Neil McMahon - Hugh Davoren 02 Page 4

  According to the teenage grapevine, Astrid had brought the same attitude to romance. If she liked a boy, she didn’t hesitate to let him know it in the most time-honored and convincing way. But she’d be equally quick to dump him and move on to the next one who caught her fancy. By the end of high DEAD SILVER

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  school, she had already junked a string of young hearts and left them abandoned along the road.

  Clearly, getting married hadn’t ended her amorous penchant. She’d been trysting with a lover at the time of her death—a powerful motive for murder, at the hands of a jealous husband. Physically, Professor Callister was capable of the crime; he’d been a hardy woodsman and hunter.

  Back inside, I poured another drink, then picked up the phone and called Madbird. I’d told Renee I wanted to bring him in on this, if he was willing—that his experience and way of thinking would bring insights I’d never see on my own, and that I trusted him more than I did myself—and she was fine with it.

  When he answered, his gravelly voice had an edge that startled me. He was always a little gruff, but not like this.

  “I was going to run something by you, but maybe this isn’t a good time,” I said.

  “It ain’t you—I’m just pissed off. Me and Hannah”—his longtime live-in girlfriend—“got some stuff to give Darcy for her new apartment, and she was supposed to come by and decide what she wants. We drug it all out and cleaned it up, and she never fucking showed or called.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I should of known better. She’s pulled shit like this before.”

  It sounded like the cumulative strain of worry and annoyance was getting to Madbird, and that didn’t happen easily.

  “So I’m glad for a excuse to quit thinking about it,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  I gave him a quick description of the chaos in Renee’s carriage house.

  “Pack rats, hey?” he said, with his tone back toward normal. “I had a old Ford Bronco a while back. One night, three o’clock in the morning, my dogs start going apeshit. I look out 32

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  the window, the rig’s on fire. Turns out one of them fucking rats chewed up the wiring harness. Melted the dashboard out.”

  “I wish they’d done the same thing to that carriage house,”

  I said. “This job’s going to be ugly, and I’m not asking you to work on it—I’d just appreciate you thinking about what I told you. Let me know if you have any notions.”

  “Right off, the way it sounds, I wouldn’t bet you’re going to do any good,” he said.

  “I hear you.”

  “I remember them murders. Ten, twelve years ago?”

  “Right around then.”

  “I suppose you ain’t doing it for the money.”

  I’d been thinking about my reasons, enumerating them. I was drawn to Renee and wanted to help her through this trouble. I’d respected her father, and I’d even admired Astrid for her brash allure. The damage they’d all suffered made my heart ache. And I was pissed that someone might have gotten away with the crime. I knew it was naïve to imagine I could make a difference, but as long as I admitted that, I felt free to try.

  “It comes with a story,” I said, and gave him another quick rundown—this time about the photos.

  Roughly ten seconds passed in silence.

  “Well, Sunday morning, I can’t show up too early,” Madbird finally warned. “I got to go be a altar boy.”

  “Huh. I thought you’d moved on to hearing confessions.”

  “Only from women. I got a special clientele. That’s in the afternoon, so I’m gonna have to take off early, too.”

  “A lot of people would be surprised to find out you’re so devoted to caring for lost souls.”

  “Hey, call me Mother Mag-dah-kee.” That was his real, Indian name. It meant “bird of prey.”

  I smiled. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I was left with a Saturday evening to kill. Earlier today, I’d figured I’d grab some dinner downtown, but after I left Renee’s it had slipped my mind. I foraged through the refrigerator and found the chunk that was left of the weekly pot roast.

  I usually cooked one every Sunday and lived on it for lunch sandwiches, chili, stew, and other spinoffs. This one came from an elk Madbird had shot last fall, and was about as good as meat could get. I decided to make my own style of Stroganoff.

  I stirred a splash of red wine, a lot of garlic, and dashes of this and that into the oniony drippings, and put the pan on the stove to warm. With sour cream added at the last, poured over sourdough toast, it would be redneck gourmet.

  Then I turned on the computer I’d bought myself last Christmas—my major concession, to date, to the twenty-first century. I’d learned basic skills during my journalism stint, but I’d phased out of that a decade ago, and I had a lot of catching up to do. It was a no-frills Compaq desktop, but at first I’d felt like a Neanderthal piloting an F-16, and I still spent a fair amount of time trying to extricate myself from blunders I didn’t have a clue how I’d made. But by now I could get around reasonably well on the Internet, which was my main interest.

  It wasn’t much of a substitute for a warm and breathing com-

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  panion, but an agreeable time-passer for a solitary night, and it spurred me to dig into matters I was curious about but otherwise wouldn’t take the time to pursue.

  I spent the next couple of hours, with a break to savor my elk concoction, trying to refresh my memory about Astrid Callister’s murder. I didn’t really learn anything new. The online archives of Montana newspapers didn’t go back that far, and I wasn’t able to find much on the national archiving services I tried. There were a few breaking stories on the crime itself, but nothing about the follow-up investigation. I decided I’d stop by the Independent Record when I got a chance; probably they’d have their older records on microfiche.

