Open Season (3 page)

“The thousand dollars didn’t have to be in mixed bills, or old currency, or something like that?”

“No.” She passed a hand across her forehead, picked up the unused pot of tea and poured it into the sink. With her back still to me, she asked, “How did he die?”

“He was shot. The house he went to belonged to an old lady who’d been terrorized by threatening phone calls. She fired before she even saw him.”

Her head drooped forward onto her chest, and she leaned on the sink. “Don’t tell me he went to the wrong house.”

“No, I’m afraid he didn’t.”

She turned and stared at me with a look of disbelief. “Then what are you saying? What happened?”

This was more than I wanted to admit at the moment, but I couldn’t turn her away now. “My guess is that the old lady was used to kill your husband.” I held up both hands to stop her from responding. “Mrs. Phillips, like I said, it’s a guess. This thing just happened. I’ll need more time to nail it down, but you asked, so I told you. But I’d like you to not tell anyone else, okay?”

She nodded. “Did Jamie ever mention the name Thelma Reitz?”

“Is that the woman who shot him?”

“Yes.”

She thought for a moment. “He may have—I don’t remember it.”

“They served on a jury together.”

Again, the hand went to her face. “Oh, no.” She crossed over, grabbed the glass of milk I hadn’t touched yet, and poured it into the sink, leaving a trail of white droplets across the counter and floor. “That was the worst experience of his life. He couldn’t sleep, he almost stopped eating, he had to be treated for stomach troubles. I thought he was getting an ulcer. That trial nearly did him in.”

I was thinking maybe it had. “What trial was it?”

She whirled around from washing my glass. “You don’t know? It was the Kimberly Harris murder. My God. I heard about that case until I was blue in the face. Every single thing he heard in that courtroom he brought home to me. He went over it again and again, as if he were judge and jury wrapped up into one. I remember Thelma—he never told me her last name. I never thought I’d forget any of them. She was the one he accused of going with the crowd—of not having a mind of her own. First he’d persuaded her to vote his way, then when the majority voted against him, she switched without a second thought. For months after the trial, it was all he could talk of.”

“You mean Thelma?”

“No. All of it. Thelma was just a piece of the whole thing. He didn’t have it in for her—he pitied her. He said she’d been following men’s orders for so many years she was totally incapable of original thought. It was just the whole thing. And the guilt.”

“Guilt?”

She was still holding the wet glass. “Well, he voted with the majority too. He did the same thing Thelma did in the end. After all that anguish, he caved in. He hated himself for it. He said he should have stuck by his guns and caused a mistrial, or whatever it’s called—you know, when the jury can’t make up its mind.”

“Was this trial still an obsession with him?”

For the first time, her expression changed gradually. Her face lost its tension and became softer and more reflective. Her eyes slid off me and focused somewhere beyond the walls around us, and she smiled in sad remembrance. In the last five minutes, at some point I hadn’t recognized, she’d accepted his death. It occurred to me then that she was built of sterner stuff than I’d imagined.

“You obviously didn’t know Jamie. I suppose the trial had become an obsession. But that word isn’t right—it’s too negative for him. I mean, the trial was a negative thing, but that was the exception. Jamie went from enthusiasm to enthusiasm—even the trial was kind of like that. He got totally involved in things—to where you’d think he was becoming a little nutty—and then he’d focus on something else. Most of the time, they were harmless enough—the dog, this kitchen, Christmases were big. I think even I was one of them. All of them—or I should say all of us—were possessions. We weren’t discarded after our time—he treated me at least as well as he treated Junior, and that’s saying a lot—but we just weren’t the latest acquisition.”

She finally put down the glass and dried her hands. “Jamie gave his love to me, and to Junior, and to building projects, and even to that dumb trial. If things had turned out the way he’d wanted, he’d have turned the hearts of every person on that jury, just like Henry Fonda did in
Twelve Angry Men.
The fact that he couldn’t do it really bothered him a lot, but he didn’t carry it around with him for too long. Maybe longer than usual, but it passed eventually.”

“But he ended up betraying his own convictions. Why didn’t he force a mistrial?”

She got a normal-sized glass out from a cupboard, poured a moderate amount of milk into it, and handed it to me before answering. “He was a social creature. If he couldn’t change someone’s mind after a good argument, he’d quit, and he wouldn’t bear a grudge.”

I resisted saying how big I thought that was of him and merely muttered, “A man’s future hung on that good argument,” and drank my milk.

But she took it in stride—better, in fact. “Was the man innocent?”

I handed her back the glass. “Good point. I suppose not.”

She was silent for a moment, looking at me. When she spoke, her voice was hesitant, even a little scared. “Where is he, now?”

“He’s been taken to Burlington for an autopsy. They have to do that by law. They’ll bring him back, probably by the end of the day, or tomorrow at the latest.”

“Will I be able to see him?”

“Yes. In fact, someone will want you to, just to make sure.” This last part didn’t make me feel too good, so I tried to skate around it a little. She had settled down amazingly from when I’d walked into her house, but I didn’t want to presume too much, especially just as I was leaving. “Mrs. Phillips, he was pretty badly hit. His face is okay, but I think you should realize that you won’t be seeing someone who just looks asleep. It’s not like the movies.”

I got to my feet and she let me get away with simply that much. “Thank you… Did you tell me your name? I probably forgot.”

“Lieutenant Gunther—Joe Gunther.”

She escorted me to the living room and my coat and held the front door open for me. I noticed she was still holding the glass. “Mrs. Phillips, is there someone I can contact to come stay with you? Even someone from the police force, just for a while—to help you drive or whatever? I mean, you’ll have your car returned to you today sometime, but still, you might want somebody to talk to, even if it’s about the weather.”

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 Jamie 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 spires. 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 room 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 of 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.”

I got up and hung my coat on the back of the door. Murphy was still standing there. “So what did you dig up?” I asked him.