The Skeleton's knee

5

J.P. Tyler, Willy Kunkle, and Ron Klesczewski found me pacing in front of the cottage a half hour later, boiling over with anger and frustration.

“Where the hell have you guys been?”

Each of them reacted true to form at my outburst. Tyler silently raised his eyebrows, Kunkle smirked and ignored me, and Klesczewski looked worried.

“We left as soon as you called,” he answered.

“Did you see an old guy in a red-and-black-checked wool shirt when you drove up?”

Tyler answered crisply, “Nope. Is this the place you want checked out?”

I began walking quickly toward Coyner’s house. “Yeah, but wait ’til I get back. Ron, come with me. You guys just keep an eye out.”

I heard Kunkle’s “So much for bustin’ our butts to get here” as I led Klesczewski back down the trail.

“What’s goin’ on?” he asked in a tentative voice. Ron Klesczewski was my second-in-command, a senior detective sergeant still in his twenties, serious, sober, and hard-working, a little shy of using his authority, and a man in dire need of a good sense of humor.

Not that I would have appreciated one had he chosen to display it now. “While I was using the phone to get you three up here, somebody ripped off a major piece of evidence.”

“The guy in the wool shirt?”

“His name’s Coyner. He owns this whole place. Did Harriet give you any idea of what’s going on here?”

“Pretty much.”

By the time I got to the edge of the woods, within sight of Coyner’s house, I’d cooled down considerably from my earlier humiliation and had come to realize that I was hunting for a lion with an empty gun. I stopped dead in my tracks, staring at the distant house and breathing heavily, both from exertion and the dregs of my anger.

Klesczewski took a couple of steps farther on and then hesitated. He looked back at me quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m being a horse’s ass-again.”

“You don’t think Coyner took it?”

“I’m sure he took it, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it. I have no proof, so I can get no warrant. He could have that damn thing right behind his front door, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Unless he invites us in.”

I smiled at the thought. “He might invite us to drop dead, but that’s about it.”

We both stood there in silence for a moment, with nothing much to weigh. I finally shrugged. “What the hell; we’re here. We might as well knock.”

I resumed my course, slower and calmer now, thinking more about what the search of Fuller’s house might reveal than about the chances of Fred Coyner undergoing a sudden personality change. If we were lucky during the search, we might even get something to pin Coyner to the theft of the chart.

We walked up to his front door, and I pounded on it with my fist, having fruitlessly looked for a bell. There was a pause; I thought I heard something move within the house.

“There he is,” Ron muttered.

At a side window, the curtains moved slightly, revealing Fred Coyner’s impassive, creased face. He looked at us without expression for several seconds, and then the curtain fell back into place. We could hear footsteps retreating slowly away from the door.

We waited a half-minute more, until I finally shrugged and turned my back. “Okay, he screwed us. Off to plan B.”

“Search the other house?” My pace grew stronger as I set my sights ahead, the sharp sting of my earlier embarrassment fading, if not vanishing completely. “That, and have the photographs I took developed. There may be another way around Mr. Coyner.”

Back at the cottage, Tyler was loitering in the garden, looking around generally, his technically oriented mind no doubt intrigued by the effort in Fuller’s work. Willy Kunkle, by contrast, was lying flat on his back near the front door, staring at the clouds overhead with a cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth.

“Jesus,” Ron sighed under his breath as he caught sight of him. Willy Kunkle, the most unique member of our detective squad, had one working arm, a lousy attitude, and a sniper’s eye for other people’s weak spots. He was also one of the best cops I’d ever worked with. When he was inspired, he went after cases like a pit bull after a mailman, ignoring long hours, hard work, and lousy working conditions, all while staying totally sharp to every new wrinkle around him. He had a feel for the overlooked detail and a nose for his fellow humans’ devious ways. But his contemptuous, cynical, and constantly testing attitude gave truth to the cliché that some great cops, given the right spin at the wrong time, had the makings of crooks.

