Deadline (5 page)

So I'd tried the ME. I'd tried the cops. I could hit the fire station, see if the rescue people had anything to add, but the shift went off at seven, so I'd get somebody who had just come on and didn't know anything about anything. Who did that leave? Taxi drivers? A long shot. Arthur's friends? He didn't have any, that I knew of. But what
did
he have? What did he do? What was inside his head?

Or inside his house?

I walked back up the block, saw Vern across the street outside Perry's again, and waved. He waved and I turned off Main Street on to Court, behind the office, and got the car. It started hard, as usual. I was going to have to get it looked at, but I hadn't found anybody
yet who had the hang of working on twenty-five-year-old Volvos with dual carbs, one of which was screwed up.

It was a weird car, an old Volvo 144 that you didn't see much anymore, especially in Maine, where the winters chewed up vehicles and spat them out. The woman I'd bought it from, a news assistant at the
Times
, hated it because she got it from a guy who was no longer her boyfriend. I'd thought it had character, which it did, but in Androscoggin there were times when it was a little too conspicuous, an easy way for people in town to know where I was, and when.

Maybe I'd trade it in on a log truck.

I drove out Main Street and took a right over the green steel bridge at the Androscoggin Falls. A half-mile west of downtown, I swung off on Carolina Street, went a hundred yards, and parked in the lot of what had been Carolina Street Service but was now closed up, the lot filled with junks.

The black Volvo blended right in.

I got out, crossed the street to the storefront that had been Arthur's studio. Standing at the front door, I looked both ways and fished for the key in the bottom of the mailbox on the wall. That was where Arthur got it when I dropped him off at night. He'd rattle the box, take out the key and unlock the door, and wave once before disappearing inside. I'd never been invited in.

There was mail in the box. Flyers and junk, then the key at the bottom, loose.

I unlocked the door and gave it a nudge with my shoulder. It shuddered open and I stepped into the dim light. My heart pounded as my eyes adjusted and the studio waiting room took shape.

It was dim but not dark. The storefront windows were covered with paper that looked like it had been newsprint but was now brown
from the sun. There was junk everywhere. Newspapers piled in red vinyl chairs. Cartons of books and magazines and stuff along the walls. The place smelled like dust and developer. When I stepped away from the door, my boots grated like sandpaper on the gritty linoleum floor.

Brides had come here with their gowns in plastic bags. Little kids had fussed as their parents had fixed their hair, pulled at their clothes.
Just wait a second. You want to look nice in the picture, don't you?

But that had been a long time ago. A very long time.

I walked across the room to the counter and picked at the stacks of magazines and newspapers and camera parts. The newspapers were yellow. The
Sun
, June 14, 1986; January 30, 1979. Magazines were in piles, dusty.
Photography
, May 1953. A blonde woman in a red leotard and fishnet stockings. Babies and kids in
Universal Photo Almanac
, 1950. John Glenn smiling in his space helmet on the cover of
U.S. Camera International
, 1963. I put the magazines down and walked to a dark gray blanket hung across a doorway. Stopped for a second and then groped inside for a light switch. The light went on. Red. The darkroom. I pushed the blanket aside and stepped in.

There were bottles of chemicals, brown and frosted with dust. Black darkroom sinks. Trays and a couple of enlargers. Next to one of the sinks was a crinkled tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap, pink, with dirt in the cracks. A toothbrush stuck out of a glass.

Arthur's bathroom.

I swallowed and turned back through the blanket. To the left was a narrow hallway, then another blanket, beige instead of gray. I reached and groped again and found the light switch on the right. I flicked it and froze.

It looked like a hideout for a hostage. There was a bed against the far wall, unmade, with gray sheets. At one corner the bedding
was pulled back. The mattress was stained. There was a wooden crate on end next to the bed, with a dirty plate on top and a fork on the plate. On the wall next to the bed was a reflector shade, the kind photographers use to light portraits. It was thick with grime, like a faded dirty parasol.

This had been the studio but was now the bedroom. A studio apartment, silent and still. I walked to the center of the room and stood.

To the right, along the wall, were stuffed toy animals. A teddy bear sat and stared. A light blue bunny rabbit with foot-long ears lay on its side. The tools of the trade, props used to get the little tykes to smile. They looked like they'd come to life and murder children in their beds.

The place was giving me the creeps. I told myself ten more minutes, then out.

Along one wall was a bookshelf. I rummaged through more magazines, more newspapers, folders of old prints of couples and kids and groups lined up and shot against walls, all with
ARTHUR BERTIN PHOTO
stamped on the back. Dead people, I thought. Folder after folder of them. Arthur's portfolio. His friends from the other side.

I walked the room, picking and poking. The crate beside the bed had stuff that looked more recent, less dusty. There were notebooks, white reporters' notebooks from the
Review
, filled with Arthur's scrawl. Pens and reusable film canisters. A binder with more pictures. I opened it to the middle, a photo of a guy in an Army uniform. He was standing beside a car from the early fifties.

Arthur.

He was thinner, with thicker hair that still looked greasy, even back then. On the next page was another picture of him, standing on
the runway of an airfield with planes in the background. It must have been Air Force, not Army. Arthur was looking into the viewfinder of an old 120-millimeter camera. Four smiling guys in uniform were posing in front of a big propeller plane.

The pages went chronologically. An advertisement for Arthur's studio grand opening, May 15, 1958. Arthur Bertin photos clipped from the
Review
and taped to lined paper. A cop beside a wrecked car. A bunch of official types with a shovel.

More pages and more clippings. I went to the back and then turned to the front. A black-and-white wallet-size picture fell out on the floor. I picked it up. It showed a man and woman sitting on a lawn but it was taken at a weird angle, from above and crooked. The man had his arm around the woman's waist. The woman was staring into his eyes, like something from an old movie.