  I’d fallen into that near-trance state of being like a lab animal trained to press a bar for a pellet of food or a jolt of pleasure to the brain. I kept clicking my finger, dancing the arrow across the screen, hoping for my own little reward in the form of a morsel of intriguing information.

  Then, on a whim I hadn’t even realized was in my head, I typed the name Seth Fraker into the search window.

  About four hundred entries turned up, fewer than I’d expected. Most involved minutes of the current legislative session or other business where his name was attached in some perfunctory way. He was also mentioned in political websites, occasional news articles, and a few blogs, although he didn’t seem to generate much interest with those. There were a couple of photos and snippets of personal information. His looks defined the term “clean-cut.” He enjoyed wholesome sports like skiing and boating, and had played on the golf team at Arizona State. He believed piously in God, his country, and, of course, family values.

  The single factor that at first seemed to stand out was his claim to be a moderate in a Republican party that generally leaned far to the right. But even that started looking like just a way to play it safe. I didn’t see any record of him taking DEAD SILVER

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  a strong stand on any controversial issue, or even speaking out. In a couple of instances when he was pinned down by questions from the press, he’d hedged, saying that he was still giving the matter serious thought. But his voting record was straight party line.

  None of that was surprising or interesting, and my brain and vision were dulling toward slumber. But my robotic finger kept clicking the mouse, and after a few more pages, I caught an entry that opened my eyes again.

  It was in French, apparently from a newspaper on St.

  Martin, in the Caribbean. The heading read only Le St. Martin Courrier, and was dated way back in February 1997.

  Tragique noyade accidentelle au Lagon Blanc. . . . La victime se baignait toute seule le soir et a disparu . . . malgré l’insistence
de son ami M. Seth Fraker qu’il a fait tout effort pour la sauver. . . .

  I’d studied French through high school and some in college; my grasp of it had never been anything to brag on, and like most of my other formal education, had suffered with the passage of time. But I got the gist.

  A woman had drowned in a tragic accident, while swimming alone at night in White Lagoon. A man named Seth Fraker had tried to save her.

  My first hit was that this was unrelated to the Seth Fraker I was checking out—that it referred to another guy who happened to have the same name.

  Still, I opened the file.

  The Courrier was a small weekly that billed itself as “The Voice of French St. Martin.” It had a semi-tabloid presentation, with graphics that tended toward garish and catchy head-lines, the lowdown that you wouldn’t find in the mainstream press. In fact, most of it consisted of ads; the news was limited 36

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  to a roundup of a dozen items from the previous week, none much over a hundred words. The drowning story was one of those, and, at least via my clumsy translation, as tame as hand crème.

  Guests had been staying at a seaside villa. Late in the evening, they’d noticed that a young woman, one Lydia Korzina, had slipped away. They found her clothes on the beach. Seth Fraker had swum into the night-bound lagoon and searched for her until police arrived. Her body was recovered next morning. She wasn’t a St. Martin resident—it was thought that she was originally from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Authorities were trying to locate her family.

  That was all.

  I clicked on the link to the newspaper’s website to see if there was a follow-up story, but got a “can’t be displayed”

  message. The same thing happened when I tried a general search. At a guess, Le St. Martin Courrier was defunct. I took a stab at penetrating the archives of the island’s major paper, the English language Daily Herald, but the names Seth Fraker and Lydia Korzina turned up nothing. I drew another blank going through the remaining entries on Fraker. Maybe there was information in there, but I wasn’t the guy to find it.

  But why would there be? If it even was the same Seth Fraker, he had simply happened to be present when a sad accident occurred, long ago and far away. There was no hint of scandal; his political opponents surely would have brought that to light.

  Although one bit of nuanced phrasing, in such a brief account, struck me as a little odd—Fraker “insisting” that he’d made every effort to save her.

  As if maybe there’d been a suggestion otherwise.

  CHAPTER 8

  Madbird pushed my old worm-drive Skilsaw horizontally across a plaster wall in the Callisters’ carriage house, with a sound like a freight train braking hard along a mile of rusty track. Sparks flew out in sprays when the blade hit lath nails, and clouds of stifling white dust billowed forth, hanging in the air like they had a half-life. I followed along behind him, digging my hammer claw into the plaster and ripping out chunks.

  By now, it was early Sunday afternoon. We’d already checked the obvious places where the photos might be hidden, then sifted through the toxic Zonolite insulation in the attic.

  Next came the walls. Since it was impossible to guess where somebody might have eased a piece of siding loose and slipped something inside, we’d decided to open them up—carve channels that later could be filled with drywall, taped, and textured to match the plaster. There was an additional benefit: The ancient knob-and-tube wiring was a fire hazard, and this would clear pathways for rewiring.

  Besides the main room that the Professor had converted into his study, there was also a small bathroom and an unimproved back area. The rats hadn’t left a square inch of it untouched. Cleaning up the mess just so we could walk around, every bit the ugly job I’d warned Madbird about, took us half 38

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  the morning. We’d managed to tear up the sodden carpet and drag it into the yard, then mucked out the rest with shovels. A couple of armchairs and a small couch were far beyond saving, so they’d gone, too. The resulting heap of trash would damn near have filled a Dumpster.

