Occam's razor

8

Based on What June Dutelle had told us about her daughter’s friends, we decided to pull in both Janice Litchfield and Jamie Good for questioning that night. A phone conversation with Brenda Croteau’s husband, James-safely tucked away in the Burlington jail-also added Dwayne Matthews to the list, supposedly Brenda’s current boyfriend.

In what amounted to a drawing of straws, I got Janice Litchfield. Willy and Sam got the other two. Ron and J.P. were sent to bed so at least somebody would be conscious the next day.

The police department has only one official interrogation room, the traditional small box with a one-way mirror. Since we knew Jamie the best, he being a repeat customer, he got the box, and Willy along with it. Janice Litchfield and I ended up in a small cubbyhole used by the department’s office manager.

Litchfield was in her mid-twenties, thin to the point of scrawniness, and equipped with spiky purple hair and all the standard hardware accessories, from tongue and eyebrow posts to a half dozen earrings running up each lobe. She also sported a rose tattoo on her temple, which I rather liked.

I had her sit in a straight-backed chair in the corner, while I remained standing. “Would you like me to call you Janice or Miss Litchfield?” I asked her.

She was sitting slouched over and knock-kneed, scratching at one set of painted nails with the other. “I don’t care.”

“All right. We’ll make it Janice. You want a soda or some coffee?”

“No.”

“Anyone tell you why we asked you to come here tonight?”

“No-I figured it was about Brenda.”

“How did you hear about that?”

“I just heard. Everybody did. It’s all over town.”

“They saying who did it?”

“No.”

“You have any ideas about that?”

“No.”

I reached back in time. “How long have you known Brenda?”

“Since before high school.”

“Middle school or around the neighborhood?”

“Middle school. I knew about her when we were kids, but I didn’t know her.”

“What was she like?”

Janice hunched her shoulders slightly, eyes still glued to her fingertips. As far as I knew, she hadn’t looked at me once yet. “Normal-you know.”

I had no idea what defined normal here, although I had my suspicions. “You describe her as a follower or a leader?”

“Kind of a leader, I guess.”

“How was she with boys?”

“Pretty tough. She didn’t take no shit from them.”

“That get her into trouble with them?”

“Nah. They kind of like that-sometimes.”

“Until they don’t get what they want?”

She looked up quickly, and just as quickly dropped her gaze. But I’d seen the smile. “You mean sex? That wasn’t a problem. She wanted it, too. She just didn’t let them control her.”

I picked up a feeling of envy there. “So what happened after high school? You two keep in touch?”

“Sure. We were best friends.”

“You must be pretty sad she’s dead, then.”

The fingers suddenly stopped their nervous dance. Her head tucked in just a fraction more. “Sure.”

I paused, considering my course. “Must be scary,” I finally said.

She didn’t answer.

“The two of you did some risky things together.”

She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“You worried that’s what got her killed?”

“Sort of.” It was barely a whisper.

“You may be right, Janice.”

Silence filled the room. I crouched next to her so I could look up into her face. Her expression was rigid with concentration. “Janice, I’d like to stop whoever did this from doing it again. What were you and Brenda up to that might’ve killed her?”

Her eyes slid over to me at last, her chin trembling slightly. She sounded bewildered. “It could’ve been anything.”

Of that, unfortunately, I had no doubt. For the next hour, I extracted details of a life as haphazardly brutal and careless as any in the urban front lines to our south. We kid ourselves in Vermont that because of the trees, fields, and our thinned-out, monochrome population, life is somehow saner up here. But it isn’t architecture, density, or racial mix that breeds despair and self-destruction. It’s the training and instincts we supply our young at home, and there Janice Litchfield and Brenda Croteau and a few thousand others like them had been as shortchanged in bucolic Vermont as any shattered child in the ghetto.

By the end of my session with Janice, I was armed with a long list of names, and a sense of confusion as deep as her own. Given what I’d learned, Brenda could have been killed for drugs, sex, money, or because the type of coffee she drank wasn’t the right brand. I was certainly no longer wondering how she could afford to live beyond the means of a welfare recipient.

Later, close to midnight, Willy, Sam, and I met around the long table in the conference room adjacent to the squad room. Each of us had pads of paper covered with notes.

“Okay,” I began. “Willy, why don’t you start off?”

