I walked toward him. I was pleased to see him take a step back.
“There you go again,” I said. “You do seem certain that Daniel Clay is dead.”
“I got nothing more to say to you.”
“Who was the detective?” I asked. “Who hired him?”
“Fuck. You,” he said, but then he reconsidered. A broad, bitter grin creased his face. “You want to know who hired him? That bitch hired him, just like she hired you. She was fucking him too. I could tell. I could smell him on her. I bet that’s how she pays you too, but don’t think you’re the first.
“And he asked all the same questions that you did, about Clay and ‘projects’ and what she said or didn’t say to me, and you’re gonna go the way he did. Because that’s what happens to people who go asking after Daniel Clay.”
He snapped his fingers.
“They disappear.” He wiped the dirt from his jeans. Some of his false courage began to dissipate as his adrenaline failed him, and for a moment he looked like a man who had glimpsed his own future, and what he saw frightened him. “They disappear . . .”
10
I touched base with Jackie Garner when I got home. He told me that all was quiet. He sounded vaguely disappointed. Rebecca Clay said the same when I called her. There had been no sign of Merrick. He seemed to be keeping his word, and his distance, the phone call to me apart.
Rebecca was working in her office, so I drove over to speak to her, acknowledging Jackie’s presence outside with a small wave when I arrived. We ordered coffee at the little market beside the realtor’s, and sat at the single table outside to drink it. Passing motorists looked at us curiously. It was too cold to be dining al fresco, but I wanted to talk to her while my conversation with her ex-husband was still fresh in my mind. It was time to clear the air.
“He said all that?” Rebecca Clay looked genuinely shocked when I told her of what had passed between Jerry and me. “But they’re all lies! I was never unfaithful to him, never. That wasn’t why we broke up.”
“I’m not saying he was telling the truth, but there was real bitterness behind his words.”
“He wanted money. He didn’t get it.”
“Is that why you think he married you? For money?”
“Well, it wasn’t for love.”
“And what about you? What was your reason?”
She shifted in her seat, her discomfort at discussing the subject manifesting itself physically. She looked even more tired and drawn than when I had first met her. I didn’t think she would be able to take the strain of what was happening for much longer without breaking in some way.
“I told you part of it,” she said. “After my father disappeared, I just felt completely alone. I was like a pariah because of the rumors about him. I met Jerry through Raymon, who installed the alarm system in my father’s house. They come back once a year to check that everything is working okay, and Jerry was the one who arrived to do the maintenance a few months after my father went away. I guess I was lonely, and one thing led to another. He was okay, at the start. I mean, he was never exactly a charmer, but he was good with Jenna, and he wasn’t a deadbeat. He was surprising too, in some ways. He read a lot, and knew about music and old movies. He taught me stuff.” She laughed humorlessly. “Looking back, I guess I replaced one father figure with another.”
“And then?”
“We got married kind of fast, and he moved into my father’s house with me. Things were fine for a couple of months. Jerry was hung up on money, though. It was always a big thing with him. He felt that he’d never been given an even break. He had all kinds of big plans, and no way to make them happen until he met me. He smelled cash, but there was none, or none that he could get his hands on. He started to harp on it a lot, and that caused arguments.
“Then I came home one night and he was bathing Jenna. She was six or seven at the time. He’d never done that before. It’s not like I had made it clear to him that he shouldn’t, or anything, but I just kind of assumed that he wouldn’t. She was naked in the bath and he was kneeling beside her, outside the tub. His feet were bare. That was what freaked me out: his bare feet. Makes no sense, huh? Anyway, I screamed at him, and Jenna started crying, and Jerry stormed out and didn’t come back until late. I tried talking to him about what had happened, but he’d run up a head of steam by that point, fueled by a lot of booze, and he slapped me. It wasn’t hard or painful, but I wasn’t going to take a slap from any man. I told him to get out, and he did. He came back a day or two later, and he apologized and I guess we made up. He was real careful around me and Jenna after that, but I couldn’t shake off that image of him with my daughter naked beside him. He had a computer that he used for work sometimes, and I knew his password. I’d seen him enter it once when he was showing Jenna something on the Internet. I went into his files and, well, there was a lot of pornography. I know men look at that kind of stuff. I suppose some women do too, but there was so much of it on Jerry’s computer, just so much.”
“Adults or children?” I asked.
“Adults,” she replied. “All adults. I tried to stay quiet about it, but I couldn’t. I told him what I’d done and what I’d seen. I asked him if he had a problem. At first he was ashamed, then he got real angry, real, real angry. He screamed and shouted. He threw stuff. He started calling me all these names, like the ones he used when he was talking to you. He told me I was ‘soiled,’ that I was lucky anyone would want to touch me. He said other things too, things about Jenna. He said that she’d end up like me, that the apple never fell far from the tree. That was it, as far as I was concerned. He left that night, and things came to an end. He had a lawyer for a time, and he was trying to get an order made against my assets, but I didn’t really have any assets. After a while, it all dried up, and I didn’t hear from him or the lawyer again. He didn’t contest the divorce. He just seemed happy to be rid of me.”
