Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  twelve

  Near the end of Billy’s exhausting shift of shoveling the histories of the dead into the computer, the fax machine spit out a paper soul who had died in a car crash. The paper had covered the crash in the news pages, before the funeral arrangements had been made. Billy had avoided the news coverage. He had no choice but to read the obituary.

  He typed with clattering fury.

  PROVIDENCE—Heidi M. Ward, 20, a senior at the University of Rhode Island, originally from Bar Harbor, Maine, died last Saturday in a two-car accident on Route 1 in Narragansett, on her way home from Scarborough Beach. Police have charged the driver of the other vehicle with operating under the influence of alcohol and motor vehicle homicide.

  He closed his eyes and touched-typed.

  Heidi was only twenty years old. Can you goddamn believe this? She was 20. This is not a typo, ladies and germs. 20 FUCKING YEARS OLD!! She was a premed student ranked eighth in her class at a pretty damn good school, so we can assume she was a decent person, unlike the hateful son of a bitch who killed her on the highway and who probably will get away with it. Because that’s the way things work in this corrupt little state!!! So Mr. and Mrs. Ward should GET THAT awful truth THROUGH THEIR SKULLS if they think they’ll ever see justice for their little girl. Why do I keep typing, since I know I have to erase this and do it all over again??? Jesus Christ, I need help because I AM LOSING IT. I think I need to take a pill.

  Billy rested his head in his hands, elbows on the desk.

  He wiped tears on his palms, deleted the unusable paragraph he had just typed, and finished the obit the way the funeral home had written it. Then he filed it to the electronic queue for the editors to slap into the paper tomorrow with cold efficiency. To the layout editor who would arrive in the morning, Heidi Ward would be a seven-inch block of type, to be shoehorned around the advertising in a daily jigsaw puzzle, along with the box scores and the bus schedules.

  Suddenly, the newsroom annex went nearly dark as the preprogrammed computer turned off all but one light. The clock on Billy’s desk agreed that it was quitting time.

  Billy looked around. While he had been working, a janitor had swabbed the tile floor, and had left his mop and an A-frame WET FLOOR sign for the day crew to put away. Billy couldn’t even recall seeing the cleaning crew. He was exhausted from the trial all day, and then work all night. And when he slept, he had dreamed of murder.

  The doomsday clock on the wall said six minutes to midnight.

  Billy scribbled “DONE” on Heidi Ward’s obituary fax, then filed it in a plastic tray.

  He rubbed his eyes and watched the faint yellow fireworks on the inside of his eyelids. Then he stared at his computer screen for a minute.

  Quitting time … I should go.…

  Instead, he dialed an in-house number and punched a code to turn on the lights.

  Then Billy cleared his computer screen, created a new file, and typed.

  PROVIDENCE—Charles J. Maddox, a police officer retired on a disability after an auto crash last year, has died. He was brutally murdered.

  Billy read over what he had typed. The letters on his screen seemed to grow brighter. He looked away and let a rush of light-headedness pass. What he had written wasn’t quite right. He deleted the word brutally. All murders were brutal, weren’t they?

  The sentence read better with that little edit. Then Billy replaced murdered with executed.

  He was executed.

  No—wrong word. That was political spin. Journalistic standards called for the more general term: murdered.

  Billy switched it back and read it over again. The paper’s style required the age of the deceased in the first line. How old was Charlie Maddox?

  Billy got up and went to the one semimodern computer in the annex, a PC three generations past its prime. The machine was tied into the paper’s electronic archives. He did a keyword search with Maddox’s name and the word crash, then waited while the computer sorted through thousands of news stories. The search was a tall job for the old machine.

  Christ, Billy thought, I could do math faster than this thing.

  Finally, the machine showed Billy what it found: three stories on the crash that had killed Angie.

  Billy had never read them. He paused for a moment, then clicked on the earliest story, headlined PROVIDENCE WOMAN KILLED, OFF-DUTY COP HURT IN CRASH.

  The text appeared on his screen. The reporter who had written the piece, a kid Billy had never met, had done a good job. All the relevant information was high in the text, including Maddox’s age—forty-nine.

