by David Daniel
Pepper looked miserable, but he said nothing. I still wasn’t sure whether he knew I’d worked his game last night. I doubted it, and I wondered if it was because he saw so many people come through the carnival, or if possibly he’d been distracted by what he’d done to Flora Nuñez earlier in the day. Maybe I just wasn’t that memorable. I said, “The thing about the so-called wheels of justice is they can move slower than almost anything—until they don’t. Then they can turn so fast you get dizzy, and sometimes they roll right over you.” Boy, did I know that. “What we’ve got to try to do is get the wheels turning in the right direction at the right speed. You pled not guilty this morning. Now your lawyer needs to make your case to prove it. I can help. I want to. But I’m going to need your help.”
He went on saying nothing. I slid even closer. If there hadn’t been a wall between us, our knees would have touched. “I talked with some of your coworkers. They seem to be on your side. Warren Sonders is. You’ve got allies.”
He stirred slightly, his eyes coming up to meet mine—and I saw again that they weren’t eyes that went with the rest of him. There was a quality of appeal in them, a softness, a woundedness, if that was the word. I could imagine some women going for it. “Where did you first meet Flora Nuñez?”
His eyes stayed on mine for a moment, then slid away, gazing beyond me. It occurred to me that his face was the exact opposite of Nicole’s face, in that his showed almost nothing.
“Were you in love with her?”
He sat motionless.
“Did she love you?”
He blinked.
“I need something here.”
Same response. I did a bit of business with my notebook, turning pages, not looking for anything, really. I felt angry at being ignored. “I’m putting together some background on you, because you know the police are doing the same,” I said. “You have whatever story you told them. If it’s straight, okay. If not, if it’s just something you latched on to, or if you’ve remembered more, we need to sort it out and get the facts straight. We can take the upper hand if you give me proof you didn’t kill Flora Nuñez. Anything. It’ll all be confidential.”
The silence went on, like something being woven by long-legged spiders.
“She took out a restraining order against you, didn’t she?”
Nothing.
“Can you tell me why?”
More nothing.
I sat back. I slapped my notepad softly against the palm of my hand. Tap tap tap. “Okay, if the cop case adds up, if the woman is in the morgue because you put her there, then my job is easy. I won’t help some weak, uncompetitive bastard who feels the only way he can get a woman is by force.” I paused expectantly but was disappointed. “But if it’s not true, if someone else killed Flora Nuñez and is walking around out there right now … think about it. And if you’re sitting here imagining that the police are going to come to their senses and realize they’ve caged the wrong bird and you’re going to fly away home, think even more.”
I tore out several pages of my handwritten notes, fanned through the rest of the notebook, which was blank, tucked my card inside, and pushed it under the screen. He cast a quick look my way, a little more white showing around the blue eyes, but he didn’t grow talkative. “If you think of anything you want to share and that might help your case—anything at all—jot it down and get word to your lawyer.” I left.
“I told you the guy is a clam. Which doesn’t bode well for his defense.” Meecham’s voice on my cell phone didn’t seem to, either; he sounded far away. “What a defendant doesn’t say can work against him even more than what he does say.”
I realized what I was hearing was frustration. I briefed him on my earlier telephone conversations.
“So, according to this Ms. Parigian, Pepper was facing jail for going after his classmates after the window-breaking incident?”
“The father of the one kid was ready to put him away for life. The judge gave Pepper a choice, jail or a uniform.”
“Why hasn’t he told us any of this?”
“Would you, Fred?”
“If I thought it would be extenuating. Though extenuating to what? I guess if you’re charged with something you didn’t do, why offer excuses as to why you did it? Okay. And the warehouse he was employed at?”
I told him I was waiting for a callback and that I’d keep him posted. In the meantime, I had questions of my own: chief among them, a motive. Based upon my brief exchange with Troy Pepper at the carnival last night, I had to wonder: Would the barker have worked as calmly as he had, knowing a woman was lying dead in his trailer? Would he have looked me in the eye, wished me good luck the way he had? Was he that calculating and cold? He’d shown me nothing to assure me otherwise. I found myself thinking of the souvenir pennant that Alice Parigian had told me about. Would a person who’d fight for a scrap of cloth kill for his sense of honor?
