AHMM, September 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “What kind?”

  “Kicked out of high school because he belted a teacher. Dishonorable discharge from the army after threatening an officer with a knife. He apparently is part owner of a suspected chop shop in Dover, a few miles north of Portsmouth. Hasn't been seen in two days. And apparently his father, who's a retired CPA, has also disappeared. Doesn't answer his phone.”

  “They coming here to find him?”

  “No, but they're interested.”

  Before we left the restaurant I spoke to Mr. Berry who didn't remember me but said Shirley had three kids, was divorced, and lived in Atlanta, Georgia.

  * * * *

  Next day, while looking for Samuel Grovner in hotels and motels around Portland, I got a call from Mike telling me that Doris Wilson had been found dead of an apparent strangulation in a parking lot outside a convenience store in Thomaston. I used to associate that name with the state prison, which has since been demolished. Now it made me think of Andrew Wyeth painting his famous Christina's World just down the peninsula from there.

  “Check with Sergeant Marcel Auclair,” Mike said. “Tell him I sent you.”

  * * * *

  I found Auclair at a convenience store filling station with a State Police trooper named Elroy Farson. Auclair, a one-time hockey player, was impressed by my mentioning Mike. Elroy wasn't. He wanted to know why I was in Thomaston looking for Veronique Pascal.

  “She and Doris Wilson were friends,” I said. “I thought maybe...”

  “You know the deceased?”

  “No.”

  He looked up from the papers I had given him—driver's license, registration, my P.I. card. “Just snooping around?” he said, twiddling the card in stubby fingers, dropping it. “Sorry.” He waited for me to pick it up. When I didn't, he bent down, scraped it across the asphalt and handed it to me. I made a show of examining the tattered edge he had left on the laminate.

  A thin man with shirttails dangling over faded jeans strode past us, nodding as though he knew me. It was one of those nervous reactions, like if we made eye contact he was supposed to acknowledge it. I watched him go into the store, a streak of mud on his leg.

  Elroy said, “You came all the way here from Portland to find somebody who was a friend of the deceased?”

  I was tempted to say, “That's what I just told you,” but I contented myself with a nod. Most cops respect the work I do. Some don't. He apparently didn't.

  He asked to see my license again. When I handed it to him, he asked Auclair to hold it so he could copy my name and address into his notebook. Must've looked odd to the man coming out of the store. He paused on his way to the pump to see what the trooper was looking at. I noticed mud on the wheels of his pickup, along with dirty fenders and rocker panel. It looked like he'd been driving in a swamp.

  The trooper spent at least five minutes copying words off my license, the brim of his Stetson moving shadows across his long nose as he turned his head.

  “And you were sent here by the Portland police?” handing my license back.

  “I was given directions and a referral to Officer Auclair.”

  “What kind of directions?”

  “How to get here.”

  Turning to Auclair, he said, “You know the guy he's talking about?”

  “I do,” Auclair said, “and I knew Mr. Kerrigan's father, Captain Frank Kerrigan,” looking to me for agreement and maybe gratitude.

  “Oh,” the trooper said, and disdain evaporated from his face.

  “He got shot in the line of duty,” Auclair said.

  Elroy took that in, searching my face for qualities he might have overlooked.

  “There was a woman,” Auclair said, disregarding a possible protest from Elroy, “maybe the one you're looking for, seen with the deceased down in Cushing. We've been checking the motels. You can come along if you want to.”

  Although the state takes precedence over local authority in homicide cases outside of Portland and Bangor, the crime had been committed in Auclair's jurisdiction and Elroy was not a detective.

  Auclair followed the police cruiser and I followed Auclair as we visited four motels and one bed-and-breakfast. We found what we were looking for in the office of a string of cottages down the peninsular.

  “Tall,” the woman said, squinting at us through thick lenses. “I knew you'd come here.”

  “They stayed only that one night?”

