Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Part 29

It was nearly seven, so we made long shadows as we walked the bluestone path and up four steps to the deep porch. I didn't like the vibe, the quiet. I noticed I was taking short breaths through my mouth, like a kid who's scared the bogeyman will hear his breathing.

I knew before I knocked that n.o.body would answer.

Tried anyway-heavy raps, doorbell, polite shouting. Randall had disappeared to walk a lap around the house.

The picture window in the living room had a smaller window on each side, and they were open. I was looking both ways, wondering if the neighbors were nosy, when Randall's voice carried from around back. "s.h.i.t!"

I heard him run toward me. "s.h.i.t s.h.i.t s.h.i.t," he said, taking the porch steps at two bounds. He took one look at the open windows, moved a rocking chair, kicked out a screen with his t.i.tanium ankle, and stepped through. Five seconds later I heard the front door's dead bolt slide, opened the door, walked inside. Randall was already in the kitchen.

It stank.

I followed Randall through a small dining room and toward the back of the house.

It was the type of kitchen that would make yuppies think twice about buying the place. Twelve by twelve, thirty-year-old fridge and oven, small window looking over the backyard, Formica countertops the color of pus, tired linoleum floor.

On that floor lay a woman who was old and dead, her head near the fridge. She was on her back. She wore white tennis shoes and a peach sweat suit. An ap.r.o.n that said SOUPS ON in script lay at her side, as if she'd been drying her hands on it when she died.

No, that wasn't it: I saw she'd been strangled with an ap.r.o.n string. Her neck was paper white up to the string, which had bitten so deep you could barely see it against her flesh. Above the ap.r.o.n string, her face was purple going on black and her eyes were bugged out like something in a cartoon. The white of her left eye was red where she must have popped a blood vessel.

On the Formica were two plates, with two slices of bread and a handful of Wise potato chips per plate. Next to the plates stood an open jar of pickles, a jar of mayonnaise. Next to the mayo were two plastic deli bags.

It wasn't the dead woman that stank. It was the cold cuts.

She'd been strangled while she made sandwiches for Josh and Ollie.

Standing next to me, Randall said, "Jesus Christ." Then he backed into the dining room. I heard him breathing, trying for control, trying not to puke.

"Don't touch anything," I said. "And breathe through your mouth."

"Jesus Christ." He dropped to one knee.

I touched his shoulder as I stepped past. "You okay?"

"I don't ... I don't know. An old lady."

"Go to the front porch and breathe."

"Where are you going?"

I didn't answer, walked upstairs. Before I made the landing I heard Randall following.

The hall was tiny. I looked at four closed doors. Opened the one to my right. Technically it was a third bedroom, I guessed, but the woman had obviously used it as storage s.p.a.ce. I closed the door. Dead ahead, I knew, was the house's only bathroom. Behind my left shoulder would be the master, most likely, with the killer mountain view.

So I opened the fourth door-the one that led, I was guessing, to Ollie's childhood bedroom.

"Oh h.e.l.l," I said.

"Jesus Christ," Randall said.

Ollie was hanging from a frosted-gla.s.s light fixture.

There was one window at the gabled end of the room. It was shut. The room was stifling. And Ollie had s.h.i.t himself while he died.

The stench reached out and took hold of you.

I stepped in. Randall stayed where he was. I put my hands in my pockets to make sure I didn't touch anything, and I breathed through my mouth.

Twin beds, boy-size. Both were made up but in a sloppy way-a guy way. So Ollie and Josh had been using the room while they stayed here.

Beneath Ollie's dangling legs-his right knee was still puffy and bandaged and he'd kicked off one Doc Martens-lay a tipped-over boy-size chair that matched the beds. Standing on the chair, or maybe the nearby desk, someone had stuck Ollie's head through a noose, then watched him die. Maybe Ollie kicked the chair himself. Maybe the killer slapped it over, trying to make the scene look like another suicide.

Any doubt about whether Ollie'd killed himself flew away when I took a closer look at the noose.

A necktie. Blue with little tennis racquets.

"Oh h.e.l.l," I said. "I liked him."

Randall had pulled his shirt to cover his nose and mouth. He looked as pale as me.

I was puzzled. No cheesy light fixture would hold two-hundred-plus-pound Ollie. Using my feet only, I righted the chair and stepped up. I flinched at the stench even though I was breathing through my mouth. Tried not to look at Ollie's face, purple going on black, just like his mother's. I saw how they'd done it: The light fixture had been loosened and slid aside a few inches, and the necktie was knotted around a stout beam in the attic above.

I turned. "Whoever killed him put a lot of thought into this." I sounded funny, realized I was still holding my nose.

Randall's eyes were bigger than I'd ever seen them. He tapped his wrist.w.a.tch, said nothing.

I nodded. We spilled down the stairs and out to the truck, gulping clean air the instant we got outside. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, and the temperature had dropped ten degrees. As I backed from the driveway I craned my neck in both directions. The houses I could see looked dead quiet.

We worked down Route 89 in the dark. We said nothing for a long time. I was thinking about Randall's reaction when he saw Ollie's mother. Finally I said, "Your old man once told me you weren't in Iraq long before you got blown up."

"Three weeks," he said, half laughing, "and thank you for putting it in such charming fashion."

"I never said I was charming," I said. "Three weeks. So I guess you didn't see a lot of ... war."

