by C I Dennis
“Lila would sleep with anyone Clement says, but she confessed that you weren’t really her type.”
“Gosh, I’m devastated,” I said. “So, what are Fridays? Bingo night?”
“Clement works on Friday and Saturday evenings,” she said. “He prepares his radio sermon for Sunday morning. We have a gathering on Sunday, after dark.”
“What do you mean by a gathering?”
“It’s usually just Clement and us. He has lots of—energy. But if he finds someone he likes, he may invite them along. Like you.”
“I’m sorry if I was a letdown,” I said.
“I was fine with whatever you decided,” she said, lowering her eyes. “I like you, Vince. You give me hope for Grace.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who would want to threaten her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Donald Lussen go to the parties at Clement’s?”
“Yes. He was deeply in love with Grace. It got out of hand.”
“How so?”
“His work went to hell. He would have lost his job, eventually. And his wife.”
“What’s she like?”
“She didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re wondering. She was in Connecticut yesterday.”
“Did you really have a smack habit?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t fit the profile—at least not the one that I used to know in Florida.”
“Cindy had a boyfriend at the hospital. He got her some pain pills. She broke an ankle, and she got strung out on them. It’s too easy.”
“I’ve been there,” I said. “Go on.”
“My sister and I are very close. She couldn’t get the pills after a while. Nobody could—the whole supply thing got tightened up, and people started doing heroin instead. It was cheap, and it’s everywhere, even out here in the sticks. I tried it too, and I can’t explain why, but Cindy and I have been like that our whole lives. That was two years ago, and I know I would be dead if I hadn’t met Clement. It really does work, you know. I was never a religious person, Vince, but he’s right. People live for love, and sex is a big part of it.”
“What happened after I left?”
“Clement wanted Grace, and she refused. They had a shouting match. She told him to fuck off, and she ran out the door with his car keys. Cindy was going to go after her, but Clement said no, Grace would come home. But I think he’s wrong.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s using again,” Karen Charbonneau said. “She was trying to hide it from us, but I can tell. Addicts know. I didn’t have the heart to tell Clement.”
“One step forward, two steps back,” I said.
“Please find her, Vince. She needs to go through a regular detox program. This one worked for me, but not for her.”
“Where would she go?”
“Ask her mother.”
“Her mother wants nothing to do with her,” I said. “She’s a hard case. I know her from high school.”
“I’ve met her,” Karen said. “She knows more than you think.”
My phone rang and I moved to turn it off, but it was John Pallmeister. “Excuse me,” I said, and I put it to my ear.
“Grace Hebert’s cellphone is in Barre,” he said. “She hasn’t made an outgoing call in weeks, but she’s received a bunch of texts.”
“From who?”
“The recently-departed Donald Lussen.”
“That fits,” I said. “Where is it, exactly?”
“It’s inside Carmela Tomaselli’s apartment,” he said. “We’re waiting on a warrant. I’ll see you there.”
*
There are no secrets in Barre. It boasts a population of nine thousand people, large by Vermont standards, but it is a big small town, and if the State Police are parked in your driveway, no one will have to wait for the next day’s paper to find out why. The town’s grapevine is faster than the Internet and is equally unreliable when it comes to the facts, but facts don’t matter to gossips.
Carmela Tomaselli had been the subject of gossip since puberty, and the cops had been to her house before. It was a miracle that her four marriages had ended in divorce and not death, because she was a wild animal if you crossed her. By the time I arrived on the scene she was cussing out Lieutenant Pallmeister and Janice, his female sergeant associate, and you could have heard her yelling from my mother’s house, which was four blocks away up the hill.
The State Police had summoned her from the nursing home to let them in and locate Grace’s missing cellphone. I’d worked with John Pallmeister for one year during my very brief stint as a rookie cop on the Barre force, and he was one of those guys who never, ever confronted people, much less yelled back. It was like he didn’t have a temper to lose—he would just wait people out until they were exhausted, and then he’d get the job done, whatever the task was. I always wished I had his kind of cool, but I’m too Italian for that.
Carmela saw me approaching. She kept up the volume for a few more moments, but I could tell that she was coming to the end of her rant. The neighbors who had gathered in the street parted to let another car in the driveway: a mostly-yellow Saab 900 convertible with a torn roof and one flat-black fender panel that was primed for repainting. A wiry, thirtyish man got out of the car. I figured that this was Carmela’s current flame. His hands were stained with the kind of grease that never fully washes off, with tattoos running up and down both arms. It was not a warm day, but he was dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and red basketball shorts. I caught a glimpse of his face: handsome, in a bad-boy sort of way, with thick, waxy hair and deep-set, dark eyes. Cleaned up, he might have been a model, except for the arms—there were needle marks among the tattoos. Apparently he had the same monkey on his back that Grace did.
He strutted toward the cops with what I call the Asshole Swagger: shoulders back, arms hanging loose—hey man, be cool. People like that bring out my natural urge to just handcuff them and throw them in the back of the car, and ninety percent of the time it would save a lot of trouble.
“Chill out, everybody,” the young guy said to the group. “I know where it is. I’ll go up and get it for you. Wait here.”
