Tag Man (21 page)

“All the time. He almost lives at the American Legion hall in BF.”

“Bellows Falls?” Sally asked.

“Yeah. On Rockingham—across the street and down from Nick’s.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Joe studied the front page unhappily.
POLICE SEEK MAN AS WITNESS.
Dan Kravitz’s face confronted him, he thought a little resentfully.

He couldn’t blame him. From what Willy had said, and from what they’d discovered since, Kravitz was almost fanatically private.

“You think it’ll work?”

He glanced over the top of the page at Sammie Martens, who was back at her office desk, if only for another hour. She’d just hung up the phone, which had been ringing ever since the paper’s appearance. She was still on maternity leave, but was transparently yearning to return to work. She claimed to be trying out babysitters, leaving them with Emma for a few hours at a time—supervised by a set of clandestine video cameras, at Willy’s insistence—but Joe knew the trial separations to be as much for her as for her daughter.

“It better,” he said. “We’ve tried everything else. The man’s like a friggin’ ghost, drifting all over town without leaving a trace. That another I-know-him call?”

“Yeah,” she said without elaboration. They had received ten of those so far, from people who hadn’t seen Dan recently but knew him personally, or knew
of
him. “Do you know where he is now?” Of course not. “Oh, is that what you wanted to know?”

The phone rang again. This time, Joe picked it up.

“Gunther. Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

The voice on the other end was elderly, tentative, and female. “Hello?”

“This is Joe Gunther. Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

“Are you the people looking for Daniel Kravitz?”

“That’s correct, ma’am. Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “But he was here just a couple of days ago.”

That was some improvement, Joe thought. “Where are you?”

“At home.” She gave the address.

“He came to your home?” Joe asked, entering the address into his computer and requesting a cross-reference. The name that came up belonged to a Gloria Wrinn.

“Yes,” she was saying. “With a young woman. They pretended to be from a state agency that I knew didn’t exist. They were asking about a tenant of mine.”

“Is this Mrs. Wrinn?” Joe asked.

“Why, yes,” she answered, surprised.

“Are you at home right now?”

“Yes, I am.”

“This is very interesting, Mrs. Wrinn. Would it be all right if a colleague and I came right over to speak with you?”

“Of course.”

Joe hung up and looked at Sam. She was already reaching for her jacket.

*   *   *

Forty minutes later, Joe placed his empty teacup on the low table before him and addressed their hostess.

“Mrs. Wrinn, did either one of them tell you why they were so interested in Paul Hauser?”

She reached into her cardigan pocket as she spoke. “John—that was the name he used—said they thought he’d committed a crime.”

“They said they were cops?” Sam asked, startled.

“No, no. From the Division of Indigent Residents.”

“What?”

Joe started laughing as he read the business card Gloria handed him. “This is classic.” He gave it to Sam and asked Gloria, “What was the crime supposed to be?”

“He didn’t say.”

He pointed to the card. “You believed that?”

“No, but I knew they weren’t dangerous, or at least Nancy wasn’t…”

“Nancy what?”

“She never gave me a last name. She was the one I met first. Knocked at the door and introduced herself as running a survey of everyone on their indigent residents list. She was very sweet. After she interviewed me about Paul, she brought in John, and I allowed them to go through his things.”

“You didn’t think you’d need Hauser’s permission?” Sammie asked.

“Honestly?” Gloria asked with her eyebrows raised. “No. He left me high and dry. I suspected that he was up to something underhanded before he disappeared.”

“What was that?” Joe asked.

“I’m not sure. I knew that someone had been in my bedroom when I was away recently. It had been cleaned up, but you can always tell when things aren’t exactly as you left them. I also found a broken table from upstairs that had been hidden in the basement, as if Paul thought I wouldn’t notice it was missing, and the doorframe to the top-floor staircase was split. People always assume that old folks are idiots.”

“Okay,” Joe resumed. “So you let them go through his things. Did you go with them?”

