Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  I should have known better. “She doesn’t have any either—no one on the block does—which means the assailant left it behind inadvertently, just like the fiber sample from his red wool shirt.”

  “Gail told me last night she still has her Swiss Army knife,” I volunteered, my memory jostled by what he’d just said.

  Tyler nodded. “Well, we expected that. That’s good, though, ’cause when we find this guy, we can check all his knives for traces of blood. Even if he wiped the blade off on his pants, we might still find something. And the window lock I removed might come in there, too. I know for sure a knife was used to jimmy it open. I might be able to match the marks to the blade.”

  I reflected on that for a moment, impressed at how impersonal it could all be made to sound. “That it?”

  “For the moment. The DNA analysis won’t be here for weeks, and we’re not expecting anything there anyhow. I’ve pretty much done all I can do with fingerprints. You’re going to get dozens of other people’s prints in most houses anyhow—guests, workers, people like that—and Gail’s was no different. I haven’t had a hit with any of them, except yours and hers, of course.”

  “What about Harry Murchison, the window installer?”

  Tyler smiled apologetically at the vagaries of his beloved science. “No. We know he was there, but it was over a year ago—it’s hard to expect a print to survive that long.”

  I finally asked a question that had been chewing at me since Gail had first brought it up. “Do you know what they heard back on Gail’s blood tests?”

  He looked at me quizzically. “I don’t think they found anything. What were you after?”

  “No sign of HIV or AIDS?”

  His mouth fell open slightly. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I should’ve thought of that.” He looked suddenly embarrassed, and his words came out slowly and carefully. “No—the test was clean… for the moment. That’s fine, of course—a good sign—but you shouldn’t take it as gospel, not yet. She ought to have another test in a month or so—and periodically for every six months after that—just to be sure.”

  I thanked him and went into my small corner office. I sat down at my desk and dialed Women for Women.

  Susan Raffner was on the line in a few minutes. “Hi. What’s up?”

  “Nothing specific. We may have a lead, but we need to check it out thoroughly. I was just wondering how Gail fared last night. I didn’t want to call her at your place in case she was sleeping.”

  Susan’s voice saddened. “She’s not doing much of that. She woke up right after you left. I ended up putting her in bed with me—it seemed to calm her down a little.”

  “What about something to help her sleep?”

  “I’m not crazy about that stuff—her system’s messed up enough as it is—but I did ask her. I think she’s planning to sleep days and stay awake nights, if she can.”

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked.

  “No, but it’s her own decision, and that is good. The more she takes charge of things, the better. She just feels too vulnerable to sleep at night. It’ll pass with time.” There was a pause on the line before Susan added, “Did you see the paper this morning?”

  “Saw it—I didn’t read it.”

  “Katz played it pretty straight—the editorial’s a little heavy-handed, but sympathetic. He did say a few things you probably won’t be too happy with, like how the paper’s going to make it a mission not to let this just slip by. The quote was something like ‘keeping a spotlight on the wheels of justice.’”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “I know how you feel, Joe, but we agree with him, and we’re planning to help him out. We’re going to keep this in the news.”

  “I realize that,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “And Gail’s going to be a part of it.”

  Despite my unhappiness, I appreciated the sensitivity in her voice.

  Even believing as she did that I was wholly supportive of Gail’s identifying herself as the victim, Susan still understood the pressures such a decision placed upon a couple. After years of locking horns with her on purely technical grounds, finally I found it oddly comforting that she was there as head of Women for Women, even as she prepared to make my professional life miserable. It was the sign of someone, as irony might have it, that I could trust.

  “I know that, too,” I answered. “And I know that’s what she thinks she needs. I just don’t want everyone else’s enthusiasm running her over.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on it, Joe. And, by the way, your coming over last night made a big difference. I think you should drop by any time you feel the urge, as long as you keep the same tone. I’ll tell the others you might do that.”

  I thanked her and hung up, ignoring the fact that “keeping the same tone” might be easier said than done, depending on my own emotional mood swings.

