Whatever's cheapest.'
'One-ply is the way to go. Ladies like the softer two- ply, but it breaks down slow, scums up the top of the tank. Flush down that three-ply they make now, or a baby wipe, or one of them quilted paper towels? Might as well pull off your shirt and throw it in there too. None of it's going anywhere until I come by to suck it out.'
The motor whined and the console clicked. The feeding stopped. Ripsbaugh eyed the screen, toggled the joystick controls.
'Yep,' he said. 'We got a blockage. Right at the inlet. Something's snagged there.' He tried to prod at it with the scope, to no avail. He patted his knees and stood. 'Have to crack her open outside.'
Maddox stopped in the kitchen, the linoleum crackling under his boots. Prescription bottles and dirty dishes and soft packs of GPC cigarettes. Losing lottery scratch tickets facedown in the trash. A still life in crumb and stain. He could feel it here, he could almost smell it: the malaise, this enfeebling despair that radiated like a contagion throughout Black Falls. The breakdown of law and order was, in a sense, a reflection of this mental breakdown.
Outside, beyond a tattered blue tarpaulin covering last winter's unused firewood, Ripsbaugh held the head of a wide green hose unwound off his whirring Cold River Septic truck, the thing twitching as it sucked from a hole in the yard.
The stink was rude, richly awful, just shy of disgusting. Closer, Maddox saw a half-moon slab of concrete overturned next to Ripsbaugh's trusty shovel, revealing a crescent hole smiling out of the earth like a dark mouth, wide enough to swallow a child.
'Thousand-gallon tank,' Ripsbaugh said. 'That's small potatoes. I remember yours, when I did the Title Five inspection on your mother's house?' Prior to the sale of any property in Massachusetts, the state environmental code required that the septic system be inspected and certified. 'That was an old six-by-six vault. Way over capacity for the house size.'
Ripsbaugh pulled up the dripping hose, offering Maddox a glimpse below. A muddy white inlet PVC pipe came from the house, jutting into the tank in a modified T. Below it lay a solid coat of thick, white-gray fluff.
'That mess on the top there, that's the paper, sink food, detergents. Below that, all wastewater. People think their septic tank is full of shit, but it's not. Waste dissolves pretty quickly. 'Effluent' is the term.'
This was by far the most he had ever heard Ripsbaugh speak at one time. But everybody in this world is an expert on something. Maddox looked down at the meringue of undissolved waste shimmying on the surface. 'Effluent, huh?'
'Dribbles off into the leeching fields. Seeps back down through the rock and soil, reentering the water table. Then you pull it back up through your well and drink it, start the whole cycle over again.'
'Yum,' said Maddox.
'Earth is the best filter there is. All these other towns on water bans now, because of the lack of rainfall? That's public sewers. Piping out all their water instead of returning it to the ground. These new developments go up and bleed the land dry, just so that residents don't have to face the once-a-year stench of getting pumped out. People want to believe in magic white bowls that make everything disappear.'
Maddox looked back to Ripsbaugh's rumbling tanker. 'And from here??'
'Treatment facility over in Aylesbury, they burn it clean.' He left the thirsty hose sucking air on the dirt lawn, picking up a long, flexible wire tool with a two- pronged end. 'I don't take it all out, though. You leave the sludge on the bottom, the bacteria that feeds on the waste. Breaks it down. The dirtiest part of the tank, that does all the work.' He lay flat on the ground and reached into the smelly tomb with the tool in his gloved hand. 'That's nature in action.'
He worked by feel, picking around inside the PVC pipe, then pulling back sharply as though hooking a fish. Fluid from the unclogged pipe disgorged into the tank.
Ripsbaugh brought the tool out of the mouth of the chamber and deposited the dripping obstruction on a clump of dead grass. Maddox glanced back at the front door. This went beyond snooping through the Tedmonds' garbage, closer to a necropsy of their home.
The matter was sodden and soiled but not mucked brown. Some prodding and separating with Ripsbaugh's tool revealed the bulk of it to be gauze strips and first aid tape. A swollen packet that looked like a fat, cotton wallet was an absorbent bandage, and threaded into it were faint traces of black.
'Blood,' said Maddox.