Strange.

The woman was pretty, with dark hair combed back. She was wearing a full skirt with pleats and her legs were stretched out on the grass. They looked like pretty legs. The man looked passionate. I held the picture up to the light. It almost looked like Martin. What? In his passionate youth? In a play? Was that his wife, or was he married before—

I heard a sound.

Scraping. Metallic. Nothing. Then again.

The mailbox. Somebody scraping in the mailbox for the key. But the key was in my pocket.

I listened. Nothing, then another scrape. Nothing. A tap on the door. I closed the binder and put it back on the shelf. Turned and switched off the light. The room went black except for the edges of the blanket at the doorway.

A bang. I stood and listened. Another bang. The door rattled.

I took a step toward the blanket. Fought off an urge to run. Listened.

Nothing.

Was there a back door? I couldn't remember. How would I explain being here in the dark? The landlord? Who would be out there?

There was another bang, then glass breaking, falling on the floor.

I jumped and batted at the blanket and walked toward the front door. Kicked something and stumbled, then ran to the door. There was a fist-size hole near the knob. I waited at the door. Listened. A car whined by, fast. I opened the door but the bottom caught on the glass and I squeezed through the narrow opening and half-walked, half-trotted to the car. Keys. I dug and emptied my pockets. Handkerchief. Change. The studio key. The picture of Martin and the woman. Keys. Get the hell out.

4

S
o now I had a secret. But it was like somebody seeing a murder while committing a burglary. How did I know somebody almost broke into Arthur's? Because I more or less broke in myself.

When I got back to the paper, I felt myself almost slink through the door. For somebody who prided himself on his basic honesty, it wasn't a comfortable feeling.

I needed to stop and think, to sort things out. I needed a timeout.

No such luck.

The first thing I saw was the back of a tan trench coat, gray corporate slacks, corporate-approved L.L. Bean boots.

“Oh, damn,” I said. “Not now.”

David Curry didn't hear me because he was up to his eyebrows in Cindy's aura, thinking that just because she was smiling she was buying his act, which she was, but no more so than she did any of the other male revues that came through the door.

Curry was the local flack for St. Amand Paper, a puffed-up flunky who thought he was really something just because he wore a suit to work. The suits were corporate issue, right down to the yellow tie,
which, in Androscoggin, was like wearing a cummerbund. But Curry wore them because the big guns in Pittsburgh wore them, or at least they had last time he saw them. Of course, yellow had been replaced by red in corporate fashion, but he didn't know that, and I didn't feel like telling him. If he thought wearing a yellow tie would help him to make it through the ten years he had left until retirement, let him wear it. If there were more women in the higher corporate echelons, Curry would wear a dress.

One could only hope.

Curry was a yes-man, a valet for the people who made the real decisions, and, more importantly, didn't want anything printed about the mill or the company that they hadn't written, approved, preread, or censored.

“Hey, Jack,” Curry said, turning around. “How's it going there? On the trail of something hot or what?”

“Not really hot. Arthur Bertin dying. That's probably the biggest.”

“Oh, yeah. Oh, wasn't that a tragedy? Hey, listen, if there's anything the company can do, anything, you give me a call. A real tragedy.”

“On mill property, too,” I said.

“Yeah, wasn't that strange. Where was it exactly? Way down south of the pulp mill, wasn't it? I haven't been down there myself in years.”

“No reason to.”

“No—hey, what's down there? Some storage. Empty property, really. Off the record, I can't see any reason for Arthur to be there, off the record.”

Curry leaned closer. I knew we were talking man to man because I could see the stains on his teeth.

“Now this is really off the record—was he, you know, having problems? Despondent or something, I mean?”

I didn't say anything and he backpedaled.

“I was just curious, you know, if he had some problems and that's what happened. I wondered what happened, why, you know, he'd be there and all. Tragedy, really, 'cause I knew Arthur. He did some work for us years ago, pictures at the retirement dinner. Did a heck of a job, too.”

“I don't doubt it,” I said. “But I didn't think he had any problems. No more than anybody else.”

I paused and looked at him. Waited. Waited some more. Waited for him to get to the point.

Because I knew what he wanted, the slimy little weasel. I was doing a story on the mill and he wanted to run more interference, do a little of what they called damage control. The story was about the mill asking for a tax break from the town. They paid $2.8 million a year and they wanted to knock off $400,000. For weeks, they'd been in “negotiations” with the board of assessors, which was the assessor and four people from the town council. Behind closed doors, they'd been talking about these state formulas which were used to decide how much companies paid in local taxes. In public, there was a shakedown going on, and St. Amand was doing the shaking.

It really was pretty simple.

While St. Amand went for a tax break, it leaked information saying it was considering closing the Androscoggin mill and moving the production of magazine paper to Georgia. In Androscoggin, a leak like this didn't trickle. It hit the town like a thunderstorm, complete with hailstones. Once everybody was good and worried, the company confirmed the rumors by not denying them.

Voilà
. Four hundred grand, delivered on a silver platter.

But not by the
Androscoggin Review
.

In years past, the
Review
would have come out with some boot-licking editorial about the company's contribution to the community, about the need to cooperate with the town's biggest employer. Instead, I made a few phone calls, talked to a couple of people at the
Wall Street Journal
, three or four industry analysts on Wall Street, and called the city in Georgia where the Androscoggin jobs were supposed to go. The
Journal
guys sent up some stories about other paper companies using the same ploy to extract tax breaks. The analysts said it was unlikely that the company would move production away from its Maine wood supply. The union guys in Georgia said they'd been told their jobs might be moved to Maine.