Memory Man (23 page)

D
ECKER STARED UP
at the front of the bar. Then he looked on the right side of the façade and then on the left. The buildings here were brick and dilapidated.

He walked down the stairs and into the dark, smoky interior.

He gazed around and saw two working-class men at a booth in the back, both hefting beer mugs. There was a woman alone at a counter-height round table with a glass of white wine in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. As he watched she placed her cigarette in a black plastic ashtray and set her wineglass down, pulled a compact and lipstick from her purse, and redid her mouth.

Decker passed by them all and walked up to the bar. The same barman was there. Decker sat and ordered a Coors. The barman poured out the draft, skimmed off the foam on top with a butter knife, and slid it across, in return for which Decker passed him a fiver and told him to keep the change. This got the man’s attention.

“You were in here before,” said the barman.

Decker nodded and sipped his beer. “I was. With the other guy.”

“Yeah, that other guy. Weirdo.”

“Has he been back in?”

“Nah.” The man started to wipe down the mahogany bar using a rag with a circular motion briskly applied.

“Had he been in before?”

“Couple times.”

“You ever talk to him?’

“He never talked to nobody. Except you.”

“He live around here?”

“Don’t know. Only saw his back leaving the place. Never saw him past that.”

“I don’t see that waitress around.”

The barman chuckled. “That’s right.”

“What happened to her?”

“Her?” He chuckled harder and then stopped wiping, put his elbows on the bar, leaned across, and said, “You call
it
a
her
. Maybe I don’t.”

“Then what do you call
it
?”

The barman pointed a finger at Decker. “Now that’s a damn good question. I don’t do the hiring here. I just pour the drinks and wipe stuff down and throw the occasional drunk bastard out the door.”

“Who hired her?”

“Management, whoever they are. Place has been sold four times in three years. Only constant is yours truly, and I wouldn’t be here ’cept I can’t find nothing else that pays better.”

“So are you saying she was a guy in drag?”

“Or something, yeah. Don’t know for sure. And I wasn’t about to check to confirm. I don’t hit from that side of the plate.”

Decker closed his eyes and the frames flipped through his head.

Tall, thin, blonde curls.

That hid pretty much all of her face.

Or
his
face.

And maybe the Adam’s apple, the surefire giveaway. Only surgery could take care of that.

“You have any info on the person? Must have given a name, address. Stuff for payroll?”

“Management has all that. And they’re not even local. Maybe even another state. Think they rolled up a bunch of businesses and combined it into one entity. Economy of scale or some shit like that. I bet they’re making a crapload of money, me not so much.”

“So none of those records are kept here?”

“No.”

“Who interviewed the person for the job?”

“Came from an agency.”

“You know which one?”

The barman looked at Decker. “Why, you hit from that side of the plate?”

Decker pulled out his police credentials. “Working a case. This person might be someone I need to talk to.”

The man studied the credentials and said, “Okay. Matter of fact, I don’t know which one.
It
just showed up one day and started working.”

“And you didn’t question that?”

“Hey, we needed a waitress. The other one didn’t show. Said she’d been sent by the temp agency that management uses. So I put it to work.”

“When was this?”

“Day before you came in with that other guy.”

“And if she hadn’t been sent by the temp agency?”

“Well, why the hell would it lie about that?”

“You have a restroom here just for employees?”

“Yeah, in the back.”

“The person ever use it?”

“I’m sure it did. Everyone has to take a pee or something more, right? Either standing up or sitting down.”

“Show me.”

The barman led him down a rear hall to a battered door marked
RESTROOM
.

“You got any duct tape?” Decker asked.

“In the back.”

“Get it for me.”

The confused barman left and returned a minute later with a roll.

Decker proceeded to tape off the door with long strips crisscrossing the doorway.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked the barman.

“I’ll have a forensics team here in five minutes. No one goes in.”

“But what if I have to use the facilities?”

“Use the one the paying customers do. And you’re going to be asked to give a description of
it
, so start racking your memory for every little detail.”

