A Room For The Dead (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 3)

by Noel Hynd

  There he found that he could both give orders and dish them out, particularly under pressure. His first commanding officers were impressed and bounced O'Hara to San Diego where he emerged as an ensign. Next stop, Vietnam.

  He embarked upon a three-year stint-including thirteen genuinely rotten months on Mekong River patrols. He lost count of how much hostile fire he saw or how many shore parties he participated in, ferreting out Vietcong in the jungle underbrush around the riverbanks.

  He expected to be killed. During one horrible ship-to-shore firefight against ARVN regulars south of Ho Xiem, the man on his left and the man on his right got whacked within four minutes of each other. But O'Hara never lost a drop of blood.

  He returned home from the war, staying briefly in Chicago, but anxious to move on. He enrolled on the G.I. Bill at a university in the northern Midwest, a university more noted for pigskin than for Rhodes scholars.

  Sentiment about the war was running high from both the left and the right. O'Hara kept his opinions to himself, a talent which often led people who were talking to him into thinking that O'Hara agreed with them.

  But in November of 19'71 the students in the Conservative Union, noting his classroom articulation and aware of his three years as a naval officer, invited him to speak about the war.

  “What do you want me to say?” O'Hara asked.

  “Whatever you think.”

  O'Hara shrugged. “Okay,” he said. And so he spoke, treating his audience to the most scathing indictment of the war and the idiots running it that most of the students had ever heard, particularly from someone who had been there.

  A couple of thick-shouldered Sigma Chi muscle boys in the front row got up to leave before O'Hara was finished. They chipped in some opinions as they rose. O'Hara, setting aside intellectual arguments, pushed up his shirt sleeves and challenged them to come up on stage to duke it out. He would entertain both of them at once, he offered, and teach them a little about real combat-not the type theorized by fat armchair warriors who thought it would be a great idea if someone else fought. Or else, O'Hara said, they could sit down and shut the hell up. They sat. O'Hara was not invited to address the Conservative Union again.

  The incident might have made him an idol for the antiwar types on campus, but O'Hara wanted nothing to do with them, either. He considered them a bunch of druggies, wimps, and fools who didn't have any idea what they were talking about, either. So once again, Frank O'Hara was the odd man out.

  He lasted one year at the university, acquiring a 3.6 grade point average. But he never felt himself intellectually challenged. So he read heavily on his own. Novels. Histories. Politics. Anything. But he also felt an overwhelming urge to get back out into the real world. There was much to do. He wanted to get out to help people on a one-to-one basis. To many of his generation, that meant VISTA or the Peace Corps. O'Hara said the hell with that.

  He learned that certain police departments were making special accommodations for veterans. In particular, Oregon and New Hampshire were seeking state police recruits. One night O'Hara decided to flip a coin. Heads he'd go to Oregon, tails he'd go to New Hampshire.

  The coin came up heads. Oregon. But his instincts told him New Hampshire. And how could something like this be decided by a coin flip anyway? He closed out his apartment, bought a second hand Volkswagen and drove to New England. He went on the job in January of 1974.

  He spent his first few years on the force being jerked around the state, a lot of time spent on highway surveillance. He hated the red tape of being a cop, but overall much police work really was a matter of helping people, or setting things right for people who'd been victimized. And the job, tooling along in a spiffy uniform in one's own car, offered a certain frontier-style independence. A Lone Ranger on wheels, highteched with modern weapons and two-way radio. And at first even the long, bitter New Hampshire winters were a novelty. Almost “Christmas Tree” quaint at forty nasty degrees below zero. It was only much later that he started to hate the deepfreeze season.

  Five years into his career, he passed the detective's exam with the highest grade in the state. He began plainclothes duty a few months later, just in time to work on the state protection detail for the parade of presidential candidates who invade the state every four years. Up close he listened to their hollow promises and developed a new and deep contempt for almost all of them.

  There was one happy offshoot of the campaigning, however. One night in March of 1980 he stopped a car with New York plates when it slid through a stop sign. It was driven by a woman.

