by John Philpin
It has to do with the way he looks at things, and the questions he asks, Jaycie had said.
“I intend to help,” I said lamely, wanting to avoid discussion of my role in the investigation.
“Jaycie was my friend,” Sara said. “She was your friend, too.”
WHEN I LEFT THE SILO, I EXPECTED TO ENCOUNTER Steve Weld ready to piss and moan, or Stu Gilman prepared to slip into his Batmobile. One rendezvous or another seemed routine.
The hilltop was deserted. I heard students behind me, and listened to the wind rustle through the fallen leaves as I gazed into the graying afternoon.
I stopped at Downtown Grocery, gathered the ingredients of a meal, and fenced briefly with Angie Duvall. When I stepped onto Main Street, a sense of loss enveloped me like a coastal fog. Jaycie was not there, waiting.
I drove to my house. The moment I stepped inside, I reflexively reached for a weapon that was not there, and nearly dropped my bag of groceries.
Someone had impaled an orange on my kitchen counter with a hunting knife.
I walked to the counter, dropped my parcel, then grabbed a thick piece of limb wood from the carrier near the fireplace. I prowled through the house expecting someone or something to leap out at me.
The place was empty. Nothing was disturbed.
I returned to the kitchen and stared at the bone-handled knife that had sliced through the orange, then penetrated an inch through the Formica and pressed board. To create the display had required great force.
“Someone is stalking me,” I muttered, gazing uneasily around the room.
HERB JAWORSKI ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT SEVEN A.M., and we drove south on I-95 to Portland. I intended to make small talk, pass the time, gab about something other than the murders.
“What do you do when you’re not managing the police department?” I asked.
The question proved to be a mistake.
Jaworski collected Portlands, and he seemed about to dump them on me. He knew the population of Portland, Iowa, and the latitude and longitude of Portland, Ohio. He owned police department patches from all the Portlands big enough to have a full-time force, and he had visited most of them.
“New York’s got two Portlands,” he said. “There’s a little bit of a place not far from Ithaca. Then there’s a more normal-sized place southwest of Buffalo.”
“Normal-sized?”
“For a Portland. The one in Indiana is normal-sized, but it isn’t a port. A lot of them aren’t. Kentucky’s got three. One of them’s a port on a river, one sits near a creek, and the other is the only stop you’ll find on Highway 467 before Knoxville, Kentucky. I think my favorite, though, other than this one right ahead, is Portland, North Dakota. It’s a small town north of Fargo. Biggest body of water around there is what they call the Goose River, so it sure as hell isn’t a port. I had the best damn meal there. Ever have frittered rabbit?”
“I hope not,” I muttered.
“I stayed an extra day so I could go back to that restaurant.”
I thought I’d weathered the storm as we left the interstate and picked up Forest Avenue. “You’re from Michigan,” Jaworski said.
I knew what he was getting at.
“You got one, too,” he continued.
“One what?” I inquired, just to be contrary.
“A Portland. Not far from Lansing, on the Looking Glass River. I’ve never been there.”
“Neither have I.”
WE DROVE DOWN MELLEN STREET AND PARKED.
“Dorman had the basement apartment,” Jaworski said, leading me up the front steps and through the door. “All the way to the back, turn left, then down. The lead detective, Norma Jacobs, should be waiting for us.”
The building fit in with its neighborhood. It was a turn-of-the-century brownstone, originally a single-family home, that had been renovated and subdivided in the 1970s. I walked through the open basement apartment door and saw a solidly built, fortyish woman on her knees beside a cot. She wore jeans and a Boston Red Sox warm-up jacket.
“Norma?” Jaworski inquired.
“Hey, Chief,” the cop said, turning and pushing herself up from the floor.
If the Portland P.D. had a height requirement, Jacobs barely passed. She was a shade over five feet in her flat shoes. “Got a triple in Ragged Harbor, huh?” she said. “Husband and I used to drive up there now and then because it’s such a pretty, peaceful town. He likes to take pictures of the ocean. Don’t imagine it’s peaceful today. Hear you got more satellite dishes than lobster pots.”
