For Want of a Memory Read online

  They tried to get her to stay, warning her that they were going to call the police.

  "Fine! Call them! I work at The Early Girl. That's where I'll be!"

  Then she'd run to her car. She'd left her door open again, and they had left the other one open too, after they got him out. It was freezing inside again. As she got in, she saw the stains that, in the daylight, she knew would be red. The crapping guy had bled all over her car.

  The only reason she didn't hit twenty cars on her way to work was because no one else was on the roads in town at this time of night.

  * * *

  Mitch Connel put his uniform cap on the visitor's chair and looked down at the man in the bed. His face was bandaged in more places than it was not. It was impossible to tell whether that face matched the one on the driver's license that had come out of the wallet in the pants the guy had been wearing. That driver's license said the man was one Kristoff S. Farmingham, who lived in New York City. The problem was that a rental agreement-wet and bloody, but still legible-along with the key in his pocket, said his name was Larry Phillips, and that he was renting one of Rudy Chastain's vacation cottages. Mitch knew Rudy, of course. He knew everybody in town. There were only five men on the force in Pembroke, which served a population of some twenty-five hundred. Rudy worked as a fishing guide during the summer, and had seven or eight vacation cottages scattered around that he rented out.

  Doctor Massouf fussed with tubes that were attached to the man.

  "And you say Lulu brought him in?" Mitch asked. He hated talking to people who couldn't speak English. Dr. Massouf was Pakistani, and he was a good physician, but he couldn't speak English worth a damn.

  "Eet vas hur, yes I am telling you. Se said se fund heem on zom hifay. You must be talking to hur I tink."

  "When are you going to learn English, Doc?" groaned Mitch.

  "Zer is nothing being wrong wit my spich, offitzer," said the doctor. "You haff itten ferry much too many donuts, and zay haff plooged oop your ears, I am tinking."

  "So will he live?"

  "Yes, I am tinking so," said the doctor. "He vas loosing much blud ven he came here. He vas shooted, I am tinking."

  "Shooted?" Mitch frowned.

  "You know," said the doctor, making a gun with his thumb and finger. "Bang bang." The doctor then pointed to a thick bandage on the left side of the man's head. "Zee boolet just touch heem little beet here."

  "What makes you think he was shot?" asked Mitch.

  The doctor just stared at him. "I am being from Pah-kees-tahn. I am, when I was there, seeing many, many shootings veecteems."

  "Just there?" asked Mitch, pointing at the head.

  "Only there, yes," said Massouf. "And many glass cuttings too, I am sure." He reached into a pocket of his lab coat and pulled something out. He offered it to the policeman. It was a bloody piece of automotive window glass. "I take thees froom hees skin." Again, he pointed at the left side of the man's face. He waved his hand over the rest of the body. "Many contusions and lacerations and so on, but no more shootings."

  Mitch picked up one of the unconscious man's hands, and looked at it. There was mud under the fingernails, which was odd, because the hands were soft. There was the suggestion they had been callused in the past, but the thick skin was being replaced with new skin that did no manual labor.

  "How long will he be out?" asked the policeman.

  "I am not being in a position dat I can tell you deese answer," said the doctor, shaking his head. "He is being healing while slipping until his eyes are ready to be opening, yes?"

  A nurse stuck her head in the door.

  "You got a phone call, Mitch," she said.

  "Thanks, Jessica," said Mitch. "Hey, were you here when this guy came in?"

  "Yeah, but I wasn't in on the team that cleaned him up."

  "Was it really Lulu who brought him in?"

  Dr. Massouf snorted.

  "That's what they said," said Jessica. "Can't mistake her for anybody else."

  "It just seems odd," said Mitch.

  "Why?" asked Jessica. "She's about the oddest person I know."

  "She's your best friend!" laughed Mitch.

  "I know that," said the nurse. "That's why I know how completely believable it could be that she'd happen upon some almost-dead guy and haul him in here. Why don't you just go ask her about it?"

  "I will," said Mitch, a little defensively. "I just have lots to do, that's all." He moved toward the door. "Doc says he was shot. Is that right?"

  "You're asking me?" Jessica's face was impassive. "He's the doctor. If he says the guy was shot, then he was shot. Why are you harassing me? I just came to tell you to come to the phone!"

  "I'm not harassing you," said Mitch. "I'm doing an investigation and questioning witnesses."

  "Well I didn't see nuthin' and I don't know nuthin', so you can just go interview somebody else. And quit looking at my boobs, too!"

  Doctor Massouf snorted again.

  "I'm not looking at your boobs," said Mitch, sounding injured.

  "You always look at my boobs, Mitch. One of these days I'm gonna tell Carla about it, too!" she said, referring to Mitch's girlfriend.

  "Okay, okay," said Mitch, holding his hands up. "You don't have to get all upset. I'm just a trained observer, that's all. I can't help it if I observe. It's instinct."

