The Ragman's memory

3

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.

And yet, the expression he was giving me harked back to long ago, when the assumption was that every word I uttered was a bald-faced lie.

“What’s your problem?” I asked him finally.

“No problem. I was just wondering why the personal approach for what could’ve been put into a press release or a phone call. Makes an old bloodhound curious-like there’s more to all this.”

My mind turned to the gold tooth with the enigmatic engraving, and the traces of purple hair dye, both indicative of the complex chasm of mutual need and distrust that would forever stretch between us.

I gave him a pitiful look. “We’ve got as many questions as you do. I just thought you’d like to have what we had before deadline. It’s up to you if you want to believe we’re sitting on Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse.”

I stood up as Ted McDonald laughed, dissolving the brief tension. “I’ll make sure you’re kept up-to-date.”

The house Gail and I bought last year was on Orchard Street, a winding, wooded, uphill drive north of the main road linking Brattleboro to West Brattleboro. It was an enormous building, with an attached barn, a garage, and a deck out back with an equally gigantic maple tree growing through it. Gail had been a Realtor for twenty years, since dropping out of the commune that had first brought her here, and this house reflected why she’d been so successful. For a childless couple long set in their ways, who had rigorously maintained separate quarters throughout their relationship, this house had all the amenities-his and hers upstairs wings, a large enough kitchen for two people to avoid traffic jams, and lots of space, inside and out, that allowed for either companionship or privacy. The only thing missing-temporarily, I hoped-was the spirit that made a home of a house.

The rape had ended Gail’s desire, even her ability, to live alone, and had coincided with my interest to build on our relationship. But shortly after the move, she’d left for law school, and was now so busy hitting the books I barely saw her. After all that had contributed to our finally moving in together, this work-driven result had left me feeling oddly bereft. I knew my melancholy was largely selfish, and understood the forces that were driving her so hard. I also knew that with time, things would settle down, her confidence would return, and both our lives would be enriched for the changes she was making.

But that didn’t stop me from feeling lonely now and then.

I parked in the garage beside the barn, comforted despite these thoughts by simply being here, and crossed the driveway to the house in the bright glare of floodlights triggered by my arrival. Gail had acquired an understandable mania for security, rigging the place with lights, shutters, an alarm system, and deadbolts.

Sadly, even in rural Vermont, this degree of self-protectiveness was looking only slightly ahead of its time. The first stop off the interstate from the overpopulated south, Brattleboro, in many people’s opinion, had slid from being gateway of Vermont to doormat in a scant thirty years. With its uninspiring but steady economy, its generous welfare checks, and its plethora of services for the poor, the town was a natural for those fleeing urban blight. We had seen an alarming growth in homeless people, youth gang members, domestic violence, and petty crime. Also, where just fifteen years ago the police department had dealt with a single murder every few years, not a twelve-month period went by now without at least one homicide and several near misses.

Gail’s behavior might have aroused my skepticism once, regardless of her reasons. Now it never occurred to me to challenge it.

I used two keys to enter by the kitchen door, and saw that she’d fixed a sandwich on a plate for me, with a note reading, “Come up and visit. Am contemplating suicide.”

I peeled back the top slab of whole wheat, unsure of what lay underneath. I recognized fake bacon strips made from soy, and some lettuce and tomato, but there was another item that escaped me. Too hungry to care, I sank my teeth into it and retrieved a Coke from the fridge. Food was not an area where Gail and I shared much common ground. She was a lacto-vegetarian, and I was someone who ate anything that had stopped moving. But since I didn’t care in any case, I ended up eating well without having to think about it, while still enjoying the occasional Spam and pickle sandwich.

I balanced the soda can on the plate and walked through the darkened house, drawn by the gentle glow from the stairwell. As I rose into the warmth and light of the second floor, I could hear a man’s muffled voice emanating from Gail’s cluster of rooms at the far end of the hall, beyond our master bedroom.

