The Skeleton's Knee, page 6
part #4 of Joe Gunther Series
I knocked on the door. “You want me to come in?”
“Sure; I’m just racking some prints.”
I twisted the knob and walked into a brightly lit laboratory as pristine and orderly as an operating room. The shiny steel surfaces of long, deep sinks and circulating equipment contrasted with several looming dark enlargers, the softly glowing eyes of digital timers and thermometers, and the light-absorbing black paint covering the walls and ceiling.
“Never been in here before?” Rogers glanced at me over his shoulder. He was slipping damp oversized prints onto wire mesh racks so they could dry.
“No. Looks like something out of NASA.”
“Well, don’t tell the IRS; I only tell them about the front. What’s on your mind? You usually send J.P. down here.”
“Now I know why he takes so long getting back to the office.”
Allen laughed as he placed his last print in place. “Yeah—he’s got a mind like a vacuum cleaner, always full of questions.”
I pulled the rolls of film out of my pocket and held them out to him.
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”
“It’s a little special. On this one roll, I photographed a piece of evidence that was stolen immediately afterward—a chart hanging on a wall. This is the only copy I’ve got of it.”
He took the roll in question and held it in his palm, as if he could already see its contents. “Cloak and dagger, huh? Great. When do you want it?”
“In an hour?”
He gave me a quick glance. While our business was both appreciated and occasionally intriguing, the police department was not one of Allen’s big-spending clients; and rush work out of his shop usually cost a fortune. “You just want prints of the chart, right? The rest of it by tomorrow?”
“That would be great.”
He smiled and steered me toward the door. “Okay. I better get cracking. I’ll charge you the standard rate and drop it off at your office on my way home. Show yourself out, okay?” He stopped suddenly.
“By the way, was there a girl with dirty blond hair out front when you walked in?”
“No. Place was empty.”
He shrugged vaguely. “Okay. She must have gone home for the day. Do me a favor and lock the door behind you, will you? Thanks.”
I said I would, shaking my head and smiling at his casualness. Brattleboro was hardly crime-free. In fact, the worsening economy, especially in Massachusetts, just a few miles to the south, had caused a surge in criminal activity. But it hadn’t gotten very sophisticated, nor was it rampant, and attitudes like Allen Rogers’s were only beginning to change.
The light was ebbing as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, dulling the subtle colors in the old masonry walls along the street and transforming the world around me to monochromatic shades of gray and brown. I checked my watch; I had forty minutes before Harriet Fritter would begin getting twitchy.
I was standing where Elliot Street dead-ends into Main, allowing a view up Elliot almost to the central firehouse before the street curves out of sight. It also let me see that the lights were still on at Zigman Realty’s second-floor office partway down the block. I crossed at the loudly buzzing WALK sign—one of the town’s odd and unique conciliatory gestures toward the visually handicapped—and made my way to the narrow door by the side of an upscale pastry shop.
Gail Zigman’s office was located right over the shop, a position imbuing it with the most seductive aroma of any nonbakery in town. Gail—the owner and sole employee—claimed she’d given up working from her home for the convenience of a downtown location. Of course, every time I visited her office, I knew otherwise; it was the smell of fresh bread that had lured her off her hill. Convenience, if there was any of it, had come purely by happenstance.
I knocked on the glass-paneled door and stuck my head in. “Got something with high walls and a moat?”
She was sitting in a huge beanbag chair by the window, framed by the fading light and the drooping leaves of an eight-foot potted plant, reading from a thick manila file. The office was an antique one-room affair with high ceilings, tall sash windows, and ancient, rattling steam heating. She looked over her glasses at me and smiled. “Feeling the need for one?”
A tall, slim, muscular woman, now in her forties, Gail was graced with a dynamic face, both angular and strong, dark, serious eyes, and a complexion molded and tanned by an uncaring exposure to the weather. Most importantly of all, she had in abundance what my mother had always counseled me to look for in my friends: character.
