The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  · · ·

  At the top of the basement stairs, I found Connor O’Brian, NeverTom’s lawyer, waiting for me, fussily dressed as always and equipped with a superior smirk.

  He tapped the folded warrant against the palm of his open hand. “I hope you had a good time touring the house, Joe, because a tour is all you’re going to get out of this blatant invasion of privacy. This,” he held up the warrant, “is a joke, as you probably know. If Judge Harrowsmith had been in town, instead of the twinky you hoodwinked, you never would’ve gotten it signed.”

  “But I did get it signed, Connor.”

  “A temporary inconvenience—worse for you, since I see you actually collected something. Now it’ll all be thrown out, along with the warrant. I thought you were more professional.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to know the difference.”

  The smile flattened slightly, to my satisfaction. Connor O’Brian had always soured my stomach. “Joe, there is no weight of law behind the recommendations of how to dispose of dead animals, rabid or not.”

  “Take me to your master, Connor,” I said, not bothering to debate.

  Walking stiffly, he led the way to the door through which Chambers had vanished two hours earlier. It opened onto a truly magnificent library—wood-paneled, with leaded windows and leather furniture—straight out of My Fair Lady. Tom Chambers was standing by a large fireplace, lit, I noticed, by gas jets behind decorative ceramic logs. In a far corner, looking like a child in an oversized chair, Ben Chambers sat watching the three of us, pale, withdrawn, and nervous. I nodded silently in greeting, and he responded in kind.

  “Have you finished?” Tom demanded petulantly.

  “Yes, thank you. And collected some evidence.” I gave him a handwritten receipt. “I should warn you, Mr. Chambers, that despite what your lawyer may say, you are in trouble.”

  He glanced down at the receipt, and to my disappointment a look of genuine amazement crossed his face. “What the hell? A ricer? What in Christ’s name is a ricer? And coffee filters? What do you people think you’re doing?”

  I glanced at his brother, who was looking with baffled alarm at Tom. I began to feel slightly queasy, as if some vast and expensive structure of my own design had just begun to crack at the foundation.

  Tom Chambers was advancing toward me, his face back to its familiar shade of purple. “Get out of my house. Now. I’ll see you in court, Gunther, and it won’t be over some fucking ricer. It’ll be to sue you for every penny you fucking own. This is the last time you’ll ever play the Gestapo in this town.”

  O’Brian slid between us, placing his hand on Chambers’s chest, murmuring calmative phrases I couldn’t hear over his client’s bellowing. I left, closing the door behind me.

  J.P. and Willy were waiting for me outside the house, stamping their feet against the cold.

  “I guess Mr. Big took offense,” Willy said with standard grace.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, heading for the car. But I was no longer sure Tom Chambers’s outrage was so misplaced.

  26

  “BRING THE TIME LINE INTO MY OFFICE,” I told Sammie as I passed her desk.

  She did as requested, surprised at my tone of voice.

  She sat down opposite me and opened a file folder on her lap. “This is as much as I have so far.”

  “What’ve you got on Tom Chambers?”

  “Specifically? Nothing. There are three dates we know for sure—when the PCB was dumped in Keene, when Mary Wallis disappeared, and when Adele Sawyer was murdered. Tom Chambers was in Montpelier on the first, at home on the second, and at an all-night poker game on the third.”

  “Who’s vouching for him being at home? His brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that one’s up in the air.”

  Sammie continued. “We’re pretty sure Hennessy did the PCB. Neither his mistress nor his wife can give him an alibi, and the meeting he claimed he was at in Albany never took place. Also, just for the hell of it, we had Keene PD check their records for that night. Hennessy was given a ticket for burning a red light at two in the morning. He was driving a Carroll Construction pickup with an oil drum in the back. He was also so hyper they gave him a breath test. He passed.”

  I thought a moment, my apprehension growing. “Did J.P. hear back on the raccoon carcass?”

  “Ten minutes ago—there was too much damage to the brain to do a test, so we can’t categorically say it was rabid. Not only that, but he checked the ricer and the wood samples he removed from the worktable. He couldn’t find a trace of anything except bleach.”

