Mission Flats Read online

  I was horrified by the body of Robert Danziger. It assaulted the senses. That glistening cleft in the scalp, the distended and discolored torso. The skin rubbery and taut over the swollen calves. The overpowering stink that hung like smoke in the sinuses. I made it to the woods a good ways off from the cabin before vomiting. Even that did not still the vertigo. I lay down on the pine needles and closed my eyes.

  That afternoon was filled with state troopers, assistant AGs from Portland and even Augusta. The prosecutor in charge of the state’s investigation was a larval politician named Gregg Cravish (it rhymed with crayfish). He had the waxy, artificial look of a TV Game-Show Host. Even the crow’s-feet sprouting on his temples looked like they had been placed there intentionally to add a little gravitas to his too-handsome face. Cravish explained that the staties would handle the investigation. Under Maine law, the AG’s office has jurisdiction over all murders. ‘Standard procedure,’ the Game-Show Host assured me with a little squeeze on my shoulder. ‘We’ll sure be needing your help, though.’

  So I stood aside and watched.

  A team of state-police techs pored over the cabin and grounds like archaeologists on a dig. The Game-Show Host peered in the cabin door now and then but spent most of his time leaning against a car, looking bored.

  After some time, I was asked to block the roads leading to the cabin. Beyond that, it was clear, my job was just to stay the hell out of the way. I put an officer about a mile up the access road to the north, and I covered the road from the opposite direction myself. Occasionally cars would pass – troopers, more Game-Show Hosts, the ME to collect the body. They waved as they drove by. I waved back, then returned to scrubbing little spatters of vomit off my shoes with spit and Kleenex. The nausea receded, replaced by a headache. And I realized that I could not simply wait. I had to act. For there were two choices at this point: either allow the investigation to proceed without me, as it had already begun to do, or inject myself into it somehow. The first – taking a pass on the whole thing – was not really an option. I was already involved, however unwillingly. I could not walk away from this case, a homicide in my own town.

  It was past noon by the time I returned to the cabin, determined to take my rightful place in the investigation. Cravish and his team were already packing their gear into trunks and loading the trunks into the vans. They had gathered enough fibers, photos, and dead bodies to keep them busy for a while. The cabin was trussed up in yellow crime-scene tape like a big Christmas present, and a second cordon of tape had been strung along wooden stakes around the building to deter anyone from venturing near. I was able to walk through this scene unnoticed. To the Game-Show Hosts, I was invisible.

  The corpse lay curled on a steel-top gurney, forgotten. In the open air the smell of it had dissipated a little, enough at least that the odor no longer made my head swim. I found myself wandering toward it, fascinated. There was a lurid appeal to the thing. The bare limbs, swollen and pallid and hairless. The face distorted by the fatal wound. It seemed inhuman, this creature. A snail shucked from its shell, left to wriggle about unprotected, to burn in the sun.

  I was staring down at the corpse when Cravish and another man came up to the opposite side of the gurney. The new man was small but he had a stiff, combative look, like a rooster. Cravish introduced him as Edmund Kurth from Boston Homicide.

  ‘Boston?’ I asked.

  The Bostonian Kurth stared at me. He seemed to be scrutinizing me for signs of rural stupidity. I should say right up front that there was something disconcerting about Ed Kurth, even on this first meeting. He was the sort of man one is anxious to get away from. He had a severe, angular face dominated by a narrow nose and two dark eyes. His skin was pitted with acne scars. Thick eyebrows imparted to his face a permanent scowl, as if he had just been shoved in the back.

  ‘The victim was a DA in Boston,’ Cravish explained to me. He gave Kurth a look: Do you see what I have to deal with?

  ‘Boston,’ I repeated, to no one in particular.

  Kurth bent over the body, examining it with the same unblinking focus he had directed at me. The detective snapped on rubber surgical gloves and prodded the thing with his finger as if he were trying to wake it up. I watched his face as he came nose to nose with Bob Danziger’s remains. I expected a reaction, a flinch. But Kurth’s face remained impassive. To judge by his expression, it would be hard to tell if he was looking into a dead man’s ruptured eye socket or just poking through his glove compartment for a map.

