The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  Seated around the room, eating, drinking, or chatting among themselves, were the same people I’d assembled before, but who by now had become an integrated, unofficial task force. The earlier confusion and doubts about what we were up against had been washed away by a common desire to nail a single as yet unidentified nemesis.

  That this person could only be called “the partner,” and that no known connections had yet been drawn between him and Shawna Davis or Milo Douglas or Mary Wallis didn’t seem to matter. There was a confidence in the air that we were at last on the right track, and that things would make sense in the end.

  I just hoped that trust was well placed.

  “Okay,” I began. “It’s been a full day. I thought it might help to compare notes before we pack it in till tomorrow. You’ve all read the report on my interview with Ginny Levasseur—or you should have by now—so I won’t bother repeating it. Let’s go straight to Sam and Marshall instead, and what they got out of Eddy Knox.”

  Sammie Martens glanced at her temporary partner and then said, “A documents search of both his home and office revealed a dramatic boost in income beginning at about the same time the convention center project was heading for the zoning board. We talked to his bankers, his wife, other members of his family, his co-workers, and anyone else we could think of to pinpoint the source of his money, but nobody had any answers. Knox had told them all that he’d hit it rich playing the stock market, although a quick check proved that to be totally bogus. As far as we can determine, he’s never bought a stock in his life.

  “That left the interrogation, which we conducted a couple of hours ago. After telling him we knew he’d been corrupted, and that a direct cause-and-effect line had been drawn between his sudden wealth and his glowing report on the convention center project, we got him to fess up and admit that Thomas Chambers had been the source of the money.”

  Riding a small murmuring of comments, Jack Derby’s voice rose to the surface, “How was that money delivered?”

  Sammie allowed a wry smile. “You mean, does it have NeverTom’s fingerprints on it? No. Knox said they were all cash payments, mailed to him in plain white envelopes. The only connection we could make on paper was that Chambers sponsored Knox for membership in an elite Keene golf club. That’s something a newspaper or a rival politician might make hay out of, but it doesn’t break any law we know of.”

  “How was contact made initially?” Gail asked.

  “By phone. In fact, all contacts were made by phone. Chambers made it clear that if Knox ever approached him in person on this subject, the money would dry up then and there.”

  There was a telling silence in the room at this disappointing news, which Gail broke quietly. “There was never an exception?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” Derby muttered. “We can basically throw that one out, unless the phone records can tell us something.”

  Marshall Smith shook his head. “I asked a friend at the phone company to take a discreet look at NeverTom’s bills. They must’ve all been local calls. Plus, Knox told us he was only contacted at the office, when a call from someone like Tom Chambers would’ve appeared perfectly legit.”

  My mind suddenly clicked on something obvious. “What about Ned Fallows? He doesn’t have a phone, but with NeverTom nervous enough to threaten suing us, he might’ve contacted Fallows in person or by mail to keep the pressure on.”

  “I want to talk to Fallows myself,” Derby said darkly. “He’s beginning to piss me off.” He turned to Gail. “Can you have someone pick him up?”

  She nodded, taking notes, her face as blank as I knew her feelings were not.

  “If that’s all we got on Knox,” Tony asked, “do we even have enough to prosecute him?”

  “I doubt it,” Derby admitted. “Even with his confession, it might be shaky, depending on who he got to represent him. You can get him fired, but you’d have to fight for anything more. Maybe the IRS would be interested.”

  Willy Kunkle crushed the Styrofoam cup in his hand and tossed it toward the wastepaper basket in the corner, missing by three feet. “That’s fucking great.”

  “All right,” I said, overriding a brief resurge in conversation. “Sheila and J.P.—what’ve you got on Harold Matson?”

  “Not much,” J.P. admitted. “He got defensive fast and tried to argue various points, all of which Sheila was able to win, but the issues were basically procedural. Without legal authority to get into B of B’s records, we didn’t have any proof of unethical or illegal activity. When we popped the Chambers brothers on him, I thought we nearly had him—there’s clearly a connection between them—but he shut down, demanded a lawyer, and was out the door five minutes later. We just didn’t have enough hard evidence to make him bleed.”