His instincts were as nasty and combative as Ron’s were compassionate and hesitant, an outlook not helped by the crippled left arm he’d lost to a rifle bullet several years ago and which he dealt with by stuffing his shriveled hand in his pants pocket so the arm wouldn’t flop around. That arm was a symbol to him of adversity overcome and of his own tenacity; it was also a symbol to us of how embittered and unbalanced he could become when his occasional self-pity kicked in and dragged him into the depths. To say he was an emotional roller-coaster was to put it lightly, which explained why Ron tended to treat him like unstable dynamite.

The search took the rest of the day. We used a line method, stringing out four abreast and working our way, on hands and knees, across the floor to the kitchen area’s far wall. It was a painstaking effort, involving the occasional use of tweezers and a magnifying lens; transparent sticky tape for lifting hair and soil samples; and tiny Ziploc bags for storing minute particles whose origin only a lab analysis could reveal. As one of us located some item of interest, the rest had to stop where we were and wait, so the integrity of the line would be maintained. Traveling twenty-five feet of open floor took over an hour.

Tyler was in his element. This, rather than working street snitches and following up leads, was his idea of police work at its best. Due to our small staff and the mundane quality of most of our cases, however, Tyler’s forensic expertise was only rarely called upon.

Four long hours later J.P. had a cornucopia of hair, dirt, and fiber samples to keep him busy for days, and I had a headache and nothing more to show for our efforts than what I’d discovered earlier on my own.

I also had nothing linking the chart’s disappearance to Fred Coyner.

I sent my three colleagues back to the office with the evidence, the film from my camera, and the duffel bag full of money from under the kitchen sink, while I remained behind. All sense that this was a paperwork case destined to pass from our hands to some other agency’s had vanished along with the chart on that wall. Its disappearance had served notice that Fuller’s crimes, if he had committed any, might not be as remote in time or distance as we’d imagined.

I made my way back to Coyner’s house. What warmth there’d been was fading with the day, and an autumnal chill ran down my back and numbed my face. As before, Coyner looked impassively out at me following my knock on his front door. This time, however, the door opened.

“What.” It was less a question than a demand, but gently put, as if the old man was resigned to whatever Fuller’s death would bring down upon him.

“I wanted to tell you that our investigation into Abraham Fuller is going to be stepped up. Removing that chart from his wall while I was on the portable phone was illegal, and we’re going to have to pursue it. That also means we’ll be digging into his past and yours, and looking under every rock we come across.”

His face didn’t change, but I sensed a new tension in the man. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I shrugged. He hadn’t invited me in, and while the cold didn’t seem to affect him, I was beginning to shiver, which rarely adds to a cop’s credibility. “Maybe, but we’ll have to figure that out on our own. I think I ought to warn you, though, that cooperating with us might help you in the long run.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even blink.

“Left to our own devices, not knowing exactly what we’re after, we’re going to have to put you under a microscope, and we’ll find out things you wouldn’t believe. Information like that gets hard to control, once it gets out.”

“Look all you want.”

The door shut in my face, quietly but firmly. It was apparent that the connection between Coyner and his tenant would have to be uncovered the hard way-if at all.

By the time I got back to my office, the medical examiner’s courier had dropped off what little information on Abraham Fuller Beverly Hillstrom had been able to gather, which boiled down to a set of fingerprints, some photographs, and a detailed analysis of her physical findings.

Morgue pictures are hardly the most scintillating of art forms, but in this case I looked them over with keen interest. They showed a tall, slim, clean-cut man, well muscled, with strong facial features. Even with his eyes half-closed in death-a cadaver’s typically sleepy drunk appearance-Fuller’s angular nose, his hollow cheeks, and powerful chin all told of a driven intensity.

He had taken on a personality for me by now, still vague and elusive, but tinted with enough unusual character traits to capture my imagination. Homicides are generally uncomplicated affairs-brutal, forthright, displaying little planning or subtlety. Most of the time, the investigator doesn’t have to look far beyond the victim’s immediate circle of acquaintances to find the one with the gun or knife.

