Quick Pivot

by Brenda Buchanan

  In his message on my answering machine the previous night, Nate sounded like he was underwater. It turned out he’d caught a summer cold. He looked at me through dull eyes and tried to smile, but it was obvious he felt lousy. Jiggling his key in the heavy door’s deadbolt lock, he muttered something about entering a crypt.

  The hallway lights in the Saccarappa’s basement seemed dimmer than on the day Desmond’s bones were found. A steady dripping plinked in the distance. I turned on the heavy mag flashlight I’d loaded with fresh batteries that morning. Carrying his own torch, Nate led the way, stopping ten feet before the gap in the bricks that marked the place where George Desmond had been entombed.

  “See the difference in color?” Nate shone his light against the bricks. “These over here have a lot of grime on them.” He ran his finger along the surface of the wall, showing me how it picked up greasy soot. He then took two steps toward the opening, where a pool of yellow crime scene tape lay on the floor, no longer needed to keep prying eyes and contaminating hands away from the place Desmond’s bones had rested for four and a half decades. He rubbed a different finger against the bricks next to the hole. It came away almost clean.

  “I noticed the difference the first time I came down here. I had to find out what that was about.”

  When I moved toward the hole in the wall, Nate went in the opposite direction, leaning against the far side of the corridor, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets.

  “The opening seems bigger than it did last Friday,” I said.

  “Looks like the police enlarged it both vertically and horizontally. They must have wanted to get lights and equipment in there.”

  I knelt and shone my flashlight inside, leaning in for a long look. Four feet ahead another brick wall rose to the ceiling, its bricks almost black. I sat back on my heels.

  “Are we facing west?”

  “Yup. Right on the riverbank.”

  “Why the double wall?” I tapped my knuckles against the corridor’s bricks.

  “To protect against flooding and provide better structural support. This is the oldest part of the mill. When it was built in the 1840s, this basement was a big open space with a dirt floor. Every spring it flooded.”

  “Nothing like your mill eroding out from under you.”

  “Exactly. In the late 1850s they laid a rock floor with drainage channels. Then, after the Civil War, the looms got much heavier, meaning the upper floors needed better support. The mill owners’ solution was to build an interior perimeter wall and a series of supports across the middle. On the river side, the perimeter wall also provided more protection from the flooding.”

  “Those bricks on the outside wall are almost black.”

  “They’ve been exposed to the damp for a hell of a long time.”

  Sticking my head back through the hole, I moved my flashlight’s beam to the right. Another brick wall, perpendicular to the corridor, was six feet from where I knelt. It appeared solid from the ceiling down to a point about four feet up from the floor, where enough bricks had been removed to permit a man to squeeze through. The discarded bricks—still red—were stacked neatly to the right of the hole.

  “There’s a newer wall to the north, or part of one,” I said. “Red bricks. Looks like the cops opened a hole in it.”

  “The plans don’t show a wall in that location.” Nate came over and knelt beside me. The hole was more than wide enough for him to lean in and see for himself.

  “What the hell?”

  Swinging my light to the left I found another perpendicular brick wall, near enough to touch. It was intact, ceiling to floor. Like the one on the north side of the hole, the bricks were red.

  “Another one on this side.”

  “These walls must have been built when the killer put Desmond’s body back here.” Nate backed away from the opening and stood up. “He didn’t just open a hole from the corridor and brick it back up once he dumped the body.”

  I thought of the evasive Mike Thibodeau. “He built a crypt.”

  “An eighteen-foot-tall brick crypt. Why would someone go to so much trouble?”

  I swung my flashlight down and noticed the floor between the outside and perimeter walls was granite. It was a good six inches lower than the concrete corridor. A foot inside the exterior wall, a deep trough had been carved in the stone. I traced it with my light.

  “Your basic aqueduct,” Nate said. “The Greeks started building them in 500 BC” He sneezed twice, dug out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “The mustiness in there’s intense.” He moved back toward the stairway. “I need to stand where there’s better air.”

  “I’m going in. You okay with that?”

  “Be my guest,” he said.

  I crab-walked through the hole and stood inside the burial place between the parallel brick walls. The air felt different.

  Cooler. Damper. Grittier.

  Wyatt said the forensic autopsy indicated Desmond had been killed elsewhere, but I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d been alive when he was entombed. Willing myself past a moment of claustrophobia, I stepped toward the perpendicular wall to the north. Once again I had to crouch but I was able to ease through the opening the cops had made. The darkness beyond it was almost absolute.

  I played my flashlight back and forth, up and down. The beam found nothing of note. Just two brick walls, side by side, four feet apart, running north-south, the granite drainage channel loping beside the blackened wall on the west side. Within the illumination range of my flashlight no other perpendicular walls interrupted.

  Crawling back through the cop-made hole in the wall, I began to examine Desmond’s tomb. I paced it off at eight and a half feet, north to south. With my left palm flat against the west wall, I reached back toward the hallway. My right elbow hit the bricks. I was wishing I’d brought a tape to measure the actual distance when I heard a muffled noise.

