The Skelly Man Read online

  A pair of young men on skateboards had approached the subject, one on either side. While one must have jostled the woman for distraction, the other grabbed her purse. They were weaving down the sidewalk now, coming my way. I saw the woman recover, shout something.

  The kid with the purse—a lithe surfer blond—pitched it to his partner and peeled off down an alley. The second guy, a bodybuilder, kept stumping along in my direction. Not wanting to tip him that I was aware, I stopped and half-turned. As he came abreast of me, I used his momentum and hit him with a body check. He was top-heavy—all his meat in his chest and shoulders—and he flew from his skateboard. He banged off the shuttered front of an arcade. The purse popped open and spilled. Swearing, the guy got up fast. He rounded on me, fists clenched.

  I smiled widely. “Ain’t we got fun?”

  He chewed that for a long second. In a gym, pushing metal around and posing for the women, he was probably a hot item—but a grinning middle-aged guy in a suit, talking from the 1920s, was beyond his realm, and a basic law of the jungle said: Don’t mess with strange. He snatched his skateboard and bolted.

  The woman arrived with miraculous speed. She squatted and started to gather her belongings. I sneaked two shots with the camera and stooped to help her. “You okay?” I said.

  “If I’d a caught the little scumbags I’d a kicked their asses!” She grabbed her purse like it was full of disability checks; then, swearing under her breath, she trotted back toward where her cane lay shining in the autumn sun while I used the Kodak.

  I drove back to Lowell, whistling all the way.

  * * *

  On Saturday morning I took a run along the Merrimack River. I looked at it as a life-insurance premium. I didn’t have a payroll deduction, nor anyone anymore who I figured needed to benefit from my demise—though demise was far from my mind this glorious morning. Sumac blazed beside the paved path, and the river sparkled. Three miles is my routine, but I stretched it a little today, prodded maybe by the prospect of guarding Mr. Good Night America. Mine was a one-man show, and lately the only one buying my time was a Hartford giant. It was standard stuff—snooping at the Hall of Records, mostly—but I was grateful when it came … when it came.

  The heyday of the big companies had passed. For years, Lowell had been Wang’s World, complete with three corporate towers and bright blue flags spanking in the economic wind. It had meant a fair amount of security and investigative work. But time hurries on, and when Dr. Wang died, some piece of his dream died, too. Several hotshots had been in since, charged with keeping the company afloat. Downsizing, they called it, as if it were just a matter of a fat man having his pants altered; but after each new round, I would think of the U.S. general in Vietnam who had declared that the only way to save a hamlet had been to destroy it. It was a mental Möbius strip, with a logic you could examine all day but never find the seam.

  Later, showered and suited, I drove downtown with the check and the cut-and-paste note that Justin Ross had given me. Outside my bank there was a group of people muttering about the CLOSED FOR BANK HOLIDAY sign on the door. I remembered why I called it the First Marginal. I went over to Kearney Square to the Sun building, where my friend Bob Whitaker is a news photographer. I told him I wanted several color copies of the note and asked what he would suggest. He scratched at his thinning Afro. “Well, I could use the copy stand, shoot it in Fujicolor, send it out for prints, get it back in a few days. Or”—he gestured toward a small gray machine—“we could use this. I’ll make a negative, lock it into the scanner, set the computer for the right ASA and resolution. This’ll read the negative and put it on the screen. It’ll scan in the pixels, we can adjust tones, crop it, and get a final scan that’ll look just like what you’ve got here. It’s stored electronically, so we run it through a color printer, and you’ll get what you want in an hour.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  He burned off a photocopy for me, and while he went to the darkroom to make a negative, I went across the street and up to my third-floor office. I put the uncashed check in my safe, then gathered a stack of the magazines petrifying in my waiting room. Bypassing Security Management Monthly in favor of Time, Newsweek, and a few others, I took them in to my desk. After a half hour, I had confirmed that several of the words used in the cut-and-paste note sent to Jerry Corbin had come from national advertisements. Big deal. My coup, though, was identifying that Corbin’s name, as used in the note, had come from the Boston Herald. A phone call to the librarian there revealed it had appeared on October 13 in the “Inside Track” column. This tended to confirm that the note had been sent from here and had been assembled within the past two weeks. Which narrowed the field dramatically: the Herald’s circulation was under a quarter-million.

