The Ragman's memory

6

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.

She smiled wistfully. “Yeah. Can’t seem to concentrate. And I don’t like the bullshit. Never liked taking orders. I quit a lot.”

“And drink?”

A murmur of the old gleam returned to her eyes. “A lot.”

“You doing anything about it?”

“No.”

“You want to?”

She stretched in her seat-arching her back like an old cat. She closed her eyes briefly. “Who wouldn’t want to change this?”

It was an ambition I thought Wilma Davis had probably lost long ago. “I can help.”

She looked at me. “How? Get me into AA? Tried it. Don’t like all the God stuff.”

“Doesn’t have to be AA. I was thinking more of a one-on-one arrangement. Have someone come by to talk with you-figure out a game plan.” I cut off her darkening scowl by adding, “You don’t have to do anything about it. Just listen and see if it sounds right.”

“I let ’em in the door, I can’t get rid of ’em.”

I rose, bent forward, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She didn’t smell like roses, but interrupting her train of thought seemed worth it.

Her head straightened and her eyes fully focused for the first time. “What was that? You want to get laid?”

I laughed. “No, but I carry a mental snapshot of you in my mind-since the first time we met.”

She frowned for a moment, thinking back, and then smiled. “I flash you?”

“You did. It was a sore temptation.”

“I remember. You brought me a coffeemaker after that asshole beat me up.” She paused. “I offered you a freebie… Boy Scout.”

She looked off into the distance for a while. I kept quiet, letting her memories fill her mind-I hoped for the better.

Finally, she brought her attention back to me, laying her hands flat against the front of her bathrobe. “Okay, send me your head shrinker. I’ll talk to her… She better be good, though.”

“Thanks.”

Without moving a muscle, she seemed to gather herself together then. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

I pulled out the photograph Wilma Davis had given me and showed it to her. “When you were at Clipper’s, you worked on this girl-orange and purple dye job, shaved one side, left the other side long.”

She studied the picture carefully. “Yeah-Shawna.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “That was a long time ago.”

“She was special. I wouldn’t forget her. We talked. It was like seeing myself, a lot of years ago. The backgrounds weren’t exactly the same-but I knew where she was headed.” She waved the picture in her hand. “I guess I was right, huh?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Jesus. I didn’t even give her a decent cut. How’d she end up?”

I doubted Susan had seen a newspaper or listened to the news in months. “We’re not sure. We only found the remains. What made you think she was in trouble?”

She shook her head. “A lamb to slaughter. You know the type.”

“But nothing specific?”

A crease appeared between her eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Joe, what do I know? We talked. We never met again. End of story.”

“She didn’t mention anyone by name?” I persisted. “Where she was living? Who she was seeing?”

She surprised me again. “Mother Gert’s-at least we talked about it.”

Mother Gert’s was the street name given to the William Stanchion Home, a privately funded shelter for the temporarily homeless. “She was staying there?”

“Either staying there or planning to. I might’ve told her about it-I don’t remember. I cut her hair, said a few things, and she unloaded on me like I was a bartender. She talked about where she grew up, her mom, her friends. She was on her own, blowing her last bucks on me, changing her look. ’Course, even there, I screwed her up-not that she complained. She even tipped me.”

“But she didn’t refer to anyone local?”

She rolled her eyes. “No-nobody local-least nobody I remember. I think that’s why Gert’s came up.”

I stood up. “Okay, Susan. I appreciate it.”

I hesitated, about to give her shoulder a squeeze. From that angle, she looked diminished again, like someone dropped from an enormous height.

But she stopped me cold, reading me like an old pro. “Don’t push your luck. I’ll see whoever you send over, but it could be I’ll just throw her out. Make sure they know that.”

I nodded and crossed to the door. “I will. Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah.”

Gert was Gertrude Simmons, a lapsed Catholic nun who had owned and operated her oddly named shelter since the sixties. William Stanchion, she’d once told me, had been an early financial backer-one of the few people from her previous life that hadn’t scorned her after she’d left the Church. As far as she knew, he’d never been to New England, much less Brattleboro, but to this day, her feelings for him made her the only person never to refer to the William Stanchion Home as Mother Gert’s.

The building was a statuesque Greek Revival mansion on Western Avenue, the heavily traveled umbilical cord tying Brattleboro to West Brattleboro, but the house was set up and away from the road on a tree-lined embankment that offered a sense of privacy and retreat. Sammie and I drove directly there from Susan’s in silence-I lost in thought and Sammie having the sensitivity to leave me there.

The official entrance was to the back, where the original home had no doubt once received horse-drawn deliveries. The trade-off for the building’s survival beyond those days had been the carving up of its once splendid but impractical interior into a rabbit warren of offices, dorm rooms, and meeting areas-all of which had doomed the grandiose official entrance hall. It was a sacrifice part of me mourned every time I visited and saw, either hidden under the paintwork or almost covered by later remodeling, a glimpse of the original hardwood, high-ceilinged, stained-glass splendor.

It was not a subject I ever broached with Gert, however. A short, no-nonsense pragmatist, who nevertheless gave both of us the customary hug she offered all comers, Gertrude Simmons was not one to pine over past glories. If queried, I had no doubt she would have acerbically reminded me how the first owners of this house had probably treated those they’d deemed their social inferiors.

