Deadline (21 page)

Thank you, Annie Oakley.

Fortunately, I could hear that irritating beeping sound the phone company uses to tell you your phone has been shot but still is working. I flipped the base over, picked up the pitted receiver, and dialed 911. A woman, probably a county dispatcher, answered. I told her my address and said I needed an ambulance.

“What is the nature of the emergency?” she asked.

“A woman shot a gun off in my living room and I think she broke her arm.”

“Does she still have the firearm?” the dispatcher asked. “No. I threw it over the couch,” I said.

“Is the firearm in her proximity?”

“I guess, but I don't think she feels like shooting it anymore.”

“Where is she now?” the dispatcher said.

“She's in the living room, crying.”

And she was. I went in and sat with her for a few minutes. Pauline sobbed silently and I patted her on the shoulder. Her shoulders were very thin and bony, and it was like consoling a skeleton. We waited what seemed like a very long time, sitting there in the quiet, and then there were heavy footsteps and voices in the hallway and the room filled with uniforms.

Vigue and a couple of other Androscoggin cops came in first. Then a bunch of volunteer firemen who came to the ambulance call as much for something to do as to help. A big state trooper who had heard the call on her radio and came in case there was a real shoot-out.

Pauline buried her face in her arms and the cops and firemen stood over her like they were visiting a sick aunt. They brought a stretcher up from the ambulance and lifted her onto it and she didn't look at anybody as they maneuvered her through the kitchen and out the door and down the stairs.

After she'd left, I went in and found the state trooper in the bedroom, looking at the basketball-size hole in the wall. The plaster was blown away, the wooden laths underneath were splintered, and there were dime-size holes going through to the darkness outside.

“Buckshot,” the trooper said.

“It's always something,” I said.

“Where's this friggin' picture?” Vigue said.

He was behind the wheel of his cruiser with a clipboard balanced in the steering wheel. The radio was coughing up static, the motor was running, and the heat was blasting onto my feet in the passenger seat.

“At the paper,” I said.

“What's it of?”

“Martin and Arthur's mother. Meredith something.”

“So what's the big deal about it?”

“I don't know. It's of Martin and this woman sitting together. Sort of hugging.”

“So?”

“So, I don't know. I guess Martin had some kind of fling with this lady a hundred years ago.”

“When he could get it up,” Vigue said.

“Whatever. What happened is, I found this picture in Arthur's stuff after he died. Or drowned. He had all these pictures, and this was with them.”

“Like the pictures of the girls.”

“Yeah. They were in a folder. I was looking for stuff for the paper, and there was all this other stuff. I didn't think anything of it. Sort of funny, I thought. Some high-school date or something. No, it was too old for high school. But anyway, I didn't think much of it. But I said something to him about it. Kidding or whatever. He said he wanted it back, but I said I'd have to give it to the police because it wasn't mine to give away, and the police were handling the investigation of Arthur's death.”

“So where is it?” Vigue said.

I shrugged.

“I wasn't sure what to do. I guess I didn't do anything.”

He had stopped taking notes and was smoking a cigarette. He hit the power button and whirred the window down to flick out an ash.

“So that's it?” Vigue said.

I looked at him.

“Is that what all this is about? Some old picture? You gotta be shittin' me.”

“I told you what she said.”

Vigue whirred the window down and flicked the cigarette down again. The ambulance had left and LeMaire, J. and another Androscoggin cop were talking with the trooper next to the trooper's cruiser. All of the cars were running.

“A couple days ago, Martin came and asked me for the picture again. He told me Arthur told him about the picture, and told him—Arthur told Martin, I mean—that the picture was some kind of proof that Martin was Arthur's real father.”

Vigue looked at me.

“Is this
Guiding Light
, or what?” he said.

“‘Hey, don't look at me. That's what he said. Pauline gets there and she's just sitting in the room, and she says Martin told her I had the picture and I was going to give it to you. She said she knew, but he didn't know she knew because she never told him. About this fling.”

“Jesus,” Vigue said.

