by David Daniel
I made my way west along VFW Highway, past the state university, where the football team was practicing. On an adjacent field, a class of criminal justice grads in uniforms and boots were performing hand-to-hand maneuvers. There was also a cheerleading squad in action. All that sanctioned violence under the blue September sky.
“I’ll need some background to start,” Fred Meecham had said. “You know what to do.” I hadn’t needed much convincing. True, I had the work for Atlantic Casualty, but hustling the Internet for credit info on total strangers six hours a day is about as interesting as it sounds. The insurance company wasn’t in any big hurry to have it done, and I figured I could manage both.
Any homicide investigation begins with a two-prong approach: find out everything you can about the victim and about the killer. I also needed to find out if there were any witnesses beyond the ones that the police had already identified. Meecham directed me to the carnival boss who had hired him, a man named Sonders.
Regatta Field was several miles out on Pawtucket Boulevard, part of a large fairground and meadow opposite the esplanade and the public boathouse. Like a stranger you pick up in a bar and take home, the carnival site appeared a lot different on the morning after. What lights, music, and excitement had done to beguile you was undone fast. In the distance, a man was prodding at litter with a spiked stick. I parked at the curb and strolled toward a gypsy camp of well-worn vans and small makeshift shacks daubed with colors that tried to look bright but seemed only washed out. I passed among the series of booths for games of chance, souvenirs, and fast food, but I might as well have been in a ghost town. The aromas of popcorn and tobacco smoke and fried foods lingered over the scene, awaiting exorcism. Several diesel generators, the source that had given life to the whirling lights and the rides, and even to Michael Jackson, were silent now, electrical cables trailing from them like rubbery gray tentacles. Castle Spookula had the fright quotient of a Casper cartoon. In the meadow beyond, a large rectangular outline of yellow plastic ribbon marked the place where the body had been found.
In my beige summerweight, which I’d have dry-cleaned one more time before I put it away for the winter, I suppose I could’ve passed for a cop, though I liked to think my J. Garcia silk tie made me a notch more hip. I was looking for a headquarters trailer when I heard the jingling sound. I turned and saw a young woman struggling to control half a dozen dogs who’d managed to tangle their leashes.
“Can I help?” I asked, going over.
The young woman looked surprised to see someone there. “Oh … no. Well, could you maybe take this leash?”
I took one, and then another. None of the dogs was barking, so it all just seemed like good fun. Together we sorted out the pack, though I couldn’t imagine them staying untangled for long. “Thank you so much,” she said. A few of the dogs took a friendly interest in me.
“Are they all yours?”
“Only the beagle—Otis. The others belong to people here.”
“Do you work here?”
“Yes.” She was small, and I couldn’t tell if she was eighteen or twenty-five. She seemed shy but friendly, and a little childlike.
I stooped and began rubbing the beagle’s head. “Otis, huh?” All the dogs, except a greyhound, crowded around, thumping me with their tails.
“This big mutt is Tex. The Pomeranians are Mike and Ike. That one that looks like she should be on a diet is Miss Piggy.”
“And this one?” I reached to pet the greyhound, but he drew back.
“He’s still timid. He was rescued from the racetrack, so he never got much loving till he got adopted. He’s awfully sweet, though. We call him Speedo.”
“But his real name is Mr. Earl.”
“I’m sorry?”
I grinned. “Before your time. What’s your name?”
“Nicole.”
“I’m Alex Rasmussen. Do you work with Troy Pepper, Nicole?”
Her eyebrows tensed together above her small dark eyes. “Who are you, sir?”
I showed her my license, not that she paid much attention to it. She suddenly seemed as eager to keep a distance as the greyhound was. “Actually, I’m working with the attorney who’s defending Mr. Pepper.”
She blinked. “Really and truly? You mean like that’ll be his lawyer?”
“Yes.”
