Skull Session

  He had a moment of trepidation as he knocked at the door of Janet's modern duplex, keying "No Reply" on his lapel as his abdomen clenched spasmodically. Anticipation was always the worst for bringing on the tics. He dropped his hands as Janet opened the door.

  She was wearing faded jeans and a heavy sweater, bare feet. She had her hair cut in a new style, a chin-length, straight cut that was very chic.

  "Hi," he said. It was always unsettling, seeing Janet or Mark here: the wall-to-wall carpeting that she'd once claimed she hated, the too-prominent television, the coordinated furniture. Mark wasn't in the living room.

  She shut the door behind him. "I tried to call my attorney, but of course I couldn't reach him on a Sunday. I take it you were bluffing me with that legal vernacular."

  "Looks like you'll have to wait until Monday to find out, doesn't it? Where's Mark?"

  "In his room."

  Paul felt a flood of relief just knowing he was nearby. "I brought you something from New York. A little place in Chinatown," he said, putting the box on the table. He rustled in the tissue wrappings and took out the Chinese teapot he'd bought. "I remembered Mark had broken yours last month. The man who ran the store told me that in China you always offer a gift with both hands. It signifies that it is a gift of value, testament to the esteem in which the receiver is held by the giver."

  It was a risky gambit, too virtuous, one that could easily backfire, but he cradled the delicate porcelain pot in two hands and held it out to her. For a moment he saw the spark of fury kindling in her eyes. He made himself hold her gaze, and to his surprise he saw the anger in her face give way to a brief indecisiveness and then a split second of softness.

  She took the pot from him, two hands. "Thank you," she said simply. For a moment a kind of grace held between them as she admired the teapot, stroking its flawless surface, and he admired her. Then the moment passed, and when she spoke again her voice was flat, all business. "It's very pretty, and you're right, I need a teapot. But you can't bribe me."

  "Don't I know it. I have more respect for you than to try." He unpacked the cups that went with the pot and set them on the table beside it. "And you can't threaten me. Not when it comes to my son. How about a truce? How about talking to me about what's going on?"

  "Mark," she called in the direction of the hallway, "your father's here."

  Back at the farm, they went for a walk, catching the remains of the afternoon sun. In the woods above the high field, both were thrilled to find a trail of moose prints, matched pairs of crescents, bigger around than a saucer. Nearby they found a tree that the moose had eaten from, its trunk stripped of bark in a long slash. They decided it had been a bull moose, a big one: The top of the scrape began three feet above Paul's head.

  The sun was going down as they headed back to the house. Mark seemed thoughtful. "What if we saw the moose?" he asked.

  "That would be great, wouldn't it?"

  "No—I mean, what would we do? So he wouldn't get us."

  "He wouldn't want to 'get' us. The only time you have to worry about them is in rutting season, when they get territorial."

  "What's rutting season?"

  "Well. That's when they mate. The males sometimes butt heads, deciding who gets to be with the female moose." He laughed. "It's not so different from when humans are in love—they just lock horns in different ways."

  Mark had a stick and was systematically slapping every tree they passed with it. "How come everything, people and animals, fight when they love each other? Like you and Mom. Or in stories and movies. It's almost like loving and fighting always have to go together."

  Mark was always catching him by surprise, the sudden lateral step, the innocent wisdom. You always hurt the one you love—who sang that? The Coasters? No, Clarence "Frogman" Henry. It was true: love and war, love and hate, even love and death, forever paired. Who didn't wish for just love, without its dark twin? Love had its shadow.

  "You're a pretty smart kid," Paul said. "Seriously. There's a lot of truth in what you just pointed out. But it's not always all that gloomy, I assure you."

  Mark didn't seem to hear the compliment. "Like Mom says negative things about you, usually when something else is making her feel bad. I think maybe when she's missing you."

  "What kind of negative things?"

  "Today she said you were a quitter. That you run away from things, you're good at starting things but never finishing them. She said you'd quit the job you have now, you'd give up before you were finished."

