The Price of Malice

by Archer Mayor

  Her response was rueful at best. “Even if I did scare myself half to death?”

  The meeting spot Joe chose was both practical and an homage to more than a few cinematic forebears. The Penobscot Narrows Observatory is a two-story glass cube atop one of the towers distinguishing the new bridge. Access is via an elevator, where a ticket taker lets you on, and another employee meets you some four hundred feet higher up. From the observatory, which Joe and Lyn visited earlier, the view was absolute—of both the beautiful surrounding countryside, and the roads and parking lot servicing the tower. When Brandhorst made his approach, he knew he’d be under surveillance; just as he knew that this spot, with its restricted access, would be an awkward place to try anything violent or off script.

  Lyn was in place early on, caught between earth and sky, feeling like a captive bird within the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, when her cell phone went off two hours later. Of Joe, she had no clue. Somewhere far below, he’d placed himself to wait and watch.

  “Hello?” she said, feeling this would be the perfect time for a phone marketer to mess everything up. At the last moment, she remembered to turn on Joe’s recorder.

  “Ms. Silva?” came the unctuous reply, paradoxically setting her at ease. “I just got to Bucksport. There are a couple of good restaurants in town, especially if you like seafood.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she answered. “Can you see the modern bridge from where you’re parked? Over the Penobscot Narrows?”

  He sounded quizzical. “Sure. The side-by-side bridges?”

  “Right. The tower on the right has a glass top.”

  There was a pause. “Okay. I see that.”

  “Drive to the base of that tower and buy a ticket to the observatory at the top. That’s where I am. And come alone.”

  “I am alone, Ms. . . .” He was still talking when she hung up.

  She crossed the small, exposed room, now feeling as if she were hanging from a string in midair, and looked down at the narrow span of the bridge far below. The massive cables stringing the two towers together ran in a single line down its middle, like a knife blade, rather than in the more traditional double row along the outsides, as with the smaller, rusting suspension bridge alongside. The result was to give her a totally unobstructed view of the road from Bucksport, and thus of Brandhorst’s vehicle when it came. But she stared in vain at car after car scurrying along the bridge like bugs running for cover, before she finally gave up and moved to the window above the parking lot.

  She was aware of nearby Fort Knox, the steam-spewing paper plant across from it, and the widening of the river, the mirrored image of picturesque Bucksport reflected in its waters. But just barely. At the moment, the charms of the observatory were more irritating than impressive.

  This was taking forever. Joe hadn’t given her any tricks about how to wait. In her real life, Lyn was prone to action and noise, at least while she was working. This stillness was driving her nuts. The observatory had been empty since her arrival, being a little unusual as tourist stops went, and she was beginning to crave a diversion—even a busload of busybodies.

  She suddenly froze. A car had glided to a stop between the white lines of a slot near the walkway to the tower’s base. She knew it was Brandhorst, even before he emerged and stared straight up at her roost.

  He waved cheerfully, although she was obviously not visible to him. Still, she stepped back, as if caught in the open with stolen goods in hand. Unlike when she’d walked into his office the day before, she was now sweating and nervous, her brain teeming with possible mishaps. Innocent and headstrong then, now she knew too much, thanks to Joe.

  It seemed like half an hour before the elevator doors hissed open on the first floor of the two-story cube, and footsteps climbed the stairs to the observation deck. Again, she readied the recorder, now in her pocket.

  Dick Brandhorst was all smiles as he floated into view. “Ms. Silva. What a great idea. You had me going with all the cloak and dagger, but I never would’ve discovered this, otherwise.” He paused on the top step to take in the panorama.

  “My God,” he continued, passing by her to press up against one of the glass walls. “It’s incredible. You can see everything.”

  It occurred to her only then that he was probably still in role—playacting that he was doing her a favor by looking into her father’s disappearance.

  This was odd, given that at their last encounter, he’d called her a tough little bitch, but then she thought that being half a chameleon was probably an asset to a financial planner who was also a bookie—or whatever he was.

