by David Daniel
When I reached the law library door, Meecham said, “By the way, did I mention who’s prosecuting?”
He didn’t have to; his forced grin told me.
Down the hall in my own modest shop I checked the morning’s mail and then phone messages. I’d been nominated for a national leadership award; all I needed to do was call an 800 number with my credit card to talk about the press release. I decided to hold out for the Nobel. I scanned the notes Meecham had prepared. Troy Samuel Pepper, born Paterson, New Jersey, grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, as a ward of the state and sometime foster child. He didn’t finish high school and joined the service at eighteen. Stayed in six years, discharged nine years ago, worked for a power company—which is where he got the injury that had mangled his left hand. He worked in a warehouse, made foreman. He left that a year ago, did odd jobs for several months, and started with the carnival as a roustabout last April.
It would give me a few places to stick a pry bar. With that and the file Sonders had loaned me, maybe I could conjure something that Fred could use. I hadn’t missed his oblique mention of the prosecutor. On the job, I’d worked with Gus Deemys. With Ed St. Onge and Roland Cote, too, but at least with them the feelings had ranged from friendship to tolerance. I’d known Deemys as a well-dressed and aggressive little rooster who’d seemed to get off on needling people, friend and foe alike, but it was a mean-spirited needling, never the bonding kind. He’d probably lost his hero when Robert Blake went up on murder charges. Deemys had always been ambitious; I’d give him that. For years he’d attended night school to earn a law degree. Now he was an assistant county DA, and with an audience other than corpses to parade his five-foot-four-inch, well-draped form in front of, he’d proven a winner. His conviction rate was one of the best in the state.
Ambitious wasn’t a word that leapt to mind when Roland Cote’s name came up. Brilliant wasn’t, either. Dogged worked. Unimaginative (as I’d told Pop Sonders). Loyal. And now large. I’d glimpsed him last night when the detectives showed up, and I almost hadn’t recognized him. His somber, vaguely handsome bachelor’s face was intact, but free donuts and the big meals at his mother’s house, where he still lived at forty-five, had undone him. He was heavy now in a way that no tricks of clothing could disguise. At some point he must have shown promise of something to be punched up to detective in the first place. In a typical career arc, he would’ve made sergeant or lieutenant by now, or been busted back to patrol duty for having screwed up somehow—but he hadn’t gone either way, and that was telling. As a cop you got pigeonholed, and if you accepted it and didn’t fight it, you got to stay. As with mediocre schoolteachers (or doctors or judges, for that matter), your peers didn’t have the stomach to kick you out, so they let you dangle at the point of least hassle. Unless you’d done something truly vile—like get caught with a bag full of money and leave a state trooper in a coma—in which case you were gone.
I took out the sheet that Courtney had typed and hoisted the phone. I didn’t bother with the U.S. military—getting a date with Cameron Diaz would’ve been easier, though I didn’t try that, either. I dialed 411 and got the listing for the New Jersey department of human services. It took several more calls and some waiting through taped menus before finally I reached the division of youth and family services and got hold of a Ms. Alice Parigian, who confirmed that she was the person who had handled Pepper’s foster care case in Nutley sixteen years before. “Who is this again, please?” she asked.
I told her, making it clear that I was on Pepper’s side, at least in terms of the law. From her questions, I got the sense that someone, probably Cote, had already been in contact with her. “I don’t want to seem rude or impolite, Mr. Rasmussen, but is there somebody who can vouch for you?”
I gave her Fred Meecham’s number, and she said she’d get back to me as soon as she’d vetted me. I wasn’t holding my breath when the phone rang three minutes later. “What do you need to know about this individual?” Alice Parigian asked.
“Anything that you can tell me, ma’am.”
