Tag Man

by Archer Mayor

  “Mrs. Wrinn, did either one of them tell you why they were so interested in Paul Hauser?”

  She reached into her cardigan pocket as she spoke. “John—that was the name he used—said they thought he’d committed a crime.”

  “They said they were cops?” Sam asked, startled.

  “No, no. From the Division of Indigent Residents.”

  “What?”

  Joe started laughing as he read the business card Gloria handed him. “This is classic.” He gave it to Sam and asked Gloria, “What was the crime supposed to be?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  He pointed to the card. “You believed that?”

  “No, but I knew they weren’t dangerous, or at least Nancy wasn’t…”

  “Nancy what?”

  “She never gave me a last name. She was the one I met first. Knocked at the door and introduced herself as running a survey of everyone on their indigent residents list. She was very sweet. After she interviewed me about Paul, she brought in John, and I allowed them to go through his things.”

  “You didn’t think you’d need Hauser’s permission?” Sammie asked.

  “Honestly?” Gloria asked with her eyebrows raised. “No. He left me high and dry. I suspected that he was up to something underhanded before he disappeared.”

  “What was that?” Joe asked.

  “I’m not sure. I knew that someone had been in my bedroom when I was away recently. It had been cleaned up, but you can always tell when things aren’t exactly as you left them. I also found a broken table from upstairs that had been hidden in the basement, as if Paul thought I wouldn’t notice it was missing, and the doorframe to the top-floor staircase was split. People always assume that old folks are idiots.”

  “Okay,” Joe resumed. “So you let them go through his things. Did you go with them?”

  She shook her head. “I accompanied them to the top of the stairs. Paul lived in a separate apartment I have under the kitchen. I don’t go down there very often anymore, because of my legs. I don’t move as easily as I used to.”

  “I understand,” Joe said. “But let me get something straight: They came here asking what you knew about Hauser. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they asked to see his apartment?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did they tell you about the apartment or did you bring it up in conversation?”

  Sam glanced at her boss, realizing how much she’d missed him during the past few months.

  Gloria hesitated. “I don’t recall.”

  “How about when you showed them where it was? Did you lead the way?”

  Her eyes froze on his face. “Oh, my goodness.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I really didn’t. I mean, we all went together, I remember—kind of in a herd—but now that I think of it, John knew exactly where to go. I remember him holding the door open for me at the back of the kitchen, which leads to the downstairs. There’s no way he should have known…” She lapsed into thoughtful silence.

  Neither Sam nor Joe said anything, letting her gather her wits.

  “He’d been here before, hadn’t he?” she finally asked.

  “It looks that way,” Joe agreed. “Was there anything else that tells you they knew more about Hauser than they were letting on?”

  “He asked about Lake Bomoseen.”

  The two cops exchanged looks. “Bomoseen?” Joe asked. “In what context?”

  “Whether he’d come from there, or had family there. The girl asked about Claremont, New Hampshire. The conversation was generally about where Paul might have been from, I think in part because I said that I thought he was a local, more or less. From this overall region, in other words.”

  Joe looked at his partner. “You have any questions?”

  Sam shook her head and he returned to Gloria. “I’d like to ask you an enormous favor, Mrs. Wrinn, and you should know that you’d be entirely within your rights to turn us down.”

  “Go ahead,” was the ready response, “although I think I know what it is—you’d like to see Paul’s room, too.”

  Joe laughed. “Well, you’re absolutely right. We would. But there’s something else: We’d like to follow up on what you said about somebody having been in your bedroom, and breaking a table from the upstairs hallway. It’s sounding as if something happened in this house while you were away that set these people against each other, and we would sure like to know what that was.”

  She was already nodding. “Of course. Of course. I’d like to know myself.”

  Joe and Sam stood, smiling. “Outstanding,” he said. “I’ll get a team in here right away and we’ll get to it.”

  “There is one last thing that I almost forgot,” Gloria suddenly added.

  “Yes?”

  “The man—John—made a point of mentioning that Paul had a suitcase, and asked if he’d left with it.”

  “Did you know what he was talking about?” Joe asked.

  “Oh, yes. Paul was carrying it when he first came. It was just strange, is all, how John mentioned it. I think I’d made some comment about how Paul traveled with everything on his back—I don’t remember my own wording anymore. But John specifically added, ‘and a suitcase,’ or something like that. And when I looked at him oddly, he explained that he’d noticed how a suitcase had left a mark in the dust of Paul’s room.”

  “So the suitcase meant something special?” Joe ventured.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The smile returned to Joe’s face as he said, “You’ve been great, Mrs. Wrinn. This has been a huge help. I’ll make that phone call now and rally the troops.”

  * * *

  Bellows Falls was a good example of how the march of history can alternately make a place successful or maul it underfoot.

  Its geography tells most of the story. It is located on a point of land within a dramatic bend of the Connecticut River—complete with a waterfall, resulting hydropower, and one of the nation’s earliest bypass canals, all of which once made it both picturesque and commercially viable. A go-to place.

