Needful Things (62 page)

“What?
Who?”

“I said
might,
remember.”

“I know what you said. Don't tease me. Who is it?”

“A kid. The woman who lives next door to the Jerzycks heard noises and came out to try and see what was going on. She said she thought maybe ‘that bitch'—her words—had finally gotten mad enough at her husband to throw him out a window. She saw the kid pedaling away from the house, looking scared. She asked him what was going on. He said he thought maybe Mr. and Mrs. Jerzyck were having a fight. Well, that was what
she
thought, too, and since the noises had stopped by then, she didn't think any more about it.”

“That must have been Jillian Mislaburski,” Alan said. “The house on the other side of the Jerzyck place is empty—up for sale.”

“Yeah. Jillian Misla-whatski. That's what I've got here.”

“Who was the kid?”

“Dunno. She recognized him but couldn't come up
with the name. She says he's from the neighborhood, though—probably from right there on the block. We'll find him.”

“How old?”

“She said between eleven and fourteen.”

“Henry? Be a pal and let
me
find him. Would you do that?”

“Yep,” Henry said at once, and Alan relaxed. “I don't understand why we have to roll these investigations when the crime happens right in the county seat, anyway. They let them fry their own fish in Portland and Bangor, so why not Castle Rock? Christ, I wasn't even sure how to pronounce that woman's
name
until you said it out loud!”

“There are a lot of Poles in The Rock,” Alan said absently. He tore a pink Traffic Warning form from the pad on his desk and jotted
Jill Mislaburski
and
Boy, 11
–
14
on the back.

“If my guys find this kid, he's gonna see three big State Troops and be so scared everything goes out of his head,” Henry said. “He probably knows you—don't you go around and talk at the schools?”

“Yes, about the D.A.R.E. program and on Law and Safety Day,” Alan said. He was trying to think of families with kids on the block where the Jerzycks and the Mislaburskis lived. If Jill Mislaburski recognized him but didn't know his name, that probably meant the kid lived around the corner, or maybe on Pond Street. Alan wrote three names quickly on the sheet of scrap paper:
DeLois, Rusk, Bellingham.
There were probably other families with boys in the right age-group that he couldn't remember right off the bat, but those three would do for a start. A quick canvass would almost certainly turn the kid up.

“Did Jill know what time she heard the ruckus and saw the boy?” Alan asked.

“She's not sure, but she thinks it was after eleven.”

“So it wasn't the Jerzycks fighting, because the Jerzycks were at Mass.”

“Right.”

“Then it was the rock-thrower.”

“Right again.”

“This one's
real
weird, Henry.”

“That's three in a
row. One more and you win the toaster oven.”

“I wonder if the kid saw who it was?”

“Ordinarily I'd say ‘too good to be true,' but the Mislaburski woman said he looked scared, so maybe he did. If he
did
see the perp, I'll bet you a shot and a beer it wasn't Nettie Cobb. I think somebody played them off against each other, scout, and maybe just for the kick of the thing. Just for that.”

But Alan, who knew the town better than Henry ever would, found this fantastical. “Maybe the kid did it himself,” he said. “Maybe
that's
why he looked scared. Maybe what we've got here is a simple case of vandalism.”

“In a world where there's a Michael Jackson and an asshole like Axl Rose, anything's possible, I suppose,” Henry said, “but I'd like the possibility of vandalism a lot better if the kid was sixteen or seventeen, you know?”

“Yes,” Alan said.

“And why speculate at all, if you can find the kid? You can, can't you?”

“I'm pretty sure, yeah. But I'd like to wait until school lets out, if that's okay with you. It's like you said—scaring him won't do any good.”

“Fine by me; the two ladies aren't going anywhere but into the ground. The reporters are around here, but they're only a nuisance—I swat em like flies.”

Alan looked out the window in time to see a newsvan from WMTW-TV go cruising slowly past, probably bound for the main courthouse entrance around the corner.

“Yeah, they're here, too,” he said.

“Can you call me by five?”

“By four,” Alan said. “Thanks, Henry.”

