Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Part 17

I nodded.

He looked around the interior. "Nice."

Then we were quiet again.

I took him to Charlene's and watched him eat two egg-and-cheese sandwiches from Dunkin' Donuts. He sat at the kitchen table wearing green scrubs they'd given him at Cider Hill, chewing like h.e.l.l with his lousy teeth.

I said, "What's your shoe size?"

"I don't know."

"How can you not know your shoe size?"

"Go twenty years without buying a pair of shoes, that's how."

"What was your shoe size twenty-one years ago?"

"Ten and a half. Why?"

"I'll buy you some clothes."

He nodded and polished off the last sandwich. Then he looked around. "Nice house," he said. "Not yours, though. This is a woman's house. Your girlfriend?"

"Yes."

"You live here?"

"Kind of."

"It's not a kind-of question. Yes or no?"

"f.u.c.k you."

He looked at me awhile, then nodded. "I won't begrudge you that," my father said. "f.u.c.k me."

Twenty minutes later he was showered, naked, asleep in Jesse's room. I'd pulled the curtains while he climbed into bed. "Room dark enough?" I said, and heard snoring. He was out cold. "Guess so," I said, and headed for the door.

But stopped. I looked down at my father. He could use a haircut. His was mostly gray, but it was all there. And it was clean now.

I reached and touched my father's hair. His snoring hitched. I pulled my hand back, then soft-footed out the door and down the hall to Charlene's room. I pulled the curtains in that room, too.

I like to pray in the dark when I can.

I hit my knees, closed my eyes, set my forehead on the yellow comforter.

I prayed.

The praying turned into thinking. That happens a lot. I used to worry, thought I was praying wrong. Then Eudora Spoon told me there was no way to pray wrong. She said praying is praying.

So I thought and I prayed. Somewhere in there I started to cry.

When I finished praying, the comforter and my T-shirt were soaked. I rinsed my face, changed my shirt, stripped the bed, went downstairs, ran a load of laundry.

I watched a rerun of a World of Outlaws race while the washing machine ran. Called Charlene, got voice mail, left a message. Called Randall. Voice mail. Message.

I transferred the laundry to the dryer and was coming back to the family room when everything hit me. I felt my knees go, the way they had at the hospital. Got a hand on the wall, steadied myself. "What am I going to do?" I said out loud.

My cell rang. I squinted at the number. It was a 603 area code, which meant New Hampshire, but I didn't recognize the number.

I clicked on but said nothing. Somebody said my name, waited, then said it again.

It came to me: the New Hampshire Statie who rolled up on me at Phigg's place, the supersized Abe Lincoln. "McCord," I said.

"h.e.l.l of a way to answer your phone."

I said nothing.

"Where are you presently, Mister Sax?"

"My girlfriend's house. Shrewsbury, Ma.s.s."

"Been there awhile?"

"Why?"

"Been there awhile?"

"Sure."

"Folks there with you? Anybody to back up your story?"

"Sure," I said. "What do you want, McCord?"

Long pause. "Somebody tore the h.e.l.l out of Tander Phigg's sorry little shack," he said. "Thrashed it and trashed it."

"Kids?"

"Doesn't look like it. Somebody looking for something, you ask me."

"Looking for what?"

"You tell me," McCord said. "I'll be here another hour or so, keeping my blue lights on while the detectives knock around."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

I made it to Jut Road just as McCord was leaving.

It hadn't been an easy getaway. I'd had to figure out which friend Sophie was with, then call to make sure she could stay until Charlene came home from work. The mom said sure, the girls were reading pop-star magazines in the tree house and it'd take an act of Congress to get them down anyway.

Then I left a note for my dad. Then I called Charlene. I was grateful she didn't pick up-the message was that I'd carted a derelict she'd never met from the loony bin to her home, and he was sleeping naked in her daughter's room. Yikes.

After doing all this as fast as I could, I paused at the front door and thought about my father waking up alone at Charlene's place.

Most drunks won't keep booze in the house, but Charlene calls that scaredy-cat bulls.h.i.t. She has business friends who enjoy a drink now and then. She keeps vodka in the bas.e.m.e.nt freezer and a couple bottles of this and that high in a kitchen cabinet.

What should I do?

Decided to play it safe. I quick-stepped to the kitchen, grabbed the half-empty fifths of Scotch and bourbon, bounced to the bas.e.m.e.nt, grabbed the vodka from the freezer. I stashed the works on a shelf behind a box of painting supplies.

