At the meadow where the carnival was set up, I parked behind a cruiser and an unmarked city car and walked over to where I found Pop Sonders standing outside his motor home, hands cocked on his hips. Nicole squatted nearby, petting the greyhound. Seeing me, she hopped up. “Hello, Mr. Rasmussen.” I winked at her.
“I see the city hasn’t run you off yet,” I said to Sonders. There was no sign of the cops.
“They might as well have. I can’t open tonight, and unless I can get a whaddyacatlit—injunction—lifted, not any night soon, either.”
“Have you spoken with Fred Meecham?”
“He was gonna make some calls. For now …” He put his hands up, in a palms-open gesture. “Meanwhile, somebody shot Speedo here.”
I glanced at the dog, then at Nicole. “I took a BB out of his side,” she said.
“Is he all right?”
“I think so—aren’t you, fella?” She scrubbed the dog’s long, narrow head. “Maybe it was kids playing in the woods and it was an accident. I don’t think anyone would do it on purpose, do you?”
Pop caught my eye, and his expression made it clear he thought otherwise.
“Do you want to take him to a vet? The city animal clinic is just across the river.”
“No, thank you. The BB came out, and I can take care of him good. He hardly notices. He just wants to go back into the woods.” She patted him. “Did you speak with Troy, Mr. Rasmussen?”
“I saw him, but I didn’t get much.”
Sonders frowned. “He isn’t denying the charges?”
“Denying, confirming … he’s not saying much of anything.”
Nicole’s small face clouded with uncertainty. “He’s always pretty quiet,” she said meekly.
“Except now ain’t the time for it,” Pop grunted.
The girl seemed nervous at such talk, and her dog was eager to run. She said good-bye, and they went off. I turned to Pop. “The city won’t even let you leave?”
“Oh, we can leave, all right, if we want to go without the show. But I get the idea that if we do leave, it’ll be for good. Someone’ll say we broke our agreement and put a lien on all this stuff. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them railroad me. Or railroad Pepper, either.” He glanced in the direction of Pepper’s camper trailer, and I noticed that the door was partway open. “Guess who’s back?” Pop said.
“I saw the cars. What are they after?”
“You’re the ex-fuzz. You tell me.”
I said I’d catch up with him later and wandered over to the trailer that belonged to Troy Pepper. The door was ajar, but I knocked anyway. A rugged young officer pulled the door open wider. He had a brutal battering ram of a face and close-cropped hair a few shades darker brown than his eyes. He was one of the patrol officers who’d been on detail the night before, the male half of the pair I’d seen. He wore short sleeves, fade-washed jeans, and short boots, his weapon and handcuffs on his belt, his badge on a lanyard around his neck. He lifted his head in inquiry, and I gave him my name and asked if one of the detectives was around. “What’s it about?”
Roland Cote appeared behind him in the doorway of the camper. Neither of the cops was wearing latex gloves, which seemed to confirm
that that the forensic heavy lifting had already been done. “It’s okay, Paul,” Cote said in a slow voice. “Rasmussen here used to wear a badge. He misses it sometimes and tries to compensate by carrying a piece of paper. Or have you sprung for a shiny star out of one of those rent-a-cop catalogs?”
I let it alone. The patrolman’s jaw clenched for a moment, as if he were chewing marbles, then he stepped aside to let Cote emerge.
The detective had thickened with time, like stew The aluminum steps creaked with his weight, which I pegged at near 220, most of it on the torso of his five-ten frame. His thinning brown hair was scraped back across his head like wires on a faulty electrical coil. He was wearing a forest green blazer with brass buttons over a shirt and tie, both the color of beef gravy. He shifted a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup to his left hand. The extended right hand was perfunctory, but I took it.
“Carnival doesn’t open till nighttime,” he said.
“Not even then, I gather.”
“Oh?”
“The city shut it down.”
“I didn’t know that.” And didn’t much seem to care, judging by his tone. “So what brings you?”
“Work.”
Cote stepped back and raised his brows, which gave his face a momentary curiosity before it settled back into its bland cast. “For the lawyer representing the perp? Seems kind of a waste. This one’s going to be convict-by-the-numbers, from what I see. We got our man.”
“Fred Meecham’s old-fashioned that way. He still has this idea about innocent until proven guilty.”
“And you bill by the hour.” Cote’s grin looked like it had been snipped into his bland face with garden shears.
