Cutter's Run

by William G. Tapply

  He nodded. “Forten arranged that, and he hired Leon Staples to help him. See, their problem was to find a way to dispose of the waste—those dead laboratory animals—so it couldn’t be traced back to SynGen. So they trucked a load up there a couple times a week, dumped it into the tank, and poured lime over it. The chemical’s potency dissipates fairly quickly, apparently, so if those dead animals just lay there for a while, they’d pretty soon lose their toxicity. If the beavers hadn’t come along, nothing would’ve happened.”

  “You’re forgetting Charlotte Gillespie,” I said. “She knew something was going on. She found a discrepancy when she did the SynGen quarterly audit. There was something she couldn’t account for. It was those animals. They were buying large numbers of them, but there was nothing in their records to account for what happened to them. When she refused to fudge her numbers, they had her fired.”

  “That’s why she moved to Hood’s cabin,” said Dickman. “To check it out.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Ellen Sanderson told me Charlotte had been having an affair with someone. She thought it might be a client. I bet it was one of the guys from SynGen. Tate, maybe, the CFO, the one she would’ve worked closely with. Those SynGen guys used Hoodie’s place for deer hunting. So Tate took Charlotte up there a couple times, maybe let something slip about that stuff they were making and how they disposed of their dead laboratory animals. It was probably Tate who got her fired. Charlotte wasn’t one to shrug and say okay. So she decided to do something about it. She rented Hoodie’s cabin and moved there to get the goods on them. When her dog died, she knew she had it.”

  “Yep,” said Dickman. “A woman scorned. Charlotte Gillespie is the real hero here. She refused to knuckle under and change her report. When she got fired for it, she didn’t just fade away. She went to Garrison and figured it out.”

  “She tried to tell me about it.” I shook my head. “But I wasn’t there for her. By the time I got back, it was too late.”

  Dickman nodded. “Forten got to her first.” He touched my leg. “Not your fault, my friend.”

  I shrugged and reached for my ginger ale. I took a tentative sip. This time it settled comfortably in my stomach. “So is everybody under arrest, or what?”

  Dickman smiled. “It’s not that simple. Forten’s the main villain here. He masterminded the whole thing, and he’s the one who committed the murders. The feds’ve got him stowed away somewhere. They’ve shut SynGen down pending an investigation, but it’s not clear who has jurisdiction over any criminal prosecution of them, if there ever is one. From what we can get out of Leon, he just trucked those dead animals from Portland to Garrison twice a week and kept his ears open for Forten. He admitted telling Forten about Charlotte’s dog and about how you were getting snoopy, and I guess old Noah must’ve let something slip, too, because Leon was feeling pretty bad about Noah. He swears he didn’t kill anybody.”

  “So who took Charlotte’s dog from the hospital and left those messages on Alex’s machine? Forten?”

  He nodded. “According to Leon.”

  I shook my head. “Why would a man like Leon get involved with someone like Paul Forten?”

  Dickman rubbed his fingers and thumb together. “Money, what else? Forten was paying him a helluva lot of money, by Leon’s standards. By the time they were done, Leon would’ve had enough to leave Garrison. He said all his life he’d been dreaming of dumping that store and dumping that wife of his. Said the store was the chain and Pauline was the ball.” Dickman smiled. “You know Pauline. It’s kind of hard to blame Leon for that.”

  I nodded. “So what’s going to happen?”

  He shook his head. “The feds have taken over. They can’t prosecute SynGen without implicating Forten, and that would mean exposing a government scheme to manufacture a chemical weapon. You know how that works.” Dickman shrugged. “Big can of worms. Even Leon might get off. So far, no one is showing any inclination to indict anybody for anything. Fish and Game dynamited the beaver dam, and then the EPA sent over a team to incinerate everything in that cistern—including Charlotte Gillespie’s body. And that’s that, as far as physical evidence is concerned. On the other hand, before too long you might be able to catch a trout out of Cutter’s Run, at least upstream of where the pond was.”

