“Do you mean the forensic information wasn’t complete?”
“Oh, the forensic information’s complete enough. The forensic information isn’t the point. Just a minute and I’ll get you what I’ve got.”
Dr. Brye began to search patiently and systematically through the second file drawer from the top. Files came out and were shoved onto the file cabinet’s cluttered surface. Files went back in, crammed until they bent against other files that had already been crammed. Gregor Demarkian finished the rest of his cheese Danish and sipped at his coffee.
“Here we go,” Philip Brye said after a while. “My personal file on the death of Tim Bradbury. Did you know he was a local boy?”
“I think it was in one of the newspaper clippings. Branford, I think it said. Or something like that.”
“North Branford, yes, that’s where he had his apartment before he moved in at Fountain of Youth, but that isn’t the kind of local I meant,” Philip Brye said. “He was born and brought up in the area, out in Derby. He started working in and around New Haven when he was a teenager. He took shit jobs at Yale. Dishwasher. Parking lot attendant. Road construction work when he could. We call that Connecticut’s own state college scholarship plan. Every summer, the crews are full of kids working their way through college. Not that you really can work your way through college anymore. The prices are prohibitive. Anyway, my point here is that a lot of us knew him—not well, you understand, not as a friend, but enough to recognize him on the street and say hello to. New Haven isn’t a small town anymore. Everybody doesn’t know everybody. But some people do get around. Tim Bradbury was one of them.”
“Did Tony Bandero know him?”
Philip Brye shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think Tony’s that much of a shit. However, the thing is, I knew Tim, maybe better than most people did. When I was still married, my wife and I had a house out in Hamden. Tim did our yard work and our snow plowing one year. Good kid. Very responsible. Came to work on time. Got down in good order. Gave value for money. Always polite. So, when all this happened, and I saw what Tony was turning it into, I decided to check it all out for myself.”
“And?”
Philip Brye had a thick file folder in his hands. He walked back across the office and dumped it in Gregor’s lap. “Take a look through that. That’s the result of the first, and God knows I hope the last, detective investigation I have ever conducted. It’s probably a mess, but it’s got to be a whole hell of a lot better than anything Tony Bandero has got.”
As far as Gregor knew, Tony Bandero had nothing. On the other hand, Tony could have everything and just be keeping it to himself. Gregor positioned the file on his lap so that it wouldn’t fall off and opened it up.
The first thing in the file was a glossy eight-by-eleven black-and-white photograph of what looked like a shack, boarded up and deserted. The second thing in the file was another eight-by-eleven photograph of the same shack. The third thing in the file was yet another photograph of the same shack—but here Gregor could see a difference. In this third photograph, there was very distinctly a lit kerosene lamp in the one gap in the boards that covered the windows of what Gregor thought was, or had been, a glassed-in porch. Gregor raised this picture in Philip Brye’s direction and then raised his eyebrows, too.
“Well?” he asked.
“That,” Philip Brye said, “is Tim Bradbury’s mother’s house. If you look closely at the last picture, you’ll be able to see the Housatonic River in the background. The house was built originally—all the houses on that part of the river were built originally—as summer places. This would have been at the end of World War Two. The houses are small and they’re not insulated. Most of them were built without heating systems on the assumption that they would only be used in the summer. But it didn’t work out that way.”
“Absentee landlords got hold of them.”
“Yep. And people who were really too poor to afford to keep up a house got hold of them, too. I checked about Tim’s mother. She owns her place. Such as it is.”
“It looks boarded up,” Gregor said.
Philip Brye shrugged. “It’s cheaper to nail driftwood over a broken window than to replace the glass. The place is boarded up. It looks empty. But it isn’t.”
“Tim Bradbury’s mother lives there alone?”
“She’s got two cats. Otherwise she lives there alone. Tim moved out right after he graduated from high school.”
Gregor looked over the last picture of the shack again. “I don’t suppose you can blame him for that,” he said. “It isn’t anyplace I’d want to live if I didn’t have to.”