Open season

20

A woman was severely beaten in her apartment last night, apparently by the same man in a ski mask who has been responsible for a recent rash of crimes in Brattleboro. Starting with the shotgun killing of James Phillips by Thelma Reitz on January 3, this mysterious masked man, whom police have yet to identify, has been involved in a series of assaults, thefts, and possibly one other death-that of police Captain Frank Murphy on January 10-now officially ruled a traffic accident.

With this latest assault, however, a possible motive has been found for the unknown assailant’s previous actions. Susan Lucey, last night’s victim and a “part-time” prostitute, told this reporter that the man police have labeled Ski Mask forced his way into her apartment and demanded to know what she had told police earlier in the day about the death of Kimberly Harris, found murdered at the Huntington Arms apartment complex on September 15, 1983. Harris and Lucey reportedly worked together as prostitutes for a brief period several months prior to Harris’s death.

The Harris case, the most sensational in Brattleboro’s history, ended with the conviction of William Davis, who at the time of his arrest was the janitor of the Huntington Arms complex. Davis, a black Vietnam veteran originally from Baltimore, claimed throughout the trial that he had been framed and was innocent of all charges.

It seems the police might now be in agreement. Lt. Joseph Gunther, acting head of the Police Department’s Support Services, has been rumored for weeks to be investigating the old case. Indeed, it was Lt. Gunther who visited Susan Lucey yesterday before she was assaulted and who questioned her on her relationship with the late Miss Harris.

I stopped reading half way through and put the paper down. “Exciting stuff.”

Tom Wilson, the town manager, glowered at me. “Did you read it all?”

“I got the gist of it.”

“I want you to read it all. If I end up doing something you’ll live to regret, I want you to know why.”

I nodded and looked at the other people in the room-Brandt, Dunn, Patrol Captain Billy Manierre, and town counsel Robert Denby. They sat like boys outside the principal’s office. I went back to reading.

Katz had dug up much of what there was to dig, especially on the prostitute angle. Surprisingly, he still missed the connection betwesaid dth="0"›Ien Ski Mask’s early victims and the Harris jury members, as irrelevant as that was now. He also didn’t bring out a lot of what we were currently holding-all the forensic stuff, Harris’s time cards, her bank records, or even the fact that her name wasn’t Harris. All that just revealed how good he was at combining peripheral knowledge with some jazzy writing. Still, he knew more than we had officially released, and I couldn’t deny that the news of Susan Lucey’s beating came as a double shock.

I put the paper down a second time.

“Finished?” Wilson asked.

“Yup.”

“Just to give you the benefit of the doubt, is it true you saw Lucey and talked to her about Harris?”

“Yes. This is the first I heard of her being beaten up. I’d like to talk to her.”

“Talk to me first, assuming that isn’t monumentally inconvenient.”

“To be fair,” Brandt interrupted, “Joe would have had no reason to talk to you until now in any case. He reports to me. I report to you.”

“In theory, you mean.”

“I’ve kept you up to date.”

Wilson’s face reddened and he grabbed the paper out of my lap. “Then why the hell is most of this new to me? I had no idea Harris was a hooker.” He was tense, but under control.

“Most of it isn’t new. I’ve kept you apprised of the major elements in this case. The prostitute angle is less than a day old. You know a lot more than Katz does, and you’ll know even more before the end of the day. These are political and PR problems. They had to surface sooner or later.”

“I’d say they were legal ones,” Denby softly said.

Wilson glanced at Denby and nodded. “He’s right. We could be taken to the cleaners on this thing. I’ll give a shit about the politics when I’m up to my ass in lawsuits. How the hell did Katz make the Kimberly Harris connection?”

We all looked at each other. I finally stated the obvious. “He says it was through Lucey.” Wilson shook his head in exasperation. “I know that, for Christ’s sake. I meant, how did he find her?” There was silence in the room. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should ask him.” Denby said.

“What would he get out of a conversation like that?” asked Dunn. Brandt started fiddling with his pipe. “We could give him something-trade a little. Up to now, he’s been baying at our walls, trying to get in. If we let him in, he might at least tone things down a notch. The closer we get to cracking this thing, the more harm stories like that will do us. He might even be of some help if we approach him right.”

“That’ll be the day.”

Wilson held up his hand. “Fine; whatever. If you want to try playing footsie, it’s okay with me. I just want to know what’s coming next. I’m tired of being blindsided. The selectmen put me on the griddle every time we get together-and ter amp;withat’s been a lot lately-and I don’t have anything to tell them.”