  “Claimed we had bedbugs. Refused to pay until I threatened to call the police. City people! I got no more bedbugs than she's got fleas. They just wanted a bigger bed for whatever they were doing in it.”

  “And what was that?” Elroy said.

  “Who the hell knows? They talked funny. A couple of schoolteachers. Come up here where nobody knows them. Who knows what's going on?”

  I left with a description of Doris Wilson's companion—tall, gaunt, long straight hair with streaks of gray, no makeup, walked with a limp. And she drove a yellow VW Beetle.

  “At least we know one of them was Doris,” Auclair said.

  “If they was lesbians wouldn't that mean she was the male in the relationship?” Elroy said, looking to me for an answer. “I mean, if she signed the register?”

  “I wouldn't know,” I said.

  * * * *

  Later, in a Thomaston diner drinking coffee with Auclair, I asked about Claudia Dupuis, a trooper I had worked with a while back on a missing persons case, and I learned that she'd been assigned to the Crisis Negotiations Team in Augusta. “It's when they moved Troop D out of here ... and sent us Elroy,” he added, laughing.

  “Crisis negotiation sounds about right for Claudia,” I said. “A woman's voice...”

  He nodded, impatient to get back to what we'd been talking about. “The parking lot was dark where Doris Wilson got strangled. Her body'd been pushed into some bushes. The clerk said he didn't know anything'd happened out there. He closed up around ten.”

  “Didn't see her car in the parking lot? Those women had only the one car. Doris left hers in Portland.”

  “Then...”

  “Veronique was with her and drove off,” I said. “Or Doris was alone and someone stole her car.”

  “If this Veronique was there, why didn't she call it in?”

  “Maybe she got carted off by the murderer. Could've been two of them, the second one taking the Beetle.”

  “All I know,” Auclair said, “is it wasn't a woman who called it in. It was Bobby Lancaster delivering milk. Said he stepped into the trees to take a leak and saw the body.”

  We were puzzling over this when I noticed the thin man in the dirty truck saunter into the diner and park himself on a stool, his back to us.

  I asked Auclair, “You know that guy?”

  Auclair turned to see who I was talking about. “Don't think so. Why?”

  I shrugged. “Probably nothing.”

  He gave the man another look, got up, and walked to the counter. I watched him fumble with a napkin dispenser, causing the thin man to look at him. Auclair smiled, drew a few napkins from the dispenser and came back to the table. “Not from around here,” he said.

  I laughed. “You know everyone?”

  “Damn near. There's less than four thousand people in this town. Don't know every face, but I can spot a stranger.”

  I believed him. Toyed with my drink for a while. “Who claimed the body?”

  “Some controversy over that. We can't locate any blood relatives.”

  “Crime scene roped off?”

  “Waiting for people from Augusta. Said they'd handle it.”

  Until Veronique's body was discovered, I had to assume she was alive and would want to claim the body. So I drove to Brunswick and spent a few minutes with a woman in a small hospital office who looked surprised when I said my name.

  “Always wanted to meet you,” she said, tossing hair off her face, grinning. She had a kind of raspy voice, not unattractive. “Sylvia told me about you. Never said you were so big.”


  “You worked with her?”

  “At Maine Medical. You still...?”

  “Very much,” I said. And not wanting to dwell on that, I asked, “Has anyone come here for the remains of Doris Wilson?”

  “Oh,” and the grin was replaced by apology. “I can't say. Privacy rules.”

  “I'm looking for her friend, Veronique Pascal. Thought she might—”

  “I'd like to help you, Duff, but you know I can't.”

  “Can you tell me whether the body's been autopsied?”

  “The medical examiner's gone upstate, I've been told.”

  “But any doctor can do it.”

  She raised her shoulders in a pained shrug. With feigned innocence, she asked, “Does the woman you're looking for have a limp?”

  I smiled, thanked her, and headed for the door.

  After an hour of driving around the area, using a Chamber of Commerce road map that showed motel locations, I found a yellow VW in a carport outside a cabin a few miles south of town.

