Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  On the night in question, he and his thirteen-year-old daughter had been alone—his wife and other child having stayed at his in-laws’ house for the night. Sammie had probed and prodded at the man’s growing discomfort, until he’d ended up admitting that he’d spent the night alone downstairs, and that in fact he did not have the alibi he’d claimed.

  Mark Sumner had been less vulnerable. Not only was his alibi buttressed by other witnesses at the office party, but his trip to Newfane on the day of Gail’s surreptitious photo session had been prompted by an unexpected call from prospective clients. Sumner had left his office on the spur of the moment to cater to them—a spontaneous scenario we hadn’t been able to discredit, despite working the phones all afternoon. Nevertheless, Sammie had given it her best, going after his being a thirty-year-old bachelor, a solitary drinker, a man who saw Gail as a rival realtor and a success where he was not. Sumner had ended the conversation by calling his lawyer then and there, forcing Sammie to either get on the stick and be specific, or leave.

  Duncan had been the standout. At first friendly—even charming—he’d quickly become almost robotically aloof, refusing to rise to Sammie’s bait. With growing tension, we’d sat in our darkened vehicles, keyed to Sammie’s microphone, listening to a floundering interview die against a wall of cold antagonism. By barely saying a word, Duncan had controlled the conversation. When I’d debriefed Sammie immediately afterward, she’d been shaken—even fearful—and very happy to be away from him.

  This had not come as a total surprise. All afternoon, Tyler and I had focused on Philip Duncan, running his name through our computer, talking to his colleagues, calling up his friends—all stimulated by the small bell that had gone off in my head when I’d heard he had a view of Gail’s office from his desk. What had emerged was a pristine model citizen with a nightmarish childhood—a man about whom several people told me, “I can’t believe he turned out so well.”

  Unfortunately, that Boston childhood had been routinely brutal. Duncan had been born into a poor family with multiple and transient fathers, an alcoholic mother, in a neighborhood on the ropes. As a youngster, he and one sister had been legally adopted by a domineering and abusive aunt and gone to live north of the city, where he’d grown up silent, private, and rigidly self-controlled. He’d left home as soon as he’d been legally able and had never returned since.

  The sister, with whom he still kept in touch, lived in Greenfield. She’d moved there just before Robert Vogel had raped Katherine Rawlins.

  Shortly before we’d sent Sammie out on her interviews, I’d telephoned Gail to ask her again why Duncan’s name had appeared on her list. Speaking to Ron weeks earlier, she’d merely said that Duncan gave her the creeps, and given her state then, we hadn’t pushed her for more.

  This time, she went into more detail. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but a few years ago, Ethan Allen Realty had an exclusive listing on a million-dollar estate in Hillwinds. It was Phil Duncan’s account, and he couldn’t get it to move. He kept urging the owners to lower their price. They eventually got tired of him and came to me, and I sold it within a month. It was a pretty standard deal—no breaches of contract or anything—but I guess Ethan Allen was suffering, so the loss was felt generally. Sumner was pretty unpleasant about it—and has been ever since—which is one of the reasons he made it on the list. But Duncan was weird. He confronted me on the street afterward, all smiles and charm, and said he now knew what it felt like to be violated.”

  “In those exact words?”

  “Close enough. But it was the way he said it—kidding around, but cold, too, like it was some private bad joke. I found the comparison offensive. I told him I seriously doubted it, and we parted company. As far as I know, we’ve never spoken since, and whenever we see each other around town, he makes it a point to avoid me.”

  I’d questioned her further, but that had been the total gist of it—from Gail, from my own research, and from Sammie after her interview—an accumulation of muted alarms, not one of them loud enough to allow us to do more than we were already doing. I had people back at the station still checking computer files and making phone calls about Duncan, but right now our current plan seemed as potentially fruitful as any. It also helped us avoid the same trap we’d fallen into with Vogel, of focusing on one man too much and too early.