“That was per agreement. You were willing to take the hot seat,” Brandt reminded him.

“What was agreed was that we should let as few people know what Gunther was doing as possible, until he was sure we couldn’t get out of this thing.” He shook the paper again. “Wouldn’t you say that time has come? In fact, wouldn’t you admit we missed the boat a little on this one? I’d have been a whole lot happier if the selectmen had read this with the dubious comfort of advance knowledge. As it was, the damn paper wasn’t even distributed before my phone started ringing off the wall.”

Brandt finally stopped fiddling and lit up his pipe. “We have no way of knowing when Ski Mask is going to pop up.”

Wilson shook his head. “You miss the point. As it reads now, the police department has been reinvestigating the Harris case for weeks, piling up data, stepping over a growing number of corpses, opening us up to Christ-knows-how-many potential lawsuits, and the hoard hasn’t been let in on any of it. I mean, Jesus, I gather Dunn here was given inside information. He’s not even a town official.”

“Amen,” muttered Dunn.

Wilson glared at him. “Tony, I was willing to play dumb with the board on the premise I’d be the first to know of any developments. You’ve probably gotten my ass fired, you know that?”

Brandt took the pipe out of his mouth and shut his eyes for a moment. Ten long seconds drifted by before he spoke. “All right. Let me talk to them. Until Joe and Frank went to Connecticut, we weren’t even sure Harris shouldn’t be left just where she was. A lot has happened since then; some of it, like Joe’s meeting with Susan Lucey, is so new we haven’t been able to digest it yet.” He pointed at the paper with his pipe. “That’s the real damage here. Katz blew the whistle before the players were ready to start. I do have one major misgiving, though, and it’s the same one I’ve had from the beginning. If I have to give everything I’ve got to the board, I doubt any of us will have to wait for the next paper before the word’s all over town.”

“Could that be any worse than the way things are now?” Wilson asked.

Brandt nodded. “Yes. We still have a lot Katz doesn’t know. If it gets out before we’ve been able to put it to use, all sorts of things might go wrong, some of which we might never even hear about.”

“For example.”

I interrupted here. “For example, we pretty much know Ski Mask got this whole thing started because he wanted the investigation reopened; what we don’t know is why. We’ve also got a pretty good idea that he’s not the only player in this game-there may be others whose motives are even murkier. Now if we just dump all we know on the table without playing with it first-at least for a while-we run the risk that Ski Mask or the other guys will recognize something we don’t and will proceed on their own, in private. It seems obvious right now that Ski Mask at least needs us to do his homework. If we don’t maintain that role, and allow him to dispense with us, we’ll either be left with the strong suspicion that we have the wrong man in jail, but with no way to prove it, or we might have a growing stack of bodiesta us to do s for which we’ll have no explanation. Either way, we’ll look like a traffic cop who’s being totally ignored by the traffic. If you’re worried about lawsuits, that’s when I’d advise running for cover.”

Wilson passed his hand across his eyes. “God. We’re not geared for this. Okay, Tony, I’ll call a special session for this afternoon or tonight-as soon as possible. You tell them what you want. But pretend it’s all you’ve got, will you? I mean, it’s not inconceivable that some of them might try to sue you for withholding vital information if they found out about it. Right, Bob?”

Denby nodded. “Or you for conspiring with him.”

I tossed Denby a salute. “Thank you, Robert.”

“He asked.”

Wilson stood up. “All right, all right. Let’s just do it and hope it doesn’t all blow up in our faces. Let me know how the meeting with Katz goes. It would be a big help if we got him to cool his jets a bit.” He got to the door and stopped before opening it. “Needless to say, gentlemen, this conversation is not to be repeated, right?” He stuck his finger in Brandt’s direction. “And Tony, never again-my playing dumb for you is over.”

Brandt, Manierre and I stayed behind.

“You certainly were chatty,” I said to Manierre.

He smiled. He was a large, gentle, grandfatherly sort, always immaculate in uniform, looking like the stereotype of the friendly cop from the 1950s, which he was. “Oh, I’m just a goldfish around you sharks.”

“Impressive, were we?”

“I was thrilled. It reminded me of Military Intelligence.”

Brandt tilted his chair back against the wall. “I wanted Billy to know what was going on.”

“Let me know when you find out.”

“I also got all those warrants and thought Billy’s men might be of some help. I told him what they were all about.”

“Can you spare anyone or do we pull in the state police?”

“How many are you putting onto it?”

“Everybody.”