  If Veronique had left the crime scene without Doris, she must have known what had happened. Wouldn't she at least have gone into the store, asked where her friend was? Did she witness the murder?

  The question weighed heavily on me as I waded through crabgrass to a green cabin—the one farthest from the office. I hit the door with my knuckles and stepped back into the grass. The curtain inside the only window stirred, then parted to frame a pale, lean face staring out at me.

  “Veronique Pascal?”

  The curtain closed.

  I waited for her to come to the door. After a few minutes I again knocked, half expecting a voice to say “Go away!” like in the movies.

  I didn't go away. I yelled her name several times, and finally she opened the door.

  She was tall and gaunt, as she'd been described, and her hair was a faded brown with gray streaks. She was wearing horn-rimmed glasses that made her eyes look small.

  “You're Veronique Pascal, the artist?” I asked, sounding, even to me, like a summons server.

  “What is it you want?” she said, like submitting to the demands of a fool.

  “I need your help,” I said, feeling like one.

  “Do I know you?”

  “You may know a man I'm working for—Samuel Grovner.”

  Her eyes narrowed but that told me nothing.

  “He brought a painting here and wants you to authenticate it.”

  She stared at me as though peeling skin off my face.

  “Just what is it you want?” she said.

  “You're a friend of Doris Wilson?”

  “Go away.” She stepped back and closed the door.

  I walked ten feet into the crabgrass so that I could watch the door and the yellow Beetle. Nothing stirred. After a few minutes I drove off, didn't want to explain myself to the cops.

  A message from Sylvia on my voicemail announced that she had been ordered by the court to take a runaway child to his parents’ home in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, said she wouldn't be back in Portland until tomorrow afternoon. Disappointed that I'd have to spend the night alone, I had a serving of spaghetti at Lefty's, went back to my loft, dropped onto my cot, and leafed through an old paperback western by Elmore Leonard. I fell asleep and woke up fully clothed with sunlight warm on my face.

  I called Mike and asked what he knew about Samuel Grovner's son. I didn't mention Veronique or the questions I had about her.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “They know where he is?”

  “You got something?”

  “A guy about that age's been following me around.”

  “Give me a couple of minutes,” he said. I waited a half hour going through bills in my in-box before my phone rattled.

  “Nobody seems to know,” Mike said. “Portsmouth couldn't locate him. But they want to know what you know, and so do I.”

  “I'll get back to you. It's probably nothing.”

  I killed part of the day chasing down a young couple who had left town with a suite of furniture: skip-chasing paid a lot of my bills. In my Jeep heading toward Sylvia's apartment, I received a call from Sergeant Auclair.

  “We got your skinny guy with the pickup. Thought you might—”

  “His name Grovner?”

  “License says Isaac Petrovski, and he's from Dover, New Hampshire.”

  “What you got him on? Can you hold him? It'll take me a while to get there.”

  “Driving over the limit is all. He's agreed to join us in Placido's for coffee. That's just north of those red buildings on Main Street. That's Route One.”

  I put in a call to Mike, gave him the man's name. Before I reached the outskirts of Thomaston, Mike got back to me. The New Hampshire police knew a lot about Isaac Petrovski.

  “He owns the garage in Dover where Martin Grovner works.”

  Armed with this, I strode past Auclair's Dodge Charger and the black S-10 into a small Italian diner that smelled of burnt cheese. A girl at the cash register smiled at me. Auclair waved from a booth past a row of bar stools. Isaac Petrovski turned and regarded me with anxious concern.

  Auclair stood, gesturing me to slide over, leaving him free to jump if he had to—a cop on duty.

  “You guys eaten?” I said, looking at Petrovski.

  Auclair smiled. “That an offer?”

  “Sure. Pizza okay?”

  I called the girl over. “A large one. Everything on it,” glancing at Petrovski. “Okay with you?”