The two friends shook hands.
“This is Lucas Frank. He’s helping me on this one.” Jacobs nodded. “You were in Boston for a lot of years. Used to see you on TV from time to time.”
“I live in Michigan now.”
“Go Tigers,” she said. “Guy’s name was Harper Dorman. Lived alone here with his dog. He’d been through chemo and radiation for cancer. He was sixty, pretty much waiting to die. The dog was supposed to be therapy for him. Must’ve run off.”
Jacobs hitched up her jeans and pointed at the cot. “That’s where we found most of Dorman. Eight copperjacketed slugs to the head.”
“Stingers,” Jaworski said, referring to the ammunition. “Same as our three.”
“Probably an eight-shot clip,” Jacobs added. “No spent shells. Shooter cleaned up after himself. Well, more or less.”
Jacobs handed Jaworski a set of crime scene photos. I glanced over the chief’s shoulder as he skimmed through them.
“Looks like the other went down on the floor in front of the bed,” she said.
“The other” was the worst carnage that I had seen in years.
“This probably got started with him fully clothed in gray chinos and work shirt,” Jacobs continued. “Drank all evening. Point-two-three blood alcohol concentration. We figure he flopped against the cot, grabbed a blanket to cover his lower legs. Passed out, like. You see the back of his head there?”
Jacobs tapped the photo with a pencil. I had missed two holes at the man’s hairline. Reflexively, I looked around the apartment for something that suggested the number eight. I found nothing and thought that Jacobs was probably right. The shooter had emptied a clip.
“Looked like a wildcat tore into him. Castrated him. We haven’t found the sex organs. You tell me this, Doc. What kind of strength does it take to rip open a man’s chest? We found his heart on the coffee table next to his bottle of Jim Beam.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jaworski said, continuing to scan the photos. “I didn’t know you had a slaughter here. Lucas, you ever hear of anything like this?”
I examined the thirty-five-millimeter photographs of what was left of Harper Dorman. Eight shots to the head, then Dorman’s killer had hacked at his face and throat like Angie Duvall wielding her cleaver on a slab of meat in Downtown Grocery. Dorman’s chest looked as if it had exploded. A mass of blood and stringy flesh covered his groin.
“Ed Gein, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s inspirations for Psycho, gutted some of his victims and hung them up to bleed out like deer,” I mumbled in rote response to Jaworski. “He also stripped the skin from some of them. Made lampshades out of it.”
“Jeffrey Dahmer,” Jacobs said.
I nodded, still staring at the photograph. “Dahmer lunched on some of his. Richard Chase drank human blood and carried body parts around with him.”
I was aghast. How could this be our killer?
I pulled my attention from the photos, glanced around the studio apartment, then looked at Jaworski. “I don’t know of any flailing, over-the-edge type who graduated to the kind of control and precision that we have in Ragged Harbor. We have evidence of rage. We don’t have this. The scenes look like the work of two different people.”
But as soon as I said that, I had doubts. There was a case years ago, before Quantico gave the words “organized” and “disorganized” new meaning. A killer who was both, but I could not recall the case. Yet another indication of aging, I decided.
>
“Gun changed hands maybe?” Jacobs asked.
She hoisted her jeans, then answered her own question. “That ain’t too likely. Not in thirty-six hours. That’s the time spread, right?”
Jaworski nodded, still examining the crime scene photos. “This is out of one of those videos the kids rent to scare themselves into the shits.”
“He was the building super,” Jacobs said. “We found the door open. Maybe one of the tenants was pissed he didn’t dust the banister.”
Jacobs had the razor-edged humor shared by many seasoned homicide detectives. She was talkative, rattling on as if she were enumerating the ways her Red Sox lost baseball games.
“He walks in,” Jacobs continued, “stands about where you are, blasts away. You’ve got a mess of pumped blood on the bed from the shooting, leakage on the floor from the cutting. You got some on the other side of the coffee table, where we found the heart. If you step into the hall and turn right, there’s a smaller pool just inside the furnace room. No drag marks. You figure.”
