The Violet Crow (24 page)

“Excuse me?”

“The Wales girl. She's the one who got him started, mixed up with the wrong sort of people. Her parents provided no supervision. When they were 15, they'd go to her house and do whatever they wanted.”

Chief and Bruno exchanged embarrassed glances. “Actually, the reason we're here is to ask if you might have a recent photograph that we could borrow …?”

Dr. Murphy didn't let him finish. “Of Newton? Why would you want that?”

“Actually of Alison. We're trying to locate her. Guys often keep a photo of their girlfriends, you know.”

“Not in this house, you wouldn't find something like that. He was always at that job of his at the Lenape. I imagine he might have kept some things there.”

“Thanks for the suggestion. That'll be our next stop.” The Chief turned to leave.

He pulled up short when he heard Bruno speaking for the first time. “Dr. Murphy. You're taking this hard. Is there anything I can do for you?”

Icky's father looked at Bruno as though he were an alien asking if he wanted his brain removed. “I am fine, thank you,” he replied through tightly pursed lips. “I lost my son about a dozen years ago and have been moving on since then. I am simply irritated by all the red tape and your inability to establish a safe environment in this town. Now please leave me alone and don't intrude on my personal affairs again.”

Chapter 49

Gary rounded up members of the Red-Headed League and brought them in for interrogation. Kennedy was a hard case: heavily muscled, with a rough complexion. His hair was clay-colored and he looked at the world through narrow slits. He didn't seem concerned that he could be brought up on a variety of charges. “I don't know how any of that stuff got in there,” he lied—brazenly. “Probably it was left there by the previous tenants.”

“And why were you renting an apartment that none of you actually lived in?” Gary asked.

“We needed a place to get away from our families. We were talking about starting a band or something.”

“So you won't mind if we test your skin and clothing for chemical residues?”

“That won't tell you anything,” Kennedy sneered. “That stuff goes all over the place.”

“Not if you never opened any of the bottles, it wouldn't.”

“If the previous tenants were cooking, it'd be all over the apartment. I'm going to sue the landlord for not warning us.”

Klinger was a head case. He had close-cropped carrot-colored hair, thimble-sized inserts in his ears, and a full array of other piercings and tattoos. His skin was broken out with terrible running sores and his breath could steal your appetite for weeks. Did he even realize exactly what had happened to Icky? It was hard to tell. Maudlin one minute, convulsed with insane laughter the next, then racked with coughs, he was barely worth interviewing. He did tell a long and rambling story about driving around with Icky in “farm country.” Apparently they were looking for unattended fertilizer tanks, but didn't find any. In Klinger's case, ineptitude was a blessing that helped to keep him from killing himself for the time being. Icky hadn't been quite so lucky.

Finally, there was Sammy Pearl. Standing only about five feet, six inches tall, he had shiny, copper-colored hair and was reasonably coherent and cooperative. Pearl was genuinely shaken by the loss of Icky and clearly felt something approaching remorse when he stated, “That coulda been me in there.” He provided valuable information about contacts in Philly. But he claimed that the group didn't have it together to start cooking, so the fire could not have started as a lab accident.

“What about Alison?” Gary asked. “Was she hanging out with Icky in the apartment?”

“No way. She was, y'know, going to college; she didn't want to have anything to do with speed freaks. I haven't seen much of her since high school.”

Hearing Gary's report, the Chief sighed. There'd be nothing conclusive until they confirmed the cause of the blaze. “Time to visit the Lenape King.” He rolled his eyes. “Are you ready to walk back in time?”

“No more dinosaurs, I hope,” said Bruno, hurrying to keep up with the Chief as he left the Municipal Building.

“Just a little stroll along Ye Olde King's Highway,” replied the Chief. He pointed to the canopy above them. “Just think, some of these trees were planted during the reign of George III.”

Bruno surveyed the spreading branches of the sycamores and oaks. Did they have anything they could tell him? If he touched the bark, could he sense the emotions of people who had passed beneath them? The Hessian troops or the Continental Army? The spirit of Washington? The wit of Franklin? The fury of the mob? The vision of liberty? It had never occurred to him to try this. He suspected it would all be too remote, abstract.

