The Skeleton's Knee (3 page)

I didn’t see anyone around when I got out of my car. All three ambulances and the crash truck were parked on the apron before the two huge, open garage doors, the early-fall air still balmy enough to be welcome inside and out. I stood in the cavernous central truck bay for a moment and listened for voices, hearing a murmur emanating from behind a door far to the back.

I crossed the bay, knocked once, and opened the door to what looked like a classroom, complete with blackboard. Seven people, five of them in uniform, sat side by side at a pair of long tables, stuffing, stamping, licking, and cataloguing thousands of envelopes.

Alphonse Duchene, the burly, white-haired president of the company, raised his head and grinned. “Caught us in the act.”

“Fundraising time?”

He rose, stretching his back, and walked over to shake my hand.“Forever and always. Want to join in?”

I looked at the dulled expressions of his colleagues. “Not even maybe. I wanted to ask you about a call you had a few days ago.”

His expression, while still genial, became slightly guarded. “We might be able to tell you a little, assuming it doesn’t trespass into patient confidentiality.”

“The patient’s dead.”

Now he looked downright nervous. Ambulance personnel, like police officers and firefighters, have come to fear lawsuits more than personal injury. I quickly took him off the hook. “Name was Abraham Fuller. You picked him up for back pain and leg paralysis. He died in the hospital two days later of unrelated causes, more or less.”

Duchene’s face cleared somewhat, but I noticed all activity had stopped at the long table. One of the men in uniform, a paramedic I knew slightly, named John Breen, spoke up. “I was on that one. What killed him?”

“Aneurysm. There’s no question of impropriety. You guys did it by the numbers, as did the hospital staff. It was just a long-standing thing that finally let go.” I had no interest in revealing too much. We had our own confidentialities to protect.

My answer apparently did the trick, however. Duchene, the happy host once more, escorted me back out the door, calling over his shoulder as he went, “John, why don’t you join us in my office?”

The three of us cut across the truck bay to a small glass-walled room in the far corner. Duchene held the door open, made sure we were both settled comfortably, and then planted his considerable hulk behind a cluttered metal desk, locking his hands behind his neck. “So, what’s on your mind?”

“Where did you pick him up?”

Breen made a face. “The far side of the moon. About three miles up Sunset Lake Road, out of West Bratt, there’s a horseshoe-shaped road.”

“Hescock Road,” I put in.

“Right; Hescock or Goodall, depending on who you talk to. Well, it leads to an old farmhouse owned by…” Breen hesitated a moment, thinking back. “Ed? No, Fred Coyner. He was the one who called us.”

“So Fuller lived with Coyner?”

Breen laughed and shook his head. “No, no, it gets worse; it took us over forty minutes to get to this place from the time we got called. Coyner owns the property, but Fuller lived in a small building a half mile behind the main house, deep in the woods. We couldn’t drive the rig to it—there was barely a track, much less a road—so we had to hoof it with the cot. Another fifteen minutes…”

“What did you find?”

“The patient lying on the floor of a central room—living room, kitchen, and everything else combined. He was in a lot of pain, had probably been there for several days. He was fully oriented; he’d managed to drag some food off a table nearby to sustain himself, but he was slightly dehydrated.”

“He wasn’t happy to see us. Coyner had warned us that he’d made the call over Fuller’s objections—that happens a lot, and we often end up not transporting—but this was an extreme case. The guy was really furious, accused Coyner of a ‘breach of faith,’ whatever that meant.”

“But still you transported. You can’t do that if the patient doesn’t want it, can you?”

“Not unless he’s deemed incompetent,” Duchene put in.

“He wasn’t that,” Breen resumed. “This was a highly intelligent man. He was just angry, outraged that we’d invaded his privacy. It took a long time just to get him to talk about why we were there; he kept asking why he couldn’t die in peace. I got the impression he’d been living as a hermit, totally cut off from the world around him.”

“He really thought he was dying?”

Breen shrugged. “I don’t think he meant that literally—hard to say. Of course, seeing how things turned out, maybe he knew something we didn’t. At the time, he was in agony, and I just wrote it off to that.

