Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  One major obstacle to all this, however—aside from the fact that the trial had begun the day before, and that nobody now wanted to hear from a last-minute Cassandra—was that legally I couldn’t return to work. Until the hospital officially released me, my doctors issued a clean bill of health, and the town’s insurer gave me the nod, I couldn’t be seen inside the Municipal Building in a professional capacity.

  I was pondering how to get around this red tape, having slowly and painfully climbed the stairs to my third-floor apartment, when I fished my keys from my pocket and inadvertently inserted the wrong one into the lock.

  I stood there for a moment, staring at the lock. I’d lived here for decades, always using the same key every day, and yet, after only a five-week absence, I’d goofed. It wasn’t me I was thinking about, however. In a totally different context, it was Bob Vogel.

  I returned the keys to my pocket and slowly returned downstairs, the question of where to start my private quest suddenly answered.

  · · ·

  It had been well over a month since Willy Kunkle and I had tailed Vogel along the back roads between Jamaica and West Brattleboro, but while the route we’d taken had been new to me then, it seemed intensely familiar as soon as I pulled off Route 30 forty minutes later and began retracing our trip.

  This time I wasn’t following a distant pair of taillights with my own lights out, hoping to avoid notice and the ditch both; instead, I put myself in Vogel’s position—a recent arrival to the region, traveling on roads familiar only for where they led, watching not for any memorable landmarks, but rather for the roving sheriff ’s car that would mean the end of my license and the probable revocation of my probation.

  It had come to me, when I’d inserted the wrong key in my lock, that perhaps Vogel had done much the same thing with his proffered alibi—identifying not the place where he’d broken down and lost a noticeable amount of oil, but where he’d assumed the breakdown had occurred.

  According to the statement he’d given Willy Kunkle after I’d gone into a coma, his car had quit “maybe four miles out” between Wardsboro and Newfane, just beyond where a narrow road or driveway took off into the trees on the right. We’d already determined that his car’s odometer was on the blink, but Willy, who’d done the on-site investigation, had also discovered that there was only one place along that approximate stretch of road that fit the description.

  I drove almost as fast as we had the other night, assuming that was the pace Vogel usually set for himself, and I made a pointed effort not to study the right side of the road with undue scrutiny. Nevertheless, the gap, when it came, was pretty evident, all by itself along an uninterrupted stretch of forest.

  I stopped, delicately extricated myself from behind the driver’s wheel, grimacing at the pain in my still-sensitive gut, and walked along the side of the road. Even allowing for the passage of time, there was no sign of an oil slick, despite extensive sweeps with my flashlight. I’d told Brandt that five weeks of inaction had probably led to an overblown imagination, but I hadn’t actually believed that myself. I’d been dreading that, at first scratch, some overlooked truth would rear up and bite us all. Now that it hadn’t, I was paradoxically disappointed. I got back in the car and resumed my way home.

  It was then that my suspicions were given a second wind. A half mile farther on, I came across a second road to the right. Puzzled that Willy had reported no such thing, I pulled over and stopped again.

  The answer became obvious as soon as I played my flashlight across the opening in the trees. There was no road, but merely a sizeable equipment yard for logging skidders and trucks, thinly screened from passing vehicles by a spindly row of saplings.

  The catch was, as soon as I killed my flashlight, all that remained in the peripheral glow from my head-lamps was the narrow dark gap and the presumption that it marked the opening of a side road. Willy, investigating during daylight hours, would have made no such mistake; for him, the yard had been as obvious as a parking lot.

  In contrast to how I’d felt in the face of good news a few moments ago, I now felt a rush of excitement at this disturbing discovery. I quickly returned to where my car was parked and began scrutinizing the ground in front of it, concentrating—as per Vogel’s testimony—just beyond the “road” to the right. Sure enough, even some five admittedly dry weeks later, the soil was dark and greasy with motor oil.

  I continued searching, trying not to fall into the same trap that had apparently enmeshed Willy. Unlike him, I didn’t want to stop at finding what I was after, but instead wanted to eliminate any possibility I might be wrong. Unfortunately, I was soon brought up short. Not surprisingly for an area opposite an equipment yard, I found several more oily patches, and with them the realization that all I’d done was to make the whole issue more muddled. Vogel might well have broken down just as he’d said, albeit confusing one site for another; but given the contaminated ground around me, there was no way I could prove it.

  I stood in the cold night, reflecting on my growing ambivalence and the potentially dangerous game I was playing. If word got out that I was privately rattling the state’s ironclad case—which I’d largely built myself—the restless army of Dunn observers would ignite like gasoline.

  I snapped out of my trance suddenly and peered into the surrounding frozen gloom, my senses alarmed by something out of place. It had been a metallic sound, and perhaps a glimmer of light, both so subtle they could have been imagined. A car door perhaps? I shot a beam of light up and down the silent dirt road but found nothing.

  Fueled now more by instinct than by common sense, I got into my car, turned it around, and headed back to Jamaica—to Vogel’s former place of employment.

