The Ragman's memory

17

By mid-morning Mary Wallis had still not been found. The last sighting of her had been around suppertime the previous evening, when she’d dropped off some papers at a friend’s house, saying she was heading home. Her neighbors hadn’t noticed the open door, since it was screened by a trellis from all but a straight-on view from the curb. And Mary was known as a night owl, so nobody had thought twice about seeing her lights on when the last of them went to bed. No unusual traffic had been noticed on the street until we’d arrived.

Aside from Shawna Davis’s purse, nothing of note was discovered either in or outside the house-no footprints, no scratches on windowsills or door locks, so signs of blood or violence, no significant notes or letters. There was nothing to tell us that this wasn’t merely the empty domicile of a woman living alone.

J.P. collected his usual array of samples to send off to the state police lab in Waterbury, with no great hopes for any of it, but he used an iodine fuming gun to momentarily reveal and photograph the prints on the smooth pale exterior of Shawna’s wallet. The process didn’t alter the evidence any-the prints briefly appeared as clear purple wheels, revealed as if by magic by the iodine fumes blown across their surface, and then slowly faded back to obscurity. It was a shortcut allowing an instant sneak preview of what the lab would report in a week or so. In this case, it merely confirmed what the discovery had suggested-Mary Wallis’s fingerprints were among those on the wallet. An officer was dispatched to North Adams immediately to collect any items of Shawna’s guaranteed to have her prints on them so we could compare them to the others on the wallet. But we weren’t holding our breath for any surprises.

I, however, had more than just this scanty evidence to ponder. I hadn’t forgotten how frightened Mary had seemed when she’d last opened her door to me, nor could I dismiss the impression I’d been left with of a woman in real need of help, and yet incapable of asking for it. I was all but convinced that some terrible pressure had been put on her recently, above and beyond her grief over Shawna’s death, and that we were now facing its end result.

Willy Kunkle, never much for similar reflection, gave voice only to the obvious implications. “She stole the money, whacked the kid, and then took off when she thought we were on to her.”

Sammie shook her head disgustedly. “Jesus. She’s going to kill a girl for a thousand bucks and then never spend it? And when she makes her big escape, she doesn’t take her coat or her car and leaves the door wide open? Give me a break.”

All the team members, along with Tony and Harriet Fritter, were in the squad room by now, sitting in scattered chairs or parked on the edges of tables.

“You saying Wallis had all her screws down tight?” Willy shot back. “I don’t think so. The girl spends a few days with her, maybe Wallis gets the hots, makes a pass, gets rejected, and bam. She doesn’t steal the dough-she just stashes it, like she did the body.”

“What about the phenobarbital?” Tony asked quietly.

Willy shrugged and looked at Tyler, who admitted, “I checked every pharmacist we know she did business with. She never had a prescription for the stuff. And the three doctors I found who ever treated her said they never gave her any. It’s not the most difficult med in the world to get hold of, though.”

“But why use it at all?” Sammie persisted. “Why keep Shawna sedated for a week before killing her?”

Willy waved his hand dismissively at her. “Maybe she wanted to pick her moment and had to keep the body alive so it wouldn’t rot. Pretty slick plan, when you think about it. And the Satanist blind alley was a nice extra touch-pointed the finger at somebody else and meant she didn’t have to bury the body deep, which a small woman like Wallis would’ve had trouble doing anyhow.”

Sammie turned to me. “You interviewed her last. You didn’t think she’d killed Shawna then.”

“I also didn’t think she knew anything about the money,” I said. “But I was going on impressions. It’s hard to argue with what we’ve got now. And she did drop out of the political scene at the exact time Shawna died.”

“Because she was heartbroken.”

Willy laughed. “Oh, come on. She’s fighting one of the biggest political battles of her career, and she dumps it because some teenybopper jilts her? Get real, Sam-it makes more sense she knocked her off and then lost her grip. Look at the woman’s background-she’s a prime candidate for a nuthouse.”

