“Guidry,” Willy added from the doorway, where he’d typically appeared without making a sound.
“Meaning?” I asked him.
He strolled over to a chair, taking his time to settle down. “I been bugged by a couple of things, so I decided to check ’em out. Remember what that note said? The one that Marcel was supposed to have written to his old man, inviting him down?”
“Yeah.”
“He said ‘we’re’ having a good time down here. And ‘come down and join us,’ as if he wasn’t alone. Always made me wonder.”
“You figure it out?” Gary asked.
Willy made a face. “Not really. It’s weirder than that. I didn’t have anywhere to start with Marcel, since the letter was the only thing we had connecting him to Stowe. So I went back to the Alvarez register at the old Snow Dancer Hotel and looked at it closer up, thinking that if Jean checked in, maybe the son did, too, under another name—or somebody else we’d recognize.”
He shifted in his seat as we waited. “There was nothin’. I checked it three times.”
“Willy,” Sammie barely muttered in a warning tone.
“Okay, okay,” he answered. “I guess Alvarez was a pretty snotty guy. Turns out he had a coding system for when anyone arrived with hired help. The guest would be registered like normal, but the slave—maid, butler, chauffeur, whatever—was just marked down by a symbol next to the guest’s name. Deschamps had one of those marks.”
“No shit,” Tom said.
“That’s what I thought, so I drove back to Richford to talk to Arvin Brown again. We never asked if anyone was with Deschamps when he walked into Brown’s place. Turns out he had a chauffeur. He didn’t come in, but Brown delivered him some grub in the car. The description pretty much fits Pierre Guidry. I asked how he could still remember that, and he said the whole night was burned into his brain—plus he thought the chauffeur was as much an asshole as his boss was like a movie star.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“That’s not all,” Willy continued. “Since we’re hot after Mike Sawyer, I asked Brown about him, too. He knew Sawyer—asked him for a job once. Said the guy was a prick and that everyone hated him except the customers, since he brown-nosed them and they didn’t give a shit anyhow. I drew a blank trying to connect the dots between Sawyer and any of the other players, but Brown did tell me the rumor mill was running hot and heavy when Sawyer set up his first restaurant…”
“The Snow Bank,” Gary added.
Willy looked at him dismissively, which made me think of Gary’s comment about Kunkle earlier. “Whatever. The thing is he paid cash on the barrel-head for the place and paid the same way to fix it up.”
“They speculate where he’d come from?” Tom asked.
Willy smiled. “Yup. You’ll love this—Canada. He said ‘out’ and ‘about’ like a Canuck. But he never owned up when he was asked—just told people to piss off.”
“Your kind of guy,” Gary said.
Willy laughed. “Yeah—probably right.”
“But what’s that tell you about the ‘we’ reference in Marcel’s supposed letter?” Sammie asked.
Willy tilted his head to one side. “Nothin’. That part’s still got me goin’. I did ask Brown if we might be able to get some more dirt on Sawyer, though, and he coughed up a woman named Amy Butynski. Used to be one of his waitresses. Brown said she was smart, had done okay for herself, and still lived in town. Sounded like he once had the hots for her, but I don’t think he ever scored.”
“That’s relevant,” Sammie commented peevishly.
Willy laughed again. “I think so,” and he raised his eyebrows at her. She stared at her paperwork, her face reddening.
“Sammie,” I said. “Why don’t you call Lacombe and ask him to run a check on Sawyer? And tell Paul what we’ve got—maybe it’ll help him in his digging.” I checked my watch and then looked at Willy. “It’s still not too late. You want to go visit Ms. Butynski?”
· · ·
The address Willy had took us north of town on Route 100. As we drove slowly through traffic, I seized the same opportunity I’d taken with Gary earlier. “How’re you liking this detail so far?”
“Why?” he asked. “Want to fire me?”
I shook my head. “Nope—straightforward question.”
“I doubt that. How many have asked you to can me so far?”
“Nobody. One of them said you were a little over the top. I thought that was pretty mild given the shit you’ve handed me over the years. That was a nice piece of work, by the way, chasing down Guidry.”
After a moment’s silence, he answered my question, “It’s okay. I didn’t think I’d like being out of Bratt.”
“Having Sammie around must help.” He didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it, either.
