The Ragman's memory

27

I was pacing the floor of the squad room when Ron Klesczewski entered, a concerned expression on his face. I had called him at home from the Skyview and told him to meet me at the office. Ever since the birth of his first child, I’d grown reluctant to disturb him after hours. Tonight, however, I had no such concerns. After so many frustrations and false hopes, I was angry, elated, worried, and most of all anxious to move forward.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“You’ve been digging into Hennessy and Levasseur. I need to know if Ben Chambers’s or BTC’s name ever surfaced in any of Hennessy’s black market dealings-before the convention center came up.”

He raised his eyebrows and removed his coat, draping it over the back of his chair. “How long before?”

“Could be years. I’m looking for some initial contact.”

He unlocked his desk and slid open a full filing cabinet. “You got it.”

I retreated to my office and called Tony Brandt at home. “Bernie pegged Ben Chambers as Adele Sawyer’s killer.”

Brandt remained silent for a long time, letting me twist in the absurdity of what I’d just said. I was glad I hadn’t broken the news to Jack Derby yet. Mercifully, Tony merely pointed out, “Maybe not the ideal witness. What else do you have?”

“I’d like to try something. Part of the reason people haven’t been willing to squeal on the Chambers brothers is fear of reprisal. But if word got out that their boat is sinking, that might change. Newspaper articles like this morning’s are not lost on people like Fallows and Matson, and even Hennessy. If they see that Tom and Ben are under fire, they’re going to be a lot more eager to cut a deal with us, not only for their own advantage, but to make sure both brothers get properly declawed.”

“Funny you should mention that article. Nice piece of timing. I never did hear back from NeverTom’s lawyer.”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely. “Lucky break.”

Brandt left it at that. “So what’re you after?”

“I want to bring Garfield, Knox, and Matson in again, tell them they either testify against the Chamberses now or go down with them. If it works, they may give us the evidence we’ll be pretending we already have-at least enough to stimulate a warrant.”

Brandt barely hesitated. “Okay. I’ll call Derby. I want him here for this.”

I chose to interview Harold Matson, the bank president, playing good cop to Sheila Kelly’s bad cop. And since Matson had a lawyer stuck to his side like a pilot fish, I asked Jack Derby to stand by too, in case I needed some quick advice.

But Sheila had done her homework well. Showing no emotion other than a surprisingly implacable toughness, she took Matson to task, point by point, through a tangled web of intrigue involving both Chambers brothers and the Bank of Brattleboro. Matson’s lawyer ran interference at first, until the brothers were shown to be exposed and vulnerable. Then he began fishing for ways his client might escape prosecution with the least possible damage. As I had hoped, two hours later we’d gotten Matson to agree to testify against Ben and Tom Chambers in exchange for the loss of his job, a probationary sentence, and a modest fine. To my private satisfaction, Matson mentioned that the article exposing NeverTom in the Reformer had been a major influence in his decision to come clean.

Sammie and Marshall Smith fared equally well with Eddy Knox. In exchange for leniency, he gave a chapter-and-verse reading on how to corrupt a public official. The biggest difference between Matson’s and Knox’s testimony, however, was that while the latter still maintained that all clandestine communications between NeverTom and him had taken place on the phone, the former owned up to having face-to-face meetings. This, as we all knew, was a critical distinction-as it would be to the judge we’d be asking to sign our warrants.

The zoning administrator, Rob Garfield, proved a dead end. Increasingly angry at being put under our microscope, he denied any knowledge of skullduggery, and further informed us that if we bothered him again without presenting hard evidence, we would be made to regret it. Tony Brandt, when he heard, merely rolled his eyes.

The final piece of truss work we tacked into the affidavit for search warrants of all and any paperwork of both Ben and Tom Chambers was Ron’s discovery that, four years earlier, Paul Hennessy had built a small rental property for Ben using one of his dummy fronts, thus establishing a connection between the two men that predated their mutual involvement in the convention center project.