Kunkle looked like he’d just stepped into something disagreeable. “If there was any justice, Jamie Good would be a permanent boy-toy in some federal pen. That guy is the slimiest piece of shit I ever met.”

“Meaning he gave you nothin’,” Sammie interpreted.

“I wanted to rip his head off.”

“Were he and Brenda tight?” I asked.

“He said they knew each other, had slept together, done drugs together. But that’s like asking puppies if they piss on the same newspaper. He said it didn’t mean a thing, and I believe him. I know his type, and I know him personally. He was having fun in there. I don’t think he killed her.”

“He know who did?”

“He’d like to. That’s the one thing that got him down. He would’ve loved to have held that over my head, but he couldn’t.”

“Or didn’t,” I suggested.

“He’s not that self-restrained,” Willy countered, “and I know him well. Much as I hate to admit it, I think he’s clean.”

We both looked at Sammie.

“I can’t say the same about Dwayne Matthews,” she admitted. “He says they were getting along fine, that he last saw her day before yesterday, around noon at her house, but he’s cagey. Denies ever doing drugs, although we got him down as a probable dealer; said he didn’t have a record, till I put it in front of him.”

“What kinds of stuff?” Willy asked.

“Penny-ante-disorderly, assault, petty theft, B amp;E, possession-usual kinds of recreation. Nothing armed, nothing lethal, nothing that had upward mobility written on it. We’ve never actually caught him at anything.”

“Janice told me Brenda was into everything that moved,” I said, “and usually got paid for it. Did Dwayne share that opinion?”

“Not really,” Sammie answered. “He called her a wild chick, but it was hard to tell if he meant sexually, criminally, or socially. He was real evasive. He did say he thought she drank too much and overdid it with dope. Gave me some sanctimonious shit about how he’d told her it was a bad influence on the baby.”

“I did a record check on Brenda,” Willy said. “Maybe Dwayne was vague because he didn’t know where to start. Her sheet covers prostitution, drunk and disorderly, possession of and selling a controlled substance, assault, probation violations, receiving stolen goods. My kind of woman.”

“That would explain hanging out with Jamie Good,” Sam muttered.

“Neither of you knew about her before?” I asked. “With a reputation like that?”

“It’s from here and there,” Willy explained. “She traveled around, mostly in-state. Good’s a hometown boy. Brenda was a wanderer.”

I wondered if we’d end up going outside of Brattleboro for our solution. Generally, these types of crimes occurred close to the nest, but Brenda’s restless background left that door wide open.

First things first, though. I tapped my pad with my fingertip. “Let’s compare the names each of them gave us. See if we can come up with some kind of family tree. Maybe someone’ll stand out.”

There are two major groupings for homicides: the slam-dunks and the who-dun-its. The slam-dunks, luckily for us and unhappily for fiction writers, are by far the most common. Someone gets pissed off, lashes out, and either waits remorsefully for us to arrive or at most hightails it home, leaving ten witnesses behind to point the way. With these, we sift through an excess of testimony, making sure the perpetual contradictions are explained (he was left-handed, he was right-handed; he was fat and short; he was tall and skinny). Basically, it amounts to legalistic traffic control, done in close cooperation with the prosecutors inheriting the ball.

Who-dun-its are much rarer. With them, we’re left on our own, interviewing people who don’t want to talk to us, conjuring up scenarios based on evidence and not wishful thinking. There’s also a sense of lost time, lost opportunity, and ever-vanishing prospects. Who-dun-its are like being adrift in a rowboat with the tide pulling you out to sea. Unless something turns up to reverse the trend, all that’s left is to watch the shore slowly sink into the horizon. In the movies, who-dun-its are action-packed, thrillingly progressive, and ultimately successful. In reality, they are slow, plodding, and often end up nowhere. If a bad guy in this country has the smarts to knock someone off with just a modicum of discretion, chances are pretty good he’ll never be caught. All the science, the networking, and the inspiration don’t come to much if you don’t have a name to begin with.

Which was why we were comparing notes.

It was routine in an interview especially-versus an interrogation, where you were usually pursuing a confession-to throw as broad a net of questions as possible. Who do you know, who did you see, who did you hear being talked about-were all questions designed to sift suspects like a colander. Sam, Willy, and I spent two hours sifting, formulating how each name connected to the rest, so we could get a better glimpse of the world Brenda Croteau inhabited before she died.