  ‘Well, maybe that’s why he was killed,’ I ventured, eager to show my instinct for sleuthing. ‘Because he was a DA.’

  Kurth did not respond.

  I babbled on. ‘If he was killed. I mean, it could be a suicide.’ Now, here was an insight. In crime-scene training, I vaguely recalled, we learned that gunshot suicides invariably shoot themselves in one of three places: the temple, the roof of the mouth, or between the eyes. That this man might have killed himself struck me as a profound observation, though I imparted it with calculated cool – in a tone that suggested, Yes, sir, I’m an old hand at the homicide game. ‘Maybe he went to kill himself and he flinched, wound up shooting himself in the eye.’

  Kurth said, without looking up, ‘He didn’t kill himself, Officer.’

  ‘It’s Chief, actually. Chief Truman.’

  ‘Chief Truman. There’s no gun here.’

  ‘Ah, no gun, well.’ My ears went hot.

  A little smile puckered the lips of the Game-Show Host.

  ‘Maybe he inserted the bullet manually.’

  ‘That would be unusual,’ Kurth informed me.

  ‘It was a joke.’

  He glared another moment as if I were the back-wardest country clod imaginable, then returned to the creature on the gurney, which he seemed to find less repulsive.

  The Game-Show Host asked me, gesturing toward the body, ‘Did he have any connection to this place?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I spoke to him a little bit while he was up here—’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know him. I just spoke to him. He seemed like a nice guy. Kind of . . . gentle. I certainly didn’t expect—’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ I said. ‘We just kind of talked for a while. We get a lot of tourists come through here. I don’t bother with them, most of the time.’ I nodded toward the hills around the lake. The trees were daubed with yellow and red. ‘They come to look at the leaves.’

  ‘So he was just here on vacation?’

  ‘I guess so. Some vacation . . .’

  We stood shaking our heads over Danziger’s body. I did remember meeting this Bob Danziger. He had a shy little wave, a smile nearly hidden under the eaves of his mustache. We’d met on the sidewalk in front of the station. Hi, he’d said, you must be Chief Truman . . .

  I began to say to the Game-Show Host, ‘I’d like to be involved—’

  But a cell phone chirped on his belt. He held up one finger to silence me while he answered it. ‘Gregg Cravish.’ He kept that finger up as he uttered monosyllables into the phone. ‘Yes. Don’t know yet. Fine. Good.’

  When he was done, I said again, ‘I’d like to be involved in the investigation.’

  ‘Of course. You found the body. You’re an important witness.’

  ‘Right, a witness, sure. I meant, I’d like to do more than just guard the road.’

  ‘Securing the scene is important, Chief. The last thing I need is to get OJ’ed in front of a jury. If the crime scene is contaminated . . .’ Cravish looked at me portentously, preassigning the blame for a contaminated crime scene.

  ‘Look, the guy died in my town,’ I told him. ‘And like I said, I met him once. I’m just saying, I’d like to be in the loop, that’s all. I’m supposed to be the chief here.’

  The Game-Show Host nodded to signal he understood. ‘Okay, sure, we’ll keep you in the loop.’ But his expression said, I understand. You’re supposed to be t
he chief and it wouldn’t look good if all these flatlanders swooped in and chased you off your own case. So I’ll humor you, I’ll let you hang around awhile.

  Kurth straightened up from examining the corpse. ‘Officer, does the press have the story?’

  ‘The press?’

  ‘Yes, the press – newspapers, TV.’

  ‘No, I know what the press is. It’s just, we don’t really have a press here. There’s a newspaper, but it’s more of a community thing. David Cornwell puts it out by himself. It’s the schools and the weather mostly. The rest he just makes up.’

  ‘Don’t give him any information,’ Kurth ordered.

  ‘Well, I have to tell him something. In a town like this—’

  ‘Then withhold the details. Or get him to. Will he do that?’

  ‘I guess so. I’ve never asked.’

  ‘Ask.’