  Her name was Barbara Godfrey and she had just hit the New Hampshire “Happy Motoring” trifecta: She didn't have her license or registration or insurance certificate. But O'Hara recognized her from one of the campaign rallies. And she did have beautiful dark eyes and a nice smile, a couple of qualities that could balance out a lot of petty motor vehicle infractions.

  O'Hara let her go. He guessed he would see Barbara Godfrey again at her candidate's next campaign stop. He was right. When he did, he asked her out for coffee. She agreed.

  It turned out she, too, was Irish-American, was originally from the Midwest, and had left a similar university after two years for many of the same reasons as O'Hara. Her candidate dropped out of the race two months later after igniting only nine percent of the electorate in the California primary. Barbara took the occasion to revisit New Hampshire. She and O'Hara were married eight months later.

  For the first several years of their marriage, they were happy. During non-campaign years, he worked Vice, Grand Larceny, and Narcotics. His job took him from prostitution operations along Hampton Beach during summers, to busting a ring of Alabama-born cracker strongarms who were running hot trucks in and out of the state.

  Then there was a memorable evening in Franconia when a guido white powder operation in North Boston made him as an undercover cop in a sting operation. They put a Cuban triggerman on his case. O'Hara stepped out of his car one night and found himself looking at a guy leaning into a firing position with a monster piece of sawed-off technology.

  Barely time to think. O'Hara dropped down behind his car and went for his weapon as the shooter blew out all his car windows with the first of two barrels. O'Hara came up from the back end of the car and drilled his would-be assassin with four rounds.

  The sting blown, his nerves a wreck, part of the hearing gone in his left ear-the one closest to the shotgun-O'Hara got himself transferred to something more peaceful. Statewide homicide. This was 19'79.

  He worked with a detective named Carl Reissman. Carl was a world-class cynic, a man who figured someone had died the second he saw a bouquet of fresh flowers, and further figured that the death had probably been unnatural. Reissman was an outstanding cop, even though he was a borderline alcoholic as well as a head case himself.

  Reissman took a liking to O'Hara. Jointly they made a couple of high-profile busts within the first month of their partnership. They even circled back into O'Hara's recent unlovely past and hung conspiracy to commit murder raps on the two Boston drug lords who had ordered the hit on O'Hara.

  “Homicide is where the big-time action is in a small-time dingbat state,” Reissman said. And in a sense, it was . . . without the dirt and corruption that went with narcotics.

  “A homicide dick's desk is never completely clean,” Reissman liked to say. “There are always names of dead people on the wall. If not, there will be soon.”

  Reissman had a sense of the macabre, a habit that O'Hara picked up quickly. On major cases, he always kept a small possession of the victim with him: a ring, a money clip, an earring or some other piece of jewelry. It kept him focused. It kept him thinking.

  Reissman also wanted to rearrange his wall chart of unsolved murder cases to list them in red marking pen by their most salient features:

  Stabbings. Shootings. Strangulation. Suspicious drownings. Suffocation. Fags. Mutilation. Sex. Children.

  “A lot of these cases,” O'Hara noted in eyeing
the chart one day, “fit into three or more categories.”

  “Hell of an awful world, isn't it?” Reissman answered.

  “Yeah,” O'Hara answered, “but I like your approach.”

  “You're the only one who does.”

  District Command complained about the classification system, so Reissman and O'Hara did the next best thing. They put their active open cases on the wall by picture of the victim. Every day the dead would stare out from the wall in Reissman's office. Some smiling. Some forlorn. Each silently asking for resolutions to their cases. Eventually, male and female, all ages, they became a makeshift family.

  Staring from another world.

  Asking for justice.

  Not that O'Hara even needed to look at them. The wall had an eerie feel. For the first time in his life, O'Hara could sense the eyes of the dead upon him. Sense their presence. They recurred to him like acid flashes at any unpredictable time.

