The Cold Blue Blood (16 page)

In reality, there were two Dorsets, Des reflected as she drove. One was the Dorset of the Pecks and the Havenhursts, the old money WASP gentry who’d long ago claimed the lush meadows and pastures, the precious Long Island Sound frontage, the village’s power structure and its upper social rung. The other Dorset was made up of the people who plowed that gentry’s driveways and mowed their lawns and pumped out their septic tanks. Some of them held low-end factory jobs at the Electric Boat submarine plant in Groton. Or toiled as chambermaids at the mammoth Indian reservation casinos in Uncas. Most of these lower-rung people were crowded into the mildewed cabins and cinder-block ranchettes that were squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, around Uncas Lake. The fetid, sulphurous lake was situated five miles inland from the shore. The soil was rocky here, the roads narrow and dark. Kids in dirty diapers rolled around unattended on scraggly front lawns. Dogs roamed loose, sometimes in packs. Idle men sat on their front porches drinking beer in the middle of the day.

There was a name for white people such as these. They were called swamp yankees.

Bliss slowed his cruiser way down when he turned off of the Post Road and started his way through their squalid enclave. The resident trooper knew the territory well. He knew it because he lived here himself.

He pulled up in front of a seedy cottage where a rusty pickup with no tires rested up on blocks in the driveway. An ancient sofa was set out in the weeds out front, surrounded by empty beer cans. He parked and got out. Des did the same. She heard music blaring from somewhere, a dog barking, a baby crying. She could smell spaghetti sauce. And feel a million eyes watching them through windows up and down the street. As always she felt the same mix of anger and intolerance that smoldered within her whenever she was in such a neighborhood, whatever its racial or ethnic make-up. She simply could not understand how people could sit around all day doing nothing with their lives.

The third trooper remained back at the corner of the Post Road, a shotgun mounted to his dashboard.

She and Bliss strode up to the front porch together. The sound of a television blared through the screen door. Bliss knocked on it. A girl’s voice called, “It’s open—come on in!”

The room was stuffy and reeked of cigarette smoke and soiled diapers. A slovenly, rather bovine-looking girl of no more than eighteen lay sprawled lazily on the sofa, drinking a diet soda and watching one of those trashy daytime talk shows. A naked baby, a boy, dozed peacefully next to her on a blanket. The girl wore a tank top and cut-offs. She had red hair and fair skin and a small, mean face. Her bare arms and legs were soft and sprinkled with freckles. Her feet were pudgy and dirty. She painted her toenails black and wore rings around two of her toes. Also one in her right nostril. She exuded a certain ripe concupiscence in spite of her chubbiness. By age thirty, Des reflected, she would be jowly and jiggly, a pig. By forty she would be an old woman, her tits hanging down like a pair of accordians. Right now, she was just about the same age Dolly Seymour had been when Tuck Weems’s father had raped her.

The girl eyed them warily as they stood there in the room with her. But she did not stir from the sofa. Or turn down the volume on the TV “Whoa, it’s the resident trooper man,” she said in a mocking voice.

On the sofa next to her, the baby continued to sleep peacefully.

“Darleen, isn’t it?” Bliss said pleasantly.

“Yeah, so what?” she shot back defiantly. “Who’s
she
?”

Des told her.

“You can think of her as my boss,” Bliss added, by way of explanation.

“No way,” Darleen exclaimed. “That is so weird. No offense or nothing. I mean, it just is, isn’t it?”

“We’re looking for your father, girl,” Des said.

The girl’s eyes went back to the TV “My father’s been dead for fifteen years, ma’am,” she said sullenly. “If you’re looking for Tuck he’s not around. And I haven’t seen him since …” She trailed off into silence for a moment. “Why, what did he do?”

“Where is he, Darleen?” Bliss asked.

“How should I know? God, can you
believe
these people?” She meant the ones on the TV—two women who had wrestled each other to the floor and were throwing punches. The show’s host was egging them on. “Can you
believe
somebody would go on TV and actually
do
that over some man? I mean, why would they do that?”

Because cows like you actually sit here all day and watch it, Des said to herself. This was the truly remarkable part. “Darleen, Tuck may be in a lot of trouble. I’m not saying he is. I’m saying he may be. He’s wanted for questioning in connection with a murder, okay?”

