MacMillan Wharf

MacMillan Wharf: Chapter Six

MacMillan Wharf: Chapter Six

by Richard Gifford

Annie, Mary Ellen and the chief were all silent as the police car sped up Bradford Street. As they passed the high school at the top of the hill, Annie had the presence of mind to ask, “Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you two back to the police station. The whole town is going to be crawling with reporters pretty soon and I need to talk to each of you about what happened to Linda.”

“Linda, if people can’t accept you for who you are, the hell with them, that’s their problem!” Mary Ellen stared blankly out the side window of the big car as the little shingled houses passed by. Not in her wildest imaginings could she have thought that the day would turn out like it had. Just last night over dinner at the Oceanside Café, she and Linda argued about whether or not to get married in the fall. Mary Ellen was all for it. She wanted to go to town hall at midnight on the day it became legal last spring. Linda wanted to wait, however. She was out in Provincetown, and to her colleagues at the Whale Center, but most of her family didn’t know she was a lesbian or so she thought.

This was always a touchy point for Mary Ellen. In her mind she replayed the conversation they had at the restaurant last night.

“Linda, if people can’t accept you for who you are, the hell with them, that’s their problem!”

“Sweetie, we have been through this time and time again. My parents are old, they’re not in good health and it would just be too much for them right now. They’ve only known I’m gay for a few years. They just wouldn’t understand. Why can’t we just keep things the way they are?”

“Because the way things are now, I have to pay $600 a month for my own health insurance; because the way things are now, I have no retirement plan; the way things are now, if something happened to you, I might not even be able to visit you in the hospital.”

“What are you talking about, what’s going to happen to me?” Linda asked.

“I’m just saying, by getting married, we can have all the same rights that straight couples have had for years. Don’t you want that?”

“Of course I do, but…”

“But what?” Mary Ellen interrupted. “Are you saying you don’t want those things with me? Jesus Linda, we’ve been together for almost five years now. If you don’t want to be with me, then just go. There’s thousands of women in this town, why not hook up with one of them?”

“Mary Ellen, that’s not what I’m saying. I just want more time, that’s all, just a little more time.”

Mary Ellen recalled sliding her chair back, and standing up, looking down at her and growling, “You’ve had enough time to think about it Linda” and stormed out of the restaurant.

That was the last time she saw Linda alive. The realization that her final words were spoken in anger saddened her. Then the thought occurred to her that she might be considered a suspect. After all, she was already in the back seat of a police car.

The chief pulled into his space in front of the police station on Shankpainter Road. He was relieved to see that no satellite trucks had yet blocked off the parking lot. It would still take a few more hours for them to get here from Boston, but he was sure that the story was already on the wires. As he glanced up and down the street, he could see the wiry figure of Betsy Gilmore pedaling a bicycle towards him.

“We need to get inside,” he said to his passengers as he opened his door and exited. Mary Ellen momentarily panicked when she tried the handle and found it locked. Annie did the same.

“They only open from the outside, hold on.” Chief Souza opened Annie’s door first, then walked around the car to Mary Ellen’s side. Betsy Gilmore was less than 100 yards away and closing fast.

As Mary Ellen stood up, the chief instinctively supported her by the elbow. She was nervous and her head was spinning due to the events of the past half hour.

“Let’s go” said the chief.

Mary Ellen looked across the roof of the car and saw Betsy Gilmore approaching. She suddenly understood the chief’s urgency to get them inside. Quickly, she made her way to the door.

Three decades of police work had sharpened his senses and dimmed his view of humanity considerably. The chief held the heavy glass door open as Annie and Mary Ellen made their way inside. Officer Thompson quickly buzzed them into the secure area of the building from behind the dispatch desk. Chief Souza ushered the two women into his office in the back of the building. As he closed the office door, he could hear Betsy Gilmore shrieking from the lobby.

“Chief, Chief, when’s the press conference? Are those two suspects?”

“What the hell is that woman’s problem?” asked Mary Ellen.

“I wish I knew,” answered Chief Souza shaking his head, “but I don’t want either of you to feel hounded by the press. You’ve been through enough today. Please, sit down.”

Annie and Mary Ellen each sat in blue vinyl armchairs in front of the chief’s cluttered desk. Chief Souza hung his hat on a hook on the back of the door, then sat down across from them. He glanced down at his desk and saw the remnants of what would have been his lunch, a half cup of cold coffee with a crusty ring of cream around the rim, and an enormous pile of papers that he needed to sort through. On top of all the pandemonium of Carnival weekend, now he had a fresh murder case on his hands.

“Okay, I’ll need to take a statement from each of you. This shouldn’t take very long. I’ll start with you Mary Ellen. What’s your full name?”

“Mary Ellen Johnson.”

“Address?”

“342 Commercial Street”

“You live right on Commercial Street?”

“Yes, there’s an apartment behind the gallery.”

“What was your relationship to the deceased?”

“She was my partner.”

“Did she live with you?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Last night. Around 7:30. We had dinner at the Oceanside.”

“You didn’t see her after that?”

“No, she didn’t come home.”

Chief Souza paused for moment, then shifted his gaze towards Annie. “Annie, could you wait outside for a few minutes while I finish with Mary Ellen?”

Annie was flustered by all of this. “Um, okay. Mary Ellen, she didn’t come home last night? Did you two have a fight or something? Why didn’t you call me?”