“Fruit,” I muttered, thinking of Stanley Markham’s signature and the gift impaled on my kitchen counter.
“What?” Jacobs said.
“We had orange peels at ours,” Jaworski explained.
“Nothing like that here.”
“I received the whole orange last night,” I said, and described my montage.
“I’ll want to take a look at that,” the chief said.
“Ain’t too likely you’ll get prints off a bone handle,” Jacobs said. “You a target, Doc?”
“I’m beginning to feel that way.”
I looked at the bottle that held two inches of bourbon. There was a single empty glass beside it. I crossed the room, glanced at photos, and examined the small apartment. The cops’ voices behind me settled into a soft drone as I stepped into the hall and followed Jacobs’s directions to the furnace room.
I pushed open the unlatched door. The blood pool was immediately inside the small room, two feet from a nightmare-sized boiler that dominated the confined space. The pool appeared larger than it did in the photograph.
No blood trail. No drag marks.
“What the hell,” I muttered, slowly gazing up at a large dark stain on the ceiling.
I looked for a light switch and found a string with a cardboard pine tree attached, just inside the door. When I yanked the string, what could not be more than a twentywatt bulb flickered on and off, intermittently illuminating shelves of empty pint and quart bottles.
“Dorman minded his Ps and Qs,” I said.
Six feet from the ceiling stain, a trapdoor hung open.
What I assumed was the superintendent’s winter coat lay across a backless chair. His work boots, wool socks stuffed inside, squatted side by side on the floor. I grabbed what remained of the chair, placed it beneath the trap, and pulled myself into the crawl space.
Jaworski and Jacobs entered the room below. “You got something?” Jacobs called.
The furnace room light continued its stuttering performance, creating pockets of dark shadow that seemed to move.
“I can’t see worth shit,” I yelled. “Got a flashlight?”
“What the hell are you doing up there?” Jaworski asked through the trapdoor as he handed me his threecell.
Estimating the distance to the ceiling stain, I crawled forward, pausing to shine the light ahead of me.
Copper heat pipes, metal-encased wiring, a pile of loose insulation and…
I balanced on a joist, the edge of the two-by-six digging at my knees. A sharp pain knifed from my right knee to my shin. I fell forward. The flashlight slipped from my hand, indirectly illuminating what I had thought was a mound of pink fiberglass.
I shoved backward violently and smacked my head on a pipe. “Jesus Christ,” I yelled, struggling to understand what I stared at.
“Lucas? You okay?”
A small white dog with its neck snapped, the head nearly torn from the body.
“It’s the dog,” I said.
Disemboweled, with bits and pieces of entrails flung about like confetti.
“What’s left of it,” I added.
I stuggled to the trapdoor and lowered myself through the opening. Jaworski reached up and gave me a hand.
“We always look down,” Jacobs said, squinting at the ceiling, “check surfaces. When do we look up?”
I rubbed the back of my head tenderly.
“Jacobs, we need to interview the tenants,” Jaworski said.
She climbed onto the chair, pulled herself up, and peered into the dark space. “They’ve been talked to, but go right ahead. I’ll get the crime scene techs started again. How’d they miss the fuckin’ dog? Shit.”
She pulled her head back through the hole. “Come down when you’re finished and we’ll go to Big Mama’s for lunch.”
Cops know good restaurants. The thought of lunch filled me with the willingness to carry on, despite my headache.
JAWORSKI SAID THAT HE WOULD HANDLE THE TWO apartments on the first floor. I climbed the stairs, taking time to admire the ornate, original wood moldings while I tried to make the ringing in my head go away. I wanted someone to tell me why I left the comforts of forest dwelling. Anyone. Probably I should have banged my head a lot earlier and a lot harder. As I climbed the second flight, I realized that I was out of shape. Knowing that I was lying, I promised myself that I would get back to my morning walking routine. I read somewhere that graceful aging involves acceptance of “our increasing limitations.” Must have been some of that conservative AARP crap sandwiched between ads for walkers and electric carts in Mod ern Maturity. I was still in my fifties, for chrissake.