That was a long while ago, she said; I agreed that it was. In a profession where people tended to get used up, burned out, and shuffled to other agencies like tattered office furniture, it was a stretch of time to be a social service worker (or a sofa, for that matter). Was she another Roland Cote? Of course, some people had a particularly strong sense of mission—or a stoic sense of delayed gratification that enabled them to envision a Florida condominium for the golden years. I couldn’t tell from her voice what drove her but she sounded dedicated. “As a matter of fact, he was one of my very first cases. And I did take out his file when a policeman called me this morning. I can tell you exactly what I told him. The boy’s mother got struck and killed by a commuter train when he was just five, a freak thing. The father was pretty much a nonentity, so the boy was picked up and put into DHS care. He was an only child, healthy, and seemingly well adjusted. For the first few years after he came into our custody, he was in foster situations and moved around from family to family. He was a shy, respectful boy. Tested average on IQ. He liked sports. He left our official custody when he turned seventeen. I know he didn’t finish high school, but I believe he went into the marines. That’s about all I can tell you. This office had no further contact with him after that.”
That was the formal end of our conversation. I took a chance. “Ms. Parigian, you said he was quiet and polite, and yet he never ended up being adopted?”
There was a silence, and I wondered if she’d already hung up; then she said, “No, he never did,” in a kind of wistful voice, as if it were a mystery she still hadn’t fathomed. “His early childhood wasn’t any picnic, but he was a survivor. He had no physical or severe emotional handicaps. Though that isn’t necessarily a factor in adoption. Families choose for reasons of their own. Some people, God bless them, are willing to take on even the most challenged children.”
“But no one took him,” I said. “No one adopted Troy Pepper.”
“Mr. Rasmussen, it would break your heart to know the children who never find a loving home. Troy was one of my very first cases, as I said. I really believed he’d do just fine. I worked hard to place him.”
“I’m sure you did. You said he had no ‘severe’ emotional problems—were there some other kind?”
“That’s not anything I’m able to address. In our system, each child receives a periodic professional evaluation, but I don’t have any of that data here. It’s medical information, so it’s classified.”
“You knew him, Ms. Parigian. You’re a professional. Would you venture an opinion?”
“Well … if I had to guess, I’d say his big problem might have been temper. He could get very angry sometimes. I think it was especially noticeable because he was so quiet most of the time. Possibly he was depressed, though I just considered him to be deep … you know, still waters?”
“Do you happen to know what would set him off?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Does his file show any kind of disciplinary record?”
In the silence, she drew a long breath, and I had an image of her: a somewhat formal middle-aged woman, sitting in an office no bigger than mine, at a desk with papers and folders stacked high on it; perhaps with a window overlooking a city street, but I saw her looking inward. Hell, maybe I was way wrong, and she was sitting in her bra and panties on the lap of the boss, who was blowing in her ear as she tried to stifle giggles, but I didn’t think so. She let the breath out as slowly as she’d drawn it.
“Each time he would get placed in a foster setting—and he did during the ages of about five through nine—he was hopeful that this would be the one, the family that wanted to hang on to him and cherish him as their own. I remember he had a pennant that he showed me one time. One of those felt souvenir pennants that said ‘Welcome to Asbury Park.’ He loved that. I think one of his foster families had taken him to the beach. He’d bring that with him wherever he was living and tack it on the w
all. One day somebody—it may have been a foster sibling—tore it down, and Troy got very upset. Physically.”
“A fight?”
“I don’t think it went very far, but I do know the family didn’t keep him for long after that. He was crushed. He’d been hoping it would work out.” A sigh escaped her, like some energy going out of her, out of all the kids who’d dreamed the same thing and never had it happen. “There’s a term … the ‘foster home bounce’—but there comes a point when a child sees the way it’ll be, and I wonder if maybe they give up a little.”
“What finally happened with Troy?”
“When he stopped bouncing around? What happens to all of us, I suppose. We … he grew up. He was pretty much a loner by the time he got to school. And, in time, he left us, as he was legally bound to do.”
“After the service,” I said, “he evidently worked at a food warehouse in the area. Would you happen to know anything about that?”
