The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  “Not really, but he fell on his alibi like it was a long-lost puppy, so he might’ve known when she was being killed. He’s connected to it all somehow, and I’m guessing he’s the weak link we need. We have to squeeze him hard enough to make him act. The girlfriend’s name is Ginny Levasseur. Find out what you can about her, too.”

  Back in my office, I reached for the phone. It was early yet, and I hoped I could catch the Skyview’s attending psychiatrist, Dr. Andrews, before his workday took hold of him. Encouraged by my conversation with Hennessy, I wanted to find out if Bernie had seen something that might have traumatized him—and whether or not I could find out what it had been.

  I was doubly lucky. Not only did Dr. Andrews answer his own phone, having just come into the office, but he exhibited none of the vagueness about Bernie that Harry the orderly had claimed he might.

  “Wonderful guy,” said Andrews. “Full of stories. And a fascinating case. In my own experience he’s the only post-traumatic stress disorder to exhibit such deep-seated symptoms. Usually, they’re either transient or episodic in nature, although they can last for years at a stretch, especially if untreated, but Bernie seems permanently afflicted. He may have an element of what’s called Korsakoff’s syndrome, which is a classic alcohol-induced memory-loss phenomenon. It would exacerbate the PTSD and may explain why he can’t remember much after the early fifties.”

  “Everything since then is blocked?”

  “Well, no. That’s why I said he had an element of Korsakoff’s. There are times he appears more lucid, when I’ve noticed he assimilates current events into his dialogue. The problem is, I can never be absolutely sure of that. Nursing home life is bland, repetitive, and predictable, which is good—but it makes some forms of clinical observation a little difficult. I often wish I had the time and resources to put Bernie into an environment where I could really study him. As it is, I have a catch-as-catch-can relationship with him.”

  “Have you seen him since the murder?” I asked.

  “No. I haven’t had the time—typical, I’m afraid. I heard he was very worked up following the event.”

  “Do you think he could’ve seen the murder take place?” I asked hopefully.

  There was a long, thoughtful silence at the other end of the line. I expected a speech about the difficulties and dangers of assuming too much from a couple of brief encounters, but he surprised me by admitting, “That’s quite possible. His attack on the other resident may well have been an acting out of the event. I also heard that he’s been expressing himself exclusively through his warrior persona, which might be another indicator that he witnessed something violent.”

  “How could I get him to talk? I need a description of whoever killed her.”

  His response was cautious. “Lieutenant, this man will not be the kind of witness you’re used to. If I were you, I wouldn’t pin too much hope on getting anything useful out of him, assuming he even saw what you hope he did.”

  “I realize that. But right now I have nothing.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t look to Bernie for your salvation. For one thing, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t get any verbal description. I have a theory—largely unfounded, by the way—that in some cases, one’s abilities fade in the reverse order in which they were learned as an infant. Thus, the verbal skills in a patient like this would be among the least reliable. He talks a mile a minute—that’s not what I mean—but he doesn’t make much sense anymore. Just as a baby’s first words are haphazard and often erroneously linked to what it’s trying to describe.”

  “So what’s that leave me?” I asked.

  “Well, some of the earliest senses are touch and sound. Another is the bonding reflex. I know that Bernie was terribly attached to his daughter, and that he has an affinity for young-looking slender women with long dark hair—the way his daughter looked when he last saw her lucidly. I’ve noticed he’s more relaxed among people fitting that description. Music can be helpful also, as can the touch of a docile animal, like an older cat or dog.

  “What I’m saying is that if you can get him sensorially anesthetized, he might be able to express some of what he saw. But it’s liable to be very vague, assuming it surfaces at all, and it may demand a good deal of time.”

  “Is there any harm in giving it a try?”

  “I can’t imagine any harm, but if he’s never met you, there’s likely to be a barrier neither one of you could overcome in a single encounter.”

  “You could though,” I said flatly, “especially if I supplied the woman, the cat, and some music.”

