Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

“After you provoked her with some pretty strong language. We have a roomful of very impressed witnesses.”

He fairly exploded. “Language? What the hell’s going on here? She accused me of raping your fucking girlfriend, and you’re talking about two-edged swords? Did all your fucking witnesses turn into dummies when that happened?”

“No, no. They got it right. They also saw you hightail it for your car and lock the doors against a small woman with a shoe. That got a few laughs. How much do you weigh?”

Several expressions chased across his face as he began seeing where I was headed. “What was I supposed to do?” he finally asked a little lamely, “punch her out? You would’ve nailed me for sure.”

I glanced over the patrolman’s notes once more. “You could’ve tried to defend yourself. You ‘ducked and ran,’ according to these people. One said you screamed.”

“Horse shit I screamed. What the fuck’s goin’ on here, Gunther? You jerk me around anymore and I’ll sue your ass to hell.”

I put the note pad into my coat pocket. “Straight? Okay, you press charges against her, and I’ll make sure the eyewitness accounts get circulated all over town. You don’t press charges, and I’ll also make sure she stays out of your way-with a restraining order, if necessary.”

He didn’t react immediately. Ironically, for a man whose prose made sewage look clean, his self-image was important to him. What he saw in the mirror was a bastion of conservative rectitude, attending town meetings and writing letters to the editor as a saint might stand by the front door of a brothel, warning all of the sins within. My offer, though painful, had its impact.

He glanced out the window at Wallis and the two patrolmen. “What’s to stop them from blabbing?”

“Me. Some word might get out from the crowd that was here, but that’ll just be gossip you can deny.”

There was a long pause as he stared out the windshield, considering his options. What he finally said both surprised me and helped explain his decision, which had less to do with vanity than I’d thought. “I didn’t rape your girlfriend.”

“You said all she needed was a good fuck.”

“I say that to a lot of people.”

“Saying it that time made you a suspect.”

I expected outrage, but he looked at me, genuinely startled. “But I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that.”

I let it stand at that. I didn’t want to pursue this without seeing what Kunkle and Martens might have dug up about Ryan’s whereabouts last night. I gestured toward Mary Wallis. “So what about her?”

He frowned and touched his lip. “Tell her to stay the fuck away from me, and that if I hear one more crack out of her, I’m suing for libel. And that goes for you assholes, too. Shut the fucking door.”

I drew back and complied. He fired up the car and spun its rear tires leaving the parking lot. Across the now-empty space, I looked at Mary Wallis. “You’re off the hook, with a few provisions.”

My first opportunity to see Ron Klesczewski’s handiwork came at around eight o’clock that night, not long after I’d filed a report about my meeting with Stan Katz, and a private memo to Brandt concerning the parking-lot spat I’d just arbitrated.

Ron’s command post reflected his penchant for order and tidiness. The room directly down the hall from the detective bureau-normally a wasted space in search of a proper function-had been transformed into a data-management center of classic design. Bulletin boards, desks, phones, in and out trays, rows of open cardboard filing boxes were all arranged clearly and logically, without clutter or duplication-an efficient bureaucratic information funnel, designed to guide every scrap of incoming intelligence, no matter how trivial, to an easily locatable parking spot.

I hadn’t expected to see much activity at this time of night. I knew Ron would be there-his personality dictated he’d probably move a cot in before long-and I knew at least one officer from each patrol shift was assigned to be there. What I found was four times that number of people, all of them immersed in work, shrouded by the sounds of typewriters, telephones, muttered conversations, and the vague odor of overcooked coffee.

Sammie Martens was the first one to see me standing in the doorway. Listening on the phone, she waved me over to where she’d staked out a claim at one end of a long folding conference table.

She jotted down a few notes, thanked whoever it was at the other end, and hung up, explaining, “Still canvassing Gail’s neighborhood.”

She rose and led me to one of the bulletin boards, which had been covered horizontally by a six-hour timetable, divided into columns fifteen minutes apart. The legend, Time of Assault , occupied the center-most column. Reading from her freshly obtained notes, Sammie filled out an index card with “car sound-southbound-un-witnessed,” and stuck it with a pin under the 4:00-4:15 label.

She stood back and explained the team’s progress so far. “We’re filling it up little by little. Some of them, like Dennis’s old guy going to the john, are pretty specific; others, like the one I just got, aren’t worth too much.”

I pointed to the only entry in the 3:30-3:45 column, a card stating, “Burgess returns home.” After freeing herself and pulling the pillowcase off her head, Gail had locked the time at 3:37. “What about that one?”

“Timothy Burgess-lives over a mile down the street. One of the patrolmen working with Dennis found him. Rock-solid alibi, seen leaving one place and arriving home. We checked him for priors just to be sure. Nothing.”

I scanned the entire board, noticing that even I made an appearance. “Anything interesting at all, even if it doesn’t fit the timetable?”

Sammie shrugged. “Maybe.”

She marched back to her table and pawed through a pile of notes, extracting a single sheet. “Harry Murchison, works for Krystal Kleer Windows and Doors. He was half the crew that installed two of Gail’s windows last year.”

She handed me the sheet-a printout from the Vermont Department of Corrections. “One count of sexual assault and battery, for which he served time, and an arrest for sexual molestation, which never made it to court. We haven’t contacted him yet, nor have we run him by Gail to see if he rings a bell.”

She hesitated a moment and then added, “Are you planning to see her soon?”

I handed the sheet back. “I don’t know. Probably. You been able to check out what Murchison was doing last night?”

“I asked around his neighborhood a bit-low profile. He has a girlfriend with a noisy kid, they like loud music, and they put down a fair amount of beer on the weekend, so they’re not too inconspicuous. But the closest I could get to pinning down his whereabouts was whether his truck spent the night at home.”

She paused, apparently for effect. “It didn’t, at least not the whole night. When the woman I spoke to went to bed at midnight, the truck was still gone. When she got up early this morning, it was there, and she says she thought she heard it coming back ‘sometime in the middle of the night,’ to quote her.”

My mind was running through the various ways we could get closer to Mr. Murchison without tipping our hand. “He on parole or probation?”

Sammie shook her head. “I thought of the same thing. No, he’s not, so we can’t use a parole officer to help us out. Except for maybe getting chummy with his girlfriend, I don’t see how we can get close.”

“Maybe one of our snitches will. Where’s Willy?”

She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Out there somewhere, poking around in other people’s laundry. This is his kind of case. I’ll try to find him and tell him to work on that.”