But not here. Unless the fingerprint card in my hand had all the answers we needed, this case had the elements of a true mystery.

I carried the card to Harriet Fritter’s desk. “Could you have J.P. classify these and forward them on to the FBI? And is Ron in the building?”

She gestured with a nod of the head. “In the conference room.” The conference room was a dead end beyond the cluster of detectives’ desks and marked the second half of our office space. It held a long table, some blackboards, a few lockers, and a TV–VCR setup. Some of us used it individually for either private interviews or the extra table space. As I walked in, I saw Ron was taking advantage of the latter; the table’s entire surface was covered with the fruits of a paper trail he’d established to nail a local bank embezzler, a case he’d been on for the better part of a month.

“Getting anywhere?”

He looked up and gave a weary smile. “Yeah, but for all the time and effort, I doubt it’s worth it. Prosecuting this guy’s going to cost a whole lot more than what he stole in the first place.”

I nodded at the sheaf of papers still in his hand. “Sorry if this afternoon screwed up your fun here. How much longer before you can hand it over to the State’s Attorney?”

“Not long-a few days. You got something you want me to do?”

I laughed at his eagerness. “Don’t you wish. No, I’ll use people with a little less on their plates. There is one thing, though; in your digging through bank statements and whatnot, have you ever run across someone who knows a lot about currency?”

He frowned and knitted his brows, muttering, “Right, the moldy C notes…” His face then cleared somewhat. “I don’t know the guy personally, but one of the people I’m working with on this case mentioned that one of his colleagues collects money as a hobby. I could give him a call and get a name.”

I thanked him, but he stopped me as I turned to leave. “I’m almost wrapped up here, you know. Just waiting for a few more items to come in the mail. The pressure’s really off of it.”

I smiled at his excess eagerness. There were times when he made me almost as weary as Kunkle did. “I’ll keep that in mind, Ron. Thanks again.”

I stopped by Harriet’s desk on my way back to my corner cubicle and asked her to get a list of all the bookstores-new and used-in the immediate vicinity. I also asked her to locate the two missing members of the detective squad, Martens and DeFlorio, for a quick meeting in my office in one hour.

I then retrieved the roll of film I’d shot that morning, along with the others that J.P. had taken during the search, and headed for the freedom of the street.

The front door of the Municipal Building gives out onto a sweeping view of a busy intersection to the impartial observer, a Gordian knot to the traffic-pattern expert, and a pain in the butt to anyone in a car. I took the steep stone steps down to street level and turned right to walk downtown.

This particular Main Street is fairly rare in the lexicon of American downtowns. Its industrial heyday having peaked at the end of the previous century, Brattleboro didn’t have the money to tear its architectural heart out and rebuild it according to the latest fashions. Businesses came and went, storefronts changed as with the seasons, but the buildings they inhabited remained like ponderous, ancient redwood trees, host to a nonstop stream of temporary inhabitants.

The end result is a quarter-mile stretch of fifty buildings that appear on the National Register of Historic Places-old brick monsters proudly touting their names in embossed granite stonework: Brooks House, Richardson Building, Union Block, and, somewhat incongruously, Amadeus Di Angelis. None of them is particularly graceful, inspiring, or even fanciful. Reflecting the era and the mentality that gave them birth, they are for the most part solid, practical, and businesslike. With the exception of the Brooks House and its Second Empire fifth-floor tower, the heavy, smudged brick and granite buildings standing shoulder-to-shoulder are a perfect reflection of the serious, dogmatic, slightly vainglorious New England industrial spirit.

I headed for Photo 101, a hole-in-the-wall photography store owned by a tall, stooped, skinny chemist named Allen Rogers, whose years of exposure to darkroom fumes and chemicals had stained his hands, affected his eyesight, and damaged his lungs. As the police department didn’t have a darkroom, much to J.P.’s distress, Allen had become our primary film processor.

