The Wolf in Winter

  He stopped eating, and in an instant he looked terribly lonely. His mouth moved soundlessly as he tried to express emotions that he had never shared aloud before: his feelings for Jude, and about himself now that Jude was gone. He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence and will always defy expression. In the end, Shaky just gave up and slurped noisily at his latte to cover his pain.

  'You were friends?'

  He nodded over the cup.

  'Did he have many friends?'

  Shaky stopped drinking and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  'No. He kept most people at a distance.'

  'But not you.'

  'No.'

  I didn't pursue it. It was none of my business.

  'When did you last see him alive?'

  'Couple of days before he was found in that basement. I was helping him to collect.'

  'Collect?'

  'Money. He was calling in the debts he was owed, and he asked me to help. Everyone knew that me and him was close, and if I said I was working on his behalf then it was no word of a lie. He put it all down on paper for me. As I'd fnd someone I'd cross the name off the list, and record how much they'd given me.'

  He reached into one of his pockets and produced a sheet of paper, which he carefully unfolded and placed before me. On it was a list of names written neatly in pencil. Beside most of them, in a considerably messier hand, fgures were scrawled: a couple of dollars, usually, and no sum more than two bucks.

  'Sometimes I'd get to a person after he did, and maybe they'd already have paid up, and maybe they wouldn't have. Jude was soft, though. He believed every hard luck story because it was his way. Me, I knew some of them was lying. As long as they was breathing, they was lying. I made sure that if they could, they paid.'

  I took the piece of paper and did a little rough addition on the numbers. The total didn't come to much: $100, give or take some change. Then I realized that, while it wasn't much to me, $100 could get a man beaten to a pulp if he fell in with the wrong company. It might even be enough to bring death upon him.

  'What did he want the money for?' I said.

  'He was looking for his daughter. Told me she used to be a junkie, but she was straightening out. Last he heard she was up in Bangor looking for work, and seems like she found some. I think—'

  He paused.

  'Go on.'

  'I think she'd come up here because she wanted to be near him, but not so near that it would be easy for him,' said Shaky. 'She wanted him to come fnd her. Jude had abandoned her momma and her way back, and he knew that the girl blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her life since then. She was angry at him. She might even have hated him, but when there's blood involved love and hate aren't so different, or they get all mixed up so's you can't tell one from the other. I guess he was considering moving up to Bangor and having done with it. But Jude didn't like Bangor. It's not like here. They tore the heart out of that city when they built the mall, and it never recovered, not the way Portland did. It's a bad place to be homeless, too – worse than here. But Jude wanted to make it up to the girl for what he'd done, and he couldn't do it from Portland.'

  'How long did it take you and Jude to get the money together?'

  'A week. Would have taken him a month if he'd been working alone. I ought to get me a job as a debt collector.'

  He used the forefnger of his right hand to pull the scrap of paper back to him.

  'So my question is—' he began, but I fnished it for him.

  'Why would a man who had just spent a hard week calling in his debts, and who is fxated on mending his relationship with his daughter, hang himself in a basement just when he's managed to get some cash together?'

  'That's right.'

  'So, what: he was going to give his daughter the money, or use it to move to Bangor?'

  'Neither,' said Shaky. 'If I understood him right, I think he was hoping to hire you to fnd her.'

  He seemed to remember that he still had his coffee. He drank half of what remained in one gulp, and turned an eye to the muffn on my plate. I pushed it towards him.

  'Go ahead,' I said. 'I'm not as hungry as I thought.'

  We spoke for an hour, sometimes about Jude, sometimes about Shaky himself. He'd served in the military, and that was how he had come by his bad arm: it was nerve damage of some kind caused by a jeep tire exploding.

  'Not even a proper wound,' as Shaky told me. 'I used to lie about it to make myself sound brave, but it just don't seem worth the effort no more.'

  At the end of our conversation, two things were clear to me: Shaky knew Jude better than almost anyone else in Portland, and he still didn't really know him at all. Jude had only shared the barest of information about his daughter with Shaky. To Shaky, it seemed as though the more troubles his friend encountered, the more reluctant he was to seek help with them, and that was how men ended up dying alone.

  I bought Shaky another maple latte before I left, and he gave me instructions for how best to reach him. As with Jude, he used the Amistad Community and the good folk at the Portland Help Center for such communications. I then drove to South Portland to meet my prospective client at her home, and she gave me details of where her husband was working, where he was living, just how much of an asshole he now was and just how much of an asshole he didn't used to be. She didn't want to involve the police for her children's sake, and she hated her lawyer. I was the least bad of the remaining options, although she did ask if I knew someone who would break her husband's legs once I had made it clear that this wasn't something I was prepared to take on, or not without a better reason.

