Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

Unfortunately, I’d already had lunch at my desk and had to settle for the pie and some coffee.

Win Johnston was a pleasant-looking man, neither fat nor thin, short nor tall, with the kind of face people could never recall and a manner and voice best described as bland. When he was a state cop, he could make almost anyone open up. Now as a private investigator, he could nose around without drawing attention or leaving much of an impression. He was very good.

He joined me in ordering some pie for himself.

“Nice work you been doing,” he said once the waitress had delivered our orders.

“Which might’ve been speeded up if you’d shared a little.”

He smiled and cut into his pie. “And violated a contract in the process.”

“Can you tell me now what you were up to?” I asked.

“Some of it, sure. Not all.” He took time to savor a mouthful with a contented smile. I didn’t press him.

“The initial investigation you know about,” he finally resumed. “To dig into that office break-in. But it wasn’t quite as unfocused as I implied when you asked me. Reynolds suspected Mullen from the start. He’d known for a couple of years the two of them were in competition, and that sooner or later things might turn nasty. The break-in was like a warning shot.”

“Which Mullen are you talking about?”

“Either one. They’re joined at the hip. Danny feels he owes his younger brother pretty much everything, so there’s not much he wouldn’t do for him, and Mark’s come to rely on his always being there. They’re like two halves of a pair of scissors that way.”

“Very poetic,” I said sourly. “Does that make Mark a killer, too?”

“I don’t know,” he answered candidly. “I suppose it’s a possibility.”

“You sure you don’t know?” I asked pointedly.

“Me? Yes, I’m sure. I’d be straight about that.”

“Tell me about the break-in, then. You called it a warning shot. Was that its intention?”

“Oh, no. Our guess is it was something like Watergate-plant a bug or two for a little competitive eavesdropping. I found out later Danny had bought some miniature audio equipment through a mail-order catalog.”

“What about the open filing cabinets?”

Win raised his eyebrows, looking bemused. “Like Jim told you-sloppy housekeeping. As far as we know-or at least according to Reynolds-there were no signs that whoever jimmied that door ever got into the office. Your boys scared ’em off.”

I moved on, curiously disappointed. “Why is Danny so beholden to Mark?”

He chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds before admitting, “That I can’t say.”

The body language was eloquent enough, but I asked anyway. “Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t. That part is confidential and involves nothing prosecutable.”

I didn’t push him. He’d said what he could, and I wanted to keep him talking.

I retreated to firmer ground. “We have a tape proving the office break-in was Danny’s doing, and you just mentioned his buying some bugs, but given their closeness, you think Mark was behind it?”

He took a sip of coffee. “That’s one of the amazing things about them. According to people who’ve known them since they were kids, they’ve always been like Siamese twins, at least when it comes to sharing information. But I dug till I thought I’d disappear from view, and I couldn’t find any business documents linking them together, or anyone who’d been privy to their private conversations. I read about the papers Danny was supposed to have burned-it didn’t surprise me he could fit them all into a single box. Probably wasn’t half full. As far as I could tell, everything was spoken, and kept strictly between the two of them. They were like their own secret society, with Danny handling the money and Mark the power.”

“Be interesting if Mark wins the election.”

Win nodded in agreement. “No argument there. Of course, there’s no proof any of it’s true.” He paused and then added, “On the other hand, Danny had no qualms about killing someone for the cause. I suppose that shows a certain prejudice.”

I laughed with my mouth full.

Win smiled at my reaction but then became serious again. “I don’t know, Joe. All I’ve learned tells me you’re on the right track, trying to connect Danny to Mark on this killing, but I’m damned if I know where you’ll find the evidence.”

We both ate in silence for a while, chewing as much on the information as the food. I suddenly paused in midbite, however, struck by an odd revelation. “You know something weird?” I told him. “I’ve never even met Danny Mullen. It’s almost like he was the puppeteer in this whole thing-pulling the strings, but always out of sight.”

“You’d like him,” Win said. “He’s like his brother that way. Very good-natured, very approachable. I guess it goes without saying he does have a temper, though.”

I couldn’t argue with that. The voice I’d heard on that tape recording had hardly been good-natured.

“What’re you doing for Reynolds now?” I asked after another pause. “You implied you’re still under contract.”

Despite our both being trapped in a booth together, I could almost sense him stepping back. “Yeah, I’m checking a few odds and ends. Mostly wrapping things up. The primary’s almost here, so it won’t be too much longer.”

I gave him a long, level look. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

He smiled benevolently. “You know the rules, Joe. If I find anything you can move on, I’ll call you in a heartbeat.”

We finished our snack, exchanging gossip and updating one another on what we were up to. Win observed that the way Gail was going, she’d probably wind up governor herself someday, and I didn’t disagree.

After we parted, however, I didn’t wait to get to the office to act on what Win had refused to tell me. Driving back toward downtown, I called Ron on the cell phone.

“I just had coffee with Winthrop Johnston. He’s been digging into the Mullens. I think he’s found something he won’t talk about. It’s nothing criminal-he would’ve fessed up to that-but I want to know what it is. Get everyone working on this, including the BCI people, and let’s see if we can track who he’s been talking to.”

“Why bother if you know it’s not criminal?” Ron asked.

“Because he wasn’t hired to put Mark Mullen in jail. He’s just looking for dirt that’ll get Reynolds the election. If we dig a little deeper in some of the same holes, we might just get lucky and find something to prosecute.”

Marcia Wilkin lived in Bristol, Vermont, a small town northeast of Middlebury, tucked into a steep-sided narrow gap between the Hogback and South mountains, and hard up against some of the most dramatic, rugged areas the Green Mountains have to offer-Camel’s Hump, Sugarbush, and Mad River Glen among them. Driving out of the Champlain valley toward the axelike incision splitting this solid wall-under a flat, gray skillet of ominous, snow-laden clouds-I felt I was about to be swallowed alive by a dark and looming menace so vast and intractable that no one would bother looking for me once news of my disappearance leaked out.

It was now late November, closing in on a year since we’d discovered Phil Resnick across the railroad tracks in the middle of the night. A year in which law enforcement in Vermont had been threatened with total overhaul and undergone a major readjustment, in which a bright political star had clashed with one of the state’s Democratic standard bearers-and begun a battle they were waging even now-and in which a stack of dead bodies had been attributed to ambition, paranoia, and greed, but whose final rationale had yet to be explained.