Cold Quarry (3 page)

“Do you have to be involved?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Marcia nodded. I could sense her disapproval but she said nothing. We’d all driven in separately the night before and were staying at a motel at the Cross Lanes exit off the interstate, a Sleep Inn just over the hill from an industry that
was
thriving: a thousand-slot “racino,” as its promoters liked to call it, complete with a greyhound racing track and video poker. Apparently, suckers spring eternal, even here in the shoulder of the Appalachian Bible belt.

A particular numbness settled into the pit of my stomach. It was the same as I’d felt at my own father’s funeral a decade before. All the conversations I’d had with Chester over the past three or four years, mostly about falconry, but about other things as well, came flooding back to me.

If you’ve lived in West Virginia your whole life and have any brains about you, Carew once said, you learn to endure the hillbilly comments and inbreeding jokes about Appalachia with a certain amount of defiance and pride. I’d heard the jokes ever since I’d lived in Virginia.
What’s the state flower of West Virginia? A satellite dish.
You get the idea. In New York, we used to assume the same sort of superiority over New Jersey or Upstate. I’ve been told they say the same thing in St. Louis about Arkansas. Why do you suppose we do that, Carew had asked, run down somebody else’s home turf in order to elevate our own?

I stared across the blue tarp surrounding the casket at Betty Carew. Her face was stoic as she listened to the pastor’s words, the wind catching wisps of her white hair and winding them about like tendrils, though her eyes betrayed a hurt the likes of which I could only imagine. She and Chester had been together for what, thirty years? Beside her, the boy shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other as he continued holding on to her hand. He was seven or eight years old and was adopted, but besides that I knew little about him.

The wind rose again and several of the three or four dozen other mourners in attendance shivered against the damp air. More than half were falconer friends from Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but the rest were people from Chester and Betty’s church or people he’d known from his work at the chemical plant in Institute. Chester had lived in the Kanawha Valley his entire life. This was home ground for him and he had loved it. At least the local earth had seen fit to return the favor and had not been too frozen to delay the interment.

When the ceremony ended, the assembled mourners began to file from the cemetery, navigating the narrow walkway along the edge of the bluff back toward their cars. Marcia, Nicole, and I went over to Toronto and the old man at his side.

“Marcia, Nicky, I don’t think either of you have ever met Jake’s father.”

Felipe Baldovino—he and Toronto’s mother had never married—listed hard to port into the wind, using his son’s ample arm as support. He was shorter than Toronto and much thinner, except for a bloated belly. Across his wizened face he bore a perpetually surprised expression, the result of thick gray eyebrows curving upward. Today he wore a threadbare black overcoat with a tall gray fedora atop his head that must have been a holdover from the sixties.

“A pleasure to meet you young ladies,” Felipe said. His voice was firm despite his frailty and the cold.

“It’s a pleasure to meet
you,”
Marcia said.

“Me too,” said my daughter.

“I’m only sorry it had to be on such a sad occasion. Chester was a good man. A very good man. And my son here … well, I suppose you all know how he felt about him.”

He looked at my mouth. “Frank, what happened to your face?”

Marcia and Nicole had managed to help me stop the bleeding from the corner of my Up, but when I’d looked in the mirror in the church bathroom, I also saw a nice little bruise blossoming there. I exchanged glances with Toronto. He’d been the one who’d called to tell me about Chester’s death a few days before, but his expression, or lack thereof, gave nothing away.

“Let’s just say I had a bad encounter with a pine tree,” I said.

“Did you come all the way down from New York, Mr. Baldovino?” Marcia asked. She was the only one of us, besides Felipe, dressed appropriately for mourning: a long black wool overcoat, black pants and fashionable low-heel black shoes. From me she knew how Felipe had lived in Queens while his son had grown up mostly without a father on the streets of the Bronx and Yonkers. Felipe had worked for years as a longshoreman. He had also, according to Toronto, nearly drank himself to death, chased just about anything in a skirt and, although he’d never physically struck Toronto’s mother, had inflicted unimaginable mental anguish on the woman he refused to make his wife. Seems Felipe, at the time, had had this little problem of a wife and five children over in Queens.

