Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries)

by Archer Mayor

  “Okay. Follow me.”

  The name of the town in New Hampshire was Gorham, a small pinprick on the map just north of Mount Washington, high in the middle of the state. The name Cioffi had told Cramer to use on all correspondence was John Stanley.

  I arranged to have Cramer send an overnight letter in twenty-four hours to Cioffi stating that he would Express Mail the first check in two days. With any luck, that would give us three days to infiltrate the Gorham area without attracting attention and to be in place when Cioffi came to collect his loot.

  On the surface, it looked pretty straightforward. But as I sat on the tiny lurching seat of the puddle-jumper flying me back to Keene, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d hooked something unusual swimming in murky waters. Whether I could reel it in—or it would pull me overboard—was something I wouldn’t know until it actually happened.

  I had gone from having too few pieces of this puzzle to having an excess. How did shady union dealings, a sudden promotion, Cioffi’s lucrative interest in the stock market, and Pam Stark’s jump in income and subsequent death all coincide? And the fact that Cioffi graduated from the accounting department—had Cioffi discovered something scaly in the numbers? Did it have anything to do with unions? Who would decide a promotion like that, and how did they tie in? And was Pam more than a simple gold digger? And what about the fact that the fetus within her belonged to neither Davis nor Cioffi? Despite the scant attention it attracted, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the pregnancy was more than a biological penalty being paid by a modern promiscuous girl.

  There were other things nagging. Why the elaborate frame, assuming Davis was indeed framed? Why not a simple bullet in the head—clean, efficient, unsensational?

  And finally, what about Stark? Was he simply a neurotic father run amok? Or did his intelligence background have something to do with all this? Who were the people he’d warned me about—the people who’d killed Frank? And what had become of them? Since Frank’s death, things in that quarter had been totally still—lurking like some wild animal waiting for the kill.

  But Stark consumed my thoughts most, as he had done from the start. This was his play we were acting out; he was the director. I was utterly convinced that from his precarious relationship with his daughter, he’d created a cause as big or bigger than anything he’d ever undertaken.

  I looked out the window at the darkening black-and-white landscape below—shadowed fields and stark forestland, the flat pale disks of frozen ponds, an occasional house, its lights just beginning to glimmer. I floated between two realities: one serene and unreachable, being swallowed up by the night, the other violent and calculating, lurking just beyond my comprehension.

  28

  I GOT BACK TO THE OFFICE around six that evening. It was already dark, and moonless. The radio cautioned about heavy snow in the near future; how far in the future was uncertain. Very helpful.

  By the sounds that greeted me as I pushed through the Municipal Building’s double doors, I wouldn’t have guessed quitting time had come and gone an hour ago. The place was as jammed as it was in preparation for George Bush’s little pre-election pep rally in the eighties.

  I sought out Brandt in his cloudy office, leaving the door half-open to allow some minimal circulation.

  He looked up at my knock. “Close the door. What’d you find?”

  “You might think I’m losing my marbles, but I’d like to tell you that outside in the parking lot, if you don’t mind.”

  Brandt glanced around and smiled. He got up and put on his overcoat, and we both went into the dark, cold night.

  He stopped when we were about equidistant from everything but cars. “We did have the place swept, you know—never found a thing.”

  “Humor me—he’s screwed us enough times. I don’t want to underestimate him now.”

  “All right. What have you got?”

  “Cioffi will be waiting for his money, addressed to John Stanley, at a post office box in Gorham, New Hampshire, in three days.”

  Brandt positively grinned. “Hot damn.”

  I gave him the details, which he absorbed with little nods and grunts, his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed deep in his pockets. I also filled him in on the peculiar swirl of coincidences that had so changed Cioffi’s life three years ago.

  Brandt continued nodding. “Yeah. Complicated fella all of a sudden, isn’t he? By the way, your friend Kees called in his report on those blood samples you had delivered.”

  “So soon?”

  “He said it saves time when he knows what to look for.”

