Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (10 page)

*   *   *

In 1958, Tander Phigg, Jr., moved to New York City and enrolled in a third-rate photography school run by a Brillo-haired man who walked funny because all his toes froze off in the Ardennes in 1945. He walked even funnier when he was drunk, which was most days. The student population changed every week because the drunk demanded tuition in cold cash, first thing Monday morning, and anybody who couldn’t fork it over got the bum’s rush down four flights.

To Phigg it was heaven. Once nanny-mama pulled her end run on Tander Senior and freed up trust-fund income, Phigg commuted from a doorman building on the Upper West Side to SoHo and Greenwich Village. He played Artsy Boho all day, then commuted back.

“What’s boho?” I said.

“Bohemian. Hippies before there were hippies.”

I nodded.

According to nanny-mama—who was Trey’s source for the story—Phigg felt comfortable for the first time in his life. He caught Lower Manhattan Fever—poetry readings, basement jazz, very early pop art. (Trey said, “Warhol?” I said, “I know that one.”) And photography out the wazoo, of course. He spent most days tramping around the city, shooting whatever struck him. Then he’d head back to the darkroom to experiment.

He was having a ball.

Trey smiled as he told it. We cleared the traffic and eventually sailed down Route 31. “There’s even reason to believe Tander Phigg, Jr., son of the paper baron of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, had himself a cohabitational-level fling,” Trey said. “His nanny was sketchy on details, but I read between the lines.”

He trailed off, looked at the Souhegan on his side of the car.

I said, “Then what?”

“Then his coach turned into a pumpkin.”

I waited.

“Something happened,” Trey said. “I’ll never know exactly what. In ’sixty-two, my father came home with his tail well and truly between his legs. For the rest of his life he hated to talk about New York, and when he did, all he said was he’d gotten it out of his system.”

“What happened at home? He sign on with the family business?”

“Eventually. First he finished up his MBA. Then it was straight to Fitchburg, with a corner office overlooking the river that by then looked and smelled like the Jolly Green Giant’s urinal, thanks to my granddad.”

“He stepped into his old man’s shadow again.”

“Never to emerge.”

“Why’d he come back?” I said. “You must have wondered. The nanny say anything?”

“Not a syllable.”

“You think we could talk with her?” I said, slowing for Rourke’s three-block downtown stretch.

“She died four months after my grandfather did, back in ’ninety-six.”

“Just like an old married couple. One goes, the other can barely wait to follow.”

“You’re not the first to make that observation.”

We passed Dot’s Place, a nail salon, a barbershop with a dead pole. As I turned onto Mechanic Street and eased toward Motorenwerk I made a note: When I checked in with Randall about Trey’s timetable, I should ask if Phigg’s address book included any pointers back to New York.

*   *   *

When Trey and I stepped into the office at Motorenwerk, we heard Ollie breathing but couldn’t see him. I stepped forward, leaned on the counter, looked down.

Ollie sat with his back to a filing cabinet. His face was the color of a three-day-old bruise. He stared straight ahead and rocked a little at the waist, breathing like a train leaving an uphill station. His right pant leg, the one near us, was slit all the way up to plaid boxer shorts. His kneecap was three times as big as it ought to be. Josh knelt on the floor with his back to us. He heard me and turned. “I told him he’s got to get to an ER,” he said. “But he won’t let me call an ambulance.”

Ollie, focused on breathing, didn’t turn his head. But he pointed a finger at me and said, “Get me the fuck out of here, Sax. I know a guy who can take care of me. No hospitals.”

“No dice,” I said, looking at the knee. “Listen to Josh. Go to the ER.”

“No … fucking … hospitals.” He said it slowly, concentrating on every word. Then he went back to breathing. He turned to look me in the eye, moving carefully, knowing he might pass out. “This guy I know, he’ll do a better job than the hack hospitals around here.
Please
.”

He was right about the local hospitals. I said to Josh, “What’d they use? A hammer or something sharp like an awl?”

“Five-pound hammer,” Ollie said.

“That’s good,” I said, nodding, thinking it over. “A hammer’s the same as falling square on the floor. If they’d used a chisel or something, you’d have no choice but to go to the hospital.”

Ollie fainted.

I said to Josh, “Take him wherever he wanted to go.” I told him to fetch his car. Trey and I each got an arm beneath Ollie’s meaty shoulders and dragged him outside. I noticed Trey’s face was white, his lips pulled thin. He wasn’t used to this kind of thing.

I wished I wasn’t.

Working Ollie into the smallish backseat of Josh’s Audi made me glad he was passed out: We were careful, but Ollie was heavy and he bumped around plenty.

We got the back doors closed. As Josh climbed into the driver’s seat I said, “It was definitely Montreal’s guys did this?”

He nodded and started the car.

“Why?” I said.

“Ollie wanted out,” Josh said.

“How much do you know about what they’ve been doing?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Josh said, putting the car in first gear. He damn near ran over my foot as he U-turned out.

*   *   *

Trey said nothing, all color still gone from his face. I pulled his Dodge onto the main drag, thinking about Dot’s Place. “Hungry?” I said.

“Dear God no.”

I looked over. Trey’s body shook as he stared at me. “What the hell is going
on
?” he said. “What the hell
are
you? You talk about smashed knees like they were goddamn
paper cuts,
or
oil changes,
or … or…”

I needed to settle him down. Angled into a parking spot, killed the engine. I put myself in Trey’s shoes. After a while I said, “Helluva twenty-four hours, huh?”

“I wouldn’t argue with that.”

“You’ve had more than your share of rough news. You’ve handled it well.”

Trey said nothing.

