by Dick Cluster
* * *
The house was fairly new, a split-level, with the bedroom, Alex guessed, in the raised section over the two-car garage. The door knocker, on a tight hinge, didn’t make much noise. Probably it operated a switch that rang a bell or chimes. The man who answered wore a blue blazer over a yellow shirt and bluish plaid tie. His face was lined and craggy, with sandy brows over deep sockets, and a nose that had maybe been broken once. The only sag in the face was the beginning of a double chin. Paul Jakes, New Hampshire builder, was built like New Hampshire. If a sizable group of citizens knew he was also a drug wholesaler and pimp, that didn’t affect the way he carried himself. Alex knew it would be a mistake to push him too far. He also knew it would be a mistake to try to pull any wool over his eyes.
“I’m Paul Jakes,” the man said. “Come on in.” He took Alex’s coat, hung it in a closet, and led Alex past the living room where two teenage boys, who were watching television, did not look up. “You mind talking in the kitchen?” Jakes asked. “I’ve got a little office here at home, too, but it’s kind of a mess. Anyway, my wife’s on the computer. She’s always on it since she went back to school. Can I get you coffee, or a drink?”
“Coffee, please.” The evening had started with too much alcohol and it would end with too much caffeine. Alex added, “I hope we can speak frankly. Milk and no sugar, please.”
“Here you go,” Jakes set Alex’s cup before him and settled on the opposite chair with a bottle of Heineken, looking the TV image of domestic contentment and ease. Except that, on the way into the kitchen, he’d closed the swinging door. And now he looked at his watch, as if to say he wanted to get this over with before the kids came in for their midnight snack. And what else didn’t Jakes need to put into words? Tied as he was into the local police, he would already know that Alex had been poking around in Scat’s condo. Alex decided to voice his suspicions straight out, and also to make as clear as possible what he didn’t know. The one thing he was sure of was that Scat or Caroline or both had died because somebody had concluded that they knew too much.
“As I said on the phone,” Alex began, “I’m trying to find out, for Caroline Davis’s grandmother, about Caroline’s death. I think it has something to do with Scat Johnston’s death, and something to do with the disappearance of a woman, a prostitute, who went by the name of Nilda or Nell. I think you knew all these people, but I don’t have any reason to suspect your involvement in their deaths or disappearances. What I do suspect is that somebody, perhaps you, has been blackmailing Graham Johnston. If I knew what somebody had been holding over him, that might shed some light on what I’ve been trying to see.”
Paul Jakes took a long swallow of Dutch beer and then slammed the bottle on the tabletop. He stood up, turned his back to Alex, walked as far as the closed swinging door, and then turned around again. Color rose into his up-country Yankee face. He said, “Let’s get one thing clear here. I was more of a father to that kid than his father ever was. I taught him how to throw a curve ball. I taught him how to chase girls. I taught him how to ski.”
All the initiation rites. Alex thought of the two boys in the living room. Had their father taught them what he’d probably taught Scat? How to set up a line to sniff, how to mainline into a vein? Maybe he taught them how to talk about their fears and dreams. Maybe he taught Lowell Townsend Johnston that too.
“The Johnstons and Pepperells have thrown a lot of work your way,” Alex said. “Here and in Boston too. You may be a very fine builder, but they didn’t have to do that. Was it gratitude for standing in for Scat’s father in Cambridge and his mother in France? Or did you have to hold up some kind of mirror to their face?”
“I ought to throw you out of my house,” Jakes said. “If I don’t, it’s because I don’t like a fight I don’t need. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Scat or that Davis girl. I didn’t even know the Davis girl. Now I’ll tell you what you asked. After I make sure you’re not wired.”