  Like when he slept. When he tried to make love to Barbara. When he tried to watch hockey on television during the increasingly miserable New Hampshire winters.

  “Working deathwatch is a good way to keep a finger on the pulse of the public,” Reissman explained, further elaborating that stabbings increase in tougher financial times, whereas the gun was the sign of boom years.

  “This is an era of shameless, obscene greed,” Carl Reissman announced in 1982. “Buy stock in Remington, Browning and Colt, vote Republican, wear your bulletproof vest at all times, stand back and wait for a shitload of gun crimes.” Statistics would prove him correct. As for Reissman, he was entering into a manic-depressive era of his own.

  But O'Hara listened and learned. Working with Carl was better than going to college. From Reissman, O'Hara learned how to sweet-talk confessions out of icepick murderers with vampire complexes, how to toss a crime scene before the locals arrive, how to read black-and-white crime scene photos in a way that revealed more than the glossy color jobs, how to bribe the state pathologist's office (when necessary) to get a warm corpse examined faster and more accurately than the cold dead trash that gets shipped in early Sunday mornings, and how to pass for a nighttime maintenance worker in order to lift institutional records at the state nut houses, at the phone company, or at Social Security. From Reissman, O'Hara even learned how to stay completely clear-or, failing that, at least on the good side of-the button-down, tie-clipped mick assholes at the FBI outpost in Nashua. His mentor also imparted probably two hundred other little subtleties of murder detection not covered by the criminology texts.

  Together, Reissman and O'Hara solved several big-time, bad-assed cases together, got their names in the Manchester Union-Leader during the old-time, rock-ribbed reign of William Loeb, and drew front-page coverage of the new statewide tabloid, the New Hampshire American, published by Wilhelm Negri, a right-wing darling, publishing mogul, and more recently a radio loudmouth with a growing audience of quasi-fascist yahoos. Next to Negri, Rush Limbaugh was squishy soft, and the American was quickly supplanting the Union-Leader in regional wallop.

  Not surprisingly, the Reissman-O'Hara team had already come to the attention of Captain William Mallinson, who considered Reissman and O'Hara his best two men.

  “My best two, with no one in third place,” Mallinson frequently growled. It remained that way for several years. Up until the advent of Gary Ledbetter.

  Gary Ledbetter. A low-rent Lothario. A bluebeard of dirt bike society.

  The final atrocity linked to Gary Ledbetter, officially known as “Ledbetter homicide number five,” had been discovered in the basement of a garage attached to a white cape-style farmhouse in Antrim, New Hampshire.

  The usual.

  Head of a young woman severed at the neck. Right hand at the wrists. Deft chopping motion, followed by sawing. The victim's head then placed on a makeshift altar at the front of the chamber. The hand placed in a rosewood box tied neatly with pink ribbon.

  Pink ribbon. What a cute touch. Same in all five killings. Pink for the little girls, one shrink noted. Pink for childhood innocence. Pink was a favorite of mass murderers, another pathologist noted. Pink had been Hitler's favorite color, too, and when Gary was young, an abused kid with a brutal father, there had been this portrait of Hitler in Gary's room. And on and on it went. . . .

  The final victim's name had been Karen Stoner, and she had been a waitress at a doughnut joint near the Massachusetts state line. A friendly girl who didn't sleep around and who needed a ride home one night. Pink uniform, by the way.

  Reissman and O'Hara drew the investigation. Karen Stoner's picture went up in their gallery of open cases. A color glossy. Right in the middle.

  Reissman began by running through violent sex offenders in the area, trying to close the case by sifting through killers. O'Hara focused on Karen and figured the crime was not committed by anyone local who was already known. He scoured the countryside, beat the brush for someone new in the area and came up with some virgin psychos.

  Gary Ledbetter was one of them. He was working in a 7-Eleven and someone complained that Gary had shot the neighbor's dog. Sixteen bullets, which even people who didn't like the dead mutt thought was excessive by maybe ten bullets or SO.

  O'Hara investigated the arf-arf assassination and came away with chills after five minutes with Gary.

