Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries)

by Archer Mayor

  I closed the door behind me and hung up my coat. I heard her walk into the room. “Hi, Joe.” The terror in her voice made me whirl around. She was standing in the kitchen door, wide-eyed and pale. Behind her, holding a gun, was Henry Stark. “Yeah. Hi, Joe.”

  For a split second, I was frozen still, my heart hammering. Pictures flashed in my mind—of Jamie Phillips, Wendy Stiller, Ted Haffner, Lew Hill, and all the others this man had mentally or physically maimed. And now Gail. I fought back an explosive surge of absolute rage—something so violent, I had to reach back to Korea to remember its predecessor.

  Stark smiled and pushed her gently toward the living room sofa. “Strong, silent type, huh? Why don’t you follow your girlfriend after depositing your gun gently on the floor? I hate the way they throw guns around in the movies.” He shook his head, “Dangerous.”

  I did as I was told, thinking he sounded a lot like a movie himself. Gail and I sat side by side on the sofa.

  “That’s right. Lean way back. Put your feet up on the table and keep your hands folded in your laps.” He sat comfortably in an armchair opposite. He was dressed neatly in the dark blue jumpsuit and paratrooper boots I’d seen him in earlier. His face looked just as it did in his photo, except in person he positively oozed graceful menace. I had seen that once before, in a National Geographic, looking at a straight-on close-up of a panther in the wild. Even the pale, inert eyes looked the same.

  “I felt I ought to introduce myself personally, since you now know who I am. I also wanted to thank you for having done such a good job, albeit with some prodding. I have the definite feeling we won’t be at this too much longer. We’re getting very close, don’t you agree?”

  I was so roiled up inside I was having a hard time breathing, much less coming up with pleasantries to exchange with a psychopath. In the abstract, I’d had the leisure to deal with this man’s actions, to think about them one by one. Sitting here facing him, I just wanted him to go away. It was as if all he’d done—to his wife and daughter, to almost everyone I’d had to deal with for weeks—was suffocating me.

  “If you hadn’t been such a screwup as a father, none of this would have happened.”

  He tightened his mouth slightly, but that was all. “Aren’t we judgmental.”

  “Your daughter was an accident waiting to happen. If you want to find out who really raped and strangled her, look in the mirror.”

  He remained outwardly impassive, but he also stayed silent. I felt Gail’s eyes boring holes into the side of my head. She was evidently unhappy with my approach.

  But I’ll grant Stark this much: he had more self-control than I. After a long sixty-second count, he resumed in the same tone as before. “If you were actually trained by someone to talk like that to a man holding a gun on you, I suggest you report back that the method needs revision.”

  I heard Gail let out her breath softly. Stark rearranged himself in the chair, stretching his legs in the process. It seemed to relax him a bit. He smiled again. “Whether you admire me as a father or not, we’re stuck together on this thing, so we might as well get it over with quickly.”

  “You’ve got to be out of your mind if you think I’m going to cooperate with you. I fully intend to stop you long before I nail whoever it was who killed your daughter.”

  “Utter crap and you know it. The only case you have is the one we’re on together. You’re no closer to catching me than you were the night Thelma Reitz turned Phillips into Alpo, which, by the way, wasn’t my fault.”

  “Wasn’t your fault? Who the hell’s fault was it then?”

  “I had no idea she had a shotgun in the house. Not that I really minded—the results were satisfactory.”

  “Phillips was the only guy who tried to stop this whole mess.”

  “Oh, come, come. His actions are what count. The jury was unanimous—he just tried to get the best of both worlds. Pure hypocrisy.”

  I knew I wasn’t doing this right—that I should be conversational and supportive, trying to get as much out of him as I could. But I was both angry—at him and at myself—and nervous. With everybody poised to move on Gorham in the next few hours, I was now chatting with the one man I wanted kept in the dark. I felt everything I knew was printed across my forehead. “Why the hell didn’t you come to us in the first place and ask us to reopen the case?”

