Page 26 of The Furies

Observe, and prepare.

CHAPTER XXXI

The Braycott Arms was situated just off Park Avenue, and had once operated as a railroad hotel, back when Union Station was located on St. John Street. Union Station was torn down in 1961 to be replaced with a strip mall that nobody had ever liked, when the future looked, smelled, and sounded like an automobile. Even by the standards of grand nineteenth-century railroad architecture, the old station had been something special, designed to resemble a medieval French château, with a high clock tower and pink granite walls. People wept openly when that tower fell, or so my grandfather told me.

Nobody would have wept if the Braycott Arms fell, particularly if it took some of its tenants with it. Back in the day, the Braycott had catered to a lower order of traveler than the nearby Inn at St. John, which had since reinvented itself as a boutique hotel. By contrast, the Braycott’s current owners had a reputation for tolerating antisocial behavior to the point of active facilitation, and had they conducted background checks before renting, virtually every unit in the place would have remained empty. It wasn’t somewhere to call home, just somewhere from which to call home. The parole service tried to discourage recently released prisoners from taking a bed there, but sometimes the ex-cons didn’t have a great deal of choice, the majority of landlords being understandably reluctant to welcome malefactors into their buildings. As a result, the Braycott frequently held more people with criminal records than the Cumberland County Jail.

The longtime manager was a guy named Bobby Wadlin, who lived in a single-bedroom apartment just inside the front door, and broke a sweat by standing still. He spent most of his day behind a scarred plexiglass screen with a slot for accepting money and dispensing mail and keys, and had never been known to take a vacation. During disputes over rent or damage, he would reluctantly take it upon himself to act as a moderating influence on the faceless owners, like Simon of Cyrene being pressed into assisting Christ with the cross. Since Wadlin was one of the owners, along with his two brothers and a sister-in-law who wanted nothing more to do with the Braycott than cash the rent checks, negotiations didn’t take very long, and usually ended unsatisfactorily for the tenants involved.

Wadlin, true to form, was seated behind his screen when I arrived, watching an old western in black and white on a portable TV hooked up to a DVD player. Wadlin was always watching old westerns in black and white. Even if they were made in color, he’d alter the setting on the TV so he could view them in monochrome. There was probably some psychological insight to be gleaned from this, but life was short. In any event, it wouldn’t have made me like him any more than I already did, and I didn’t like him much at all. Despite the cold, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a blind man’s tie, the garishness of the latter’s colors an attempt to compensate for the utter grayness of the rest of his existence.

“Bobby,” I said.

Wadlin kept his eyes fixed on the screen.

“I’m watching my show,” he said.

“Raum Buker.”

“What about him?”

“Is he in?”

Wadlin tore his gaze from the TV for long enough to check the key hooks. Residents were not permitted to take keys with them when they left the premises, not even for a short time, just in case one fell into the wrong hands and was used to gain entry to the Braycott in order to surreptitiously disinfect it.

“Out,” said Wadlin.

“I’d like to take a look at his room.”

“Our guests expect privacy and security.”

I put a twenty in the slot. I figured Will Quinn was good for it, even if it was unlikely to be receipted. Wadlin, meanwhile, was financially comfortable enough to be offended by the size of the bribe if he chose, but he didn’t so choose. Doing something for nothing was against his principles, or what passed for them in the absence of any actual principles. He also knew that if he didn’t help me, I’d find a way to make life difficult for him in the future, because this wasn’t the first time I’d had business at the Braycott, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Wadlin produced a spare key from a drawer, leaving the main one on its hook should Raum Buker return.

“Don’t be up there too long,” said Wadlin.

“I’ll try not to disturb the dirt.”

“I’ll warn the roaches you’re on your way,” he said, returning to his western. “It might help us get rid of them.”

CHAPTER XXXII

The medium- and long-term rental units at the Braycott Arms were larger than those of the average motel but smaller than a modest apartment. There was one elevator, which mostly worked, and one washer-dryer, which mostly didn’t. The paintwork was battered, the floorboards were scuffed, and the ceilings had more cracks than a medieval artwork, but everything was at least superficially clean, as long as one’s standards weren’t excessively high. The halls and stairways smelled of cooking, and I could hear music playing and televisions blaring. Tourists had been known to stay at the Braycott, but only when too desperate or ill-informed to do otherwise, and they rarely made it to a second night, or not without barricading their doors. The only regular visitors were parole officers and police.