  Paul struggled with the anger that reared up. He didn't care what Janet thought about him. But she had no right to make Mark distrust his father. The kid was entitled to the security of feeling that Paul was going to be there and was competent to protect him, guide him, instruct him.

  "I have no intention of quitting that job. And what she said just isn't true, I don't quit things."

  "You quit from being married to Mom." Whack-whack: Mark hit another tree.

  There didn't seem to be an adequate response. The explanations could take a lifetime. "Well," Paul said, trying to keep his tone conversational, "that's a subject that deserves a long answer. But the most important thing, right now, is that you know—I mean know, for sure—that I'm not quitting being your father, ever. Do you know that?"

  Mark didn't answer. They came out of the woods and stood for a minute on the hill overlooking the farm. The direct sunlight was gone, but the landscape still glowed with a lavender tint, as if giving off the sunset colors it had absorbed. Paul found himself holding his breath, watching Mark covertly. Then they started down the hill. He was relieved when Mark took his hand and held it, but wasn't sure whether Mark was taking, or offering, comfort.

  45

  AFTER A MONDAY MORNING TALK with Barrett in which the basset-faced senior investigator made it clear that he wanted reports on various other cases, Mo worked on everything but High-wood. To his surprise, he found that looking at the other cases was refreshingly uncomplicated, real-world. The whole tangle of missing kids and pathological violence and big old empty houses and schizophrenic girls had created an aura of weirdness around the Highwood case. It was good to come back to Earth.

  On Tuesday, when he finally took a few hours to run down some details on Highwood, he found his outlook much improved. Dealing with good old, straightforward greed and dishonesty had reminded him of some useful truths. At bottom, he decided, he was a traditionalist who believed in the meat and potatoes of investigation: motive, opportunity, means. Give him MOM every time. Mostly people did things because they wanted the green stuff. Money. So who stood to gain from the destruction at Highwood?

  At the Mt. Kisco library, he found a copy of Hoover's Handbook of World Business and looked up Royce Hoffmann. Hoffmann was listed in association with two corporations: Pacific Development, which lent money to other companies with interests in Asia and the Pacific Rim, and Star Technologies, an outfit with offices in Europe and Malaysia. He wondered how many others Royce might be involved with.

  Money: Star Technologies made a lot of it, sales around $750 million. On the other hand, Star had several thousand employees. Pacific Development was possibly as lucrative or more so: Being a lender, its sales were not listed, but it had to be substantial to warrant a listing. And it had only twenty-three employees.

  Of course, it added up to nothing.

  Mo thought back to his meeting with Lia and Paul. Something Paul said had struck him. "I just keep feeling it's connected to the past" he'd said. "To something when I was a kid. A gut feeling." It was the way he said it, the groping, inward-looking, troubled yet certain pronouncement Mo had learned to value in interviews. And the idea was backed up, possibly, by the photos Lia had shown him, the KKK photos. Clearly some sort of major violence had happened at the lodge years ago. Mo put the photos at thirty years old. Had Vivien called the police back then, as she had on Falcone, the gardener? Was there a way to find records that old?

  An angle occurred to him, a way to f
ind out about the earlier violence. Every call to either state or local police was entered into the dispatcher's blotter—an actual ledger, handwritten moment-by-moment to record complaints or requests for assistance, and the office's response. Local State Police barracks kept blotters for five years, then either put them in storage or destroyed them. Handling of old blotters by township police departments varied town by town.

  The Lewisboro and North Salem police claimed they kept their blotters at the station level for fifteen years and then incinerated them.

  But Wild Bill had told him that in fact many old blotters from regional departments had survived.

  "There're these little old ladies in the Putnam-Westchester Historical Society who like to save everything," Bill had said. "I mean everything. I know because my wife is one ofthem. They've got feed orders from when the circuses were in the area, a hundred fifty years ago, phone books from when you only needed five numbers. They even collected the old blotters when the police were ready to get rid of them, put them in their attic. I guess they think of themselves as a sort of a time capsule, although who's going to want any of that crap I couldn't tell you."