“The big outfit here is Garden State Foods, out on Ethyl Turnpike. That’d be the likely one.”
I asked if she could get a telephone number, and in a matter of seconds she had one for me. I shifted the phone against my cheek. “Do you think he could have done what he’s charged with?”
“Killed that young woman? I wish I could say categorically no, that it wasn’t in him. That the core values we instilled in him, reinforced by his military discipline, would make that impossible.” She gave a small joyless laugh. “But I can’t say that. I hope he didn’t do it. And I thank you for asking. I think the policeman I spoke with—Officer …”
“Roland Cote?”
“I’ve got it right here. Duross, that was his name. Anyway, I think Officer Duross just automatically assumed Troy had done it. My earnest prayer is that he’s innocent. Sometimes, though,” she added softly, “it’s those standoffish ones you find can be the most destructive later on.”
I pressed the phone tighter, to hear better. “Was he destructive?”
The line was silent a moment. “Well … there was one time. In junior high school. Someone broke a bunch of windows in the school, and some classmates of Troy’s put the blame on him, said they’d seen him do it. He wasn’t involved at all, actually, but it was his word against theirs, and I think the police believed them—they were from the good side of town.” I didn’t miss her emphasis. “But there wasn’t any hard evidence, so he was let go with a firm reprimand.”
“How do you know he didn’t do it?”
“Why, he told me. He knew those other boys had done it. So one by one he caught up to them, and he whaled them pretty good. The parents of one of the boys pressed to have Troy arrested, and that led to his bout with real trouble. This isn’t in his file, of course.”
“No, ma’am.”
There was a storyteller in Ms. Parigian. I could almost see her peeling away layers of memory, opening the storage banks, and now she didn’t care to seal them up again. I didn’t have to push hard to get her to tell the rest of it.
7
The person in human resources I’d spoken to at Garden State Foods was a temp, taking care of the day-to-day but after some waiting on my part, and some trial and error on hers, she was able to confirm that a Troy Pepper had once been employed there in the warehouse. The one I should really talk to, though, she said, the person who had the history of the company in her head, was the woman she was filling in for. That person was out on family leave, but the temp promised she would get a message to her, along with my number. I didn’t sit around waiting to strike oil twice in one day. I headed for my wheels.
Fred Meecham had suggested that my talking with Troy Pepper might be useful, so he had faxed a request to the warden of the Middlesex County House of Correction to grant me permission to visit. Traffic eastbound toward Billerica on Route 3 wasn’t heavy, but a crew blasting granite ledge as part of a highway-widening project slowed it. Portions of shoulder had already been hydro-seeded, and in the September sun, the grass was sprouting as green as Easter basket excelsior.
Time was when Route 3 was a swift and a scenic route across the Merrimack Valley, especially beautiful this time of year, as the red maples, birches, and alders grew flush with colors. But the attractions of the area, north of Boston, had drawn people looking for a place to settle, so traffic was heavy, many of the cars bearing tax-free New Hampshire plates, with the “Live Free or Die” motto—which, of course, worked better as a motto than reality: The jobs were in Massachusetts, where there were taxes aplenty. As I waited for a flagman to wave us on, I replayed what several of the carnival workers had told me.
The men remarked that Pepper never went out to socialize with them, citing theories that ranged from his being on the wagon to not liking company, but I weighed another possibility. Suppose he stayed away from bars because they sometimes brought trouble—and for reasons of his own, Pepper wanted to avoid trouble. Why? The most logical reason was that he’d been in trouble before. Flora Nuñez had apparently taken out a restraining order against him some while back. Another “Why?” These were questions that I hoped to get answers to.
From the front, Bihoco, as the Billerica House of Correction was known among the state’s prison population, had a forbidding look, an odd mingling of old and new, like a fortress that had been upgraded for modern warfare. In reception I showed a copy of the request that Meecham had sent to the warden. A guard with a buzz cut, whose uniform fit him like shrink-wrap, gave it a few seconds’ interest, then had me empty my pockets into a small basket: keys, an assortment of coins, a pack of gum, and my notebook and pen. He looked at me expectantly, his fingers moving in a “gimme” gesture.
