Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  On the surface, it was both practical and efficient. It was also a good way for Mullen to maintain near-total control.

  Once again, I was asked to Montpelier to act as an expert witness, which I only hoped I could do with total impartiality. As the months had slipped by, the law enforcement “super agency” bill had been sharply debated across the state, and my earlier desire to keep an open mind had begun to erode.

  In this I was hardly alone. If nothing else, Reynolds had given birth to a genuine hot potato. In radio commentaries, newspaper editorials, and squad rooms across Vermont, this topic had been bandied around with passion and prejudice, and with little general agreement. Most interesting, however, no one had been seen rallying around the status quo. They couldn’t agree on what exactly was broken, but everyone agreed it needed fixing.

  It was a custom-made void for Mark Mullen and his ambitions, whatever end strategy he might have been considering.

  Mullen had made of himself a living local legend—although one whose grasp on power was at a crucial juncture. Born outside Barre forty-five years ago, the youngest of two sons of a quarryman father, he’d been elected to the House while still in his early twenties and had stayed there ever since, eventually sitting on most of the committees, and finally—though a member of the minority party that year—being elected speaker, a quirky phenomenon almost unique to Vermont, and one the Republicans had since come to rue.

  At the time, however, his selection had been no surprise. An instinctive consensus builder and a genuine “people person,” Mullen paid minimal attention to party lines, orchestrating the Legislature less from the podium and more by intimate personal contact, although naturally most often to the advantage of the Democrats.

  His early reign had not been without controversy—with predictable accusations of favoritism and grandstanding—but lately it had smoothed out to the point of becoming bland. His influence had begun to pall. Mullen’s creation of this special committee, instead of letting the Reynolds Bill loose among the standing committees, had struck many as the action of a man both doubtful of his old clout and transparently eager to make a big splash.

  My drive to Montpelier this time was very different from before, when the snow and ice had turned the countryside into a crystal palace. Now a strong feeling of change was pervasive in the countryside—the unlocking season, as some called it, was nigh—when winter’s frozen grip began yielding to something just shy of spring.

  This wouldn’t have been the case during the legislative sessions of yore. Back then, the State House had called it quits by early April, so the mostly farmer/lawmakers could return to their fields and maybe get in a little late sugaring if they were lucky or lived up north. But times had changed and The Bill, as some sorrowful legislators were calling it, had delayed things even more, so that nobody was placing bets on when they’d be going home.

  But while the mood in the State House was souring, its crush of humanity had steadfastly remained the same. The hallways were as crammed with people—an inordinately large number of them in uniform—and the sense of tension was as palpable as before.

  I was supposed to meet with the study committee at one but found that the schedule had gone routinely off track. So I located an old and decorous chair, tucked under the wing of one of the building’s two sweeping staircases, and prepared for a long wait.

  A tall, thin, angular man wearing a suit and a tangled mop of dark hair slid into the chair next to mine—Commissioner of Public Safety David Stanton.

  “Hi, Joe,” he said, leaning over to shake hands. “Long time.”

  “Yup.” I gestured at the stream of people passing before us. “You pretty pleased with what you set in motion?”

  Still smiling, he watched me closely. “I set in motion?”

  “Reynolds wouldn’t have started all this without the governor’s blessing, and Howie wouldn’t have given it without consulting you. That makes you the logical choice for the next Secretary of Criminal Justice.”

  “He consulted me, sure,” Stanton agreed coyly, ignoring my conclusion. “But this is Reynolds’s baby. Not mine.”

  “Oh-oh—that mean you’re looking to jump ship?”

  He laughed. “You’re worse than the news guys. I have no idea where this is headed.”

  “I’m not against it heading somewhere,” I said to reassure him. “And I never expected the Legislature not to tie it up in knots. But I was thinking as I drove up here that the debate’s been pretty interesting—opened up a few closets a lot of people might’ve liked kept shut.”

  “Like the sheriffs?”

