The Ragman's Memory (8 page)

Through my open door, I saw Ron arrive at his desk. “Got the phone records,” he said when he saw me.

I beckoned to him, asking Tyler, “That it?”

Tyler nodded and rose. Ron noticed the printouts in his hand. “You get any DNA?”

Tyler looked at him curiously and then riffled through his collection. “Yeah—somewhere here.”

Ron explained his interest. “I was thinking that if we could get any DNA from the bones or teeth, we might be able to match it to Shawna’s PKU test on file in Massachusetts.”

I stared at him blankly.

But Tyler lit up. “Right. Every child born is supposed to have a PKU test. Stands for phenylketonuria—it’s done to check for mental retardation. And the blood sample is usually kept on record at the State Health Department. It’s just an identification card with a small dot on it, but it would be enough for us.” With rare exuberance, he patted Ron on the shoulder. “I’ll get right on it.”

Ron watched him leave, a small smile on his face.

“How’d you think of that?” I asked him.

The smile broadened. “I’m a new papa, remember? We just went through all that. Kind of stuck in my mind—all those vital records.”

Spoken like a true information nut, I thought gratefully, hopeful again that the identity issue could be settled. “You get a chance to look at those phone records?”

The smile slipped away. “Yeah—nothing to Brattleboro. For that matter, there weren’t many long-distance calls at all.”

“Okay. It was worth a shot. If you get any spare time, you might want to check the other numbers anyhow. Is Willy around?”

“I saw him talking to one of the patrol guys in the parking lot. Don’t know if he was coming or going.”

It turned out Willy was going, but I jogged outside and caught up with him just as he was starting his engine. He rolled down his window, scowling. “What?”

“You talk to any of your Satanist contacts?”

His look turned to disgust. “If I’d found anything, I would’ve said so. Besides, you only told me to think about it.”

“And then you went poking around.”

“Fuck you.” Willy didn’t like admitting defeat.

“What did you find out?”

“They’re all a bunch of thin-skinned assholes. What I got was a lot of holier-than-thou, alternate lifestyle bullshit. As far as I could tell, nobody’s contacted them to join up recently, and they haven’t been out recruiting. And it doesn’t look like they’ve been butchering virgins lately either. Can I go now?”

I stood back and let him slither out of the parking lot, his tires spinning on the hard-packed snow.

I didn’t share his obvious disappointment. Considering the little we had to work with, and the short time we’d been on the case, we were actually making pretty good headway. That satisfaction, however, was purely professional in nature. Emotionally, I was facing a darker picture. Tyler’s report, even with his scientific qualifiers, made it ever more likely that Shawna Davis’s death was a homicide.

SAMMIE MARTENS WAS WAITING FOR ME
impatiently in the squad room when I returned from the parking lot. “I found the hairdresser who might’ve dyed Shawna’s hair,” she said.

“Okay. Let me get my coat.” I took a thick, quilted Navy pea jacket from its peg and slipped Shawna’s photograph into my pocket.

Sammie drove us to the south side of town, to Canal Street. An extension of Main, Canal began at one of the town’s most confusing intersections. Two parking lots and four roads emptied into this crossroads, which was further hemmed in by several large buildings and the bridge over the Whetstone Brook—the town’s most significant geographical division.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the Whetstone had been a major power source for a string of grist and saw mills stretching miles away to the west—one of the primary reasons West Brattleboro had started life as the dominant of the two towns. Now, the brook was a social boundary, separating Brattleboro’s patrician north side from its more lowbrow, commercialized southern half. Whenever we were called for domestic disturbances or alcoholically lubricated brawls, we most often headed south.

The irony was that much of Brattleboro’s vitality also resided on this side of the water. The high school, the park, and the old warehouses of the Estey Organ Works—once the world’s foremost provider of parlor organs—were all here, along with one of our largest grocery stores, most of the garages, the hospital, and half the town’s fast-food outlets. In fact, before the Putney Road was metamorphosed into a “miracle mile,” Canal Street, along with lower Main, had ruled the commercial roost.