I finished my coffee. A wind blew, sending dead leaves scurrying like children fleeing the approach of rain. I knew she hadn’t told me everything, that aspects of what had occurred would remain private, but some of what she had said explained Jerry Legere’s animosity toward his ex-wife, especially if he felt that he was not entirely to blame for what had occurred. There were truth and lies bound up together in what each of them was saying, though, and Rebecca Clay had not been entirely honest with me from the start. I pressed on.
“I mentioned the Project that Merrick had spoken about to your ex-husband,” I said. “It looked like he had heard it referred to before.”
“It could have been something private that my father was engaged in—he was always doing research and reading journals, trying to keep up with changes in his profession—but it wouldn’t make sense for Jerry to have information about it. I mean, they didn’t know each other, and I don’t even remember Jerry coming to check out the security system before my father died. They never met.”
But mention of the Project led me to the final question, and the one that was troubling me the most.
“Jerry told me something else,” I said. “He claimed that you hired a private investigator once before, to look into your father’s disappearance. Jerry said that the man you hired disappeared in turn. Is that true?”
Rebecca Clay bit some dry skin from her bottom lip.
“You think I lied to you, don’t you?”
“By omission. I’m not blaming you, but I’d like to know why.”
“Elwin Stark suggested that I hire someone. It was about eighteen months after my father had vanished, and the police seemed to have decided that there wasn’t anything more that they could do. I spoke to Elwin because I was worried about Jerry’s lawyer, and I didn’t know what could be done to protect my father’s estate. There was no will, so it was going to be messy anyway, but Elwin said that a first step, if my father didn’t reappear, would be to have him declared legally dead after five years. Elwin’s view was that it would be helpful to hire someone to make further inquiries, as a j
udge might take that into account when it came to making the declaration. I didn’t have a whole lot of money, though. I was just starting out as a junior realtor. I guess that determined the kind of person I could afford to hire.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
“His name was Jim Poole. He was just starting out too. He had done some work for someone I knew—it was my friend April: you met her at the house—who suspected that her husband was cheating on her. It turned out that he wasn’t. He was gambling instead, although I don’t know if that was better or worse for her, but she seemed happy with Jim’s work. So I hired him and asked him to look into things, even see if he could discover anything new. He spoke to some of the same people that you did, but he didn’t find out anything more than we already knew. Jim might have mentioned something about a project at one point, but I probably didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. My father really did always seem to have some kind of article or essay on the back burner. He was never short of ideas for things to write about and research.
“Then, after a couple of weeks, Jim called me to tell me that he was heading out of town for a few days and that he might have some news for me when he got back. Well, I waited for Jim to call again, and he never did. About a week later, the police came to see me. Jim’s girlfriend had reported him missing, and they were talking to his friends and his clients, although he didn’t have very many of either. They found my name among the files in his apartment, but I couldn’t help them. Jim hadn’t told me where he was going. They weren’t happy about that, but what more could I do? Jim’s car was found down in Boston shortly after, parked in one of the long-term lots near Logan. They found some drugs in the car—a bag of coke, I think—enough to suggest that he might have been dealing on the side. I think they figured that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble over the drugs, maybe with a supplier, and that he’d either fled because of it or been killed. His girlfriend told the police that he wasn’t that kind of guy, and he would have found a way to get in touch with her, even if he was running from something, but he never did.”
“And what do you think?”
She shook her head. “I stopped looking for my father after that,” was all she said. “Is that enough of an answer for you?”
“And you didn’t tell me about Poole because you thought it might dissuade me from helping you?”
“Yes.”
“Was your relationship with Jim Poole purely professional?”
She stood up quickly, almost knocking over her cup. It splashed coffee between us that dripped through the holes in the table and stained the ground below.
“What kind of question is that? I bet that came from Jerry too, right?”
“It did, but now isn’t the time to get self-righteous.”
“I liked Jim,” she said, as if that answered the question. “He was having problems with his girlfriend. We talked, had a drink together once or twice. Jerry saw us in a bar—he used to call me sometimes when he’d been drinking, asking for another chance—and decided that Jim was getting in the way, but Jim was younger and stronger than him. There was some shouting, and a bottle was broken, but nobody got hurt. I guess Jerry’s still sore about it, even after all this time.”
She straightened the skirt of her business suit. “Look, I’m grateful for what you’ve done, but I can’t let this go on for much longer.” She gestured toward Jackie, as if he symbolized all that was wrong in her life. “I want my daughter home, and I want Merrick off my back. Now that you know about Jim Poole, I’m not sure that I want you to keep asking questions about my father either. I don’t need to feel guilty about any more people, and every day seems to cost me, like, at least a day’s pay. I’d appreciate it if we could get this whole thing wrapped up as soon as possible, even if it means going to a judge.”
I told her that I understood, and I’d talk to some people about her options and call her to go through them with her as soon as I could. She headed back to her office to collect her things. I chatted with Jackie Garner and told him about the call from Merrick.