  “Is Cioffi our man?”

  “To a T. The semen was definitely his. Can we go back inside now?”

  I ushered him toward the building. The place and the date of Cioffi’s planned reappearance were the only two pieces of information I deemed crucially confidential. Considering the growing number of people tied up in this investigation, everything else was fast becoming common knowledge.

  I settled into Brandt’s guest chair after taking off my coat and rubbed my eyes with my palms. Kees’s report on the semen was the first and only rock solid evidence we’d gathered despite all the dust we’d kicked up. In legal parlance, it placed Cioffi at the scene of the crime, but I’d been mulling this one over so long now, legal parlance was no longer enough. “I wonder what the hell happened in that room?”

  Brandt sat and put his feet on his desk. He twitched his chin up in half a nod. “I know what you mean. Things are so tangled now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the man’s semen did get delivered without him.” He paused and pursed his lips, “I almost hate to tell you this, considering, but your little duckling Kunkle has come up with something that isn’t going to help much.”

  I raised my eyebrows, but he merely answered by picking up his phone and asking Kunkle to join us. There was a knock on the door in less than a minute. Kunkle entered carrying a thick file.

  “How was your trip?” The civility stunned me. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if he’d kissed me. “Good. If everything works, we’ll have Cioffi in the bag pretty soon. Tony says you’ve found a monkey wrench.”

  Kunkle laid the file on the desk before me. “Yeah. I think I have. We all figured Cioffi’s convention schedule was a perfect cover for all those trips ‘Louis Armstrong’ took with Pam Stark, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  He bent over and flipped open the file. “Well, I ran a comparison check between his appointment calendars and the passenger manifests we got from the travel agents on Stark and her boyfriend. They don’t coincide.”

  “But he filled in the appointment calendar, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought—he was covering his tail. So I got a warrant for the tickets he bought—from a different travel agent, by the way—and matched them to his books. They fit.”

  “So Louis Armstrong is not Cioffi.”

  Kunkle shook his head. “Not according to the records. I’ve started the paperwork to track whether he was actually seen at those conventions, but I have a feeling they were legit.”

  He was quiet. I looked at Brandt, who gave me that little smile. I sighed. “So we’ve got Davis, who might have been framed, Cioffi with the semen, which might have been planted, and Louis Armstrong, who might be the father. We also have the remote possibility that all three are innocent of her murder and that a fourth guy did it, or that all three were in her room that night and did her in together.”

  “And on and on,” Brandt muttered.

  I shrugged. “Well, what the hell. Let’s go with what we’ve got.”

  Brandt dropped his feet off his desk. “Suits me. There is one other item, though. The good colonel located Dr. Duquesne and squeezed him about Cioffi.”

  Something sagged inside me. “How?”

  “He called up and said he’d grabbed Duquesne, Jr., and would cut his heart out or something if the doc didn’t spill the beans. It was all done by phone and apparently the kid never was grabbed—
he was at school all along. Duquesne was pretty bent out of shape and threatened to sue. In any case, we better assume Stark isn’t far behind us, as usual.”

  I shook my head. “How the hell does he do that?”

  Brandt reached into his trash can and tossed me that morning’s paper. “We live in an information society. Katz found Duquesne and interviewed him. All Stark had to do was read the paper.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Katz found Duquesne’?”

  “Dunno.”

  I stared at the front page article without reading it. Katz wasn’t the only one who amazed me; Duquesne’s stupidity was pretty awesome too—I guessed the urge to talk to a real live member of the press was more than he could resist, even considering the risks. That was one lawsuit that wouldn’t keep me up at night.

  I put the newspaper back in the trash. “You know, if we hope to lay a net around Cioffi without attracting attention, we’re going to have to put a stop to this.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “We could try what they did on D-Day: involve the reporters in exchange for exclusives after the fact.”

  “Those were different times, Joe. Pre—Woodward and Bernstein.”