I was surprised a few years before when Toronto had told me he was going up to New York one weekend to visit his father. But by then his mother had already been dead for more than a decade, the old man wasn’t in the best of health, and maybe Toronto had wanted, if not to forgive him, at least to allow the remaining years of his father’s life to include some form of relationship with his estranged son.

“No, no. Didn’t Jake tell you? I own a cabin maybe thirty, forty miles from here,” Felipe said. “A few of us got together and bought it to go hunting way back when I was still working the docks. Now I’m the only one left. We didn’t pay but a couple hundred dollars for it. Just a battered old place … like me, eh?” He chuckled to himself. “ ‘Course that was pretty good dough back then.”

“You still come down here to hunt?” Marcia asked. She knew he meant deer hunting.

“Nah.” He waved his hand. “I come down for a few weeks every now and then just to check on the place. That’s how I got to know Chester. Didn’t think I’d ever be attending his funeral though while I was here.”

No one said anything for a few moments.

“That was a nice touch with the release,” I said to Jake. “Whose idea was it?”

“Mine,” he said. “I got Mark Bigelow and Lonnie Richards to set it up. They run that rehab operation and breeding facility down toward Beckley.”

“I didn’t know Chester all that well, but from what I remember and what Frank has told me, it seems to me it’s exactly what he would have wanted,” Marcia said.

Toronto nodded. “Still remember the day Chester called and asked me to be his sponsor … like I could teach
him
anything.”

His father poked him in the arm. “Hey, I told him you were my son. He said he checked you out with all those other hawk people and they said you was the best.”

“Hawk people” was how Felipe referred to anyone having anything to do with falconry. He said he couldn’t see why anyone would waste time chasing a bird around the woods when you could a lot more easily just grab a box of shells and a thirty-ought-six and go.

A wiry man with dark red hair and a goatee came walking over to us. “Hey … Jake, Frank, you guys got a couple of seconds?”

Toronto and I turned to look at him. Damon Farraday was a plumber from across the river in St. Albans who was a recent apprentice of Chester’s. He’d probably spent more time with the old guy in the past few months than anyone besides the new widow.

“Geez, Frank, what happened to your mouth?”

I repeated the pine tree story.

“That’s too bad. Listen,” he said, “I’d really like to talk with you guys.”

“Yeah?” Toronto said.

I was afraid Farraday might want to talk about what would happen to Chester’s remaining two birds, which seemed a bit untimely given the fact that he wasn’t even cold yet in the ground.

But instead he said, “I suppose you guys have heard I’m the one found Chester the other day.”

“Right. We know.”

I hadn’t, in fact, but obviously Toronto had known so I said nothing.

“I’d really like to talk with you guys about it. I mean, you two used to be cops, right? And nothin’ like that’s ever happened to me before.”

“You must’ve already talked to the police, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but you guys knew Chester, and I want to get your take on it. I got some ideas of my own about who mighta killed him.”

“Oh, yeah? You think we got time for that, Frank?”

I guessed my gunman had been about the same age as Farraday; not as tall, however.

“Plus, Betty wanted me to ask if you two will be stopping by the house before you leave town,” Farraday said. “There’ll be a bunch of folks and food and stuff, but, Frank … she especially says she’d like to talk with you.”

I glanced back at Marcia and Nicole and at the remnants of mud on my clothes. I also felt the inside of my swollen lip with my tongue. “Be happy to talk with her,” I said.

Another mourner, a woman, came along in front of us. She was of medium build, wore her wavy blond hair in a short bob, and was dressed from head to toe in the chocolate-brown uniform of a West Virginia conservation agent, a forty-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun holstered to her side. Farraday introduced her. Her name was Gwen Hallston.

“So you must be the famous Jake Toronto.” She looked Toronto up and down. “Heard a lot about you from Chester.”

“Mmm. …” Toronto said.

She said she had had a great deal of respect and admiration for the old falconer.

“He’ll be missed, that’ for sure,” I said.

“You going by the house now?” Farraday asked her.

“No. I’ve got to head down to Cabin Creek for a meeting.”

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Of course.”

“What’s your opinion of how Chester died? You buy into this hunter theory?”