She shook her head. “I accompanied them to the top of the stairs. Paul lived in a separate apartment I have under the kitchen. I don’t go down there very often anymore, because of my legs. I don’t move as easily as I used to.”

“I understand,” Joe said. “But let me get something straight: They came here asking what you knew about Hauser. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And they asked to see his apartment?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did they tell you about the apartment or did you bring it up in conversation?”

Sam glanced at her boss, realizing how much she’d missed him during the past few months.

Gloria hesitated. “I don’t recall.”

“How about when you showed them where it was? Did you lead the way?”

Her eyes froze on his face. “Oh, my goodness.”

“What?”

“Well, I really didn’t. I mean, we all went together, I remember—kind of in a herd—but now that I think of it, John knew exactly where to go. I remember him holding the door open for me at the back of the kitchen, which leads to the downstairs. There’s no way he should have known…” She lapsed into thoughtful silence.

Neither Sam nor Joe said anything, letting her gather her wits.

“He’d been here before, hadn’t he?” she finally asked.

“It looks that way,” Joe agreed. “Was there anything else that tells you they knew more about Hauser than they were letting on?”

“He asked about Lake Bomoseen.”

The two cops exchanged looks. “Bomoseen?” Joe asked. “In what context?”

“Whether he’d come from there, or had family there. The girl asked about Claremont, New Hampshire. The conversation was generally about where Paul might have been from, I think in part because I said that I thought he was a local, more or less. From this overall region, in other words.”

Joe looked at his partner. “You have any questions?”

Sam shook her head and he returned to Gloria. “I’d like to ask you an enormous favor, Mrs. Wrinn, and you should know that you’d be entirely within your rights to turn us down.”

“Go ahead,” was the ready response, “although I think I know what it is—you’d like to see Paul’s room, too.”

Joe laughed. “Well, you’re absolutely right. We would. But there’s something else: We’d like to follow up on what you said about somebody having been in your bedroom, and breaking a table from the upstairs hallway. It’s sounding as if something happened in this house while you were away that set these people against each other, and we would sure like to know what that was.”

She was already nodding. “Of course. Of course. I’d like to know myself.”

Joe and Sam stood, smiling. “Outstanding,” he said. “I’ll get a team in here right away and we’ll get to it.”

“There is one last thing that I almost forgot,” Gloria suddenly added.

“Yes?”

“The man—John—made a point of mentioning that Paul had a suitcase, and asked if he’d left with it.”

“Did you know what he was talking about?” Joe asked.

“Oh, yes. Paul was carrying it when he first came. It was just strange, is all, how John mentioned it. I think I’d made some comment about how Paul traveled with everything on his back—I don’t remember my own wording anymore. But John specifically added, ‘and a suitcase,’ or something like that. And when I looked at him oddly, he explained that he’d noticed how a suitcase had left a mark in the dust of Paul’s room.”

“So the suitcase meant something special?” Joe ventured.

“That’s what I thought.”

The smile returned to Joe’s face as he said, “You’ve been great, Mrs. Wrinn. This has been a huge help. I’ll make that phone call now and rally the troops.”

*   *   *

Bellows Falls was a good example of how the march of history can alternately make a place successful or maul it underfoot.

Its geography tells most of the story. It is located on a point of land within a dramatic bend of the Connecticut River—complete with a waterfall, resulting hydropower, and one of the nation’s earliest bypass canals, all of which once made it both picturesque and commercially viable. A go-to place.

That had been long ago. Since then, the interstate had been laid out like Hadrian’s Wall to the west, complete with a couple of slightly-too-distant exits, introducing a subtle suggestion that this once-vibrant village was now a place to speed past without thought.

That, of course, was open to interpretation. As with any town, Bellows Falls—or BF as locals call it—was accessible with ease; it was even the immediate area’s commercial hub. But it was hard to argue that where the river had once made BF a destination point, so the interstate now largely passed it by.

The village had spirit, however, and stubborn lasting power, and most modern boosters were happy to think that the worst times—involving crime and poverty and economic blight—were things of the past.

