by David Daniel
He explained that his father had once owned the show but sold it. Sonders had eventually bought it back. “I made it a profit-sharing operation. No union. I never met a union yet that didn’t start off as a good idea and end up feeling like a gun in your ribs.”
“Shh—not too loud in this town.”
“There may be some, I’m not saying that. But the solution to one problem seems to create new problems. I don’t like the idea of shoving a stick into a turning wheel. There’s got to be something that works both ways.”
Over at Harvard Business School, students were paying plenty to study with people like him. I said, “I’d still like to see Pepper’s personnel file.”
“I’m not crazy about opening up files to just anyone. It’s an unwritten rule.”
I gave him a look. “Let me ask a question. Do you think Pepper killed that girl?”
Sonders frowned, letting it buy him a moment. “No.”
“Then who’s going to object to my seeing the file? Pepper?”
“Okay, you’re working with us,” he said, relenting. “I’ll pull his jacket when we go back.”
“Did you run a background check when you hired him? Call references?”
“When I need someone, I need them today. Usually, I go on horse sense. Not just anyone can do this work. Remember Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity? His ‘little man’?” He poked his potbelly. “I’ve got my own little man, right here. Tells me what I need to know. Okay, sure, I suppose I could hire a big fancy search firm, with a bunch of names in the title and letters after the names, and they could run applicants through parlor games, right?”
I let it alone.
“Like I say, I do my own hiring, and I stand by my choices. I can’t smoke for real anymore ’cause my wind is shot. Booze is out. My stomach’s got more holes than a tin can in a shooting gallery, but goddammit, it tells me when I’m on the right track.”
“What’s it telling you now?”
Again, he hesitated. “That I ain’t wrong to trust Pepper.”
We had looped back around to his motor home. Nicole was stepping out of a small adjoining camper, no dogs with her this time. She handed Sonders the morning’s edition of the Sun. He let his eyes drift across the front page. “You seen this?”
I had. He stuck the paper under his arm. “Nicole, will you go in and pull out Troy’s file for me?”
Her small face clenched with concern, and she glanced at me, then back. “Sure thing, Pop.”
When she’d gone to get the file, Sonders said, “The bull I talked to is named Cote. Know him?”
“Roland Cote, yeah.” The carnival boss was feisty; he wasn’t going to let the information exchange only run one way. “He’s steady. He’ll get the job done,” I said. “Is he imaginative? No, but then he doesn’t have to be. In this city, the killers aren’t very imaginative, either. They get caught.”
“Not this time,” Sonders said. “Not yet, anyhow. So, where do we go from here?”
“Fred Meecham is quarterbacking. You’ll hear from him. Obviously, you should cooperate with the police, but anything you come up with that’ll help us, too, let Fred or me know.”
Nicole brought out a manila folder, which she handed to Sonders, then went off in the direction of the midway. “You can lamp this in my digs,” he said.
“I’d like to take it along with me.”
He tugged at an earlobe. “Awright. I sized you up pretty good, I guess.”
“And your ‘little man’ gives me a pass?”
He winced and poked his stomach again. “That, or it’s gas.” He thrust the folder at me. “Come on, I’ll introduce you around.”
“I can do that myself. I’ve got my own horse sense.”
The fact was I wanted to keep a small element of surprise.
He regarded me skeptically from under the snowy hedges of his eyebrows, but shrugged. “Be my guest.”
“One more thing. The police seem to have their minds made up one way,” I said. “I’m going to look at whatever information I can get. But if I don’t find anything to contradict their read, I say so.”
“Hell’s bells, I know that. No one’s paying you to kiss ass.”
I handed him one of my cards, with the addition of my cellular phone number handwritten on it. Even with the pair of gold-frame specs he hooked on, he had to hold the card at arm’s length. “Never seen this spelling of ‘Rassmusen’ before.”
“No one has. It’s a printer’s error. I’m halfway done with a deck of five hundred.”
