Occam's razor

20

I rose early the next morning, out of long-standing habit, got ready for the day in a bathroom down the hall so I wouldn’t disturb Gail, and went downstairs to fix a cup of coffee and some toast.

It was still as dark as the middle of the night, making the house more intimate than I ever found it during the day. Somehow, with most of the lights off and all the artwork and elegant furniture obscured, I felt more at ease with my surroundings. Less like a visitor.

I washed my cup in the sink, put on my overcoat, grabbed the bag where I kept my gun, radio, paperwork, and various odds and ends, and headed outside.

The freezing air grabbed my nostrils like a pair of pliers, making me blink and catch my breath. It was short-lived, as always, and even comforting in an odd way, instilling in many of us who chose to live here a sense that by merely staying alive this time of year, we weren’t doing too badly.

I crossed the driveway to the garage, triggering the usual battery of motion-detector spotlights, which both ruined the mood and replaced the starlight with a confusing tangle of harsh glare and deep shadow. Inside the garage, I pulled my keys from my pocket-and suddenly froze.

Outside the garage, I heard the faint squeak of frozen snow under a carefully placed foot.

I dropped down, circled the car, and waited, crouching behind its passenger-side wheel well, breathing through my mouth, my chin tucked down so no vapor cloud would rise above my barricade and give me away.

I heard someone approach, pause, then turn slightly. After a long silence, a voice said tentatively, “Joe?”

I rose from my hiding place and found Stanley Katz standing awkwardly, looking slightly frightened.

“For Christ’s sake, Stan. You ought to know better.”

He laughed nervously. “Holy shit. I didn’t know where you went. It was weird.”

“Keep your voice down. Gail’s still asleep. What’re you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Reynolds. You read yesterday’s paper?”

“I had it shoved down my throat, thank you very much. What the hell were you thinking?”

He looked offended. “Printing the truth. It was all accurate, wasn’t it?”

“My God. Where’re you parked?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “On the street. I’ve been here half an hour. I wanted to catch you alone.”

I started my car to warm it up but then headed to where he’d indicated. “Let’s talk there. My heater takes ten minutes to kick in.”

He followed me without comment. Inside his smelly truck, I asked him, “A man goes into a bar, stays an hour, then leaves. On the way out, he stumbles, falls against another patron, mutters something incomprehensible, and wanders off. What’s the conclusion?”

Stanley looked at me quizzically. “He had too much to drink?”

“Wrong. He’s a teetotaler. But he was visiting a friend, has a speech defect, and stumbled because he’s near-sighted. If you’d written the story the way I first told it, it would be accurate, but everybody reading it would’ve reached the same conclusion you did.”

“Meaning you got nothing on Reynolds.”

I was surprised. A younger Stanley Katz would have started preaching along some thin line of logic, defensive to the end. This new cut-to-the-chase, realistic approach was much more appreciated. “Right. I think both you and I are being had. I don’t have any proof of it-any more than I have proof against him-but every time I hit him with the little I dig up, he comes back with a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“So he’s a good liar.”

“Or he’s telling the truth. It is possible, Stan. It happens.”

Katz thought a moment. “What’d you find in Maine?”

“That he defended a trucking company, bumped into Phil Resnick, and backed off as soon as he heard Resnick had Mob connections in Jersey.”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “He does?”

“Down, boy-stay with me here. Remember that night we visited Reynolds’s house and checked his car? It was because we’d heard it had been used to carry Resnick’s unconscious body to the tracks. Then we found the real car, dummied up to look like Reynolds’s-a clear-cut frame. Same thing with that tip you gave us about Reynolds being involved with Brenda Croteau. There were some pages missing from her journal, but nothing even vaguely linking her to him-on any front. And again with the deal in Maine-smoke but no fire. I think the game plan here is to combine our wild goose chases with the rumors you’ve been fed so you can write a story you think you’re putting together on your own.”

He mulled that over. “Either that or you cooked this whole thing up to get me to back off.”

“Back off what? We don’t have a case against Reynolds. I thought you’d want to know you’re being used.”

“So big-hearted. Why do you care?”

He had me there. “I’d like to know who your police source is. If he’s on the take instead of just being a motor mouth, I want his hide.”

But he was already shaking his head. “No way.”

I didn’t argue with him. I hadn’t expected him to agree. “Then do me a favor. Break a tradition-look this gift horse in the mouth. Draw your own conclusions.”

