The Wolf in Winter (2014) Read online

  Dave's concern was understandable, therefore. But despite their appearance, and an undeniable propensity for violence that seemed resistant to all forms of pharmaceutical intervention, the Fulcis were essentially brooders by nature. They might not brood for very long, but they did tend to take some time to consider which bones they might enjoy breaking frst. The fact that they'd stayed away from me for so long meant that they'd probably been considering the fate of their friend with a certain degree of seriousness. That either boded well for me, or very badly.

  'You want me to call someone?' said Dave.

  'Like who?'

  'A surgeon? A priest? A mortician?'

  'If they've come here to cause trouble over Jackie, you may need a builder to reconstruct your bar.'

  'Damn, and just as the place was coming together.'

  I worked my way through the crowd to reach their table. They were both sipping sodas. The Fulcis weren't big drinkers.

  'It's been a long time,' I said. 'I was starting to worry.'

  To be honest, I was still worrying, and maybe more than before, now that they'd shown up at last.

  'You want to take a seat,' said Paulie.

  It wasn't a question. It was an order.

  Paulie was the older, and marginally better adjusted, of the two brothers. Tony, his younger sibling, should have had a lit fuse sticking out of the top of his head.

  I took the seat. Actually, I wasn't too worried that the Fulcis might take a swing at me. If they did, I wouldn't know a lot about it until I woke up, assuming I ever did, but I'd always gotten along well with them, and, like Jackie, I'd tried my best to help them where I could, even if it meant just putting in a word with local law enforcement when they stepped over the line. They'd done some work for me over the years, and they'd put themselves in harm's way on my behalf. I liked to think that we had an understanding, but Timothy Treadwell, that guy who was eaten by the grizzlies he'd tried to befriend, probably felt the same way until a bear's jaws closed on his throat.

  Paulie looked at Tony. Tony nodded. If it was going to turn bad, it would do so now.

  'What happened to Jackie, we don't blame you for it,' said Paulie.

  He spoke with great solemnity, like a senior judge communicating a long-considered verdict.

  'Thank you,' I said, and I meant it, not only because my continued good health appeared assured for now, but because I knew how important Jackie was to them. I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd held some residual grudge against me, but there would be none. With the Fulcis, it was all or nothing. We had a clean slate.

  'Jackie done something very bad,' said Tony, 'but that didn't mean he should have been shot down from behind because of it.'

  'No,' I said.

  'Jackie was a good guy,' Tony continued. 'He took care of his mom. He looked out for us. He—'

  Tony choked. His eyes were tearing up. His brother patted him on a muscled shoulder.

  'Whatever we can do,' said Paulie, 'whatever help you need to fnd the man who did this, you let us know. And any time you want us to step up for you, you just call. Because Jackie would have stepped up, and just because he ain't around no more don't mean we ought to let these things slide, you understand? Jackie wouldn't have wanted that.'

  'I hear you,' I said.

  I reached out and shook their hands. I didn't even wince, but I was relieved to get the hand back.

  'How's his mom doing?' I asked.

  Jackie's mother had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease the previous year. Her illness was the only reason Jackie had committed the acts that led to his death. He just needed the money.

  'Not so good,' said Paulie. 'Even with Jackie she would have struggled. Without him . . .'

  He shook his head.

  Jackie's insurance company had invoked a clause in his life policy relating to criminal activity, arguing that his death had resulted from participation in a criminal enterprise. Aimee Price was fghting the case on a pro bono basis, but she didn't believe that the insurance company was going to modify its position, and it was hard to argue that it didn't have a point. Jackie was killed because he screwed up: he was careless, somebody died, and vengeance fell. I made a mental note to send a check to Jackie's mother. Even if it only helped a little, it would be something.

  The Fulcis fnished their drinks, nodded their goodbyes and left.

  'You're still alive,' said Dave, who'd been keeping one eye on proceedings, and another on his bar, in case he didn't get to see it again in its present form.

  'You seem pleased.'

  'Means I get my night off,' said Dave, as he pulled on his overcoat. 'Would have been hard to leave otherwise.' *

  I enjoyed that evening in the Bear. Perhaps it was partly relief at not having incurred the wrath of the Fulcis, but in moving between the bar and the foor I was also able to empty my head of everything but beer taps, line cooks and making sure that, when Dave returned the next morning, the Bear would still be standing in more or less the same condition as it had been when he left it. I drank a coffee and read the Portland Phoenix at the bar while the night's cleanup went on around me.

  'Don't tax yourself,' said Cupcake Cathy, as she nudged me with a tray of dirty glasses. 'If you strained something by helping, I don't know how I could go on living.'

  Cathy was one of the wait staff. If she was ever less than cheerful, I had yet to see it. Even as she let off some steam, she was still smiling.

  'Don't make me fre you.'

  'You can't fre me. Anyway, that would require an effort on your part.'

  'I'll tell Dave to fre you.'

  'Dave just thinks we work for him. Don't disillusion him by making him put it to the test.'

