Cloudland

by Joseph Olshan

  Anthony looked over at me and said, “Let me jump, Marco. As soon as I drop Catherine I’ll head down to you.”

  “All right. And if on the way you happen to run up against any New Hampshire Staties, just mow ’em down.”

  “Will do.” Anthony handed me the phone and I switched it off.

  Anthony’s car was traveling over an uneven section of highway and for a moment I listened to the tires thumping and thwacking. “So you think it might be another one,” I said at last.

  He nodded. “Out-of-state car parked by the river, a whole trunk full of a woman’s clothes. Where is she? There have been other dead bodies found near the Connecticut.” He cogitated for a moment or so. “Funny sometimes how you just get a few details, they aren’t necessarily conclusive, but you know in your gut where they’re going to lead you.”

  “A little bit like Nan O’Brien,” I ventured to say.

  “But I mean, surely what I’m describing happens when you’re doing investigative journalism, right?” Anthony asked.

  “Well,” I said, “you might divine the truth. But everything has to be backed up with fact. No leaps of faith. You can get discredited. Or sued.”

  FOURTEEN

  AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE ABANDONED CAR appeared the following morning in the Valley News, stating that the Maryland owner was from the Dominican Republic, living in the United States on an expired visa. It had yet to be determined if the driver was alone or if there were other passengers, but certainly one of them was a woman: a battered sky-blue suitcase was found when the trunk was jimmied open, and among the contents were black spandex brassieres; a pot of iridescent eye shadow, cherry-and-lime-green-colored panties, a box of tampons, several pairs of low-cut blue jeans adorned with spangles, and one embroidered dress that seemed as though it were made by hand. There was a copy of the Bible in Spanish.

  I pictured the owner of the suitcase as a young woman in her early twenties, lured to America, wide-eyed and hopeful, and that the dress was perhaps something her mother gave her with great ceremony on her very last night in Santo Domingo. I kept thinking/hoping that the stranded car was just a coincidence and had absolutely nothing to do with the River Valley murders.

  Shortly after reading the article, I went to the prison to teach my class. When I arrived, the inmates already knew about the marooned vehicle—I assumed there was access to the newspaper—and immediately asked if I believed there might be another victim whose body had yet to be found. I told them I knew as much as they did.

  One-legged Jess was sitting in a fold-out chair holding on to his crutches, struggling to gain a standing position. “Why don’t you put them down. Stay a while,” I said. He shook his head and refused. Then Peter, my patricidal seventeen-year-old, explained that during outdoor activity people had been stealing Jess’s crutches and pushing him around. The rest of the guys were sitting in a circle holding their copies of Dead Souls. They had seemed to appreciate Pushkin, so I thought I’d hug Russia and try them out on Gogol’s fantasy of crossing social and financial lines with a scheme.

  Raul spoke up. “Well, you know, buying the names of dead people is kind of like having a cell phone in here. No reception most of the time, but people who got ’em, even when they can’t use ’em, still don’t want to share with nobody else.”

  Very good analogy, I thought, and should have run with that but found myself floored by this incredible piece of information. “Cell phones?” I said. “You have cell phones?”

  “Unofficially,” said Jones, Anthony’s former suspect incarcerated for sexual misconduct in a mini-mart. He was turning out to be one of the more vocal of the bunch.

  “Shouldn’t they be confiscated?”

  It was explained to me that people visiting had managed to smuggle them to the inmates in spite of the security regulations.

  “They some kinds that get through metal detectors and shit,” said Travis, slumped down in his chair, bony shoulders pointing through his orange prison jumpsuit. I was surprised to hear him speaking; he hardly ever contributed anything much to a discussion.

  “Good to hear from you,” I said to him.

  He narrowed his eyes at me and said, “You don’t want to hear from me.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “He’s talking about something else,” Peter warned, and was then silenced by a malignant look.

  “Travis.” I attempted to further engage him. “Did you get a chance to read Dead Souls?”

  “Hell yeah, I read it. Or most of it anyway,” he said. “Guy’s a fool. Buying the names of dead people so the world would think he was rich? What was he on?”

  “Yeah, buying the names of dead slaves,” Raul interjected.

  “People find you bullshitting sooner or later,” Travis pressed on. “But nah, didn’t get to the end. Does he get thrown out of town or somethin’?”

  I pointed out the man gets caught; however, the book itself was a bit inconclusive because the author died without having had a chance to properly finish it. Like Wilkie Collins and The Widower’s Branch, I remarked to myself.

  “Then why are we reading it?” asked Raul, crossing his tattooed arms over his chest.

  Travis spoke up again. “Damn. I should write a frigging book. Could clean up with what I know.” He thumped on his temple. “What I got in my head.”

  I took this in for a moment and then I said, “Maybe you should.”

  I always encouraged them to write down their stories and promised that I’d gratefully read them. Crude as the execution would undoubtedly be, embedded in them surely would be fascinating material.

  “’Cause the shit I got to say you don’t want to hear.”

  “Try me.”

  Travis looked at me as though I were an alien. “I know where this guy’s head’s at.”

  “Which guy?” Raul asked before I could.