“How about three from the morning shift and two each from the other two?”

“Great. What’s the story on Susan Lucey, by the way? Did she ever call us, or did she go straight to the newspaper?”

“She called for you, but no one knew where you were. She wouldn’t talk to anyone else and wouldn’t say what was wrong. I don’t know how she got together with Katz. Where were you, anyway?”

“With Martha Murphy. I forgot to call in. Where’s Lucey now?”

“She’s at home. We tracked her down after we read about the attack, but she refused to talk. There wasn’t much more we could do.”

“How bleft="0em" wiadly did he beat her?”

“I’ve seen worse. It wasn’t the beating, really. I think he scared the living daylights out of her.”

Brandt handed me the warrants. “Why don’t you guys set all this up? Use the interrogation room if you need space.” We both rose. As I put my hand on the doorknob, he added, “Don’t wander away without checking back. I’m going to try to set up a meet with Katz and his boss as soon as possible.”

Manierre and I gathered our troops. Excluding ourselves, we had six men. Between us, we had to request and search through the files of four travel agents, eight car-rental agencies, one airline, two taxi services, two bus companies, and one railroad. Each man took one warrant and headed out the door. Mine was for the Good Times Travel Agency. First, however, I went to my office to use the phone.

My first call was to the hospital to check on the blood sample Floyd Rubin had left there the day before. He was a type O, the same as Bill Davis, which ruled him out as the fetus’s father. Technically, it also meant he could be the semen depositor, pending an analysis by Kees, but I felt on safe ground ruling that out. It was a character judgment, but I was sure Floyd Rubin didn’t have it in him to kill this particular woman.

The second call was to Don Hebard at the Boston Police Department. He had been on our force about ten years ago but had found it too tame and uninteresting. Since his move to the city, he’d had his share of complaints, but never those two. I arranged to meet with him around 11 P.M. at Boston’s police headquarters downtown, after the usual chaos in their records department had subsided to a murmur.

The intercom buzzed a minute after I’d hung up. It was Brandt. “I’ve got Katz and Bellstrom in my office. You want to come over?”

“Christ. That was fast.”

“We’re a hot item.”

I crossed to the south side of the building and joined them. Katz was standing nervously by the window, as if waiting for an accident. His boss was sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him. Dick Bellstrom had been editor of the Reformer for over fifteen years. He was a rumpled moderate Democrat with good common sense, and he had a finger on just about every pulse in town. He also had a closet sense of global outrage that would pop out on occasion on the editorial page. Despite his laid-back looks, he was not a man asleep at the wheel.

I nodded to both of them and took a chair.

Brandt opened. “It will be no surprise to either of you that I was hoping we could talk a little about Kimberly Harris. First off, I’d like to congratulate Stan on his article this morning. It was very flashy and mostly accurate. It also caused a bomb to go off at the town manager’s office.”

Bellstrom chuckled. “Is he rallying the troops for a little damage control?”

“I’ll let him tell you what he’s doing. I don’t consider the article damaging. I do have my concerns, though.”

“I bet,” Katz said.

“Before I go on, I’d like you both to consider this consi

Katz looked at Bellstrom, who just nodded, still smiling.

“It is true we’ve reopened the Harris case. Certain discrepancies were discovered by Joe here that were missed the first time around. So far, nothing indicates that Bill Davis didn’t commit the murder, but some things have raised the possibility that he may not have been the only suspect.”

“Are you saying if you keep pushing at that possibility, you might come up with a different killer?”

“Maybe.”

“I can see why Wilson’s getting sweaty palms.”

“Well, he’s a politician. Sweaty palms are his business.”

“Still, they might cost you your job.”

Brandt nodded. “Mine and a lot of other people’s. But that’s the luck of the draw. If, in fact, we didn’t do our homework the first time on this, maybe a few heads ought to roll. The point is, we’ve come to a very dicey crossroads in this investigation, and I thought it might be a good idea for the four of us to get together and maybe come to some sort of understanding.”

“In other words, butt out of your business,” Katz said. Bellstrom laughed and reached out to pat him gently on the arm.

“Down, boy, down.”

Brandt resumed. “There was a lot missing from this morning’s story, a lot that would give it more coherence and that might also reduce some of the hysteria. People are starting to see this Ski Mask as a marauding cutthroat, randomly knocking people off. In fact, he’s being very methodical and has but one goal in mind. Now, I would love to share as much as we’ve got on him with you in the hope of setting the public’s mind more at ease.”

“In exchange for what?”

“In exchange for some advance warning on your future articles.”