“What happens when our time runs out?” asked Jackie. “We just gonna wait for him to make a move?”
I told him it wouldn’t come to that. I also told him that I didn’t think Rebecca Clay would keep paying us for much longer and that I was going to bring in some extra help.
“The kind of help that comes from New York?” asked Jackie.
“Maybe,” I said.
“If the woman don’t want to pay you, then how come you want to keep working?”
“Because Merrick isn’t going away, whether he gets what he wants from Rebecca or not. Plus I’m going to shake his tree a whole lot over the next day or two, and he’s not going to like it.”
Jackie looked amused. “Well, you need a hand, you let me know. It’s the boring stuff you have to pay me for. The interesting stuff I do for free.”
Walter was still wet with salt water from his walk with Bob Johnson when I got home, and seemed content to sleep in his basket away from the cold. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was to meet June Fitzpatrick for dinner so I went on to the Press-Herald’s web site and browsed its archive for anything I could find on Daniel Clay’s disappearance. According to the reports, allegations of abuse had been received from a number of children who had been patients of Dr. Clay. At no point was there any implication that he was involved, but questions were clearly being asked about how he could have failed to notice that children whom he was assisting, each of whom had been abused before, were being abused again. Clay had declined to comment, other than to say that he was “very distressed” by the allegations, that he would make a full statement in due course, and that his main priority was assisting the police and social services with their own investigations with a view to finding the culprits. A couple of experts had come, somewhat reluctantly, to Clay’s defence, pointing out that sometimes it could take months or years to get an abuse victim to reveal the depth of what he or she had endured. Even the police were careful not to apportion blame on Clay, but reading between the lines of the story it seemed clear that Clay was taking some of that blame on himself anyway. There was such a scandal brewing that it was hard to see how Clay could have continued to practice, no matter what the outcome of any investigation. One piece described him variously as “ashen-faced,” “hollow-eyed,” “gaunt,” and “close to tears.” There was a picture of Clay beside the piece, taken outside his house. He looked thin and stooped, like a wounded stork.
The detective quoted in one of the newspaper articles was Bobby O’Rourke. He was still a detective with the Portland P.D., although he worked out of Internal Affairs. I got him at his desk just before he left for the day, and he agreed to meet me for a beer over in Geary’s within the hour. I parked on Commercial and found him seated in a corner, flipping through some photocopies and eating a hamburger. We had met a couple of times in the past, and I’d helped him to fill in the blanks in a case involving a Portland P.D. cop named Barron who had died under what could euphemistically be termed “mysterious circumstances” a few years before. I didn’t envy O’Rourke his job. The fact that he was with IA meant that he was good at his work. Unfortunately, it was work at which some of his fellow cops didn’t want him to be good.
He wiped his hands on a napkin and we shook.
“You eating?” he asked.
“Nope. Going to dinner in an hour or two.”
“Anyplace flash?”
“Joel Harmon’s house.”
“I’m impressed. We’re going to be reading about you in the society columns.”
We spoke a little about the annual IA report that was about to be published. It was the usual stuff, mainly use-of-force allegations and complaints about the operation of police vehicles. The patterns remained pretty consistent. The complainants were typically young males, and the use-of-force incidents mostly related to breaking up fights. The cops had used only their hands to subdue the combatants, and the guys involved were mostly white and u
nder thirty, so it wasn’t like senior citizens or the Harlem Globetrotters were being rousted. Nobody had been suspended for longer than two days as a result of complaints. All told, it wasn’t a bad year for IA. Meanwhile, the Portland P.D. had a new chief. The old chief had stepped down earlier in the year, and the city council had been considering two candidates, one who was white and local, and one who was black and from the South. Had the council gone for the black candidate it would have increased by 100 percent the number of black cops in Portland, but instead it had opted for local experience. It wasn’t a bad decision, but some minority leaders were still sore. The old chief, meanwhile, was rumored to be considering a run for governor.
O’Rourke finished his burger and took a sip of his IPA. He was a slim, fit guy who didn’t look like burgers and beer usually accounted for too many of his calories.
“So, Daniel Clay,” he said.
“You remember him?”
“I remember the case, and what I didn’t recall I checked before I came over here. I only met Clay twice before he went missing, so there’s a limit to what I can tell you.”
“What did you think of him?”
“He seemed genuinely upset by what had happened. He looked to be in shock. He kept referring to them as his ‘kids.’ We started investigating, along with the state police, the sheriffs, the local cops, social services. The rest you probably know already: some points of correspondence came up in other cases over a period of time, and a number of those cases could be traced back to Clay.”
“You think it was a coincidence that Clay had worked with the kids?”
“There’s nothing to indicate that it wasn’t. Some of the children were particularly vulnerable. They’d been abused before, and most of them were in the very early stages of therapy and intervention. They hadn’t even got around to talking about the first series of abuses before the next began to happen.”
“Ever come close to an arrest?”