Dead Head db-3

by Rosemary Harris

  No one I knew used highschoolmemories.com. Well okay, one person, but she was recently divorced and looking for love, or a reasonable facsimile. Why she thought she’d find it among her former high school classmates was beyond me. Most people would rather eat ground glass than relive their high school years.

  I printed out the list of Caroline’s classmates and planned to search the likeliest candidates on Facebook—athletes, cheerleaders, and those with the same zip codes as Caroline had had. I didn’t know the demographics of the average Facebook user, and it was a long shot that there would be a lot of overlap with Caroline’s classmates, but it would keep me busy until the yearbooks arrived, and I might trip over somebody with the initials JW. In my former career I had unearthed more than a few good stories by just doggedly pursuing trails that others had dropped.

  I had my own dormant Facebook page that I’d started, under protest, three years earlier. Most of my “friends” were old television contacts, and once I stopped being interested in who had his hand in what cookie jar and who had signed what deal, I stopped checking my Facebook page for invitations and new friend requests, but I was still out there in cyberspace with a three-year-old picture and outdated contact info. Just as well—I looked younger and wasn’t as easy to find, a winning combination.

  Maybe I’d get lucky and locate that one perky gal who considers it her mission to reconnect people whether they want it or not. Every school, business, or organization has one, the person who organizes things no one else wanted to bother with—the uncool activities, the obscure charity events. (Hi, want to volunteer for the National Frankfurter Finger Weenie Roast?)

  At my school her name was Rena. She wore an ear-to-ear grin from the first day of high school to graduation. A relative of mine, from the cynical side of the family, claims only babies and idiots are that happy. In Rena’s case, she might have been right. Rena always seemed to be cradling a clipboard in her arms as if the sign-up sheet was her baby. She was probably working for a cruise line now, with a steady stream of new people to annoy every week.

  I started with the school and the word cheerleader. Two female names popped up but no pictures—presumably they wanted to be remembered as they were, ponytailed, flying through the air, no cellulite, eternally young. Perversely, I was glad. Who wanted to think cheerleaders from twenty-five years ago were still as beautiful and limber as they were back then? No male names appeared.

  Next I tried the football and baseball teams. The hat was a Detroit Tigers hat. Maybe our man was an athlete and not just a fan. That coughed up pages of names to scroll through; either Newtonville’s male students were all on Facebook, or every water boy and equipment manager claimed he played a valuable role on some team. And this was interesting: the men were more likely to post pictures of themselves and the women posted avatars or nothing. No matter how saggy, bald, or tubby they got, the males thought they still looked hot. Self-esteem or self-delusion?

  I was up to the Fs and getting a little punchy. There was nothing in the fridge, so I ordered a pizza and a two-liter bottle of diet soda for dinner. Good food was going to take time and mine would be there in less than twenty-five minutes or it would be free. My finances being what they were, I found myself hoping for a tiny fender bender somewhere between here and Armando’s Pizza Coliseum, nothing serious, just enough to hold up traffic and make the pizza arrive in twenty-seven minutes.

  I stared at my computer screen, wondering how else I might find the man who’d bumped into Caroline if I got to the Zs and didn’t see a guy with a cleft lip. The customer who knew his sports teams also knew Retro Joe, and said that these days Joe was driving for Hutchinson Shipping. If my other research came up empty, I’d try Hutchinson, but I wasn’t relishing that conversation. “Hi, do any of your truckers have scarred or cleft lips?” I’d have hung up on me.

  For her part, Babe posted a note on the Paradise bulletin board claiming the man had left something at the diner. Not entirely true but not entirely false either, he’d left a lot of questions.

  The bell rang, I snapped out of my blue screen stupor, grabbed my wallet, and headed for the door. I glanced at my watch—shoot, twenty-three minutes. When I opened the door I saw Mike O’Malley standing there holding a pizza box and a paper bag.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Delivering your pizza,” he said, inspecting the receipt that was taped to the top of the box. “I thought you ate healthy food. Cake for lunch the other day and now this. Has life in Springfield totally corrupted you?”

  “What have you done with the pizza man?” I asked, looking down the driveway.

  “Ran him off the road and stole his pie.” He waited for me to at least smile, but I was too tired. “You used to have a sense of humor. I stopped him for speeding, around the corner.”

  “And he bribed you with my dinner?”

  “Of course not. Technically, I’m off the clock, so he got away with a strongly worded warning. I paid for your pizza and this swill that you’re planning to drink. Can I come in or are we going to let this pie get cold? Truce?”

  I should have just tipped him and sent him on his way after his less-than-polite exit at lunch, but there was something about him that always made me open the door and invite him in.

  Of course, he was one of the few single men I knew in Springfield between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five. It could have been that. Or maybe it was something else. He was a good man: he looked after his elderly father, he had a dog, he brought me food. He had all the outward signs of normalcy that usually appealed to women, but maybe that was it. I didn’t ordinarily gravitate toward normal. I wanted the tortured artist. The driven genius. The explorer with just one more mountain to climb. And here I was, once again trying to picture this pale, thinning-on-top suburban policeman naked on a fur rug in front of a crackling fire. There was no denying it—we had the worst timing since that couple on the Titanic.

