Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

Slowly, reluctantly, Bernie did as he’d been told, peeling off pictures one after the other, moving faster, shifting his position so I could no longer see which ones he was looking at.

And then he stopped, one picture held out before him, crying openly now. “Johnnie… God damn it… ” He took the photo and placed it, facedown, against Gail’s breast. Her hands closed on his and he bent over, his cheek against her stomach.

Andrews began rubbing Bernie’s back, mouthing instructions soundlessly at Gail, who by now was crying also, a victim of her own nightmares. “Thank you,” she said with difficulty. “Thank you for helping me. Thank you for letting me sleep again.”

She raised his head in her hand and kissed him on the cheek. Andrews rose and helped Bernie to stand, and then escorted him to the bed. “Lie down. Your job is done. You’ve brought peace to yourself and others-peace and quiet. The war is over, Bernie. Time to sleep.”

He helped Bernie stretch out, smoothed his bathrobe and arranged his pillow. Bernie looked up at us all for a moment and smiled. “My friends,” he said quietly and shut his eyes, sighing deeply.

Georgia, who’d been curled up at the foot of the bed, rose, stretched, and resettled into the crook of Bernie’s arm. Instinctively, his fingers lost themselves in her fur.

We crept out, followed by the sound of her purring.

In the hallway, squinting in the glare of the overhead lights, we stood a moment in a tight circle, emotionally spent. Then, without comment, I extended my hand to Gail. She gave me the photograph.

I looked at it for a moment, trying to untangle the emotions it stimulated-the questions, the arguments, the doubts, and finally the acceptance that it might all be starting to make sense.

The picture was of Junior Chambers, NeverTom’s reclusive brother.

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.