  I parked in the dimly lit lot of New England Wood Products, pulled the file so labeled from the box Brandt had delivered to me, which I had stashed in my locked trunk, and headed for the supervisor’s office.

  Directed by a couple of employees along the way, I discovered the supervisor near the loading docks, talking to a group of workers. I waited for them to break up and then quietly introduced myself.

  I showed him the list that we’d compiled of Vogel’s co-workers, all of whom we’d interviewed previously, and explained that I was merely doing some last minute double-checking. “Did we miss anyone that Vogel might have worked with?”

  He looked it over carefully, shaking his head, and then stopped, putting a finger on one name. “There’s Fran Gallo. He may’ve been out sick when your boys came by. He’s sick a lot.”

  It was said without rancor, or with a poker player’s demeanor. I took the list back. “He here tonight?”

  “Yeah. Area five.” He pointed toward a large opening in one of the galvanized-steel walls nearby. “Look for a skinny guy, ’bout six feet, lots of pimples, pale face. Always wears a purple cap, even under his hard hat.”

  I passed into an enormous stacking yard, under the same roof as the rest of the building. It was lit by the same sodium lights, but with chain-link walls on two sides, open to the cold air—presumably a feature allowing both security and flexibility, if not worker comfort. I found Fran Gallo gingerly fitting the blades of a forklift under an enormous stack of lumber laid out on the cement floor. He may have been skinny underneath, but he’d been fattened in appearance by multiple layers of heavily patched quilted clothing. He cut his engine as he saw me approaching and gave me an incongruously affable, off-center grin. I guessed he couldn’t have been much over eighteen years old.

  “Help you?” he asked, his breath floating before him in a misty cloud.

  I showed him my badge and muttered my name as inaudibly as possible, sensitive of the thin ice I was treading. “You know Bob Vogel?”

  His eyes grew wide, as befit the publicity Vogel had been getting. “Oh, wow. Sure I do. I mean, who doesn’t? Right?”

  I looked at him closely, wondering if this was going to be worth the effort. “Do you know him personally? I gather you worked with him.”

>   “Sure I did.”

  I waited for more, but Fran Gallo’s initial exuberance seemed to have abruptly lost wind. He finally raised his eyes to look at me, smiling apologetically. “I didn’t get along with him, that’s all.”

  “Why not?”

  “He landed on me pretty hard first time we met—called me a douche bag and told me to mind my own business. All I’d done was say hi and ask who he was—just being friendly. We didn’t talk much after that.”

  “Did you ever work side by side?”

  “I do with all of them, more or less, at least out here—’cause of this.” He patted the steering wheel of the forklift.

  “How was he different from the others?”

  Gallo pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Is this going to get out?”

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t want people to think I shot my mouth off.”

  I addressed instead what I thought was the root of his problem. “Bob Vogel is going to jail for a long time, Fran, regardless of how the rape trial turns out. He’s never going to know we talked.”

  He nodded, obviously relieved. “Okay. I thought Bob was a real asshole. He treated everybody like shit, sat on his butt every chance he got, and I smelled liquor on his breath a lot of times. I did everything I could to stay out of the guy’s way.”

  “He had no friends that you know of?”

  “Nobody would put up with him.”

  “He ever talk about women? Or rape?”

  “Not with me. I never saw him talk with anybody, except to insult them.”

  I glanced down at the folder, in which Ron had included a sheet summarizing the questions that had been asked the other workers here. I was beginning to feel this entire outing had been a waste of time.

  “Did he seem any different on the night of the rape?”

  “Nope,” Gallo answered simply.

  “Did you see what he was wearing that night—under his overalls?”

  Gallo shook his head and opened his mouth to answer but then paused. “I guess I did—I almost forgot. We were in the men’s room at the same time. He came out of one of the stalls and got back into his winter gear near the sinks. We got to wear a lot of stuff to keep warm.”

  I looked again at Ron’s notes. No one else had had this kind of opportunity. “What clothes was he wearing?”

  Gallo thought back. “Jeans, work boots, one of those chamois shirts—”

  “Anything under the shirt?”

  “I don’t know—a T-shirt, I guess… it was something white.”

  “What color was the chamois shirt?”

  “Blue.” He smiled suddenly. “Sort of. He was real dirty, too—smelled awful.”

  “What else?” I asked, as stimulated by the mention of the blue shirt as I’d been by the oil stain on the road.

  “He put on a black insulated vest—one of those quilted things, like this.” He unzipped his own overalls to show me a dark green version of his own. “And then his overalls, cap, and work gloves. I think that’s it.”

  “He wasn’t wearing anything red?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about at the end of the shift? Don’t you guys generally leave some gear in a locker?”

  Gallo nodded. “Most of us do, but not Vogel. He came and left in his work clothes. I heard him tell a guy once he’d sooner give us all blow jobs than leave his stuff where we could rip him off. That’s just the way he was.”

  I returned to the warmth of my car’s heater in a thoughtful mood. I’d known already that Vogel came and went to work in his insulated overalls—that much had been gleaned by earlier investigators. It had explained why no one had been found who’d seen what he’d been wearing underneath, until now.