  Addressing the entire group, Travis said, “This killer fucker up here who’s going around finding women and whacking them.”

  “Oh yeah, where’s his head at?” Jones asked.

  Travis was getting flustered and started waving his hands, his eyes raging. “I seen shit like this before. Somebody goes crazy. They start popping people in a certain way like warming up for somebody else.”

  I told him I wasn’t sure I got his meaning.

  “You better get it, lady. Because your ass is next in line.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I say this mofo will be coming for you.”

  Even though I knew what he was driving at, I felt I had to be sure. “But he did that already, came around to where I was.”

  Travis was losing patience and pinching his shoulders together and said, “Not talking about no down the street from you. Talking about right down your driveway.”

  “Oh Travis, shut it!” somebody said.

  Looking thoroughly disgusted now, Travis said, “I’m just telling you what I know from what I seen.”

  * * *

  Peter purposely lingered after class was over. In the midst of his chemically induced placidity, he seemed anxious to speak to me.

  “Anybody in your family come to visit you last week?” I began, and was told that his cousins had. His older brother was a sophomore at Williams College; in the wake of the senseless murder of their parents, this boy refused to have anything to do with his younger sibling, a rejection that Peter tried to outwardly slough off in his late-adolescent way, but which I knew pained him terribly.

  I asked if he’d been writing in his diary. In response, he gave me several pages that he’d been able to print out in the prison’s computer room. With a quick glance I saw they were scantily filled with writing and larded with lots of juvenile drawings. Disappointed in his lack of effort, I folded them carefully and put them in one of the manila folders I was holding.

  “He’s not joking, you know.” Peter was gazing at me steadily with his rheumy gray eyes.

  “Who?”

  “Travis.” I could see that two pinpoints of color
had risen to his doughy cheeks.

  “He doesn’t talk much but he reads the paper. He knows what’s going on. And he told me you have to be careful.”

  “I am being careful.”

  Peter’s face flushed even more when he added, “He just said it makes sense.”

  “That what makes sense?” I repeated impatiently.

  Peter shook his head. “That the guy would come after you, too.”

  * * *

  Perturbed by the bizarre, unforeseen warning, I found Fiona standing in the little office we shared. As soon as I came in, she smiled, said a cautious hello, and then settled back down at her desk to begin collating a bunch of very skillful drawings of the nineteenth-century brick prison building, the double-height chain-link fence, and the field beyond it populated by an old rusted hay thresher with huge, spoked metal wheels.

  “Who did those?” I said, instinctively moving closer to her.

  “Oh, this older guy I have who’s a … molester, I guess you’d call him.”

  “His first incarceration?”

  “I think actually it’s his third.”

  “They’re really lovely.” I was glad to be drawn away from Travis’s dire prophecy. Surely he was just trying to frighten me; the killer had yet to return to the same exact location. His radius was rather short but he’d kept moving.

  Fiona went on. “I’m amazed that this man has the will to even do them. The other guys, they punch him, they torture him and push him down. He’s got cuts and bruises all over him to prove it.”

  “May be his way of retreating and surviving,” I said. “But don’t the guards protect him?”

  “Not really. Not somebody in for sexually molesting children. They’re the lowest form of life in prison.”

  “Yeah, the whole prison pecking order.” I sat down at my desk and swiveled the chair around so that I could face her. “Human nature. The strong punish the weak, and criminals in turn punish those whose crimes they believe to be worse than theirs.” I reached toward her. “May I flip through them?”

  She handed me the sheaf.

  “I don’t know if you’ve read the writer Primo Levi,” I remarked as I began studying moody, detailed drawings of the prison from different angles, interior corridors and close-ups of grimy windows, barred cells, a parallax view of incarceration.

  “I haven’t,” Fiona said. “But I’ve always been meaning to.”

  I went on to say that Levi writes movingly about the pecking order among the inmates of the concentration camp: the top of the ranking being political prisoners; next, Scandinavian inmates; then French; then English; then Poles; continuing down to the lowest rung, which are the Jews, Primo Levi among them. “According to him, each group of the incarcerated mistreats the group perceived to be just below it. He believed that such behavior is basic human nature.”

  Fiona was shaking her head and I could tell she was perturbed by the truth of this. “That’s very depressing.”

  “I guess it’s no surprise that Primo Levi killed himself. But not until years later,” I added.

  Fiona murmured something inaudible, and I returned to the drawings. It was sad to see such incredible skill demonstrated by somebody who’d lost control of his life. But then again, sometimes I felt as though I kept losing control of mine: my love, my resentments, fear of losing my daughter, fear of losing my life. “These are actually good enough to be exhibited somewhere.” I handed the drawings back to her. “Don’t know about you but sometimes I feel there is just a thin membrane separating me from my guys.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I have plenty of criminal fantasies, for example.”

  Fiona smiled at me guardedly, enough for me to see her yellowed front tooth. She sat back in her chair, adjusted her skirt, and then said, “You really have it in for me, don’t you?”

  “Oh my God! I’m not talking about you!”

  “No, but I mean you’ve been assuming I had something to do with Emily leaving.”

