Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  She nodded. “Yes.” Her voice had lost most of its perfect hostess lilt.

  “I heard he was pretty upset.”

  “He was. Very.”

  “This is an important time for him, isn’t it? With this new bill?”

  “Yes.”

  “He been tense? Preoccupied?”

  “Of course.”

  “Mrs. Reynolds, do you ever worry about him? Some of the clients he’s had over the years, some of the people he has to deal with to get things done in Montpelier?”

  “There have been a few unpleasant ones…” She stopped, seemed to clear her head, and then spoke again more forcefully. “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here. Jim is a good man, who’s doing the best he can to help this state out. He’s risking a lot with this bill, and he’s doing it for people like you. I don’t know what this is all about, but I know Jim isn’t a part of it.”

  I got up and moved to the window. The light from the house lay dimly on the driveway. Beyond, the darkness of the trees made it feel as if we were floating in outer space.

  I spoke to my own reflection. “Mrs. Reynolds, I want to be perfectly honest with you. I like your husband. I voted for him, the woman I live with campaigned for him, and even though he’s a defense attorney, we have a lot of respect for him at the police department. He fights hard but fair.”

  I turned toward her. “So don’t think I’m going after him because we’re political opposites. If anything, I’d like to lend him a hand. But I have to do my job, and what he’s been up to lately has raised some questions.”

  “What do you think he has been up to?” she asked, her face coloring. “All I’ve heard is something about his office being broken into and our car being somewhere it wasn’t. This is crazy.”

  I held up a finger. “He hired a private investigator to look into the break-in, and we have several witnesses to the car.”

  Her mouth opened slightly. “A private investigator?”

  “Yes. Winthrop Johnston. Good man. Very discreet.”

  There was a long pause before she asked, “What are you saying?”

  “Only that your husband has a lot of irons in the fire, that he hasn’t been entirely straight with you, for whatever reasons, and that I have some concerns about what may be going on.”

  “Like what?”

  I spread my hands out to both sides. “I don’t know. Maybe you can help me there. Have you had any worries about him recently?”

  She looked thoughtful for a moment. “He’s been very tense. I thought it was because of the bill. He’s betting his political future on it.”

  “What about at the office? He’s had to cut back on his practice. That must affect your income.”

  She waved that away, her voice slightly bitter. “I have money. We don’t need the income. He works so he can feel he’s not a kept man. It’s not my choice we barely get to spend time together.”

  There was a sudden flash of light in the window next to me, and the motion-detection lights exposed a big Ford Explorer angling into the driveway and pausing in front of the garage doors. Laura Reynolds stood up, the tension of an instant ago replaced by the perfect smile. She crossed the room to stand next to me. “It’s the children with supper.”

  With obvious relief, she headed for the kitchen and the garage beyond. Then she stopped abruptly and looked back at me. “What are you going to tell them?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “That we’re investigating an accident and wanted to make sure your car was okay.” Her smile warmed then, perhaps for the first time since we’d met. “Thank you.”

  · · ·

  I waited until we were retreating down New England Drive, having met the kids, the au pair, and the two dogs, before asking Willy, “So what did you find?”

  “Zilch. No blood, no scratches or tears, no signs of anything hinky. There was even some dust on the steering wheel, as well as on the garage floor behind the tires, and the license plate screws look like they’ve never been touched. That car hasn’t moved in weeks.”

  “You take a picture of it?”

  “A dozen of ’em.”

  · · ·

  This time around, I met Ed Renaud at home—a far cry from the dark, cool sanctity of his fishing shanty. Reverberating with the blast of a television sitcom, and tinged with a sour blend of poverty, neglect, and lost hopes, his crowded walk-up apartment was ample enough justification for a fondness for outdoor recreation.

  I didn’t ask to be let inside. The landing was close enough. I dug into my pocket and retrieved one of Willy’s Polaroids.

  “Mr. Renaud, you told me last time you got a pretty good look at the car carrying those three men. You think you’d recognize it again from a photo?”

