Read Gravewriter Online

Authors: Mark Arsenault

Gravewriter (10 page)

BOOK: Gravewriter
9.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“So when Mr. Dillingham refers to Peter as a heroin
user,
he ain't lying to you. But he neglects to mention that Peter has the disease of addiction. It's something each of us might have seen in our own families. Not with heroin, probably, but whether it's street drugs, single-malt scotch, or a half-decent pinot noir, addiction is all the same.”

Martin paused a few moments, letting the jurors replay their own dark memories of the parent shamed by a drunken-driving bust, or
the belligerent uncle who got plastered and started a screaming fight at the Thanksgiving table.

“So if you put an addict like Peter Shadd on the street, without supervision, without somebody to crack a stick over his knuckles, he's going to fall under the spell of those drugs. And he'll even steal to get them. He'll rob his own cell mate, and that's what happened in this case.”

It hurt to acknowledge that Peter had played stickup man after he had escaped, but Martin had no choice. He couldn't accuse Dillingham of ignoring the whole truth and then ignore some of it himself. He had a few more inconvenient truths to get through; he plowed quickly past them, spinning the facts best he could.

“You'll hear from Mr. Dillingham about the gunpowder residue on Peter's hands, but he won't tell you that
any
weapon would have left that powder there. He neglected to mention that they don't have the gun that killed Garrett Nickel—they can't find it. He won't tell you that Peter has a reasonable explanation for the powder on his hands.” The actual explanation, not as reasonable as Martin would have liked, could wait for later.

The tough part over, Martin attacked on his strongest point.

He stopped before the jury, stuck his hands on his hips, and said, “And because he doesn't have to tell you the
whole
truth, Mr. Dillingham can brag about his star witness, the cell mate, whom Peter allegedly robbed with a gun, but he doesn't have to tell you that his witness is a conniving con man and a violent felon, with a record as long as winter in Buffalo, who escaped from prison, too, and is being rewarded for his testimony with leniency. I wouldn't trust this witness to water my wife's geraniums, but Mr. Dillingham wants you to trust him enough to send another man to prison for life.

“The state's case is based on the premise that Peter Shadd is a bad person, so he must have killed Garrett Nickel—because we don't
know who else might have. Well, Garrett Nickel had enemies, lots of them. He started his criminal career as a world-renowned graffiti artist—and I'll bet you didn't realize a graffiti artist could have such a reputation. I sure didn't until I started work on this case.

“From graffiti, Garrett Nickel graduated to burglary, then armed robbery, and then kidnapping and ransom. It got worse, I'm afraid. He was in jail for killing three people—three that we
know of.
But I think even Mr. Dillingham would agree that putting Garrett Nickel in jail for just three murders was like prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion—it got him off the street but didn't approach justice for all his crimes. There are more than a hundred unsolved killings in this city, and we'll never know how many belonged to Garrett Nickel. How many people have sworn revenge on the Nickel-plated Outlaw? Who else would have wanted him dead? Well, lots of people.”

Martin paused there. That was it. He was out of material.

Hmmm, probably should sum it up for them.

“It's my job to point out holes in the state's case,” he continued, making it up as he went along. “It's my job to tell you what Mr. Dillingham won't—because he doesn't have to.”

Martin let the point penetrate, and then he lightly tapped his hand on his hip, a covert signal to Peter, who looked up from his notes and for the first time met eyes with the jurors.

“The state cannot prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Martin told the jury, “because you're looking at an innocent man.”

twelve

N
ear the end of Billy's exhausting shift of shoveling the histories of the dead into the computer, the fax machine spit out a paper soul who had died in a car crash. The paper had covered the crash in the news pages, before the funeral arrangements had been made. Billy had avoided the news coverage. He had no choice but to read the obituary.

He typed with clattering fury.

PROVIDENCE—Heidi M. Ward, 20, a senior at the University of Rhode Island, originally from Bar Harbor, Maine, died last Saturday in a two-car accident on Route 1 in Narragansett, on her way home from Scarborough Beach. Police have charged the driver of the other vehicle with operating under the influence of alcohol and motor vehicle homicide.

