The Skeleton's Knee (7 page)

But not here. Unless the fingerprint card in my hand had all the answers we needed, this case had the elements of a true mystery.

I carried the card to Harriet Fritter’s desk. “Could you have J.P. classify these and forward them on to the FBI? And is Ron in the building?”

She gestured with a nod of the head. “In the conference room.” The conference room was a dead end beyond the cluster of detectives’ desks and marked the second half of our office space. It held a long table, some blackboards, a few lockers, and a TV-VCR setup. Some of us used it individually for either private interviews or the extra table space. As I walked in, I saw Ron was taking advantage of the latter; the table’s entire surface was covered with the fruits of a paper trail he’d established to nail a local bank embezzler, a case he’d been on for the better part of a month.

“Getting anywhere?”

He looked up and gave a weary smile. “Yeah, but for all the time and effort, I doubt it’s worth it. Prosecuting this guy’s going to cost a whole lot more than what he stole in the first place.”

I nodded at the sheaf of papers still in his hand. “Sorry if this afternoon screwed up your fun here. How much longer before you can hand it over to the State’s Attorney?”

“Not long—a few days. You got something you want me to do?”

I laughed at his eagerness. “Don’t you wish. No, I’ll use people with a little less on their plates. There is one thing, though; in your digging through bank statements and whatnot, have you ever run across someone who knows a lot about currency?”

He frowned and knitted his brows, muttering, “Right, the moldy C notes…” His face then cleared somewhat. “I don’t know the guy personally, but one of the people I’m working with on this case mentioned that one of his colleagues collects money as a hobby. I could give him a call and get a name.”

I thanked him, but he stopped me as I turned to leave. “I’m almost wrapped up here, you know. Just waiting for a few more items to come in the mail. The pressure’s really off of it.”

I smiled at his excess eagerness. There were times when he made me almost as weary as Kunkle did. “I’ll keep that in mind, Ron. Thanks again.”

I stopped by Harriet’s desk on my way back to my corner cubicle and asked her to get a list of all the bookstores—new and used—in the immediate vicinity. I also asked her to locate the two missing members of the detective squad, Martens and DeFlorio, for a quick meeting in my office in one hour.

I then retrieved the roll of film I’d shot that morning, along with the others that J.P. had taken during the search, and headed for the freedom of the street.

The front door of the Municipal Building gives out onto a sweeping view of a busy intersection to the impartial observer, a Gordian knot to the traffic-pattern expert, and a pain in the butt to anyone in a car. I took the steep stone steps down to street level and turned right to walk downtown.

This particular Main Street is fairly rare in the lexicon of American downtowns. Its industrial heyday having peaked at the end of the previous century, Brattleboro didn’t have the money to tear its architectural heart out and rebuild it according to the latest fashions. Businesses came and went, storefronts changed as with the seasons, but the buildings they inhabited remained like ponderous, ancient redwood trees, host to a nonstop stream of temporary inhabitants.

The end result is a quarter-mile stretch of fifty buildings that appear on the National Register of Historic Places—old brick monsters proudly touting their names in embossed granite stonework: Brooks House, Richardson Building, Union Block, and, somewhat incongruously, Amadeus Di Angelis. None of them is particularly graceful, inspiring, or even fanciful. Reflecting the era and the mentality that gave them birth, they are for the most part solid, practical, and businesslike. With the exception of the Brooks House and its Second Empire fifth-floor tower, the heavy, smudged brick and granite buildings standing shoulder-to-shoulder are a perfect reflection of the serious, dogmatic, slightly vainglorious New England industrial spirit.

I headed for Photo 101, a hole-in-the-wall photography store owned by a tall, stooped, skinny chemist named Allen Rogers, whose years of exposure to darkroom fumes and chemicals had stained his hands, affected his eyesight, and damaged his lungs. As the police department didn’t have a darkroom, much to J.P.’s distress, Allen had become our primary film processor.