Sammie fell silent, temporarily beaten down.

I gave her a little support. “That’s scenario A. But it doesn’t take anything else into account-Milo’s death and the irregularities surrounding the convention center project. In a town this size, we’d be idiots to assume that two deaths, a disappearance, and the possibility of a corrupt real estate deal are all coincidences. It would be safer to think they might be related, and work from there.”

Everyone looked at Willy for a reaction, but he kept his peace, scowling. He’d often enough said that anyone who relied on coincidence was a jerk.

I tried to dissipate the tension. “So let’s find out if there are any connections. Right now, both the Shawna and Milo death investigations are in a holding pattern, pending developments. The Wallis case is wide open and currently gets top priority, although for the moment, with our own Patrol and all surrounding law enforcement agencies chipping in, we’re doing pretty much all we can. The convention center project’s looking a little more promising. Ron and Justin Willette came up with a few names we need to look at more closely. Sammie will hand out assignments. We’re looking for lifestyle changes or signs of sudden wealth, during the year and a half the project was getting permits. I want to see if we can get enough on these people so a judge will cut us subpoenas for their bank records. But remember to be subtle about it-for our sake. We don’t want a lot of thin-skinned bureaucrats screaming to the media and giving whoever’s responsible enough time to destroy evidence.”

“Is NeverTom on Ron and Willette’s list?” Willy asked contentiously.

“No. But if he is involved, he’s probably the one pulling the strings,” Sammie answered. “First, we need to look at people like Eddy Knox, the zoning administrator, and Ned Fallows and Rob Garfield of the ZBA, and Lou Adelman. They may be the small fry, but if they’re crooked and we can get to them, we can use them to lead us to the top guys.”

“Don’t think we won’t look into the Chamberses, Willy,” I added. “But we need to take the time to do this right, by the numbers. If we’re right about all these cases being interconnected, then we’ll be doing a lot more than digging up dirt on a few bigwigs. We might be saving Mary Wallis’s life.”

Shortly afterward, in my office, I dialed the state police in St. Johnsbury and asked for Lieutenant Mel Hamilton, the barracks commander. Several years ago, I’d worked with the Essex County SA’s office and had coordinated with Hamilton on a case. We’d become pretty friendly and had kept in touch over the years.

“Hi, Joe. What’s up?” he asked.

“You don’t follow the news?”

He laughed. “Well, I figured it’d been twenty-four hours already-time to add an extraterrestrial sighting to your list, or maybe a tidal wave. Is there any truth to that Satanism stuff?”

“Maybe-it’s probably a smoke screen. Unfortunately, smoke is all I’ve got right now.”

“Which is why you’re calling.”

“I need a favor. Could you have someone pick up a man named Ned Fallows? Lives in a log cabin two miles east of Lunenburg, on the dirt road crossing Turner Brook. I want to talk to him, and he has no phone. Something’s come up down here I want him to explain.”

“This a bad boy?”

“He’s a seventy-year-old retired town planning commissioner who got his hands dirty. I was up there last night, but he wouldn’t fess up. I’m hoping I just found the right piece of persuasion.”

“Okay. I’ll put it on the radio.”

“Thanks. Better tell ’em to go slow and polite-he’s got a Rottweiler. Quiet but big.”

“Great.”

I’d barely hung up when Harriet buzzed me on the intercom. “Line one, Joe-Conrad Blessing at Guillaume’s Funeral Home.”

Surprised, I picked the phone back up. “Conrad. How can I help you?”

Blessing’s voice was hesitant, seemingly embarrassed. “I hate to bother you. But I think I found something you ought to see.”

“Something to do with Milo?”

“Oh, no. I’m afraid it’s someone else. We had a customer delivered from the Skyview Nursing Home-an elderly woman who died last night. She has a death certificate listing natural causes, but… I suppose this is crazy. I shouldn’t have called.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be right over.”

