Ruski’s was a Portland institution, opening early and serving food until late. It had long been a destination for those whose working hours meant that breakfast was eaten whenever they happened to want it, which was why Ruski’s served it all day. On Sundays it was a magnet for regulars, including cops and firefighters from anywhere within an easy drive of Portland who wanted somewhere dark and friendly in which to kill an afternoon. It boasted darts, a pretty good jukebox, a shortage of places to sit, and it never changed. It was what it was: a neighborhood bar where the prices were better than the food, and the food was good.
Macy was sitting by the window when I walked up, drinking and chatting with a patrol cop named Terrill Nix. I knew Nix a little because one of his brothers was a cop out in Scarborough. Nix was in his late forties, I guessed, and probably already thinking about cashing out. His hair was thinning, and his face had assumed a default expression of pained disappointment. The remains of a hangover special – hash, toast, eggs, home fries – lay on the plate beside him, but he didn’t look like he was trying to beat down a hard night. His eyes were bright and clear. He could probably see all the way to retirement.
Macy looked like Macy: small, dark, with quick eyes and an easy smile. Damn. I tried to remember why I hadn’t called her again. Oh yeah. Life, whatever that was. And some dying.
Nix spotted me before Macy did, as she had her back to the door. He nudged Macy’s left leg with his right foot to alert her. It didn’t look as though there was anything between them, just two cops who had happened to cross paths in Ruski’s, where cops crossed paths with one another all the time. Anyway, Nix’s wife would have emasculated him and left him to bleed out before decorating the hood of her car with the pieces if she even caught a whiff of another woman on him, not to mention the fact that Nix’s brother had married Nix’s wife’s sister. The whole family would have helped to weigh down his corpse in the Scarborough marshes.
‘Charlie,’ said Nix. ‘Detective Macy, do you know Charlie Parker, our local celebrity PI?’
Macy’s initial surprise at seeing me gave way to a lopsided grin.
‘Yes, I do. We had dinner once.’
‘No shit?’ said Nix.
‘Mr Parker never called for a second date.’
‘No shit?’ said Nix, again. He clucked at me like a disappointed schoolmarm. ‘Hurtful,’ he opined.
‘Uncouth,’ said Macy.
‘Maybe he’s here to make amends.’
‘I don’t see any flowers.’
‘There’s always the tab.’
‘There is that,’ said Macy. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I’d come in. She wasn’t flirting, but she was enjoying herself.
‘So if he’s not here to apologize for blowing you off, why is he here?’ said Nix.
‘Yes, why are you here?’ said Macy.
‘He’s going to put trouble on someone’s plate,’ said Nix.
‘Are you going to put trouble on someone’s plate?’ said Macy.
‘Not if I can help it,’ I said, just happy to be getting a word in at last now that Nichols & May had paused for breath. ‘I had a couple of questions about the Jude case. Your name came up in connection with it.’
Nix and Macy exchanged a look, but Nix left it up to Macy to comment if she chose. She was, after all, the detective.
‘Small world,’ said Macy.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Nix was first responder,’ said Macy. ‘And there is no “Jude case” – unless,’ she added, ‘you know different.’
‘It was a nice, clean hanging,’ said Nix, and I knew what he meant. You took those ones when they came along. They were paperwork, and not much else.
I pointed at their bottles, which were mostly suds. ‘You want another?’
Nix was drinking a Miller High Life. There was something about Ruski’s that made people want to do strange stuff like drink High Life. Macy was on Rolling Rock. Both of them agreed to let me spend my money on them, and Nix wondered aloud if buying a drink constituted a second date in my world. I ignored the peanut gallery and ordered the drinks, along with a Rolling Rock for myself as well. I tried to remember the last time I’d ordered a Rolling Rock, but couldn’t. I suspected a fake ID might have been involved.
Nix, I noticed, had the sports section of the Press Herald beside him, open to the basketball page.
‘You a fan?’ I asked.
‘My kid’s a Yachtsman,’ he said.
The Yachtsmen were Falmouth High’s basketball team. The previous season they’d taken the kind of beating from their local rivals Yarmouth that usually requires years of therapy to overcome: 20–1 in the regional final. They had looked dead and buried, but so far this season they’d only been beaten once, by York, and had won their first sixteen games by an average margin of more than twenty points. Now they had the state final in their sights, and Coach Halligan, who had also taken Falmouth to nine state soccer titles in his twenty-six-year career, was a candidate for sainthood.
‘Better season than last,’ I said.
‘They got stronger kids this year,’ said Nix. ‘My boy plays soccer too, and he skis. Kid is built like a racehorse, and he’s got another year left. He’s ready for the move to Class A.’
He took a long tug on his beer. Once again, he was leaving it to Macy to do the heavy lifting.
‘So, what do you want to know about Jude?’ said Macy.
‘How was he found?’
‘911 call from a public phone on Congress. No name given. We figure it was one of his homeless buddies.’
‘Anything odd about it?’
She looked to Nix, who thought about the question. ‘It was an unfinished dirt basement, L-shaped, so kind of split in two by the angle of the walls. It looked like someone else had slept in there that night. There was a depression in the earth, and we found a couple of beer caps. Whoever it was had also taken a dump, and used a copy of that day’s newspaper to clean himself off. But the ME’s report said that Jude had been dead for at least thirty-six hours when we found him. You do the math.’
‘Somebody spent a night with the corpse.’
‘They maybe slept with their back to it, but yeah. You know, it was wicked cold, and if you don’t have anywhere else to go …’
‘What about his possessions?’
‘Sleeping bag was gone,’ said Macy, ‘and it looked like his pack had been rifled for valuables.’
‘Any money found?’
‘Money? Like what kind of money?’
‘Probably more than a hundred dollars. Not much in the normal scheme of things, but a lot to a guy like that.’
‘People have died for less.’
‘Amen.’
‘No, there was no money. What, you think he might have been killed for it?’
‘Like you said, people have died for less.’
‘Sure,’ said Macy, ‘but it’s hard to hang a man who’s struggling against it, and harder still to make it look like a suicide. The ligature marks were consistent with the downward momentum of the body, and the ME found no excessive injury to the neck. The victim did scratch at the rope, but that’s not unusual.’
‘Any idea where the rope might have come from?’
‘Nope. It wasn’t new, though. Like Jude, it had been around the block a couple of times. It has been cut to make the noose.’
‘At the funeral I heard that he had no alcohol or narcotics in his body.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Which is unusual.’
‘Depends on how you read it,’ said Nix. ‘If you’re talking Dutch courage then, yes, you might have expected him to take something to ease the pain. On the other hand, if you’re looking for evidence of a homicide made to look like a hanging suicide, then some drugs or alcohol might be useful if you wanted to subdue the victim first.’
I let it go.
‘The money is the other thing,’ I said.
‘How come?’ said Macy. She was interested now. I could see it in her eyes. A lot of detectives wouldn’t have cared much to have a snoop question a neat, closed case, but Macy wasn’t one of them. I doubted if she had ever been that kind of cop, and whatever happened out on Sanctuary had done nothing to change her. If anything, it had simply strengthened that aspect of her character. She hadn’t told me much about what had occurred on the island beyond what was already in the official record, and I hadn’t pressed her on it, but I’d heard stories. Sanctuary was a strange place, even by the standards of this part of the world, and some of the bodies from that night had never been found.