It is usually pretty dry work, so I was encouraged when, at Willy’s mention of Frankie Harris, Sammie grew wide-eyed.

“What is it?” I asked her.

Willy, who’d continued reading aloud, paused, saw her face, and repeated, “Frankie Harris-yeah…that does ring a bell.”

Sammie’s voice was strained. “He was at the poker party.”

I watched them both closely as Willy momentarily froze. “Overlooking the railroad tracks? The night the bum got whacked?”

“More than that,” he agreed, with none of his usual malice.

It was the party where Sammie had met her current flame. “What’s your new friend’s name, Sam?”

She flushed and said angrily, “It’s not Harris. It’s Andy Padgett.”

The quiet in the room fell like a loud noise in church-everyone noticing it, and pretending they hadn’t. Frankie Harris, after all, was no longer just a name being mentioned in the context of one killing, but of two. We all had to wonder what Andy Padgett might have to say about that, especially given his sudden interest in a cop.

I tried skirting the issue. “Tell me what we’ve got on Mr. Harris,” I told Willy.

For once, he was happy to cooperate. “According to Jamie, Harris was one of Brenda’s johns, but one she liked. He was a regular. He’s also clean-I ran him through the computer.” He paused slightly, still watching Sammie, whose eyes were glued to her notes. “I remember him from when we did the first canvass. Quiet guy, maybe early fifties.” He pulled his pad from his back pocket and flipped through its pages. “Yeah. Here he is. Typesetter, fifty-one, unmarried, lives on Frost Street. He was the one who said he saw the car with no headlights through the window, on his way to take a leak.”

“Sammie?” I asked. “Anything to add?”

Her voice still showed her discomfort. “I remember him. Seemed legit.”

“Have you and Andy discussed him at all?”

“Only that night. I don’t think they know each other that well. It was one of the other guys’ birthday. He was the connection between Andy and Harris.”

Willy referred back to his pad. “Donald Carter, age thirty-one, divorced, two DUIs, a disorderly stemming from a domestic dispute, and a disturbing the peace with loud music, all spanning the past eight years. Nothing within the past several months, when he got clipped for the second DUI. No jail time. Claimed he never saw or heard a thing, not even the train. It was his apartment, so he’s learned to tune it out, according to him. I think he’d tucked away enough that night to make him deaf anyway.”

“Anything to add to Carter?” I asked Sammie.

“Andy’s mentioned him,” she admitted reluctantly. “They work together at Naughton Lumber, in the mill.”

Naughton Lumber was a huge operation north of town, turning felled trees into lumber, molding, plywood, and pulp. One of the town’s larger employers, it was notoriously unscrupulous about whom it hired.

In the awkward pause following her statement, Sammie grew angry again. “So what? Willy’s probably related to half the people doing life in St. Albans. Doesn’t mean he’s crooked.”

Willy laughed. “Don’t be so sure.”

It was a typical crack, although once again I sensed him casting her a protective mantle. He and Sammie had always worked well together, while bitching like cats and dogs. He had a respect for her he’d never shown Ron, for example. But I’d never seen him shield her from anything-her or anyone else, for that matter.

“No one’s saying anything against Andy,” I told her. “But we have to look into this, don’t you think?”

“He doesn’t know Frankie Harris that well,” she repeated. “That’s all I’m saying. And I don’t know how Carter knows him. Maybe they went to school together or something.”

“Harris is twenty years older than Carter,” I reminded her.

She pushed away from the table and stood up suddenly. “For Christ’s sake. I knew this would happen. I didn’t expect it from you.”

She stalked out of the room, leaving her notes behind. I rose, grabbed her pad, pointed a finger at Willy, said, “Stay put. I want to talk to you,” and gave chase.

I caught up to her just shy of the front door, taking her by the elbow. “Sammie. Slow down.”

She didn’t fight me off but turned and leaned back against the wall, her face contorted by fury, embarrassment, and frustration. “Damn,” she said.

I gave her the pad, moving my hand from her elbow to her shoulder and looking her straight in the eyes. “Sam. What the hell’s going on?”

She averted her gaze. “I don’t know. I’m tired. It’s a little confusing, is all.”

“Being in love?”

She looked at me then, checking for any mockery, finding none. “I don’t know what hit me. I barely know him, but I can’t stop thinking about him. It was like an electrical connection or something.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal. Maybe you got it worse than some, but you’re also overdue. And nobody’s dumping on you because of it, least of all me.”