  He burst out laughing. “You certainly make it sound easy—a Shake-’n-Bake therapy session. All right, I’m willing to give it a try, but I’ll have to think about the approach a bit, visit Bernie myself, and call you back on the timing. Is that acceptable?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “There is one thing I’d recommend in the meantime,” he added. “If you do have a specific woman in mind, have her meet him several times before the session, and have her bring the animal. The prior exposure will be important, and while he may not remember the woman from one meeting to the next, he might recall the animal.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you got it. I’ll wait to hear from you.” I hung up smiling, imagining Gail’s reaction.

  · · ·

  Unfortunately, my good humor was short-lived. Moments later, the intercom buzzed, and Tony Brandt’s voice came over the speaker. “You better get over here, Joe. We’ve got problems.”

  With memories still fresh in my mind of the earlier meeting with NeverTom, Wilson, and Nadeau, I crossed the hallway to Tony’s office with no small feeling of dread.

  But although Tony was alone in his office, his expression was still grim as he waved a letter in the air. “Tom Chambers’s lawyer just sent me this, stating that unless we bring formal charges against his client, he’s going to sue the PD.”

  I took a seat, depressed by how fast our stab at discretion had gone for nil. “For what?”

  “That’s been left purposefully vague, but it obviously has to do with our current inquiries. What’s our status there?”

  “Sammie got a subpoena this morning to grab all of Eddy Knox’s papers. She was hoping to pull him in this afternoon for the initial interrogation.”

  “Does she think he’ll give us NeverTom?”

  “I haven’t talked to her today. But if Tom Chambers is kicking up dust already, it sounds like Knox caught wind of what’s going on and went straight to him for help. Either that, or NeverTom heard through his own sources that we’ve been checking him out.” I pointed at the letter. “Maybe that’s a good sign. Why would NeverTom care about the smoke if there wasn’t any fire?”

  “Possibly because he’s a mean-hearted son of a bitch. If he knows he’s innocent, this is a perfect opportunity to prove we’re out to drag him through the mud. And he’ll be able to pull in both Wilson and Gary Nadeau as witnesses to how uncooperative we were just a few days ago. I told you then he had something up his sleeve.”

  I leaned forward and picked up the letter, scanning its contents quickly. “Does this affect our investigation?”

  Tony shook his head. “It’s just a threat so far, and a bogus one at that—you can’t sue a department for making inquiries. He’s just trying to put us on the defensive. He probably also has more than a few indiscretions he doesn’t want us digging up by accident. I just wanted you to know we got his dander up. This is most likely just the opening shot, by the way. He’s perfectly capable of calling another press conference and railing at us in public. He’d have little to lose, guilty or not.”

  I got up, nodding. “Okay. Thanks, Tony—keep me posted.”

  · · ·

  Back at my office, however, NeverTom’s attempt at a preemptive strike against us kept preying on my mind, and gave birth to an idea of how to both feed him some of his own medicine, and help us look into his and his brother’s financial dealings. It flew in the face of my professio
nal instincts, and I was pretty sure that if Jack Derby found out about it, it could possibly cost me my job. But I still couldn’t shake its appeal. I picked up the phone and dialed Gail for consultation.

  “You alone?” I asked once I had her on the line.

  “What’re you offering, a little phone sex?”

  I laughed. “Let me run something by you first.”

  “That doesn’t sound like half as much fun. Go ahead—I’m alone for the moment.”

  “NeverTom’s sicced his lawyer on us, threatening to sue because we’re digging into his affairs. I know it’s all hot air, but it got me wondering. What if I pull a Deep Throat with Stan Katz? Leak him a little inside information on Tom, get the Reformer to do some of our legwork for us, and throw a bit of Tom’s shit back in his face all at the same time?”

  There was a long pause before she answered. “Why do you need to do that?”

