Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

She stared at me. “Danny. You know God-damn well he tucked Walter out of sight ’cause he was on the payroll. No frigging way that’s some kind of fluke.”

I didn’t disagree. “What about his brother?”

“Same thing. They’re in it together. One guy does up-front showboating, the other one breaks legs and raises the money. All we need now is enough to justify a warrant for all his paperwork, and I bet we get him cold.”

I remained silent in the face of her enthusiasm. “You don’t think so?” She challenged me.

I hesitated before answering. “I don’t doubt Danny’s got dirt under his nails, and I don’t doubt Mark wants to be governor. I do wonder how neat and tidy it all is.”

Sammie was dismissive. “But it is neat and tidy. That’s what’s fouled us up from the start-Phil Resnick, Owen Tharp, Brenda Croteau, Walter Freund, Billy Conyer. All of them were like cobwebs hitting us in the face, keeping us from seeing the root cause of it all. If you take it back to the Mullens, it gets real simple.”

I thought back to what was the biggest objection to William of Occam’s famous razor in his day-that if the answer to a problem was arrived at by extracting or excluding all pseudo-explanations, who was to decide which of those was superfluous and which had merit? Might the process not become too simplified and miss a vital truth?

I decided to hold off debate and take advantage of Sammie’s reborn energy to get her to open up a little. “I’m glad you got the bit back in your teeth.”

That caught her by surprise. She looked out the side window at the passing darkness for a while before finally saying, “Yeah, well.”

“I owe you an apology,” I continued. “I think I’m partly to blame for what happened between you and Andy.”

She switched her gaze to me. “How?”

“After I talked to him about hanging out at the Dirty Dollar, drinking with Billy Conyer and the others, I dropped the ball. I knew Brenda used to go there, too. It would’ve been logical to find out if they knew each other-I did ask him, but only in passing. I should’ve checked into it. If I had, it might’ve made things easier for you.”

She merely shrugged. “I doubt it. Any way you look at it, he lied to me. Wouldn’t’ve mattered when I found out.”

“You really loved him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Whatever that is.”

“Don’t be so cynical. It doesn’t make you a sucker because you fell for the wrong guy. Everything in life takes practice, otherwise every teenage hot flash would end up in a lifelong commitment.”

She flared up a little. “I’m not a teenager.”

I kept silent, hoping I’d uncorked things enough that they’d start flowing on their own.

After a pause, she added, “It just felt so right. He was really good company.”

“You sure you were right to dump him?”

She surprised me by sighing tiredly. “Yeah. You know, it’s funny, saying what good company he was. It’s almost like hearing someone else talking. He wasn’t that good company. To tell you straight, he was mostly just terrific in bed. And I was really horny. Sounds pathetic, but that’s what I miss the most right now. I never did have what I see with you and Gail-the deeper stuff.”

I laughed. “Better not go too far with that. We’re looking for a place for me to live right now.”

She stared at me in total amazement. “What?”

I flapped my hand dismissively in the air, “It’s not that big a deal. We’re putting things back to where they were before she was raped. If anything, it’s a sign of restored health. We lived apart all those years because we knew we were probably too independent to share the same roof. Not that it was a bad experience-it was actually kind of nice-but you got to stick your neck out sometimes to make things work. Gail’s strong again, and she needs her space.”

“And you?”

I thought of how poorly words stand in for one’s feelings sometimes. Reducing all that Gail and I were going through to a few snippets of rationalized thinking made it feel trivial and painless, which it definitely was not.

But Sam didn’t need to hear that right now.

“It works for me, too. That house was always a little big for my taste, and it looks like Gail’ll be commuting a lot to Montpelier when she starts up with StayGreen. I think I’d be better off with a small place I can call my own. I’ve been missing my old habits. I like to play music and read. I’ve been thinking of setting up a woodworking shop, like I had when I was a kid.”

Sammie still seemed shocked by what I was admitting.

“You know,” I told her, “sometimes the trick to making a relationship work is realizing you don’t have to see eye-to-eye on everything. You don’t have to like the same things, or keep the same hours, or have the same ambitions. You don’t even have to live in the same house. If you admire and respect and love one another, the rest is just details that can always be worked out. I think a lot of people fall apart because they get tangled up in a skirmish they turn into a major battle.”

“You telling me something here?” she asked a little sharply.

“I doubt it’s anything you don’t already know. You’re an aggressive, type-A perfectionist. That’s good on the job-a bit of a pain sometimes-but you got to learn to shift gears when you’re at home. Didn’t you like staying home when you were with Andy, just putting your feet up and watching TV or whatever?”

She didn’t answer. The hurt she was feeling was eloquent enough.

My concern that Sammie was overrating the Mullen brothers-to the exclusion of all others-was eased the next morning when Harriet told me over the intercom that a woman was waiting in the hallway to see me.

I stepped outside to find Sandy Corcoran sitting on the park-style bench we kept there for people awaiting Breathalyzer tests or to settle their parking tickets. She was still rigged out in black-heavy boots, a leather jacket, and several chains looping this way and that-but her demeanor was significantly more civil.

“Hey, Sandy,” I greeted her. “What’s up?”

With a hint of medieval clanking, she reached into one of her pockets and handed me a key. “Belonged to Walter. With him dead, I figured maybe you should have it.”

I held it in my palm. It was obviously to a safe-deposit box. “He give it to you to hold?”

“I guess. He called it his insurance policy and told me to hide it where no one could find it. ’Cept him, of course.”

“You know what it is?”

She shook her head and stood up. “Don’t want to neither.”

With that, she thudded down the hallway.

It took some doing finding the bank that owned the key, and even more on Jack Derby’s part to legally fit the key to the lockbox and take hold of its contents. When he did, what we had was a single cassette tape.

Given what we’d all been through so far, it seemed only fair to share the tape’s contents with everyone involved, so the premiere took place in Derby’s conference room, with most of my squad, most of his office-including Gail-and Tony Brandt attending.

J.P. waited until we’d settled down before hitting the play button. Walter Freund’s voice filled the air. “I got him out of the motel, like you said. He’s stashed at a friend’s place.” The other voice was obviously on the far end of the phone line.

“What’s he saying?”

“Same thing-he wants to be taken care of.”

“Or?”

“Or nothing. He wants to be checked out. He’s scared he’ll get cancer or something. He looks like shit. And he’s probably right-that junk rotted his clothes, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t care how he looks. I want to know if he’s getting an attitude.”