Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  “Oh, God. I don’t know.”

  I leaned for emphasis. “Alice, listen to me. You stay here, word of this will get out. Not from us, but someone’ll talk. That’s the way things work. You know that, right? Word gets around sooner or later. Somebody sees something, or somebody, and puts two and two together. You want to run that risk? You want us to find you like we did Brenda Croteau, in a pool of blood with your head half cut off?”

  She covered her ears and began rocking back and forth.

  I reached out and stopped her. Pulled her hands down. “Alice, show us the bag and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Without comment, she swung her legs off the bed and headed for the door. Sammie quickly updated Willy by radio, and we all three silently followed our skinny guide down the dark, creaking stairs, straining to hear anyone approaching, fearful we’d be interrupted with the prize almost within grasp. Alice led us to an earthen-floored basement, cold and damp and filled with shadows. We used flashlights rather than hit the lights, and Alice took us to a distant corner, behind a monstrous oil tank squatting on short metal legs.

  Brushing aside cobwebs, crawling on our hands and knees, just she and I squeezed behind the tank and came to a stack of moldy bricks, which she began unpiling in a frenzy, sending up a clatter that rebounded off the cold walls.

  “Slow down, slow down,” I urged her. “It’s okay now.”

  She finally reached into the middle of the bricks and pulled free a dirt-smeared black gym bag, which she thrust into my hands as if it were on fire. “There. Can we go now? Please?”

  “You want anything from upstairs?” I asked.

  She was crying now. “No, no. I just want to go. Come on, come on.”

  I placed my fingertips on her mouth. “Quiet, Alice. Keep it together. We’re almost out of here.”

  We returned to the first floor, exited to the street, and crossed quickly to the warehouse opposite, surrounding Alice like bodyguards, blocking her from view.

  Willy met us inside the door. “What’d you get?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I told him. “Let’s get to some light. Sheila, can you take care of Alice?”

  She nodded and took the skinny girl off to where we’d parked one of our cars in a back bay, out of sight.

  The rest of us crossed the dark, echoing room we’d entered and stepped inside a small interior office. Willy closed the door and turned on the lights.

  I placed the bag on a dust-covered desk, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and opened the zipper. On top of a bundle of clothes and a pair of spattered sneakers were some blue jeans, one knee of which was crusty with old blood.

  “Bingo,” Willy said softly. “Who they belong to?”

  “As far as we know,” I answered, “they’re Walter’s.”

  24

  WE DIDN'T ARREST WALTER FREUND, although there was pressure to do so among members of the squad. Instead, we sent a car to his house shortly after he’d returned home and had a patrolman question him about his girlfriend’s whereabouts, implying she might have been involved in a crime and left town. The officer reported later Freund hadn’t seemed too concerned.

  The contents of the bag—the bloodstained clothes, the sneakers, and a vicious-looking but very clean hunting knife—were labeled, packed up, and sent to the crime lab for analysis.

  Gail, Jack Derby, Tony Brandt, and I met on the afternoon of the next day in Derby’s office to discuss what to do next.

  Derby, seemingly recovered from his anger of our last meeting—I thought in large part because we’d brought him something useful—made a show of letting Gail represent their office in the conversation.

  “You’re comfortable not arresting him?” she asked us after I’d outlined how we’d come by the bag—barring a few details.

  “We don’t think he’s going anywhere. He has to report daily to his parole officer, he doesn’t know what we’ve found, and he thinks his girlfriend just got into a jam and split town. On our side, we don’t want to repeat the mistake we made with Owen Tharp and move prematurely. Until the lab tells us otherwise, we can’t prove if the contents of that gym bag have anything to do with him or Brenda Croteau.”

  “Would you have any objections to getting a nontestimonial evidence order for a blood sample from Freund?”

  I thought about that for a moment. It was perfectly feasible. Freund had waded deeply enough into the “reasonable suspicion” category to allow a judge to grant such a request. And with Alice Duprée now out of harm’s way, stirring up Walter’s paranoia might not be a bad idea. It could push him to do something that might land him in hotter water.

