by Archer Mayor
“It’s also a possibility that Reitz’s daughter hates her guts, that Mrs. Phillips has had enough of the dog-lover, or that Woll rubbed some guy the wrong way, maybe even Henry Wodiska. Do we have anything besides his word that he spent the night where he said he did?”
“Of course. We checked where he works. We have done this kind of thing before, Frank.”
“Well, we better start showing it. Did you see tonight’s news? At six o’clock?”
I shook my head.
“They carried the Reitz shooting. Not much, but the ball’s beginning to roll. If we don’t do something fast, we’re going to get buried. The way I see it, we’ve got enough on our hands finding the guy who made Reitz pull that trigger without digging up old news.”
“Is that a subtle way of telling me not to touch the Harris thing?”
His eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that bullshit? I’m just being helpful. Isn’t that why you came over?”
I didn’t answer, much as I was tempted. Slowly he turned away and took another swig from his glass. He looked suddenly deflated. “It’s been a long day. Do what you have to do, Joe, but keep it under your hat and make damn sure you keep your priorities in order. A lot of people in the department were happy to see Davis go down. If they find out you’re digging into that stuff, you’re going to start feeling the heat, even if you can tie it together with what’s on our plate now. And if the press gets the slightest whiff of it, we’ll never hear the end of it. Have you told everyone to keep their mouths shut?”
“I think I convinced Wodiska. Woll’s the only one I can order. Will you back me up on Harris?” He paused before answering. “I’m not here for long; they know that. My backing isn’t going to be worth diddly.”
“Will you do it anyway?”
“You haven’t convinced me yet. As far as I’m concerned, the guy who set up the Reitz-Phillips thing and Woll’s mugger are two separate people, and neither one has anything to do with Harris.”
I rose and returned my half-empty glass to the bar. “All right.” I put my coat back on and headed for the hallway. “See you tomorrow, Frank.”
“Hey.” I turned around, and he hoisted his glass at me. “I’ll be thinking about you in Florida.”
“Sure.” I hated to admit it, but right now part of me wished he was already there.
5
The weathergirl with the poodle hair was wrong: it was already snowing as I left the Murphy house. From where they lived high on Hillcrest Terrace-an area my friend Gail Zigman, who was a Realtor, described as “middle-class, non-intellectual”-I could see the light below on Western Avenue, Brattleboro’s main artery to West Brattleboro, and the glistening snake of Interstate 91, twisting its way north along the Connecticut Valley floor. The scene looked safely Christmas-like, all twinkling lights and snowy motes. Most of the other houses on the block added to the mood with lingering holiday mementos: wreaths on doors, snowmen, colored lights, even an illuminated Santa on a roof, complete with blinking HO-HO-HO.
I don’t know what made me notice the dark green Plymouth Duster parked across and down the street. Maybe it was that I had once owned a Duster and had considered it the best car I’d ever had; maybe it was that the snow hitting its hood melted instantly. I couldn’t see through the windshield. In any case, at the time I didn’t give it much thought.
I drove down to Western, caught the interstate to the exit below, and bought some groceries at the Finast nearby, not far from Thelma Reitz’s house. I then retraced the route I’d traveled a very long day ago.
Brattleboro is an appealing town, at least to me. Modernization and the trendy urban remodelers have all but passed it by, settling for the outlying areas like the Putney Road north of town to set up their shopping plazas and fake colonial restaurants. The city itself, whose heart is the T intersection of Main and High, hasn’t changed much from its industrial nineteenth-century heyday, when two organ companies, one sewing-machine company, and a factory turning out baby carriages guaranteed a healthy income for most of the town.
There’s a pretty good reason developers stay away from down-town-apart from the challenge of tearing down the massive red-brick buildings that line the major streets-and that’s the hills. Brattleboro has a hard time gathering together a single flat acre. For reasons I’ve never figured out, the original settlers passed up the more spread-out regions to the north and south and planted their town on a crazy quilt of slopes and ravines tumbling precipitously down the banks of three rivers-the Connecticut to the east, the West River to the north, and Whetstone Brook, which neatly slices the town in two.