  That had been long ago. Since then, the interstate had been laid out like Hadrian’s Wall to the west, complete with a couple of slightly-too-distant exits, introducing a subtle suggestion that this once-vibrant village was now a place to speed past without thought.

  That, of course, was open to interpretation. As with any town, Bellows Falls—or BF as locals call it—was accessible with ease; it was even the immediate area’s commercial hub. But it was hard to argue that where the river had once made BF a destination point, so the interstate now largely passed it by.

  The village had spirit, however, and stubborn lasting power, and most modern boosters were happy to think that the worst times—involving crime and poverty and economic blight—were things of the past.

  Dan Kravitz agreed. He’d been coming here for years, on his restless peregrinations, and had even called it home a couple of times, once when Sally was a child.

  The American Legion building on Rockingham Street, just off the eye-catching downtown square, was not representative of the latter’s architectural grace. A single-story, largely windowless brick building, it had the appearance of something constructed to withstand a nuclear attack. But it was a home away from home to many, and perhaps a place where a person could pretend, if only for a while, that the outside world had indeed ceased to exist.

  That certainly seemed true for the man at the end of the long bar, who looked as attached to his seat as a potted plant—turnip-shaped, with a tangle of hair standing in for the leaves. In response to Dan’s whispered inquiry, the barkeep said, “That’s what’s left of him,” before returning to his soapy sink.

  Dan led Sally down the length of the nearly empty room. He sat by one side of their target while she sat by the other. The large man barely took them in.

  “Bryn?” Dan asked. “Bryn Huxley-Reicher?”

  “Like there’re
two guys named Bryn in the room.”

  Huxley-Reicher had both pudgy hands cradling a half-empty glass of beer, and Sally was suddenly struck by the similarity between his fingers and his rounded lips, which had barely moved when he’d spoken. In fact, all she could see of him seemed to be constructed of rolls of flesh-colored material—like the Michelin Man stripped of all his white outer coating. It was simultaneously fascinating and revolting. It made her happy that her father once more had taken the lead.

  “Good point,” Dan said. “Where’s the name from?”

  “Parents.”

  Dan nodded. He could be like that. For years, he’d had Willy Kunkle believing he could speak in little more than grunts. For that matter, he knew his own daughter thought him a social misfit. But in a world where people spoke too much and said too little, silence was a good way to find out a lot without asking a single question.

  Or simply to be left alone, which Dan knew worked for him, and suspected was the case here. Bryn Huxley-Reicher did not appear to be a man much interested in anything.

  “Norm Myers says hi,” he tried.

  “You could fool me.”

  “He’s doing his annual thing at the crash site.”

  The thick lips compressed for a second before Huxley-Reicher reacted. “That is so crazy.”

  “You ever been?” Sally asked.

  The large man finally moved slightly, turning his head to take her in. “That look likely to you?”

  “Doesn’t look like you could get out the door nowadays,” she said cheerfully, abandoning her embarrassing first reaction for a new tack. “But you got around once, and Norm’s been doing his thing for more’n sixty years.”

  Huxley-Reicher swiveled his head all the way back to Dan. “Where’d you find her?”

  “I’m his daughter,” she answered. “My name’s Sally.” She stuck out her hand, both to undercut her prejudice and out of a darker need to discover what it would feel like to shake this man’s hand.

  Bryn hesitated. It appeared that he had settled for a limited repertory of social interactions, none of which involved physical contact.

  But her approach and her gender made the difference. He cautiously unfolded one hand and awkwardly extended it to her, a bit like an offering with an uncertain future.

  Her smile widened. His hand was incredibly soft and warm and pleasant to grasp, akin to cupping a baby’s bare butt.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Huxley-Reicher.”

  He half smiled back wondrously. “Really?”

  “You know how it is,” she said, her father all but eclipsed by now on the far side of this huge human being. “You get into a routine, always seeing the same people, pretty much saying the same things, narrowing your focus more and more until even you get bored by you. It’s nice to get out sometimes—do something you never tried, or meet someone you’d normally never meet. Like you and me. It doesn’t have to be like bungee jumping, right?”

  He was laughing by now, or at least shaking in a way that made it appear as such. Certainly, his eyes were almost closed and those lips were smiling.

  “You talk a mouthful, you know that?”

  “Gets me in trouble sometimes,” she admitted. “I usually end up hurting someone’s feelings.” She laid a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t do that, did I?”

  He shook his head, glancing down at her hand but not touching it.

  “No,” he told her. “You’re a breath of fresh air.”

  He suddenly straightened and looked around, seizing his glass more firmly. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s move over to that booth, so we can see each other.”

  Dan and Sally slid off their stools, while Bryn began a slow and cautious maneuver that caught the attention even of the barkeep, who glanced over in fear.

  “You okay, Bryn? Where’re you goin’?”

  Huxley-Reicher ignored him, perhaps didn’t even hear him. He placed his feet on the floor and tested it momentarily, as if gauging the sea swell beneath a deck. He grunted approvingly and began shuffling toward the booth across the aisle. The barkeep, his mouth open and hands dripping, stared as if the moose head on the wall had begun to sing.