Darleen’s eyes widened.
“Murder?
No way …”

“If we don’t find him, and talk to him, then I’ll have to alert every trooper in the state to be on the lookout for him,” Des told her. “Believe me, that will not be a good thing. He will be considered a dangerous person. And I cannot promise that he will not be hurt. All we want to do is ask him some questions. If you care about him, you’ll help us.”

Darleen took a long drink of her soda, considering this. “What makes you think I care?”

“You had his baby, didn’t you?” Des asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” She reached for a cigarette and lit it.

Des stared at her intently. At the way her soft, childlike hands shook. And her knee jiggled. She was talking plenty hard and tough, but was clearly frightened. She had a baby to take care of. She had no job, no education, and no skills—other than the obvious one. Tuck was her meal ticket, her comfort zone, her home. And now she could see that disappearing right before her eyes.

“Look, I don’t know where he is, okay?” Darleen said finally. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“He didn’t come home last night?” Bliss asked.

Darleen shrugged.

“Does he stay out on you regularly?” Des pressed her.

The girl shrugged again, although this time her nostrils flared slightly. Evidently, Tuck Weems was not a one-teenager man.

“Where’s he been working lately?” Bliss asked.

“Nowhere.”

“Big Sister?”

“I guess.”

“Lock ’n Load still his regular hangout?”

Darleen didn’t answer. She’d gone mute.

Des and Bliss exchanged eye contact. They were not going to get anything more out of this girl.

“Thank you for your help, Darleen,” said Des, who felt it was her duty to add, “Girl, exposing your baby to secondhand smoke is a serious health risk. It can lead to ear infections, respiratory disease, even heart disease. You do know that, don’t you?”

“I am a
really
good mother, ma’am,” Darleen snarled in response. “Why don’t you take care of your own business, hunh?! Why don’t you
leave
?!”

They did just that. Went out the door and down the steps toward their cars.

That was when Des got the call. It came from Soave, who got it by way of the Westbrook Barracks.

The rain-soaked body of a fully clothed adult white male had just been found behind the dunes on a remote stretch of Dorset town beach called Rocky Neck. He had been shot twice. He had been dead at least twelve hours. And he had been positively identified as Tuck Weems.

CHAPTER 7

MITCH’S IDYLLIC ISLAND PARADISE was different now.

It was no longer secluded. It was no longer peaceful. There was no way it could be. Two local men had been shot dead.
The New York Post
was now calling Dorset “the murder capital of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.”
Inside Edition,
the syndicated tabloid news show, had delivered up Big Sister to the entire nation on a platter: “The blue blood is flowing,” declared their breathless correspondent.
Dateline
, not to be outdone, had unearthed the sordid murder-suicide of Tuck Weems’s parents, complete with grainy thirty-year-old local news footage of troopers with mutton-chop sideburns.
Entertainment Tonight
had gotten into the act, too, by sniffing out the celebrity angle—Big Sister’s own Jamie Devers.

In fact, there were so many reporters clogging the entrance to the bridge that it was hard for Mitch to get off the island. He ventured out only because he needed groceries. Also a few things at the hardware store, where he found out from Dennis that the villagers bitterly resented how Niles Seymour was being portrayed as one of them by the media—which he was not—while Tuck Weems had been labeled as a low-life, when he was actually a decorated Vietnam vet whose family had lived in Dorset since the early 1800s.

The villagers particularly resented the presence of so many news vans and cameras and microphones. They considered it a gross intrusion on their privacy. In Dorset, the only offense that ranked worse than invading someone’s privacy was selling your land to a developer.

Lacy sent Mitch a tart one-line e-mail message from the office:
Still think you can be left alone?

To which Mitch replied:
I’m doing my damnedest not to think.

His paper’s Connecticut correspondent phoned him in the hope of getting Mitch’s exclusive firsthand account of how it had felt to dig up Niles Seymour’s body. Mitch didn’t want to talk about it. “Sure, I understand,” the correspondent retorted, thinking Mitch wanted the story for himself. He did not. He wanted no part of it. He didn’t like this real-world invasion. He didn’t like that his photograph had been in all of the newspapers. He thought about going back to the city until the whole mess blew over. But he didn’t want to do that either. So he stayed and tried to work on his book. Only now it seemed hard to get excited about a sagebrush ventriloquist on horseback.

