The Ragman's Memory (4 page)

I realized then what my trouble was—what was making my other sorrows that much sharper. It wasn’t so much that someone had died. I didn’t have enough details yet to have an opinion on that. It was that he or she had died quite some time ago, and that only a few birds and other scavengers had taken notice of it.

A life, it seemed, should amount to more than that. It was the chance this one hadn’t that saddened me the most.

IN GENERAL TERMS, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT
is divided into four distinct sections: the downtown, with its old New England red-brick heart; the equally aged but wood-built residential neighborhoods radiating to the south, west, and north, with the Connecticut River, and thus the New Hampshire border, forming the eastern boundary; West Brattleboro, once a separate entity, but now a slightly jilted satellite, relegated to the far side of the interstate; and the Putney Road, a strip of low-profile shopping plazas, fast-food joints, supermarkets, gas stations, and businesses that sliced north through the no-man’s-land between Brattleboro and the Dummerston town line.

It was along this latter blighted avenue that I drove to reach the newspaper office before deadline. Regardless of the stoicism we routinely showed in public, both the SA’s office and the police were acutely aware of how crucial it was to treat the media as a guarded confidant. Too many times, we’d suffered the price of being close-mouthed and secretive. It was better to share some of what we knew—while down-playing the drama—than to be dogged at every step by a bunch of reporters imagining a major story was being kept just beyond their reach.

Several decades earlier, the Putney Road had been farmland, much of it owned by an old and canny operator named Benjamin Chambers. Less a farmer than an instinctive broker of almost anything salable, Chambers had taken a gamble on where and when Interstate 91’s umbilical cord would eventually connect the state to the rest of the country—thereby christening Brattleboro as the “Gateway to Vermont”—and had managed to buy, trade, and some said steal a mosaic of properties lying directly in its path. By the time the federal grand plan became reality in the sixties, old man Chambers was sitting on a pot of gold.

Never had gold looked so unattractive. I was struck as always by the contrast between Brattleboro’s northern residential section, which featured some of our oldest, stateliest homes, and where the Putney Road “miracle mile” began. It was like having a McDonald’s sharing a wall with a grand Victorian mansion.

On the other hand, Putney Road was also where a great many locals did their shopping or came to work, not only from Brattleboro but from towns all around. It had helped make Brattleboro a hub community, and its commercial vitality had carried the town through times that had steadily eroded nearby places like Springfield, Vermont, and Greenfield, Massachusetts. In fact—almost emblematically—one of the state’s largest employers, a gigantic wholesale groceries supplier, occupied the northernmost end of the road. None of that made the strip any less of an architectural eyesore, but it highlighted the reality that had Brattleboro been only old bricks, elegant homes, and quaint shops, it would have gone belly-up years ago.

About midway up the street, however, the dark side of the more-commerce-the-better philosophy loomed into view on my left. Like a missing tooth in a hundred-watt smile, a dark, abandoned building site interrupted the seamless string of fluorescent signs, bright windows, and glowing, snow-covered parking lots.

A proposed fifteen-million-dollar hotel/convention center complex—not as big as the two in far-off Burlington, but the only one of its size in the whole southeast quadrant of Vermont—its developer, Gene Lacaille, had run into financial difficulties and had dropped it, half-built, into his banker’s lap.

It was painful proof that the Putney Road money machine was not a guaranteed thing. As I drove by the lifeless site, still filled with equipment but clotted with untouched snow, I imagined a cluster of high-echelon bankers burning the late-night oil downtown, wondering how in hell to extricate themselves from this one.

I drove on for another half mile and turned left onto Black Mountain Road. The
Brattleboro Reformer
, where I was scheduled to meet both its editor, Stanley Katz, and his radio rival, Ted McDonald, had its low-profile office building tucked away on a small bluff between the shoulder of Interstate 91 and an overpass bridge. I had under forty minutes before they started rolling the presses at eleven.

The parking lot was almost empty. A morning paper, the
Reformer
was only fully staffed during the mid-afternoon overlap period when the nine-to-five workers and the news crew shared the same roof for a few hours. By this time of night, only the hard core remained—the night reporters, an editor or two, the press operators, and the back-room people responsible for getting the product delivered. It was a thin crowd, and sometimes a rowdy one, befitting a bunch whose days ran upside down.

