The Weight of Living

by Michael Daigle

  “Good luck with that,” Nagler yelled as he walked away. Then he turned back. “Why Calista?”

  “Something about the way she looked at those boxes of books that got dropped at Leonard’s. I mean, they’re just books, right? But a shade came over her face, a look that only would come if you knew something about the books or the company that sent them or the address. Something. She seemed afraid of something, and I’ll tell you, Frank, if she knows something about the Mine Hill Foundation, maybe she has a reason to be afraid.”

  Nagler pondered Dawson’s reply, then flicked up and eyebrow and said, “Maybe. Guess I better ask.” Then he walked away.

  Dawson paced in the middle of the street, surveying the mess he was in. The truck in front was a double-widebody with dual rear wheels and a trailer hitch that nearly touched his grill. The rear truck had a raised suspension so its bumper was level with the trunk of the Nissan. Dawson guessed he had a total of about eight inches of clearance.

  He spied a guy in a hardhat and walked over.

  “Hey, hi. Any idea who owns these trucks? I’m jammed in there pretty good. Maybe they could move them, or one of them.”

  The hardhat squinted over at the trucks and said, “Don’t think they’re ours,” and walked away.

  Crap. Dawson got into the car, started the engine and thought, forward or reverse? He couldn’t see the trailer hitch, so he put the Nissan in reverse and the car followed the natural downslope of the street and rolled back until he heard a slight metallic thump as his trunk stopped at the truck’s bumper.

  He turned the steering wheel toward the street and shifted to drive, lightly touched the gas and clenched his teeth as the car shifted forward inches. He hit the brakes hard. He didn’t want to drive the end of that trailer hitch into his grill.

  Then back, a little too fast, and there was a more solid thump. Shit. Turn the wheels, then forward. Where’s the hitch? Then back, turn the wheel, then forward, maybe enough clearance, then turn, and as he turned he heard, a scratching sound as he guessed the trailer hitch scraped against his grill and hood.

  But he was out. And sweating. Damn it.

  He got out of his car and examined the trailer hitch and the chrome bumper of the second truck and saw no damage, not even a minor scratch. Then he thought: Take a photo, dummy, just in case, and then used his phone to take several photos of both trucks.

  Jerks.

  ****

  “No prints, Frank. Not really anything.”

  Lieutenant Maria Ramirez handed him a copy of the report on the red pick-up that Garrett Alton had abandoned on the railroad tracks.

  He weighed the paper, thumbed through its several pages and dropped it on his desk in disgust.

  “What do you make of all this, Maria? Alton, I mean. Walks off the job, following people around, apparently steals a truck and some license plates and leaves the truck so everyone can see in the middle of the train tracks.” Nagler screwed up his face. “I checked his records. Had sort of a sketchy childhood, but his police academy work was adequate and he passed his psych exam. No one saw any red flags?”

  Ramirez leaned against the edge of Nagler’s desk. “Sometimes people slip through the cracks. None of my guys seem to know Alton; just never crossed paths.”

  “Yeah,” Nagler nodded. “Same here. But why the big public display with the truck? It’s like he wants us to catch him, but what has he done? The department is investigating the Belmont Street drug bust that netted Del Williams, and while there seems to be something wrong about it, if he came in and talked about it, it would probably help him. What went down there wasn’t his idea. But whose?”

  “Heard they’re looking higher up the food chain,” Ramirez said. “Heard Del’s charges got dropped.”

  “They did,” Nagler smiled. “I knew there was a reason I held onto those drug-testing records.”

  Ramirez’s phone buzzed.

  “Oops, gotta go,” she said. “Three-car crash with a vehicle fire up on Clinton Street.”

  Nagler waved her away. “Yeah, go. Hey, ever heard of an outfit called the Mine Hill Foundation?”

  “No.”

  “Keep an eye out, see if it comes up on anything, okay?”

