Open season jg-1 Page 22

  “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 seoinv height=ries 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, Westpor t, 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 nevetilrleaderr 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 looked 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 whight="yer? ch 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.<
br />
  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 ti du always amp;me 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, Willy, 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.”

  “Is he friendly?”

  “He’s not a snitch, if that’s what you mean. He’ll take some work.”

  “Well, let"›h i’s do it.”

  Kunkle remained seated, his face regaining that familiar cloud. “So who shakes him down?”

  I stood and showed him both palms. “Hey, Willy, he’s your baby. I’m just riding shotgun.”

  Still Kunkle stayed where he was, reading the summary. “So Stan followed you to Susan Lucey’s and supposedly Christ-knows-who tailed you from Connecticut. Have you been watching your back lately?”

  I still hadn’t told anyone about the private detective from Burlington. “I didn’t see much point.”

  “Why not? It sounds
like an easy way to pick up bad guys, maybe even Ski Mask.”

  “So what do we do? Get one of our own to tail us, and hope he picks up the competition?”

  “It’s an idea. We might get lucky. If nothing else, it might dissuade people from following you around and lousing up the case.”

  It seemed silly as hell to me. I don’t know why-pride maybe-but I wasn’t going to antagonize Kunkle now that he’d agreed to help out. I picked up the phone and arranged to have an unmarked car follow us from a distance.

  · · ·

  Ted Haffner lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of West Brattleboro-the last cluster of urban dwellers before Route 9 began its gradual climb into the Green Mountains. In fact, it was so much on the fringe it was hard to tell whether the homes or the trees were gaining the upper hand in taking over the real estate. My personal bet was on the trees. Mostly evergreens, they stood tall and dark, their bristling skirts massive and ancient in the flat, gray light. The trailers, by contrast, sandwiched between the icy crusts on their roofs and the rough turmoil of ground-up, dirty snow around them, looked like the remnants of a civilization long on the ropes.

  We bumped along a winding track, weaving between snow covered sofas, rusting cars and assortments of trash and cordwood. No one was visible, although several of the battered, dark-windowed homes leaked thin strings of gray smoke from their oily metal chimneys.

  “I see the drug trade stood Mr. Haffner in good stead.”

  Kunkle was at the wheel, trying to save his car’s suspension from as much abuse as possible. “Like I said, as a businessman, his mind tended to wander.” He stopped before an oblong metal shack, modest even by these standards, a mobile home whose only movement was toward disintegration. “This is it.”

  We climbed out and walked unsteadily across the frozen debris scattered outside the small aluminum front door. Kunkle pounded on the wall. “This is purely a formality. He never does answer.”

  He grabbed the doorknob and pulled. As the door swung back, I noticed a faint, wispy cloud billow out like a belch. Kunkle put his foot on the high threshold and heaved himself inside. I followed him, my nostrils flaring at the overheated stench. Before my eyes adjusted, I thought the place was totally blacked out, but a faint glow slowly grew at the far end, where Kunkle was already talking with someone.