Tag Man Read online

  “I know people have been giving you grief, Sam,” he said. “But I think motherhood suits you to a tee.”

  Despite her misgivings, she smiled broadly and hugged her baby slightly, making Emma stir in her dreams. “I’ve never been happier.”

  “Willy looks good, too,” he suggested.

  She laughed at the thought. “Only you would notice that,” she told him. “You’re right, though. He hates to admit it, but this has given him something I don’t think he knew was missing. I understand the scuttlebutt, though. Giving Willy a baby must look like giving a lamb to a hyena.”

  Joe wrinkled his nose. “Lovely thought.”

  She kept smiling. “You know it’s true.”

  “I do,” he agreed. After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry about the timing of my own mess, by the way, what with Emma arriving on the scene. I know it’s putting a strain on the unit, too.”

  She saw where he was heading. “It’s okay,” she countered. “Things are quiet—down to a dull roar, anyhow. Willy and Les aren’t complaining, and I’ll be back in a few weeks, maybe sooner. I have child care for her all lined up already.”

  “Still,” he persisted. “I left you high and dry, ducking out the way I did.”

  She was already shaking her head. “Since the day we met, Joe, the only time off you’ve ever taken was when you were in some hospital, usually half dead. Give yourself a break. We’re fine; I’m fine. Take advantage.”

  She was ill at ease, wishing she could find the eloquence to match her feelings. But she apparently had done well enough. Joe nodded as if in confirmation, stood, and kissed them both again.

  “I will,” he said. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and left as he’d come, deliberately and deep in thought.

  * * *

  Willy Kunkle removed the pen from his pocket and used it to tap sharply against the glass door of an Argentine restaurant named Bariloche. It was late, and Brattleboro’s Elliot Street was empty enough that a single cat felt free to stroll down the middle of the road a hundred yards away, looking around like a tourist taking in landmarks.

  To gauge from the surrounding architecture, this moment could have been a hundred years earlier. Brattleboro was a poster child for the archetypal New England, Industrial Revolution museum piece—all red bricks and stone moldings with bas-relief titles like the Union Block, or Amedeo de Angelis. In fact, if anything, the few parked cars looked out of place in the gloom, rather than the buildings that seemed as cemented in place as the pyramids themselves.

  A shadow moved in the dimly lighted restaurant, and a narrow form in a trim white apron and T-shirt approached the door like a specter, pale and silent.

  The lock was thrown, and the door opened to reveal a clean-shaven, short-haired, nondescript man who smiled as he recognized Willy—not the latter’s usual reception.

  “Mr. Kunkle,” he said, stepping back to let Willy inside.

  “Dan,” Willy countered, not bothering to shake hands, knowing the other’s dislike of the form. It also didn’t surprise him that, although Dan Kravitz had been working in the restaurant’s kitchen for a full shift—a restaurant with open grills and a reputation for preparing juicy steaks—Dan’s white clothing looked as fresh as if it had come from the washing machine.

  Kravitz was an intelligence source of Willy’s—a denizen of the town’s unnoticed lower levels, among the bums, fences, prostitutes, drug dealers, runaways, and others as invisible to society as the lampposts and parking meters lining the streets.

  But Dan Kravitz was also something else, something Willy hadn’t known for the first ten years of their acquaintance. During that time, as cop and CI, respectively—or confidential informant—neither had put enormous effort into getting to know the other. Willy had found Dan to be reliable when consulted, and Dan had told Willy of certain illegalities only when they’d surpassed his own standard of outrage. This strictly business relationship had been additionally constrained by Dan’s almost exclusively monosyllabic speaking style, which had naturally led Willy to write him off as simpleminded.

  A prejudice shattered just last year.

  That was when a major case had occurred involving several of Dan’s friends, with whom he and his daughter had been living. When Willy had asked for his impressions at the time, Dan’s response had left him speechless. The insight, thoughtfulness, and careful, elegant phrasing—seemingly straight out of nowhere—had revealed a man of education, culture, and experience, steeped in the vagaries of the human spirit and refined in psychological analysis. His advice and guidance, in a single conversation, had been of enormous help. Willy had found the entire event comparable to a dog suddenly speaking English.

