad, flat, cinder-block warehouse, a scattering of tractor-trailers to one side and empty boxes to another. At one end of the building was an office with some men loitering outside.

The group quieted at his approach, a couple of them knowing who he was. At this level of the employment pyramid, law-enforcement encounters tended to increase, especially during Friday and Saturday nights.

“Detective,” one of them said, nodding.

“Alvin Davis,” Willy acknowledged, his encyclopedic memory unhesitating. “Everything good at home? Your mom okay?”

Davis’s wariness softened a notch at the unexpected question. “Yeah. The chemo kicked the crap out of her, but she’s doing good. Thanks.”

One of his friends asked, “Your mom sick?”

Alvin merely looked at him pityingly before asking Willy, “What’s up? You shopping for bad guys?”

“Nah,” Willy reassured him. “Just doing homework—looking to talk to Dan Kravitz. I heard he was working here.”

“He in trouble?” one of the men asked.

Willy waved it away. “Not even close. He around?”

Alvin looked a little vague. “He sort of comes and goes, you know? Not like he’s really on the books.”

The other man said, “He’s in the maintenance shed, working on that pile of shit in the back room—probably find a Model T at the bottom of it.” He pointed to another concrete building across the yard.

Willy nodded his thanks, told Alvin to give his mother his best, and ambled over to where Dan Kravitz was purportedly practicing archaeology.

Kravitz was the oddball in the Karen Putnam household—he and his daughter Sally. Only an occasional customer of the local PD—mostly for vagrancy—Kravitz kept a low profile, minded his manners, and either stayed out of trouble or never got caught. For Willy, that made him an interesting character, and a valuable informant, which he’d been for over ten years, if only sparingly used.

The shed was cavernous, and—with cinder-block walls and a metal roof—like the inside of a drum. It was also, aside from the resonant clangs of heavy objects being thrown about, empty of life. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, Willy searched in vain for whoever was making the noise.

He walked farther inside the building, ducking under large pieces of machinery and sidestepping piles of tools and discarded truck parts, until he spied a small opening in the back wall, which was acting like a loudspeaker for all the clatter.

He paused on the threshold to get his bearings, the description from the group at the office suddenly taking form. A pile of unmitigated junk reached halfway to the ceiling, high enough to completely hide anyone in its midst.

The lighting didn’t help. A couple of yoked floodlights, screwed into a single overhead outlet high above, threw a ghastly, angular glare across the jagged peaks of accumulated debris, leaving the corners and the floor shrouded in gloom.

Willy quietly entered and followed a narrow path between precariously piled walls, eventually discovering a thin man in work clothes, clean shaven and close-cropped, who was standing like a mythical combatant in the only cleared space between metaphorical
good and evil—a mountain of trash on one side, and a smaller pile of salvage on the other.

Both men froze and stared at each other in the abrupt silence, Kravitz with a bent piece of rebar in his hand.

“Hey, Dan,” Willy said, his voice sounding orphaned in the stillness.

“Mr. Kunkle,” Kravitz responded.

“It’s been a while.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You taking care of yourself?”

“Won’t complain.”

Willy looked around. “Got a little project here, don’t you?”

Kravitz nodded. “Guess I do.”

Willy studied him for a few seconds, reacquainting himself with the man. Even in these surroundings, Dan was neat, tucked in, and relatively clean, aside from his hands, of course. His appearance spoke of his demeanor. Reserved and quiet to the point of being withdrawn, Kravitz could hold his own. Of unknown origin, he had slowly, almost invisibly, become a part of Brattleboro’s social fabric, if only at its edges, but it was his work ethic and moral stamina that made him stand out. He stuck to every job given to him, worked hard, and—most remarkably—had raised a daughter in the process. This despite a driving personal code that made him refuse all offers of steady employment, or stay at any job beyond its immediate completion. It was a guarantee, given this, that once the contents of this shed were sorted out, Dan Kravitz would move on. No one of Willy’s acquaintance knew what made the man tick. He wasn’t handicapped, by any means, but he certainly wasn’t part of the mainstream, placing him beyond categorization.

