The Catch

by Archer Mayor

  As soon as Joe told them what he’d discovered.

  “Not a good thing—a man like you watching late night porno.”

  Joe squinted into the darkness past the TV set, trying to see the owner of the voice. “Hey, Willy,” he said. “Sam throw you out again?”

  A shadow emerged from the surrounding gloom. “Up yours. Couldn’t sleep. What’re you watching?”

  “The Sleuter cruiser tape.”

  Willy reached out, grabbed a spare metal chair, and dragged it around beside Joe’s, settling down and propping his feet up on the desk beside the TV. “No shit? I thought you had that memorized by now.”

  Joe let out a brief snort. “Me and a hundred other cops.”

  “Not me,” Willy admitted, staring at the screen. The action before them was about half played out. “I never seen it.”

  Joe picked up the remote from his lap. “Allow me.” He hit Rewind, and they both watched the screen go snowy.

  “Any news on Grega?” Willy asked as they waited.

  “No,” Joe said dourly. “That whole deal got so weird. I have no idea what the Mainers’ll do about it—probably just wait for something to fall in their lap. That would be my plan.”

  “We don’t really care, do we?” Willy asked. “He didn’t do Sleuter.”

  Joe shifted in his seat and stared at him. “You believe that?”

  “Sure—that’s what he told you.”

  Joe laughed. “The man’s a crook, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yeah,” Willy retorted, “which makes him a businessman. What was in it for him to kill a cop? I take him at his word. He’s got bigger fish to fry—like he said when he grabbed you. Which,” he added with an approving nod, “I thought was a really ballsy move. Actually,” he added as further explanation, “that stunt is what makes me think he didn’t kill Sleuter—no bad guy in his right mind would’ve done that otherwise. He seriously didn’t want that particular rap on him, for whatever reason.”

  Joe couldn’t argue the point. He, too, had been impressed by Grega’s determination, especially in the middle of a police department parking lot. “You may be right,” he conceded. “Speaking of which, you remember that guy he mentioned I’d never heard of before? Alan Budney?”

  “Claimed he was the one who killed the kingpin in Rockland,” Willy answered. “Got that whole ball rolling.”

  “Right. Well, Kevin Delaney sent me an e-mail this afternoon. Nobody can find Budney, either. According to every snitch they’ve talked to, he was there one second and gone the next. His family’s clueless, too.”

  “So?”

  “I was thinking,” Joe told him. “When Grega was talking about him, he referred to him in the past tense a couple of times and then made a point of telling me he’d be hard to find.”

  “Meaning he pinned the Roz killing on the poor slob and then knocked him off as both a smokescreen and a dead end,” Willy filled in. “That’s why he didn’t want Sleuter on his tab. I like it. It allows all of them—the Canadian exporter, the finance lady with the guy’s name, and all the rest to keep on ticking while the cops sit around with their thumbs up their ass. Cool.”

  Joe pointed the remote at the TV and hit Play. “You are a sick man. Here we go.”

  The screen stuttered awake to the image of a distant pair of taillights, accompanied by the rhythm of the cruiser’s strobe lights bouncing off the quickly passing countryside. Standardly, onboard police cameras ignite whenever the emergency lights are switched on. Joe had seen this so many times by now—still, he couldn’t shake the same ominous dread that hit him every time.

  Willy abruptly swung his feet off the desk and sat up. “Rewind it.”

  “What?”

  “Rewind it.” He grabbed the remote from Joe’s hand.

  Joe looked at the picture. Behind the snow, he could just make out the Toyota getting smaller and moving away, and the oncoming car suddenly appearing to speed backward into the distance.

  Willy hit Play, bringing everything back to normal.

  “What did you see?” Joe asked.

  Willy didn’t answer, instead leaning forward in his chair, staring intently. Once more, the approaching vehicle grew larger, got almost abreast of the cruiser, and then froze as Willy hit Pause. He fiddled with the control, changing the image one frame at a time, until he found one where the police strobes acted like a flash to light up the driver’s face.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Willy said softly.