Decker made the call to Lancaster.

She said, “I’ll send them right now. How was your talk with Bogart?”

“Predictable.”

He clicked off and walked outside.

He had solved two things by coming here.

First, the waitress had taken the photograph of him and Leopold at the bar and sent it and the story elements to Alexandra Jamison. She was the only one who could have done it. The intent had been to ruin Decker’s reputation, to the extent he had one. But more than that, they wanted him to maybe even start questioning the truth.

Second, she had left the bar, gotten a car, and picked up Leopold when he left the bar. It must have been a hybrid or electric car, because Decker had not heard a car engine and he would have.

In the frames in his mind there was only the barman left that day when Leopold had exited. The waitress wasn’t there. Because she’d gone for the car.

A man in women’s clothing.

Or maybe a woman who used to be a man dressed in women’s clothing. It was like that movie he’d seen years ago with James Garner and Julie Andrews,
Victor Victoria
.

And maybe the waitress was Sebastian Leopold’s partner in crime.

Decker had not looked at the person’s feet, but now desperately wished he had. But if he had to guess, she would have been wearing a size nine. He tried to estimate her height in his mind. He had been sitting. She might have been wearing heels. He rolled the frames through.

Maybe five-ten or -eleven. And slim, with narrow shoulders and hips.

A long way from six-two and over two hundred pounds with shoulders as wide as Decker’s.

But not inconceivable. When the will was there, anything was possible. And it seemed anything had been possible here.

He waited for the forensics team. When they showed, he told them exactly what he wanted done. Lancaster had instructed them to follow Decker’s orders to the letter. A sketch artist sat down with the barman.

Then Decker set off for the next place.

Because something else had just occurred to him.

S
HOP CLASS.

Shop class that never was this year because the teacher had quit before the school year started.

Decker had wondered if there was another reason—other than the passageway coming up in the storage room off the classroom—for the shooter to want access to this particular space.

He stepped through and into the storage room in the rear. He eyed the mounds of junk from old projects left behind like dinosaur bones waiting for an archaeological dig.

Well, Decker intended to dig.

He started at the top of each mound and worked his way to the bottom.

He found nothing useful. So he sat on the floor and thought about it. He went through the possible steps in his head. Up here, he decided, would not be pragmatic. The shooter would need more privacy, more of a buffer zone.

He left the storage room and went down the steps to the other room that had the false wall made of balsa wood. The junk pile here had been moved to the side by the shooter.

Decker didn’t have to dig very deeply through all the crap.

He pulled out the object and held it up.

A chicken-wire and leather contraption with padding built into it. The form was instantly recognizable to an old jock like Decker.

Football shoulder pads.

But much more than that. The structure went all the way down to the waist and included supports for the arms, broadening and thickening at every point. It was built on hinges that swung open when he undid two latches, like a shorter version of the Iron Maiden torture device from medieval times. It was like an entire torso that one could strap on and become basically twice one’s size.

He opened the contraption fully and tried to put it on. The thing was, though, he was already nearly the same size, so it wouldn’t fit him. But it would fit someone half his size. Instant giant. He marveled at how flexible and malleable were the wire and leather and straps holding it all together. It would have to be this flexible, because the person had had to both move and shoot while wearing it.

One-forty became two-hundred-plus pounds. Slim became the build of a defensive tackle.

Next in the mounds of junk he found pads that strapped onto the legs, adding weight and depth to the lower frame, matching the enhancements to the upper.

Okay, that solved the question of literal bulk.

Now came the question of height.

He kept digging.

And found it wedged between two old lamps and a table made partly from a tree stump.

He held it up, measured it with his eye. It was a boot with no heel, but rather a thickened sole running the length of the footwear. Wearing it would raise a person’s height about three or so inches. And he concluded that it would do so more effectively than a heel. Three-inch heels would severely limit one’s agility. This was simply like walking on a level raised platform. He placed the boot against his own shoe. Far smaller. Nine or nine and a half.

