Dead at the age of seventy-three.
All her life she compared to no other.
Now she’s at peace and so is he.
It had been Dummy’s and my meeting place for years, as well as a good spot to reflect on familial entanglements and the value of having the last word. I sat down in the shade cast by the headstone and waited.
Dummy’s role in all this hinged on the ever-growing rules and regs that kept us from jumping on the bad guys from impulse alone. We had Milly’s print on the bag of cocaine, that bag had been tied to a homicide victim, and Milly’s history was a long and documented treatise on criminal behavior. Nevertheless, we still had to establish that Milly hadn’t recently become a saint and that he was still up to his old habits. Only then could a warrant be issued to search his place for something that might tie him to Jardine’s death. In this light, the Dummy Frederickses of this world, for all their lack of esthetic appeal, had become crucial police adjuncts.
I half thought I smelled him before I saw him cresting the low grassy rise between South Main Street and our meeting place. He was dressed in a sweat-soaked, tie-dyed T-shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts of such incredible filthiness that I suddenly wondered if I might not be exposing myself to some environmental hazard.
A broken-toothed grin split his grimy, unshaven face. “Hi, Joe.”
“Hey, Dummy. Staying out of trouble?”
“I’m seeing you-can’t be too good.”
I pulled out the envelope into which I’d put the buy money and waved it under his nose. “You know the drill-as soon as you accept this, we’re joined at the hip. You go straight from my car to Milly’s place, make the buy, come straight back to my car, and hand over the goods and any change. You driving?”
“Yup.” He was looking pleased with the prospect of cutting a reasonable transaction with Milly and pocketing the aforementioned change. He might get away with it, too, but only if he could find a hiding place between Milly’s apartment and my car, because I would search him there; using him didn’t mean I had to trust him.
“All right, I’ll drive you back to your car when we’re through, then. Take your shirt off.”
He looked affronted. “Here? Come on.”
“Off, or no deal.” I could have patted him down, but I was reluctant to touch him without rubber gloves.
Still he demurred. “What am I making out of this?”
“Thirty bucks, as agreed.”
“Forget it.”
I glowered. “I don’t have time for this-it’s too goddamn hot. Thirty-five or get the hell out of here.”
With an expression of great distaste, he peeled the grungy T-shirt over his head, revealing a vast expanse of soft, pale, blotchy flesh. While the search after the buy would be to check for his ripping me off, this one was for James Dunn, indirectly. I had to be able to later state categorically, under oath, that Dummy had carried no other cash and no drugs whatsoever into the meet with Milly.
He dropped the shirt onto the grass, and I gingerly examined it. “Okay, drop the pants.”
“I will not.”
I sighed at his modesty. This was the same man we had once busted for walking naked down Main Street at ten on a Friday night. Of course, he’d been slimmer then. “Believe me, Dummy, I like this a hell of lot less than you do.” I waved the money again. “And I’m not getting a cut of the pie.”
He dropped the shorts, muttering, “I should be gettin’ more,” revealing an absolute lack of underclothing. He looked around nervously, as if expecting a Girl Scout troop to crest the hill at any moment. “Hurry up.”
I poked at the shorts, turning the pockets inside out, and had him turn around. Satisfied at last, I separated one hundred dollars from the rest of the money and had him sign a receipt for it. The thirty-five extra I’d hang onto until after the buy. “All right. We’ll ride together, I’ll find a parking place within sight of Milly’s front door, and you do your thing, okay? You screw up, and I’ll bring Kunkle out of retirement just to flatten you.”
Willy Kunkle, recently retired with a damaged right arm, had been the department’s narcotics specialist. He’d also had a notoriously cranky personality, from which the likes of Dummy Fredericks had suffered repeatedly. Dummy grinned, hopping on one foot as he got back into his pants, the cash like a bouquet of flowers in his fist. “Don’t give it another thought.”
Milly lived on a short, horseshoe-shaped street called Horton Place, right off Canal. It was narrow and one-way and lined with tall, old, skinny wooden apartment buildings made spindly by the presence of railed balconies across the front of every floor. I parked inconspicuously at the mouth of the street, where I could see Milly’s third-floor apartment by merely slumping in my seat. I radioed Maxine Paroddy at Dispatch to let her know where I was, if not what I was up to, and then settled down to wait a few minutes, feeling my shirt slowly gluing to the Naugahyde cover of the seat. I wanted to see what was up in the neighborhood before letting Dummy go. He sat quietly beside me, smelling up the car.
After about five minutes of watching a perfectly normal residential block, I decided to go ahead. I nodded to Dummy and saw him shamble up the steps to the front door and disappear. This was not the stuff of Don Johnson and “Miami Vice.” There were no stakeouts, no guns, no surreptitious mutterings over portable radios, not even any backup. Drug dealers in Brattleboro probably made annually what carwash attendants did; they just didn’t have to work as hard. Occasionally, we did go the full nine yards, including putting on bulletproof vests-we even had our own SWAT, or “Special Reaction Team”-but we did that more in practice than in real life. What they did with monotonous regularity in South Florida and other drug-infested hot spots we did once in a blue moon. Encounters like the one I was attending between Milly and Dummy had all the built-in tension of watching two rummies on a park bench lean against each other for support.
All of which explains why it took me five long seconds to react when Dummy suddenly appeared at the third-floor balcony of Milly Crawford’s apartment, waving two blood-covered hands and shouting, “He’s been shot. Joe, he’s bleeding all over the place.”
I finally bolted up in my seat, grabbed the radio, told Maxine to send backup and to dispatch Rescue, Inc., for a gunshot wound, and began running for the building.
While I ran, I wondered what had gone wrong-why had Milly been shot just as I was about to round him up? With the adrenaline came a feeling that this investigation had just been torn violently from my hands and was about to be scattered in the sun-parched wind.
10
I climbed the inner staircase two steps at a time, my back to the wall, my revolver drawn, my eyes fixed as far ahead up the stairs as I could see. Dummy’s voice was echoing down, high-pitched and thin, a wail of despair. “Come on, Joe, he’s bleedin’ bad. Hurry, hurry.”
I watched for shadows moving, for doors slightly open, for the scrape of a shoe around a blind corner. But, as expected, I saw and heard nothing aside from Dummy and a growing chorus of startled or angry murmurs from within the apartments I passed. At the third floor, Dummy came down several steps and reached for me, trying to pull me along. “Hurry, Joe, there’s blood everywhere.” His red-smeared hands left skid marks on my shirt as I shook him off.
“Dummy, stay out here and be quiet. Do you understand?”
He was breathing hard, the sweat literally pouring off his nose. He nodded as I parked him in a corner of the landing.
“One thing. Did you see or hear anyone when you found him, either in the apartment or out here?”
“I don’t know.” He put both his hands in his hair, as if holding himself down. “I don’t remember.”
“All right, all right. Stay put, okay?”
I stepped over Milly’s threshold, pushing the door back until it banged against the wall. I ignored the body stretched out before me, despite the wet gurgly breathing emanating from it, and scanned the small room. Empty. I quickly went around the periphery, checking a closet and behind the couch. The bedroom door was open. I poked my head around it and ducked back fast, waiting for some response.