I grabbed my coat and headed for the hallway, calling out to Tyler, “J.P., sounds like I’ll need you on this one. I’ll be at Guillaume’s,” I told Harriet. “I’m expecting a call from upstate-the VSP. If it comes in, get the number and call me at Guillaume’s. Tell them not to leave, okay?”

She smiled and waved me out.

Conrad Blessing opened the front door to the funeral home as we reached the top porch step. “I hope this is worth your while. It’s just that… Well, I think there’s something strange, and considering how things turned out with Mr. Douglas… ”

“Why don’t you show us what you’ve got?” I suggested. Relieved, he led us down the familiar back hallway and through a wide, locked door into a brightly lit room with a gleaming metal table in its center. The body of a dead woman lay there, dressed in a flowered nightgown.

“This is Mrs. Adele Sawyer, eighty-three years old. Apparently, she had a bad heart-you can see that from the swollen ankles-and I guess the Skyview’s attending physician, Dr. Riley, figured nature had taken its course.”

We approached the table, and J.P., already having donned a pair of latex gloves, began to gently examine the dead woman’s head, face, and neck. “I think I see what caught your eye,” he said a minute later.

Blessing moved to the body’s other side and pointed at Mrs. Sawyer’s generously proportioned neck. “It seems bruised, doesn’t it? I thought at first it might be dirt. Some of the older people have a hard time washing themselves, assuming they can move at all, but it’s not, is it?”

Tyler moved to the woman’s mouth and peeled back both her upper and lower lips, revealing the pale gums underneath. “No, it’s not,” he said. “See this piece of tissue stretching between the gum and the inside of the lip, right at the mouth’s midline? It’s called the frenulum. It’s easily bruised when pressure is placed against the lips.”

He paused, looking more carefully, prompting Blessing to ask, “What does that mean?”

Tyler straightened and removed his gloves with a snap. “I’m no pathologist, but from what I see, this woman’s mouth was covered with one hand, to stifle any noise, while she was strangled to death with the other.”

The Skyview Nursing Home had no view to speak of, the local joke being that the name was literally true, no more and no less. It was located in West Brattleboro, on a street off of Route 9, the town’s main thoroughfare, in a large, scooped-out natural depression at the foot of a steeply rising hill. On its other three sides were low-cost, single housing units, mostly painted gray, collectively labeled Skyview Village.

Among homes for the elderly, the Skyview occupied a genteel middle ground-it was neither a clinically supervised resort for the independent rich, nor a medical repository for the abandoned near dead. Several of its patients had Alzheimer’s or a different chronic disorder, while others had simply grown unable to live on their own. Virtually all of them were supported by some form of government assistance. They came to the Skyview to dwindle away in the care of a pleasant, competent staff, which in turn was supported by an outside group of physicians who dropped by for periodic visits. Death here was an accepted part of life and until now a matter of evolutionary routine.

Which made our arrival the cause of some excitement.

I had called from the funeral home to have a patrolman guard Mrs. Sawyer’s room and possessions, pending a judge’s signature on the bottom of a search warrant. By the time I got to the Skyview with Sammie, Ron, and J.P., the lobby and hallways were filled with curious staffers and residents.

On the second floor, a gray-haired woman wearing a white uniform and a very worried expression waited with our patrolman. “Are you in charge?” she asked me as we approached, each of us carrying some of J.P.’s cumbersome equipment.

“Yes-Lieutenant Joe Gunther. Brattleboro PD.” I stuck out my hand as the others filed by me into the room.

She gave my fingers a distracted shake. “Janet Kohler-I’m the head nurse here. What is going on? You really think Mrs. Sawyer was murdered?”

Impressed once again by Brattleboro’s amazingly efficient grapevine, I gave her a cautionary shrug. “Right now, we haven’t the slightest idea. Were you on duty when she died?”

“No-Sue Pasco covers nights, but I have her report.”