  He had been both caught off guard and thoroughly impressed, not that he hadn’t immediately given Dan hell for engaging in such duplicity.

  He recalled Kravitz’s response. “We’re alike in some ways,” he’d told him. “People think you’re a crippled asshole who acts like a Nazi, while they think I’m a retarded bum with good manners who knows how to shower. They’re wrong, but they buy what we’re selling.”

  That comment alone had shot Dan Kravitz to the top of Willy’s estimation, if not just for his blunt clear-sightedness. More quirkily, Willy also liked the man for his perpetual cleanliness, a trait they happened to share.

  Willy’s neatness didn’t match Dan’s. But, like Dan, he kept his need for order internalized, not holding others to his own standards. It allowed him to travel amid disorder and filth albeit uncomfortably, which may have influenced each man’s personality quirks. In Dan, spotless in the confines of a messy, commercial kitchen, Willy therefore saw a kindred soul.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Dan asked.

  Kunkle snorted at the phrasing. “For ten years, all you gave me was yups and nopes. I still can’t get used to you sounding like Richard Frigging Burton.”

  “Who is both British and dead,” Dan responded, also smiling.

  “You talk like this to anyone else?” Willy asked.

  “My daughter,” Dan conceded, tapping his right temple, “myself, and sometimes people I don’t expect to meet again.”

  Dan’s daughter, Sally, who was now about seventeen, was a precocious, pretty, very smart girl who, because of Dan’s marginal income, attended a prestigious boarding school in nearby Massachusetts on a full scholarship. Now that he was a father himself, Willy wasn’t sure if he wanted Emma to turn out quite so intelligent, or if he’d be scared of her should she do so. He sure as hell knew that he didn’t have Dan’s brains.

  As if reading that very thought, the latter said, “I hear that congratulations are in order. How are mother and daughter doing?”

  Normally, such questions were hot buttons for Willy. His privacy was paramount to him. But this was a man on whom he depended and who’d played him like a pro—clearly someone who could keep his mouth shut. He overcame instinct to answer levelly, “They’re fine. I’ve given up sleep altogether.”

  Dan laughed softly. “I remember those days.”

  Willy studied him. There had never been mention of a companion or wife in Dan’s life. He’d been questioned over the years by police, for one reason or another, but never to the point where they’d probed deeply into his affairs. On that basis, he remained an official enigma—a man who’d simply appeared one day, complete with child, as if dropped from another planet.

  “How is the young inheritor?” Willy asked, taking a gentle return jab at Dan’s own privacy.

  But the other man didn’t mind. Instead, his face softened. “Amazing, in a word. Despite being worlds apart from her classmates in origin and background, she’s more than holding her own. She seems custom-made for the place.”

  “She boarding?” Willy asked, although already losing interest.

  “Yes, but she comes home often.”

  “Where’s home these days?”

  “Oh, here and there. You know.”

  What Willy k
new was that he’d crossed the subliminal line between them.

  He took it as a cue to proceed. “We alone?” he inquired, looking past his host into the half-lit restaurant beyond.

  “Yes. The boss trusts me to close up,” Dan said vaguely, making Willy consider that they might well be standing in what Dan was calling home at the moment. The man moved compulsively around town, sometimes living alone, other times sharing a bed with some woman, often equipped with children of her own. He was a friend of many and a guest of quite a few.

  Willy let it pass, his curiosity trumped by his need to keep an ally.

  “You hear about the Tag Man?” he asked.

  Dan removed a chair from a nearby tabletop and placed it on the floor for Willy’s use, setting another just like it directly opposite. They looked like two lingering shadows of the many diners who’d crowded the place earlier, when it had been full of light and noise. Now, in the pauses between them, they could hear the refrigerator cycling on and off under the bar against the far wall.

