Widowmaker

by Paul Doiron

  “What the hell was that about?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You were trying to rattle Logan. What was up with that?”

  “There’s just something about him that seems off to me.”

  “Because he hates child molesters? So what does that make me? Jesus, Bowditch. All those years of standing up for you in front of disciplinary committees, hearing about you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong—I never thought I’d get to see it up close and personal. But you really are a piece of work.”

  Pulsifer had been in a rotten mood all morning, and I knew anything I might say in defense of my actions would only irritate him more. When we arrived at Route 16, he turned in the direction of Bigelow and Flagstaff and hit the gas hard. He wasn’t making any pretense of wanting to get me back to my Scout and out of his district as soon as possible.

  The day was shaping up to be a beauty. The snow was sparkling, brighter than crushed diamonds, where the sun hit it. We passed the dead tree where the owl had been roosting, but it had flown away along with the birders.

  * * *

  Visiting the logging camp with Pulsifer had brought back a memory I had done my best to repress. It was the memory of a drive I had taken with Warden Tommy Volk a year and a half earlier, when I was new in the Sebago region. Volk had wanted me to know where the worst dirtbags lived because I would be policing his district on his days off.

  Pulsifer might have dismissed southern Maine as a suburban la-la land. But on that day, Volk and I had visited fenced compounds where barking pit bulls announced our approach, trailer parks where men pimped out their teenage girlfriends for heroin, and former farmsteads where the only crops still being grown were sold in Baggies for three hundred dollars an ounce.

  But the memory that had lingered longest was our last stop of the day.

  Toward dark, we had pulled up in his patrol truck to an anonymous split-level house: the kind of exurban home I wouldn’t have looked at twice under normal circumstances. A single light shined from a second-story window, but all of the others were dark.

  “I’ve saved the worst for last,” Volk had said. “The guy who lives here is pure evil. Do you want to meet him?”

  “Who is he?”

  “No one you’d ever notice.”

  Volk chewed tobacco constantly, not even removing it while he ate. He spat a stream of brown saliva into a stained coffee cup. We sat outside the nondescript house, staring up at the lighted window and listening to the engine idle.

  “What did he do?” I asked finally.

  Instead of answering, Volk did something that made my heart seize up. He hit his pursuit lights and sirens, bathing the dead-end street in blue hellfire.

  The outside light came on, the door opened, and a man appeared on the front step. I couldn’t see him well from that distance, but he seemed to be middle-aged, with a fat face and square glasses. His dress shirt was untucked on one side, as if he’d come directly from the bathroom, and his athletic socks were so phosphorescent white, they seemed to glow in the dark.

  Volk switched off his blues, but the siren echoed in my head.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you, Pete,” Volk whispered, more to himself than to me.

  The man stared sleepily at our truck while he tucked his shirt into his pants. Then, without turning his back to our vehicle, he stepped back inside the house and closed the door.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Peter Hamlin.”

  “Who?”

  “You never heard of the Pied Piper?” Volk stuffed a fresh wad of tobacco between his cheek and gums. “He used to be the music teacher at Pondicherry High School—married, kids, the whole nine yards. Then a girl in the school band slit her wrists. In the hospital she told a nurse that Hamlin had been having sex with her—all three holes. When the state cops raided his house, they found pictures of him with three other girls. One of them was a niece of my first wife.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Hamlin ‘tried’ to kill himself when he was out on bail, hanged himself in a motel room, but I guess he wasn’t able to go through with it, the fucking coward. I don’t know who his lawyer was, but he must have been the best that ever was. The asshole did only ten years in the Maine State Prison. Can you believe that? Ten years? His wife divorced him, changed her name, moved out of state with the kids, but somehow that dirtbag kept the house. I think it’s technically his mother’s, and she lets him live there.”