“Good. I’d like to see that. I’d also appreciate it if you could call her and ask her to come here as soon as possible. I want to talk to her personally.”

Janet Kohler hesitated a moment. “What does this mean… If she was murdered?”

I gave her a supportive smile. “Let’s take it a step at a time. By the way, I gather Dr. Riley is the attending physician. Has he been associated with the home for long?”

“A few years-seven or eight, I guess. I don’t remember right off.”

“You two get along?”

She looked surprised and then guarded. “Of course.”

I smiled and patted her forearm. “Sorry-that was a dumb thing to ask. I just wanted to know what kind of a guy he was.”

Her face relaxed. “Well, you know doctors. But he’s nice enough, and he’s always done good work here. We never had any complaints.”

“Okay. I’m going to join my crew, so if you could get Ms. Pasco’s report and make that call to her, I’d appreciate it. It might also be a good idea to keep any rumors to a dull roar for the time being. No point getting everyone all excited.”

She nodded and left. I paused for a moment, watching the patients and a few staffers still standing in the corridor, murmuring among themselves. For a split second, I visualized the same hallway dark and deserted, in the middle of the night, occupied only by someone with murderous intent. It was a sad and sinister image to superimpose on a place already so saturated by decline and death. But despite what I’d told Nurse Kohler about the murder needing to be confirmed, I had no doubts about what had happened. The big question was how to put a face on the “someone” responsible.

And that wasn’t our only problem. For a department used to handling one or two homicides a year, this one was going to stretch our resources to the limit. That alone was worth a prayer that we would reach the bottom of it fast and neatly.

Tyler already had the others at work on different aspects of the room-Ron checking the floor, furniture, and curtains, and Sammie the contents of the drawers and the one closet. J.P. himself was bent over the night table, dusting it for fingerprints.

“Anything yet?” I asked him.

He didn’t say what I wanted to hear. “Nothing obvious. They stripped the bed. That was too bad. But nothing else seems to have been messed with. Surprising, in a way. Normally, the next of kin clean out a place like this pretty fast.”

It was an interesting point, and something else to ask Janet Kohler when she returned. In the meantime, I was more hindrance than help here, so I left the room and went next door-to the room sharing the wall against which Mrs. Sawyer had kept her bed.

The door was open, so I knocked on the frame and stuck my head in. A bird-like woman, thin, small, and with an odd, quick way of moving her head, looked up from the book she was reading in an armchair.

“Yes?” she asked, smiling, marking her place with a gnarled finger.

“Hi-not interested in what’s going on next door?”

“Oh, I already know about that-Adele was murdered in her bed last night.”

I walked farther into the room, looking around. It was bright and cheerful, something I’d noticed Adele Sawyer’s was not, and the walls were decorated with a dozen small, energetic oil paintings of rural scenes. The slight but pervading odor of disinfectant-over-human-waste that lingered throughout the rest of the building seemed thwarted by the room’s atmosphere. “You know that for a fact?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“Did you hear anything last night-through the wall?”

“No. I sleep like a log.”

I introduced myself and we shook hands. Her name was Esther Pallini, and her hand felt like a small bundle of brittle sticks wrapped in smooth, warm cloth. Her eyes glittered with friendly enthusiasm. “What you do must be very exciting.”

I sat on the edge of her bed. “Not really. Paperwork and phone calls, mostly.” I tilted my head toward the shared wall. “Were you and Adele friendly?”

She shook her head vigorously. “She was a complainer-I don’t like that.”

“How was her health? Did she get around easily?”

“For a woman her size, she was lucky she could move at all. She was an encyclopedia of every pain known to God, but I think her heart may have been the real problem-she had those fat ankles heart patients get.” With forgivable vanity, she tapped her own trim, tiny feet briefly on the floor.

“Did other people like her?”