She shrugged. “We get our share of hunting deaths, that’s true. Except, of course, it’s usually the people carrying the guns.”

I nodded.

“The shooter could’ve been lost or might’ve been poaching. He could’ve thought he was firing at a deer or a bear, maybe even a wild boar. Or it could’ve just been some yahoo with a rifle stoned out of his mind. Had a guy last year said he thought he was trying to take down an elk. He said that after he’d blown apart someone’s backyard birdfeeder with his black-powder rifle. We get a few of those kinds too.”

“Are you saying the person might not have known they were on Chester’s land?”

“Exactly. Those posted signs deteriorate. Chester hadn’t kept them maintained.”

“You must know a lot of the deer hunters around here. Any particular suspects come to mind?”

She laughed, scratching her arm. “Most of the hunters around here are pretty responsible. … Something like this? Drive down the road and flip a coin. You might as well start searching every vehicle.”

“Okay,” I said.

She eyed me thoughtfully for a moment. “You don’t mind me asking, Mr. Pavlicek, what’s your interest in all this?”

“I knew Chester from falconry. Jake here was also my sponsor when I started.”

“I see. …”

“Frank’s a private investigator,” Farraday interjected.

“No kidding?” She raised her eyebrows toward me. “Don’t get involved in shooting cases too often though, do you?”

“Not when I can help it,” I said.

“You got any ideas, you best share them with the sheriff’s department.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

She said it had been nice meeting us and moved on.

Marcia and Nicole had come abreast of us. “Hey,” I said. “You folks up for stopping by the Carews’ house first, maybe grabbing something to eat, before we hit the road?”

“I thought you were all going to head straight home, and—” Marcia stopped in midsentence, obviously remembering our earlier words and realizing that my getting socked in the face with a shotgun barrel was going to have to make a serious dent in our plans.

“Damon wants to talk with Jake and me about Chester’s shooting,” I said. “And Betty wants to see us too.”

“Oh,” she said.

We all walked together for a few more paces, then Marcia and I peeled off from the group for a moment to stand awkwardly by her car. She seemed distracted.

“You see,” she said softly. There was anger tinged with hurt in her voice. “This is why you and I can’t be together.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“Because I can’t even show up at a funeral for a friend of yours without you getting punched in the jaw and involved in some kind of trouble.”

I said nothing because she was right, at least about the getting in trouble part.

“I think I’ll just head on back to Charlottesville,” she said. “It’s a long drive and I’ve got a class to teach in the morning. Please pass on my sympathies to Chester’s widow and son.”

It was one of those times I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to act or what she needed or didn’t need from me. I didn’t want her to leave but she seemed determined.

“It was really nice of you to come, Marsh,” I heard myself saying. “Even though you hate funerals.”

She kissed me on the cheek, unlocked her car, and opened the door. I turned so that no one else would see my face while I watched her climb in, start the engine, and drive away.

3

Toronto and I rode with Damon Farraday in his old Scout. Nicole followed in my truck. The Scout was one of the ugliest buckets of bolts I’d ever seen, stained a permanent shade of rust. I got stuck in the back. My head hurt.

Toronto had left his own mode of transport, a brand-new silver-and-black Harley-Davidson V-Rod most other people wouldn’t be caught dead driving in the middle of winter, back in the Carews’ barn. Felipe said he wasn’t interested in going to the gathering at the house, so Toronto had walked his father to his vehicle before saying good-bye.

The land around Nitro looked dry and distressed. Farraday maneuvered down a steep hill, negotiating a hairpin turn. He looked uneasy himself. He glanced first at Toronto, then back at me. “Never thought I’d have to be the one to go finding somebody dead like that,” he said.

“Most people don’t.” I kept my tone neutral. “What happened?”

He glanced across at Toronto. “Well, Jake here already knows some of this. … I was working on a residential job down in South Charleston when I got a message from my office saying Betty was trying to get ahold of me. I called her up and she told me Chester hadn’t come back yet from his early-morning hunt. He was supposed to be going to his regular doctor’s appointment, but he hadn’t shown up back at the house and she was starting to worry about him. Asked if I’d go up there and make sure he was all right.”