Open Season Page 22

  “Louis Armstrong?”

  “The irreverence of torrid love, I guess. They certainly had an eye for glamour: Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Miami, San Francisco—all the hot spots. We interviewed the agents who booked most of the tickets. It was all done in cash, and it sounds like Kimberly did the arranging for both of them, although she was apparently in disguise—dark glasses, hair hidden, stuff like that. Just enough hocus-pocus to make her impossible to forget. I guess that makes the guy a well-heeled married local, or at least one with access to funds. From what Susan Lucey told me about Kimberly’s taste in men, I would also assume he’s—as they say—mature in years. Either that or a shy-but-precocious fifteen-year-old.” Or, I thought, even Ski Mask himself.

  “Good.” He still hadn’t opened his eyes or moved. “Now what?”

  “Now I go to Boston. I have a date tonight with a friend at the police department.”

  “In search of Pam Stark?”

  “Yup.”

  “Happy trails. Don’t get mugged.”

  I called Gail before I left and congratulated her on surviving the afternoon. She said Brandt had displayed the stoicism of Saint Sebastian and had fared about as well. I apologized for not showing up last night and told her not to expect me tonight either. I had a feeling that what I would find in Boston would keep me out of town for a while. Her reaction was matter-of-fact, with no hint of the emotion she’d shown the day before. The see-saw was back in balance, thanks to me, and for that, idiotically, I was now sorry.

  To me, driving to Boston at night is slipping toward the heart of a gigantic landlocked amoeba, whose thin and ragged outer fringe extends far beyond its inner core. From narrow, unlit New Hampshire farm roads, lights gradually begin to cluster along the sides of the highway. Occasional houses become occasional towns; the towns begin to link first tenuously with filling stations and a restaurant here or there, then with modest “miracle miles”—commercial stretches of small retailers, low-rent discount stores, and fading supermarkets. Finally, still well over an hour from the city, suburbia takes over in an endless chain of lights and malls and parking plazas and increasingly maddened traffic. By the rules known only to these particular urbanites, behavior behind the wheel metamorphoses into animal cunning. Speed limits are ignored, traffic lights are useless; drivers maneuver for room and advantage, speeding and braking, flowing from one side of the road to the other in a ceaseless attempt to get ahead of the other guy. I entered Boston, as always, like a leaf in a torrent, my only thoughts turning on ways to avoid the rocks.

  I finally beached myself downtown, not far from the city’s government center, and entered the Boston Police Department’s main building on Stuart Street. I found Don Hebard as promised, loitering outside the records division, a plastic coffee mug in hand.

  “Welcome to Beantown.”

  “You people actually call it that?”

  “Sure, sometimes. Especially to tourists.” He led me through a set of double doors and signed in. “How was the traffic?”

  “Probably what you’d call normal.”

  “Go on red, stop on green?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t they do that in New York or anywhere else I’ve been?”

  He continued down a hallway and ushered me into a large room jammed with floor-to-ceiling shelf units stuffed with cardboard boxes. There was a counter near the door with a computer monitor on it. “Ever been to Rome or Athens or Cairo?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well I have—once each. I was on one of those Mediterranean whirlwind tours—real waste of money. It’s my theory that when all of us came over to this great American melting pot, some of us opted to stay in Boston. Now the reason we did that was some cosmic genetic glitch we share with people who ended up in Rome and Athens and Cairo. It’s that gene that makes us all drive the same way.”

  I nodded in silence. The less I said the better. I’d forgotten Hebard never took comments about the traffic or the weather as mere icebreakers. To him they were subjects of real merit, comparable to religion and sports.

  “What’s the name?”

  “Stark, Pamela.”

  He entered it on the computer and watched a spume of green letters wash across the screen. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  He pointed to a series of numbers. “That means it hasn’t been put in the data banks yet.” He waved at the room beyond the counter. “All that is going on computer, along with everything that comes in now, but we haven’t quite finished. I’m afraid your girl is buried in the stacks.”

