I wish the dead could speak.
Another early morning flight into obsession. Waking up in my own bed the next day did not have a soothing effect; far from it. In my own place, I lay there thinking about the case, and about another horrific crime.
It had just happened. Once again -- this time somewhere in Kansas -- a mother and daughter were the victims. Traveling from New England to the West Coast, they called relatives after dinner one night, saying: we’re close to the halfway point and making good time; we’ll call again in two days.
A week later and a hundred miles away, their car was located on a remote access road. The daughter’s body was found in a field; she’d been raped and strangled. Her mother’s body was sprawled on the car’s back seat. The killer put a bullet through her head.
This sadly familiar scenario -- a carjacking or an abduction possibly committed by more than one assailant -- left me imagining the physical and psychological trauma these women suffered before they died: the first realization of being in terrible trouble; the terrifying recognition of the brutality of their abductor or abductors; the unmitigated horror of not being able to protect themselves or each other, and the final admissions that escape was impossible and death inevitable.
Obviously, imagination proved inadequate to comprehend their experience. That’s why -- groping my way from the bedroom to the bathroom just after dawn -- I thought: I wish the dead could speak. What if we the living could have real knowledge of their suffering? What if our speculation could be supplanted by the voices of ultimate, horrifying experience?
Realizing my mind was free-falling into a dark morass, I redirected my consciousness to more productive ends. I mulled over my theory of the Madigan case, my talk with the sheriff, and what I would tell Carpenter about the Verasco business. I thought about being run off the road in Hollywood.
Who might have done that? The Hispanic asshole in the bar? Seemed unlikely. Was it the guy I’d talked to through the trailer door, who claimed to be Verasco’s cousin? Had he followed me after I left the park, deciding that scaring the shit out of me would get me off his cousin’s back? Or was it Verasco himself? Had his cousin warned him that someone, apparently not a cop, was looking for him, and he’d better steer the guy off his trail before he found out something he shouldn’t know? And then there was the possibility that the guy in the trailer was Verasco, not his cousin.
But that still begged the question of how Verasco could find me. Well, he might have known the bars in the area, figured the Oar was one place to look. The bartender had acted strangely at one point. Maybe he wasn’t a stand up guy after all, and maybe Verasco himself had paid him a few bucks to keep me there long enough to get liquored up, and followed me when I left..
And maybe this was all bullshit. Perhaps some punk kid from Hollywood or Lauderdale, high on booze or his drug of choice, got his late-night kicks harassing motorists on relatively untraveled roads. He could have been tooling down 95, decided he didn’t want to run into a state trooper at that hour, took the first exit he saw, then found a bonus: me, proceeding drunkenly but cautiously down what passed for a country road in charming South Florida.
Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe I needed to stop obsessing, think about something other than the Madigan case and similar tragic examples of evil rampant in the world (if evil was a concept one could live with); maybe I needed to get up and take a shower and have a cup of coffee and start the damn day with as clear a head as possible.
That’s what I needed, and that’s what I did.
Later that day, I had two phone conversations. The first: “Detective Carpenter.”
“Detective, this is Jake Arnett at the Citizen.”
“Yeah sure, how you doin’?”
“Pretty well. Yourself?”
“I’m okay. But I gotta tell ya, if you’re after some new angle on the Madigan case, I don’t have it.” I pictured him leaning back in his chair, feet propped on the edge of his desk, the approved cop posture for brushing off pesky reporters. “We’re in a holding pattern.”
“Well, actually, that’s what I’m calling about. It’s possible I have something that could be useful. Does the name ‘Verasco’ ring any kind of bell with you?”
“Not really, sounds like some mob guy who wrote a book they turned into a movie. Those things piss me off. ”
“Not this guy, this is something else entirely.” I explained to Carpenter how I’d picked up the name.
“That doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on,” he said. But his voice had perked up a bit. “I mean in terms of picking him up. All you’ve got is a motorcycle dealer fingering him. But I guess it’s worth a look. I’ll nose around, see what I can find out.”
“Good, that’s all I was hoping for, Detective. That you’ll give it a shot.”
“Right. I’ll let you know one way or another.”
“Thanks.”
The second call:
“Hey, Roberta, it’s Jake.”
“Oh, hi, how are you? Look, I’m a little swamped here. Trying to chase a couple of things.” She wanted to get rid of me.
“You don’t have two minutes for your old colleague?”
“Just two, maybe three.”
“Okay, I wanted to fill you in quickly on the Madigan case.”
“What’s going on with that?” And for the second time in as many phone calls, I could hear the almost imperceptible voice alteration that signaled the speaker’s awakened interest. But why would that be the case with Roberta? I was just calling her because I wanted to share my Verasco tip with someone familiar with the case. “I sort of lost it in the shuffle.”