  The state of Maine doesn’t have laws dictating how close a sex offender can live to a school, day-care center, or playground, but I knew that some towns had passed their own ordinances. Whatever statutes Pondicherry might have put into place wouldn’t have applied here anyway. Hamlin had no proximate neighbors.

  “How long has he been out?” I asked.

  “Five months,” Volk said, growing redder. “I have made him my personal project. I come over at all hours. Blast my siren. I want him to know he’s being watched. I want him to think I’m a crazy motherfucker who doesn’t give a fuck about the law. I want him to have a heart attack from fear.”

  The inside of the truck smelled of Volk’s sickly wintergreen dip.

  “So he’s called the Pied Piper because he was a music teacher?” I asked. “Or because of the Hamlin/Hamelin thing.”

  Volk seemed confused; I don’t think he was familiar with the locale of the German folktale.

  “Hamlin wanted those girls to play his skin flute,” he said simply. “That’s how the fucker got his name.”

  In my career as a law-enforcement officer, I had accompanied regular police on bail-compliance checks, and I’d seen firsthand the damage child molesters can inflict on the most helpless of victims. I had seen horrible things that had torched whatever faith I’d once had in the essential goodness of human beings. So, however much I disliked being made his unwitting accomplice, I wasn’t about to rat out Tommy Volk.

  Then, three months later, I had heard the news that Peter Hamlin had burned his mother’s house down with himself inside. His charred skeleton had been found inside a bedroom closet, of all places. There were no signs that his death had been anything but suicide, and as vicious as Volk could be, I couldn’t imagine him plotting such an elaborate and brutal death for the Pied Piper. On the other hand, I had little doubt that the pedophile had felt driven to take his own life.

  What I had tried so hard to repress was my emotional response to the fire. Some of it was guilt. I’d wondered if I should have told someone in command about Volk’s campaign of harassment. There had also been a sense of relief. I was glad that one evil man, at least, was no longer at large upon the earth. But there was something else, too: a buoyant feeling in my chest. It was satisfaction, I realized.

  I had never felt that emotion before at the death of another human being.

  25

  “Do you ever look at the registry?” I asked Pulsifer as we neared the Bigelow crossroads.

  He flicked the wipers to clear the windshield of the salt and dirt being splattered on us by every passing vehicle. “The sex offender registry?” he said. “No, but I know where the local predators live, if that’s what you’re asking. If one of them moves into the area, I hear about it around town. People spend hours on that site, looking to see if they know anyone. It qualifies as a recreational activity up here.”

  That hardly surprised me. In my experience, rural people, having few distractions, especially enjoyed prying into one another’s business. Without gossips and grudge holders, Maine game wardens would be out of business.

  “I’ve been wondering about Nathan Minkowski,” I said.

  For the first time all morning, Pulsifer burst out laughing. “Mink! That’s right. You were supposed to tell me about your close encounter.”

  “I gave him a ride home yesterday from town.”

  “What was he wearing?

  I closed my eyes and summoned his image. “Fur hat, lumberman’s coat, jeans
, pack boots.”

  “That makes sense,” Pulsifer said. “Yesterday was an even day.”

  An even day? I didn’t understand what that meant. “There was something off about him,” I said. “I wondered if he was on the registry or something.”

  “Not yet.” Pulsifer turned the steering wheel suddenly in the direction of the village. “Let’s see if he’s out on display this morning.”

  Up ahead was a gas station. It had old-style signs that needed to be changed manually when the price of gasoline rose or fell, and vintage pumps that wouldn’t take credit cards. Because it was such a beautiful morning, there were lines of vehicles in both directions. Not many places to fill up in Bigelow, evidently.

  “There he is,” said Pulsifer with a broad grin.

  I saw a few men pumping gas, and a short blond woman in a fur coat using a squeegee and paper towels to clean a windshield. But no Mink.