  He thoughtfully dug at a tooth with a fingernail. “I guess so.”

  I handed him the picture.

  He glanced at it for no more than ten seconds and returned it. “That ain’t it. The license is right… Well, I guess I screwed that up a bit. I thought it looked like ‘PERCH,’ but now I see it again, I know that’s what I seen. But the car’s wrong.”

  I watched his face carefully. “Mr. Renaud, you said it was a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria.”

  “It was. But that thing’s got one of those fake ragtops.” He took the photo back and stabbed it with his finger. “See? The one I saw had a shiny roof. I remember the reflection coming off it. This ain’t it.”

  He paused and pulled at his chin. “Don’t understand how that plate ended up on it, though, ’cause I’m sure it’s right.”

  I returned the Polaroid to my pocket. “I guess that’s for us to find out.”

  11

  I FOUND GAIL IN THE TUB, surrounded by music and soap bubbles, looking like a vision from a Doris Day movie. She was pink and hot and smelled as fresh as a baby.

  “God, that looks nice,” I said as I leaned over to kiss her.

  She smiled up at me. “There’s room for two.”

  I began shaking my head.

  “Why not?” she interrupted. “I’m not getting out till I’m good and pruny, and you look like you could use it.”

  I considered her offer for three seconds and then loosened my tie.

  The water was so hot it hurt to enter it. But as soon as I’d done so, I had no regrets.

  “Tough day?” she asked, after I’d settled in with much groaning, sliding my thighs over hers and my toes just under her armpits, my skin burning with the slightest movement.

  “More like a waste of time. What can you tell me about Jim and Laura Reynolds?”

  I hadn’t shared our recent interest in Reynolds with her. I’d thought it might put her in an awkward position, since they were friends and political allies. But given how Ed Renaud had just cleared their car of being at the train tracks, I wasn’t so sure Jim Reynolds was in the hot seat I’d thought he was.

  “They on your radarscope for some reason?” she asked.

  “I think someone’s trying to put him there. One of their cars was reported seen at that railroad killing, but now it looks like it might’ve been a substitute look-alike equipped with his license plates. It’s smelling like some strange kind of frame-up.”

  “I guess,” she agreed. “So what do you want to know?”

  “General stuff. Gut reactions. Whatever you can tell me about both of them.”

  “You met her?”

  “Yeah—tonight. I’d seen her before, but this was the first time face-to-face. She’s very poised—to begin with.”

  Gail laughed. “And then?”

  “I got the feeling she was underwhelmed by his ambition.”

  “She hates it,” Gail said flatly. “But he’s a hard man to push around. Very competitive. I’ve talked to her about it—she plays the doting wife well, and I was curious how and why she did it. She didn’t hold back once we got friendly. She loves him very much, and she’s willing to put up with the bullshit for now, hoping to get her turn later. I think she’s kidding herself, but t
hat’s the plan.”

  “A retirement in Santa Fe with concerts, tennis courts, and visits from the grandchildren?” I asked.

  “Something like that. I don’t think she understands how committed he is.”

  My chin was barely clear of the water by now, which meant that only half her face was visible above a field of billowing soap bubbles. My entire body was slowly relaxing.

  “And how committed is he?” I asked.

  “Very. Jim Reynolds’s altruism is the real McCoy. It’s not just ambition or insecurity or misplaced machismo that makes him both a politician and a defense lawyer. For one thing, he’s bright enough to have gone to Boston or New York and made a zillion bucks working for cigarette companies or something. He believes in what he says, no matter how corny the Willy Kunkles of the world think that sounds. It’s one reason he came up with this law enforcement bill, even if it means it’ll make his life tougher as a lawyer. Selfishly, he’d be better off leaving the system alone, since it allows him a whole variety of loopholes to jump through.”

  “Except he won’t be working as a lawyer,” I commented. “If things work out for him, he’ll be governor and won’t have to give a damn.”

