Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  “How ’bout the night of January sixth?” I asked, ignoring that Sheeney had actually blushed a bit, “when the body of Phil Resnick was found on the railroad tracks in Brattleboro?”

  The only reaction I registered was a slight hesitation in her answer. “I don’t know nothin’ about that.” She then followed with more bluster, pointing at J.P. and Willy, who were quietly poking around the room, heading off elsewhere into the house. “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?”

  I walked over to the TV and switched it off. “Read the warrant, Ms. Corcoran. We’re here because a judge agrees that you’re up to your neck in trouble. Have a seat.” I motioned toward the couch.

  “Eat shit,” she said.

  “Your choice,” I continued. “We happen to know Phil Resnick was brought here shortly before he was murdered. When he was dumped on the tracks, he was already unconscious, probably because he’d been hit on the head.” I made a show of pausing a moment before adding, “Which is something you like to do, don’t you? Beaned your boyfriend not long before Resnick got his. State’s Attorney will like that pattern.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” she said, but I thought her enthusiasm was beginning to flag.

  “Not this time.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “You know what they’re looking for?”

  “Whatever it is, they won’t find it.”

  “Not a single drop of blood?” I asked. “Not a fingerprint? What about his clothes? He was dressed like a bum when we found him. You don’t strike me as the neatest person around. If you forgot to remove, or vacuum, or wipe off even the tiniest bit of evidence, we’ll find it. After that, your life will be hell. Remember, we’re across the state line here. This’ll involve cops, prosecutors, and judges from both New Hampshire and Vermont if you don’t play ball. You could spend a lot of time in jail.”

  She seemed to freeze a moment, then her face bunched up and she came at me, flying across the room like an enraged panther. Caught off guard, I braced myself for the worst.

  But Budd Sheeney knew his people. Just as I was raising my hands to defend myself, Sheeney’s massive bulk cut across my line of vision, enveloping Corcoran’s body and whisking it away like a gust of wind might a leaf. They both landed with a tremendous crash against a side table, a tangle of arms and legs, wrestling and rolling on the floor until Sheeney was able to pin her face down and pull her arms up behind her back. Willy and J.P. appeared at separate doors, guns drawn, just as Budd was slapping on the cuffs, comfortably sitting on her muscular backside.

  I squatted by her head. Her nostrils flaring, she sent up little puffs of dust from the floor with her breathing. “You assholes.”

  “Talk to us, Sandy. We got you on attempted assault. Won’t be long before there’s more, including murder. I can’t believe it’s worth it.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. When she reopened them, her voice was calm and measured. “If he’s finished enjoying himself, get this ape off my butt and help me up.”

  Sheeney did the honors, smiling broadly, and steered Sandy Corcoran over to the couch, checking its cushions first for weapons. She sat down with a wince, her hands pinched against her back. I settled opposite her on the coffee table. “Your choice.”

  She stared at me angrily. “He was here, but I had nothin’ to do with killin’ him.”

  “Who did?”

  She hesitated. “Walter Freund.”

  I felt a small release valve open up inside my brain, and I fought the urge to smile, helped by a sudden concern. “You know where he is now?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since that night. That was the deal. I didn’t want any more to do with his bullshit.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Take the cuffs off.”

  Sheeney laughed. “Not likely.”

  She flared back up. “I’m cooperating, all right? My wrists’re killin’ me. I already said I know what happened.”

  I glanced at Sheeney and nodded. He crossed over to her, reached behind her back, and undid the cuffs. She made herself more comfortable, rubbing her wrists. “Walter called me one night and said he needed to stash somebody for a while. We did each other favors now and then. The timing was okay, so I said fine. He shows up with this guy. His face is all red and puffed up and kind of slimy in places. His hands, too. It was disgusting. I told Walter to fuck off—that I wasn’t no hospital. I thought it might be catching—all this shit you hear about in the news.”

  “Did it look like Walter was helping this man, or forcing him to be here?”

  “He was helping him. The guy was hurtin’, and complaining about some son of a bitch who’d done it to him. Walter told me he’d been splashed with chemicals. They’d even raided a Salvation Army bin to replace his clothes. He looked like a bum.”

  “The son of a bitch have a name?”

  She smiled slightly. “That was it, far as I heard. What were those chemicals anyhow? I always wondered.”

  I ignored her. “Was Resnick threatening to get even?”

  “He was pissed, all right. But he was too sick to do much about it.”

  “Was there any indication of where Resnick had been staying before Walter brought him to you?”

  She looked at me curiously. “Before? I don’t know anything about that.”

  “How did Walter get you to change your mind?”

  She laughed. “He doubled the price. Plus he told me it wasn’t catching. The damage had already been done.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing at first. He stayed here a couple of days, tried to take care of himself. I don’t know ’cause I was at work.”

  “Did he use the phone?”

  “That would’ve been a neat trick. I don’t have one.”

  “What kind of shape was he in?” I pressed her. “Did you think he was going to die?”