  “Like everybody—all that local control baloney. I’ve always loved how those official press releases about interagency cooperation compared to the real thing. This has ripped off some of the camouflage.”

  Stanton cut me a look. “Sounding pretty cynical, there, Joe.”

  I shook my head. “I’m happy it’s getting shaken up—long overdue. I just hope things don’t end up exactly where they were.”

  He stared at the floor, nodding silently in agreement.

  I became aware of a shadow to my left and turned to find a young page awkwardly standing by my chair. “What’s up?”

  “Are you Mr. Gunther?”

  I admitted as much.

  “Speaker Mullen would like to meet you in his office.”

  Stanton laughed softly. “Watch your step there, Joe.”

  I got up and patted his shoulder. “You, too. For what’s it worth, I think you’d be good in that job.”

  I followed the page upstairs to the second floor, through the vast, empty House chamber with its brilliant red carpeting and enormous bronze chandelier festooned with statues of nude women, snakes, and eagles. We climbed the low stage at the front, circled the carved, pulpit-like speaker’s podium, and almost ducked under a large, low-hung portrait of George Washington into a narrow hallway connecting the old building to a new addition housing a modern cafeteria and Mark Mullen’s office.

  There, barricaded behind a small reception area guarded by a secretary, I found the speaker stretched out across an old leather tilt-back chair, his feet planted on his antique desk, talking on the phone. He smiled as the page faded away, waved me to a chair, and quickly wrapped up his conversation.

  He then rose, leaned over, shook hands, and said, “Joe Gunther. I’m sorry we’ve never met till now. Heard a lot about you. Appreciated what you said when the Senate called you in. You want some coffee?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I’m also sorry we had to drag you up here again, but I told ’em I didn’t think we could do this thing justice if we didn’t get some of the brains in on it they’d had the first time around.”

  “There going to be big changes?” I asked innocently.

  He didn’t duck. “Count on it. You don’t throw out over two hundred years of tradition without pissing a few people off. Reynolds was living in a dream world if he thought otherwise. You two buddy-buddy?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Good, ’cause he’s in for a wake-up. The Senate has no idea what’s going on in this state. They see some dead babies, all the headlines, they run a poll, and next thing you know, they’re talking about a mandate from the people. It’s a joke. The people don’t know any more about the problem than they do. It is a problem—I know that just like you do—but to solve it you need expert advice, to find out what you can do and what you can’t. Simple as that—and hard as that, too. People don’t take kindly to politicians saying, ‘This is the way it’s going to be.’ You gotta give ’em a sense they’re part of the process.” He paused and then smiled. “But, shit. You know all that. What do you think we ought to do?”

  I had to hand it to him. He was affable, gregarious, informal, and inviting—a very likeable mix—and very unlike his rival in the Senate. He also spoke with the practical assurance of a veteran and left his listeners thinking they were dealing with a man who would use the tools at hand to get the job done.
The amount of Mullen’s blarney probably didn’t differ much from Reynolds’s, but it was a lot more pleasant to listen to.

  “So you agree with Reynolds that a big change needs to happen?”

  “You kidding? That’s the downside of two hundred years of tradition—it’s two hundred years old.” He laughed. “Sure it’s screwed up—everybody guarding his own little patch of dirt. Dumber than hell. But how do you change it?”

  I realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Maybe shoot for the middle ground? Somewhere between seventy agencies and one. And standardize communications and procedures so we all play out of the same book. I don’t really know, either,” I admitted uncomfortably, “but it’s pretty clear the more we share, the better off we are. Programs like CUSI, NUSI, and single dispatch centers like the one in Chittenden County could be used as models.”

  He was nodding vigorously. “Right, right. That’s it. Use what we got as examples. That way, law enforcement’s leading its own instead of being pushed into something by a bunch of politicians.”

  The same page who’d escorted me here reappeared in the doorway.