  I pulled open my bottom desk drawer and removed an old electric razor, with which I did an approximate job on my face, using my fingertips in place of a mirror. The shower would have to wait. I knew that with this morning’s headlines, the political natives were going to be at least restless, and perhaps arming for battle.

  I crossed the hallway to Brandt’s side of the building, only to find him putting on his jacket and preparing to leave. “I was just about to round you up. Dunn wants to see us—I think he’s getting sweaty palms.”

  I accompanied Tony back out to the hallway and upstairs to where the State’s Attorney had his offices on the top floor. Dunn’s request—and Brandt’s reaction—were in perfect keeping with my own concerns. The SA had been a fixture in the county for the past fifteen years, a feather in the community’s cap when he’d first been elected as a highly respected prosecutor with big-city credentials. He’d been slumming then, a fifty-five-year-old flatlander, newly retired from handling big criminal cases in New York, and his run for office had reflected that lack of desperate hunger so common among office seekers. Dunn had felt free to say whatever was on his mind, regardless of the consequences, because he’d literally had nothing to lose. It had even seemed to some of us in those days that, were he elected, he might not choose to serve, having found something else of more interest. This curious nonchalance had worked well in his favor, being misinterpreted by both press and public as courage rather than arrogant indifference.

  Time had worked its devious alchemy, of course, eroding the man’s lack of ambition—and the public’s gullibility—with the result that he was now as driven to hang onto his position as a growing number of people were to see him replaced.

  Having the chairwoman of the board of selectmen raped, therefore, with no suspect in jail and both these facts in banner headlines, was not good news.

  He greeted us silently from behind a large, gleaming, imposing cherry-wood conference table, looking like a bad caricature of some egomaniacal dictator. Before him, in pointed isolation, lay a single copy of the morning’s newspaper, face up. We were not invited to sit.

  He extended one long, manicured finger and tapped the newspaper gently with it, looking me straight in the eye. “Why wasn’t I told about this?”

  I hesitated a moment, weighing any number of possible responses, and finally settled for, “I didn’t think of it. Sorry.”

  “You guys made me look like an idiot. Alice Sims called me up at the crack of dawn and asked for an on-the-record comment, and I had to ask her what the hell she was talking about. She said you and Raffner’s crowd cooked this up together.”

  Alice was Stan Katz’s “courts-’n’-cops” reporter, covering his old beat. She was young and aggressive and dying to make an impression, just as Stanley had been before her. I was sure Dunn was right that she’d make the most of this communications glitch, and felt badly that I’d dropped the ball. I didn’t like Dunn, but it did none of us any good to make it appear the police and the SA weren’t talking.

  Dunn continued coldly, “She also told me that Jack Derby had weighed in with his own homespun country-crack
er bullshit about the plight of women in this violent society, and how bravery like Ms. Zigman’s was an example of how to stem the tide—or some other highly original piece of crap.”

  He pushed aside the paper and laid his thin, pale hands flat on the table’s shiny surface. “Are you two gentlemen counting the days until Mr. Derby moves into these offices? Perhaps you think he needs a little help?”

  I had seen James Dunn pull the imperious magistrate performance before—it was one of his better acts. But it had always been directed outward, at a suspect or a reluctant witness. Turning his vitriol on us, especially on purely political grounds, was a mistake I knew Tony was not going to take in stride.

  Brandt walked around the end of the long table to join Dunn on the other side. The latter looked taken aback by this gesture and, as Tony approached, even faintly alarmed. He shifted in his chair and raised his hands vaguely over his chest, as if prepared to physically defend himself.

  Tony, however, smiling thinly but affably enough, merely pulled out the chair right next to Dunn’s, sat in it, leaned back, and placed his crossed feet on the immaculate tabletop, all the while reaching into his jacket pocket to remove his pipe and pouch. Dunn’s theatrically staged and imposing set dissolved. As an afterthought, I sat down on the edge of the table, instead of standing like an abashed schoolboy.

