Bellows Falls (16 page)

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Willy Kunkle shifted in his car seat and pointed through the windshield at a scrawny young girl, her long hair swinging across her back, who’d just appeared on the sidewalk and begun walking quickly away from us, down Flat Street toward the shadowy parking lots near the end of the block.

“Give her ten minutes,” he said, “and I’ll guarantee you we’ll catch her dirty. She’s like a Swiss watch.”

We waited in the late night darkness, the warm breeze wafting through the car’s open windows. The girl we were watching was Marie Williams, Jasper Morgan’s erstwhile girlfriend, and—Willy assured me—the weak link among his old inner circle. Weak for the very reason we were here, because she had a nightly rendezvous for a supply of crack, a habit that had been escalating ever since Jasper’s disappearance.

“She was a tough little cookie when I first talked to her,” Willy said softly. “Told me to fuck off. ’Course then Jasper was John Dillinger on the loose, complete with a cop’s stolen gun. Amazing what a little time and loneliness will do to one’s self-confidence.”

I glanced over at him. He would know about such things. A Vietnam vet who’d come home haunted and angry, he’d taken to the bottle and to using his wife as a target for his misery. When that sniper bullet had shattered his arm, he’d been on the threshold of being fired. Crippled, divorced, and temporarily working as the crankiest employee in the history of the municipal library, Willy had somehow rallied. Before I’d approached him with a way to come back to us, he’d already cleaned up his act. Now, as a one-armed man, he was twice what he had been, even if his personality was as maimed as ever.

“Why haven’t you busted her contact, if he’s so predictable?”

“Small fry. He only carries what he sells her. I haven’t been able to find out where he gets the stuff. I will, though. I only tumbled to this a few weeks ago. She probably got her junk from lover-boy before. Now
that
was a tight little operation—all my poking around, I never got a look at it.”

He opened his door. “You want to catch her in the act, now’s the time.”

We walked down the street and cut through a loading area to an alleyway near the back of a large, dark parking lot located between two building blocks and a gigantic stone retaining wall that supported Elliot Street high above us. Connecting Elliot and Flat streets was a towering, switchback wooden staircase. In the gloom of this latter structure, we saw the flare of a match and the quick reflected glow of a pale face looming over a glass pipe.

“Don’t do it, Marie,” Willy said sharply.

The pipe fell to the ground and broke, and someone else’s feet scuffled off into the night, ignored by the both of us. Willy had produced a flashlight and was holding Marie Williams frozen like a deer in its harsh, bright halo.

“Who’s there?” Marie’s voice was high and frightened.

We stepped closer, so the light bouncing off her caught us as pale ghosts. “You know us,” Willy said.

She squinted into the light. “You bastards. You made me break my pipe.” But her tone wasn’t angry. It was plaintive, and she had tears in her eyes.

I gently took her arm and steered her around the corner to the bottom of the staircase, sitting next to her on the bottom step. After pocketing the pipe, Kunkle stood opposite us, the “bad cop” of the team.

“Marie. What’re you doing?” I asked. “You know what that stuff does.”

“Fuck you. What do you care?” She was looking down at her hands, clenched together between her knees.

“Enough to be here right now. You think we like seeing people like you kill themselves in slow motion, keeping a bunch of guys like that jerk in business?”

She gave me a sour look. “Oh, right. So I give you his name ’cause you care so much, right?”

“Richie Belleau,” Willy said flatly.

She stared at him in surprise. “What?”

“Eleven o’clock every night, Marie,” he went on. “I set my watch by you two. I liked the yellow T-shirt you had on last night better than that thing, by the way.”

Her mouth opened. “You been following me?”

“Not anymore.”

She slowly woke up to his meaning, and buried her face in her hands. “Oh shit, you’re not going to bust me?”

I put my hand on her skinny back. “Slow down. What was I just telling you? You’re in a jam. We’re here to help you out of it.”

“I tried that,” she said in a weak voice. “I can’t quit.”

“You tried it alone. It’s not like quitting cigarettes, Marie. You need people to give you guidance and support.”

“And rip me off.”