8
Like the rest of us, cops develop habits that provide them a little order in the chaos. Even beyond the rote of drill and the paperwork, they find something: a watering hole for after-shift whiskey, a floating card game, a pew at the back of a church. One cop I used to know would go to the shooting range once a week and blast away at man-sized targets, because, as he said, “it keeps me from shooting people.” Ed St. Onge had a place, especially when the city crime rate was up, and his blood pressure along with it. Blindfold me and I’d still know the smells: liniment and cigar smoke, b.o. and tired canvas.
The West Side Gym had a history as colorful as the city’s, including gunfights, gaming rings, and more characters than Damon Runyon. Mostly, however, it was dedicated to the manly art of pugilism. Outside of Brockton, where Hagler had come from, and Marciano before him, Lowell had produced some of the best prizefighters in the country, a lot of them developed in the West Side Gym, under the tutelage of Christy Speronis. These days there were still prospects, title contenders, and even a champion or two who trained there, but working at the front counter was a moon-faced fellow who should’ve served as fair warning to anyone considering taking up gloves. Joe Doyle had worked up through the amateur ranks and had a stretch as a pro, fighting as a mid-heavy under the name Kid Sligo. He’d never topped any big card or come within hailing distance of a title belt, and yet he’d lasted a lot of years, many of them taking it on the chin, and the last few of them, it was rumored, refusing to hit the canvas for the New England mob, which some would claim was more a testimony to stupidity than anything else: Better-wired men than him had ended up as landfill. He’d wound up mumbling his words out of a face that looked like an Edsel’s hubcap that had rolled all the way from Palookaville.
“Hey, Kid,” I greeted him.
He dropped into a crouch and did a one-two with his shoulders. “Hiya, gooda seeya.” He recognized me, though I don’t think he could have picked my name off a list of one.
“Last I knew, you were the gate over at Matty Silver’s lounge.”
“Still am. This is supplemental. Christy says he likes to keep me around to add class to this joint.” His grin showed more gums than teeth. We chewed life for a moment, then I asked for St. Onge, making it sound as if Ed was expecting me, and Kid motioned with his head. “Steam room. Want a towel?”
St. Onge was standing in front of a locker mirror, unbuttoning a brown cardigan. He didn’t see me, and I paused, struck with an image of a much younger cop, standing before a squad room mirror, trimming the corners of his dark mustache. He caught sight of me and turned. “Rasmussen, what the hell?”
“I know, it’s your naptime. I won’t take much of it.”
He dropped his arms. “You won’t take any of it. When I come here I’m off-limits.”
“The billboard over City Hall Square neglected to mention that.”
“Spare me. That’s part of the new approach: Cops are your friends, you should trust them. The idea was old when Pat O’Brien played it in the movies and the crime was kids swiping fruit off the apple cart. These days
I figure anybody who’s got to worry about me coming after them, I don’t want to be friends with. All right, you got two minutes, then we’re done here. There’s no way I’m letting you climb into the steam bath with me.”
“Good thinking.”
He hung his sweater on a hook in a locker. “By the way,” he said, “congratulations.”
“For working the other side?”
“What side? I heard you bought a house. Out in the Ivies, I heard.”
It was on the west side, off Princeton Boulevard, in a section where streets were named Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell, don’t ask me why. It was where I probably ought to have been right then, sanding floors, scraping wallpaper, buying new accessories with income from my good steady unglamorous insurance gig. “I like the peace and quiet.”
“What’s this about the other side?” he asked.
I told him Troy Pepper’s attorney had hired me.
“Makes sense.” He loosened his pink necktie and let it hang, like the tongue of an exhausted bloodhound. “You and Meecham are both right there in the same rat hole, you can huddle together and nibble the cheese.”
