Archer Mayor - The surrogate thief

Joe smiled. "Don't worry about it. Take care of yourself."

This time they shook hands.

Three days after Ellen's funeral, Joe returned to work. No one thought he should. His brother, Leo, and his mother, who both lived in Thetford, Vermont, where Joe had been born and brought up, lobbied him to spend some time back home. The chief, whose name was Canaday but who was never called anything but "Chief," told him to take as many days as he wanted. But Joe didn't think he could stand much more time on his own. For weeks already he'd been traveling between the hospital and their small apartment, seeing day after day how his living alone was slowly eroding all traces of Ellen's presence. His shaving equipment laid permanent claim to the rim of the bathroom sink, where in the past, it used to retreat behind the mirror until needed. Similarly, the kitchen cabinets yielded to cans and boxes of his choosing; the fridge emptied of perishable items and restocked with a few things to drink and little else. Joe's clothes, draped here and there, became almost all there was to be seen outside the closet.

As Ellen was vanishing inside her own body, so was she disappearing at home.

The morning of the service, freshly dressed in black, Joe rented a fully furnished apartment on the corner of High and Oak, just a stroll from the center of downtown, so that after the funeral he'd have a new place to spend the night. He paid the rent on the old place for a couple of months, but he didn't return there for six weeks.

He needed to work, and with Klaus Oberfeldt's death, he hoped he had something that might keep him on track.

But that wasn't all.

He also needed to work because he'd let Maria Oberfeldt down. She'd been the only one railing for someone to address her husband's beating, and no one, Joe especially, had given it proper attention.

Now, in a world without Ellen, Joe could only think of who had killed Klaus Oberfeldt.

Instinctively knowing that it was too late, he started with Shea's inner circle, not including family. As far as could be determined, there was none of the latter. Given up for foster care as an infant, Pete had moved from home to home, establishing no lasting connections, deemed time and again incorrigible. He'd ended up in Brattleboro only because that's where he'd turned eighteen, and had thus been flushed out of the system. As a result, like a parody of a homing pigeon, Pete Shea had returned to Brattleboro forever after, usually following one of his brief sojourns in the penal system.

After rummaging through Shea's apartment and meager possessions, Joe spent days chasing down old cell mates and drinking buddies and poring over the young man's arrest records, scouring for a name that he hoped might hold some promise. He finally found it in Ted Moore, who was listed as having been busted with Shea twice, once for supplying minors with alcohol, again for being drunk and disorderly, and who was suspected of being a fence for some of Pete's ill-gotten goods.

Given the recent timing of their last known association, and the fact that Moore had been reported living it up just two days after the Oberfeldt assault, Joe thought Ted might well be worth a visit.

At the time Joe set out to locate Ted Moore, Brattleboro wasn't the gentrified, politically active, socially diverse place of today. It was something else altogether. Vietnam was still in full swing; the seeds of the sixties had blossomed into protest, violence, and a universal social uneasiness; and all of it was palpable even in this remote pocket of Vermont. Kids made oinking sounds as police cars drove by, the sweet aroma of marijuana was in the air and clung to people's tie-dyed clothing and long hair, jobs were scarce and the local economy terrible, and thirty-eight licensed outlets served liquor throughout town. The bars were full to capacity every Friday and Saturday night, dumping hundreds of quarrelsome patrons into the streets come closing time.

Things finally got wild enough, regularly enough, that an edict was issued to all arresting officers: Start cuffing people flat on the ground-the hoods of the patrol cars are taking a beating from all the heads being thumped against them.

There was an almost Wild West energy in the air separating the rebellious have-nots from the sheltered gentility. The police force and its famous "thin blue line" fit smoothly into this context, however inaccurately, between those paying them respect and those giving them trouble.

As a result, the cops were in an element perversely to their liking. Underpaid, poorly staffed, overworked, and only marginally supported by the town fathers, they labored more for the mystique than for any job security. This wasn't something you did for income. You did it for the same reason you thought people had once joined the Texas Rangers.

And, to a great extent, you did it alone. When Joe became one of the few in this beleaguered department, it had two cars, one huge portable radio that barely reached base, and a flashing red light system located at the three major crossroads downtown, used to let the beat guys know they were being summoned. Cops learned to keep an eye peeled, depend on their wits, and interpret the law as it suited their needs. Countless disputes every weekend never even appeared in the paperwork, much less made it to court on Monday morning.

It was against this backdrop, driven by guilt and coping with sorrow, that Joe set out to find Ted Moore.

According to his police record, Moore was an itinerant carpenter, and according to the people Joe found loitering outside Moore's run-down apartment building on Canal, he was helping build an extension onto the town garage on Putney Road.

The present Putney Road is a traditional "miracle mile," cluttered with chain stores, gas stations, and motels-as unique to Vermont as to suburban Iowa. When Joe Gunther went to meet Ted Moore, virtually the entire western side of the road was farmland. Not so the eastern, however, which is why Joe was never surprised by how the strip finally ended up. Directly across from the farm, like an urban metaphor for a slow-moving prairie blaze, stood restaurants, a drive-in, a dairy, and a couple of hamburger stands, all poised by the curb like a row of flames straining to jump a firebreak. Once that tourist-laden interstate appeared in the late sixties, just beyond the fields, Joe knew that the farmers' days were all but done.

The town garage occupied the southern edge of those fields. It was a large wooden structure, with a shed big enough for a winter's supply of salted dirt, next to a few stalls housing the salt and the plow trucks. The "few" part was why Moore and others had been contracted to expand the garage.

Joe pulled off next to several pickups and took his bearings. Adjacent to the salt shed was the equivalent of a wing, and at its far end were several men wearing tool belts, working on the roof. Below them, the walls of the extension shimmered in clean, new pine siding.

Gunther walked the length of the building and nonchalantly addressed the first workman he came across. "Is Ted Moore around?"

The man's reaction came as a surprise. Instead of answering directly, he turned and bellowed toward the roof crew, "Hey, Ted, you've got a visitor."

It was neither what Joe had wanted nor expected, and standing flat-footed in the parking lot while his hoped-for interviewee straightened up like a startled gazelle put him at precisely the disadvantage he'd been hoping to avoid.

Sure enough, Ted Moore unbuckled his tool belt, dropped it with a crash, and vanished over the far side of the roof.

"Thanks a lot," Joe muttered as he set off in a sprint around the corner, hoping to cut the other man off.

But there was no chance of that. By the time Joe caught sight of him, Moore had already leaped from his perch and was hotfooting it south down the length of the garage. Cursing his own stupidity for having parked where his quarry was now headed instead of driving straight to the site, Joe picked up his pace, praying that he was faster and in better shape than the carpenter.