Archer Mayor - The Skeleton's knee

The end result is a quarter-mile stretch of fifty buildings that appear on the National Register of Historic Places-old brick monsters proudly touting their names in embossed granite stonework: Brooks House, Richardson Building, Union Block, and, somewhat incongruously, Amadeus Di Angelis. None of them is particularly graceful, inspiring, or even fanciful. Reflecting the era and the mentality that gave them birth, they are for the most part solid, practical, and businesslike. With the exception of the Brooks House and its Second Empire fifth-floor tower, the heavy, smudged brick and granite buildings standing shoulder-to-shoulder are a perfect reflection of the serious, dogmatic, slightly vainglorious New England industrial spirit.

I headed for Photo 101, a hole-in-the-wall photography store owned by a tall, stooped, skinny chemist named Allen Rogers, whose years of exposure to darkroom fumes and chemicals had stained his hands, affected his eyesight, and damaged his lungs. As the police department didn’t have a darkroom, much to J.P.’s distress, Allen had become our primary film processor.

The store, just opposite the Vermont National Bank, was on the first floor of what looked like a brownstone walk-up. Its front room was narrow and high, its ornamental tin ceiling smudged with ancient leaks from the floor above, and its shelves and counters cluttered with archaic photographic paraphernalia so old and dusty it looked more like a bankrupt museum than a store. The old-fashioned bell above the door tinkled feebly as I entered.

“Be right with you.” The voice came from the gloomy rear of the building, beyond a wall partition decorated with photographs of airbrushed prom-night girls with bouffant hairdos, all of whom were well into middle age by now.

“Take your time, Al. It’s Joe Gunther.”

“Hey, Joe. Come on back.”

I began picking my way carefully toward the disembodied voice. Despite appearances, Allen Rogers made a good living. As a darkroom technician, he was a near genius, capable not only of producing beautiful prints from standard negatives but also of salvaging decent results from negatives so poor that most people would have thrown them out. It was a talent he marketed well.

I reached the partition and edged around its side, entering a back room that was half stock area, lined with freestanding metal shelf units, and half closed-off darkroom, the door of which had a red light burning brightly above it. My eyes instinctively scanned the contents of the shelves as I passed them to approach the darkroom door. The other strength of Allen’s business was that he mostly served the highbrows of his profession; stacked in neat and orderly piles were papers, chemicals, and films I’d never even heard of, reserved for those whose forays into the darkroom were truly artistic. Indeed, Al had once told me that he kept the front part of his shop in such musty chaos to politely discourage weekend snapshooters.

I knocked on the door. “You want me to come in?”

“Sure; I’m just racking some prints.”

I twisted the knob and walked into a brightly lit laboratory as pristine and orderly as an operating room. The shiny steel surfaces of long, deep sinks and circulating equipment contrasted with several looming dark enlargers, the softly glowing eyes of digital timers and thermometers, and the light-absorbing black paint covering the walls and ceiling.

“Never been in here before?” Rogers glanced at me over his shoulder. He was slipping damp oversized prints onto wire mesh racks so they could dry.

“No. Looks like something out of NASA.”

“Well, don’t tell the IRS; I only tell them about the front. What’s on your mind? You usually send J.P. down here.”

“Now I know why he takes so long getting back to the office.”

Allen laughed as he placed his last print in place. “Yeah-he’s got a mind like a vacuum cleaner, always full of questions.”

I pulled the rolls of film out of my pocket and held them out to him.

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“It’s a little special. On this one roll, I photographed a piece of evidence that was stolen immediately afterward-a chart hanging on a wall. This is the only copy I’ve got of it.”

He took the roll in question and held it in his palm, as if he could already see its contents. “Cloak and dagger, huh? Great. When do you want it?”

“In an hour?”

He gave me a quick glance. While our business was both appreciated and occasionally intriguing, the police department was not one of Allen’s big-spending clients; and rush work out of his shop usually cost a fortune. “You just want prints of the chart, right? The rest of it by tomorrow?”

“That would be great.”

He smiled and steered me toward the door. “Okay. I better get cracking. I’ll charge you the standard rate and drop it off at your office on my way home. Show yourself out, okay?” He stopped suddenly.

“By the way, was there a girl with dirty blond hair out front when you walked in?”

“No. Place was empty.”

He shrugged vaguely. “Okay. She must have gone home for the day. Do me a favor and lock the door behind you, will you? Thanks.”

I said I would, shaking my head and smiling at his casualness. Brattleboro was hardly crime-free. In fact, the worsening economy, especially in Massachusetts, just a few miles to the south, had caused a surge in criminal activity. But it hadn’t gotten very sophisticated, nor was it rampant, and attitudes like Allen Rogers’s were only beginning to change.

The light was ebbing as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, dulling the subtle colors in the old masonry walls along the street and transforming the world around me to monochromatic shades of gray and brown. I checked my watch; I had forty minutes before Harriet Fritter would begin getting twitchy.

I was standing where Elliot Street dead-ends into Main, allowing a view up Elliot almost to the central firehouse before the street curves out of sight. It also let me see that the lights were still on at Zigman Realty’s second-floor office partway down the block. I crossed at the loudly buzzing WALK sign-one of the town’s odd and unique conciliatory gestures toward the visually handicapped-and made my way to the narrow door by the side of an upscale pastry shop.

Gail Zigman’s office was located right over the shop, a position imbuing it with the most seductive aroma of any nonbakery in town. Gail-the owner and sole employee-claimed she’d given up working from her home for the convenience of a downtown location. Of course, every time I visited her office, I knew otherwise; it was the smell of fresh bread that had lured her off her hill. Convenience, if there was any of it, had come purely by happenstance.

I knocked on the glass-paneled door and stuck my head in. “Got something with high walls and a moat?”

She was sitting in a huge beanbag chair by the window, framed by the fading light and the drooping leaves of an eight-foot potted plant, reading from a thick manila file. The office was an antique one-room affair with high ceilings, tall sash windows, and ancient, rattling steam heating. She looked over her glasses at me and smiled. “Feeling the need for one?”

A tall, slim, muscular woman, now in her forties, Gail was graced with a dynamic face, both angular and strong, dark, serious eyes, and a complexion molded and tanned by an uncaring exposure to the weather. Most importantly of all, she had in abundance what my mother had always counseled me to look for in my friends: character.

“Not yet. In fact, I’m feeling pretty good.” I closed the door behind me and crossed over to her, bending low to give her a kiss.

I pulled her office chair away from the desk and turned it to face her, settling myself comfortably in it, with my feet propped next to hers on the windowsill. She removed her reading glasses and lay back against the beanbag, a smile on her face. “Oh yeah? Stuck another crowbar in some bureaucrat’s bicycle wheel?”