  “And the phenobarbital?”

  Her expression lightened. “There we might have something. The prescription was filled by an out-of-town pharmacist, which is why we missed it the first time around. J.P. got a warrant based on what we found in Shawna’s hair and took a look at the pharmacy’s records. Tom Chambers has a standard prescription there—has had for the past five years, for difficulty sleeping and nerves, and there was a spike in the purchase pattern at about the right time, as if he’d had to replace a bottle. ’Course, that’s pretty circumstantial—he could say he dropped them down the drain by mistake.”

  I tossed the pencil I’d been holding across my desk. “Shit. Without Hennessy, Wallis, or Fallows, we don’t have a goddamn thing, do we?”

  “We will,” she said softly.

  “What about Ben Chambers?” I asked suddenly.

  She shrugged. “Nothing—and nothing to use as leverage, either. He’s a loner who keeps to himself. BTC is a privately held company, so its records are closed without a warrant. We have been asking around, but where NeverTom goes everywhere and sees everybody, Ben either stays at home or visits the office. He doesn’t date any women, go out to restaurants, travel anywhere, belong to any clubs. At business meetings, he either phones in or shows up late and leaves early so no one can chitchat. He’s not a recluse, but he comes close.”

  I had moved my chair while she was talking and was now staring out the window at the cobalt-blue sky.

  “We’ve got a problem, don’t we?” she said quietly.

  I shifted my gaze to her. “Yeah. We focused on NeverTom fast and early. He’s a loud-mouthed creep, he obviously deals dirty, and we had people like Fallows and Eddy Knox to help prejudice us. But I’m worried we missed the boat… Still, how can you dig up as much as we have and still wind up with nothing? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Unless you’re digging in the wrong direction.”

  “You mean Ben Chambers?” I asked. “Where’re the connections? Aside from buying the convention project, he never comes up.”

  “Maybe Ben’s using Tom as a front.”

  “So why can’t we nail Tom then? It should work out that if we can get one, we get the other. My God—with three dead bodies and a possible fourth, and a fifteen-million-dollar con game going on right under our noses, you’d think we could come up with some solid evidence. What the hell’re we missing?”

  · · ·

  Ted McDonald filled his tiny studio. A truly huge man, planted on an all-but-invisible swivel chair, he could reach every knob, switch, and button on his various pieces of equipment without having to do more than bend forward slightly. Ted was WBRT’s news director, not a DJ who read the news, so the two of us were on our own until the top of the hour, when the rock-’n’-roll diet was regularly interrupted for a five-minute informational update.

  Not that all he did was sit and wait. He got out quite a bit, sniffing around for material, often filing his reports by remote. Less obviously, he kept in touch with probably a thousand informants, from street cleaners to selectmen to state legislators, all of whom he treated with the same generous equanimity. Although restricted to five minutes every hour, McDonald had enough in his brain to monopolize the air all day.

  “So… You did a Deep Throat with Katz,” he said, smiling.

  I didn’t bother denying it. On such matters, he was a listener, not a talker. “Hope yo
u didn’t mind.”

  “Mind? Christ, no—made perfect sense. I’m a headline service. You needed something in depth to shove under NeverTom’s nose. Did it work?”

  “I don’t know. We’re pushing pretty hard, and we’ve got nothing to show for it. I was hoping you could expand on that portrait you drew for me at the construction site.”

  “Of the Chambers boys? What do you want to know? I’ve only met Junior a couple of times.”

  “What about when they were younger, when the old man was still alive? You said Tom had the balls and Ben had the brains, and that Tom got his kicks putting Ben down all the time. Can you build on that a little? Seems like everyone else we talk to either doesn’t know or is too scared to say.”

  McDonald smiled cherubically. “Works that way a lot, doesn’t it? All right, I suppose I could do that. Keep in mind, though, this is all rumor, okay? Quote me and I’ll play dumb.”

  I merely nodded.