  To her credit, Gail didn’t get defensive. “Okay,” she conceded, “I’ll admit he’s also a self-serving, conceited egomaniac who’s going to wind up disappointing his long-suffering wife. If he does pull off this miracle and become top dog, he’ll probably be aiming for something higher before he’s three terms into it. She’ll end up alone in Santa Fe and he’ll be in DC. He is a politician, after all. He needs the attention. He needs people to tell him they love him.”

  “Could all that make him crooked if he got desperate enough? He hadn’t been making much of a statewide name for himself before this.”

  Again, she avoided the expected denial, merely tilting her head reflectively and admitting, “Maybe.”

  I laughed. “So much for Ivanhoe.”

  She scowled at me, provoked at last. “I never said he was that. I said he backed his ideals with action. What idealist hasn’t run over a few people because he convinced himself it wasn’t too high a price? And who are you or I or anyone else to say they’re wrong? It’s a pretty blurry line between stepping on people’s toes for the right reason and running them over with ambition. I don’t see Jim Reynolds ever committing an immoral or illegal act for purely selfish reasons. I could see him doing it thinking the ends justified the means.”

  “Sounds pretty arrogant,” I said.

  “He is that,” she agreed. “He’s also a real believer, which is why Laura’s going to have to make up her mind to either make her peace or run for the hills.” She paused and then added, “Not that it’ll ever reach that stage—not with Mark Mullen standing ready to clip Jim’s wings.”

  “The speaker?” I asked, surprised. I’d never heard Mullen’s and Reynolds’s names in the same sentence before. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “They’re eyeing the same gold ring. You watch. He’s not going to let Reynolds ride that bill to the governorship. Somehow or another, when it gets to the House, Mullen will take it over—kill it, amend it, abandon it in committee—‘let it hang on the wall,’ as they say up there. But he’ll remove Reynolds’s fingerprints from it. Mullen hasn’t spent thirty-plus years in the House without knowing how things work. And with Howell retiring, he feels he’s earned a promotion.”

  I wiped the sweat from my face with a wet hand. “This may be more than I need to know right now.”

  Gail smiled and returned to more immediate issues. “So you think Laura may be trying to hobble Jim’s horse?”

  I laughed. “By framing her own husband? Interesting idea. I suppose she has the means to set it up—she said she was rich.”

  “Very. All inherited. Believe it or not, they met on a ski slope. He was the rugged, handsome instructor, on vacation from law school. She was the wealthy snow bunny working hard to drive her father nuts. That part probably worked, but she hadn’t banked on Jim having dreams of his own.” She paused and then added, “I doubt she figured on falling in love with him like she did, either. She may hate the life, but she’s devoted to the man. That’s where your theory hits the rocks.”

  I laughed. “My theory? This is your little movie. I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on. I do know Stan Katz has his nose in the wind, though, so whatever it is, it’s not going to stay private for long.”

  She made a disgusted face. “Great. That’ll really help clear things up.”

  “He called me to ask if Reynolds had any ties to illegal dumping.”

  She surprised me by not rejecting the notion out of hand. “As in hazardous materials?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  She answered slowly—and enigmatically—“He’s represented a lot of people over the years. One of them might be thinking he didn’t get his money’s worth. That’s where I’d look.”

  The thought had crossed my mind. As had the fact that Jim Reynolds—despite Gail’s opinion and his own wife’s support—might be a whole lot less pure than the driven snow.

  · · ·

  Snow, as it turned out, was on everyone’s mind the next morning. Having held off entirely through a bitterly cold, bleak Christmas season, it seemed winter was trying to make amends all in one day. Looking out the window as I dressed, I couldn’t even see the garage. Slowly falling in thick, heavy flakes, it reminded me of a flurry of cherry blossoms torn suddenly from their stems. But a flurry without end.