  “Sure thing,” she said as she walked away, voice fading. “Look out for them, and Garrett Alton and child molesters, murderers, teenage drivers, robbers, little green men...”

  “Ha!” Nagler called out.

  He stretched as he crossed off one item on his mental check list. He called Lauren, but the call went to voice mail.

  “Hey, you, it’s Frank. Can you do me a favor? Find any records on the old theater —permits, violations, grants, anything — for maybe ten, fifteen years? Please? Owe you.” Then he hung up.

  He glanced around the office and saw he was alone. Now, he thought, maybe I can look at those reports Guidrey from Atlanta.

  With a sigh, he flopped open the file. A lot more than I thought. Background. Nebraska accident file. Real estate. Financials. Wow. Why is this guy so important? Shoulda called Guidrey. Oh, well.

  Nagler removed the paperclip from the first set of pages, tapped them into a neat file and said, “Page One.”

  “Suspect drove WB on I80 in an...”

  “Damn it!”

  Nagler slammed the folders shut and kicked back from his desk. “Damn it. Damn it! Who gives a crap about some asshole from Georgia?”

  Maybe we’re just running in circles, he thought sourly.

  Alton could be just a confused kid. Why not return to the department and face the probable suspension?

  Then why is he following Lauren? And why did he say that he didn’t know the little girl? But why doesn’t anyone else seem to know her?

  Nagler stared across the dark office into the glare of the distant windows.

  They had shown the girl’s photos to dozens of prostitutes and pimps, jailed or otherwise, to motel managers at places like the Boundary Motel, places known for one-hour room rentals, to doctors, social works, school teachers, junior high school kids, and no one said they recognized her. He wanted to grill the Boundary Motel owner about allowing video tapes to be made in his rooms, but held off.

  Rashad Jackson said the city council was considering a resolution to petition the state family welfare office to allow her to be sent to a state facility for children. The city was paying for her care at the nun’s home, he said, and the account used for those payments was about empty.

  To Nagler, that prospect sounded more frightening than Bruno Hapworth’s warning that the Mine Hill Foundation thugs wanted her.

  Or is it the same thing?

  He heard the soft steps, and the call of his name. “Frank?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Over here. Hey.” He stood up.

  It was Calista Knox. Now? No.

  “Well, hi, Calista.” They shared a cheek kiss. “Here, sit. What’s up? Nice tat,” he said and nodded at her left shoulder where “Leonard” had appeared in a red script about a week ago.

  She touched it softly, and bit her lower lip. “I use my body to express my feelings, and it was a way to show Leonard and everyone else how much a part of me he’s become.”

  Nagler reached over and touched her hand. “Thank you for that.”

  She sat and glanced around the dark, quiet room.

  “Thought it would be a little busier,” she said.

  Nagler threw out a hard breath and shrugged. “Half the department has been laid off.”

  “Sorry. A lot different than when I was here as a kid.”

  Nagler smiled. “What for?”

  “Shoplifting, mostly. And other stuff.”

  Nagler knew she was not in his office to confess to past behaviors. “You don’t need to tell me.”

  She grinned oddly.

  “The teachers called me ‘incorrigible.’ In fourth grade, they caught me in the little girls room with my pants down and three boys staring. Cost them a quarter. By eighth grade, I’d go into the woods with three
or four boys, strip down and give them all hand-jobs for five bucks and in high school it was blow jobs for twenty. Boys are so stupid. They thought it was a conquest, some rite of passage, but for me it was survival.”

  “What’s that mean?” The plain spoken nature of the answer, the hard honesty of it, set him back. If it was honest.

  “I was on my own, Frank. My parents divorced and my mother hooked up with a guy who used me for practice and entertainment, so I left. Lived on the street.”

  Nagler leaned back in his chair. “How’d you manage not to become a pro?”