I parked in a poorly plowed visitor’s slot and began slogging my way toward the front door, marked by a peeling flagpole and a huge, dead, snow-capped potted plant. The walkway hadn’t been shoveled, but compressed by countless footsteps, which had also made it hard, uneven, and slippery. A year ago the building, if not the product, had been in better shape. A Midwest conglomerate had poured money into the place, hoping to create a
USA Today
of Vermont—with glitzy colors, bite-sized articles, and screaming headlines, jammed into a tabloid-sized paper designed to be read in a subway…

Except that the more the old
Reformer
was twisted out of shape, the more subscribers switched over to the more traditional
Rutland Herald
.

Several months ago, the employees, facing either layoffs or bankruptcy, had banded together, rounded up a few local backers and several banks, and had bought the paper. Now it was its old broadsheet self, printed in conservative black and white and operating on a shoestring. Watering plants, painting flagpoles, and even hiring someone to shovel the walk had all fallen under the heading of needless expenses. But an era of crazed flatlander yuppiness had been survived, and I wasn’t about to fault the staff ’s hard-won victory with petty complaints of a broken neck. So I chose my footing carefully and made my way slowly to the front door.

Beyond the double glass doors of what had been a sharp-looking modern building fifteen years earlier, the air in the large, central newsroom was stale and motionless—the ventilation kicking in only intermittently to save money. The rug beneath my feet was soiled and worn, the lighting turned off except where strictly necessary, and the trash cans overflowing for lack of a janitor. The effect suggested a futurist movie where everyone worked in shabby, fluorescent boxes on a planet where everything was dying and energy was at a premium. Supporting the notion, the only people I could see were sitting in a centralized cluster of desks, hunched before computer terminals, their faces bathed in a lifeless, electronic shade of blue.

I watched them in silence for a few seconds, impressed that they had worked so hard for such a seemingly dismal result, and remembered how Katz had once said that newspapering demanded equal parts love and dementia.

As a cop, I had little use for newspeople. I thought they were sloppy, cynical, exploitative, self-righteous and thin-skinned. But I realized I was probably wrong, since their view of us was as lazy, close-minded, arrogant, and paranoid. Whatever the truth, we were stuck with each other and had no choice but to cooperate.

A door opened to one of the small conference rooms lining the far wall, and a thin, pale, exhausted-looking man in a rumpled shirt leaned out and fixed me with dark-rimmed eyes. “Joe. Come on in. Ted’s already here.”

I crossed the room, aware of several faces looking up from their screens to murmur greetings. I waved back to them collectively and shook Stanley Katz’s hand.

“I’d offer you coffee, but we’ve gone through our nightly allotment. Budget crunch—sorry.” He ushered me over the threshold, closing the door behind us.

A small conference table occupied the center of the room, and sitting at its far end was a man as fat as Stanley was thin, placed like a Buddha awaiting an audience. His pudgy hands were wrapped around a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, which he raised in salute as I nodded my greetings. “Gotta’ plan ahead, Joe. These guys don’t have a pot to piss in.”

“We don’t have time to piss, Ted,” Katz shot back. “We got to do more than supply five minutes of gossip for every hour of canned music.”

But he was smiling as he said this. Having once told me he thought Ted McDonald was a fat slug “woodchuck”—the local pejorative for a dim-witted native-born—he’d also frequently conceded that Ted had integrity—and a network of informers he envied.

I sat opposite them both. “I wanted to let you know what was really going on, since for the past several hours, Ted’s been reporting we found a body off Hillcrest Terrace and that foul play is suspected.”

“It’s not?” Stan asked. “We have a source that said it is, too.”

I rubbed my forehead tiredly. “They’re jumping to conclusions. We have a sample of hair recovered from an old, abandoned bird nest and a piece of upper jaw. Most of it’s probably human—Waterbury’s checking that out—but we don’t know who they belong to, how long they’ve been lying around, or how they got there to start with. So far, there is absolutely no evidence of foul play.”