“Also, we finally did talk him into going with us, which reinforced my feeling he was being a little overdramatic.”

I didn’t fault Breen his seeming callousness. As with cops, lots of people in the rescue business grow numb to some of the subtleties of human anguish; it was less a hardness—although it could be that, too—and more a sense that they’d seen it all before. “Did you notice a dirty red knapsack?”

Breen shook his head. “Not at first. After we’d finally convinced him to come along with us, he made us all go outside for a few minutes. When we came back in, he was holding the pack. Never let go of it all the way to the hospital.”

“He show you what was inside?”

“Nope. And it could have held anything—two hundred toothbrushes, for all I know. Nothing else had been normal about the call.”

“How many minutes were you outside?”

Breen paused, thinking back. “Couldn’t have been more than five.”

“And you didn’t see the knapsack before going back in?”

“I didn’t, no. I generally look around quickly when I enter a scene, to check for any danger, or clues to the patient’s condition, like pill bottles or needles or whatever. I don’t remember seeing the pack, but then it probably wouldn’t have registered anyway, since it wouldn’t have told me anything.”

“But if it had been hanging from a hook on the wall or in a closet, could he have reached it? How helpless was he?”

“He could barely move. Like I said, he’d been there for days, and the only food he’d been able to reach was on a nearby table—a bag of trail mix and a bowl of fruit. He’d only gotten that because he’d pulled on the tablecloth and dragged it to within reach. He was lying in his own waste, if that gives you any idea.”

It did. Fuller had been a desperate man, torn between a passion for solitude and the need for help. I closed my small notebook and stood up. “Well, I guess that’s it for the moment. I’ll let you get back to your paper cuts.”

I put my hand on the doorknob and then hesitated, looking back at Breen. “How did you convince him to go with you?”

“I think he finally convinced himself. At first, when he was trying to send us away, he kept saying it would pass, as it had before, but I don’t think he really believed it. No one wants to live with that much pain if there’re people around who can help.”

“He said the pain had passed before? Did he explain that?”

“Nope. When I asked him later if this had ever happened before, he denied it. By that point, of course, he didn’t have much credibility with us, since he’d also denied having a date of birth, a Social Security number, or even a mailing address.”

I thanked them both and headed back to my car. A hermit, Fuller may have been, but not just that. I remembered the contents of the red bag: Aside from the money, there’d been a change of socks and underwear, a few toilet articles, and a book by Mark Twain, all of which, now that I thought back, had been both musty-smelling and brand-new, with the wrappers still on and the back of the book unbroken.

During the Korean War, one of the things I’d learned the hard way was always to have a pack ready at hand, something light and compact, containing the essentials of survival, that could be grabbed at a moment’s notice, along with my rifle. Life then had been an uncertain thing, with the Chinese threatening to overrun us at any time. We never knew if our tenuous connection to the rear might not vanish altogether. I couldn’t help wondering if Abraham Fuller hadn’t acquired the same habit of always having the bare essentials packed and ready by the door, including ten thousand dollars in antique bank notes.

I could blame the Chinese army, but what had been Fuller’s dread? One obvious suggestion was the police. But despite his initial resistance, Fuller had finally agreed to go to the hospital, possibly to have his old bullet wound discovered, and therefore be interviewed by us. That risk couldn’t have escaped him.

So either the police were not the stimulus that kept him packed and ready to run—which implied that somebody else was—or he was a demented and paranoid reclusive with a fondness for classic American literature.

MY OFFICE IS LOCATED
on the first floor of one of the Victorian era’s least successful architectural leftovers. The Municipal Building—all red brick, carved stone, and bristling with rooftop spires—is perched threateningly on a steep bank overlooking upper Main Street. It is also as functional as a survivor from a train wreck. Years of remodeling and renovation have introduced elements of modern heating and cooling into its labyrinthine soul, but, like Frankenstein’s monster, it seems cursed with a defective mind all its own.

The police department occupies the rear of the first floor and is cut in two by a broad central corridor running the length of the building. After parking my car in the rear lot, I was buzzed through the main entrance by Dispatch—Maxine Paroddy—who waved to me through the teller-like glass window. The chief ’s office was located in the far corner of the main reception area.