  Still, I had taken the precaution of assigning Klesczewski and Kunkle to watch Duncan’s house, instead of the one-detective/one-patrolman teams all the other suspects were assigned.

  Now, as I sat in my car listening to Sammie’s tinny, metallic voice over the small tape recorder/receiver on the seat beside me, I kept reviewing what we knew of Phil Duncan, hoping to catch a glimpse of some metaphorical chameleon, waiting to be seen… Then, as I reached for the receiver’s volume control with my left hand, I simultaneously made a grab for my gloves with my right as they slid off the seat.

  I froze in mid-motion, my thoughts suddenly crystallized around a similar ungainliness on the night of Gail’s attack.

  “Which hand did he use to cover your face?” Megan Goss had asked Gail in the depths of her hypnotic state.

  “His right,” she’d answered, which had surprised me at the time. I mimicked the motion now, using my right hand to push an imaginary face to my right, struck as I had been then by the unnaturalness of the gesture. If I had been the rapist, and had suddenly seen Gail looking at me, I would have pushed her head aside in a crossover movement—moving her face from my right to hers—rather than defeating my own momentum by reversing directions.

  Unless I’d intended her to see the clock—so that she could become my alibi.

  I switched on my headlights and drove up alongside Tyler’s car. Marshall Smith, the patrolman accompanying Tyler, rolled down his window. “What’s up?”

  I handed him the small case holding the receiver and tape recorder. “I’ve got to make a phone call. You’re on your own.”

  I pulled out into the Putney Road and turned left, heading downtown. On my portable radio, I called up Ron Klesczewski. He and Willy were in his car, outside Philip Duncan’s house on Allerton Avenue, a middle-class, dead-end street paralleling the interstate. “You had any movement lately?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But he’s still there, right?”

  “As far as we know.”

  I pulled into a service station across the intersection from my office, parking opposite a pay phone. I didn’t want to risk meeting any reporters at the Municipal Building.

  The snow was falling heavily now, making even the nearby phone booth ghostly and ephemeral, drifting in and out of view at the whimsy of the wind.

  I dialed Gail’s number at the friend’s house where she was staying on Lamson Street, far from her own home, her office, or Susan Raffner’s, all of which had been besieged by the press.

  She answered on the first ring.

  “I need to ask you something about the night you were attacked—something we missed at Megan’s.”

  “All right,” she answered cautiously, surprised by my urgency.

  “Can you think back to before you woke up—before you realized someone was on top of you?”

  “What am I looking for?”

  I didn’t want to suggest the answer I was after. “Sounds.”

  I heard the phone being put down and imagined Gail settling into a chair, making herself comfortable, perhaps closing her eyes. There was a silence of several minutes, during which I became covered with snow.

  Her voice, when it finally came back on, was hard-edged with excitement. “It’s the clock, isn’t it?”

  “What did you hear?”

  “The same sounds I make when I reset it.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “He had to change the time to establish his alibi. Then he had to make sure you saw the clock before he pulled the pillowcase over your head. He must have changed it back when he went on the rampage later, making enough noise to hide what he was doing.”

 
; She hesitated a moment, before adding, “So who needed that kind of alibi?”

  “If my hunch is right, it’s Philip Duncan—but we’re going to have to dig deep to prove it.”

  “Here we go again,” she murmured.

  “You still have Mary Wallis’s gun?”

  Her melancholy was replaced by surprise. “Yes. Why?”

  “We’re trying to push a few of the suspects into tipping their hand. Duncan among them. Megan said whoever it was would probably just hunker down under pressure—and that’s what he seems to be doing—it just never hurts to be cautious. I’ll call you as soon as I know more.”

  I hung up and got back into my car, dusting off the snow. I was about to leave the filling station to join Ron at Duncan’s house when I was abruptly filled with a sense of foreboding, as if the very mixture of warning and solace I’d given Gail had circled back on itself and settled on my chest.