Alex stood and raised his hands over his head. Could Scat have stood, maybe turned his back, and left himself open like this? Alex didn’t turn his back. Paul Jakes’s hands felt thoroughly for hidden microphones and wires. It was invasive, but it was professional, like Dr. Wagner’s laying-on of hands. Alex was glad he had nothing to hide. Then both men sat down on either side of the kitchen table and Paul Jakes took a last swallow of his beer. He set the bottle down on the dark synthetic surface flecked with silver, and put his hands over first his own deep eyes, then his long but not fleshy ears, then the wide mouth above his bony jaw. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, that was what he meant. He said, “The name Johnston makes monkeys out of most people around here. I’ve got pictures of Scat dealing. Telephoto lens. Not many, just enough. I’ve got copies of some pictures that he took himself, bedroom shots, him and some working girls. I sent prints of these pictures to Graham, at his office, marked ‘Very Personal’ on the front. Dates, places, merchandise, and occupations noted on the backs. I grew up poor. I didn’t see any reason to stay poor. I let him know about jobs I wanted him to send my way, that’s all. He never paid me a dime I didn’t earn. Now tell me if he’s got a reason to complain.”
Alex tried to decide how much farther to go.
“You didn’t know Caroline. But you knew Scat well. Do you think he ran into her by accident?”
Paul Jakes shrugged. The shrug made the pretend-brass buttons on his blazer jiggle up and down. His rocky face didn’t move. “Search me,” he said. The tone made it evident that the irony was calculated. He could search Alex, but Alex had better not try to search him.
“Caroline was apparently worried about somebody named Nell. One of those working girls you mentioned. One who left suddenly. One who Caroline felt sort of disappeared.”
“I could look into that,” Jakes said slowly. “If something showed me I had to. Got a last name?”
Alex shook his head. “Not for sure. Gonzalez, maybe, Martinez, Fernandez. I could get it.”
Jakes looked at his watch again. Alex knew it was time for him to go. “Just one more thing,” he said. “Dennis MacDonald and I found a picture at Scat’s place. It was the only interesting thing there. It was a picture of a hole in the ice. Pond ice. Somebody mentioned that the two of you used to go ice fishing together.” He left it as a statement. He also made it clear he wasn’t the only one to know.
For the first time he thought he saw a skitter of fear in Paul Jakes’s eyes. Ice fishing. Ice fishermen used mechanical red flags that flapped up if a fish struck the line. So they didn’t have to hold onto a cold line by an icy hole in the winter wind. So they could sit by a fire, if they had one, and keep their eyes on a dozen lines at once. It might not have been a warning flag that went up in Jakes’s eye. It might have been only a blink. Alex heard the door open behind him, and a woman say, “Oh, excuse me.” Out of politeness, he had to turn around. But the door had closed, and when Alex looked back at his host the gaze was steady.
“I hope you appreciate what I told you,” Paul Jakes said. “I hope you keep it to yourself, and I hope you don’t come back here again.”
* * *
The road was empty, nothing on it except the dotted white line that glowed in Alex’s headlights. Rounding a curve, the headlight beams left the road and caught the four sparkling eyes of a pair of deer standing, alert to the engine’s noise, on a farmer’s field. Alex slowed to the fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit in Jericho Center, shut tight for the evening. He took the turn that led up the river to Pepperell Woods. So Paul Jakes’s prosperity was built on photographs of Scat Johnston’s misdeeds, and judicious exploitation of Graham Johnston’s shame. Now Jakes could afford to forget about supplying the vices of the upper middle class. From now on he could concentrate on building their homes and office parks and fitness centers. Unless he had to worry about the fact that he’d organized the “accidental” death of Caroline Davis. Unless he’d had something to do with the disappearance of a friend of Caroline�
�s named Nell. Alex wondered where Suzanne was right now. And he wondered where Lena Hanson was. He hoped she was driving, too— in the opposite direction, away. He also hoped he hadn’t put himself at the top of Paul Jakes’s enemies list.
None of this hoping would do him any good. Instead he tried to make sense of the two photographs that Dennis had pointed out to him. Scat had tucked those two particular pictures in the back of the album— as if he wasn’t sure whether to include them or not. As if he couldn’t decide either to make them part of his personal history or to consign them to the realm of events suppressed. In one picture was a woman now dead. In the other, the place somebody, or a pair of somebodies, could have disposed of another woman. Alex thought about the fact that the word disappeared had acquired a particular meaning in Spanish in recent years. If Caroline’s friend Nilda was not living it up in Barcelona or Paris, then Alex was afraid she could be found waterlogged and bloated at the bottom of a frozen New Hampshire pond. He pulled into the parking lot of the Black Pine Inn, thinking he was through for the night. It turned out he had a visitor waiting.