“How’s my story affected the department?”

I supposed that was something all reporters wanted to know, especially after they thought they’d hit a homer. “You haven’t done us any favors, and I think in the long run you’ll be wiping egg off your face. Whoever your Deep Throat is, he’s going to be feeling some heat.”

“What about Derby?”

I looked at him. “Why? You have something personal in this?”

Now he did look defensive. “No, but he’s been acting real political lately. I just wanted to know how he’d reacted.”

I opened the door to a tidal wave of freezing air. “Ask him yourself.”

He rolled down his window as I crossed the street. “What? What did I say? There’s nothing wrong with that. What’re you so touchy about all of a sudden?”

I didn’t bother answering. Aside from thinking his curiosity a little juvenile, I hadn’t found it that offensive. It was the suggestion of irresponsibility behind it that had propelled me out of his truck-that and the need to be free of him in general. Much as we scratched each other’s back now and then, I didn’t want it to become second nature. Besides, I’d done what I’d wanted to do-made Stanley a little pickier about the morsels he was fed and, more subversively, perhaps compelled him to act as a bird dog on our behalf.

If I could convince him that he’d been used to smear Jim Reynolds, then there was little that would stop him from trying to discover the truth behind the ruse. I’d seen Stanley Katz get angry before, and use a keyboard like a shotgun when his pride was stung.

At the squad meeting that morning, I followed Brandt’s recipe of the day before and told everyone our first priority was to analyze Billy Conyer’s past with a microscope-chasing down everyone he had contact with and finding out what they were up to-while being very careful not to sabotage the SA’s prosecution of Owen Tharp. I made it clear they were to think about what they were asking before they asked it. We each took names, culled from all the sources we’d accumulated from interviews, Brenda’s journal, and common knowledge, and set out to create a combination timeline/genealogy of the late Billy Conyer’s universe, hoping we could discover who his two colleagues had been, and maybe whoever had turned him into a killer.

Afterward, I signaled Willy Kunkle to follow me into my office.

“Shut the door,” I told him as I sat at my desk.

He took his time getting comfortable, tucking his useless left elbow between his body and the arm of my plastic guest chair, as if buying himself time. I imagined he thought he’d earned yet another trip to the doghouse and didn’t want to rush things.

“You all set?” I finally asked him.

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I got something extra I thought you might enjoy. All that stuff I just said about not stepping on the SA’s toes doesn’t apply to you.”

He looked at me without comment for a moment, a doubtful half smile on his face. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning I’m going to ask you to stick your neck way out. One point Jack Derby made no bones about yesterday was that he didn’t want Kunkle messing things up for him. He was worried that since the Croteau and Resnick cases involved some of the same players, you’d go straight to work displaying all your usual lack of delicacy.”

He laughed.

“But what I want from you,” I continued, “isn’t good manners-it’s a little subtle subversion. You heard about the tensions between Derby and Gail?”

“Sure. I never thought she was cut out for that job anyhow.”

“Be that as it may, she’s asked me for a favor only you can help me grant.”

The smile widened. “Yeah?”

“Gail doesn’t think Owen Tharp acted entirely on his own. That given his personality, he had someone pushing him to kill Croteau.”

Willy’s reaction was fully expected, echoing the way I’d felt initially. “So what? He killed her anyway-and the baby.”

“I know the logic-that just because he’s got problems doesn’t mitigate his crime. She’s not looking to get him off the hook. But she does think he was used like a contract killer-by remote control-and that if all we do is nail Owen, the guy pulling his string will get off.”

He was beginning to look very doubtful. “She know something I don’t? I didn’t hear anything about Owen being used, and I’m the guy he confessed to, remember? He didn’t say anything about being under orders.”

“I know, I know,” I conceded. “This is where you’re going to have to cut me some slack. This whole hypothesis is just a gut feeling. Gail’s sense of it is that Owen was made so dependent on someone that he was willing to do anything that person told him to do, especially if it was phrased right and he was suitably under the influence, which his urine and blood tests say he was. Gail asked me a while ago to look up the autopsy of Lisa Wooten-the girlfriend he said he was avenging.”

“Because Croteau had spiked her dope,” he finished.

“Except,” I said, “that her dope wasn’t spiked. It was a straight overdose.”