“Not yet. In fact, I’m feeling pretty good.” I closed the door behind me and crossed over to her, bending low to give her a kiss.
I pulled her office chair away from the desk and turned it to face her, settling myself comfortably in it, with my feet propped next to hers on the windowsill. She removed her reading glasses and lay back against the beanbag, a smile on her face. “Oh yeah? Stuck another crowbar in some bureaucrat’s bicycle wheel?”
It was a pointed remark. I had gathered enough evidence against one of the selectmen during a case two months ago to stimulate both his resignation and an indictment, much to Gail’s delight. Still, it had been an uncomfortable time for her, since she, too, was on the board of selectmen.
“Nope, I have myself an old-fashioned mystery.”
I told her of my day’s activities, from Hillstrom’s baffling phone call to my doubts about Coyner and my concerns about the chart’s disappearance. Through it all, she listened carefully, her paperwork resting on her stomach, her long blue-jeaned legs stretched out before her, knowing that I wasn’t just shooting the breeze but indirectly enlisting her help.
This was by no means unusual. We covered different aspects of this municipality—she the political/business side and I the streets and crooks. But in a small town, these arenas often overlapped, so Gail and I had become comfortable exchanging information. We never quoted each other in public, were sensitive to the potential pitfalls of our sharing, and occasionally were able to defuse a few situations when the police department and the selectmen had locked horns.
My appeal to her this time, however, had more to do with the instincts and interests that had brought her to southern Vermont in the first place. Gail had been part of the hippie communes that had surrounded Brattleboro in the 1960s like dolphins crowding around a friendly boat, and although she’d joined the mainstream long since, many of her friends still followed their own unconventional drummers. I was hoping that she, or someone she could suggest, might shed some light on the stolen chart.
She thought a moment after I’d finished my brief saga. “What did the chart look like?”
I held my hands a yard apart. “What there was of it was about this big; the top edge had been torn off neatly, either from a large drawing pad or to remove one part of the document. The chart itself was like a sundial wheel with the center crisscrossed by connecting straight lines of different colors—”
“How many segments was the dial broken into?” she interrupted.
I closed my eyes to concentrate. “Seemed like about six to a side; twelve overall.”
She handed me a pencil and the manila folder from her lap. “Can you scribble one of the symbols on the back of that from memory?”
“I’ll have a photograph soon, so I can show you the whole thing, but I do remember three of them. The first two I already knew: the signs for male and female. The third one was a circle with a dot in the middle.”
She smiled and nodded. “Mars, Venus, and the Sun. That was an astrological chart, Joe. It didn’t have a date or a name anywhere on it?”
I shook my head. “It might have at one point; that may explain the tear. Could you tell anything about it if I showed it to you?”
“Probably not. I could identify most of the symbols, and with enough time, I might be able to give a very general reading using the few books I’ve got, but I think Billie Lucas is the person you want to talk to. She’s been doing them for years and she’s very good. I had lunch with her today, in fact.”
I instinctively demurred. Confiding in Gail was one thing, but the idea of officially consulting an astrologer brought out the skeptic in me.
“I don’t know. I don’t take that stuff too seriously.”
She shrugged. “Can’t hurt to try. If you don’t like what you hear, you can forget it. I’ve had Billie do my chart—yours, too, in fact. It taught me a few things about myself I hadn’t realized.” I was amused at her admission, and curiously touched. “How’d I come out?”
“She said you were one of the most sensible things I’d ever done.” She smiled before forging ahead. “There’s a lot of shading in astrology, of course, a lot of ‘he could be this way, or he could be the other, depending on this or that.’ That’s why some people use charts to let themselves off the hook. But a good reader like Billie might be useful; it could turn out to be like an artist’s sketch—close enough to be handy.
“Besides,” she added pointedly, “it sounds like that chart’s the only real thing you’ve got, and it was the only thing that got stolen. It must have something going for it. You want me to call Billie and set something up?”
