by Archer Mayor
Joe gave her a sympathetic look. “Was that hard to hear?”
Her response was unexpectedly honest. “At first. Do you know where Johnny is, Mr. Gunther?”
“No. I wasn’t misleading you, Linda. I have no idea. What did he do for a living?”
“Now? Or what did he used to do?”
“Both, if you don’t mind.”
“Will this help find him?”
“I hope so. It’s like being asked to find a missing child. You have to know what they look like, what their interests are, their friends. All of that. If you want our help, everything and anything might be useful.”
She considered that for a moment. “Okay. Is he in trouble, though?”
“Not as far as we know,” Joe answered truthfully.
“Why did you want to talk to him?”
He paused, impressed by her asking questions, instead of just following his lead. At this early stage, he wasn’t sure if that reflected a native intelligence, or past experience of being too open with law enforcement.
“An old business associate of your husband’s died recently—”
“You mean BB?”
“Yes. So we’ve been trying to interview everyone who knew him. Not surprisingly, Johnny’s name came up.”
“They were old friends. Helped build a roofing business together. You asked what Johnny used to do—that was it. Ridgeline Roofing. BB owned it, but Johnny played a big role in making it a success.”
“Were he and BB friends recently, as well?” Joe asked hopefully.
But she disappointed him. “Not in years. BB created a new company, or merged with somebody. I forget which. Anyhow, he kept with the business, where Johnny had had enough.”
“What did Johnny do next?”
“Investments,” she answered simply.
“Like, stocks?”
She shrugged. “I guess so. I know nothing about business. That’s what he called them—investments.”
Joe suffered a moment of envy. In TV shows, this was where one detective turned to the other with instructions to “get a warrant for his bank records.” In reality, that wasn’t so easy.
“How’s he been seeming lately? Different at all? At the house, you showed us a note from him saying something came up and he’d be gone for a while. That sounds unusual. Is that why you’re worried?”
Her expression returned to its look of concern. “He’s been nervous as a cat. I kept asking him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said it was a big business deal and he had a lot riding on it. That scared me a little, so I asked if we were in trouble, but he said absolutely not—that he never messed with our savings, and he hadn’t this time, either. He was just excited, is all.”
“Did you believe him?”
She hesitated. “Not really,” she then conceded. “This couldn’t’ve been the first big deal he’d ever done, and he’s never acted like he did this time, disappearing and leaving a note. Before, I figured he just didn’t want to tell me, and I respected that. That was our deal. But now, I don’t know.”
“Your deal?”
“When we got married. He said he had a complicated financial life—that he liked it that way—and that, number one, he’d never risk our own funds, and two, that I wasn’t to bug him about it. It was separate from us.”
“Was it?” Joe wanted to know. “Truly?”
She seemed to consider that. “Yes.”
“But there must’ve been meetings,” Joe pressed her. “Phone calls. Maybe even business trips, now and then?”
“Of course. All the time. I just didn’t ask about them, and he didn’t say.”
“And he was never upset or unhappy after one of those trips, or one of those phone calls?”
She shook her head. “No. He was very good about that.”
“Were you close?”
She didn’t take offense, although Joe wouldn’t have minded if she had. Her answer was ready and apparently open. “We were best friends. Maybe that was helped by not having kids, and lots of money. We could travel where we wanted, and take vacations whenever. Neither one of us really had a job—not a nine-to-five one, anyhow. So, if the impulse grabbed us, and we both thought it’d be fun, we’d just go.”
“What kind of places?”
“Hawaii, Paris, the Grand Canyon. It didn’t matter. How’s this going to help find him, Mr. Gunther?”
“Let’s talk about his friends,” Joe suggested. “Not so much those you’d have dinner or go to the movies with. More like business types. You meet any of them?”
“No. That was the dividing line I was talking about. He kept that away from me.”
“Did he have an office somewhere, outside the house?” Joe asked.
“Not that I know of,” was the answer.
“All right,” Joe redirected the conversation. “Maybe we should discuss the social friends. Were any of them particularly close to your husband, in a best-buddy kind of way?”
Linda thought again. “Not really,” she said. “Johnny’s not too outgoing. I mean, he’s friendly, and he never said no when I suggested having dinner with someone. But it’s not something he did on his own. He likes to keep to himself—doing business or watching sports on TV, or going out on the river in the boat. And,” she added with a sad smile, “our trips together. He does enjoy those. Or did.”
Joe was touched by her awkward use of present and past tense when referring to him. “Mrs. Lucas. Linda. What do you think might have happened here?”
Her eyes teared up. “I don’t know. He seemed so on edge lately—even looking out the windows at traffic. And he was fussing with the security system just yesterday, complaining that it wasn’t acting right. I can’t get it out of my mind that something terrible has happened.”
She scrounged around in her purse and produced a small pack of tissues, with which she dabbed her eyes, trying to keep her makeup in place.
“Where did Johnny come from, originally?” Joe asked.
“New York, I think,” she said, studying the tissue for mascara.
“Where, exactly?”
She looked up. “Oh, I don’t know. He never said.”