By ten o’clock that night, I was on a private phone to Stanley Katz, telling him what we had, and what we were about to do with it.

He took everything down without comment before finally asking, “If you’ve got enough for a warrant, why’re you giving me all this?”

I was bluntly honest with him. “Because we might not find anything. I want Fallows and Hennessy to know it’s safe to come out of hiding, and I want other people who might’ve been screwed by these two creeps to know that now’s the time to speak up.”

“What about the Sawyer murder? Does she tie into this?”

I hadn’t told him about Bernie’s revelation. Tony’s reaction earlier had been all the encouragement I needed to keep that one under wraps. “We’re making progress, but it’s still too early. With any luck, and if we can get this Chambers avalanche rolling, all sorts of things will show up in the debris.”

“Are the Chamberses implicated in the murder?”

“Off the record? I can give you a strong ‘Maybe.’ ”

To my surprise, he dropped it. “Well, I got enough for now anyhow. I sure wish you’d stop calling me so close to deadline. This late night crunch routine sucks.”

I took that as a thank you and hung up.

As the affidavit was being prepared and a judge rounded up to sign it, I had patrol cars check out both the Chambers residence and the BTC offices on High Street, to see if I could locate both brothers. From the reports that came back, it didn’t seem that anyone was at the house. The lights at the office, however, were still burning brightly.

“Damn,” I muttered to myself.

Tony, still in my office, picked up my concern. “Is that a problem?”

“Could be. Ted McDonald told me once that NeverTom had informants all over town. If he caught word we brought Matson in again, he might’ve decided to cover his ass and destroy all the evidence. I’d like to move with that warrant as soon as we get it signed.”

Tony stood up, a small smile on his face. “Mind if I join you?”

It was an unusual request. The chief was less a cop than an administrator nowadays, but he had come up through the ranks. I also knew that for this bust in particular, he wanted to be there when the tables were turned on one of the most antagonistic selectmen he’d ever had to deal with.

“It would be a pleasure,” I told him.

BTC Investments owned one of the old brick buildings that stood on High Street’s steep slope, just before it T-boned into Main. Tall, narrow, and unremarkable architecturally, these structures looked painfully jammed together, as if the first one at the bottom of the hill had suddenly ground to a halt at the traffic light and forced all the others to collide and compress like passengers in a bus wreck.

It was an abandoned wreck at this time of night, however-dark and silent. In midweek, midwinter, and after hours, Brattleboro tended to fold up like a backwoods village. Glancing up at the address as I got out of the car, I could see why the patrol unit earlier had made such a quick and accurate assessment of BTC’s occupancy-theirs were the only lights on in any of the surrounding buildings.

There were four of us-Tony, J.P., Sheila Kelly, and me. The other team, led by Sammie Martens, was already on its way north, to Eaton Avenue and the Chambers home.

“Front or back way?” J.P. asked as we gathered on the sidewalk.

I looked at the door facing us. “Might as well go through here. I don’t even know where the back door is. Most of these buildings have been turned into mazes.”

We trooped inside, located the ancient, phone-booth-sized elevator, and rode creakily to the top floor. Just as we were almost there, Sheila sniffed the air. “You smell something funny?”

The door slid open as if in response, and the small space we were in filled with the acrid tang of smoke.

“Damn,” I swore, running toward the door marked “BTC Investments,” around which I could see thin, gray tendrils leaking into the hall. “J.P.,” I called back over my shoulder, “find a fire alarm.”

With the other two close behind me, I paused only briefly at the door, checking it for heat, and then threw it open and burst in. Ahead of me was a large, high-ceilinged room, possibly once an enormous storage area, now segmented into office cubicles by interlocking waist-high panels. A wide, central walkway led straight from the front door to the back of the room; and it was there, as if lost in a fog, that Ben Chambers, a wet handkerchief tied across his mouth and nose, stood grabbing documents from a row of open filing cabinets and stuffing them into a metal trash can filled with burning paper.

