by David Daniel
Roland Cote appeared behind him in the doorway of the camper. Neither of the cops was wearing latex gloves, which seemed to confirm that that the forensic heavy lifting had already been done. “It’s okay, Paul,” Cote said in a slow voice. “Rasmussen here used to wear a badge. He misses it sometimes and tries to compensate by carrying a piece of paper. Or have you sprung for a shiny star out of one of those rent-a-cop catalogs?”
I let it alone. The patrolman’s jaw clenched for a moment, as if he were chewing marbles, then he stepped aside to let Cote emerge.
The detective had thickened with time, like stew The aluminum steps creaked with his weight, which I pegged at near 220, most of it on the torso of his five-ten frame. His thinning brown hair was scraped back across his head like wires on a faulty electrical coil. He was wearing a forest green blazer with brass buttons over a shirt and tie, both the color of beef gravy. He shifted a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup to his left hand. The extended right hand was perfunctory, but I took it.
“Carnival doesn’t open till nighttime,” he said.
“Not even then, I gather.”
“Oh?”
“The city shut it down.”
“I didn’t know that.” And didn’t much seem to care, judging by his tone. “So what brings you?”
“Work.”
Cote stepped back and raised his brows, which gave his face a momentary curiosity before it settled back into its bland cast. “For the lawyer representing the perp? Seems kind of a waste. This one’s going to be convict-by-the-numbers, from what I see. We got our man.”
“Fred Meecham’s old-fashioned that way. He still has this idea about innocent until proven guilty.”
“And you bill by the hour.” Cote’s grin looked like it had been snipped into his bland face with garden shears.
“Idle curiosity,” I said, “what brings you back today?”
“Just dotting i’s and crossing t’s.”
“Do you mind if I have a peek inside?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Why not? You’ve broomed it.”
“Because I said so.” He raised his hand in a slow gesture to indicate the pointlessness of further entreaties. I didn’t push. He was on firm ground; until the police released it, it was still a crime scene, and until Meecham directed me, I had no formal clearance for access. From what little I could see through the open door, the trailer was eight by twelve, with a couple of folding chairs, a small dressing table, and a day bed, which had been stripped of sheets. The floor looked to be carpeted with Astroturf. The patrolman was jotting on a steno pad. Taking a different tack, I asked Cote, “So how do you read it?”
We’d never been friends, but we weren’t enemies, either. I hoped he wouldn’t mind talking, cop to ex-cop. He took a sip of his coffee. “Pepper and the victim had a past. She came here to see him yesterday morning. She’d been here Saturday, too. We’ve got eyewitnesses that put her with Pepper that afternoon and early evening. On Sunday, she apparently got herself prettied up and came over. There was some sort of argument, it got physical, and she got dead.”
“Why’d she show if she had a restraining order against Pepper?”
Cote showed no surprise that I knew about it. “Why does any woman? I could spend all my time on domestic relationships that go bad but where the partners can’t let go. Plenty of shrinks do. Anyhow, that went back more than a year, and when it lapsed, she didn’t renew it.”
“Had Pepper ever violated the restraint?”
He tried to read whether it was rhetorical or a genuine question. Finally he just said, “I haven’t seen anything about that.”
“Have you talked to her friends and found out if he’d made any threats to her?”
“You looking for something special?”
“It seems to me part of the job for both of us is to get some back story.”
“Back story? What is this, Hollywood? Okay, sure, there’re always things in anyone’s life that are interesting to dig up—but where are you going to begin that story? ‘Your Honor, I’d like to start on a blustery March morning, when the moon was on the wane. My client’s mother gave birth to him … ’ I mean, the way I see it, we may be interested in entirely different things. So the best policy right now is we don’t talk anymore. That okay with you?”
I let it go. Beyond, the meadow was bright with goldenrod and purple loosestrife and the little stark-white tufts of burst milkweed pods, and farther back still, the woods were aflame with scarlet sumac and yellow and orange maples, the colors a vivid backdrop to Cote’s drab presence. I gestured in that direction. “Why there?” He turned. “You guys obviously have your evidence,” I pursued, “but wouldn’t it have made more sense to wait till he could get her out of here for good?”
“What did I just tell you?”
“This is just me spitballing. Pretend I’m not here. Why not stick her in the river down in Lawrence or Haverhill or put her in the New Hampshire woods? No body, no crime, and maybe next spring, or five years from now, some hiker comes across decomposed remains, and Pepper and the carnival have been in a hundred other cities and no one remembers.”
Cote’s interest didn’t stir. “You think too much, Rasmussen,” he said.
“No one’s ever told me that before.” I shrugged. “The spot where he allegedly carried her is a hundred yards from here. Does that make any sense?” Saying it, I realized I was working through it for the first time for myself, too.
He gave his shoulders a vague twitch. “Dumping the body somewhere else is maybe what he’d like to have done, but he didn’t get a chance, the dumb shit. He had to be on the job. So he left her in the trailer, waited till later, and hauled her straight out. We estimate that to be around seven, seven-thirty, when he took a short break from working the midway. It’s going dark then. He didn’t even take time to clean up the evidence. She was found at eight-forty. Her pocketbook was under the bunk in his camper.”
