Instruments of Night

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Did he tell you anything about the meeting?”

  “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want him to go into it over the phone. I wanted you to hear whatever he had to say. That’s why I’m here, Paul. Brinker agreed to talk to us at eight-thirty this morning.”

  Minutes later they were on their way, Eleanor at the wheel of her black Mazda. She’d opened the sunroof, and Graves felt an unaccustomed pleasure in the play of light upon her face, the way the wind tossed her hair. Then an invisible hand yanked him from this brief delight, and he saw Gwen before him, her eyes open but cold and colorless. Her lips moved mechanically, in a surreal whisper, repeating the words Eleanor had heard years before in the Maine woods, Come here, sweetie.

  Graves felt the bite of the rope that bound him to the chair, heard his voice cry out, Leave her alone. He saw Kessler let go of Gwen’s blood-soaked hair, turn to face him. You want me to leave her alone, boy? Kessler was coming toward him now, a knife in his hand. The old certainty swept over Graves again, that he was going to die. Then astonishment when he didn’t. He heard the knife slice the rope, felt Kessler’s lips at his ear, whispering softly, What’s your name, boy?

  When he returned to himself, the landscape had changed. Hills had become valleys, the broad estates that bordered Riverwood now broken into small, neat farms.

  “Where do you go, Paul?” Eleanor asked. She was watching him intently. “In your mind?”

  “Into the past,” Graves said. Which was true. “Old New York,” he added quickly. Which was a lie.

  It was exactly 8:30 when they arrived at a rambling, badly run-down farmhouse that rested at the end of an unpaved road. A circular fish pond swept out from behind it. A teenage boy drifted idly in a small boat at its far end. There was a dilapidated barn to the right, along with a corral. Two horses stood just behind the fence. Their heads bobbed slowly in the warm morning air as they munched hay from a long wooden trough.

  A screen door snapped loudly as Graves got out of the Mazda. He flinched, then glanced toward the farmhouse. A man had emerged and was now ambling toward them, one hand tightly gripping an aluminum cane.

  “Mr. Brinker?” Eleanor called. She began to walk toward him.

  “That’s me,” the old man said. He wore baggy pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Despite the cane, he seemed quite agile. “You must be Miss Stern,” he said.

  “Yes, I am. And this is Paul Graves, the writer I told you about.”

  “It’s good to have a little company,” Brinker told them cheerfully. “I don’t get many visitors anymore. Not living way out here in the sticks.” He lifted his cane and pointed to the pond. “Just my grandson, and he doesn’t know enough about anything to keep a conversation going.” He shook his head despairingly. “I don’t know what they teach kids in school anymore. That kid knows nothing. Absolutely nothing. Couldn’t tell you who Alexander Hamilton was. Doesn’t know a thing about the Civil War. The past is just some vague idea in his mind. There once were other people. They did stuff. That’s all that boy knows.” He scowled, then seemed to grasp that he’d gotten off track. “We’ll sit outside,” he decided. “The house gets a little musty.”

  They took their seats on the front porch. Graves and Eleanor sat in ragged wicker chairs, Brinker in an unpainted wooden swing whose rusty chain creaked as he propelled himself backward, pushing against the floor with the heels of a pair of worn brown shoes.

  “I’m surprised anybody’s going back over that old murder case,” Brinker began. He was nearly bald, with only wisps of white hair. They trembled delicately with each breeze, then settled down again. But it was his eyes Graves noticed. They were warm and trustworthy, yet unmistakably penetrating as well, the sort that burned through lies with a steady heat.

  “I’d just been elected mayor of Britanny Falls when I met with Mr. Davies,” the old man went on. “Inexperienced in politics, that’s for sure.”

  “Was Warren Davies one of your supporters?” Eleanor asked, wasting no time, Graves noticed, in getting to the matter at hand.

  Brinker waved his hand. “I didn’t need Warren Davies’ support. I was already elected. It was Mr. Davies who needed a favor from me. That’s what the meeting was about.” He sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “There was some town land that bordered Riverwood, you see. And Mr. Davies wanted to buy it.” He smiled. “It was one of those moments, you know, when you take one route or another, and that makes all the difference.”