"I know where you're going," Randall said. "You're right. My wound came on my second patrol, my first urban patrol. Before that I played a lot of Ping-Pong and drank a lot of ice-cold water. Inured to purple-faced corpses I'm not."

"What's 'inured'?"

"Never mind."

We were quiet some more.

We stopped in Ascutney, fueled the truck, took a leak. "What do you think?" I said when we got on the highway again.

Randall knew what I meant. "Here's what they want the cops to think," he said, looking straight ahead. "Ollie snaps. He already killed Tander Phigg over some d.a.m.n thing, a claim that somebody owed somebody thirty-five hundred bucks. Maybe he figures the heroin deal is catching up with him, or maybe his business is deeper in the red than we know. Somehow his mother triggers him. In a twist even a made-for-TV movie would reject as hokey, he strangles her with an ap.r.o.n string. Then he realizes what he's done, trudges upstairs to his boyhood room, and hangs himself."

"So the New Hampshire Staties' party line that Phigg killed himself is blown up."

"The police couldn't be faulted for thinking that way before, but they need a new theory. I suspect they'll find the neckties used on Phigg and Ollie are knotted exactly the same way."

"It all hangs together."

"I should pardon the pun."

I said, "Huh?" Then I got it. I didn't smile. "Before, you said here's what they want the cops to think. Who's 'they'?"

"Montreal and his guy," he said. "Obviously."

"What about Josh Whipple? What about Patty Marx?"

"You said Ollie could fight like a tiger. Can you see Josh and Patty hoisting him into that noose?"

"Not conscious."

"Montreal is your man," he said. "Try this: Montreal's working his heroin deal with Ollie. Life is good. But along comes nosy, obnoxious Tander Phigg, whose Mercedes is nothing more than busywork to make Motorenwerks look legit. He pushes, he pesters, he figures things out. Montreal gets wind of this-through Ollie or Josh or G.o.d knows who. And Montreal is a serious man. He takes out Phigg, thinks that over a few days, decides he'd better take out Ollie for safety's sake. Ollie's mom is collateral damage."

"That's good as far as it goes," I said after a while. "But what about Josh? What about Patty Marx? And my take on Montreal is he was sniffing after Phigg's money. How's that fit?"

"h.e.l.l," Randall said.

Quiet.

I thought and thought, felt Randall doing the same. Part of the reason I liked him was he didn't have to fill the air with palaver every second.

After a while I dug through my wallet, found the card I wanted, dialed.

McCord picked up. "Sax," he said.

"You got any pull in Vermont?"

"'Bout as much as I got in Nebraska. Why?"

"You must know some guys."

"Maybe a few. Why?"

"I can point you to a murder-suicide in Vermont," I said. "Or maybe a double homicide."

I pictured McCord pulling over in his Charger, taking a pen from his shirt pocket. "Where are you?"

"This Vermont mess is tangled up with the Tander Phigg thing in Rourke. Once they get a load of it, your detectives will have to admit he didn't kill himself."

"Where are you?"

"The favor I'm asking," I said, "can you leave me out of it?"

"No." He didn't even hesitate.

"Okay then," I said. "Vermont's a small state. Shouldn't take long to find the bodies."

I drove three-tenths of a mile before he said, "I'll try."

"That's fair."

"They'll get to you sooner or later, but I won't say your name in my first phone call. Best I can do."

"Enosburg Falls," I said, and told him the street address.

McCord clicked off.

I called Charlene, asked about Fred. No news. She'd called the Shrewsbury cops again, then the staties. They'd promised to keep an eye out for him.

Yeah, right.

I clicked off, let my mind go where it wanted. It had been a long day.

After a while I said, more to myself than to Randall, "Going to be a b.i.t.c.h to get that car now."

"What?"

"I was thinking about Phigg's Mercedes. Going to be hard to lay my hands on it once the state cops poke around at Motorenwerk."

"If you have any sense at all," Randall said, "you'll forget about the G.o.dd.a.m.n car."

I said nothing.

"You do have that much common sense, don't you?"

"This all started when Phigg asked me to fetch his car. Can't just drop it now."

When Randall finally spoke, he kept an artificial calm. "Let's work through this," he said. "A few minutes ago, the Vermont State Police found the bodies of Ollie and his mom. I'm going to take a flier and guess they don't get a lot of double strangulations in the Maple State, so it's going to be big f.u.c.king news."

"They call it the Green Mountain State, I'm pretty sure."

"Shut up," Randall said. "If you and I are very lucky, and if your pal McCord is very kind to us, we won't get arrested. On the other hand, maybe we will. Regardless, there'll be a mob of police prowling around Motorenwerk pretty d.a.m.n soon. Agreed?"

"Okay."

"Once they start prowling, they will find heroin, or traces thereof. Oh, and I haven't even touched on the hanging of Tander Phigg, which your pal McCord is going to bring up because he thought all along it was homicide rather than suicide."

I said nothing.

"Let's review, shall we?" Randall said. "Three citizens strangled. Two of the deaths were supposed to look like suicides, while the third is a sweet old granny. One of the dead guys was an heir to a noted Ma.s.sachusetts manufacturing family, but he had an illegitimate black daughter and he died broke. The other ran an innocent-looking auto-repair shop that was a front for an international heroin-smuggling ring." He looked over at me. "Gee, you think a case like that will get any publicity?"