It wasn’t much of a lobby, this being the low-budget hotel. No half-timbers or ornate wallpaper, just soft chairs, more painted sheetrock, a front desk, and a TV. The man at the desk cast a furtive look at Alex, the guest who had attracted questions from the police, but Alex let his own attention sweep past. It came to rest on Dennis MacDonald, sunk deeply into one of the soft chairs, a book lying open on his lap. Dennis shut the book and approached slowly, like a tank.
“I want to know what happened,” he began. “Whether you got anywhere with the bartender, and what you learned about Caroline if you did—”
“Why don’t I fill you in tomorrow?” Alex interrupted, but then he saw determination in Dennis’s shoulders and a certain sly, shy expression about his mouth. “Okay,” he relented. He didn’t like doing this, but he made his summary purposely short and bitter. He realized that, pleased to have made an ally of the big man who tackled him at the foot of Scat’s ladder, he had let his guard down more than he ought. “The short version,” he said, “is that the guy did fix me up with somebody, though I promised her I wouldn’t tell her name. Caroline applied— or went through the motions of applying— for a job as a prostitute. The job required a trial run with Scat. He liked to take pictures of the trial runs.”
Scat, in other words, got to be where Dennis MacDonald had wanted to be but never would. Not in an emotional sense, but the physical fact was there. And suppose Dennis had known it all along? A gentle giant was how he’d been seeing Dennis. But a jealous giant could be quite a different thing.
22. COUSINS
Dennis sat down in the nearest chair, a pale blue one whose upholstery showed the dirt. He opened his book— A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers— stared at the page, turned to the page before, turned back, and finally shut the volume with a loud smack. Then he shifted his glance to the desk and then returned it to Alex, his shoulder-length hair wafting like a Dutch boy’s as it moved. If the pain was real, Alex thought, it had more to do with loss than it did with jealousy or judgment or sex. No, he corrected himself. The pain was real. The question was only whether what Alex had just told him had been new. He tried to put a hand on the big man’s arm, but Dennis shook it away.
“Forget it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear the long version, not right now.” Then he said, “I almost forgot to tell you where I put Suzanne.”
“Where you put who?” Alex swallowed hard, but tried to appear calm. He said, as if reasoning with forced patience with his daughter, “Dennis, you didn’t even tell me you knew Suzanne.” He saw Suzanne Lutrello as she’d been on his front porch, arms bound and head pressed against the cold painted floor. He saw her inert body slung easily over one of Dennis’s shoulders, her black hair dangling in front and brown boots on limp legs behind. He saw the pond with the hole in it again.
“I don’t know her,” Dennis said. His pink forehead twisted up as if he felt Alex’s alarm but couldn’t understand its cause. “I mean, I recognized her when I saw her run out, that’s all. I was sitting here, killing time, waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?” Alex said sharply. “I didn’t tell you I had a room in this place.”
“No, but after I left you at Larabee’s I was wondering what was happening. You hadn’t told me whether you had a place you were planning to take… whoever it would be… to. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I called around. Hell, it ain’t exactly difficult to find out where you’re registered, once anybody knows you’re here in the Woods. So then I called your room here, and a woman answered, so I thought, okay, maybe this is the one Caroline knew. So I came over, and I sat down here, and I put my ass in this chair and waited.”
“Uh-huh,” said Alex. That was the same logic Natalie had used to argue that Lena Hanson must know Caroline: this ain’t that big a place. Coincidence, or not? Dennis sank back farther into the cushion as if to illustrate the word waited. His thoughts were somewhere else. “Uh-huh,” Alex said again. Dennis nodded at him and went on. This time he told his story with animation, and didn’t stop.
“About eight-thirty, I saw this girl come out, in a hurry. I wondered about that. Then when she saw me looking at her, she kind of ducked down and hurried out even faster. When she ducked down, lowered her chin into her neck, you know, that’s when I recognized her. She used to hang her head like that. She used to be Scat’s girl. She looks a lot better now than she did then. It was too much of a coincidence, her being here now, same place as you. I followed her out. She was trying to get through the snow, keeping away from the road, so it didn’t take me long to catch up. I said, ‘Wait, I want to talk to you,’ something like that. She didn’t stop till I got close enough to grab her arm. Or I tried to, but she spun around and put her hand out like a traffic cop, a crossing guard, you know? She said, ‘Hey. Who the fuck are you?’ When we got that straight, she said the cops were coming for her. We talked it over. She said she was tired of running, but she needed to hide out just a few more days. I gave her a sleeping bag and some food and put her in the hikers’ cabin up by Contocasset Brook. They’ll be looking for her here in the Woods, but nobody will ever think to look for her up there.”