  It was a bit of a journey, and Sally even helped some by placing her hand on their new friend’s elbow, not that she could have done much had he started to fall.

  But Bryn’s expression told of his satisfaction and sense of achievement as he lowered himself before the table with the grace of a large ship sidling up to the dock. He sighed happily as his companions slid in opposite him.

  The bartender continued watching in amazement for a moment before offering, “You guys want something?”

  “A couple of Cokes?” Sally asked.

  “On my tab,” Bryn added.

  “You kidding?” the man asked without thought, before immediately adding, “Got it, Bryn. No sweat. Comin’ right up.”

  The big man’s smile broadened as he looked at Sally. “You’re a smart girl.” He shifted over to Dan at last to say, “You’re a lucky man.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Comfortably situated at last, Huxley-Reicher studied them inside a single angle of view, without having to move his massive head.

  “So, what do you want? It’s not to say hi from Norm. He can do that himself.”

  “It does involve him, though,” Sally continued, having figured out that this conversation was now hers to carry to the end. “You two go pretty far back, right?”

  “That’s something you already know.”

  She laughed suddenly. “This is cool—like Law and Order.”

  He looked baffled. “Why’re you people here? You’re not cops.”

  Dan’s impatience got the better of him. As grateful as he was to Sally for winning Bryn over, his own anxieties were beginning to well up.

  “We’re after Paul Hauser. You know him?”

  “Paul?”

  “Yeah. I need to talk with him.”

  Bryn shook his head. “Peter, not Paul.”

  “What?” Sally asked.

  “I know Peter Hauser,” the big man explained.

  “A brother?” Dan asked.

  “Yeah. I never met Paul. I heard about him, like a thousand years ago, but Peter was the one I hung out with. Peter’s dead. Well, not dead-dead, but he’s in a home, totally out of it. A vegetable.”

  “Why?”

  “Some blood-shortage thing. I guess it was an accident or something. Starved his brain. Anyhow, it messed him up big time. He just sits in a wheelchair, staring at wherever they point him. Pathetic.”

  “How long ago did you see him last?” Sally wanted to know.

  Bryn pushed out his lower lip. “Years. It’s not worth the effort, and it takes everything I got just to cross the street nowadays.”

  “Back in the day, though,” Dan asked, “when you and Peter hung out, what did he say about his brother?”

  “He didn’t like him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Pete thought he was weird.” Bryn tapped his temple with his fingertip. “Talk about the elevator not reaching the top. I guess he tortured animals and shit like that.”

  Dan was scratching his forehead, in need of details. “Can we start with some basics? I’m just trying to get a full picture here. What do you know about the family? Mom, dad, siblings—stuff like that?”

  “Dad was a postal worker. Mom was a teacher. I think there was a car crash or something. Whatever it was, Mom was pretty messed up and Dad ended up a drunk, cheating on his wife, losing his job, abandoning the family. Peter was fine but Paul went through the wringer. I think Pete told me that his brother was messed up before then anyhow, though, so maybe that had nothing to do with it.”

  Dan thought back to the pictures of the young women, tortured and splayed, and was inclined to differ.

  “How old were the boys when this happened?” he asked.

  “Little enough. I don’t know. Under ten, maybe?”

  “How bad
did it get at home?” Dan persisted.

  Sally turned to look at him, struck by his urgency. She’d been told that her mother had died in childbirth, and had wondered about that, although never actually asked, as she gathered was typical of kids like her. At times like these, however, given the father she’d been handed, she had to wonder if some of his questions weren’t rooted in a more dramatic story than the one she’d been told.

  “I think it was pretty bad,” Bryn was saying. “Pete and I met in high school, near Castleton, and I guess a lot of this was still happening at home.”

  Sally would have left it at that, but her father kept right at it. “A lot of what, exactly? The drinking?”

  Bryn played with the mug between his hands before answering. “The drinking wasn’t it. Hell, both my folks drank—my dad till he passed out every night. I don’t think Pete’s father was the only one stepping out.”

  “Mom cheated as well?”

  Bryn sighed before admitting, “I came over to their house once. Pete hadn’t showed up when he said he would, so I rode my bike to his place to find out why. He wasn’t there, but his mom was, and she came on to me pretty strong. It was really awkward.”

  “You talk to Pete about it later?”

  “Nah. Too embarrassing. But he asked me if I’d come by, and I fessed up then—kind of. He just came right out with, ‘Sorry if she put the moves on you,’ or something like that. He said she was sick and did that a lot to people. That’s what made me think that Pete’s home life must’ve been pretty tough.”

  Sally had rested her chin in her palm, mesmerized. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “What was Pete like?” Dan asked.

  “He was a good friend.”

  Neither Dan nor Sally said a word, respecting his meditation.

  Bryn eventually continued. “He was a little driven, like he had something chasing him down.”

  “A risk taker?” Dan inquired.

  “Yeah. Right. Jumping off rock quarries when he didn’t know what was under the surface; running onto the ice without checking how thick it was; driving too fast. Just basically pushing the envelope. But he was fun, and he watched your back, and he was the best friend you could have.”