She seemed relieved, actually gave a sigh, but then appeared worried all over again. “The police were here a lot last night,” she volunteered. “I didn’t get much sleep.” She was under five feet tall, with the look of undernourishment, but her feelings were big, most of them visible in her face. She had a warm smile somewhere—I’d glimpsed it—but at the moment her expression was about as cheery as a thundercloud. “I wonder what’ll happen to Troy? I’m scared for him. And I feel awful for that poor woman who died.” As if the dogs were picking up her agitation, they started to pull at their leashes. She stooped and quieted them.
“I’m looking for Mr. Sonders,” I said.
“Pop.”
“He’s your father?”
Her smile made a partial return, like something she was going to trust me with. “We all just call him that.” She rose. “Come on with me.”
Contrary to my prediction, the dogs kept themselves straight. She led me over to a motor home, a two-tone green and white affair that had the door propped open with a red sand-filled bucket marked NO IFS OR ANDS, JUST BUTTS that sat on the top step. She leaned in. “Pop? Someone’s here to talk to you.”
A potbellied man appeared in the doorway. He looked about sixty-five, bald, with tufts of white fluff jutting out on the sides above his ears, and a crinkled face, from which he turned bold blue eyes on me. “Another one?” His jaw worked, as if he were chewing tobacco or wearing badly fitted dentures. “What now? You want me to stay?”
“Stay?”
“Or go? Make up your mind, goddammit. You’re either a cop or from the city.”
“How do you know I’m not a newshound?”
“Dressed up like that?” He snorted. “Most of them tramp around these days straight from Hemingway, like they’d been posted for Baghdad. I just shook one loose—some wet-behind-the-ears mutt working for a Boston paper. Who’re you?”
I handed him my card. He examined it. “Okay. Yup, yup, okay.” He looked at the girl. “How they doing, sweetheart?”
She smiled. “The dogs? They’re great, Pop.”
“Good work, kiddo.”
“Bye, Pop.” She nodded at me, too. “Nice to meet you, sir.” She led the dogs away.
The old man waved me into the motor home. “Thing I like about dogs,” he said, “when the world’s falling in around our ears, they take us just the same as they did yesterday.”
“She has them well trained,” I said.
“It’s one of the unwritten rules, if folks’re going to have pets here. But it’s also Nicole, she’s got a touch. Give me a sec here.” He snatched up a portable phone he’d evidently been using. “Yup, he’s here now,” I heard him tell someone, and guessed that Fred Meecham was on the line.
I turned away to give him what space the area afforded. The motor home appeared to double as living and working quarters, with the desk and a computer, a three-drawer file cabinet, a vinyl recliner embalmed in duct tape, and, beyond a folding partition, a rumpled cot with drawers underneath for storage. The beige carpeting was coffee-stained, and the walls, which were paneled in ersatz wood, were busy with framed good-citizen awards, a vintage Barnum & Bailey poster, and several plywood cutouts in the shapes of big keys. One said SCHENECTADY. I’d always wondered what a key to a city looked like and what it would unlock. There was also a certificate of recognition from a national parents’ association with a splashy signature on it that I recognized as a former U.S. president’s. Sonders’s first name, I discovered, was Warren.
He cradled the phone and moved some papers aside to make a seat for me in the recliner. “Park your bones. Meecham said you’d be out.”
He took
a beat-up corncob pipe from his desk, clamped the stem between his teeth, and scrutinized me. Apart from the white tufts sprouting from the sides of his head, the only hair on his face grew in tangles above his eyes, stark against the ruddy forehead and cheeks. He was wearing a weathered brown corduroy shirt and a cranberry knit tie, washed-out denim bell-bottoms, and work boots. There was something vivid and restless about him that reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t think of who. “It’s evidently an open and shut case,” he said around the unlit pipe, drilling me with a look. “Guilty.” He sank into a spring chair and drew himself in until the edge of the desk creased his belly. “That how it looks to you?”
The folksy manner had set me up for a softer landing. “It isn’t for me to say.”
“No? You sure about that?”