Mary Ellen stared down at the floor, unable to look at either of her inquisitors.

“Annie please, just wait outside. There’s a waiting room down the hall to the right.”

Annie quietly exited the room and closed the door. From where she stood in the hallway, she could see Betsy Gilmore sitting on a wooden bench talking on a cell phone. Fortunately, Betsy didn’t see her leave the room, and Annie quickly made her way to the waiting room diagonally across the hall.

“Mary Ellen, I need you to tell me exactly what happened last night. Is Annie right? Did you two have an argument over dinner?”

“Yes, we did.” Mary Ellen recalled the events of the night before to the chief.

“I just thought that she went to a friend’s house for the night or something. I was pretty upset, and so was she. I just went home, cried, had a few drinks and went to bed. This morning I realized that she hadn’t come home, so I tried her cell phone, then I called a few friends, then I called her office and they said she hadn’t come in at all. I knew something was wrong, that wasn’t like her. I walked around town this morning, looking for her in a coffee shop or somewhere, but I couldn’t find her.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

This question took Mary Ellen aback. “I, I guess I thought she was just angry and wasn’t talking to me.” she stammered.

“How did you know to come down to MacMillan Wharf this afternoon?”

“Well, eventually I just went back to open up the gallery this morning around ten. It’s Fourth of July weekend, so there’s a lot of customers and I couldn’t stay closed all day. A couple walked in talking about all the commotion down on the wharf, and how one of the whale watch boats found…her. I just knew it had to be Linda.” Her voice ebbed as more tears welled in her eyes.

“Do you have any reason to think that someone would want to hurt her?”

“No, none at all. She’s the nicest person I’ve ever met, she never did anything to anyone.”

“Have you noticed any unusual people hanging around her, or the gallery? Any late night calls? Anything at all out the ordinary?”

“No. Linda’s been working late a lot in the past few weeks. There have been a bunch of whales getting entangled in fishing gear, and she is on the team that responds to those, and she’s been working on a big report for the government. Sometimes she’s been going back to work after dinner and staying until eleven or twelve o’clock.”

“What’s the report about?”

“Something about how natural gas drilling on George’s Bank will hurt the whales. I’m no scientist like her, but she says that it could be really bad. She was really stressed out about it. She was supposed to present the report to the EPA in Washington, D.C. in a couple of months.”

“Have you seen the report?”

“No. It’s mostly technical stuff anyway. Like I said, she’s the scientist.”

“Okay. I guess that’s all for now. Do you have a number where I can reach you if anything else comes up?”

“Yeah, do you have some paper?”

The chief handed her a small notebook that he always kept in his shirt pocket and Mary Ellen wrote down her cell phone number.

“Thanks. Here’s my card with my direct line and cell number. If you think of anything that might help me find who did this, give me a call anytime, day or night, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let me have an officer give you a ride home, you can go out the back door and avoid the reporters.”

“Okay, I just want to go home.” Mary Ellen looked deflated as she slumped in the chair. She felt lost, scared and confused, not knowing what to do next. “What should I do about funeral arrangements?”

“The county medical examiner will need to do an autopsy, they always do in a homicide. They should release the body after that. Probably Monday or Tuesday. Are you able to contact her family?”

“Yes, I have her parents’ phone number.” Mary Ellen grimly thought about making that call.

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mary Ellen. I promise I’ll do everything I can to catch whoever did this to Linda.” He pressed a two-digit extension that rang the dispatchers desk. “Officer Thompson, I need someone to drive Ms. Johnson home. Use the back door, please.”

Officer Thompson replied over the speakerphone. “OK, I’ll have someone come pick her up.”
 The chief stood to show Mary Ellen out of the office. “Again, I’m very sorry. Thanks for you cooperation. If you’ll just wait in the hall, an officer will give you a ride home in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” said a stunned Mary Ellen.

Annie was waiting  outside the door as Mary Ellen stepped into the dimly lit hallway.

“Are you all right?” Annie asked.
“I guess so. They’re giving me a ride home, but I don’t want to go alone Annie. Will you come with me?”

“Sure, sure I will.” She looked at the chief and he nodded in agreement.

“Annie, here’s my card. Same thing I told Mary Ellen, if you can think of anything that might help us out, call me anytime.”

“Okay thanks. You can always reach me at the Whale Center, or on my cell phone.”

“Sure, let me write that down.” The chief retrieved the notebook again from his shirt pocket. “Okay, go ahead.”

While Annie told him the number, Officer Jenny O’Neal came through the back door of the station.

“Hi,” Officer O’Neal said. “Where do you need to go?”

Annie told her the address of Mary Ellen’s house and gallery on Commercial Street.  Officer O’Neal led the two out the back door and helped them into the rear seat of her patrol car.
As Chief Souza watched them depart, he had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t quite sure if it was sadness, hunger or a premonition of things to come. Three decades of police work had sharpened his senses and dimmed his view of humanity considerably. He didn’t yet know who killed Linda Hanscomb, but he had a feeling that Mary Ellen Johnson wasn’t telling him everything.

Ignoring the pile of paperwork on his desk, the Chief sat down and turned towards his computer. He opened his browser to the website of crimedata.gov, entered his password and quickly found out what Mary Ellen Johnson hadn’t revealed to him.

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