Blunt Darts Read online

  “No body.”

  “In the Concord?” I asked. “That river’s current barely pushes a fallen leaf.”

  The tower man’s voice crackled in the background. Cal eased his cylinder shut. “It was early spring, John. Swollen and running hard from the snows and rain. When they pulled the car up, Mrs. Kinnington wasn’t in it. Never found her.”

  “Was one of the doors open?”

  Cal smiled and pulled his muffs on. The tower man finished his litany. We fired the second string double-action and again cleared our weapons.

  As we moved downrange once more, Cal continued the conversation. “Smollett’s diver said he didn’t notice.”

  “Did you say ‘driver’ or ‘diver’?”

  “Diver, as in SCUBA.”

  “Meade has its own SCUBA team?”

  “Of sorts. Meade is ‘concerned about crime.’ At least I think that’s Smollett’s usual budget speech. Pretty effective pitch, too.”

  “Cal, I’m told that Stephen flipped mentally soon after his mother’s death. Institutionalized. Then he was apparently fine until two weeks ago. Can you tell me anything about his disappearance?”

  A frown, and his voice dropped. “Smollett never even called me to put our force on alert. I found out from one of my men whose wife works in the cafeteria in Stephen’s school. Nothing on the radio or the computer. Nothing at all.”

  We reached our targets again. “Can you think of any reason the judge wouldn’t want his son found?”

  Cal clucked his tongue, perhaps at the question, but more likely at my miserable shooting. “Maybe the kid just doesn’t fit into his system.” The chief began penciling our newer shots. “The judge, who by the way, this department and I have to live with, is a cold, cold man. Just the opposite of his brother, who was real personable, though in an unpredictable sort of way. But the judge … well, if you ever saw him in court, you’d know what I mean.”

  “I have. I’ve also met his bodyguard.”

  “‘Bodyguard’? Oh, Blakey?”

  I nodded.

  “Gerald Blakey,” said Cal. “He’s a bad-ass, John. On the Meade PD, then broke up this fight in a tavern a little—no, a lot—too hard. Citizens’ group managed to raise enough fuss to get him off the force, because he was still probationary. But then Kinnington hired Blakey on at the courthouse. One of those political moves that makes the judge look fearless to the law-and-order folks.”

  Cal pocketed his pencil but made no move back toward the firing line. “You have a jam with him?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Watch his hands, John. He could open coconuts with them. By-the-by, if memory serves, Blakey was the officer who noticed the smashed fencing when Mrs. Kinnington went into the river.”

  I perked up. “And then, sometime later, when he’s squeezed off the force, the judge gives him a job?”

  Cal nodded.

  “How does that add up to you?” I asked.

  Cal gave me a philosophical look. “Small-town police chiefs don’t ‘add,’ John; they subtract. Every time they take a stand, they subtract from their support in the town. Support remembers only the times when you do what they don’t want. Enough subtractions and there’s a new chief to do the arithmetic. I don’t know what happened between his Honor, Smollett, and Blakey.”

  While I decided not to push my luck any further, Cal walked over to a locker at the end of the range and came back with a stapler and two bigger cardboard targets. He stapled them onto the target easels. They were full-sized, human silhouettes.

  “Why these?” I asked.

  “You didn’t do real well on those first two strings, John. Never can tell when you might need to be better.” We turned and walked back toward the firing line.

  “Combat string!” Chief Calvin Maslyk yelled to the tower man.

  Twelve

  FORDHAM ROAD WAS A short street of older houses three blocks from the Meade center. I parked and rang the bell marked V. Jacobs.

  “Oh, John, I’ve been leaving messages for you all morning. Where have you been?” Valerie was dressed in a halter top and shorts. Both were pastel, and the colors clashed a bit.

  “What’s so urgent?”

  She ran back down the hall, disappeared, then reappeared with a picnic basket and a beach bag.

  “I ran into Miss Pitts this morning in the market. You remember, the retired teacher who had Stephen in the fifth grade? We have to go see her right away.”

  Valerie Jacobs was past me and halfway to my car. I shrugged and followed after her.