He closed his eyes and touched-typed.

Heidi was only twenty years old. Can you goddamn believe this? She was 20. This is not a typo, ladies and germs. 20 FUCKING
YEARS OLD!! She was a premed student ranked eighth in her class at a pretty damn good school, so we can assume she was a decent person, unlike the hateful son of a bitch who killed her on the highway and who probably will get away with it. Because that's the way things work in this corrupt little state!!! So Mr. and Mrs. Ward should GET THAT awful truth THROUGH THEIR SKULLS if they think they'll ever see justice for their little girl. Why do I keep typing, since I know I have to erase this and do it all over again??? Jesus Christ, I need help because I AM LOSING IT. I think I need to take a pill.

Billy rested his head in his hands, elbows on the desk.

He wiped tears on his palms, deleted the unusable paragraph he had just typed, and finished the obit the way the funeral home had written it. Then he filed it to the electronic queue for the editors to slap into the paper tomorrow with cold efficiency. To the layout editor who would arrive in the morning, Heidi Ward would be a seven-inch block of type, to be shoehorned around the advertising in a daily jigsaw puzzle, along with the box scores and the bus schedules.

Suddenly, the newsroom annex went nearly dark as the preprogrammed computer turned off all but one light. The clock on Billy's desk agreed that it was quitting time.

Billy looked around. While he had been working, a janitor had swabbed the tile floor, and had left his mop and an A-frame
WET FLOOR
sign for the day crew to put away. Billy couldn't even recall seeing the cleaning crew. He was exhausted from the trial all day, and then work all night. And when he slept, he had dreamed of murder.

The doomsday clock on the wall said six minutes to midnight.

Billy scribbled “DONE” on Heidi Ward's obituary fax, then filed it in a plastic tray.

He rubbed his eyes and watched the faint yellow fireworks on the
inside of his eyelids. Then he stared at his computer screen for a minute.

Quitting time
…
I should go
.…

Instead, he dialed an in-house number and punched a code to turn on the lights.

Then Billy cleared his computer screen, created a new file, and typed.

PROVIDENCE—Charles J. Maddox, a police officer retired on a disability after an auto crash last year, has died. He was brutally murdered.

Billy read over what he had typed. The letters on his screen seemed to grow brighter. He looked away and let a rush of light-headedness pass. What he had written wasn't quite right. He deleted the word
brutally.
All murders were brutal, weren't they?

The sentence read better with that little edit. Then Billy replaced
murdered
with
executed.

He was executed.

No—wrong word. That was political spin. Journalistic standards called for the more general term: murdered.

Billy switched it back and read it over again. The paper's style required the age of the deceased in the first line. How old was Charlie Maddox?

Billy got up and went to the one semimodern computer in the annex, a PC three generations past its prime. The machine was tied into the paper's electronic archives. He did a keyword search with Maddox's name and the word
crash,
then waited while the computer sorted through thousands of news stories. The search was a tall job for the old machine.

Christ,
Billy thought,
I could do math faster than this thing.

Finally, the machine showed Billy what it found: three stories on the crash that had killed Angie.

Billy had never read them. He paused for a moment, then clicked on the earliest story, headlined
PROVIDENCE WOMAN KILLED, OFF-DUTY COP HURT IN CRASH
.

The text appeared on his screen. The reporter who had written the piece, a kid Billy had never met, had done a good job. All the relevant information was high in the text, including Maddox's age—forty-nine.

God, he looks a lot older than that.

Billy was about to exit the program, when he noticed a link to another section of the archives, entitled: “Unpublished Photos.”

That was odd.…

Billy had never seen any pictures of the crash. Had there been a photographer at the scene?

He clicked. He felt his face flush.

The first picture had been taken from inside the car, looking out at a forest, through a windshield cracked with a giant
X.
The bull's-eye where the two cracks crossed was smeared red.

He clamped a hand over his mouth, against a surge of stomach acid. He swallowed hard to force it down. His other hand fumbled with the computer mouse and dispelled the picture. He coughed. His throat burned like he had been gargling with Tabasco.