  That brought a chuckle. “Would it have worked?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Stranger things have happened. You never gave it a thought, did you?”

  He waved his hand. “Water under the dam.”

  Another blast of anger made me struggle to get up and lunge at him. He placed his pistol barrel against my forehead so fast I barely saw him move. “Sit back.” He pushed lightly with the gun, and I fell back against the pillows. Gail instinctively reached for my hand. Stark didn’t stop her.

  “Who killed Frank?”

  He looked at me for a long moment and then smiled and rose. “That’s enough for now. I merely dropped by to say hi. Perhaps we’ll meet again later.”

  “When we do, you’ll be in jail.”

  He slowly raised his pistol to where it was pointing at my right eye. “I want you to understand something here, Joe. You are not in control. You are my stalking horse. I put you in place and you’ve done your job. In a short while, the quarry will be exposed and you’ll be expendable.”

  His arm moved slightly to where the gun was pointed at Gail’s head. “But in the meantime, you had better remember: you people live at my discretion. That includes Miss Zigman, your mother, Leo, Martha Murphy, and all the other people you’d better place above your moral outrage. Because if you don’t, I’ll have to remind you how responsible you are for their safety.”

  The arm went down and he smiled again. “I’ll let you two get cozy. I know you haven’t seen each other in a while.” He walked to the door and picked up my gun. “I’ll leave this on the hood of your car. Good night.”

  And he was gone.

  Gail twisted around, put both her arms around me and held on tight. I kissed her ear and rubbed her back. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  She didn’t answer, but her grip tightened.

  We didn’t talk for a good half hour, which was probably just as well. We ended up instead lying on the couch, with her head on my chest, silently running it all through in our minds, again and again.

  Finally she sighed deeply, and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Gut reaction? I’d like to start by getting everyone out of harm’s way.”

  She looked up at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Protecting all the people he mentioned—you, Mother, Leo—all of them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Police protection maybe. I could get Martha to return to her daughter’s. I could get the state police to watch over Thetford.”

  “You can’t do that, Joe; you know it. Shy of putting us all into a tanker and pushing it out to sea, there’s no way of protecting us. If he really wants to, he’ll find us. Besides, he could put you in the same position by threatening a total stranger. It doesn’t need to be one of us.”

  The point was inarguable, but seeing him point that gun at Gail’s head had shaken my priorities. What, after all, did I really care about Bill Davis? He was a moral abstraction, a victim of circumstance. It was idiotic that I risk the lives of everyone who mattered to me for some principle no one had liked from the start.

  “You’ve just got to keep going the way you have been, Joe. From what he said, the worst thing you could do is to change course. It would force him to set you straight again.”

  “And setting me straight means I lead him to his daughter’s killer so he can execute him and fade back into the woodwork.”

  “You’ve already pulled him more into the open—he’s no longer the anonymous Ski Mask. Maybe he’ll trip up; maybe you can make him trip up. Just because he says he’s in control doesn’t mean it’s true. Your harping on him and his dau
ghter showed that. I didn’t appreciate that one bit, by the way. You’d have a short life as a psychiatrist—he was right about that.”

  That made me smile.

  She propped herself up by putting her elbows on my chest and looking me straight in the face. “Joe, you’re a decent, honest man. You can’t do anything other than what you’ve been doing. I know Stark can carry out his threat, but it’s not what he wants. His focus is on finding who killed his daughter, and that’s where yours has to be too. It’s the only way the two of you will ever be on close to an equal footing.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “Christ, I don’t know. I wish I were ticketing cars right now.”

  She leaned forward and kissed my chin. “Let’s go to bed.”

  29

  THE PROCEDURE FOR CAMPING on another town’s front step until the bad guy rides in involves more than notifying the local sheriff, much to Hollywood’s chagrin. Nowadays, the hierarchy of the “need-to-know” extends right up to the governor’s office of each state involved. Luckily, it’s quicker than it sounds, although the three days I’d allowed us was still cutting it fine. Due to the notoriety of the case, I wasn’t too worried about hitting snags; nobody wanted this thing to get stalled because of them. But I was worried about leaving Gorham uncovered until all the paperwork was in. So, bending the rules a bit, I gave three of my men official time off and told them to spend their vacations in beautiful Gorham, New Hampshire, where the post office was renowned as one of the world’s true scenic wonders. I forgot to let Katz in on this.