Both men stopped scribbling in the pads they’d each produced. “Jesus, Joe,” Ted said first, perhaps stung at the suggestion that he’d hyped up the story. “Isn’t it a little unlikely someone went all the way up there to die of natural causes?”

“Maybe,” I agreed, “but right now, that’s as good a scenario as any. There have been no reports of missing persons, or of anything odd going on in the neighborhood, and nothing to indicate violence.”

“You going to tear up that field?” Katz asked.

“We have no idea where the rest of the body might be, or even if there is a rest. It might’ve been taken apart by animals and carried into half a hundred burrows and dens by now. We found the jaw fragment in an old tree, ten feet off the ground. We’re going to see what we can find out first by checking with other New England departments and NCIC, and then circulating X-rays of the teeth to all surrounding dentists. The state police crime lab and the ME are working to see what they can get from the little we sent them, and once they do, we’ll put that into the system as well. It’s a much more effective approach than tearing around with a bunch of snow shovels.”

Katz looked up from his notes. “How did you find out about this in the first place?”

“An observant, helpful citizen,” I answered blandly.

“Who shall remain nameless,” he murmured with a smirk.

“Correct. Off the record?”

They both nodded.

“It was a child. She found the hair in a bird nest near her home—thought we’d be interested.”

“Enterprising,” Ted said. “Wish I could talk to her.”

“I don’t doubt it, but she’s pretty shy, and a little shook up right now—that’s why we’re keeping her under wraps, okay?”

They both nodded again. I didn’t doubt they’d honor the request.

“You said you found the jaw in a tree,” Katz picked up. “How’d you know to look there?”

“We brought in a naturalist as a consultant. She gave us pointers on where scavengers might take their… What they found.”

Katz smiled at the hesitation. “And she doesn’t have a name either.”

“She might,” I conceded. “I’ll call and ask her tomorrow if she wants to be identified.”

“What about the bones? What were they? Arms, legs… ?”

“Probably human skull fragments, found in a doghouse, which is being thawed right now so we can dig under it to check for more. A generalized canvass will continue tomorrow at first light, to see if we can find anything else.”

“I love it,” Katz barely whispered, bent over his pad, his need for income-stimulating stories rising to the surface.

“Can you give us a vague idea of what you’ve got? Male, female, old, young?” Ted asked, sounding a little exasperated, but whether with me or his colleague I couldn’t tell.

Again I shook my head, instinctively hedging. “We can’t determine that in-house. We’re hoping the crime lab can tell us.”

Katz was looking skeptical again. “You don’t have anything on your books that might fit this? I thought you guys were on the computer to each other all the time, exchanging information.”

“We are, but not everybody who disappears goes missing. This might’ve been a homeless person, or a runaway from some town that’s not on the network, or someone from a family that doesn’t give a damn. It’s not a flawless system.”

“You do have a pretty good handle on what’s happening locally, though,” Ted persisted. “Is the implication that whoever this is, they’re from out of town?”

I answered slowly. “That would be an educated guess, but we’re covering all bases.”

“I love it when they get specific like that,” Katz murmured, not bothering to look up. He finished writing and sat back in his chair. “When will the lab be reporting back?”

“Maybe a couple of days.”

“So that’s it?”

I spread my hands. “For the moment. We’ll let you know when we get more.”

There was an awkward silence. McDonald was going over his notes, but Katz just sat there staring at me. The “courts ’n’ cops” reporter back in the old days when the paper was locally owned by a small New England chain, Katz had honed a reputation of not giving a damn who he antagonized on his way to a story. As a result, although his articles had been more accurate than not, his personality had made the point moot. The police department wouldn’t have agreed if he’d written that water was wet.

Times and events had mellowed him—the paper changing hands, his quitting and briefly working for the
Herald
, then being wooed back as editor and discovering what it was like to be responsible for more than a single story. Over the past two years, he’d been battered by boardroom struggles with absentee owners, plagued by a rising turnover rate, and had watched both morale and readership dwindle as the paper had lurched toward bankruptcy. It was then, I knew from my own private sources, that he’d mortgaged his house to become one of the
Reformer’s
new owners—as committed now as he’d once been cynically detached.