I stood up, still not convinced. “Yeah, okay—try to tell her diplomatically that I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, though. I agree I ought to check it out, but I still don’t have much faith in it. It smacks of voodoo and crystal balls.” I checked my watch. “I better run, or Harriet’ll have my head. There is one other thing: Outside of the local food co-ops in town, are there any other health-food wholesalers Fuller might have used for his supplies?”
She thought for a moment. “How varied was the garden?”
“Enough that I sure didn’t recognize much. Some of it was decorative, but it was mostly produce. And the house was filled with the kind of seeds, grains, nuts, and rabbit pellets you people call food.”
She grinned and poked me with her foot. “Did he sell any of it?”
“Coyner did the selling, in exchange for rent; I’m going to have someone look into that end of it.”
“But Coyner wouldn’t tell you where the supplies were bought?”
“Not yet, and he may not; he’s not feeling very friendly right now.”
“Let me call around. I won’t mention names,” she added, anticipating what I was about to say. I kissed her quickly before heading out the door. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“My pleasure. There is a price, though: dinner at my place tonight?”
I made a face. “Can I bring my own food?”
“No.” She laughed and threw a pencil at the door.
I was just about to climb the long set of stone steps leading from Main Street to the Municipal Building when I heard Allen Rogers call me from across the street. “Hey,” he said, waving an oversized envelope out the driver’s window of his car. “How’s this for service?”
“Great, Al. I appreciate it.” I crossed over to him as he backed into a parking space.
“No sweat—I was heading home. By the way, were you alone when you were photographing that chart?”
I looked at him carefully. “Yes. Why?”
He got out of the car and joined me on the sidewalk, an excited smile on his face. “Well, I did the print like you asked, as a close-up of the chart, but the negative included both the chart and the window below it, so I did a full-frame proof first.” He handed me the envelope. “Open it.”
I did so, spreading the contents out on Allen’s car hood. There were three photographs: one of the chart, in high contrast to make it easily legible; one of both the window and the chart above it, in which the exposure had been cut back to favor the latter; and one of just the window, exposed to favor the stronger outside light. In this last picture, badly out of focus and distorted by the window’s cheap glass, was the unmistakable figure of a human being, lurking at the edge of the blurry trees.
“Interesting?” Allen asked, his face beaming.
“Very,” I muttered.
“You know who it is? I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.”
“I think it’s a thief,” I answered. “And maybe worse.”
6
SAMMIE MARTENS AND DENNIS DEFLORIO, the two squad members I’d asked Harriet to locate earlier, were waiting for me in my office. I invited Willy Kunkle to join us and sat on the edge of my desk to address them.
I began with Sammie and Dennis. “Have you two been brought up to date?”
“Ron did the honors,” Sammie answered, “And we’ve read the reports.”
“Good. Sammie, I’d like you to check out the hospital. Interview everyone who had anything to do with Abraham Fuller, from the nurses and orderlies to the finance people who got the cash from him. Then I’d like you to check out Fred Coyner’s records at the tax assessor’s office, the county clerk’s, and anywhere else he may have left a paper trail.”
Samantha Martens, intense, dogged, enthusiastic, occasionally bullheaded, was never going to give anyone cause to use her gender against her. Even Kunkle conceded that she’d never be caught napping. She pulled out her pad and made a few notes.
DeFlorio, by contrast, was fat, short, sometimes laid-back to a fault, and no candidate for a Ph.D.—but he did what was asked of him with rarely a complaint. On my bad days, that alone could put him higher in my estimation than his brighter colleagues.
“Dennis,” I resumed, “I’d like you to contact all police agencies in the New England area with what we’ve got on Fuller so far and see if you get lucky. Ask them about any old shootings in which Fuller might have played a part. And remember, if he does have a record, chances are that’s not his real name. Also, make a list of the serial numbers from Fuller’s loot and send it to the Secret Service to see if it’s stolen. And get the paperwork started on requests for information from the IRS and Social Security, just to see if there ever was an Abraham Fuller.”