  “That wasn’t me, Frank. I saw the working girls and the pimps, strung out, heading for a dead end. I wasn’t about to have some fat drunk put his dick up my ass. I know it sounds bad, but in high school, I had a few guys, and would hit them up when I needed money for food. After a while, they’d just give me the twenty.

  “I was a good kid. Just lived on the street. Went to school, got good grades. Took baths in the river at night. I knew who I was, but I couldn’t live there. It would have killed me.”

  “How’d you avoid social services?”

  Calista laughed. “I lied, and then never went to the meetings they set up. I knew all the empty buildings in Ironton. They would have just put me back with my mother and her jerk boyfriend.”

  He shook his head. “Man,” he said softly. Maybe that’s where all the tenderness she shows Leonard comes from. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah.” Calista’s face turned soft and she stared at the floor. “A nun. Caught me digging through the trash for food and thrown-out clothes behind St. Francis. Told me there was place to stay. The door was unlocked. No pressure.”

  “Sister Katherine,” Nagler said.

  Calista laughed. “How’d you know?”

  “She’s known me since I was six,” he said. “She had a direct line to my mother, so I never got away with anything. When was the last time you spoke with her?”

  Calista was puzzled. “After high school. Why?”

  “Want to see her again? I have to head up there in a while. The sisters are caring for the girl we found on the street. Unless you have somewhere else to be.”

  That wasn’t exactly the truth, but Nagler knew that Calista did not come to his office to testify about her past. And he knew even if he just showed up, Sister Katherine would understand.

  Calista smiled briefly, then her face settled for the first time to a troubled mask. She fumbled with her cell phone cupped between both hands.

  “What’s up, Calista?” Nagler asked. “You didn’t come here to chat about Sister Katherine. Something going on with Leonard?”

  She flashed a weak smile and said, “Oh, no.” Then she leaned back into the chair and her shoulders curled inward as Nagler watched the bold, confident Calista Knox he had known these few months shrink into a fumbling, troubled teen.

  “I know this guy,” she began, staring at the floor. “We met in high school because we have the same background, except for him it was an uncle.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “You know, I can talk about being raped by my mother’s boyfriend, but I can’t figure out how to explain what happened to him because it seemed so much worse, so enormously evil, and I could see even then how scarred he was. I could see it in his eyes, all the pain, and then it would turn to anger and he’d pound the ground and the walls until his hands bled.”

  “Calista...”

  She shook her head. “And sometimes at midnight we’d go to the river, strip down, and lie in the cold water and just try to let the pain flow away. I’d tell him he could have me, but he’d shake his head no and say that he would never make love again because it would be just passing on the poison. Then at times we’d lay naked on the blankets and I’d rub his back and shoulders and he would just cry and all I could do was stroke his hair, the pain was so bad.”

  Nagler said nothing, but watched as her face tightened and curled into a deep, sad frown, the rest of the stories ratting in her head. He wanted to offer sympathy, but that was not why she came.

  “You’ve seen him lately,” Nagler said softly.

  Calista shook her head, scattering the gloom. Her voice lost the mist and she said firmly, “Yes. I met with him the other day.”

  “And...”

  She faced him. “You need to understand, Frank, that when I’m doing physical therapy with Leonard at the book store, I block out most of the background chatter. That’s what my instructors taught me, you know, pay enough attention so you don’t miss a request or comments, but keep the outside conversation light. You need to understand that when I tell you what he said.”

  Nagler silently shrugged and waved one hand.

  “He said this: ‘Tell Nagler I’m not who he is looking for.’”

  “What? Who...”

  Calista held up one hand. “I didn’t understand either, until yesterday when Jimmy Dawson was talking with Lauren about the records he found at the county office, and he said his name. Like I said, I usually don’t listen but the store was exceptionally quiet. I didn’t know you were looking for him.”

  “Who?”

  “Alton Garrett, the cop.”

  What? “Don’t you mean Garrett Alton?”

  “His real name is Alton Garrett. He changed it to try to hide and stop people from asking about his family.”