Her eyes widened and she smiled broadly. “Do I think one of them could have killed her? What a wonderful idea. I suppose so. Most people think we just sit around in a place like this and turn into vegetables. But there’s lots of intrigue that goes on.” She suddenly lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “And sex. People are jumping into bed with each other all the time. Causes jealousies sometimes.”

I raised my eyebrows and matched her conspiratorial tone. “Did Adele fool around?”

Esther Pallini looked utterly startled and burst out laughing. “What a picture. I couldn’t even imagine it-oh, think of the poor man. No, no. Adele just liked to talk about it. She usually got her facts mixed up, of course, getting everyone riled.”

“Upset a few people?”

Only then did my spirited informant become pensive. “A few. But to the point of murder? I don’t really care that she’s dead-we’re used to that here. But I can’t imagine one person killing another.” She gestured to a radio situated on the windowsill. “You hear about it all the time… I don’t know if it could happen here-I mean… That one of us could actually do it.”

I laid my hand on hers. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. We don’t know what happened yet.”

“Lieutenant Gunther?”

I turned at the voice coming from the doorway. Janet Kohler stood on the threshold, holding a file in her hand. “Be right there,” I said.

I returned to Esther Pallini. “Thanks for talking with me. I’ll see you again later. And don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Thank you. I’ll be fine.”

I stepped out into the corridor with Janet Kohler.

“I called Sue Pasco. She’s coming right over. I also called Dr. Riley… Was that okay?”

“Sure,” I said, although I’d been planning to do that later, after I’d gathered a few more facts. “Is there somewhere we can talk more privately?”

She led me down the hall to a small, cluttered office and closed the door behind us. I gestured for her to sit at the desk while I chose a small bench lining the wall. “Did anyone here contact the next of kin?”

The head nurse looked vaguely insulted. “Of course. Once the doctor’s signed the certificate, that’s the next thing we do. Sometimes the family likes to visit the body in the room, sometimes not, but it’s our policy to give them the opportunity.”

“What time did she die?”

She consulted the file she was still holding in her hand. “Dr. Riley declared her dead at 2:08 this morning. I have no way of knowing when she actually died.”

“Right,” I muttered, “but there was no sense of alarm about her death?”

“None at all. She was a heavily medicated congestive heart patient, with both COPD-that’s bad lungs-and diabetes complications, and she was grossly overweight. We’d all been expecting her to die for months.”

“But she could still get around.”

“Oh sure-lots of people can, right up to the end. She wasn’t fast on her feet-don’t get me wrong-but she did all right.”

“I gather she wasn’t too popular.”

Janet Kohler looked at me steadily for a moment, as if weighing her options. I was pleased with her final choice. “She was a bitch.”

“Thanks for the honesty. Did she have any enemies, or people who disliked her more than others?”

“I’d say the second more than the first.”

“I’ll have someone get those names from you. How about the home in general-is it a good place to work?”

The tension in her face eased a bit. “I love it here. For the most part, the residents are wonderful, the staff knows its stuff, and management is very supportive. We spend a lot of time coming up with things the residents can do together, and it helps everyone stay young, at least mentally. I used to work in places-some of them pretty famous-where the residents might as well have been animals. All cooped up, with nothing to challenge their minds. We’re very interactive here. It doesn’t cost any more, and when you think of it, it helps us, too-makes the job more interesting and rewarding. You were talking with Mrs. Pallini-how did she seem to you?”

“Very content,” I admitted. “Speaking of her, she implied the patients have pretty free rein to wander.”

Kohler smiled broadly. “She tell you about the hanky-panky? It’s absolutely true. Some of that goes on. As for the more innocent wandering, we do have people that bear watching-the Alzheimers tend to roam, especially at night, and a few others need to be restricted to a single area of the home. It’s a passive kind of restraint, though-just so they don’t hurt themselves, or somebody else by mistake. Except that we keep a sharp eye peeled for any health changes, all the rest are pretty much free to come and go as they please. The only restriction we impose is that no one spontaneously leave the building.”

