The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  They sipped their tea, nibbled the shortbread, and spoke of the weather and the repairs that would have to be made to the town office once winter was gone, before moving on to the real business of the afternoon.

  “I hear they buried that hobo,” said Hayley.

  Morland wasn’t sure that the man named Jude had been a hobo, strictly speaking. As far as he knew, hobos were migratory workers. Technically, Jude had been a bum.

  “Apparently so,” said Morland.

  “Has there been any fuss?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “I told you there wouldn’t be. I had to listen to all that bitching and moaning for nothing.”

  Morland didn’t dispute the point. He had done all his arguing when the board’s decision was communicated to him, but by then it was too late. He’d tried to talk Hayley around, but on that occasion she had proved immune to his charms.

  “It would have been preferable if he’d just disappeared,” said Morland.

  “That would have cost more—a lot more. Books have to be balanced.”

  “It might have been worth it. I don’t think anyone would have come looking for a missing homeless man, and it’s hard to prove the commission of a crime without a body.”

  “Nobody’s trying to prove that a crime was committed. A hobo hanged himself, and that’s the end of it.”

  Not quite, thought Morland. Hayley was thinking like a selectman, Morland like a lawman.

  “The problem, as I see it, is that we now have two dead bodies to no good end,” said Morland.

  “Ben told me that he had no choice but to shoot the girl. You agreed.”

  Yet I didn’t agree to the killing of her father, Morland was about to say, but he stilled the words before they reached his tongue.

  “This town has survived, and flourished, by being careful,” he said.

  “You don’t have to tell me that!” said Hayley. A little blood found its way into her pale cheeks. “What do you think I’ve been doing all these years? Every decision I’ve made has been with the best interests of the town at heart.”

  I’ve made, he noticed, not we’ve made. He wondered if this was how all despots began. At some point, someone had to speak truth to power. Then again, those who did frequently ended up with their heads on stakes.

  “I’m not questioning your commitment to the town, Hayley. Nobody is. But two dead from the same family could attract attention.”

  “One dead,” she corrected him. “There’s one body, not two. Has the girl even been reported missing yet?”

  “No,” he conceded.

  “And she won’t be either, because the only one who might have been concerned about her is now in the ground. By acting as we did, we solved the problem—or we would have if that damn fool Dixon hadn’t let the girl go.”

  “That’s an interesting choice of words,” said Morland.

  He hadn’t raised his suspicions with Hayley before. He wanted to let them percolate some before he started pouring them out. Hayley nibbled on her shortbread, her tiny white teeth chipping away at it with the actions of a hungry rodent.

  “You think he’s telling lies about what happened?” she said.

  “I went to their house and tried using a scrap of material to open the bolt from the inside, like he and Erin claimed the girl did.”

  “And?”

  “It worked.”

  “So?”

  “It took a while, and I had to use a piece of wood to pull the cloth in and form a loop, just as Erin Dixon did when I put her in the basement and asked her to demonstrate how the girl might have escaped. She told me she’d found the wood on the floor, and that the girl must have broken it off the bed. She showed me the bed, and there was a long splinter of wood missing that matched the piece in Erin’s hand.”

  “I’m waiting for a ‘but.’ ”

  “But there was blood on the floor by the bed when I let Erin out, and it was fresh.”

  “Could it have been the girl’s? She couldn’t have been gone for but an hour by then.”

  “If it was, the blood would have congealed.”

  “If it was Erin’s blood, maybe she cut herself when she was examining the wood.”

  “Maybe.”

  Hayley set her shortbread down by her mug. She seemed to have lost her taste for sweetness.

  “Why would they let her go?”

  “I don’t know. There are rumors about Harry’s business.”

  “I’ve heard. I’ve been concerned since they took that loan.”

  “The paintwork on his house needs a new coat, and that old truck of his might just be the only vehicle in Prosperous that’s in worse shape than yours. I didn’t have time to take a good look around his kitchen when I visited, but I saw that some groceries had been unpacked and hadn’t yet been put away. They’re buying cheap bread, generic pasta, a couple of packs of chicken joints that were about to expire but would be okay if you froze them, that kind of thing.”

  “They could have been for the girl. They weren’t going to be feeding her filet mignon.”

  “It just doesn’t sit right with me.” He regarded her closely. “It sounds to me like you’re trying to defend them.”

  “I’m not defending anyone,” said Hayley. “I’m trying to understand. If what you’re suggesting is true, we have a major problem on our hands. We’ll have to act, and that could cause unrest in the town. We don’t turn on our own.”

  “Not unless our own start turning on us.”

  “I still can’t figure out why they’d want to release her.”

  “Pity? Guilt?”

  “It’s not like we were asking them to kill her,” said Hayley. “They just had to take care of her until we were ready. She was too thin. All this might have been avoided if Walter and Beatrix hadn’t brought us a junkie.”