  I looked at her squarely. “Not at all. We’re all adults, right? Perhaps you’ll agree with me: sometimes as adults we make childlike choices that … I don’t know, maybe because in some way we always remain children. But not in this particular case. As far as Emily goes, I don’t think she should have taken her children out of the state. I don’t think it’s fair to Anthony. Beyond that, though, Anthony filled me in. He told me about her long-term affair.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you believed him or not.”

  “Why wouldn’t I believe him? Anyway, I’ve thought about it and decided it doesn’t really matter who had the affair first.”

  “I think it does.”

  Well, of course you do, I thought. “Just so you know, I have no moral high ground to stand on.”

  Fiona blushed and pushed her hair behind her shoulders. “I just don’t want things between us to be awkward.”

  “I know I’ve been frosty to you. And I’m sorry. I’ll admit to you, part of it is jealousy. I wouldn’t mind being with somebody like him. But obviously not him exactly.”

  Fiona smiled and said, “Well, I was a little jealous of your young guy, to be honest.”

  I chuckled. “I got that feeling. But just so you know, it came at a high price.”

  “I assumed it did,” Fiona said softly.

  * * *

  When I arrived home from the prison there was another message from Matthew, asking if I’d decided when he could see me—hardly surprising. His being back in the country and now close by was making me feel terribly unsettled.

  And then a message accompanied by an eerie sound of static: Anthony calling from the site of the abandoned car in Charlestown, New Hampshire. When I called him back on his cell, he told me that the registered owner of the car had not been driving it, but rather the owner’s niece, to whom the suitcase presumably belonged. She was in the country illegally, spoke little English, and apparently had borrowed the car to drive up to Waterbury, Vermont, where she hoped to join a friend and be hired to pick strawberries and corn. Two DNA samples had been collected from strands of hair extracted from the car; one, the Dominican woman’s, and the other yet to be identified.

  “It’s not the uncle’s,” Anthony informed me. “They ran one on him already. Now they’re taxing the FBI’s database to see if they come up with a match.”

  “So a DNA sample,” I said. “That’s promising news.”

  “If it leads somewhere.”

  Anthony went on to say that when the FBI showed up at the apartment of the car’s owner in Maryland, the man at first had been reluctant to identify his niece or explain why the car was in New Hampshire. He’d also been afraid to try and trace the car, figuring she might have been detained by the INS and the car impounded.

  “But that makes no sense. If she’d been detained, they have already located him from the car registration,” I pointed out.

  “Precisely. Anyway, we have an ID of the driver. Her name is Elena Mayaguez. She’s twenty-four.”

  The name was melodious and lovely, and thinking she might be yet another murder victim left me sad and silent. Anthony explained that the woman’s cousin had provided the FBI some of her clothing to see if they could match it to some of the DNA samples they found in the car. “Apparently her parents don’t even know she’s here.”

  “That’s tragic,” I said.

  “There aren’t a lot of people up here with dark complexions,” Anthony went on. “A cashier at a local convenience store a few miles away from where the car was found easily remembered her.” Beyond this, the New Hampshire investigators had coughed up two reports from separate motorists claiming to have seen a dilapidated Japanese car matching the one left by the Connecticut River screaming down the two-lane highway, tailed by a late-model American sedan with flashing lights. A motorist who’d observed the car chase choreography through a rearview mirror actually claimed to have seen the pursued vehicle swerve over to the side of the road—approximately in the same place where it was eventual
ly found.

  The deserted car held a full tank of gasoline, and it’d been construed that the missing driver probably stopped to refuel at the convenience store where she’d been noticed by the clerk and perhaps spotted by the killer at a pumping station. “Something else we’ve been thinking, Marco and I. If she was driving and being chased by another car flashing its lights, maybe she figured the car pursuing her was INS or government.”

  “Even if the car was unmarked,” I added.

  “Whereas most people would’ve tried to drive faster and escape, she probably thought it was better to pull over.”

  “That sounds plausible to me.”

  “Now, that aside, there’s something else of an entirely different order going on down here.”

  “Oh.”

  “New Hampshire and Vermont are fighting over the sharing of evidence. It’s crazy.” I asked him to elaborate. “Well, Marco says New Hampshire sat on the abandoned car for a week before telling him. That’s why it’s already been published in the papers. He learned of it around the same time as the Valley News reporters did.”

  “So why is New Hampshire being so uncooperative?”

  “That’s the thing. They claim they haven’t. I spoke to Prozzo’s counterpart in Claremont, who says he passed along the data about the car as soon as they got it. Claremont alleges that during a phone conversation with Springfield, the car was mentioned, along with several other routine observations. They’re obligated to pass crucial info back and forth, but Prozzo insists that the car was one of ten things Claremont summarized but didn’t emphasize where it was found, just that it was found.”

  I also knew from experience that cooperating police departments were known for withholding information from one another when they were following a very specific lead, wanting to claim all the glory for a discovery that would help solve a case.

  Anthony pointed out, “Poor communication like this is not the way to find the killer. Which is Marco’s point. Hopefully they’ll work it out, especially because now we’ve got something else concrete to go on.” He paused, probably for effect.

  “Which is?”