  “Because NeverTom is well connected, rich, and not tied down by rules or bureaucracy. We’re understaffed, in the dark, and handcuffed by regulations—most of them designed to stop us from doing our job. If I could get Katz fired up enough, it might give us a crucial advantage in finding out what’s going on. I know he’d protect my identity, and now that the paper’s employee-owned, he’s got no outside bosses to tell him what to do.”

  There was another long silence before she said, “You want my honest opinion? I think NeverTom Chambers has gotten under your skin, and you’re going to make damn sure he takes the rap for something, even if it’s just bad publicity. From what I’ve seen so far, you don’t have a thing on him. Is that still true?”

  I admitted as much.

  “You might soon, though, with Eddy Knox coming in. And if the bank is implicated, that could involve some federal charges. The PD gets threatened with lawsuits all the time, Joe. But you keep playing by the rules. That’s both the department’s strength and the twenty-pound weight around its neck.”

  I made no comment, hearing in her words my own inner debate, and also wondering if she was about to reach the same conclusion I had.

  “So now another rich, powerful, arrogant jerk is shooting his mouth off. Only, this time you’re thinking, ‘What the hell? A few suggestions in the right place, and I can watch the fur fly without getting damaged, and maybe pick up a few insights along the way.’ Is that about it? You feeling like rebelling against a lifetime of traditional rectitude?”

  I started laughing. “Yeah—that’s close enough.”

  She joined me for a few seconds, took a breath, and then said, “I say, ‘Go for it.’ If ever there was a guy worth breaking a rule or two to get, it’s NeverTom.”

  She hung up before I could ask her if she knew of anyone with an old cat.

  22

  SHEILA KELLY AND J.P. TYLER CAME BY my office later that morning, both hesitating in the doorway as if uncertain about how to proceed.

  “You got something?” I asked them, waving them in.

  Sheila, as tall and faintly glamorous as J.P. was short and homely, deferred to his seniority. “Yeah,” he said, “we may have found a hook on Thomas Chambers.”

  They both sat down.

  “I better warn you,” J.P. continued, “this is strictly anecdotal so far. We had to make sure not to do anything that might be thrown out in court later on, so we consulted only public records, and made it clear to everyone we talked to that what we were after was purely informational. I did tape every conversation, though, and had each person sign a release.”

  I noticed Sheila fighting to hide a smile, and wondered how many times in the last two days she’d been tempted to wring his compulsive little neck.

  “From what we were told,” J.P. went on, “and from what Sheila obtained from the records, it looks like Thomas Chambers influenced Harold Matson—and through him the Bank of Brattleboro—to finance the convention center, although neither Chambers nor his brother had any financial involvement in it at that time.”

  “Aside from owning adjacent property,” Sheila added.

  “Is that illegal?” I asked.

  J.P. looked vaguely uncomfortable. To a man who found pleasure poking through hair samples, bloodstains, fingerprints, and other minutiae, the amorphous world of finance lacked the absolutes he relied on.

  Sheila Kelly sensed his dilemma and smoothly took over. “The best answer to that is probably historical. When Gene Lacaille first came up with the idea for a convention center, he had about a million dollars to invest. He already owned the land free and clear—inherited from his father. As we all know, support for the idea was fast and broad-based, including from the Chambers brothers. The biggest problem from the start, however, was financing. Gene was willing to commit to three million altogether, one up front, and two more to be generated from the Keene mall he was just completing. The State of Vermont was sweet-talked into providing two million more, to be funneled through Lou Adelman’s office of community development, in the form of a grant that then became a municipal loan. And the Bank of Brattleboro was approached for the remaining ten.”

  Sheila stretched her long legs out in front of her, settling in more comfortably. “The problem was, for a bank to make a ten million dollar loan, it has to have total assets of some two billion, based on a conservative ratio that came out of all those bank failures in the go-go eighties, when people were loaning way more than their banks could afford to lose. The Bank of Brattleboro has nowhere near those kinds of assets. The best it could put up was five million, and even then Matson, the president, was probably pushing it.”