I broke into a run.

I was about twenty feet away when he saw me, a thick wad clutched in his hand like so much laundry. But instead of bolting for a back door, or merely yielding to overwhelming odds, he caught me by surprise. Ignoring what must have been excruciating pain, he dropped the papers, grabbed the hot metal trash can in both bare hands, and threw it at me with all his strength.

I instinctively dove to my right, behind one of the cubicle panels, and crashed heavily onto the floor against a desk. The can sailed overhead and exploded in the middle of the walkway, in front of Sheila and Tony. Sheila let out a scream as her momentum carried her right into the flames.

I scrambled to my feet and saw Chambers vanishing toward a far corner of the room. Tony had already grabbed Sheila from behind, pulled her free of the flames, and was stripping his coat off to extinguish the few flickers on her clothing.

Seeing me hesitate, he shouted, “Go, go, go. Get the son of a bitch.”

I turned on my heel and gave chase.

Chambers had disappeared down a narrow, dimly lit hallway. Pausing on its threshold, I closed the door behind me to cut off the noise and listened. Vaguely, as if from very far off, I heard the clattering of footsteps, half-running, half-falling down a set of stairs.

I moved quickly along the short hall, checking each door until I found the one opening onto a brick-walled stairwell. There, the sounds I’d heard so dimly echoed clearly from below. I headed down, three steps at a time, just barely keeping my balance. “Chambers-stop where you are,” I shouted. “This is the police.”

My words sounded tinny and futile against the fear I knew was driving the man ahead of me. I didn’t bother repeating myself.

Like two magnetized toys with similar polarities, we sped downstairs, never closing the distance between us, never setting eyes on one another. We ran as if isolated and alone, both of us stimulated by the pounding of the other man’s feet on the metal-edged steps.

Near the bottom, a loud crash killed the effect, and suddenly the only sounds left in the stairwell were my own. I descended the last two flights to find a second hallway, this one wider and longer, at the back of which was a wide, heavy fire door. Again pausing only briefly, hearing the muffled din of approaching sirens from outside, I pulled open the door and found myself looking down a last set of stairs into a dark, cold, and very quiet cellar.

Using the light spilling out of the corridor behind me, I groped for a switch, flipped it on, and slowly, gun drawn, began edging my way down. Reminiscent of the cave-like, dirt-floored basement in which I’d interviewed John Harris, this one was strung with intermittent bare bulbs, casting as much shadow as light, and heading off along a labyrinthine selection of passages.

Pausing on the last step, however, I began thinking the choices facing me were perhaps of little concern. Chambers had not used the light switch, and upon opening the fire door, I hadn’t heard a sound, both of which implied he had gotten himself cornered-or that he wasn’t far from where I was standing.

I placed my back to the nearest wall, suddenly aware that our roles might have just been reversed, and silently cursed my forgetting to grab a radio on the way out of the squad room.

But backup would be on the way eventually. If I was right about Chambers being boxed in, my staying put wasn’t such a bad strategy. Nevertheless, acutely aware of the dark niches and shadows confronting me, I began looking around, plagued by the concern that he might have somehow gotten away, and that the basement was silent for good cause.

My eyes went to the dirt floor and there found the explanation. Scratched into the greasy soil was a fresh quarter-circle arc, radiating out from what appeared to be part of the wall. Crouching down, I studied the wall, actually a rack of wooden planks spanning two ancient brick pillars, and found where it was discreetly hinged. I moved to the other side, looking for a door pull or handhold, and heard the tiniest of noises-just enough to make me move my arm up defensively-before I was catapulted backward by the door flying open against me.

My left arm absorbed what would have been a direct shot to the head, but I was thrown against the opposite wall and had the wind half-knocked out of me. Sprawled on my back, I saw Ben Chambers loom briefly before me, a two-by-four in his hands. I aimed my gun in his direction and fired.

