Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

“Want me to keep going?”

“No,” he muttered, rolling down the window. Mary Wallis was one of the women who’d been attending Gail at the hospital, and one of Tony’s prize antagonists. An outspoken advocate of women’s rights, she was dedicated, hard-working, and utterly dependable when it came to the cause, but she could also be dogmatic, narrow-minded, and combative-the type of partisan that made feminists like Gail and Susan Raffner true connoisseurs of a gift horse’s mixed value.

“Hi, Mary,” Tony called out. “What are you doing here?” She was obviously not in a sociable mood.

“I’ve been looking for you. What’ve you found out?”

Brandt looked apologetic. “We’ve got everybody working on it, Mary-”

Her eyes narrowed, “Which means you’re stuck. What about Jason Ryan?”

Tony turned briefly and looked at me. I merely raised my eyebrows. Jason Ryan was well known to us-and anyone else who regularly read the letters to the editor in the Reformer . A local restaurant owner, he was a major town crank, finding conspiracies under every rock and proclaiming his discoveries from any available pulpit. The police department was one of his supposed regular dens of iniquity, apparently a clever cover for a major drug ring, among other things.

“What about him?” Tony finally asked.

“Have you questioned him? He threatened Gail at the last selectmen’s meeting-said he knew exactly what she needed to get her off her high horse.”

Gail hadn’t mentioned it to me, although that came as no surprise-it sounded like the kind of thing Ryan leveled at almost everyone he met. But this was no time to be dismissive. I leaned forward to better make eye contact. “What was the nature of the disagreement?”

“He was there to protest the wording of a sexual-harassment clause in the new town employment guidelines. He got ugly over it, raving about the dykes and fags and whatnot.”

“Sounds pretty typical,” Tony said softly.

It was the wrong response. Wallis stuck her face closer to his. “You should know, considering how long it took you to upgrade the wages of your own female employees.”

Brandt’s voice went flat. “That was years ago. I had to follow the town attorney’s rules of procedure. You can’t change everything overnight.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but I interrupted. “Mary, this run-in with Ryan, did Gail get into it with him, or did he just foam at the mouth a little and take off?”

She let go of the door, shaking her head in disgust. “Jesus. One of your own men had to come in and escort Ryan from the room. He was threatening her, for God’s sake, and you don’t know a thing about it.”

Tony muttered, “Let’s go. We’ll look into it, Mary-thanks for the tip.”

She looked at him grimly.

I drove by the patrolman who’d been listening to all this with a half smile on his face-the small joys of hearing a boss reamed out in public-and continued slowly up the long, steep driveway.

Brandt rubbed the side of his nose with his finger. “That was a little embarrassing. Did you know anything about it?”

“Nope. Gail never mentioned it, and it wasn’t in our daily reports.”

“The board met last Thursday, didn’t they? Let’s find out which of our people was asked to throw him out. I think we ought to dig into this a bit.”

I smiled as I parked and cut the engine, wondering who was talking-the cop or the politician. Both sounded worried.

All the earlier activity had ceased. There were no more lines of searchers crossing the field like grouse hunters looking for lost change, no reporters lurking at the boundary lines. The house, apart from four cars parked outside, looked empty and forlorn, standing out against the flat, gray sky, its windows blank. As we slammed our doors, a patrolman sheepishly stepped out onto the deck from inside.

We climbed the outside steps to join him. His name was Marshall Smith-a native Floridian who always took on a slightly bereaved look around this time each year, as summer’s warmth began to wilt. He was wearing a coat, unlike us, and it was tightly buttoned up.

I opened the door for Tony and motioned to Smith to follow suit. “No point getting cold. Where’s J.P?”

Smith pointed across the broad central space of the house. “Downstairs bathroom. You just missed Ron-left about ten minutes ago.”

We found Tyler standing on the toilet seat, scrutinizing the sill of a single high window and muttering into a small tape recorder.

“Find out how he got in?” I asked after I’d heard him snap the recorder off.

J.P. pocketed his machine and picked up the camera from the top of the toilet tank. “I think so; from the evidence, I’d say it was through one of the living-room windows.” He focused on the windowsill, took a shot, and then climbed down.

“What about that?” I pointed at the high window.

“It was locked and painted shut. I’ve documented all the windows, just in case it comes up later.”

That fit Tyler’s character perfectly-a scientist in cop’s clothing. His job description was as broad as the rest of ours, encompassing all the usual duties of a small-town detective; but where some of us relished working the streets and the snitches, J.P. was most at home in forensics. I often wished we had both the budget and the business flow to have him specialize only in that.

“You about finished?” I asked him.

“Yup. That was my last stop.” He led us toward the living room. “As far as I can tell, the guy entered through here, using a knife or a shim to slide the lock back on the window.”

He kneeled on the sofa in front of the row of sash windows and pointed to the middle one. “This is the intriguing part, and what makes me think whoever did this was invited inside the house at least once before: See this lock?”

He manipulated the ancient clasp that swiveled from the top of the lower window frame to grasp the bracket attached to the bottom of the upper frame. It swung to and fro so loosely that he barely had to touch it.

“Just slipping a blade up between the frames from the outside is enough to pop this open. In itself that’s no big surprise-these are notoriously lousy locks-but this is the only one in the house that’s this loose, and the only one of the older windows to open easily. In fact, all the others are either jammed or painted shut, or are newer windows with more pickproof locks.”

Tony frowned and unconsciously pulled his pipe from his pocket and began filling it. Tyler’s not protesting was a sure sign he’d finished his search.

“Any prints outside the window?” I asked.

J.P. shook his head. “Ground’s dry and hard. Dennis and his crew didn’t find anything outside. I did come up with something here, though.” He pointed at the sofa he was still kneeling on. “A trace of vegetable matter. Assuming he did enter this way, he had to step on the sofa to get to the floor, so I’m hoping what I found came off his shoe.”

I looked dubiously at the dozens of house plants that Gail had placed on almost every flat surface available. Tyler answered my question before it was out. “I took samples of all the plants to rule them out. I’d also like to remove the lower half of this window and replace it with plywood. Some tool marks were left on the wood and the lock. If we find this guy, we might be able to match his pocket knife, or whatever he used, to the marks.”

I nodded my approval and turned to face the building’s interior. “So you think he entered here, went straight up to the bedroom, and then left by the front door?”

“Yeah.” Tyler led us from the living room to the staircase leading up to the bedroom. “And by now, I’m almost positive he brought both the knife and the rope with him. I found Gail’s knives in a rack in the kitchen, all arranged by size. There don’t seem to be any missing, and they’re all clean as a whistle.”