  “The old man was a traditionalist parent, and since his wife died when Tom was born, he was free to do what he wanted. So, traditionally the elder son gets the inheritance, and the younger one gets to screw around and become a drunk, and that’s the way things started out. Except neither son cooperated. Ben was a slow learner—retiring, intimidated by his overbearing father, who was a real tyrant. The more the old man pushed, the less Junior was able to achieve.”

  “NeverTom, on the other hand, blossomed. Ignored by his father, a witness to what was happening with his brother, he took all the old man’s lessons to heart, without the old man knowing he was even there. Tom became the athlete, the socialite, the popular one—and a son of a bitch—until his father finally took notice. Then, typically enough, Benjamin dropped Junior like a hot rock, and turned all his attention to Tom, who ate it up. Conversely, Junior was able to get up from under the heat lamp, sorted himself out, and became the scholar of the two boys.”

  “He turned into a bookworm, almost an intellectual, even though his brother got the higher grades. You seen that library they have at home? I doubt Tom’s read a single book in it. That’s Junior’s room—his sanctum.”

  “Isn’t Ben the one who really runs things? You implied he’s the reason they still have all that money.”

  Ted laughed and gave me a Machiavellian look. “I may have misled you slightly the other day—rumor is there isn’t as much money as people think. From what I heard, Junior’s taking the gamble of a lifetime with this convention center.”

  I scowled at him. “Wouldn’t the bank know that? They had to have checked Junior’s books when he came riding in as the white knight.”

  I could tell Ted was enjoying being the source for once, instead of the mouthpiece. “Harold Matson looked at the books, sure.”

  I stared in stunned silence. How many times had we talked around the same subject—a single item lost among dozens—without seeing it in just this way? “Matson cooked the information and then sold it to his board and the other banks?”

  McDonald shook his head. “I said no such thing. For all the proof I have, this might as well be a fairy tale.”

  “All right, all right,” I retreated. “Let’s go back. So Junior may not be such a hot businessman after all. What’re the rumors specifically?”

  “That while he’s been a wheeler-dealer, he’s lost more than he’s made. He’s still got money—both of them do—but it’s less than what the old man left them. That brings up one of the weird wrinkles about the relationship between the two brothers, in fact. Despite the old man’s disenchantment with Junior, he insisted on keeping the eldest son at the helm of the business. That’s Junior’s hold over NeverTom—he controls the cash flow. That’s one of the reasons all of this was kept quiet—politically, Tom couldn’t afford to appear dependent on a recluse loser of a brother, so they’ve both worked well together at hushing up the truth and making Junior look like a winner.”

  “So all that stuff that was leaked during NeverTom’s run for the select board, about how Junior’ll do anything to pave his brother’s political future, is bullshit?”

  “I don’t know,” Ted answered. “But I don’t think there’s any love lost between them.”

  “How does NeverTom treat him?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea, but Tom could be pretty awful when they were young. Word was he tortured pets, pulled cruel jokes on people, and once ‘accidentally’ broke the arm of a rival football player so he could play first string. Pretty sociopathic behavior, all in all. I wouldn’t guess he’s a great guy to live with.”

  Ted smiled at my expression. “You seem disappointed.”

  I stood up in the small room and ran my fingers through my hair. “I am. We’ve been getting nowhere trying to nail this on NeverTom. I was hoping you could give me something on Junior.”

  Ted gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry. From everything I know about them, Junior’s just your classic repressed nerd.”

  · · ·

  Beverly Hillstrom was uncharacteristically jubilant. “Congratulations, Lieutenant, your hunch was correct. We located an injection site at the base of Milo Douglas’s skull, just above the hairline. He was definitely exposed to rabies artificially. You can rule his death a homicide.”

  “Thanks, Doctor. I appreciate all the hard work.”

  But she sensed the flatness in my voice. “Is this not good news?”

  “It is. I’m sorry. I’m just not sure how to use it anymore. Things have been unraveling a bit down here. We’re trying to regroup.”

  She tried to fill the awkward pause that followed. “I hope it’s not a major setback.”