He found the matching one a few seconds later.

He put the boots on the floor. Even though he couldn’t wedge his far larger feet inside them, he was able to stand on top of them.

Six-five instantly became six-eight.

The same way five-ten or five-eleven became six-two.

He doubted that the shooter could have brought this equipment in with him on the night of the school play, stashed it in the cafeteria, and then taken it with him along the passageway. But he didn’t have to. He could have snuck all this in anytime he wanted and left it right here.

He found a trash bag and piled all of the items into it.

Okay, that solved the size, and also how the man had gotten through the door from the passageway without moving the AC units. He had been a much thinner man then, perhaps as lean as Lancaster, who’d had no trouble getting through the narrow opening. Lean like the waitress; she could have managed it.

Decker’s mind flashed to the camera at the rear entrance to the school. Only from the waist up. The shooter didn’t want any possibility that the platform boots would be videotaped.

The shooter wouldn’t have worried about eyewitnesses observing his feet. Those who weren’t dead surely wouldn’t have bothered to notice the footwear, not when someone was shooting at them.

He called Lancaster and told her what he’d found.

Several “holy shits” later she said she would be there in ten minutes to pick up the evidence in the trash bag.

Decker perched on a counter in the middle of the shop class and looked around. He wanted to order this all in his head, putting the puzzle pieces together, if only to see how many empty spots he still had.

Shooter comes into the school the night of the play, holes up in the freezer in the cafeteria. He comes out the next morning, uses the passageway from the cafeteria to get to the back of the school unseen. He’d arranged to meet Debbie Watson in the shop class. He knocks her out, changes into his gear, guns up, walks in front of the camera after dragging Debbie out of the shop class and positioning her next to her locker, and then turns the corner and shoots her. Then he goes on his killing spree. From the back to the front of the school. Then he flees through the passage in the cafeteria that connected to McDonald Army Base, the existence of which he found out from Debbie Watson. He stashes the elements of his disguise in the junk pile, which would account for the second set of shoeprints going up those stairs. After that, he makes his escape through the old Army base after accessing the passageway revealed through the supposedly solid wall Decker had discovered.

Okay, if that’s how it went down, Decker had one very important question.

Why Mansfield? Why shoot this place up?

He had one idea.

He had attended school here. But if this really was personal to him, there were things here that were very personal to Amos Decker. They literally had his name on them.

He lowered himself off the counter and strode down the hall.

School had not resumed and there was talk that students would be transported to other high schools in the area to finish out at least the first semester. Then over the holidays the town would figure out what to do about the rest of the year.

Decker was torn about students ever returning here.

Part of him wanted this place demolished and turned into some sort of memorial for the dead.

The other part of him didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction of having forced the town to take such a drastic step. It would be like giving in to terrorists.

He entered the gymnasium and walked quickly over to a large display cabinet set against one wall. In here were all the trophies and other awards won by Mansfield over the years. They were arranged in chronological order, so it was easy enough for Decker to find what he was looking for.

Only they weren’t there.

Every award that he had won, every trophy that had held his name—and there were about a dozen—was gone. He checked and rechecked. They were not there.

He leaned against the case and put his hand up to his mouth.

Someone had come in here and shot up Mansfield High. And the mass murderer had done it because of him. Amos Decker.

Same motivation for his family’s being murdered.

Me, Amos Decker.

He suddenly felt like Dwayne LeCroix had leveled him again.

His phone buzzed. He thought it was Lancaster.

It wasn’t. It was Bogart.

“Decker, we found something in a Dumpster in the alley where Nora Lafferty was taken. You were right. It was a policeman’s uniform.”

Decker sensed something else coming, though, from the man’s unnerved tone.

“What else?”

“The uniform was authentic. It was a Burlington Police Department standard issue.”

“And?”

“And the uniform had a name stitched on it.”

“They all do. Whose name was it?”

But somehow Decker already knew the answer.

“It was
your
name,” replied Bogart.