27
Walsh kept me sitting around until Proctor’s body had been taken away. I think he was punishing me for not being more forthcoming, but at least he was talking to me and hadn’t come up with some obscure legal reason to put me in a cell for the night. Since it would take me almost three hours to get to Portland, and I was tired and wanted to shower, I decided to find a place nearby to stay. The decision wasn’t entirely mine to make. Forensics wanted to wait until morning to make a full sweep of the property, and the sniffer dogs would arrive soon after. Walsh had suggested that, in a spirit of goodwill and co operation, I might like to remain in the vicinity, just in case a question occurred to him the next day, or even during the night.
‘I keep a notepad beside my bed expressly for that purpose,’ he said, as he leaned his considerable bulk against the car.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Just in case you can come up with awkward questions to ask me?’
‘That’s right. You’d be surprised at how many cops might say the same thing.’
‘You know, I wouldn’t be.’
He shook his head in a despairing way, like a dog trainer faced with a recalcitrant animal that refuses to give up its ball. Some distance away, Soames was watching us unhappily. Once again, he clearly very much wanted to be part of the conversation, but Walsh was deliberately excluding him. It was interesting. I predicted tensions in their relationship. Had they been a couple, Walsh would have been sleeping in the spare room that night.
‘Some might say that we underpaid state cops have a legitimate beef against you, given what happened to Hansen,’ he continued, and I instantly recalled Hansen, a detective with the Maine State Police, standing in the deserted house in Brooklyn in which my wife and child had been killed. He had followed me there out of some misguided missionary zeal, and he had been punished for it: not by me, but by another, a killer to whom Hansen was inconsequential and for whom I was the true prize.
‘It doesn’t look like he’s ever going to work again,’ said Walsh, ‘and it’s never been clear just what he was doing in your house on the night that he was hurt.’
‘Are you asking me to tell you about that night?’
‘No, because I know that you won’t, and anyway, I read the official version. It had more holes in it than a hobo’s drawers. If you did tell me anything, it would be a lie, or a partial truth, like all that you’ve told me so far this evening.’
‘And yet here we are, taking in the night air and being civil to each other.’
‘Indeed. I bet you’re curious as to why that might be.’
‘Go on, I’ll bite.’
Walsh hoisted himself from my car, found his cigarettes, and lit up.
‘Because even though you’re a jerk, and believe you know better than everyone else, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I think you’re fighting the good fight. We’ll talk tomorrow, just in case I’ve scribbled something brilliant and incisive in my notebook overnight, or in case forensics has a question about some part of the crime scene that you’ve contaminated, but after that you can go about your business. What I expect in return is that, at some point in the near future, I’ll receive a call from you, and you’ll feel compelled to unburden yourself of what you know, or what you’ve learned. After that, if it’s not too late to do anything other than view a body, given your previous form, I’ll have an answer to what happened here, and I may even get a promotion by wrapping it all up. How does that sound?’
‘That sounds reasonable.’
‘I’d like to think so. Now you can get in your fancy Lexus and drive out of here. Some of us have overtime to earn. Incidentally, I never took you for a Lexus guy. Last I heard, you were driving a Mustang, like you’re Steve McQueen.’
‘The Mustang’s in the shop,’ I lied. ‘This is a loaner.’
‘A loaner from New York? Don’t give me a reason to run those plates. Well, if you can’t find a room in Rangeley, you can just sleep in that car. It’s big enough. Drive safely now.’
I headed back to Rangeley and sought out a room at the Rangeley Inn. The main building, its lobby decorated with deer heads and a stuffed bear, wasn’t yet open for the season, so I was given a motel room in the lodge at the rear. There were a couple of other cars parked nearby, one of them with a map of the area on its passenger seat, and a decal for a TV station out of Bangor on the dashboard, to which had been appended a handwritten sign pleading ‘Do Not Tow!’ I showered, and changed my shirt for a t-shirt I had picked up at a gas station. The smell of Proctor’s decay was still with me afterward, but it was mostly remembered, not actual. More troubling to me was the sense of unease that I had experienced in the room adjoining Proctor’s body. It felt as though I had wandered in at the tail end of an argument in time to hear only the echo of the final words, all venom and malice. I wondered if they were the same words that Harold Proctor heard before he died.