  “What the hell is that?” Nate’s voice sounded farther away than the spot where I’d left him. A second series of thumps echoed through the damp air.

  “That must be my photographer,” I called back. “I told her to whale on the door when she got here.”

  “I’ll go up and let her in.”

  When I heard him jog away I almost crawled back out into the hallway, but shook away the heebie-jeebies. Again pointing my flashlight at the floor, I examined the granite. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, but it appeared to be a shade or two darker in the area where I guessed Desmond’s remains had rested. Kneeling to take a closer look, I heard a scuffling noise behind me to the right. When I swung the flash around I spotlighted a fat Norway rat. It looked at me for several seconds, eyes glittering, before scrabbling away through the hole the cops had made in the south wall.

  Another Paulie-ism came to mind.

  There’s never just one rat.

  I crawled back out to the corridor. Apparently the door-banger hadn’t been my photographer because I could hear Nate’s voice and another man’s coming from the stairway. Expecting a cop, I was surprised to see Jay Preble.

  “Hello there, Joe. I should have known you’d be here already.”

  “Yeah, I’m doing a follow-up story. Why are you here?”

  “I’ve maintained a little consulting business since I retired from the bank. The consortium of investors that owns this place has retained me to be its man on the ground. There was considerable concern about last week’s discovery, of course. No one wants the sale to young Mr. Kimball to fall through.”

  He glanced down the damp corridor. “When the police notified me last night that civilian access would be permitted today, I thought my first order of business should be to come take a look around.” His resonant voice echoed down the otherwise silent corridor. “I must say, except for the lack of noise, the place hasn’t changed much. Used to be a cacop
hony in here.”

  Preble extended his arms out from his side and stretched, as though he’d just climbed out of bed and was greeting the day, seemingly oblivious to the fact we were standing twenty feet from the spot where Desmond’s bones had been hidden for four decades.

  “Nate and I were standing right here when the construction workers opened up the wall and found George Desmond’s remains.” I gestured toward the hole in the wall.

  The light in the corridor wasn’t so dim as to hide the blood rushing from Preble’s face.

  “This is the spot?” He turned to Nate. “I didn’t realize this is where we were headed.”

  Bowing his head for a moment, he pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and passed it over his face. Though Preble was somewhere in his seventies, he’d always seemed fifteen years younger, his full head of hair and athletic frame creating the illusion of vigorous middle age. In that moment, face pale and eyes watering, he looked like an old man. With a jerk of his head, Nate began walking the three of us back toward the stairs.

  “It was such a tragedy,” Preble said. “For George and his family, and also for this whole town.”

  “Must have been terrible.”

  Preble stopped and looked at me, his mouth set in a straight line. “You have no idea, son. Sitting behind my desk at the bank, I apologized to more people than I can count.”

  “Apologized? What did you have to apologize for?”

  “Our bank should have spotted irregularities with the mill’s accounts. There were several red flags.”

  “Recognizable at the time, or only in retrospect?”

  He took a huge breath and let it out, his shoulders sagging. “We should have known something was going on with our biggest customer.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence I didn’t know how to break. Nate suggested we go upstairs.

  “Excellent idea,” Preble said. “When I came over here, I didn’t anticipate I’d come face-to-face with that.” He waved a hand back the way we’d come.

  Once we were on the main floor, Nate segued into his tour guide narrative. I assumed he was talking for Preble’s benefit because my “Former Mill Morphing Into Hip Housing” feature story wasn’t going to be written anytime soon.

  My photographer showed up five minutes later, lugging her camera bag and a light bar. Excusing myself, I left Nate and Preble wandering around on the main floor, deep in conversation. As we jogged down the two flights to the burial place, I warned her about the rat.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said. “Glad I’m not wearing sandals.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Monday, June 3, 1968

  Riverside, Maine

  Paulie decided he’d rather dig ditches than cover school board meetings.

  Deep ditches. In hundred-degree heat. During black fly season.

  The school board chairman was Hector Finagle, a name that said it all. An undertaker by day, he brought to his elected position the same unctuous demeanor with which he convinced Riverside’s bereaved citizens to upgrade from pine coffins to cherry caskets.

  Finagle’s twin brother Dexter owned the company that provided bus transportation to Riverside students. Even though Heck was making a big show of recusing himself from discussion about renewing the bus contract, no one doubted the fix was in.

  Spare me having to treat this like a big fucking deal.

  The only redeeming thing about covering the school beat was that it got him out of the newsroom. Paulie couldn’t bear to listen when the city desk operator sent calls related to the Desmond investigation to greenhorn Bernie Francoeur. From his seat two rows away, Paulie could tell Bernie was good at listening but bad at asking questions. His stories read like they’d been written by an FBI flak.

  Lots of empty words. No new information.

  While Heck Finagle droned on about the need to raise school lunch prices, Paulie looked at his watch and planned his next undercover reporter moves. As he’d told Tommy MacMahon, he had no intention of stopping his work on the Desmond story. His first order of business was to test the statie’s theory. To do that, Paulie needed to get behind Ken Coatesworth’s boyish smile, get a look at the man within. He flipped to a blank page in his notebook and jotted some notes:

  KC approach: Direct interview? Confront w/ rumors?