  “What is this, anyway?” Bob Whitaker asked me ten minutes later. He handed over the original note and prints he had made.

  “Case I’m working on,” I said.

  The model of discretion, he let it go at that. I went down to the Sun’s morgue and dug the dirt on Corbin. I had been wrong about the divorces: there had been four. There was no current Mrs. Corbin. Ex number three, according to reports, was the hands-down winner in the alimony department. Also, Corbin’s audience numbers had slipped over the past couple of years. I wasn’t sure of the difference between a rating and a share, but then, who was?

  The best source of general information was Corbin’s obit, which the paper had ready to roll out when the occasion arose. I hoped it wouldn’t be on my watch. From the piece I learned that Jeremiah James Corbin had been born in Lowell in 1937, had attended city schools, done a three-year hitch in the peacetime army, and had come back to attend the local state college. There he had been a member of the debate team, the dramatic society, and a brother in Kappa Tau fraternity. He had a B.A. in business, class of 1962. The college yearbook listed his heroes as J. D. Salinger, Sid Caesar, and jazz singers, and had named him most likely to do some “real gone thing” like swipe a DeSoto and head west. In fact, he had gone to Los Angeles (the article didn’t say how he got there), had broken into television in the days of Jack Paar and Steve Allen, and had been working ever since. I phoned the university and asked for the alumni office, but they had bankers’ hours, too.

  3

  AT 9:30 ON Monday morning, having deposited Jer-Cor Productions’ $5,000 check in my NOW account, I appeared at the front desk of Lowell’s best hotel. The Riverfront Plaza was a classy operation overlooking one of the locks on the city’s old canal system. A young clerk with Valentino sideburns stepped over so smartly, I thought he might salute. His gold lapel tag identified him as Miguel.

  “My name’s Rasmussen,” I said. “Is there a Ms. Nash registered here as a guest?”

  He checked a list. “Chelsea Nash?”

  “That’s her.”

  He said she was registered but that she was out; however, she had left a packet for me. It was a large envelope designed to look like a TV screen. It held a press kit for Jerry Corbin’s New Gong Show. It was first-rate fancy all the way through, including an 8 × 10 glossy of a smiling Corbin, his hand raised to God, swearing this was going to be the hot new show on network TV. I slid the pages back inside. “Did Ms. Nash say when she’d be back?”

  “No, sir. But I hope it’s soon.” Miguel grinned. “You never seen her before, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “She’s cute. I seen her in the pool this morning, swimming laps. She supposed to be famous or something? From California, I notice. And, I mean, who else gonna wear a name like Chelsea?”

  “Nobody born within forty miles of Boston,” I said.

  Across town I found a parking spot on University Avenue. I drew in between a telephone-company van and a pale yellow Camaro splotched with primer. As I fed the meter, a university police car crawled by. I flagged it. A pair of campus cops was inside: one young, one old. With the wizardry of my ratiocinative skills, I figured if any place kept data on the old grads, it would be
the alumni office. The cops directed me.

  The campus was an oasis of calm: students strolling about in a kind of endgame of dewy innocence. Well, almost. A couple walked by in T-shirts that advised the world where it could stick what. In a quadrangle between dorms, football pep banners luffed in a breeze too mild to do much more than tease a few leaves out of the fluorescent maples.

  I found Alumni Hall and hiked to the second floor. A woman with frothy white hair and clip-on earrings beamed when I explained what I wanted. “So it’s true!” she said. “Jerry is coming to Lowell. You’re the second person today who’s asked about him.”

