Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries)

by Archer Mayor

  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.

  “The sheriff just called and said one of his men found the car in some guy’s backyard, not far from Williamsville. They’re bringing him in now.” Murphy tapped Woll on the shoulder. “You can go now. If you can stand it, try to resist talking any more to pretty little Miss Sims, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Woll muttered as he slipped out the door.

  Murphy took his place in the guest chair. I sat behind my desk. “What was that all about?”

  “Alice Sims didn’t just ask him a lot of questions—he answered them.”

  “While he was handcuffed to the pole?”

  “Yup.”

  “Jesus, she’s meaner than I thought. That’s pretty heartless.”

  “Pretty obnoxious too. The morning edition already has the story on page one and every asshole in town has been calling up with one tune or another.”

  “So that’s why Max is so pissed off.” Murphy chuckled.

  “Yeah. She bawled me out too. Still, it’s no joke. This could become a great local gag, right up there with pet rocks. At least that’s the way the selectmen seem to see it, or the ones who called the Chief, who then had the good graces to sic them onto me.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Yeah.” Frank pulled at his lower lip, which was a form of “period-paragraph” body language he’d developed for changing the subject. “What about last night’s shooting?”

  I shrugged. “You seen George’s report yet?”

  Murphy nodded.

  “Then you know what we found. Tyler and some uniforms are going over the house today, dusting for prints and all… I doubt they’ll find much more than we got. They’re going to re-interview Reitz once she gets back on keel.

  “I visited Jamie Phillips’s house and talked to his wife. She had this wild story about their dog being kidnapped and held for ransom—a thousand dollars to be paid at Thelma Reitz’s back door. The message was: ‘Don’t knock—walk right in.’ Unless it was a setup to have him blasted by Reitz, that’s a pretty unlikely deal.”

  “So you believe her?”

  “No reason not to yet. I have someone looking into the Phillipses as an item: whether they got along, if they had any money problems, possible insurance angles, stuff like that. He was a little strange, I guess—had a real thing for the dog. And she was the one who let it out of the house the day it got snatched. There might be something there, but agai
n I doubt it. We’ll talk to everybody a few more times just to nail it down, but if gut instincts are worth anything, I’d say what we see there is what we got. There is one interesting little tidbit: both Phillips and Reitz served on the Kimberly Harris jury.”

  Murphy sat up straight, suddenly agitated. “Are you kidding?”

  “Nope. I was about to pull the jury list when you hit me with Woll.”

  “Oh, Christ, not that again. Once was bad enough.” He stood up, no longer jocular. “Do what you will, but keep it under your hat, okay? No mention of it in the daily reports, no chitchat with anyone but me. After the Woll thing, people are going to have us under a microscope for a while and I don’t want them catching sight of you digging up Kimberly Harris. You got that?”

  I snapped a salute. “Oui, mon capitaine.”

  He gave me a deadly look and left. Murphy would never have been described as a laid-back, laconic type, but his reaction surprised me. The Harris killing had been sensational in itself, but its solution had been quick and easy and the legal rigmarole hadn’t hit any snags from start to finish.

  I shook it off and left my office, heading for the central corridor and the stairs leading up.

  A familiar voice stopped me as I put my hand on the handrail. It was Stan Katz, the reporter I’d seen at the Reitz house. “Hi, Joe. Running for cover?”

  I didn’t care for Katz—he had too much ambition and too little tact. “Meaning?”

  “No offense. Just a little joke. What with Woll’s car being hijacked, I thought you guys might be a little shy of the press.”

  “Stanley, I’m always shy of the press, you know that.”

  He smiled. “That’s true. You could never be accused of being one of my prime sources.”

  “So why do you keep trying?”

  “It’s the job. So what about Woll?”

  “Nothing. We’re working on it. We’ll let you know. Why are you on this anyhow? I thought it belonged to Alice Sims.”

  “She answered the phone, that’s why she went. This is my beat.”

  “So you hip-checked her, huh?”

  “I’m the police reporter.” His tone regained the familiar competitive edge I was used to—no more chitchat, as Murphy put it. I began to climb the stairs. “Joe, what about the shooting last night?”

  “What about it?”

  “Who was the stiff?”

  “We’ll let you know soon, Stan, along with everybody else.”

  “What was a guy like Phillips doing on Clark Avenue in the middle of the night? It’s sort of off his beaten track, isn’t it?”

  I came back down the stairs. “Stanley, just because you’re so brilliant and I’m so dumb, stupid games like that aren’t going to make me spill my guts. So back off. Do what you’ve got to do, but save the Woodward-Bernstein imitation for the other guys, okay?”

  He gave me a look as if I’d just grounded him for a week, but he had the courtesy to keep his mouth shut.

  If the average waist-level temperature downstairs was seventy degrees, as it probably was today, the second floor was about eighty-five. I walked slowly down the corridor to avoid working up a sweat and went through the door marked CLERK OF COURT.

  A young woman in an appropriately summery blouse looked up and smiled. “Hi, Lieutenant. We haven’t seen you up here in quite a while.”

  I let out an exaggerated puff of air and patted the top of my thinning gray hair. “People my age have to watch what they do. The stairs you dance up without a thought could kill me.”

