Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries)

by Archer Mayor

  The room was dominated by a large antique desk. I sat behind it and went through its drawers. Its contents were conspicuously neutral. A filing cabinet against one wall was empty except for one .45-caliber Colt semi-automatic pistol. I copied its serial number and left it there. I looked around a little longer with no results and returned to the living room. Mrs. Stark was sitting again in her chair, just as before.

  “Was your husband carrying a lot when he left the last time?”

  “No. Just his duffel bag, as usual.”

  “What about the contents of his filing cabinet?”

  “He came for those later.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. He must have waited until I was out of the house. He did that sometimes.”

  “You mean sneak into his own house?”

  “Yes.”

  I passed on that one. “Would you have a photograph of him and your daughter?”

  “Yes.” She got up and pulled a framed picture out of a drawer beneath the coffee table. It showed the three of them in front of this house, in the summer. They all wore shorts and T-shirts, but each looked pulled in from a different part of the world. Mrs. Stark, old and demure in Bermudas and a sedate polo shirt; the Colonel, hard eyed, crew-cut, tall and lithe, dressed in Marine-style gym clothes; and Pam, her face cold and remote, turned away from the camera, wearing very brief running shorts and a shirt that revealed her bare midriff. None of them touched one another, none of them smiled, and only Stark stared straight into the lens with the pale blue eyes that had so frightened Susan Lucey—and which I had seen for the first time when Ski Mask pulled me out onto the landing of my apartment.

  “What was Pamela like, as a daughter?”

  “Angry, like her father.”

  “She ever get into trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  “Yeah, like at school. You know, the usual things nowadays—drugs, sex, stuff like that.”

  She looked straight at me for a long moment. It was the first time she’d made direct eye contact. “That was very controversial.”

  I waited for more, but that was it. This woman’s laundry was not for public airing—especially this laundry, I thought. I held up the photograph. “Can I borrow this? I’ll send it back as soon as I have copies made.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t matter.”

  I pulled a business card out of my wallet and handed it to her. “I’ll get out of your hair. Thanks for your help. Do call me if he gets in touch, will you?”

  She took the card without looking at it.

  I walked toward the entrance hall with the picture in my hand. She stayed where she was. I hesitated at the door. “Mrs. Stark, is there anything you would like to know about your daughter’s death? You can ask me if you’d like—it’s all right.”

  She stood there in the middle of the room, arms slack by her sides, again looking into some nebulous middle distance, as abandoned and as lonely as the only living bird in a desolate forest. “No.”

  I let myself out.

  · · ·

  “Danvers.”

  “This is Joe Gunther in Brattleboro.”

  “How’d you make out on that DEA stuff?”

  “Hit the jackpot. We haven’t nabbed the guy yet, but we know who he is—Steven Cioffi, in case you’re interested. Many thanks.”

  “Sure. What’s on your mind? I don’t guess you called to kiss me on both cheeks?”

  “No, there is something else.”

  “Just so nothing’s left unsaid here, you do realize I’ve helped you out so far as a favor, right?”

  “But you are interested in that bug.”

  “To an extent, true.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me why.”

  “True again.”

  “So much for altruism. Here’s something for nothing then: Colonel Henry Stark. He’s the one in the ski mask, the owner of the bug, and the father of Kimberly Harris, a.k.a. Pamela Stark. I have a feeling he’s been around in various service branches, but the Army might be the best place to start. Maybe the CIA too.”

  “Lovely.” He didn’t sound pleased.

  “Of course, we’d be more than happy to request an interminable file search through normal channels for our own humble selves, and hope to get it before we’re all dead of old age, but I’m hoping your curiosity matches ours and that you can cut a few corners.”

  “I’ll be back in touch.”

  I put down the receiver and smiled at Brandt. “He’ll do it.” Brandt had propped the photograph of the Stark family on his desk. “Hardly Father Knows Best, is it?”

  “No, but it’s a great shot for our purposes. What do you think about distributing an eight-by-ten blowup of his face all over town—and letting Katz have it, too?”

  “What if Danvers says he’s a superspook or something and we’re supposed to keep our mouths shut?”

  “If the damage is already done, then that’s too bad. We’re only a bunch of hicks, after all—no sense of global priorities.”

  Brandt rubbed the side of his nose and smiled. “I’ll call J.P. tonight and have it ready for tomorrow morning’s edition.” He picked up the picture and looked at it again. “You know, we’re sticking our necks out a little. We still don’t have proof Ski Mask and Stark are one and the same—legally, that is.”

  I shrugged. “So don’t put Stark’s name on it. He’s probably going under Smith or Brown or Jones anyway—everyone else is. The worst that can happen is that Colonel Stark will return from some illicit affair in Guatemala, where he’s been subverting the natives for the last two months, and sue us for everything we own.”

  “Yes, I suppose. That’s comforting, at least.”

  · · ·

  The following morning, Brandt met me in the hallway with a copy of the Reformer. “Sneak preview; that’s an early run of today’s edition.”