  Since I had nothing else to do, I went to visit the errant husband at his offce in Back Cove, where he was a partner in some hole-in-the-wall fnancial advice and investment business. His name was Lane Stacey, and he didn't look pleased when he discovered that I wasn't there to give him money to invest. He did some hollering and grandstanding before it became clear to him that I wasn't about to be intimidated back on to the street. A calm demeanor always helped in these situations; calmness, and having a good forty pounds on the man on the other side of the argument.

  Like the Bentley-owning Hyram P. Taylor, Stacey wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't even as priapic as Hyram. He was lonely, he missed his wife and kids and he didn't think anybody else would be willing to have him. His wife had just fallen out of love with him, and he, to a lesser degree, with her, although he had been more willing to keep things going as they were in order to secure a roof over his head and have someone around to nurse him when he caught cold, and maybe sleep with him occasionally. Eventually I ended up having lunch with him at the Bayou Kitchen, where I explained to him the importance of not stalking his wife, and of paying to support his children. He, in turn, confessed he'd been hoping to force her to take him back by starving her – and his kids – into submission, which went some ways toward explaining why his fears that he might not fnd anyone else to put up with him had some basis in truth. By the time lunch was over I'd secured some guarantees about his future behavior, and he'd tried to sell me on a short-term bond so risky that it was little more than a personal recession waiting to happen. He took my rejection on the chin. He was, he said, 'optimistic' about the country's fnancial future, and saw only great times ahead for his business.

  'Why is that?' I asked.

  'Everybody loves the promise of a quick buck,' he said, 'and the sucker store never runs out of stock.'

  He had a point.

  After all, I'd just paid for lunch.

  12

  Acouple of calls gave me the name of the detective whose name graced the fle on Jude's case. It came as both good and bad news. The good news was that I knew the detective personally. The bad news was that I had once kind of dated her. Her name was Sharon Macy, and 'dated' might have been too strong a word for the history between us. She'd come into the Bear a couple of times when I was bartending, and we'd had dinner once at Boda on Congress, which was not far from her
apartment on Spruce Street. It had ended with a short kiss, and an agreement that it might be nice to do it again sometime soon. I wanted to, and I think she did too, but somehow life got in the way, and then Jackie Garner died.

  Sharon Macy was an interesting character, assuming you were content to accept the Chinese defnition of 'interesting' as resembling a kind of curse. Some years earlier, she was temporarily stationed on an island called Sanctuary out in Casco Bay when a group of hired guns with a grudge came calling, and a lot of shooting had resulted. Macy came through unscathed, but she blooded herself along the way, and had acquired no small degree of respect as a cop with clean kills. As a result she hadn't been destined to stay in uniform for long, and no one was surprised by her move to detective. She worked in the Portland PD's Criminal Invesigation Division, and was also heavily involved in the Southern Maine Violent Crimes Task Force, which investigated serious incidents in the region.

  Macy's cell phone was off when I called her number, and I didn't bother to leave a message yet. She wasn't at her apartment when I went by, but a neighbor said that she had gone to drop off her laundry at the eco place on Danforth. The guy at the laundromat confrmed that she'd been in, and said that he thought she might be waiting in Ruski's while he did a fast wash-and-fold for her.

  Ruski's was a Portland institution, opening early and serving food until late. It had long been a destination for those whose working hours meant that breakfast was eaten whenever they happened to want it, which was why Ruski's served it all day. On Sundays it was a magnet for regulars, including cops and frefghters from anywhere within an easy drive of Portland who wanted somewhere dark and friendly in which to kill an afternoon. It boasted darts, a pretty good jukebox, a shortage of places to sit, and it never changed. It was what it was: a neighborhood bar where the prices were better than the food, and the food was good.

  Macy was sitting by the window when I walked up, drinking and chatting with a patrol cop named Terrill Nix. I knew Nix a little because one of his brothers was a cop out in Scarborough. Nix was in his late forties, I guessed, and probably already thinking about cashing out. His hair was thinning, and his face had assumed a default expression of pained disappointment. The remains of a hangover special – hash, toast, eggs, home fries – lay on the plate beside him, but he didn't look like he was trying to beat down a hard night. His eyes were bright and clear. He could probably see all the way to retirement.

  Macy looked like Macy: small, dark, with quick eyes and an easy smile. Damn. I tried to remember why I hadn't called her again. Oh yeah. Life, whatever that was. And some dying.

  Nix spotted me before Macy did, as she had her back to the door. He nudged Macy's left leg with his right foot to alert her. It didn't look as though there was anything between them, just two cops who had happened to cross paths in Ruski's, where cops crossed paths with one another all the time. Anyway, Nix's wife would have emasculated him and left him to bleed out before decorating the hood of her car with the pieces if she even caught a whiff of another woman on him, not to mention the fact that Nix's brother had married Nix's wife's sister. The whole family would have helped to weigh down his corpse in the Scarborough marshes.

  'Charlie,' said Nix. 'Detective Macy, do you know Charlie Parker, our local celebrity PI?'

  Macy's initial surprise at seeing me gave way to a lopsided grin.