The store, just opposite the Vermont National Bank, was on the first floor of what looked like a brownstone walk-up. Its front room was narrow and high, its ornamental tin ceiling smudged with ancient leaks from the floor above, and its shelves and counters cluttered with archaic photographic paraphernalia so old and dusty it looked more like a bankrupt museum than a store. The old-fashioned bell above the door tinkled feebly as I entered.

“Be right with you.” The voice came from the gloomy rear of the building, beyond a wall partition decorated with photographs of airbrushed prom-night girls with bouffant hairdos, all of whom were well into middle age by now.

“Take your time, Al. It’s Joe Gunther.”

“Hey, Joe. Come on back.”

I began picking my way carefully toward the disembodied voice. Despite appearances, Allen Rogers made a good living. As a darkroom technician, he was a near genius, capable not only of producing beautiful prints from standard negatives but also of salvaging decent results from negatives so poor that most people would have thrown them out. It was a talent he marketed well.

I reached the partition and edged around its side, entering a back room that was half stock area, lined with freestanding metal shelf units, and half closed-off darkroom, the door of which had a red light burning brightly above it. My eyes instinctively scanned the contents of the shelves as I passed them to approach the darkroom door. The other strength of Allen’s business was that he mostly served the highbrows of his profession; stacked in neat and orderly piles were papers, chemicals, and films I’d never even heard of, reserved for those whose forays into the darkroom were truly artistic. Indeed, Al had once told me that he kept the front part of his shop in such musty chaos to politely discourage weekend snapshooters.

I knocked on the door. “You want me to come in?”

“Sure; I’m just racking some prints.”

I twisted the knob and walked into a brightly lit laboratory as pristine and orderly as an operating room. The shiny steel surfaces of long, deep sinks and circulating equipment contrasted with several looming dark enlargers, the softly glowing eyes of digital timers and thermometers, and the light-absorbing black paint covering the walls and ceiling.

“Never been in here before?” Rogers glanced at me over his shoulder. He was slipping damp oversized prints onto wire mesh racks so they could dry.

“No. Looks like something out of NASA.”

“Well, don’t tell the IRS; I only tell them about the front. What’s on your mind? You usually send J.P. down here.”

“Now I know why he takes so long getting back to the office.”

Allen laughed as he placed his last print in place. “Yeah—he’s got a mind like a vacuum cleaner, always full of questions.”

I pulled the rolls of film out of my pocket and held them out to him.

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“It’s a little special. On this one roll, I photographed a piece of evidence that was stolen immediately afterward—a chart hanging on a wall. This is the only copy I’ve got of it.”

He took the roll in question and held it in his palm, as if he could already see its contents. “Cloak and dagger, huh? Great. When do you want it?”

“In an hour?”

He gave me a quick glance. While our business was both appreciated and occasionally intriguing, the police department was not one of Allen’s big-spending clients; and rush work out of his shop usually cost a fortune. “You just want prints of the chart, right? The rest of it by tomorrow?”

“That would be great.”

He smiled and steered me toward the door. “Okay. I better get cracking. I’ll charge you the standard rate and drop it off at your office on my way home. Show yourself out, okay?” He stopped suddenly.

“By the way, was there a girl with dirty blond hair out front when you walked in?”

“No. Place was empty.”

He shrugged vaguely. “Okay. She must have gone home for the day. Do me a favor and lock the door behind you, will you? Thanks.”

I said I would, shaking my head and smiling at his casualness. Brattleboro was hardly crime-free. In fact, the worsening economy, especially in Massachusetts, just a few miles to the south, had caused a surge in criminal activity. But it hadn’t gotten very sophisticated, nor was it rampant, and attitudes like Allen Rogers’s were only beginning to change.

The light was ebbing as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, dulling the subtle colors in the old masonry walls along the street and transforming the world around me to monochromatic shades of gray and brown. I checked my watch; I had forty minutes before Harriet Fritter would begin getting twitchy.

I was standing where Elliot Street dead-ends into Main, allowing a view up Elliot almost to the central firehouse before the street curves out of sight. It also let me see that the lights were still on at Zigman Realty’s second-floor office partway down the block. I crossed at the loudly buzzing WALK sign—one of the town’s odd and unique conciliatory gestures toward the visually handicapped—and made my way to the narrow door by the side of an upscale pastry shop.