  Not that Fran Gallo’s testimony did any more to change the case than the oil slick I’d found. No one in his right mind would stealthily enter a woman’s house and sneak around wearing work boots and the equivalent of a ski-mobile suit. Vogel could have had the red shirt in the back seat of his car, along with a completely different set of clothes; or he might even have gone home and changed before going on to Gail’s.

  But while none of what I’d found would be of any interest to James Dunn, it had made a believer out of me. I was not facing a jury, preparing to paint portraits in black and white only. I was much farther afield, circling like a trespasser seeking entrance to enlightenment. My goal was less to supply answers and more to address questions, and I’d already found more of them than an ironclad case should have.

  But I was coming in late in the game, after all the whistles had been blown, and I knew that the news I’d be bearing would not be well received. It was the old story of the messenger better killed than heeded.

  19

  I SAT IN MY DARKENED apartment, surrounded by the familiar, tangible milestones of my life—books, framed photographs, odds and ends of sentimental value—all barely visible in the gloom, all so anchored in my brain I didn’t need to see them to feel their presence.

  But despite them, I felt I was in a rowboat adrift offshore, watching impotently as a loved and comforting landscape slipped slowly away to the horizon. It was an estrangement made all the more unsettling because it was intentional and self-motivated. I was willfully pulling away from the status quo I’d worked so hard to create, distancing myself from the people I worked with and the woman I loved, potentially for the sake of a convicted rapist who’d tried to kill me.

  I had to wonder why. It wasn’t to save a possibly innocent man—at least I didn’t think it was. Gail was right about Vogel—he was a bastard, and probably deserved the worst he could get.

  But maybe not for this particular crime.

  That was the gist of it—regardless of what James Dunn might believe, and a jury decree, I had to know Vogel’s guilt or innocence for myself. His history in the courts had already highlighted the system’s vagaries, so in this most important investigation of my career, I had to have more than a merely legal conclusion. I had to have the truth.

  It was the only way I knew of regaining the shore, my life, and Gail.

  The phone by my chair rang in the predawn darkness. I’d fallen asleep, and my startled reaction sent an electric bolt of pain through my stomach. Gail’s voice was sharp, on edge, wavering between anger and concern. “Joe, what are you doing here? I just got a call from Leo. You left the hospital without checking out.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I meant to call as soon as I got home, but I got sidetracked, and then I just forgot. I nodded off.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I remembered how we’d parted and wished I had something more concrete to tell her, something that would cool the rage I’d felt then. But I didn’t have that yet, and perhaps I never would. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I came back to answer some questions for myself—things I wasn’t able to do after I was stabbed.”

  “The trial’s already begun, Joe.” Her voice was almost pleading.

  “I know that, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t be happening. I just never got a chance to finish my job, and I need to do that.”

  “You don’t think he raped me?” She was trying to be more matter-of-fact, forcing her intellect to rule her emotions.

  “The evidence says he did. I need to know it’s right.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “Then we go from there.”

  “Damn you,” she shouted, “don’t you know what that means?”

  I started to answer, but then stopped. I only knew what it meant to me. “Tell me,” I said instead.

  “That whoever it was is still out there—that it’s all been a waste of time.”

  I remembered her sensitivity to sudden noises, her constant checking of locked doors, her insomnia, her apprehension of the outdoors or of being left alone. It was true that much of it had been born from the turbulence surrounding the trauma and would eventually subside. But what I’d somehow ignored was plain, old-fashioned fear—that what had happened might happen a
gain, especially if we’d caught the wrong guy.

  Still, I persisted. “Gail, if he is still out there, then that’s what we need to know, right? You don’t necessarily want Bob Vogel hung out to dry—you want the guy who raped you.”

  I could hear her breathing hard, almost panting, trying to harness her agitation. “And you’re saying they’re not one and the same.”

  “I’m saying I don’t know. Right now, Bob Vogel fits the bill.” I rubbed my forehead, wishing I had something else to offer. “I can’t tell you more than that, Gail. I’m sorry. I would’ve liked to have settled all this without troubling you, but I’ve got to do it—for your sake, too. It won’t work any other way.”

  I paused, waiting, finally wondering if she was still on the line, and then I heard her sobbing—something she’d almost never done in all the years I’d known her. I gripped the receiver tighter, riled by my inability to reach out and lend her comfort.

  “I’m not in control of anything anymore,” she said after a long pause. “My emotions are all over the place, I’m scared of everything, I can’t focus on my work. I tried to turn this into a way to help other women, but I couldn’t get over my own fears. I tried taking care of you, but you healed and I felt abandoned. I was hoping to use the trial as a way to get better, and now you tell me you’re not sure he’s the right man. And in the news, I’m an ‘alleged’ victim, as if even that might be taken away. I worry sometimes that I’m just spinning away—that I’ll just disappear.”

  “Can Susan help?” I asked softly.

  Gail took a deep, shuddering breath. “She is. She’s trying. I’m seeing a therapist again. I’ve got good support. It’s what I should’ve done from the start. I just thought I could get a handle on it sooner.”