  "I know what your instincts are, you heartbreaker," said the young woman. "Are you going to answer the phone, or should I just tell them you're too busy investigating my boobs?"

  * * *

  While Officer Connel was being notified about the almost-dead man who had been in some kind of trouble, and had responded to the little ninety bed hospital that served Pembroke, Lou Anne - known to most of the town as Lulu, a name she wasn't enthralled with, but was stuck with anyway - raised another uproar when she got to work.

  "What in the nine hells happened to you?" asked Hank, when she stomped in the front door of the diner.

  "I almost ran over somebody," she moaned. "He was lying in the road, half dead. I just dropped him off at the hospital."

  "It looks like you just gutted a deer," said Hank.

  Lou Anne looked down at her coat, which was smeared red with blood. There were twigs, and mud and water mixed in with it. It looked like she'd been rolling around on the ground.

  "You can't come to work looking like that," objected Hank. There were three customers in The Early Girl and all of them were looking at Lou Anne with interest.

  "Are you telling me you want me to take the night off?" asked Lou Anne, a dangerous tone in her voice. "I couldn't just leave him there to die."

  She took her coat off. Her uniform, under the coat was fine. Her knees were white from the cold, and wet from the snow, but a towel would fix that.

  "See? I'm okay. It's just the coat that got dirty."

  She looked dismally at the coat, holding it up to examine it. She was pretty sure it was ruined. It was a good one too, with down filling.

  "Damn!" she moaned.

  "Look on the bright side," said Hank, grinning. "At least you finally found yourself a man."

  * * *

  About an hour later, Mitch walked into the diner. He stopped to brush off the snow that had almost covered him on the way from the car to the building.

  "Coming down hard," he said.

  "I didn't do anything wrong," said Lou Anne, automatically.

  "I never said you did," said Mitch. "You got any coffee that's hot and won't spill?"

  "Ha ... ha," said Lou Anne. "I just found him lying in the middle of the road, over on Hopkins Lane. That's all I know."

  "Who said I was here to talk about him?" asked Mitch. "Maybe I'm just hungry."

  "You want something to eat?" yelled Hank.

  "No, I've got too much to do. Lou Anne has managed to find herself a real puzzle."

  "He's not mine!" said Lou Anne. "What was I supposed to do, just leave him there?"

  "No, of course not," said Mitch. "You did t
he right thing. You probably saved his life. I just need to ask you some questions, that's all."

  "She's on the clock," grumped Hank.

  Mitch looked around. There was one customer, a trucker, and he was dozing in a booth. Mitch didn't blame him. It wasn't a fit night out for man nor dog.

  "Official business," he said, trying to make it sound ominous.

  "At least order something," complained Hank.

  "Okay, French fries with creamed gravy," said Mitch. "You want something, too, Lulu?"

  "I don't eat lunch until four," said Lou Anne.

  "Your call," said Mitch. "This won't take long."

  He knew she wouldn't have much information, but he needed to try to nail down exactly where she had found the man. The glass indicated there had been a car crash of some kind. The alleged bullet wound complicated things, but if he could find the car, he could probably find more evidence, and it might tell him enough to know what he was dealing with. Things like this just didn't happen in Pembroke. It was a nice, quiet little town, and he liked it that way.

  She wasn't a lot of help. She knew she'd gone up the hill, and she knew it was just past a bend in the road. The problem was that there were a dozen bends in that road, where it paralleled the river. He asked her about tracks, even though, at the rate the snow had been falling, they wouldn't be there anymore. He was quite sure he wouldn't be able to find the car by tracks. The best she could do was to say she was pretty sure that it had been at the first curve after topping the hill.

  It was two in the morning, and there was a blizzard out there. There wasn't much he could do anyway, so he sat and chatted when he ran out of questions. Hank brought the French fries, and sat down with them.

  "I saw your dark-skinned friend," said Mitch, around a mouthful of fries. "She's on the warpath again."

  "What about this time?" asked Lou Anne.

  "She says I keep looking at her chest," said Mitch.

  "Well, you do," said Lou Anne. "You look at mine all the time, too."

  Mitch's eyes went straight to her breasts. It was the first time he'd looked at them since he got there.

  "See!" said Lou Anne.

  "You just called my attention to them," said Mitch. "I'm a man, after all." He grinned. "And both of you have a nice set."

  "You're a pig," snorted Lou Anne. "I'm going to tell Carla."

  "That's what Jess said too," said Mitch, unconcerned. He'd been in an on again/off again romance with Carla for five years. She wanted to get married and have a family, but Mitch didn't think he could support a family on his salary, and it was his firm belief that his wife, if he ever had one, would not work.

  "We should," groused Lou Anne. "You flirt with us all the time."

  "You flirt back," pointed out the policeman.

  "Only sometimes," said Lou Anne, as if that settled things.

