Quick Pivot

by Brenda Buchanan

  When he turned fifty a few years ago, Gene hung up his press pass in exchange for a raise and the title of web production editor, with a proviso in his contract that the city desk could call him back if a story needed his expertise. I wasn’t surprised when he said Leah asked him to work with me on the Desmond story, because Gene Pelletier was a son of Riverside.

  “What’s the word?” I pulled up a chair next to his.

  “Chief Wyatt was hard to find and closemouthed when I finally tracked her down.”

  “I thought you were tight.”

  He shrugged. “She was a woman of few words today.”

  “She tell you anything at all?”

  Gene laughed. “The press should stay out of this.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “She’s particularly peeved that it’s you covering the story. Thinks you’re prone to go off half-cocked.”

  Blood warmed my face. “One goddamn time I fell for a sob story from a perp’s mother. Printed some stuff that made Wyatt look bad. I apologized. We printed a correction. But she’ll never let it go.”

  “She thinks you’ve overstepped a few other times too.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Gene lost control of his straight face.

  “Jesus, Joe. I’m kidding. She did mention the glint in your eye down there in the basement of the Saccarappa, but Chief Wyatt doesn’t distrust you any more than the rest of us.”

  Mollified, I told him the high points of my meeting with Helena Desmond. “You think my Desmond theory’s correct?”

  “For your sake, I hope so, now that you’ve told his sister you think it’s him. How’d she react?”

  “Shocked, but not surprised, if that makes any sense. Vehement that her brother wasn’t an embezzler.”

  “I’m sure she’s taken a lot of shit over the years. No wonder she moved to Peaks Island, put some water between herself and the furious people of Riverside.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “George Desmond was the scapegoat for a lot of what went wrong in Riverside in the seventies. If those are his bones behind that wall, some nasty words are going to have to be eaten.”

  “Come again?”

  “At the time Desmond disappeared, the Saccarappa Mill seemed to be going strong. A few years later, it was skating on the edge of the bankruptcy pond. People blamed Desmond, saying the loss of a half a million bucks is why the mill couldn’t afford to upgrade equipment it needed to stay competitive.”

  “There must have been factors other than the embezzlement.”

  “I’m sure there were. But the only one anyone talked about was the big rip-off—George Desmond disappearing with a suitcase full of money, flipping Riverside the bird.”

  He scrubbed his face with his hand. “I was in eighth grade when the mill cut back from three shifts to two. I’ll never forget it. Winter of 1971. More than three hundred people were laid off. The next summer there was a strike, more layoffs. Pretty soon the pain was rippling through town.”

  “Must have been rough.”

  Gene crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Killed my father. Lost his job. Lost his pride. Found the bottle.”

  * * *

  The Riverside PD’s refusal to give out information and Leah’s reluctance to let me describe the discovery of the remains in any detail meant there wasn’t much of a hard news story for me to flesh out. Operating on the assumption she’d reconsider her veto of a sidebar on Desmond’s disappearance in a day or two, I spent a few hours writing a first draft. Knowing I’d be restless in an empty house that still echoed with Megan’s voice, I worked at a pace that kept me in the newsroom through the early evening.

  When I pulled my aging car into my driveway, it was after nine-thirty. My house is a two-hundred-year-old riverfront Cape I bought five years ago. I had to get creative to convince my father—who I don’t think ever owned a single power tool—why he should help me with the down payment on a tumbledown wreck of a house in Riverside, Maine.

  “It’s got good bones,” I said. “With a little shoring up and some renovation, it will be a great place. And you can’t beat the price.”

  “Isn’t that the broker’s line—that you can’t beat the price?”

  “Well, sure, but in this case it’s really true. The guy who owned it for the past forty years never screwed up the original features. There’s crown molding, chair rails, the works.”