  I keyed the radio next to me, foregoing the formalized language we normally used. “Ron, you there?”

  Ron’s voice came back, mildly surprised. “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “Knock on Duncan’s door—see if he’s home.”

  “What do I say if he is?”

  “Just wish him sweet dreams. Let him know you’re there.”

  “10-4.”

  I got back out of the car and dialed Megan Goss’s number, suddenly stimulated by what she’d said earlier. “Besides sitting put,” I asked her after she’d picked up, “what might Gail’s attacker do under pressure? Sammie’s been pushing these guys pretty hard. And she’s getting reactions, except from one of them. He just politely lost his sense of humor and steered her out the door. Never showed a spark.”

  Goss considered that for a moment. When she answered, it was with an element of anxiety. “The rape dealt more with power than with sex or violence. That’s why I suspected the rapist wouldn’t act again until he felt a renewed need to dominate. If properly stimulated, though, he could snap. His repressed violent instincts could overwhelm his cunning, and turn him into a killer with no thought of consequence.”

  That might’ve been nice to hear a little earlier, I thought. I hung up the phone angrily, thinking of Gail in a remote house with no police protection. Could Duncan know where she was? I remembered the inconsequential sound I’d heard on the darkened Wardsboro Road, looking for oil stains… And another, similarly furtive noise from the far end of the municipal parking lot as Katz and I ended our conversation last night.

  I ran for my car, realizing with a cold fear that our man had taken his precautions, following me, following Gail. If Goss was right, and Duncan did snap, wouldn’t his target be the very person whose attack had put him in jeopardy?

  Driving the slick expanse of Main Street as fast as I could with one hand, I reached for the portable radio next to me. “Ron. Is he there or not?”

  What traffic existed was bunching up at the primary intersection of High and Main, cowed by the unexpected conditions. I decided to cut right onto Grove Street and use the residential back streets.

  “Joe?” Ron’s voice sounded tentative.

  “Did you find him?”

  I pulled hard on the wheel and felt the back of the car swing wide on summer tires, sliding into the opposite lane, into the path of an oncoming minivan. I grabbed the wheel with both hands, dropping the radio onto the floor, and managed to fishtail away from a collision, accompanied by the plaintive howl of an offended horn.

  Ron’s voice eddied up from between my feet. “I tried the door. There’s no answer. We’re circling the building now, looking for tracks.”

  I groped around for the radio between my feet and finally brought it back up to my mouth. As I did so, I noticed its antenna was bent at an extreme angle, the stem connecting it to the frame cracked like a half-broken pencil. “I think he’s headed for number 20 Lamson Street. If he’s gone, meet me there. He could be after Gail again.”

  I put the radio down more carefully and swung onto Oak, gunning the engine to pull out of another skid.

  “We found some fresh tracks, Joe, leading from a side window. I guess he flew the coop. Should we do a forceful entry?” I swore and tried fumbling with the antenna. It came off in my hand.

  I took the next corner haphazardly, this time sideswiping another car waiting at the four-way stop. Spinning away from the sound of crumpled metal and fractured plastic, I sped up the hill to where High becomes Western, and where Union takes a precipitous left-hand plunge into the narrow Whetstone Brook ravine.

  I gave the radio one last try. “Ron, goddamn it, get your ass to Lamson Street.”

  “Joe? You there?”

  I threw the radio aside in disgust, cursing a department budget that required personal vehicles for undercover work and couldn’t equip them with dash-mounted mobile radios.

  Whetstone Brook cuts through Brattleboro from west to east in a thin, ragged laceration, along an ancient riverbed, the depth and breadth of which are reminders of a far more aggressive ancestor. The ravine walls that line the brook are at points almost sixty feet high and several hundred feet apart, making the town utterly dependent on a few key bridges for easy cross-access. There are enough of these crossings, however, to make the Whetstone as a barrier all but unnoticed by most of the population. I was hoping Philip Duncan, whom I assumed was on foot, had discovered just the opposite.