  She had a point. I still wasn't sure how the Bear operated, exactly: it just did. In the end, no matter who was nominally in charge, everyone just worked for the Bear itself. I fnished my coffee, waited for the last of the staff to leave and locked up. My car was the only one left in the lot. The night was clear and the moon bright, but already there was a layer of frost on the roof. Winter was refusing to relinquish its hold on the northeast. I drove home beneath a sky exploding with stars.

  Over by Deering Oaks, the door to Jude's basement opened.

  'Jude, you in here?'

  A lighter fared. Had there been anyone to see, it would have revealed a man layered in old coats, with newspaper poking out of his laceless boots. The lower half of his face was entirely obscured by beard, and dirt was embedded in the wrinkles on his skin. He looked sixty, but was closer to forty. He was known as Brightboy on the streets. He once had another name, but even he had almost forgotten it by now.

  'Jude?' he called again.

  The heat from the lighter was burning his fngers. Brightboy swore hard and let the fame go out. His eyes were getting used to the dark, but the basement was shaped like an inverted 'L', which meant that the moonlight only penetrated so far. The dogleg to the right remained in darkness.

  He hit the lighter again. It was a cheap plastic thing. He'd found a bunch of them, all still full of fuid, in a garbage can outside an apartment building that was being vacated. In this kind of weather, anything that could generate heat and fame was worth holding on to. He still had half a dozen left.

  Brightboy turned the corner, and the light caught Jude's booted feet dangling three feet above the ground. Brightboy raised the fame slowly, taking in the reddish-brown overcoat, the green serge pants, the tan jacket and waistcoat, the cream shirt and the carefully knotted red tie. Jude had even managed to die dressed like a dandy, although his face was swollen and nearly unrecognizable above the knot on his tie, and the noose that suspended him above the foor was lost in his fesh. A backless chair was on its side beneath his feet. To its right was a wooden box that he had been using as a nightstand. His sleeping bag lay open and ready next to it.

  On the box was a plastic bag flled with bills and coins.

  The lighter was again growing hot in Brightboy's hand. He lifted his thumb,
and the fame disappeared, but the memory of its light danced in front of his eyes. His left hand found the bag of money. He put it carefully in his pocket, then dragged Jude's pack into the moonlight and rifed it for whatever was worth taking. He found a fashlight, a deck of cards, a couple of pairs of clean socks, two shirts fresh from Goodwill and a handful of candy bars just one month past expiration.

  All these things Brightboy transferred to his own pack. He also took Jude's sleeping bag, rolling it up and tying it to the base of his pack with string. It was better than his own, newer and warmer. He didn't even think about Jude again until he was about to leave. They had always got along okay, Brightboy and Jude. Most of the other homeless avoided Brightboy. He was untrustworthy and dishonest. Jude was one of the few who tried not to judge him. True, Brightboy had sometimes found Jude's obsession with his appearance to be an affectation, and he suspected it helped to make Jude feel superior to the rest of his brothers and sisters on the streets, but Jude had been as generous with Brightboy as he had been with everyone else, and rarely had a harsh word passed between them.

  Brightboy thumbed the lighter and held it aloft. Jude seemed frozen in place. His skin and clothing were spangled with frost.

  'Why'd you do it?' said Brightboy. His left hand dipped into his pocket, as though to reassure himself that the money was still there. He'd heard that Jude had been calling in loans. Brightboy himself had owed Jude two dollars. It was one of the reasons he'd come looking for him; that, and a little company, and maybe a swig of something if Jude had it to spare. Someone had said that Jude wanted the money urgently, and it was time to pay up. Jude rarely asked for anything from the rest of his kind, so few resented him calling in his debts, and those that had it paid willingly enough.

  So why would a man who had succeeded in putting together what Brightboy guessed to be $100 at least suddenly give up and take his own life? It made no sense, but then a lot of things made no sense to Brightboy. He liked his street name, but he had no conception of the irony that lay behind it. Brightboy wasn't smart. Cunning, maybe, but his intelligence was of the lowest and most animal kind.

  Whatever had led Jude to fnish his days at the end of a rope, he had no need for money where he now was, while Brightboy was still among the living. He walked to St John Street, ordered two cheeseburgers, fries and a soda for $5 at the drive-thru window of McDonald's, and ate them in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. He then bought himself a six-pack of Miller High Life at a gas station, but it was so cold outside that he had nowhere to drink the beers. With no other option available, he headed back to Jude's basement and consumed them while the dead man hung suspended before him. He unrolled Jude's sleeping bag, climbed into it and fell asleep until shortly before dawn. He woke while it was still dark, gathered up the bottles for their deposit and slipped from the basement to seek out breakfast. He stopped only to make a 911 call from a public phone on Congress.

  It was the least that he could do for Jude.

  10

  Jude died without enough money to pay for his own funeral, so he was buried by the city at the taxpayers' expense. It cost $1500, give or take, although there were those who resented spending even that much to give a decent burial to a man who seemed to them to have been nothing but a burden on the city for most of his life. The only consolation they could derive was that Jude was unlikely to trouble them for a handout again.

