Back at the Fairburn Building, at Ten Kearney Square, I unlocked my waiting room, dumped my sunglasses and Troy Pepper's employment file on my desk in the inner office, and went down the hall to Fred Meecham's suite. I sometimes did this anyway, to deliver his mail if I'd been the first to fetch it from the crate in the main lobby where the postal carrier had taken to leaving it after the elevator died (and kept on after it was fixed, the way I kept using the three flights of stairs). Occasionally, I went down the hall just to chat up Meecham's paralegal, a bright beauty named Courtney, whom he'd hired straight out of Mount Holyoke. She had done a senior project on the women's labor movement and come to Lowell for research, then fallen in love and decided to stay. “She must've left a lot of heartbroken college men in her wake,” I'd told Meecham.
“And college women, too,” he confided. “Courtney is gay. And very up-front about it. Not in any militant way, just a friendly midwestern FYI kind of thing, the way she'll also let you know she's from Duluth.”
“Hi, Alex,” she greeted me with her glowing smile.
There was no resisting her. I grinned back. “Is Himself in?” Meecham was my quarry today.
He was sitting at his law library table in his shirtsleeves, his face in a
tome, which he clumped shut as he waved me in. I took one of the two vacant chairs facing his desk, each marked with the logo of Suffolk Law, his alma mater. “How'd theâ” we began simultaneously, and both backed off.
“After you,” he insisted.
“How did the arraignment go?” I asked.
“Martin Travani was on the bench, which is probably good for us. He's levelheaded. I got Pepper to plead not guilty, though his preference was to say nothing at all.”
“Just keep his mouth shut? What's that mean?”
“I'm not sure. He seemed a little removed from the proceedings. It could be shock, which might be read either way. He admitted to the police that he had been with the victim yesterday morning, and that the scratch on his chin is from her nails, and that he'd just bought her the silk scarf that was found around her throat. But he won't say he did or didn't do it. For the time being, I'll just have to work around him. As for bail, the DA argued that Pepper's transient lifestyle and lack of community roots make him a risk to flee. Travani set a status date, at which time we can offer a case for bail. For charges, we've got murder, destroying evidenceâoh, and possession of an unlicensed firearm. Police found a handgun hidden in his trailer.”
“Great,” I said.
“It appears not to have been fired, but they're running it through ballistics now. There may be another problem, too. It seems that the victim had filed a 209-A against him.”
It was a restraining order. “Filed it here in the city?”
“No one was quite clear about where or when. If true, it clearly establishes a prior relationshipâwhich Pepper doesn't deny. He told me they were in love.”
“Aren't they all.”
He went on. The police had two witnesses who saw Pepper with the victim outside his living quarters Saturday afternoon. “âSpeaking with raised voices' is how the report put it. It sounded domestic, but the witnesses said they couldn't hear the conversation very well and they didn't linger to eavesdrop. The coroner places the time of death yesterday between noon and early evening. There were signs of a struggle in Pepper's trailer.”
“Has he got an alibi?”
“He was workingâor supposed to beâduring the time. He was on duty when he was arrested. A detective, along with one of the patrol officers pulling a detail at the carnival last night, went to the trailer and knocked but got no answer. On the strength of their witness reports, they felt they had probable cause. When they went inside they realized it was most likely the crime scene. They found him working and charged him.”
“Did he say where he'd been earlier?”
“He's been pretty vague so far, but he hasn't denied anything. My turn now. How did things go on your end?”
I gave him a replay of my visit to the carnival. “Warren Sonders is called Pop by everyone out there, claims they're like a family. Sonders is definitely in Pepper's corner. I sensed a little ambivalence in some of the others, but it's more like they don't want to believe it happened. They're pretty subdued. They seem like a close-knit bunch, and now trouble has invaded their world.”
“Courtney pulled together some basic background from what I had and what the police have got.” He slid a neatly typed double-spaced sheet across the glossy table. “For you.”
When I reached the law library door, Meecham said, “By the way, did I mention who's prosecuting?”
He didn't have to; his forced grin told me.
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Down the hall in my own modest shop I checked the morning's mail and then phone messages. I'd been nominated for a national leadership award; all I needed to do was call an 800 number with my credit card to talk about the press release. I decided to hold out for the Nobel. I scanned the notes Meecham had prepared. Troy Samuel Pepper, born Paterson, New Jersey, grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, as a ward of the state and sometime foster child. He didn't finish high school and joined the service at eighteen. Stayed in six years, discharged nine years ago, worked for a power companyâwhich is where he got the injury that had mangled his left hand. He worked in a warehouse, made foreman. He left that a year ago, did odd jobs for several months, and started with the carnival as a roustabout last April.
It would give me a few places to stick a pry bar. With that and the file Sonders had loaned me, maybe I could conjure something that Fred could use. I hadn't missed his oblique mention of the prosecutor. On the job, I'd worked with Gus Deemys. With Ed St. Onge and Roland Cote, too, but at least with them the feelings had ranged from friendship to tolerance. I'd known Deemys as a well-dressed and aggressive little rooster who'd seemed to get off on needling people, friend and foe alike, but it was a mean-spirited needling, never the bonding kind. He'd probably lost his hero when Robert Blake went up on murder charges. Deemys had always been ambitious; I'd give him that. For years he'd attended night school to earn a law degree. Now he was an assistant county DA, and with an audience other than corpses to parade his five-foot-four-inch, well-draped form in front of, he'd proven a winner. His conviction rate was one of the best in the state.
