Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“Did you know his name?”

“No, I knew him just-” The left arm saluted again. “They didn’t live here that long, before… He looked nice, though. He kept his van real clean and tended to the yard when he was here. It wasn’t so overgrown then.”

A clean van and a neat yard. Tess guessed those clues to a man’s character were as reliable as anything else glimpsed from a distance.

“What happened to him?”

“No one knows.” The man leaned forward, lowered his voice. “People said he… kind of lost it. Not right away, funny enough. He was okay with the first, but not with the second.”

He looked at her expectantly, as if he wanted her to fill in the next part.

“Second what? Was someone else killed?”

“Because… because”-he looked offended-“don’t you know? I mean, can’t you imagine?”

“I know his girlfriend was shot and they never solved the case.”

The neighbor scratched his chin. “I’d forgotten that the newspaper didn’t tell it. But everyone knows.”

Tess shook her head. “I don’t.”

“It was October thirty-first, Halloween?”

She nodded, confirming that October thirty-first was Halloween.

“That was the first part.”

“The first part?”

“They found Lucy Fancher’s head in the middle of the Route 40 bridge, about two A.M. Just sitting on the median strip, almost exactly at the county line between Cecil and Harford. Her head and her driver’s license, in case anyone couldn’t make the ID with just the head.”

Suddenly, everything was too sharp: the deep itchy smell of the evergreens, the bay-tinged breeze, the blue eyes of her cheerful informant.

“That wasn’t the worst, of course.”

Of course.

“Two nights later, the body shows up, here on the back steps. It’s waterlogged, like it’s been submerged somewhere. People say the person who done it had found a jack-o‘-lantern, left over from Halloween, and propped it on her neck for a joke. Yes, she was shot, and that was the cause of death. But it always seemed the point was to get at her boyfriend, to taunt him in some way.”

Tess was beginning to see how those elliptical newspaper stories fit together. If Fancher’s head had been found on the bridge, a cop who worked for the Maryland Transportation Authority was probably first on the scene. But it was only when the body was found that they could determine the cause of death-the so-called break in the case. Which meant the head had been removed postmortem. The bit about the jack-o‘-lantern was the kind of thing cops would withhold, even if the whole town was alive with gossip about the case.

“Was she-”

“Raped?” It was creepy how quickly he filled in her unvoiced thought. “They never said.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

The man had scratched his chin until he opened up a small cut, but he kept scratching, smearing blood. “I don’t know. He moved away. Some said he went crazy. Who’d blame him?”

“Did she have an ex-boyfriend around, or an ex-husband?”

“Don’t know. Only knew her by sight, as I said, and the only man I ever saw around here was her boyfriend. They looked like a nice young couple, with everything in the world to live for. I sometimes wonder if that was the point.”

“The point?”

“Of what that crazy man did. Because he’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t he? And he’d have to be a man-just to carry her back here, I mean. Couldn’t have been easy, the body waterlogged as it was. Not easy to cut off a person’s head, come to think of it, even after they’re dead. You’d need proper tools. But I always thought the person who done it hated him more than her, you know?”

“Someone killed Lucy Fancher to get at her boyfriend?”

“I’m not saying he knew them. I’m saying he mighta saw ‘em. In town, or at the diner up on Route 40. They looked happy together. There are some men who would begrudge another man the love of a pretty woman. You ever play checkers when you were a kid?”

“What?” The conversation became more surreal at every turn.

“I used to go to a friend’s house, after school, play checkers. His little brother wanted to play, but it’s a one-on-one game, and there’s no way to make it three-person. Besides, he didn’t know how to play for beans. So we told him to go away. Well, he-he-” The gabby neighbor was suddenly at a loss for words. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, as if he feared being overheard. “He whipped it out and sprayed that board like a dog marking his territory. If he wasn’t going to play checkers, no one was going to play checkers.”

“This theory of yours-is it part of the local gossip, too, or just based on your observations about human nature?”

She had tried to sound respectful, but the man drew himself up, affronted.

“It’s good as anything they ever come up with. Better than anything ol‘ Carl Dewitt came up with, and I didn’t go crazy in the process, did I?”

“Who’s Carl Dewitt?” Tess asked. But he was already walking away, leaving her alone in the backyard. Tess glanced at the concrete back steps, trying to imagine how the scene had looked on a grayer, colder day, when the sun set so much earlier. From a distance, in the dark, the body had probably looked like a straw man, some child’s tasteless joke. Close up? Close up, that discovery could be enough to drive a man crazy. She wondered if Carl Dewitt was Lucy Fancher’s boyfriend, the one whose happiness another man might have begrudged. And she knew it would be a long time before Lucy Fancher’s landlord ever sold this property.

After almost five years at the Elkton Democrat, Margo Duncan almost quivered with ambition. When she heard that a private investigator from Baltimore wanted to talk to someone about the Fancher case, she crossed the small newsroom in three bounds, chattering before she reached Tess’s side.

“That was my story,” she said. “The editors totally screwed it up. They kept saying, You can’t have decapitations in a family newspaper! Why? It’s the news, it’s a fact. It’s not like I dwelt on the details. Do you know how hard it is to sever a human head?”

Tess nodded, fearful this young woman would tell her if she didn’t.

“So it’s her, right? I mean, they have the head and her driver’s license. But I’m not allowed to say they have just a head. They change it to ”North East woman has been found dead on the toll bridge, an apparent victim of foul play,“ blah, blah, blah. As if it could be a suicide! And then, when her body shows up, propped up on the back steps-”

“With a jack-o‘-lantern. Or so I’ve been told.”

“Well, how do you write that when they don’t let you say in the first place that all they had was a head? Besides, the cops were saying I couldn’t include the jack-o‘-lantern part because it’s something only the killer knows, and my bosses took their side. So small-town. I looked like an idiot. I think the publisher was just thinking about real estate values. That area was going up then. Visions of property taxes danced in his head.”

Margo’s rat-a-tat rhythms seemed to have been modeled, in equal parts, on Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and the little chicken hawk who dogged Foghorn Leghorn through so many Saturday-morning cartoons. Tess felt weary. It had been a long day and she was at least sixty miles from home. She yearned for her bed, her boyfriend, and her dogs, in more or less that order.

She took Margo by the elbow. “Isn’t there a break room around here?”

There was, there always was. No newspaper could publish without a row of vending machines somewhere in the building, filled with salty snacks and sodas and scalded coffee that missed the paper cups three out of five times. Margo Duncan chose a box of Mike amp; Ikes and began tossing them back as if they were tranquilizers and she was the main character in a sex-and-shopping novel.