If he’d been a fly on the wall in my office a half hour ago, he might’ve thought he had his answer; but he’d have thought wrong. “I was a cop in this city for a while. My job then was to get information, put it together the best I could, and lay it on the table for others to use. That hasn’t changed, though I’ve got certain freedoms now I didn’t have then—some I don’t advertise. Your attorney will advise you the best way to use what I come up with.”
“Well, yuh, okay. Sounds right.”
“What was that, a test of the emergency firing system?”
His reaction was a fleeting grin—though it may have been heartburn; I couldn’t miss the jug of Mylanta on the desk. There was also a framed photograph of a younger-looking Sonders with a smiling woman. He plucked the pipe from his mouth. “I know Lowell like I know most towns we pitch camp in—a nice place to come and work our asses off for a few days, then move on. People don’t get to know us, that’s fine, s’long as they spend money. It works both ways and everyone’s happy. But now it seems we got us a situation, and all of the sudden there are jokers in the deck I didn’t plan on being there. One thing I disagree with you on is that cops are as fair-minded as you say. In my experience, detectives are just street bulls with bigger noses and smaller feet. They tend to be open about things that make their case strong; otherwise … uh-uh. I need to know what I’m holding and make my decisions from that. If along the way I got to shitcan a private eye—or a lawyer, for that matter, or tell a reporter to take a hike—on account of it’s not gonna work out, well, it’s best we both know it right up front. How’s that?”
“I think you’ve got some mixed metaphors in there, but I get the point.” I drew out my notebook. “Outside you were saying something about staying or leaving. Care to translate?”
He swung a hand in a sidewise chopping motion. “First they tell me the show is frozen, that we can’t leave—not that I would’ve. I signed a contract to be here, and my name on paper still means something last I checked. But practically the next minute they’re ordering my ass out of here.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“City licensing office. Some scrawny little geezer in a Robert Hall suit shows up first thing this morning, along with a patrolman, telling me my permits are frozen. I told him I’d speak with my attorney. He said I could if I wanted to, but it wouldn’t matter, I’d still have to vacate the premises as soon as the police investigators are done. ‘Vacate.’ Hell. I got the feeling if this was a hundred years ago, they’d have had rope in their hands and be looking for a big oak tree. Anyway like I said, I got a contract, and it goes both ways. If they expect me to play square with them, they better by God do the same. Meecham just now told me to sit tight till I hear from him.”
“How did you get Meecham’s name?”
“Our fathers knew each other at Yale and sat on the Supreme Court together.”
I knew Fred’s dad retired after thirty years of climbing poles for Ma Bell and dropped dead a month later bending to pick up the newspaper from his doorstep.
He finally frowned. “I got his name off one of the officers on detail last night, and I don’t know a soul here. I’m sure there are plenty of lawyers in town. There always are. Meecham seemed okay when we talked.”
“I’m working for him, so I’ll spare you the sales pitch, except to say he’s honest and productive. Which is what he expects me to be, Mr. Sonders.” I clicked my ballpoint.
“Fair enough. Call me Pop, by the way”
“Pop.” Belatedly, we shook hands.
“Good to meet you, son.”
“Mutual, but I don’t want to push the family thing too far. It’s Alex Rasmussen, first, last, or something creative, your choice.”
“All right, Rasmussen’s good. Keep it simple, like they do in the service.”
“And prison,” I said.
He screwed one eye shut, and I suddenly saw who he reminded me of. Popeye.
4
“Tell me about Troy Pepper,” I said.
Pop Sonders uncapped the Mylanta bottle, chugged from it, and put it back, wiping at the pale green chalk on his lips. “Pepper’s been with us about five months. He works hard. I haven’t had a whisper of trouble with him. Till now, I guess. Some people, you take ’em on, you know day one they won’t hack it. This ain’t easy work. But Pepper caught on fast, and he pulls his load.”
“What did he do before he joined you?”
