Archer Mayor - Tucker Peak

“Jim,” I asked him on one of his trips out of the treatment room. “He going to make it?”

Franklin stopped in his tracks and laughed. “If we don’t kill him. You read that article on how many people die in hospitals every year through negligence? It’s amazing. Hi, Sammie. Walk with me, I gotta get something to help out with his lung. How’ve you guys been? Haven’t seen you since that gunshot wound to the heart. Remember that, Joe? Hell of a deal. At least I didn’t do that guy in. Miracle I saw him at all. Shoulda been DOA. Still, you know, I keep thinking about that case, wondering if there mightn’t have been some way… Remember, Joe? I had my finger right in the hole… ”

He finally paused long enough to notice neither one of us had said a word. This was typical James Franklin.

“Sorry. Right… This guy has a concussion, facial fractures, a few missing teeth, four broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. Basically, beaten to a pulp. But he’ll live. That answer your question?”

“One of them. Will I be able to talk to him?”

Franklin grabbed a sealed package from the shelf of the supply room we’d escorted him to. “Fine with me, but it’s up to him.”

Walter Skottick would have looked like a movie mummy if it hadn’t been for the oxygen tubing up his nose and the tufts of beard poking out from between the bandaging. He was so still I wasn’t sure he was breathing. Sammie and I stood at the foot of his bed for a moment, I toying with the fanciful notion that the hospital staff would soon discover their patient had died unnoticed under all their packaging.

“Mr. Skottick?” I said gently.

The one nonswollen eye opened. The voice barely emanating from the dressings managed to say, “Wha?”

“It’s Joe Gunther, Mr. Skottick. We met earlier-about Marty Gagnon.”

One hand flapped anemically on the bed sheet. “Wha’ the hell you do to me?”

Sammie furrowed her brow, not having been at that first meeting. “What do you mean?”

“Fine till you came,” he answered and then stopped to gasp for breath.

“Mr. Skottick,” I said. “I know you feel lousy, but we need to ask you some questions if we’re going to get the person responsible for this.”

“Didn’t see.”

“Was he wearing a mask?”

“Yeah.”

“How did he get in? You were inside, right?”

He nodded weakly. “TV. Behind me.”

“He came up behind you?”

“Yeah.”

“And he was looking for Marty Gagnon. What did he say, exactly?”

“Just where-’gain an’ ’gain-where, where, where.”

“But he didn’t say why?”

“No.”

“Why did he keep beating you? You put up a fight?”

“At first… not much. I didn’t know. I told him cops came.”

“You told him about our visit?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get any other calls about that watch, besides ours?”

“No.”

“Okay, Mr. Skottick. One last thing, and please don’t take offense, ’cause you may not like it. But are you being totally straight with us? About the watch and this attack, both?”

The man’s entire body shifted with frustration under the sheets. His hands balled up into fists. “Shit. I wanted… sell… car-that’s all.”

“All right, all right,” I tried soothing him. “I had to ask. We’ll get this guy. You just work on getting better.”

Sammie and I stepped out into the hallway.

“You think he’s telling the truth?” she asked.

I waggled my hand back and forth equivocally. “Could be. Dumber things have happened. What’s interesting to me is how his attacker found out about him. If he did chase down some of Marty’s friends first, like I’m thinking, then Skottick may be just the latest of a string of such interviews. I’d like to know what Marty did or didn’t do, saw or didn’t see, that got whoever this is so interested in finding him. And does the stealing of the watch, or anything else from the Manning house, have anything to do with it?”

Sammie knew better than to respond.

“Since the cat’s obviously out of the bag,” I continued, “we might as well go after Marty’s known playmates.”

Marty Gagnon’s criminal record was as stuffed as a phone book with names and addresses of promising “past-known associates,” many of which we got from our erstwhile colleagues at the Brattleboro Police Department. Ron Klesczewski, part of our old squad, was still there, along with J.P. Tyler, who’d been our forensics man, and it was Ron who came upstairs to our office early the next morning with the PD’s internal file on Gagnon-those investigative tidbits that didn’t merit being injected into the state or national data banks.

So, allowing Sammie to sleep late and letting Lester work on his caseload, I had Ron and Willy help me compile a contact list of the most promising among Marty’s circle. As soon as he saw the name Don Matthews, however, Willy put him at the top of the heap.

”Of all these losers,” he explained with the sure-footedness of a museum curator, “Don’s the best at handling hot property. I’d start with him.”

“He still around?” I asked Ron.

“Around and off the leash. He finished his parole three months ago. Got a job up in Springfield at the battery plant.”

Sitting next to me in my car several hours later, Willy stretched his right arm out straight and checked his wristwatch. “Matthews is on the graveyard shift, so he should be at home catching Z’s by now. I called his supervisor, and he told me odds and ends have been going missing ever since Don started working there, mostly from the locker room. No proof-surprise, surprise-but I figured we could use that to squeeze his nuts a little.”

We finished our meal of greasy offerings from a fast-food place in Springfield, Vermont (about forty minutes north of Brattleboro), and drove a few blocks, past a near-derelict shopping mall with half its parking lot unplowed, and into a neighborhood of two-story apartment buildings lined up like shoeboxes left too long in the rain. Both sides of the narrow street were dotted with rusting cars and dirty snow. Many of the windows were boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting, and the top edges of several of them had been licked with black soot from past fires, both arson and freebasing being popular time-killers here.

“What number?” I asked. Willy merely pointed through the windshield at the next address, and said, “Apartment 114. Rear.”

“There a back door?”

He nodded, pulling into a parking place in front of a pickup with three wheels. “There’s a fire escape, according to my source. You want me to cover it?”

“Sure,” I said, surprised by the offer. Willy normally prided himself on kicking in doors.

He swung out into the sharp cold air in one graceful movement. “You got it. Give me five minutes to set up.”

I stood by the car as he strode off, the odd asymmetry of his gait as familiar to me as my own brother’s. Despite the bureaucratic hassles I continued to take on to keep this man employed, I still enjoyed seeing him in action. Under his thick, hard-boiled exterior was a passion rarely seen in a veteran of any job-one which found outlets in old-fashioned justice, a reserved but endearing affection for Sammie, and even-I’d discovered once but was angrily sworn never to reveal-a remarkable ability to pencil sketch, something he indulged in while sitting alone on stakeouts.

I checked the time. Five minutes. I crossed the uneven sidewalk, went up the path to the scratched glass lobby door, and entered the building.

The heat was instantly unbearable: arid and rancid with the stench of unwashed bodies. I could hear people muttering through the thin walls around me, yelling, playing music or the TV, all in the middle of a weekday, like worker bees laboring in a hive. Except that they weren’t producing anything-at least anything legal.