  Then the realization dropped on me with the force of a Texas hailstone.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  Pulsifer swung into the lot and hit the brakes. “I honestly don’t know why Erskine puts up with Mink, looking like that. You’d think it would hurt sales to have a cross-dresser standing at your gas pumps all day, offering to clean your windshield for a buck. It’s not the kind of thing your average tourist expects to see in Bigelow, Maine. Erskine told me about one old lady who stopped in and asked about the nice blond woman who used to wash windshields. The funniest part was that Mink was standing there the whole time in his men’s clothes.”

  The gas station owner might have had a tolerant heart, but I was beginning to understand why Mink might have been banned from the general store.

  I popped open the door. “I want to say hello.”

  Mink had quite the winter wardrobe going: waist-length fur coat, black ski tights, fur-lined boots. His wig was long, blond, parted in the center, and feathered at the ends.

  “Mink!” said Pulsifer. “You’re looking lovely today.”

  “Up yours,” Mink said in his normal deep voice. His cosmetics were, if anything, even more elaborate than his clothes: fake eyelashes, mascara, rouge, scarlet lipstick, layered over a foundation thicker than pancake.

  “How’s it going, Mink?” I asked.

  “Fine until you ass clowns got here.”

  The car Mink had been cleaning took the opportunity to drive off. He swung the squeegee back and forth in the same irritated manner a cat flicks its tail.

  “How did you get into town this morning?” I asked.

  “Walked, same as usual.” I didn’t know if he changed his voice with strangers, raised it a couple of registers, but he didn’t seem to be actively trying to fool anyone into thinking he was a woman. “I don’t get many rides when I dress this way.”

  “I thought this was a brave new world,” said Pulsifer. “Isn’t transgendered supposed to be the hot new thing?”

  “I ain’t transgendered.”

  “I don’t know the politically correct term.”

  “I don’t give a shit about politics. I wear women’s clothes sometimes because I like it. Did you guys just come here to give me the prod? Because I got work to do.” He pointed with the squeegee at the line of cars.

  Pulsifer reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar. “This is for the last car.”

  Gary could be a true dick when he wanted.

  “Go jump in the lake,” Mink said. But he still took the dollar.

  I followed Pulsifer into the station, where a graying, bespectacled man stood behind the register.

  “Morning, Erskine.”

  “It was until five seconds ago,” the owner said.

  “Erskine, I want to introduce you to Mike Bowditch. He’s a warden down in north Massachusetts.”

  “He means southern Maine,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  The old man scowled. “I know who you are.”

  He must have been another person my father had made an enemy out of. I could imagine my dad on a bender, driving off from one of those old gas pumps without paying, daring the old man to give chase or call the cops on him.

  Pulsifer and I filled Styrofoam cups with coffee and returned to the counter.

  “This used to be A. J. Langstrom’s station,” Pulsifer said, “before A.J. got sick of his wife’s escapades and moved out of state. You ever hear from A.J., Erskine?”

  “Why the hell would I?”

  “I thought you two might be Facebook friends.”

  “Isn’t it a little early in the morning to be a pain in the ass, Gary?” Erskine said.

  “I was trying to explain to Mike here why you let Mink hang out at your pumps,” said Pulsifer. “Don’t you get complaints?”

  “Sure I do. But so what? It’s my store. I can do what I want.”

  “You’re a better man than me,” said Pulsifer.

  “That goes without saying.” The old guy kept a deadpan expression, but I was beginning to sense that maybe they really didn’t dislike each other, but that this was a skit they performed regularly. “I heard Jim Clegg was up at Don Foss’s place this morning.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Pulsifer asked.

  “One of John Cabot’s drivers saw his cruiser turn up that road.”

  I hadn’t considered the idea that Cabot and Foss might have been business rivals, but it made perfect sense; they were both loggers.

  Pulsifer took a sip of coffee. “Erskine, you’re better than Google when it comes to information around here.”

  “I suppose it has something to do with Amber’s son?”

  “Don’t you mean A.J.’s son?”

  “I mean exactly what I mean.”

