I tried one last time. “Is there a mention of anyone local, a local address?” Again, Gert shook her head. “I’m sorry, Joe. As far as we know, she came from nowhere and then disappeared.”
I was sitting in Tony Brandt’s office, along with the State’s Attorney and Gail. Gail’s presence surprised me-traditionally, six-month clerks were kept shoveling paperwork. Jack Derby including her was either a sign he liked her, or-more likely to my cynical mind-that as a neophyte SA, he was using her connection to the police department to help smooth his initial contacts with us. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t complaining. The novelty of having her in my professional life was very appealing.
The conversation, however, was not cheerful.
“So what you got is slightly less than zero,” Derby was saying. “A few bones, an identification, and no idea if she was murdered or not. I liked the earlier bum-who-died-of-old-age scenario better.”
“We’ve got that now, too,” Gail murmured, making me wonder what she was alluding to.
Derby ignored her. “What happens now?” he asked Brandt and me. “We better come up with something to tell the newspeople. They’re developing an appetite.”
Tony Brandt leaned back in his chair. “Why not give them everything we’ve done so far? They can write about it till they’re blue in the face, and we might get something from the publicity. We can tell them about Ron going down to Massachusetts to find Shawna’s PKU blood sample, and the lab making a definite match. Might put a slightly better light on it.”
“Should we include the etching on the tooth this time?” Gail asked.
There was a noticeable hesitation in the room. “I don’t think so,” Tony said. “I still want to keep that in reserve, along with the phenobarbital. We’re working this as a homicide, even if we can’t prove it yet.”
Derby nodded in agreement. “You want to use one of those ‘Have you seen this woman?’ approaches, with a phone number in the caption?”
I glanced at Gail. “If rumors are true that the selectmen are already leaning on us, wouldn’t that just turn up the heat? The Reformer’s been handling it like an interesting, low-profile mystery.”
“The rumors are true,” Tony answered. “Which is partly the problem. Between the politicians and the bean counters bitching about overtime, we need some kind of a jump start.” He looked at me closely. “Unless you’ve got some other suggestion.”
Reluctantly, I could only shake my head.
He rose to his feet. “All right, then. Set it up, Joe.”
The tone of Tony’s voice made it clear the debate was over. I saw his point, and knew that what Derby had suggested had worked in the past. Shawna’s fate had become personal to me by now, precisely because no one had paid it much attention when it counted. I felt badly that my best intentions alone hadn’t been enough to reveal what had happened to her.
But such quandaries were a luxury. It was Shawna’s death I had to deal with, not the wreckage of her life, and to solve it I would need all the help I could get.
7
Ron Klesczewski found me in my office after hours, catching up on paperwork. “Still at it?” he asked, pausing on the threshold.
I glanced at my watch. It was past nine. “You, too?”
“Yeah. I decided to check out those five long-distance phone numbers on Wilma’s phone bill.”
“Get lucky?”
A slow smile spread across his face. His dropping by was no casual happenstance. “Could be. One of two calls to Greenfield was to a kid named Hugh Savage. He was a grade ahead of Shawna in school, but dropped out his senior year-got another girl pregnant and had to get a job. Apparently he and Shawna were friends-‘fellow outsiders,’ according to him. He says she called him out of the blue last year and told him she was going nuts and had to get out of North Adams. She and her mother were at each other’s throats.”
“What was the date of the call?”
His smile broadened. “April twenty-first.”
The month her mother told us she’d left home. “Have a seat.”
Ron settled in and stretched his legs out. “Apparently, she angled to move in with him and his family at first, but he told her that wouldn’t work. He suggested Bratt. After he moved to Greenfield, he and his wife used to come up here for the live music at the Mole’s Eye.”
“Did he have any friends up here?”
“One-Pascal Redding, nicknamed Patty. He’s supposed to be a musician. Savage told Shawna to look him up.”
“You talk to him yet?” I asked.
He frowned. “No. I only talked to Savage a half hour ago. Since then, I’ve checked every source I can think of, but I can’t find Pascal Redding anywhere. The town clerk might have something, but that’s a dead end till morning… Too bad about that newspaper story coming out tomorrow-I’d like to creep up on this guy.”
I reached for the phone, reminded of my own discomfort at having Shawna’s picture hung below the next day’s headlines. “Don’t rub it in.”
Gail answered on the first ring. She, too, was still at work.
“How about a five-minute break? Ron and I are playing detective.”
She laughed tiredly. “What d’you have in mind?”
“We’re trying to locate a musician named Pascal Redding, nicknamed Patty. He doesn’t show up in any directories, but he’s supposed to be living in town-at least he was. You think any of your artsy crowd might know about him?”
“What kind of music does he play?”
I pushed the speakerphone button and repeated Gail’s question for Ron.
“Jazz guitar,” he answered.
“That ought to narrow it down. You think he’s a guest at someone’s house?”
I hadn’t thought of that, but it sounded likely. “Could be.”
“Try Linda Feinstein. She and her husband put people up sometimes, and they’re up to their necks in that world. When do you think you’ll be home? I need my daily squeeze.”
I killed the speaker as Ron retreated from my office, laughing. “I don’t know. I was shooting for ten, but if we get a fix on this Patty character, I might try to check it out tonight.”
I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Okay. I’ll keep a light on.”
“Thanks. Don’t work too hard.” I was leaning forward in my chair, about to hang up, when I suddenly stopped. “Hold it. You mentioned something this afternoon in Tony’s office I wanted to ask you about-something about a bum who died of old age?”
“They found him last night under the Whetstone bridge. You didn’t hear about that?”
“Nobody told me,” I answered, slightly annoyed.
“One of your sergeants checked it out. Carol Green signed off on it once the Assistant ME declared it a natural death.”
Carol Green was one of Derby’s Deputy SAs-the same position Gail was hoping to land after passing the bar. What Gail had just described was mundane enough-most natural deaths were similarly and expeditiously handled. But I was embarrassed by my own ignorance. I hadn’t been reading the dailies filed by each patrol shift lately.
“What did he die of?”
Despite her earlier relief at being interrupted at work, I could sense a faint impatience in Gail’s response now, exacerbating my own discomfort. “I don’t know, Joe, and I didn’t get his name. I guess it was a heart attack, or cirrhosis of the liver.”
I got the message. “Okay. I’ll let you go. Thanks for Linda’s name.”
I called Ron back in and dialed Linda Feinstein’s number, reactivating the speakerphone.
The hesitation in Linda’s voice when I asked about Patty Redding told me more than her carefully worded response. “We haven’t seen Patty for a while. I think he needed some time to himself.”