  And that was as much conversation as Edmund Kurth cared to lavish on me. He snapped off the gloves, dropped them on the gurney, and stalked off without a word.

  ‘Mr Kurth,’ I called to him.

  Kurth paused.

  I stood there blinking at him. A sentence made its way to the back of my throat but no farther: It’s Chief Truman, not Officer. ‘Never mind,’ I said.

  Kurth hesitated. I imagine he was weighing whether to ignore me completely or tear out my heart and show it to me still beating. In the end, he just gave a little nod and moved on.

  ‘Have a nice day,’ I murmured, once he was out of earshot.

  In a few minutes the caravan of official vehicles – cruisers, late-model Tauruses, a modified camper marked CRIME SCENE SERVICES, a black van from the Medical Examiner’s office – started their engines and pulled away. The clearing around the cabin was quiet again. The loons were rhonking over the lake.

  Dick Ginoux appeared out of the gloomy woods. It occurred to me he’d been hiding there until the strangers left. He came over and stood beside me as the parade rumbled away down the access road. He shuffled the pine needles with his feet. ‘What do we do now, Chief?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dick.’

  4

  Kurth was wrong about one thing: You could not keep the case quiet, not in a place like this. There are no secrets in Versailles, Maine. Information shoots around the town like tremors over a spider’s web. Details of the murder began to emerge the same day, and within twenty-four hours most Versellians had a pretty good idea what we’d found in that cabin. Thankfully, people around here don’t scare easily, and the case excited more curiosity than fear. It was the hot topic at the Owl and McCarron’s. The morning after the body was discovered, Jimmy Lownes sidled up to me at the Owl and confided that he ‘knew a little about guns,’ if I was interested. Bobby Burke pleaded for a look-see inside the cabin. No one was immune.

  ‘Tell me what it looked like,’ Diane prodded.

  This was at our poker game, a quarter-ante affair that met at the station to help me pass the Sunday-night shift. Diane was usually the most serious player at the table. She chain-smoked Merits, played conservatively, and rarely lost when she did go after a big pot. But tonight even Diane was distracted, even she had the bug.

  ‘Tell you what what looked like?’

  ‘The body.’

  ‘It musta been the gormiest thing,’ Jimmy Lownes snorted. He took off his ball cap to scratch his head in wonder.

  ‘I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t talk about it?’ Diane was offended. ‘The whole town is talking about it! You’re the only one who isn’t.’

  ‘I can’t. They told me to keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘Oh, Ben, you are such a wuss.’

  ‘Hey, are we playing poker or not?’ I scolded.

  Of course, they did not give a rat’s ass about poker, but it would have been unseemly to abandon the game altogether, so they acquiesced, albeit with murmurs of reluctance.

  ‘Alright, that’s better. Seven-card stud, roll your own—’

  ‘I bet it was stiff as a board.’

  ‘Jesus, Jimmy, I just got through saying. We’re not talking about this.’

  ‘I’m not asking you anything, Ben. I’m just saying: I bet it was stiff as a board.’

  ‘Ai-yi-yi, how should I know if it was stiff? I didn’t feel the thing!’ I dealt the cards, sensing their eyes on me. ‘Jimmy, it’s your bet.’

  ‘Did it smell?’

  ‘Your bet.’

  Jimmy checked, and the rest of the table promptly did the same. They barely glanced at their cards.

  ‘Alright, dealer bets two bucks.’ I tossed in two blue chips.

  ‘What, you can’t even tell us if it smelled?’

  ‘Alright, yes, Diane, it smelled.’

  ‘No, but what did it smell like?’

  ‘You really want to know what it smelled like?’

  She put her cards down, exasperated. ‘Yes. I really do.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ Dick said, apropos of nothing, ‘The Chief never had a murder case.’

  My father had retired, reluctantly, in 1995, but even two years later when people referred to The Chief, they meant him, not me.

  ‘Dick,’ I explained, ‘The Chief never worked a murder because nobody ever got murdered. It doesn’t make me anything special.’

  ‘Well now, I didn’t say you were anything special, Ben. I just said The Chief never had a case like this one.’