  God, he looks a lot older than that.

  Billy was about to exit the program, when he noticed a link to another section of the archives, entitled: “Unpublished Photos.”

  That was odd.…

  Billy had never seen any pictures of the crash. Had there been a photographer at the scene?

  He clicked. He felt his face flush.

  The first picture had been taken from inside the car, looking out at a forest, through a windshield cracked with a giant X. The bull’s-eye where the two cracks crossed was smeared red.

  He clamped a hand over his mouth, against a surge of stomach acid. He swallowed hard to force it down. His other hand fumbled with the computer mouse and dispelled the picture. He coughed. His throat burned like he had been gargling with Tabasco.

  Of course that picture had not been published—a family paper wouldn’t run such a gruesome photo, especially when the skull that had cracked the windshield had belonged to the former wife of a former star reporter.

  “Are you okay, man?”

  Billy whirled. He shouted toward where the voice had come from. “No! I’m fine! There’s nothing here.”

  The security guard recoiled a half step. “Whoa,” he said, blinking. His eyes were slits.

  Billy hurried to his terminal and spiked the first line of Maddox’s obituary. “Just finishing up,” he said. “It’s all, uh, fine here.”

  Not knowing where to go, he wandered back to the PC and fiddled with the mouse. Part of him expected the guard to club him and cuff him, then march him straight to prison, the theme from Dragnet blasting through the halls. Ridiculous, of course—the paper’s security man could never have caught a criminal; he was too stoned. He couldn’t have caught gonorrhea in a whorehouse.

  The guard’s walkie-talkie barked. He spoke into it. “Yeah, I’m at the annex—it’s cool, man. No break-in. Just the obit dude staying late.” He nodded, saluted Billy with the radio, and then shuffled off.

  Billy watched him leave, then collapsed into the chair. He felt a crying jag coming on and clenched his teeth against it.

  No, not now.

  He fished a pill bottle from his pocket. He popped two antianxiety tablets without water. The label said BuSpar, but who knew what they were? Billy had bought them off the Internet.

  What would it be like in prison?

  How much space does a man need to make a life?

  Billy had never been out of North America. He had already proved that a man doesn’t need the whole world to make a life. Could Billy get along inside a thousand square miles? That was about the size of Rhode Island. How about a hundred square miles? Or just one?

  Could he make a life inside seventy-seven square feet?

  That was the size of a cell in the state prison. Eleven feet long, seven feet wide. Could he survive in such a small space? Maybe he should lock himself in the bathroom for a few years to try it out.

  He thought about Peter Shadd.

  Peter was facing a sentence of natural life for premeditated murder. With any luck, Peter wouldn’t live too long. One of the last stories Billy had written before he was demoted to the obituary desk was about the prison ban on tobacco. For men doing the rest of their natural lives in prison, cigarettes had been one way to shorten a sentence.

  He absentmindedly tapped Peter Shadd into the computer, then commanded the machine to search.

  The older stories were abou
t the escape, and then Garrett Nickel’s murder, and the discovery of his body snagged at the mouth of the Providence River. Of course the judge had ordered the jury not to read about the trial, but these stories were old. What did it matter?

  The stories said that Peter had been arrested in an old boathouse—alleged crackhouse, in newspaper language—at 66 MacKay Avenue, near the city waterfront. Billy knew the street from his days as a police reporter; he had spent many nights there watching the cops stretch yellow tape around atrocities the detectives might solve but could never explain.

  The computer automatically searched the text of the story and offered cross-referenced links to other articles, listed by headlines. Several were about drug abuse, or the state prison budget. One caught Billy’s eye. The computer had matched the address of the boathouse and the date of the story about Peter Shadd’s capture and had offered a link to a story headlined HOMELESS MAN DEAD IN VACANT HOUSE.

  The story was dated three days after the cops had arrested Shadd. The text of the story was short; the piece seemed like something a harried police reporter had dashed off in five minutes.