So he was slouched in his easy chair, chasing doggedly after Hendrix’s “Little Wing” on his Stratocaster, when Lieutenant Mitry returned to question him for the second time.

She did not bring her sketch pad. She did not knock. She just stood there in his doorway, smiling at him sweetly. “I learn something new every day, you know that?”

“Oh yeah? What did you learn today?”

“Well, I had no idea that Don Ho ever covered Jimi Hendrix’s songs.”

“Gee. Thank you, large.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Berger. I hear ‘Tiny Bubbles,’ I go to pieces.”

“I’ll remember that, Lieutenant. Now what can I … ?” Mitch trailed off, frowning. “Wait, what was that noise?” he demanded suspiciously.

“What noise?” she said innocently.

“Meowing. I distinctly heard meowing.”

“Oh, that’s Baby Spice,” she said, retrieving a nylon cat carrier from the front porch. There was a small, wide-eyed kitten inside, predominantly gray, and extremely anxious to be let out of jail. “She’s free of worms and ear mites. She’s had all of her shots. And she comes with a certificate for one neutering, free of charge. She’s my best girl. All she needs is somebody to love her.”

“Lieutenant, I told you I wasn’t interested in taking in a stray cat.”

“You sounded wavery.”

“I did not,” Mitch insisted. “Look, I had one when my wife was alive. That was then. I don’t want to go there again, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay. You can’t take it out on the entire cat population that your wife died of cancer.”

Mitch peered at her, startled. He hadn’t told her anything about Maisie’s cancer. She had been checking up on him.

“We’re living in the here and now,” she went on. “This is
today
. And today Baby Spice needs a home.”

“Did you
have
to name her Baby Spice? I mean, that’s really nauseating.”

“So I’m not good with names. I know this about myself. Call her Ashley. Call her Heather. Call her any damned name you please. Just take her. You won’t regret it. She’s the sweetest little thing. She’s excellent company. And it’s a proven fact that a cat’s soothing presence helps reduce a man’s blood pressure.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my blood pressure, or at least there wasn’t.”

“Just try her out for a few days, okay?” She was already barging her way upstairs to his room with the carrier. “It doesn’t work out, I’ll take her back. No harm, no foul.”

“You’re really going to do this to me, aren’t you?”

“You’ve got that right.”

“And my feelings don’t enter into it at all?”

“Not one bit,” she affirmed. “Now I’m going to release her up here in your bedroom. They like to get acclimated in a small, contained space. She may stay up here a few days. When she’s feeling ready to come down, she will. I’ve brought you a week’s supply of food. And I’ve got a litter box in my trunk. All we need is some native sand.” Mitch could hear her cooing softly to the kitten now. “Lookie, lookie … She just loves your bed.”

“How touching.”

The lieutenant charged back downstairs and went into his kitchen to fill a saucer with water.

“Just out of curiosity, do the authorities know about you?”

“I am the authority,” she replied, carrying the saucer back upstairs. Then she returned, empty carrier in hand. “And you may as well know this—when it comes to cats, I am utterly ruthless.”

Mitch did not know what to make of this woman at all. There was something disconcerting about the pale green eyes behind those thick horn-rimmed glasses. Her gaze was so direct, so calm, so lacking in guile or deceit, that he found himself flummoxed by her. Then again, maybe it was just that he had never been alone in a room before with someone who was licensed to carry a loaded semi-automatic weapon. Mitch’s experience with the police was extremely limited. His apartment had been broken into once. That was it. He had never been involved in a serious crime.

The lieutenant had. She tracked down killers for a living. She was obviously tough. She was obviously bright. She was obviously a marshmallow when it came to stray cats. She was also someone who did not like to reveal anything personal about herself. Clearly, she’d been bothered when Mitch had noticed the charcoal under her fingernail. Beyond that, Mitch could not read her. Which would not have been of any great concern to him were it not for two undeniable facts.