  Talk w/ friends not likely to squeal.

  Tail? When? How?

  The first option would put Paulie in his element, flexing his journalistic muscles and maximizing the potential for results. Coatesworth was almost certain to be unprepared for direct questions about whether he had mob ties, increasing the likelihood he’d do or say something stupid. But if Coatesworth figured out the source of the tip was MacMahon, Paulie would be doing what he promised not to do: burning his best source and blowing up the investigation in the process. He mentally back-burnered that option.

  Options two and three made more sense, and might be complementary. Tagging behind Coatesworth when he didn’t know he was being watched might yield sources of firsthand information about the man and his habits. It was coming up on four o’clock. As soon as he wrote up the damn school board story he could start doing some real reporting.

  Jay Preble called the newsroom at ten till six, oblivious to the concept of a first-edition deadline. He left a message asking if Paulie could meet him for a drink. When the copyboy delivered the note, Paulie considered his approach. There were only so many more times he could casually bring up Coatesworth’s name without alerting Preble to the fact he was digging into his friend’s background, but he didn’t dare take Preble into his confidence yet. Though the banker was actively helping the FBI with the Desmond investigation, his loyalty to Coatesworth seemed strong. And even if Preble didn’t tell Coatesworth that the cops were looking at him, he might let something slip to Wellington. Either way, MacMahon would wind up on the hot seat, and Paulie on an even hotter seat.

  When the edition had been put safely to bed, Paulie called Preble back and suggested they meet at the Bog.

  “It’s a dive, but I think they stock top-shelf liquor.”

  “To what do I owe the honor of your company? Is your ladylove busy tonight?”

  Paulie shielded his mouth in an attempt to keep his newsroom neighbors from hearing the latest on his personal life. “That’s kind of over,” he said.

  “I’m surprised to hear that. At the party the other night you had eyes only for each other. And hands too.”

  Paulie hoped to hell there hadn’t been witnesses to the interlude on the beach.

  “What can I say?” Paulie said. “Women.”

  “I know, man. Tonight we’ll drink to the futility of trying to understand them. I’ll meet you at your waterfront hangout and stake us the first round.”

  Big Leo Harding’s broad face was the first one Paulie saw when he squinted through the haze of cigarette smoke inside the Bog’s heavy door. Leo was standing five feet inside, drinking a longneck Schlitz and jawing with a couple of fishermen. His eyes took note of Paulie but he made no move to join him at the bar until Preble walked in, the only man in the place wearing a suit, much less a tie.

  “People are going to think you took a wrong turn when you came in here,” Paulie said. “Take your necktie off, at least.”

  “Am I embarrassing you?”

  “Nope. I don’t want you to get rolled when you walk out the door.”

  “Fat chance of that.” Preble reached beyond Paulie to shake hands with the suddenly sociable Harding. “I’ve got my own personal ruffian to watch my back.”

  Paulie nodded hello to Big Leo, wondering if the jukebox-destroying fight had been forgiven by the management. Preble made the barkeep happy when he ordered high-end scotch. Paulie knew the first couple of drinks would be the real deal but subsequent pours—once Preble’s pal
ate was dulled—would be from a Canadian Club bottle containing something far cheaper.

  Not my problem, he thought, sipping a beer as he eased into conversation with Preble and Harding, alert for an opportunity to steer the discussion toward the scandal at the Saccarappa. Harding gave him the opening, saying he heard the FBI was going to reinterview Desmond’s family members and fishing buddies.

  “As if he would have told anyone he was planning to skip town.” Big Leo popped a couple beer nuts into his mouth. “Sneaky bastard. I heard he had a book at his house about how to make a getaway.”

  “The whole story isn’t known yet,” Paulie said.

  “You’re the reporter.” Preble swirled the scotch in his glass. “Tell us what we don’t know.”

  “There’s nothing I know that you don’t. I’m just saying, there’s more to be mined in this story. I’ve been trying to talk with some of the people at the Saccarappa office who actually worked with Desmond, but can’t get in the door. Can you help me with that?”

  “What about your girlfriend?” Big Leo said. “She was his secretary, for Chrissakes.”

  “If you’d read my stories you’d know she was in the dark. She typed. She filed. She answered the phone. If he was skimming money, Joan knew nothing about it.”

  “That’s what she says, anyway.”

  Paulie half stood off his barstool.

  “Shut up, Leo.” Preble put his hands up, like a boxing referee.

  “I’d ask Ken Coatesworth to talk with you, but he can’t even talk with me.” Preble shrugged. “He’s been told to zip his lips.”

  “How closely did Ken work with Desmond?”

  “Very little. Ken’s in marketing, a world apart from finance.”

  “Then why can’t he talk with you?”

  “You’ve met Mr. Wellington, I presume? His edict is that nobody in any position of power at the mill can talk to anybody else.”

  Paulie tried not to let frustration show on his face. “How about you guys? When’s the last time you saw Desmond?”

  “No idea,” Preble said. “I knew George, but we didn’t run in the same social circle.”