The person in human resources I’d spoken to at Garden State Foods was a temp, taking care of the day-to-day but after some waiting on my part, and some trial and error on hers, she was able to confirm that a Troy Pepper had once been employed there in the warehouse. The one I should really talk to, though, she said, the person who had the history of the company in her head, was the woman she was filling in for. That person was out on family leave, but the temp promised she would get a message to her, along with my number. I didn’t sit around waiting to strike oil twice in one day. I headed for my wheels.
Fred Meecham had suggested that my talking with Troy Pepper might be useful, so he had faxed a request to the warden of the Middlesex County House of Correction to grant me permission to visit. Traffic eastbound toward Billerica on Route 3 wasn’t heavy, but a crew blasting granite ledge as part of a highway-widening project slowed it. Portions of shoulder had already been hydro-seeded, and in the September sun, the grass was sprouting as green as Easter basket excelsior.
Time was when Route 3 was a swift and a scenic route across the Merrimack Valley, especially beautiful this time of year, as the red maples, birches, and alders grew flush with colors. But the attractions of the area,
north of Boston, had drawn people looking for a place to settle, so traffic was heavy, many of the cars bearing tax-free New Hampshire plates, with the “Live Free or Die” motto—which, of course, worked better as a motto than reality: The jobs were in Massachusetts, where there were taxes aplenty. As I waited for a flagman to wave us on, I replayed what several of the carnival workers had told me.
The men remarked that Pepper never went out to socialize with them, citing theories that ranged from his being on the wagon to not liking company, but I weighed another possibility. Suppose he stayed away from bars because they sometimes brought trouble—and for reasons of his own, Pepper wanted to avoid trouble. Why? The most logical reason was that he’d been in trouble before. Flora Nuñez had apparently taken out a restraining order against him some while back. Another “Why?” These were questions that I hoped to get answers to.
From the front, Bihoco, as the Billerica House of Correction was known among the state’s prison population, had a forbidding look, an odd mingling of old and new, like a fortress that had been upgraded for modern warfare. In reception I showed a copy of the request that Meecham had sent to the warden. A guard with a buzz cut, whose uniform fit him like shrink-wrap, gave it a few seconds’ interest, then had me empty my pockets into a small basket: keys, an assortment of coins, a pack of gum, and my notebook and pen. He looked at me expectantly, his fingers moving in a “gimme” gesture.
“I’m not carrying, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “So sorry.”
He seemed disappointed. If I’d been packing a hog-leg the size of Dirty Harry Callahan’s, I’d have been a made man. He gave the wand a perfunctory pass over my torso, front and back, and then down my legs, quipping, as he probably did forty times a day, that it wouldn’t ruin my love life. I pocketed my belongings. “Through there,” he said, nodding at a steel door, which he buzzed open.
The inside guard was tall and gray-haired and not nearly so jolly. He scoped my paperwork carefully, eyeing me with suspicion, but I didn’t take it personally; it wasn’t. In the legal system’s game, we were just on opposing teams. Off the clock we could drink a beer together as civilly as any two guys. Jangling keys, he unlocked the holding area and ushered me into a room the size of a three-car garage.
The walls were a washed-out brown that gave the impression that they’d be sticky to the touch. A tired-looking, heavyset woman was talking through a circular screen to a hard-eyed young man on the other side of the long plate glass window that divided the room. Otherwise, the place was empty. “Sit anywheres,” the guard told me, and went to a black wall phone. I took a seat as far from the chatting pair as I could, to give everyone some privacy. The only real color in the room was the red sweep hand of a wall clock, ticking off the seconds. Somehow it didn’t seem an adequate measure of time in a place like this. I leafed through a little pamphlet called the Inmate Handbook, which began with a message from the sheriff and, according to the table of contents, addressed everything from inmate property and leisure time activities to work assignments and discipline. It was written in a clear, direct fashion that showed no hand of attorney or tech writer. Several minutes later, a wiry man of medium height in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit and manacles was led through a door in the back of the room on the other side of the glass, and my look at Troy Pepper was one of sudden recognition. Last night I’d given him two tickets in exchange for the privilege of being publicly identified as a Cake Eater. He walked slowly to the place opposite me and sat.
A person in a cage is an interesting animal. Sometimes there’s one little moment, when you first come face-to-face, without history, and you get this flash of his truth. From the set of his shoulders, or from his eyes, or his soul, it speaks to you, and you know his guilt or his innocence, his capacity for violence, or the kind of threat he poses. Then, in another blink, the balance shifts, gates come down, walls go up, and as cleanly as you might snap a cracker in two, there’s an understanding that one of you is free and the other one isn’t. I looked for something else in Pepper beyond my flicker of recognition that I’d seen him the night before, something murderous or craven, resentful or remorseful, anything, but I didn’t see it. I honestly could not tell a thing more about the man.