“You have Grace’s phone?” Carmela said to him. Her voice was hoarse from the confrontation with the cops.
“She dropped it off,” he said. “Didn’t want it no more.”
“What? Listen, Matty—”
“Later, babe,” I heard him say, and he went inside the house. I approached Pallmeister.
“Are you going inside?”
“No need, if he gives us the phone,” he said. The lieutenant was my age, but aside from the close-cropped gray hair under his hat, he could have passed for forty. That said, he didn’t look like he’d had any more sleep than I had. “You got anything new?”
I steered him away from Carmela, out of earshot. “Yes,” I said. “Grace has a drug habit. On and off, but it’s currently on.”
“You wouldn’t believe how bad that is around here,” the lieutenant said. “We make a heroin bust every couple of days.”
“She was detoxing at Goody’s, but it didn’t last. Did you see the tracks on that punk?”
“Yes, and I’m tempted to toss the whole house, but the warrant is specific to the cellphone,” Pallmeister said. “You know about warrants.”
Yes, I knew about warrants. I’d performed a search without one and had been caught, and a killer had gotten off. It was the reason that I’d lost my job as a deputy sheriff after twenty-five years on the Indian River County force. Pallmeister knew that, and he couldn’t help bringing it up. “Are you going to question these two?” I asked him.
“Not unless we find something on the cell.”
“I might stay around for some chit-chat,” I said. “Carmela and Matty. He’d be husband number five.”
“Five times a charm,” Pallmeister said, just as the young man was coming out of the hou
se with the phone in his hand.
“Here you go,” he said, giving it to the lieutenant and displaying a smirk that was just begging to be wiped off by someone’s fist. “Now fuck off, man. Leave us alone.”
Pallmeister ignored him and got back into the cruiser where Janice was on the phone. I approached Matty and Carmela who were in a heated discussion. “Got a moment?”
“Who are you?” the kid said.
“I’m a private investigator. Carmela and I know each other. Let’s go inside and talk.”
“Vince, not now,” Carmela began. She was puffing on the second cigarette that she had lit in the five minutes since I’d arrived.
“Hey, you can fuck off, too,” Matty said. He gave me the same contemptuous sneer that he had given the cops, with an implied invitation: Go ahead and start something.
As tempted as I was to rearrange his dental work, I channeled John Pallmeister’s reserve and turned to Carmela. “I saw her last night.”
“Where?”
“She was staying with a friend for a while. But she’s moved on. I’m still working on it.”
“You know where Grace is?” Matty said. “Who are you again?”
“Grace’s grandmother is concerned about her,” I said. “I’m making sure that she’s all right.”
“Shit, man,” he said, and the tough-guy posturing evaporated. “I didn’t know that. I’m worried about her too, even though Carmela says I shouldn’t. But I sure would like to find her.”
“Let’s go inside,” I said.
“Can’t,” he said. “I have to get back to my shop.”
“Carmela?”
“Don’t bother, Vinny,” she said. “You already know what I think about this. You’re wasting your time.”
“You know that she’s doing heroin? And that somebody has been threatening her?”
Carmela said nothing, but I caught a fierce look that was exchanged between her and her boyfriend, and I recognized it, because I had seen it often enough over the course of my two marriages:
You and I are going to have a little talk.
*
I decided that the most productive thing that I could do until I heard back from John Pallmeister about the cellphone would be to go to my mom’s house and wait. Grace Hebert’s secrets would soon be revealed. Your cell is your most unreliable, blabbermouth, tell-all friend. It has no ethics, no sense of loyalty to you, and it feels no remorse for laying out every sordid, humiliating detail of your personal life for the world to see. Your movements, the calls you made, the late-night drunk texts, and, of course, every single selfie that you took, clothed or not: all of that will live on forever like a prehistoric bug embedded in amber.
I stopped at the Quality Market and loaded up on cold cuts and sliced cheese. The delicatessens in Florida simply don’t get the same products that you can find here, and I was jonesing for capicola, mortadella, some good Genoa salami, and a pound or two of provolone to take home and roll up in little tubes, sit back in my father’s chair, and nosh on while my mother and I talked. I didn’t know how much I would tell her about Grace, although she would have seen Donald Lussen’s death on the news, and she would have made the connection to Johnson State. I was thinking that I might lay it all out and get her opinion. My mom has always been a shy person, but she has a good feel for things. Maybe she could shed some light.
John Pallmeister phoned me as I was driving back from the market. I pulled over to the side of the street to take the call. “This isn’t going to help you,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“It’s a five-year-old Motorola. It can text and make calls, but that’s it.”
“A college girl who doesn’t own a smartphone?”
“I know. It must be her choice. Some people are that way.”
“So what do you have?”
“It was at Johnson State until September 18th. That was two Saturdays ago. Then it went to the Comfort Inn, by the Barre exit, and then up to Shelburne, somewhere out on the point. We couldn’t triangulate it exactly. And then it went back to Barre the same afternoon and stayed there. At her mother’s apartment.”
“Anything else?”
“Seventy-one texts from Donald Lussen’s phone, sent between the 19th and two days ago. No outgoing texts.”