  The museum was a handsome cube of a brick building, late eighteenth century, near Lake Lincolndale: two stories of brick surmounted by a slate mansard roof with small round windows in it. Inside, Mo found an immaculate foyer with glowing wood floors and white walls, surrounded by glass-fronted cases displaying books, monocles, inkwells, quill pens. A gray-haired woman glanced up from the desk opposite the front door.

  "Can I help you?" she asked. She looked as if she expected a stickup. "Well, I hope so," Mo said, smiling. "I'm doing some research, and everybody tells me that this is the place to find what I'm after. I can see they must be right."

  The flattery seemed to work. "Oh yes. We have a very unusual collection. Is there a particular area—?"

  "I understand you keep police blotters."

  "Yes, we do. Just since 1950, though." The request seemed to disappoint her.

  "That's perfect for me, actually. I'm really interested in the period of, say, 1960 to around 1965."

  "You don't know the particular year?"

  "No. I'd hoped I could, you know, browse through a few years' worth."

  "Because I'm afraid some of our collection isn't very well organized. Documents of that sort, you see, we keep in the attic, and they're not very accessible. I'd be happy to get you down a volume, but you'd have to tell me which one."

  "Oh, I wouldn't think of it, Mrs., uh—"

  "Otis. Dorothy Otis."

  "Pleased to meet you." Mo extended his hand and shook hers, a narrow bundle of bones. "I'm Morgan Ford. Mrs. Otis, I wouldn't think of bothering you to find the books for me. If you'll just show me where they're kept. I'll be happy to look through them myself."

  "Just a minute, please," Mrs. Otis said. She went through a door into an office, where she consulted another old woman sorting papers into a file cabinet. The other woman tilted her head to look over her half-lens glasses at him.

  "Don't you know who that is?" she whispered loudly to Mrs. Otis. "That's Norman Mailerl" Mo turned away, smiling. Only a faint resemblance, to book jacket photos of thirty years ago.

  When Mrs. Otis returned, she smiled at him conspiratorially. "Come right this way, Mr. 'Ford.' I'll take you upstairs myself."

  Mo followed her up a broad stairway and then up a narrower stairs to the attic. She opened a last door to reveal a large bare-raftered room, lit by rows of fluorescent lights and by the round windows Mo had seen from the outside. Along the walls, and in rows down the middle, were tables and shelves laden with books, stacks of papers, and cardboard boxes.

  "I'm sorry, it's just a bit chilly up here," Mrs. Otis told him. She drew her sweater around her bony frame, then led him to a series of wooden shelves that bore hundreds of identical canvas-bound volumes. "Here you are. Lewisboro, Somers, North Salem blotters. The dates are on the spines. You can use this table. Now, if you get too chilled, you must come down for a cup of coffee. I'll start a fresh pot."

  Mo decided to start looking at the Lewisboro blotters from 1960 and work forward from there. He pulled several, brought them to the table, and sat on the wooden stool provided. The blotters were meticulously dated, the hour and minute specified. He scanned rapidly, looking for names of people or places that sounded familiar. An hour later, after a couple of volumes, he got lucky: In July 1962, Mrs. Vivien Hoffmann of Highwood Lodge had called in with a complaint against her gardener, who she alleged had stolen some things and done damage to her property. The date supported what Paul and Lia had told him and corroborated what he'd heard from Falcone.

  There was no more about the Hoffmanns or Highwood in that volume. He set it aside and opened the next, scanned through the pages. Here was the secret history of the area, he realized, the sad, sordid underbelly of the county. Car accidents, thefts, burglaries, fires, trees fallen across roadways, heart attacks, drownings, biting dogs, marital arguments, truant kids, drunkenness, violent assaults, petty mischief, smelly trash fires. All the mean and unpleasant stuff, distilled to an essence of pure misfortune, despair, squalor. You had to have a certain bent to be a cop, a cast-iron stomach for this stuff. Mo wasn't sure he had it.

  By three o'clock he'd only gotten through 1963 and hadn't found anything on the Hoffmanns since his first lucky break. He was freezing to fucking death, about ready to call it a day. Clearly the good luck had passed on by again. He'd give it one more volume and then quit, try again some other time.