The officer came out now, glancing at Cote for instructions. “Seal it up,” Cote said.
The cop set to affixing crisscrossing strands of yellow tape to the door, pressing the ends in place with thick-fingered hands. He seemed to have a relish for the job.
I asked, “Do you figure Pepper carried the victim out of the trailer by himself?”
“Why not? She weighed all of a hundred pounds. Plus we caught a break. There were officers on detail, and their quick thinking helped us ID Pepper as a suspect right away. Officer Duross here was one of them.” Duross. He was the one who had talked with Alice Parigian in child services in New Jersey.
Cote looked around, then underhanded his coffee cup toward a clump of weeds. It spun through the air, spraying coffee in a golden pinwheel. “Probably just as well the city is shutting this place down,” he said. “They ought to rethink the whole idea of carnivals coming to town, you ask me. If you ran criminal checks on some of these shitbuckets who work here, you’d be amazed how many got sheets. Well, I guess I’ll see you in due time.” He started off, then stopped and turned. “Hey, speaking of … how about our boy, huh?”
He read my blank expression.
“Deemys is prosecuting. I used to rib him about how he wore clothes they have to unlock cables before you can buy them—Mr. Fancy Pants. But he’s the man now.” He gave it his crinkled grin. “You, me, Gus … gonna be like old times.”
Pop Sonders was in his motor home, talking on the phone. Nicole sat at the computer. She cut a timid glance my way and went back to the keyboard. Pop sounded angry at whomever he was speaking to, his occasional words strained, his face ribbed with deep, disapproving lines. With a grunt of good-bye, he hung up and jabbed his chin my way. “How’s it look?”
“The police investigation? Like a noose tightening.” Nicole had turned now, listening. “They’ve got the coroner’s report and evidence from Pepper’s trailer. I don’t suppose you can alibi him between noon and around six last evening?”
“Already told you. That was a busy stretch. I
t got pretty hectic and noisy around here.”
“Are you wondering if anybody saw him then, Mr. Rasmussen?” Nicole spoke up.
I looked her way. “Did anyone?”
She thought for a moment, then her small face darkened. “I seen him for some of the time. But everyone’s got jobs to do and we do ’em. Plus, part of the time he’d have been inside his trailer.”
“How about the woman—Flora Nuñez? Did you see her?”
“I didn’t think so. But people saw him here in the morning, and I definitely saw them together on Saturday.”
“That’s the afternoon you opened?”
“Yeah … she was here,” Pop said. “Troy took her around. Won her a stuffed doggie sinking baskets or something. Women like that kind of thing.”
Yeah, I thought, they do. “Did you know he kept a handgun?”
He pulled a morose face and shook his head.
“Does Pepper use drugs?”
“What are you getting at?” His bushy eyebrows tensed together.
“Just fishing. Is that a no?”
“It better be. We got a policy about that.”
“Do you go into each other’s trailers?”
“Only if invited. A person’s home is his castle here, same as anywhere. Going in would violate one of our unwritten rules.”
“You seem to have a lot of rules, written and unwritten.”
“Show me a place that doesn’t.” He nodded with obscure meaning.
“Another one of ours is no go, no dough. Right now I’m sitting here on my duff, so if it’s all the same with you, I’ve got some things I’ve got to do to deal with this shutdown.” I wondered if this had something to do with his just-completed phone conversation, but I didn’t ask. He was already feeling a little harried, and I had things to do, too. As I got to the door, he said, “Why don’t you fall by this evening?”
“What have you got in mind?”
“I’m calling a meeting of my staff to talk about what we should do next. You could meet some of the others, maybe get a few answers to all those questions you got.”
I told him I would, and we agreed on a time. Outside, I saw that the police had gone. As I opened my car, Nicole called me, and I turned and saw her hurrying toward me.
“Are things going to be okay, Mr. Rasmussen?”
“Call me Alex,” I said. She nodded. I had the feeling she wanted me to assure her that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. I turned the question around.
She clenched her hands together at her chest and sent a furtive glance around, though we were the only ones there. “I wonder if people are going to be angry with us … on account of what happened. I mean, not that we caused it—I don’t think that—but that it, you know … happened here.”
Her face was a transparent screen where I watched her emotions come and go. “Nicole,” I said gently, “are you thinking that someone shot your dog on purpose?”
She lowered her eyes. “Well, only that I know sometimes people get angry and … scared over things they don’t understand.”
“True. Anything else?”
“When I was walking just before I saw you, a car went by and someone yelled out the window. I won’t repeat what they said. It wasn’t nice.”
“For some people life is so boring, they feel they have to bother other people just so they know they’re alive. Don’t mind them. Just be careful, all right?”
“Okay.”
“Good,” I said, keeping my own sudden worry to myself.
“Thank you. I feel better.”
“Maybe the city will change its mind, and Pop will decide it’s a good idea for the show to get back on the road and let the legal system take care of things here.”