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve had to find someone,” said Morland. “It’s harder now. The safest way is to take the vulnerable, the lost, the ones that nobody will miss. If that means junkies and whores, then so be it.”

  “Junkies and whores may not be good enough.”

  “It’s been many years, Hayley. Some people are wondering if it might not be necessary at all.”

  She flared up.

  “Who? Tell me!” Her eyes grew sly. “The same ones who are whispering about my ‘commitment’ to the town?”

  He should have stepped more carefully. She heard everything, turning the details over in her mind and examining them the way a jeweler might consider gemstones before deciding which to keep and which to discard.

  “I know there are some who are starting to doubt me,” she said.

  Hayley stared at Morland, as though willing him to confess that he himself had been guilty of such thoughts, but he did not. She leaned over the table and grasped his hand. Her skin was cold, and its look and feel reminded him of the cheap cuts of chicken at the Dixon house.

  “That’s why this is so important,” she said. “If I’m to go, I want to leave knowing the town is secure. I want to be sure that I’ve done all that I can for it.”

  She released her grip on him. She had left marks on the back of his hand, as if to remind him that she was still strong and should not be underestimated.

  “What do you suggest?” he said.

  “We talk to the Dixons. We tell them to find us another girl, fast. And no junkie either; we want someone clean and healthy. If they come through for us, we’ll see what more the town can do to help them out if they’re in trouble.”

  Morland had more to say about the Dixons, but he kept it to himself, for now.

  “And if they don’t?”

  Hayley stood and started clearing the table. She was tired of talking with him. The discussion was over.

  “Then they’re a threat to the security of
the town. There’s still money in the discretionary fund, thanks to the decision not to disappear the hobo instead of just leaving him to be found.

  “And,” she added, “our friends will be grateful for the work.”

  CHAPTER

  XI

  I was sitting at a table in Crema Coffee Company, on Commercial, when the man who called himself Shaky found me. It was just after nine in the morning, and while a steady stream of people kept the baristas busy, most of the tables remained empty. It was that time of day when folk wanted to order and go, which suited me just fine. I had a nice sun-dappled spot by the window, and copies of the New York Times and the Portland Press Herald. Crema had one of the best spaces in town, all bare boards and exposed brickwork. There were worse places to kill an hour. I had a meeting later in the morning with a prospective client: trouble with an ex-husband who hadn’t grasped the difference between keeping a protective eye on his former wife and stalking her. It was, depending upon whom you asked, a thin line. Neither did he appear to understand that if he really cared about his wife he should pay her the child support that he owed. On such misunderstandings were hourly rates earned.

  Shaky was wearing black sneakers, only slightly frayed jeans, and an overcoat so big that it was just one step away from being a tent. He looked self-conscious as he entered Crema, and I could see one or two of the staff watching him, but Shaky wasn’t about to be dissuaded from whatever purpose he had in mind. He made a beeline for my table.

  It wasn’t just Shaky who called himself by that name. Apparently, everyone on the street did. He had a palsied left hand that he kept close to his chest. I wondered how he slept with it. Maybe, like most things, you learned to get used to it if you had to endure it long enough.

  He hovered before me, the sunlight catching his face. He was clean-shaven, and smelled strongly of soap. I may have been mistaken, but it struck me that he’d tidied himself up and dressed in his best clothing to come here. I remembered him from the funeral. He was the only one present to shed a tear for Jude as he was lowered into his grave.

  “You mind if I sit down?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Would you like a coffee?”

  He licked his lips, and nodded. “Sure.”

  “Any preference?”

  “Whatever’s the biggest, and the warmest. Maybe sweet too.”

  Since I was mainly a straight-filter kind of guy, I had to rely on the girl behind the counter to guide me on warm and sweet. I came back with a maple latte and a couple of muffins. I wasn’t too hungry, but Shaky probably was. I picked at mine to be polite while Shaky went back to the counter and loaded up his latte with sugar. He tore into the muffin as soon as he resumed his seat, then seemed to realize that he was in company, and nobody was likely to try and steal the snack from him, so he slowed down.

  “It’s good,” he said. “The coffee as well.”

  “You sure there’s enough sugar in there for you?” The stirrer was pretty much standing up by itself in the coffee.

  He grinned. His teeth weren’t great, but the smile somehow was.

  “I always did have a sweet tooth. I guess it’s still in there somewhere. I done lost most of the rest.”

  He chewed some more muffin, holding it in his mouth for as long as he could to savor the taste.

  “Saw you at the cemetery,” he said, “when they put Jude in the ground. You’re the detective, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You knew Jude?”

  “A little.”

  “What I heard. Jude told me that he did some detecting for you, couple of times.”

  I smiled. Jude always did get a kick out of being asked to help. I could hear some skepticism in Shaky’s voice, just a hint of doubt, but I think he wanted it to be true. He kept his head down as he stared up at me, one eyebrow raised in anticipation.

  “Yes, he did,” I said. “Jude had a good eye, and he knew how to listen.”