  “They want him downstairs?” Mullen asked, jumping to his feet.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He shook my hand again as I headed out. “Give ’em all you got, Joe. No time to hold back. Good talking to you.”

  With that staccato pep talk echoing in my ears, I followed my skinny guide back through the building, this time to the second floor of the north wing, where the House held its hearings.

  It had been an odd encounter to no apparent purpose, although I was conscious of feeling that, like a bull going up for auction, I’d just been given the once-over by the money behind the bidders.

  · · ·

  I returned to Brattleboro that evening, after two hours with the study committee. The experience had been appropriately more chaotic than during my encounter with the senators, since the contradictory special interests had finally broken cover to wield their influence. But one thing I did come away with was the conviction that Reynolds’s clean if simpleminded bill would reemerge as a shredded shadow of its previous self.

  · · ·

  The car phone went off as I was nearing the interstate’s Putney exit, north of Brattleboro.

  It was Ron. “Looks like that intel meeting you attended a few months ago paid off,” he said. “I just got a call from Budd Sheeney in Hinsdale. He’s been showing Resnick’s picture around since you handed it out, and he thinks he might’ve found something. He’s being a little coy—probably worried we’ll steal the credit unless he talks to you himself.”

  I sighed at the mentality, memories of where I’d just left fresh in my mind. “Where is he?”

  “I didn’t know where you were, so I didn’t set anything up.”

  “Call him back. I’m fifteen minutes out. I’ll drop by the station, pick you up if you want, and we can go straight to him.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he answered. “I don’t need to come. I’ll get back to you with a location.”

  I was almost in Brattleboro when the phone buzzed again. “Hinsdale High School parking lot,” Ron said. “He’ll be waiting for you.”

  Hinsdale, New Hampshire, is right across the river from Brattleboro, so integrally linked to it that the relationship is essentially symbiotic—they have a greyhound racetrack that our citizens regularly patronize, while our Putney Road commercial strip—complete with a sales tax New Hampshire has so far avoided—still serves as their primary shopping place. The best example of this close tie can be found with the local Wal-Mart. When Vermont was making a stance as the nation’s only Wal-Mart free state, the company defiantly planted an outlet within view on the Hinsdale side of the Connecticut River. Over time, not only had such proximity not gutted Brattleboro’s downtown, but Wal-Mart had been forced to ask its rival’s board of selectmen to accept the residue of a slipshod, malfunctioning sewer system instead of trucking it daily to who-knew-where. Brattleboro had politely refused.

  The actual village of Hinsdale lies several miles southeast of the bridge—a quiet, none-too-prosperous town, once dominated by the quasi-obligatory nineteenth-century mill and now looking for a substitute cash cow to help it survive. Home of several substantial trailer parks and mile upon mile of residential roads, Hinsdale had become a bedroom community for those looking for less expensive housing and New Hampshire’s lighter touch in the taxation department.

  The high school was located just west of the village, at the back of a broad expanse of fields and parking lots. There, reflective under one of the bright sodium lights, was a marked cruiser, its muffler emitting a tenuous plume of vapor. I pulled up next to it, nose-to-tail, and rolled down my window to talk to Budd Sheeney, elbow-to-elbow.

  “How’re you doing, Joe? You didn’t waste any time.”

  Budd was a large man in his forties—big-bellied, broad-shouldered, sporting the straight bristle mustache so common to police officers. A Hinsdale boy from birth, he’d gone straight from the school surrounding us to the police department and had been there ever since. He knew everybody as though they were blood-related and was as comfortable in this community as a bullfrog in a pond.

  “I was just coming into town when Ron called me,” I answered. “I hear you have something on Phil Resnick.”

  “I got a tickle, yeah. Wasn’t sure how high that was on your list anymore.”

  I didn’t know if I should believe that, but I didn’t see any harm in letting him play Santa Claus. “Pretty high, Budd. I’d appreciate any help you can give us.”

