Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

“Don’t be. Your job is partly to blame. I bet people talk to you a lot like I did.”

I went back to tending to Stan, pondering how to proceed. Obviously unintimidated, Marcia Wilkin was either trying to keep me off balance or merely displaying the habits of a self-confident woman who felt she had nothing to fear.

I decided to push her a bit. “I suppose you know why I’m here.”

She ignored the bait. “Not really.”

“You knew who I was.”

“I know what you’ve done to Danny Mullen, and that you’re part of a conspiracy to keep Mark from being governor.” It was said matter-of-factly, without passion.

I studied her a moment, my hands resting on the cat, who’d settled down in my lap to doze off. “I did help put Danny in jail. That’s my job. As for Mark, I guess I’m damned whatever I say. For what it’s worth, driving into town, I was thinking how much I genuinely liked him. I really do hope I can give him a clean bill of health-but I’m stuck till I get all the facts.”

She frowned, as if holding a private debate. “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here.”

“You know the Mullens well?”

“We grew up together.”

“But it was more than that, wasn’t it? I’d heard you and Mark had once been a couple.”

She smiled thinly. “You hear all sorts of things. We were friends.”

I let that go, despite what my research had told me. “It doesn’t really matter. None of my business. I just wondered what they were like when they were younger. I mean, would you have guessed back then that Danny could’ve done what he did?”

“He hasn’t gone to trial yet, has he?” she asked pointedly.

“No, but regardless of what the jury’s allowed to hear and finally decides, I know the case against him. He did kill that man.”

“So you say.”

“I’d like to hear why, though. We’re not supposed to worry about that-we catch ’em red-handed, that’s pretty much it. But given how close Danny is to Mark, the question begs asking.”

She half opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again, seemingly angry with herself. “Then you better ask them.”

“You seem like you’re wrestling with something, Ms. Wilkin.”

She inhaled a deep breath and let it our slowly. “Maybe I’m just having a hard time staying polite.”

I doubted that and so took a chance. “Would you like me to leave?”

That caught her off guard. “No, I’m sorry.”

I tried a different approach. “Look, let me be honest with you. I know you don’t like my being here, I know your ties with the Mullens run deeper than just friendship, and I know a private detective named Win Johnston’s been bugging you about all this. We don’t live in a world where too many secrets survive anymore. We’ve been taking apart the Mullens’ life for months now, trying to separate what Danny did from what Mark may have known. You’ve popped up as having deep, long-lasting financial ties to them-for well over twenty years. We know they’ve been supporting you all that time.”

Her face had hardened during this, so I quickly added, “I don’t want to make anything of that. I’m here as a guest only, to ask for your help-not to harass or threaten or anything else. I just wanted you to understand I wasn’t being coy or playing games.”

That wasn’t entirely true, of course. Of all of the people we’d connected to the brothers, only Marcia Wilkin had stood out for her very lack of clarity. Born in their hometown and a classmate of Mark’s all through school, reportedly ending up as his lover, she hadn’t had any known ties to either one of them since-and yet had been living all this time without a job or any obvious source of income. What I’d just rattled off had been pure speculation.

And yet she still didn’t throw me out.

Instead, she said, “Go on.”

“As I see it, Ms. Wilkin, my only job here is to make sure the right thing’s done. Your loyalty to Danny notwithstanding, I think you know he’s not innocent. We all make mistakes, sometimes pretty big ones, and sometimes we make them out of misguided affection. That’s what I think happened to Danny. He got carried away-things escalated. Before he knew it, he was in over his head. He didn’t kill that man because he’s evil. He killed him because right then, at that moment, he’d convinced himself it was the right thing to do-that he was acting for the one person in his life who means everything to him.

“What I need to figure out is where Mark fits into it, regardless of what the prosecutor does, or of what I think of Mark personally, or even whether he gets to be governor. Because until I can get that settled in my head, I’m going to have to keep digging. It’s the way I am.”

She smiled slightly. “Just for yourself? I doubt that. One thing leads to another, Lieutenant. I won’t help you be Mark’s jailer.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. Maybe you could just help be his conscience.”

I was about to continue, but the look on her face made me stop. She seemed suddenly drawn into herself, as if the inner debate I’d suspected she’d been having all along had finally taken her over.

The silence dragged on, the cat continued sleeping peacefully, and I slowly became aware of every small sound in the house. Finally, she raised her eyes to mine, smiled ever so slightly, and said quietly, “I think I would like you to leave now.”

I placed Stan on the pillow next to me, brushed myself free of cat hair, removed my coat from the peg by the door, and let myself out.

On the face of it, I was leaving as empty-handed as when I’d arrived. On a deeper level, however, I felt oddly as if I’d accomplished something substantial, the meaning of which for now eluded me.

I returned to Brattleboro from Bristol along the scenic route, enjoying the fading day and the emergence of the stars. I’d seen my conversation with Marcia Wilkin as the last turn of a wheel before it comes to a final stop. If anything had been accomplished there, it was now going to be played out elsewhere by someone else. After ten months of digging, I felt-perhaps disingenuously-that I’d reached daylight, or at least enough of it to deserve a sense of peace. As I drove for hours along smooth blacktop, the trees, farms, and villages becoming an endless blur to either side, I reviewed the year’s events meditatively and tried to convince myself that while little had worked out the way I’d imagined, the final results were mostly acceptable.

I stopped to have dinner in a small café in Poultney. Eating at a table by the window, I watched the traffic go by as if from a fish tank, trying not to feel remote and ineffectual. Occasionally pedestrians turned toward me in passing, drawn by the neon sign flashing above my head, their faces alternating from pale gray to tepid pink, emphasizing my lack of success.

Gail had left for her job in Montpelier, driven to the next stage in her life as by a migratory urge, dissolving a pattern I’d been adjusting to since we’d moved in together. And despite my encouraging her, and having occasionally longed for a return to the “old days,” I was now having to deal with only a subtle imitation of the past-and at an age when such evolutions were made slowly and with doubt.

With Gail’s practiced help, I’d found a place to live on Green Street, just a block away from my old apartment. It was a radically different setup-a two-story carriage house out back of a large building that was home to a family of four. The carriage house had a garden, huge windows, a brick wall with a chimney, lots of exposed wooden beams. It was a place that felt like home.

Gail had joined me the first night I moved in. We’d made love in the bedroom upstairs, and on the rug in front of the open wood stove. I’d made her spaghetti out of a box, with sauce from a jar-my kind of vegetarianism. We’d watched an old movie on TV, huddled under a shared blanket on the couch. And after she’d left, and I’d cleaned the place up to some music on the radio, I’d felt better than I thought I would. Just as she’d reached a point where she could recollect her strength and set out to achieve new goals, so I began to think I might find comfort in surroundings all my own again.