A River Red With Blood

Chapter 1

Moxie Castin and I were sitting in the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue. The Bear was quiet that evening; the after-work crowd had departed and there was no sign of any great rush to fill the chairs left vacant. But enough souls remained to lend more life to the Bear—“more” because the Bear was always alive, even when hibernating—and outside it might have been day or night, summer or winter, because the Bear didn’t hold with windows and natural light. Inside, it was, and would always be, the Bear.

Portland was nearing the end of its annual period of transition: a gentle early fall easing into a cooler late one, soon to harden into winter. The smell of the city had been subtly changing since summer’s close, the vegetal, arboreal essence fading as the temperature dropped. The streets of the city were now less crowded, the tourists no longer so obvious, and the younger drifters, the troubled and the lost, were abandoning the Northeast, warned of the chill to come or feeling its approach in their bones. The ones who stayed were mostly older, with the knowledge of past winters to draw on, and were resigned to what must follow. The city, allied with charities and volunteers, would attempt to care for them, because no one with alternatives would choose to spend the season on the streets of Portland, and those months

would be cruel enough without callousness and ignorance to the burden. But then, it seemed to me that we were living in callous, ignorant times.

Moxie was drinking wine, which was an odd choice for the Bear. It wasn’t that the wine was bad, just that nobody went to the Bear for wine, only beer. Ordering wine at the Bear was like going to one of those fancy cheese shops, with hundreds of varieties on offer, and asking for chocolate spread. It defeated the purpose of the exercise.

As usual, Moxie was wearing a tie to make the blind wince, and a suit that started to wrinkle as soon as it touched his skin. Moxie could have been sitting next to a six-­month-­old and the kid would have creased out of sympathy. Only Moxie’s bald head was smooth, gleaming under the lights like a great white egg waiting to be cracked. A couple of the cops at the bar might have liked to give that a try, as Moxie was the state’s best criminal defense lawyer and thus a source of aggravation, but they, like so many of his adversaries, wisely kept any feelings of hostility to themselves. Moxie would have taken them amiss, as would I, but more worryingly, so would Tony and Paulie Fulci, who were

playing Snap on a reinforced table reserved for their use. The zone around the Fulcis was conspicuously unoccupied, perhaps because anyone who didn’t know them was afraid that should the card table break, the Fulcis might start pounding on them in its absence. The Fulcis weren’t very tall, but they were very wide and very strong. It was hard not to feel sorry for the table. Even buttressed, it was difficult to see it lasting much longer.

Each time a massive flattened palm landed on the wood, the man seated with us flinched.

“Do they have to do that?” he asked.

“You could ask them to stop,” said Moxie.

“Would they?”

“They might, but then you’d have to worry about what they did next.”

The man sighed heavily. He was thin and bald, with a face built for sighs. His name was Allen Atwood Alcock, and unlike Moxie, he was far from being the best criminal lawyer in the state, even if he was always in steady employment—or had been until Maine finally instituted a system of public defenders, after years as the only state not to provide them for the indigent accused. In their absence, it hired private attorneys on a case-by-­case basis, one of them Alcock, who did nicely out of the arrangement. In return, a lot of defendants had spent less time behind bars than they might have otherwise, because Alcock was the king of the plea deal. A poor performer in court, he was aware of the shortcoming and did his best to ensure his cases never made it to trial. This wasn’t great news if you didn’t want to cop a plea or, God forbid, you were innocent, but since Alcock’s client base inclined toward the guilty, such conflicts rarely arose.

Alcock was still a contracted attorney, but he wasn’t making as much as before, despite public defenders struggling with their workload and a backlog of cases remaining to be cleared. This was because Allen Atwood Alcock—or Triple A, as nobody called him, Alcock himself excepted—had irritated someone at the Capital Region Public Defenders’ office, or so he claimed, which meant any cases that did come his way were lousy.

“They hate me,” he said. He took another mouthful of Brown Hound Ale and sighed again. Somewhere in Venice, a bridge debated relocating west to be closer to its kin.

“They don’t hate you,” said Moxie. “They just don’t like you. There’s a difference.”

“What difference would that be?”

“The difference between some money and no money.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” said Alcock. “You wear a Rolex.”

“It’s fake.”

“Really?”

“No,” said Moxie, “but that’s what I tell people. I work with criminals. I don’t want them to think I’m wealthy. They might try to rob me.”

Alcock picked at the bowl of chips and salsa before us.

“If I don’t get this business with the defenders’ office sorted soon, I’ll have nothing left worth stealing,” he said. “Any thief would take pity on me, and feel compelled to give instead of take.”

Moxie patted him on the back, causing Alcock to choke briefly on a chip. Allen Atwood Alcock really was a most unhappy man. He wore a wedding ring, and I could only imagine what his wife might be like. If she resembled her husband, only a pitchfork and a gabled window would be required to bring a Grant Wood painting to life.

