Bomber's Moon by Archer Mayor

Author:Archer Mayor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 15

“Hey, Joe. You taking over?”

Gunther nodded to the gray-haired sheriff’s deputy standing outside Alex Hale’s apartment. “You’re officially off detail, Vern. Thanks for keeping a lid on the place.”

“Don’t know if it wasn’t too little too late,” Vern said, gathering up his thermos and magazines from the folding chair the landlord had supplied. “I can’t say who might’ve come and gone before I got here.”

“I know,” Joe acknowledged. “You do the best you can sometimes.”

They were on the fourth floor of one of the old redbrick buildings on Brattleboro’s Main Street, a virtually unknown universe of low-cost, minimally maintained, small and dark apartments, home of fringe inhabitants the rest of the townspeople—window-shopping on the sidewalks just below—knew little about.

Vern shook hands. He was another old cop who, even if he hadn’t seen it all, had stopped being surprised by much. “Take care of yourself, Joe. See ya at the next one.”

“You, too, Vern. I’ll let your dispatch know if and when we need more help. I’ll probably be here a couple of hours.”

“No problem. I’m heading for a beer.”

Joe watched with true fondness as Vern shambled down the dim hallway. There were hundreds like him out there, warhorses fighting complete retirement by finding part-time work as deputies, constables, or auxiliaries for a state agency. In truth, Joe often wondered what he’d end up doing whenever the VBI decided it no longer wanted his services.

He used the door key they’d located on Alex’s key ring and stepped into the apartment beyond, taking comfort in the thought that, as old as he might feel, he was livelier than the young man he was investigating.

As a norm, entering a deceased person’s home is like seeing the everyday from another realm, as if the visitor and not the owner were the ghost. It is at once disorienting, intrusive, embarrassing, and even touched by guilt, one irrational thought being that some spectral figure might throw open the door and demand an explanation.

On this occasion, however, that unlikely concern was immediately offset by what Joe saw confronting him from the opposite wall: a large poster of the 1943 movie Bomber’s Moon.

Curiosity trumping reflection, he crossed the room to better study it. A fan of older movies, especially ones concerning World War II, he was dimly aware of this one, if only for its lack of impact on cinematic history. George Montgomery and a French starlet named Annabella. Joe was hard-pressed to remember what else they might have been in. And yet the poster, though old, was mounted and framed, and displayed where it could be enjoyed from every angle of the room. A valued icon.

Joe turned from the poster to take in his surroundings, half-hoping they would complement the vintage poster. But there were no plane models or memorabilia or other nods to the movies or the war. On that level, the room was mundane and secular—a cluttered and messy collection of the usual modern artifacts, including the predictable flat-screen TV, a rumpled mattress on the floor, scattered CDs, clothing in heaps, and a few dishes piled in the sink of a small kitchen.

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