Page 3 of The Furies

“Whoever killed this man didn’t come here to steal from him,” said Condell. He gestured to the safe and its open door. The contents were disturbed, as though a search had been conducted, but it remained full. “Or if they did, they had a specific object in mind. I don’t know a great deal about coins, but his safe contains at least five or six Liberty Head twenty-dollar gold pieces, all from the nineteenth century, and that’s not the only gold in there. As for the rest, some of them look very, very old. If they were worth keeping locked away, then they’re of value, and if they’re of value, they’re worth stealing. So why break into a man’s house, force him to open his safe—unless it was already open—and then leave gold lying in plain sight after killing him?”

They had spoken with Marie Biener, the woman who discovered the body, but she didn’t know enough about Ellerkamp’s collection to be able to tell them what, if anything, might be missing from it. Condell and Gardner hadn’t yet ruled her out as a possible accomplice, but Beth Ann was certain that they would soon enough. She was familiar with the family, and had been just a couple of years ahead of Marie in high school. The father might have been a louse, but Marie and the rest of the Bieners were good people.

“So it was retribution?” said Gardner.

“Wouldn’t you say?” said Condell. “There are simpler ways to kill a man than this.”

They heard movement from behind, and turned to see a gurney being maneuvered into the hallway, ready at last to move the body to the Bradford County Medical Examiner’s office in Troy. By the following day they’d know just how many coins it had taken to kill Edwin Ellerkamp, but there remained the opportunity to open a discreet book on it. Then again, if anyone ever found out, Beth Ann wouldn’t have to worry about the timing of her retirement, because she, and all involved, would be out of a job.

“I don’t like to jump to conclusions,” said Gardner to Condell. “You taught me that.”

They stepped aside to let the ME’s staff through, and watched as one of them began bagging the victim’s hands and bare feet so that any matter lodged on the skin or under the nails would not be lost. An evidence technician stepped in to store individually the loose coins on the victim’s chest and around his lips. After a brief consultation, it was decided to bag the head as well, but not before a cervical collar was put in place to stop it from moving during transportation to Troy, thereby minimizing any disturbance or damage to the contents of the mouth.

“Yeah,” said Condell, “jumping to conclusions is bad. But,” he added, “I’ll bet you a brown bag lunch this is about coins.”

“Thank God we have your expertise to guide us,” said Beth Ann.

“That’s what I’m here for,” said Condell. “By the way, care to have a friendly wager on how many coins they find inside him? A dollar a guess.”

CHAPTER IV

Raum Buker stood by the host station and surveyed the crowd in the Great Lost Bear. His glance passed over me before returning, alighting on my face like a bug on a window. We had history, Raum and I. Toward the end of his parole period, during which he’d worked at a local warehouse in order to fulfill one of the conditions of his release, he’d begun falling back into bad habits and worse fellowship. He and a pair of buddies decided to put pressure on older store owners in Portland and South Portland to hire them as assistants or security guards, even if the stores had no need of them. Not that Raum and his boys would have shown up for work anyway, this being the most basic of protection rackets, the type that probably dated back to cavemen, although it was hard to tell whether the likely absence of Raum and his pals represented a worsening of the deal or an improvement on it.

It was Raum’s mistake to target a woman named Meda Michaud, who ran a little bakehouse and deli off Western Avenue and played weekly bingo with Mrs. Fulci, beloved mother of the Fulci brothers. The Fulcis were overmuscled and undermedicated ex-cons with hearts, if not of gold, then of premium nickel silver. They were also devoted to their mother, and by extension to anyone their mother liked. Trying to strong-arm Meda Michaud was, in the eyes of the Fulcis, scarcely less appalling than harassing Mrs. Fulci herself, and they were thus of a mind to separate Raum Buker’s limbs from his torso before feeding them to his associates until they choked.

But the Fulcis were also familiar with Raum’s reputation, which meant that any confrontation they initiated was destined to escalate. If the Fulcis killed Raum or simply left him maimed, neither outcome being beyond the bounds of possibility, they’d have ended up in prison, although the citizens of the state would have sent muffin baskets at Christmas as tokens of gratitude. On the other hand, if they didn’t put Raum down, there was a good chance he’d come after the Fulcis or those close to them, once his broken bones had healed. Even if it took years, Raum would have found a way to avenge the outrage.

Ultimately, Louis, Angel, and I offered to keep the Fulcis company, and also do most of the explaining to Raum, the Fulcis being doers rather than talkers. We caught up with Raum and his friends at a Nason’s Corner dump called Sly’s, formerly part of the business empire of Daddy Helms. In my adolescence, Daddy Helms had once hurt and humiliated me for vandalizing a stained-glass window in one of his bars. After all these years, the memory of that act of deliberate destruction still shamed me, but I’d been a foolish, angry young man back then, and a foolish, angry older man for a good deal longer. Daddy Helms taught me the error of my ways, although he’d done so by causing my friend Clarence Johns to betray me. Clarence had been with me on the night we took care of Daddy Helms’s window, and Daddy’s men had found him first. To save himself, Clarence had implicated me, and I took the punishment for both of us: stripped naked on a deserted beach before being covered with fire ants. Even now, I could still recall the pain and indignity, and had not yet decided which was worse.