“That’s mice, not rats. They don’t live together. Anyway, I want to get some details on the police investigation.”
“I like peace and quiet, too. It’s why I come here.” He began unknotting his tie.
“Maybe you can preview what’ll be in the Sun, save me from reading between the lines.”
He looked at me, his lips pursed under his mustache. “That’s all you’ll get from here.”
I nodded.
He motioned me to a bench, and we sat. He began untying his shoes. “We got the squeal about eight forty last night. There was a uniform detail at the location already, doing security. We sent detectives, and they’re handling it. I might’ve caught the case ordinarily, but I’m doing this task force on gangs, I’m spread thin. I just came from Lowell General. Southeast Asian kid, fourteen years old, he’s critical after a beating. You’ll read that tomorrow.”
I sensed he wanted to talk about it, so I kept quiet.
“There’s this ritual to join a gang—a ‘jump-in,’ where members get to beat on you for a while. To see how well you defend your manhood. They’re too young, too dumb to figure out yet that being tough isn’t about being violent. Jumping out, though … that’s a bitch. This kid wanted to quit, go back to school, reconnect with his family. A dozen of his so-called crew beat him senseless. When he wouldn’t wake up, somebody with a shred of brains took him to the emergency room, and then split. So he’s down there, fourteen years old, his family heartsick, and it’s touch and go, all because he wanted out. We had a seventeen-year-old shot the day before yesterday. We picked up the shooter because he was bragging about it. The sad part? A lot of these kids aren’t stupid and could make something of themselves. But they’re all twisted up in this machismo crap, like it’s about honor or something. They’re violent because they’re weak, and way down inside they know it, but no one’s ever showed them another way to express it.” His face was damp and grim, and I tried to think of some appropriate words, but I knew that words wouldn’t help, any more than the steam bath would, that maybe only time had any chance. “Anyway,” he went on, clearing his throat, “the carnival killing. I hear there are some people working out there who are worth taking a close look at their backgrounds. But that’s Cote’s case.” He glanced around and added in a lowered voice, “Though you know who’s riding herd on it personally, right?”
I hadn’t until that moment. “Frank Droney?”
His silence was his answer.
“Is it just one of Mother Nature’s tricks, or has his face been carved Mount Rushmore—fashion into the granite ledges along Route Three?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah.” It was interesting; and it added up. Strangers come to town and one of them kills a citizen, dumps her in a field. It was simple. This was election season, and Droney’s man Cavanaugh was up for another term. They were hands washing each other, crime and punishment. “Rumor has it there are a few people around who still think being a crook doesn’t pay, but none of them are politicians.”
“It’s just as well. If they weren’t sitting in office, half of them would be sitting in jail for exposing themselves in public.” He flung off a shoe. “The point is, it’s not for you to decide whether this carnival character is innocent or not. That’s for the law. You know where I’m going to land.”
“Where you can huddle and nibble cheese.”
“Hit the bricks, pal.”
“Good luck. I hope that kid in the hospital makes it.”
Walking back through the gym, listless in the aftermath of cheap victory and loss, I caught sight of a young woman in a corner, kickboxing at a heavy bag. Something in the energy of her attack—let alone the very unlikelihood of her presence there in that temple of testosterone—drew me over. Her dark hair was in a tortoise-shell clip, high on her head. Her Everlast sweatshirt was form-fitted and ended below her ribs, baring her muscular midriff and a small gold belly ring. She had a good rhythm going, and a vicious kick. She may have been vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t sure and I wasn’t going to lay that old line on her. I listened to the steady whap of canvas for a minute, then she stopped, took a towel that was draped nearby, and mopped her face. She saw me looking. “Don’t step on your eyeballs, Jack.”
I gave it an embarrassed smile. She reared back on one leg and drove her other foot into the bag with a whump that set the bag swinging like a hanged man.