  “What are you smiling at?” he said.

  “Nothing. When did you get so health conscious?” I said, shaking off the image. I shooed him in and led him past the door to my office. He peeked in.

  “You’re working late.”

  “Actually I’m being interrupted late. Is this supposed to make up for stiffing me at lunch?”

  “Yes.”

  We went upstairs to the kitchen and I dropped the greasy cardboard box on a round oak table I’d scored at a flea market the previous summer. The last time Mike O’Malley was here, my kitchen had been ransacked, with all the drawers and cabinets open and their contents strewn about. Despite that, he knew where everything was located. He set the table as if he lived there and we sat down to dinner every night.

  “I think the garlic powder is downstairs.”

  “No worries, I can do without it.”

  We were being very careful with other, not wanting to get into another of our volatile and incomprehensible dustups. The tiptoeing generally lasted about three minutes. According to my kitchen clock, we were at two minutes and forty-five seconds.

  “What were you doing around the corner?” I asked. “Am I under surveillance?” I meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding too snippy. He let it slide.

  “No. The pizza delivery boy was speeding on Longview Road. I just happened to catch up with him here. Fortuitous, since I’m now off duty and strangely in the mood for one of our pizza dates.” He separated a slice and deftly wiggled it away from the others without adding too much extra cheese. Was this a date?

  We agreed that drivers on my street were reckless fools and it was only a matter of time before some poor soul, driver or pedestrian, was sent flying into the wetlands, never to be seen again, body parts scattered by foraging critters. We discussed the renovation of the one and only Chinese restaurant in a twenty-mile radius and the latest exhibit on Polish immigrants at the historical society. What was next? The weather? The merits of the Mets’ newest acquisition? Caroline was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room with us, whethe
r we said her name out loud or not. As usual with O’Malley, I blinked first.

  “I’m sorry if you think I asked you to lunch only to pump you for information.”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “Grant Sturgis asked me to find the tipster. That’s the digging I said I’d do, and it kind of backfired.”

  O’Malley picked the pepperoni disks off his slice and stacked them like poker chips in one corner of the cardboard box. “I take it that was before he thought it was you who informed on her?”

  “Yes, wise guy. Before everyone thought it was me.” Stay calm, I told myself. If you’re going to ask someone for his help, try not to call him names first. “I know it’s not your case, but isn’t there anything you can tell me?”

  O’Malley added to what I’d already learned. Caroline was arrested for attempting to sell drugs to an undercover cop. That much anyone with a newspaper or an Internet connection knew. Her attorney claimed it was entrapment—the cop was a young woman and they were at a party. Apparently, Caroline offered the woman a joint and the woman insisted on paying. The next day the police came to the football field and arrested her in the middle of practice.

  “I don’t know anything about the law, but that sounds like a trap to me.”

  “Harder drugs were found in Caroline’s gym bag, as was forty-seven thousand dollars in cash. She’d been under surveillance for some time. Seems like half the student body was on speed at one time or another, and what better way to distribute than through one of the most popular girls in school?”

  I couldn’t believe it. Our Caroline?

  “But why would she do it?”

  “There could have been any number of reasons—money, wanting to look cooler than the other kids, boredom. I’m a bachelor. I don’t know why kids do the things they do. I’m just telling you what I heard and read.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  In the police report. O’Malley had seen it and I needed to. I didn’t know about the past, but police records were public these days. In Springfield, all I’d have to do was walk into the station house and ask for it, like the mother of that unruly thirteen-year-old. A decades-old report in another state where I’d never been and didn’t know anyone was going to be harder. Certainly for a gardener, but maybe not for a journalist. I thought of asking Lucy for help, but I’d have to tread carefully. In this instance, she was one of them. I didn’t want her contributing to the feeding frenzy surrounding the Sturgises, although it was naive to imagine I could stop it.

  At least now I had something tangible to look for, and who knew, maybe my online research would turn something up. I couldn’t wait to hustle O’Malley out of the house and get back to the computer.

  I inhaled three slices of pizza and washed them down with copious amounts of diet soda guaranteed to ruin my teeth and the lining of my stomach.

  “You were hungry,” O’Malley said, working on slice number two, pacing himself and peeling off excess strands of cheese.

  Not really, but I hoped that if the food was gone, O’Malley would leave soon after. He finally took the hint.

  “I can’t stop you from looking for this person, but I don’t see what good it will do anyone.”

  He didn’t, but I did. It was my reputation and my new life, almost as much as it was Caroline’s.

  Soon after Mike left I resumed my Facebook research. The Ms were promising because there were just so many, but no one looked remotely like the trucker I’d seen at the diner. Nothing at all until the Ws, someone named Jeff Warren. I’d assumed the name JW referred to his first and middle names. The picture he posted was of a Tigers shirt and hat. I reedited my Facebook profile and became a Detroit Tigers fan. Then I friended Jeff. Within four hours he’d confirmed me as a friend and I learned that he worked for Hutchinson Shipping and was currently on some mind “making a dead-head run on some mind-numbing stretch of highway between Maine and North Carolina.” Which would mean he’d recently driven through Connecticut.