“I’m not here to jam you up, Dan,” Willy told him. “But I’d like to talk to you for a bit—outside.”

Kravitz considered that for a moment, before nodding and placing the rebar carefully on the floor. “Sure.”

Willy stood aside to let him pass, again noting his cleanliness—a virtual hallmark. Willy hadn’t dealt with him much, and certainly didn’t know him well, but he liked the man, in part—not surprisingly—because of his nonconformity.

They wended their way to the main room, and beyond that to the truck yard. There, Willy led them to the relative privacy of the building’s far side, where they found seats on a stack of discarded wooden loading pallets.

“I need to ask you a few questions, Dan,” Willy began, “but not because of anything you’ve done—or Sally, for that matter.”

Once more, Kravitz nodded. “Okay.”

“It’s about your living situation,” Willy continued. “I hear you’re both staying with Karen Putnam.”

“Yes.”

“Is that working out?”

“Yes.”

“No frictions between you and the others? It’s pretty jam-packed.”

“No.”

Willy tried for a little more eloquence. “And Sally?”

He failed. “No.”

Willy scratched his neck, rethinking his strategy.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you ever say anything except yes and no?”

“Sure.”

Willy got up and stepped in so close, their faces were inches apart.

He glared at him until Kravitz allowed for the tiniest of smiles.

Willy sat back down. “I thought so, you asshole. You done fucking with me?”

Kravitz finally conceded. “Yes, Mr. Kunkle.”

“Describe the family to me, then, member by member.”

Kravitz didn’t say a word for a moment, and Willy wondered if his request might actually be challenged. After all, he’d not explained why he was here.

But apparently, Dan was merely thinking. “Karen and Todd are the parents,” he began mundanely. “Todd is a frustrated bully. He scares a lot of people by lashing out, but he lacks ambition and brains. He doesn’t know how to organize that energy and so can’t earn respect except from other losers like himself. Karen is loving, caring, and needy. She doesn’t know how to protect herself, and so she turns creature comforts like booze, sex, and cigarettes into temporary shelters from reality.”

Willy was staring at him. “Are you shitting me?”

Dan smiled a little wider this time. “What?”

“You know goddamn well what, you little prick. Why do you pretend to be such a dummy when you got all that shit inside you?”

“I don’t pretend. That’s where people put me because of my lifestyle and my manner.”

Willy was fascinated. He sat forward. “Dan, get real. Who do you talk to like that? I mean, a lot of people know you. I have
never
heard anybody say you were anything other than a yup-nope kinda guy. Christ knows, that’s all you’ve ever given me.”

“Are you going to blow my cover?”

Willy straightened back up, caught off guard by the question. He thought carefully before answering. “No. That’s your point, isn’t it?”

“We’re alike in some ways,” Dan told him. “People think you’re a
crippled asshole who acts like a Nazi; they think I’m a retarded bum with good manners who knows how to shower. They’re wrong, but they do buy what we’re selling.”

Willy shook his head. “Holy Christ. I thought I’d seen it all. Why open up now, after all these years?”

Dan shrugged. “It was time.”

“Damn.” Willy spoke wondrously. “I met an accountant like you once, living in a tent by the river. A real mental case, of course, but he’d gone to college, had a home and a family once. He just couldn’t handle it. Liked the simple life, as he called it. ’Course, he was a roaring drunk.”

Kravitz merely shrugged. “There but for the grace of God,” he said softly.

Willy understood all too well, his own disabilities looming large in his mind. “But you ducked the bullet,” he commented.

“I may have seen it coming,” Kravitz said more fully.

Willy stared off into the distance, wishing he’d had such prescience. “No shit.”

He then looked at his companion. “Okay. You’re right. I won’t tell anybody. But thanks for telling me. That means something. Maybe someday, you’ll tell me who you used to be.”