The Surrogate Thief

by Archer Mayor

  He pressed on, determined to get something from her, as addicted to his elusive goal as she was to her chronic problems. “I remember a few other people from back then,” he said. “Didn’t you used to hang with Pete Shea? Wow. There’s somebody I haven’t thought about in a while.”

  She was giving him another of those strangely vacant stares. “What’s your name again?” she finally asked.

  He hesitated a split second, fearing she’d finally put the pieces together. “Joe,” he answered simply.

  She set her head at rest again. “Right. Sorry. Not good with names.”

  He didn’t respond, waiting for her to react to his earlier question, before realizing she had no clue what he’d just said.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d ever kept up with Pete Shea. You were friends once, right? We all lost track of him.”

  “No shit you did,” she acknowledged. “He got the hell out of Dodge. The cops were after him.”

  Joe nodded agreeably. “Nothing new there. Why this time?”

  “They thought he murdered some guy. He didn’t—he said it was a frame—but he took off anyhow.”

  Despite having heard variations on this before, Joe suddenly saw it in a completely different light. He’d always assumed that Pete had disappeared because they were interested in him from the thumbprint on the knife blade. Now, feeling foolish, he wondered for the first time how Shea could have known of that interest. When they’d set out to question him, he was already long gone.

  “What made him think the cops were after him?” Joe asked carefully.

  “They weren’t,” she explained tiredly, as if to a slow child. “Not yet. He just knew they would be. It was the gun that set him off.”

  “The gun?” Joe prompted after a pause, both puzzled and relieved that they’d finally reached his purpose for being here.

  “He found it under our mattress. Had blood on it. The papers said the man had been beaten with a gun, and Pete somehow figured this was probably it. He’d put his fingerprints on it by handling it, so he knew he was screwed. That’s why he ran. Good thing, too.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He was right, wasn’t he? They did come for him. Funny thing was, they didn’t ask about any gun. It was all about that stupid switchblade he played with. Guess they found that, too. Sort of pissed me off at the time—the risk I took with that gun.”

  She took a rest, pausing to breathe as if she’d just sprinted up a set of stairs.

  “What happened to it?” Joe asked quickly, not wanting her to lose this train of thought.

  “I cleaned it up and gave it to my brother. He hid it under the floorboards of his house. Made me nervous as hell bringing it to him.”

  “And you never saw Pete again?”

  She looked incredulous. “He lived here with me for a few years. Later on. Nobody had a clue. You’d think they’d put out one of those bulletins or something. Pathetic. Maybe they pinned it on somebody else and stopped looking. I guess that could happen and you’d never know it, right? There’s something for you—be on the run your whole life and not know there’s nobody after you. Kind of like The Fugitive in reverse.”

  Joe tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. “He lived here with you?”

  She’d had her eyes closed through all this and now merely exhaled wearily. “Not here, here. In Orange. I live here because of the disability thing. This was before. Years ago.”

  “You guys split up?”

  “Yeah. You drift apart. You know how it goes.”

  That he did. “You keep in touch still?”

  “No,” she said wearily. Her voice had been steadily losing whatever strength it had. By now she was almost whispering.

  “That’s too bad,” Joe conceded, more truthfully than she could know. “I always liked him. What makes you think that he was innocent? The evidence seems pretty damning.”

  “You just know a guy,” she answered simply.

  “Wish I could look him up,” Joe lamented.

  “Can’t help you. By the time we split, he was drinking every day. And then, all of a sudden, he was gone. Left everything behind, even his toothbrush.”

  Again she seemed to be purposefully tantalizing him with leading inferences. It was like water torture. “Really? That’s weird. Must’ve been a bummer being stuck with all that.”

  “No. I threw most of it out.”

  Joe rubbed his forehead. Naturally. He looked at the woman across from him, her eyes shut, her body limp and draped across the chair’s pillows as if she’d been poured there from a glass. He tried one more time, pushing a little since he had so little left to lose.