Homes and businesses, large and small, brick and wooden, hang on to the hills for dear life, like a haphazard collection of Matchbox toys left scattered across a rumpled blanket. The streets conform to the topography, plunging straight down or twisting back and forth, sometimes barely gripping the sharp inclines. It is not unusual to have a wall of trees, rocks, and grass on one side of a house, a view of the neighbor’s rooftop on the other.
All thi Fw os is covered with a thin layer of generations-old city grit. A Dunkin’ Donuts has incongruously appeared smack in the middle of downtown-with all the architectural finesse of a broken-down spaceship-and a few other buildings have been built with more sensitivity to their older neighbors, but generally the place is pretty static. The rich live in old rich homes of Victorian excess, the poor live in old poor homes that look like small-town slums all over New England-wooden, peeling, ramshackle, and depressing on a sunny day. Vaguely speaking, Whetstone Brook marks the DMZ below which the handful of “haves” rarely wander, but above which the more numerous “have-nots” have established a few minor toeholds. Gluing the two together, as always, is a majority middle class, which more than anything else has given Brattleboro its identity. It’s a regular-people kind of town.
My apartment represented this smorgasbord rather well. Located on Oak Street-an area Gail labeled “intellectual-young rich”-it was on the top floor of an ineptly remodeled Victorian townhouse on the corner of High Street, a short stroll from both the Municipal Building and downtown. There were two other tenants, both as young and as rich as I, and all three of us had been living there for years. Trying to explain this anomaly, Gail figured we could afford it either because the High Street traffic noise had kept the rent low, or because our benevolent octogenarian landlady, Miss Brooks, had never seen fit to raise it. Personally, I never much noticed the traffic.
I did, however, notice the Plymouth again. As I put down the groceries to open my mailbox, it passed quietly down the street. The snow was falling harder now, and I couldn’t make out the plates.
I’d never been tailed before, so I had to wonder if it wasn’t coincidence. Neither Hillcrest Terrace nor Oak Street are exactly off the beaten path, and it was early enough that a good many cars were still on the roads. Conceivably, it could even have been a different car.
But I didn’t believe any of that. As I climbed the creaking, carpeted steps up to my door on the third floor, I knew in my bones someone was watching me.
The apartment was, of course, quite empty. There was no reason it shouldn’t have been. I dumped the mail on the living room coffee table and the groceries in the kitchen and went into the bedroom to change into a pair of comfortable furry slippers.
I then fixed dinner-diced, fried Spam stirred into scrambled eggs and peas, a glass of milk, and a half can of fruit cocktail for dessert-and settled down in a large, slightly bedraggled armchair to read the mail. I tend to do this every night and rather thoroughly at that. Catalogues, mailers, the free Town Crier, all of them get the same attention as the occasional letter and the morning Reformer. I even fill out the sweepstakes, idly wondering what I’ll say to Ed McMahon when he hands me my million-dollar check. Habits, now old, born of comfortable isolation. I hadn’t dropped by the Murphy’s after their dinner hour to avoid Martha’s cooking, which was indeed better than my own, but only because I wanted the evening to myself, as usual
.
My wife Ellen died of cancer about eighteen years ago. We’d been married eight years-she’d been a teller at the bank I use to this day. She couldn’t have children, and for some reason we never thought of adoption, so we paid a good deal of attention to each other, going to movies a lot, planning picnics and day hikes for the weekends K th so, reading books aloud while she sewed or I built plastic airplanes for Murphy’s kids.
We had our run-ins, of course. Days when all we did was get in each other’s way. I would long for the bachelor life then, sensing how within reach it was. A divorce for us, after all, would have been a simple parting of the ways-no children, little property, still young. But we never did; it never got that bad, and it never lasted long.