The store, just opposite the Vermont National Bank, was on the first floor of what looked like a brownstone walk-up. Its front room was narrow and high, its ornamental tin ceiling smudged with ancient leaks from the floor above, and its shelves and counters cluttered with archaic photographic paraphernalia so old and dusty it looked more like a bankrupt museum than a store. The old-fashioned bell above the door tinkled feebly as I entered.

“Be right with you.” The voice came from the gloomy rear of the building, beyond a wall partition decorated with photographs of airbrushed prom-night girls with bouffant hairdos, all of whom were well into middle age by now.

“Take your time, Al. It’s Joe Gunther.”

“Hey, Joe. Come on back.”

I began picking my way carefully toward the disembodied voice. Despite appearances, Allen Rogers made a good living. As a darkroom technician, he was a near genius, capable not only of producing beautiful prints from standard negatives but also of salvaging decent results from negatives so poor that most people would have thrown them out. It was a talent he marketed well.

I reached the partition and edged around its side, entering a back room that was half stock area, lined with freestanding metal shelf units, and half closed-off darkroom, the door of which had a red light burning brightly above it. My eyes instinctively scanned the contents of the shelves as I passed them to approach the darkroom door. The other strength of Allen’s business was that he mostly served the highbrows of his profession; stacked in neat and orderly piles were papers, chemicals, and films I’d never even heard of, reserved for those whose forays into the darkroom were truly artistic. Indeed, Al had once told me that he kept the front part of his shop in such musty chaos to politely discourage weekend snapshooters.

I knocked on the door. “You want me to come in?”

“Sure; I’m just racking some prints.”

I twisted the knob and walked into a brightly lit laboratory as pristine and orderly as an operating room. The shiny steel surfaces of long, deep sinks and circulating equipment contrasted with several looming dark enlargers, the softly glowing eyes of digital timers and thermometers, and the light-absorbing black paint covering the walls and ceiling.

“Never been in here before?” Rogers glanced at me over his shoulder. He was slipping damp oversized prints onto wire mesh racks so they could dry.

“No. Looks like something out of NASA.”

“Well, don’t tell the IRS; I only tell them about the front. What’s on your mind? You usually send J.P. down here.”

“Now I know why he takes so long getting back to the office.”

Allen laughed as he placed his last print in place. “Yeah-he’s got a mind like a vacuum cleaner, always full of questions.”

I pulled the rolls of film out of my pocket and held them out to him.

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“It’s a little special. On this one roll, I photographed a piece of evidence that was stolen immediately afterward-a chart hanging on a wall. This is the only copy I’ve got of it.”

He took the roll in question and held it in his palm, as if he could already see its contents. “Cloak and dagger, huh? Great. When do you want it?”

“In an hour?”

He gave me a quick glance. While our business was both appreciated and occasionally intriguing, the police department was not one of Allen’s big-spending clients; and rush work out of his shop usually cost a fortune. “You just want prints of the chart, right? The rest of it by tomorrow?”

“That would be great.”

He smiled and steered me toward the door. “Okay. I better get cracking. I’ll charge you the standard rate and drop it off at your office on my way home. Show yourself out, okay?” He stopped suddenly.

“By the way, was there a girl with dirty blond hair out front when you walked in?”

“No. Place was empty.”

He shrugged vaguely. “Okay. She must have gone home for the day. Do me a favor and lock the door behind you, will you? Thanks.”

I said I would, shaking my head and smiling at his casualness. Brattleboro was hardly crime-free. In fact, the worsening economy, especially in Massachusetts, just a few miles to the south, had caused a surge in criminal activity. But it hadn’t gotten very sophisticated, nor was it rampant, and attitudes like Allen Rogers’s were only beginning to change.

The light was ebbing as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, dulling the subtle colors in the old masonry walls along the street and transforming the world around me to monochromatic shades of gray and brown. I checked my watch; I had forty minutes before Harriet Fritter would begin getting twitchy.