“Not a dime.” There was a long silence. Around us we could hear the familiar sounds of a town crowded in by the country—distant car engines almost covered by the gentle wind in the trees. The scratchings of small nocturnal animals foraging for urban scraps.

“You’ve hit bottom, Marie,” I said finally, using what Willy had told me earlier. “You’re panhandling, giving five-dollar blow jobs, shoplifting, all so you can sleep on a friend’s floor and feed a lousy habit. You’re alone, Jasper’s gone, most of your old pals dump on you now that he’s not around. All you eat is junk and leftovers. You’re either hungry or cramped up all the time… Am I right?”

Under my hand, I could feel her weeping quietly. “We can help you.”

“But you have to help us, first.” Willy’s voice was like a hard squeeze following a caress.

She looked up at him. Her voice shook. “Oh, right. Who’m I supposed to rat on before you make me this big gift?”

“No one,” I said. “We just want to talk about Jasper.”

A deep furrow creased her forehead. “Jesus Christ. You think I’d be here if I knew where he was?”

“We think he’s dead,” Willy said quietly.

She slid off the step and tucked her knees up into a ball against her chest.

“We want to find out what happened to him, Marie,” I said. “You want to know for sure, don’t you?”

She barely nodded.

“When he first disappeared, you thought he’d gone underground. You went to his standard hideaways, places only the two of you knew. Again and again.”

Her voice was muffled by her arms. “He never showed.”

“What was the one place you thought he’d pick over the others?”

“That old motel on Putney Road—the abandoned one near the C & S plant. He found a way to sneak in. We used to get away from everybody there.”

“What room?” Willy asked.

“Nine.”

I took her gently by the arms and lifted her to her feet. “Okay. We’re going to take you to some people who’ll help you out.”

She didn’t fight me, but she shook her head. “What’s the point?”

I didn’t answer. I figured she’d heard enough lies.

THE MOTEL MARIE WILLIAMS HAD TOLD US
about dated back to the early fifties, and marked the transition between the “motor courts” of old, with their small, separate buildings, and the motels we know today, with wings stretching off to either side of a central office. This one, whose name had long ago been removed from the marquee, was a series of flat, scaling, concrete boxes squatting side by side, as if uncertain which role to play. It had been abandoned—or had looked that way—for almost as long as I could remember and before that had been a repository for the truly down-and-out. Just finding the landlord of record and securing permission to search by waiver had taken half the next morning.

With me were J.P. Tyler, complete with bulky equipment cases, and Ron Klesczewski, the fourth and final member of my squad. Ron was the least demonstrative of the bunch—quiet, self-doubting, a man who brooded unless given direction. He was a wizard at tracing paperwork and keeping large operations organized. Ironically for a timid type, Ron had been with me most often when bullets were flying. This time, however, he was along to help Tyler, having, unlike Kunkle, two good hands and no propensity to argue with any course J.P. might propose.

The motel looked as boarded up as a packing crate, all doors and windows tightly sealed with plywood sheathing. As we circled it, Ron asked the obvious question. “How did they get inside? The roof?”

I shook my head, leading them to a small shed built into the hill behind and below the motel. As Marie had told us the night before, the padlock was closed but not locked. I seized on the door and wrenched it half open, revealing a small room filled with cobwebs, dust, and piles of junk. I pulled a flashlight from my pocket and played it against the walls. Opposite me, a rusted bed frame with a wood slat bottom sat tilted up on end. I crossed over to it and twisted it on its axis, swinging it back like a door. Behind it, disguised by a grimy blanket, was a narrow door.

“I’ll be damned,” Ron said, and helped shove the bed frame farther out of the way.

Behind the door was a steep set of wooden steps leading up to a third and final door, this one leading into the motel’s office. Except for our three flashlights, the place was as dark as a tomb, oven-hot, and smelled like a rotting septic tank.

“Now what?” Tyler asked, looking around, consciously breathing through his mouth.

“There’s a breezeway out back,” I explained, “running the length of the units.”

I located the rear exit and stepped onto the veranda, now a dark, shuttered, musty tunnel, clotted with debris. “Number Nine should be down here.”