  I opened it up and saw Stark staring at me again. SKI MASK REVEALED, SAY POLICE, was the awkward headline; the caption under the picture asked, “Have you seen this man?” and gave our telephone number. It also identified Stark by name. “I see you decided to go whole hog.”

  “The name? Yeah, I figured, what the hell, when you’re nine-tenths in, you might as well take the bath.”

  “That make Wilson happy?”

  “Hard to tell. I think he’s on a general hate binge. I’ve got more, though.”

  I had to smile at the light in his eyes. “Oh?”

  “I got a call from Danvers at the crack of dawn. He said he couldn’t send us anything on Stark officially—apparently the man’s classified—but he did give me a rough outline, which is all we really need.”

  “And?”

  “It’s even better—or worse—than you suspected. Stark’s a super-spook of sorts—CIA, maybe, although Danvers won’t say; it might be Military Intelligence. Anyhow, he’s done covert work in Korea, Latin America, Africa, Beirut, you name it. He was in Special Forces during Vietnam and worked a lot behind the lines. Apparently, he’s a real hands-on guy—not an administrator. I also got the feeling that behind all the patriotic crap about someone having to do a dirty job in a dirty world, the guy is regarded as a bit of a maniac—not just a stone-cold killer, but a quote-unquote real strange guy to boot, whatever that means. He’s so good, though, that he has ‘the longest leash in covert operations.’ Those are Danvers’s words again.”

  Brandt took back the paper and folded it under his arm. “I would guess with all this mess that the leash is about to get yanked—hard.”

  27

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE DID TAKE PLACE, later that morning, but only Wilson was there to answer questions. He didn’t reveal Cioffi’s identity but only that the police department had zeroed in on one particular suspect—who had apparently already fled—and that hopes were high for “a rapid resolution of the case.”

  When asked about Bill Davis, he said that while the case against him wasn’t as “structured” as it had been originally, it still didn’t exc
lude him from “the realm of guilt.” No evidence had surfaced that didn’t “fit the scenario that Davis had possibly worked with the man now being sought.”

  About Henry Stark, Wilson revealed nothing from Danvers’s report. He conceded that the colonel’s rash actions had caused a reopening of the case, but he was not to be construed as some avenging angel, as one New Hampshire reporter implied. He was a dangerous killer, and he would be “tracked down and brought to justice.” A series of redundant questions concerning the progress of this tracking met with: “The situation is increasingly under control.”

  He took an unusually nasty beating from the reporters, none of whom was remotely satisfied with his comments, and I must admit I grudgingly tipped my hat to him for maintaining his cool, if not his control over the English language. That calm demeanor was reserved for reporters only, however; the rest of us gave him wide berth when he walked fuming back into the building.

  Not that many of us were there to get in his way. Even with the added help from the state police and the Windham County Sheriff ’s Department, we were stretched so thin we had meter maids out directing traffic—a breach of rules we were bound to hear about at some later date.

  The rest of us were either tucked away in offices, scrutinizing every scrap of Cioffi’s belongings, or out on the road asking questions about his background. At the rate we were going, his anonymity wasn’t going to last for long.

  Steven Cioffi, we slowly gathered, had been employed at Leatherton for twenty years. He’d begun as a young clerk at their previous factory near Bellows Falls, working out of the accounting office. According to the office people we interviewed, all in the company of the rotund Mr. Kleeman “from legal,” his personality through those years remained as Dr. Duquesne had described it—dull, humorless, and utterly without charm. An early orphan, he had been raised by his stern maternal grandparents until they were both killed in a car crash when he was sixteen. His only sibling was an older sister, still living in Bellows Falls, with whom he had little contact and who, on the afternoon we talked to her, showed no interest in him whatsoever.

  He graduated from high school, living off a small sum of money he’d inherited from his grandparents, and then embarked on an unremarkable round of local odd jobs until he landed the position at Leatherton, which had just moved to town and was hiring people from the area.

  He worked hard, if without visible inspiration, and his efforts were traditionally rewarded. With the relentless energy of a growing weed, he infiltrated up through the ranks of the accounting department, suddenly leaping to his present unrelated position three years ago. Curiously, none of the people we interviewed could explain the career jump, nor could they remember a single outstanding feature about the man.

  So what he did as vice-president of “industrial relations” remained an enigma. It had something to do with conventions, as his secretary had vaguely pointed out. It also involved keeping in touch with—and keeping friendly with—the various unions working for the Leatherton network of factories. But primarily, as one disenchanted observer remarked, Cioffi was a case of deadheading; he had worked his way into a crack in the corporate wall, closer to the top than to the bottom, and had effectively disappeared. It was this man’s opinion that the wall was full of such cracks and that all of them were stuffed with Cioffis.

  One interesting but unprovable comment surfaced late in the day linking Cioffi’s financial well-being to his ties with the unions. The allegation was that Leatherton’s peaceful relationship with its work force was maintained by something more tangible than corporate harmony. What that meant precisely was never explained and would demand more than a scant few hours of research.

