The Ragman's Memory (15 page)

I pushed a tray at him. “Me neither. Dig in.”

He did just that, as did Danny a minute later, eventually dusting their beards, gloves, and clothing with small fragments of Egg McMuffin, hash-browns, toast, jelly, and coffee.

I let them eat half the meal in peace before exacting my price. “You told Sergeant Capullo that Milo had a seizure before he died.”

“Yeah,” Danny spoke for the first time. “He twitched a bunch.”

Phil gave his friend a look over the top of his Styrofoam cup but otherwise kept quiet.

“The three of you were hanging out together, around a fire, and he suddenly up and died—just like that?”

Phil nodded and began to speak but was drowned out by Danny’s, “Oh no. Not like that.”

“Shut up, Danny.”

We both looked at Phil, Danny’s eyes growing wide. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot.” Then he looked at me with childlike sincerity. “Yup. He died just like that.”

Milo’s appearance at the funeral home returned to me once more, along with the memories it had evoked. This was the moment I’d been anticipating and dreading both, and I wanted to make sure I handled it right. “How did his beard get all wet, Danny?”

Danny looked at me in startled silence.

“He foamed at the mouth,” Phil answered. “They do that with seizures.”

“Sergeant Capullo reported that you two were living under the bridge, and Milo was camped out in the drain tunnel. Is that right?”

They both nodded.

“Why weren’t you staying together?”

“Didn’t like Milo,” Danny blurted.

“So why gather around a fire like a bunch of Boy Scouts?”

Neither man answered.

“Look,” I finally said, “let me get something out in the open. The doctor who examined Milo thought he’d died of natural causes—because of your seizure story and the fact that Milo was on heart medication. Turns out the heart condition wasn’t fatal, and Milo never had a seizure in his life. I checked on that. I think Milo died of something else. Not anything you did—you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But you made up the seizure story to make the whole thing go away. Isn’t that about right?”

Danny’s mouth fell open, dropping a few half-eaten scraps.

But I focused on Phil. “Yesterday afternoon, I called your old landlord. You can have your room back, as long as you don’t start another campfire. But I need to know what really happened.”

“We won’t get in trouble?” Phil finally asked.

“Not unless you did something against the law.”

“We didn’t do nothing,” Danny complained.

“What happened, then?”

After a long pause, during which the food lay ignored before them, Phil finally said, “We didn’t think people would believe us. We weren’t all around the fire—that was just Danny and me. We didn’t even know Milo was in the tunnel.”

“We heard him, though,” Danny said, excited now that he could say what he knew.

“Yeah. He was making all kinds of weird noises—shouting and yelling—sounded like he was fighting somebody.”

“We were scared.”

Phil frowned. “We wondered what was goin’ on, so we shouted into the tunnel, you know? We didn’t know it was Milo. Didn’t recognize his voice or anything. ’Course, the echo didn’t help. After a while, the noise stopped, and we could hear somebody moving—”

“Yeah—shhhhh.”

“Right, like he was dragging himself along. We weren’t about to go in there—”

“Too scary.” Danny was alive with excitement by now.

“But that’s when Milo came out, crawling on his belly. His eyes were huge, and he had spit coming out of his mouth—tons of it—all thick and gooey. Scared the shit out of us.”

“Yeah.”

“He looked real sick, and just when we could tell who he was, he started spazzing out, flopping all over, banging himself against the walls… And spitting. That was the weirdest part—he kept spitting.”

“What did you do?” I asked, feeling the cold much more than I had a minute earlier, a long-dormant horror now thoroughly awake.

“We didn’t know what to do.”

“I ran,” Danny admitted candidly.

Phil made a face. “Yeah, well, I didn’t think he was going to hurt anybody—’cept maybe himself. I figured it was the DTs, you know? But I guess I knew it wasn’t, too. Anyway, he was sort of reaching out for me, so I offered him a drink—I had a can in my hand—and that’s when he just flipped out—”

“He was crazy,” Danny said.

“And then he died,” Phil added flatly. “Just collapsed, right in the middle of one of those…
Things
he was having.”

“So they weren’t really seizures?” I asked.