  “Most of it?”

  But instead of growing suspicious of all the questions, she merely smiled. “Yeah. Stupid, I know, but I kept his shot glass collection. Wherever we’d go—Maine, New York, wherever—he’d buy a souvenir shot glass. Funny, the things some people collect and other people hang on to, always for different reasons.”

  She opened her eyes then and slowly straightened her head, frowning at the exertion. Joe figured he had less than five minutes left before she passed out right in front of him.

  “They’re over there,” she murmured. “On the wall.”

  He glanced toward the bathroom door and saw attached to the wall next to it a glass display case, its every shelf filled with small glasses, each one decorated with some image or motto or decoration. He rose from his seat and crossed over to it.

  He scanned its contents, tracking the couple’s travels all over New England, again struck by the fact that Pete Shea had done all this with an open arrest warrant out on him.

  The case had a door. He opened it noiselessly, seeing that Katie had once again settled down, and took a closer look. On one of the glasses directly before him, there was a fat fingerprint visible in the light slanting in through the window.

  “You ever use these?” he asked.

  In the answering silence, he turned to look at her again. This time it appeared she was fast asleep. He placed the glass gingerly in his handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket.

  He crossed back over to her. “Katie?” he asked quietly.

  She didn’t stir.

  He touched the crown of her head with his fingertips, as a parent might a sleeping child’s after a long, hard day. “Take care, Katie Clark,” he whispered, and showed himself out.

  Chapter 11

  What good’s a print going to do?” Willy Kunkle asked Joe. “We already have his prints on file.”

  Joe was back in Brattleboro, staring at the shot glass nestled amid a small, ignored stack of pink call-back notes in the middle of his desk. It was his sole trophy so far in what was starting to look like a repeat exercise in futility.

  “And didn’t you say she’d moved since he split? That means she must’ve packed all that crap, touching each and every item. The print’s probably hers.”

  Gunther shrugged. “It was something she said. She was impressed we never caught him, even though he was wandering all over New England. Made me think that if we’d missed something as obvious as his living with his old girlfriend, maybe we were missing something just as obvious now.” He stood up, preparing to follow Willy out the door. “I’m going to run Shea’s old prints through AFIS. We never did anything like that when we were looking for him, you know? Never sent them to the FBI, never circulated them anywhere. We just kept them here, relying on a physical description for the all-points.” He scratched his head. “It was so long ago. It never crossed my mind he could’ve been busted somewhere else and his prints entered into the system. That would’ve waved a red flag right off the bat.”

  Willy looked at him. “Jesus, you’re cracking up, you know that? Who says the guy’s even alive, much less that he was printed someplace else? You’re dreaming.”

  Joe walked out into the hallway with him, still distracted. “Maybe, but I never even thought of it. That’s what’s getting me. From the start,
my head wasn’t in this case.”

  Willy made for the staircase at the end of the hall, his meager counseling abilities exhausted. “You win some, you lose some. Shit happens. Get some sleep.”

  With a rattle of shoe heels on stair treads, he was gone.

  Joe smiled and murmured, “In a while.”

  “You get what you were after?” the AFIS operator asked him an hour later.

  Joe stared at the printout in his hands, incredulous. “You could say that.”

  The cell phone in his pocket chirped. He thanked the technician and moved out into the deserted hallway, only half visible in the after-hours lighting.

  “Hello?”

  “Joe. It’s me.”

  He smiled at the sound of her voice. “Gail. Where are you?”

  “I’m driving into town. I have to go from one something to something else, but I was hoping I could see you for a couple of minutes. Are you nearby?”

  “The Municipal Building. Is everything all right?”

  “I’m eating too much and I‘ve lost track of who I’m meeting when or why sometimes, but I’m fine. It’s something else. Can you stay put for five minutes? I’m almost there.”

  “Sure. I’ll be in the parking lot.”