  He copied the reference number from the screen and led me behind the counter. We walked up and down looming, claustrophobic corridors, checking numbers, until he came to a halt and dropped to his knees. I joined him on the floor.

  “I never find these things at waist level, you know? It’s started to make me wonder.”

  I helped him pull the box off the bottom shelf. “You didn’t drop by the Cairo Police Department, did you?”

  He looked serious and pursed his lips. I took the box from him and stood up, flipping it open. “What’s the last number?”

  He rose slowly and gave it to me. I pulled out the appropriate folder and handed the box back. “You got some place I could read this ?”

  He led me to a table against the far wall and left to get some more coffee, still lost in thought. Hebard was no longer a street cop; he was in administration. It gave him lots of time to wonder about things.

  Pamela Stark’s file consisted of some mug shots, a fingerprint card, and a badly typed arrest report, along with all the paperwork attending an overnight stay in the Boston jail.

  I compared the picture I had of Kimberly Harris—taken the morning she was found with a belt around her neck—to the shot of a young and sulky Pamela Stark. It was a match. It made me feel odd, seeing her alive for the first time. I’d looked at the other picture so often it had become her real portrait, rather than the face of a muscleless corpse.

  I stared at the mug shot for a long time. She wasn’t beautiful in the advertisement sense—no chiseled cheekbones or aristocratic brow. She had the look of an aging teenager whose choices now would determine her appearance. She could either carry her cheerleader softness into gentle maturity, or lose it to bitterness, hardship, and the grind of a hopeless life. From the little I knew of her, she’d opted for the former by dancing near the latter, obviously a shortcut that hadn’t worked out.

  According to the report, she’d been busted virtually off the bus while selling her favors to an undercover cop. She claimed she’d been in the city less than twenty-four hours, had no pimp, no family or friends in the area, no lawyer, little money, and no remorse. It was the arresting officer’s opinion that this would not be the last time she and the police would do business. She gave her home address as 24 Stone Creek Road, Westport, Connecticut. She also gave her age as nineteen.

  Hebard saw me writing down the address. “You know to take that with a grain of salt, I guess.”

  “How big a grain?”

  He looked at the arresting officer’s report. “She hardly sounds like the virgin-from-Peoria type; stupid maybe, but not impressed by authority. I’d say you could eat the whole salt-shaker. She was above the age of consent and pleaded guilty; there was no reason for us to check the address—or the name, for that matter. Still, you never know.”

  He reached over my shoulder and picked up the photo. “Pretty girl. Very pretty, in fact.”

  “Before and after.” I handed him the picture I’d been carrying around.

  He looked at them both. “Kind of gives you a queer feeling, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  22

  I WOKE UP in the middle of the night with a start. Gail’s arm, thrown across my chest, tensed instantly.

  “What is it?” Her voice was a hard, urgent whisper.

  I reached over and touched her cheek. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing. I just thought of something.”

  She lifted her head and lo
oked around, her face half covered with a cascade of hair. “God, you scared the hell out of me.”

  “No, it’s all right. Go back to sleep.” I noticed the glowing red numbers of the digital clock beyond her; it was 2:43 A.M. She lowered her head back to the pillow.

  I hadn’t really been asleep, at least not in a deep sleep. In fact, I’d only returned from Boston a half hour ago. I’d taken Gail at her word, albeit twenty-four hours later, and had slipped into her bed as quietly as possible, waking her just enough to say, “Hi.”

  She moved closer, wrapping one leg around my own, a glutton for snuggles. “What woke you up?” Her voice had regained a sleepy fuzziness.

  “Bill Davis said all along that the drugs we found at his place were planted there, something we never paid much attention to. But if he was telling the truth, then that means someone else bought them beforehand, probably the same guy who killed Kimberly—I mean, Pam Stark.”

  “Who’s Pam Stark?”