  “What about downstream?”

  “That poison has a pretty short life once it’s activated in water.” He smiled. “Trout will be able to live downstream, too. Which is what you were worried about.”

  “Oh, I worry about things like that, all right,” I said. “But you’re telling me nothing’s going to happen?”

  He shrugged. “It’s in the hands of the feds, Brady.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Two people are dead. They’re testing some horrible poison, dumping dead animals into a trout stream—”

  Dickman touched my shoulder. “Leave it lay, Brady.”

  I blew out a quick breath. “Like hell.”

  He looked at me for a minute, then shook his head. “Don’t do anything stupid, my friend.”

  I smiled at that. It’s what Charlie was always saying to me. “Sure,” I said. “You’re right.”

  Dickman glanced at his wristwatch, then pushed himself up from his chair. He held out his hand.

  I took it. “Thanks for coming by,” I said.

  He nodded and headed for the door. Then he stopped, turned around, and held up a forefinger. “Oh,” he said. “One more thing.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a leather case. He tossed it up and down in his hand.

  “Hey,” I said. “Is that my badge?”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “You’re fired.”

  CHAPTER 34

  AFTER THE SHERIFF LEFT, I dozed in my chair. Sometime later a candy striper burst into my room bearing an aluminum tray. She looked about fourteen, short and chubby and cute, and she flashed a mouthful of braces when she smiled. “Lunchtime, Mr. Coyne,” she announced. “You wanna eat there in your chair?”

  “I’m not sure I want to eat anywhere,” I said.

  “Oh, you gotta eat. Look what I brought you.” She was grinning. “I got a bowl of hot orange stuff and a square hunk of cold green stuff and a glass of room-temp yellow stuff. Mmm.”

  “You make it sound so appetizing, how can I resist?”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  She put the tray on my lap, said, “Bon appetit,” and breezed out, leaving the faint scent of bath soap in her wake.

  Tomato soup—Campbell’s directly from the can, with a glob of sour cream drowning in the middle, just the way my mother used to make it—and rubbery lime Jell-O with a dab of whipped cream, also one of Mom’s specialties, with a glass of apple juice for a chaser. I started tentatively on the soup, paying close attention to the reception my stomach gave it. Two spoonfuls assured me that I was ravenous, and I wolfed everything down.

  The effort exhausted me. I dozed again.

  Alex showed up sometime in the middle of the afternoon. She had brought some clothes for me and insisted I get dressed and take a walk. So I held on to her arm and we prowled the corridors of Mercy Hospital. I peeked into rooms. They were full of people who looked sicker than I was, and I noticed that each room was decorated with its own Jesus on the cross.

  By the time we’d circled the floor and arrived back at my room, I’d begun to feel positively frisky and didn’t need to lean on Alex.

  I plopped into my chair. Alex sat on my bed. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “They want to keep you one more night,” she said. “If all goes well, I’ll bring you home tomorrow morning.”

  “What could go wrong?”

  “They don’t know much about that poison. They just want to keep an eye on you.”

  “I feel great. Tip-top. I am ready to leap tall buildings with a single bound. If not tall buildings, I am at least ready to jump all over your bones.”
<
br />   She gave me a little enigmatic smile. “Not today, Superman,” she said.

  Dr. Epstein came by Saturday morning while I was eating my dropped egg on toast. He told me I should be ashamed, a healthy guy like me taking up a valuable hospital bed that some sick person could use.

  Alex fetched me around ten, and by noontime I was sitting on her deck with my heels up on the railing, rocking and sipping coffee and casting threatening glances at my woodpile. I wanted to get it all split and stacked before Thanksgiving. I thought maybe I’d take a few whacks at it later in the afternoon.