  “I’d have to be fresh off the bus not to have heard of him,” Dan conceded, adding, “I don’t know who he is, though.”

  “No rumors?” Willy pressed.

  “What would there be?” Dan challenged him. “The guy doesn’t do anything. The papers say he breaks in and leaves a note. It’s not like he’s fencing jewelry or stealing underwear…” He studied Willy more closely before adding, “Unless you people are holding something back. What is he doing, Mr. Kunkle? You work for a major-crimes unit nowadays.”

  Willy shook his head. “I’m just being nosy. This has nothing to do with me. It’s a local case.”

  “So why the interest?”

  Initially, Willy considered a routine denial—a cop’s instinct to slam the door on all questions. But he liked this enigmatic man, with his preference for the night and his interest in human nature. He appeared to have a code, a guiding principle that kept him level. With Willy’s past of violence, alcoholism, and relational chaos—of which his crippled arm was but the most obvious symbol—he needed to stay open to someone like Kravitz.

  “Because I can’t make sense of it,” Willy admitted.

  “It or him?”

  Willy hesitated. “Both, I guess,” he said. “Why do you ask it like that?”

  Kravitz considered his answer carefully. “They are distinct entities. The man—assuming it is a man—and his actions. We know a human being is breaking in and leaving notes. What we don’t know is what else he might be doing. So the ‘it’ part of the equation is a little elusive, if you get my point, kind of like a discussion about something that isn’t there.”

  Willy stared at him. “I liked it better when all you did was grunt.”

  Dan laughed. “No, you didn’t. I was just a snitch then. Now I’m a fellow soul. You have to care about me.”

  “The fuck I do.”

  “What are you doing here, then?”

  Willy frowned. He hated this kind of exchange. He preferred things straightforward. And to leave the mental gymnastics to Joe. “I’m trying to find out what you know about the Tag Man, which is looking like shit.”

  Dan nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t tell you about him, Mr. Kunkle, but if I were you, I’d lay bets that he’s up to more than leaving messages like Kilroy.”

  “Like what?”

  The answer was a shrug.

  “Money?” Willy pursued.

  Dan’s eyebrows rose. “I hadn’t heard that. Is that what you’re holding back?”

  “Jesus,” Willy growled. “This is getting me nowhere. Tag Man is probably you, just to dick me around.”

  Dan laughed. “Why bother? I seem to be doing that anyhow.”

  “Seriously,” Willy asked, trying to justify the visit in some way. “Is there money being lifted? Is that what you’re hearing?”

  Dan considered his companion philosophically. “That does raise an interesting question,” he mused. “What if this fellow is stealing something from all these people, but no one is reporting it? You’d have to wonder what that could be.”

  Willy just watched him.

  “Something to consider,” Dan continued. “How seriously are the police interviewing the victims?”

  Willy realized it was a genuine question. “They have a decent enough guy on it,” he blurted, trusting that the compliment would never get back to Ron. But in fact, he wondered about Kravitz’s point. Back when he was working this very turf, he would have given little time to a crime with no real consequence—go through the motions, say all the right things, file reports with the brass. But that would be about it. He knew Klesczewski was more of a grind for procedure, and that he’d give even the stupidest case a thorough once-over, but nowadays he had an entire squad to run. Was he in fact digging that deeply?

  As if to run the point home, Dan asked, “Is he really applying a microscope?”

  Willy decided to grant Ron the benefit of the doubt. “That’s his style.”

  Dan sat back, his body language dismissing the whole topic as a trifle. “Just a thought—to bring as much depth to the ‘it’ as to the ‘who,’ that we were discussing a minute ago.”

  Willy nodded and stood up. “I’ll fly it by the locals. You tell me if you hear anything, okay?”

  Dan joined him and escorted him back to the front door, unlocking it to let him out. “Of course, Mr. Kunkle. You’ve piqued my interest. I’ll ask around.”