  The approach Gunther chose for the arrest was unconventional. Generally, there would have been ballistic vests, an entry team, a backup team, an ambulance in reserve, and maybe—if the politicians got their way—even some journalists out of sight for the follow-up press conference. Finally cornering a long sought-after cop killer—a front page item for weeks on end—was supposed to be at least an opportunity for relief, closure, a little self-congratulation, and a lot of good PR.

  Instead, although watched over by several tucked-away people with guns, all that appeared at the suspect’s house two mornings after Willy’s revelation were Joe and Willy himself. And Joe was there only as company.

  But the plan proved well thought out. On a bright and sunny morning, with the sounds of summer building with the heat, Willy rang the bell, the door opened up, and Shirley Sherman stepped out before them, a dish towel in her hands.

  Her expression settled between pleasure and calculation upon recognizing Willy.

  “You’re back,” she said neutrally.

  “Hey, Shirley,” Willy greeted her. “This is my boss, Joe Gunther.”

  Joe nodded wordlessly. Shirley stayed rooted in place.

  “We put it together,” Willy continued. “We got you on Brian’s cruiser tape, and we’re gonna match the bullet to your.45.”

  She lifted her chin half an inch, as if warding off the slightest of long expected blows. “I was kind of hoping it would be you.”

  She glanced over their shoulders, as if surprised to see only the driveway and the fields across the road. She raised her eyebrows slightly. “You want to come in?”

  “Sure.”

  She walked stiffly ahead of them, turning as Joe closed the door after issuing a quick thumbs-up to those covertly watching from outside. Both he and Willy were wired for sound.

  “You want coffee?” she asked.

  Willy hesitated, but Joe wanted her sitting down as soon as possible. “We’re good, thanks.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the assembled living-room chairs. “Be all right to talk here?”

  She shrugged and chose a fake antique ladder-back near the fireplace. Paranoid about anything going wrong at this late stage, Joe scanned the area near her for any potential weapons. There were none. He and Willy perched on the edge of armchairs, roughly to either side of her.

  “Shirley,” Joe began, “I’ve got to advise you that you don’t have to talk to us, if you don’t want to.”

  But she’d already held up a hand in protest. “Don’t worry about that. I know what I did. I can live with the consequences.”

  “So you did kill Brian Sleuter?” Willy asked formally.

  “Yes,” she answered, and then dropped her gaze to the rug. “I was driving home when I saw his blue lights. I didn’t know it was him at first, of course. But I recognized him as I passed by. That’s when it grabbed me.”

  In the following silence Joe asked, “The urge to kill him?”

  She nodded. “I had the Colt with me. Don’t know why—threw it in the car at the last minute. I do that sometimes, just for what-the-hell. Never know when you might see something to plink at.”

  “You didn’t know he’d be on that road, on patrol?” Willy suggested.

  “I knew he was out. I didn’t know where. And I wasn’t looking for him. I was driving back from Middlebury. I’d been at a bar down there.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Just seeing him. Something snapped. I didn’t even think much about it. I parked over the rise,
walked back with the gun, popped him where he sat, and left.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. Didn’t even look at who was in the other car. I didn’t care.” She looked up at Joe. “I couldn’t believe it when the papers started talking about drug runners and all the rest. That was all pure dumb luck.”

  “Why did you do it, Shirley?” Willy asked.

  For the first time since he’d first met her, Willy thought she looked not only her age but older—almost hollowed out.

  “I know it sounds weird,” she said. “But Bri and I always kind of connected, in our funny way. I should’ve hated the guy, the way he treated Kathleen, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  “You were lovers?” Joe suggested.

  She tilted her head to one side. “I never liked that word. Sounds phony.”

  “Still,” he pressed.

  “Yeah—whatever.”

  “Anyhow, you had a fight?” Willy filled in.

  She laughed bitterly. “He dumped me, is more like it. I knew he would. I mean, look at me.” She placed her hands on her round thighs.

  She gazed at each of them in turn before adding, “I’m not an idiot. I know what this is. But you don’t know what he said to me. I hated him more for that than for what he did. He was just a man—they’re all shitbags. But Bri was a mean man.”