Of course that picture had not been published—a family paper wouldn't run such a gruesome photo, especially when the skull that had cracked the windshield had belonged to the former wife of a former star reporter.

“Are you okay, man?”

Billy whirled. He shouted toward where the voice had come from. “No! I'm fine! There's nothing here.”

The security guard recoiled a half step. “Whoa,” he said, blinking. His eyes were slits.

Billy hurried to his terminal and spiked the first line of Maddox's obituary. “Just finishing up,” he said. “It's all, uh, fine here.”

Not knowing where to go, he wandered back to the PC and fiddled with the mouse. Part of him expected the guard to club him and cuff him, then march him straight to prison, the theme from
Dragnet
blasting through the halls. Ridiculous, of course—the paper's security man could never have caught a criminal; he was too stoned. He couldn't have caught gonorrhea in a whorehouse.

The guard's walkie-talkie barked. He spoke into it. “Yeah, I'm at the annex—it's cool, man. No break-in. Just the obit dude staying late.” He nodded, saluted Billy with the radio, and then shuffled off.

Billy watched him leave, then collapsed into the chair. He felt a crying jag coming on and clenched his teeth against it.

No, not now.

He fished a pill bottle from his pocket. He popped two antianxiety tablets without water. The label said BuSpar, but who knew what they were? Billy had bought them off the Internet.

What would it be like in prison?

How much space does a man need to make a life?

Billy had never been out of North America. He had already proved that a man doesn't need the whole world to make a life. Could Billy get along inside a thousand square miles? That was about the size of Rhode Island. How about a hundred square miles? Or just one?

Could he make a life inside seventy-seven square feet?

That was the size of a cell in the state prison. Eleven feet long, seven feet wide. Could he survive in such a small space? Maybe he should lock himself in the bathroom for a few years to try it out.

He thought about Peter Shadd.

Peter was facing a sentence of natural life for premeditated murder. With any luck, Peter wouldn't live too long. One of the last stories Billy had written before he was demoted to the obituary desk was
about the prison ban on tobacco. For men doing the rest of their natural lives in prison, cigarettes had been one way to shorten a sentence.

He absentmindedly tapped Peter Shadd into the computer, then commanded the machine to search.

The older stories were about the escape, and then Garrett Nickel's murder, and the discovery of his body snagged at the mouth of the Providence River. Of course the judge had ordered the jury not to read about the trial, but these stories were old. What did it matter?

The stories said that Peter had been arrested in an old boathouse—
alleged
crackhouse, in newspaper language—at
66
MacKay Avenue, near the city waterfront. Billy knew the street from his days as a police reporter; he had spent many nights there watching the cops stretch yellow tape around atrocities the detectives might solve but could never explain.

The computer automatically searched the text of the story and offered cross-referenced links to other articles, listed by headlines. Several were about drug abuse, or the state prison budget. One caught Billy's eye. The computer had matched the address of the boathouse and the date of the story about Peter Shadd's capture and had offered a link to a story headlined
HOMELESS MAN DEAD IN VACANT HOUSE.

The story was dated three days after the cops had arrested Shadd. The text of the story was short; the piece seemed like something a harried police reporter had dashed off in five minutes.

PROVIDENCE—Police discovered the mutilated body of a homeless man in a vacant boathouse at 66 MacKay Avenue late last week during an investigation, police said yesterday in a written press statement.

The body had no identification, and detectives have been unable to determine the name of the person. A staff member from the Manger, the Providence-based homeless shelter, made tentative identification of the man as a frequent client of the shelter, who
never gave his full name and whom the shelter staff had been encouraging to participate in substance-abuse programs.

Police would not say how the man died, though they are treating the case as a homicide.

BOOK: Gravewriter
9.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Rumor Has It by Tami Hoag
Unmasking Charlotte (a Taboo Love series) by Saperstein, M.D., Large, Andria
Lady Killer by Michele Jaffe
Spooky Buddies Junior Novel by Disney Book Group
No Other Story by Dr. Cuthbert Soup
Beyond the Grave by C. J. Archer
Matahombres by Nathan Long
Masquerade by Nancy Moser
Ray & Me by Dan Gutman