It was Willy Kunkle I sought out concerning the small bombshell Gail had dropped on me late last night.
The center of the detective squad’s main room is a cluster of four modular cubicles, constructed of head-high, interlocking, sound-absorbent panels. Each detective has space enough for a desk, a chair, and maybe a corner in which to pile paperwork-not an environment conducive to loitering. Predictably, that’s where I found Kunkle, leaning back in his chair, his feet up on an impressively littered desk, holding a mail-order weapons catalogue open before him.
He gave me an instinctively peevish look, which I ignored. “Any Satanists around town?” I asked him, knowing an unusual initial approach was often the best way to catch his interest.
His eyebrows rose. “There are some,” he answered with rare caution.
“You ever seen this symbol before?” I showed him the sketch Gail had used in her research.
He frowned slightly. “This the engraving on the tooth?” Kunkle had not been involved in yesterday’s discovery or subsequent neighborhood canvass, and yet it didn’t surprise me he had the details of the case. Knowing everything that was going on inside the department, regardless of how trivial, was second nature to the man, and a telling facet of his personality.
“If you go to the far side of the playground in Crowell Park,” he said, “there’s a six-foot retaining wall at the top of the drop-off leading down to Beech Street. It’s a good hideout in summer-the condoms, syringes, and beer cans tell you that-but one part of the wall has a ton of this shit spray-painted on it-pentangles, upside-down crosses… This one, too.”
“You know what it means or who put it there?”
He shook his head. “Could’ve been the town treasurer. We got so many wackos in this town-Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, who the fuck knows. The Satanists fit right in. You think the bones were some kind of sacrifice?”
I held up both hands. “Down, boy. I’m just looking for a connection. What kind of things do the Satanists do?”
“Depends-they’re pretty half-assed, like most people around here. There aren’t more than six of ’em anyway. They get together and drink chicken blood or whatever. We’ve found squirrels and shit like that nailed to a front door or two, complete with some weird symbols in chalk. A few cats have disappeared that people claimed were used in rituals. But it’s hard to tell what’s real from what’s paranoia.”
“Are there people you could ask? Find out if they’ve gotten more ambitious all of a sudden?”
He tossed the catalogue onto his desk and sighed. “Jesus, just because of some graffiti on a tooth? Why don’t we wait’n see what the lab says? Save me asking a bunch of stupid questions. These people are just dying for a little attention, you know.”
His reaction didn’t surprise me. “Well-run some names through your head. Think about it for a while. You come up with anything, check it out. Otherwise, we’ll wait.”
I returned to my office, knowing I’d get what I’d asked for, and probably more. As dismissive as Willy Kunkle worked hard to appear, he was a driven man, compulsively nosy. I knew he would make damn sure he wasn’t caught by surprise; he’d have all the names and facts I wanted if and when I needed them. As did many people who’d survived lives of chaos and self-destruction, Willy held dearly to his pride and reputation. That his personality grated on everyone around him was of no consequence-what counted was that he was a cog neither easily overlooked nor replaced.
Still, it was with some relief that I got a phone call from Beverly Hillstrom a half-hour later, giving me-I hoped-more than shadowy Satanists to pursue.
Voices over the phone rarely match their owners’ appearance, something blind dates discover all too often, but Beverly Hillstrom’s brought to mind the exact same tall, patrician coolness that she presented in person. A slim, blonde, immaculate middle-aged woman, her diction was grammatical and precise, her manners distinctly old-world, and her ability to put veteran cops in their place with little effort legendary. And yet there was true warmth in her toward those she trusted and respected, a group of which I thankfully was a part.
There were proprieties to be faithfully observed, however, despite a friendship that stretched back years. We never referred to our private lives, never took liberties with social decorum, and always addressed one another by our respective titles. With anyone else, I would have dismissed such unstated ground rules as snotty affectations. With Beverly Hillstrom, I sensed in them a need for order and courtesy, almost a frailty that required nurturing. It was an enigmatic character trait that allowed me to ponder the personality behind it, and occasionally amuse myself with unfounded wild images of her life away from the office.
“You sound relieved to hear from me, Lieutenant. Are you running out of options on this case?”
“You could say that. I just finished telling one of my men to check out all the local Satanists.”
“Ah-the tooth. Is that what that engraving signifies?”
“Supposedly.”
“Well, the tooth might be helpful, although perhaps not for that reason.”
“X-rays?” I blurted out, instantly regretting that I’d rushed her.
There was a telling pause at the other end of the line. “No,” she answered slowly. “X-rays have been taken, of course, and they’ve revealed a badly decayed, albeit previously treated tooth. But I can’t imagine too many dentists having the time to compare any X-rays we could send them to their patient inventories of five thousand or so cases each. It would be a near hopeless task.
“What I was referring to was the gold cap itself-which is actually gold-colored aluminum. I’ve consulted an odontologist colleague of mine up here. She tells me such devices are only rarely used, and then only as temporary stopgaps pending further work.”
When Hillstrom had something hot, she tended to drag it out-a touch of vanity I’d come to patiently accept, considering the usually rewarding results.
“They are apparently nicknamed ‘tin caps,’” she continued, “and their use has a certain psychological elegance I think you’ll find interesting. The X-rays have revealed that the tooth was previously filled-extensively-and that the old filling had failed, explaining the return trip to the dentist for the cap. According to my colleague, since the tooth was already so far gone, the dentist probably had two courses of action left to him-he could prepare the tooth for a permanent cap, as is standard, or, if the patient was too short of funds to afford the roughly six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar cost, he could put on a tin cap for one hundred and seventy-five dollars and tell the patient he or she had six months to find the money.”
“The trick,” and here I could hear the satisfaction in her voice, “is that the tin cap is not only inexpensive, it is also thin-walled, relatively fragile, and not a custom fit. It’s available only in a variety of generic sizes, and every dentist has to improve the fit with added cement, which unfortunately does not hold off further eventual decay. Sooner or later, the patient has to return to the dentist, if for no other reason than the tooth begins to hurt.
“But the plot thickens-I never thought dentists were so devious. It turns out the aluminum cap is chosen not only for its price-about ten dollars each-but because it will only last from six months to a year before the patient eventually bites through it and destroys it. This gives the dentist an even more reliable method of forcing the patient to return for more definitive care.”
I searched through the papers on my desk, quickly locating the close-ups J.P. had given me of the tooth. “So since the cap is aluminum and it hasn’t been bitten through,” I volunteered, “the implications are that a) we’re dealing with a relatively rare dental procedure, and that b) that procedure was done not too long before the victim died.”