  My biggest headache, as I saw it, was keeping Colonel Stark out of the picture. He had prematurely moved into the open when he’d questioned Haffner and killed Lew Hill. It was a mistake he wouldn’t repeat. I was absolutely sure that when I saw him again, it would be for the last play of the game. I only hoped that when that happened, we would already have Cioffi under wraps.

  For the next two days, we escorted the paperwork through the process like a kitten through a kennel—very quietly. James Dunn agreed to handle all his office’s details personally, including the typing. A judge was found in the middle of the night to sign on the dotted line. Kunkle drove the papers up to Montpelier and hand-delivered them to the governor’s man responsible for state warrants. He then drove over to Concord, New Hampshire, and made the connection with their people.

  In the meantime, I organized the troops, picking my men, coordinating with the New Hampshire State Police—who would actually make the bust—and poring over maps of Gorham to determine the best plan of attack. I did all this in parking lots, other people’s cars and secretly rented motel rooms—all places I was sure Stark couldn’t have bugged beforehand. Through it all, Katz was the perfect gentleman, which was just as well. Including him in all the cloak-and-dagger stuff made most of the people I dealt with think I had totally lost my mind.

  The solution to Stark’s following us to Gorham and to Cioffi—brilliant, I thought—was to fly everyone there by helicopter, leaving Stark to watch us vanish into the sky. When I stepped outside the Municipal Building after almost forty-eight hours of nonstop preparations, I knew that part of the plan was shot. It was snowing—heavily.

  Kunkle appeared out of the gloom, his head and shoulders speckled white.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The chopper pilot said the flight’s off. I guess we drive.”

  That’s not what I wanted to hear. “What’s the forecast?”

  “This shit for thirty-six to seventy-two hours. It’ll get worse before it gets better. Travel advisories are already out.”

  “Damn.”

  Kunkle hesitated a moment. “I’ve got Katz in the car, along with the equipment.”

  “Equipment” was a euphemism for rifles, shotguns, and bulletproof vests. I appreciated his forethought.

  “I guess we go, then.”

  He led the way across the parking lot to his car. Katz was sitting in the back.

  “Hello, Stan.”

  “Hi, Joe. Not quite the weather you were hoping for, is it?”

  I slid onto the front seat and Kunkle started the car. “Not exactly.”

  We already had three of our men in Gorham, which had miffed the New Hampshire State Police—they felt we were doubting their prowess—so I’d restricted the second wave to just the three of us. I hadn’t told our new allies who Katz was.

  That was a detail he hadn’t overlooked. He knew that once we crossed into New Hampshire, my deal with him had no value. If the state police over there didn’t want him around, that was it. My silence had made him friendlier than I’d known possible—a definite plus. It was going to be a long drive, and I was grateful my two normally overbearing companions had lightened their personalities.

  Still, the trip was tense. Looking out the windshield was like staring at an interminable swarm of fireflies on the attack, careening at the car and veering away at the last instant. The sudden appearance of other cars was the only startling reminder that we were still on the road. The memories of my last trip with Frank were real enough to be scary. I kept looking over my shoulder to check for headlights, but except for when we came to the occasional town, there was nothing.

  “Did you check the car for bugs?”

  “A couple of times. It’s not my car anyway. I borrowed it at the last second from a friend, just to be sure.”

  I looked at Kunkle’s profile in the glow from the instrument panel. It made me think of that nursery rhyme about what’s-her-name: “When she was good, she was very, very good…”

  It took us all night to reach Gorham, a trip that normally lasted three hours. By the time we rolled to a stop in the parking lot of the Swiss Alpine Lodge, daylight was struggling to penetrate the cotton candy around us.