  PROVIDENCE—Police discovered the mutilated body of a homeless man in a vacant boathouse at 66 MacKay Avenue late last week during an investigation, police said yesterday in a written press statement.

  The body had no identification, and detectives have been unable to determine the name of the person. A staff member from the Manger, the Providence-based homeless shelter, made tentative identification of the man as a frequent client of the shelter, who never gave his full name and whom the shelter staff had been encouraging to participate in substance-abuse programs.

  Police would not say how the man died, though they are treating the case as a homicide.

  The cops had found a dead body in the same boathouse where they’d arrested Peter Shadd? Around the same time?

  A mutilated body? Why the hell hadn’t that come up at the trial?

  Billy paused a moment and held his chin, thinking. Shadd’s lawyer must have won a motion to exclude any mention of the body at the trial. Made sense—if the cops couldn’t find a way to charge Shadd with killing a homeless man, then any mention of the body at trial could unfairly color the jury’s thinking.

  Just like it’s coloring my thinking right now.

  “Cripes!” Billy said aloud as he banged the keyboard and dispelled the story. No wonder Lady Justice wore a blindfold.

  Billy glanced at his desk clock. He knew that if he stayed too long, the light of dawn would pull him up College Hill to the East Side, where he might find Maddox on his morning walk. He sighed and struggled to stand under the weight of his world pressing down on his shoulders. On his way out, Billy grabbed the janitor’s mop and stood below the doomsday clock. With the mop handle, he nudged the big hand ahead to three minutes to midnight.

  thirteen

  Billy pulled the van to the curb on a dark and empty street and studied his map under the dome light. Aha. He was close. He headed toward the waterfront. The road cut through a field of house-size storage tanks for the petroleum industry, and then a dense cluster of duplexes and apartments houses. Billy made two quick lefts, turning onto MacKay Avenue. The street sank steeply toward the bay and then turned to soft dirt and angled gently into stinking black mud at the edge of the water—this was a boat ramp, though for nothing much bigger than a canoe.

  To the right of the ramp, the shuttered and dilapidated boathouse had been built into the slope, so that the front of the building was on land and the back reached out over the water on log piles.

  Billy made a clumsy six-point turn that would have gotten him flunked out of driving school. He studied the building in the driver’s side mirror. The nearest streetlight was two houses away, but Billy could see that not much had changed from the picture of the boathouse in the newspaper’s archive. A tattered ten-foot tail of police tape fluttered from a railing. The front door had been barricaded with plywood, but somebody had stolen the boards over a first-floor window, leaving a black hole like a rotting cavity. The building was missing dozens of cedar shingles from its sides, and its floating dock had been dragged ashore, piled in sections, and left to rot.

  The boathouse was barely half a mile from Roger Williams Park, where Peter Shadd had supposedly robbed his former cell mate. Shadd could have walked here from the park, but why come all that way just to shoot up? How had he known to come here? Had he bought heroin on the street and then staggered around at random? Would those questions be answered in court?

  Billy pictured Lady Justice peeking out from behind her blindfold.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  If caught, he’d be thrown off the jury. Billy was supposed to decide the case on the evidence he heard in court, nothing else. The problem was that justice wasn’t blind in this case—Peter Shadd wasn’t getting his fair shake. He was junkie, a convict—sentenced to jail in the first place because he deserved to be there for armed robberies. Billy had sensed that most of the jury already assumed Shadd was guilty of killing Garrett Nickel. They didn’t care about the evidence or the circumstances. They wanted to cast their votes and go home.

  His thoughts drifted. Angie had never gotten justice, either. Maybe Lady Justice needed Billy to pry open her eyes.

  That’s when a leg, clad in black jeans and a tall black leather boot, slid out the open window in the boathouse to the building’s front porch.

  Billy jammed the gearshift to drive and watched.

  A woman climbed out the window. She was barely five feet tall, curvy, dressed in black. By her short spiked hair, Billy guessed she was young, mid-twenties, maybe, but he couldn’t be sure. Shadows hid her face.

  She watched Billy watching her for a few moments.

  Then she clasped her hands above her head and gently rolled her hips in a subtle little dance on the porch, in the dead of night, for the stranger in the van.