  Before I could say another word, a shrill noise seemed to come out of the air. I looked at the woman, and we both gazed around. Then the sound came again.

  “Now what is that?” the woman asked, but I knew. Hackles had risen on my neck.

  The sound had been a scream, and I identified its source as a heating register in the wall. Through the grid I could see a vent shaft. “Is there a basement?”

  The woman gawked at me. “What? My goodness. Downstairs. Through that door. But you can’t go down, it’s … it’s—”

  I was moving. In the hallway other doors had opened, people standing in them, peering about uncertainly. I shoved through a set of fire doors to a stairwell and started down.

  The stairway turned three times. I had heard no more screams, and the stillness filled me with both hope and dread as I reached the bottom. At the foot of the stairs there was a dim foyer. To the left was a janitor’s closet; to the right a double door with opaque glass in the top panels and the words LADIES LOCKERS. I hesitated, listening, then eased open one of the doors and called in.

  The room had a terrazzo floor and pale green tile walls that threw back my words. No other voice answered. I stepped in. Overhead ran the ductwork through which the scream had found its way upstairs. To the right were several closed toilet stalls and a shower room. Along the left wall stood a row of old wooden lockers. Partway down the row, half-crouched inside one locker, as if there hadn’t been enough room for any other stance, was a woman. She had on a wine-colored nylon sweatsuit and running shoes. Her face was turned away, pressed into a corner of the locker, as though she were hiding from something. I glanced around to see what.

  “Ma’am?” I said.

  I went nearer. It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t standing in the locker. She had a towel twisted around her throat, suspending her from a clothes hook.

  I struggled to lift her off the hook, but there was little room to maneuver. With clumsy fingers, I fumbled at the knot in the towel. There was movement behind me, and I spun. A young woman with auburn hair and round tortoiseshell glasses came out of a toilet stall, bent over, wiping her mouth with her wrist.

  I lifted out the hanging woman and laid her on the rubber floor mat. Her face was a dull gray, the color of ashes once a fire has died. I pulled off my jacket and spread it over her. I don’t know if it was called for, but I needed to do something. I probed her throat for a pulse.

  At that moment, the younger campus police officer I’d seen in the car charged in. He stopped. He looked at me, at the young woman standing bent over, the woman on the floor. He opened his mouth, then shut it. He was accustomed to panty raids, keys locked in cars. I thought he might follow the young woman’s example and head for the porcelain. In that instant my fingers found a pulse. I said to the cop, “Get an ambulance.”

  He snapped the walkie-talkie from his belt and began barking into it. Bending close to the woman on the mat, I put my cheek near her face. I felt breath coming from her nostrils. It was faint, but there. My own breath came a little easier.

  Beyond the opaque glass in the door, I could sense a crowd gathering. In a moment, fascination would overcome shock, and they would move in, gobbling air, trampling any evidence. I couldn’t worry about that now.

  The older campus officer from the car showed up. I told him what I knew. He instructed his partner to check out the rest of the locker room; then he squatted and looked at the woman. He moved slowly, lazily you might have thought; but it was a deliberateness I recognized, a habit of taking in details. I was pretty sure he’d been a city cop somewhere. Maybe deciding that all that could be done was being done, he looked at me and nodded. The young cop returned and said he’d found an outside door ajar. Together he and the older cop started rousting onlookers back out into the stairwell. I stayed with the woman. When the EMTs showed up I let them take over.

  Back out in the hallway, I noticed the grandmotherly woman from the office upstairs. As if having heard that first scream together had forged a bond, she came over. She asked me did I know what had happened. I didn’t. I said the woman inside was alive, though. While I was digging a card out of my wallet to give her, she whispered suddenly, “That’s the one.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The other person who was asking about Jerry Corbin.” She nodded toward somebody standing at the edge of the crowd. It was the young auburn-haired woman who had been in the locker room being sick when I arrived—the one, it dawned on me now, whose screams had alerted us. I went over.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She had on a pair of fashionably faded jeans and a green sweater and looked like a grad student. Behind the round tortoiseshell glasses, her green eyes were guarded, not meeting my own.