  She was faster than she’d thought, and drove up only ninety seconds after he’d stepped outside. He leaned on her door as she rolled down the window to kiss him.

  “Come around,” she urged him. “It’s cold out.”

  He circled the car and waited while she cleared her passenger seat so he could slide in beside her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked after closing the door.

  She reached for his hand, her face glowing from the dashboard lighting. “I have an apology to make.”

  He waited, confused.

  Her words almost tumbled over one another. “I heard about the case you’re working on—the one you had when Ellen died. I’m so sorry I didn’t ask what you were doing. I’ve been so tunnel-visioned with this stupid campaign. It must be so hard for you, reliving all that.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Slow down. It’s okay. How’d you find out, anyhow? Nothing’s been in the paper.”

  But she maintained her manic pace. “In this town? You’re kidding, right? ‘Confidential’ isn’t even in the lexicon around here. Someone leaked it to Ted McDonald, so WBRT’s been running it all afternoon, meaning the Reformer will have it tomorrow. I just couldn’t believe it when I heard. You came by the house that night, probably to tell me, and I barely said hi. That was it, wasn’t it? Why you came by?”

  Joe was embarrassed, not to mention stunned by her revelation about the news getting out. He now had a pretty good idea what most of those unread call-back slips were about on his desk. “Oh, well, not really. Maybe a small reason. I just wanted to see you.”

  “And share a little of what was going on in your life,” she finished. “Hardly a huge request, but too big for me.” She leaned over suddenly and kissed him. “This thing has turned me into a total jerk.”

  He pulled back to see her better. “You’re making too much of it. I would’ve mentioned it, sure, but I saw you were busy. And it’s not like we haven’t seen each other since. This thing’s not as bad as it sounds. A lot of time has gone by. In some ways, it’s like working any other case. It’s just got some weird echoes attached to it.”

  That wasn’t quite true, but he was touched by her concern, and didn’t want her feeling any worse.

  “What’s McDonald been saying, by the way?” he asked.

  “Just that the police have reopened an old murder case dating back thirty-plus years, based on some new evidence they won’t discuss, and then a recap about Oberfeldt. How’s it coming, anyhow?”

  “Up to five minutes ago, not too well, but I just got some fingerprints out of AFIS that look pretty promising. How ’bout you? The primary’s getting close. You feeling good about it?”

  Gail made a face. “Not too good about some of the company I have to keep.” She checked her watch. “I have to meet with Rene Charbonneau in ten minutes. Guy makes my skin crawl.”

  Joe looked at her in surprise. Rene Charbonneau was a county bigwig—a self-made man who ran a soft drink and beer distributorship and a small string of convenience stores and owned God knows how much commercial real estate.

  “Charbonneau?” he asked. “What’s that about?”

  “Money. What else? He’s the top Democrat in that category—a miniature version of Ed Parker’s Tom Bander. Sooner or later, everybody stands on his rug on their way to Montpelier, at least if they’re coming from Windham County.”

  Joe was impressed by how little he knew of this world. “I’ve never even met the guy. No surprise there, I guess. I thought you were going after the tens and twenties of the unwashed masses.”

  She looked a little shamefaced. “I know I said that, but assuming I win the primary, I have to start planning for the next stage. Different game, with King Kong as an opponent. I play the same role—maybe a little more centrist—but I have to make sure the major movers are taken care of. I’m not after Charbonneau’s money so much—more the support it represents. Parker’s going to be really hard to beat.” She paused to sigh wearily. “Christ, I can’t believe what I’m saying. I sound exactly like all the politicians I used to hate.”

  He tried steering her away from such thoughts. “Is Charbonneau really bad news?”

  “Oh, no. He’s pretty progressive for a hard-core capitalist. He just sees himself as a ladies’ man, and he gives me the creeps. Takes my elbow, pats my shoulder, guides me around by the small of the back. I wish he’d just grab my ass and get it over with.”