  He was interred in an unmarked grave at Forest City Cemetery in South Portland when the medical examiner had fnished with his body. A funeral director recited a psalm as his cheap coffn was lowered into the ground, but unlike most city cases, he did not go to his rest unmourned. Alongside the cemetery workers stood a dozen of Portland's homeless, men and women both, as well as representatives of the local shelters and help centers who had known and liked Jude. I was there too. The least that I could do was to acknowledge his passing. A single bouquet of fowers was laid on the ground above him once the grave had been flled in. Nobody lingered. Nobody spoke.

  The medical examiner's opinion was that Jude's injuries were consistent with asphyxiation, with no indication of a suspicious death. The investigation was ongoing, though, and the police and the attorney general were under no obligation to accept the ME's opinion as gospel. Still, in this case it was unlikely that the Portland PD would reject it. When a homeless man died at the hands of another, it was usually in a brutal manner, and there was little mystery to it. Jude, despite the care that he took with his appearance, was a troubled man. He suffered from depression. He lived from meal to meal, and handout to handout. There were more likely candidates for suicide, but not many.

  If there was anything unusual about his case, it was that the medical examiner had found no trace of drugs or alcohol in Jude's system. He was clean and sober when he died. It was a minor detail, but still worthy of notice. Those who choose to take their own lives often need help with the fnal step. Either they set out with the intention of killing themselves, and fnd something to relax them in those last hours and minutes, or the mood induced by alcohol or narcotics is the trigger for the act. Suicide isn't easy. Neither, whatever the song might say, is it painless. Jude would have learned that as he kicked at the air from the end of a rope. I don't know how much help booze might have been under the circumstances, but it couldn't have made his situation any worse.

  To be honest, I let Jude slip from my mind after the funeral. I'd like to say that I was better than everybody else, but I wasn't. He didn't matter. He was gone.

  Lucas Morland pulled up in front of Hayley Conyer's home on Griffn Road. It wasn't the biggest house in Prosperous, not by a long shot, but it was one of the oldest, and, being partly stone built, conveyed a certain authority. Most of it dated from the end of the eighteenth century, and by rights it should probably have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but neither generations of Conyers nor the citizens of Prosperous had seen ft to nominate the house. The town didn't need that kind of attention. The old church presented them with enough problems as it was. Anyway, the Conyer house wasn't particularly noteworthy in terms of its situation or design, and had no interesting historical associations. It was just old, or at least old by the standards of the state. The leading citizens of Prosperous, cognizant of their heritage, of their links to a far more ancient history back in England, took a more nuanced view of such matters.

  Hayley Conyer's Country Squire station wagon stood in the drive. There seemed to be even more bumper stickers on it than Morland remembered: Obama/Biden; a 'No Tar Sands in Maine' protest badge; 'Maine Supports Gay Rights' over a rainbow fag; and a reminder that sixty-one percent of the electorate had not voted for the current governor of the state. (Blame the state's Democrats for that, thought Morland: trust them to split their own vote and then act surprised when it came back to bite them on the ass. Jesus, monkeys could have handled the nomination process better.) The station wagon was so ancient that it was probably held together by those stickers. He'd heard Hayley arguing with Thomas Souleby about the car, Souleby opining that the old gas-guzzler was causing more environmental pollution than a nuclear meltdown, and Hayley responding that it was still more environmentally friendly than investing in a new car and scrapping the Ford.

  Morland's own Crown Vic had been acquired by him from the Prosperous Police Department back in 2010 while it was still in perfect running order. By then Ford had announced that it would cease production of the Police Interceptors in 2011, and Morland decided to secure one of the department's Crown Vics for himself before his offcers drove the feet into the ground. The Crown Vic had two tons of rear wheel drive, and a V-8 engine under the hood. If you crashed in a Crown Vic you had a better chance of walking away alive than in a lighter patrol car like the increasingly popular Chevy Caprice. The car was also spacious, and that meant a lot to a big man like Morland. The sacrifce was getting only thirteen miles to the gallon, but Morland reckoned the town could afford that small gesture on his behalf.

  Hayley appear
ed on her porch as Morland was musing on his car. She was still a striking woman, even as she left seventy behind. The chief could remember her in her prime, when men had circled her like insects, fitting around her as she went about her business. She did her best to ignore them or, if they grew too persistent, swatted them away with a fick of her hand. He had no idea why she had never married. That rainbow bumper sticker on her car might have caused some folk to suggest an explanation, but Hayley Conyer was no lesbian. She was, if anything, entirely asexual. She had committed herself to the town: it was hers to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She had inherited her duty to it, for more members of the Conyer family than any other in Prosperous had served on the board. Hayley herself had been the chief selectman for more than four decades now. There were those who whispered that she was irreplaceable, but Morland knew better. Nobody was irreplaceable. If that were true, then Prosperous would never have thrived for so long.