I walked over to Sarge’s pub to get something to eat. It wasn’t a hard choice, since it was the only place nearby that seemed to be open. Sarge’s had a long, curving bar with five TVs showing four different sports and, in the case of the final screen behind the bar, a local news show. The volume on the sports screens had been turned down, and a group of men was watching the news in silence. Proctor’s death had made the lead, as much for the oddness of his passing as for the fact that it was a slow news night. Suicides didn’t usually merit that kind of coverage, and the local news stations generally tended to be pretty sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of the deceased, but some of the details of Proctor’s death had clearly caught their attention: a man sealed up from the inside in a room of a disused motel, his life ended by an apparently self-inflicted wound. The report didn’t mention the shots that he had fired at someone outside the room before he killed himself.
I heard muttered words as I took a seat away from the bar, and a couple of heads turned in my direction. One of them belonged to Stunden, the taxidermist. I ordered a burger and a glass of wine from the waitress. The wine arrived quickly, closely followed by Stunden. I cursed myself quietly. I had forgotten all about my earlier promise to him. The least I had owed him, both for the information he had provided and because of his concern for Harold Proctor, was a personal visit, and some clarification of what had occurred.
Those who had stayed in their seats were all looking in my direction. Stunden smiled apologetically, and shot a quick look at the men behind him, as if to say, well, you know how small towns are. To their credit, those at the bar were clearly trying to balance embarrassment with curiosity, but curiosity was ahead by a neck.
‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Parker, but we hear that it was you who found Harold.’
I gestured to the seat across from me, and he sat. ‘There’s no apology necessary, Mr. Stunden. I should have paid a courtesy call to you after the police let me go, but it had been a long day, and I forgot. I’m sorry for that.’
Stunden’s eyes looked red. He’d been drinking some, but I thought that he might also have been crying.
‘I understand. It was a shock for all of us. I couldn’t open the bar, not after what happened. That’s why I’m here. I thought somebody might know more than I did, and then you came in, and, well . . .’
‘I can’t tell you much,’ I said, and he was smart enough to pick up on the dual meaning of the words.
‘If you’d just tell me what you can, that would be enough. Is what they’re saying about him true?’
‘Is what who’s saying true?’
Stunden shrugged. ‘The TV people. Nobody here has heard anything official from the detectives. Closest thing we have is the border patrol. The story is that Harold committed suicide.’
‘It looks that way.’
If there had been a cap in Stunden’s hand, he would have twisted it awkwardly.
‘One of the border cops told Ben here—’ He jerked a thumb at an overweight man in a camo shirt, his belt so weighted with keys, knives, phones, and flashlights that his pants were almost around his thighs. ‘—that there was something hinky about Harold’s death, but he wouldn’t say what it was.’
There was that word again: hinky. Joel Tobias was hinky. Harold Proctor’s death was hinky. It was all hinky.
Ben, and two other men from the bar, drawn by the prospect of some enlightenment, had gravitated toward us. I weighed up my options before I spoke, and saw that there was no benefit to me in holding anything back from them. Everything would emerge eventually, if not later tonight when some off-duty border cop came in for a drink, then tomorrow at the latest when the town’s own information-gathering resources began to kick into gear. But I also knew that while there might be aspects of Harold Proctor’s death about which they did not know, then equally there would be parts of his life about which I had no knowledge, and they did. Stunden had been helpful. Some of these men might be helpful too.
‘He fired all the bullets in his gun before he died,’ I said. ‘He saved the last one for himself.’
Everyone probably came up with the same question at the same time, but it was Stunden who asked it first.
‘What was he firing at?’
‘Something outside,’ I said, again pushing to the back of my mind the spread of the bullet holes in the room.
‘You think he was chased in there?’ asked Proctor.
‘Hard to see how a man being chased would have time to nail himself up in a room,’ I replied.
‘Hell, Harold was crazy,’ said Ben. ‘He never was the same after he came back from Iraq.’