She forced a smile through an expression of pain. “I can tell you don’t know Pop very well, Mr.—Alex. He don’t quit easy. But I will do like you said and be careful. You be, too.”
I watched her go back to her carnival, and I turned and headed for my car to go to mine.
10
Courtney approached me in the hallway as I unlocked my office. “Mr. Meecham just sat down with a woman who knew the murder victim. Can you join them?”
Flora Nuñez’s acquaintance was perched on one of the client chairs in Fred Meecham’s inner sanctum, looking edgy. She was a tan-skinned woman in horn-rim glasses and wearing a dark sweater with an autumn leaf pattern on it and black jeans. “Ms. Colón,” Fred said, “this is Alex Rasmussen. He’s working as my investigator. Alex, Lucinda Colón.”
“Lucy, please,” she said. “It is nice to meet you.” Her fingers were cool, her grip soft.
She wasn’t pretty by conventional standards—her mouth was too wide, her dark coppery hair cropped very short—but there was a fashionable glamour about her. I took a chair, and Meecham said, “Ms. Colón was just telling me that both she and Flora Nuñez came from the same town in Puerto Rico. Patillas, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but we only met when we were here. We went in a class at the community college together, and we became friends.”
“How long did you know each other?”
“For more than two years.”
“Did Ms. Nuñez ever mention Troy Pepper?” I let Meecham pose the questions.
“They knew each other in New Jersey, before Flora came to Lowell. They were in contact with each other and were planning to get together when the carnival came to town.”
“When did she tell you this, Lucy?”
“In May, I think. She said this guy that she used to date and was sometimes in love with, he was going to be in Lowell in September. They dated before, but it never got too serious.” She had a charming accent and a lively manner, though I read sadness for her friend in it, too.
“Did you ever meet Troy Pepper, or see a photograph?”
“Yes, she showed me a snapshot she had of him. But I never saw him with my own eyes.”
“When did you see Flora last?”
“Oh, not for a while. She was working at the Hilton downtown. A chambermaid. But on the telephone, we spoke often. Is very sad what happened.”
“When you talked with her the last few times, did she mention Troy Pepper?”
“She just said that she was going to tell him something. But I don’t know what it was. She seemed pretty excited to see somebody, but I don’t know for sure. I think it was him.”
“Were they lovers?” Meecham asked.
Her hesitation was either modesty or surprise. “I think so, you know. Once upon a time. Back in New Jersey. But since then? Quién sabe? Flora didn’t tell me too much of her life. I think she seen other men sometimes.”
“Here in the city?”
“Maybe here, yes. But I don’t know who.”
“Did you ever see her with bruises, maybe, or a swollen eye?”
“No, never.”
“Did she ever seem … frightened, or afraid?”
She hesitated. “Maybe yes. I think so.”
“Recently?”
She nodded.
“Do you know why?” Meecham asked.
“No. I don’t.”
“Have you any idea?”
“No. But what I think … I think maybe it was of Troy Pepper she was afraid.”
Meecham sent a glance my way but didn’t lose his rhythm. “Because of things she said, or … ?”
“Is just what I think. I don’t know very much.” That was the theme she stayed with for the rest of our questions. When she finished, he thanked her for coming in and saw her out.
“What do you think, Alex?” he asked when he came back in.
“If Pepper and the victim had a history, it could be motive, especially depending on what she was planning to tell him—if she was breaking something off, that could be motive. It could also be that she was going to tell him she wanted them to be together. Hell, it could be any number of things, some of which would support Pepper’s innocence, others that would damn him.”
He pushed fingers across
his forehead, as if to erase the deep creases there now. I said, “The cops seem pretty sure they’ve got the case on ice, but I don’t know enough yet.”
He nodded. The accused hadn’t given us much to form an opinion on. I’d have liked to insist that I was simply an information gatherer, as impartial as a machine, as wise as Solomon, but the reality was that believing a client was innocent, or that he’d been wronged in some way, was valuable. If it was the other way, and I was comfortably convinced that he was guilty, I had decisions to make. With Pepper, I wasn’t close to anything like assuredness yet. And I realized that the only person who could help me decide was the person who seemed not to want to.
Back in my office, I had a phone message to call Phoebe Kelly at her office in the Registry of Deeds, which I was happy to do. “What are you doing?” I asked when she answered.
“Hey, it’s you. I thought I heard bells ringing. I’m reading the latest issue of People. Don’t worry, I’m not on county time.”
“You’d be getting more done than a lot of people who are. What’s the deal?”
“Coffee break. What are you doing?”
“Sniffing out clues.”
“I’m sniffing mocha latte.”
“So much for a fascinating probing of each other about our life’s work.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were kidding. Were you finished?”
“I am kidding.”
“Okay. I’m not. The boss is taking all of us out to dinner tonight. Jennifer, the office manager—do you remember her? The older woman who has the cubicle by the window? Anyway, she’s retiring. Guess who might get her desk?”
“No kidding?”
“It’s not a sure thing yet. Anyway, we’ll be at Cobblestones. Do you want to meet me there after, or are you going to be glued to the Pats game?”