After all that, a steady ninety miles an hour up Route 495 put me nose to nose with McCord's green-and-copper Charger as he got set to swing out of Jut Road. He backed away to let me in.

The hottest part of the day overpowered the thin shade in this overgrown spot. Souhegan noise battled insect noise.

I said, "Sorry I took so long." McCord waved it off and walked us toward the shack, pointing as we neared it.

"Building's got no business still being here," he said. "Used to be a house right over there, a big one. My old man remembers it. But the river floods every five years, and there's a natural bowl in this spot. Real bad flood when my old man was in high school. The owners said f.u.c.k it, never came back."

I told him I'd guessed most of that. "And Phigg was building on the same spot, more or less. Bad move?"

"Maybe not," McCord said, but his shrug told me he thought it was. "You can see where they tried to fix the grading."

"But a bowl next to a river is a bowl next to a river."

He twitched his eighth-inch smile.

"Brick support piers," I said, pointing. "That's why this one's still here."

"Miracle they're holding, uh? Place could fall any day."

As we stepped inside I asked about the break-in. McCord folded his arms. "Local lady drove by, spotted a vehicle. She wouldn't have thought twice about it, but Phigg's the talk of the town. She called nine-one-one. I was the nearest unit. Got here twenty-one minutes after she made the call, but they were gone."

"She see their car?"

"Black SUV, a big one she thought."

Montreal and his black Escalade. So I'd been right-Montreal had p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at Phigg's name. I was glad my back was to McCord. I didn't have to worry about a poker face as I clicked through possibilities, coming up with two questions: Why did Montreal care about Phigg, and should I tell McCord about the connection?

I answered the second one first: no dice. Felt guilty at the thought of jerking McCord around, but as far as I knew the cops had zero Ollie-Montreal-heroin info, and that seemed like a good thing.

The first question-What did Montreal know about Phigg?-would have to wait.

The shack didn't smell any better. The floor still sagged beneath me. All the same c.r.a.p from the other day was here. It had been thrown in different spots, maybe, but the shack was such a mess to start with it didn't look any worse today.

"You sure it wasn't kids?" I said. "Looks like somebody came in on a dare, tossed things around, and took off."

"Detectives saw it that way, too," McCord said. "They didn't even want to come here, didn't want to f.u.c.k up their nice clean suicide."

"They find anything?"

He shook his head. "Showed up, b.i.t.c.hed about the drive, smoked cigarettes, looked around a little, said I was a douche bag for hauling them out here. Then they drove back to Concord."

"You don't like detectives much."

"I don't like stupid ones." He stepped to the shack's northern side, where a sort of box, maybe four feet tall by two feet deep, jutted from the main wall. To me it looked like it must house a couple of axles and gears from when this was a pump house.

McCord pointed at the boxed section.

I said, "What?"

He motioned me closer and tapped brick. I saw it-an eighteen-inch horizontal line in the mortar, much whiter than the brick and mortar around it.

I looked at the floor near the boxed section. The floor was such a mess it took me a few seconds, but I spotted shards of mortar. A few of them rested atop a Dunkin' Donuts bag the detectives had tossed here the day Phigg died.

"Fresh," McCord said.

"You've got a h.e.l.luva good eye."

"Wait here."

He trotted from the shack. I heard his trunk open and close, heard him trot back. He came in with a lineman's hammer. It was double faced, weighed maybe three pounds. It was new, the SKU sticker still on the shaft.

"Found it in the drive when I rolled up," McCord said. "I'd say they left in a hurry, uh?"

"You think they were chiseling at this wall."

He nodded.

"That's the wrong tool for the job," I said. "Why not bring an eight-pound sledge and bash right through this s.h.i.tty old brick?"

"You know that. I know that." He shrugged. "Maybe they didn't know that. City boys, clean-hands boys."

He was right, though I still didn't want to tell him about Montreal the lounge lizard, who was looking more and more like a guy who could and would kill Phigg. I felt bad about holding back the info, but even a good cop is a cop. Trusting them doesn't come easy.

"What do you think they were looking for?"

"Stand back," he said. "We'll find out." McCord took a wide-legged stance and touched the hammer to the wall once, where the mortar had been chipped. Then he reared back and took a big-a.s.s swing.