  Union Street is precipitously steep, literally plunging downhill, and with a couple of challenging curves thrown in for good measure. It offers rooftop views of the houses tucked below, presenting a very real threat of some car hurtling through the old wooden guardrail, and crowning one of the hapless homes like a hellish version of Santa’s sleigh. The town’s sand trucks usually make Union Street their first stop in a snowstorm.

  Except that this one had hit so early those trucks hadn’t even been mounted with plows yet, much less loaded with sand.

  As I nosed over the edge off of Western Avenue, I felt the car balancing between the pull of gravity and the resistance of the road. I knew from painful experience how slight this margin was—how one small mishap could cause a momentum to build that only a large, heavy, possibly lethal object could stop. The car’s heater began to feel like a sauna as I strained at the wheel, my eyes glued to the swirling funnel of falling snowflakes that swept past the windshield, as if the wind itself were trying to push me back.

  Of all the questions assaulting me now, the primary one concerned the size of Duncan’s head start. Whetstone Brook was but one of Brattleboro’s geographical obstacles; the other was Interstate 91, running on a north-south axis. Between the two of them, they cut the town into quadrants. They’d also turned some neighborhoods into cul-de-sacs, especially near the center where they intersected. Lawson Street was wedged into the southeast corner, far below I-91’s embankment, and teetering high above the Whetstone’s fast-flowing waters. Thinking only to shield Gail from the public’s prying eye, I’d left her alone instead, in a corner pocket with only one easy way out.

  Halfway down Union the car slowly sloughed off to the side, coming up against the guardrail. I took advantage of the movement to accelerate rather than brake, and rode along the barrier, tearing at the side of the car, until the rear wheels regained their grip.

  I fought to swallow the bitter irony that I might have stimulated Gail’s tormentor to show himself, only to incite him to greater violence. That possibility, coupled with the fact that he’d been given a healthy lead, blinded what caution remained in me. Impatient with the snow and the fear it instilled, I finally just gunned the car and sent it hurtling down the rest of the hill, sliding sideways into the five-way intersection at the bottom, rear wheels spinning frantically. I shot across the narrow bridge spanning the river, and used the car’s own dead weight to sling myself halfway up the hill on the opposite side, realizing only vaguely how lucky I’d been that no other car had been in my way.

  The thick snowflakes were no longer fighting gravity like feathers in an updraft. They fo
rmed instead a pale, tattered blanket, and I drove through it like a child running among his mother’s windblown laundry, the white sheets wet and clinging, blocking my sight with suffocating efficiency.

  The houses to either side of me vanished from my peripheral vision, and the twisting, slippery, snow-clogged streets became a series of interconnected tunnels, as glittering as the headlights they reflected. Staring at the mesmerizing, swirling vortex so hard it hurt my eyes, I began to feel I was falling through the storm, and that the wheel I clenched in my hands was no more functional than the restraining bar on a roller-coaster. Ron’s voice, and those of others he was talking to, trying to locate me, faded away into the background.

  I circled ever closer to Gail, across the water to the south bank, up Estey Street and around to Chestnut, almost to where it dead-ended against the interstate, and to the right again down Lawson—short, narrow, and pointing like a finger at a precipitous, sixty-foot plunge into the foaming Whetstone, newly thrashed into white water by a brief, stony falls a half mile upstream.

  I saw her car first, cloaked peacefully in snow, parked before the old wooden home of mutual friends who were out of town for a few weeks. Windows were glowing along the first floor, the porch light reflecting off the knifelike shards from the front door’s shattered right sidelight, the one nearest the dead bolt.

  I was out of the car before I knew what I was doing, and stopped halfway to the house, torn between impulse and training—the latter telling me to go next door, to find a phone, to get backup… and to run the risk that in that time, Gail would be made a victim all over again—this time, perhaps, of murder. I continued up the steps.