Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  He sat back suddenly, disgusted. “Defense argued it was a consensual deal gone bad—that the girl changed her mind and screamed rape.”

  “They bought that?” Ron blurted.

  “Only because Vogel’s lawyer twisted it around. She showered after the assault, took a long time reporting it, messed up her story—she did everything you’re not supposed to do. In a nutshell, the jury didn’t like her, and maybe didn’t trust her, and the lawyer played on that. But there was no doubt about Vogel’s involvement. But the judge bought it, said that considering some of the sexual positions she described, she had to have been a willing participant, since a simple twitch of the hips would’ve ended it. I mean, Jesus, they didn’t even focus on the knife, or the fact she was scared shitless. The DA fucked up, if you ask me.”

  Brandt interrupted gently. “And with Wendy Polan?”

  Catone held up a second finger. “I know you’re not supposed to blame a fellow officer, but that fiasco rests entirely with Walter Huss. The bastard was hitting the bottle—got the wrong address on the search warrant of Vogel’s apartment, lost the chain-of-custody paperwork, and then made up a phony story to cover his ass… ” He slammed the tabletop with his hand. “But Vogel was dirty then, too. We just couldn’t do anything about it. If you people nail this creep, you’ll make a lot of people real happy. I came up here so you’d understand that—and so you’d know that if you need any help south of the border, don’t hesitate to call.”

  Brandt and I exchanged glances. It was obvious things would have to get pretty desperate before either one of us took him up on that. Nevertheless, he had brought the similarities between our case and Vogel’s MO into sharp focus. I no longer had much doubt that we were on the right track.

  I got to my feet and extended my hand, making it clear the interview was over. “Jim, we appreciate your making the trip up here. It’s helped a lot. And I promise we’ll keep you posted.”

  As further niceties followed from the others around the table, Harriet closed her pad and gracefully escorted our guest back outside.

  There was a long pause following his departure. Tony finally looked over at Todd Lefevre and asked, “Well?”

  Todd smiled and confirmed my own thoughts. “Well, I don’t think we’d ever want to use him in court, but I do think he’s confirmed we’ve got a hot one.”

  “With a few discrepancies,” I added.

  Brandt nodded. “Like the gloves and the lack of ejaculate?”

  “Yeah, and the fact that he kept some of his clothes on in the past.

  Also, he never got a job in the victim’s neighborhood before, to scope the place out.”

  Todd waved his hand in disagreement. “But his MO’s evolved from crime to crime. From tape to slipknots, from nightgown to pillowcase, from showing a knife to using it. He’s refined his style. So now he takes all his clothes off, puts on gloves to protect his hands, makes a display of the woman’s underwear, even gets a job to stake the target out. If you look at them all as a progression, including Gail, I don’t see much that doesn’t fit. I’d bet Dunn would have a field day painting exactly that picture to a jury—and making it stick.”

  Since I happened to agree with him, I didn’t argue the point. I stood up and stretched instead, suddenly feeling the previous night’s lack of sleep. “Well, let’s not forget how Greenfield dropped the ball on victim number two. I’d just as soon go slow, take the heat, and get it right.”

  “Amen,” Brandt said quietly. “Where’re you off to now?”

  I paused halfway out the door. I kept forgetting my agreement not to move around independently. “I thought I’d see a man about some garbage.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Oh—right. Let me know what you find.”

  I walked down the hallway to a set of stairs that was awkwardly located in the middle of the floor, opposite the detective squad’s front door. Earlier, returning from Vogel’s trailer, I’d asked Harriet to locate J.P. and have him dissect the garbage bag I’d swiped. Having seen him do similar operations before, I knew where I’d find him.

  The Municipal Building’s basement is a wondrous throwback to a previous century—and to childhood nightmares. It is high-ceilinged and gloomy, strung along a twisting central corridor lined with mysterious blank doors and wired-off alcoves, complete with the distant rumbling of unexplained machinery and the sense—at all times—that one is never alone.