  I went downstairs and paused on the back doorstep, taking it in. This kind of snowstorm—dense, silent, and windless—has an effect unlike any other weather phenomenon. Rather than producing sound, it absorbs it; instead of displaying great havoc, it cuts off your sight. And yet it permeates every sense, less like an act of nature and more like a spiritual event. Most people walk around in such a snowfall as if blessed with new insight—or at least lost in childlike wonder.

  Gail, on the other hand, was having none of it. Appearing next to me moments later, she merely glanced up, scowled, and said, “This’ll sure screw up traffic,” and disappeared into the whitewash like a thought fading from memory, heading for her car.

  I followed her example a few minutes later, driving off without working my windshield wipers. The snow was dry, and the motion of the vehicle was enough to clear the glass, which allowed me to enjoy the snow-clad stillness unimpeded. I could almost imagine not being in a car at all, but traveling in a dreamlike state through some hopeless romantic’s version of utopia.

  Except, of course, that Gail had been right. Not far from the house, I passed the first abandoned car in a ditch and after that was confronted by a series of traffic jams, confused drivers, and irritated plow operators. The scanner in my car murmured an endless stream of directives to ambulances, wreckers, and squad cars to aid those lost, hurt, and broken-down. The town I’d left the day before had been visited by a quiet, otherworldly, beatific disaster.

  When I finally reached it, the office was a command center under siege, the dispatch room manned by a double shift, the hallways filled with milling, snow-dusted officers tracking muddy footprints behind them, and the air resonating with the sound of ringing phones and squawking radios. And yet, beneath it all, there was a lightheartedness. No one, it seems, can really take a storm like this too seriously, even in the midst of chaos and discomfort. Too many memories of sledding, snowballs, and the taste of it on your tongue get in the way.

  Predictably, the detective squad was sparsely populated. Harriet was there, as was Ron. Willy, as expected, was not. Sammie, the sudden enigma, was also missing, no doubt bundled up with her newfound joy under a comforter.

  My one concern was Tyler. “Where’s J.P.?” I asked Harriet.

  “Returning from Waterbury. He radioed in a while ago. He’s on the interstate, not far north of here, but he’s having a tough time. Things are almost at a standstill. The weather report’s predicting three feet—a record-breaker.”
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  “He did say the lab came through big time,” Ron added from his desk. “’Course, he was up there all night bugging them.”

  He looked it when he arrived an hour later—disheveled, in need of a shave, and with bloodshot eyes. But smiling.

  He dumped an overstuffed briefcase on his desk and collapsed into a chair without removing his coat. “The print on the knife belongs to one Owen Tharp, aged nineteen. Last known address: Brookside Terrace. Supposedly lives there with an aunt, Judith Tharp Giroux. He’s unemployed, was being monitored by SRS until two years ago, and has been tested ADD, among other things. SRS told me his parents never married, his father’s unknown, and his mother died of alcoholism about eight years ago. He’s been in foster homes since he was three, never stayed in one for more than a few years, and didn’t finish high school.”

  He paused to take a breath.

  “Any criminal record?” I asked, saddened by the familiarity of this litany.

  “You bet. Burglary, destruction of private property, criminal trespass, assault, possession of malt beverages, public disorderliness, and a shit-load of other stuff, mostly committed in Springfield and Bellows Falls, where he grew up. He did juvie time, too, but I couldn’t find out what for. My contact would only bend the rules so far.”

  SRS was the state’s Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, largely designed to help those of Vermont’s children who were in peril. It was a swamped organization that was predictably either lauded or damned, depending on one’s viewpoint. I wouldn’t have worked there to save my life. They got my respect, though, even if their procedures sometimes drove me crazy.

  “One other thing,” J.P. added with a broad smile. “Just in case you were thinking of an arrest warrant. The lab pegged that plaster cast I took of the tire impression to a cheap Taiwanese brand, sized to fit something small and equipped with the kind of knobby tread a teenager might put on a pickup. Aunt Judith is registered as owning an ’88 Chevy Luv pickup, pale blue.”

  I turned to Ron Klesczewski. “The names Owen Tharp or Judith Giroux appear in any of those lists you been tabulating?”