Archer Mayor - Open season

She reached out and patted my shoulder, as if I were the one in need of comfort. “Thank you, Lieutenant, I’ll be fine. There are people I can call if I need them.”

Not your run-of-the-mill human being. As I drove back home to get the pajamas out from under the rest of my clothing, I thought Jam ie Phillips had been wise making her one of his enthusiasms.

The Brattleboro Police Department is located in a hundred-year-old converted high-school building perched on a slope overlooking the junction of Main Street, Linden Street, and the Putney Road-a notorious traffic quagmire that the Board of Selectmen has never been able to straighten out, despite an inordinate number of expensive and ludicrous studies on the subject.

From the vantage point of the usual five o’clock traffic jam, the Municipal Building, as it’s officially known, looks a little like Norman Bates’s gothic pile in Psycho, looming overhead-dark, ugly, and prickly with spirtacdes. It’s one of the few examples of architecture I know of without the slightest redeeming value. Added to that, its heating is satanic, its parking facilities a bedlam, its toilets a throw-back to primitive times, and its lighting a credit to Dickens. It is, however, cheap. So that’s where we live, occupying several rear offices on the ground floor, with five cage-like holding cells in the basement. I kind of like the old dump.

I parked on the icy snowbank bordering the back lot and walked through the double doors leading to the building’s overlarge central hallway. To the left are the offices of Support Services, our name for the detective division, and to the right are the rest of them: Dispatch, Traffic, Parking, Patrol, the secretarial pool, and the chief’s office. Before the state police moved out to new quarters in West Brattleboro, they occupied the left, and we were all on the right. That arrangement lent itself to a lot of frayed nerves.

In fact, stepping through the door this morning brought back memories of those days. There was a tension in the air quite beyond the usual grousing about the overeager furnace. I stuck my head through Dispatch’s open door to check in and was greeted with a “Where the hell have you been?”

Dispatch from 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. was Maxine Paroddy, a thin chain-smoking, middle-aged ax handle of a woman with the telephone voice of a teenage girl. She was usually a lot more genial.

“I’ve been up half the night with that shotgun killing. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Forget it. Murphy wants you.”

“Come on, Max. What’s cooking?”

She turned in her chair, ripped the phone headset off her ear, and chucked it onto the counter. “I just don’t need everybody else’s grief, is all. I’m a glorified receptionist. It’s not my fault when the shit hits the fan. If somebody is pissed off at somebody else, they ought to have the decency to wait until that person gets on the line. They don’t have to fill my ear with crap. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“About what?”

“John Woll got mugged last night. Somebody handcuffed him to a telephone pole and stole his patrol car. Now everybody and his uncle is all over me on the damn phone because either the chief hasn’t come in yet, or he has come in and he won’t call ’em back.” The switchboard let out an electronic burp, and Maxine cursed and reached for the headset. “Go see Murphy-he’s one of the yellers.”

I crossed the corridor to my own bailiwick-a short, straight hallway with doors on both sides opening onto five tiny, high-ceilinged offices-and leaned against the door frame of Frank Murphy’s; his had one window, mine had the other. He was on the phone, his feet on his desk, his eyes fixed on some invisible object on the opposite wall. Frank was one of the police force’s two captains, and the head of Support Services.

He covered the phone with a thick, freckled hand and said, “Go to your office. John Woll’s hiding out there. You hear about him?”

I nodded and he waved me off. My office was directly opposite. It was a cubicle really, eight feet by eight, with a ten-foot ceiling that always made me want to tip the room over so I’d have more roomhe ve more and more heat. As it was-and Murphy himself once tested this out with a thermometer and a ladder-when it was sixty degrees at my ankles, it was ninety degrees just beyond my reach. The only workable solution to this problem anyone had come up with-since fixing the heating system was out of the question-was to pile up several desks and to set up shop at the top. Instead, when I had a lot of paperwork and had to stay put, I settled for wrapping my legs in a blanket.

John Woll stood up when I entered and mumbled a greeting. I motioned to him to sit back down and parked myself on a corner of my desk. “So, rumor has it you got intimate with a telephone pole.”

He shook his head. He was a young man, maybe twenty-four with the obligatory mustache of the nervously assertive male. He’d been with us for three years and hadn’t quite been able to make his personality match his upper lip. “This is really embarrassing.”

“It sounds it. What happened?”

“I was making my patrol, like always, and I saw something weird on Estabrook. I knew it was a man, because I could make out the shape, but I couldn’t see his face and I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He was all sort of bunched up and leaning on a garbage can, like he was really hurting, you know? He waved me down-”

“Without showing his face?”

“Yeah. He just sort of lifted an arm, but most of his back was turned so I couldn’t see much. I stopped and got out and walked over to him. I was a little twitchy, you know, because of the neighborhood, but I was mostly worried he’d be a drunk and throw up all over me. That’s happened before. Anyhow, I walked up to him and poked him a little and asked him if he was all right, and he straightened up, pulled out a sawed-off from under his coat, and shoved it under my nose.”

“You must have seen his face then.” He shook his head. “He was wearing a ski mask. He told me to turn around-”

“What was his voice like?”

“It was a whisper. I couldn’t make it out. Didn’t sound like an accent or anything, though.”

That’s a breakthrough, I thought. “So he turned you around… “

“Yeah, and then he shoved me over to the pole, took my cuffs, told me to hug the pole, and locked me up. And that was it. He got into my car and drove off.”

Frank Murphy appeared at the door and waited for Woll to finish. “We may have something on this. Go ahead.”

I turned back to Woll. “So who found you?”

If I ever thought an adult couldn’t squirm in his chair, I was wrong. “That’s the embarrassing part. It was a reporter from the Reformer. She drove up about ten minutes later and started asking me questions. I felt like a real jerk.”

“Pretty girl, too,” added Murphy. “Alice Sims. She called us after she found him.”

“And presumably Ski Mask called her to tell her about Woll.”

Frank beamed. “Top o oued. “f the class.”

“John, is there anything you might have missed? Something about his hands maybe, or his eyes, or the way he walked? His clothes?”

Woll shook his head. “It was too dark and he wore gloves. I’ve thought about this a lot. I can see him in my mind, but it’s like seeing a storefront dummy-there’s just nothing about him that stood out, except that shotgun.”

“What about that? What make was it?”

“Nothing I recognized. It looked like an old single-shot. It was a handmade job, though, because I could see the burning around the barrel where he’d cut if off with a hacksaw. That looked new; it was still shiny.”