Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  “Pretty much. It hasn’t been a high priority, what with her killer in jail. I thought I’d use it more as a future intel source than as ammo against Owen. He’s barely mentioned.”

  “What about Reynolds? Does he come up?”

  Ron shook his head, giving that look again. “Nope. Not a peep.”

  “How ’bout code names or pseudonyms?”

  His brow furrowed. “Nothing that obvious. She used a lot of first names, though. I suppose they could be codes.”

  I got up, disappointed. “Okay. Thanks anyway.”

  · · ·

  “How’d the arraignment go?” I asked Gail that night.

  She put her briefcase on the floor, kicked off her snow boots, dumped her coat on one kitchen chair, and collapsed into another. “Fine. McNeil whined about his client’s confused state, his ties to the community, his financial constraints. Judge Harrowsmith couldn’t have cared less. I asked for no bail, and that’s what we got. Good thing Owen called about bus schedules just before you grabbed him. I think that clinched it for Harrowsmith. We have any boiling water ready?”

  I knew her well enough to have done just that. Without asking, I fixed her a steaming cup of green tea and set it on the table beside her. She took advantage of my proximity to kiss me as I leaned forward.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You get a chance to talk with Owen?”

  “No. By the time I got out of the hospital, he’d already been sucked into the pipeline. Why?”

  She paused to sip her tea, wincing slightly at its heat. “God, that feels good. I don’t know—he looked pretty pathetic. Hardly the knife-wielding sort.”

  A cold feeling entered my mind as I recalled Katz’s suspicions about Reynolds. “You had dinner yet?” I asked.

  “We had a pizza brought up—again. That’s one reason this tastes so good. Cuts through the grease.”

  “You seen the evidence we have against him?” I asked her cautiously.

  She interrupted a second sip to answer quickly, “Oh, yeah. I don’t have any doubts he did it, and we have Janice Litchfield’s statement about him attacking someone with a pen a while back. He just looked a little incongruous, you know? Like the kind of kid always ignored by the in-crowd.”

  I took my own cup of coffee and sat next to her, as we often did late at night. “You think that’s the line McNeil’s going to use? Diminished capacity or something?”

  “Probably. Who knows? He’s only had about fifteen minutes with him so far. It’s too early to tell. He’ll start digging around and collecting witnesses and asking for delays, like he always does, hoping he can wait long enough for either the furor to die down or for us to drop the ball somehow. And sure as hell he’ll try to get that confession thrown out.”

  “You think he can?” Again, I was wondering what Katz might be doing in the meantime, unwittingly or not, to undermine the process. Not to mention where those missing journal pages might be.

  She shook her head. “I talked to Willy about it. I wish he hadn’t been the one to get it. He leaves such a lousy impression with juries. But he had J.P. with him, and it sounds like it was straight as a string. It should hold up. What worries me is that since it came after that chase, McNeil’ll argue Owen was too weak and disoriented to know what he was saying—and since he did ask for a lawyer right after he confessed, it shows he was confused.”

  I smiled at her scrutiny of the angles. She hadn’t been a deputy SA for very long and had started out, as most of them did, in family court, where any potential mistakes occurred mostly behind closed doors. This was big-league stuff at last, and I could almost touch her enthusiasm.

  “How’s Derby to work with on this?”

  “Great. He’s giving me lots of leeway. He handed virtually my entire case load off to the others, so I can really keep focused. I think it’ll be fine.”

  “Scuttlebutt has it he’ll be chasing votes most of the time anyway,” I said mildly. “James Dunn supposedly wants back in.”

  But she saw through the veil. “Oh, I know what people think. I’m a woman, I have strong local connections and a useful political past, and this case is a no-brainer. I can live with that perception.” She drained her cup and smiled at me. “Because I also know Jack Derby owes me. He feels guilty for giving me the shaft when you got into trouble with the Attorney General’s office—treating me like a pariah just because he was worried about bad press. He knows I deserved better.” She paused and added, “He didn’t come up with the idea of using me entirely on his own, you know.”

  I nodded deeply in her direction in a mock salute. “I should never have thought otherwise. And I’m sure you’ll knock ’em dead.”

  But I had my concerns, both real and imagined.

  13

  LEVERETT, MASSACHUSETTS, IS BETWEEN AMHERST and the Vermont border on one axis, and Interstate 91 and the Quabbin Reservoir on the other, which puts it neither in a popular recreational area nor along the highway’s heavily commercial corridor. Once home to the largest general store in the county—a hundred and fifty years ago—Leverett township covers some twenty square miles and contains four minute villages, almost no businesses at all, and just under two thousand commuters, retired hippies, stay-at-home workers, and a few retirees.

  As Peter Manning had mentioned at the intel meeting the week before, it was an odd place to headquarter a trucking company.