  “No, sir. I didn't shoot no one's doggie.”

  “Then why do three witnesses say you did it?” Detective O'Hara inquired.

  “Don't know, sir. Guess they don't like me.”

  “Think this guy's our pigeon?” Reissman asked his partner.

  “He gives me the creeps,” O'Hara answered.

  “That's not what I asked.”

  “I know what you asked,” O'Hara said.

  “Let's get a camera.”

  Reissman took a surveillance photograph of Gary and mixed it in with photographs of six other Granite State lunatics. He and O'Hara took all seven shots back to the doughnut dive where Karen had worked.

  Surprise. A couple of people recognized Gary and picked out his snapshot. They said he'd come in several times, all tidied up, neat and clean with a smile in those cobalt blue eyes. And he had seemed very sweet on Karen.

  “Yeah. Real sweet,” O'Hara answered.

  Then, working backwards, O'Hara and Reissman foraged for some evidence, or, failing that, witnesses. A woman in a notions store in Peterborough volunteered that she thought she had sold Gary some pink ribbon. And two of Karen Stoner's girlfriends said that she had gone out with Gary a couple of times. They had gone to her place where Gary had played the piano for her-old church hymns favored in the South, played with feeling on a ratty old spinet.

  But where had Gary been when the murder occurred? O'Hara and Reissman finally asked him after they had hauled him into an interrogation room at the big roundhouse in Nashua.

  “I was home watching smut videos.”

  O'Hara did the questioning. “What were the names of them?”

  “Who knows names of beaver movies? I was jacking off. Should try it some time, you dickhead cops. You'd be in a better mood.”

  “And maybe we wouldn't be,” Reissman answered, intersecting. “Where did you rent the videos?”

  “Don't remember. I rent them a lot of places.”

  O'Hara again: “Name a couple.”

  “Don't remember.”

  “If I were you, Gary,” O'Hara warned, “I'd start remembering. You're going to take a fall on homicide.”

  “Bullshit. I got friends in this state, man. Big shot friends.”

  “Yeah? Name two.”

  “You'll soon find out,” Ledbetter snarled.

  “Why don't you tell me? Save us all some time.”

  “If I tell I'm dead meat anyway,” Ledbetter said. “So what's the difference?”

  “On one hand you tell me you have friends, Gary,” O'Hara said. “Then you tell me your friends will let you fry. So I'm not following you. “

  “Good. I don't want you to.”

  �
�You're in a lot of trouble. Don't you understand that?”

  “Fuck you, O’Hara. And the horse you rode in on.”

  Then Gary clammed up, answering virtually nothing else.

  “The empty profane threats of a cornered, delusional psychotic,” Reissman complained. “Forget it. This guy's guilty as sin.”

  “Think so?”

  “Don't you?”

  “Where's the evidence?”

  “If we can't find any we'll make some.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Who's kidding?”

  O'Hara visited every video store within thirty miles, flashed Gary's picture and found no place where the suspect had rented anything. For that matter, O'Hara discovered, Gary didn't own a VCR. A case began to build itself around Ledbetter.

  Reissman became possessed. So did O'Hara. A year and a half of combat, a dozen years as a cop, and O'Hara had never seen cold-blooded brutality the way he had seen it inflicted upon Karen Stoner. Both detectives worked like demons. They slept in their clothes at the office. Then Reissman came up with a major break. Acting on a tip, he and his partner broke into a storage locker rented to an “S. Clay.” In the locker, among some perverse sexual gear, was an ax stained with blood. There was also a shopping bag with some rosewood boxes.

  The blood samples matched Karen Stoner's. Gary's fingerprints were on the ax. His prints were also on the rosewood boxes. And the manager of the storage units, an eighty-IQ sort of guy, had a sharp enough memory to identify Gary as the unit's owner when O'Hara and Reissman returned with a photograph. Not surprisingly, Ledbetter's signature matched the handwriting of “S. Clay” on the storage unit contract.