Phil shook his head. “I had a cousin who had seizures—fall on the ground and get all stiff and then fall asleep—pee all over himself. Milo wasn’t doing that. He was gasping and shouting and flopping around… Like when you get hit with freezing-cold water—you know how you dance around and breathe hard and slap yourself? It was kind of like that.”

“What did you do after he died?” I asked.

“We didn’t know what had happened,” Phil said. “First I thought we should just leave him there—let somebody else find him. But Danny said that was wrong. So we cleaned him up a little, invented the seizure story, and called you guys.” He paused for a moment. “Are we in trouble now?”

I thought he might be, but not in any way he could possibly imagine. “You’ve done nothing illegal, Phil.”

His face relaxed, and he looked down at the cardboard tray before him, poking among the fried potatoes.

“But,” I added, “I’d like you to do me a favor. Hang out here for a few more hours, okay? I want to make sure your landlord’s going to hold up his end of the deal, and I want to know where to find you. Okay?”

Both men shrugged simultaneously. “Sure,” Phil said and motioned toward the two trays. “We’re in good shape now, anyway.”

· · ·

I left them and drove straight back to the office. Still wearing my coat, I reached for my phone.

Decades earlier, while in the Army in Asia, we were shown a cautionary training film about some of the perils of our new environment. It was a silent film, with no voice-over or music, featuring a middle-aged, bearded Indian man sitting on a straight-backed chair in a small, bare room. On a table beside him was a single glass of water.

For twenty minutes the camera watched as the man, his face contorted and his body twitching, made every effort to take hold of the glass. His eyes huge, rolling, and totally focused on the water, he seemed desperately thirsty—and yet utterly incapable of simply seizing the glass before him. Finally, in a spastic lunge, spilling most of the water, he succeeded, although he still couldn’t bring the glass to his lips.

Thick saliva poured from his mouth, impregnating his beard and dripping down his front. His body thrashed against the opposing forces tearing him apart as he fought to bring the now empty glass almost to his lips. Then, finally, mercifully for those of us watching the film, he suddenly stiffened and rolled off the chair, dead of hydrophobia.

Beverly Hillstrom answered on the second ring.

“Lieutenant. You’re in earlier than I expected. I was going to call you later. I have disappointing news on Mr. Douglas. I can find nothing to contradict the opinion originally rendered on his death certificate.”

“Doctor, I just interviewed the two men who found him. They invented the seizure story to make the whole thing go away, but from what they just told me, I think Milo died of rabies.”

Her answer was short and precise. “I’ll call you back.”

“OKAY, EVERYBODY,”
I began, “we might as well get started.” I held up a copy of that morning’s newspaper. “As you can see, the
Reformer
has nothing to say about Shawna Davis today. Perhaps we can thank Ben Chambers for that. But whatever the reason, it gives us a small breather, just when we may need it.”

We were all in the squad’s conference room—Kunkle, Tyler, Sammie, Ron, and I, along with Tony Brandt and Jack Derby.

I dropped the paper onto the table we were gathered around. “From our perspective, the crucial difference between what we know and what we’re admitting is the phenobarbital we found in Shawna Davis’s hair. That distinction makes her death a homicide, at least until proven otherwise. I’d like to keep that distinction under wraps for as long as we can.

“You’ve all read the internal reports. You know how we’ve traced Shawna’s movements up to a couple of weeks before she died. Last night, in response to a tip we received because of yesterday’s article, Sammie and I talked to Mary Wallis, who admitted knowing Shawna and to last seeing her in late May. Wallis denied any knowledge of the thousand dollars, claimed Shawna only dropped by for the day on her way out of town, and said she’d only just learned about Shawna’s death from yesterday’s news reports. Sammie and I think there’s a lot she’s not saying. Mary Wallis, therefore, has become a prime suspect. But not only,” I added with emphasis, “because of her being seen with Shawna in May. Wallis also abruptly dropped her opposition to the convention center project shortly thereafter, just as the groundbreaking was taking place—a crucial piece of good luck for the developers. That may be a coincidence, but it’s one we shouldn’t ignore.”

I noticed Sammie’s surprised look at this additional piece of the puzzle—something I hadn’t had time to brief her on before.