  What was gnawing at me by the end of the day, however, wasn’t the possibility of under-the-table payments between management and labor—with Cioffi and God knew who else skimming off the top—but rather, where that money was stashed. The only bank accounts we could find in Cioffi’s name were negligible—enough to keep his bills paid, but in no way reflective of his obviously expensive tastes.

  Willy Kunkle, on temporary bright-eyed leave from his manic depression, gave me the answer at ten o’clock that night. He poked his head around my door and gave me a grin I’d never before seen, “I think I found the loot.”

  “Where?”

  He waved a thick sheaf of papers. “Phone records, going back over the past four years. Most of it’s crap, but there’s one number that pops up as regular as rain.”

  He came in and laid the papers on my desk. On sheet after sheet, sometimes in clumps, sometimes singly, but never separated by more than a week, was the same New York City number.

  “Who’s it belong to?”

  “Timothy Cramer. He’s a stockbroker.”

  I smiled. “Bingo.”

  · · ·

  I was on the first flight to New York the following morning, traveling under an assumed name. I’d had Kunkle tail me all the way to the Keene airport to make sure I wasn’t followed. If Timothy Cramer did in fact have Cioffi’s money, I was convinced it would lead me to the man himself. Considering Cioffi’s lack of personal attachments—hobbies, interests, or people—money seemed the only lead left, and judging from the number of calls he’d placed to Cramer, it was obviously a big one.

  I found Cramer in an enormous, brightly lit room on the fifteenth floor of the headquarters of a large, well-known brokerage house. He sat in one of a long line of cheek-by-jowl cubicles, each equipped with a metal desk, two chairs, and a computer. It reminded me of someone’s pessimistic vision of the future.

  He was an affable man, still in his twenties, and very much impressed by the sight of a badge. I explained to him it was utterly worthless in New York and that he was under no obligation to speak with me.

  “No, no,” he said, getting up and leading me to another row of glassed-in conference cubicles lining the wall. “This is a nice break. Unconventional, too, which is saying a lot for this place.”

  He opened the door and ushered me in. The silence after the glass door had closed was eerie, as if all the activity within our sight had suddenly had its sound unplugged.

  We sat in opposing padded plastic chairs, like contestants in a game show.

  “So, what can I do for you?”

  “I gather you handle the account of a man named Steven Cioffi.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Would you be able to tell me how much it comes to?”

  “I could but I can’t, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure. Could you tell me at least if it’s big or small?”

  He gave me a lopsided smile. “Those are relative terms, especially around here, but I could say that I personally don’t consider it small.”

  “And is it still in place? Has he liquidated yet?”

  He looked at me curiously, his face suddenly still. “No, I’ve still got it. Why do you ask?”

  “He’s wanted for murder.” I watched for his reaction, hoping I could tell if his surprise was genuine or not.

  His mouth fell open. “Holy shit.”

  I believed him. “He knows we’re after him. He’s already cleared out of town, taking everything with him, but I was hoping things had been a little slower at this end. Has he asked you to liquidate?”

  “Yes, about a week or so ago. In fact, I was getting ready to mail him a check for a large chunk of it.”

  “Where to?”

  “A post office box somewhere in New Hampshire. I’d have to look at my notes to tell you where exactly. It didn’t mean anything to me. Who did he kill?” He suddenly looked embarrassed. “Is that all right to ask?”

  “Sure. About three years ago, we think he was involved in the rape and strangulation of a young woman. Have you ever met him?”

  “Never set eyes on him. He just called up—about three years ago, now that you mention it—and started doing business. I didn’t have anything to do with it, really. He calls—he called—his own shots; I just carried them out.” />
  “Did he do well?”

  “Extremely well. He really does his homework.”

  “How did he strike you as a personality?”

  Cramer held up his thumb and index finger and formed a circle. “Zip. He didn’t strike me as anything. At first, I tried being friendly, you know? Maybe a light comment or two? But there was nothing coming back. I felt like I was pitching pennies into an empty well, so I stopped. It was all business.”

  “And a lot of business, according to his phone records.”

  “You bet. He calls me more than any of my other clients, giving me orders and asking for research.”

  “Did he send you a lot of money to invest?”

  “Oh, yes, regular installments would come every month. That’s not unusual, though. Lots of people take a set sum out of their monthly paycheck or whatever and put it on the Street.”

  “When did he contact you last?”

  “Just a couple of days ago. He asked if I had the money yet and I said, ‘Almost,’ and then he gave me the post office box number.”

  “Could I have that?”

  For the first time his face clouded. He looked doubtful. “That would probably get me fired. Is there any way you could get a warrant?”

  “Yes, but it’ll take time, and I’m not sure we have it. So far, he thinks he’s covered his trail; if he senses something’s wrong, we may lose him.”

  “Is there any way you could just keep me out of it?”

  “Sure. It’s just an address. I could have gotten it from any confidential source, as they say. Of course, if and when we catch him, the State’s Attorney might want to ask you about Cioffi’s dealings with you, but that’ll all be through proper channels. This conversation will never come up.”

  He quickly nodded once—a man used to making fast decisions.