  “What about the board of directors?” I asked.

  “Good question. The board at B of B is the old-fashioned type, pretty rare nowadays, mostly made up of prominent local people with little or no banking background or knowledge. It’s almost utterly dependent on the president for its decision-making.

  “The obvious solution in a situation like what Matson was facing is to bring in as many additional banks as necessary to make up the difference. That’s what he did, but with the unusual proviso that the commitments be made in a tiered fashion, rather than as a pool, so that B of B’s five million would be spent before the other banks had to pitch in. This might’ve been a show of Matson’s faith in the project—or it could’ve been a careful strategy on Chambers’s part. In any case, it worked, and once the permits were secured, it was full steam ahead.”

  “Until the Keene shopping mall project was stopped dead in its tracks,” I filled in.

  “Correct,” Sheila said. “That was supposed to have been completed in time to finance Lacaille’s investment in the convention center. But once some PCB pollutants mysteriously surfaced at the Keene site, everything was turned on its ear. Not only was it going to cost Lacaille a fortune to clean up the PCBs, but the revenue he was counting on was history—the EPA and the state of New Hampshire’s pollution people saw to that. Matson tried his damnedest to get Lacaille to hang on to the property, but Gene was no longer interested. He was doing all he could just to stay afloat. The convention center had become a pair of cement shoes.”

  “Enter NeverTom?” I asked.

  “Well, yes and no. NeverTom had been in it from the start. We heard he’d gotten Matson to stick his neck out for B of B’s commitment of five million, even though Matson had initially been cool to the idea. In fact, that’s an area where Matson might have some interesting things to say, since Chambers’s public encouragement could easily have become private coercion with nobody being the wiser. The neat coincidence though, is that by the time Lacaille had to pull out, NeverTom was a selectman and could rally the public to force Matson to come up with a fast solution. You see, normally, when a bank gets handed a white elephant by a bankrupt developer, it takes its time putting together the best substitute deal it possibly can, quoting the interests of the stockholders all the way. But not in this case.”

  “Because of local political pressure,” I stated flatly, reliving the recent past from a whole new perspective.

 
“Local and state,” Sheila agreed. “Don’t forget that the state had a vested interest, too. The governor picked up the phone a few times to remind people of that. At which point, Ben Chambers suddenly appeared out of the blue, almost as soon as the project got stalled, and offered Matson a fused deal—meaning it was tied to a deadline. His three-part proposal was that the bank, having by now invested four million, forfeit one of them; that the town, having spent both of its millions, forfeit one also; and that Lacaille sign over all his interests to Ben, including the land, worth close to another million. In exchange, Ben would assume some twelve million in loans by the date of completion, having acquired almost four million in equity without spending a dime of his own. The catch was that the fuse would burn for one month only—Matson and company had only thirty days to beat the deal, or Ben would retire his offer.”

  “So Matson sat on his hands for one month and signed on the dotted line?” I suggested.

  “No way,” she protested. “He would’ve been crucified. Not only would the other banks have jumped on him, not to mention his own stockholders, but the feds would’ve, too. No, he and his officers all busted their humps looking for an alternate white knight, but Ben’s offer had an element no one else would match, and which was too politically volatile to ignore. His proviso that the town would have to eat half of its two-million-dollar loan was actually a pure gimme—a gift of a million bucks. Any other white knight would’ve told the town to eat it—why pay for somebody else’s mistake? By coming up with that gimmick, Ben all but guaranteed himself success. That one million had nothing to do with the bank, but it had everything to do with good will, and the bank didn’t want to look so mercenary that it would willingly stiff the town—and through the town the state and our telephoning governor—for that huge an amount. It was very cleverly done.”

  “The time fuse also worked in Ben’s favor,” J.P. added, “because Carroll Construction still had its equipment on site. Had the bank delayed, Carroll would’ve packed up and left, and the bank would’ve had an even tougher package to sell.”