  I’d never dealt much with pack rats before. Between my tomcat and predators like a resident badger family, my premises stayed pretty clear of varmints. But I knew other people besides Madbird who’d had run-ins with them, and as often as not come out second best.

  They tended toward the large end of the North American rodent family, almost the size of cats. They could chew like chain-saws. A construction pal had told me about a ceiling that collapsed under the weight of dog food they’d hoarded up there. Another friend from northern California reported that they loved marijuana plants and were a bane to the region’s growers—an army of feral four-legged narcs, stealthily searching and destroying by night. Like most critters, they avoided humans, but while others would run if you surprised them, pack rats tended to stand their ground and stare right back at you, even if you were pointing a gun.

  Whether this was because they were bold or stupid, nobody seemed sure.

  They were probably best known for their penchant for pilfering small objects and leaving others in their place. The consensus was that they didn’t deliberately swap objects on a quid pro quo basis, but if a rat was carrying something and saw something else it liked better, it would drop what it had and pick up the new item. They were particularly attracted to shiny stuff. Eerily, they tended to trade up in value, as if they had an aesthetic sense. They’d abandon a scrap of cloth for a scrap of tinfoil, the tinfoil for a beer tab, and the beer tab for a coin. If you left any jewelry where they could get at it, you could kiss it good-bye.

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  Their peculiarities also included a fondness for flowers.

  They’d strip gardens of them, not to eat, but to decorate their turf—touching, considering that otherwise, they were about as destructive and filthy as creatures could get.

  They’d sure proved that here.

  The Skilsaw’s shriek died off as Madbird finished his cut and released the trigger. When the blade stopped spinning, he jerked the saw out of its kerf and laid it on the floor. Blessed quiet settled over the room, and the swirling dust clouds settled over us.

  “Hope there ain’t any hantavirus in here,” he muttered.

  “Be just right—die from mucking out the shit of the rat that killed you.”

  “Hugh? Can I come in?” Renee called from the doorway.

  She’d probably been waiting for the commotion to stop.

  “Stay there, we’ll come out,” I said. We groped our way outside into the cool damp day. Spring was still taunting but not yet delivering.

  When Renee saw us, she actually started to laugh before she caught herself. I didn’t mind. It was the first time I’d seen worry leave her face. And we had it coming. Madbird looked like an extra in a Road Warrior movie—his body was white with dust except for dark goggle rings around his eyes, and his thick black hair was tangled with a nest of plaster chunks that suggested he’d gone through a wall headfirst. I was sure I was no improvement.

  “My God,” she said. “I’m sorry, I had no idea it would be so—chaotic.”

  “That’s why we get paid the big bucks, darlin’,” Madbird said. His gravelly voice was reduced to a parched croak.

  “I baked fresh cookies,” she said timidly. “And there’s coffee.”

  “That sounds real tasty,” Madbird said. “But you know, there’s nothing works up my appetite for cookies like a couple cold beers.”

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  I nodded agreement. We didn’t usually drink while we were working, but this wasn’t usually.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I should have thought of that. I’ll run get some.”

  “Half-rack of Pabst.” He fished a twenty out of his wallet and handed it toward her, trailing dust. “Try Louie’s; they keep it almost froze.”

  She pushed his hand away gently. “I’ll buy it, don’t be silly. Let me grab my k
eys.”

  While Renee walked to the house, Madbird and I stayed outside to suck down a few more fresh breaths. The sky was blue-gray with a threatening storm that sent occasional flurries of spitting snow and the breeze had a sharp edge, but it felt damned good.

  “You know that couch for Darcy?” Madbird said. The question seemed abrupt, but his mind worked in mysterious ways.

  “Yeah?”

  “We could probably use another hand getting it up them stairs.”

  “Like, her boyfriend?” I said.

  “You got it.”

  He’d mentioned earlier that Darcy had finally showed up at his and Hannah’s house last night and picked out some of the furniture they’d offered her. Her new apartment was on the second story; the two of us were going to move the heavier stuff tomorrow, including a couch.

  I’d told him about the drowning incident involving Seth Fraker on St. Martin island—not because it was important, but just because. That must have gotten him thinking about Darcy’s situation; he’d decided he’d had enough of Fraker dodging him, and had seen a way to force his hand, by inviting him to join in a manly effort to help his girlfriend. If he refused, that would be a serious loss of face. Darcy would try to head it off, but Madbird could handle her. It was going to be interesting.

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  “Let me know what time,” I said.

  As Renee stepped out the door with her purse, a rumbling sound in the distance was getting louder and more jarring, fast.

  A few seconds later, its source rolled into sight—one of those yacht-sized sedans that Detroit had made in the ’70s, with a body faded to bilious green and a vinyl top that was peeling like a bad case of eczema. Besides the shot muffler and disintegrating engine that the noise advertised, the car belched smoke and was cancerous with corrosion. A great old line from Raymond Chandler flashed through my mind—in this pretty, peaceful place, the big rust bucket stood out like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.