  “This to compare with the tissue sample collected from under Brenda’s fingernail?”

  “Seems like a good idea—it didn’t match Owen,” Gail admitted with a smile.

  “Sure, I’ll serve him with it,” I answered. “What happens with Owen and Reggie McNeil while we’re waiting for forensics?”

  Gail deferred to Derby.

  “We’re meeting with Reggie in Judge Harrowsmith’s chambers this afternoon. I’m hoping Reggie will see the value of holding his breath till we sort this out.”

  I asked another question that had been nagging me. “What did your shrink think of Owen?”

  “Perfect fit,” Gail said. “I just got her report this morning. She confirmed our guess he was a prime candidate for manipulation. She couldn’t ask him anything about the crime, of course—not with Reggie there—but in general terms, she found him both extraordinarily malleable and prone to devoting himself to whoever’s treating him well at the moment. Supposedly, Owen’s sense of gratitude is so psychologically rooted that it virtually stands in stead of a conscience. He’s not wired too tightly, of course, which doesn’t help matters, so he’s also easily overwhelmed by people’s use of language.”

  “What about the fits of violence?”

  “They’re there, but ‘fits’ is the operative word. She agrees with me that the carnage at the Croteau scene exceeds Owen’s capabilities, even if he was artificially disinhibited with booze and dope.”

  That caught Derby off guard. “Hold it—I thought we were working on the theory that if the blood on Freund’s belongings was Brenda’s, then that merely placed him at the scene. Is the shrink suggesting he actually played a role in the killing?”

  “That’s what we’re starting to think,” I admitted, “but my question is, why did Walter get Owen involved in the first place? Why run the risk of having some simpleminded kid spill the beans later?”

  “He hasn’t spilled the beans, though, has he?” Gail answered.

  She had a point.

  “Still, the risk…”

  “So Walter set Owen in motion,” Derby hypothesized, “and then watched from the shadows to make sure he did the job right?”

  “And possibly finished her off when he didn’t,” I suggested. “Now that we have two knives, I can ask the ME to try to match each wound to the blade that caused it.”

  “Why would Walter make it so complicated?” Derby wanted to know.

  Gail shrugged. “Because he had the perfect fall guy. Because it fits his sociopathic needs. Because he almost got away with it.”

  That last crack obviously hurt. Derby scowled. “What a mess.”

  Tony broke his silence to disagree. “Maybe not—in a few days, we could have a nice, tidy little package that McNeil will be happy to help gift-wrap.”

  Derby looked doubtful. “Maybe. What bothers me about all this is that everything made sense when Owen was the sole killer. With the death of his girlfriend, he had the perfect rationale for killing Croteau.” He looked at Gail balefully. “You’re the one who’s so hot on motive. What did Freund have against Croteau?”

  If he’d had a sense of humor, the obvious response should have been that motive wasn’t a prosecutor’s concern. Gail, however, wasn’t about to go there again, jokingly or not. She simply said, “Let’s hope we find out.”

  · · ·

/>   I found Walter Freund in what seemed to be his home away from home, the Dirty Dollar—a true dump of a bar near where South Main meets up with Canal. Once the basement of a tenement building, the Dirty Dollar reminded me of the lower-class speakeasies I’d read about as a boy, where the bar had consisted of a plank and two sawhorses, and a seat was wherever you chose to fall down.

  It wasn’t quite that bad, of course. Building codes and licensing requirements had seen to that. And a long time ago some pretense had even been made to decorate the place. But the effort was so faded or in disrepair, and the lighting so poor in any case, that none of it really mattered.

  Walter was sitting in a corner booth, his back against the wall, his feet extended along the bench, as if he were propped up in bed. On the battered table next to him were a pack of cigarettes, an overflowing ashtray, a small, closed notebook, and a glass of what looked like water, although the glass itself was too dirty to tell. He was a small man, cadaverously thin, with a long greasy ponytail and a yellowish complexion that reminded me of mushrooms.

  I slid onto the bench facing him. “Walter Freund?”