Dan Kravitz agreed. He’d been coming here for years, on his restless peregrinations, and had even called it home a couple of times, once when Sally was a child.

The American Legion building on Rockingham Street, just off the eye-catching downtown square, was not representative of the latter’s architectural grace. A single-story, largely windowless brick building, it had the appearance of something constructed to withstand a nuclear attack. But it was a home away from home to many, and perhaps a place where a person could pretend, if only for a while, that the outside world had indeed ceased to exist.

That certainly seemed true for the man at the end of the long bar, who looked as attached to his seat as a potted plant—turnip-shaped, with a tangle of hair standing in for the leaves. In response to Dan’s whispered inquiry, the barkeep said, “That’s what’s left of him,” before returning to his soapy sink.

Dan led Sally down the length of the nearly empty room. He sat by one side of their target while she sat by the other. The large man barely took them in.

“Bryn?” Dan asked. “Bryn Huxley-Reicher?”

“Like there’re two guys named Bryn in the room.”

Huxley-Reicher had both pudgy hands cradling a half-empty glass of beer, and Sally was suddenly struck by the similarity between his fingers and his rounded lips, which had barely moved when he’d spoken. In fact, all she could see of him seemed to be constructed of rolls of flesh-colored material—like the Michelin Man stripped of all his white outer coating. It was simultaneously fascinating and revolting. It made her happy that her father once more had taken the lead.

“Good point,” Dan said. “Where’s the name from?”

“Parents.”

Dan nodded. He could be like that. For years, he’d had Willy Kunkle believing he could speak in little more than grunts. For that matter, he knew his own daughter thought him a social misfit. But in a world where people spoke too much and said too little, silence was a good way to find out a lot without asking a single question.

Or simply to be left alone, which Dan knew worked for him, and suspected was the case here. Bryn Huxley-Reicher did not appear to be a man much interested in anything.

“Norm Myers says hi,” he tried.

“You could fool me.”

“He’s doing his annual thing at the crash site.”

The thick lips compressed for a second before Huxley-Reicher reacted. “That is so crazy.”

“You ever been?” Sally asked.

The large man finally moved slightly, turning his head to take her in. “That look likely to you?”

“Doesn’t look like you could get out the door nowadays,” she said cheerfully, abandoning her embarrassing first reaction for a new tack. “But you got around once, and Norm’s been doing his thing for more’n sixty years.”

Huxley-Reicher swiveled his head all the way back to Dan. “Where’d you find her?”

“I’m his daughter,” she answered. “My name’s Sally.” She stuck out her hand, both to undercut her prejudice and out of a darker need to discover what it would feel like to shake this man’s hand.

Bryn hesitated. It appeared that he had settled for a limited repertory of social interactions, none of which involved physical contact.

But her approach and her gender made the difference. He cautiously unfolded one hand and awkwardly extended it to her, a bit like an offering with an uncertain future.

Her smile widened. His hand was incredibly soft and warm and pleasant to grasp, akin to cupping a baby’s bare butt.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Huxley-Reicher.”

He half smiled back wondrously. “Really?”

“You know how it is,” she said, her father all but eclipsed by now on the far side of this huge human being. “You get into a routine, always seeing the same people, pretty much saying the same things, narrowing your focus more and more until even you get bored by you. It’s nice to get out sometimes—do something you never tried, or meet someone you’d normally never meet. Like you and me. It doesn’t have to be like bungee jumping, right?”

He was laughing by now, or at least shaking in a way that made it appear as such. Certainly, his eyes were almost closed and those lips were smiling.

“You talk a mouthful, you know that?”

“Gets me in trouble sometimes,” she admitted. “I usually end up hurting someone’s feelings.” She laid a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t do that, did I?”

He shook his head, glancing down at her hand but not touching it.

“No,” he told her. “You’re a breath of fresh air.”

He suddenly straightened and looked around, seizing his glass more firmly. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s move over to that booth, so we can see each other.”

Dan and Sally slid off their stools, while Bryn began a slow and cautious maneuver that caught the attention even of the barkeep, who glanced over in fear.