But it had since acquired a tired, weather-beaten look, especially when compared to the Putney Road’s shiny glitz. The interspersing of decaying, multifamily residences, while giving Canal a more human feel, also injected an element of marginal despair. And because it was boxed in by the old wooden reminders of a past long gone, Canal had nowhere to go, while the Putney Road was former farmland and had acre upon acre left to heedlessly invade.

As a result, Canal was where a business went that either had spotty financing, or hoped to cater to a largely poor-to-working-class population. It was also the home of Clipper Academy—a launching pad for aspiring hairdressers and a place to go for a very cheap cut, assuming you had low expectations and a flair for spontaneity.

The manager, wearing a miniskirt and tottering on skyscraper spikes, greeted us at the door from under multihued eyebrows and a glistening, curly mass of black hair. She spoke loudly to be heard over the intermittent shrieking of air wrenches from the garage beyond a shared cinder block wall. “Good morning. May we help you?”

Sammie, whom I’d never seen in makeup, nor wearing anything besides pants, practical shoes, and a short haircut, appeared speechless. I gave our hostess a discreet look at my badge. “I hope so. We’re from the police department, and we’re trying to trace the whereabouts of a client of yours.” I showed her Shawna’s picture.

She looked at it carefully, holding it with stiffened fingers so her two-inch nails wouldn’t get in the way. “It’s a terrible cut.”

“Does she look familiar?” Sammie asked.

“No. When did she come here?”

“We’re not sure,” I answered. “It might’ve been a year ago—maybe six months.”

She shook her head, still looking at the picture. “We get so many people, and most of them for just one visit. You don’t have a name?”

“Maybe. Does Shawna Davis ring a bell?”

Her face lit up and she returned the photograph. “Well gosh, that makes it much easier. We keep a record of everyone who comes in, along with the student who did the work—it’s part of our teaching program.”

While she was talking, she circled around to the back of a curved counter and retrieved a fat book much like the dentist’s from the day before. “That’s last year’s.” She got out a second one and laid it on top of the first. “And that’s the year before.”

She opened the top one to a sample page. “They’re basically appointment books—day by day. You look under this column here, on each page, for the client names. Some of this other stuff is coded, so when you find who you’re after, I can translate for you.”

She gave us both a bright, toothy, lipstick-smeared smile. “Okay? I gotta get back to work before someone gets a crew cut by mistake.”

Sammie and I watched her totter away between rows of mismatching barber chairs, most of which were manned by young, nervous neophytes holding scissors with expressions of wonder and apprehension. It made me happy I’d been cutting my own hair for decades, even if the end result was what Gail called a “prison ’do.”

We each took a book and began leafing through its contents, pausing occasionally at some nearly indecipherable scrawl, our eyes preconditioned for anything approaching “Davis.”

About a half hour later, I found it, clearly written, along with the date—April 23rd of the previous year. I showed the entry to Sammie. “If J.P. was right about her dying a month and a half after she got her hair colored, that would put her death into June. When did Norah say her chickadees built their nest?”

“Early July.”

I caught the eye of the manager, far to the back of the salon, and beckoned to her. “Last June was hotter’n hell. By July, a corpse left in the sun would have decomposed enough for hair to slough off. Ron’s PKU test, if he finds it, will make it official, but Shawna looks pretty good as our victim.”

The manager approached us, still beaming. “Find what you were after?”

I pointed out the entry. “Yes, thank you. You said you could tell us what all these numbers mean.”

“Right. This is the code for the procedure—a cut and dye—purple and orange. The cut was half shave, and half left long—very popular. Let’s see, the hairdresser was… Hang on a second.” She went back behind the counter and retrieved another ledger. After a minute spent flipping through its pages, she announced, her voice flattening, “Susan Lucey.”

I broke into a smile. “You’re kidding. Is her address still Prospect Street?”

She looked at me with eyes wide, confirming I had the right Susan Lucey. “You
know
her?”

I laughed. “Yeah. I take it she hasn’t changed much over the years.”

The manager suddenly became guarded. “I don’t know. She didn’t do too well with us. And she lives on Washington now.” She handed me the book so I could read the address.

I shook her hand. “Not to worry. Thanks for your help.”