  “Have you been able to look into Ben Chambers?” I asked.

  “I was about to ask the same thing,” Gail joined in. “Seems he’s the most direct beneficiary here.”

  Sheila answered. “We watched for his name during our paper chase, and asked a few of our contacts, but there’s not much there to investigate. He has a checking account locally—not with B of B—and of course a small suitcase of land titles, again with other banks, but the bulk of his assets are out of state, probably in Boston and New York. Again, with no legal muscle, we weren’t able to do much. It all sure confirms how private he is, though, especially compared to his brother. An amazing number of people have never even met the man, and the few who have said he’s a pretty strange bird—quiet, shy, apologetic. I guess he’s a true nerd—happiest in front of a computer, trading stocks and doing deals long distance.”

  “So all the stuff you dug up points to Thomas, not his brother?” I asked.

  “Right.”

  “All the more reason to dig deeper, then,” I said, unsuccessfully masking my disappointment. “On a brighter note, we do have the goods on Paul Hennessy.” I leaned forward and retrieved a sheet of paper from under one of the pizza boxes. “Along with a listing of all his properties, courtesy of Ron’s diligent spadework. When we do get our hands on him, we’ll not only have enough to chuck him in jail for a long time, but we’ll have some left over to trade for his partner’s name. We have a Be-on-the-Lookout all over New England, so it shouldn’t be long before we hear something.”

  “You wish,” Willy said softly.

  “It’s more than that,” I told him. “Whoever this partner is, he ended up giving Hennessy the screwing of a lifetime. We’ve frozen every asset we can find, so unless he has a Swiss bank account, which he doesn’t seem bright enough to have thought of, all Hennessy should have left is a desire to beat the shit out of the guy who put him in this mess.”

  “Hope he doesn’t look in the mirror,” Willy said to general laughter.

  “All right,” I continued. “Everything else seems to be on track. Willy, I take it there’s nothing new on Sawyer?”

  “Nope,” he said with his usual eloquence.

  “Gail and I are meeting with Bernie, the patient we think may have seen the killing. Our session with him is going to be orchestrated by his psychiatrist, but we’ve been warned not to expect much.”

  I stood up, indicating the end of the meeting. “Let’s wrap it up for tonight. Remember, Sammie is putting together a time line tracking everybody’s alibis, so any relevant information you get should be handed over to her ASAP. As we’ve just found out, knowing who the bad guys are and proving it are two different things.”

  · · ·

  It was still snowing hard later that night. Over a foot of it had accumulated on the ground. The sky overhead was as black as a grave, making the appearance of white snowflakes from its midst a little startling, and vaguely magical.

  I was standing on a steep hill overlooking Brattleboro from the north, next to one of its oddest landmarks—a sixty-five-foot stone tower built by patients of the Retreat as a therapy project in the 1890s. The Retreat is a famous, 160-year-old alcohol and rehabilitation center, but one of i
ts biggest attributes locally—aside from being the butt of many a teenage nuthouse joke—is its maintenance of hundreds of pristine acres within the town limits. Be it farmland or field and forest, this property does much to enhance Brattleboro’s distinctly pastoral appearance. Aside from the eccentric tower, the Retreat keeps this vast ownership demure, and does its best to only gently acknowledge its careful and costly stewardship—usually only when it needs to flex a little political muscle. Word had gotten out that tangling with the Retreat was not a great career move.

  The tower was part of a recreational area—a crosshatching of trails in a tangle of trees that gave people the pleasures of nature within earshot of downtown traffic. But during the winter, and especially on a night like this, it marked the most isolated of spots—dark, silent, and empty, although ringed by the town’s snow-blurred lights and serenaded by the dulled scrapings of invisible passing snowplows.