“I don't know. I know it sounds crazy, but if he thought the whole town was going to find out this deep, dark secret about his past—”

Martin. The pillar of the community, third row at the Baptist Church, writing nice stories about all his nice friends. Vigue had put the pen back in his pocket. It was a gold Cross that went with his uniform. He took it back out.

“I think he had wanted her to think he could be trusted, but then he figured everyone in town would know because of this picture. That's what it looks like, anyway.”

Vigue exhaled the last drag on his cigarette and flicked it out the window onto the driveway.

“Okay,” he said. “Forget the picture. You're all nuts. Did she have the firearm aimed at your person?”

“My general direction. Not when she shot it.”

“She didn't fire it at you.”

“Nope, she was shooting at the phone. It rang. Like I told you. Saved by the bell, I guess.”

Vigue scribbled on the pad.

“You would have been splattered all over that wall, my friend,” he said, without looking up. “The buckshot in that gun would have cut you in two. They'd be in there for weeks with scrub brushes, trying to get Mr. McMorrow off the walls.”

“Funny thought.”

“I'm chuckling,” Vigue said.

“So what happens to her? They put her in jail or the hospital?”

“No way. She's an old lady. She'll get reckless conduct with a firearm, terrorizing, maybe. Keep her in the rubber room for a while, pump her full of dope, and send her home in a few weeks. I got guys who do the same thing and get sixty days and five hundred bucks. Judge tells them not to play with guns in the house anymore.”

“Nice.”

“Goddamn great. Junior gets out and we have to go up and see him next time. Round and round. Same scumbags. All related. This one's father, this one's kids. I get these little bastards, I used to arrest their grandfather. Goes on forever. We'll be six feet under and somebody else will be chasing 'em.”

“You sound like a man who likes his work,” I said.

“Once upon a friggin' time,” Vigue said.

The downtown was deserted that afternoon, as if everyone had been invited to a funeral I didn't know about. I parked the Volvo a
block over on Front Street and walked to the paper. There was no one around, and I locked the door behind me. The word would be out soon enough. Pauline Wiggins went nuts. Tried to shoot the guy from the paper. Pauline? You're kidding. No, I'm serious. Jimmy Lancaster, he told me. His brother-in-law's an EMT. Married to Wendy. Said she almost killed the guy. No, I'm serious. Pauline Wiggins. Almost killed the guy in this house on … well, I'm not sure what street it was on, but it did happen. No, really.

I dreaded it.

Sunday was my day for planning and writing the stories that were hard to do when the office was buzzing, so that's what I pretended to do. I made a pot of coffee at the plastic machine and sat at my desk with a blank legal pad. At the top, I wrote Arthur's name. Then I listed everyone who had anything to do with him. I stared at the names. A loud four-wheel-drive truck went by, five feet off the ground on big tires and red mags. I got a glimpse of it, then listened to the blare of the exhaust until that grew softer and softer and then faded away.

My list was still there.

I had been in the office three minutes, by the clock on the wall. Four minutes and I stared at the names. Arthur. Martin. Pauline and Vigue and Cormier. Me. I had forgotten myself. I put my name on the bottom of the list. I knew him. After my name, I put Cindy and Vern and Marion and Paul. LeMaire, J. Meredith, Arthur's mother. She was dead, but I put her on the list anyway. A list of names. I stared at it and waited for illumination. Seven minutes now. Eight.

I felt hopelessly inadequate, utterly powerless. I knew these names, but little more. Cormier's friend. I added him. The phone caller. I wrote “caller” under Cormier's friend. But the caller could have been somebody already on the list. Not Arthur or Meredith. Or Cormier or his
friend. Unless the call was taped, but that was unlikely. Roxanne would have known if it was a tape recording. I put her name on the list, too.

Twelve minutes.

I looked at the names. It looked like an invitation list for a dinner party. I would have them all to dinner at my house and we would discuss it all in a very British way until the suspect, unable to conceal his guilt, or to live with the cancerous knowledge of his crime, would confess, screaming and crying and sobbing until the credits marched over his bowed head.

Fifteen minutes.