  "When are you going to make some man happy?" asked Mitch.

  "When I find a man who deserves to be happy," she snapped. "I have to find somebody for Jess first."

  "Good luck," said Mitch. "She's the only black woman in fifty miles, more than likely."

  "She's a sweet, sensitive woman!" insisted Lou Anne. "She can't help it if she's black. It shouldn't matter anyway!"

  "Just like your haircut shouldn't matter," said Mitch, looking at the bare side of her scalp that was exposed.

  "Don't go there," said Hank. "You'll get her all riled up."

  "Are we done here?" asked Lou Anne, her voice tight. "I have salt shakers to fill."

  "Don't go away mad," said Mitch, grinning. "I like your hair just fine."

  The change that came over Lou Anne was startling. She smiled, a lazy, friendly kind of smile - the kind of smile that made a man's groin tighten up. This would have been the point in time that small wagers would have been made, had there been any regulars there.

  "Aren't you just the sweetest man," she cooed. "I'll be sure to tell Carla you like my hair." She got up. "You want some coffee with that?"

  "No Ma'am!" said Mitch. "I need to get going. That fella was in a car before you found him, and I need to find it." He turned to Hank. "Thanks for the fries. Put them on my tab?"

  "Two-forty-seven," said Hank dryly. "Tax included."

  Mitch got out his wallet and fished out three ones.

  "Keep the change," he said. "As a tip for Lulu."

  "I'll be sure to tell Carla what a big tipper you are, too," said Lou Anne sweetly. "Y'all come back soon, now, you hear?"

  Chapter Three

  It was three in the morning and Detective Sergeant Jim Harper had to piss again. All that coffee he'd been drinking - along with being in his late forties - was taking its toll, but it had to be done to stay awake. Reports would be expected to be ready for distribution in the morning. The fucking mayor was sticking his nose into it, as if the entire law enforcement hierarchy wasn't bad enough. Lonny Hildebrand, the Captain of Detectives, had already pissed himself earlier in the evening, when Harper had had the balls to call up the governor's mansion and ask Mrs. Custer to come in for an interview.

  "We don't call the fucking governor's wife in for an interview!" Hildebrand had choked. "You get your ass over to Albany and talk to her! And you'd better fucking salute the fucking flag pole in front of the fucking mansion when you get there!"

  "Gosh," said Harper, trying to look mournful. "I'd be happy to do that, Captain, except that she said she'd be happy to come see us. She'll be here at ten, tomorrow morning."

  "You actually fucking talked to Mrs. Custer her fucking self?" Hildebrand looked like he was going to have a stroke. He deflated, slumping into a nearby chair. "Ohhhhh," he moaned. "Fuck me to tears ... I'm getting too old for this shit."

  Harper decided not to point out that the captain was ten years younger than he was, and had gotten the appointment to his position only because his father had friends on the force. If the idiot quit, there would be a kegger thrown by the detectives who'd suffered under him.

  "Take it easy," said Jim in a soothing voice. "I've been doing this a while. I know how not to ruffle her feathers. It will be fine. Why don't you go on home and relax? I'll have the report on your desk when you get here in the morning, with copies for the chief and the mayor. I'll give you two extra copies for whoever else decides this is their business too. We've got the perps. The rest of this is just a formality."

  Captain Hildebrand looked hopeful.

  "Okay," he said. "But please don't screw this up, Jimmy. You got anything on the good Samaritan yet?"

  "Just some paint scrapings," sighed Harper. "The lab should be able to give us a make and model tomorrow sometime. Then we can start looking for it. As best we can tell, that's who Moe was shooting at, and if there are bullet holes, it should be a piece of cake to find."

  * * *

  Mitch Connel stood on the edge of the road, peering down the incline, where his flashlight simply reflected light off of falling snowflakes, rather than illuminating the terrain. Just enough light got past the falling snow that he could see bent and torn underbrush. This had to be the place, but he couldn't see far enough to spot the car.

  He'd have to come back in the morning.

  If the roads were passable.

  He got back in the department's 4WD and slipped and slid back to town. The office was warm, and the snow in his hair started melting immediately. He sat down at the desk and flipped open the manila folder that had only a single piece of paper in it. All he had were two names and the possibility of a bullet wound.

  On impulse he pulled open a desk drawer and pulled out a black hardback law enforcement directory for the state of New York. He'd already found the address on the driver's license on Google maps. Now he had to figure out which precinct might cover that part of Long Island. Half an hour later, feeling helpless, he dialed a number.

  "Nine one one, what is your emergency, please?" came a bored voice.

  "I didn't dial 911, said Mitch, I called the Nassau County PD."

  "What is your eme
rgency, please?" asked the voice.

  "I don't have an emergency. I need to talk to missing persons."

  "Reporting a missing person is not an emergency, sir," said the voice. "Please clear the line and call the administrative number in the morning."

  There was a click in Mitch's ear.