Gail Zigman’s office was located right over the shop, a position imbuing it with the most seductive aroma of any nonbakery in town. Gail—the owner and sole employee—claimed she’d given up working from her home for the convenience of a downtown location. Of course, every time I visited her office, I knew otherwise; it was the smell of fresh bread that had lured her off her hill. Convenience, if there was any of it, had come purely by happenstance.

I knocked on the glass-paneled door and stuck my head in. “Got something with high walls and a moat?”

She was sitting in a huge beanbag chair by the window, framed by the fading light and the drooping leaves of an eight-foot potted plant, reading from a thick manila file. The office was an antique one-room affair with high ceilings, tall sash windows, and ancient, rattling steam heating. She looked over her glasses at me and smiled. “Feeling the need for one?”

A tall, slim, muscular woman, now in her forties, Gail was graced with a dynamic face, both angular and strong, dark, serious eyes, and a complexion molded and tanned by an uncaring exposure to the weather. Most importantly of all, she had in abundance what my mother had always counseled me to look for in my friends: character.

“Not yet. In fact, I’m feeling pretty good.” I closed the door behind me and crossed over to her, bending low to give her a kiss.

I pulled her office chair away from the desk and turned it to face her, settling myself comfortably in it, with my feet propped next to hers on the windowsill. She removed her reading glasses and lay back against the beanbag, a smile on her face. “Oh yeah? Stuck another crowbar in some bureaucrat’s bicycle wheel?”

It was a pointed remark. I had gathered enough evidence against one of the selectmen during a case two months ago to stimulate both his resignation and an indictment, much to Gail’s delight. Still, it had been an uncomfortable time for her, since she, too, was on the board of selectmen.

“Nope, I have myself an old-fashioned mystery.”

I told her of my day’s activities, from Hillstrom’s baffling phone call to my doubts about Coyner and my concerns about the chart’s disappearance. Through it all, she listened carefully, her paperwork resting on her stomach, her long blue-jeaned legs stretched out before her, knowing that I wasn’t just shooting the breeze but indirectly enlisting her help.

This was by no means unusual. We covered different aspects of this municipality—she the political/business side and I the streets and crooks. But in a small town, these arenas often overlapped, so Gail and I had become comfortable exchanging information. We never quoted each other in public, were sensitive to the potential pitfalls of our sharing, and occasionally were able to defuse a few situations when the police department and the selectmen had locked horns.

My appeal to her this time, however, had more to do with the instincts and interests that had brought her to southern Vermont in the first place. Gail had been part of the hippie communes that had surrounded Brattleboro in the 1960s like dolphins crowding around a friendly boat, and although she’d joined the mainstream long since, many of her friends still followed their own unconventional drummers. I was hoping that she, or someone she could suggest, might shed some light on the stolen chart.

She thought a moment after I’d finished my brief saga. “What did the chart look like?”

I held my hands a yard apart. “What there was of it was about this big; the top edge had been torn off neatly, either from a large drawing pad or to remove one part of the document. The chart itself was like a sundial wheel with the center crisscrossed by connecting straight lines of different colors—”

“How many segments was the dial broken into?” she interrupted.

I closed my eyes to concentrate. “Seemed like about six to a side; twelve overall.”

She handed me a pencil and the manila folder from her lap. “Can you scribble one of the symbols on the back of that from memory?”

“I’ll have a photograph soon, so I can show you the whole thing, but I do remember three of them. The first two I already knew: the signs for male and female. The third one was a circle with a dot in the middle.”

She smiled and nodded. “Mars, Venus, and the Sun. That was an astrological chart, Joe. It didn’t have a date or a name anywhere on it?”

I shook my head. “It might have at one point; that may explain the tear. Could you tell anything about it if I showed it to you?”

“Probably not. I could identify most of the symbols, and with enough time, I might be able to give a very general reading using the few books I’ve got, but I think Billie Lucas is the person you want to talk to. She’s been doing them for years and she’s very good. I had lunch with her today, in fact.”