  'Yes, I do. We had dinner once.'

  'No shit?' said Nix.

  'Mr Parker never called for a second date.'

  'No shit?' said Nix, again. He clucked at me like a disappointed schoolmarm. 'Hurtful,' he opined.

  'Uncouth,' said Macy.

  'Maybe he's here to make amends.'

  'I don't see any fowers.'

  'There's always the tab.'

  'There is that,' said Macy. She hadn't taken her eyes off me since I'd come in. She wasn't firting, but she was enjoying herself.

  'So if he's not here to apologize for blowing you off, why is he here?' said Nix.

  'Yes, why are you here?' said Macy.

  'He's going to put trouble on someone's plate,' said Nix.

  'Are you going to put trouble on someone's plate?' said Macy.

  'Not if I can help it,' I said, just happy to be getting a word in at last now that Nichols & May had paused for breath. 'I had a couple of questions about the Jude case. Your name came up in connection with it.'

  Nix and Macy exchanged a look, but Nix left it up to Macy to comment if she chose. She was, after all, the detective.

  'Small world,' said Macy.

  'Really?' I said.

  'Nix was frst responder,' said Macy. 'And there is no "Jude case" – unless,' she added, 'you know different.'

  'It was a nice, clean hanging,' said Nix, and I knew what he meant. You took those ones when they came along. They were paperwork, and not much else.

  I pointed at their bottles, which were mostly suds. 'You want another?'

  Nix was drinking a Miller High Life. There was something about Ruski's that made people want to do strange stuff like drink High Life. Macy was on Rolling Rock. Both of them agreed to let me spend my money on them, and Nix wondered aloud if buying a drink constituted a second date in my world. I ignored the peanut gallery and ordered the drinks, along with a Rolling Rock for myself as well. I tried to remember the last time I'd ordered a Rolling Rock, but couldn't. I suspected a fake ID might have been involved.

  Nix, I noticed, had the sports section of the Press Herald beside him, open to the basketball page.

  'You a fan?' I asked.

  'My kid's a Yachtsman,' he said.

  The Yachtsmen were Falmouth High's basketball team. The previous season they'd taken the kind of beating from their local rivals Yarmouth that usually requires years of therapy to overcome: 20–1 in the regional fnal. They had looked dead and buried, but so far this season they'd only been beaten once, by York, and had won their frst sixteen games by an average margin of more than twenty points. Now they had the state fnal in their sights, and Coach Halligan, who had also taken Falmouth to nine state soccer titles in his twenty-six-year career, was a candidate for sainthood.

  'Better season than last,' I said.

  'They got stronger kids this year,' said Nix. 'My boy plays soccer too, and he skis. Kid is built like a racehorse, and he's got another year left. He's ready for the move to Class A.'

  He took a long tug on his beer. Once again, he was leaving it to Macy to do the heavy lifting.

  'So, what do you want to know about Jude?' said Macy.

  'How was he found?'

  '911 call from a public phone on Congress. No name given. We fgure it was one of his homeless buddies.'

  'Anything odd about it?'

  She looked to Nix, who thought about the question. 'It was an unfnished dirt basement, L-shaped, so kind of split in two by the angle of the walls. It looked like someone else had slept in there that night. There was a depression in the earth, and we found a couple of beer caps. Whoever it was had also taken a dump, and used a copy of that day's newspaper to clean himself off. But the ME's report said that Jude had been dead for at least thirty-six hours when we found him. You do the math.'

  'Somebody spent a night with the corpse.'

  'They maybe slept with their back to it, but yeah. You know, it was wicked cold, and if you don't have anywhere else to go . . .'

  'What about his possessions?'

  'Sleeping bag was gone,' said Macy, 'and it looked like his pack had been rifed for valuables.'

  'Any money found?'

  'Money? Like what kind of money?'

  'Probably more than a hundred dollars. Not much in the normal scheme of things, but a lot to a guy like that.'

  'People have died for less.'

  'Amen.'

  'No, there was no money. What, you think he might have been killed for it?'

  'Like you said, people have died for less.'

  'Sure,' said Macy, 'but it's hard to hang a man who's struggling against it, and harder still t
o make it look like a suicide. The ligature marks were consistent with the downward momentum of the body, and the ME found no excessive injury to the neck. The victim did scratch at the rope, but that's not unusual.'

  'Any idea where the rope might have come from?'

  'Nope. It wasn't new, though. Like Jude, it had been around the block a couple of times. It has been cut to make the noose.'

  'At the funeral I heard that he had no alcohol or narcotics in his body.'

  'That's right.'

  'Which is unusual.'

  'Depends on how you read it,' said Nix. 'If you're talking Dutch courage then, yes, you might have expected him to take something to ease the pain. On the other hand, if you're looking for evidence of a homicide made to look like a hanging suicide, then some drugs or alcohol might be useful if you wanted to subdue the victim frst.'