  “Lieutenant,” he said, as if we’d known one another for years. In fact, despite his reputation, we’d never actually met. Neither of us extended a hand in greeting, and Freund kept his eyes sleepily focused elsewhere.

  “Your name’s been coming up quite a bit lately.”

  “So’s yours,” he answered.

  I kept my tone conversational. “Oh, yeah? How’s that?”

  Walter gave a shrug so small it was barely a quiver. “Busting Owen, shooting Billy, libeling politicians. I was thinking you maybe had Katz on the payroll—keeping you in the news. Must compensate for the lousy salary and all those hours. What do you make?”

  I was impressed by the way he modulated his voice, making it almost theatrical. “Funny you should mention Owen and Billy. They were regulars here, weren’t they?”

  “Them and a lot of other people.”

  “You and Owen pretty tight?”

  He glanced at me. “Kid’s a retard.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  His eyes narrowed just a fraction, then he went back to staring into space. “He was a wannabe—attached himself to whoever didn’t shake him loose.”

  “Like you.”

  “What do you care who he hung out with?”

  I ignored the question. “You may be right—we think he’s a little simpleminded, too. Prone to doing what he’s told, even when it gets him in trouble.”

  “No shit?” But he didn’t sound surprised.

  “You know anyone who used him that way?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t pay attention. He sucked up to me a lot, but it just bugged me.”

  “So that’s what people saw when you two were together? Him sucking up and you resisting?”

  He smiled. “Okay. It wasn’t that bad. I didn’t know he was a psycho, though. I would’ve told him to fuck off if I’d known he was nuts. I mean, hell, he could’ve whacked me.”

  “He did come at you once. What did you do to piss him off so much?”

  He seemed to consider that for a moment. “Don’t know. I don’t even remember it.”

  “You know Brenda Croteau?”

  He took the change of topic in stride without comment. “Sure. Everybody did—one way or the other.”

  “Which way was it for you?”

  He leered. “Oh, no. I wasn’t going to stick it in that honey pot. She was just a barfly to me, and an ugly one to boot—that’s it. Did the autopsy show she had AIDS? I bet she did.”

  “How ’bout Owen?”

  “I didn’t think he knew her—guess I got that wrong, huh?”

  “Interesting. You two were glued at the hip. He knows her well enough to kill her, and you don’t think they were even acquainted.”

  He equivocated again. “Well—acquainted—sure, they were probably that. This is a popular place. All sorts of people see each other.”

  “What was the scuttlebutt when he killed her?”

  “Not much. It’s a weird world. Lot of bad shit happens.”

  I slid a document across the table at him. “Got something for you.”

  He picked it up as though it were a flyer stuck under his windshield wiper and gave it a cursory glance. His eyebrows knitted slowly. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a court order for a sample of your blood.”

  “Why do you want my blood?”

  “You can have it drawn at the hospital within the time frame stated in there. Or if you want, I can drive you there right now—get it over with.”

  “I got to do this?”

  “So says the judge.”

  For the first time, he seemed at a loss for words. He stared at the evidence order before asking, “What’s my blood going to tell you?”

  “Your DNA, for one thing, plus all the information a urine sample does.”

  He laughed. “Oh, shit. I live to pee in a cup. Seems like that’s all I do for you people. I can tell you now, you aren’t going to find any drugs. No way I’m going to fuck up my parole doing that shit.”

  I slid out of the booth and stood up. “Then you got nothing to worry about.”

  He hesitated, obviously weighing his options. “What about DNA? They use that like fingerprints, right? For rapists and whatever?”

  “Yeah. You leave a little of it behind and we find it, you might as well have left your driver’s license.”

  Walter’s confidence seemed to return. He actually laughed as he also got to his feet. “Just like a fingerprint. That’s pretty cool. Lead the way.”

  I took him to my car and we drove to the hospital at the other end of Canal Street, less than a mile away.

  “So why me?” he asked on the way.

  “You knew Owen, Brenda. You been a bad boy in the past. You’re actually pretty high on our list of suspects.”

  “Suspects of what? Owen whacked her.”

  “He knifed her. We don’t think he killed her.”