The Lenape was well maintained with its mustard-colored clapboards and black shutters. It didn't look like a 250-year-old building, as it fit right in with the rest of downtown. Only the plaque by the door indicated its status as a historic landmark.

The Chief rapped firmly on the wooden door, which opened slowly. “May we come in?”

The man who answered stood half hidden in the interior as the door swung open. “My, there are a lot of you,” he murmured.

Bruno looked around in surprise. Had other cops decided to come along at the last minute? Maybe some passersby had sensed a tour was about to start and decided to tag along. No, it was just the two of them …

“Well, come in,” said the man at last.

Once inside, the Chief introduced him to Scott Spurrier, curator of the Lenape King Historic Monument. Bruno recognized the type immediately. He was tall, but not athletic. Weak vision. Thinning blond hair worn long, with a sort of Prince Valiant cut. Wrong side of middle age. Dressed in matching corduroy trousers and camel hair sweater vest—identical in spirit, if not in detail, to the way his mother dressed him in the sixth grade. No doubt about it. Mr. Spurrier was a
shmendrick
. Classic example. If he opened the refrigerator door, a bottle of ketchup would fall out and break. If he tried to wipe up the ketchup, he'd get a splinter in his hand from the wooden floor. If he tried to take out the splinter, he'd find a way to poke himself in the eye with the tweezers. If he went to the hospital for his eye, he'd contract a drug-resistant staph infection.

“Look …” whispered the Chief, grabbing him by the elbow. Bruno emerged from his reverie to realize he was standing in a poorly lit hallway. The inn's rooms were marked off with velvet ropes. Tables were set with period utensils to show how people ate and drank two and half centuries ago. No detail was overlooked, including mugs filled with papier-mâché beer and mucusy-looking oysters on the half shell.

“Looks like he swiped DNA specimens from Dr. Cronkite's lab.” The Chief chortled. Then he resumed his professional demeanor and asked Mr. Spurrier, “You heard what happened to Icky?”

“Can't say I'm surprised,” the curator replied petulantly. “He was a walking disaster, an accident waiting to happen.”

“You seem almost relieved,” Chief Black observed.

“I won't mince words with you, Chief Black. I am glad he won't be coming back here,” said Mr. Spurrier. He paused for breath, then continued with moderate heat. “You forced me to give him a job here, but I was never happy about having him around. He didn't have the education, the training. This wasn't his vocation.”

“Yes. You were born to take care of the Lenape, weren't you?” The Chief grinned. Talking to Mr. Spurrier clearly put him in a good mood.

“What he and his girlfriend did to Dolley Madison's bed was no joke. We had to have the team from Rutgers set up a special project to restore it. That should never have happened. We have such limited resources.”

“Where did they hang out when they weren't banging away on Dolley's bed?”

“I don't know. I was never sure.” Mr. Spurrier looked uncomfortable.

“Could it have been the cellar?”

“No! The cellar is off limits. He wasn't permitted down there.”

“Could he have gone down there anyway?”

“Certainly not. It's potentially dangerous. The foundations may not be safe. There could be gas leaks. I only go down there when I absolutely have to.”

“When was the last time you absolutely had to?”

“A fuse blew.”

“When was that?”

“Last month.”

“And you replaced it. Did you notice anything? Any signs Icky was down there?”

“None that I noticed.”

“Where is the fuse box?”

“At the bottom of the stairs.”

“So you replaced the fuse but didn't look around?”

Mr. Spurrier indicated that he had not looked around. Bruno was beaming but trying not to show it. This was true
shmendrick
behavior; Mr. S's
shtick
was letter-perfect. Now if only he'd be so kind as to trip and fall down the basement stairs …

“Mind if we look around?” The Chief's deep voice intruded into Bruno's thoughts.

