I perched myself on the edge of the desk he was rummaging through searching for paper clips.
He glanced up briefly, his first words a commentary on our department’s small size. “Hey, Joe. Nice collar on Patty Redding. He must’ve shit his pants when he saw you two at the door.”
“Close enough.” I chose my next words carefully. As old as our friendship was, what I’d just done with Milo’s body could easily have been taken as a rebuke for shoddy work. I felt on thin enough ice as it was without damaging George’s pride.
“Tell me something. I’m curious about Milo Douglas’s death. Did you notice any discrepancies-anything that struck you as odd?”
He stopped poking through the drawer and looked up at me carefully. “I thought that was natural causes.”
“Probably was. I’m just picking at it. I sent the body up for an autopsy.”
Thankfully, he sat back in his chair and nodded. “Yeah. They don’t usually just drop dead like that. But the AME was pretty sure of himself, and it looked solid on paper. What’ya thinking?”
“Not much. You listed Danny Soffit and Phil Duke as witnesses. Were they sober?”
“Danny was pretty useless, as usual, but Phil seemed relatively straight at the time.”
“What were they doing under the bridge? I thought both of them went indoors during the winter.”
“They do-normally. They got thrown out by the landlord that morning. Danny wanted to cook something in the room, so he lit a fire in the middle of the floor. Not much damage-the smoke alarm went off-but they ended up on the street. They were spending the night in a kind of cardboard cocoon wedged way up where the under-structure of the bridge meets the wall, as far out of the weather as they could get. They were planning to find other digs the next day. Probably have by now.”
“Where was Milo hanging out?”
“In the storm drain just under them-the one that shoots straight up Main Street. It’s clean, dry, stays the same temperature-a few of them use it year round. At the time Milo died, Danny was cooking something on the cement ledge just under the tunnel entrance.”
“And Milo was fine up to the time he had the seizure?”
“That’s what they said. Guess I shoulda’ pushed a little harder,” he finished apologetically.
“I doubt I would’ve,” I comforted him. “I’m just curious why he died so suddenly. The cardiologist he got those pills from says his heart problem wasn’t that bad.”
“I just took the AME at his word; never occurred to me to chase down the doctor listed on the pill bottle.”
I tapped the side of his leg with my foot, once again keeping my own suspicions to myself. “Relax-it’s a buddy system. We back each other up. Besides, Hillstrom’ll probably tell me I just blew a thousand bucks for nothing. Where d’you think I can find Danny and Phil?”
He looked at me again, this time with determination. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find ’em and let you know.”
Several hours later, chained to my desk by a week’s backlog of paperwork, I found myself growing increasingly restless, wondering why George hadn’t called in yet, wanting to settle what was nagging me once and for all.
Had his death better fit his medical condition, and had his physical appearance not been so startling-to me at least-Milo’s passing wouldn’t have caused me much concern. The lives these men led-and they were mostly men-were case studies for premature death. Virtually all alcoholics, they ate rarely and poorly, were constantly exposed to disease and infection, and lived outside in all kinds of weather. In the wintertime, it was true, when the summer transients were gone, the full-time locals generally abandoned their fair-weather camps along the railroad tracks, the interstate, and up behind the Putney Road, to flock to the town’s several fleabag apartment buildings. But it wasn’t much of an improvement, and not all of them bothered. Some of the hard-core-as Milo had been-kept to themselves, and chose crannies to live in a stray dog would pass up.
It was lost in these thoughts, my pen ignored in my hand, that Sammie found me close to suppertime. “We may have a new lead on Shawna Davis. Ron’s talking to someone right now on the phone.”
Ron was just finishing as we reached him. “Thank you very much-you’ve been a big help. I hope you don’t mind if we call you later on… Right… No, I appreciate that. Thanks again.”
He hung up, still scribbling on a sheet of paper before him.
“That was a mailman-Sherman Bailey. He thought he saw Shawna at this address, maybe in late May. It belongs to Mary Wallis.”
“Bingo,” Sammie murmured. Mary Wallis was one of the town’s most outspoken advocates for the downtrodden-women, the poor, minorities, homeless animals, criminals, children, and a dozen other broad, sometimes conflicting categories.
She was well known to me personally, not only because she and Gail shared many of the same passions, but also because she’d been known to act on them to excess. When Gail was assaulted, for example, Mary Wallis took it upon herself to identify the culprit-inaccurately-and bean him on the head with her shoe.
But Wallis could also be an effective and dogged campaigner. With the zeal of a true believer, she pursued her goals with relentless energy and had been known to effect the change of an offending policy almost single-handed.
The trade-off was that both her manner and her approach carried a high personal cost. Few people liked her, including many of those she worked so hard to support. Gail herself, after making much ado about Mary’s tenacity and value as an ally, had to admit that she could only take her in short doses.
“He’s a little vague on the date,” Ron continued, “but he saw her in Wallis’s front yard when he was delivering the mail. The hairdo is a match, along with a studded black leather jacket with colored feathers on the sleeves both Messier and Bertin said she wore.”
“But he can’t get any closer on the date than last spring?” Sammie asked.
Ron shook his head. “He just remembered the weather had started to get hot.”
Suddenly recalling one of Mary Wallis’s pet causes, I leaned forward and checked a list of telephone numbers Ron had thumb-tacked to his wall. “I have an idea how Shawna and Wallis met up.”
I dialed Mother Gert’s, turned on the speakerphone, and waited until she got on the line. “Gert, who processed Shawna Davis the night she visited you?”
There was a long pause as she went to consult the file. “Why?” came the predictable reply.
I pursed my lips. “Because the girl’s dead. Surely you can break a confidence so we can find out why.”
“Is the person who processed her a suspect?”
“We’re not even sure there is a suspect. We’re trying to track her movements.”
There was a moment’s silence on the other end. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Joe.”
I took a deep breath. “Let me try it this way. Will you confirm it was Mary Wallis?”
Gert’s short reply bristled with anger, as if I’d been playing her for a fool. “Yes,” she said, and the line went dead.
I returned the phone gently to its cradle. “So they met that night.”
“Maybe she went to Gert’s because she knew Wallis would be there,” Ron said.
Sammie shook her head. “Shawna only found out about Mother Gert’s that day, at the hairdresser’s.”
“Either way, she must’ve sought out Wallis after ripping off Patty Redding,” he concluded.
“Looks that way,” I admitted.
Harriet Fritter came up behind us. “Joe? There’s a call for you-George Capullo.”
“I’ve been waiting for this,” I explained and picked up Ron’s phone again. “You find ’em, George?”
“Yup. They’re camping in a trailer box on Old Ferry Road-Ferguson’s yard. At least that’s the latest I got. I didn’t want to risk flushing them out. I don’t know how hinky they are.”