Blaze (16 page)

“They might get that ransom,” the driver said, flipping out his second cigarette butt and lighting a third, “but they'll never get to spend it. Nossir. Not
never.
”

They were headed up Route 1 now, past frozen marshes and clam-shacks shuttered for the winter. The trucker was avoiding the turnpike and the weighing stations there. Blaze didn't blame him.

If I hit 'im right in the throat, where his adam's apple is, he'd wake up in heaven before he even knew he was dead, Blaze thought. Then I could grab the wheel and pull 'im over. Prop 'im up on the passenger side. Anyone who sees him'll think he's just catching him a little catnap. Poor fella, they'll think, he was probably drivin all n—

“…goin?”

“Huh?” Blaze asked.

“I said, where you goin? I forgot.”

“Oh. Westbrook.”

“Well, I gotta swing off on Marah Road a mile up. Meetin a buddy, you know.”

“Oh,” Blaze said. “Yeah.”

And George said: “You got to do it now, Blazer. Right time, right place. It's how we roll.”

So Blaze turned toward the driver.

“How about another cigarette?” the driver asked. “You in'trested?” He cocked his head a little as he spoke. Offering a perfect target.

Blaze stiffened a little. His hands twitched in his lap. Then he said, “No. Tryin to quit.”

“Yeah? Good for you. Cold as a witch's tit in here, ain't it?” The driver downshifted in anticipation of his turn, and from below them came a series of barking explosions as the engine backfired down its rotting tailpipe. “Heater's broke. Radio, too.”

“Too bad,” Blaze said. His throat felt as if as if someone had just fed him a spoonful of dust.

“Yeah, yeah, life sucks and then y'die.” He applied the brakes. They screamed like souls in pain. “You have to hit the ground runnin; sorry, but she stalls out in first.”

“Sure,” Blaze said. Now that the moment had come and gone, he felt sick to his stomach. And afraid. He wished he had never seen the driver.

“Say hi to your buddy when you see 'im,” the driver said, and downshifted another gear as the overloaded truck swerved onto what Blaze assumed was Marah Road.

Blaze opened the door and jumped out onto the frozen shoulder, slamming the door behind him. The driver honked his horn once, and then the truck roared over the hill in a cloud of stinking exhaust. Soon it was just a sound, dwindling away.

Blaze started up Route 1 with his hands jammed in his pockets. He was in the exurban sprawl south of Portland, and in a mile or two he came to a big shopping center with stores and a cinema complex. There was a laundrymat there called The Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was a mailbox in front of the laundrymat, and there he mailed his ransom note.

There was a newspaper dispenser inside. He went in to get one.

“Look, Ma,” a little kid said to his mother, who was unloading kleen kloze from a coin-op dryer. “That guy's got a hole in his head.”

“Hush,” the kid's mother said.

Blaze smiled at the boy, who immediately hid behind his mother's leg. From this place of safety he peered out and up.

Blaze got his paper and went out with it. A hotel fire had pushed the kidnap story to the bottom of page one, but the sketch of him was still there. SEARCH FOR KIDNAPPERS GOES ON, the headline said. He stuffed the newspaper in his back pocket. It was a bummer. While cutting across the parking lot to the road, he spotted an old Mustang with the keys in it. Without giving it much thought, Blaze got in and drove it away.

C
LAYTON
B
LAISDELL
, J
R
.,
became the prime suspect in the kidnapping at 4:30 PM on that same gray January afternoon, about an hour and a half after he dropped his letter into the mailbox in front of the Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was “a break in the case,” as law enforcement officials like to say. But even before the phone call that came to the FBI number listed in that day's story about the snatch, ID had become only a matter of time.

The police had a wealth of information. There was the description given by Morton Walsh (whose ass would be canned by his Boston employers as soon as the furor died down). There were a number of blue threads plucked from the top of the chainlink fence surrounding the Oakwood visitors' parking lot, identified as being from D-Boy jeans, a discount brand. There were photos and casts of boot-treads with distinctive wear-patterns. There was a blood sample, type AB, Rh-negative. There were photos and casts of the feet of an extendable ladder, now identified as a Craftwork Lightweight Supreme. There were photographs of boot-prints inside the house, featuring those same distinctive wear-patterns. And there was a dying declaration by Norma Gerard, identifying the police artist's sketch as a reasonable likeness of the man who had assaulted her.

Before lapsing into a coma, she had added one detail that Walsh had left out: the man had a massive dent in his forehead, as if he had once been hit there with a brick or a length of pipe.

Very little of this information had been given to the press.