“I’m not carrying, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “So sorry.”
He seemed disappointed. If I’d been packing a hog-leg the size of Dirty Harry Callahan’s, I’d have been a made man. He gave the wand a perfunctory pass over my torso, front and back, and then down my legs, quipping, as he probably did forty times a day, that it wouldn’t ruin my love life. I pocketed my belongings. “Through there,” he said, nodding at a steel door, which he buzzed open.
The inside guard was tall and gray-haired and not nearly so jolly. He scoped my paperwork carefully, eyeing me with suspicion, but I didn’t take it personally; it wasn’t. In the legal system’s game, we were just on opposing teams. Off the clock we could drink a beer together as civilly as any two guys. Jangling keys, he unlocked the holding area and ushered me into a room the size of a three-car garage.
The walls were a washed-out brown that gave the impression that they’d be sticky to the touch. A tired-looking, heavyset woman was talking through a circular screen to a hard-eyed young man on the other side of the long plate glass window that divided the room. Otherwise, the place was empty. “Sit anywheres,” the guard told me, and went to a black wall phone. I took a seat as far from the chatting pair as I could, to give everyone some privacy. The only real color in the room was the red sweep hand of a wall clock, ticking off the seconds. Somehow it didn’t seem an adequate measure of time in a place like this. I leafed through a little pamphlet called the Inmate Handbook, which began with a message from the sheriff and, according to the table of contents, addressed everything from inmate property and leisure time activities to work assignments and discipline. It was written in a clear, direct fashion that showed no hand of attorney or tech writer. Several minutes later, a wiry man of medium height in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit and manacles was led through a door in the back of the room on the other side of the glass, and my look at Troy Pepper was one of sudden recognition. Last night I’d given him two tickets in exchange for the privilege of being publicly identified as a Cake Eater. He walked slowly to the place opposite me and sat.
A person in a cage is an interesting animal. Sometimes there’s one little moment, when you first come face-to-face, without history, and you get this flash of his truth. From the set of his shoulders, or from his eyes, or his soul, it speaks to you, and you know his guilt or h
is innocence, his capacity for violence, or the kind of threat he poses. Then, in another blink, the balance shifts, gates come down, walls go up, and as cleanly as you might snap a cracker in two, there’s an understanding that one of you is free and the other one isn’t. I looked for something else in Pepper beyond my flicker of recognition that I’d seen him the night before, something murderous or craven, resentful or remorseful, anything, but I didn’t see it. I honestly could not tell a thing more about the man.
He was a lean package, with straw-colored hair, worn short, and a muscular neck and forearms (a faded tattoo of a rose on the left one), physically intimidating, even in the county jumpsuit; yet his shoulders slumped, and there was something contrastingly soft about his eyes, which were a bright blue, like gas flames turned down low. He had a broad nose, a cleft in his chin, and, of course, the ruined left hand, which lay with his other hand on the small table between us, and which I avoided glancing at. His overall manner, I realized, was resignation, as though he’d been on the lookout for something bad, and it had finally come. I told him who I was, pushing one of my cards through the small slot into the tray on his side to back up my self-introduction. He didn’t show much interest.
“I’m working for your lawyer,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“He already did.”
“I know. I’ve got some additional things to ask you.”
“Nothing else to say.”
“You haven’t heard the questions yet.”
When he didn’t respond, I said, “Okay, the first thing—”
“First, last … I got nothing for you.”
I hitched in closer. “The way it looks right now, Mr. Pepper, there’s a strong case against you. You deny it, and some of that case is circumstantial, but there’s crime scene evidence, eyewitness testimony—and you better believe the police are beating the bushes for anything else they can find. The DA will show that you knew the victim, that you argued with her. I think you know where he’s going to go from there.”