  Snow has a unique way of isolating everything within its mantle. Early in the morning, before the curtains are drawn aside for confirmation, one can sense the presence of new snow upon the ground. There is a muted quality to the air’s resonance all around, akin to the emergence from a deep sleep. Standing in its midst, as it is still falling, that feeling becomes as blatant as the numbing of one of the five human senses—with the added confusion of not knowing for sure which one of those senses has been lost.

  Stanley Katz came toward me, dimly lit by the town’s residual glow, tramping through the deep snow, his breath escaping in powerful, rhythmic blasts—and yet all without a sound, as silently as a hologram.

  He reached the tower’s rough, dark, curving wall—an incongruous shaft with no base visible in the snow and its top buried in the black sky overhead—and put his hand against it for stability, his thin, narrow frame bent over from the exertion of his climb.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, gasping, “what the hell is so goddamn important I got to kill myself coming up here in the middle of a fucking blizzard?”

  “Just a storm, Stan. You should get in better shape.”

  “Up yours, Gunther. How long did it take you to recover?”

  I let him continue in that vein for a few minutes, both hands now on his knees, his breathing gradually returning to normal. Finally, he straightened, took in one last cleansing lungful of lightly powdered air, and fixed me with a baleful look. “All right. I’m here, I made sure I wasn’t followed, and I parked my car the hell-and-gone up the block. What do you want?”

  I pulled a plain envelope from inside my coat and handed it to him. “That’s a detailed list of illegal—but maybe unprosecutable—activities that Tom Chambers has been engaged in for the past several years, all in the interests of gaining control of the convention center construction project.”

  Katz held the envelope in his hand gingerly, not opening it, not even looking at it. His eyes were locked on to mine. “What’s going on?”

  “Not a word about where you got this, Stan—not a name, not the usual ‘a confidential police source,’ not a murmur connecting us to what’s in that envelope, or I take it back and this conversation ends. Agreed?”

  “How do I know what it’s worth?”

  “You’ll read it—privately—then you’ll check its contents through your own sources. You’ll come to your own conclusions.”

  The envelope moved to his coat pocket. “Agreed.”

  I paused to collect my thoughts. What I wanted to give Katz was a simple, connect-the-dots story line linking together most of the headlines he’d been producing over the past week. Some of it would be conjecture, and some of it solid, but all of it was designed to whet his appetite.

  “Shawna Davis met up with Mary Wallis at the same time Mary Wallis was protesting the project. For reasons I won’t go into, Wallis fell for Davis sentimentally, and when Davis disappeared, Wallis folded her tent. We think she was either physically pressured or blackmailed to back off and was finally grabbed or killed to guarantee her silence.

  “Milo Douglas is connected to the project because he slept above Paul Hennessy’s office one night and possibly overheard something, shortly before dying of a disease to which he had no explainable exposure. We don’t know exactly how the two tie together, but we do know Milo was paid a bundle just before he died, and that he was cagey about its source.

  “Adele Sawyer comes into it because she’s Hennessy’s aunt, and Hennessy’s been ripping off Carroll Construction for years, using her name on his dummy businesses to keep a low profile. But he took on a partner with this last project, and it was the partner who knocked off Sawyer to curb Hennessy’s runaway greed.”

  “And this partner is NeverTom?” Katz’s voice was incredulous.

  “We don’t know, nor is any of what I just said in that envelope. I only told you so you’d know what we’re facing. We do know Tom Chambers has engaged in bribery, blackmail, and illegal coercion, but while some of the people he pressured have admitted it to us, they also said all contact was made by phone or mail, so there’s no way in hell Jack Derby can do anything about it. That’s why I need your help.”

  Katz pointed at the two of us. “Did Tony set this meeting up?”

  “No one knows anything about it—this is just you and me.” The snow fell around us in utter silence as Stanley Katz pondered what I’d told him. My own thoughts were crowded with a dizzying uncertainty. As Gail had pointed out, what I was doing flew in the face of a lifetime of traditional reticence. It felt tantamount to treason.

  “What about Ben Chambers?” he finally asked.

  “So far, he seems to be Tom’s financial source only. But there again, we’re still looking.”

  “Nothing new on Hennessy?”