  Wantastiquet Mountain is in New Hampshire, right across the Connecticut River from downtown Brattleboro. It is of classic rounded, ancient New England dimensions—and provides a backdrop for the town as tangible as the place’s own history. It is also a favorite place for hardy hikers to climb, in order to look back and enjoy a view like that from a low-flying plane.

  Joe was sitting on a large rock near the summit, but without eyes for the untidy urban sprawl below him. Instead, he was looking at Lyn, also adorning a rock, about ten feet away and slightly downhill so that he couldn’t quite see her face. She was perched there like a slim schoolgirl, hugging her knees, and—he knew—not enjoying the view, either.

  He had just finished telling her of what he’d found in Maine or, worse, what he hadn’t. She’d taken the news quietly, numbness quickly replacing shock, and then had asked for a little privacy in order to gather her thoughts.

  He wished her well there. Years earlier, she, like so many others hit with a family tragedy, had been able to make her peace and move on. She’d constructed a cubbyholed chest of emotional keepsakes and then sealed off a select few of its compartments.

  He knew what damage he’d just done to that structure. What he didn’t know was how she would cope with the resulting jumble.

  He took his eyes off of her long enough to glance at the town that he’d called home for his entire adult life, and to which she had moved, in large part to be near him.

  Two people were in jail—a woman scorned by a younger man, and Wellman Beale, for some minor drug charges cobbled together because he couldn’t be touched for a double homicide. The others—Luis Grega and Alan Budney—remained enigmatic, because they either were lying low or were perhaps pinned down by weights at the bottom of the ocean.

  A little justice, hampered by limitations, had been erratically meted out—by pure luck, by paltry legal finesse, or by vicious Darwinian selection.

  The rest of it would have to wait, to fester with time, threatening to bring havoc at any moment.

  Joe returned to watching Lyn, waiting for any sign to which he could helpfully respond, fearing—given his growing love for her and the nagging weariness dogging his meditations—that he might be left hanging for a very long time.

  He could only trust that the wait would reward them both.

  Here’s an excerpt from Archer Mayor’s next novel, The Price of Malice—available soon in hardcover from Minotaur Books!

  Willy Kunkle gently removed his one functional hand from the bare back of the woman stretched out beside him and reached for the softly buzzing cell phone on the night table. Unlike Sammie Martens—the woman in question—Willy had been termed a “vigilant sleeper,” which sounded like psychobabble to him. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him that he slept like shit.

  “What?” he asked in a muted growl, noticing the first pale hint of dawn against the window shade.

  “That you, Willy?”

  It was Ron Klesczewski, Brattleboro, Vermont’s chief of detectives, an old colleague of Willy’s before he and Sam had left the PD to join the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, a new, state-wide, major crimes unit. As far as Willy was concerned, Ron was a perfect example of the Peter Principle. Way too touchy-feely for Willy’s taste, he’d never have landed the top job if the rest of them hadn’t jumped ship.

  “Jesus, Ron. Who do you think it is? You called me.”

  Ron laughed, unfazed. “I’m just used to you yelling into the phone. You sound downright demure.”

  Willy rolled his eyes, as much at the word choice as at Sam’s stirring from all the noise.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “You’re the VBI on call, according to your dispatch,” Ron explained brightly, “and I got something for you.”

  “You lock your keys in the car again?”

  Klesczewski ignored him, slowly enunciating, “Homicide.”

  Willy smiled abruptly, his mood improved as if by the flick of a switch. “Say that again for what’s-her-name.”

  Ron repeated himself as Willy dangled the phone just above Sammie’s exposed ear. He was rewarded as her eyes opened wide and she sat up in one fluid motion.

  “Who is that?” she mouthed silently.

  “Your buddy Ron,” Willy said, bringing the phone back to his mouth. “Throwing us a local, at last. What is it, in under a thousand words?” Willy asked Klesczewski.