  The interruption surprised me, as if everyone should know what I knew. “That’s Kimberly’s real name; at least I think it is. It’s the name she used when she was busted for soliciting in Boston four years ago.”

  Her eyes became more focused. “Hey, that’s right. You’re supposed to be in Boston now. What’re you doing here?”

  “I thought I was going to go from there to wherever was listed on the arrest sheet, but the address was a phony, at least according to directory assistance, so I came back home. But that’s not important—”

  “Right—now you’re sniffing after heroin. Isn’t that a little hopeless?”

  “Not if we apply the same wishful thinking we’re using in the prednisone search. If we do that, it gives us a hunchback buying drugs in a back alley—something a local pusher is liable to remember for quite some time.”

  “Find the pusher and you find the buyer?”

  “If we’re lucky. If nothing else, the pusher might remember the hump, in which case we know for sure the guy we’re after definitely had a long-term prescription, which would help cut down the search a lot. It also wouldn’t hurt as a piece of backup evidence.”

  I smiled at the ceiling. The machinery was finally beginning to turn in our favor—or at least it wasn’t turning against us. We had the off chance of pinning a physical deformity to someone who’d had close ties to Kimberly—possibly along with a prescription naming that someone—we’d matched her with a man during her three-day weekends, and we’d given her a new name, possibly a real one. It was all pretty iffy, but it was developing. We were already combing the area looking for Ski Mask, we’d soon be asking the Connecticut local cops to locate any and all families named Stark, and my bright idea about tracing the drug sale—as unrealistic as it might seem—was making me beam. Things were happening. I felt like a man who was slowly slogging his way to the firmer ground at the edge of the swamp.

  Gail kissed the inside of my ear. That always sent shivers down my spine. “My hero. You’re so smart.” She slid her thigh up between my legs. “I’m all awake now.”

  “I can tell.” Her hand slipped down across my stomach and she giggled. “You’re all awake too.”

  · · ·

  I stopped by Maxine’s window early the next morning and picked up the daily report. Brandt had entered everything I’d dug up to date.

  “You’ve certainly been busy.”

  “Not having to write your own reports helps.” She rolled her eyes. “Friends in high places. He wants to see you, by the way.”

  “Did he ever go home?”

  “He was here when I came in.”

  I thanked her and went back to Brandt’s office. He looked the same as always—no stubble on the chin or bags under the eyes. The man seemed immune to the common signs of wear and tear. “Thanks for this.” I waved the report.

  “How was Boston?”

  I laid a copy of Pam Stark’s arrest sheet on his desk and settled in a chair. “I think the address is bogus; I don’t know about the name.” He read it over quickly. “Pam Stark, huh?”

  “Yeah. I looked at a map of Connecticut this morning. Assuming she didn’t tell a bald-faced lie, she might have picked the name of a town near hers, which would make it Norwalk or Bridgeport or Wilton, something like that. We could query the local cops on it, and if we come up dry, we could try the state police.”

  Brandt nodded. “Sounds good to me. I’ll get on it.”

  I stood to go and he leaned back in his chair to look up at me. “I thought you’d like to know that John Woll did a little investigating on his own yesterday.”

  “Oh?”

  “He thought our mysterious friend might have bought his ski mask in a local store, so he went to every outlet he could think of and asked about recent purchases—his was during his time off.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing; he came up dry. But I thought you’d like to know.”

  I smiled and shook my head, remembering Murphy’s wrath at the man. “Poor bastard; he’s going to be living that one down for years.”

  “What’re your plans, by the way?”

  “Mend fences with Willy Kunkle.”

  I stopped by Maxine’s window again on my way to my cubbyhole office. “Has Willy come in yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Give me a buzz when he does, will you?”

  I had mixed feelings about dealing with Kunkle. He was so totally irascible I was half-inclined to let him self-destruct in private. But he was still a functioning cop and had once been a good one. He had also become my direct responsibility, now that I was acting captain, and in all conscience I couldn’t let him slide without at least offering a hand. My timing, though, was utterly self-serving. Kunkle, more than anyone on the force, was wired to Brattleboro’s small but intense narcotics trade.

