Occam's razor

18

To a native-born Vermonter, driving across New Hampshire is a little like walking on a rival team’s playing field. It’s not an infraction of the rules, or even in bad taste, but it does feel kind of funny.

On the map, they look like mirror images of the same real estate-two similarly sized wedges fitting together to form a rough rectangle. New Hampshire has the sea, Vermont, Lake Champlain; New Hampshire’s largest towns are near Boston to the south, Vermont’s are to the north, not far from Montreal. Both pride themselves on their mountains, their maple sugar, their cows, and their sense of independence.

And both couldn’t be further apart.

The rivalry between them predates the Revolutionary War, when New Hampshire claimed sovereignty right up to the New York border, declaring present-day Vermont to be the “New Hampshire Grants.” That was actually fine with the few settlers living there, except that in 1764, King George III stuck his foot in it again by giving Vermont to New York, whose governor had taken exception to New Hampshire’s high-handedness. This allowed a very belligerent Ethan Allen-with his Green Mountain Boys and the fortunate timing of the American Revolution-to create in 1777 not just a new state but a wholly independent republic, which didn’t join the Union for another fourteen years.

Referred to colloquially as Vermont from its birth, the new republic was officially named New Connecticut, revealing how ambiguous its residents had become.

Maybe as a result of this contentious start, both New Hampshire and Vermont have forever after eyed one another like suspicious twins and made great hay about their differences.

It was hard to admit, therefore, that the actual drive across New Hampshire to Portland, Maine-where Ron had set up a meeting with the prosecutor in Reynolds’s old case-was more pleasant at this time of year than a similar trip would have been across southern Vermont. At home, the Green and Berkshire mountains link up between Brattleboro and Bennington, making passage across their backs scenic but perilous in all but good weather. New Hampshire is only gently hilly and benign at the same latitude, influenced by the seashore to the east and the Massachusetts plains to the south.

Not that we had bad weather to contend with. The whole region had settled into a routine after that one major storm, with perfectly bearable alternating periods of grayness and sparkling sun. The day Ron and I had chosen for our drive was of the blue-skied, ice-cold variety so favored by skiers and longed for by those going bonkers with cabin fever.

We didn’t discuss work at first, taking advantage of the outing to simply enjoy the scenery. Traffic was light and the roads were in good shape, so the feeling encouraged more talk of home and family than of major crimes and office squabbles. Ron had a wife and a small child, of whom he was inordinately proud. Where many male cops referred to their mates as “the wife” on a good day, Ron carried pictures in his wallet, bragged about his small family at the drop of a hat, and made no bones about the delights of going home at the end of the day.

It was a healthy tonic for me to hear him go on about such domestic bliss, and so I encouraged him until we’d passed through Concord on our way to Manchester and then due east.

At which point, making a reasonable transition, he brought up Sammie Martens.

“You think she and Andy are going to become a permanent item?” he asked hopefully.

It had been several days since my chat with Andy Padgett, and I hadn’t said a word to anyone about it. I had double-checked some of what he’d told me-speaking with the bartender Sammie had recommended, for instance-but I’d only covered the basics. I hadn’t probed deeply, both for my sake and hers, and hadn’t found reason to in any case.

I didn’t harbor deep suspicions about Padgett. I truly believed him to be as he appeared: someone on the periphery, not my type of human being, and not too wise in his choice of drinking companions-but essentially an innocent.

That being so, I still didn’t like him and protectively hoped Sammie wouldn’t try to make a go of him.

“I don’t think so,” I said lightly.

“Really? She seems pretty stuck on him.”

“I think she’s making up for lost time.”

“Is this the father figure I’m hearing?” he asked with a smile.

I glanced at him appraisingly, impressed less by his insight, which hardly mimicked rocket science, and more by his boldness. To hear Ron Klesczewski speak in a jocular, mocking manner was like hearing Willy Kunkle being compassionate.

“You’re feeling your oats.”

He laughed. “Probably just getting away for a few hours. Not too often we have this heavy a caseload-which’ll only be getting worse.”

“With Reynolds? Could be. He’s certainly the strangest aspect of all this. The way his name keeps coming up is pretty weird.”

“Maybe that’s part of his game plan.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at the chronology,” Ron said. “The break-in, the abandoned truck, the killing. Each one a little worse than its predecessor. The confusion over that car always struck me as real screwy. It was so elaborate, so stagy, and incredibly risky. If you get a guy like Resnick-from out of state and with a minimal support system-and you bang him over the head, why go to the effort those three guys went to? Especially when the frame can be pulled apart so easily?”

“And your answer is?”

“Maybe Reynolds staged it himself, to make it look like he’s being targeted by someone.”

“Implying Reynolds killed Resnick?”