  I knew the falling-down house because I lived a couple of blocks away in an apartment over the garage of Rufus Smathers, plumber by day, singing actor with the Riverside Community Theater by night. Having visited a few times, my dad knew from personal experience that Rufe—who has a fine baritone—sings not only in the shower but in the kitchen, the yard and in the garage when he’s rummaging for a fitting or the right length of PVC pipe. My father’s a classical music fan who hates show tunes, so I shamelessly threw Rufe to the dogs in order to seal the down-payment deal, complaining that I’d about reached my limit with early-morning renditions of “If I Were a Rich Man.”

  So I became the proud owner of the handyman special of all handyman specials, and with much technical assistance from Rufe, I’d transformed it into a sweet place.

  A note on the kitchen table from Christie’s fifteen-year-old son Theo reported he and my dog “hung out” for a while before supper. Unclear if that meant they’d gone for a walk, I snapped a leash on Lou’s collar and headed out into the sticky night.

  Lou and I strolled through downtown Riverside in a rough circle that started and ended at the Cascabago River, past the rambling Victorians and Colonials built in the mid-1800s by the town’s prosperous textile merchants. Multiple mailboxes and sagging porches revealed the once-genteel neighborhood’s shame: when the money left town, the mansions were sold to bottom feeders who chopped them into cheap apartments. A few were turned into condos before the recession hit, but other than Nate Kimball, investors hadn’t found their way back to Riverside.

  In the itchy humidity of the July night, the Saccarappa was like a slumbering behemoth covered by forest undergrowth, its stillness rendering it almost invisible. Some of Maine’s former mills have retained their architectural verve. The once-mighty factories of Biddeford, Lewiston, Waterville and Skowhegan look a bit gritty in retirement, but the fundamental beauty of their brick and granite façades makes me want to salute when I pass by. The Saccarappa isn’t like that. During the decade I’d lived in Riverside, I’d never stood back to admire the place, or even given much thought to what lay inside its time-scarred walls.

  Slouched against the river on Main Street’s west side, the original four-story brick edifice was hidden by overgrown shrubbery and a mismatched jumble of punky-looking wood and corrugated additions. It looked too far gone for redemption, as though it had lost respect for itself. But the moment the economy began inching its way out of recession, Nate unveiled his plan to remove the utilitarian zits and turn the historic part of the mill into hip condos overlooking the Cascabago River. Young and hungry to make a name for himself, Nate’s spin was that he was the only guy ballsy enough to tackle the redevelopment project that could wipe away Riverside’s tears. After the morning’s events, I wondered if he was home crying in his beer.

  Easygoing Gene had been on the edge of anger when he spoke of how in the span of a few years, the mill morphed from Riverside’s largest employer to a symbol of lost prosperity. I wondered if the rusty chain-link fence surrounding the property had been there all along or was erected after it closed. The wire barricade sure hadn’t spared the Saccarappa from the town’s rage. Dozens of boarded-over windows were testament to the passion with which young Riversiders hurled rocks at its glass.

  Turning our backs on the mill, Lou and I ambled down the main drag. We were rounding a corner a few blocks from my house when an unmarked cruiser sli
d around the curb and rolled to a stop. The driver’s window whispered down.

  “Got a minute?” It was Chief Wyatt.

  I nodded.

  “Meet me at the ball field.” She drove to the end of the street where a Little League diamond sat hard by the river. I ambled along the sidewalk at the same pace I’d been walking, allowing more time for Paulie Finnegan flash cards to roll through my brain.

  Never trust a cop to tell you the truth.

  They’ll mislead you if they can get away with it.

  Your only leverage is having information to trade.

  The police chief was wearing jeans and a pale blue blouse instead of her usual pantsuit. She’d climbed out of her unmarked and settled herself on the low log fence that separated the parking lot from the ball field. The scent of freshly mown grass perfumed the air.

  “Where’ve you been keeping yourself since I kicked you out of the Saccarappa this morning?”

  “Here and there.” I unhooked the leash from Lou’s collar so she could sniff the bushes at her ease. “Did some digging into the newspaper’s files, but you already heard that from Gene Pelletier.”