  He was quiet for a while, watching the scenery go by. The snowbanks hadn’t been replenished for several weeks. Winter was winding down, and its coat was shabby, tattered, and stained.

  “I never heard she was raped.”

  I liked that his brain was circling this problem, trying to sort it out.

  “She wasn’t.”

  Another patch of silent thinking. “Then why collect DNA?”

  “Oh. There was a ton of blood. Her head was almost cut off—by a hunting knife—probably one with a double edge, curved at the tip like a Bowie knife.”

  He turned away from the view to stare at me. “How could you know that?”

  This time I laughed, pulling into the hospital parking lot. “Don’t you watch TV? They don’t make that stuff up. Those lab guys are incredible. Here we are.”

  I escorted him to the ER, got him hooked up to a nurse, who quickly and efficiently sat him down in one of the examination rooms, tied off his upper arm, swabbed the inside of his elbow, and extracted a tube of bright red blood—all in a matter of minutes. Throughout, I could almost see the wheels turning in Walter’s head as he tried to calculate what he’d just given up.

  Finally, rolling his sleeve down over a Band-Aid and putting his parka back on, he asked, “So they’re going to compare my blood with what they found at Brenda’s?”

  “Yeah, among other things. You want a ride back downtown?”

  He paused in the lobby. “What other things?”

  “Well, DNA’s funny that way. It’s not just in blood or semen. It’s almost everywhere in the body. It’s what makes up our cells.” I held up my fingertip. “There’s DNA in every bit of skin, for example—in the roots of each hair. And you know how much they fall out—hundreds of them every day, supposedly.”

  Unconsciously, his hand snuck up and touched the side of his head. He jerked it away as if he’d found it trespassing.

  “But it’s not rea
lly hair we’re interested in,” I continued casually. “Turns out there was a small sample of skin under one of Brenda’s nails—we think where she scratched the man who really killed her. That’s what we’re hoping this’ll match.” I patted the pocket where I’d placed Walter’s vial of blood.

  He stared at me, and then down to the pocket, his lips slowly compressing.

  “Give you a lift back?” I offered again.

  I could barely hear his voice, it was so low. “I’ll walk.”

  · · ·

  I was watching TV when Gail got in that night, not too late. I heard her dump her briefcase in the kitchen, as usual, and kick off her shoes in exchange for the slippers she kept by the back door.

  “Hot water’s on,” I shouted and heard her preparing one of the curious-smelling concoctions she called tea.

  A few minutes later, she entered the living room balancing a steaming mug and a plate of cookies on a tray. I cleared the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “My kind of hors d’oeuvres,” I said, grabbing one of the chocolate chips. “How was your day?”

  “Pretty good,” she said noncommittally. “What’re you watching?”

  I hit the mute button and reduced two people to reading lips over a greasy pan and a dishwasher. “The news. Just finished. I was trying to make up my mind to either veg out or make some dinner. I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

  She laid her head back against the cushions. “I know. And I have a pizza being delivered. So you’re off the hook. What did the news say?”

  “Hot topic’s our esteemed speaker, Mark Mullen, who’s doing what everyone thought he would. Now that the Reynolds Bill is in his hands—which he never refers to by name—there’s a whole bunch of hemming and hawing going on. The clip they showed had him touting the virtues of all us heroes in blue, and how the worst thing we can do to this precious resource we call Vermont is to overreact to an admittedly egregious situation, et cetera, et cetera. I smell some wicked deal-making in the air.”

  Gail sipped her tea. “There will be that. He has to pay lip service to the popular support that came out of those town meetings, while he replaces Reynolds’s name with his own as the author of a solution.” She sighed. “Pretty predictable. Even if he weren’t competing with Reynolds for governor, he’d still be inclined to gut the bill and start over. It’s his nature. He’s been in the House for more years than anyone can remember, cutting deals, bringing opposites together, making or breaking friends and enemies—and in the process completely forgetting that sometimes you don’t need to do all that crap. Sometimes a situation is so simple and obvious that it’s worth your while not to mess with it.”