I was standing where Elliot Street dead-ends into Main, allowing a view up Elliot almost to the central firehouse before the street curves out of sight. It also let me see that the lights were still on at Zigman Realty’s second-floor office partway down the block. I crossed at the loudly buzzing WALK sign-one of the town’s odd and unique conciliatory gestures toward the visually handicapped-and made my way to the narrow door by the side of an upscale pastry shop.

Gail Zigman’s office was located right over the shop, a position imbuing it with the most seductive aroma of any nonbakery in town. Gail-the owner and sole employee-claimed she’d given up working from her home for the convenience of a downtown location. Of course, every time I visited her office, I knew otherwise; it was the smell of fresh bread that had lured her off her hill. Convenience, if there was any of it, had come purely by happenstance.

I knocked on the glass-paneled door and stuck my head in. “Got something with high walls and a moat?”

She was sitting in a huge beanbag chair by the window, framed by the fading light and the drooping leaves of an eight-foot potted plant, reading from a thick manila file. The office was an antique one-room affair with high ceilings, tall sash windows, and ancient, rattling steam heating. She looked over her glasses at me and smiled. “Feeling the need for one?”

A tall, slim, muscular woman, now in her forties, Gail was graced with a dynamic face, both angular and strong, dark, serious eyes, and a complexion molded and tanned by an uncaring exposure to the weather. Most importantly of all, she had in abundance what my mother had always counseled me to look for in my friends: character.

“Not yet. In fact, I’m feeling pretty good.” I closed the door behind me and crossed over to her, bending low to give her a kiss.

I pulled her office chair away from the desk and turned it to face her, settling myself comfortably in it, with my feet propped next to hers on the windowsill. She removed her reading glasses and lay back against the beanbag, a smile on her face. “Oh yeah? Stuck another crowbar in some bureaucrat’s bicycle wheel?”

It was a pointed remark. I had gathered enough evidence against one of the selectmen during a case two months ago to stimulate both his resignation and an indictment, much to Gail’s delight. Still, it had been an uncomfortable time for her, since she, too, was on the board of selectmen.

“Nope, I have myself an old-fashioned mystery.”

I told her of my day’s activities, from Hillstrom’s baffling phone call to my doubts about Coyner and my concerns about the chart’s disappearance. Through it all, she listened carefully, her paperwork resting on her stomach, her long blue-jeaned legs stretched out before her, knowing that I wasn’t just shooting the breeze but indirectly enlisting her help.

This was by no means unusual. We covered different aspects of this municipality-she the political/business side and I the streets and crooks. But in a small town, these arenas often overlapped, so Gail and I had become comfortable exchanging information. We never quoted each other in public, were sensitive to the potential pitfalls of our sharing, and occasionally were able to defuse a few situations when the police department and the selectmen had locked horns.

My appeal to her this time, however, had more to do with the instincts and interests that had brought her to southern Vermont in the first place. Gail had been part of the hippie communes that had surrounded Brattleboro in the 1960s like dolphins crowding around a friendly boat, and although she’d joined the mainstream long since, many of her friends still followed their own unconventional drummers. I was hoping that she, or someone she could suggest, might shed some light on the stolen chart.

She thought a moment after I’d finished my brief saga. “What did the chart look like?”

I held my hands a yard apart. “What there was of it was about this big; the top edge had been torn off neatly, either from a large drawing pad or to remove one part of the document. The chart itself was like a sundial wheel with the center crisscrossed by connecting straight lines of different colors-”

“How many segments was the dial broken into?” she interrupted.

I closed my eyes to concentrate. “Seemed like about six to a side; twelve overall.”

She handed me a pencil and the manila folder from her lap. “Can you scribble one of the symbols on the back of that from memory?”

“I’ll have a photograph soon, so I can show you the whole thing, but I do remember three of them. The first two I already knew: the signs for male and female. The third one was a circle with a dot in the middle.”