He didn’t speak for a few seconds, digesting what I’d said. I knew this meant more to him than the sum of its parts, since he had been the one to receive Owen Tharp’s confession. Unlike the rest of us, he’d heard the inflection behind the words and studied the face of the man uttering them. Instinctively, he’d been burdened with more than mere content. He’d been witness to meaning as well.

I didn’t doubt such distinctions had gone unnoticed at the time. Now I was hoping I’d triggered their reconsideration.

One of Willy Kunkle’s saving graces-so few in a man in need of so many-was his grasp of human character. He was dismissive, offensive, and occasionally abusive, but largely, I thought, because he’d been saddled with insight so clear as to make life almost unbearable. He saw through cant and affectation and self-service and moral cowardice with ease, and yet-for a lack of training or experience or pure simple faith-could find little with which to fight it. Except rage.

And the anger had been all that most people had been able to see, including Jack Derby. Which was too bad, because Willy, as I think Sammie also understood, knew more about the human animal than almost anyone I’d met. It was his secret and his curse.

It was also what prompted him to finally say, “I hate to admit it, but old Gail may be on to something.”

“If you do this, and it leads where she thinks it will, we’ll undoubtedly catch unholy hell from her boss. He’ll say we were working for Reggie McNeil.”

You might be. I’ll just be trying to put another bastard in jail.”

Over the next few weeks, life became an odd, slow, carefully paced minuet of assembling facts on several segregated levels. The detective squad-helped by the patrol division in dealing with the weekly menus of B and Es, bad check reports, and minor drug busts-constructed a paper trail of Billy Conyer’s last few months of life. Willy, while fulfilling his role in this effort, additionally wandered farther afield, examining the growing tentacles that linked Conyer’s world to Tharp’s, working discreetly, alone, and at odd hours of the day. He and I met occasionally to discuss what he’d discovered and wonder, like questioning chemists, whether any promising solutions were in the making. Meanwhile, Tony Brandt conducted his own investigation in pursuit of the department’s leak, fueling a paranoia that is never far from a police officer’s mind in the best of times.

In the background, Gail, who had no idea what Willy and I were up to, tried not to press me when we were at home, where we labored instead to bury our emotional concerns in a predictable domestic routine, using the pretense of overwork to stave off the inevitable reckoning.

The irony to this stage of a major investigation is that it looks so deliberately paced. The popular notion of a police department handling several homicides at once is that everyone works around the clock. In fact, it’s usually too much to ask-either of people’s passions or the department’s budget-to keep up an around-the-clock schedule.

So we all eventually became like workers on an assembly line, busy building parts of what we hoped would be an overall final product.

Ron, as usual, managed the information as it arrived, assigning it a roosting spot and keeping track of it on several oversized charts he’d rigged up in the conference room. On a daily basis, we met there and compared notes, watching the charts for changes as devoted stockbrokers might a ticker tape.

This scrutiny had an entertaining side effect. Many of the people we were watching led lives that defied the norm. We grew attached to favorite characters and either cheered or bemoaned their actions as we learned of them-as when, for example, we discovered that Billy Conyer’s brother Brian had at least once gone to bed with Brenda Croteau’s mother. Soap operas couldn’t compete.

Adding to this tangle of loyalties and associations were the moves and countermoves of Gail and Reggie McNeil, who were also involved in much the same research, racing one another to load up on their witness lists, ascertain competency, and determine who would depose whom and to what purpose.

Owen’s confession fell early to this maneuvering, when McNeil filed a motion to suppress on grounds that Owen had been too cold, exhausted, and scared by the likes of Willy Kunkle to know what he was doing.

And all of this played out to a steady drumbeat of newspaper articles, radio reports, and the occasional piece on the nightly TV news, alternating with an equally endless stream of updates on the progress of the Reynolds Bill through the state Senate.

Which was reasonable, given that the latter began taking on a life of its own, spreading in notoriety to the Boston media and beyond. Reynolds’s rugged likeness cropped up in magazines and TV programs far outside the region, and as the month of March slowly approached-and Vermont’s famed plethora of town meetings along with it-the name of Jim Reynolds became increasingly linked to the looming vacancy in the governor’s office. The early flurry of concern stimulated by Katz’s articles was slowly replaced by a naive overconfidence among Reynolds’s growing boosters that his idea might actually become reality-despite the ominous silence on the issue from both the speaker of the House and the various spokesmen from the law enforcement community. My personal feeling remained that, like the iceberg awaiting the Titanic, some pretty formidable forces were standing ready to stop Reynolds cold in his tracks.