The doctors said she died quickly. The whole thing took about four months from diagnosis to burial. But that was a long time for me, watching her die in slow motion, piece by piece. This was, after all, the woman I had undressed many times, scattering her clothes around the house. We’d made love with real enthusiasm, often on the spur of the moment. She’d been an extremely sensual woman.
So her death had been a catharsis of sorts, her slow and steady deterioration had been draining something vital from my core until at last, mercifully, by dying she released us both. For a long time afterward, I was alone-I needed no more companionship, no more emotional ups and downs. I was free to work, to read, to go to the movies utterly alone. I had come to realize that my home life, even with someone as accommodating as Ellen, had begun to echo the complexities of my job. Day in and day out, each twenty-four-hour cycle was a constant struggle, swimming against dozens of competing currents in an effort merely to tread water. Perhaps I’m a man whose ambitions are too slight, or maybe I lack the basic toughness most have to deal with a crowded life without respite. I could be just selfish. Whatever it is, by the time I snapped out of mourning Ellen’s loss and renewed my interest in the opposite sex, I was a confirmed bachelor, devoted to keeping at least one small part of my soul entirely to myself.
Which brings me back to my Realtor friend, Gail, the only reason I might have interrupted my monk-like solitude and scrambled Spam.
One of Brattleboro’s peculiarities is that it has become a retirement village for sixties flower children-“trust-fund hippies” and “granolaheads,” as we used to call them. Initially flocking to locally resented communes, attracted no doubt by the quaint woodsiness of the state, this vanguard of “creeping vegetarianism”-to quote one alarmed member of the Holstein Association-gradually grew older, cut its hair and, with values mostly intact, joined the homegrown establishment. The result was a leavening of the town, setting it apart from other has-been industrial centers. Mixed in with the beer dives and neocowboy bars were health food stores and vegetarian restaurants. Kids named Sheela, Alayna, and Charity ran up and down the streets, while their parents became business leaders and declared Brattleboro a nuclear-free zone. My fondness for this crowd wasn’t based on any Berkeley-born nostalgia, however. It was firmly attached instead to one of its leading citizens.
Gail Zigman had followed the above recipe word for word, arriving in Marlboro, near Brattleboro, in the mid-sixties to join a commune. Long-haired, free-loving, pot-smoking, and more involved in the lives around her than I’d ever been at her age, she eventually tired of communal life, moved into town and went through the gentle and predictable transformation from antiestablishment outsider to successful Realtor and selectman. She was also on every committee possible, from day-care to arts council to Ban-the-Bomb. She and I had been lovers for the past several years.
For two people supposedly committed Kdlyst to their community, we showed remarkable restraint regarding each other. Ours was a balancing act with both of us keeping the seesaw level. When one pushed for closer involvement, usually because of outside troubles, the other counterpushed. The irony was that life’s traumas, so routinely counted on to bring people together, forced us apart. We cared for one another and showed it as much as we dared, but our separate independencies had, over the years, become too valuable to give up. We were a perfect match, both too old and too self-centered to change our ways. Frank called us roommates without a room.
I threw out the junk mail, piled the bills on my desk, and picked up the phone.
“Hello, Joe,” she answered before I’d said a word.
“How did you know it was me?”
“You’re the only one I told when I’d be back.”
I liked that. “How was New York?”
“As usual; awful and lovely.”
“And your parents?”
“Awful and lovely. Dad gave me a ‘how-to’ book about finding a way out of mid-life crisis, and Mother and I had our annual boy-talk. You’d never have guessed I turned forty two months ago. How was your Christmas? And what’s Leo up to?” Leo was my brother, and an endless source of fascination for Gail.
“He’s dating a wild woman who dyes her hair green and drives a Corvette. She runs a Sunoco station she picked up in a divorce. According to Leo, she doubled the business the first summer because all she wore were grease-covered hot-pants and a halter top. Trade falls off in winter. I like her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ginny. She’s a tough thirty-five, which makes her Leo’s junior by a mile.”