  “He told me your theory about the mill guy who disappeared in the sixties. I know it must have shaken you up to see the skull roll out from behind that wall, but you need to slow down and let the police do the investigating.”

  “Backing off isn’t in my job description.”

  “Neither is forensic science. You’re jumping to conclusions. It’ll get you in hot water.”

  “I’m not writing yet, just asking questions.”

  “Even that can lead to trouble.”

  “How?”

  Wyatt leaned back and looked at the stars for a long moment. “You don’t have to agree, but I’m telling you it’s stupid and dangerous for you to stick your nose into this case.”

  “I don’t get it. Why is this story different from any other story?”

  “Because you’re trying to get ahead of the cops.”

  “I’m trying to survive in an around-the-clock media environment. I can’t sit back and wait for you to call a press conference after you solve the case.”

  Wyatt’s face was in shadow, but I could feel her eyes on me. “When we figure out whose bones they are, I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”

  “I saw that crushed skull with my own eyes. Can you at least acknowledge that it’s a murder investigation?”

  She shrugged. Said nothing.

  “A dead body didn’t get bricked behind that wall by itself.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “You need to let us do our job.”

  I whistled for Lou.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you let me do mine.”

  Lou and I took a shortcut home through an unpaved alley. She skittered across the kitchen floor and had a slurp of water before collapsing on her dog bed. With Barb Wyatt’s words still rolling through my mind, I didn’t notice the blinking voice mail light until I was twisting the cap off a bottle of beer.

  After digging a jar of peanuts out of the pantry, I hit the play button. Dead air. My left hand was busy with the beer and my right was full of peanuts, so I didn’t reach over to tap the delete button. Good thing. Helena Desmond had trouble finding her voice.

  “Jimmy gave me your number. He didn’t think it was too late to call.” Her voice was unsteady. “I want to thank you for coming to see me. I’m not sure I’ll sleep tonight, but I’m grateful to you.”

  She paused. I could hear labored breathing, then soft sobs.

  “I hope it is George, as odd as that may sound.” Her voice was tight with tears. She hung up without saying goodbye.

  Standing at the kitchen sink, examining my shaggy-haired reflection in the window, I drank my beer and thought about Helena’s words and the chief’s warning. I wished more than ever that Paulie was still alive. Having covered George Desmond’s disappearance, he’d be keen to know if the Saccarappa skeleton was the missing finance manager and, if so, to figure out who killed him and absconded with all that money in 1968.

  I also knew that if Paulie heard Helena Desmond’s message, he’d have muttered one of his favorite cautions about straddling that line between empathy and over-involvement.

  When you’re covering a sad story, for Chrissakes, don’t start weepin’ yourself.

  Chapter Six

  Friday, May 17, 1968

  Riverside, Maine

  The cops were playing their cards extraordinarily close to their vests, which peeved Paulie Finnegan to no end. He’d worked his ass off for the past two years cultivating sources inside the Riverside PD. Trading on his experience working search and rescue during his Coast Guard hitch, he’d convinced the cops that unlike the other reporters, he had things in common with them. It was a rare day when someone didn’t feed him information, but to a man they’d clammed up about the Desmond investigation.

  If the reservation clerk at the Riverside Hotel hadn’t dropped a dime, Paulie wouldn’t have known that four FBI agents were due to arrive in town the next afternoon.

  Piloting his ’63 Chevy Bel Air down Main Street as the town hall clock struck 7 p.m., Paulie considered his next move. Friday through Sunday, the mill ran only two shifts, which in theory meant millworkers and their families should be out and about downtown, eating dinner at Heywood’s Restaurant, catching a movie at the two-screen Riverside Palace. But the mercury had hit eighty degrees that afternoon—a rare event in May—and everyone who owned a camp vamoosed for the weekend before the end-of-shift whistle finished blowing. Paulie figured those who didn’t own lakeside cabins had cadged invitations with friends, promising to bring a case of beer if they could bunk on the screen porch for a couple of nights. Riverside was deadsville, that was for sure.