  The living room was filled with the kinds of things one used to obtain with trading stamps. Plastic-brass floor lamps, plastic-walnut cocktail tables, and plastic Hummel-like sculptures on eight, separate, knicknack-holding shelf arrangements. My rocking chair, however, was built of massive pine. It must have gone for twelve-and-a-half stamp books, minimum.

  Miss Pitts was plump and spoke in a soft purr. The three of us held teacups and coffee cakes in our hands and on our laps in a precarious balance that I’ve never been able to master. Miss Pitts had thus far covered her brightest class (1959), and her catlike voice was slowly putting me to sleep. I began to wonder why the hell she had the cocktail tables if she wasn’t going to use them for the tea and cakes. I was giving serious consideration to cutting a fart, toward re-channeling the direction of the conversation, when Valerie mercifully jumped first.

  “Miss Pitts, what year was it you had Stephen Kinnington?”

  “Ah, Stephen, Stephen. What an unfortunate story. Oh, one of today’s wicked novelists would have a field day with his sad life. But the brightest boy, the absolute brightest I’ve ever seen. No one, not even in the class of nineteen-fifty-nine, could touch him.”

  “Actually, Miss Pitts,” I broke in, setting my cup, saucer, and goodies on the floor, “what I’m interested in is whether anyone has touched him. In the unfriendly sense, I mean.”

  “Uh, quite,” said Miss Pitts, a bit miffed, I thought. “Well, as I told Miss Jacobs this morning, two weeks ago, on the twelfth, I was taking my evening exercise. I used to call it my evening ‘constitutional,’ but after the way some groups have twisted one meaning of that word, I have ceased to use it at all. In any case, while I was walking down Ballard Street, I saw Stephen ahead of me, carrying his books. No doubt he was so late in heading home—it was nearly five-thirty, you see— because he had visited the library after school. Well, seeing Stephen I was about to call out a greeting, when this black sedan screeched to a halt on the street beside him. He took one look at the driver and was gone.”

  “Did the driver go after him?” I asked.

  “Hah, not likely. Stephen is as springy and quick as an antelope. That Gerry Blakey couldn’t have caught him on horseback, assuming a horse could bear him any better than this town can.”

  Blakey, again. “What happened then?”

  “Well, Blakey, who’d gotten half out of the driver’s side, muttered something, slid back in, and drove off.”

  I leaned back. Miss Pitts’s eyes might be getting a little weak, but she wouldn’t be likely to mistake somebody else for Stephen, and nobody else for Blakey.

  “Why didn’t you report this to the police?” I asked.

  She gave me a jaundiced look. “The police? Hmph. Josh Smollett is a fool who can’t even control the teenage hoodlums in this town, much less be its chief investigative officer. Besides, he’s in the judge’s pocket. Everyone knows that. And if Blakey was chasing Stephen, the judge was likely connected with the poor boy’s leaving. That’s why I decided to tell Eleanor.”

  “You mean Valerie.”

  Miss Pitts determinedly set down her teacup and stood. “Young man, you are smug, and you are rude. If I were to say ‘Valerie’ I would mean Miss Jacobs. When I say ‘Eleanor,’ I mean Eleanor Kinnington. I’m afraid this interview is over.”

  I glanced to my right. Valerie seemed as stunned at the reference to Mrs. Kinnington as I was.

  I rose poli
tely and looked at our hostess. “Miss Pitts, please accept my apology. I was rude, and I assumed you were a meandering old woman who might confuse things. I was wrong. But I’ve been retained to try to find a probably terrified fourteen-year-old child, and you’re the first bright spot I’ve come across. Can we please talk a while longer?”

  Miss Pitts’s face softened, and she sat back down. “Stephen is just such a dear, dear boy.”

  We covered the intersections of Miss Pitts’s and Stephen’s lives during the prior six months. Nothing from that sounded helpful. I decided that a quiet interlude was appropriate before we returned to tougher ground.

  “What can you tell me about Telford Kinnington, the judge’s brother?”

