Back outside, I stripped off my containment suit, balled it up, and stuffed it into a red garbage bag J.P. had left for that purpose. Ron got out of the car, leading a woman in her forties by the elbow.
“Lieutenant, this is June Dutelle.”
I shook her hand, noticing as I did so that she seemed curiously remote from her surroundings, as if she’d been delivered to the wrong airport and couldn’t speak the language. “Glad to meet you,” I told her. “Sorry it’s under such circumstances. Why don’t we go back into the car? I’m freezing.”
We all three returned to the warm embrace of the patrol car, seeing through its windows the tired old house beside us, its peeling, battered hulk flickering in the strobes like an advertisement of the grief within. From the front seat I leaned forward and killed the flashing lights. Ron and June Dutelle were sitting in the back.
“Mrs. Dutelle was telling me,” Ron began, “that she’d been having trouble locating her daughter Brenda for over a day. She didn’t answer the phone, missed a date they’d set up, and didn’t come to the door when Mrs. Dutelle knocked on it.”
I couldn’t resist smiling at his stilted use of her name, remembering Edith Rudd. “Do you prefer June or Mrs. Dutelle?” I asked her.
She smiled timidly. “June’s fine. Dutelle was my husband’s name.”
I just barely heard Ron sigh. “When your daughter didn’t answer the door, why didn’t you walk in to see what was up?”
“That was a rule she had,” June answered. “She set boundaries. She said that if more mothers and daughters did the same thing, there wouldn’t be so much trouble between them. I was never allowed inside unless I was invited. ’Course, all those boundaries were for me. I never closed any doors to her.” Her voice gained an edge of irritation. “Any time of night or day, I was always willing to babysit, sometimes with no notice at all. Brenda would just appear and drop him off, dirty diaper and all.”
“She worked odd hours?”
June Dutelle laughed bitterly. “Her idea of work was to stand in line at the welfare office. This was when she wanted to see her friends and didn’t want a baby hanging around her neck, ruining things.”
“I take it the boy’s father isn’t in the picture?”
Her eyes widened. “Jimmy hasn’t been near any of us since Brenda first got pregnant.”
“What’s Jimmy’s full name?” Ron asked quietly.
“James. A. Croteau. Lived in Burlington, last I heard.”
“So your daughter’s name is Dutelle?”
June shook her head sadly. “Oh, no. They got married. Lasted about a month. I suppose she still is married, legally.”
Ron shot me a glance at June’s use of the present tense.
“This is a pretty expensive house for a single person on welfare,” I noted. “Did you help her out with the rent?”
The older woman’s face shut down. “You should see the hole I live in. Brenda has her own money-I don’t know how. I didn’t want to know.”
“Who did she hang out with?” I asked.
June looked through the side window for a moment. Her voice was wistful when she answered. “I don’t know that, either. Not really. Those boundaries she talked about went a long way. I was just the babysitter, when you get down to it.”
I let her silence fill the small space inside the car, until its own weight prompted her to continue. “She has a girlfriend named Janice Litchfield. She’s a wild one. I hold her responsible for most of what Brenda got into. Then there’s Jamie Good, who’s anything but.”
Ron gave a slight shake of his head as he wrote down the names in his notepad. We all knew Jamie Good.
“The others,” June continued, “I don’t remember. They come and go. Most of the time, I never hear their names anyway. Janice and Jamie were the most regular. They go back years-all went to school together.”
“From what you just said,” I commented, “I’m guessing Brenda got herself into a jam once or twice?”
When June Dutelle turned back to face me, her face was damp with tears. She’d gotten so practiced at suppressing her feelings, I hadn’t noticed her slide from shock into grief.
“Well,” she barely whispered, “I guess that’s over now.”
Through the rear window behind her, I saw two shadows approaching up the street. “It’s okay,” I said softly. “We can finish this later. Do you have someone at home to keep you company? Or someone who can stay the night?”
She nodded. “I’ll be okay.”
“Ron here will see about getting you home. I take it you drove here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all right. We’ll have someone bring your car home, too. I don’t want you driving yourself right now.”
“Thank you.”
I slipped out of the car and met the two people I’d recognized through the window: the local assistant medical examiner, a GP in real life named Alfred Gould, and Carol Green, one of Gail’s fellow deputies from the State’s Attorney’s office.
“Is it just my imagination,” I asked her, out of earshot of the car, “or are you the only one they allow out after hours?”
She gave me a tired smile. “Just lucky, Joe. Besides, it’s just barely quitting time. Is this as bad as it sounds?”
I escorted them both to J.P.’s pile of equipment. “’Fraid so, and we’re doing it by the numbers, so I’d appreciate your both suiting up and staying on the paper carpet J.P.’s laid out inside.”
Gould put down his bag to comply, asking, “How fresh are they?”
“A day or so. There’s no heat in the house, so they’re both frozen solid. The hypothesis right now is the stove died after the mother was killed. Whoever did her in may not have even known about the child till later-not that he cared even then.”
Carol pulled one leg of the overalls on angrily. “Yeah, well, if you guys catch the son of a bitch, he’s going to find out we don’t give a damn what he knew or didn’t know. He’s got two murders on his hands, like it or not.”
“This blind justice talking?” I asked, half in jest, a little startled by her vehemence.
“Not if I can help it,” she answered.
7
The REFORMER’S Alice Simms was going to hold me to my promise. She intercepted me as I tried to duck under the police line as far from the thinned-out crowd as I could get.
“Walk you to your car, Joe?”
“Sure. Still too early to say much, though.”
“Try me.”
I gave her little more than what she and a few hundred other eavesdroppers had already heard over the scanner. “Appears to be a double homicide, woman and infant, unknown manner and cause, unknown identities, unknown time, unknown suspect or suspects.”
“You find a weapon?”
“Not so far, but we’ve barely begun looking-don’t want to rush things,” I added, hoping the philosophy might be catching.
It wasn’t, of course. “Was it a gun, a knife? What?” She was walking and writing in a notepad at the same time. Her head ducked down, her hair covering her face, she was headed straight for a telephone pole.
I grabbed her elbow and guided her clear. “Watch your step.”
She looked up quickly. “Could it be a murder/suicide?”
“I can’t say that for sure.”
She stopped and dropped her hands to her sides. “Well, say something, for crying out loud. Whose house is it, at least?”
I shook my head. “You’re moving too fast.” I checked my watch. “You’ve got five hours till deadline, more if you push it. Let me do the basic homework so we don’t both look like idiots later, okay? I’ll call you, I promise.”
She grudgingly went along with it, although I knew she’d pursue other sources in the meantime. She snapped her pad closed and let me leave in peace.
Heading back to the office, however, I decided to test Willy’s theory about Dave Raymo, who was supposed to be laboring in front of a keyboard, writing his report. I reached for the radio under my dash and called him up.