Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “The college police have no official role in any criminal investigation,” said Jordan, “but I will make sure he is assigned to the case as our liaison to the investigative team.”

  “I will not allow his death to be swept under the rug, no matter who might be embarrassed by the consequences,” she said fiercely, getting up from the couch. “That woman even refused to allow me to see Dennis at the coroner’s office. Please arrange for a car to take me there now.”

  “Of course,” he said, quickly heading for his desk.

  I hoped for Jordan’s sake that the Groton Fire and Rescue Squad had been able to retrieve Wheatley’s head. After he called the coroner and cleared her visit, Jordan’s secretary escorted Evelyn Wheatley down to the parking lot.

  “What a fucked-up mess,” said Jordan when she was gone.

  “Since Wheatley and his money seem to be the common denominator, I’m going to pursue both avenues and see where they lead. Aside from his wife, does Wheatley have any friends at the reunion that could have seen him in the final hours before the hanging?”

  “I don’t know. He was staying at his old fraternity house for homecoming weekend,” said Jordan. “Some of his brothers from those days might have come back too.”

  “You should know there is a reporter tracking the story. Her name is Lauren Kenniston and she works for the Groton Journal. She was eavesdropping outside Morgo’s office when I left to come over here.”

  “I’ve met her,” said Jordan. “Grew up here, went to Princeton, and apparently had a promising career in fashion design in New York before tossing it in and moving back home.”

  “She left the bright city lights to come back here and cover Cub Scout blue and gold dinners?”

  “I seem to recall some kind of family trouble.”

  “You need to call Captain Morgo,” I said.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed her extension.

  “Janet,” he began, “we have to rethink this Cantrell suspension.”

  I could hear her yelling through the line from across the room. They could have heard her in Buffalo.

  6

  I was walking out of the building when Jordan’s green Volvo came swinging into the parking lot. Only one person could have been driving it. I found a vantage point to watch her from behind the colonnade that connected Jordan’s building to the new performing arts center.

  As Blair walked briskly toward the entrance, I felt the familiar electrical charge in my brain, all circuits flashing. In the years since we had been together, she had only grown more beautiful to me. Back then, her thick brown mane of hair had almost reached her waist. Now it was shoulder length, framing her face like a coronet as it swung back and forth in rhythm with her stride.

  She was wearing a cream-colored dress with a cardigan sweater over it. I saw the familiar determined look on her face, the one that said I’m still going to change the world, as she disappeared into the building.

  I was stunned at the raw impact she still had on me.

  Since coming back to Groton, I had seen her only once, from a distance, but the feeling was exactly the same. I hadn’t been prepared for it. Playing football, I had learned to brace myself when I saw a big linebacker coming at me. This was more like the times I was blindsided, taken out of a play from behind and rammed into the turf.

  Walking over to the campus police building, I remembered the last time we were together, back when I thought we were going all the way. I had asked her to marry me again, but she repeated that it would be better to wait. I was on my five-day embarkation leave, and we were spending part of it at a small hotel in Saratoga Springs. We had just made love and were still lying together in the big four-poster bed.

  I thought our lovemaking had a rightness about it, from the initial ferocity at the start of our relationship to the sensual growth that took place as we began to learn each other’s mysteries, always wanting to give and receive pleasure until we were both fulfilled. Each completion would be followed by an interval of sweet, drowsy sleep until our sexual craving returned. I savored her body, and she proved beyond a doubt that she enjoyed mine.

  On the last morning, we were having breakfast together after coming straight from bed.

  “I love the feeling of power inside you, Jake, the physical hardness,” she said at one point. “Your strength is . . . intoxicating. Yes . . . that would be the word for it.”

  I was about to thank her when she added, “But I can’t believe that the man who made love to me the way you did last night could kill another human being.”

  “They murdered three thousand Americans, Blair,” I said with honest conviction. “We are in a war over there. I’ve been trained to help fight it and to kill the enemy. They’ll certainly be trying to kill me.”

  I had written my senior thesis on the just war theory and its advocacy by philosophers like Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, who personally found war morally abhorrent but understood it was sometimes necessary to wage it. I began trying to make the case that the war in Afghanistan met that test.

  “What about the innocent people who get caught in the middle?” she asked.

  “Innocent people always die in a war. It’s an ugly business,” I said.

  “Then why do you have to do it?”

  I didn’t answer her. Looking back, I didn’t have an answer. Blair let it drop.

  Her first letters were filled with detailed and passionate observations of everything she was seeing and doing. She had started a new job with a nonprofit agency that worked with mentally challenged children, and she wrote eloquently of how one of the kids had worked against the odds to learn the alphabet.

  Early on, there were also unabashed love letters, intimate and bawdy.

  Other letters were filled with indignation. She wrote that apart from the military families bearing the burden of the war, there was no shared sacrifice, no sense that all Americans had a stake in it. I wrote back to her about the remarkable men I was serving with and how they were fighting for the right reasons.