Raum Buker occupied a corner unit on the third floor. I passed one person on the way up, and he was too busy conducting a cell phone conversation about pot to even notice me. He stank like a grow house, too, which came with the territory. Ever since Maine legalized recreational marijuana, the sickly sweet scent had become ubiquitous. You could get a contact high just from taking an Uber. If you stayed in the ride for too long, you had to fight the urge to order brownies and listen to “Dark Star” on heavy rotation.

Someone was shouting in the room next to Raum’s, carrying on a one-sided argument with an unseen other that I suspected didn’t involve a phone, a relentless stream of invective and obscenity punctuated by occasional sobbing. The soliloquy just added to the constant backdrop of noise at the Braycott Arms. It reminded me of prison; doubtless it reminded some of the residents of prison, too, which might have been one of the reasons they elected to stay there. I’d known ex-cons who were unable to sleep properly for months after their release because they couldn’t cope with the silence, just as others couldn’t deal with open spaces. There were lots of reasons why former prisoners ended up back behind bars, but probably the most disturbing of all was that it was easier than being free.

I knocked on Raum’s door. The main key might have been sitting on the hook in Wadlin’s office, but that didn’t necessarily mean the room was unoccupied. The list of those who’d been shot for making that mistake was worryingly long. Only when I was sure that the unit was empty did I try the lock. Each of the Braycott’s doors had a peephole, so I couldn’t know if I was being observed from nearby, but I was banking on the likelihood that its tenants preferred to mind their own business in the expectation that others would extend them the same courtesy.

Raum’s lodgings held the odors of bleach and damp towels. The door opened directly into a bedroom, the bathroom to the left, with two windows on the opposite main wall, the color scheme tending toward sour cream and rancid butter. It was furnished with a double bed, a table and chair, a vinyl couch, a microwave oven, and, in one corner, a stovetop. A refrigerator stood on one side of the stovetop, with a closet on the other. A cheap flat-screen TV was bolted to the wall in front of the bed, with the remote anchored to the nightstand by a short length of heavy cable. The room was devoid of pictures or superfluous decoration, but a stain occupied the wall above the couch, as though a previous tenant had blown their own or someone else’s brains out, leaving the residue to dry into the paintwork.

Raum’s occupancy hadn’t altered the place substantially. A few items of clothing hung in the closet, and his socks, underwear, and T-shirts were stored beneath in separate drawers. A pair of boots and a pair of sneakers were arranged on a sheet of plastic by the door. A shelf above the stove held coffee, sugar, cereal, popcorn, an open bag of potato chips secured with a clothespin, and a loaf of cheap white bread. The refrigerator contained milk and unsalted sweet cream butter. I checked under the neatly made bed and pulled out a suitcase. It wasn’t locked, and revealed nothing of note when opened. I put it back where I’d found it. The only personal touch was a photograph in a chipped wooden frame, which leaned against the wall beside the kettle. It showed a much younger Raum standing between what must have been his parents, each of them clasping one of his hands. All three were wearing swimsuits, and sunlight had faded the image’s original colors to a uniform pale brown. I opened up the frame by releasing the clasps at the back, but it contained only the picture. A date was written on the back: May ’83, in what looked like a woman’s script. I reassembled the frame and restored the picture to its place.

The organization of the room wasn’t a surprise, not from someone who’d done time. Prisoners learned how to use space, and the Braycott Arms didn’t exactly invite a man to spread out and make himself at home. Yet even by those standards, the unit was very much a temporary refuge. It wouldn’t have taken Raum more than five minutes to pack up and depart, leaving no obvious sign that he had ever moved through the Braycott’s environs. I wondered if he had another hideaway somewhere, perhaps up in the County, because whatever was contained here couldn’t possibly have represented all his possessions. Spending twenty dollars of Will Quinn’s money on a bribe had, it seemed, bought me absolutely nothing.

I gave the bathroom a second look as I prepared to leave. A cup, a plate, and some silverware were drying on a towel by the sink. The medicine cabinet was already open, and held only antacid and ibuprofen, along with some sleep remedies that suggested Raum, as reported, was having difficulty getting a night’s rest. The only incongruous element was a sprinkling of black dust between the faucets of the sink. I hadn’t noticed it anywhere but there.

---