Deadline (9 page)

“I don't know. A news story. Write it straight. That's all I can do right now. I'll do some kind of profile, too. ‘Stobit,' they call it. Part story, part obituary. But I'll keep pushing. Do an editorial. Maybe if I write enough nasty things about the cops and the medical examiner, they'll reopen the case. Bow to media pressure. Appoint a special commission to investigate allegations of neglect of duty and corruption.”

“Have you ever had that happen?”

“Written stories that resulted in commissions being formed?”

“Yeah.”

“Actually, I was involved in one. The
Journal
, in Providence. They had this hotshot investigative reporter who did some stories on a Mafia judge. Guy ended up being booted off the bench. I was just a gofer. But that was the
Journal
. This is the
Androscoggin Review
. There's something called the clout factor, and I don't know how much we have.”

I finished my beer and put it down on the floor by Roxanne's shoes.

“I guess I'll find out,” I said.

“You've got clout with me,” Roxanne said.

“Just so you don't want me to tie you up.”

“Do people really do that?” she giggled.

“Don't ask me. I just know what I see in Times Square.”

“And what's that?”

“Nothing as nice as what I see right now.”

“You didn't really go there, did you? To those movies, I mean.”

“Hell no. I just went there to buy heroin.”

“What am I getting myself into here?” she said, putting her arms around me.

“I've been asking myself that question,” I said, kissing her deeply, and then deeper than that.

6

I
really had worked on a story like that. It was back when I was a young would-be hotshot working eighty hours a week at the
Journal
. The story had to do with bid-rigging and the construction industry and this judge who was on the take, but I didn't actually write it. I was what they called a contributing reporter, doing groundwork as part of the investigative team and getting my name at the end of the story in agate. The reporter who did the writing later won a Pulitzer for his work on the Mafia. He accepted it and packed his family off to Miami to work for the
Herald
. Rhode Island was a small state, and a lot of people didn't like him.

But I had never felt that I was in any danger back then, meeting construction-company sources in shopping malls and rousting Mafia types in their offices. Nobody went after reporters, and besides, I was twenty-four and I wasn't afraid of anything.

In eleven years, I'd changed.

Over the years, I'd gotten the late-night phone calls, the notes nailed to the door of the apartment. Bad grammar. Atrocious spelling. Threats of violence and a sad commentary on the state of public education. But even then, I'd had the protection of being one of
millions. I could disappear into the crowd, hide behind the big security guards who stood in the
Times
lobby. In Androscoggin, there was no place to hide.

It was morning and I stayed in bed and thought about things. The
Journal
. Roxanne in bed. God, she was voracious in a single-minded, almost athletic sort of way. After the self-doubting neurotics I'd been with, it was almost baffling. Could she really be that well-adjusted?

She had left while it was still dark, a figure in a skirt and white blouse, bending over me with shoes in her hand. She'd said she'd call me, and then there was the faint whir of the Subaru motor and the sound of gravel and leaves crunching in the driveway.

Exit, stage left.

Her assessment of Arthur was interesting. That he was polite and nice. With Roxanne, there were no snide remarks about his clothes, his hair. Ridiculing wouldn't have accomplished much, she'd probably say. And if you didn't make fun of his clothes, there wasn't much more to say.

Arthur was very private. He never talked about himself, his family. He'd never given me a clue of what he did when he wasn't shooting pictures for the paper. I hadn't seen a television or even a radio in his studio. Maybe photography was his life. His photography. The Knights of Columbus bowling champs. The Garden Club and the Androscoggin High School basketball team.

The phone rang once and stopped, jarring me loose from the bed. I stood in front of the window for a second, naked from the night before. Outside, it was cloudy and raw and looked cold enough to snow. I grabbed my robe, picked up two empty Molson bottles from the floor, and went to the kitchen to make breakfast.

I was out of the house at 8:30. The Volvo started hard, and I sat for a minute to let it warm up. It was a car that taught you Nordic discipline. A good student, I waited for the temperature gauge to inch past the line next to “C” and started downtown through the back streets.

Lawns were covered with a film of frosted oak leaves and a light tentative snow was beginning to fall. I drove down streets lined with old Victorian houses, the town's showplaces of the last century. Some were faded but intact. Others had been chopped into apartments, the intricate detail yanked off as it rotted. The doctors and lawyers and lumber and paper barons were gone, and another era had come to a not-so-graceful end.

The new money did not build mansions. The new money was mill money, and it was earned at sixteen dollars an hour, time and a half on weekends and holidays. It built ranch houses on slabs with oversize garages for ski boats and snowmobiles and new four-wheel-drive pickups. It bought security and luxury that hadn't even been dreamed of by earlier generations. It was hard-earned union money, and sometimes I wondered how long it would last.

At the west end of town, I cut in on a convoy of pulp trucks lumbering toward the mill. On the upgrades, the drivers downshifted and the trucks shuddered under the strain, coughing big clouds of diesel smoke. I followed the dirty orange warning flag that dangled from the waving tip of the longest spruce log in the load of the truck in front of me. The tree was spindly, maybe eight inches at the stump and thirty years old. That was what they were cutting now because most of the bigger stumpage had been cut. The country wiped its noses and kitchen counters faster than trees could grow in the Maine woods.

Where the pulpwood procession went straight on Route 108, I took a left and drove past the boxcars and storage sheds down to the canal road. When I pulled up to where Arthur had been pulled out, two kids, thirteen or fourteen, were standing on the wall. They looked over their shoulders at me when I got out of the car. One of them flicked a cigarette out into the water.