  I was still in Afghanistan when she wrote that she was taking another job. It was with a local community advocacy program that Jordan Langford had started in Detroit after he got back from the Peace Corps. She had heard about his work through one of our mutual friends and had written to him asking for a position. He told her to come on out.

  Soon after that, her letters stopped coming.

  A steady mass of St. Andrews alumni streamed past me as I arrived at the campus police building. The squad room was empty, as was the wire mesh holding pen. The lawyer in golf clothes had apparently sprung the two boys I had seen there earlier.

  From my cubicle, I called Fred Beck, the local tow truck operator employed by the college to remove illegally parked cars. When he came on the line, I asked him to run my truck over to the Fall Creek Tavern. He was a regular there too.

  “I knew that’s what you would have wanted me to do, Jake,” he said. “It’s already in the Creeker parking lot.”

  When I got up to leave my cubicle, Captain Morgo was standing at the entrance.

  “So you think you have an ace in the hole,” she said, her voice husky. “Well that hole is disappearing fast, believe me.”

  “Why are you always so miserable?” I asked her.

  “I despise you,” she said. “I’ve tried to get rid of you from the day you first arrived.”

  “Why?”

  “You already disgraced one uniform in Afghanistan, Cantrell. And then you thought you could just waltz back in here because you were a big football hero and a pal of the president.”

  “I guess you know everything about me.”

  “You were kicked out of the army. That tells it all. I can see the rot in your eyes.”

  There was no point in trying to give her my side of the story. She had already made up her mind. Like so many others.

  “Yeah, that says it all.”

  “I’ve fought against the odds to earn every position I’ve had in law enforcemen
t,” she continued. “I’ve had to be tougher than a man in order to prove I could succeed in a man’s profession. And now you have to poison my department.”

  I didn’t bother to reply.

  Resting one hand on the butt of her Glock 17, she said, “President Langford has asked that you be temporarily assigned as liaison to the sheriff’s department while they continue to investigate the suicide of Dennis Wheatley. Sheriff Dickey has arranged to interview the friends and family of the deceased at the Tau Epsilon Rho fraternity at fourteen hundred this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “I don’t give a shit what you do,” said Captain Morgo. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still in a state of technical suspension. Accordingly, you have no rights when it comes to preferred shift designations, and you do not have the privilege of wearing the uniform of this department. I do not expect to see you in this office, is that clear?”

  I couldn’t mask my smile.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” she said. “Your time is coming. Just this morning I received a complaint from a distinguished graduate of this college who claims you stole his camcorder and then physically threatened him. I urged him to press criminal charges against you.”

  When I didn’t respond, she turned and marched back down the corridor, her heavy boots rapping like pistol shots on the polished floor. In the locker room, I changed into jeans, a blue work shirt, and a pair of old Rockports.

  Leaving through the back door, I headed across campus. Like Mrs. Wheatley’s dead husband, I now found myself at the end of a short rope. The only difference was that I still had my head.

  At the moment, it wasn’t cooperating with me. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock, and I felt completely drained. I didn’t know where to begin. The best idea I could come up with was to go back to bed and recharge my batteries, but I knew that wouldn’t help the case. I decided to stimulate my muddled brain with black coffee.

  I had passed the arts quad and was near the bridge when I suddenly felt like someone was following me. Call it an extra sense, but there was a time when I actually had one, and it was always triggered by the familiar prickling of the skin at the back of my neck. I stopped and turned around. No one was there. Another lost asset.

  The bells on the library tower were chiming when I headed down the stone staircase that led to the footbridge. The yellow crime scene tape that had been strung across both ends had been removed, and nothing remained to suggest that something terrible had occurred there. So far, Jordan had been successful in keeping a lid on who had actually died. That would soon change when Lauren Kenniston filed her first story.

  When I arrived at the Creeker, it was already packed with the Saturday morning crowd. A dozen customers had spilled out onto the side porch, drinking draft beer. Several of them waved a greeting as I went inside.

  The tavern, a combination mountain lodge and old Adirondack boathouse, with rough-milled clapboard siding and big mullioned windows, had been there for more than a hundred years.

  The main room had a high tin ceiling and a long oak-slab bar with traditional brass foot railings. Dusty hunting trophies adorned the walls, along with pictures of former St. Andrews sports heroes and long-dead customers. The owner rented out the upstairs rooms to students.

  Since it was the closest watering hole to the campus, professors and students who needed a quick shot of confidence could get there between classes. At lunch it overflowed with blue-collar types—plumbers, electricians, and carpenters who worked on the campus construction projects and began their working days before sunrise.

  I found an empty stool next to Ben Massengale. Even when the place was crowded, there was usually an empty stool alongside him. He rarely put in his upper bridge anymore and reeked from cigarettes and beer.

  Looking at him as he tried to maintain his balance, it was hard to believe he was the same man I had met my first year at St. Andrews. Ben had commanded the ROTC battalion. Tall and rugged, he had won the Navy Cross at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and was larger than life to those of us who went through the program. Now he lived off a small disability pension, and his shrunken cheeks were covered with several days’ growth of gray beard. In spite of his age, his body retained a wiry toughness.