  “I think Katz is too big an asshole to trust.” Kunkle’s voice startled me. I’d forgotten he was still in the room.

  “I won’t argue with that part, but he does a hell of a job.”

  Kunkle’s eyes widened. “A hell of a job? That son of a bitch tries to screw us every time we bend over.”

  “That’s because we’re on the receiving end. You got to admit, if he weren’t so good, we wouldn’t hate him so much.”

  Brandt lit his pipe and blew out some smoke. “I think the imagery is getting disgusting.”

  I held up a hand. “All right, but wait. This is a legitimate point; he usually does get his facts straight, right? What about the stakeout story at the Misery Hilton. That was fair.”

  Brandt shrugged. “Granted.”

  “So maybe it’s our fault, and that’s what pisses us off. It’s not like we’re dealing with some jackass from the National Enquirer who just invents what he can’t get.”

  “Joe, no one’s arguing the man’s abilities. It’s his personality—and the times. He’s a very ambitious guy, and that gets rewarded. You don’t get recognition in his world for being friendly with the authorities.”

  “And I still say he’s an asshole,” Kunkle muttered.

  I stood up. “Well, let’s find out. You and I’ll go talk with him.”

  Kunkle made a sour face. “Why me?”

  “Because you have nothing better to do.”

  “Oh, give me a break—”

  “And you might learn something about human nature.” I turned to Brandt. “Call the paper and tell them we’re coming, will you? See if you can line up Katz and Bellstrom both.”

  “Good luck.”

  I led the way back to the parking lot. Kunkle was still clutching his file. “I don’t need a goddamned nanny, you know. If I want to find out about human nature, I’ll do it on my own.”

  I stopped halfway out the double doors, the cold air reaching at my throat through the gap. I buttoned my coat. “Fine. Let me put it another way. You are the biggest head case I have on this investigation, so I want you to know every detail of my conversation with Katz and his boss so you won’t fly off the handle later if and when you see Katz hanging around. Is that more acceptable?”

  He nodded, which I took as a good sign. Nothing like a series of murders to snap one out of a depression.

  We found Bellstrom and Katz in the editor’s office, ready and waiting. Bellstrom was his usual laid-back, affable self. Katz was back to being Katz. “Getting Brandt to work as your secretary? That’s hardball for a mere acting captain.”

  “Asshole,” Kunkle muttered one more time.

  “Hello to you, too, Stanley,” I added.

  Bellstrom had made a steeple of his fingers and was tapping it gently against his lower lip. “Since it’s getting on toward dinner time, maybe we ought to get started.” He then smiled apologetically. “My wife just called. Her sister’s in town, and if I’m not home for dinner, she suggested I spend the night at a motel.”

  “The life of a press lord?”

  He shrugged.

  “All right. We’ve had some of this conversation before and didn’t get anywhere, so I’m offering a new approach.”

  “To what?” Katz asked.

  “To mutual back scratching. Unless I guess wrong, you’ve got every reporter, every stringer, and probably every janitor in your building out covering this Colonel Stark thing. That includes working your police moles overtime and wearing out shoes. How did you find Duquesne, by the way?”

  Katz looked at Bellstrom, whose expression didn’t change. Katz then smiled. “That was hard work. I heard one stray comment about prescriptions—nothing specific—and based on that, I had everyone who could handle a phone call every doctor in town and ask why the cops had dropped by recently. Duquesne bit. He said something like, ‘That’s confidential,’ and I knew I had my man. I showed up and his ego did the rest.”

  I turned to Bellstrom. “Is this the biggest story this paper has ever covered?”

  “It’s a big story,” he agreed with a poker face. “Pulitzer big, maybe?”

  “Conceivably. It’s nice to dream.”

  “Well, I wish you well. Unfortunately, some of that eagerness could have gotten Duquesne’s kid killed if Stark had played it another way.”

  “Break my heart,” Katz grumbled. Kunkle shoved his hands into his pockets. Bellstrom looked uncomfortable.