This was where her choice of homes had been especially inspired. We each had three rooms at either end of the house that we could manage as we wished. She’d turned hers into exercise, meditation, and study areas. I’d made all of mine a Salvation Army warehouse.

I knocked at her office door and entered. Gail was sitting in a large armchair, her feet up on an ottoman. A portable computer was in her lap, and an instructional video was running on a small TV set placed on a chair before her. A professorial type droned in front of a blackboard, pausing occasionally as the camera cut to a piece of text. Gail was fast asleep.

I hesitated, my hand still on the doorknob, knowing she both needed the rest and would want to be woken up.

She solved my dilemma by opening one sleepy eye and giving me a small smile. “Caught me.”

I tilted my head toward the TV. “Must be the company you keep.”

She located the remote by her thigh and froze the professor with his mouth open.

I leaned over and kissed her. “Thanks for the sandwich.”

“How did it go at the paper?” she asked, arching her back and stretching her arms high above her.

“All right. Ted was his affable self. Katz thought we weren’t giving him all we had.”

“Which we weren’t.”

“Who’s your friend?” I asked of the immobilized video.

“That’s the bar-review course I told you about. I either do it by mail using these things, or attend classes in Burlington or South Royalton. Not much of a choice. It’s not that bad-you just caught me at a bad time.”

“You going to call it quits?”

She gave a weak laugh. “Fat chance. I think I’ll give Mr. Energy here a rest, but I’ve still got a stack of discoveries to process on the Miller case from Bellows Falls. The defense is already claiming we’re stalling.”

I bent forward and kissed her again. Her lips parted under mine and her fingers slid up the inside of my leg. My plate still precariously balanced in one hand, I slipped the other under her sweatshirt.

She moaned softly and broke off, her face flushed and her eyes bright. She was pulling at my belt. “I think I’ve come up with a way to recharge my batteries.”

There was a large skylight over our bed, tonight a frost-rimmed window onto a glittering spray of bright, hard stars. It struck me as a meaningful asymmetry-this framed picture of merciless cold and Gail’s warm naked body stretched out on top of mine. I enclosed her in a gentle bear hug, appreciative of how the day had balanced out.

It was the wrong move to have made. Her head rose sleepily from the crook of my neck, and she peered at me through a veil of long brown hair. “Better hit the books.”

I knew not to argue. I massaged her shoulders briefly, slid my hands down her back, and let her go. Reluctantly, she slid off me and sat on the edge of the bed, using the moonlight from above to select her clothes from among the trail of entangled pants, shirts, and underwear stretching toward the door.

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” she asked, crossing the room and dressing, piece by piece.

“Resume the canvass and the search, get a preliminary list of all the hairdressers that use permanent purple dye, work the computer in detail-get the groundwork ready for when we hear back from the lab.”

She stopped abruptly, halfway into her pants. “Damn, I forgot. I got a lead on that symbol you described. I ran it by a friend of mine who’s seriously into astrology and the occult. She said your sketch looked like the symbol for the Church of Satan in San Francisco.”

“Great,” I murmured dourly.

“Yeah. I thought you’d like that. Supposedly, it appears in something called the Satanic Bible. I don’t know where you’d get a copy of that, or even if you’d want to. She said it was a popular symbol among teenagers-a tattoo and graffiti favorite-so your victim may have known nothing about the church.”

She sat back down on the bed and pulled on a pair of thick woolen socks before leaning over and giving me one last kiss. “That useful?”

“Could be. I’ll let you know next time we pass in the night.”

She gave me a dirty laugh. “See you in twenty-four hours then,” and she vanished out the door.

Now the skylight merely looked cold, and I gathered the covers around me. No matter how trivial or common that Satanic symbol might be, I knew it meant trouble. As soon as the press and the politicians got hold of it, the heat on this case would increase-along with the troubles we’d have conducting a nice, quiet investigation.