  The police department had reserved several of those mysterious rooms for its own use, including a small gym and shower area, and it was to one of the least used of these that Tyler had retreated.

  As I opened the door and crossed the threshold, I both blessed his consideration and cursed having set him to work. “Jesus Christ.”

  He looked up from his hunched-over position in the midst of a putrid, rotting semicircle of refuse spread out over a large plastic sheet. He had Vicks Vaporub smeared under his nostrils and was wearing latex gloves.

  “You get used to it eventually.” He dug the Vicks from out of his apron pocket and tossed it over to me. A box of gloves lay just shy of the plastic sheet.

  “What’ve you found?” I asked, decorating my upper lip.

  “So far? That this guy has one of the worst eating habits I’ve ever seen. His two major food groups seem to be Spam and peanut butter—I guess potato chips are considered roughage. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t eat anything that doesn’t come in a package. None of it even needs heating up, much less cooking. And he seems to have a fondness for cake icing, straight out of the can.”

  I pulled on a pair of gloves and got down next to him. The sickly sweet odor that rose in waves from this glistening, mold-crusted mess made me slightly dizzy. “Anything else?”

  He pointed to a segregated corner of neatly piled but slimy documents. “Third-class mail, mostly—same as we all get. The envelopes are all unopened.” He suddenly extricated a small piece of paper from inside a half-finished can of marshmallow fluff. “Grocery-store receipt.” He carefully placed it with a soggy pile of others like it. “It’s amazing to me how little paperwork people like this collect. Besides a single electricity bill, I haven’t found anything that links this guy to the outside world—no phone bills, letters, magazines, newspapers—nothing except lousy food, lots of cigarettes, and empty beer bottles.”

  “And junk mail,” I added. I moved over and began gently peeling apart the various catalogues, flyers, and ad sheets, looking for something more personal that might have become mixed in with them. It was the usual haphazard collection, from local grocery-store inserts to mail-order brochures, along with three tantalizing offers from Ed McMahon to make “Robin Vogle” a millionaire.

  Fifteen minutes and about half the stack later, I sat back on my heels, a barely perceptible buzzing pressing against the inside of my temples. “Bingo.”

  Tyler looked at me, his eyes narrowing. “What?” I showed him a damp and incongruous Victoria’s Secret catalogue, my finger pointing to the mailing label. “Damn,” he muttered, surprise mingling with embarrassment. Smeared but still legible were Gail’s name and address.

  10

  MY TIMING COULDN'T HAVE been worse. Delayed by the meeting with Jim Catone and pawing through Vogel’s garbage with J.P., I didn’t arrive at Susan Raffner’s until shortly before 7:00 p.m., long after any anticipated quiet moment with Gail had been overrun by the stress and commotion leading up to the march. When I was brought upstairs by a distracted Raffner, still clutching a cordless phone in her hand, Gail was in the company of several intense women, including Mary Wallis, who cast me a startled and embarrassed look.

  Gail was speaking in a hard-edged staccato to a harassed-looking woman with a note pad. “Damn it all. I thought we’d made that clear from the start. It doesn’t matter if we march around the courthouse from the left fork or the right—either way we look like a herd of goddamn cattle. The point is to divide there so that we meet at the common. We want to envelop the courthouse.” She made a vase-like gesture
with her arms, “Not walk around it like it was some puddle in the road. Where the hell’s Susan?”

  She turned to the doorway and saw me there. Susan was back in the hall, talking quietly on the phone. Gail’s face crystallized briefly—hard and angry, both too pale and too flushed in parts; and her eyes were red-rimmed and haggard—gleaming almost feverishly. She seemed totally thrown by my appearance. Her mouth opened slightly and her hand vaguely touched the side of her head, but for a moment nothing was said. I realized with dread that showing my face—especially this close to an emotionally charged public event—served only to remind her of why she was here, and undermined the protective, hard-driving persona she’d adopted for herself. Like a strong breeze on a house of cards, my appearance—for a brief but telling instant—was threatening and unwelcome.