“Really? That’s unusual, isn’t it? You probably told him all about where you grew up.”
She laughed without much enthusiasm. “Yeah. I never shut up. That’s what some people say.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Joe said quickly.
But she waved that off. “It doesn’t matter. Johnny said nothing good happened where he came from, so he didn’t want to talk about it.”
“No family, either?”
“He said the less he thought about them, the better. It was incredibly sad. I have two sisters, and we’re on the phone all the time, or on Facebook. They mean the world to me. But Johnny didn’t have anybody. It was like he was an orphan.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“Not really, no. I think he just had such a terrible time as a kid that he didn’t want to think back. I always figured that had something to do with his not wanting children. But he might’ve been an orphan. I just don’t know. He never said.”
Her tears welled up again as she added, “He’s such a nice man—especially after some I’ve known. He’s private and a little reserved sometimes, but he’s always been good to me. I want to know what’s happened.”
“Let’s roll back the clock a little, Linda,” Joe suggested. “When Johnny spoke about his early years with BB, building up the business with Hank Mitchell and the others, how did he refer to all that? Did he have good memories of those days?”
That diverted her from a new bout of crying. She blinked several times while she reflected. “I suppose. It was more like he mentioned it in passing—you know what I mean? You have to understand that my husband has a careful way of speaking sometimes. He doesn’t babble like me. He’s quiet a lot, and he thinks before he says stuff. Some people think he’s cold, or insincere, because they don’t understand. But he’s just being thoughtfu
l.”
Or careful, Joe reflected.
“So you never got an impression of how he felt about any of those people?”
“Not really. Apart from BB, of course, but even there, like I said, that friendship cooled.”
“I want to ask you about something more recent, Linda,” Joe began. “And it’s important that you understand that I’ve asked the same thing of everyone I’ve talked to recently, so it’s not a loaded question in any way. Okay?”
She looked confused. “Okay.”
“On the day of BB’s death,” he continued. “What was Johnny up to? I just want to account for his whereabouts, for the record.”
Her reaction caught him off guard. Her face brightened as she said, “Oh—that’s easy. We were at Stratton, overnight. They had a wine-tasting event, with localvore cheeses and cured meats and music. It was wonderful. It was a Welcome to Spring theme. Really festive. We had a great time.”
“You said overnight?” Joe asked.
“Yes. It started in the afternoon and ran till late. We spent the night and had brunch the next morning. That’s when we heard about BB, on the news.”
“Lot of people there with you?” Joe asked.
“It was jammed. Johnny wasn’t crazy about that part, but he still had fun. It was a pain getting our car the next morning because of the crowd. It was really popular. I guess everybody was a little stir-crazy after the winter we had.”
“What do you mean, getting your car was a pain?”
“Well, we’d arrived early enough the day before that they buried it in the back row, so when we wanted to leave the next morning, it was a whole ordeal getting it out. There was something about another car that they couldn’t get started. Anyhow, it took a while. Johnny wasn’t too thrilled.”
“How did he take the news about BB?”
Her mood sombered as she considered the question. “It was funny, now that you mention it. He was quiet for a long time, as if he couldn’t really make up his mind. I’d always wondered why they’d drifted apart, not that you don’t hear of that happening between old business partners, but still…”
“Did he say anything later on?”
“No,” she answered thoughtfully. “That was it. He just seemed to process it, and then left it at that. But it was afterwards that he started acting weird.”
“What about several days before BB died? When I came by and knocked on your door, just looking for a conversation about old times at Ridgeline Roofing?” Joe asked. “Did Johnny act oddly after that? Or make any comments you recall?”
She gave him a blank look. “You came by? I didn’t know that.”
“I rang the bell. He answered over the intercom.”
She smiled slightly. “Oh, right. He did that a lot. It’s not like a regular bell, and he doesn’t want me answering the door anyhow—at least not when he’s there. He was pretty concerned about security, so I let him do all that. He’d talk to people who rang, and I didn’t pay attention. Our friends all knew to call ahead, so anyone who just dropped by was pretty sure to be a stranger.” She paused again. “I’m sorry he didn’t let you in. I don’t know why he didn’t.”
“He didn’t say the police had come by?”
“No.”
“Today was actually the third time.”
She frowned, her expression darkening. “What’s going on, Mr. Gunther? Where’s Johnny?” she repeated.
“I wish I knew,” Joe said, rising and inviting her to stand. “More than you can imagine.” He paused to ask further, “Does your husband have a cell phone? We could possibly use that to trace his whereabouts.”
She shook her head. “He left it behind.”
As they reached the door to the borrowed office, he tried a different tack: “In light of all this, Mrs. Lucas, to help us locate Johnny as quickly as we can, would you allow me or one of my officers access to his papers? It might be extraordinarily useful.”
She stopped dead in her tracks. “I don’t know about that,” she said nervously. “I told you how private he is. I think he’d hate that.”
“It’s up to you, of course,” he said soothingly. “But you are the one who thinks something bad may have happened.”
She was stuck. “I don’t know.…”
He sensed how that might force her to go, and tried for a compromise. “Tell you what: If you accompany whoever comes by, you could control whatever they examine. How would that be? We just want to help.”