  “Single white male, done in with a knife; unknown assailant,” Ron responded, his smile almost audible. He then gave the exact address on Manor Court, off of Canal, between Clark Street and Homestead—a hard-luck neighborhood a stone’s throw from downtown. He hung up without further ceremony, having given Willy only precisely what he’d requested.

  Willy laughed and closed the phone. “That boy’s growing balls.”

  Sam was already across the room, getting dressed. “A minor miracle, given how much you bust ’em.”

  The name, Manor Court, sounded like a mass-produced, nineteen-seventies, Northeastern development, in the way that Flamingo Estates brought to mind a Florida flophouse of fifty squirrel-sized apartments. In fact, it was not a development, or a court, and hadn’t been touched by a builder’s level in 150 years. It was a residual holdover of Brattleboro’s nineteenth-century industrial past, when the town cranked out everything from parlor organs to baby carriages and had neighborhoods so clearly class-divided, it felt like some residents required passports for travel.

  Manor Court had once been an open-ended street, which, as with some rivers, implied a sense of cleansing circulation. But subsequent traffic engineering had turned it into a J-shaped dead-end, a tidal pool of sorts, located in a section of town relatively downtrodden to this day. The dominant architecture was both the famed working-class “triple decker” so much in evidence in a hundred other soot-stained, reinvented, ancient New England towns, and a less definable, two-and-a half story structure—often clad in scalloped, gray, pressed board siding—whose sole distinguishable attribute was that it didn’t look like anything more than a roof over four walls of marginal integrity.

  The address Ron Klesczewski had offered was one of the former—and therefore of modest historical merit—minus any grace notes of subsequent care or maintenance. In fact, as Willy swung out of the car he and Sammie shared to get there, he wondered if the electrical and phone lines looping in from the nearby utility pole weren’t the only modern amenities added over the prior seventy-five years.

  Including the paint on the walls.

  “You ever been here?” he asked his partner.

  Sam was reaching into the back seat to grab a canvas shoulder bag she favored for crime scene investigations. “Seems
like our kind of place, but I don’t know for sure.”

  Willy was standing by the car, studying the structure in the slowly growing dawn. It was peeling, sagging, and gaping where stair and balcony railings had vanished over time. His left hand, as always, was stuffed into his pants pocket—the useless tail end of an arm crippled years ago by a rifle round received in the line of duty. His powerful right hand remained empty. No extra equipment for him, not at this early stage.

  “A hanging—about eight years ago.”

  Sammie pulled her head out of the car. “What?”

  “A hanging,” he repeated. “That’s it. About eight years ago. That’s how I know this dump.”

  She smiled, if just barely. Trust him to remember that—and almost everything else, in fact, except the everyday rules of social conduct. In that way, he reminded her of an idiot-savant who could play the concert piano, but not read a comic book. The man was a dinosaur, an old-fashioned, old-school cop, a black-and-white man in a colorful world. She loved him for that, among other quirks.

  She adjusted her bag and motioned across the street. “Shall we?”

  There were already two PD cruisers parked by the curb, along with an unmarked Impala that should have had “cop” stamped on both doors. A couple of patrolmen were stringing crime-scene tape around the building, and a third was loitering by the entrance at the top of the rickety porch steps, clipboard in hand.

  A broad smile creased his weather-beaten face as he caught sight of them approaching.

  “Oh, oh—watch out. It’s the cavalry.”

  The two of them spoke simultaneously, Sam saying, “Hey, Zippo. How you been?” while Willy responded, “It’s the brain trust, asshole, come to save your butt again.”

  Zippo just laughed, knowing them both well. “Beauty and the Beast. God help us.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and applied pen to clipboard as he spoke. “Second floor, apartment three.”

  They filed by, into the fetid embrace of the dark, malodorous first-floor lobby, stifling even at this early hour. Summer had kicked in at last, following a winter of more snowfall than the region had seen in years. Typically, it had taken barely a week for everyone to switch from enjoying the warmth to complaining about the heat. New Englanders tend to be hardier in the cold than they are in its absence, making Florida as the terminus for so many of them conceptually rational only because of its universal air-conditioning.