“He could have, using hired help. I think the office break-in was for real. The body language Bobby Miller reported sounded right on. But I also think it was more than an interrupted B amp;E. Which means that maybe something happened that night to make the other stuff necessary.”

I couldn’t say he was wrong. Neither one of us had anything concrete to work with. But it sounded far-fetched. “What about the truck breaking down?” I asked. “Forensics said it looked like a straightforward mechanical problem.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, “but it doesn’t explain why Resnick hung around town afterward, his skin burning from chemicals, not going to the ER to be checked out. Why didn’t he seek help? What happened that night? Where did he go? Who did he call? It must’ve been somebody, or those three guys wouldn’t have found him. And that means he must’ve trusted them-or thought he could.”

I started shaking my head emphatically. “Ron, for Christ’s sake. Listen to yourself. Reynolds is involved in trucking dirty goods. One of his drivers-Resnick-has a breakdown and an accident both, pouring God-knows-what on himself. He therefore calls Reynolds for help. Help, however, consists of three of Reynolds’s henchmen, who bean Resnick on the head, drive him to the tracks in a car designed to compromise their own boss, and use a train to kill him. All so we can find the body first and the car later and declare the whole thing a clumsy frame, thereby taking the one guy we never suspected in the first place off the hot seat? It’s crazy.”

He remained silent and tight-lipped.

I instantly regretted my outburst. “Ron, look, I’m sorry.”

“No big deal.”

“You do hear what I’m saying, though, right?”

“Yeah.” He sounded more regretful than angry.

“I’ll grant you most of what you said,” I tried again. “But not with Reynolds as the mastermind. More logical would be that the frame was meant to stick-and only fell apart because the people rigging it had a room-temperature IQ.”

He conceded the point, suggesting instead, “It still means Resnick holed up somewhere-maybe with a friend-until the others figured out what to do. We find out where that was-or who it was-and we go a long way to solving this.”

I couldn’t argue with him there.

We were introduced to Kevin Daly in a basement in downtown Portland, in a small room next to what appeared to be the courthouse archives. The room was windowless, undecorated, and quiet, and dominated by a large table with four wooden chairs.

Daly waved his hand at several document boxes neatly arrayed on the table’s surface and blithely announced, “The State of Maine versus Katahdin Trucking. All yours.”

Ron and I both stared at what was obviously several days’ worth of reading. “Mr. Daly,” I began slowly. “We were kind of hoping we could do some of this verbally. We won’t have enough time otherwise.”

He was visibly caught off guard. “Verbally? You’re kidding. I don’t have any more free time than you do. Try starting with the witness lists and depositions. And the index to the transcript, in case there’s anything you want there. That won’t take too long. I thought I explained all that to someone over your way.”

I backed up a bit. “Okay, I’m sorry-probably just crossed wires. You were the prosecutor?”

He smiled. “Yeah, but I won’t be much use to you.” He pointed to the boxes. “That was a few hundred cases ago, and no big deal either. I barely remember it.”

“How ’bout the basic charge?” I pressed him.

He cupped his cheek with his hand and stared at the floor for a moment. “Well, like I said on the phone, I think it had something to do with Katahdin lying on their manifests. They’d write down construction debris and forget to mention a few oil drums. Or they’d log an empty run to a site for a pick-up when they were in fact transporting an illegal shipment for burial at the site-splitting the profits with the job foreman or contractor or whoever-and then getting legitimately paid for carting out a real load. My memory’s pretty vague, though. They aren’t the only ones we’ve nailed for something like that, so I may be mixing their case up with someone else’s. Do your homework first. If you have any questions after that, maybe I can help you out.”

We thanked him for digging out the files, let him go back to his job, and settled down to work, despite Ron’s grumbling under his breath,

“‘I thought I explained that.’ Bullshit he did. I’m the one he talked to. He barely said two words-I asked if we could meet, he said sure.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to smooth his feathers. “He probably just forgot and is covering his butt.”

Relying on the index to lead us to the trial’s highlights, we still spent some six hours reading, discussing, and taking notes about The State of Maine versus Katahdin Trucking. The charges were close to what Daly had described, and by the end of our labors I understood why his memory had been so hazy. Katahdin had been found guilty, given a fine and a wrist-slap by the judge, and then allowed to carry on, aside from a few conditions designed to keep them on the straight and narrow. It had amounted to a probation, which I was happy to see still hadn’t run out.

I mentioned that to Ron, who merely raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“It means we have something to hold over them when we meet,” I explained.

He checked his watch warily. “We’re meeting with them?”

I knew he was thinking of the very family he’d been extolling on the way over, and hoping to return to by late tonight. “Ron, what’ve we gotten out of this so far?” I indicated the piles of scattered documents.

“That Reynolds defended Katahdin and lost?”