  “What do you mean?” Eleanor asked.

  “I mean you stay honest, or you don’t,” Brinker replied. “Mr. Davies wanted me to take this little piece of town property and auction it off. To private bidders, I mean. Of course, there’s no doubt who would have bid the highest. Nobody around here could compete with Warren Davies on that score.” Brinker chuckled. “Of course, Mr. Davies didn’t get to the point right away. He primed the pump a little first. Started with a few compliments about how lucky Britanny Falls was to have me. Stuff like that. Flattery. Then we talked about the war a little. Where I’d been. What I’d done.” He grabbed the swing’s rusty chain. “But none of that really interested him. He wanted that land. That’s what he’d come to talk to me about. People had been using it as a kind of parking area because it was near the river. Mr. Davies said it ruined Riverwood. Made it too accessible. He didn’t like the public getting that near his property. So he wanted the town to put it up for sale.”

  “Are you talking about the parking area at the base of Mohonk Ridge?” Graves asked.

  “That’s right.” Brinker nodded. “If he could get hold of that land, he could close it to the public. That’s what he intended to do. He said people parked there and wandered around in the woods. His woods, that is. Riverwood. He wanted to put a stop to that. He said he’d make it worth my while if I arranged for the land to go up for sale. A bribe, flat out. Of course, no particular amount came up, but we both knew what was being discussed.” Brinker’s eyes grew steely, as if he were once again facing the man he’d refused that day. “Well, let me tell you, Warren Davies had a way of looking at a person. Intimidating. I’m sure he could scare most people into doing whatever he wanted.” He lifted his head proudly. “But me, I’d just gotten back from four years fighting the Japs. Mr. Davies didn’t scare me. So I just stood up and said, ‘Good day, sir,’ and I left.”

  To Graves’ surprise, Eleanor asked nothing about the bribe, but went on to another issue entirely. “What time did you leave Mr. Davies?”

  “It couldn’t have been more than half an hour after we got to the restaurant.”

  “Did Mr. Davies leave the restaurant at the same time?”

  Brinker shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I think he’d already planned to have another meeting that afternoon. Because the minute I left, he motioned to this other fellow. A guy who’d been sitting at the bar.”

  “Did you recognize this other man?”

  “Sure, I did,” Brinker answered. “I hadn’t been mayor very long, but I knew enough to recognize the local law.”

  “Local law?” Graves asked. “You mean Sheriff Gerard?”

  Brinker looked as if such a possibility struck him as mildly comical. “No, not Gerard. He was sheriff, all right, but when push came to shove, he didn’t really have a lot of say about what went on in Britanny Falls. It was the State Police you went to if you needed something done. They had the right connections. All the way to Albany. And this other guy, the one who was sitting in the bar and who went over to Davies when I left, he was with the State Police. The head honcho for this area. In charge of all the big cases. The Class A felonies, I mean. Rape. Murder.”

  “Dennis Portman?”

  “That’s right,” Brinker said. “Portman. Big as life. Sitting at the bar. Sort of hunched over it. Wearing that ratty old rainslick. Hat too. Pulled way down, the way he wore it.”

  Graves instantly envisioned the scene, Portman curled massively over the wooden bar, neon lights reflected blearily on the rumpled surface of h
is rainslick.

  “He was waiting for me to leave, I guess,” Brinker continued, remembering. “Anyway, the minute I got to the door, Portman walked over to where Mr. Davies was sitting. He took off his hat and shook Mr. Davies’ hand. Mr. Davies was still there when I left my office later that afternoon. So was Portman. Sitting right where he’d been before, in that same booth at the front of the restaurant. It surprised me. A meeting that long. That’s before I found out that Portman worked for Mr. Davies.”

  Eleanor gave no hint of what Edward Davies had told her about his father’s relationship with Portman. “What kind of work did he do for Mr. Davies?” she asked.