She led us into an office the size of a small bathroom and offered us the one guest chair, which I forced a reluctant Sammie to take. I closed the door behind us and leaned against its frame.

“Two of you,” Gert said, perching on an ancient tilt-back that caused her feet to swing free of the floor. “This must be big.”

“Actually,” I answered, “we’re not sure what we’re chasing.”

“Except that it led you here.”

“Maybe.” I pulled the picture from my pocket again and gave it to her. “Ring a bell?”

She looked at it and handed it back, poker-faced. “Why?”

The response was typical and expected. Maintaining the confidentiality of her many skittish guests had become one of the cornerstones of her success in this business-something they’d learned to believe in, and we’d learned to respect.

“No strings, Gert. You hear about the bits of skeleton we found? We think it’s her.”

Her expression saddened, and her response was disappointing. “I’m sorry, then. It doesn’t ring a bell. Do you have a name?”

“Shawna Davis,” Sammie said.

Gert climbed out of her chair and moved me over so she could get into a filing cabinet by the door. “Do you have any idea when she might have been here?”

Again, it was Sammie who answered. “April or May of last year, give or take.”

“Close enough,” Gert said, half to herself, and riffled through a tightly packed wad of files, eventually pulling one free from near the back. She brought it with her to her seat and opened it there, where I couldn’t see over her shoulder.

After a minute of silently reading, she looked up. “Shawna Davis. Stayed one night only-April twenty-third.”

So it looked like Susan Lucey had been the one who suggested Mother Gert’s. “Can you tell us anything about her?” I asked.

She closed the file. “What do you think happened?”

It wasn’t a question I normally answered from someone outside law enforcement-we, too, liked our secrets. With Gert, however, I didn’t hesitate. “She might’ve taken an overdose of sleeping medicine, but I’m starting to think she was murdered. I don’t have anything concrete to base that on, though.”

“Are you looking at anyone in particular?”

“We’re not looking at anyone period,” Sammie answered. “This thing’s heading nowhere unless you can give us something.”

Gert looked at her sympathetically and gestured with the folder in her hand. “This contains what we call an ‘entrance sheet,’ which everyone is asked to complete. It lists things like name, age, address, family, and all the rest, but it’s voluntary, and she only gave us the first two. It also has an evaluation form that one of our volunteer counselors fills out if he or she is allowed to by the client. Without actually showing you that form, I can tell you it also contains very little. Apparently, Shawna Davis wanted a place to spend the night, and nothing more.”

I tried one last time. “Is there a mention of anyone local, a local address?” Again, Gert shook her head. “I’m sorry, Joe. As far as we know, she came from nowhere and then disappeared.”

I was sitting in Tony Brandt’s office, along with the State’s Attorney and Gail. Gail’s presence surprised me-traditionally, six-month clerks were kept shoveling paperwork. Jack Derby including her was either a sign he liked her, or-more likely to my cynical mind-that as a neophyte SA, he was using her connection to the police department to help smooth his initial contacts with us. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t complaining. The novelty of having her in my professional life was very appealing.

The conversation, however, was not cheerful.

“So what you got is slightly less than zero,” Derby was saying. “A few bones, an identification, and no idea if she was murdered or not. I liked the earlier bum-who-died-of-old-age scenario better.”

“We’ve got that now, too,” Gail murmured, making me wonder what she was alluding to.

Derby ignored her. “What happens now?” he asked Brandt and me. “We better come up with something to tell the newspeople. They’re developing an appetite.”

Tony Brandt leaned back in his chair. “Why not give them everything we’ve done so far? They can write about it till they’re blue in the face, and we might get something from the publicity. We can tell them about Ron going down to Massachusetts to find Shawna’s PKU blood sample, and the lab making a definite match. Might put a slightly better light on it.”

“Should we include the etching on the tooth this time?” Gail asked.

There was a noticeable hesitation in the room. “I don’t think so,” Tony said. “I still want to keep that in reserve, along with the phenobarbital. We’re working this as a homicide, even if we can’t prove it yet.”

Derby nodded in agreement. “You want to use one of those ‘Have you seen this woman?’ approaches, with a phone number in the caption?”

I glanced at Gail. “If rumors are true that the selectmen are already leaning on us, wouldn’t that just turn up the heat? The Reformer’s been handling it like an interesting, low-profile mystery.”

“The rumors are true,” Tony answered. “Which is partly the problem. Between the politicians and the bean counters bitching about overtime, we need some kind of a jump start.” He looked at me closely. “Unless you’ve got some other suggestion.”

Reluctantly, I could only shake my head.

He rose to his feet. “All right, then. Set it up, Joe.”

The tone of Tony’s voice made it clear the debate was over. I saw his point, and knew that what Derby had suggested had worked in the past. Shawna’s fate had become personal to me by now, precisely because no one had paid it much attention when it counted. I felt badly that my best intentions alone hadn’t been enough to reveal what had happened to her.

But such quandaries were a luxury. It was Shawna’s death I had to deal with, not the wreckage of her life, and to solve it I would need all the help I could get.