I watched two old ladies step into the nail salon. “I was you, I’d want two things,” I said. “One, I’d want to know what the hell
I’m
all about.” Bumped my thumb to my chest. “Two, I’d want to get back to your wife and kid, make sure they’re okay.”

“You got two out of three,” he said. “But there’s something else first.”

I waited.

“I want to see where my father died,” he said, looking me in the eye, color returning to his face.

I put the Dodge in drive.

*   *   *

Except for fresh tire tracks in the clay, the Jut Road shack was just the way I’d left it …
yesterday
? That didn’t seem possible, but yeah, yesterday.

We climbed from the Dodge and listened to the fast river, the angry bugs.

“From that,” Trey said, gesturing at the skeleton of his father’s dream house, “to … this?”

I started to tell him the shack was once a hydropowered generator for a big house. Then I realized there was no reason for him to give a shit. I shut my mouth instead.

There was no
CRIME SCENE
tape. The sagging door had been knocked clear off its hinges, probably by EMTs rolling a stretcher. I followed Trey inside, let him see and feel for himself.

Phigg’s sad suitcase and sleeping bag were gone. On the floor sat a couple of Dunkin’ Donuts cups that hadn’t been here yesterday. Trey paced the room slowly, taking everything in. Then he turned to me and spread his arms. “This?” he said. “Only this?”

I nodded.

He paced again, found the milk crates. His eyes traveled up the north wall. When he spotted the pipe stub he pointed, turned to me, raised his eyebrows. I nodded. He cocked his head. He hesitated, then stacked the crates and stepped up. He wobbled, steadied, spun a slow 180. Now he was facing me. “Like this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Come down before you fall, huh?”

He ignored me. He touched his right index finger to the spot just below his throat, where a necktie knot would fall. Then he reached back with the same finger, feeling for the pipe stub. It took him a few tries to locate it.

Trey slow-panned the room. “This is the last thing he saw? This is what Tander Phigg Junior’s life boiled down to?”

Tander Phigg the Third began to cry. Silent tears tracked both cheeks.

After a while he went back to the movie-announcer voice he’d used in the car. “Tander Phigg Junior. Mediocre son of a paper baron, fish out of water, expelled from the finest schools in New England. He did as he was told, occupied a corner office that should have been labeled ‘Daddy’s Boy,’ spent his days signing papers presented by groveling employees who snickered behind his back.”

Long pause. Trey dropped the fake voice, spread his arms wide, panned the shack one more time. “He died here,” he said. “Master of a condemned pump house, pilot of a two-hundred-dollar Nissan, aficionado of three-for-a-buck potpies.”

Then he shifted his ankles quickly to knock over the milk-crate stack. The move caught me off guard. I started to reach for Trey, then realized he’d done it on purpose. He rode the top crate to the floor like a surfboard, hopping off at the last instant.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

If Trey Phigg had killed his father, he was one hell of a good liar. But then I’d known plenty of good liars. Hell, I’d
been
one.

Maybe I still was.

*   *   *

“I’ll be damned,” I said when we got outside.

A silver Jetta was parked beside Trey’s rental. Between the cars stood the black woman I’d seen talking with Phigg the day before he died.

She was pretty. The short hair I’d noticed was nearly buzz cut, and she pulled it off because her head had a nice shape. I can never tell how old blacks are—she might be thirty, fifty, or anywhere in between. She stood an inch taller than Trey and held a red leather pocketbook in one hand and a little notebook in the other.

Trey and I stared at her maybe five seconds before she smiled and said, “Patty Marx, from
The Boston Globe
.” She fished business cards from the pocketbook as she stepped to us, handed them over.

“I’m Trey Phigg.” He shook her hand. Her face went from friendly professional to friendly sympathetic.

“I’m so very sorry about your loss,” Patty Marx said. “I profiled your father a while back. I came today to pick up some atmosphere for a follow-up story. I didn’t realize anybody would be here.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry to intrude. It’s my job.”

“You wrote about my father?” Trey said.

She nodded. “A year and a half ago. Truth be told, it wasn’t a straight profile. More of a look at the fates of old manufacturing towns.”

Trey said, “Did he mention me?” Then he tucked his chin to his chest and turned red.

“Very much so,” Patty Marx said, squinting. “You moved to … Vietnam, was it?”

While Trey nodded, I clicked through possibilities, wondering if I should mention the meet I’d spied on. I decided no—better to give
her
a chance to mention it.

“Why the follow-up?” I said.

“Tander’s suicide,” she said, looking me in the eye.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, after Trey showed the reporter the inside of the shack and set up a sit-down interview, I pointed the Dodge at Framingham and drove. We were quiet. Trey sat with his right elbow on the door’s armrest, chin propped on fist, looking at nothing. I wondered what Patty Marx was up to, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned her car-to-car meeting with Phigg. Talk to a man the day before he dies, that’s a pretty big deal.

After half an hour Trey said, “You promised to tell me what you’re all about. How you came by your intimate knowledge of shattered knees and hangings and police procedures.”

I owed him that much, but didn’t know where to start. “I’m a mechanic by trade,” I finally said.

“Where do you work?”

“Well … nowhere, for now. I get some money from Charlene. I don’t like it and neither does she, but there was a time she needed
my
help, and—”

“Who is Charlene?”

“My girlfriend. Sorry. Anyway, I’m fixing up the Framingham house. Going to sell it and use the cash to open another shop like the one I used to have.”

“Which went out of business?”

“Torched by a douche bag.”

Long pause. “Are you involved with organized crime?” Trey finally said.

“No. Look, I spent time in prison. Manslaughter two.”