  “Background checks,” Brinker answered. “Mr. Davies was always concerned about security. Before he hired somebody to work for him, he liked to find out as much as he could about them. That’s what Portman did. He had access to all the records of the New York State Police. He could find out what a person had been up to. He reported stuff like that to Mr. Davies. It was just a way of making a few extra bucks. You see, Portman’s wife was sick for a long time before she died. The bills must have been pretty high. I figure doing a few jobs for Mr. Davies was just Portman’s way of making ends meet.” He sighed, then shrugged. “In those days nobody would have thought that much about it. It was just a little police moonlighting. The way cops hire out to direct traffic at a church or a private party nowadays. Nothing wrong with it. It didn’t mean the guy was on the take.”

  “But is that all Portman did for Davies?” Eleanor pressed. “Just background checks?”

  Brinker looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, could he have done other jobs for Davies? Jobs that were less … innocent.”

  Impatient, Brinker frowned. “Look, why don’t you just come right out with it. So I know what you’re talking about here.”

  “Well, since Portman was in charge of the investigation of Faye Harrison’s murder, and since that investigation involved Mr. Davies, we were wondering if we should trust him.”

  “Trust him how?”

  “Trust him to have conducted a true investigation.”

  “Instead of what?” Blinker’s tone had sharpened.

  “Working for Mr. Davies.”

  “You think Portman might have covered something up about that girl’s murder? Because he worked for Mr. Davies?” Blinker’s gaze shifted from Eleanor to Graves, then back to Eleanor. “Let me tell you something about Dennis Portman, miss. He worked his ass off on that case. He worked day and night on it.” Like Graves, he appeared to recall Portman in his mind, see his great hulk moving down the small streets of Britanny Falls, massive and ungainly, a giant in their placid midst. “He slept on a cot right in Sheriff Gerard’s office. For weeks. Going over everything he could find. There’s no telling how many people Dennis talked to. Walking Mohonk Trail. Floating up and down the river in that old aluminum boat of his. Talking to everybody he could find that might have seen some stranger in the woods or on the river. Somebody who might have had something to do with the murder, or seen something that had to do with it.” He stopped, and for the first time seemed to weigh his words. “To tell you the truth, Dennis went a little nuts over it.”

  “Nuts?” Graves asked.

  “A little nutty, yes.” Brinker nodded. “Because he started thinking that it had to have been someone at Riverwood who killed that girl. Not a stranger. Or someone from the area. But somebody from Riverwood. Someone who lived there. He was absolutely convinced of it. That’s why he never stopped looking. Until his dying day, I mean. His son told me that. Said that to the very end, Dennis just couldn’t let it go.”

  Graves pulled out his notebook. “Portman had a son?”

  “Oh, yeah. Charlie lives in Kingston. Got his own little private eye business. He wanted to be like his father. A big-time crime investigator. But it’s mostly divorce work, I hear. Anyway, it was Charlie who told me Dennis was still working that case up to the minute he passed on.” The old man shook his head in wonder at Portman’s legendary doggedness. “He’d gotten a little crazy by then, Charlie said. Kept going on about the rope. The one the killer used to strangle Faye.”

  As Graves knew, nothing in Portman’s notes had ever suggested such a focus. “Why the rope?” he asked.

  Brinker shrugged, clearly at a loss to fathom the twists in Dennis Portman’s mind. “Because it was missing, I guess. That’s what Dennis always looked for in the end. Something that was missing.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Graves thought Kingston a drab little town of squat brick buildings, old but without the charm of age, dreary, in decline, like an elderly relative whom no one wants to visit anymore. Charlie Portman’s office was on the second floor of a dingy building on Sycamore Street. A Be Back Soon sign was posted on the door. Its cardboard clock said 10:30.

  It was only a short wait, but rather than linger on the street, they walked to a small café a few blocks from Portman’s office and took a booth at the front.

  “Just coffee,” Eleanor said when the waitress stepped up.

