Face on the Wall (6 page)

F
red Small had been out on the road again, searching for Pearl's brother, because Pearl's goddamned brother had tripped him up that day and then plunged down the stairs and cleared out. Where the hell was he? God, he had to be someplace. The man was dangerous, he was a loose cannon.

It was the first day of spring. For the last week Fred had been looking for the son of a bitch, but so far without success.

In the meantime, there was something else he had to do, and this time it was no problem, except that right now his hands were shaking. Small sat at a table in his bedroom, bowed over a piece of paper. Sunlight poured through the window and lay on the bed like a cloth. Looking up, he could see in the distance the towers of his failed sand-and-gravel company, and he frowned. Then he reminded himself that before long the towers would be obscured by twenty or thirty large and impressive houses. At this moment he could almost see them looming up here and there along the Pig Road, ghostly shapes outlined in air. Soon they would actually occupy the land, lining the curving drive that had been laid out on paper so cleverly by his friend the developer, maximizing the number of lots.

Small looked down again at the curlicues and scrawls on his piece of paper. They still weren't right. He couldn't seem to get the hang of it, that big generous upright hand with its looped I's and tightly closed a's. Pearl's signature should not look cramped. It should seem quick and unstudied. Absently he watched the jerky movement of his pen, thinking at the same time about the two irons he had in the fire. “Irons in the fire,” it was a blacksmith's term. When the irons glowed red, the smith took them out of the fire and hammered them into shape.

The first of Small's irons was heating up, the second was growing cold.

Iron number one was the development of Pearl's land. Now that her stubborn resistance was no longer a factor he could at last get started. Pearl had inherited the place from her uncle the pig farmer—the house and ninety-nine acres of land.

No, watch it, the slant still isn't quite right.
Small took a firmer grip on his pen.

He had tried to make her see it as a bonanza, prime real estate, ripe for intelligent development. Especially with Meadow-lark Estates going up next door, setting a high tone for a neighborhood that had once been a rural slum, with third-rate malls and sleazy discount stores and pig farms like her Uncle Charley's. But poor old misguided Pearl, she'd insisted on seeing her ninety-nine acres as some sort of natural paradise, a haven for wildlife. Small's pen trembled as he remembered the look on Pearl's face when she reached down and touched the soil under her feet, compacted by the hooves of a thousand pigs.

Come on, Fred, be careful, don't let the letters run downhill.

She had talked wildly about the trees she was planting, pines and birches, mountain laurel and hemlocks. Pheasants would find cover in her shrubbery, Pearl said. Rabbits and foxes and deer would hide in her woodland. She had shown him the red-tailed hawk perched on the very top of the tallest of his gravel-sorting towers. “Someday,” she had said dreamily, “that hawk's descendants will perch in my white-oak trees.”
Goddamnit, Pearl! Why couldn't you see the opportunity? Why couldn't you get it through your thick head
?

But she didn't see. No matter what he said to her, no matter what he
did
to her—and he'd done plenty—no matter how many times he showed her the developer's figures, she still didn't get it, she just sulked and turned her head away. She was
stupid,
that was the trouble.

Well, it was no longer a problem. Pearl was out of the picture. He could go right ahead. Any day now he'd pull that red-hot iron out of the fire and strike it a mighty blow.

Unfortunately, the second iron was rapidly growing cold. His sand-and-gravel company was on its last legs. It had already been in trouble on the day he ran into Pearl for the first time. There she had been on the other side of his chain-link fence, a pretty girl with yellow wisps of hair peeking out from under her kerchief. She had been planting trees along the southern edge of her property—a lovely girl with yellow hair and ninety-nine acres of land!

Pearl had wanted to know at once how long the conveyor belts and sorting bins and rusty towers were going to remain right there beside her
wilderness
, her
wildlife refuge
, her
bird sanctuary.

“Oh, not long at all,” he had told her, enchanted by her fairytale prettiness. “I'm selling out. It's all coming down, everything, even the asphalt plant.”

The truth was, Fred Small had no choice. He merely leased the land on which his sorting towers stood, with their crushers for six-inch boulders, their hoppers for pea-sized and half-inch gravel, their screening decks and belt-driven conveyors. The owner of the land wanted to sell. And anyway the site was exhausted. The ground had been scraped clean of sandy topsoil. Sooner or later Fred would have to dismantle all the rigs and move them to New Hampshire, even the asphalt plant, which had at last begun to break even.

It would cost millions. All the more reason to carry through with the development of the old pig farm! Couldn't Pearl see that? Then, for an instant, Small's hand stopped its exercise in penmanship on the paper in front of him. He remembered something he had read a thousand years ago, a story about sailors turned into swine. Maybe all the pigs in Southtown had been human once. Now the poor creatures were long gone, turned into sides of bacon and a thousand miles of sausage.