  “Not a problem,” he answered casually. “It’s one of those guy-who-knows-a-guy things, though, and I haven’t checked it out. But according to my source, someone looking like Resnick was seen at Sandy Corcoran’s place around the time you’re interested in.”

  “What makes you think it was Resnick?” I asked.

  “You said he might’ve been burned. Supposedly, this one’s face and hands looked like one big blister.”

  That stopped me. I remembered the ME saying that the chloracne reaction to the chemicals would have taken several days to develop—and that, at the time of exposure, Resnick probably wouldn’t have done much more than wipe the stuff off without giving it a thought. “You have a precise date on this sighting?”

  Sheeney shook his head. “The reference I got was ‘a few days before’ you found that body, whatever that means. Supposedly the guy was seen looking out of one of Sandy’s windows.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “What’s the story with Sandy Corcoran?”

  “Standard bad girl, but no headline-maker. She’s been clean for about eight months. Did a little time for drunk and disorderly back then, when she took a bottle to her boyfriend’s head—not that he noticed or cared. But it was in the racetrack parking lot, so we had to do something about it.”

  I thought for a moment. “Okay. Could you round up a search warrant? I want to be able to move on her with full guns when the time comes. I’ll have Ron call you tomorrow to coordinate. That okay?”

  Sheeney nodded gravely, now officially integrated. “You got it.”

  · · ·

  Sandy Corcoran lived in a small, peeling house on Route 63 heading out of Hinsdale village. Neither in town nor in the suburbs, it hung like a tattered thread on the border, near a couple of others like it, just shy of where the road opened up to countryside and woods.

  When I parked the car a hundred yards below it and killed my lights, it was almost seven o’clock the night following my talk with Sheeney. Willy and J.P. were in the car with me. Sammie had taken a few days off and hadn’t been seen or heard from since.

  I saw Budd Sheeney’s bulk loom up ahead of us, his outline caught by the dim lights from the house behind him.

  He crouched by my door as I rolled down the window. “She’s inside, alone. Got back from work about an hour ago. I have a man watching the rear.”

  “Then let’s get going,” Willy said and swung o
ut of the car.

  We walked quietly up to the building’s front porch, littered with the remnants of a winter’s worth of cordwood, now reduced to a few logs and a dunelike pile of bark scraps. The air was still and surprisingly warm—a hopeful harbinger of long-awaited spring.

  Sheeney knocked politely on the front door.

  We heard footsteps against a backdrop of TV noise, and a shadow passed across the curtain next to us. “Who is it?” The voice was neither soft nor fearful. I remember the comment about Sandy laying a bottle across her boyfriend’s head.

  “It’s Budd Sheeney, Sandy. Wondered if we could talk to you.”

  The door swung open, splashing us with light. Before us stood a tall, muscular, statuesque black-haired woman, dressed in tight jeans and a tank top. Her feet were bare and her eyes hard. She had a tattoo of an eagle on her well-muscled shoulder. “Who’s we?”

  Budd gestured in our direction. I answered, “Joe Gunther—Brattleboro Police. We’re investigating a homicide and thought maybe you could help us.”

  “I haven’t killed anybody.”

  “No one said you did, Sandy,” Budd said. “Can we come in?”

  “It’s not that cold. We can talk here.”

  I took the warrant Budd had handed me earlier and gave it to her. “We’d like it better inside.”

  She took it from me but didn’t bother opening it. She stepped back. “You fucking guys.”

  We took that as an invitation and filed past her into a cluttered living room, piled with clothes, several old pizza boxes, and an assortment of cast-aside magazines. The walls were decorated with Harley and rock star posters, a plastic cat clock, and an out-of-date calendar advertising a beach in Hawaii.

  “I got nothing to say, you know?” she continued. “And I don’t know shit from any homicides.” She pointed at Sheeney and smirked. “Ask him. He watches me enough of the time. He could probably tell you more about what I done than I could.”