Ambitious wasn't a word that leapt to mind when Roland Cote's name came up. Brilliant wasn't, either. Dogged worked. Unimaginative (as I'd told Pop Sonders). Loyal. And now large. I'd glimpsed him last night when the detectives showed up, and I almost hadn't recognized him. His somber, vaguely handsome bachelor's face was intact, but free donuts and the big meals at his mother's house, where he still lived at forty-five, had undone him. He was heavy now in a way that no tricks of clothing could disguise. At some point he must have shown promise of
some
thing to be punched up to detective in the first place. In a typical career arc, he would've made sergeant or lieutenant by now, or been busted back to patrol duty for having screwed up somehowâbut he hadn't gone either way, and that was telling. As a cop you got pigeonholed, and if you accepted it and didn't fight it, you got to stay. As with mediocre schoolteachers (or doctors or judges, for that matter), your peers didn't have the stomach to kick you out, so they let you dangle at the point of least hassle. Unless you'd done something truly vileâlike get caught with a bag full of money and leave a state trooper in a comaâin which case you were gone.
I took out the sheet that Courtney had typed and hoisted the phone. I didn't bother with the U.S. militaryâgetting a date with Cameron Diaz would've been easier, though I didn't try that, either. I dialed 411 and got the listing for the New Jersey department of human services. It
took several more calls and some waiting through taped menus before finally I reached the division of youth and family services and got hold of a Ms. Alice Parigian, who confirmed that she was the person who had handled Pepper's foster care case in Nutley sixteen years before. “Who is this again, please?” she asked.
I told her, making it clear that I was on Pepper's side, at least in terms of the law. From her questions, I got the sense that someone, probably Cote, had already been in contact with her. “I don't want to seem rude or impolite, Mr. Rasmussen, but is there somebody who can vouch for you?”
I gave her Fred Meecham's number, and she said she'd get back to me as soon as she'd vetted me. I wasn't holding my breath when the phone rang three minutes later. “What do you need to know about this individual?” Alice Parigian asked.
“Anything that you can tell me, ma'am.”
That was a long while ago, she said; I agreed that it was. In a profession where people tended to get used up, burned out, and shuffled to other agencies like tattered office furniture, it was a stretch of time to be a social service worker (or a sofa, for that matter). Was she another Roland Cote? Of course, some people had a particularly strong sense of missionâor a stoic sense of delayed gratification that enabled them to envision a Florida condominium for the golden years. I couldn't tell from her voice what drove her but she sounded dedicated. “As a matter of fact, he was one of my very first cases. And I did take out his file when a policeman called me this morning. I can tell you exactly what I told him. The boy's mother got struck and killed by a commuter train when he was just five, a freak thing. The father was pretty much a nonentity, so the boy was picked up and put into DHS care. He was an only child, healthy, and seemingly well adjusted. For the first few years after he came into our custody, he was in foster situations and moved around from family to family. He was a shy, respectful boy. Tested average on IQ. He liked sports. He left our official custody when he turned seventeen. I know he didn't finish high school, but I believe he went into the marines. That's about all I can tell you. This office had no further contact with him after that.”
That was the formal end of our conversation. I took a chance. “Ms.
Parigian, you said he was quiet and polite, and yet he never ended up being adopted?”
There was a silence, and I wondered if she'd already hung up; then she said, “No, he never did,” in a kind of wistful voice, as if it were a mystery she still hadn't fathomed. “His early childhood wasn't any picnic, but he was a survivor. He had no physical or severe emotional handicaps. Though that isn't necessarily a factor in adoption. Families choose for reasons of their own. Some people, God bless them, are willing to take on even the most challenged children.”
“But no one took him,” I said. “No one adopted Troy Pepper.”
“Mr. Rasmussen, it would break your heart to know the children who never find a loving home. Troy was one of my very first cases, as I said. I really believed he'd do just fine. I worked hard to place him.”
“I'm sure you did. You said he had no âsevere' emotional problemsâwere there some other kind?”
“That's not anything I'm able to address. In our system, each child receives a periodic professional evaluation, but I don't have any of that data here. It's medical information, so it's classified.”
“You knew him, Ms. Parigian. You're a professional. Would you venture an opinion?”
“Well ⦠if I had to guess, I'd say his big problem might have been temper. He could get very angry sometimes. I think it was especially noticeable because he was so quiet most of the time. Possibly he was depressed, though I just considered him to be deep ⦠you know, still waters?”
“Do you happen to know what would set him off?”
“No, I don't.”
“Does his file show any kind of disciplinary record?”
In the silence, she drew a long breath, and I had an image of her: a somewhat formal middle-aged woman, sitting in an office no bigger than mine, at a desk with papers and folders stacked high on it; perhaps with a window overlooking a city street, but I saw her looking inward. Hell, maybe I was way wrong, and she was sitting in her bra and panties on the lap of the boss, who was blowing in her ear as she tried to stifle giggles, but I didn't think so. She let the breath out as slowly as she'd drawn it.
“Each time he would get placed in a foster settingâand he did during
the ages of about five through nineâhe was hopeful that this would be the one, the family that wanted to hang on to him and cherish him as their own. I remember he had a pennant that he showed me one time. One of those felt souvenir pennants that said âWelcome to Asbury Park.' He loved that. I think one of his foster families had taken him to the beach. He'd bring that with him wherever he was living and tack it on the wall. One day somebodyâit may have been a foster siblingâtore it down, and Troy got very upset. Physically.”
“A fight?”
“I don't think it went very far, but I do know the family didn't keep him for long after that. He was crushed. He'd been hoping it would work out.” A sigh escaped her, like some energy going out of her, out of all the kids who'd dreamed the same thing and never had it happen. “There's a term ⦠the âfoster home bounce'âbut there comes a point when a child sees the way it'll be, and I wonder if maybe they give up a little.”