  She finally managed to mutter, “Joe.”

  “I know you’re busy. I just wanted to wish you luck and tell you I’ll be out there. I’ll get out of your hair now.” I waved awkwardly, turned, and bumped into Susan Raffner, who’d seen enough to understand what had happened.

  She grabbed my arm and gestured to Gail, who was only slowly recovering her composure. “Why don’t you both take five in my office? I’ll sort things out here. I think we’re in pretty good shape—not to worry.”

  She ushered us both out and down a short hallway, steering us into a large, comfortable corner room filled with bookshelves, overstuffed furniture, and an enormous, cluttered antique desk. She closed the door behind her, leaving us alone.

  Instinctively, I reached for Gail’s elbow, startling her and making her pull away. “I’m sorry. I should’ve called or given you some warning. I just wanted to see you, to wish you good luck tonight—let you know I was here… ”

  She held up her hand, shaking her head. “It’s okay. You just caught me by surprise. I hoped you’d come by—I guess I thought it would be earlier, and then I forgot all about it.”

  She looked at my face and half smiled, moving closer and taking my hand in hers. “I didn’t mean to flip out on you. I feel a little like a juggler on center stage… I just lost my concentration for a second.”

  Her voice was still taut, but at least the cause of her tension was no longer me. She was one of the strongest women I’d ever met, but I knew—and I half suspected she did, too—that in the long run she was going to have to let down her defenses, allow the pain and the anger and the loss to flush through her, and then rebuild herself from the inside out.

  But that wasn’t now. This time she needed all the stamina she could muster.

  Still, I felt bound to ask if she was thinking ahead. This was someone, after all, who was fully aware of how deep rape cuts the soul, even before she’d experienced it personally. “You sure you want to do this? So soon after?”

  She gave a lopsided smile and shook her head. “I’d really like to escape to a deserted island for a few months.”

  “That could be arranged,” I said quickly. She turned and settled into the huge, soft armchair near the window, looking exhausted. Again, she shook her head, but with no smile this time. “I can’t, Joe. I need to stick this out.”

  We’d debated her beliefs too often for me not to understand what she meant. In her view, leaving town, even though wounded, would be to concede to her attacker, abandoning the very principles in which she and her colleagues put their faith. Besides, the die was already cast.

  All of which left me with few options. “Would you like to know how the investigation’s going?” She didn’t react at first and then answered slowly, almost shyly.

  “Do you have a suspect?”

  “We’re looking at someone. He doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

  Her eyes widened. “It could be a stranger?”

  “Possibly. If this is the guy, that’s how he’s worked before.” I probably should have tried Vogel’s name out on her, but something told me she didn’t want to know—not yet.

  She nodded, studying the floor. After a few moments, she pushed herself slowly and awkwardly out of the chair, like a woman twice her age, and came to me. “Thank you—that did help.”

  “One question?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you on the Victoria’s Secret mailing list?”

  She actually laughed then and looked slightly embarrassed. “I didn’t ask for it. It was sort of an inside joke—feminist black humor. You found a copy at the house?”

  I nodded and lied. “Yeah—it seemed a little out of character.”

  She touched my cheek then, and I was careful not to react beyond smiling.

  “Thanks for being there, Joe.”

  I nodded. “Good luck tonight.”

  “Where’re you going to be?”

  “In the background.”

  She nodded wistfully, and as she turned toward the door, her face became more composed, a little harder—a face for the outside world. She smiled at me one last time as she left the room. “I like the eau-de-Vicks, by the way—very subtle.”

  · · ·

  Two hours later I was standing in front of the darkened Municipal Building, high on the slope overlooking where Main Street split in two at the tip of the courthouse lawn like the water before a ship’s bow. Heightening the image, a long, wide, undulating stream of flickering candlelight slowly flowed down Main from the south, breaking before and surrounding the building like phosphorescence, a credit to Gail’s dramatic flair.

  I crossed the steep lawn diagonally, seeing that Gail, Susan, and the other leaders of the march had opted for the route closer to where I was. I joined the crowd at the curb.