  Painfully aware of the effort she’d made, I tried to lighten up a bit. “It’s not. We’ll get this nailed down, and what you just gave me will be a big help. I’ll keep you updated.”

  · · ·

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and checked my watch for the fourth time.

  “Don’t tell me,” Gail smiled at me. “He’s still late.”

  I gave her a sour stare. “Typical doctor—and he even chose the time.”

  She returned to the law book she’d brought along, and I began another tour of the lobby’s paintings and citations. We were waiting at the Skyview Nursing Home for Bernie’s psychiatrist, Dr. Andrews, who’d finally called to schedule “our little experiment,” as he phrased it.

  With a sudden bang of the front door, a tall young man, athletic and wild-haired, came striding in from the night. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and a sheaf of loose papers in the other. A wide smile split his face at the sight of us, defusing my irritation.

  He marched by without pause, talking as he went. “I’m so sorry—had somebody on a bender, couldn’t pull out before she landed. Let’s duck into one of these offices here. I want to bring you up to snuff on a little of Bernie’s history.”

  Gail and I exchanged glances, both of us struck by his congenial energy, and fell into step behind him. He stopped at a door about halfway down the hall, fumbled in his pocket for a key, and ushered us into an office whose blandness suggested a large number of short-term tenants.

  There were three armchairs grouped around a low coffee table, across the room from a more formal arrangement of a desk and three ladder-backs. Andrews chose the former, dumping his paperwork on the coffee table.

  “Sit, sit,” he urged and took his own advice, not bothering to remove his coat. “What did you do to your head?”

  I unconsciously fingered the bandage. “Just a cut.”

  He absorbed that with a nod, enigmatically adding, “Might come in handy tonight. Okay—I’ll make this fast so I won’t waste any more of our time. I visited Bernie this afternoon, just to make a quick appraisal, and found that the recent snowfall has set him back a little, which could be to our advantage. Fresh snow reminds him of the war and therefore throws him into his soldier mode, as I call it, but since that’s the mode in which he chooses to reflect on Mrs. Sawyer’s death, that may be good news.” He looked in
tensely at Gail, his smile broadening. “You’re Gail Zigman? Thank you for all the time you’ve spent with him. It’s had a great impact. He keeps talking about the cat. You have it with you?”

  “Harry’s got it upstairs. Seemed easier to let him keep her.”

  “Right. Well, the ‘lady with the cat’ is a big hit. He can’t place you in time—keeps thinking you’re either his daughter or wife or an old girlfriend—but I like the fact that he’s taken a current image—you—and placed it back in the historical time frame he’s comfortable with. It shows he might’ve done the same thing with Mrs. Sawyer’s murder.”

  He picked up the papers and settled them in his lap. “Right. Either of you know much about the Battle of the Bulge?”

  “Hitler’s last-ditch effort to stall the Allied invasion of Germany in December, 1944,” I answered, feeling like I was back in school.

  “Right—that’s the big picture. From Bernie’s perspective, it was an eighty-mile-wide patch of dense forestland, flat up against the German border, where green troops were supposed to get a gentle introduction to being on the front. They called it the ‘Phantom Front,’ because everyone knew the Germans were basically whipped, and that even if they did put up a fight, it wouldn’t be in a thick forest with a few narrow roads.”

  “Bernie was a seventeen-year-old PFC, attached to the Hundred-and-Sixth Division. He’d been in place five days, had only fired his rifle on the range, and was part of a combat group that was way under-strength. When the Germans attacked, they did so with a massive one-hour artillery barrage—complete with batteries of searchlights to both blind and light up the American positions. For the GIs, the result was instant bedlam—not only because of the incredible noise, but because the shells knocked out many of the telephone cables they depended on for communications. Before they knew what was going on—or could figure out if this was a ‘spoiling attack’ versus an all-out counteroffensive—German tanks and troops were suddenly mixed in with their own. Inexperienced American officers found themselves giving orders to German soldiers and getting shot at for their trouble. Infantrymen ran for cover behind tanks from the wrong side.”