Confess to what? A crime that nobody felt had even happened? To an obscene phone call? To shooting a shotgun through my bedroom wall? No confession needed there. To tossing Arthur in the water and leaving him to drown? He would call out. He would claw at the wall of the canal. He would call out in the night until he was too cold, and then? Would he cry to himself in the dark? Would he pray as death took him? Was there anyone on this list of acquaintances who was capable of leaving a man to die so slowly? You'd have to be crazy—to have a crazy streak.

Pauline.

Nineteen minutes.

The horn sounded at the fire station, three blasts. A rescue call, with volunteers needed. As I walked to the window, a police cruiser whined by, blue lights and siren on. A few seconds later, the rescue truck followed, hissing flat out down the empty street.

My camera was in the car. I jogged over and jumped in and floored it out Front Street and west on to Route 2, just in time to see a fire truck heading up the hill past the falls. I followed as fast as the Volvo would go until I got to the top of the hill and saw the back end
of the rescue truck and the blue lights stopped a couple of miles up the road. A hundred yards behind the rescue truck, I slowed down. I had seen enough car accidents to know there was no need to race. If there was death and destruction, it would be there when I arrived. I slowed down a little more. The readers of the
Review
would have to forgive me for not racing to the scene of the carnage. I fulfilled this part of our contract without enthusiasm, reporting the tragedy because I had to, not because I liked it.

The two cars had hit head-on. They sat crumpled in the middle of the two-lane highway, bleeding gasoline and radiator fluid onto the pavement. I parked behind the ambulance on the shoulder and shut off the motor. Camera in hand, I walked slowly toward the wrecks.

Police and fire radios crackled everywhere. Volunteers in rubber boots ran from their trucks. Two guys from the rescue unit were leaning into the windows of what had been a little Japanese car, a Nissan or a Toyota. It was blue, and there was glass all around it on the road. When I got closer I could hear a woman's voice. She was sobbing, saying “Oh my God” over and over in a high-pitched unnatural voice. One of the rescue guys leaned farther into the window and she screamed.

The other car was a big Chrysler from the early seventies, a big green boat of a car, an armored troop carrier. On the side of the road beside it, four teenage boys stood watching the rescue operation. They were expressionless, as if they had been sedated. Everyone else was running and they were standing still. I shot their picture with the wrecks in the foreground.

LeMaire, J. had a fifth kid off to the side. The kid had shoulder-length black hair tied with a red bandanna. His dungarees were ripped
and his boots were unlaced with his pant legs tucked in, the way I'd seen kids wear them. Country kids, trying to look tough.

This kid did not look tough, though. Next to LeMaire, J., he looked small and skinny. LeMaire, J. had him by the arm with his big paw of a hand and was talking to him in a loud voice that could be heard even over the police radios.

“Have you been drinking?” LeMaire, J. said.

The kid looked at him sullenly.

“I think you've been drinking, and I'm going to have to ask you to put your arms behind your back,” LeMaire, J. said, speaking slowly and methodically in his police voice.

“I ain't putting my arms nowhere, get your hands—” the kid said, but then LeMaire, J. whipped the kid's arms behind him, slipping the cuffs on in the same practiced motion. The kid stumbled and LeMaire, J. held him up by the arms and pushed him toward the cruiser. I backed up a few feet and focused the camera.

I got off three quick shots. As I took the last one, the kid lunged toward me and spat, and I felt something wet on my hands.

“You little bastard,” LeMaire, J. said between his teeth, and spun the kid around and slammed him into the side of the cruiser hard enough to snap the kid's head back and lift his feet off the ground. In some cities it would have been enough to bring on a brutality suit, but in Androscoggin, some of the quaint old ways survived.

LeMaire, J. stuffed the kid in the backseat of the cruiser and came back to the car, where four rescue workers and firemen were taking the woman out of the car on a spine board. She was strapped down like she was going in for shock treatments and she had blonde hair that was curly and had blood in it. The blood looked dark, almost black.

I took a shot of them lifting her out of the window. It had all the elements, as Arthur used to say. The victim, the rescue workers, both cars, the crowd in the background. In the crowd were familiar faces from town, truckers with their names on their shirt pockets. A man in a green chamois shirt and khaki pants had the prosperous look of a tourist, and sure enough, there was a car on the west side of the wreck with blue license plates. Ohio or Connecticut.