“Don't mention it,” Henry Payton said, and hung up.

Alan's first impulse was to go get Norris Ridgewick and tell him all about this—Norris made a hell of a good sounding-board, if nothing else. Then he remembered that Norris was probably parked in the middle of Castle Lake with his new fishing rod in his hand.

He made a few more shadow-animals on the wall, then got up. He felt restless, oddly uneasy. It wouldn't hurt to cruise around the block where the murders had taken place. He might remember a few more families with
kids in the right age-brackets if he actually looked at the houses . . . and who knew? Maybe what Henry had said about kids also held true for middle-aged Polish ladies who bought their clothes at Lane Bryant. Jill Mislaburski's memory might improve if the questions were coming from someone with a familiar face.

He started to grab his uniform hat off the top of the coat tree by the door and then left it where it was. It might be better today, he decided, if I only look semi-official. As far as that goes, it wouldn't kill me to take the station wagon.

He left the office and stood in the bullpen for a moment, bemused. John LaPointe had turned his desk and the space around it into something that looked in need of Red Cross flood-relief. Papers were stacked up everywhere. The drawers were nested inside each other, making a Tower of Babel on John's desk-blotter. It looked ready to fall over at any second. And John, ordinarily the most cheerful of police officers, was red-faced and cursing.

“I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap, Johnny,” Alan said, grinning.

John jumped, then turned around. He answered Alan with a grin of his own, one which was both shamefaced and distracted. “Sorry, Alan. I—”

Then Alan was moving. He crossed the room with the same liquid, silent speed that had so struck Polly Chalmers on Friday evening. John LaPointe's mouth fell open. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw what Alan was up to—the two drawers on top of the stack he had made were starting to tumble.

Alan was fast enough to avert an utter disaster, but not fast enough to catch the first drawer. It landed on his feet, scattering papers, paper-clips, and loose bunches of staples everywhere. He pinned the other two against the side of John's desk with his palms.

“Holy Jesus! That was lickety-split, Alan!” John exclaimed.

“Thank you, John,” Alan said with a pained smile. The drawers were starting to slip. Pushing harder did no good; it only made the desk start to move. Also, his toes hurt. “Toss all the compliments you want, by all means.
But in between, maybe you could take the goddam drawer off my feet.”

“Oh! Shit! Right! Right!” John hurried to do it. In his eagerness to remove the drawer, he bumped Alan. Alan lost his tenuous pressure-hold on the two drawers he had caught in time. They also landed on his feet.

“Ouch!”
Alan yelled. He started to grab his right foot and then decided the left one hurt worse.
“Bastard!”

“Holy Jesus, Alan, I'm sorry!”

“What have you got in there?” Alan asked, hopping away with his left foot in his hand. “Half of Castle Land Quarry?”

“I guess it
has
been awhile since I cleaned em out.” John smiled guiltily and began stuffing papers and office supplies helter-skelter back into the drawers. His conventionally handsome face was flaming scarlet. He was on his knees, and when he pivoted to get the paper-clips and staples which had gone under Clut's desk, he kicked over a tall stack of forms and reports that he had stacked on the floor. Now the bullpen area of the Sheriff's Office was beginning to resemble a tornado zone.

“Whoops!” John said.

“Whoops,” Alan said, sitting on Norris Ridgewick's desk and trying to massage his toes through his heavy black police-issue shoes. “Whoops is good, John. A very accurate description of the situation. This is a whoops if I ever saw one.”

“Sorry,” John said again, and actually wormed under his desk on his stomach, sweeping errant clips and staples toward him with the sides of his hands. Alan was not sure if he should laugh or cry. John's feet were wagging back and forth as he moved his hands, spreading the papers on the floor widely and evenly.

“John, get out of there!” Alan yelled. He was trying hard not to laugh, but he could tell already it was going to be a lost cause.

LaPointe jerked. His head bonked briskly against the underside of his desk. And another stack of papers, one which had been deposited on the very edge of gravity to make room for the drawers, fell over the side. Most floomped straight to the floor, but dozens went seesawing lazily back and forth through the air.