  Paulie headed for Portland, where he knew he’d find buddies from the South Portland base hanging out in a bar tucked amid the warehouses on Commercial Street. Twenty minutes later, he didn’t have both feet inside the door of the Bog when a heavy hand fell on his right shoulder. He spun to his left, twisting away from the owner of the clammy mitt, an obnoxious ex-marine whose own kind had rejected him so often he’d made a Coast Guard dive his home base.

  “Hey, Coastie,” the leatherneck said. “You got a cigarette?”

  His breath stank of something sharp, salami or pepperoni maybe, overlaid with cheap bourbon.

  “Still don’t smoke,” Paulie said. “Just like the last time you hit me up for a butt.”

  “The machine’s busted.”

  Paulie ignored him and elbowed his way to the bar. He snagged the last open stool and looked around at the usual suspects, a mix of young and old, veterans and active duty guys. Almost to a man they’d served in the Coast Guard, most stationed across the Fore River at the South Portland station, tending buoys and running search-and-rescue operations. The Bog was their place, and even though the chairs were rickety and the bathroom was a sty, they kept coming back.

  Paulie was finishing up his second beer and contemplating a third when the Harding boys blew in. Three beefy brothers and their old man, reeking of overripe bait.

  Paulie was listening to the conversation buzzing around him with half an ear, thinking about the logistics of how George Desmond might have disappeared without a trace, when the mill man’s name came up. One of the Harding boys had left the fishing life behind in favor of a job at the Saccarappa. The repugnant marine was razzing him about working at a place where men disappeared.

  “What’s this I hear about the Riverside mob?” he said. “Someone make this Desmond guy a pair of cement boots and toss him into the Cascabago?”

  The Harding kid’s tree-trunk neck was dripping sweat. He was several years younger than Paulie—twenty-two or twenty-three—and his sun-bleached hair and wind-reddened cheeks made h
im look even younger. From where he was sitting, Paulie heard his response, even though the oversized kid was addressing his kin.

  “Management oughta keep the rabble outta here.” Harding jerked his head in the direction of his half-drunk harasser. “Especially that fucking leatherneck.”

  “No offense taken.” The marine failed to swallow a belch. “You’re 4F, right? Otherwise why the hell wouldn’t a big strapping fellow like you be serving your country?”

  “Ignore him, Leo,” the elder Harding warned his bristling son.

  The taunts continued. “You must be yellow through and through. Ducked the service, and now the mill thugs got you running home to Daddy’s rusty boat.”

  If anyone wondered whether the Harding kid was strong or just big, he answered the question right then and there. Bellowing like an enraged elephant, he grabbed the marine’s shirtfront and picked him up off the floor.

  “Shut. Your. Fuckin’. Yap.” Leo spoke through gritted teeth, each word a sentence of its own. The jukebox was playing Otis Redding’s new single, “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay,” when Harding smashed his tormentor’s head into its glass front, causing the needle to screech to a halt between “resting” and “my bones.”

  The Bog’s owner vaulted over the bar to break up the fight but he needn’t have bothered. Leo the bruiser was being pushed out the door by his brothers while his father fished a wad of bills out of his wallet.

  “This should patch up your music box.” Papa Harding handed what looked like several twenties to the barkeep. “Sorry my boy lost his temper. But he’s right. You shouldn’t let that asshole inside your bar.”

  * * *

  Sunday morning Paulie caught the seven-thirty Mass at Holy Martyrs after being awakened at quarter past six by the wailing of his downstairs neighbors’ three-week-old baby. After a leisurely shower and shave, he stepped inside the rear door of the cavernous brick church just as the organist struck the first note of the processional. He slid into a pew halfway down the left-hand aisle and pretended to sing while surveying the crowd. Within seconds he’d spotted Lieutenant Thomas MacMahon’s red head. At six foot six, the state police detective stood out, ten rows ahead in the middle aisle.