by Archer Mayor
19
I SAT AT MY DESK, the long-awaited case file open before me. It was thicker than most, not surprising considering the subject, and it had the usual ragtag appearance of its peers—official reports, photographs, torn notepad pages, copies of letters, scribbled-on napkins, and whatnot—but it was missing the tone that should have been there. After a few years’ practice, these case files took on the feel of music manuscripts. Beneath the hodgepodge of mismatched paperwork, there was a rhythm of progression; beyond the banality of a beginning, a middle, and an end, there was the tempo of building enthusiasm, of increasing light being cast into dark corners.
It might have been all I’d gone through prior to this day, or the fact that my mind was already clouded with suspicions about the contents of this file, but I knew for a fact that something was wrong here.
Perhaps it was the lack of unanswered questions. Normally, especially on the odd scraps of paper, officers would scribble “what ifs” to their colleagues—questions designed to force them off their scent for a moment’s reflection, like a dog sniffing the air as well as the trail. Frank had done this with me when he’d proposed that Jamie Phillips might have been the victim of life insurance fraud. In any case where you didn’t find the burglar climbing out of the window with a bag full of silverware, this was standard practice—except here.
Here, everyone had marched in lockstep. The suspect had been caught, his rights had been read to him, evidence had been gathered, people had been interrogated, a case had been built according to the rules. But no fundamental questions had been asked—at least none that I could see. Kimberly’s bank records, her extraordinarily skimpy background, her curious lifestyle—or lack of one—all passed without challenge in the shadow cast by the evidence against Bill Davis. That—the superficial blood tests, the broken lamp, the scratch marks, the drugs, the rope used to tie her down, and all the rest—was the case. Nothing, from what I could read, was allowed to disturb that. Not even the most obvious question of all: why had the crime occurred?
I got up and crossed the hall to Willy Kunkle’s office. The door was open. He was sitting behind his desk muttering into the phone, his face twisted with frustration and anger. He saw me before I could duck away.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He covered the phone with his hand. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk about the Harris case. I’ll be in my office. No rush.”
I went back to my cubbyhole and waited. If Kimberly’s case file could be compared to a manuscript, then Kunkle was its editor. He had taken all the bits and pieces and put them in order; he had made sure all the forms were filled out, the procedures followed, the details attended to. He was neither the author nor the publisher, and therefore was not solely responsible for its contents. But more than anyone, he knew the workings of the whole.
Unfortunately, he was a head case. A Vietnam vet with an impeccable record, he had started, like most of us, from the bottom. Always high-strung and introspective, he had nonetheless channeled a furious energy into his work, spending hours of overtime on cases, regardless of their merit, and had wound up being regarded as an all-around grind. Despite this and coupled with a fifty-grit personality, there was no denying his capabilities. He became one of the youngest corporals ever to make Support Services. He also married, and the dual achievement made us hope his rough edges might round off.
But that didn’t happen. Inside his pressure-cooker mind boiled a thwarted ambition. He had left the Army because of slow promotions, and when Murphy elevated me to lieutenant a few years back, all but locking up the succession to captain, Kunkle began to unravel. His disappointment either led to or was heightened by his disintegrating marriage, a fact made all too obvious when a patrol car was called to his home by neighbors complaining of a domestic dispute. His eye-blackened wife didn’t file charges, but the story made the rounds.
We watched him, as cops will, with both sympathy and wariness. The bonds on a police force are stronger than elsewhere, allowing for an extraordinary amount of friction. But even in a department like ours, with minor exposure to truly dangerous elements, cops have to gauge the colleagues who might be asked to save their lives. So Willy Kunkle rode a seesaw in the eyes of his peers, and while most of us—most of the time—wanted him to settle on the right side of things, we all wished like hell he’d stop his teetering. He’d been at it for years.
He finally appeared at my doorway and stood there, his hands in his pockets. “You’re really going to blow it up, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to look into it. It’s not my choice any more.”
“You realize I’ll probably get sued by that bastard Davis as soon as he gets a whiff of this.”
“If anyone gets sued, it’ll most likely be the town.”
“That’s a big comfort. My ass’ll be the first thing out the door.”
“You’ve got to admit something strange is going on.”
“I don’t have to admit a damned thing. I don’t happen to know what the hell is going on. People have been tiptoeing around here for weeks, and I haven’t been told word one.”
“You weren’t alone. Brandt didn’t know about most of it till just a while ago. Believe it or not, Murphy and I were trying to keep a lid on it to the end. If the shit hits the fan, we’re all going to be in the way.”
“So the lid is off?”
“It will be, yes.”
He looked at me with withering contempt. “Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. Frank Murphy is dead because of all this, as are a few other people.”
“What, because he drove off the road?”
“No. Because we were forced off by a truck—deliberately.”
He knit his brow. “Why?”
“Because we were asking some questions that weren’t asked from the very start.”
“Like what?”
“Like who was Kimberly Harris really? Like wasn’t some of the evidence against Davis unbelievably overwhelming? Like what was behind the mysterious payments that started showing up in Harris’s checking account? Like why wasn’t the apartment manager exposed as a Peeping Tom?”