  The phone buzzed before I even sat down. “He’s hot on your heels.”

  I stuck my head out into the hallway and caught him as he entered. “After you’ve read Brandt’s summary, could I see you for a minute?”

  “What about?” His voice was neutral, which for him was probably a good sign.

  “I’ll tell you when you’re finished; it’s related.”

  He was in my doorway three minutes later, a sour look on his face. “Is this where I get my walking papers? Or do we go the ‘you’ve-been-under-a-lot-of-strain-lately-why-not-take-some-time-off ’ route?”

  “No. We do the ‘why-don’t-you-put-your-butt-in-that-chair-and-can-the-crap’ bit. Is that acceptable?”

  He didn’t answer, but he sat.

  “I need your help on this thing, but I want to make something clear first. We all know you’re in some sort of personal bind. So far it hasn’t gotten in the way of you doing your job, although you seem hellbent on that happening. Maybe you want out and you don’t know how to do it—beats me. So I’m asking you—pure and simple, no strings attached—do you want to be a cop or not? Because if you do I’ve got some business I want help with.”

  “What?”

  “Answer the question, and think about it first.”

  He thought, but not the way I wanted. “What are you after? What’s the game?”

  “The game is I’m trying to get to the other side of your paranoia. I want to know if you, William Kunkle, want to be a cop. Yes or no.”

  “And if I say yes, then I’ve got to go see a shrink, right?”

  I shook my head and sighed. “I think you need a shrink in any case, but if you say yes, then I’ve got business on my mind.” I pointed at the summary in his hand. “Relating to that.”

  “All right. Yes.”

  “Thank God. Now promise you’ll try something for me, will you? Let’s just work together on this thing. I won’t ask what’s bugging you, and you stop assuming everything I say has a double meaning. Deal?”

  “You’re really making me into a nut case.”

  “The way I feel now, I’m the one headed for the rubber room.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look, Wi
lly, I think maybe we all let you down a little here. Cops have more stress than any professionals I know. It’s as common as the flu. We ought to help each other out more because of that, but maybe the macho thing gets in the way; I don’t know. In any case, it’s easier for cops to let a fellow cop slide, pretending he’s just eccentric, than to offer him help. And on the flip side, it’s normal for that cop to think he can deal with it himself—that if he asks for help, or shows he needs it, everyone’ll think he’s a weenie. So everyone loses. I think that’s what’s happening to you and I also think it stinks. For what it’s worth, I’d like to apologize for not having done something earlier.”

  “And what are you going to do now?”

  “Nothing you don’t want me to. I’d like to bring you into the Stark thing because I just thought of a drug angle and that’s where you’re hot. But I’d also like you to know that I’m approaching this as if it were a whole new case. The fuck-ups that landed Bill Davis in jail are past history, and we’ve all got to answer for them—you probably least of all, because you were lowest on the totem pole. If any heads roll, they’ll start at the top, among Brandt and Dunn and the board and Tom Wilson, and they’ll even dig up Frank Murphy and wave him around before they get to me and you, so I wouldn’t worry…You want to do business?”

  “Yeah.”

  As usual, it didn’t make him break into song, but this time—for the first time—I actually sensed I might have penetrated. I ran him through everything then, in chronological order, from the Jamie Phillips killing to my flash in the night a few hours ago; I also included Frank’s cover-up, an admission I could tell he appreciated. He sat and listened, looking carefully at the contents of the file I was building, item by item, without saying a word.

  “So,” I ended up. “Who’s the local gossip in the trenches?”

  “Ted Haffner. He’s not the gossip; he’s not even in the business much any more, but a couple of years ago, he was the number-one heroin man in town.”

  “What happened?”

  Kunkle gave a little smile. “These people aren’t much for job security. He got interested in other things, mainly sampling his wares.”