“I have an idea about who ‘we’ and ‘us’ were in Marcel’s fake letter,” I said. “When Paul and I interviewed Marie Chenin, I asked her as we were leaving where Marcel had been when his father disappeared. She didn’t know. But when I asked the same thing about Picard and Guidry, she looked like I’d just told her about some favorite relative dying.”
Willy looked at me but remained silent.
“Let’s say,” I continued, “that this whole let’s-keep-the-trip-to-Stowe-a-secret routine was a crock—cooked up so everyone could claim ignorance at the time and stop any police investigation dead in its tracks.”
“Meaning everyone knew Guidry was along in his chauffeur mode. That would explain Jean keeping a high profile while he was in Stowe.”
“Right,” I agreed. “But then why would Chenin look so surprised by my question?”
Willy smiled. “’Cause it wasn’t Guidry that got her thinking. It was Picard.”
“And two makes for ‘we,’” I said.
“So the two of them killed Jean together?”
I equivocated there. “I think they rigged the letter framing Marcel. It still doesn’t make sense to me why they would’ve killed Jean.”
· · ·
Amy Butynski lived in a handsome, three-story brick house with white trim and a slate roof. There were two bright lanterns mounted to either side of the front door and a neatly shoveled path connecting the driveway to the walk. As Arvin Brown had told Willy, it looked like life had been good to his old flame.
A striking woman answered the door—tall, slim, white-haired, and yet remarkably youthful in appearance. Her face and hands looked twenty years younger than I knew they were—assuming I was right about her identity.
“Are you Amy Butynski?” I asked.
She smiled broadly, displaying a row of perfect white teeth. “I was. It’s been quite a while since anyone called me that. It’s Sommers now.”
We fished out our shields and told her who we were. To my relief she didn’t take us for health inspectors. Instead, she merely drew back and invited us in, calling out to her husband as she did so.
We were ushered into a pleasant living room by both of them, he being a stocky man with an open face and an easy demeanor, unintimidated by our appearance at his door.
After disposing of the usual chatter about whether we wanted coffee or something to eat, Amy asked us, “Why was it you wanted to see me?”
I smiled apologetically. “It’s a little off the wall, to be honest, and as you guessed, it deals with ancient history. We heard you once worked as a waitress for Mike Sawyer at the Snow Bank.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, my gosh. That
was
a long time ago. I haven’t thought of those days in ages. What could you possibly want to know about?”
“We need all the help we can get, actually,” I told her. “So maybe the best thing would be to start with some general questions, like how long you worked there?”
She was sitting beside her husband on the couch and now casually took his hand in her own—a long-standing habit, it appeared, born of easy companionship. My sympathy with Arvin Brown’s sense of loss was tempered by the guess that his intended had found her own perfect mate.
“Let’s see,” she began. “I was about sixteen when I started. That would make it 1946.”
“Just after Sawyer opened the place,” I said.
“That’s right. I’d forgotten that. Anyhow, I stayed on until about 1949. It was all I could take of the man.”
“Difficult?”
She laughed. “A perfect monster—treated everyone terribly, except the guests, of course. They all thought he was heaven.”
“Why’d you stay on so long if he was that bad?” Willy asked.
She looked a little sad as she explained, “I needed the money. My family wasn’t very lucky in that area, and the tips were some of the best in town.”
“She wouldn’t tell you,” her husband said, “but she was supporting the whole family back then. Her father had been crippled in a logging accident, her mother was sickly, and she was the oldest of five kids.”
She squeezed his hand harder. “They don’t need to hear all that.”
I moved on. “Still, it must have been tough working there.”
“It wasn’t so bad. You had to get used to him, is all, and a lot of people couldn’t. His bark was worse than his bite by far.”
“Had Mike been in the restaurant business long? Seems an odd thing to choose if you’re short-tempered.”
“I’m not sure he had been, now that you mention it. For one thing, he wasn’t that old—in his twenties somewhere. But I also remember thinking he was learning the ropes as he went. He made some mistakes a real professional probably wouldn’t have—things like under-ordering supplies and not having enough food on hand for a Friday night. He was smart, though, so that happened pretty rarely, and in no time flat he was right in his element. Went on to become quite famous, around here at least. I suppose you already know that.”