“She’s a hooker, isn’t she?” Sammie asked me as we crossed the sidewalk to the car.

I caught the disapproval in her voice. In her way, Sammie was quite old-fashioned, and prostitution was one of the things she utterly condemned. But the older I became the less judgmental I felt—there are a lot of prostitutes out there, after all, and only a few of them are women selling their bodies for sex.

Plus, I genuinely liked Susan Lucey. She’d been a big help to me on a case years before—at personal risk to herself, as it turned out—and I’d never forgotten the favor. And she had spirit—plying her trade in Brattleboro, Vermont, was not the sign of an overachiever, but she carried herself with a pride I respected. As the saying had it, “She walked like she was going places and looked like she’d been there.”

I was struck by the change of address. Prospect Street, where she’d previously lived, followed the crest of a bluff overlooking Canal and most of the town, like a sentry’s high catwalk. A few years back, as with the neighborhood behind it, Prospect had been much the worse for wear—a neglected offshoot of a more boisterous commercial age and now an example of society’s frayed edge.

But times had improved, and with them Prospect Street’s fortunes. While still no yuppie enclave, it was looking much better. It saddened me to know that Susan had not been able to keep pace and had instead been forced back—a single, significant block—to the kind of environment where she seemed fated to spend her whole life. Not that Washington Street was a ghetto—it even sported some very handsome, well-maintained houses. But it was also a harbor of endless economic struggle, where a single bad year could mean the loss of a home. Cheek-to-cheek with those occasional gingerbread showpieces were tired, old, patched-together multi-tenant dwellings that stood like reminders of a very thin margin.

Without specifically knowing the address we’d just been given, my gut told me which of the two above options it was going to be.

Sadly, my fears were confirmed. We pulled up opposite one of the dreary, gray-sided triple-deckers so common to New England factory towns. It looked like the landlord would soon be choosing between a whole new foundation, or complete demolition.

I left Sammie in the car. I had no desire to rub her nose in something she didn’t like, nor in subjecting Susan to a scrutiny she didn’t deserve.

The manager’s ledger had indicated the top floor, so I circled the building, stepping carefully through snowdrifts littered with hidden trash, until I got to the exterior staircase running up the back wall. Switchback on switchback, balcony to balcony—one of which was festooned with frozen laundry—I climbed to the third-floor apartment. There I found a blank door, curtained windows, and an empty porch. The pleasure I’d first felt at hearing Susan’s name had by now been corroded by gloom.

I knocked on the door several times before I heard a shuffle of feet and the sound of something being jarred, as if bumped into. By the time the door swung back several inches, I was braced for the worst.

“Hi Susan, it’s Joe.”

“No shit. Blind I’m not.”

I couldn’t see much through the narrow opening, but what little there was didn’t look good. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face drawn and tinged yellow, her hair flat and oily. “Can I come in?”

“What for? Can’t be a social call, right?”

I suppressed the polite lie forming in my brain. “No.”

She looked at me without expression for a few seconds and then vanished from sight, leaving the door ajar. I pushed it open, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. Susan was moving slowly away, heading for a well-used armchair that she sank into with a tired sigh. The girl who’d once walked like she was going places was gone, leaving a giant void behind.

I sat opposite her in a straight-backed chair, my elbows on my knees, and looked at her more carefully. She was thinner than in the old days, when she’d been a compact fireplug of a woman, full of sexual vitality. Her skin now hung on her loosely. At most, she was in her mid-thirties, but she was looking fifteen years older.

“Like what you see?” she asked bitterly.

“I always have, but you don’t look healthy. You okay?”

“I don’t have AIDS, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m glad to hear it. It wasn’t what I meant.”

She sighed again and rubbed her forehead. “I’d forgotten what a Boy Scout you are. What do you want?”

“Information, but only after you tell me what’s been going on.”

“I’m a tired old fuck. What’d you think? I sleep, I eat, I get laid, I have a drink every once in a while. Life goes on—takes its toll—the johns drop off—money’s tight. You figure it out.”

“You’ve tried other jobs,” I said, telling her I knew at least that much.