  Another belated revelation: Adam’s questionable parentage was a topic of conversation. I wondered if anyone had ever fixated on the strong resemblance he bore to Jack Bowditch.

  The old man scratched one of his hairy ears. “I don’t know who they thought they were fooling, passing that boy off as A.J.’s son all those years. He looks no more like A. J. Langstrom than I look like George Clooney.”

  “When was the last time you saw Adam Langstrom around, Erskine?” I asked.

  “Last time I saw him was before he went to prison. That prick knows he’s not welcome here. I caught him stealing gas once. Can you believe that? Stealing gas from the same store his own ‘father’ used to own?”

  A woman, dressed from head to toe in expensive Moncler ski apparel and carrying a five-dollar bottle of water, cleared her throat behind us. We paid for our coffee and stepped aside so Erskine could ring up the sale.

  “Have a good day, Erskine,” said Pulsifer.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the old man.

  We found Mink enjoying a cigarette outside the door. The filter was red with lipstick. He made no secret of having been waiting for us.

  “And another thing,” he said.

  Pulsifer said, “Mink, have I ever told you how hard it is for us to have a conversation when you’re dressed like that?”

  “That’s your issue,” he said. “So what’s this I hear about Langstrom’s truck?”

  “What did you hear, exactly?” asked Pulsifer.

  “I heard someone found it over near the SERE school. The window was busted and there was blood inside.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that report.”

  Mink sniffed up a line of clear snot that had begun to run from his nose. “So did he kill someone or did someone kill him?”

  “Maybe he just hit a deer,” said Pulsifer, winking at me.

  “And it landed in the seat beside him? You dopes don’t really believe that.”

  “Stranger things have happened. Besides, didn’t I hear once you had psychic powers? Maybe you can help Detective Clegg with his investigation.”

  “Laugh if you want, but I got a sixth sense about things. My mom is half Roma. That’s what Gypsies call other Gypsies.”

  “Maybe you should dress as a fortune-teller sometime,” said Pulsifer. �
��You know, with the red kerchief and the bangles.”

  “Go jump in a lake.”

  Mink dropped the butt on the wet ground. He smacked his bright lips and readjusted his wig. When the woman in the Moncler ski suit stepped out the door, he wasn’t shy about checking out her rear end.

  * * *

  Lauren Pulsifer’s Ford Explorer was gone when we arrived back at their farm. She must have let the goats out of the barn, since several of them were making trails through the snowy pasture. They had heavy, hairy coats.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand against the sun. “Are those Angoras?”

  “Cashmeres. You wouldn’t believe what we get for their wool. You sure you don’t want a tour of the farm?”

  “I should head home.”

  Seeing Mink in women’s clothes seemed to have lifted his spirits. Either that or his hangover had worn off. He helped me dig out my Scout at least.

  “You should call DeFord this morning and tell him you’ve been up here,” he said, “Didn’t he tell you to keep a low profile to help the AAG make a stronger case against that Michaud bitch?”

  “Too late for that.”

  “You are exceptionally bad at following helpful advice, Bowditch. It’s almost a gift.”

  “So you’ve told me.”

  As I backed out of the dooryard, he waved like a beauty queen riding by on her float: limp-wristed, with a pasted-on smile. Always the comedian, Pulsifer.

  Heading back into town, I turned left at the blinking light and took my second tour of the day through beautiful downtown Bigelow. Mink was back at the gas pumps, but he was too engrossed in his work as a freelance service station attendant to notice me.

  Wait until I told Stacey that my hitchhiker had turned out to be the town drag queen. She would insist on us driving up here again to see Mink in the flesh. Stacey was, if anything, a more curious person than I was.

  First, she needed to accept my apology, of course. She had given me no guarantees that she would.

  I knew that at this very moment she must be up in the Forest Service helicopter. The stubborn woman couldn’t take a single day off from work to rest in bed and recover. It took me a few seconds to realize who she reminded me of in that regard.