I walked up and said hello. They looked at me suspiciously, then grunted a guttural greeting. We stood there, the three of us.

They were wearing high-top sneakers with the laces undone. Their blue denim jackets had designs scrawled on the back with ballpoint pen. Red bandannas hung limply from their back pockets.

We looked down at the black water. The jagged chunks of ice broken by the rescue boat had refrozen in a zigzag pattern like the fruit in Jell-O salad.

“You a cop or something?” one of the kids suddenly asked.

He looked at me defiantly, one eye covered with a swatch of blond hair.

“No,” I said. “I work for the paper.”

“The paper here? I worked for the paper. Had a route but quit it.”

“Too much work?”

“Naah. I didn't feel like doing it.”

We looked at the water some more. It looked bitterly cold but deadly as hot tar. The walls were sheer granite slabs, stacked on top of each other. There was no easy way out, and the water wouldn't give you much time to think about it.

“A guy bought it here,” the short kid said.

“Yeah, I heard,” I said.

“Friend of mine saw him. In the water there, with his arms out like this.”

He held his arms out in front of him and stuck out his tongue and tilted his head. His friend snorted. The short kid grinned at me.

“My friend knew he was dead. He freaked right out, man.”

“Scared him, huh?”

“No, it didn't scare him or nothin' like that. It was just, like, gross. Like the guy was in there floating and everything, and he was dead. It was some old guy. He bit it, man. Big-time.”

We stood and looked down at our feet. Four dirty sneakers. Two tan leather boots.

The kid turned toward the Volvo.

“What kind of a car is that?”

“Volvo.”

“That from Japan or someplace?”

“Sweden.”

“What?”

“It's Swedish. Made in Sweden. It's a country in Europe.”

“What is it? An antique or something?”

“It's not that old. It's a sixty-four.”

“That's old. Me and him weren't even born yet.”

“Nope.”

“I've got a dirt bike. Suzuki two-fifty. I bet it's faster than that.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But the car's warmer.”

We still stared. They seemed mildly fascinated by the idea that a man had died here and their friend had seen him. Maybe it gave them a sense of their own mortality, the frail thread from which all life hangs.

“What do you think happened to him?” I asked them.

“I bet he got drunk and passed out and fell in,” the taller kid said, speaking for the first time. “Probably some old wino. Probably puked on himself and fell in.”

The short kid made a gagging sound and leaned over the edge. They both laughed, and I was reminded of the boys whooping in the classroom the day before. I left them there and went back to the car and drove back up through the junk and shacks toward the highway.

So that was the crime scene. No cop. No cordon. Nothing that could ever be introduced as evidence without noting that it had been trampled by truants and firemen and any of the other countless people who had wanted to come down and see where Arthur Bertin had died. The old guy. The wino.

He might have been old by the kids' standards, but he wasn't a wino. He never drank that I knew of. In fact, he seemed as terrified of alcohol as he was of women.

No booze. No women. No family, and no one I would really call a friend. What did that leave?

It was almost nine o'clock and everyone would be in at the office, drinking coffee and waiting for the caffeine to seep into their bloodstreams so they could function enough to begin the day's business. They wouldn't need me for a while. They certainly wouldn't miss me for at least two cups.

I drove back slowly, passing oncoming pulp trucks. When I came to the turnoff to Court Street and the downtown, I braked, thought for a second, and then drove straight, over the bridge and out Route 2.

In five minutes, I turned off the main road and slowed as I passed Arthur's studio. A piece of cardboard had been stuck in the window that had been broken while I was in the building the last time. The place looked even more deserted, more forlorn.

I made one pass, then turned around in the vacant gas station and came back. This time I made it more official, pulling up in front of the door for anyone to see. If anybody asked, I was looking for negatives Arthur had processed for the
Review
. Important negatives. To make important prints. I checked the front door and then remembered that I was still carrying the key from the last time. The key turned and I went in.

The room seemed even more dank. The air smelled unclean. I flicked on the bare overhead bulb and wondered who paid the electric bill when the customer was deceased. Maybe Arthur paid in advance.

From the front room, I pushed through the blanket to the darkroom and fumbled for the switch. The safelight went on and the room glowed amber. I waited for my eyes to adjust and then started rummaging in the half-dark.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but it wasn't negatives for the paper. It was something, anything, that didn't have to do with the
Review
. Something that would tell me about the rest of Arthur's life. Something that would tell me why he was in the drawer at the morgue when he didn't drink, drive drunk, chase after women, or climb mountains.

The darkroom was filled with supplies: paper, dark brown jugs of developer and fixer, boxes of rejected prints. Arthur's stuff wasn't horrible but it wasn't good, either, and it was interesting to see how hard he had worked to come up with even mediocre results.

I flipped through the prints—football, clubs, people passing a giant cardboard check—and opened the cupboards. More jugs, empty and coated with dust. Pieces of enlargers. Lenses. Unidentifiable junk. I weeded through it.

Nothing.

I pushed through the blanket and into the bedroom and found the light. The murderous bunnies and teddy bears eyed me as I picked through a couple of cartons and found nothing but photo magazines, old yellowed copies of the
Review
, and more dirt and dust. On the bunny shelf, it was more of the same. Years of accumulated, worthless junk. I inched along the shelf, squatting and moving things aside until something stopped me.