“I can't permit it. This is an historic building. This is where New Jersey threw off its shackles and signed the documents that renounced our status as a colony and declared our independence from England. The team at Rutgers insists …”

—“I'm afraid
I'm
going to have to insist,” the Chief broke in, his good humor starting to wear off. “This is a murder investigation. Icky may have been a pain in the ass, but he died last night. We have to look around.”

“Can you come back later, after visiting hours? I'm just one person here, I can't do everything at once.”

The Chief ignored the objection. Instead, he strode nimbly to the front door and locked it. “I can guarantee there won't be too many tourists trying to visit today. With the exploding meth lab, I don't think many people are going to want to risk their health just to brush up on their colonial history.”

Chapter 50

Heading down the steep, narrow staircase Bruno felt the weight of all the recent events pressing in on him. He could hear his heart thudding inside his chest. The nameless girl. Gussie. Maggie. Mimi. Icky. He was still a kid, really. Alison too. Maybe Biff was right. Maybe it was time to start taking things personally. Like it or not, he was in harm's way. He'd been selected. He was a target, a combatant.

It wasn't about emotion interfering with his psychic ability or mental state. Or power corrupting. He had no selfish purpose here. It was self-defense. If he waited for the killer to make his move, he'd likely be dead. It was as simple as that.

Bruno heard the Chief's voice ahead of him, “Remember this is a crime scene. Keep your eyes open and your hands in your pockets.”

The basement of the Lenape King was, in fact, a series of brick-lined chambers. Each room was on a different level. Some required several steps to get in or out of. Others were separated by a sill of two or three inches. The mortar between the bricks was drying out, leaving piles of gritty gray powder everywhere.

They wandered around from one dank chamber to the next. The basement was poorly lit and it seemed like they might be walking in circles. Finally they stumbled into a room that was full of furniture. It was Icky's boudoir, containing all the items he'd brought in to make himself comfortable during the long hours when he was supposed to be the inn's night watchman. There was his filthy mattress covered with deplorable sheets. The cheap wooden bureau topped with a reading light and an overflowing ashtray. A Shop-Vac—they heard Mr. Spurrier murmuring, “I wondered where that had gone …”—and assorted piles of clothing, both male and female.

The Chief pulled on latex gloves. He was picking items up with tweezers and dropping them into Ziploc baggies, measuring, drawing diagrams, and taking notes feverishly.

Bruno was overwhelmed. Memories from his school days were starting to come back to him. “This used to be part of the Underground Railroad, didn't it?” he asked Mr. Spurrier.

“That's nothing but myth or legend,” the curator explained with a long-suffering sigh. “Of course there was a lot going on throughout this area. The Quakers were quite active in the abolition movement. However, there are no documented efforts to help runaway slaves escape through Gardenfield. The center of activity was Philadelphia; they moved slaves north along the Delaware, crossing the river at Burlington. Or else through Lawnside. All of this has been thoroughly documented by experts in the field. The curious thing is that the legends about this place persist, despite all the evidence. I can't understand it.”

“Look at this,” the Chief called out gleefully. He had secured a cigarette butt with the tweezers and was holding it up like a trophy-sized fish for the world to see. “Gauloises. Pretty sophisticated taste for teenagers.” He bagged it and moved to the next item, which provoked an excited, “Bless my soul, look at this. Bruno, quick, put your gloves on.”

As Bruno struggled into the latex gloves, the Chief asked Mr. Spurrier, “Was this place used as a dungeon?”

The curator stepped back and rolled his eyes. “Another myth. The basement was a storage area for beer kegs. There were locked iron gates on some of these rooms to prevent the help from stealing.”

“I see. And what did they use those iron rings for?”

“It's possible that prisoners were kept here, at times, during the Revolutionary War. However, we believe those rings were used as a sort of pulley system for lifting heavy items: beer kegs, food stuffs, and such.”

“Hmm? You mean to tie down the ends of the rope, or to give the men doing the hoisting some leverage? That makes sense. But then where are the actual pulleys? Wouldn't there be some evidence of them in the ceiling near the center of the room?”

He handed around Polaroids that depicted Icky or Alison chained to metal rings that were bolted into the wall. Neither was wearing a stitch of clothing.