Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

A door opened to one of the small conference rooms lining the far wall, and a thin, pale, exhausted-looking man in a rumpled shirt leaned out and fixed me with dark-rimmed eyes. “Joe. Come on in. Ted’s already here.”

I crossed the room, aware of several faces looking up from their screens to murmur greetings. I waved back to them collectively and shook Stanley Katz’s hand.

“I’d offer you coffee, but we’ve gone through our nightly allotment. Budget crunch-sorry.” He ushered me over the threshold, closing the door behind us.

A small conference table occupied the center of the room, and sitting at its far end was a man as fat as Stanley was thin, placed like a Buddha awaiting an audience. His pudgy hands were wrapped around a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, which he raised in salute as I nodded my greetings. “Gotta’ plan ahead, Joe. These guys don’t have a pot to piss in.”

“We don’t have time to piss, Ted,” Katz shot back. “We got to do more than supply five minutes of gossip for every hour of canned music.”

But he was smiling as he said this. Having once told me he thought Ted McDonald was a fat slug “woodchuck”-the local pejorative for a dim-witted native-born-he’d also frequently conceded that Ted had integrity-and a network of informers he envied.

I sat opposite them both. “I wanted to let you know what was really going on, since for the past several hours, Ted’s been reporting we found a body off Hillcrest Terrace and that foul play is suspected.”

“It’s not?” Stan asked. “We have a source that said it is, too.”

I rubbed my forehead tiredly. “They’re jumping to conclusions. We have a sample of hair recovered from an old, abandoned bird nest and a piece of upper jaw. Most of it’s probably human-Waterbury’s checking that out-but we don’t know who they belong to, how long they’ve been lying around, or how they got there to start with. So far, there is absolutely no evidence of foul play.”

Both men stopped scribbling in the pads they’d each produced. “Jesus, Joe,” Ted said first, perhaps stung at the suggestion that he’d hyped up the story. “Isn’t it a little unlikely someone went all the way up there to die of natural causes?”

“Maybe,” I agreed, “but right now, that’s as good a scenario as any. There have been no reports of missing persons, or of anything odd going on in the neighborhood, and nothing to indicate violence.”

“You going to tear up that field?” Katz asked.

“We have no idea where the rest of the body might be, or even if there is a rest. It might’ve been taken apart by animals and carried into half a hundred burrows and dens by now. We found the jaw fragment in an old tree, ten feet off the ground. We’re going to see what we can find out first by checking with other New England departments and NCIC, and then circulating X-rays of the teeth to all surrounding dentists. The state police crime lab and the ME are working to see what they can get from the little we sent them, and once they do, we’ll put that into the system as well. It’s a much more effective approach than tearing around with a bunch of snow shovels.”

Katz looked up from his notes. “How did you find out about this in the first place?”

“An observant, helpful citizen,” I answered blandly.

“Who shall remain nameless,” he murmured with a smirk.

“Correct. Off the record?”

They both nodded.

“It was a child. She found the hair in a bird nest near her home-thought we’d be interested.”

“Enterprising,” Ted said. “Wish I could talk to her.”

“I don’t doubt it, but she’s pretty shy, and a little shook up right now-that’s why we’re keeping her under wraps, okay?”

They both nodded again. I didn’t doubt they’d honor the request.

“You said you found the jaw in a tree,” Katz picked up. “How’d you know to look there?”

“We brought in a naturalist as a consultant. She gave us pointers on where scavengers might take their… What they found.”

Katz smiled at the hesitation. “And she doesn’t have a name either.”

“She might,” I conceded. “I’ll call and ask her tomorrow if she wants to be identified.”

“What about the bones? What were they? Arms, legs…?”

“Probably human skull fragments, found in a doghouse, which is being thawed right now so we can dig under it to check for more. A generalized canvass will continue tomorrow at first light, to see if we can find anything else.”

“I love it,” Katz barely whispered, bent over his pad, his need for income-stimulating stories rising to the surface.

“Can you give us a vague idea of what you’ve got? Male, female, old, young?” Ted asked, sounding a little exasperated, but whether with me or his colleague I couldn’t tell.

Again I shook my head, instinctively hedging. “We can’t determine that in-house. We’re hoping the crime lab can tell us.”

Katz was looking skeptical again. “You don’t have anything on your books that might fit this? I thought you guys were on the computer to each other all the time, exchanging information.”

“We are, but not everybody who disappears goes missing. This might’ve been a homeless person, or a runaway from some town that’s not on the network, or someone from a family that doesn’t give a damn. It’s not a flawless system.”

“You do have a pretty good handle on what’s happening locally, though,” Ted persisted. “Is the implication that whoever this is, they’re from out of town?”

I answered slowly. “That would be an educated guess, but we’re covering all bases.”

“I love it when they get specific like that,” Katz murmured, not bothering to look up. He finished writing and sat back in his chair. “When will the lab be reporting back?”

“Maybe a couple of days.”

“So that’s it?”

I spread my hands. “For the moment. We’ll let you know when we get more.”

There was an awkward silence. McDonald was going over his notes, but Katz just sat there staring at me. The “courts ’n’ cops” reporter back in the old days when the paper was locally owned by a small New England chain, Katz had honed a reputation of not giving a damn who he antagonized on his way to a story. As a result, although his articles had been more accurate than not, his personality had made the point moot. The police department wouldn’t have agreed if he’d written that water was wet.

Times and events had mellowed him-the paper changing hands, his quitting and briefly working for the Herald , then being wooed back as editor and discovering what it was like to be responsible for more than a single story. Over the past two years, he’d been battered by boardroom struggles with absentee owners, plagued by a rising turnover rate, and had watched both morale and readership dwindle as the paper had lurched toward bankruptcy. It was then, I knew from my own private sources, that he’d mortgaged his house to become one of the Reformer’s new owners-as committed now as he’d once been cynically detached.

And yet, the expression he was giving me harked back to long ago, when the assumption was that every word I uttered was a bald-faced lie.

“What’s your problem?” I asked him finally.

“No problem. I was just wondering why the personal approach for what could’ve been put into a press release or a phone call. Makes an old bloodhound curious-like there’s more to all this.”

My mind turned to the gold tooth with the enigmatic engraving, and the traces of purple hair dye, both indicative of the complex chasm of mutual need and distrust that would forever stretch between us.

I gave him a pitiful look. “We’ve got as many questions as you do. I just thought you’d like to have what we had before deadline. It’s up to you if you want to believe we’re sitting on Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse.”