Katz jammed his hands into his pockets, but kept quiet.

“You want to read the articles first?”

“Well, if not read them, at least hear about what’s going into them. This isn’t too ominous, by the way. It amounts to merely hearing both sides of a debate before publication-pretty standard practice.”

“When we choose it to be. There are a couple of problems I can see, the most practical of which is finding one of you guys in the middle of the night before we go to press. This morning’s story didn’t have much lead time, and I wouldn’t have been able to waste more of it chasing after you.”

“I understand. That’s an unusual circumstance.”

“There is one more important point. If we tell you what we’ve got before we publish, that opens the door to a lot of similar interference. People could legitimately lay claim to the same right we give you. Every board meeting, every feature article, every sports report would be open to the same scrutiny. We’d nevny. icleer be able to get to the printers.”

Brandt pulled his prop out of his pocket and started fiddling. “I understand. It’s hardly a new argument, nor is mine for that matter. In fact, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t even have this conversation. In our cases, it’s an I-do-my-job-you-do-yours kind of world-it has to be that way. But, and please pardon the cliche, this is somewhat of a special case. We may have put the wrong man in jail. We have to either find enough to get him off the hook, or nail someone else in his stead. If we don’t do one or the other, he stays where he is. The legal process put him in; it’ll have to get him out. But it can only do so with our help. If you folks find something and publicize it before we can nail it down, it might blow his chances at getting out. I don’t want to censor anything you might get; at the most, I might ask for a little time before you publish it.”

“I don’t like it.” Katz muttered. He turned away from the window at last and faced us. “I mean, it sounds swell and bighearted-you guys working overtime in order to clear an innocent man. But it doesn’t have to be true. I’m not calling you liars, but look at what you’re facing. There are two alternatives: you reaffirm Davis’s guilt and get rapped on the knuckles for having been slightly sloppy; or you discover he’s totally innocent, and you all get fired and sued within an inch of your lives. You’d like us to believe you’re hell-bent on suicide. I’m a little skeptical.”

“It is true,” Bellstrom added, “that by clearing everything through you first, we jeopardize the integrity of the facts as we find them. You could conceivably influence us to color things just enough to change their meaning. Look, Stan may not like to admit it, but we both know you folks are okay. We’ve worked well together over the years. But the fact remains that we’re lambs and tigers-I’ll resist saying who’s which-we’re natural enemies. We may spend most of our lives in perfect harmony, but that doesn’t mean that one morning Mother Nature won’t suddenly remind us of who’s who, and then it’s best friend-for-breakfast time.”

Brandt sighed. It wasn’t noon yet, and I could feel him staring ahead at a long, long day of similar conversations. “So. No deal.”

Bellstrom gave him his most sympathetic smile. I’ll grant him that-he had the perfect personality for this kind of discussion. “I’m afraid not, Tony, at least not formally. Let’s leave it that we’ll play it by ear. On the assumption that our hearts are all in the right place, that ought to be enough.”

Brandt gave him a weary look. “I’m sure Davis would agree.”

Bellstrom stood to leave and wagged his finger. “Cheap shot, Tony.”

Brandt nodded and stood also. “I know. Sorry. Look, the earlier offer still stands. I have to huddle with the board soon, but afterward I’d like to let Stan in on some of the detail stuff. There’s no point letting people think Ski Mask is more of a menace than he is, and what we’ve got won’t jeopardize what Joe’s looking into right now.”

“All right. Thanks. Is that okay with you, Stan?”

“Sure, as long as I don’t have to promise I’ll publish any of it.” Brandt shook his head. “Christ, what a hard-ass. I think you’ll consider it news, even coming from me.”

“That reminds me, Stan.” I asked. “How did you link up with Susan Lucey?”

Stan smiled and shook his head.

“Come on, Stan, give him that much.” Bellstrom nudged his arm. “It’s not like you’re revealing a source.”

Katz was obviously torn between keeping a secret and revealing his cleverness. He finally gave in. “I followed you. After you left her place, I had a chat with her myself. You made a big impression on her and she wasn’t very giving, although I sure as hell was-she’s very expensive. Anyway, I didn’t learn much, but I left her my number and told her to call me-that I’d make it worth her while.

“So she calls me in the middle of the night. She’s been beaten up; you’re nowhere to be found; she feels totally betrayed. She said she asked for protection and you ignored her. All of a sudden, she wasn’t so keen on you, so she spilled her guts. That’s about it. You ought to be nicer to your snitches.”

He was right.