  Tony’s voice, despite his mild appearance, was ice cold. “Want to run that by us again?”

  Dunn looked ready to explode. “How did Derby know about this before I did?”

  Tony focused on stuffing his pipe. “The paper knew about it before we did, and the paper’s endorsed your opponent. How do you explain it?”

  The SA’s eyes narrowed slightly as he stared at me. “What do you mean, the paper knew about it before you did? She’s your goddamn girlfriend, for Christ’s sake.”

  I decided to play Brandt’s bland game. “She called them, an informant there called us, and I went over to their office to make it look like we were all coordinating. Katz bought it. You just slipped my mind. I am sorry about that. I’m afraid I was scrambling for cover myself.”

  Dunn’s lethal gaze shifted back and forth between us. Tony lit up and his pipe erupted into a cloud of smoke. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk to us about, James?”

  It was a graceful offer from someone who would have been entirely justified in simply walking out of the room. Dunn grudgingly recognized it as such.

  “Yes. How is the investigation going?” he asked, switching gears.

  Brandt spoke as if the conversation had just begun. “Fine. We’ve got two possibles from among the files Joe collected at the intelligence meeting yesterday, and a third one Gail gave us of a guy who replaced a couple of windows at her house a year ago—”

  “And Jason Ryan,” I added, “who said she deserved what she got, a few days before the rape. We also have a guy from Massachusetts on parole here on a burglary rap who has a long history of sexual assault.”

  Tony gave me a quick glance, since I hadn’t had a chance yet to update him on Bob Vogel. He also was not one who enjoyed being left out of the informational loop, especially with Dunn on the warpath.

  Dunn looked at his watch, eager to get this over now that it had blown up in his face. “I take it Todd’s being kept abreast of all this.”

  “I haven’t seen him this morning,” I said, “but I’ll fill him in.”

  Dunn stood up and walked to the door that led to his private office. “All right. Let me know when something develops.”

  He closed the door behind him, and Tony and I looked at one another. “Can’t imagine why the race is so close,” Brandt muttered.

  · · ·

  Lunch was a combination of brown-bag sandwiches and chips, ordered-in slabs of glistening pizza, and a mismatched assortment of carrots, pickles, cookies, yogurt, soda, and one Twinkie, belonging to Dennis. Sitting around the least cluttered conference table in the command post were the entire detective squad, Brandt, Billy Manierre representing Patrol, and Todd Lefevre from the SA’s office.

  Ron Klesczewski was running the meeting. “Of the two possibles gleaned from the intelligence meeting—Lonny Sorvin and Barry Gilchrist—Sorvin looked the most likely. They had both blindfolded their victims in the past, but only Sorvin used ropes and spoke in a whisper. Neither one of them broke into their victims’ homes, neither one had used a knife, and neither one had stripped naked prior to sexual contact. Still, they were the only ones that even came close to fitting the MO of the guy we’re after. Also, given their jobs and generally known habits, they both had the opportunity to commit the rape in question.

  “On the strength of that, we had them interviewed by their parole officers. They were asked to account for their movements in detail, and then we had their stories checked out. As far as we can tell, they’re clean.”

  “Who did the checking? Us or Corrections?” Brandt asked, slightly confused by Ron’s syntax.

  “I did,” Dennis DeFlorio answered. “I talked to family members in Gilchrist’s case—Sorvin lives alone—and friends and neighbors of both of them. Harriet’s transcribing my report. Maybe I’m wrong, but I kind of think we’d be wasting our time with them. Just my opinion, of course.”

  No one challenged him, much to his apparent relief, so Ron plowed on. “We finished going through the list of people Gail submitted, and except for Harry Murchison, we came up empty. But since those were the people she suggested herself, we gave them a second going-over. The only iffy pair were Philip Duncan and Mark Sumner, who were at a party together until two-thirty—after the rape began. Since each had spoken for the other concerning that time, and their friends could’ve been covering for them, we looked for other witnesses for corroboration. Unfortunately—or fortunately, I suppose—we found them. Both a waitress and a bartender confirmed the time.”

