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 final step. Either they set out with the intention of killing themselves, and find 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 Griffin 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 officers 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 sacrifice was getting only thirteen miles to the gallon, but Morland reckoned the town could afford that small gesture on his behalf.
Hayley appeared 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 flick 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.
But in the still, dark corners of his mind, Morland was starting to feel that it might be for the best if Hayley Conyer made way for another. It would take her death to do it, for she would never relinquish control while there was still breath in her body, but it was time that the Conyer reign came to a close. There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one’s nature. Morland himself was still a work in progress after two decades of marriage, but he liked to think that his wife might be as well. Hayley Conyer, on the other hand, simply grew more resolute in her self-belief, more intransigent in her views and more ready to embrace the use of dictats to get her way. She was helped by the rules of the board, which gave the chief selectman the equivalent of two votes. It meant that even if the board was evenly divided on an issue, Hayley’s side would triumph, and she could force a stalemate with only one other selectman on her side. It was also a simple fact that the rest of the board combined had less testosterone than she had. It was increasingly left to Morland to try to deal with Hayley, and to encourage her to moderate her behavior, but he had been having less and less success in recent months. A body left hanging in a Portland basement was testament to that.
‘I was just admiring your car,’ said Morland.
‘You going to tell me that I need to replace it too?’ she said.
‘Not unless pieces of it start coming off on the highway and injuring folk, although that’s starting to seem increasingly likely.’
She folded her arms over her chest, the way she did at meetings when she wanted to let people know that she had given up listening to their arguments, and her decision was made. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, and her breasts hung low beneath her shirt. With her flowered skirt and her sandaled feet and her long gray hair held back by a scarf, she came across as the typical earth mother, all bean sprouts and wheatgrass and organic milk. It wasn’t entirely inapt, even if it didn’t even hint at the hardness beneath.
‘It’s mine,’ she said, ‘and I like it.’
‘You’re only holding on to it because the Thomas Soulebys of this world keep telling you to get rid of it,’ he said. ‘If they started stroking it and admiring it, you’d sell it for scrap in a heartbeat.’
Her scowl softened. Morland still had a way of disarming her that so many others did not. His father had enjoyed the same gift. Daniel Morland’s relationship with Hayley Conyer had been almost flirtatious, at least when his wife wasn’t around. Whether Hayley chose to embrace sexual activity or not, she was still an attractive woman, and Alina Morland wasn’t about to stand by and let her husband play patty-cake with her just to ensure the smooth running of the town. Neither had Alina been concerned at the power Hayley wielded as chief selectman, because that was all politics, and this was about a wife and her husband. The town could have decided to make Hayley Conyer its official queen, and Alina would still have knocked her crown off for stirring even the slightest of sexual feelings in her husband.