  Her eyes grew round. “Shit, no. He was burned, is all, like with scalding water or something. It hurt like a bitch. I did buy him some ointment I got at the store. He used a ton of that stuff, and either it helped or he just started getting used to the pain.” She shook her head. “He was fine otherwise.” She paused. “At least while I saw him. I mean, I know some of that crap’ll really do you damage—cancer and what all—but that would’ve been later, right?”

  “What happened to change things? Why did they go from helping him to killing him?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I told Walter we were done afterward. They showed up the next night and popped him one with a hammer. Just like that. He went down like a dead cow. I mean, Jesus, one minute they’re talkin’, next minute they’re draggin’ his ass outta here like he was meat. I went ballistic.”

  “You keep saying, ‘they.’ Who did Walter have with him?”

  “Some little shit. Called him Billy. I didn’t know him.”

  “That was it? There weren’t three of them?”

  “Nope.” She began studying her nails.

  I leaned forward slightly. “Don’t quit on me now, Sandy. Who was the other man Walter brought with him?”

  She suddenly gave up, staring me in the eye. “I never saw him. He stayed in the car. I figured he was Walter’s boss, or at least someone who had something over him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She looked contemptuous. “Well, for Christ’s sake. It ain’t rocket science. Walter’s already in deep shit—on parole and all. He didn’t need to be poppin’ people off. So he was pissed. When they were dragging the guy out of here, he kept bitchin’ about how he didn’t have a say in it—that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He wasn’t a happy camper.”

  “Neither Walter nor Billy mentioned any names?”

  “No. Billy was a moron, anyhow. Kept lookin’ at my tits like he didn’t know what they were. Probably didn’t.”

  Sheeney laughed shortly. Sandy leered at him. “You do, don’t you, though, lardass? Too bad you’ll never get a piece of ’em.”

 
“Sandy,” I interrupted. “You were about to hold back a minute ago. Were you thinking you could still get something out of this—put the squeeze on this third man?”

  She smiled ruefully. “Seemed worth a try.”

  “How were you going to find him?”

  She shrugged. “Shit, I don’t know. I figured find Walter, you find that guy, right? Worth a shot.”

  I couldn’t argue the logic. “Right.”

  27

  SANDY CORCORAN’S SIMPLE RECIPE FOR USING WALTER to find whoever had ordered Phil Resnick killed had one obvious, glaring flaw—and with our inability to locate Walter, our investigation finally rolled to a complete stop, despite a national distribution of his picture and description.

  Happily, our misfortune wasn’t contagious. Gail and McNeil finally found enough common ground to work out a deal. Owen Tharp agreed to a fifteen-years-to-life sentence for second-degree murder, making him eligible for parole in twelve years, which Jack Derby spun into a bragging point as the summer campaigning began picking up speed. In the face of a few media grumbles about Walter—as with a cartoon showing Derby à la Teddy Roosevelt with his foot on a dead rabbit, and a grizzly escaping over the horizon—the candidate merely blamed us for not getting our man. The press wasn’t all that interested, in any case.

  Tempers cooled between Gail and Derby also, allowing her to graciously serve notice that she’d be moving to the StayGreen job by summer’s end, and with sad predictability the flight of Walter Freund and the fate of his two lower-class victims slipped off the front page.

  Our squad was left to pursue all the deferred day-to-day business that had piled up when things were hot and to deal with the fact that, posturing aside, Derby had been right—we hadn’t gotten our man. Not a week went by when we didn’t meet to discuss Walter’s open file—and to wonder what might be in it that we simply couldn’t see.

  And that wasn’t our only aggravation, although it topped the list. As spring gave in to summer, the Reynolds Bill saga reached the level of comic opera, affecting every cop within the state along the way.

  Mark Mullen’s strategy of disassembling the bill and remaking it in his own image reached a climax in late May, when his special committee finally reported to a restless and bored Legislature that—aided by many witnesses, much thought, and the application of old-fashioned pragmatism—it had taken Reynolds’s radical notion of replacing those sixty-eight agencies with a single cost-saving unit and had “amended” it by slapping on a sixty-ninth.

  To be called the Vermont Bureau of Investigation—a dismissive nod to Reynolds that while his plan had been gutted, he’d come up with a great name—this new creation was to do what the Vermont State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations had been doing for years for those communities lacking full-service departments. A loosely structured, minimally bureaucratic entity, VBI was to handle all so-called major crimes, including, among others, murder, rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, and arson with death resulting. Operated by the Department of Public Safety’s now legislatively mandated and funded Criminal Justice Services, and reporting directly to the Attorney General—who could at his discretion dole out prosecutions to the state’s twelve state’s attorneys—VBI was to have full reign throughout the state, directed by statute to assume responsibility of all major crime investigations, regardless of which other agency was handling them to begin with. Thus, from the state police down to the lowliest constable, everyone was to give the big cases to VBI. Agencies could keep their detective squads—the lesser-ranked crimes, of which there were plenty, would still need local addressing—the state police would maintain its BCI, and all uniformed forces would pretty much keep their traditional roles, with a renewed emphasis on community policing. Commissioner Stanton would not become a cabinet secretary.

  In short, it was the ideal political solution, designed to look good on paper, sound good on the stump, and drive the people it affected the most totally insane. Not a single cop I knew liked it.