“You do bed checks, then?”

“Yes, and we monitor the building’s exits and access to some of the home’s special areas. The residents try to pull a fast one now and then, sneaking around for some late-night high-jinks, but we usually know what’s going on-we just pretend we don’t.”

“Is there a fair amount of activity in the halls after hours?”

“No. I think we play it up slightly because most of them get such a kick out of it-keeps them young in spirit, anyway. To be honest, we’re not talking about more than a handful.”

“You said the Alzheimer’s patients wandered at night.”

“Oh-I see what you mean. Yeah-that happens sometimes-it’s fairly typical of the disease, but… You’re not thinking one of them did this, are you?”

I smiled to reassure her. “No, no. I’m not thinking much of anything right now. We’ve got a lot more digging to do still. I am curious, though, about Mrs. Sawyer’s next of kin. Who do you have listed?”

She opened the file and began leafing through it. “It’s funny-I’ve never met them. As far as I know, she’s never had an outside visitor-family or otherwise… Here it is. Annabelle Tuttle-Spruce Street. You’d think she would drop by every once in a while-must be all of a ten-minute drive.” She handed me the file so I could copy the address.

There was a knock on the door as I was finishing up, and the patrolman who’d been guarding Mrs. Sawyer’s door poked his head in. “Phone call, Lieutenant-from St. Johnsbury. I think it’s line three.”

“Thanks-be right there.” I turned to Janet Kohler. “I guess that’s it for the moment. If you’d like to get back to what you were doing, go ahead. I appreciate all your help.”

Kohler rose and crossed to the door. “Happy to do so, Lieutenant. I’ll bring Sue and the doctor to see you as soon as they get here. Shouldn’t be too much longer.” She pointed at the phone on the desk. “Feel free to use that.”

I waited until the door had closed behind her before picking up the receiver. “This is Joe Gunther.”

“Hi Joe, it’s Mel. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. We had to hunt around for your friend. We ended up just taking him to the barracks-easier than finding a pay phone. I’ll put him on. Good luck, buddy.”

“Thanks.”

A few moments later, Ned Fallows’s voice came on the line, sounding cautious. “Joe? What’s the problem?”

I decided to play it hard-nosed, hoping that might get me better mileage than the approach I’d used last night, but also because I was tired and angry and no longer interested in games. “Things have changed down here, Ned. I want some straight answers.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mary Wallis disappeared last night. It’s looking like an abduction, and it’s anyone’s guess if she’s still alive. Since the building project’s the one common denominator we keep coming across, I need to know who put the squeeze on you. Now.”

“It’s not connected, Joe.”

“I’ll decide that. You talk to me now, or I’ll charge you in connection with her murder if Mary Wallis turns up dead.”

After a long, deliberating pause, he said in a barely audible whisper, “Tom Chambers-NeverTom.”

“Why?”

“He’d discovered something I’d done years before-a mistake. I thought I’d buried it, but he’d known all along. He’d just put it in his ‘rainy day fund,’ as he called it, for future use.”

“What was the deal? Vote his way just this once, and he’d let you off?”

“The way things worked out, he got his money’s worth.”

I couldn’t argue the point, although I was hoping the State’s Attorney might eventually.

His next comment, however, made that a more complicated issue. “I won’t repeat what I just said, though, no matter how many subpoenas you hit me with. Nor will I answer any more questions. I only told you this much so you’d let it be.”

I opened my mouth to give him hell but then realized the futility of it. The Ned Fallows of old had been drowned by self-pity and perhaps self-loathing. I’d gotten what I wanted for the moment. Finding him later wasn’t going to be a problem.

“We’ll see, Ned. I’ll do what has to be done. But if Mary Wallis suffers because of something you’re not telling me right now, you will bear the consequences.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he replied, his voice emotionless. “I’m way ahead of you.”

The line went dead.