A visit to Tony Brandt’s office was like a trip back in time to when London heated itself with soft coal exclusively and force-fed black lung into all its inhabitants. Tony smoked a pipe. It was a habit he said he took up to cure his addiction to cigarettes, but he smoked so much, and in such airtight circumstances, I never could grasp the advantage of his conversion.

He looked up as I paused on the threshold, letting as much of the fog bank roll by as possible before plunging in. As always, I left the door open, and as always, he motioned me to shut it. “Rumor has it we have a dead body on our hands.”

I settled into one of the guest chairs as he leaned back and locked his hands behind his neck, ignoring the periodic beeps that softly emanated from his glowing computer screen. “So far, that’s about all we’ve got, that and the decades-old bullet wound that killed him. How’d you hear about it?”

“Harriet told me. I was trying to hunt you down for some paperwork. Give me the details.”

I told him what I had so far, which took ten minutes at most.

Brandt formed a steeple with his fingers and tapped his lips a couple of times before speaking. “None of this rings any bells concerning unexplained shootings or losses of money in recent years?”

I shook my head. “My immediate guess is that Mr. Fuller brought his problem with him from somewhere else. In fact, the money and the bullet may have nothing in common, and neither one is necessarily a sign of criminal activity. He could have been a wounded Vietnam vet with a mistrust of banks. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up handing it over to some other jurisdiction pretty quick, probably right after the FBI spits out something on his fingerprints.”

Brandt was silent a while before asking me, “What do you intend to do now?”

“I’d like to check his residence out. It seems to me that if we’re going to get a handle on this guy, that’s where we’ll find it. Maybe we can pin down a prior address and wash our hands of it even before the FBI stirs itself into action.”

In fact, I had my doubts things would be that easy, doubts I was pretty sure Brandt shared. But neither one of us was willing to turn up the political heat just yet, still smarting as we were from the fallout that had followed a recent grisly case involving a fellow officer, an investigation tainted by insider leaks and a lingering distrust among the various agencies involved.

Brandt gently tapped his pipe against his ashtray. “All right. That seems fine to me. You’re planning to secure a warrant?”

“Of course,” I answered.

“But check it out alone, okay?” Brandt added quickly. “No forensics team. If you find anything, you can call them in later. And I’ll let the State’s Attorney know.”

I shrugged. It was a little unconventional, not to mention impractical, but I sympathized with his wishful thinking. “You got it. One tiptoe at a time.”

Neither one of us smiled.

· · ·

Two hours later, a signed search warrant in my pocket, I drove along Route 9 into West Bratt, in the local jargon—a barely separate entity from Brattleboro, segregated by I-91’s gray slab of a no-man’s-land, which only three streets manage to breach. The fire department has a substation out there, as does the post office, among a small cluster of commercial buildings at the intersection of Greenleaf Street and Route 9, but the sense of it being a community apart is lacking. Despite occasional yearnings to be otherwise, West Bratt remains a commercial tentacle on the map, dangling from downtown.

There is an irony to this, since the village of West Brattleboro cropped up in the late eighteenth century, around the same time Brattleboro, or the “east village,” was being settled. In fact, the west village was an independent entity until 1927, catering to the rural trade that found its bustling, more industrialized neighbor largely unapproachable. By then, however, the battle had already been lost, and West Brattleboro fell victim to urban Darwinism.

Seen on a map, it appears like a finger pointing west, the only intrusion on an otherwise-green expanse of forests, meadows, and farm fields. Indeed, once I’d turned off Route 9 onto Sunset Lake Road, I didn’t go more than a third of a mile before I was embraced by almost pristine countryside, making it hard to believe I was only minutes from the fourth-largest town in Vermont.

Sunset Lake Road climbs to the body of water after which it’s named—a large, beautiful hilltop pond ringed by rustic cabins and dense woods, but the lake is actually in Marlboro township, which raised a concern in my mind that Coyner’s property might be just outside the Brattleboro town line, and therefore outside my jurisdiction.