“We’d heard rumors,” I conceded. “Did you have any idea of his background? Had he fought in the war, for example?”
“Or did he even come from this country?” Willy added.
She laughed again. “Which one do I answer first? Actually, it’s no to both. I don’t think he was in the war, and I’m pretty sure he’d come from Canada.”
“How did you come to those conclusions?” I asked.
She looked thoughtful. “On the war thing it was more of a feeling I had. It was definitely something you didn’t talk about—unless you wanted Mike in one of his rages. I guess that could have been due to a traumatic combat experience, too, but I always sensed it was because he’d never had the chance to fight. People forget it now, especially since Vietnam, but the whole world was wrapped up in that war, and unless you had an arm or leg missing—I’m talking about the men, of course—you were made to feel like you had to explain yourself. The war had finished by then, obviously, but I still felt a leftover sense of shame in him.”
“What about the Canada connection?”
“That’s easier. He spoke like they do, and he had some pictures he’d pinned to the wall over his desk.”
“Could you recognize the places?”
“I remember one was Sherbrooke, all lit up at night. I asked him about it and he told me they once called it the Electric City in an effort to attract more tourists. This was during the Depression, when all they had going for them was hydro-power. The whole town looked like a Christmas tree. It was a wonderful postcard.”
I glanced at Willy and asked, “Did he ever say he was from Sherbrooke?”
“If he wasn’t, he knew a lot about it, and he spoke perfect French, too. Nowadays, half of Stowe is filled with Canadians—it wasn’t that way back then, but there were still a fair number that came down to ski or visit, and he’d chat with them whenever they came in to eat.”
“You got those pictures on you?” I muttered to Willy, who dug into his inside pocket. “When these French-Canadians came to visit,” I asked Amy Butynski, “did they
just
come to eat, or were they friends of Sawyer’s?”
She thought back a moment. “Most of them were customers, but Mike had a small office, and I remember him taking a couple of men back there once. I walked in on them by accident. I thought the office was empty and I was getting some more order pads. Mike got really mad at me—it stuck in my mind because there was no reason for it, not even for him. They were speaking French.”
I handed her the pictures Willy was dangling from his one hand. “I know it’s been a long time, but do you recognize any of these faces?”
She looked at them all carefully—of Jean, his son Marcel, Guidry, and Picard—but finally shook her head and gave them back. “I’m sorry—it’s been too many years.”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “It was a long shot. How did the restaurant do in the beginning, before Sawyer got the hang of things?”
She shrugged. “It seemed to do fine. I mean, the customers were few and far between at first, but that’s pretty normal.”
“Sawyer paid cash for the restaurant,” Willy explained in his own shorthand style, “and to fix it up after.”
She stared at him wide-eyed. “Really? Wow. No wonder we didn’t have any problems early on.”
“What do you mean?”
She shifted her gaze to me. “Those beginner glitches I mentioned—Mike would yell at us and have a fit, but it was never any trouble to buy our way out of a jam. Once, when he under-ordered filet mignon on a Friday night, he didn’t just admit it to the customers and push another item. He went across town and bought what he needed from a competitor. It must have cost him a fortune, but he didn’t seem to care.”
“Did he live high on the hog?” Willy asked.
“I didn’t think so. He was better off than I was, but then almost everyone was. He didn’t drive a fancy car or anything.”
“Probably being discreet,” I said softly, mostly to myself.
Amy’s husband spoke up at that. “I don’t suppose we could ask why you want to know all this?”
“You could,” I told him, “but we wouldn’t be able to tell you much. It’s a very old story, with quite a few holes in it. And we’re not actually singling out Mike Sawyer—he’s just one of many leads.”
“Did the restaurant have a freezer?” Willy asked abruptly.
Butynski’s face lit up. “Yes. Actually, that’s another example. Right after we had the problem with the meat shortage, Mike had one put in. It was quite a big deal—I’m not sure anyone else had one then. They were quite rare in those days. In fact, the government had started a program of building community freezers here and there so that people could use them the way municipal swimming pools are used now—for the benefit of all. But typically, Mike wasn’t interested in anything like that. It was always first-class for him. It made the newspaper, if I recall correctly, and the freezer was enormous—as big as a room. In the summer, some of us would go in there to cool off—when Mike was away, of course.”