  Graves ordered the same, then peered out the smudged window of the diner onto a nearly deserted main street. “They say southern towns look like this now. Left behind.” It was only an idle comment, something he’d tossed in because he could think of nothing else to say. He was not used to small talk, had little idea of how it was accomplished. It was one of the deficiencies his isolation had imposed, the sense that even with others he was alone, with no obligation to engage them, inquire into even their most superficial aspects, or to in any way reveal his own.

  “You’ve never gone back for a visit?” Eleanor asked.

  “No.”

  “There was no one you wanted to see again?”

  Mrs. Flexner’s face swam into Graves’ mind. Kind. Watching him with a patience he still could not fathom. “Only one person,” he said before he could stop himself.

  Something in Eleanor’s dark eyes quickened. “Who?”

  Graves felt his silence draw in around him, but not before he said, “The woman who took me in.”

  “Took you in?”

  Graves knew that he had no choice but to answer. “After what happened.” He decided on a course of action, then told her as much as he could. “After my sister died. We’d lived together. My parents had been killed the year before. A car accident. After that I lived with my sister. When she died, a woman took me in. Mrs. Flexner. She’s the one I mean. The one I’d like to have seen again.”

  “And yet you never went back to see her?”

  “I couldn’t. It would have been too difficult, I suppose.”

  He could tell that Eleanor doubted him, suspected that everything he revealed left other things hidden. “You’re like a set of Chinese boxes, Paul,” she said at last. “One inside another, inside another.”

  Graves tried to make a joke of it. “I wish I were that mysterious.”

  She stared at him without smiling. “You don’t let anyone get close, do you? When someone tries to touch you, you pull away.”

  Graves suddenly imagined her reaching out, touching him. He felt a delicate tremor run through him, a subtle quickening that urged him to escape the enforced solitude he’d lived in for so long. It was a life that now struck him painfully as little more than a blur of eating, sleeping, writing, a noose of featureless days, each scarcely different from the one before or after. He knew it was the life Gwen’s death had fashioned, a choice he’d made to be dead as she was dead, the truth of her murder, of his appalling silence in the face of Sheriff Sloane’s relentless probing, of everything that had happened on Powder Road still hanging from him like the tatters of her bloody dress.

  “Paul?”

  “What?”

  She nodded toward his hands.

  He glanced down, saw that his fingers were trembling, and swiftly drew them into his lap, where she could not see them. “Portman may be back at his office by now,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’d better go.”
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  They paid at the register, then headed down the street toward Portman’s office, past pawnshops and used-furniture stores, the neighborhood Charlie Portman had chosen, or been forced to accept, as the location for his profession.

  There was a bail bondsman on the bottom floor of the building. A small blinking neon light promised “personal service.” As he glanced toward the window, Graves saw an elderly man in baggy pants and suspenders sweeping bits of paper across a plain cement floor. There was a red plastic radio on the front desk. Gwen had kept one like that in her room. Kessler had turned it on during that last hour, made her dance and sway around while he clapped and stomped his foot. He’d finally partnered her with Sykes, made him spin her wildly, dip her hard, slam her head against the floor.

  Graves could feel his body tightening at the thought of it. He sank his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers and turned away, toward the door that led up the stairs to Portman’s office.

  As he opened it, Eleanor took his arm firmly. “I can do this if you’re not …”

  “No, I’m fine,” he interrupted curtly, then wheeled away from her and began to make his way up the stairs.

  But he was not fine. He could feel the panic building, the terror that it had never really ended, that Gwen was still stumbling right and left, struggling blearily to keep time with the frantic rhythm of Kessler’s pounding feet, leaving bloody tracks across the floor as Sykes, with both hands wrapped around her wrist, flung her brutally from wall to crushing wall.

  At the top of the stairs he looked back. Eleanor had made it only halfway up by then, so he knew he’d bounded up them furiously, taken them two at a time, the way Slovak always did when Kessler seemed almost within his grasp.

  Even so, what she said when she reached him at the top of the stairs surprised him.