“Bullshit.”
“Fact, Willy—by his own admission. His nose greased her window night after night. Every time she jacked off, he was an appreciative audience. You should have heard his reviews. In fact, they ought to be part of this file.”
“I knew it. You are going to string me up.”
I slapped the desktop with my hand. “God damn it, why won’t you get your face out of the mirror? I could give a shit about stringing you up. I need a little cooperation here. Help me get the job done and maybe we can all avoid getting sued. Don’t you get it?”
“I get it. I just don’t happen to believe it.”
I took a deep breath and held up my hands. “All right—whatever. If that’s what you want to believe, that’s fine with me. Will you at least go over the file with me so we can maybe find what we missed the first time?”
“When?”
“Now.”
His eyes dropped and he passed his hand across his mouth. “I was going to take some personal time.”
I thought a moment. It might not be the worse thing to cut him a little slack, as a peace offering. “How much?”
“Just a couple of hours at the most. I got some trouble at home.”
“Go to it. We’ll do this later.” He didn’t burst into a smile and give me a hug, but his tone softened a shade. “Thanks.”
“No sweat. By the way, do you keep your old note pads?”
Gone was the soft tone. “Why?”
“I was thinking maybe we could compare them to this”—I put my hand on the file—“help freshen your memory.”
He shook his head scornfully. “You must think I just fell off the truck. I’ll go over that lousy file with you—that’s part of my job. But there’s no way in hell you’re ever going to see that note pad. That’s private.�
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“You can read from it. I won’t even touch it.”
“Give me a break. Maybe we’ll all be standing in the way when the fan gets turned on, but I’d sure as hell be a convenient scapegoat. Better me than the saintly departed Murphy, right?”
“What’s that mean?”
“What do you think it means? Christ, he was captain—nothing happened without him knowing about it. My name’s on that file because I was first on the scene, but the whole thing was his baby. You better believe it—including the bullshit.”
He walked away, leaving me nailed to my chair. It was like hearing the one clear note in a jumble of sound. Kunkle had to be right. The cause of Murphy’s hedging at the start of all this wasn’t simple pre-retirement jitters. I remembered the night he’d driven me home from the morgue. “I did everything I could to speed things up,” he’d said. I’d taken that as an apology for his having been such a jerk until then, but it had been more. He’d been edging toward an admission he’d never directly made.
I grabbed my coat and headed for the car. The implication cut beyond Murphy’s integrity. It also made a joke of my loyalty. I’d made assumptions and from them had drawn conclusions that were possibly criminally wrong. I had never entertained the remotest possibility that Frank’s behavior went beyond the fumbling of a boozy old cop counting his last days. The realization that he may have consciously allowed the wrong man to go to jail spread through my chest like ice water.
Martha Murphy was still in Massachusetts with her daughter, although she was due back that evening. I found the spare key wedged behind the mailbox.
I knew the house as I knew my own. They had lived here for over twenty years, and never had a week gone by that I hadn’t come to visit at least once, and usually more. I had helped move furniture, select drapes, repair the plumbing. When they’d gone on their rare vacations, I’d watered the plants and brought in the mail.
I walked straight to the roll-top desk Frank had referred to as his office, parked in a corner of the living room, and started going through the large lower drawers. I found a thick packet of small black note pads, bound by a rubber band, arranged in chronological order. It was my good fortune that for all his flaws as a human being, Frank had been a very neat cop.
For the next two hours, I dug through the pads like an archaeologist looking for bone fragments. It was not easy work. The purpose of these things was to merely stimulate what was already in the mind of the writer. Sometimes codes were used, or abbreviations bordering on shorthand. Cases were referred to indiscriminately, one on top of the other. An FBI file number, standing in total isolation, might hover over a reminder to pick up some pickles at the store.
But they did go page by page, each page representing a progression through time, so once I’d located the book whose dates bracketed the Harris case, at least I had some sense—however vague—of forward movement.
I didn’t find much in quantity. People don’t write notes to themselves on how to subvert their own integrity. But I did find what I’d hoped I wouldn’t. It was a reminder, presumably written too late in the day for immediate action: “Stop KH print code.”
That was as far as I went. I rebundled the pads and put them back in the drawer. I sat for a while by the large north window, the one with the view of the Connecticut River valley.
I can’t really say I was upset. Frank was dead, after all, and despite Kunkle’s nasty jab, I never had considered him a saint. His gradual winding down through the years had been visible to all. In fact, the best description of his life was probably found in my own mirror. We all get old and slow down. And most of us get fat, become complacent, maybe drink a little too much, and tend to let things go towards the end. Obstacles to this easy, introverted, downhill slide either get put off or are muffled in routine. Sometimes—as in this case—they are even physically removed. It’s not so much an act of corruption, it’s just something to make life more convenient.
When Kimberly Harris’s fingerprints had been taken, they were translated into a transmittable code. Routinely, such codes are sent to the FBI’s Identification Bureau for filing and an immediate comparison check. It’s not as accurate as comparing the actual prints—something which can be done later—but it’s a workable and fast beginning. The FBI has the prints of virtually every individual who’s ever been booked at a police station, along with those of a lot of other people as well. More often than not, when we send a print code to Washington in a felony case, we get some kind of readout. Murphy’s note implied that Kimberly’s code had never been sent.