“Idle curiosity,” I said, “what brings you back today?”
“Just dotting i’s and crossing t’s.”
“Do you mind if I have a peek inside?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Why not? You’ve broomed it.”
“Because I said so.” He raised his hand in a slow gesture to indicate the pointlessness of further entreaties. I didn’t push. He was on firm
ground; until the police released it, it was still a crime scene, and until Meecham directed me, I had no formal clearance for access. From what little I could see through the open door, the trailer was eight by twelve, with a couple of folding chairs, a small dressing table, and a day bed, which had been stripped of sheets. The floor looked to be carpeted with Astroturf. The patrolman was jotting on a steno pad. Taking a different tack, I asked Cote, “So how do you read it?”
We’d never been friends, but we weren’t enemies, either. I hoped he wouldn’t mind talking, cop to ex-cop. He took a sip of his coffee. “Pepper and the victim had a past. She came here to see him yesterday morning. She’d been here Saturday, too. We’ve got eyewitnesses that put her with Pepper that afternoon and early evening. On Sunday, she apparently got herself prettied up and came over. There was some sort of argument, it got physical, and she got dead.”
“Why’d she show if she had a restraining order against Pepper?”
Cote showed no surprise that I knew about it. “Why does any woman? I could spend all my time on domestic relationships that go bad but where the partners can’t let go. Plenty of shrinks do. Anyhow, that went back more than a year, and when it lapsed, she didn’t renew it.”
“Had Pepper ever violated the restraint?”
He tried to read whether it was rhetorical or a genuine question. Finally he just said, “I haven’t seen anything about that.”
“Have you talked to her friends and found out if he’d made any threats to her?”
“You looking for something special?”
“It seems to me part of the job for both of us is to get some back story.”
“Back story? What is this, Hollywood? Okay, sure, there’re always things in anyone’s life that are interesting to dig up—but where are you going to begin that story? ‘Your Honor, I’d like to start on a blustery March morning, when the moon was on the wane. My client’s mother gave birth to him … ’ I mean, the way I see it, we may be interested in entirely different things. So the best policy right now is we don’t talk anymore. That okay with you?”
I let it go. Beyond, the meadow was bright with goldenrod and purple loosestrife and the little stark-white tufts of burst milkweed pods, and
farther back still, the woods were aflame with scarlet sumac and yellow and orange maples, the colors a vivid backdrop to Cote’s drab presence. I gestured in that direction. “Why there?” He turned. “You guys obviously have your evidence,” I pursued, “but wouldn’t it have made more sense to wait till he could get her out of here for good?”
“What did I just tell you?”
“This is just me spitballing. Pretend I’m not here. Why not stick her in the river down in Lawrence or Haverhill or put her in the New Hampshire woods? No body, no crime, and maybe next spring, or five years from now, some hiker comes across decomposed remains, and Pepper and the carnival have been in a hundred other cities and no one remembers.”
Cote’s interest didn’t stir. “You think too much, Rasmussen,” he said.
“No one’s ever told me that before.” I shrugged. “The spot where he allegedly carried her is a hundred yards from here. Does that make any sense?” Saying it, I realized I was working through it for the first time for myself, too.
He gave his shoulders a vague twitch. “Dumping the body somewhere else is maybe what he’d like to have done, but he didn’t get a chance, the dumb shit. He had to be on the job. So he left her in the trailer, waited till later, and hauled her straight out. We estimate that to be around seven, seven-thirty, when he took a short break from working the midway. It’s going dark then. He didn’t even take time to clean up the evidence. She was found at eight-forty. Her pocketbook was under the bunk in his camper.”
The officer came out now, glancing at Cote for instructions. “Seal it up,” Cote said.
The cop set to affixing crisscrossing strands of yellow tape to the door, pressing the ends in place with thick-fingered hands. He seemed to have a relish for the job.
I asked, “Do you figure Pepper carried the victim out of the trailer by himself?”
“Why not? She weighed all of a hundred pounds. Plus we caught a break. There were officers on detail, and their quick thinking helped us ID Pepper as a suspect right away. Officer Duross here was one of them.”
Duross. He was the one who had talked with Alice Parigian in child services in New Jersey.