He put it in his shirt pocket. “I suppose you’ll want to be paid.” His laugh was the first trace of mirth he’d shown.
“I laugh at it all the time, too. Your lawyer will take care of me. Oh, and just an observation, Pop. You keep saying ‘hell’s bells’ and calling folks ‘geezer,’ the slickers around here are going to think you’re an anachronistic old seadog.”
He squinted one eye, and I suddenly felt like Bluto. “Just let ’em try.”
As I set off, I realized I liked the guy. If he was a little clattery and overprotective, that was okay. I knew where I stood with him. After freelancing for the past few months for a monolith, where people wore faces like cold coffee—if you got to see anyone at all—I was glad to have a real person, and not to have a sense that my sole purpose was protecting some outfit’s Dun and Bradstreet rating. Sonders’s rating appeared to be the good regard he held his workers in, including Troy Pepper. I felt inspired to want to prove him right.
5
At midmorning the carnival had a residue of depleted energy and foggy purpose. The jack with the spiked stick was spearing empty popcorn cartons, cigarette packs, and the little paper spindles on which cotton candy was spun. Someone else was stocking cheap stuffed toys onto the shelves of an arcade. In another, a shirtless man with a large spiderweb tattooed on his lean chest was partially inflating tough-skinned little balloons from a compressed-air tank, affixing them to a square of particleboard, where most of the darts that hit them would bounce off. At a booth where for a buck you tossed baseballs to knock over a stack of milk bottles, there was no one around, so I gave in to curiosity. The balls were light and squishy and hit the canvas backdrop with a listless thwack. The bottles were made of wood, with weighted bottoms. What did I expect?
I wandered among the tents and booths and food concessions, most of which were shuttered. Farther back, away from the traffic area, was the encampment of vans and small mobile homes where the carnival workers lived. Judging by the number of satellite dishes, they didn’t want for much. I made my way in that direction. A woman in pink curlers, several clothespins protruding from her mouth like weird teeth, was hanging ratty stockings and sequined costumes on a line strung between two trailers. I approached a man and a woman who were sitting on the steps of one of the trailers, having a cigarette. The man was making gestures with one hand. I introduced myself and told them why I was there.
“If Pop says y’all are okay, it’s fine by me,” the woman said. “Me and Red were just talking about it. I’m Penny Bergfors. This here’s Red Fogarty, from Bangor.” He was a big, rough-complexioned redhead with a hand that felt like lumpy rawhide when we shook. “Red works the Tilt-a-Whirl, and drives truck when we roll.”
And apparently didn’t speak for himself. Penny looked around forty, with dark roots showing in her blond hair and the Deep South oozing out of her voice. “No, sir, I don’t know what-all to think. I mean, you work with a guy, you like to reckon you know him some. Personally, I like him. He keeps to himself, but he’s friendly enough, and he works hard. Wouldn’t you say so, Red?”
The redhead made some hand gestures again, which I realized were sign language. Penny turned to me. “He says, ‘A-yuh.’”
We all smiled. “Was the victim familiar at all?”
“Poor thing.” Penny clicked her tongue. “No, she wasn’t. Though I gather Troy knew her.”
“The police claim that he was here with her yesterday sometime.
Did you see or hear anything, arguing maybe, or raised voices?”
“It’s pretty noisy around here anyway. With the rides going, you get shrieks and screams all the time. I don’t reckon I’d have noticed.”
“I did,” someone else said.
I turned. A lean man who didn’t look much older than twenty, though weathered, drifted over. He wore a red-speckled, tie-dyed T-shirt that made him look like he’d been shotgunned and was bleeding out of many holes. He had small gold earrings. “Heard you askin’ about Pepper,” he said. I gave him my name and told him what I was up to. He was Tito Alvarez. “You talkin’ about the woman,” he said. “I seen the two of ’em yesterday, and on Saturday, too. She come over both days. Beats me, man, what was she doing, but I got my ideas.”
“You saw them, Tito?” Penny Bergfors asked.
“Oh yeah. They didn’t hang around chewing the fat. Went on into his trailer.”