  * * *

  Dan stood by the restaurant window and watched Willy walk down the sidewalk, cross the street, and vanish from sight. He sighed and pulled back into the darkened dining room, enjoying the solitude and quiet of a place designed for everything but.

  He was interested in the interplay of opposites, which explained his attraction to Kunkle. If ever there was someone at odds with himself, Willy fit the bill. Dan sincerely hoped that the baby girl he and Sam had just brought into the world would only and forever be a reflection of Willy’s good side.

  He suspected so, but he’d had enough education at the hands of people more emotionally stable than Willy to know it could play out one way or the other. He imagined that for Willy’s child, it would boil down to luck—and whatever weight Sammie Martens might bring to bear.

  But he’d been blessed with his Sally, and he wasn’t vain enough to think that she’d wound up so well through any effort of his.

  He stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around, double-checking his final tidying up. Satisfied, he switched off the last light, leaving only the one over the bar, and climbed the narrow staircase behind the door off the tiny stage at the back wall. It was a tight fit, even for him, and very steep, which he enjoyed for how it made him feel like a gopher heading into his hole.

  Above, the stairs opened up into a single large room with a tall ceiling and a row of windows overlooking the Harmony parking lot behind the restaurant.

  The room was painted with ghostly tendrils of light streaming in from the surrounding town. As always, Dan hesitated at the top step to take it in. It wasn’t rentable space, because of the restricted access and lack of a fire escape, but the owner let him stay here in exchange for Dan’s caretaking the place at night. It was one of Dan’s better finds, too—spacious, sparse, easy to clean, and with an alcove for Sally when she came to visit.

  He crossed to the table he’d set up as a desk near one of the windows and sat down in a straight-backed chair, barely making a sound, as was his wont. He liked to pass through life unnoticed, even while taking note of all its workings.

  Prompted by his conversation with Willy, he reached into a canvas bag he used solely to transport his stolen prizes—eventually fated to end up in a cabinet, safe and sound in folders, and indexed according to their homeowners’ last name—and extracted the wad of papers he’d removed from the Jordan residence.

  He’d known the police were withholding evidence. That was standard practice. But he’d thought it amounted to his trademark of eating from every fridge. He’d assumed t
hat whatever items he’d collected—pictures, letters, documents—had either not been missed or were deemed too embarrassing to have been reported lost in the first place.

  Like Lloyd Jordan’s hidden love letter from Susan Rainier.

  But Dan had stolen more than that. He hadn’t liked Lloyd, both for betraying his wife and from what he’d interpreted of the man’s personality. That’s why he’d grabbed a few of the hidden financial papers as well.

  It wasn’t his habit to carefully read the documents he stole, in a contrary concession to people’s privacy. It usually didn’t seem that important after the thrill of breaking in.

  But maybe this time deserved an exception.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dr. Eberhard Dziobek removed his glasses and placed them on the arm of his upholstered chair. Opposite him, Joe Gunther sat—slouched, tired, and morose—staring at some spot on the ancient oriental rug between them. They were in the therapist’s office at the Retreat, Brattleboro’s mental health facility, where Dziobek had been treating alcohol- and drug-dependent patients for decades. Dependence wasn’t Joe’s problem, of course. He was simply in mourning. But Eberhard liked him, and had offered to be a sounding board. Gunther had given enough of his time and talent to others to deserve a small kindness in return.

  “In your rational mind, of course, you know that you shouldn’t be blaming yourself,” he suggested in his carefully phrased English.

  Joe allowed for a thin smile. “Yeah. I saw that movie too. ‘It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault.’ That’s when the poor bastard breaks down, bursts into tears, and is instantly cured. Not a dry eye in the house.”

  “You don’t believe me?” Dziobek’s voice was soft and gently modulated, his German accent almost a parody.

  “I believe it on paper, but I’m not sure I give a damn. She’s dead, and she wouldn’t be if I hadn’t indirectly put her in harm’s way.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “You ever hear of a black cloud?” Joe asked him.

  Dziobek shook his head.