  “So,” he said suddenly, twisting on his heel to put the view abruptly behind him, reinforcing the personality sketch she’d just completed. “What’s on your mind?”

  She played it along the lines she’d discussed with Joe. “Same as last time—I want to know what happened to my family.”

  He looked pleasantly bewildered. “You couldn’t have asked that on the phone, or by coming by the office, as agreed?”

  “You or your goons dropping by my motel room made me leery,” she told him.

  “Really?” he asked. “Whatever that means, of course.”

  “Right. Whatever.”

  He moved right along. “Well,” he said, “it so happens I might’ve found someone to help you out.”

  He reached into his pocket and extracted a slip of paper, handing it to her. “This is the cell number of a contact. I don’t actually know much about him, but a friend of a friend recommended him as the go-to guy for such things.”

  She took the slip and glanced at it. “That’s it? You don’t even have a name?”

  Brandhorst shrugged. “That’s all I got.”

  She shoved the information dismissively into her other pocket. “I seriously doubt that.”

  “Believe what you will, Ms. Silva. I’m the one doing you a favor, though, so don’t get too bitchy. Speaking of which,” he added, as if as an afterthought, “I ran the Maria through maritime registrations. They have it as lost at sea.”

  “So?”

  He smiled. “I was just wondering what her new name was. I’m assuming you reregistered her.”

  She shook her head. “Decided not to. Too expensive, and not my area of interest. I put her in storage. Probably sell her eventually. I don’t know . . .” She waved her hand as if the whole topic was a hassle.

  Then she stared at him, eyes slightly narrowed. “Why? You want to buy her?”

  Brandhorst actually took a half step back. “Not personally,” he told her. “But you know, I keep an eye out for things like that. It’s not bad money for a middleman—you can get a couple of hundred thousand for a halfway decent boat, even now.”

  “Right,” she said, still watching him. “I’ll remember that when the time comes—if it does. How much money did they still owe you?”

  He smiled, heading toward the staircase. “Not a dime, Ms. Silva. I didn’t even know them. Good luck.”

  She stood alone, listening to his retreat fading back toward the elevator below. Joe had been right. She pulled the slip of paper from her pocket and studied it again.

  There was a sudden upwelling of noise from below, and she realized that at long last, a surge of tourists had finally discovered the observatory. She waited where she was, at the window, watching for Brandhorst to appear below, while a small mob of photo-taking, gasping newcomers joined her.

  Finally, seeing him cross the tarmac, enter his car, and drive away, she eased through the crowd to the elevator and followed his example.

  As previously arranged with Joe, she drove only a few hundred yards to the parking area servicing Fort Knox, before abandoning her car again, passing through the gift shop and museum, and climbing the grassy incline to the entrance of the fort itself.

  Filing through a thin collection of other visitors, she made her way past several photogenically placed cannons, down a narrow staircase, along a darkened corridor—lighted only via whatever sunshine could squ
eeze through a row of rifle slits—until she reached a cool, black corner room, perhaps once an ammunition dump.

  There, alone, she waited for about ten minutes before Joe joined her.

  It was a place from which they could see and hear anyone approaching for a hundred yards in any direction, without being seen themselves.

  She gave him a hug and whispered in his ear, “Jesus. Am I glad that’s over.”

  He answered in a similar, barely audible tone. “It went okay?”

  “Just like you said it would. He gave me the number of someone supposedly in the know, and again tried to get the new name of the Maria.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  She handed him the recorder, which he put away. “The first thing that came to me—that it was in storage and that if I ever got around to it, I might sell it. I even offered it to him.”

  Joe chuckled. “And he didn’t bite?”

  “I guess he didn’t want to be that obvious. I did ask him why he was so curious. He said he wanted to keep an eye out for a buyer, just for what the hell. How did you do?”

  Joe patted a small camera bag hanging from his shoulder. “I got pictures of him, his car’s registration, and two guys who couldn’t have cared less about the observatory or the bridge, one of whom followed you after you left the bridge, but had to drop you in the fort because of the route you took.”