I never did find out if Clarence knew what Daddy Helms had planned for me that night. We didn’t talk after, and Clarence was now with his Maker. But had our roles been reversed, I wouldn’t have forsaken Clarence—not out of any great sense of honor or loyalty, but because I had too much rage inside me to give Daddy Helms that kind of satisfaction. And there was also this: I used to welcome suffering, and any injury I endured only fed my animosity. By then my father had taken his own life, and cancer had stolen my mother from me. Even Daddy Helms’s stained-glass window—an attempt by a man afflicted by ugliness to add some beauty to his world—was an affront to me. If you go seeking ways to bring down hurt upon yourself, life will oblige you, because it has hurt in store for you anyway, but it will happily welcome any assistance you’re in the mood to offer. Better, then, not to oblige it any more than necessary. I’d like to have said this was a lesson hard-learned, but that would suggest my education was in the past, whereas it was still ongoing.

Daddy Helms was long dead, his fat rendering in the fires of hell, but Sly’s was a fitting monument to him, being dark, dirty, and filled with vermin, both animal and human. The barstools were fixed to the floor with heavy hex bolts, and the booths were covered in the kind of vinyl that didn’t hold stains, although the owners had opted for red just to be on the safe side. The neon sign in the window promised HOT FOOD & COLD BEER, but the only source of sustenance was a decrepit pizza oven that smelled of burning insects if one got too close. Legend had it that someone once ate at Sly’s, but if so, the body had never been found.

Raum and his boys were standing at the bar just inside the door, which saved us having to get the soles of our shoes all sticky and soiled. We invited the three of them to step outside for a conversation, because politeness costs nothing. When they declined, and much less politely, the Fulcis dragged Raum’s buddies out by the hair and ears, while Raum followed under his own steam to preserve his dignity and the symmetry of his features. Nobody intervened, and no one made a move to call the police, who would probably have laughed at the idea that they might be tempted to intervene in a minor dispute at Sly’s. Because we wanted to keep it friendly, we let Raum light a cigarette, although Louis knocked it from his mouth before he could take the first drag because there were limits to our tolerance. We then explained the Meda Michaud situation to him, and advised him to re-examine extortion as a source of income. Raum wasn’t minded to listen at first, but he paid more attention when Louis put a gun in his mouth. Some people’s hearing can be funny that way.

Raum might have contemplated defying the Fulcis, and he might even have contemplated defying me, but he wasn’t stupid enough to go up against all five of us, or not with Louis involved. Louis stood out in Portland for all kinds of reasons: tall, Black, well dressed, and gay—not that anyone was asking, or objecting, where the last was concerned. Louis had also done things that Raum Buker hadn’t, including, but not limited to, some killing. Raum was suddenly in the presence of an apex predator, and that frightened him. He still didn’t like being told what to do, but we didn’t care. To guard against any second thoughts he might have entertained after we were gone, we encouraged the Fulcis to haul his buddies around some more by the hair and ears before dumping them in the Fore River to cool off. It marked the end of Raum’s fledgling protection racket, and he left the state soon after. I didn’t know where he’d gone, and had never asked. As with an ongoing ache that suddenly vanishes, all that’s required of one is to be grateful.

But now here was Raum, making the Bear look bad, and nobody wanted that.

“You need a stricter door policy,” I told Dave.

“I think we may need to brick up the door entirely,” he said.

Which was when the Fulcis, who’d been playing Jenga at a table of their own, spotted Raum.

CHAPTER V

Certain big men can move very fast when they’re riled, which makes them doubly dangerous at close quarters. They possess an innate grace, as though the ghost of a dancer has taken up residence in their bones. Watching them fight is like witnessing a violent ballet, with all the swans lying unconscious when the curtain finally descends.

The Fulci brothers were not those men. Instead they resembled old locomotive engines, in that it took them a while to build up a head of steam, but once they did, it was unwise to get in their way.

The first sign of impending disaster was the sound of Jenga tiles scattering on the Bear’s floor, followed by at least one table and any number of chairs. By the time Dave and I were on our feet, Paulie Fulci was already closing in fast on Raum Buker, his brother pounding along not far behind. In retrospect, Dave and I were fortunate that the Fulcis were still accelerating when we reached them, and not yet at full tilt, because we were just able to apply the brakes before they could lay hands on their quarry. Raum saw them coming, and looked like he was seconds away from climbing over the bar to escape, which wouldn’t have saved him since the Fulcis would probably just have plowed right through it. I improved my grip on Tony, Dave got another arm around Paulie, and a couple of bartenders displayed a foolhardy level of bravery by positioning themselves between Raum and the Fulcis, like occidental versions of that guy who stood in front of the Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square.

“The fuck is he doing here?” said Paulie.

The question didn’t strike me as being directed at anyone in particular, although it could have been meant for God Himself, an accusation of divine error for failing to erase Raum Buker from the annals. The Fulcis were great believers in God, although God remained conspicuously silent on the subject of the Fulcis’ allegiance to Him. As one would.

“Yeah,” his brother chimed in, although Tony’s inquiry was clearly aimed at Raum, not God, because his version also contained the words “you senior-abusing motherfucker.”

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