He was a lean package, with straw-colored hair, worn short, and a muscular neck and forearms (a faded tattoo of a rose on the left one), physically intimidating, even in the county jumpsuit; yet his shoulders slumped, and there was something contrastingly soft about his eyes, which were a bright blue, like gas flames turned down low. He had a broad nose,
a cleft in his chin, and, of course, the ruined left hand, which lay with his other hand on the small table between us, and which I avoided glancing at. His overall manner, I realized, was resignation, as though he’d been on the lookout for something bad, and it had finally come. I told him who I was, pushing one of my cards through the small slot into the tray on his side to back up my self-introduction. He didn’t show much interest.
“I’m working for your lawyer,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“He already did.”
“I know. I’ve got some additional things to ask you.”
“Nothing else to say.”
“You haven’t heard the questions yet.”
When he didn’t respond, I said, “Okay, the first thing—”
“First, last … I got nothing for you.”
I hitched in closer. “The way it looks right now, Mr. Pepper, there’s a strong case against you. You deny it, and some of that case is circumstantial, but there’s crime scene evidence, eyewitness testimony—and you better believe the police are beating the bushes for anything else they can find. The DA will show that you knew the victim, that you argued with her. I think you know where he’s going to go from there.”
Pepper looked miserable, but he said nothing. I still wasn’t sure whether he knew I’d worked his game last night. I doubted it, and I wondered if it was because he saw so many people come through the carnival, or if possibly he’d been distracted by what he’d done to Flora Nuñez earlier in the day. Maybe I just wasn’t that memorable. I said, “The thing about the so-called wheels of justice is they can move slower than almost anything—until they don’t. Then they can turn so fast you get dizzy, and sometimes they roll right over you.” Boy, did I know that. “What we’ve got to try to do is get the wheels turning in the right direction at the right speed. You pled not guilty this morning. Now your lawyer needs to make your case to prove it. I can help. I want to. But I’m going to need your help.”
He went on saying nothing. I slid even closer. If there hadn’t been a wall between us, our knees would have touched. “I talked with some of your coworkers. They seem to be on your side. Warren Sonders is. You’ve got allies.”
He stirred slightly, his eyes coming up to meet mine—and I saw again that they weren’t eyes that went with the rest of him. There was a quality of appeal in them, a softness, a woundedness, if that was the word. I could imagine some women going for it. “Where did you first meet Flora Nuñez?”
His eyes stayed on mine for a moment, then slid away, gazing beyond me. It occurred to me that his face was the exact opposite of Nicole’s face, in that his showed almost nothing.
“Were you in love with her?”
He sat motionless.
“Did she love you?”
He blinked.
“I need something here.”
Same response. I did a bit of business with my notebook, turning pages, not looking for anything, really. I felt angry at being ignored. “I’m putting together some background on you, because you know the police are doing the same,” I said. “You have whatever story you told them. If it’s straight, okay. If not, if it’s just something you latched on to, or if you’ve remembered more, we need to sort it out and get the facts straight. We can take the upper hand if you give me proof you didn’t kill Flora Nuñez. Anything. It’ll all be confidential.”
The silence went on, like something being woven by long-legged spiders.
“She took out a restraining order against you, didn’t she?”
Nothing.
“Can you tell me why?”
More nothing.
I sat back. I slapped my notepad softly against the palm of my hand. Tap tap tap. “Okay, if the cop case adds up, if the woman is in the morgue because you put her there, then my job is easy. I won’t help some weak, uncompetitive bastard who feels the only way he can get a woman is by force.” I paused expectantly but was disappointed. “But if it’s not true, if someone else killed Flora Nuñez and is walking around out there right now … think about it. And if you’re sitting here imagining that the police are going to come to their senses and realize they’ve caged the wrong bird and you’re going to fly away home, think even more.”
I tore out several pages of my handwritten notes, fanned through the rest of the notebook, which was blank, tucked my card inside, and pushed it under the screen. He cast a quick look my way, a little more white showing around the blue eyes, but he didn’t grow talkative. “If you think of anything you want to share and that might help your case—anything at all—jot it down and get word to your lawyer.” I left.
“I told you the guy is a clam. Which doesn’t bode well for his defense.” Meecham’s voice on my cell phone didn’t seem to, either; he sounded far away. “What a defendant doesn’t say can work against him even more than what he does say.”
I realized what I was hearing was frustration. I briefed him on my earlier telephone conversations.
“So, according to this Ms. Parigian, Pepper was facing jail for going after his classmates after the window-breaking incident?”
“The father of the one kid was ready to put him away for life. The judge gave Pepper a choice, jail or a uniform.”
“Why hasn’t he told us any of this?”
“Would you, Fred?”
“If I thought it would be extenuating. Though extenuating to what? I guess if you’re charged with something you didn’t do, why offer excuses as to why you did it? Okay. And the warehouse he was employed at?”
I told him I was waiting for a callback and that I’d keep him posted. In the meantime, I had questions of my own: chief among them, a motive. Based upon my brief exchange with Troy Pepper at the carnival last night, I had to wonder: Would the barker have worked as calmly as he had, knowing a woman was lying dead in his trailer? Would he have looked me in the eye, wished me good luck the way he had? Was he that calculating and cold? He’d shown me nothing to assure me otherwise. I found myself thinking of the souvenir pennant that Alice Parigian had told me about. Would a person who’d fight for a scrap of cloth kill for his sense of honor?