Here in Concord, New Hampshire, for whatever reason, it’s hanger town. Bodies slumped in closets, in sheds, in unfinished basements. A week ago Friday, a furniture-store owner in East Concord tried to do it the Hollywood way, hoisted himself from an overhanging length of gutter with the sash of his bathrobe, but the gutter pipe snapped, sent him tumbling down onto the patio, alive but with four broken limbs.
“Anyhow, it’s a tragedy,” Dotseth concludes blandly. “Every one of them a tragedy.”
He shoots a quick look at his watch; he’s ready to boogie. But I’m still down in a squat, still running my narrowed eyes over the body of the insurance man. For his last day on earth, Peter Zell chose a rumpled tan suit and a pale blue button-down dress shirt. His socks almost but don’t quite match, both of them brown, one dark and one merely darkish, both loose in their elastic, slipping down his calves. The belt around his neck, what Dr. Fenton will call the ligature, is a thing of beauty: shiny black leather, the letters B&R etched into the gold buckle.
“Detective? Hello?” Dotseth says, and I look up at him and I blink. “Anything else you’d like to share?”
“No, sir. Thank you.”
“No sweat. Pleasure as always, young man.”
“Except, wait.”
“Sorry?”
I stand up straight and turn and face him. “So. I’m going to murder somebody.”
A pause. Dotseth waiting, amused, exaggerated patience. “All righty.”
“And I live in a time and a town where people are killing themselves all over the place. Right and left. It’s hanger town.”
“Okay.”
“Wouldn’t my move be, kill my victim and then arrange it to appear as a suicide?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe. But that right there?” Dotseth jabs a cheerful thumb toward the slumped corpse. “That’s a suicide.”
He winks, pushes open the door of the men’s room, and leaves me alone with Peter Zell.
“So what’s the story, Stretch? Are we waiting for the meat wagon on this one, or cuttin’ down the piñata ourselves?”
I level Officer Michelson a stern and disapproving look. I hate that kind of casual fake tough-guy morbidity, “meat wagon” and “piñata” and all the rest of it, and Ritchie Michelson knows that I hate it, which is exactly why he’s goading me right now. He’s been waiting at the door of the men’s room, theoretically guarding the crime scene, eating an Egg McMuffin out of its yellow cellophane wrapper, pale grease dripping down the front of his uniform shirt.
“Come on, Michelson. A man is dead.”
“Sorry, Stretch.”
I’m not crazy about the nickname, either, and Ritchie knows that also.
“Someone from Dr. Fenton’s office should be here within the hour,” I say, and Michelson nods, burps into his fist.
“You’re going to turn this over to Fenton’s office, huh?” He balls up his breakfast-sandwich wrapper, chucks it into the trash. “I thought she wasn’t doing suicides anymore.”
“It’s at the discretion of the detective,” I say, “and in this case, I think an autopsy is warranted.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t really care. Trish McConnell, meanwhile, is doing her job. She’s on the far side of the restaurant, a short and vigorous woman with a black ponytail jutting out from under her patrolman’s cap. She’s got a knot of teenagers cornered by the soda fountain. Taking statements. Notebook out, pencil flying, anticipating and fulfilling her supervising investigator’s instructions. Officer McConnell, I like.
“You know, though,” Michelson is saying, talking just to talk, just getting my goat, “headquarters says we’re supposed to fold up the tent pretty quick on these.”
“I know that.”
“Community stability and continuity, that whole drill.”
“Yes.”
“Plus, the owner’s ready to flip, with his bathroom being closed.”
I follow Michelson’s gaze to the counter and the red-faced proprietor of the McDonald’s, who stares back at us, his unyielding gaze made mildly ridiculous by the bright yellow shirt and ketchup-colored vest. Every minute of police presence is a minute of lost profit, and you can just tell the guy would be over here with a finger in my face if he wanted to risk an arrest on Title XVI. Next to the manager is a gangly adolescent boy, his thick mullet fringing a counterman’s visor, smirking back and forth between his disgruntled boss and the pair of policemen, unsure who’s more deserving of his contempt.
“He’ll be fine,” I tell Michelson. “If this were last year, the whole scene of crime would be shut down for six to twelve hours, and not just the men’s john, either.”
Michelson shrugs. “New times.”
I scowl and turn my back on the owner. Let him stew. It’s not even a real McDonald’s. There are no more real McDonald’s. The company folded in August of last year, ninety-four percent of its value having evaporated in three weeks of market panic, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of brightly colored empty storefronts. Many of these, like the one we’re now standing in, on Concord’s Main Street, have subsequently been transformed into pirate restaurants: owned and operated by enterprising locals like my new best friend over there, doing a bustling business in comfort food and no need to sweat the franchise fee.
There are no more real 7-Elevens, either, and no more real Dunkin’ Donuts. There are still real Paneras, but the couple who owns the chain have undergone a meaningful spiritual experience and restaffed most of the restaurants with coreligionists, so it’s not worth going in there unless you want to hear the Good News.
I beckon McConnell over, let her and Michelson know we’re going to be investigating this as a suspicious death, try to ignore the sarcastic lift of Ritchie’s eyebrows. McConnell, for her part, nods gravely and flips her notebook to a fresh page. I give the crime-scene officers their marching orders: McConnell is to finish collecting statements, then go find and inform the victim’s family. Michelson is to stay here by the door, guarding the scene until someone from Fenton’s office arrives to collect the corpse.
“You got it,” says McConnell, flipping closed her notebook.
“Beats working,” says Michelson.
“Come on, Ritchie,” I say. “A man is dead.”
“Yeah, Stretch,” he says. “You said that already.”
I salute my fellow officers, nod goodbye, and then I stop short, one hand on the handle of the parking-lot-side door of the McDonald’s, because there’s a woman walking anxiously this way through the parking lot, wearing a red winter hat but no coat, no umbrella against the steady drifts of snow, like she just ran out of somewhere to get here, thin work shoes slipping on the slush of the parking lot. Then she sees me, sees me looking at her, and I catch the moment when she knows that I’m a policeman, and her brow creases with worry and she turns on her heel and hurries away.
I drive north on State Street away from the McDonald’s in my department-issued Chevrolet Impala, carefully maneuvering through the quarter inch of frozen precipitation on the roadway. The side streets are lined with parked cars, abandoned cars, drifts of snow collecting on their windshields. I pass the Capitol Center for the Arts, handsome red brick and wide windows, glance into the packed coffee shop that someone’s opened across the street. There’s a snaking line of customers outside Collier’s, the hardware store—they must have new merchandise. Lightbulbs. Shovels. Nails. There’s a high-school-age kid up on a ladder, crossing out prices and writing in new ones with a black marker on a cardboard sign.