Dennis DeFlorio merely nodded.
The phone rang in the other room.
“Willy, see what you can get on Fred Coyner from his neighbors, old employers, and others; maybe Sammie can locate some of those names from the records. And check out this produce business he had going with Fuller—where he bought the tools, seeds, and whatnot, and where he unloaded what Fuller grew. I’m curious about how much business we’re talking about. Gail Zigman said she’d check into potential sources for Fuller’s gardening supplies, on the chance he didn’t use mainstream wholesalers or retailers. I’ll let you know what she comes up with tomorrow morning. Also, Harriet’s put together a list of bookstores that Coyner or Fuller might have used to fill up that library. Poke around and see if anyone remembers either one of them frequenting their business.”
Willy Kunkle, true to form, merely scratched himself and looked out the window.
Harriet stuck her head in. “Billie Lucas is on the phone. Want to take it?”
I nodded to her. “I think we’re set here. Any questions?” All three officers prepared to leave.
“By the way, does anyone know if J.P.’s totaled up the money we found in Fuller’s house?” I asked as they began filing out the door.
“About three hundred thousand,” Sammie answered.
Billie Lucas’s voice was low, clear, and oddly soothing, like the archetypal psychiatrist. “Gail Zigman asked if I wanted to play detective with you. It’s an intriguing offer.”
I gave an embarrassed laugh, covering my own mixed feelings about this whole idea. “I’m not sure if it’ll be as much fun as it sounds. I came across an astrological chart in one of my investigations, and Gail mentioned you might be able to give me an idea of the person whose chart it is.”
“I can certainly try. I’d like to have some time alone to examine it before we meet, though. I’ll need to consult some reference books, and maybe redo it in my own style. There are a considerable number of variables involved.”
I rolled my eyes at the phone—already the escape clauses were being penciled in. “No problem. Where should I send a copy?”
“I’m guessing you want this done pretty quickly. Why don’t you leave it with your dispatcher, and I’ll pick it up later tonight. We can meet tomorrow morning. Then I’ll have a better idea of how I can help you.”
At least her sense of timing was good. “Well, I appreciate your help. You sure it’s no trouble?”
“No, no. I’m looking forward to it; this is a first for me. Can you come by my place at around nine? It’s on Whipple Street—the house with the picket fence out front.”
“You got it. See you at nine.” I broke the connection and dialed the extension to the conference room. Ron picked up on the third ring, sounding harassed.
“Did you get anything on that currency collector you mentioned?”
His voice regained some of its usual enthusiasm. “Yeah, I did—Richard Schimke, Rich to his friends. He specializes in American money, mostly Confederate and earlier, but he knows a lot about currency generally, and he’s easy to get along with. I’d be happy to do it for you.”
“How’s it going with your paper chase?”
“Almost finished—just a few odds and ends.”
“All right, it’s a deal. But remember, we don’t have enough to get a search warrant for any of Coyner’s records right now. You’re going to have to be careful finding out where he banks and what he’s been up to. Get people to volunteer information to you, okay?”
He sounded like a sailor with a fresh wind in his sails. “You got it.”
· · ·
I finished what was left of my vegetarian lasagna and sat back in my chair, feeling full and content. Gail was mopping up the last of the sauce from her plate with a piece of French bread. She popped it in her mouth and smiled at me. “So, how was it?”
The usual kidding I gave her couldn’t compete. “Delicious—you win.”
I helped her clear the table and began filling the kitchen sink with soapy dishwater while she put the leftovers in the fridge.
Gail and I had been a couple for over a decade by now, and yet we still lived apart. Losing a wife to cancer had made me shy of repeating that degree of intimacy. Gail believed that a shared mortgage and the risk of one of us evicting the other in a dispute would undermine the honesty of our relationship. Both arguments had their flaws, but the bottom line was that we both liked things the way they were.