  Miss Pitts gave a bittersweet smile. “Ah, Telford Kinnington. He was three years younger than Willard, and enough unlike him to have been bought from the Gypsies. The judge, who went to public school here, too, was a plodder. Everything seemed to come easily to Telford, though. A gifted student, a fine athlete at Harvard, and a true patriot, Mr. Cuddy. Telford didn’t just talk about this country, he died fighting for it. Only a few months after he’d been home on leave, too. In fact, I still have the newspaper account of his last battle. Just a minute.”

  Miss Pitts bustled over to a stuffed, floor-to-ceiling case and levered out a scrapbook. I feared a lengthy, unproductive tangent coming on. I thought about telling her to forget it but decided I was talking to her on borrowed time as it was.

  “Let … me … see,” she said, turning pages with agonizing slowness. “Yes. Yes, here it is.” Miss Pitts passed me the open volume.

  There were two accounts, one from the Banner, a local paper, and one from the Boston Globe. Both were dated April 11, 1969. According to the local paper, Captain Telford Kinnington had led his company in a counterattack from an American position against a much larger Vietcong force that was engaging a separate sector of the position. Telford and nearly a quarter of his company (about 40 of 160) were killed or wounded, but the VC had been annihilated. The medal he’d received, however, was, in my experience, not a very substantial award for a heroic charge.

  The Globe article implied between the lines that Telford Kinnington’s action had been unnecessary and reckless. It also indicated that he’d entered the service as a second lieutenant five years earlier and had only recently been promoted to captain—a long time to wait for his second bar in those casualty-ridden late sixties. I noted the part of the war zone involved and remembered that I knew someone from Military Intelligence who’d served there after I’d come home.

  I then swung the conversation as delicately as I could back to the judge’s late wife. Miss Pitts was reluctant at first, but once I emphasized the importance of my knowing Stephen’s earlier life, our hostess lapsed into the nearly universal enthusiasm with which people discuss those who appear big but turn out to be little.

  “Diane Kinnington was a terror, Mr. Cuddy, a demon from hell. The judge met her when he was in law school. At first she was an enchanting girl, and I served with her on several town committees just after their marriage. Diane continued to be active in town matters far into her pregnancy with Stephen. But for a while before he was born, she began acting … well, strangely. She appeared at committee meetings with alcohol on her breath. The woman walked past people she knew on the street as though she never saw them. Diane began wearing sunglasses even into the evening, and, despite two servants at the big house, she sometimes slipped into Carver’s, the small grocery store in Meade Center, to buy odd items. Then, one September night, something happened. I’ve never talked with anybody who knew just what. But Diane was hospitalized, and Stephen was born to her a few hours later, two months premature.”

  “Miss Pitts, can you tell me who would know what happened that night?”

  She frowned. “Yes, for all the good it would do. Her obstetrician couldn’t be reached in time, and Dr. Ketchum, who was the family’s doctor, rushed down and delivered her of Stephen. Doc Ketchum wouldn’t talk about it, and he died a few months later. The Kinnington house servants, a woman and her husband, were let go within a week, I suspected because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on Diane and somehow failed. They headed south somewhere. No one else that I know of was involved.”

  “How did Mrs. Kinnington get to the hospital?”

  “Her husband.”

  “But surely, if she was admitted, there’d be records of what her trouble was.”

  “Oh, she was admitted, all right, but into a private facility, if you get me.”

  “A sanatorium?” I decided to use the “old parlance.”

  “Yes, out in the Berkshires.”

  Coincidence? “Does the name Willow Wood ring any bells?”

  “What?”

  “The name Willow Wood. Was that the sanatorium Diane Kinnington was in?”

  Miss Pitts shook her head. “I don’t know. Though I think it was the same one Stephen stayed in.”

  “What do you know about the night Diane died?”

  A deep sigh. “Even less, I’m afraid. Just the newspaper stories, and I didn’t keep them. After Stephen was born, Diane seemed to rally back in spirit. Then, a few years later, she began to decline again. By the time Stephen reached my class, Diane had declined frighteningly. If her earlier conduct was strange, this later behavior was wicked. Drunkenness, rowdiness, and … well …”

  “Miss Pitts, I know this must be difficult—”

  “Oh, you know nothing, young man, nothing!” she snapped. “You ‘know’ I’m relatively old and therefore you ‘know’ that I’m patriotic and narrow-minded and a prude. Well, we may have felt strongly about some things when I was young, like love of country and order and respect. But perhaps we felt differently about other things than you think we did. And while we didn’t go around talking about those things, we nevertheless knew how to enjoy ourselves. But what we didn’t do was what Diane welcomed with every male who could unzip his trousers.”