  Twenty-one

  Before I even brushed my teeth I ran downstairs and turned on the computer to check for Facebook messages. Had Jeff Warren posted something? Did he say where he was? It was ridiculous—I felt like a fifteen-year-old girl waiting for “Billy” to ask me to the prom. I showered and dressed but punctuated every morning ritual with a return to the computer and my Facebook page. It was as if I were tethered to the damn thing and some unseen force was reeling me back in every ten or fifteen minutes.

  When I was in the television business, my company had an account with an online outfit called Background.com. It was pretty scary that something like Background.com even existed. I hadn’t thought of it that way in my previous life when I had different notions of the definition of privacy, but the fact that anyone, anywhere could simply plug in your name and get your phone number and vital statistics made me want to close every credit card account, shred every piece of paper that had my name on it, and become a survivalist somewhere in Montana.

  The production company used it to vet possible hires and to confirm the reliability of story sources. It wasn’t a given that you’d get all the info you needed on a source, but often you could find out if someone who’d been spilling his guts to you had any hidden agenda or ax to grind. Once I’d learned that a so-called witness to improprieties at a day care center had himself spent time in jail on a lesser but similar charge. It had saved me days and an embarrassing story, but more important, it had saved his potential victims a lifetime of having to repudiate untrue allegations. They never learned how close they came to being ruined.

  Instead of checking Facebook for the umpteenth time, I went to the Background Web site. Our passwords used to be changed monthly but were sometimes repeated since Betsy, the department head, wasn’t quite as paranoid as management thought she should be. And it wasn’t easy to keep coming up with memorable words or names every four weeks when you’d been doing it for years and had passwords for just about everything.

  When I had left the company the password was Pyewacket1250. Betsy was an animal lover, and Pyewacket was the name of the cat in a movie she was crazy about. The twelve fifty was a constant, a required numerical addition to the password. That part was easy to remember—it was our address. I took a chance and tried to sign on with the old password. No luck.

  I considered looking through the newspapers, trying to find a more recent film with animals in it, but how would I know?—They rarely got top billing unless you went back to Marley & Me, and Betsy was more of a cat person than a dog lover. I knew it would mean tipping my hand, but it was a heckuva lot simpler to call Lucy Cavanaugh.

  Lucy and I went way back. She’d have liked us to go way forward, too, but I was still committed to my five-year plan for Dirty Business. If I couldn’t make it work, then maybe I’d see about a return to the big city and the career I’d left behind. I can get us a production deal. We’d be a two-woman team and just use the freelancers we liked and only when we needed them. Our lives will be a write-off. I could hear her sales pitch even as I dialed.

  The company we’d both worked for had flirted with hard-hitting news stories during my tenure, but I couldn’t take credit for that. I left during the embryonic stage of non-news news. Now there was more money and ratings in missing coeds, baby bumps—real or imagined—and celebrities misbehaving. Those were the things people seemed to care about, and it was one of the reasons I was not unhappy to get out.

  Lucy’s assistant, Courtney, always sounded disappointed when she heard it was me on the phone and not a colleague or source about to drop some bomb that would make them all famous. Courtney might have been nicer to me if she knew that I was on the fringes of one of those salacious stories, but I resisted the urge to impress her. She put me through.

  “Luce, I need a favor.” I was interrupting her, of course—I could hear her keyboard clicking. It was nearly impossible to get her undivided attention.

  “What’s up?” she asked. “I’m checking on a chocolatier who’s
being accused of using less cocoa in his candies than he claims. I think we got him.”

  I felt so much safer knowing that someone was tracking down the real evildoers. “I’m calling about Caroline Sturgis,” I said.

  The clicking stopped, and for a moment I wondered if I had crossed over to the dark side.

  Lucy knew Caroline had been extradited to Michigan; everyone who cared to, knew. It was what I would have considered junk news if I hadn’t been tangentially involved. A judge there had scheduled a hearing to be held in three weeks. Until that time Caroline would be making her home in a Michigan jail. I tried to imagine her in a cell instead of in her pristine kitchen with its whiteboard tracking everyone’s activities. What would her new bulletin board read? Walk around courtyard, make hand-carved shivs, design tattoos, join gang?

  “They confiscated her knitting needles,” Lucy told me. I could tell she was reading from a screen. “I guess they didn’t think she was a threat to herself or anyone else in the Bridgeport jail, but things are more formal where she is now. Maybe they’ll let her crochet. How much damage can she inflict with a plastic crochet hook? Although I suppose you could kill someone with a sharpened pencil if you stuck it in that right spot.” An interesting theory. I’d have to bring my pencil case the next time I went out at night.

  “I need to use Background. Do you guys still have an account?” I whispered, as if someone other than Lucy could hear me.

  “You’re wasting your time.” The keyboard clicking resumed. “I already plugged her name in. Just a few old phone numbers under Monica’s name and five under Caroline’s—her home number and four cells which look like hers, her husband’s, and the two kids’. I did get the criminal records, though, and the original arrest report. You want them?”