  He gave me a timid nod, his face full of questions. Although the room was cooled by fans whirling over us, the ruddy skin on his neck looked oily with sweat.

  “Mr. Petrovski,” Auclair said, after a pizza had been placed in front of us, each of us peeling off a slice, “hoped to see the old prison. Didn't know it'd been torn down.”

  “You interested in prisons?”

  “That movie,” he said, “Shawshank Redemption. Thought it might've been filmed there.”

  “I liked that movie,” I said. “Big fan of Morgan Freeman. They called him ‘Red,’ didn't they?”

  He gave that a cautious nod.

  “That has a special meaning doesn't it? I mean in prison talk? It's not just a name, is it?”

  “I don't know,” he said, shrinking from the question.

  “You ever been in prison?” I asked.

  Alarm hit his eyes. His hands trembled on the table, leaving sweat marks on the laminate.

  “Oh, he's just making small talk,” Auclair said, playing good cop, patting the man's hand, wondering what I was doing. “Lots of people come here looking for the prison.”

  “Why are you holding me?” Petrovski said, scared.

  “We're not holding you,” Auclair said. “We just want to talk.”

  I chewed on a pepperoni slice, swallowed it, took a sip of water. “Did Martin Grovner come here with you?”

  Like he was slowly sinking into a hole he pondered my face, Auclair's, then stared across the room. Nothing over there but a curtained window and some boxes. He looked back at me, at Auclair.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Any reason you should be?” Auclair said, getting into it.

  “We just want to know what you're doing here,” I said. “Is your partner with you?”

  “I knew you were looking for him so I—”

  “How'd you know that?”

  “His father told me. Said he hired you.”

  “To look for his son? That's what he said?”

  He nodded, like wondering what was strange about that.

  Auclair, to whom all of this was a surprise, said, “Maybe we ought to take this to the station.”

  “Oh, no need for that,” I said, hoping he wouldn't insist. His eyes questioned me, but he let it go.

  “After two and a half years in the state prison in Concord ... right?” grinning as I looked to Petrovski for agreement.

  “I'm just looking for my business partner. I haven't done anything wrong.”

  “
As the sergeant said, Isaac, we're here just to ask questions. Do you know where Samuel Grovner is?”

  “It's why I followed you ... to find him.”

  “But you said you talked to him about me.”

  “Two days ago. We shared a motel room.”

  “Registered in your name?”

  “It's where he found me.”

  And that explained why Grovner's name hadn't appeared on any motel register.

  “You became separated?”

  “He took off when we heard Doris Wilson got killed.”

  “Why? He told me he didn't know her.”

  “What's the connection, Isaac?” Auclair said. Good cop or not, his uniform added weight to the question. “Don't stand in our way—”

  “I'm just looking for my partner! I haven't done anything!”

  “Keep it down,” Auclair said. He probably wanted to take Isaac to the station but that would give him time to think. Neither of us wanted that.

  “If Martin Grovner has committed a murder—”

  “I don't know that!”

  “What do you know, Isaac? Go easy on yourself. You don't want to go back to prison.”

  It took him a few minutes but he finally came out with: “All I know is it was Martin ran out of the bakery and hit that woman.”

  Auclair and I swapped glances.

  “Let's take this to the station,” Auclair said, getting up.

  * * * *

  Within the walls of a small conference room Isaac became a whipped child slumped in a chair, squeezing fingers in his lap, telling us a long story about Martin's coming home from the war and the two of them buying a garage with money Petrovski's grandfather had given him. Auclair was asking the questions. In the police station I was an observer. This was official.

  “You knew him before you went to prison?” Auclair asked.

  “He was with some people I knew.”

  “And you don't think he killed ... Does that baker have a name?”

  “Waldo Asker. I saw it on TV. I didn't—”

  “So why are you here looking for Martin?”

  “He's my partner. I want to help him!”

  “Help him get away?”

  Petrovski fished a wad of bills from his pocket, pushed it toward the sergeant.