  The three men I’d sent on ahead had booked two adjoining rooms on the ground floor. It was Ron Klesczewski who answered my knock. He was wearing his undershorts and a T-shirt and was still only semiconscious. That changed when he looked past me.

  “Holy shit. It’s snowing.” He stuck his head out and looked up—a gesture that has never made much sense to me. “Jesus. It’s a goddamn blizzard.”

  He focused on Katz. “My God. What the hell is he doing here?”

  I planted my hand against his chest and pushed him back into the room so we could enter. “Hello to you too. Do you always wake up in such a state of amazement?”

  He blinked a couple of times. “No. Well, I mean… I didn’t expect it; or him. It is unusual, you got to admit.”

  “Katz is observing. Don’t tell the state police who he is or there’ll be hell to pay. Where’s DeFlorio?”

  “Here.” The voice was muffled by the pile of blankets on the far bed.

  “Morning, Dennis. Rise and shine.”

  A hand emerged from the pile and groped for a watch on the night table. Both disappeared and were followed by a groan. “Jesus. Too early.”

  The connecting door to the other room opened, and J.P. Tyler stepped in, shaved, showered, and fully clothed. “Hi, Joe; Willy.” He nodded at Katz without comment or visible surprise. From his appearance, it might have been the middle of the day.

  I pulled open the curtains, without great effect, and switched on the overhead light. “I take it you’re aware of that.” I pointed at the snowstorm.

  “Yeah. Last radio report had it at almost two feet. Worst in years, they say.”

  “Has anyone been in touch with the locals yet?” I knew the answer for DeFlorio and Klesczewski, but I thought I’d be polite. Among his peers at least, Tyler never failed to assume unofficial command.

  “I talked to them after I heard the weather. They’ve been in touch with the Postal Service. Things will be delayed, but they’ll still come through. As far as the state police are concerned, the operation is on without changes.”

  “They still headquartered at the school?”

  He nodded. There was a large school building in the middle of Gorham, several blocks southeast of
the post office. The assumption was that a small cluster of cars wouldn’t seem out of place there, even in this mess. Tyler added, “By the way, they managed to get a man inside the post office, posing as a mail sorter.”

  “Has anyone seen Cioffi?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  De Florio had by this time emerged from his blankets and was sitting with his back against the wall. “Are we sure we’re ever going to see him?”

  “Yes. I called his broker yesterday. The deal’s still on. There was a bit of a problem with Express Mail because of the post office box delivery address. Cioffi is anxious to be there when they make the delivery, so we’ll probably see him loitering around the post office.”

  “He’ll be a snowman unless he loiters inside.”

  I checked my watch. “I’m going over to the school. I want to get the lay of the land. You guys meet me there as soon as you can.”

  “You can’t see the lay of the land.”

  Kunkle, Katz, and I trudged back out to the car. We slithered from the parking lot to the road in the gloomy half-light, Kunkle fighting to keep us from the ditch. The motel was on the north end of Gorham, a small, flat town tucked between the parallel curves of the Androscoggin River and the railroad tracks. There was one central street, predictably named Main, which served as a brief convergence for Route 2, running east to west, and Route 16, which cut from north to south.

  We crawled down the deserted street, our eyes searching the white turmoil outside for the post office. We found it in the middle of town, on the right, situated like the hub of a three-spoke wheel amid Charlie’s Restaurant on one side, a small laundromat-supermarket complex on the other, and an abandoned greasy spoon across the street.

  Katz spoke up for the first time in hours. “Well, that answers where he’ll probably be loitering.”

  “I wonder if the state police have a plant in the supermarket, too,” Kunkle muttered.

  The school was several short blocks farther down the street, set back in the middle of its own lot of land. It was a typical Victorian monstrosity, not unlike the Municipal Building back home. I noticed two Sno-Cats parked by the side, blending in with some town sand trucks and graders. If the weather kept up, they’d be the only way to get around. I hoped someone knew where the keys were.