  From the kitchen door, I could smell the aroma of French fries.

  “Can I buy you a meal, Ben?” I asked.

  He looked at me with moist eyes.

  “Not hungry right now,” he said as Kelly sailed into view behind the bar.

  “You slay any dragons today?” she asked.

  “I saw a couple,” I said. “They weren’t pretty.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “What are you having?”

  In her forties, she still maintained the figure that had once graced Playboy in one of the college spreads featuring bare-assed girls from the different football conferences. Kelly was wearing a short-sleeved crimson shirt over skin-tight red bullfighter pants. She was a sun worshipper and her skin was a rich golden brown, which dramatically set off her naturally blonde hair.

  “Black coffee,” I said.

  She glanced at me in surprise.

  “I’m working.”

  “Coffee it is,” she said, moving off.

  I saw someone trying to open one of the back windows in the bar that hung over the edge of the gorge. The window had been nailed shut after a drunk had fallen through it to his death. The recollection brought my mind back to why Dennis Wheatley would have been on the footbridge if he was afraid of heights. No answer came to me.

  I was finishing my second cup of coffee when I heard nervous giggling behind me and turned to see four slumming angels in the space behind us. That’s what Kelly called them, St. Andrews coeds who thought it was cool to occasionally drink with the peasants before heading back to their dorm or sorority house. They were standing together in an awkward circle, sipping longneck bottles of Labatt Blue and gazing around the bar as if we were zoo animals.

  “So what do you do?” one of them asked me.

  “I just escaped from Auburn State Prison,” I said.

  One of the girls giggled again. Sipping his shot of rye, Ben managed to swing around on his stool without falling off and said, “Honey, I’m ninety-four fucking years old.”

  “You don’t look a day over three hundred,” said the girl, grinning back at her friends.

  “On this day in 1943, I was on the canal,” he came back at her.

  “What canal?” asked the coed as Kelly set another mug of coffee in front of me.

  “The canal . . . Second Marine Raiders. We knocked their Jap asses back at the Tenaru River . . . to Red Mike Edson,” he said, raising his empty glass in salute.

  “You fought what today?” she asked.

  “The goddamn Japs,” said Ben.

  One of the girls visibly recoiled. She looked Japanese.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself. That’s a racial slur,” declared one of her friends.

  “What canal is he talking about?” repeated the first girl.

  “Guadalcanal,” said a gray-haired man sitting on the other side of Ben. “Colonel Mike Edson commanded the Marine Raiders at Bloody Ridge.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Ben, nodding. “Best goddamn marine I ever served under.”

  The gray-haired man was wearing an old army field jacket. Unlike the ones kids buy at the army surplus outlets, this one still had patches on it, including the Vietnam combat badge. The Creeker drew a lot of retired military men.

  “Where is Guadalcanal?” asked the girl.

  “A different universe,” said the Vietnam veteran.

  The slumming angels briefly huddled together before moving out in tight formation through the exit door to the side porch.

  “Goddamn . . . I still like the young ones,” said Ben glumly as he watched them go.

  I turned back to Kelly, who had just poured a couple of fingers of something into a small tumbler. She set it in front of me and said, “I think you might nee
d this.”

  I looked down into the dark-amber fluid. I knew exactly what it was. I could see the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in one of the little bubbles that frothed near the top of the glass. The home place of Sergeant Alvin York. Generations of mountain men had labored very hard to bring this elixir to me. I thought about everything I was supposed to be doing and knew it was a mistake to take the first sip.

  I held the glass up to my nose. The fragrance rose toward the back of my sinus passages and met my brain. I downed the two fingers of George Dickel sour mash in one long swallow. A moment later, I felt its warmth heading south with a kick to my heart and then down to my stomach. I carefully placed the tumbler back on the bar and looked up at Kelly’s big brown eyes.

  “How was that?” she asked.

  “Christmas morning,” I said.

  My mind was suddenly focusing better. There was a distinct clarity to all the sounds and smells that hadn’t been there before. I knew that another one would probably clear my mind even further and nodded at Kelly to pour it.

  I took my time with the second. Two swallows. When I had finished it, my mind was like a steel trap, and my energy level was growing by the minute. It occurred to me that I should phone the call-girl service and try to arrange a meeting with the one Jordan knew as Leila.

  I pulled out my cell phone and walked outside to find a quiet place to make the call. While I was keying in the number, it struck me that if the blackmailer was part of the call-girl operation, he would know that Jordan had received the video recording in the mail and would never set up another date. There was a danger that I would blow the thing sky high. At the same time, I didn’t have any other options.

  The number rang three times.

  “Friends with All the Benefits,” said a sultry female voice. She was probably seventy years old and weighed four hundred pounds.

  “This is Alicia Verlaine,” I said.

  There was a pause, and I could hear keys clicking on a word processor or laptop.

  “Welcome back, dear,” she said without a trace of surprise. “Can I arrange an appointment for you?”