“Do you remember what time that was?”
He thought about it. “Morning. Late.”
“Did you ever see her before this week?” I was jotting as we spoke.
“Like on the road, you mean?”
“Or anywhere outside of Lowell?”
“No. I think I’d remember her. She was a bonita muchacha. Pepper, man, he’s a little strange. Quiet. He don’t mix much. In the time he’s been with the show, I can count on two fingers the times he’s ever drunk a brew with us. Wouldn’t you say so, Red?”
Red Fogarty pinched the stub of his cigarette, dropped it into a red can, and nodded.
“And that’s only when someone buys a case and we sit around here,” Tito added. “I don’t think he’s never gone to no bar with us.”
“Maybe he’s on the wagon,” Penny said.
“No, c‘mon, you’ve seen him havin’ a brew.”
“So maybe he just doesn’t enjoy the company,” she teased.
“Yeah, right. No, I’m thinking some of the bars we find are pretty rough. I wonder maybe he’s got a glass jaw?”
“He certainly looks like he can handle himself if he had to,” Penny said.
“No lie, I’ve seen rugged guys couldn’t take a punch.”
“Which trailer is Pepper’s?” I asked.
Penny indicated a cream-colored camper with a chrome strip along the side. “That’s it yonder.” It was hooked onto the bed of a gray pickup truck with a New Jersey tag. I copied the number into my notebook.
“Do any of you think Troy Pepper killed that girl?” I asked.
Penny Bergfors’s brow crinkled. “I don’t think he did,” she said tentatively; then, with more certitude, “‘Cause we ain’t like that.” The two men agreed, though with something less than firm conviction. I made sure I had their names in my notebook and thanked them for talking with me.
Pepper’s camper trailer was half the size of Sonders’s motor home. There was a set of metal stairs in the down position, and police tape on the door. The department techs would already have examined it but hadn’t released it yet. Meecham would likely request permission for us to look it over, too, but we’d have to wait our turn. I did peer through a little louvered window in the back door, but it was dark in there and I couldn’t see anything. I wandered around the carnival site some more. As I did, I had the sensation of being watched. It was one of those feelings you sometimes get, but when I stopped and did a slow 360 I didn’t see anyone. I walked toward the haunted house.
By daylight, Castle Spookula was about as macabre as a plastic jack-o’ lantern. A few hundred feet beyond it, though, there had been real horror. I kept outside the yellow crime scene tape and tried to see it as I’d seen it last night—and as I was likely to go on seeing it for some time to come. Phoebe had been so shaken by the experience that she had phoned a girlfriend and asked me to drop her there to spend the night. I hadn’t suggested that she come to my place. We hadn’t gotten that far yet, and anyhow, since my move, I still hadn’t unpacked much beyond clothes and my day-to-day needs. My living room was stacked with cardboard cartons, and going to remain so for now.
Birds sang in the autumn-tall grass, telling me nothing. A large dead pine tree stood about fifty feet back, and far beyond that, woods. I thought of the torn-open blouse, the knotted scarf. According to the Sun, the police believed the woman had been strangled in Pepper’s trailer. I judged the distance from here to there to be a hundred yards, give or take. A fair distance to carry a body—though she was small, and he was strong. The area was too trampled by the activities of last night to make much of it. I’d leave evidence gathering to the police. I’d stick with looking for answers—though at the moment I didn’t have any of those, either, only the challenge of finding some.
As I headed for my car, jotting a final question in my pad, I had the perception again that I was being watched. I stopped. When I glanced about, I noticed a shimmer of reflection on one of the crazy mirrors on the side of Castle Spookula and turned to look behind me. In an alleyway between trailers, some distance away, a large bald man wearing green work clothes was looking my way. I couldn’t tell his age. Seeing me notice him, he turned abruptly and went into a stubby Airstream trailer parked apart from the others. On the door, painted in a gaudy red and gold circus script, was a sign: ROGO THE KLOWN.