  “Not much of a change,” Nagler said.

  Calista smiled. “But it worked.” She raised one eyebrow.

  “So what about his family?”

  “No. Not from me, Frank. Look up the name Remington Garrett, or Garrettson, or Garrellson. He apparently went by all three.”

  “Okay, but who is that?”

  “An ancestor, the fount of all evil in that family. Like I said, look him up.”

  She started to leave.

  “Not yet,” Nagler said and nodded at the chair; she sat.

  “Where can I find him, Alton Garrett?”

  “He didn’t tell me where he was staying. We met up at the old elephant sheds on the county golf course in Berkshire Valley. At, like, midnight.”

  “Did he have a vehicle?”

  “Not a black SUV.” She glanced at Nagler and smiled. “I at least knew about that.”

  He nodded yes.

  “I need you to do me a favor, Calista. That’s right,” he said as he saw her hang her head. “Tell him I want, no, have to meet with him. His choice of place and time, even the elephant sheds. He’ll know what it’s about.”

  “Can I ask?”

  “I need to know what he can tell me about our street girl. He knows who she is. The very first night in the police station, he stared at her for more than a minute.”

  He watched as Calista’s face paled and she stared blankly straight ahead.

  “And you know, too, don’t you?” Nagler grabbed his head, elbows on his desk. “Calista!” His hands formed an arch and he placed them in front of his face and shook them at her. “Look, I can tell from your life story that you don’t trust anyone. But you have to trust me. You’re not in trouble, and I’ll help Alton through the mess over Del Williams’ phony drug arrest. I need help with the little girl. The city is asking the state to send her to some kid’s shrink ward in a state hospital, and I have to be able to present some reason to let her stay at the Sisters’ home. So help me here.”

  It was just the way her face changed. No longer shocked, but the cunning Calista emerged.

  “Okay,” she said softly, almost to herself, nodding her head again and again. “Okay.”

  She sat erect and stared at Nagler. “He thinks she might be his sister. He told me had had two younger sisters. But he hadn’t seen either of them in a long time, probably since they were three or four. That’s what he would have been crying about on the river bank. His sisters. I lost touch with him after high school. And the message I gave you was the first contact I’d had with him. I always wondered about his sisters.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Nagler muttered as he
sat frozen in place. Then he shifted back to sit in the chair. “Help me set up a meeting with Alton, please. We need to help each other.”

  Calista stood and turned to leave, saying yes, she would.

  “What if Alton was just trying to help you all this time, all that following was just keeping an eye on you all because he knows something else, knows someone else is out there.”

  “Do you know that to be true? Is that the Mine Hill Foundation?”

  Calista’s eyes darkened as her face flushed.

  “I, no, not really, not sure, but I remember the boy in the woods and how good his soul was, how I cried for him and how I wanted him inside me because I knew that we could heal. Instead he left.”

  Nagler placed an arm around her shoulder and kissed her forehead. “If there is someone else out there, that means you have to be careful as well. Look over your shoulder.” Then he smiled. “In the meantime, go back to the bookstore and give Leonard a big hug and a kiss and tell him you love him. You both need that.”

  She took one step, and then turned back. “I do, you know.”

  Nagler, smiling. “Yes.”

  In the silent office, he thought, a sister, no two sisters. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the trouble ahead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  That had to be some troubling incident

  Nagler nodded to Barry after his coffee cup was refilled.

  “So, I looked up this Remington Garrettson in Mansell’s history,” he said to Dawson between sips. “The guy was real. Lived up north of Milton in the old mining hills. Had a farm and orchard. Sold apple jack. Then found a small iron ore vein and lived off it for a number of years.”

  “Okay,” Dawson said. “Nice American story.”

  “Then it got weird. The guy had five wives and fifteen kids. No mention of illness or accidents. Then there’s this line: ‘The family dropped from public view after a troubling incident.’”

  Dawson chuckled. “That doesn’t say much.”