Cote looked around, then underhanded his coffee cup toward a clump of weeds. It spun through the air, spraying coffee in a golden pinwheel. “Probably just as well the city is shutting this place down,” he said. “They ought to rethink the whole idea of carnivals coming to town, you ask me. If you ran criminal checks on some of these shitbuckets who work here, you’d be amazed how many got sheets. Well, I guess I’ll see you in due time.” He started off, then stopped and turned. “Hey, speaking of … how about our boy, huh?”
He read my blank expression.
“Deemys is prosecuting. I used to rib him about how he wore clothes they have to unlock cables before you can buy them—Mr. Fancy Pants. But he’s the man now.” He gave it his crinkled grin. “You, me, Gus … gonna be like old times.”
Pop Sonders was in his motor home, talking on the phone. Nicole sat at the computer. She cut a timid glance my way and went back to the keyboard. Pop sounded angry at whomever he was speaking to, his occasional words strained, his face ribbed with deep, disapproving lines. With a grunt of good-bye, he hung up and jabbed his chin my way. “How’s it look?”
“The police investigation? Like a noose tightening.” Nicole had turned now, listening. “They’ve got the coroner’s report and evidence from Pepper’s trailer. I don’t suppose you can alibi him between noon and around six last evening?”
“Already told you. That was a busy stretch. It got pretty hectic and noisy around here.”
“Are you wondering if anybody saw him then, Mr. Rasmussen?” Nicole spoke up.
I looked her way. “Did anyone?”
She thought for a moment, then her small face darkened. “I seen him for some of the time. But everyone’s got jobs to do and we do ’em. Plus, part of the time he’d have been inside his trailer.”
“How about the woman—Flora Nuñez? Did you see her?”
“I didn’t think so. But people saw him here in the morning, and I definitely saw them together on Saturday.”
“That’s the afternoon you opened?”
“Yeah … she was here,” Pop said. “Troy took her around. Won her a stuffed doggie sinking baskets or something. Women like that kind of thing.”
Yeah, I thought, they do. “Did you know he kept a handgun?”
He pulled a morose face and shook his head.
“Does Pepper use drugs?”
“What are you getting at?” His bushy eyebrows tensed together.
“Just fishing. Is that a no?”
“It better be. We got a policy about that.”
“Do you go into each other’s trailers?”
“Only if invited. A person’s home is his castle here, same as anywhere. Going in would violate one of our unwritten rules.”
“You seem to have a lot of rules, written and unwritten.”
“Show me a place that doesn’t.” He nodded with obscure meaning.
“Another one of ours is no go, no dough. Right now I’m sitting here on my duff, so if it’s all the same with you, I’ve got some things I’ve got to do to deal with this shutdown.” I wondered if this had something to do with his just-completed phone conversation, but I didn’t ask. He was already feeling a little harried, and I had things to do, too. As I got to the door, he said, “Why don’t you fall by this evening?”
“What have you got in mind?”
“I’m calling a meeting of my staff to talk about what we should do next. You could meet some of the others, maybe get a few answers to all those questions you got.”
I told him I would, and we agreed on a time. Outside, I saw that the police had gone. As I opened my car, Nicole called me, and I turned and saw her hurrying toward me.
“Are things going to be okay, Mr. Rasmussen?”
“Call me Alex,” I said. She nodded. I had the feeling she wanted me to assure her that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. I turned the question around.
She clenched her hands together at her chest and sent a furtive glance around, though we were the only ones there. “I wonder if people are
going to be angry with us … on account of what happened. I mean, not that we caused it—I don’t think that—but that it, you know … happened here.”
Her face was a transparent screen where I watched her emotions come and go. “Nicole,” I said gently, “are you thinking that someone shot your dog on purpose?”
She lowered her eyes. “Well, only that I know sometimes people get angry and … scared over things they don’t understand.”
“True. Anything else?”
“When I was walking just before I saw you, a car went by and someone yelled out the window. I won’t repeat what they said. It wasn’t nice.”
“For some people life is so boring, they feel they have to bother other people just so they know they’re alive. Don’t mind them. Just be careful, all right?”
“Okay.”
“Good,” I said, keeping my own sudden worry to myself.
“Thank you. I feel better.”
“Maybe the city will change its mind, and Pop will decide it’s a good idea for the show to get back on the road and let the legal system take care of things here.”
She forced a smile through an expression of pain. “I can tell you don’t know Pop very well, Mr.—Alex. He don’t quit easy. But I will do like you said and be careful. You be, too.”
I watched her go back to her carnival, and I turned and headed for my car to go to mine.