“Warehouse work, different things, hauled poles and cables for light and power. He was in the service a while before that.”
“I’d like to look at his personnel file.”
“I’ll have to think about that. This is all a big surprise. A murder, and one of our people charged?”
“Were you there when the woman’s body was found?”
“Right here. We shut things down quick and got the crowds thinned out. Even so, it wasn’t the kind of thing you want folks to have to see.”
“Did Pepper say anything when he was arrested?”
He shook his head. “Not really. He had a kind of dazed, sick look. Sort of rubbery in the knees as they took him away, like a sailor before he’s got his land legs. I told him I’d hire a lawyer.”
“Have you been over to visit him?”
“Mr. Meecham said it’d probably be a good idea if I didn’t. Not yet, anyways.”
“That young woman—Nicole. She seemed upset when I mentioned why I was here.”
Sonders sighed. “She’s most of the time cheerful as a lark, and it rubs off on everyone. I like her around for that alone. She’s a sweetheart of a kid, a good scout. But she’s like a barometer, picks up on emotional weather real easy. Last night really got to her.”
I nodded. It had upset Phoebe badly, too. “She works for you?”
“She looks after things for us when we’re on the road, attends to the dogs, sometimes runs the ring toss or does ticket sales.” Sonders pursed his lips, as if deciding whether to trust me. “This is between us. Nicole’s mom was dying a dozen years back, when the girl was eight, and my wife and me—that’s my wife there in the picture—promised we’d take care of the kid. Kind of a deathbed promise, I guess. My wife’s gone now, too. Aneurysm.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He nodded. “Nicole has fetal alcohol syndrome. It hasn’t kept her back much, though I’m not sure what life would be like for her out there.” He gestured beyond the paneled wall. “She’s never really lived it. Most of her schooling’s been right here on the road. I’ve tutored her myself, and the first five, six years I got her a regular teacher. She gets by.”
“Is she a close friend of Pepper’s?”
“No more than any of us. We’re all close, come to that. Pepper’s a little newer is all.”
“How are the others taking this?”
“I haven’t talked to everyone yet. There wasn’t hardly time. I will, though. We’ll have a meeting today.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Forty-five or thereabouts. That’s the gang that travels. I got a booking staff and an accountant back in Jersey, and a safety engineer on a consulting basis. Here I got a full-time ride supervisor and a crew inspects all the r
ides every day before we open. I got jacks who operate the rides and run the concessions. We add local hands as needed. We do about fifty shows a year, all over the Northeast. Mostly three- or four-day visits, though places like here we’ll come in and stay a week or longer. We’ve got sixty rides, food stands, games of chance, we generally work it with a percentage split between the folks who contract us and the show. If it’s a charity benefit or a fund-raiser, we’ll slice it accordingly. Everyone’s on hourly, with a guarantee of hours per week, and—” He broke off, clapped his hands on his thighs, and stood up. “I’m itchy just sittin’ and thinking that we’re not operating at all right now. Come on, it’ll be easier if I show you around.”
Outside we set off among the row of camper trailers, away from the thrill rides and the kiddie amusements, toward the area where the food concessions and games of chance were set up. The aromas of food and defeat lingered in the air. “Are you the owner?” I asked.
“Legally, on paper; but we run it family-like. Everyone gets a say. I make the final call, though. Someone’s got to. I give bonuses based on what we take.”
“That must create loyalty.”
He glanced at me but said nothing. We walked through the big mowed field where the show was laid out, Sonders pointing out things with the stem of the corncob as we went. “We’re a small outfit. Independent. A lot of ‘em are owned by big operations anymore. They do the big state fairs. I pick up the slack. There’re about a hundred and fifty shows like this that move around the country. We generally run full tilt, March through October. We got a few more dates to fill up here, and then we’ll start south with the cold coming, wind up in Florida. You’ve got to pan that stream pretty deep to come up with much, ’cause you’re always up against Mickey Mouse, but hey, come December, the weather’s nice.”