Gingerly, still lugging J.P.’s baggage, we picked our way through the disemboweled mattresses, broken furniture, and shattered glass that littered the passageway like remnants of a battlefield. The scurrying complaints of escaping rodents were just audible above the sound of our footsteps.

The door to Number Nine was damaged but intact. Instinctively standing to one side, I turned the knob and pushed. Aside from the squealing hinges, there was nothing but silence from within.

Like a distant breeze, Ron nervously whispered, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

I looked around the corner and shined my light into the room. As far as I could see, there was no one to come out. I crossed the threshold, motioning the others to fan out behind me.

We stood three abreast, lighting the room like a battery of search lamps. The walls were smeared, discolored, and riddled with fist-sized holes, the ceiling stained and sagging, the rug only visible in odd patches over mildewed cement flooring. The sink in the alcove near the bathroom was shattered and hanging by one bolt. All that was left of the two mirrors was a single, lightning-shaped shard leaning against a dresser with no legs. And yet, the room had been maintained, however minimally. The bed had a bare mattress, the center of the floor had been cleared with a broom, still standing in one corner, and several candles were clustered on a chair passing for a bedside table.

“Check the bathroom,” I told Ron.

He carefully moved across the room and stuck his head through the door beyond the broken sink. “Clear.”

Tyler approached the bed. “Looks like a bullet hole in the mattress.”

“Any blood?”

He was already crouched down, opening one of his cases with a penlight held in his teeth. “Too dirty to tell in this light.”

“We could tear the plywood from the windows,” Ron suggested.

“No,” J.P. said enigmatically. “The darker the better for the moment.” From an insulated carrying case, he extracted a spray bottle much like a mister used on plants and poised it over the mattress. “Give me a little more light.”

We did as he asked and watched as he lightly dampened the entire surface of the bed.

“Okay. Kill the lights.”

It was like seeing a ghost take shape in the coal-black darkness. Glowing from the mattress’s fabric in an amber luminescence was the clearly identifiable pattern of a stain. “Jesus,” Ron said softly.

“Luminol mixed with sodium perborate and sodium carbonate,” J.P. explained. “Reacts with blood.” He quickly checked under the bed with his light. “From the angle connecting the hole in the mattress to the one in the floor, I’d say the shot came from there.” He pointed to where Ron was standing in front of the dresser, closer to the bathroom than to the front door.

He stepped back, spraying the luminol on the floor heading toward the door. At the entrance, he had us kill the lights again. We could clearly see glowing drops, their pattern indicating the direction of flight.

“Looks like he ran for it after he was shot,” J.P. said.

Ron played his flashlight across the floor. “Why can’t we see any of it?”

“It was absorbed in the filth. It’s still there, though. The lab’ll be able to analyze it once we collect it.” He glanced out to the hallway. “But let’s find out what happened first.”

We worked our way slowly down the closed-in passageway, away from the office, J.P. spraying, and Ron and I alternately turning our flashlights on and off. Section by section, we followed the grisly testament of pain and suffering until we reached the room at the dead end. Its door was missing and its contents a shambles, but there was another mattress tossed on top of all the debris, crumpled against the far corner facing the entrance. Inexorably, J.P. led us straight to it. Removing the mattress, we could see there was no further need for fancy chemicals. A huge, dry, black, clotted mass of blood covered the trash on the floor like an obscene doily.

“I guess I can’t complain about a lack of evidence,” J.P. said sadly. Positioning himself so as not to disturb anything, he leaned far over the coagulated mess and peered at a spot low on the wall, grunting softly as he discovered what he was after. “Second bullet hole. With any luck, one of ’em will yield something we can put under a microscope.”

For several hours, we stayed in that funereal location, picking through the chaos, collecting odds and ends, photographing everything. J.P. insisted on time-lapse photography to document the luminol, capturing on film the ghost of the victim’s useless flight for safety.

Although I only had Marie Williams’s word for it, I visualized Jasper Morgan in that role—all of twenty years old, leaving behind not a body, but only the putrid fluids he’d once contained. It was as pathetic a monument as I could imagine.

The plywood having at last been removed from the windows and doors for easier access and visibility, I finally left the motel through its lobby entrance and sat in the sun with my back against the disintegrating cement wall. Gail found me there ten minutes later.