On a brighter note, however, it looked like one of his early obstacles-and ours-would be melting to more manageable size. Stan Katz called me at my office one afternoon, more muted and abashed than I’d ever heard him be.

“What’s up?” I asked with real concern, thinking he’d been hit by some personal loss.

In a sense, he had. “I figured you’d like to know who’s been feeding me that false information.”

“About Reynolds?” I asked, struck by his use of the word “false.”

“Yeah. It was one of your boys in blue, like you thought. Cary Bancroft. You might want to tell Brandt. I got him on tape, had one of our photographers take a shot of us meeting-the works.”

Bancroft hadn’t been with us long and had made little impression on me. I’d written him off as one of the young transients that traipse through our department virtually without leaving footprints. I sensed now I might have been right about the length of his tenure but certainly not about his invisibility. This one was going out with a bang.

“Why, Stan? He was making you headlines.”

“I did like you said,” he admitted, sounding even more depressed. “I looked a gift horse in the mouth. I’m not sure what I did was legal, so I won’t give you the details, but I found out his bank account’s been getting padded at my expense. He was paid to feed me stories.”

“Who by?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t know. It was the old voice-on-the-phone routine, along with anonymous cash deposits. You want to chase it down, I’d start with the anti-Reynolds crowd, but good luck finding the source. To save a little face, I tried like hell to find out-I’ve known about this for a few weeks now-but I got nowhere. So it’s all yours.”

His dark mood precluded my being able to needle him, much as I was tempted. Instead, I tried my best being sympathetic. “Jesus, Stan, I am sorry. You can still make a little hay out of it when Brandt shows him the door-maybe make it into a cautionary tale. It’d be a good story.”

But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Fuck you, Joe. And if you guys do make a big deal out of this, you’ll live to regret it. I’m handing him over ’cause he broke the rules and he made me look like a jerk, but don’t push your luck. I’m still as ready as ever to chap your butts if you screw up.”

“Very graciously put, Stanley,” I said with a laugh. “I’ll be sure to pass your compliments along to the chief.”

In fact, there was no big flurry surrounding Bancroft’s departure. Brandt and Derby both agreed with Katz that discretion was probably best suited to everyone this time, and ended the whole episode with barely a murmur.

As satisfying as it was to have this problem put to rest, however, I was the first to acknowledge that its importance had been diminished by recent events. Reynolds was on a roll, the rumors that had threatened him early on all but forgotten-a fate I feared our case might suffer unless something broke soon from the underbrush.

Like Willy walking into my office, looking fresh from a meal of proverbial canary.

It had been some time since I’d seen him so well disposed, for despite his efforts-or because he’d had to be uncharacteristically light handed-he’d been having a tough time getting the cooperation he was used to. Also, he hadn’t been alone. With the SA’s office, Reggie McNeil, and the media all out there digging, not to mention half the police department, Willy’s fondness for the shadows had been thoroughly put to the test.

None of which seemed to be bothering him now. He closed my office door, leaned up against it, and said, “I think I got a hot one. You want to join me?”

“We going somewhere?”

“I am. I think I found Lisa Wooten’s supplier, but he’s skipped town. He beat feet for the hills after the bodies started piling up, and I want to know why.”

“What’s his name?”

“Eric Meade. Lives out in the boonies on the Auger Hole Road, near the Marlboro end. I would’ve done him on my own, ’cept I knew you’d get pissed, not to mention he has a fondness for firearms.” He smiled broadly at the last line.

I raised my eyebrows. “Think we ought to bring in more people?”

“Not if we want to keep this private. Plus, once he knows all we want is a conversation, he shouldn’t be too hard to handle.”

“Assuming he hasn’t already shot one of us.”

Willy waved that off. “No sweat. He’s an ex-Marine, but I hear he’s pretty peaceful. Got kicked out of the Corps because he lied on his application, not that he’d admit it. Anyway, I’ve got something I think I can use as leverage. I’ve dug up a candidate for your number one rat in all this.”

It was clear this invitation was a one-time offer. The visit to Eric Meade would take place with or without me.

“Okay,” I told him. “Have a seat and tell me who’s the rat.”

His eyes were shining with pleasure. “Walter Freund-from what I’ve been hearing, he makes Jamie Good look like he deserves his last name.”