RAY was knotting his tie and telling his wife why he had to go.
“I’ve got to follow a lead,” he said. “Shouldn’t be more than a few days.”
She came out of the bathroom in a terry-cloth robe, her hair in a towel turban.
“I’ll call,” Ray said.
“Don’t strain yourself. Just tell the baby-sitter what continent you’re on.”
“You going out?”
“I might,” she said, affecting the airy hauteur of a bored Yankee heiress. She knew Ray hated that act.
He didn’t ask where she was going. There were forbidden topics between them now. Ray’s demotion and disgrace was one of them. Win Babcock was another. Was that two topics, or one?
“I think you’re going because you want to go,” she said. She rubbed her hair with the towel and sat down at her vanity.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Keep your voice down,” she said.
Ray put his suitcoat on and paused at the bedroom door. “Be back in a few days,” he said.
FIRST he called on the Portsmouth police, which had sketchy reports on file about the death of the Navy employee, Harlan Poole, in July 1963. Rockingham County deputies questioned a handful of people who knew Poole, then the state AG ruled the death accidental, and Harlan Poole went to the archives.
Next, Ray found the landlord at the walk-up flat where the Zimquists had lived three tortured months after Poole died and the Navy shut down the Special Wing of the Portsmouth hospital. The landlord remembered everything: Seth Zimquist’s erratic behavior, his demand for extra locks on all the doors, visits from the cops when Seth started shouting obscenities out his windows and, finally, Seth’s suicide, which ended the sad episode. The landlord remembered Laura Zimquist most of all.
“Lovely thing,” the landlord said. “Fell apart when her husband died. Heard she went to work for a priest down your way. Hope her luck changed.”
Ray finished up at the public library and pulled Seth Zimquist’s obit: Navy doctor, age thirty-two, suicide with a note, October 11, 1963.
In his travels, Ray avoided the most obvious place to ask questions: the big base in the heart of the port. All the streets led to the Navy’s front gate. Ray found himself at the gate a dozen times as he groped his way around Portsmouth, but he never stopped to ask anything of the Marines on guard duty, not even directions. Portsmouth was a major sub base and a brig. An oiler lay at anchor where the Piscataqua River met the sea. Ray saw sailors in bars all over town, drinking away the afternoon.
Ray took supper in a diner on the highway—scrod, squash, fries, black coffee—reading a book about electroshock. What little Ray knew about psychiatry he had learned beating insanity defenses at trial, and that wasn’t much. He knew that psychiatrists put you on a couch and asked you how you felt. He knew that some of them would take an expert’s fee to say you couldn’t tell right from wrong. The world of electroshock was new to Ray. He learned that standard electroconvulsive therapy was 110 volts fed from a generator to the human brain through electrodes, once daily, never more, a fraction of a second, under local anesthesia and phenobarbital to cut down on convulsion injury. Electroshock relieved depression and schizophrenia, but nobody knew why. The prevailing view seemed to be that the voltage wiped the brain clean, erasing mental illness.
Ray turned a page to a black-and-white photograph of a man getting the treatment: electrodes on his temples, a black rubber mouthpiece in his jaws, eyes bugged.
Ray tried to picture kindly Father Sedgewick as chaplain to the house of horrors. Sedgewick had training in psychotherapy, so Zimquist and Childs let him in on everything. What does a priest say to somebody getting volts to the head courtesy of the government?
Ray looked up from his book as a waitress cleared his plates.
“Closing time,” she said.
Ray paid and went back to his hotel, where he expected trouble sleeping.
AFTER breakfast, Ray headed inland to the village of Stratham and met a gaunt man named T. K. Marcotte, who wore the khaki-and-green uniform of a Rockingham County deputy sheriff. Ray found Marcotte in the barbershop, which was also the post office, draft board, and town hall.
Ray shook the deputy’s hand and explained his business. Marcotte walked him to a squad car parked out back.
“I was a new hire then,” Marcotte recalled on the road out of Stratham. They passed rambling homesteads and dairy farms with stone walls. Ray rolled down his window and smelled wet hay and cows.
“Got a radio call from a construction crew digging foundations for new houses in the orchard,” Marcotte was saying. “I’d never seen a corpse before.”
Marcotte had a harrowed face from a Walker Evans picture and spoke with a Down East drawl—“orchard” came out awe-chid, “corpse” came out cops.
“Harlan Poole was a local boy, a roustabout, a drinker,” Marcotte said. “Portsmouth PD knew him well. Poole spent a lot of time in the trailer parks with the Navy wives when the husbands were out to sea. Even his brothers hated him. We figured there was at least a dozen folks in the county with a motive to kill Harlan Poole, and this ain’t a big county.”
Marcotte pulled into a development of identical A-frames, cut-rate Swiss-style chalets for the Boston ski-season traffic, almost empty on the weekday. He parked near a cement-lined culvert full of fine sand and brown pine boughs. Ray followed him to the edge of the ditch, and both men looked in.
“Poole’s body was just about here,” Marcotte said.
“You guys investigate?” Ray asked, trying not to sound big-city.
Marcotte nodded, inscrutably matter-of-fact. “State police came down from Concord. Had me guarding the ditch for days. They found boot prints in the mud leading back to some tire tracks up there.” Marcotte pointed back to the main road. “This was still dirtpack back then, hadn’t paved it yet. This whole side of the county’s new. Nothing but these little bungalows, all the way to Exeter.”
Marcotte seemed to dwell on the little bungalows for a moment—the newness, the changes, all the way to Exeter.
“State police matched the tire tread to a car they found abandoned,” he said. “The car had come from Portsmouth—stolen from the parking lot of the hospital the day before we found Poole out here. Seemed pretty promising for a while, but they never made an arrest.”
Ray wanted to ask Marcotte if he didn’t find the whole case odd: an Easter-egg hunt sending the investigation from Poole’s roadside disposal straight back to a Navy mental hospital, then nothing. But Ray looked at the deputy’s hollow face, and climbed down into the culvert instead.
“Federals showed up.” Marcotte volunteered this from the bank. Ray turned and squinted up at him.
“You mean like the FBI?” Ray asked.
“Drove Navy sedans,” Marcotte said. “Plymouths,” he added, as if it mattered.
Ray scrambled out of the culvert, wing tips scraping cement, Marcotte pulling him up by the arm the last few feet.
“What kind of shape was the corpse in?” Ray asked, patting dust off his overcoat.
“Beat up bad—nearly busted in two. Had two black marks here,” he said, touching his temples with each index finger. “Like bad burns.”
Ray remembered the picture of the man getting shocked, electrodes on his temples.
They walked back to the sheriff’s car.
“State police took the case from us,” Marcotte said. “They closed it hit-and-run.
“Mind you,” he said, walking faster, “it’s nine miles to Portsmouth from here, and nobody saw a man along the road that night, though folks out here notice strangers. And, mind you, it’s sixty-eight feet from the road to the ditch—I know ’cause I measured it myself. If a car ran him down and caused all them injuries, can’t see him rolling that far, or crawling. Plus the burns on the temples…”
Marcotte was at the patrol-car door. He turned suddenly and looked past Ray to the ditch. “Still,” he said, unconvincingly, “I suppose the state folks know better.”
Ray understood that this was as close as T. K. Marcotte came to calling his own government a liar.
“Who closed the case?” Ray asked, hand on the car door. “Who do I see?”
“Feller named Woodrow Wilson Whitaker in Concord. He’s a prosecutor up there.”
“Something stinks,” Ray said.
Marcotte climbed into the car. “That’s manure,” he said.