6
Back at the Fairburn Building, at Ten Kearney Square, I unlocked my waiting room, dumped my sunglasses and Troy Pepper’s employment file on my desk in the inner office, and went down the hall to Fred Meecham’s suite. I sometimes did this anyway, to deliver his mail if I’d been the first to fetch it from the crate in the main lobby where the postal carrier had taken to leaving it after the elevator died (and kept on after it was fixed, the way I kept using the three flights of stairs). Occasionally, I went down the hall just to chat up Meecham’s paralegal, a bright beauty named Courtney, whom he’d hired straight out of Mount Holyoke. She had done a senior project on the women’s labor movement and come to Lowell for research, then fallen in love and decided to stay. “She must’ve left a lot of heartbroken college men in her wake,” I’d told Meecham.
“And college women, too,” he confided. “Courtney is gay. And very up-front about it. Not in any militant way, just a friendly midwestern FYI kind of thing, the way she’ll also let you know she’s from Duluth.”
“Hi, Alex,” she greeted me with her glowing smile.
There was no resisting her. I grinned back. “Is Himself in?” Meecham was my quarry today.
He was sitting at his law library table in his shirtsleeves, his face in a tome, which he clumped shut as he waved me in. I took one of the two vacant chairs facing his desk, each marked with the logo of Suffolk Law, his alma mater. “How’d the—” we began simultaneously, and both backed off.
“After you,” he insisted.
“How did the arraignment go?” I asked.
“Martin Travani was on the bench, which is probably good for us. He’s levelheaded. I got Pepper to plead not guilty, though his preference was to say nothing at all.”
“Just keep his mouth shut? What’s that mean?”
“I’m not sure. He seemed a little removed from the proceedings. It could be shock, which might be read either way. He admitted to the police that he had been with the victim yesterday morning, and that the scratch on his chin is from her nails, and that he’d just bought her the silk scarf that was found around her throat. But he won’t say he did or didn’t do it. For the time being, I’ll just have to work around him. As for bail, the DA argued that Pepper’s transient lifestyle and lack of community roots make him a risk to flee. Travani set a status date, at which time we can offer a case for bail. For charges, we’ve got murder, destroying evidence—oh, and possession of an unlicensed firearm. Police found a handgun hidden in his trailer.”
“Great,” I said.
“It appears not to have been fired, but they’re running it through ballistics now. There may be another problem, too. It seems that the victim had filed a 209-A against him.”
It was a restraining order. “Filed it here in the city?”
“No one was quite clear about where or when. If true, it clearly establishes a prior relationship—which Pepper doesn’t deny. He told me they were in love.”
“Aren’t they all.”
He went on. The police had two witnesses who saw Pepper with the victim outside his living quarters Saturday afternoon. “‘Speaking with raised voices’ is how the report put it. It sounded domestic, but the witnesses said they couldn’t hear the conversation very well and they didn’t linger to eavesdrop. The coroner places the time of death yesterday between noon and early evening. There were signs of a struggle in Pepper’s trailer.”
“Has he got an alibi?”
“He was working—or supposed to be—during the time. He was on duty when he was arrested. A detective, along with one of the patrol officers pulling a detail at the carnival last night, went to the trailer and knocked but got no answer. On the strength of their witness reports, they felt they had probable cause. When they went inside they realized it was most likely the crime scene. They found him working and charged him.”
“Did he say where he’d been earlier?”
“He’s been pretty vague so far, but he hasn’t denied anything. My turn now. How did things go on your end?”
I gave him a replay of my visit to the carnival. “Warren Sonders is called Pop by everyone out there, claims they’re like a family. Sonders is definitely in Pepper’s corner. I sensed a little ambivalence in some of the others, but it’s more like they don’t want to believe it happened. They’re pretty subdued. They seem like a close-knit bunch, and now trouble has invaded their world.”
“Courtney pulled together some basic background from what I had and what the police have got.” He slid a neatly typed double-spaced sheet across the glossy table. “For you.”