She smiled and nodded. “Mars, Venus, and the Sun. That was an astrological chart, Joe. It didn’t have a date or a name anywhere on it?”

I shook my head. “It might have at one point; that may explain the tear. Could you tell anything about it if I showed it to you?”

“Probably not. I could identify most of the symbols, and with enough time, I might be able to give a very general reading using the few books I’ve got, but I think Billie Lucas is the person you want to talk to. She’s been doing them for years and she’s very good. I had lunch with her today, in fact.”

I instinctively demurred. Confiding in Gail was one thing, but the idea of officially consulting an astrologer brought out the skeptic in me.

“I don’t know. I don’t take that stuff too seriously.”

She shrugged. “Can’t hurt to try. If you don’t like what you hear, you can forget it. I’ve had Billie do my chart-yours, too, in fact. It taught me a few things about myself I hadn’t realized.” I was amused at her admission, and curiously touched. “How’d I come out?”

“She said you were one of the most sensible things I’d ever done.” She smiled before forging ahead. “There’s a lot of shading in astrology, of course, a lot of ‘he could be this way, or he could be the other, depending on this or that.’ That’s why some people use charts to let themselves off the hook. But a good reader like Billie might be useful; it could turn out to be like an artist’s sketch-close enough to be handy.

“Besides,” she added pointedly, “it sounds like that chart’s the only real thing you’ve got, and it was the only thing that got stolen. It must have something going for it. You want me to call Billie and set something up?”

I stood up, still not convinced. “Yeah, okay-try to tell her diplomatically that I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, though. I agree I ought to check it out, but I still don’t have much faith in it. It smacks of voodoo and crystal balls.” I checked my watch. “I better run, or Harriet’ll have my head. There is one other thing: Outside of the local food co-ops in town, are there any other health-food wholesalers Fuller might have used for his supplies?”

She thought for a moment. “How varied was the garden?”

“Enough that I sure didn’t recognize much. Some of it was decorative, but it was mostly produce. And the house was filled with the kind of seeds, grains, nuts, and rabbit pellets you people call food.”

She grinned and poked me with her foot. “Did he sell any of it?”

“Coyner did the selling, in exchange for rent; I’m going to have someone look into that end of it.”

“But Coyner wouldn’t tell you where the supplies were bought?”

“Not yet, and he may not; he’s not feeling very friendly right now.”

“Let me call around. I won’t mention names,” she added, anticipating what I was about to say. I kissed her quickly before heading out the door. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“My pleasure. There is a price, though: dinner at my place tonight?”

I made a face. “Can I bring my own food?”

“No.” She laughed and threw a pencil at the door.

I was just about to climb the long set of stone steps leading from Main Street to the Municipal Building when I heard Allen Rogers call me from across the street. “Hey,” he said, waving an oversized envelope out the driver’s window of his car. “How’s this for service?”

“Great, Al. I appreciate it.” I crossed over to him as he backed into a parking space.

“No sweat-I was heading home. By the way, were you alone when you were photographing that chart?”

I looked at him carefully. “Yes. Why?”

He got out of the car and joined me on the sidewalk, an excited smile on his face. “Well, I did the print like you asked, as a close-up of the chart, but the negative included both the chart and the window below it, so I did a full-frame proof first.” He handed me the envelope. “Open it.”

I did so, spreading the contents out on Allen’s car hood. There were three photographs: one of the chart, in high contrast to make it easily legible; one of both the window and the chart above it, in which the exposure had been cut back to favor the latter; and one of just the window, exposed to favor the stronger outside light. In this last picture, badly out of focus and distorted by the window’s cheap glass, was the unmistakable figure of a human being, lurking at the edge of the blurry trees.

“Interesting?” Allen asked, his face beaming.

“Very,” I muttered.

“You know who it is? I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.”

“I think it’s a thief,” I answered. “And maybe worse.”