“Nothing officially. But you know that guy Granger we talked about, the one we both tried to interview?”
“Sure, the lifeguard.”
“Right. I think I may be able to pin him down as the second person in Diane’s apartment.”
“What? What second person?”
“I’ve always assumed there was a second person. Haven’t you?”
“No,” she said immediately -- and with more force than necessary, I thought. Maybe she was pissed off that the two-perp scenario hadn’t occurred to her, Ms. Cop Reporter, and maybe she was still harboring a small grudge because the sheriff had turned the story over to me. . “I mean, it’s possible. But even if . . . Jake, look, do me a favor and don’t go down that road right now, okay?”
She sounded really edgy. But by now I’d been working on the Madigan story so long that one would think it wouldn’t matter to her anymore. “So when should I go down it? What’s the problem? What’s going on?”
“I mean, maybe you shouldn’t go down it at all. It’s just that…it’s just…”
“Spit it out, Roberta. What the hell’s going on?”
“I’m sorry, I’ve got another call, Jake. It’s probably one of the things I’m working on. Gotta go. I’ll talk to you soon. I promise.”
“But . . . “
“Really, we’ll talk soon. Bye.”
Bye Roberta. And what the fuck are you up to?
You win a few, you lose a few, some days you eat the bear, etc. etc. Homilies came to mind in replaying these conversations.
I appreciated Carpenter not blowing me off on Verasco -- the odds were about even, I’d say, on any given occasion for a cop to take a reporter’s tip seriously. Some cops I’d dealt with resented press involvement in a case. Sometimes I understood their annoyance -- too many so-called civilians stumbling around could botch big cases. But other times I felt as though my professionalism was under-valued -- the damn cops gave me no credit at all. So it was gratifying that the sergeant not only didn’t tell me to buzz off, he said he’d check out Verasco. I had no reason to think he wouldn’t.
But what about Roberta? I had no idea where she was coming from. Which alarmed me. A good reporter with good sources, she had decent judgment and was a hard charger. You could fault her for being too much into office politics, but not for an inability to go for the jugular. You could figure that if she tried to steer you off something, she had good reason.
When she got out from under her breaking cop stories, I’d talk to her at greater length. Maybe even show up at her fashionable Palm Beach address unannounced. That would get her attention. I hadn’t been to her place since our one and only dinner.
I first made a possible connection between Granger and Verasco -- or someone like him -- on my initial sojourn to the beach looking for the uncooperative lifeguard. On that very hot day, after my visit with Granger on his beachfront perch. I was sipping water from a fountain next to the men’s room -- located behind the lifeguard stand -- when I heard a roar in the distance. The sound was one irritating element mingling with another -- the heat -- and I took an extra long drink, fortifying myself for the short walk to my air-conditioned car. (Florida summers make you think like that.)
The car was parked in a small lot surrounded by a scruffy mix of sand and trees. Beer cans and other trash were discarded in the sand The roar grew louder as I approached my car and, sure enough, within moments the sources of the noise came around a bend in the road leading to the beach: three motorcycles. They slowed down and coasted by, just a few feet from me, toward the open end of the lot.
The bikers parked and cut their throbbing engines, and the heat became a trifle more tolerable without the damn noise. I stood by my car, pretending to look at a map I’d taken from the back seat, and watched them dismount and take off their helmets. One of them -- they looked pretty much alike to me initially, big, brawny, shaggy-haired guys, all dressed in black leather -- pointed toward the men’s room or the water fountain or the lifeguard station, or all three. Then they headed up a three or four-foot bluff and out of my sight. I thought of following them to see if they actually made contact with Granger. Too conspicuous. I got in my car, turned the air on full blast, and left.
If that had been my only sighting of cyclists near Granger’s place of outdoor employment, I might not have thought much of it. But a week later, back at the same beach on an inane weather story -- it had been so hot for so long that the sheriff sent a couple of us out to ask people how they felt about it -- I saw two bikers. This time they stood around after parking their bikes, apparently waiting for someone. That someone turned out to be Granger.
I watched from inside the car so the lifeguard wouldn’t spot me. He approached the cyclists -- I couldn’t tell if they were the same ones from the week before. One of them probably wasn’t; he had a ponytail. They talked for a few minutes and some kind of exchange took place. I saw Granger reach for his wallet. I was several yards away and my car window needed washing and they kept shifting around; it was hard to tell the exact nature of the transaction.
But I was more than willing to hazard a guess. To concoct a theory. They pay me what little they pay me to add up two and two and see what I come up with. It doesn’t necessarily have to be four to be at least a half-truth.