  “Didn’t you find her?” I said.

  For an instant, she looked as if she might deny it. Then she nodded.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long were you there before I came?”

  “I don’t know. Two minutes.”

  “Was anyone else in there?”

  She shook her head. She seemed eager to go. I asked her name.

  “Jane Doe,” she said abruptly. “Sally Citizen. I found the poor woman, I didn’t put her there. This doesn’t concern me.”

  “The police are going to think otherwise. They’re going to want to talk. You can prepare yourself by trying to remember everything you saw.”

  Though I meant for them to calm her, my words only made her more nervous. I sensed she wasn’t telling the truth—or at least not all of it—but before I could take my suspicion anywhere, the campus cops parted the crowd. The EMTs brought out the other woman on a wheeled stretcher. The onlookers, including the young auburn-haired woman, followed.

  Remembering my jacket, I went back into the locker room. Someone had left it on a bench. As I was pulling it on, the door opened, and in walked Sergeant Ed St. Onge. He was followed by Gus Deemys, one of his detectives in the Major Crimes Unit of the Lowell PD.

  Without a word of greeting, St. Onge motioned me to follow and led the way around the bank of lockers to the other side. It was a changing area, made up of low wooden benches and a table where Babe Didrikson Zaharias might have taken her first massage. The smell of varnish mingled with the wintergreen sweetness of liniment. He pushed through an inner set of pebbled glass doors, and we stepped into a shower room. I guess he was assuming anyone who might have been using the facility when the commotion started wasn’t now.

  He checked each stall. I watched him. At the last stall, he reached in and turned the taps. Water hissed. Leaving the taps on, he rejoined me. He didn’t look happy, but when in all the years I’d known him had he? His maroon blazer and gray slacks made him look like a middle-aged movie usher.

  “Funny to find you here,” he said in a voice that held not a trace of cheer.

  “I happened to be on campus. I heard a scream.”

  “Happened to be on campus,” he said. Steam began to rise behind him.

  I shrugged. “I believe the key to a bright future is a sound education.”

  St. Onge and I had been friends for a lot of years. We and our wives had socialized when I’d been married. Thrown together originally by the uniform and badge, we were long past the former, and only he still swore allegiance to the latter. He still had a wife, too. Though n
either of us had given it an epitaph, lately the friendship had frayed to threads of grudging mutual tolerance. He was right to be here, but I decided that mentioning I was working for Jerry Corbin was a needless complication. In terms of jurisdiction, what Corbin had retained me to do was of no concern to the cops. The weird note had been sent and received elsewhere, and it was Corbin’s personal property. “I was upstairs,” I said over the hissing shower. “Intending to do some research. I heard a scream.”

  “And you came down to help.”

  “Something wrong with it?”

  “Good Samaritan Rasmussen.”

  “Can you remember that line for the reporters?”

  “Cut the bullshit.”

  “What’s this about?” I asked.

  Steam was drifting from the shower stall. With his back to it, it appeared to be coming out of his body. “About you getting in the way—that’s what.”

  “Who do you think told the campus PD to call an ambulance?”

  “After you heard a scream and came down. Back up to that. We still haven’t established what you were doing over here in the first place.”

  St. Onge wasn’t a big man: five-ten, not heavy, but his was a toughness that made size secondary. His eyes looked like the snipped ends of steel rods, and his mustache was a flat gray line, like the horizon of your future. When it started to tip off kilter, trouble was headed your way. I’d seen him sweat confessions out of street hoods without ever raising his voice, though he wasn’t above physical persuasion when he figured it was needed and wouldn’t be reported. Mostly, however, his menace came in the form of his mind, which at times gave a sense of rolling several lengths ahead of your own—my own, at least. I didn’t want trouble with St. Onge. Lowell is a small big-city. I needed the good graces of at least one cop with clout.