Other than the dent in the forehead, investigators were particularly interested in two facts. First, D-Boy jeans were sold at only a few dozen outlets in northern New England. Second, and even better, Craftwork Ladders was a small Vermont company that wholesaled only to independent hardware stores. No Ames, no Mammoth Mart, no Kmart. A small army of officers began visiting these independent dealers. They had not reached Apex Hardware (“The Helpful Place!”) on the day Blaze mailed his letter, but it was now only a matter of hours before they did.

At the Gerard home, traceback equipment had been installed. Joseph Gerard IV's father had been carefully coached on how to handle the inevitable call when it came. Joe's mother was upstairs, stuffed with tranks.

None of the law enforcement officials were under any orders to take the kidnapper or kidnappers alive. Forensic experts estimated that one of the men they were after (maybe the only man) stood at least six feet, four inches tall and weighed in the two-fifty range. The fractured skull of Norma Gerard offered testimony, if any were needed, of his strength and brutality.

Then, at 4:30 PM on that gray day, SAC Albert Sterling got a call from Nancy Moldow.

As soon as Sterling and his partner, Bruce Granger, stepped into the Baby Shoppe, Nancy Moldow said: “There's something wrong with your picture. The man you want has a big hole in the middle of his forehead.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Sterling said. “We're holding that back.”

Her eyes got round. “So
he
won't know that
you
know.”

“That's correct.”

She gestured to the young fellow standing next to her. He was wearing a blue nylon duster, a red bowtie, and a thrilled look. “This is Brant. He helped that…that…
him
out with the things he bought.”

“Full name?” Agent Granger asked the kid in the blue duster. He opened his notebook.

The stockboy's adam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. “Brant Romano. Sir. That guy was driving a Ford.” He named the year with what Sterling deemed to be a high degree of confidence. “Only it wasn't blue, like it says in the paper. It was green.”

Sterling turned to Moldow. “What did this man buy, ma'am?”

She actually laughed a little. “My laws, what
didn't
he. All baby things, of course, that's what we sell here. A crib, a cradle, a changing table, clothes…the works. He even bought a single place serving.”

“Do you have a complete list?” Granger asked.

“Of course. I never suspected he was up to something awful. He actually seemed like a nice enough man, although that dented place in his forehead…that
hole
…”

Granger nodded sympathetically.

“And he didn't seem terribly bright. But bright enough to fool me, I guess. He said he was buying things for a little nephew, and silly Nan believed him.”

“And he was big.”

“My laws, a
giant!
It was like being with a…a…” She trilled nervous laughter. “A bull in a baby shop!”

“How big?”

She shrugged. “I'm five-feet-four, and I only came up to his
ribs
. That would make him—”

“You probably won't believe this,” said Brant the stockboy, “but I thought he had to be, like, six-seven. Maybe even six-eight.”

Sterling prepared to ask a final question. He had saved it for last because he was almost sure it would lead to a dead end.

“Mrs. Moldow, how did this man pay for his purchases?”

“Cash,” she said promptly.

“I see.” He looked at Granger. It was the answer they had expected.

“You should have
seen
all the cash he had in his wallet!”

“Spent most of it,” Brant said. “He tipped me five, but by then the cupboard was mostly, like, bare.”

Sterling ignored this. “And since it was a cash purchase, you don't have any record of the man's name.”

“No. No record. Hager's will get around to putting in security cameras in a few years, I suppose—”

“Centuries,” said Brant. “This place is, like, cheap to the max.”

“Well, then,” Sterling said, flipping his notebook closed, “we'll be going. But I want to give you my card in case you think of anyth—”

“I
do
happen to know his name,” Nancy Moldow said.

They both turned back to her.

“When he opened his wallet to take out that big stack of money, I saw his driver's license. I remember the name partly because that kind of sale is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but mostly because it was such a…a
stately
name. It didn't seem to fit him. I remember thinking that a man like him should be named Barney or Fred. You know, like on
The Flintstones
.”

“What was the name?” Sterling asked.

“Clayton Blaisdell. In fact, I think it was Clayton Blaisdell,
Jr.
”

By five-thirty that evening, they had their man tabbed. Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., aka Blaze, had been popped twice, once for assault and battery against the headmaster of the state home where the kid was living—a place called Hetton House—and once more, years later, for bunco and fraud. A suspected accomplice, George Thomas Rackley, aka Rasp, had gotten off because Blaze wouldn't testify against him.