“Nothing tricky?” she asked.
“You call the shots,” he reassured her.
She nodded reluctantly. “Okay.”
Excellent, he thought, betraying nothing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was after sunset when Willy drove up the dirt road above Brattleboro, his windows open to the night air. Ahead of him, unfolding in the headlights like the twin tread marks of a Caterpillar tractor, the rutted, gluey, twisting narrow road came at him in bold relief, making the surface’s gleaming texture look worse than it was. In fact, many of Vermont’s roads were slippery washboards like this—especially after winter—and served the state well enough, if perhaps not to the tastes of many transplants from farther south.
And, as familiar and comfortable as he’d become with such terrain—and this particular address—Willy almost missed the poorly marked entrance to Greg Mitchell’s cluster of remote cottages.
He racked the wheel harshly, slithered into the driveway, and ground up the curving slope, seeing the ghostly row of small and isolated homes rise up before him, one by one—four-walled cells of people self-banished from the rest of the world.
At the end, separate from the others, as seemingly abandoned as the severed caboose of a forgotten train, Willy again found Greg’s tiny cabin, its one window spilling light onto the surrounding grass.
True to his nature, he parked at a distance and got out of the car without a sound, drifting over to the window to ascertain what he might find upon knocking on the door. Inside the one-room house, Greg sat in the single chair, an open newspaper on his lap, but staring at the floor before him.
Willy waited a couple of minutes, watching to see if this posture was temporary or a reflection of something more—a body-language glimpse into a man at sea within himself.
Greg never moved. Willy sidestepped to his right and knocked.
Mitchell opened the door and stood staring at him—tall, heavy, bearded, and silent.
Willy brushed by him, establishing control. “We need to talk,” he said.
His impromptu host turned, the door still open.
“Close it,” Willy told him. “You’ll let in the bugs.” He gestured to the bed as he repositioned the chair. “Sit.”
Greg’s shoulders slumped as he reluctantly sat on the edge of the bed. “What do you want?”
“You didn’t think I’d be back?” Willy asked him, slipping completely into his comfortable bad-cop role. “Really? Right after the same guy we’d been talking about is found dead with three bullets in him? I thought you were off dope.”
“I am.”
“Doesn’t sound like it. The same man who was putting moves on your mom, Greg. I wouldn’t want to ask you about that?”
Greg was shaking his head. “Ancient history, man.”
“Ancient when you thought Dad had stepped out on the whole family, maybe. But after you found out he’d really been bumped off? That changed things, didn’t it?”
Mitchell didn’t respond.
Willy leaned forward suddenly and smacked him on the knee, making him jump. “Didn’t it, Gregory?” Willy yelled.
“Fine,” Greg shouted back, his face flushed.
Willy sat back just as abruptly. “Struck a nerve?” he asked in a normal voice.
Greg struggled for composure. “What do you think I’ve done, anyhow? Why’re you here?”
“Isn’t that obvious? BB was killed right after it was revealed your father was murdered. Either Barrett killed himself out of remorse—pretty unlikely
, considering how many times he was shot—or somebody offed him because they thought he’d killed Hank. It is what it is, Greg—straight up and down. Where were you? Sitting in the bushes, waiting for BB to present the right target?”
Mitchell stared at him, openmouthed. “What?”
“Where were you when BB was killed, Greg? Not that complicated.” Willy half rose and pulled his chair closer, still speaking. “And you know what? When we hear somebody dance around a direct question like that, it’s a dead giveaway they’re cookin’ up a lie.”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Too late. I don’t believe it.” Willy shifted gears, smiling and crossing his legs. “Don’t get me wrong. I totally sympathize. The son of a bitch fucked up your life—and everybody else’s. Am I wrong? Your mom never remarried, your sister’s a shadow of what she should be, and you … Well, look at you.” Willy gestured with his hand. “One guy, one selfish act, and everybody gets screwed. You think I don’t get that?”
In a sudden, well-practiced move, Willy reached across his body and pulled his withered hand free of his pants pocket, flopping his arm like a dead animal between them. “It happened to me, Greg. I’m reminded of it every … single … goddamned … day.”
He released the arm, it thudded into his lap, its palm landing face-up and looking like a sun-bleached starfish. Greg’s eyes darted to find something else to stare at.
“I know what it’s like, having someone ruin your life. BB Barrett destroyed everyone you loved.”
“It’s not the same.” Greg was barely audible.
“Where were you?” Willy asked again.
“I was at a meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“AA.”
“Where?”
“The Unitarian church.”
“Who saw you?”
Greg’s eyes flashed with anger, very briefly. “It’s AA. It’s anonymous.”
“It’s Vermont, stupid. There’re twelve people in the whole state. Everybody knows everybody else. Who else was there?”
“I don’t know,” Greg said slowly. “The usual.”
“How’d you know that?” Willy asked out of the blue. “I don’t know where I was when Barrett got popped. It’s not like the Twin Towers going down, when everyone remembers where they were. The news didn’t cover the shooting till way later.”