  “This place was still open at two-thirty?” Billy Manierre asked.

  “It was a special party at the Redtop Inn—the dining room was reserved for the whole night. Ethan Allen Realty’s just been bought out by some businessman from Boston, and I guess he wanted to show his new employees what a great guy he is.”

  “So what about Murchison?” Brandt interrupted, impatient with Ron’s methodical approach.

  “I’ve been checking him out,” Sammie answered. “And he’s still a good candidate. I went to Krystal Kleer pretending I wanted a mirror cut to size, and I got into a conversation with the woman at the desk. According to her, Murchison is a grade-A sexual harasser, making comments, copping feels, and generally being a pain in the ass. She said even some of the customers complained, and the boss had to stop sending him out on the road.

  “I looked into the two sexual priors against him—an aggravated-assault conviction and a dropped simple-assault charge. The first involved a woman he was seeing and who’d broken off the relationship; he waited for her one night when she got back from work, forced her inside, threatened her with a hammer, and then raped her, apparently hoping the ecstasy of the experience would make her see the error of her ways.”

  Everyone but Kunkle remained studiously silent at the bitterness in Sammie’s voice. Kunkle laughed.

  “Murchison did three years for that and got out almost three years ago. The simple-assault charge was eight years ago and didn’t stick because the girl he had sex with was too flaky—she only came forward because her parents forced her to, and she kept changing her story. The state wasn’t all that sure who to believe.”

  “What was the background on that case?” Todd Lefevre asked.

  “Backseat groping at a lover’s lane. The girl was a well-experienced minor. He claimed he didn’t know how old she was. There was no violence, but her first story—the one she came in with accompanied by her parents—was that he’d forced the situation. There don’t seem to be any parallels with our case, unlike the rape he was convicted for. Willy did the legwork on his whereabouts the night before last.”

  We all looked expectantly at
Kunkle, who took his time finishing off a Coke. I filled the gap by asking Sammie, “Did you run a picture of Murchison by Gail, just to make sure we’re talking about the same window installer?”

  She hesitated. “I wasn’t sure I should—not this soon after.”

  “You better get me a mug shot or something. She said the guy had almost electric blue eyes.”

  Sammie was already nodding, “That’s him—the receptionist even said it was too bad they belonged to such a creep.”

  Willy put his can down and wiped his mouth against his sleeve. “Okay: Harry Murchison is a definite maybe—the truck fits the old man’s description, and we know from his neighbor he spent at least part of the night away from home. Turns out he had a fight with his girlfriend—something about her drinking too much beer at a party they were both at—and she had to catch a ride home with a friend. Murchison lit out for parts unknown.

  “I put together a list of his drinking buddies—most of it from his ex-parole officer—and tried to see if I could trace his movements that night. Up to about the time of the rape, I got him drinking at a guy’s house near West Dummerston, but then he disappears. They ran out of booze and Murchison took off, either in search of another watering hole or someplace to pass out besides home. With more time, I might be able to pin down which one. One interesting thing, though—the quickest way to get back into town from the place in West Dummerston is Meadowbrook Road.”

  “So the truck the old guy saw was Murchison’s,” Dennis said.

  But I saw the problem with that. “Maybe—Willy said Murchison left his buddy’s around the time the rape began—that’s 2:13—and the witness didn’t see the truck ‘til… ” I glanced over my shoulder at the board, “4:15—over half an hour after Gail got loose, and twenty minutes after her own car was seen leaving for the hospital.”

  “He could’ve waited, to watch her leave,” Ron suggested.

  I didn’t argue the point. “I’m not ruling him out—it’s just a discrepancy we need to remember. Keep digging, okay, Willy?”

  He nodded once without looking up, his eyes on a distant pickle.