  Illuminated as they were by the gentle flickering of their hand-held candles, the women seemed both serene and somehow otherworldly, like harbingers of some truth only they fully comprehended. Certainly some of the people watching them were at a loss. As Gail drew near to us, her face upheld and her long hair loose and flowing down her back, I found myself next to two young men dressed in jeans, work boots, and denim jackets. They’d been chatting quietly together before I arrived, their hands buried in their pockets against the evening chill. The three of us—I standing slightly back of the other two—watched those women, united in a common cause, making a statement all the more powerful for its silent and symbolic eloquence.

  One of the young men leaned toward the other slightly. “Is that the one that was raped?” he asked quietly.

  His companion muttered, as if muted in awe. “Yeah. Third from the left.”

  “Pretty,” whispered the first, “I’d fuck her in a minute.”

  · · ·

  Bob Vogel’s station wagon was a twisted, rusting, spring-shot heap, the standard ornament on a run-of-the mill backwoods Vermont lawn, and reminiscent of his next-door neighbor’s. Except it was parked in the Jamaica lot of New England Wood Products, where Vogel worked the four-to-midnight shift.

  Willy Kunkle and I were in my car far to the rear of the lot, beyond the reach of the anemic floodlights attached to the distant warehouse’s corrugated walls. We were completely wrapped in a couple of thick wool blankets I kept stashed in my trunk for just such occasions. It was 11:45, and I was having serious problems keeping awake, even with the cold. Willy was snoring peacefully, wedged in the corner, looking utterly content.

  For me, unlike for Gail and her colleagues, the parade had been a melancholy affair. They had been pleased by the attendance, the coverage—by several outside papers and radio stations, and even WNET-TV from White River—and by the overall tone of the evening. Among other luminaries, Jack Derby—Dunn’s opponent in the SA’s race—made a speech, suitably brief and stirring, which hit home all the more by highlighting Dunn’s absence.

  Afterward, there’d been a song or two sung by the crowd, and then, on cue, all the candles but Gail’s had been extinguished—over three hundred all at once—and Gail had quietly placed hers on the steps of the courthouse. It had b
een both theatrical and magical and had left many of the spectators wiping their eyes.

  And yet I had left feeling depressed, the voices of those two young men still echoing in my ears, enhanced by several other comments I’d heard in the crowd. Gail and her supporters had their cause to rally around and their enthusiasm to maintain their faith. I just had a thorough working street knowledge of the odds stacked against them.

  Naturally enough, Gail had been unapproachable following the rally. Flushed by their perceived success, her supporters had surrounded her like an enveloping cocoon and had virtually carried her away to Susan’s house to celebrate. Stimulated as they were—or, perhaps, depressed as I was—I felt they were ignoring the look in her eyes, which I saw only from afar as she was whisked by. She appeared wrung out and haunted. I hoped Susan would find time to focus on her friend, and not get swept up in the fervor of making a well-timed political point.

  It was in this bitter mood that I decided to personally step up the investigation of Bob Vogel—starting that night.

  Willy Kunkle stirred next to me, peered at the watch on his right wrist, and let out an exaggerated sigh. “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? This schlunk is going to get in his car, drive home, and hit the sack, leaving us with bupkis.”

  I checked my own watch—just a couple of minutes shy of midnight. “Maybe. You’re getting overtime.”

  He grumpily buried himself slightly deeper into his blanket. “That’s no shit.”

  A flow of people began spreading out over the surface of the parking lot from a small door in the building’s side, to be absorbed here and there by dozens of cars. Vogel’s heap remained ignored for some ten minutes before a narrow shape, otherwise indistinguishable from this distance, finally hesitated by its side, worked the lock, and then settled inside. A black, oily cloud erupted from the station wagon’s tail pipe and drifted over the rest of the car on a gentle breeze, making the subsequent appearance of head-and taillights look like the distant glimmerings of a lighthouse on a foggy night.