  “Nope, but his girlfriend spilled the beans. My own feeling is he’s still in the area.”

  Katz let out a sigh. “Christ.”

  I checked my watch. “It’s about eight-thirty. Read that over, make a few inquiries, call me at home if you want. You should have enough time to put something in tomorrow’s paper if you move fast enough.”

  “Is that the deal?”

  I took several steps away from the tower, heading back the way I’d come. “The Rutland Herald’s next on my list if you don’t. Have a nice evening.”

  · · ·

  Arriving home later, expecting the dark and tomb-like silence I’d grown used to over the last few months, I instead found Gail ensconced on the living room sofa, surrounded by pillows like some romanticized pasha, a glass of milk in one hand, the TV remote in the other, and an open bag of chocolate-chip cookies on her stomach.

  She gave me a broad smile as I entered the room and patted the sofa next to her, removing two pillows to make room. “Have a cookie?”

  I glanced at the TV screen—a hysterically pitched sitcom with too many attractive people speaking loudly and moving fast. “Have we hit job meltdown?” I asked, settling in next to her.

  She hit the remote, found a doctor show, gave me a chocolaty kiss, and pushed the cookie bag in my direction. I hadn’t had dinner yet, and this seemed an excellent substitute.

  “A drop-the-books-and-screw-them-all mental health break,” she answered. “I intend to finish the contents of this bag—with your help if you’re interested—knock off that half-gallon of ice cream that’s been sitting in the freezer, and then go to bed at a reasonable hour, where—after about thirty minutes of satiating myself sexually at your expense—I plan to sleep the sleep of the nutritionally poisoned. How’s your head?”

  I reached up to touch the bandage. “Fine—I’d forgotten I still had this thing. You sure you’re okay?”

  She punched the remote again, found an old western, and placed her glass on the floor beside her. “Never better—and I have you to thank, twice over. Once because you got conked on the head, which made me realize how much we both give to our jobs and how little to each other, and the other because you twisted my arm into visiting Bernie at the nursing home—which I did again tonight, by the way—and which has
reminded me how wrong-headed it is to take our time on this earth for granted. I have been so wired for so long, I could almost feel my brain leaving my body. I won’t say I’m sorry for the last few months, because I did what I had to, but I am going to do my damnedest to keep things a little more in perspective from now on.”

  She stopped long enough to lean up against me, rubbing my body with hers, and gave me a long, deep, definitely energizing kiss. “I also plan to take more advantage of some of the household appliances I’ve been neglecting lately.”

  She kissed me again, her hand roving across my shirt, undoing any buttons she happened across. Dropping my cookie, I fumbled with her blouse, and then pulled her up and along the length of the sofa, probably crushing our dinner beneath us. She paused to concentrate on my belt buckle. “Don’t think this lets you off the hook for later on, by the way.”

  · · ·

  An hour later, still both on the couch but naked under a soft, thick blanket, we were watching the western, sprinkling cookie fragments over ice cream, and feeling better than we had in quite a while.

  Until the phone rang.

  With a one-word curse, I stretched out and fumbled for the receiver, located on a table behind the couch. “What?”

  “It’s me,” came Sammie’s voice. “Jack Derby’s investigator just called me. They can’t find Ned Fallows. His place is empty, the dog’s been left with a neighbor, and nobody knows where he went. You want me to set something up?”

  I felt a sudden coldness enter my chest. “No, that’s okay. It may be time to just let things happen—see where they take us.”

  I settled back onto the couch, slipping my arm more tightly around Gail’s naked waist. She looked up into my face. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah—no problem.”

  But the coldness remained, along with the feeling that with my visit to Lunenburg, I’d set something dark, sad, and irreversible into motion.

  25

  THE PREDOMINANT NOISE IN THE SQUAD ROOM next morning was the rustling of hastily turned newspaper pages. Everyone, it seemed, was sitting in some corner, silently scanning one column inch after another, utterly focused, I knew, on finding the one thing that wasn’t there—the name of Stan Katz’s source.