From the time I was forty in Boston and visited Doc London for an annual medical checkup, he always smiled and said, “So, you can’t pee over the tops of cars anymore.”
Obviously I had blown my youth, never having tried to pee over a car. I missed an exercise in twisted virility, and my prostate would not let me return to the days of yesteryear. I was not about to go gracefully, but I would be damned if I got suckered into soaking my Jeep. Maybe I would restart my walking routine.
Apartment three found me. A thrumming electric bass resonated inside, shook two hallway pinup lamps, and threatened plaster walls. I recognized the tune, Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle.”
“I’m watching the miracle,” I muttered, expecting an instant replay of Joshua in Jericho.
When the song faded, I pounded on the door.
Wendell Beckerman was young, probably a student, and most likely specializing in something vaguely artsy, with a minor concentration in a decidedly aromatic field. He wore glasses with thick lenses and fat plastic frames, and had a sparse goatee and a fluff of black curly hair.
Beckerman opened the door on its chain. “You got a search warrant?”
Huh?
“I’m not a police officer, Mr. Beckerman. I have no interest in what you smoke. I want to ask you about Mr. Dorman.”
Shit, I was beginning to sound like a reporter for The New York Times.
He glanced over his shoulder into the apartment. “What about my brew?”
“Why don’t you step into the hall,” I suggested. “That way there won’t be any problem.”
He considered my proposal. Then he looked into his apartment again, nodded, unfastened the chain, set the catch on his lock, and slipped into the hall. Beckerman was barefoot, dressed in black pants and shirt, and he sported one black onyx earring. He also looked vaguely familiar.
“Harper Dorman,” I said.
“Let me see the badge.”
The kid glanced at his hands, his feet, the ceiling, never at me. He was pissing me off.
“Mr. Beckerman, don’t push your luck. There are two police officers in the building. The way we’re going to do this is I ask questions, you answer. If I get annoyed, then I call the cops and you get a paid vacation to a place that isn’t at all like Club Med. Based on the aromas that blew into the ha
ll, my guess is that you were enjoying a joint while cooking up a batch of lysergic acid diethylamide.”
Beckerman’s jaw dropped into slack position.
“My second guess is that you have enough shit stewing in there to be charged with intent to distribute. Mandatory-sentencing laws suck, but some judges get their giggles slapping kids with ten years to take it in the ass. We together on this?”
“Dorman’s the landlord,” he said. “He drinks. I didn’t know he was into dope.”
I resisted the urge to shake the little prick.
“He’s dead,” I patiently reminded Beckerman.
“No shit? Wow. Somebody said he had cancer or something.”
“The police talked to you a few days ago. Dorman was murdered, Mr. Beckerman.”
“Oh. So that’s why the cops… I get it now. Murdered?”
I nodded, bemused.
“Like, with a gun or something?”
“Did you see anyone, or hear anything unusual in the building last Thursday night?”
He considered the question. “Everything I hear is unusual.”
I was certain of that. “When did you last see Mr. Dorman?”
Beckerman furrowed his brow, attempting a thought, no doubt. “Yesterday,” he finally said. “He was coming in. I was going out. It was late afternoon.”
“Mr. Beckerman, he’d been dead for five days yesterday.”
Beckerman shrugged. “I don’t own any clocks or watches or calendars or anything. My shrink says I’m field-dependent. Like, I have to rely on my environment for information like that. I told her I—”
I interrupted what threatened to become painfully taxing. On my part.
“Were you here the middle of last week?” “If I was, I wasn’t,” he said, with a perfectly straight face.
I understood. “You live alone?”
He looked pained. “Not always, I don’t think. Friends stay here sometimes. I hear their voices. I don’t remember.”
We stood in silence for a moment, then I asked, “Where have I seen you before?”
Beckerman established eye contact for the first time. “Shit, man, that’s your problem.”