  Joe laughed. “That would be the end of somebody’s career, sure as hell.”

  There was a momentary stillness, which she followed in a more muted voice. “That brings up something else, Joe.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the real reason for the apology. I did something I’m even more embarrassed about than having ignored you the night you came over. Have you started calling your law enforcement contacts yet, telling them about me?”

  Joe felt his face get warm in the darkness of the car’s interior. “No. I’m sorry. I talked to Lester about it, and he said—”

  She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t do it.”

  “Don’t call?”

  She looked out the windshield, avoiding eye contact. “I’ve been aiming at this campaign for a long time—a lot longer than I’ll admit. I don’t know if it’s ambition or a need to be admired, or maybe, God forbid, because I actually believe in what I keep preaching about.”

  “Gail,” he cautioned.

  “No,” she said with a quick smile. “It’s okay. I spend so much time telling people what they want to hear, it’s nice to just be honest with someone. Especially you.” She took a breath. “Anyway, the point is that getting here has taken a lot of time and effort, and the actual campaign has rubbed my face in things I never dreamed of—like the allegations that I’m milking the rape for sympathy, or using my gender to advantage, or soaking my flatlander parents for money. It’s all made me a little crazy, and turned winning the election into a kind of Holy Grail, especially against a guy who’s starting to look damn near unbeatable. It’s like a vendetta. I don’t listen so much to all my friends and supporters anymore. I listen instead to the bastards who don’t even know me and treat me like shit, and I want to win so I can shove it up their noses.”

  Joe didn’t respond to any of this, recognizing not only its cathartic benefit but also that it probably reflected a much broader truth. He suspected that most politicians, if only in the secret recesses of their hearts, shared many of the same sentiments.

  ”Bottom line is,” she continued, “that I sometimes lose sight of who I am and of what really counts in my life.” She looked at him and took hold of his hand again. “In a more clear-sighted moment, it never would have crossed my mind to ask you to make those calls, Joe, especially while we were ly
ing naked in bed.”

  She held up her hand to quiet the response she saw forming on his lips. “You would argue the point because you’re a nice person, but I see what I did as emotional blackmail, and I don’t want you to cater to it. So, promise me you won’t make those calls, okay?”

  He fought the instinct she’d already quelled twice, to downplay her words and make light of the perceived injury. Because in fact, she was right, and he was grateful for her perception and honesty. But despite his desire to, he still couldn’t match her eloquence.

  “Okay,” he said simply. “Thanks. And don’t worry. No matter how you’re feeling now, you are the good guys. Don’t forget that.”

  She leaned over and kissed him once more. “That’s me—Wonder Woman. Oy.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Would you be up for a late-night visitor in a few hours?”

  “Absolutely,” he said instantly, but just as immediately felt a renewed unspoken frustration. As he left her car and waved good-bye, he swore under his breath at his own weakness. Just as Gail had run roughshod over him because of her own ambitions, he’d just now shot himself in the foot so as not to hurt her feelings.

  In fact, he didn’t want company tonight. He wanted to be on the road. The AFIS printout in his pocket told him that Peter Shea’s fingerprints currently belonged to a man named Norman Chesbro, and that Chesbro had been arrested for a chronic failure to pay parking tickets just two months ago in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

  Once again, Joe found himself caught in tendrils of his own making.

  He let out a puff of air in resignation and headed toward his car. What the hell. A few hours now wouldn’t make that much difference.

  Chapter 12

  Gloucester, Massachusetts, is one of the grand old New England towns, as renowned in maritime history as Cape Ann—on which it is perched—was famous among vacationing artists of old. The same holds true for both places today, though mostly for sentimental reasons. Gloucester, while still fully functional as a fishing port, is but a pale glimmer of its past. And to Joe’s jaundiced eye, Cape Ann’s genteel and frugal Yankees were being overrun by Hummer-equipped megaconsumers seemingly bent on proving they had more cash than sense.