  “And the other one?”

  “He left after Brandhorst. My guess is they won’t pay you much attention till you contact the guy with the cell phone. You told Brandhorst you knew they’d searched your room?”

  “Oh, yeah, not that he admitted it.”

  “That’s okay,” Joe said. “We just wanted him to know you were on your guard. You make a couple of fancy moves after leaving here, like we discussed, and you should lose that tail again, assuming he’s still around. As I said before, I think Brandhorst was just playing it safe showing up with muscle, and maybe hoping to get lucky.”

  “Did you make it back to Bangor after lunch?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Double-checked your motel room and moved your car to the rental place. You want to have dinner together, maybe in Augusta?” he asked.

  “Don’t you have to get back to Vermont?”

  “Sure, but it’s on the way, and it’ll give me a chance to make sure you weren’t followed.”

  She reached up and kissed him. “Deal.”

  He studied her carefully then. “So—are you going to stay put until I can get back out here—no running off on your own? We’re only talking a couple or a few days, max.”

  She patted his chest and smiled. “I promise.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Willy propped the heel of one shoe against the edge of his desk. “Where the hell is he?” he asked, scowling.

  Sam glanced over to Joe’s section of the office, empty and neat. “Told me he had to duck out for a personal day—that something came up.”

  Even Lester was caught off guard by that. “Something came up?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Fuck him,” Willy recommended. “Let’s do it without him.”

  “Thank you for your support,” Joe said from the doorway as he entered, adding, “and sorry for running late. Small family emergency.”

  “Everything all right?” Sam asked, typically solicitous.

  “Better not be,” Willy threw in, “ ’cause Bill Allard was looking for you, too. Didn’t sound happy. I had no clue what to tell him, so you better be dealing with a full-blown personal crisis.”

  Allard was the director of VBI, Joe’s immediate boss in Waterbury, strategically located near Montpelier, the state capital. Bill Allard tended to let his people run on their own, but he did like to be kept in the loop, just in case he got bushwhacked by a bureaucrat with a need to know. Joe hadn’t spoken with him since Castine had been found murdered—a definite and unusual oversight. He wasn’t surprised to hear Bill was getting twitchy.

  “Probably didn’t help that you told him to drop dead,” Lester suggested from his desk.

  Willy smiled. “He’s used to that from me—wouldn’t expect otherwise.”

  Joe gave Kunkle a serious look, to which Willy waved his hand. “Just kidding, boss, just kidding. I was on my best behavior.”

  “Whatever that is,” Sam muttered.

  Joe dumped his bag beside his computer and perched on the windowsill behind his chair. Mercifully, the region-wide heat wave had broken during the night, and the weather was back to a pleasant high seventies—sunny and dry.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s find out where we are.”

  “The way things’re looking,” Les volunteered, “we may be the only ones who didn’t want this guy dead.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Willy cracked.

  Sam stayed on track. “It’s getting complicated fast. Last night, Les grabbed a guy named Ray Needham who used to steal with Castine and split the proceeds. Castine screwed him on their last outing, and Ray claimed he hadn’t seen him since—except that Ron found a store tape that shows them together the day before Wayne died.”

  “Did Ray know about the Manor Court apartment?” Joe asked.

  “He says he didn’t even know where Wayne lived,” Les said. “ ’Course that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have followed him there, or anywhere else. If Ray lied about when he last saw him, maybe he was also the one knocking on that apartment door.”

  Joe opened his mouth to ask a question, but Les then threw in, “And the last guy he tuned up, he used a baseball bat. Damn near killed him.”

  Joe nodded instead and looked over to Sam.

  She got the message. “Next on the radar is Karen Putnam. She was having an affair with Wayne while her daughter—Becky Kerr—was maybe being abused by him, at least according to Wayne’s neighbor, Andrea Halnon. That would make me consider killing Wayne, and that was before I met Karen. She’s got a real short fuse.”

  “What did she tell you?” Joe asked.

