Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

It was colder without the snow and felt darker as a result. Even with the starlight and the feeble seepage from the street lamps around the corner, my eyes took longer to adjust than I expected.

The police officer at the bottom of the Arch Street alley looked up at me quizzically as I hesitated beside the car, my hands burrowing deep inside my pockets. “You okay, Lieutenant?” He was stringing a yellow “Police Line” tape across the way.

I shuddered and nodded, walking down the paved incline, careful of its neglected, broken surface. “Sure, Bobby. Still half asleep.”

He lifted the tape to let me pass. “Know what you mean. I been on nights for a week already. Still can’t get used to it.”

He was fresh from the academy, eager and curious, and, if statistics were any guide, destined to learn the ropes with us and then either enter the private sector, disillusioned and bored, or angle a job with the state police, assuming he passed their scrutiny.

“Who’s here already?” I asked him.

“Detectives Klesczewski and Tyler. Officer Lavoie’s with them. Sheila Kelly’s closing the other end off.”

I smiled at his titling everyone except Sheila. It wasn’t sexist. She’d been his supervisor before we’d let him loose on his own. She was the reverse of the trend, ten years with the Burlington PD, come to us in search of a slightly mellower pace. Bobby Miller looked to her as a kid might to an older sister.

I continued to the corner, where the Main Street buildings above and behind me showed their backs to the train tracks and the Connecticut River beyond. Typical of many old red-brick New England towns, Brattleboro, Vermont, faced away from the serenity and beauty of the river, having chosen well over a hundred and fifty years ago to regard both it and the railroad paralleling it as unsightly commercial conduits. In its heyday, this stretch of ground, unseen by the gentry, had been a coarse and bustling string of loading docks and receiving bays, feeding businesses two floors above, whose windows had glittered with the primped and polished end results.

Now the area was forlorn and ignored, a parking place for dumpsters, the homeless, and teenagers seeking illicit time alone. High overhead, out of sight in the gloom, dotting the curved, fortresslike wall following the river’s bend, were hundreds of dingy rear apartments, an increasing number of which were being transformed into tastefully renovated lofts or rendered into peaceful, sunlit havens by the town’s excess of psychologists and therapists-drawn to the very scenery that their predecessors had ignored. Most, however, still belonged to the marginally solvent-welfare dwellers holed up in small, dark, cluttered dens, surrounded by commerce and benefiting from none of it.

With theatrical abruptness, a tripod-mounted halogen lamp burst the darkness ahead of me with a brief electrical hiss. It was facing away from me, down and across the tracks, so the effect wasn’t blinding but more fancifully melodramatic. Its harsh light destroyed any subtlety or nuance, revealing everything in its arc in angular, brittle starkness-while consigning the world outside it to simple nonexistence. The soiled, damaged brick walls, the cinder-stained gravel of the railroad bed, the parallel crescent of gleaming tracks, and the flat black slab of river water beyond-all were briefly frozen in that initial flash of light, like a startled, disheveled partygoer caught in the glare of an instant camera. And just as quickly, it all became mere background to the reason for our gathering in the middle of a freezing January night.

Perpendicular to the outermost track, his feet toward the river, lay a man in a thick, long, dirty coat. He had no head or hands-they’d all been resting on the track when the last train had passed by, and what was left of them didn’t merit much description. But they lent the scene its one source of bright color, and to the entire picture a grim sense of purpose.

Standing over the body was Ron Klesczewski, that night’s detective on call. J.P. Tyler, our forensics man, had just plugged in the lamp.

He moved away from its glare and joined me in the darkness, like a technician stepping offstage to check his work. “I couldn’t see calling the paramedics. Got hold of everybody else-the ME, the SA’s office, more backup. Gail not on tonight?”

Gail Zigman was a deputy state’s attorney, and the woman I lived with. “No,” I answered. “I forgot to ask who was when I left.” I gestured with my chin down the tracks. “What’ve we got?”

Tyler shrugged. “Little early to tell, and I don’t want to do too much before the ME gets here, but it looks like a bum who ran out of rope.”

“Suicide?” I asked mildly.

“Probably. Although you don’t usually find them with their hands on the track.”

Before moving any closer, I said, more to myself than to him, “Unless he was already dead.”

Three hours later, with the sky still black at winter’s insistence, I brought a cup of coffee into Tony Brandt’s office and settled tiredly into one of his guest chairs.

Brandt was our chief of police and had been for years on end. A born administrator, a natural politician, and a cop his entire professional life, he was probably far more skilled than we deserved. I wondered sometimes if he’d ever realize how much better he could do than a twenty-four-person police force, or when someone like the governor might wake up and draft him to work in Montpelier as the head of some huge agency. It was ironic that we lost less-talented people than Tony all the time but kept hold of a man whose blueprint for community policing was slowly being emulated across the entire country.

But there was a canniness to Tony Brandt that implied that none of this was accidental. A good friend to many and affable to most, he remained both private and quietly driven, leaving the impression that he was looking at us all-and at himself in our company-in some kind of grand context.

He now sat back in his chair, his feet up on his desk, his hands interlocked behind his head. He looked at me impassively through frameless bifocals. “This something to worry about?”

It was an interesting choice of words-a politically savvy variation on the question I’d asked Tyler earlier.

“Could be. It looks like suicide. No signs of a struggle, no other obvious trauma to the body. No one we’ve canvassed so far has owned up to hearing anything. It might be that easy.”

“Except…” he suggested.

I held up my hand in protest. “No, no. Except nothing. That’s all we’ve got so far. He’s been shipped up to Burlington for an autopsy, Tyler’s still poking around the scene, and the canvass is ongoing. Any one of a couple of hundred people could’ve seen or heard something. I’m just saying we’re not done yet.”

He watched me without comment while I sipped from my cup, knowing what he’d say next. We went back far enough to find comfort in such oblique communication.

“What’s really on your mind?”

I placed the cup on the corner of his desk. “He might be a suicide. He might also have been tossed from a flying saucer and his blood replaced with food dye. But as suicides go, it’s a little unusual. He had nothing in his pockets-and I mean nothing at all-and while his clothes were filthy, his underpants were snowy white.”

He knew better than to debate the worth of such evidence. “Okay. Keep me informed.”

I climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the banister, by now feeling the lack of sleep. I’d entered the building from the front, using a nondescript door to the right of a clothing store. The double row of weathered, ornate buildings lining Brattleboro’s main drag often reminded me of two ancient beached battleships-huge, rusty, and abandoned by modern needs, but also too big and reminiscent of past glories to be replaced. By design and through countless renovations, therefore, they’d been worked over, modernized, and brought up to code until no two floors looked alike, making passage through their innards like an archaeological field trip.