Her brow knitted. “That’s not the way it felt at the crime scene earlier.”

I shook my head. “I was pissed at you for showing up healthy when you’d told me you were sick. It made you look devious, and I was already mad at Raymo for playing cowboy. I’m not angry you’ve finally found someone to fall in love with.”

She pursed her lips and said quietly, “I don’t know if it is love.”

I smiled at her. “Sex, then. I don’t care. Whatever it is, it’s good for the soul. It’s also nobody’s business but your own. I’m not going to tell you people won’t talk, or aren’t talking already. Not only did this happen pretty fast, and in an unusual context, but it’s also out of character for the Sammie we’re used to-a Sammie you trained us to be used to. You’ve got to expect some flak for that, just like anyone else would get.”

She sighed once heavily and then nodded. “I suppose.”

I let her go. “You want to pretend to be like one of the boys, they’re going to treat you that way-sophomoric as it sounds. It doesn’t mean they’re really going after you. On the contrary.”

“I know, I know,” she agreed, calming down. “I’ve seen it enough times. It’s just hard being on the receiving end.”

“It would’ve helped if you hadn’t been so coy about it, taking sick days.”

She smiled ironically. “You really believe that?”

I conceded the point. “Okay. You would’ve caught shit anyhow. But now the cat’s out of the bag. You can relax. All right?”

“All right. Sorry I blew up.”

“Don’t be. It’s been a hell of a day, this thing came out of left field, and,” I added, raising my eyebrows suggestively, “I don’t imagine you’ve been getting much sleep lately.”

She laughed and punched me in the arm. “Lay off. You want me back in there?”

“No. Hit the sack, rest up, and I’ll see you later. Check in when you’re ready. I’ll finish with Willy and kick him loose, too. We’ve all done enough for tonight.”

I watched her go and then returned to the conference room. Willy was tilting back in his chair and gave me a lewd smile. “Sort out her love life?”

I ignored him, sat down, and asked, “Tell me about Andy Padgett.”

He gave me an exasperated laugh. “What do I know? She met the guy, sparks went off, they been making like rabbits ever since.”

“You telling me you didn’t run him through the computer?”

His small notepad was still lying open before him, but I noticed that this time he didn’t bother consulting it. “Age twenty-eight, been working at Naughton for three years, drove a truck for Rugby before that, unloaded groceries at C amp;S right out of high school, which he attended here. Lives in a trailer in West Bratt. Never been married, no kids, one dog. Owns a pickup and a Harley. No record outside a disturbing the peace when he was in high school, and an equipment violation when he was driving rigs, which went back to the owner.”

I was struck by Padgett’s having once been a truck driver. “What was your gut reaction when you met him, before he and Sam became an item?”

“Just a regular guy. Nothing special.”

I left it at that, sensing his discomfort. “What about the fourth member of this poker party. Who was he?”

Willy reached for his pad. “James Lyon, married, three kids, age thirty, works at Span-Lastic. Plays on a softball team with Carter-that’s how they’re friends. He’s clean as a whistle. I wrote down ‘nervous’ in my notes, but I don’t know if it means much. We do that to people, especially virgins.”

I rubbed my eyes. “What do you think about Frankie Harris being connected to both Brenda Croteau and the railroad killing?”

“Could be a coincidence,” Willy equivocated, then added reluctantly, “but we’d be nuts to just assume it.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “You better really look into him-family, friends, co-workers, the works. Also, get together with Sam later and chase down the list of common denominators we compiled tonight-put them under the same microscope. If the law of averages has anything to do with this, Brenda got killed over drugs, money, or both. June Dutelle might be more helpful there, too, if we press her a little harder.”

I paused, and Willy got up. “That it?”

“Yeah. We’ll be crawling all over White Birch Avenue for evidence when it gets light. You’re good at that, so if you can make it, I’d appreciate it, but make sure you get some sleep first.”

He gathered up his notes. “You got it.”

I stayed where I was for a while, thinking. Not about Phil Resnick, who was maybe the dead trucker, or Brenda Croteau, or her cast of dubious friends. I found myself wondering about Willy and Sam. Something was cooking there, at least on Willy’s part. Not only had he ignored his notes while recalling Andy Padgett’s particulars, he’d also known he had a dog.

That depth of knowledge wasn’t available through a criminal records computer.