  “Nothing constructive. I was actually talking to one of her kids—the only one at home—when she drove up and threw me off the property.”

  “You have a plan for her?”

  “I’ll talk to her again. I think she’s expecting it. Maybe I started off on the wrong foot, interviewing her son first. For all her faults, she’s a protective mother.”

  “You get anywhere with him?”

  Sam shook her head. “His name’s Richard Vial. A real sweetheart. Maybe ten or eleven; likes to live under the trailer. Sounds like life overhead gets a little crazy. I’m pretty sure I made an ally out of him, for what it’s worth. But I need to do a lot more work on the whole family—figure out who’s who. Could be Karen wasn’t the only one who hated Wayne.”

  “Like Becky,” Lester suggested.

  “True,” Sam conceded. “I’ll be checking her out, too.”

  “Anything else?” Joe asked them.

  “Just that we’ve barely started,” Willy cautioned. “Ray, Karen, and Becky are already in our sights, but like Les found out, it could be anybody, this early into it.”

  “Okay,” Joe conceded, “so, maybe we focus on a couple of the neon signs in this case, for instance the degree of passion in the attack.”

  “Or that it specifically happened in the apartment Wayne used to get laid,” Sam suggested, “instead of his place or down a dark alley.”

  “Speaking of which,” Lester said, “when I went back to Manor Court to interview a few folks we missed during the first canvass, I found the guy who rented the apartment between Terry Stein and Liz Babbitt. He told me one reason he left was that he felt someone was dropping by when he wasn’t there. There was never anything missing or screwed up; he said it was just a feeling. Gave him the chills.”

  Joe thought back to Lyn’s story of having her motel room tossed.

  “He never bitched to the landlord?” Willy asked.

  Lester laughed. “Yeah. Right. He left instead. Anyhow, it does suggest
that Wayne’s use of the place started right after Terry left, and maybe involved people besides Karen Putnam.”

  Joe said softly, almost to himself, “We need to really dig into Wayne’s history.”

  “We got his body,” Willy volunteered. “What did your pal Hillstrom find out?”

  Beverly Hillstrom was the state’s medical examiner, and an old friend of Joe’s, which, as Willy had implied, usually made her an early stop for Joe in such investigations.

  “I haven’t seen her yet,” Joe admitted.

  There was a stillness in the room as everyone absorbed the anomaly.

  “You’re slippin’, boss,” Willy suggested with predictable subtlety.

  “We got the prelim,” Sam suggested helpfully. “Basically said what we thought—blunt trauma and a sharp instrument, neither of which were found at the scene.”

  “Hillstrom’s always got more,” Willy pressed. “Joe just needs to massage her a little.”

  Joe smiled. “Consider it done, for you, if nobody else.”

  But he was embarrassed by the oversight, tacking it onto a growing list of lapses that he’d committed since Lyn’s departure. The thought reminded him, too, of his own boss’s interest in having a talk.

  “Guess I’ll kill two birds with one stone and see Allard, too,” he told them.

  He slid off the windowsill and concluded, “All right. Sounds like we’ve got more than enough to keep us busy. Sam, you’ll coordinate who does what while I’m upstate?”

  She waved from her desk.

  “Then wish me luck,” he said, grabbing his bag. “I’ll see what I can bring home.”

  The break in the heat allowed Joe to cross the state with his windows open, instead of wrapped in air-conditioning, which he instinctively disliked. Vermont has only two interstates—91, which runs up the eastern side, from Brattleboro to Canada; and 89, which intersects with 91 halfway up and cuts diagonally northwest, toward Burlington, on the shores of Lake Champlain.

  The trip is a soothing, picturesque, graceful, two-and-a-half-hour offering of some of the best that Vermont has to offer, from serpentine rivers to granite-capped mountains. Fields, farms, covered bridges, low-head dams, railroads paralleling rocky streambeds—all of it rendered in a seamless slide show. Joe was a native Vermonter, the older of two sons of a Thetford Hill farmer. The values, traditions, and life lessons of that heritage always played in concert with the scenery to lift his spirits.