He's
gonna be filing those all day, Alan thought resignedly. Maybe all week.

Then he could hold on no longer. He threw back his head and bellowed laughter. Andy Clutterbuck, who had been in the dispatcher's office, came out to see what was going on.

“Sheriff?” he asked. “Everything, okay?”

“Yeah,” Alan said. Then he looked at the reports and forms, scattered hell to breakfast, and began to laugh again. “John's doing a little creative paperwork here, that's all.”

John crawled out from under his desk and stood up. He looked like a man who wishes mightily that someone would ask him to stand at attention, or maybe hit the deck and do forty pushups. The front of his previously immaculate uniform was covered with dust, and in spite of his amusement, Alan made a mental note—it had been a long time since Eddie Warburton had taken care of the floor under these bullpen desks. Then he began laughing again. There was simply no help for it. Clut looked from John to Alan and then back to John again, puzzled.

“Okay,” Alan said, getting himself under control at last. “What were you looking for, John? The Holy Grail? The Lost Chord? What?”

“My wallet,” John said, brushing ineffectually at the front of his uniform. “I can't find my goddam wallet.”

“Did you check your car?”

“Both of them,” John said. He passed a disgusted glance over the asteroid belt of junk around his desk. “The cruiser I was driving last night and my Pontiac. But sometimes when I'm here I stick it in a desk drawer because it makes a lump against my butt when I sit down. So I was checking—”

“It wouldn't bust your ass like that if you didn't keep your whole goddam life in there, John,” Andy Clutterbuck said reasonably.

“Clut,” Alan said, “go play in the traffic, would you?”

“Huh?”

Alan rolled his eyes. “Go find something to do. I think John and I can handle this; we're trained investigators. If it turns out we can't, we'll let you know.”

“Oh, sure. Just trying to help, you know. I've seen
his wallet. It looks like he's got the whole Library of Congress in there. In fact—”

“Thanks for your input, Clut. We'll see you.”

“Okay,” Clut said. “Always glad to help. Later, dudes.”

Alan rolled his eyes. He felt like laughing again, but controlled himself. It was clear from John's unhappy expression that it was no joke to him. He was embarrassed, but that was only part of it. Alan had lost a wallet or two in his time, and he knew what a shitty feeling it was. Losing the money in it and the hassle of reporting credit cards gone west was only part of it, and not necessarily the worst part, either. You kept remembering stuff you had tucked away in there, stuff that might seem like junk to someone else but was irreplaceable to you.

John was hunkered down on his hams, picking up papers, sorting them, stacking them, and looking disconsolate. Alan helped.

“Did you really hurt your toes, Alan?”

“Nah. You know these shoes—it's like wearing Brinks trucks on your feet. How much was in the wallet, John?”

“Aw, no more'n twenty bucks, I guess. But I got my hunting license last week, and that was in there. Also my MasterCard. I'll have to call the bank and tell them to cancel the number if I can't find the damned wallet. But what I really want are the pictures. Mom and Dad, my sisters . . . you know. Stuff like that.”

But it wasn't the picture of his mother and father or the ones of his sisters that John really cared about; the really important one was the picture of him and Sally Ratcliffe. Clut had taken it at the Fryeburg State Fair about three months before Sally had broken up with John in favor of that stonebrain Lester Pratt.

“Well,” Alan said, “it'll turn up. The money and the plastic may be gone, but the wallet and pictures will probably come home, John. They usually do. You know that.”

“Yeah,” John said with a sigh. “It's just that . . . damn, I keep trying to remember if I had it this morning when I came in to work. I just can't.”

“Well, I hope you find it. Stick a
LOST
notice up on the bulletin board, why don't you?”

“I will. And I'll get the rest of this mess cleaned up.”

“I
know you will, John. Take it easy.”

Alan went out to the parking lot, shaking his head.

The small silver bell over the door of Needful Things tinkled and Babs Miller, member in good standing of the Ash Street Bridge Club, came in a little timidly.