  Alex brought out tuna sandwiches, pickles, and potato chips. She sat beside me, then reached over and dropped a computer disk into my lap.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “I don’t know. It was in my e-mail. It’s from Skip Churchill. Figured it must be important, so I copied it all onto this disk for you.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Charlie McDevitt might need this.”

  After we finished eating, I went inside and called Charlie at home. He told me no one had come around asking questions, and his computer access had been restored on Thursday. “No thanks to you,” he said, “it looks like I’m not in trouble after all.”

  I told him I’d buy him the lunch I owed him at Marie’s on Tuesday. “I want to talk to you about what we should do.”

  “Do? What the hell are you talking about, Coyne?”

  “I heard they might not even prosecute Paul Forten,” I said. “Jesus, Charlie. We’ve got to tell the papers. I’ve got the information on a couple of computer disks, and I know a guy at the Globe—Alex’s old editor. He’ll eat up this story.”

  I heard Charlie chuckling. “You want to cost me my job?” he said.

  “Of course not, but—”

  “Brady, listen to me. The latest story going around is about some midlevel operative—I don’t know, CIA, probably, though it’s not clear—they found this morning in a Holiday Inn outside of Baltimore. The top of his head was blown off. He was holding a thirty-eight Police Special with the serial numbers filed off. Guy named Paul Forten.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I bet they’re calling it suicide, huh?”

  “Oh, sure. Case closed.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and that’s not the only case that’s closed.”

  “Put those disks someplace safe,” said Charlie. “Then—I’m begging you now, Brady—forget this thing. Okay?”

  I sighed. “Okay.”

  “Listen to me for once, will you?”

  “I hear you,” I said. “Tuesday at Marie’s, then, right?”

  “See you then,” he said. “We gotta plan a fishing trip before the snow flies.”

  In the middle of the afternoon, while Alex and I were lazing out on the deck, Susannah Hollingsworth called. Alex talked to her while I rocked and gazed out toward New Hampshire, trying not to listen. When Alex arched her eyebrows at me and pointed at the phone, I shook my head. “Say hello to her for me,” I said.

  After she disconnected, Alex slouched back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  I reached over and touched her hand. “What’d she want?”

  “She wanted to know how you were feeling.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Alex shrugged. “Okay, I guess.” She turned to me. Her eyes were solemn behind her glasses. “Brady…”

  I turned to her. “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” She smiled quickly. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  I looked into her eyes. She stared back at me, then nodded quickly and turned away.

  “How’d you know?” I said after a minute.

  “She told me.”

  “When?”

  “The other day. The day Noah died.”

  “She told you we—I kissed her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she tell you exactly?”

  “That she tried to seduce you.” She shrugged. “That you kissed her, and—and touched her, but that you didn’t…”

  “She didn’t try to seduce me,” I said. “It was my fault.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Brady.”

  “I want to explain.”

  “No, I mean it,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.”

  “You’ve known all this time.”

  She nodded. “It was my secret from you. It made us even.”

  “That doesn’t come close to making us even,” I said.

  “I guess it doesn’t.”

  “I felt awful. I wanted to tell you. I had a whole speech planned out.” She nodded.

  “But I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I dozed out there on the deck, and when I woke up, the sun was quite a bit lower in the sky. I pushed myself to my feet and went inside. Alex was in her office, working on her computer.

  I went upstairs and took a shower, and when I was finished, I lay down on the bed. I was hoping Alex might come up and flop down beside me, but she didn’t. After a while, I fell asleep again.

  We had clam chowder from a can for supper. It was about all my stomach would tolerate. Afterward we went out onto the deck to watch the bats fly around the yard.

  “I’ve been thinking about Paris LeClair,” Alex said.

  “What about him?”

  “Well, he saved your life, for one thing.”

  “Yes. I guess he did.”

  “You saved his, too.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s going to marry his girlfriend, huh?”

  “He feels that he has to, I guess.”

  “She’s pregnant,” said Alex. “But didn’t you say that Paris isn’t the real father?”