  “It was just an illustration. We’re getting very close to opening the front door to this whole mess, but like I said at our last get-together, if Stark gets there before us, we’ll probably never find out what’s inside. He’ll throw in a hand grenade. That puts us in a quandary, since you guys are reporting every move we make. So I have what Tony Brandt seems to think is a fairly quaint proposition.”

  “Which is?”

  “I will involve you in every phase of our operation from now on for the next three days in exchange for exclusive coverage, if you give us some room to arrange our plans discreetly—kind of like they did at D-Day.”

  Katz shook his head. “Three days—you that close?” I ignored him. Kunkle didn’t, but he kept quiet. Bellstrom closed his eyes for a moment. “Times have changed a bit since then.”

  “Seems like it worked pretty well at the stakeout. You’d be in on everything—every meeting, every planning session, everything. It would be your choice to go where you wanted.”

  Bellstrom shook his head. “We have arrangements of our own with other news agencies—wire services and the TV people, not to mention other papers of our own chain. It’s kind of like a pool.”

  “Kind of, but not officially, right? You’re not contractually required to reveal each detail of a story as you uncover it, are you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “If you go along with this, the whole thing’s yours. If you don’t, we’ll just throw it to the dogs and let them sort it out. I might add, by the way, that we intend to really clamp down for the next few days. The normal flow of communication in the department will stop. All information will be on a need-to-know basis. We’re going to bend over backwards to keep everything we can from the press.”

  “Then why this conversation?” Bellstrom asked.

  I noticed Katz was looking thoughtful rather than combative. That, I hoped, was a plus for our side. “Because we’ve got higher priorities than keeping you in the dark. Besides, this way, if we do screw up and let something out of the bag, it won’t necessarily hit the front page next day. I’d like to be able to concentrate on wrapping this up with you, not in spite of you. For that matter, if you want to get sentimental, this might be the only chance for Bill Davis to be declared an innocent man. Surely it’s worth three days of insider work to be able to crow about that later.”

  There
was a long silence. Bellstrom’s eyes wandered over to the window that separated his office from the now deserted newsroom. “You could mislead us more easily from the inside; use us to your advantage.”

  “That’s a risk. But it’s a risk all the time anyway.”

  “I can handle that,” Katz muttered.

  I fought down a smile. I could feel the Pulitzer bug chewing at Katz’s mind.

  Bellstrom looked at him, mild surprise on his face. “You like this?”

  “I don’t see any problems with it. It’s only three days. A trade-off sounds good. Like he said, it worked last time.”

  Bellstrom checked his watch. “The principle stinks, if you ask me. I’ve said it before—I don’t like sleeping with tigers; it’s not natural and it’s not healthy. I’m not even sure it’s ethical.”

  “But it might make for a hell of a story,” Katz added.

  The phone rang. Bellstrom picked it up, listened for a moment, said “I’m on my way,” hung up, and got to his feet. “I’ve got to go… All right. I think it stinks, but I won’t fight it. But,” and he stuck his finger at Kunkle and me, “if there’s any show of something screwy, we’re out of it.” He looked hard at Katz. “Stan, I know you want more out of life than this paper. But if you sell me out on this, if you give them more than just silence during these next three days, your ass is grass. Is that understood?”

  Katz nodded. Bellstrom looked at us all as if we’d just emerged from a swamp, and walked out of the office to lock horns with his sister-in-law.

  I turned to the other two. “Well. Now that everybody’s happy, I suggest some shut-eye. It might be the last we’ll get for quite some time. We’ll reconvene at headquarters at 6:00 A.M.”

  · · ·

  Gail’s driveway had been plowed and sanded, for which I was extremely grateful. Where my old car had usually given up halfway up the hill, I doubted Leo’s could have climbed ten feet. I walked up to her sliding glass door and knocked.

  I was a little surprised she hadn’t beaten me there, standing lookout to see how I fared on the slope. I slid open the door and called out her name. She answered from the kitchen.