“Right. We didn’t find anything connected to what we’re working on. What we need is a larger picture of Katahdin’s operations-something beyond the scope of this court case.” I turned a sheet of paper around to face him and put my finger next to a single name on a list of twenty others. “Maybe by having a little chat with this guy.”

“Joseph Crowley,” Ron read aloud. “One of the dispatchers?”

“And the guy who seemed to be sweating the most during the trial.”

Ron looked puzzled. “I don’t even remember what he said.”

“Exactly. Daly put him on the stand to account for a time-sequence gap in his boss’s story but didn’t seem to notice or care that he acted like he was sitting on a keg of dynamite. My guess is Daly already had enough to win his case and didn’t want anything complicating an easy prosecution. Crowley must’ve thought it was his lucky day when he was excused and not asked to explain his guilt.”

“Guilt about what?” Ron asked, obviously mystified.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “What counts is that he thinks he got away with something, and he’s worried about that dreaded midnight knock on the door.”

I got to my feet. “Let’s go find Daly.”

It wasn’t actually midnight-more like ten-thirty-when we rang the front doorbell of Joseph Crowley’s house in the Portland suburbs. The timing was both accidental and strategic. The first because it took a while to work through Kevin Daly to the Portland police in discovering Crowley’s address; the second because if you want to make a man nervous-especially about something that’s been going on at the office-it never hurts to approach him late at night, in front of his family.

He answered the door himself, his wife within sight in an armchair facing the television. He peered at us a moment, adjusting to the darkness outside, blinking like an owl startled from reverie. “Hi. Can I help you?”

Ron and I both flashed our useless, out-of-state credentials, which the poor lighting made impossible to read. I did the talking. “We’re police officers, Mr. Crowley. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

His mouth half opened. “Police? About what?”

I saw his wife rise and approach to stand silently beside her husband. She, too, seemed utterly stunned.

“What’s the trouble?” she asked of all of us.

“We’d like to talk to Mr. Crowley about certain aspects of his job.”

Both their faces went blank.

“Could we come in?” Ron asked from just behind my shoulder.

They both stepped back. Joseph Crowley turned toward his wife and said softly, “Honey, could you make some coffee?”

She silently squeezed his arm and disappeared to the back of the house. Crowley distractedly waved us toward the sofa and chairs grouped around the TV, while he picked up a remote and killed the set long-distance. The stillness replacing the tinny dialogue almost made my ears ring.

He sat on the edge of his chair while we made ourselves comfortable. “Is there a problem?”

“That depends,” I said. “If we feel you’ve been straight with us after we’re done, then the answer’ll be no.”

“You remember testifying five years ago?” Ron asked.

If possible, Crowley looked even more depressed than before. “Of course.”

“It occurred to us,” I resumed, “that at the time, you knew a lot more than you were being asked about-that you were even scared one of the prosecution’s questions would open a can of worms you didn’t want opened.”

“I was completely truthful at that trial.”

“I’m sure you were, just like I’m hoping you will be tonight.”

“What have they done now?”

I smiled broadly. “God knows, Joseph. Let’s hope you don’t make us want to find out.”

His eyebrows huddled together in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

Ron said, “We want to know a few things about Katahdin’s operations-very confidentially. If we like what we hear, we disappear and nobody knows we’ve been here. If we don’t, we start making wider inquiries. Given the probation you folks are still under, that should have some meaning to you.”

He licked his lips. “I have always cooperated with the authorities. I just didn’t know anything that would interest them.”

I gave him a hopeful expression. “We don’t think you were asked the right questions.”

His wife reappeared, carrying a tray with three cups, some milk, sugar, and a pot of coffee. “It’s instant,” she said quietly. “I hope that’s okay.”

I ignored her, still looking at Crowley. “If you were asked the right questions, you’d still answer them truthfully, wouldn’t you, Joseph?”

“Of course.”

“Great.” Now I addressed his wife. “Instant’s great. You’re not going to have any?”

She put the tray down and backed away as if it had a stick of dynamite burning in the middle. “No, no. I don’t want to be in the way.”

“Okay. Thanks for the coffee, then. It was nice meeting you.”

“Me, too.”

We all waited until she left the room. Nobody made a move toward the coffee. “Joseph,” I began, “in all your years at Katahdin, do you ever remember hearing of an outfit called Timson Long Haul?”

“Yes. Of course. We sometimes lease trucks from them.”

“Often?”

“Often enough. I guess I hear their name a few times a month. The business office would know exactly. I’m just a dispatcher.”

“Well, we’re here right now, so we’ll ask you. All right?”

“Sure, sure. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Tell me, though, is a few times a month a lot or average or what? I’m not familiar with Katahdin’s operations.”

“It’s about average. We don’t own a lot of the trucks we lease. That way, if business is down, we aren’t stuck with a lot of idle inventory. Timson’s been helpful that way for years.”

“But they may not own their trucks, either. Isn’t that right?”

