Obviously a promotional giveaway, colored a bright blue, the bold yellow lettering spelled out, “Carroll Construction.”
I froze in mid-motion, my brain suddenly filled with more questions than I could grasp. Here again, as with Mary Wallis-and perhaps through her to Shawna Davis-was a connection, however tenuous, to the fifteen-million-dollar convention center that so many hopes and incomes were riding upon.
12
On a sliding Scale, Brattleboro's housing is heavily weighted toward what was once called the lower middle class, a term long since eclipsed by an array of more baffling, disingenuous, but politically correct substitutes. We had our share of grand homes-and of course the odd eighteen wheeler box or two-but for the most part, we were a town that looked architecturally frozen in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when business was industry, and housing was built for a few owners, their managers, and a great many workers.
The homes of the latter had evolved over time, many of them becoming single-family dwellings, remodeled or rebuilt to look far better than the originals. Others had remained as they were-old triple-deckers, divided into as many small apartments as would fit. Depending on their condition, and where they were located, these catered to anyone from the poor to students to the burgeoning professionals.
There were finally a few housing units that reflected no historical patina, and for which no one kept any nostalgic memories-plain, shabby, decrepit buildings overlooked by most people, but all too well known to us and the town’s fire and ambulance squads, who visited them regularly to either investigate odd, threatening odors, or to cart off another piece of human wreckage to the hospital.
The one I was visiting on Elliot Street was among the worst of these, its featureless facade hiding a squirrelly tangle of gloomy staircases and narrow hallways, all servicing a vast number of small, dark, foul-smelling dens-shelters to an ever-changing population, the likes of Phil and Danny.
I was here now, in fact, on their advice, having just visited them at the hospital. After my discovery of the Carroll Construction pen among Milo’s possessions, I’d wanted to find out how and where he might have gotten it, or if nothing else, what he’d been up to the last few weeks of his life.
They hadn’t been overjoyed to see me, despite my reminding them of their current daily regimen of free food, care, and television. Most people’s misconceptions aside, bums do not lie in the gutter dreaming of such tangible comforts. The “good life” for many of them may not be what they’ve got, but anything’s an improvement over the rat race they fled. In general, Brattleboro’s “regulars” were not demented half-wits, flushed out of a state facility because of fiscal constraints. They were erstwhile inhabitants of the middle-class rush to succeed-once married and mortgaged and managed by a time clock-whose hopes and ambitions had suddenly imploded. While the Dannys of this underworld might indeed be utter victims, the Phils viewed people like me as all but trapped behind bars. An enforced return to that life-especially in a hospital setting-was no thrill to them.
Still, life on the streets encourages tolerance, and these people, if nothing else, were experts at handling adversity, even if it came in odd shapes. So after he’d given me hell for the torture he was suffering, Phil had once more become cooperative, trying to remember if anyone might’ve known what Milo had been up to recently.
The man he suggested, to my chagrin, currently lived in the building I was now visiting.
I’d never heard of John Harris, but according to Phil, he was one of the few, like Milo, who actively sought his own company. Bums don’t tend to favor large groups, but as Willy Kunkle once pointed out, most of them like to know that at least somebody will be close enough-and care enough-to make sure they haven’t drowned in their own vomit overnight.
Milo and Harris were loners. They avoided the soup kitchens, the Salvation Army-style organizations, and the summertime camps that sprouted up in the weeds behind Brattleboro’s urban facade. They lived off the land, stalking the back doors of restaurants, foraging through Dumpsters, and finding out-of-the-way nooks and crannies to sleep in. Like cats, they wandered their turfs alone, self-protective, self-absorbed, and silent.
Which was why I wasn’t heading upstairs, toward the apartments, but down into the basement, where Phil had told me to look for anywhere warm, remote, and close to a discreet exit.
That proved easier in theory than in fact. Stepping through a once padlocked, now shattered door, I found the building’s basement reminiscent of a laboratory-rat maze.
The image was reinforced by the floor being dirt, the ceilings low, and the lighting nonexistent. Even with the flashlight Phil had advised me to take, I kept planting my face into cobwebs, and feeling-the farther I went-that somehow, somebody was watching and taking notes.
The “warm” portion of Phil’s equation was the easiest to find. The entire building’s heating system, as far as I could determine, was based on the same principle applied to hot air balloons. Any radiators above me-whether functional or not-had to be playing second fiddle to the pulsating dry heat pushing up against the floorboards. For all its dank, subterranean appearance, the entire basement had the climate of a desert at high noon.
Locating a half-hidden exit was more of a challenge. Aside from the door I’d used, and which I doubted John Harris favored, since it led only to the building’s front entrance, I could find nothing that served a similar purpose. There were no windows, and the only doors I discovered merely led farther into the catacombs.
I therefore opted for the third condition-remoteness-and began weighting my search toward those areas farthest from either the furnace, the electrical panel, or the staircase, all of which I figured Harris would avoid as being potentially too frequented.
It was following this logic that I discovered an abandoned coal bin, littered with personal belongings and equipped with a large, waist high wooden storage box, comfortably lined with bedding. High on the outside wall, an abandoned coal chute showed signs of alternate use-a crudely built platform was strategically placed beneath it, with footprints marring its top, and the walls of the chute itself had been wiped clean, presumably by the repeated passings of a clothed body.
There was no way of knowing if this was in fact John Harris’s lair or, assuming I’d gotten lucky, that he’d be returning anytime soon. But it obviously belonged to someone and, humble though it was, represented all that person’s worldly goods. If I had the patience to wait, I knew I’d be joined eventually.
I removed my coat, wadded it up to make a passably comfortable backrest, and positioned myself against the wall opposite the coal chute.
A police officer’s life is largely spent sitting-in a car, at a desk, outside a courtroom, even in an interrogation room, facing a suspect, using stillness to undermine the latter’s confidence. But it is during surveillance that the immobility becomes most telling-and occasionally most taxing. Whether hidden in darkness or standing in a crowd straining to pick out one face from among many, the time spent waiting for something to happen has to be made to count. It is a contest of sorts, between the cop and the hours, with each side competing to make the other wither and vanish. The hours take their toll through boredom, discomfort, sleepiness, or a steadily mounting impatience. The cop fights back with a dwindling arsenal of curiosity, endurance, and finally, coffee, cigarettes, and a growing need to pee. It is common for the hours to win.
In the decades I’ve spent engaged in this struggle, I have tried every strategy I could think of to keep alert and have failed in various degrees, up to and including falling asleep. But over the past few years, whether through practice or some gift bestowed only on those nearing retirement, I have found a shelf on which I can park my brain, and from which I can merely observe-to the exclusion of all else. I think very little, move even less, and gather my conscious mind around the simple, single task of watching. My claim to Gail is that I have achieved the perfect meditative level she’s been striving for her entire adult life. She says I’m merely losing my mind.