Unharmed, he turned and ran into the darkness behind him, the sound of his retreat increasingly muffled, dull, and subterranean. As I struggled to my feet, dazed and with my arm throbbing with pain, I realized where it was he’d been hiding. The back of this building faced the Harmony parking lot, a block-sized quadrangle enclosed by a ragged wall of banks, businesses, and apartment buildings. In the days before oil, coal had been used to heat several of these places, and I had heard of at least one tunnel, supposedly long since filled in, designed for the distribution of coal throughout the block. As I stumbled down this narrow, musty, utterly black void, my arms outstretched before me, a tiny detached part of my brain marveled at the fossils left in the wake of a town’s march through time. I wondered at the happenstance that must have led to Ben’s discovery of this curiously convenient relic-and at the personality that had chosen to keep it secret.

Following the sounds ahead of me, I continued running blind until a dull glimmer of light and a blast of cold air from another door being thrown open indicated I wasn’t just nearing the end of the tunnel, but approaching the outdoors as well. Where I ended up, after passing through a second disguised panel, was a large, dark, former coal bin, filled with cardboard boxes belonging to the businesses overhead, and equipped with an ancient iron ramp leading up and through a gaping bulkhead. Through it, I could see stars, a streetlight, and part of an alleyway wall.

Wary of a second surprise as I surfaced to street level, I climbed the ramp gingerly, to be greeted by the angry bellow of a car horn somewhere down the alley to my left. Emerging into the night, I saw Chambers waving his arms in the middle of Elliot Street, in front of a pickup truck now skewed crookedly across the road. As I began running down the alley to intervene, the truck’s driver exited angrily from his cab and was smoothly laid out by one swipe of Chambers’s club. Barely breaking stride, Chambers threw the weapon aside, slipped behind the wheel, and gunned the engine.

I reached the street just as the wheels spun back to life, slithering wildly for a grip on the snow-clad surface of the road. The truck slid past me, just missing its former driver. Without thought or plan, I threw my gun into the bed and grabbed the tailgate with both hands, hoping to vault gracefully into the truck and put an end to this frantic idiocy. Instead, I was instantly pulled off my feet, and ended up hanging on for dear life, watching the road speed by below my nose.

Slowly, fighting the pain in my left arm and the lurching motion of the truck, I chinned myself up to the gate and after several attempts managed to get a knee onto the rear bumper. There, hanging on grimly, I paused, gasping for breath.

Chambers was speeding west along Elliot, away from downtown and parallel to the Whetstone Brook. Elliot is only a half mile long before it becomes Williams beyond a four way intersection, and it was only here, where Chambers had to slow briefly, that I was able to hook my leg over the tailgate and begin to work my way forward.

This, however, was still not easy. Chambers had seen me hitch on, and began jerking the steering wheel back and forth, trying to throw me off. Clutching on to the side-rails, my feet wedged against the wheel wells, I impotently watched my gun as it careened around the truck bed like a gravity-resistant pinball.

Such maneuvering, however, was ill-suited to the road conditions, and eventually Chambers overdid it. The truck began sliding sideways down the street, the spinning of its wheels now only exacerbating the loss of control. All thought of catching this man was overwhelmed by the desire to simply survive.

The end of our madcap journey came with merciful grace. Bypassing all guardrails, utility poles, parked cars, and trees, we plowed into a thick, soft, energy-absorbing snowbank. The impact sent me flying through the air like a basketball, but even in mid flight, I was glad to be free of the truck. I landed half in the freezing water amid a thick cluster of dead reeds.

My anger overwhelming any remnants of caution, I scrambled up the stream bank, vaulted over the half-buried hood, and wrenched open the door. Ben Chambers, small and frail, his eyes wide and his sooty forehead smeared with blood, stared at me plaintively.

“Please-don’t hurt me.”

I looked at him in stunned silence, torn between responding and tearing his head off, and finally managed instead, “You’re under arrest.”