I ostentatiously checked my watch. It wasn’t a Rolex, fake or otherwise, and I wasn’t interested in the time. I just wanted to signal that I’d now been sitting with Moxie and Alcock for ten minutes and still had no idea why Moxie had asked me to join them. I was also worried that sighing, like yawning, might be contagious at close quarters. If I became a sigher, Sharon Macy would smother me in my sleep, or leave me. Or both.

“I think Mr Parker wishes to know why he’s here,” said Moxie.

Alcock regarded me with watery eyes, like a disappointed bassett hound.

“I have a client who’d like to hire you,” he said. “His name is Ward Vose.”

“What’s he done?” I asked.

“What hasn’t he done? Robbery, burglary of a dwelling, theft of more than ten thousand dollars, theft by unauthorized taking or transfer, liquor smuggling, aggravated criminal mischief.”

Alcock sighed again. “The list goes on. It’s almost admirable in its variety. Curiously, Ward’s not such a bad person. I’ve represented worse.”

“Where is he now?”

“Where do you think? He’s in Maine State Prison, and likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.”

“Is this where you tell me he’s innocent?”

Alcock made a sound like air slowly escaping from a balloon, or the wheezing of an asthmatic kitten. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing.

“Good Lord, no,” he said. “He’s never denied any of it. For Ward, criminality is not so much an occupation as an unignorable calling. It’s just a pity he’s not better at it, though at least he represents a reliable source of income for the legal profession. I always feel a pang of regret when he receives a heavy custodial sentence: the sooner he gets out, the sooner I can begin earning again.”

Alcock resumed looking mournful, but now he was feeling sorry for someone other than himself.

“Ward has had a rough time of it lately,” he continued. “His son died and he wasn’t permitted to attend the funeral.”

If you were bereaved while in a county jail, and you hadn’t galled the sheriff, they’d find a way to escort you to the service, even if they billed you for it later. But at Maine State, you had to pray for the deceased in your cell.

“The death made the papers,” said Moxie. “Ward Vose’s son was Scott Theriault.”

Seventeen-­year-­old Scott Theriault had drowned somewhere up in the Kennebec Valley about a month or so back, close to a plantation known as The Plains, one of the smallest and least-populated communities in the state. The Plains was one of a number of plantations in Somerset County, the concept of a plantation being unique to Maine. While it dated from colonial times, referring to a state of development somewhere between nothing at all and not a whole lot more, the Maine iteration defined a region with a small population, limited self-­government, and no real urge to change the status quo. Some plantations had religious roots, but as far as I knew, the Plains was founded by speculators early in the nineteenth century. Lumber would have been the most reasonable assumption for the purchase, had the investors not cleared tracts of forest to leave the open spaces that gave the plantation its name. That suggested groundwork being laid for a settlement, but if so, it was never built. The Plains survived as an afterthought, an echo of a conversation ended more than a hundred years earlier. It featured on only the most detailed of maps, hooked northeast of The Forks plantation, and was otherwise absorbed into its larger neighbor for the sake of convenience. But it was its own entity, with residents who had been part of the landscape for generations, along with a handful of outsiders carried there by unknown tides, their habitancy marked by trailers left in place for so long that ivy had softened their lines, and RVs with tires so rotted that the rims were sunk into the ground.

Scott Theriault, however, was an inhabitant of a different stripe, closer to an inmate than an occupant. His body was discovered floating in the Austin Stream, a tributary of the Kennebec, days after he’d run away from the Spero School, the behavioral-modification facility in the Plains to which he had been consigned by his family, one of those “tough love” places favored by parents who didn’t really understand the concept of love at all, or only as a synonym for blind obedience. All I knew about the drowning was what I’d read in the papers or heard on the news. Scott’s mother and stepfather “enrolled” him after he’d started acting up at home and been expelled from a pair of more conventional

schools. He hadn’t settled at the Spero, and twice made breaks for freedom, once getting halfway to Augusta before being apprehended and returned to the institution. The third time, he’d gone north instead of south, but he must have fallen badly before entering the water, as his right leg was broken when he was found. His parents had asked for privacy in the aftermath, and that request was being respected. As for the school, it tried to counter any bad publicity by offering restricted tours of its facilities to the media and supervised interviews with some tamer students, all of whom claimed that being sent to Spero was the best thing to have happened to them since they emerged from the womb, and professed sorrow that Scott Theriault had disagreed. End of story.

“That death was investigated by Maine State Police,” I said.

“Aided by the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office,” said Alcock, “and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was ruled an accident. It went by the book, and neither Ward nor I are impugning the integrity of any of the officials involved.”

“But?”

“Ward Vose is convinced that his son was unlawfully killed.”

“On what basis?”

“Call it a feeling.”

“A feeling and a conviction aren’t the same thing,” I said.

“Let’s say that the first has hardened into the second,” said Alcock.

I looked at Moxie. Moxie looked at me. He was giving me nothing.

“Do you have an opinion on this?” I asked him.

“Only that I don’t like those schools, and I don’t like parents who submit children to their regime.”

“So you want me to cause trouble?”

“Isn’t that what you do?” said Alcock.