“So he was trying to reach her?”
“You could say that.”
“Are you looking at the other texts? And the location data?”
“Yes, but nothing stands out. I can email it to you if you want to look. Off the record.”
I told him that yes, I wanted to see the data, and I figured that Roberto Arguelles might burn some virtual shoe leather for me and possibly provide us with a few more clues. A dumbphone? Damn. For a college girl, an up-to-date phone wasn’t just an accessory; it was a vital organ. It didn’t fit, but maybe I didn’t yet know as much about Grace Hebert as I should.
Tonight I would do my homework. I would spend some time with Donna Tomaselli, because Carmela was stonewalling me, and because grandmothers often knew more about their granddaughters than mothers did. Roberto could work on the phone forensics. Grace had been clever enough to not display her personal life on a smartphone, and that would make it harder for me to find her, but it also gave me an odd kind of respect for her. She was an outlier, and if someone were truly threatening to kill her, that might increase her chances of survival.
*
Mrs. Tomaselli didn’t have much to tell me about Grace that I didn’t already know, and she was more relieved than concerned when I told her I had found her granddaughter—briefly—in Clement Goody’s questionable care. She had the grandma blinders on, meaning that Grace could do no wrong, and at the same time Carmela could do no right. Mrs. T had shown up precisely at suppertime. The meal was one of my mother’s old standbys: sausage and peppers, and I had helped out by cooking the meat on the grill over real charcoal. The crisp fall night had turned rainy, and I’d had to use an umbrella to get the food inside without getting soaked.
I didn’t want to bring up the heroin issue over the dinner table, as it would unnecessarily worry the older women. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t turning things over in my head while trying to keep semi-involved in the conversation. I parsed the afternoon’s events while I ate. The good news was that Grace’s phone had been found, but that was the private investigator’s conundrum: one answer begets a hundred new questions.
Matty—last name unknown—had a bad attitude and a smack habit. He also happened to be in possession of Grace’s cell, which had taken a ride from the college to a chain hotel at the Barre exit, then up to Shelburne Point, an old-money enclave on Lake Champlain, and then all the way back to Carmela’s apartment in Barre where the State Police had been able to locate it thanks to the carrier records. Someone needed to fill in the blanks on that one, and I figured that it would be Matty. If the State Police were too busy to ask him, I’d happily take care of it for them, and if he gave me any attitude he would regret it.
But he had seemed genuinely worried when I’d said that Grace was still missing. Carmela didn’t give a damn, but he did. Matty and Grace were both strung out on heroin. Maybe he held some responsibility for that, and he was feeling bad about it. Or maybe Matty wasn’t such a tough guy, and he actually cared about his girlfriend’s daughter. He looked closer to Grace’s age than Carmela’s. Hell, maybe they were lovers, and the Comfort Inn stop had been a shack-up. The mind of a P.I. is a fertile place, although you have to keep in mind that fertilizer is generally made from cow shit, including a hefty dose of bullshit. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Vince.
Mom had made cannoli for dessert. Mrs. T and I pushed back our chairs, protesting that we were already full to the bursting point, but a space magically opened in my digestive system and I was able to accommodate two of the sweet, rolled-up cholesterol grenades. OK, three.
John Pallmeister emailed me the location records and call logs for Grace’s phone, which I in turn sent to Roberto in Florida
. I was back in my father’s chair, regretting the cannoli decision, when Roberto sent a text: Kind of a dead end on the phone thing.
What makes you think that?
Long lapses in activity, he wrote. She might use a messaging program on her laptop. It’s slightly more secure.
Any late night calls? I sent to my young friend. When you’re looking at someone’s phone records, the three AM ones were where you started. That was when a person might call somebody they weren’t supposed to.
I traced one to her college, he wrote. Five AM, back in May. It went to the theater department, according to the directory.
Grace had called the theater department at five in the morning? Of course—Donald Lussen, and I bet he was an early riser. The State Police had no doubt examined the same records that we were looking at, but they might not have made the connection.
Interesting, I wrote back. The dead guy was her drama teacher. They had a thing going.
Aha.
Thanks. You need anything from up here? I’ll be back as soon as I wrap this up.
Nope. I’m buried in an essay for my college applications.
What are you writing about?
You, he sent.
Seriously?
Yes. About the experience of being mentored.
That ought to kill off any chance of getting into college, I sent back. The little bugger was writing about me? I was touched, and I wished that I was back in Vero, where I would be now if the whole Grace Hebert thing hadn’t happened. But it had, and I was already filling in my calendar for tomorrow.
I would call John Pallmeister to compare notes. I would also drop in on Matty at the Saab shop, and we’d chat. And I might go back up to Johnson, to see what else I could find out about the relationship between the faculty advisor and his attractive, addicted student. His death and her disappearance seemed to be intertwined, and I didn’t think that I was getting ahead of myself this time, cow shit or not.
SATURDAY
The relentless barking woke me. I grabbed a rain jacket from the front hall closet and went outside to my mother’s driveway. The racket was coming from inside my rental car, which I hadn’t bothered to lock. I recognized the bark.