  Not that Reynolds gave in without a murmur. Although the House okayed Mullen’s compromise bill—largely because they were eager to get home to their jobs or start running for reelection—it still had to go to a conference committee, where Reynolds got to make his final pitch.

  As his cherished bill had begun to unravel, he’d taken advantage of Mullen’s transparent maneuvers to wrap himself in a martyr’s cloak, decrying for weeks on end the death of common sense. So when the time came for three senators to meet with three representatives to hammer out the final bill, he offered himself for service. The Senate’s president—also the lieutenant governor and another contender for Governor Howell’s office—was the man whose job it was to make those three appointments. But while he couldn’t in all decorum deny a slot to the chair of the Judiciary Committee—and the author of the original bill—he could and did saddle him with two Senate colleagues who sided with Mark Mullen’s view of reality.

  So, at five-against-one before the conference committee even met, the outcome was preordained. Reynolds was reduced to making one last speech to his colleagues in the Senate, mourning the loss of a potentially high-quality, well-trained, efficiently run organization to a disparate clutter of unevenly trained and experienced officers reporting to a crowd of over five dozen bosses. It was clear, brief, and delivered with great heart, and when he was finished, there was a genuine tang in the air of an opportunity missed despite all his listeners’ knowing it really hadn’t stood a chance from the start.

  The new bill soon passed. VBI became law, the various bureaucrats in charge of it disappeared to turn it into reality, and all of us in law enforcement waited until January, when things were slated to come on line and our fates to be decided.

  The press kicked it around for weeks, first siding with Reynolds, then trying to predict the future, and eventually—tentatively—conceding that maybe Mullen hadn’t been so self-serving after all. Echoing the speaker’s own mantra that Reynolds had been hunting flies with an untested, high-cost artillery piece, editorials began agreeing that Mullen’s proposal had cut to the root cause of the problem—the consolidation of resources and information for the purpose of solving major crimes. With time, the vision of a steely-eyed corps of bright, tough, statewide Untouchables began to take hold of the public’s consciousness, overriding all concerns about how such a unit could be gracefully blended into a profession famous for its inbred sense of turf.

  In the end, along with everybody else in the department, I yielded to the resigned fatalism common to all military-style organizations. I remembered with irony that Jim Reynolds himself had told me early on that in the long run, the cops would do as they were told.

  Acceptance of all this was made easier by improvements at home. With Gail coming to terms about her future, she seemed to slip free of the rape’s last tentacles. She was happier, felt freer to wander and quicker to laugh, and suddenly found time in the day to relax and have fun. Not wanting to miss any of this, I left work whenever I could, and Gail and I took advantage of the early warm weather to go for walks, drives, and hikes, and started—in leisurely fashion—looking for some bachelor digs for me. The whole experience—with a few minor stumbles along the way—brought both of us back emotionally to where we’d been years before.

  It also made watching Sammie Martens that much harder.

  She hadn’t had any choice but to break up with Andy Padgett. As she saw it, he’d violated a moral code she used as her primary guide. But her commitment to what he’d represented had been deep, and his betrayal had hit her hard. After returning from an accumulation of sick days and vacation time, she’d gone back to work like an automaton—regularly, predictably, and utterly without spirit. Willy, protectively out of earshot, if with no more sensitivity, complained it was like working with the living dead.

  I began hoping either for a break in the Walter Freund case or another to replace it, just so I could give her something to sink her teeth into.

  About halfway through the s
ummer, I got my wish.

  I was standing in my office, tidying up before day’s end. The windows were open, the warm air was steady and clear, and I was looking forward to renting a Sunfish and sailing with Gail on a nearby lake.

  Until J.P. walked in, a broad smile on his face.

  “What’re you so happy about?” I asked him.

  “This.” He held up the semiautomatic we’d recovered from Billy Conyer the night he’d died. “I’ve been going over every scrap of evidence we have—checking fingerprints we hadn’t bothered with, running records of everybody we talked to, staring at witness statements till I was blue in the face. I knew there had to be something we hadn’t thought of.”

  I pointed at the gun, all too familiar with what he’d been going through. “And?”

  “Ballistics,” he said simply. “Ron figured it out. We checked the serial number at the time and got nowhere, so we figured the gun was a dead end. But we never did a ballistics check to see if any bullets from it were on file at the crime lab. They have hundreds of them up there, all dated and cross-referenced—a bunch without guns to fit. Turns out they had one for this.”

  I slowly sat down, thoughts of summertime leisure quickly replaced by that familiar adrenaline. “Go on.”

  “Three years ago, a gas station was held up off Interstate 89 south of Montpelier. A twenty-year-old named Richie West stuck a gun in the attendant’s face and told him to empty the till. Either the attendant didn’t move fast enough or he did something stupid he wouldn’t admit later, but a couple of shots were fired and he got whacked on the head before West took off into the night—just as an off-duty cop was pulling in for gas. The cop didn’t know what had happened till too late to give chase, but he remembered the getaway car, and the state cops had Richie in cuffs within forty-five minutes.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I suggested, “the gun was missing and the bullets they dug out of the wall match what we got off Billy Conyer.”