'That's what people flush,' said Ripsbaugh, picking through it some more. He poked out two tiny, waste- streaked, zippered plastic envelopes, small enough that their only legitimate use could have been stamp collecting.
Maddox looked at Ripsbaugh, and found Ripsbaugh already looking at him. 'That what I think it is?' Ripsbaugh said.
'I think so,' said Maddox.
'Probably soaked too long in there for any drug trace to show up in a lab.'
The guy knew his cop shows. Maddox looked back at the house again.
Ripsbaugh said, 'Search ain't legal anyway. 'Plain view' is the rule. Bathrobe Bill gave his consent for you to be inside, but this goes beyond discovery.'
Maddox played it down, shaking his head. 'I'm not here as a cop.'
Ripsbaugh looked at him, the wire tool dripping to the ground. 'Then what are you here as?'
Maddox tried to come up with a good answer for that.
Ripsbaugh said, 'I heard you asking Bathrobe Bill about Wanda. She still go around with Bucky Pail?'
Maddox said, 'She does.'
His tone let Ripsbaugh know that he would not go any further. The empty sucking of the dirty vacuum hose was the only noise as Ripsbaugh absorbed the information he had gleaned.
Maddox's back pocket started to vibrate. He pulled out his pager and checked the number.
No. Not Sinclair. Cullen. Maddox ignored it.
'Nice pager,' said Ripsbaugh, watching him return it to his jeans.
'My girlfriend,' Maddox said.
Ripsbaugh looked surprised.
Maddox added, 'She's not from around here.'
Not a good lie, but whether he believed him or not, Ripsbaugh let it go. He bent to pick up the dripping hose, about to return it to the hole. He pointed at the gauze and the little dope bags on the ground. 'What about this?'
They were indeed worthless to a lab, and unallowable as evidence. Maddox nodded, and Ripsbaugh used his hungry hose to suck them up into his tanker.
The nozzle went chugging back into the septic tank, and Maddox stepped away. No more waiting for Wanda to come around to his side, he decided. No more paying out rope. He needed to find her or Frankie as soon as possible.
A voice came out of his patrol car, the police radio calling his unit number and his name.
40
HESS
HESS WAS A HIT AT cocktail parties. Homicide investigators usually are, because of the gritty glamour the television-watching and moviegoing public associates with them. The imagined car chases, the Mexican standoffs, the psychological dance of cop and criminal: all that sweet nonsense. Married women especially, for some reason, would gang up on him in the corner, or sit close to him on the sectional, white wine shining in their eyes as they plied him for more stories. And Hess performed for them, he gave them what they wanted, all his best tales and others he'd only heard, selling them on the danger of the job, the pathos, the trauma. They wanted to be lifted out of their cycle of playdates and school buses and once-a-month trysts with distracted husbands; they wanted their romantic imaginations fired. They dropped 'tells' like clumsy poker players, twisting at the chains around their necks, finding conversational excuses to reach out and touch his arms. Hess lived in an upscale town near the Amherst universities, but on a state policeman's salary?though a homicide investigator, his rank and pay grade remained that of a trooper?he could not compete with his neighbor's tennis weekends and sporty third cars. So while the husbands gathered around the pool table in the finished basement talking golf clubs and consumer electronics, Hess remained upstairs mind- fucking their wives. A cocktail party gigolo, flexing his cop persona like his biceps, flashing them the goods before leaving them in the lurch, returning for good-byes with lovely Janine on his arm. Better than bedding any one of them was knowing that he was the 'other man' in a hundred imagined infidelities of overprivileged women who secretly wished they were married not to their husbands but to him.
The thing he always started off telling them, which was not a story per se but rather an operating principle, and which happened to be absolutely true, was that every case he worked was essentially the same. Every unattended death was the Case of the Broken Vase. A body, or traces of it, lay broken on the floor. Most of the pieces were right there, and his job was to reassemble what he found, then track down the rest. By the time he had the vase glued together well enough to hold water again, he usually knew who had knocked it over and how, and whether its shattering had been an act of carelessness or calculation.
Here Hess had a vase that would not come together. He could stand a flower in it?Dillon Sinclair?but water kept spurting out on all