  ‘Jimmy, it’s two bucks to stay in.’

  ‘What are you gonna do now?’ Diane pressed.

  ‘We’re waiting for the AG to sort out what they found in the cabin.’

  ‘You’re just gonna wait? That’s crazy.’

  ‘Most murders are solved in the first twenty-four hours, you know, Ben.’ This was Bobby Burke with one of his signature factoids.

  ‘Look, this isn’t the Hardy Boys. You can’t just run out and investigate a murder on your own, just because you want to. There’s laws. The AG has jurisdiction. It’s not my case.’

  ‘Well it happened here,’ Bobby retorted.

  ‘And you found the body, Ben.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Not my case.’

  ‘The Chief would have grabbed it,’ Dick tossed in. ‘You could ask him to help you out, like a – whaddaya call it? – a consultant.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘I don’t need help that bad. Besides, he wouldn’t work for me.’

  ‘Did you ever ask him?’

  I answered with a non sequitur. ‘Hey, do any of you guys know where he might have got a beer?’

  ‘Claude had a beer?’

  ‘One of those big bottles. Where did he get it?’

  ‘Could have got it anywhere. It’s just beer.’

  ‘It’s not just beer. If you hear who sold it to him, you let me know.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Arrest somebody for selling your old man a beer?’

  ‘I’m going to have a talk with him is all.’

  ‘Well,’ Dick sighed, steering us back to an older, hardier image of my father, ‘The Chief wouldn’t have listened to some smartass yuppie lawyer. No, sir. I’d like to see that kid tell your old man, “It’s not your case.” The Chief would have given him what-for.’

  ‘Dick, he’d have listened because he had to listen, same as I am.’

  ‘Well,’ Diane retorted, ‘your mother wouldn’t have listened.’ She exhaled cigarette smoke. ‘Why would she listen to some lawyer? She never listened to anyone else.’

  There was a pregnant moment while the four of them waited to see how I would react to that. There was some risk in mentioning my mother. In the ten weeks since she’d died, I had wrapped myself up in righteous Yankee stoicism. Never mind that my grief carried something extra, a tinge of guilt and shame – more than the usual dose. But to my own surprise, Diane’s comment did not trigger any of the old sadness. We were thinking the same thing: If the Game-Show Host had ever tried to put off Annie Truman with the high-handedness he’d shown me . . .

  ‘She’d
have kicked his ass,’ I said.

  Here is my mother: Around 1977 or so, on a raw morning in early spring. The weather was damp. In our kitchen that morning, you could sense the dankness outside, the smells of rain and mud. Mum was at the table, reading a hardcover book. She was already dressed, her hair gathered at the back of her neck exposing the empty dimple-holes in her pierced ears. I was at the table too. And before me, my preferred breakfast of the moment, Apple Jacks and a glass of milk. The glass was a concession from my mother, who’d recently given up trying to force me to drink the unpotable milk in the bowl, with its filmy emulsion of cereal scum. There was still a lingering self-consciousness between us over this tiff. I had the strongest urge to drink the soiled milk for her, but I couldn’t quite do it. (Those amoeboid globules of Apple Jacks oil . . .)

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘A grown-up book.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  She showed me the cover.

  ‘Do you like that book?’

  ‘Yes, Ben.’

  ‘Why do you like it?’

  ‘Because I’m learning.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘It’s a history book. I’m learning about the past.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why would you want to learn that?’

  ‘To be better.’

  ‘Better than what?’

  She looked at me. Blue-gray eyes, laugh lines. ‘Just a better person.’

  Dad pulled up in his truck. The overnight shift was supposed to go from midnight to eight, but Dad always seemed to get home earlier. I heard him hawk his throat before coming inside. He sat down at the table with little mute greetings for Mum and me.

  Look! I shot a glance at Mum: Does he know? There was a white patch in Dad’s bushy brown hair! Right at the top of his forehead! It was white powder, like baby powder, I guessed. Mum, do you see it?

  ‘Dad, there’s—’

  ‘Ben.’ My mother gave me a stern look to shut me up.

  Dad said, ‘What is it, Ben?’