  She laughed. “From what I’ve seen, they’d have to be loaded with dynamite to do it.” She suddenly leaned over the counter and poked me in the belly and then shook her hand as if she’d hurt her wrist. “Look at that—hard as a rock, see? And cute, too.” She was laughing now. “And I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

  I felt my cheeks warm up. “All right, enough. Could you do me a big favor?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Get me the jury list for The State of Vermont versus Davis?”

  She furrowed her brow. “When was that?”

  “About three years ago, maybe a little more. It was that big murder thing.”

  “Oh—the black guy. God, I remember that.” She looked around, glancing through a half-opened back door. She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “And you want that right now, of course—an emergency.”

  I shrugged, but she quickly laid her hand on my arm. “It simply can’t wait, right? I mean, you don’t have time to go through normal channels.” She drew out the word “normal.”

  I smiled—a little slow this morning. “Absolutely not. It’s an emergency.”

  “Boy—you guys, so pushy,” she said in a louder voice, walked over to the door, and spoke to someone out of sight. “I’ve got to go upstairs for some files—police priority request.”

  “Get it in writing,” was the only response.

  The young woman gave me a thumbs-up and went to a large filing cabinet to took up the file number. She scribbled it on a small pad and then handed me a form from her desk. “You can fill out the request while I’m looking. Follow me—you’re in for some more exercise.”

  We climbed to the top floor and an environment of Saharan hostility. The air was breathlessly hot, forcing both of us to pause on the landing. With sweat already prickling my forehead, I peeled off my jacket and draped it over the banister.

  “My husband says they ought to sink an insulated shaft down the middle of the building and put a fan in it to suck some of this heat downstairs. It wouldn’t be much to look at, but it would be cheaper than anything else they’ve come up with.”

  “Nothing’s cheaper than doing nothing.”

  She laughed and set out on her search. We wandered from room to room, turning on overhead lights and checking the labels on stacks of brown boxes and dented filing cabinets. I remembered reading My Brother’s Keeper when I was younger. It was a story of two brothers who never leave their family home, and who slowly fill it with newspapers, magazines, and assorted junk until they’re reduced to crawling through tunnels of the stuff just to get around. A cave-in ends the story and the brothers. I wondered how many more days it would take to reach that state here.

  My guide finally let out a little cheer in the doorway of a long-abandoned bathroom. “Here we are—the whole kit and caboodle. My Lord, it’s got the entire room to itself.” She paused, still looking, and finally pointed to a stack balanced high on the porcelain sink in the corner. “We’re in luck; the one you want is right on top.”

  I volunteered to do the climbing while she supported my legs, and managed to lug the box down with a minimum of destruction and a sweat-soaked shirt. She rummaged through its contents while I filled out her request form in the half-gloom of the dim overhead bulb.

  “Just the jury list, right?”

  “That’s it.”

  We exchanged single sheets of paper, both smiling at the absurdity. “Always happy to help in a police emergency,” she added.

  Back downstairs in the temperate zone, I found a note on my desk to go to Interrogation—a fancy name given to a room with a table and some vending machines between the squad room and the patrol captain’s office. There I found Murphy, Dennis DeFlorio, a Windham County deputy sheriff I didn’t know, and a scared-looking young man who was built like a gas pump. DeFlorio was one of the five corporals in Support Services under Murphy and me.

  Murphy caught my arm and steered me back outside. He kept his voice low. “What have you been up to? You’re sweating like a pig.”

  “Been upstairs. Is that the guy who stole Woll’s car?”

  “Let’s say he’s the one in whose driveway we found the car. He claims he doesn’t know a thing about it. The deputy in there says he dragged himself out of bed to answer the door—hardly guilt-riddled.”

  “Any prints on the car?”

  “J.P.’s doing that now, or will be soon. We do have the shotgun—found it in the car. The guy admits it’s his
but doesn’t know how it got there.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Wodiska.”

  I looked down at the jury list I was still carrying. “Henry A. Wodiska?”

  “The one and only. What have you got?”

  “Something you’re not going to like. Wodiska was on the same jury as Reitz and Phillips.”

  Frank closed his eyes. “Shit. You’re right; I don’t like it. You want to talk to him?”

  “If you’re finished.”

  “I’ll ask Dennis. I’ve assigned him to it. Remember, keep the Davis-Harris thing under your hat.” Murphy went back into the room briefly and reappeared leading all but Wodiska out behind him.

  DeFlorio stopped me as I headed in, understandably curious. “What’s up?”

  I decided to do unto Murphy as he’d done unto me. “It’s something Frank’s got cooking. I’ll let you know if this guy says anything new.”

  “All right.” DeFlorio wasn’t thrilled, but there wasn’t much he could say. He’d only just gotten the case, and on paper we all worked for the same masters. Still, this was as close to palace politics as I ever cared to get.

  Henry Wodiska looked up at me with wide, childlike eyes as I entered. “I swear I didn’t steal no police car. I’d have to be stupid.”

  “From what I’ve been told, you’re claiming to be deaf.”

  “Huh?”

  “Does your driveway slope up or down to the house?”

  “Up.” His voice had a bewildered lilt to it.

  “So someone drove the squad car up the driveway, parked it, cut the engine, and wandered off, and you never heard a thing?”

  “The bedroom’s on the other side of the house. I never hear stuff like that.”

  “What about the shotgun? How do you suppose it got in the car?”

  “I don’t know, man. I came home and I went to bed, like always. I don’t know anything about any of this shit. I swear to God.”

  “Why were you asleep when the sheriff’s department came calling?”