“Right. It’s a funny business that way. People think it’s like Avis or something, but trucks cost a fortune to own, and you never seem to have the right mix of sizes anyhow. So we’ve all come up with this system.”

“Gets a little hard, though, keeping track of who owns what.”

He looked from one of us to the other in the silence I let hang. Finally he said, “I wouldn’t know. I just dispatch.”

“So you said. Think about it, though. I lease a truck to Ron here, who leases it to you, who leases it to somebody else. Lot of paperwork going through a lot of offices, some of which aren’t very well staffed. Files get lost, numbers misplaced. And there are a pile of numbers, aren’t there? VINs, registrations, license plates, CDL numbers, God knows what else. Hard to keep track. Did you know any of the Timson drivers?”

Unconsciously, Crowley had been rubbing his hands together between his knees. He suddenly stopped and placed them firmly on his thighs. “No. I mean, I might have, but not specifically as Timson people. Actually, Timson probably doesn’t have any drivers, come to think of it. They just supply trucks. The drivers are up to someone else.”

“So drivers come and go regularly, too. You must know some of them pretty well. I mean, dispatchers tend to build special relationships with the guys at the other end of the radio.”

“I guess.”

Ron suddenly spoke up, making Crowley jump slightly. “You ever know Phil Resnick?”

“Sure.”

“Tell us about him,” I suggested.

He shrugged awkwardly. “He was just a freelance driver. We never got into personal stuff much.”

Neither Ron nor I said a word to that. Crowley began rubbing his hands together again. “I knew he was from New Jersey.”

“And Mob-connected?”

He compressed his lips a moment. “I heard rumors.”

“You see him often?”

“Off and on. Not lately.”

I felt it was time for my stab in the dark. “About the time the trial hit? Maybe just before charges were filed?”

He became very still. My suspicions were that Resnick was the least of Crowley’s concerns-that he was sitting on enough company indiscretions to be feeling very vulnerable, and that by asking only about Resnick, especially after all this buildup, I’d make him think he was getting off lightly-again-and thus make him generous as a result.

He took the bait. “He was around then, yeah.”

“Did he have any contact with Jim Reynolds?”

He straightened with surprise. “Reynolds? The lawyer?”

Again, we silently let him draw his own conclusions.

After a moment’s reflection, his eyes widened. “Yeah. He did.”

“Tell us the circumstances.”

Crowley sounded almost disappointed. “Not much to tell. During the pretrial routine-which lasted months, by the way-Reynolds was in and out of our office all the time, interviewing all sorts of people. I just remember Resnick being one of them.”

“Why him, especially?” I asked.

“’Cause it struck me as funny at the time. First because Resnick was just a freelancer, who really had nothing to do with us, then because I sensed Reynolds did everything he could to avoid him afterwards, supposedly because he’d heard about those Mob connections-and he sure as hell didn’t depose him. It was like seeing a kid reaching for a cookie and then being told it’d been baked using horse blood or something. I just remember the contrast.”

We stayed the night in a motel outside Portland, hitting the sack almost immediately following our interview with Joseph Crowley and getting up well before daybreak to return home.

The drive was far different from what it had been the day before. Our mood, for one, was bleaker. Not only were we headed back to the confusing mire this case had become, but the complication of Crowley’s revelation was more troubling than enlightening. Once more, we’d been handed Jim Reynolds’s name in connection with something unsavory, and once again, it had turned out to be little more than an innuendo.

The scenery matched the mood. Surrounded by the predawn dark and cold, utterly abandoned by other traffic, we chased our own headlights for miles on end as if we were the only people left living on the planet. Past Manchester, after exchanging the interstate for Route 9, the effect was even more dramatic as we drove through the occasional town-and found the sole signs of life to have been reduced to the rhythmic blinkings of a few traffic signals.

Amid this funereal stillness, the sudden chirping of the cell phone made us both jump.

Since Ron was driving, I picked it up.

“Joe?” Sammie said. “You there?”

I spoke louder than I had answering. “Yeah. What’s up?”

“All hell’s broken loose. The Reformer’s coming out this morning with an article saying we’re targeting Reynolds for the Resnick killing. We just got an early edition. Derby’s madder’n hell and wants to meet with you and Brandt as soon as you hit the parking lot.”

“Is Resnick identified by name?”

“Oh, yeah. And he’s been pegged to the haz mat truck. Not only that, but your trip to Maine is mentioned, too.”

“Christ,” I muttered, and told Sammie, “We’re about an hour out.”

I hung up and updated Ron.

He thought for a minute before saying, “Remember what Kevin Daly said about explaining the case to someone, quote-unquote, over your way? I bet that was Katz or one of his people following my footsteps. As far as I know, I’m the only one Daly talked to from the PD.”

“Great,” I said, half to myself. “Which means we’ve sprung a leak somewhere.”