  But then he got lucky again. Very lucky. This was better than he'd hoped. It explained a lot. For the first time, he felt he was maybe beginning to get a handle on the case.

  Mo stood on the museum's granite steps for just a moment, breathing deep and letting his eyes adapt to the brighter light of the day. He wasn't yet sure what to do with what he'd found, but he would think of something. It would be a pleasure to tell Lia and Paul. Lia would think he was hot shit for thinking of the old blotters.

  He'd found reference to the arrest of three teenaged boys, all under driving age, who had stolen a car and driven it around for a few hours until smashing it up on Route 100. The boys were brought into the station and held until their parents could come get them and sort things out with the owner of the car. One of the boys was Royce Hoffmann. One was a boy from Purdys, a name Mo had already forgotten; the other was that lifelong resident and local hero of Golden's Bridge, Pete Pdzal.

  46

  WHILE MARK WAS AT SCHOOL on Monday, Paul accomplished five things. The first was to leave the bottle of haloperidol pills on the medicine-cabinet shelf, unopened. His first full day without any at all since that day in the woods so long ago. No big thing, no damned ceremony. Just no pills.

  The second was more prosaic. The MG had been missing on a couple of cylinders, giving him the jitters about driving it as far as Westchester again. He cleaned the points and plugs and reset the timing, and was pleased that the motor ran smoothly again.

  The third was a call to Charlie Gold, a friend who maintained a single-practitioner law office in Norwich. He was a lousy guitar player and a mediocre lawyer and a good person who had chosen his low-key way of life wisely. Charlie had a healthy distrust and dislike of lawyers.

  "I need some legal advice," Paul told him.

  "Uh-huh. Shouting obscenities in public? That sort of thing?"

  "Not exactly. This is serious, Chaz." Paul explained the situation with Mark, Janet's recent threatening talk.

  "I'm not the guy for this, Paul," Charlie said at last. "Way out of my league. Knowing Janet, she's probably seeing some high-priced friend of her old man's—Brown and Caslick or somebody. Hired killers who'd chop you and me both to pieces. You'd be advised to retain somebody hke that yourself."

  "Any suggestions?"

  "If you can't get Brown and Caslick, I'd say Perry Associates. High fees. But when it's your kid—" Paul sensed Charlie's shrug: What else you gonna do?

  Paul jott
ed the name. "Any general advice?"

  "Sure. Custody courts are conservative. Typical advice is, walk the straight and narrow. Get employed if you're not, stay employed if you are. Get a good, conservative suit to wear to court, one that says 'reliable.' Not that you've got long hair, but get a haircut anyway. Shacking up? Get married. If you've got a copy of Playboy in the house, even the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, burn it. Drive at or below the speed limit. Brush and floss after every meal. You think I'm fucking kidding? I'm not."

  Paul thanked him, promised to get together when his schedule eased up, then said good-bye. He got in a call to Jason Perry's office and was told by the secretary that Perry would return his call when he had the time. Her snooty tone made it sound like the custody business was booming, a real bull market. Sign of the times, Paul thought.

  Afterward, he agonized for a while and then accomplished his fourth deed of the day. He went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and took one milligram—half the dosage he'd been on for the last week. It was a compromise, somewhere between Charlie's straight and narrow and Damon's wild and woolly.

  The fifth accomplishment: Dr. Stropes. Paul spent half an hour writing a letter that expressed his desire to learn more about HHK/ HHD, keeping his request as innocuous as he could manage. He gave Dempsey's address and phone number and the number at Highwood as the best places to reach him.

  The letter didn't relieve the impatient compulsion to contact Stropes. He called Roosevelt Medical Research Institute, got patched through to Stropes's voice mail, and suddenly couldn't decide what to say. I'm into something strange, it feels urgent, and I hope maybe you can help me—

  He stated his general interest again, left call-back numbers, and the moment he got off the line boomed out "Big Bad John!"

  The tics betrayed his misgivings. And yet he couldn't deny that there was something morbidly intriguing about the whole idea: a power that lived in you, that broke through all conscious constraint and—what? What did it do with its freedom? It might be nice to know.