  “That’s what Leon told me,” I said. “I don’t know if you can believe Leon. He said it’s Arnold Hood’s baby. But Paris thinks it’s his, and he seems quite proud of it.”

  “But they’re just children,” Alex said.

  I shrugged.

  “This is bad,” she said. “Tragic. For both of them. Three, counting the baby.”

  “I can’t argue with you,” I said. “It looks like Paris will be driving a pickup truck around Garrison, Maine, for the rest of his life. Live in a double-wide with an unhappy wife and too many kids, who’ll marry their pregnant girlfriends when they’re seventeen and live in double-wides…”

  “I want to talk to them,” said Alex. “Let’s have them over for a cookout tomorrow.”

  I argued that I had to head back to Boston on Monday, and that I’d been looking forward to a glorious Sunday of leisurely togetherness, sleeping late, reading the Globe in bed, eating a big slow breakfast, going for a walk in the woods, taking an afternoon nap…

  But Alex narrowed her eyes and set her mouth and insisted that I call Paris immediately.

  So I did, and he accepted.

  They showed up around five on Sunday afternoon. Weezie Palmer had close-cropped dark hair, big flashing brown eyes, and a tentative smile. She wore a loose-fitting cotton dress that didn’t quite hide the swell of her belly.

  Paris’s left arm was in a sling, and he sported a big bandage on his left cheek. Weezie held on to his good arm. It was unclear who was supporting whom.

  Paris introduced Weezie to us, and she mumbled “Hi” without lifting her eyes quite up to our faces.

  “Come on,” I said to Paris. “Help me get the charcoal going.”

  He followed me out onto the deck, while Alex detained Weezie in the kitchen on the pretext of assembling the ingredients for our cookout.

  I got the grill lit while Paris perched on the rail. “So how’re you doing?” he said. “You okay now?”

  I nodded.

  “You were some sick, man. I gotta tell you, I thought you were dead there.”

  “You saved my life,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Hey,” he said, with a b
ackhanded wave of his good hand. “You saved mine, too.”

  When I went inside a few minutes later to fetch Cokes for us, I heard the murmuring of voices from Alex’s office.

  I handed a Coke to Paris. “So you’re going to marry Weezie, huh?” I said.

  He gave me a shrug and an embarrassed smile. “I guess so.”

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s my responsibility.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I think you’d better ask her,” I said.

  Paris stared at me through narrowed eyes for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re probably right.”

  Alex and Weezie came out a few minutes later. Weezie’s eyes were red and she was hugging herself. She went up to Paris, rested her forehead on his shoulder, and mumbled, “We gotta talk.”

  He nodded. “Right. We do.”

  He took her hand and led her down off the deck and around to the side of the house.

  Alex dropped into a rocking chair and let out a long breath. “Arnold Hood started fooling around with her almost three years ago,” she said. “She won’t be seventeen for another two months.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Somebody oughta—”

  Alex put her hand on my leg. “She’s not very bright, Brady. But she’s shrewd. When Hood found out she was pregnant, he dumped her. So she seduced Paris, then told him the baby was his.”

  I nodded. “That’s about how I figured it.”

  “She’s the one who made those swastikas.”

  I nodded. “Why’d she do that?”

  “Leon.” Alex shook her head. “He knew Hoodie had been fooling around with her, figured it was Hoodie’s baby. Threatened to tell Paris it wasn’t his if she refused. Made her promise not to tell anyone she did it. It was no big deal to her one way or the other. The symbolism of a swastika’s a bit complicated for her simple brain. I tried to explain it to her, but she just looked at me as if I was speaking San-skirt.”

  I nodded. “The first swastika was to try to scare Charlotte away,” I said. “It didn’t work. Charlotte would not be scared away. The second one—the one on the outhouse—that was to misdirect somebody like me. Leon probably knew about Hoodie’s flirtation with the Klan and figured that sooner or later somebody would make the connection.”