Hikers’ cabin. Alex remembered a cabin shown on the map of wilderness trails beside the Parker House. “You can drive there?” Alex said.
“No, Ski-doo. I dropped her off, then came back looking for you. She wanted me to tell you where she was. It’s a safe place. The safest I could think of anyway.” He looked at Alex expectantly. His thumb rubbed back and forth along the spine of Henry David Thoreau’s book.
And in the meantime, Alex thought, I’d come back and talked on the phone, and then gone off to Paul Jakes’s place. It did fit. Anyway, he couldn’t come up with a reason Dennis would invent such a long song and dance. “The longer this goes on,” he said, “the more I think someplace safe would be the county jail. I guess she told you, somebody besides the cops has been after her too.”
“Yeah, she told me that. Somebody who could have set up Caroline for Scat to run over, and then killed Scat to keep him from maybe going to the cops.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “Either it’s that, or that’s what somebody wants me to think. Listen, Dennis, how far is it from that lunch cabin to where Suzanne is, if I want to go out there myself on skis tomorrow?”
“Let’s see, from Pamela’s place, you mean? That’s not how I went, they got that gate to keep any but their own vehicles off the trail network. I went the back way, old road into the woods. Anyway, the bridge is out, but I guess you could get across on foot. Oh, I guess it’s about three miles, not too far, something like that.” Dennis lifted himself out of the soft blue chair. “Let me know if you want me to run you out there, or anything.”
“Thanks,” Alex said. “And thanks for helping Suzanne.” It was hard not to trust Dennis MacDonald, hard not to settle back into the idea that both cold-blooded violence and vengean
ce were foreign to him. “One more question, though. Did Caroline have a friend that you know about, who went by the name of Nilda or Nell?”
“Nell. Yeah. Puerto Rican girl. Little, kind of sweet, talked a lot.”
“What did she talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. This and that. Chatter. Some people like to fill up the silence. Other people don’t care.” Dennis pursed his lips and lapsed into a brooding examination of the space above Alex’s head. He sighed and didn’t fill up the silence himself.
“Was she a good friend of Caroline’s?” Alex asked him. “Did she come visit? Do you know whether she’s still around?”
“No, she split, about a month ago, I guess. She didn’t come around my place— it was more like Caroline used to go visit her. She lived in town, in Jericho. There’s a few apartments there, over the stores. Those are about the only cheap places you can get.”
“Did Caroline say anything about her leaving?”
“She said it was too bad, I guess.”
“She didn’t confide in you about any suspicions…”
Dennis shifted his bulk in the cushioned chair. “We got along,” he said. “I didn’t claim she was in the habit of confiding things to me. What do you mean, suspicions?”
“Do you know where Nell worked?”
“I think she worked in rentals or something, over at the mountain. Though I don’t remember ever seeing her there. You’re telling me that’s not really what she did? You’re telling me she made her living on her back?”
“Yes. She worked for Scat, and for Paul Jakes. And Caroline was suspicious about the way she disappeared.”
“She should have told me,” Dennis said. “She always thought she could get along without other people’s help.”
* * *
Alex dreamed he was in the pond. It wasn’t cold, but it was dark. He swam in scuba gear. The tanks were heavy, but he wore flippers, huge flippers, that waved on his feet like tropical sea fans. The flippers propelled him steadily forward and down. His flashlight, a long one, held four D-cells like the young local cop’s. It illuminated a narrow shaft of water ahead. It was like the light sabers carried by the Jedi Knights. He knew this, in the dream, though he hadn’t thought of Jedi Knights since Maria outgrew her Star Wars fascination long ago. Use the Force, something told him, but he told himself not to be silly. He used the flippers and knew he was getting close to the bottom of the pond. He rolled over, pointing the beam of light up. It drifted away, like a slow harpoon. It must have bounced off the underside of the ice because after a while it came back.