According to police files, Blaisdell and Rackley had been a team for at least eight years before Blaisdell's fall on the bunco rap, which had been a religious con just a little too complex for the big boy's limited mental talents. At South Portland Correctional, he had taken an IQ test and scored low enough to be placed in a category called “borderline restricted.” In the margin, someone had written, in big red letters: RETARDED.

Sterling found the details of the con itself quite amusing. In the gag, there was a big man in a wheelchair (Blaisdell) and a little guy pushing him who introduced himself to marks as the Rev. Gary Crowell (almost certainly Rackley). The Rev. Gary (as he styled himself) claimed to be raising money for a revivalist swing through Japan. If the marks—mostly old ladies with a little stashed in the bank—proved hard to convince, the Rev. Gary performed a miracle. He caused the big guy in the wheelchair to walk again, through the power of Jesus.

The circumstances of the arrest were even more amusing. An octogenarian named Arlene Merrill got suspicious and called the police while the Rev. Gary and his “assistant” were in the living room. Then she walked back to the living room to talk to them until the police arrived.

The Rev. Gary smelled it and took off. Blaisdell stayed. In his report, the arresting officer wrote, “
Suspect said he did not flee because he had not been healed yet.
”

Sterling considered all this and decided that there were two kidnappers, after all. At least two. Rackley had to be in on it with him, a guy as dumb as Blaisdell sure hadn't pulled this thing off alone.

He picked up the phone, made a call. A few minutes later he got a callback that surprised him. George Thomas “Rasp” Rackley had died the previous year. He had been found knifed in the area of a known crap-game on the Portland docks.

Shit. Someone else, then?

Someone running the big lug the way Rackley no doubt once had?

Just about had to be, didn't there?

By seven that night, a statewide all-points—what would become known as a BOLO a few years later—was out on Clayton Blaisdell, Jr.

By that time Jerry Green of Gorham had discovered his Mustang had been stolen. The car was on State Police hot-sheets forty minutes or so later.

Around that same time, Westbrook PD gave Sterling the number of a woman named Georgia Kingsbury. Ms. Kingsbury had been reading the evening paper when her son looked over her shoulder, pointed to the police sketch, and asked, “Why is that man from the laundrymat in the paper? And how come that doesn't show the hole in his head?”

Mrs. Kingsbury told Sterling: “I took one look and said oh my God.”

At 7:40, Sterling and Granger arrived at the Kingsbury home. They showed mother and son a copy of Clayton Blaisdell, Jr.'s mug shot. The copy was blurry, but the Kingsburys' identification was still immediate and positive. Sterling guessed that once you saw Blaisdell, you remembered him. That this hulk was the last person Norma Gerard had seen in her lifelong home made Sterling sick with anger.

“He smiled at me,” the Kingsbury boy said.

“That's nice, son,” Sterling said, and ruffled his hair.

The boy flinched away. “Your hand is cold,” he said.

In the car Granger said, “You think it's odd that the big boss would send a guy like that shopping for the kid? A guy so easy to remember?”

When Sterling considered, he did think it a little odd, but Blaisdell's shopping spree suggested something else, as well. It was optimistic, and so he preferred to concentrate on that. All that baby stuff suggested they meant to keep the kid alive, at least for awhile.

Granger was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

So Sterling said, “Who knows why these mopes do anything? Come on, let's go.”

The all-but-positive ID of Blaisdell as one of the kidnappers went out to state and local law enforcement agencies at 8:05 PM. At 8:20, Sterling received a call from State Trooper Paul Hanscom, at the Portland barracks. Hanscom reported that a 1970 Mustang had been stolen from the same mall where Georgia Kingsbury had seen Blaisdell, and at approximately the same time. He wanted to know if the FBI would like that added to the APB. Sterling said the FBI would like that very much.

Now Sterling decided that he knew the answer to Agent Granger's question. It was really simple. The brains of the operation was brighter than Blaisdell—bright enough to hang back, especially with the added excuse of a baby to take care of—but not
that
bright.

And now it was really just a matter of waiting for the net to tighten. And hoping—

But Albert Sterling decided he could do more than just hope. At 10:15 that evening, he went down the hall to the men's and checked the stalls and urinals. The place was empty. That didn't surprise him. This was just a small office, really just a provincial bump on the FBI's ass. Also, it was getting late.

He went into one of the stalls, dropped to his knees, and folded his hands just as he had as a child. “God, this is Albert. If that baby is still alive, watch over him, would you? And if I get near the man who murdered Norma Gerard, please let him do something that will give me cause to kill the sonofabitch. Thank you. I pray in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ.”

And because the men's room was still empty, he threw in a Hail Mary for good measure.