“Was David ever violent?”
She took a few bites before answering. “Yes, in a manipulative kind of way. He could get people to do nasty things. It got to be a problem at school.”
I was recalling the anthropologist’s description of the skeleton on Beverly Hillstrom’s autopsy table. “He was left-handed?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“With perfect teeth-no cavities?”
“No cavities, but he had a chipped front tooth from a football accident. He had it capped by the dentist so it looked like new, but he stopped playing after that.”
I remembered Hillstrom’s request. “Is the dentist still around?”
She shook her head several times. “Oh, Lord, no. He died years and years ago and the business closed.”
We had both finished eating by now. “Do you have any pictures of David?”
She rose slowly to her feet. “Come with me. I’ll show you what I’ve got. It isn’t much.”
We left the kitchen for a short back hallway and entered a tiny living room with a wooden chair facing a television set. An armchair sat in the corner near the window and the walls were lined with shelves stuffed with odds and ends-boxes, bundles, some books, lots of knickknacks.
“Sit there,” she ordered, pointing to the armchair. “I can’t use it, anyway.” She grinned suddenly. “Couldn’t get up if I did.”
I took my place and she began slowly checking the shelves, muttering to herself. She stopped at one point and warned me, “It’s not an album. None of them was very big on picture taking, but I do have a shot or two of David… If I could just find the right box.”
“You wouldn’t have one of him grinning, would you?”
She paused in her excavation and looked down at me, her face quizzical. “Why would you want that?”
It would have been perfectly all right to tell her the truth. There was nothing confidential about the skeleton we’d found back in Vermont, but somehow I felt it would have been grossly inappropriate-even gratuitous-to do so. The fact that she hadn’t asked a single question about why I was here indicated to me that despite her seeming flat-footedness, Agnes Nilsson had been as much a victim of this disastrous family as any one of its members, perhaps more so, since she had chosen to remain in its midst, even over her husband’s objections.
So I shrugged at her question and responded lightly, “Pictures of people grinning are usually more helpful. The face looks more animated, more like what people are used to.”
She nodded, as if that made perfect sense to her. “I think I have a couple of him at a fair we had here. I can’t remember if he’s smiling or not…”
Suddenly, she looked up. “Of course. There’s a perfect shot of him in his college yearbook.” She handed a shoebox to me and rose to attack the shelves once more.
I cradled the box on my lap and began flipping through the slim collection, catching glimpses of landscapes and pets and Bernie and small sailboats. I found the half-dozen taken at the fair and scrutinized them, trying to locate the handsome young man with the chipped front tooth. What I found froze me in place.
“Here we go,” Mrs. Nilsson finally announced, pulling out a book and flipping through it. “I never liked this picture much-looked much too phony to me-but maybe it’ll suit you; it does look like him.”
She thrust the book at me, open to a large, clear, full-face shot of David Pendergast, his mouth wide in a toothy grin. I looked at it absentmindedly, knowing it was exactly what I was after but suddenly finding it of only minor interest.
I nodded agreeably and put the book aside, showing her the picture I’d found in the box. “When was this taken? I mean, how old would David have been?”
She sidled over next to me so we could both look at it together. “Well, he was in college in Chicago, at the University of Illinois. It was shortly after his parents died, so that would put him in his early twenties. He’d come up on vacation.”
I pointed to a figure standing to one side and slightly behind David. “Do you know who this is?”
She peered more closely at the picture. “That was a friend of his, I think-a boy he’d brought up with him from college.” She straightened and stared off into space. “They stayed here a week. You’d think I’d remember his name.”
“How about Abraham Fuller?”
26
Agnes Nilsson hadn’t reacted to Abraham Fuller’s name, nor had she remembered anything else about him, except that he, like everyone David gathered about him, had seemed diminished somehow in his presence. Nevertheless, my satisfaction at having finally linked Fuller to Pendergast remained complete. The nagging uncertainty that had come with everyone’s inability to recognize Fuller from his picture was finally quieted, along with some of my own frustration at producing so little for the time and money I had spent on this case.
Which is why, after checking into a motel on the highway heading back to the Marquette airport, I called Brandt and gave him a full report.
“Have you found anything at your end?” I asked after I’d finished.
“Yeah, actually, we have. We’ve been concentrating on Coyner, since he’s the only one we can actually lay our hands on. Kunkle remembered that when Sammie gave you her account of Coyner’s life history, she said his fortunes made an upturn ‘fresh from the funeral.’ That started him wondering about who’d paid for the funeral, since Coyner was supposedly up to his ears in debt.
“Kunkle can be a little heavy-handed, so I sent Sammie to interview the mortician. Turns out he’s ancient-at the Retreat now and a little out of it. After some head scratching, he remembered that Coyner did have a couple of unusual friends hanging around, helping with the arrangements, including the financial end.”
“Unusual how?”
“Long hair, bell-bottoms, weird smell. She showed him Fuller’s photograph, but it was too long ago and the old man’s eyes aren’t what they used to be. He said he was struck more by the clothes than the faces, anyhow. They seemed odd companions for Coyner to have. Still, it sounds right.”
“And he said there were definitely two of them?”
“Yup.”
“I’ll mail you a copy of Pendergast’s mug shot. Maybe that’ll jar his memory.”
“I doubt it. He’s half-blind. Send the picture, though, ’cause there’s more. Ron started wondering how Coyner would’ve wound up connected to two mysterious hippies. Remember Coyner shooting the bus windows at Hippie Hollow? We’re hoping to find out who was living there back then and show them Fuller’s-and now Pendergast’s-pictures. If the people we’re after were hiding out with the bus crowd, and providence suddenly came knocking in the shape of an alcoholic recluse with a shotgun, financial problems, and a shack out back, it might give us a lead on the machine gunner.”
I recalled that the State’s Attorney had once represented the denizens of Hippie Hollow. “You get Dunn to cooperate?”
Brandt laughed. “Yeah. He’s digging through his files right now. It was a pretty transient crowd, but maybe a few of them are still around. So how soon do you think you’ll be able to wrap things up out there?”
“Shouldn’t be too much longer. I’m going back to Chicago tomorrow. There’re still a few loose ends I hope to clear up fast.”
I knew that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he paid me the courtesy of merely muttering, “The sooner the better.”
I called Norm Runnion next, but not, as it turned out, to share my good news.
“Where are you?” he demanded, his voice sharp and excited.
The hairs on the back of my neck began to tingle. “Still in Marquette. Why?”
“How soon can you get back here?”
I grabbed an airline schedule out of my back pocket, where I’d shoved it absentmindedly. “There’s a flight in ten minutes, but I won’t be able to make it.”
“Catch the one in ten minutes. I’ll call the airport and tell ’em to wait.”