Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

“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.