  Billy hit the gas. The van spurted up the hill.

  He hit the brake.

  Why am I running away?

  “Why do you do this work?” Billy asked her.

  “Because my father froze on the fucking street,” she said.

  “Isn’t it dangerous? At night, in these places, especially for, um …” He caught himself about to put a sexist thought into the atmosphere.

  She leaned back on the dirty sofa, tore off a bite of strawberry licorice, and crossed her big black boots.

  “For a woman?” she said, finishing his thought. “Would I be safer as a man?” She laughed and lifted a thin brown eyebrow. “I realize men think their dicks have magic powers, but do they protect you from street crime?” She clicked her flashlight on and illuminated Billy’s face.

  Some strange emotion sizzled on Billy’s cheeks. He wasn’t sure what it was. Embarrassment? Not quite. She had zinged him, and he had enjoyed it.

  She shut off the light and held out the open bag of licorice. Billy took another piece.

  He had learned her name was Mia Elizabeth Kahn.

  She was an outreach worker for the Manger, a homeless shelter in Providence. Her job was to persuade the drunk, the drugged, and the mentally ill to come in off the streets. The boathouse near the waterfront was on her regular rounds. Billy had wanted to ask her about the dead body found in the boathouse, and whether she had heard of Peter Shadd, but she wouldn’t talk on the street, or in his van.

  “In the house,” she had suggested, leading Billy by the hand onto the porch.

  Her hands were small and strong, the skin buttery with an unscented moisturizer. What had looked like a braided bracelet around her left wrist was in fact a tattoo. Mia had slipped through the window with the grace of a cat burglar, and then had coaxed Billy through. Inside, the boathouse smelled like somebody had burned dried leaves in a gas station’s rest room.

  When Billy had clumsily entered through the window, invisible creatures had scurried away beneath strata of ankle-deep trash. He sat with her on a dirty sofa.

  She was twenty-f
our, Billy guessed—younger, maybe, but no older. Her red hair was cropped short, dyed blue at the tips, and gelled straight up, like bristles of a toothbrush. Her left ear was pierced at least a dozen times, with silver hoops every quarter inch from the bottom of the lobe to the top of her ear. A tiny metal bar, like a silver tie clip, pierced her right eyebrow, and a blue gemstone twinkled from outside her left nostril.

  “Why were you watching this place?” she asked. Her voice was scratchy, and a little lower than Billy might have expected. “Are you a cop?”

  “No,” he said, answering the second question, the one he didn’t mind answering. “What happened to your father?”

  She shrugged, then took another stick of licorice and sucked on it. “When he got moody and compulsive, blowing up anytime somebody spilled Kool-Aid, we thought he was just being an asshole,” she said. “But my dad was a prepsychotic schizophrenic.” She tore into the licorice and chewed a bite down.

  “Mine’s just an asshole,” Billy said.

  “I remember when he swung an ax at my mother and stuck the blade in the ceiling. That was the last day he lived with us. He was on the street when I was in high school. I remember him wearing a backpack with everything he owned, and empty cans dangling from it. He grew a beard down to his crotch. I never knew he smoked until I saw him outside a movie theater picking butts off the ground and smoking what was left. Lots of people were afraid of him.”

  “Were you?”

  “I was more afraid of becoming whacko, like him.”

  Billy leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Copper wires dangled from a hole.

  She asked, “Are you afraid of being like your pop?”

  “I’m already an asshole.”

  She laughed, saying, “I’m not nuts yet—I’d knock on some wood, but in here I’m afraid I’d knock a hole through it.” She laughed again, loud and hearty. If her family story was difficult for her to tell, she didn’t show it. “The last time I saw him was at a Softball play-off my senior season. The restraining order said he wasn’t allowed within a hundred and fifty feet of me and my brother, so he watched from beyond center field. Just him. Standing out there alone. He never waved. I don’t think we ever made eye contact. I pitched pretty good. We won; he left.” She shrugged again. “My brother was the last one in the family to see him—again, at a game. He played football at Cranston East.”