  “Message received and understood, Miss Pitts,” I said. She calmed down a bit, and Valerie gave me an approving smile. “What about Stephen thereafter?”

  Miss Pitts sighed again. “He’d been so obviously affected by his mother’s behavior. He had become erratic in school, and then Diane showed up roaring drunk for a student-teacher conference, with a … a man waiting for her in the car. But, things must have been twice as bad at home. The day after Diane’s accident, the judge whisked Stephen away to the sanatorium. The school records don’t show it, but I’m sure that poor boy suffered a complete nervous breakdown. He returned to school the next year. Stephen had lost a year, but he seemed to be doing so well until now.”

  “Do you remember anything else that might help us?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid not. Although …”

  “Yes?” prompted Valerie.

  “Well,” she looked from Valerie to me, “there was a reporter named Thomas Doucette on the Banner at the time Diane Kinnington died. The rumor was that Thom had been assigned to the story and, well, covered it a little too well. Anyway, no article by him on the incident appeared in the paper, and he quit the Banner a few weeks later, though most people figured he was fired. Just as well actually. I fear Thom was the least gifted boy in my class of ’61, and certainly not destined for the Pulitzer Prize.”

  “Does Mr. Doucette still live here?” I asked.

  “In Meade? No, he’s somewhere in Boston now. At least that’s what I remember from his uncle’s funeral, which must have been, oh, two years ago. You might try his parents, though. They’re retired, too. Moody Street.”

  I had run out of topics, so I decided to ask what was on my mind.

  “One last point, Miss Pitts. What did Mrs. Kinnington say when you told her about seeing Gerry Blakey with Stephen?”

  To my great surprise, she blushed and saddened. “Well, what could Eleanor say? She’d suspected as much, but had hoped against hope that her intuition was wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?”
r />   Miss Pitts suddenly stabbed several times at a box of tissues on the table next to her.

  “Mr. Cuddy, Gerald Blakey is thirty years old and has never been seen in this town in the company of a woman. Isn’t that enough to be wrong about?”

  She hurried from the room, crying.

  Thirteen

  “I GUESS YOU DON’T feel much like a picnic anymore, do you?”

  Valerie and I were back in the car, and hers were the first words spoken since we’d left Miss Pitts.

  “Actually, I’d love a picnic,” I said. Valerie beamed. “So long as the conversation level is low enough to give me some time to sort things out.”

  “Terrific!” she said, and shook her hair down onto her shoulders.

  “But first,” I said, “let’s be sure we can reach this Thomas Doucette character, class of ’61.”

  Stopping at a gas station, I called Boston information. No Thomas Doucette nor T. Doucette. Then I tried the elder Doucettes. Again, no listing in Meade. Valerie suggested we stop at Moody Street and, with luck, see the Doucettes on our way to the beach.

  She directed me up/down and left/right through semi-rural, increasingly narrow roads. If there was a poorer section of Meade, we’d found it. I pulled onto Moody Street and up to a small and old, but neatly kept, ranch house to which someone had added a little greenhouse. The mailbox had “Doucette” in paste-on letters. There were three or four similar homes on the street, but no sense of development or planning. It was as though the distance between houses was less a function of privacy or exclusivity and more a reaction to the undesirability of the intervening and uneven scrub-pine land.

  A small, four-door American subcompact sat in the driveway, and a petite woman behind a screen door. We left our car and started up the path toward her.

  She had watched us leave the car and approach her. Then she stepped outside, light blue hair and a troubled expression. “May I help you?”

  “Yes,” said Valerie. “Are you Mrs. Doucette?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Doucette, I’m Valerie Jacobs. I teach eighth grade at the Lincoln Drive School. This is a friend of mine, John Cuddy. We’d like to contact your son, Thomas.”