“I’m your junior by a few years.”
“Yeah, but you don’t drive a Corvette or wipe a dipstick on your butt. This woman could be the death of him.”
“What’s your mother think of her?”
“She’s amused, but she won’t admit it.”
“Is this serious with Leo?”
“Good Lord, no. He’s more serious about her car. She’s just part of the package, and a rather athletic one at that, according to him. But you know Leo. He’s happy the way he is.”
“Seems to run in the family. What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Same as tonight-nothing.”
“You want to come over?”
“Now?”
“No, I’m sorry,” and I could tell from her voice that she was. “I meant tomorrow. I have homework to do tonight. But I do want to give you a squeeze.”
“You got a date.” I hung up the phone and sat there for a while, my fe K whft"›et on my father’s old rolltop desk. If ever there was loneliness, this is when it hit. Sexually, our arrangement was perfection-once we’d built up a hunger, we could always take care of it. But times of friendly noninvolvement, of watching television in one room while she read peacefully in the other, didn’t happen. Those belonged with memories of Ellen. Of course, that hadn’t been perfection either, any more than this was, but the rationalization didn’t comfort. It truly was a world in which every up side had a down.
I got up and turned on the television, filling the darkened room with a shimmering fluorescence. A cop show. Perfect. I went over to the window and looked down at the street. The Plymouth was parked near the corner.
6
Murphy met me at the door when I walked into the Municipal Building at 7:00 the next morning. “You got that jury list on you?”
“It’s in my office.” I poked my head into Maxine’s cubbyhole. She waved and handed me a sheet from the dailies box-a record of the night’s activities.
I came to a dead stop in the middle of the corridor. “Is this what’s on your mind?” I pointed at the lead item: the sexual assault on one Wendy Stiller.
“Is she on it?”
I smiled at his downcast expression. “Afraid so, Frank.”
“Shit. Let’s go to my office.” He led the way, ushered me in, and closed the door. “You may have a bit of a problem.”
“Why?”
“Kunkle was on call last night, so Capullo brought him in on this.”
“And?”
“Kunkle quote-unquote headed the Harris investigation. He got a citation, a letter of commendation and a bonus from the town manager. Considering his personality, he’s not going to be thrilled with this jury thing. He�
��s going to think you’re out to get him.”
“I’m not the one going after the jury.”
“I know that, for Christ’s sake. But you’re going to want to talk to this girl, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you going to tell Kunkle? And don’t give me what you gave DeFlorio yesterday. He pestered the hell out of me trying to find out why I supposedly told you to interview Wodinsky.”
“Wodiska.”
“Whatever. Give me a break this time, will you?”
“Jesus, Frank, even a paranoid like Kunkle ought-”
He held up both hands to stop me. “You know that. I know that. I’m the den mother here, all right? I’m trying to keep everybody happy. Just tiptoe a little. Kunkle’s screwier than ever right now-home problems-and I don’t want to hear him complaining that you’ve got doubts about his handling of the Harris case.”
I gave up. “Okay. Mum’s the word.”
“Thank you. Now I’ve arranged for you to have first crack at her this morning, but Kunkle won’t be far behind.”
“I thought he had his little chat last night.”
“She had to be sedated. He didn’t get much out of her-nothing really, so get in and get out, and keep me up to date. She’s at Memorial Hospital, room three-twelve.”
Memorial was a typical small-city hospital. A little threadbare, a few patches, not staffed by the best or the brightest, but it made up in heart what it lacked in glitzy technology. Ellen had died there, admittedly a long time ago, but if caring alone could have cured cancer, she would have pulled through.
I found Wendy Stiller sitting in a green plastic chair by the window in a four-bed room. She was the only occupant. She was dressed in a long pink terry robe and had her feet tucked under her. Her blond hair hung in a tangled mess about her shoulders. Her face was pale and hollow-looking. It occurred to me that this was the third victimized woman I’d approached in just twenty-four hours. I wondered if that meant anything.