Driving along the river toward the fairgrounds, through the slowly changing trees, I reflected on the changes I’d been living. Finally letting go of the fantasy I’d clung to for too long concerning getting Lauren back was the big one. Buying my own place was part of it, too. Now I realized in a way I hadn’t looked at it before that my relationship with the cops was changing as well. For a time after I left, I maintained some profile there. Cops knew me as having once been one of them, though to be honest, with many of them it wasn’t a benign knowledge; I was the guy who’d dirtied them all by getting caught taking a bribe. Frank Droney had been the one to demand my shield. With others, people who knew me and knew the truth, there was a sense that my fall possessed a kind of grudging honor. Ed St. Onge had stuck his neck out for me and had gone on record as saying I was an innovative and gifted investigator. (I’m only quoting him.) Then, his good opinion cut ice with others. Now, only St. Onge really remembered. My relationship with the department had devolved into a dispiriting war of attrition. In the daily world at JFK Plaza, Droney ran the detective bureau. While St. Onge would still help me in ways he could, he could foresee a time when he would ride into the sunset—literally, probably, heading to the Southwest, where he and his wife could be with their only daughter, who practiced medicine near Albuquerque. There was no reason to risk his reputation or his pension by being anything more than courteous to me. Still, he’d been there when I needed him, ready to risk a lot more. I liked to think it went both ways.
9
At the meadow where the carnival was set up, I parked behind a cruiser and an unmarked city car and walked over to where I found Pop Sonders standing outside his motor home, hands cocked on his hips. Nicole squatted nearby, petting the greyhound. Seeing me, she hopped up. “Hello, Mr. Rasmussen.” I winked at her.
“I see the city hasn’t run you off yet,” I said to Sonders. There was no sign of the cops.
“They might as well have. I can’t open tonight, and unless I can get a whaddyacatlit—injunction—lifted, not any night soon, either.”
“Have you spoken with Fred Meecham?”
“He was gonna make some calls. For now …” He put his hands up, in a palms-open gesture. “Meanwhile, somebody shot Speedo here.”
I glanced at the dog, then at Nicole. “I took a BB out of his side,” she said.
“Is he all right?”
“I think so—aren’t you, fella?” She scrubbed the dog’s lo
ng, narrow head. “Maybe it was kids playing in the woods and it was an accident. I don’t think anyone would do it on purpose, do you?”
Pop caught my eye, and his expression made it clear he thought otherwise.
“Do you want to take him to a vet? The city animal clinic is just across the river.”
“No, thank you. The BB came out, and I can take care of him good. He hardly notices. He just wants to go back into the woods.” She patted him. “Did you speak with Troy, Mr. Rasmussen?”
“I saw him, but I didn’t get much.”
Sonders frowned. “He isn’t denying the charges?”
“Denying, confirming … he’s not saying much of anything.”
Nicole’s small face clouded with uncertainty. “He’s always pretty quiet,” she said meekly.
“Except now ain’t the time for it,” Pop grunted.
The girl seemed nervous at such talk, and her dog was eager to run. She said good-bye, and they went off. I turned to Pop. “The city won’t even let you leave?”
“Oh, we can leave, all right, if we want to go without the show. But I get the idea that if we do leave, it’ll be for good. Someone’ll say we broke our agreement and put a lien on all this stuff. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them railroad me. Or railroad Pepper, either.” He glanced in the direction of Pepper’s camper trailer, and I noticed that the door was partway open. “Guess who’s back?” Pop said.
“I saw the cars. What are they after?”
“You’re the ex-fuzz. You tell me.”
I said I’d catch up with him later and wandered over to the trailer that belonged to Troy Pepper. The door was ajar, but I knocked anyway. A rugged young officer pulled the door open wider. He had a brutal battering ram of a face and close-cropped hair a few shades darker brown than his eyes. He was one of the patrol officers who’d been on detail the night before, the male half of the pair I’d seen. He wore short sleeves, fade-washed jeans, and short boots, his weapon and handcuffs on his belt, his badge on a lanyard around his neck. He lifted his head in inquiry, and I gave him my name and asked if one of the detectives was around. “What’s it about?”