I didn’t make any ominous connections here. I knew the man—obviously not as well as I’d thought—but well enough to know that all he’d done in his own mind was to keep things streamlined and simple. If you don’t ask the questions, you won’t hear the answers you dread. On the face of it, Frank had an open-and-shut case, and everyone else agreed with him. But he was a good, if tired cop. He knew it was all too pat, he knew “Kimberly Harris” didn’t have enough historical baggage. He knew that if he asked too many questions, the last yard he had to go until retirement would suddenly vanish into a big, black fog.
I drove back to the office and called Danvers at the FBI—the same man who had responded so quickly to our inquiry on Ski Mask’s electronic bug.
“So this time it’s a phone call, huh? Things must be heating up.”
“Maybe. Frank Murphy’s been killed. It’s listed as an accident for now, but I have my doubts.”
“Damn. I’m sorry.”
“I was wondering if you could do me a favor. It might tie in to that bug you’re so interested in.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a fingerprint code.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah. But it’s very high priority.”
“Sure.”
I pulled the code out of the case file and read it slowly over the phone. “By the way, you wouldn’t have something on that bug that might do us some good, would you? Something you might not have felt entirely free to share?”
There was a slight pause. “No. We’re as curious about it as you are.” I didn’t believe that for a second. I thanked him and hung up. I spent the next several hours writing the report of my life, bringing everything up to date from the last two weeks. I synopsized the Harris case as I’d found it in the file, revealed what I thought were its flaws and omissions, and crediting Ski Mask as the catalyst for the reinvestigation, detailed my progress so far. I left out any hypotheses on why Frank was killed and merely let it stand as an accident. I also didn’t entirely finish the report. I expected Danvers to get back to me before the day was out and hoped I could add something tangible from what he had to say.
Late in the afternoon, the windows dark and the day staff just departed, I knocked on the chief ’s open door. He was sitting at his desk, a cold pipe in his mouth, writing.
He leaned back in his chair, smiling, and gestured me to sit. “Been doing your homework?”
“Yup.”
“So what’s our course of action?”
“Kimberly Harris’s employer gave me her time sheets. Throughout her year with him, she took a series of three-day weekends off, I think to do some serious gold digging. I spent an hour today with a part-time hooker friend of hers who told me she wasn’t all that surprised Kimberly ended up the way she did. Also, her real name wasn’t Kimberly, and it may not have been Harris. I’m having Danvers check that out right now; I’m just hoping she had a record somewhere.”
Brandt removed the pipe and scowled. “Wasn’t that done a long time ago?”
“Apparently not. Frank never transmitted the print codes.”
He stared at me.
“I ought to warn you right off that even if we pull this thing out of the fire, even if we find that we have the right guy in the jug, we’re in for a lot of heat. The ball was dropped several times, and I doubt that fact will pass unnoticed.”
“What are we talking about exactly?”
“Exactly? Time will tell. But generally, I think we’re looking at a whole bunch of people moving too fast for their own good.”
“Like Murphy?”
“Like Murphy, like Kunkle, like Dunn, like me and you, for that matter. Frank wanted a clean getaway into retirement; I suspect Kunkle wanted a fast and quick promotion, or at least a little recognition; Dunn liked the tidiness of the initial evidence and made a pointed effort not to dig any deeper; and the rest of us played along, pleased as punch we weren’t hitting any snag. Only Ski Mask wasn’t satisfied.”
“Do we know why he wasn’t yet?”
“No, but I think either Kimberly or Davis will tell us, and my money’s on her. What I’d like to do is to isolate those long weekends and then compare them with local airline, car rental and travel agencies to see if we can come up with a match. I’m sure it’ll only give up phony names, if that, but I’m hoping for at least a pattern. I also want to get the DEA to run a list on all prednisone prescriptions issued in this area during the two-month period just prior to Kimberly’s death.”
“That’ll take forever.”
“Do you have any contacts with them? Mine are all regional men. It would take them just as long.”
He shook his head. “There’s too much coming and going over there. The FBI’s like IBM. DEA’s more like a game show—lots of turnover. I can circulate it around, though. One of the other guys might have a contact.”
“Okay. If we come up empty by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll just put it through normal channels. We’ll also need a pile of evidentiary warrants. If I get you a list of all the agencies I want canvassed and the specific dates of those long weekends, could you do that tonight?”
He checked his watch. “I don’t see why not. It’ll be easier getting a judge at night than during the day, and as far as I know, everyone’s in town. How soon can you get it to me?”
“An hour, maybe an hour and a half?”
He nodded. “What about the Davis angle?”
“I think it’s a long shot, but it’s still possible Ski Mask’s motivation is merely to get Davis off the hook. Now that the Harris case can see the light of day again, I want to assign someone full-time to look into Davis’s past. He was in the Army; that bug I found in my place was military ordnance. There may be a connection.”