  Shaky almost sagged with relief. Jude hadn’t lied to him. This wasn’t a wasted errand.

  “Yeah, Jude was smart,” he said. “Wasn’t nothing happened on the streets that Jude didn’t know about. He was kind too. Kind to everyone. Kind to me.”

  He stopped eating, and for an instant he looked terribly lonely. His mouth moved soundlessly as he tried to express emotions that he had never shared aloud before: his feelings for Jude, and about himself now that Jude was gone. He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence, and will always defy expression. In the end, Shaky just gave up and slurped noisily at his latte to cover his pain.

  “You were friends?”

  He nodded over the cup.

  “Did he have many friends?”

  Shaky stopped drinking and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “No. He kept most people at a distance.”

  “But not you.”

  “No.”

  I didn’t pursue it. It was none of my business.

  “When did you last see him alive?”

  “Couple of days before he was found in that basement. I was helping him to collect.”

  “Collect?”

  “Money. He was calling in the debts he was owed, and he asked me to help. Everyone knew that me and him was close, and if I said I was working on his behalf then it was no word of a lie. He put it all down on paper for me. As I’d find someone I’d cross the name off the list and record how much they’d given me.”

  He reached into one of his pockets and produced a sheet of paper, which he carefully unfolded and placed before me. On it was a list of names written neatly in pencil. Beside most of them, in a considerably messier hand, figures were scrawled: a dollar or so, usually, and no sum more than two bucks.

  “Sometimes I’d get to a person after he did, and maybe they’d already have paid up, and maybe they wouldn’t have. Jude was soft, though. He believed every hard-luck story, because it was his way. Me, I knew some of them was lying. As long as they was breathing, they was lying. I made sure that, if they could, they paid.”

  I took the piece of paper and did a little rough addition on the numbers. The total didn’t come to much: a hundred dollars and change. Then I realized that, while it wasn’t much to me, that kind of sum could get a man beaten to a pulp if he fell in with the wrong company. It might even be enough to bring death upon him.

  “What did he want the money for?” I said.

  “He was looking for his daughter. Told me she used to be a junkie but she was straightening out. Last he heard she was up in Bangor looking for work, and seems like she found some. I think—”

  He paused.

  “Go on.”

  “I think she’d come up here because she wanted to be near him, but not so near that it would be easy for him,” said Shaky. “She wanted him to come find her. Jude had abandoned her momma and her way back, and he knew that the girl blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her life since then. She was angry at him. She might even have hated him, but when there’s blood involved love and hate aren’t so different, or they get all mixed up so’s you can’t tell one from the other. I guess he was considering moving up to Bangor and having done with it. But Jude didn’t like Bangor. It’s not like here. They tore the heart out of that city when they built the mall, and it never recovered, not the way Portland did. It’s a bad place to be homeless too—worse than here. But Jude wanted to make up to the girl for what he’d done, and he couldn’t do it from Portland.”

  “How long did it take you and Jude to get the money together?”

  “A week. Would have taken him a month if he’d been working alone. I ought to get me a job as a debt collector.”

  He used the forefinger of his right hand to pull the scrap of paper back to him.

  “So my question is—” he began, but I finished it for him.

  “Why wou
ld a man who had just spent a hard week calling in his debts, and who was fixated on mending his relationship with his daughter, hang himself in a basement just when he’s managed to get some cash together?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, what: he was going to give his daughter the money, or use it to move to Bangor?”

  “Neither,” said Shaky. “If I understood him right, I think he was hoping to hire you to find her.”

  He seemed to remember that he still had his coffee. He drank half of what remained in one go, and turned an eye to the muffin on my plate. I pushed it toward him.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

  WE SPOKE FOR AN hour, sometimes about Jude, sometimes about Shaky himself. He’d served in the military, and that was how he had come by his bad arm; it was nerve damage of some kind, caused by a jeep tire exploding.

  “Not even a proper wound,” as Shaky told me. “I used to lie about it to make myself sound brave, but it just don’t seem worth the effort no more.”

  At the end of our conversation, two things were clear to me: Shaky knew Jude better than almost anyone else in Portland, and he still didn’t really know him at all. Jude had shared only the barest of information about his daughter with him. To Shaky, it seemed as though the more troubles his friend encountered the more reluctant he was to seek help with them, and that was how men ended up dying alone.

  I bought Shaky another maple latte before I left, and he gave me instructions for how best to reach him. As with Jude, he used the Amistad Community and the good folk at the Portland Help Center for such communications. I then drove to South Portland to meet my prospective client at her home, and she gave me details of where her husband was working, where he was living, just how much of an asshole he now was, and just how much of an asshole he didn’t used to be. For her children’s sake, she didn’t want to involve the police, and she hated her lawyer. I was the least bad of the remaining options, although she did ask if I knew someone who would break her husband’s legs once I had made it clear that this wasn’t something I was prepared to take on—or not without a better reason.