Before long their old stomping ground would be turned into house lots, exclusive pieces of real estate. No ghostly pigs would ever snuffle around those stately homes.

Instant her circling wand the Goddess waves,

To hogs transforms 'em, and the Sty receives.

No more was seen the human form divine,

Head, face and members bristle into swine …

Homer,
The Odyssey

Chapter 10

She reached a slimy place where large fat sea-snails were crawling about; and … a house built of the bones of human beings.…

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Mermaid”

O
nly one of the supermarket scandal sheets was published in Boston,
The Candid Courier.
On the cover in enormous black type were the words SHARON
SHUCKS SHEIK.
The typeface on the inside pages was the same as that on the scrap of newsprint Mary had found on Annie's table, the fragment about Pearl Small, who had disappeared.

Mary flipped the pages and found a tiny masthead on the back of page one, which confessed to an office on Washington Street.

That was easy. If she left within the hour she could park at Alewife, take the T to Park Street, walk a block or two, talk to the crummy people, and be back home by lunchtime.

Washington was a street in transition. The department stores had moved out of town to the suburban malls, to be replaced by high-rise office buildings, little boutiques, and junky souvenir shops. Farther along the street, to the south, the old red-light district had insinuated itself back again after being cleaned up yet one more time.

The office of the
Courier
was halfway between north and south, on the second floor, above a joke-goods store, in an old brick building. Mary paused on the sidewalk to look in the window at hilarious items like plastic dog turds and artificial vomit, and rubber masks of skulls and the living dead. One was especially villainous, a ghastly monster with its left eye hanging down its cheek.

Upstairs the sign on the door was discreet and businesslike, as though the
Courier
were a respectable suburban weekly, reporting on church suppers and high-school sporting events. Mary was not fooled. Inside she would find a receptionist who looked like a whore and a bunch of sleazy thugs with three-day growths of beard.

To her surprise there was only one occupant of the small room, a pink wholesome-looking young man in a trench coat that was a miracle of grommets, buckles, straps and flaps, leaning back in an old-fashioned office armchair. There were no girlie calendars on the wall, only a map of the world studded with pins in bright colors.

“Good morning,” said the young man, springing to his feet, looking at her eagerly. “Can I help you in any way?”

Mary held up her copy of the
Courier.
“There was a piece in your paper recently about a woman who disappeared, Pearl Small. She was a friend of mine. I'm trying to find out more about it.”

The young man sank back into his chair. “Oh, God, I thought you were from the
Globe.
I'm expecting a response from
The Boston Globe.”
He gestured with a languid thumb at a file cabinet beside the window. “I don't know any Pearl Small. Big stars, that's all we keep on file.”

“Well, have you got a collection of back issues? If I could go through them, I'll bet I could find it.”

He gestured at a heap on the corner of his desk, and picked up the phone.

“Thanks.” Mary began leafing through the pile, while the editor of
The Candid Courier
dialed a number and began talking quickly. His voice was soft, but she couldn't help overhearing. “Personnel Department? Oh, good morning. My name's Jackson, George Jackson. I think you've recently received an application from me? I'm an experienced investigative reporter, but I'd like to add to my application that I'd be willing to accept a position as stringer in London or Paris, or, say, Barcelona. Of course I'm very busy, but I could take time off for an interview, if you—”

There was a pause. Mary could hear a polite voice fending him off.

“Well, I must say.” For a moment the eager young man seemed incapable of saying anything. Then he spoke up in a tone of grave indignation. “Well, then, I guess your loss is somebody else's gain. I'll have to try
The New York Times.
” Clashing down the phone, he stared angrily at Mary. “You've got to know somebody. Today it's all buddy-buddy, you know what I mean?”

“Right,” murmured Mary, flipping through the stack of recent issues of the scandal sheet, skimming the headlines—

FELICIA FIGHTS FLAB

WORLD'S HAPPIEST COUPLE?

GUESS AGAIN!

SIZZLING FLING ENDS IN RAPE CHARGE

MURDER VICTIM?

WHERE IS BATTERED WIFE?

Mary slapped the page. “Here it is. Thank you. I'll just make a few notes.”

The editor-in-chief, who was also the entire staff of
The Candid Courier,
was not interested in Mary's discovery. He jumped up and began moving the colored pins around on his map of the world. The pin for Bosnia went to the Gobi Desert, the one for South Africa to Tierra del Fuego, the pin for Jerusalem to Kamchatka.
Jab,
jab, jab.