“Unfortunately,” and here I waved a hand in Jack Derby’s direction, “by soft-pedaling our findings about Shawna, we also become the only ones treating her death as a homicide. That gives us a break from the press, but it also forces us to tiptoe with the investigation, including our communications with the State’s Attorney’s office. In the past, we’ve made it a habit—a good one, I think—to use his staff pretty freely for legal advice on warrants, affidavits, and whatnot. In a situation like this one, however, where the homicide may have wider implications, both the chief and Mr. Derby have decided that we better use a single conduit to his office—a person who will either directly answer our questions or pass them on to Mr. Derby. That person,” and here I felt my face flushing slightly, “is going to be Gail Zigman.”

There was a slight but telling stirring around the table, reflecting the same discomfort I’d felt when Derby had told me of his decision. Gail was not a lawyer yet, not a deputy state’s attorney, and her contract with the office was only good for six months. The use of a single conduit for sensitive cases was reasonable and routine enough. Using the temporary clerk as such was unheard of.

Derby rose to his feet as if drawn by the unvoiced doubts around him. “I better clarify that. Ms. Zigman, unlike any other member of my staff, has close and personal connections to both this department and to most of the people who make this town tick. Since it now appears your investigation will be touching on aspects of how this new convention center came about—and on who helped it along—I’ve chosen her as the best suited for the job. Not only is she uniquely qualified, but since she’s physically in the office more regularly than I or the deputies, she’s much better placed to route your questions to me—unless, of course, she knows the answer herself. This latter case would only apply to situations involving personalities and procedures within town government—not legal questions. If any of you have any problems with this arrangement, I’d be happy to try to resolve them.”

Kunkle, not surprisingly, spoke first. “We don’t even know what our assignments are, and we’re already covering our asses. I don’t care if you got some wannabe as your contact. I want to know why the hell you’re so twitchy. We got so little to go on here, it seems nuts to start sweating what the media’s going to do.”

This time, it was Tony Brandt who spoke up. “The media’s not the problem, Willy—it’s the freedom to move we want. If there is a link between Davis, Wallis, and the convention center job, it’ll take a hell of a lot of work to prove it. It’ll also kick up a hell of a lot of opposition if some powerful people get wind of it too early.”

Willy looked disgusted. “You mean NeverTom Chambers. Jesus, I knew that asshole would pop up sooner or later.”

Despite his abrasive manner, Willy had put his finger on the heart of the matter. NeverTom Chambers, so nicknamed because he hated the sobriquet Tom, was Benjamin Chambers’s younger brother. Also rich and influential, he was as outspoken and vindictive as Benjamin was philanthropic and self-effacing. Worse—and most relevantly—NeverTom was a newly elected member of the board of selectmen, a position he was fully expected to abusively exploit. Considering that his brother owned the very project we were interested in, one he had vociferously supported even before he’d been elected, NeverTom’s habit of throwing his weight around was not a happy prospect.

“Think about it, Willy,” I cautioned him. “You really want him, his brother, their allies, the Bank of Brattleboro’s lawyers, and a few dozen other screamers all down your throat while you’re conducting an investigation that might lead to nothing? Who needs the aggravation?”

He waved his hand at me resignedly. “All right, all right. It just pisses me off. So what’re we supposed to be doing while we’re creeping around?”

“We’ve got three general points of focus,” I resumed. “First, keep beating the bushes for more on Shawna Davis. That we can do in the open, of course. The second is to focus on Mary Wallis, starting with a canvass of her neighbors—”

“That’ll be discreet,” Willy said with a smirk.

I stopped. “It can be. The mailman said he saw Shawna at her house. Mary confirmed it. It’s not too big a stretch to ask her neighbors if they saw Shawna in the area, and then engage them in a casual conversation about Wallis herself. She’s an unusual person and probably a hot topic on that street. It doesn’t have to tip our hand.”

“The third area of concentration,” I continued, “is to find out if any connection exists between Davis, Wallis, and the construction project. We need to examine how the project came about, and look at everyone involved. It also means we should study this recent white knight maneuver by Ben Chambers. This is where the most discretion will be necessary.”

I paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Okay. I’ve told Billy Manierre that we may be calling on his Patrol for help, but go easy on him. This is going to rack up the overtime, and I want to keep the town manager and the treasurer off our backs for as long as possible—”