  Manning was with me now, riding shotgun as he’d promised he would, but outfitted in his absurdly resplendent state police uniform, complete with shiny black riding boots, peaked cap, and patent leather Sam Browne belt. If we’d been in his cruiser, I would have felt like a refugee being escorted out of the country. Since I was driving my car, however, it looked more like I’d kidnapped the lion tamer from a circus act.

  The six-foot-four Manning obviously picked up on my quick fashion appraisal. He cast me a sideward glance as I negotiated the narrow, snowbanked roads leading into the heart of Leverett, and smiled. “I’m hoping,” he explained, “that the guy we’re about to visit shows more respect for the uniform than he has for anyone wearing it.”

  “You shouldn’t have any problems, then. Who is he, anyway?”

  “Charlie Timson. He’s actually a pretty good guy, for a sleazeball. Twenty or thirty years ago, he probably would’ve been just another good ol’ boy, playing cards with the sheriff every Saturday night. But what with trucking regs, insurance rates, and environmental laws, he either had to move to a more urban area or follow the line of least resistance.”

  “You made it sound worse at the intel meeting,” I commented.

  “It’s not good.” Manning sighed. “But we’ve just gotten used to it. No one’s as innocent as they used to be. This part of the state was once like Vermont. Not much of Boston’s shit ever reached us. Now we’re ankle-deep in it, and it’s getting deeper fast. Springfield’s where Boston used to be, and Holyoke, Northampton, Pittsfield, and the rest are all going down the tubes.” He waved a hand at the passing trees outside. “I mean, look around. This is Leverett, for Christ’s sake. The only income is from property taxes. And here we are, looking for a bad guy.”

  He suddenly turned to look at me. “You ever been down here?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Old hippies on the north side, Amherst commuters to the south, divided by a row of hills. That’s Leverett in a nutshell.” He pointed ahead. “You want to take a left here.”

  The roads were twisting and hemmed in by dense forest. Leverett seemed like a total wilderness.

  “Timson operates just north of Rattlesnake Gutter. The Gutter’s like a deep ravine between two mountains, except there’s no stream bed. Nothing. I heard that fourteen thousand years ago, when the last ice age was wrapping up, hundreds of square miles of glacier water were backed up just north of here looking for a way out. It finally broke through and formed a miniature Grand Canyon. But when it was over, all that was left was a river chasm with no river—a gutter. Neat, huh?”

 
I smiled at his contagious enthusiasm. “We going to see it?” I asked.

  But he shook his head sadly. “There’s a road down the middle of it, but they don’t clear it during winter. Probably worried some plow operator’ll take the Nestea plunge off one of the cliffs. Too bad we had that storm, or I could’ve showed it to you. Slow down here. Timson’s place is right around the corner.”

  We came upon an old, rusting, corrugated building laden with snow, its dooryard haphazardly plowed so that only one of three truck bays was cleared. The place looked abandoned, with no vehicles or people in sight. I parked uncertainly near a snowbank and killed the engine.

  “You sure he’s here?” I asked Manning. He opened his door to a blast of arctic air. “Oh, yeah. He holes up inside like a hibernating bear.”

  I was only half out of the car when the bear in question appeared through a small door cut into the building’s side, dressed in an oil-smeared parka randomly hemmed with frayed duct tape. He looked like a creation gone missing somewhere between Jack London and John Steinbeck.

  Charlie Timson was short, round, broad-shouldered, and stamped by a life of hard, rough work. But he was also graced by the thin polish of a working-class entrepreneur. The resentment I saw in his blunt face as he appraised Peter was almost instantly masked by the broad smile and proffered handshake of a man who had only slowly come to appreciate the advantages of a feigned friendly greeting over an extended middle finger.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked in a consciously neutral voice. Peter and I had earlier decided that I’d take the lead, leaving him to play the implied muscle.

  “Charlie Timson? I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, of the Brattleboro Police Department. This is Sergeant Peter Manning. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions.”

  His small, careful eyes widened slightly. “Brattleboro? Haven’t been up there in a while.” He made no move to invite us inside, no doubt hoping to keep things short.

  “This actually concerns one of your trucks.”

  He acted out a lapse of memory, scratching his head. “Oh, right—the ten-wheeler. What a pain in the ass.”

  “It may be a little more than that. You mind if we step inside?”

  He checked his watch and sighed irritably. “I don’t have much time. You know I’m not responsible for whatever people do with those trucks, right? It’s in the lease. I don’t know anything about what happened up there, except that until I get it back, I’m out one truck. I told that to whoever called me from your office.”

  “Things have developed since then,” I explained.

  That was Manning’s unspecified cue. As Timson opened his mouth, presumably to stave us off in another way, Peter stepped up next to me, towering over both of us, and stared down at him. “Cut the crap, Charlie. It’s a murder now.”

  Nothing came out of Timson’s open mouth for a moment. When it did, it had no punch left to it. “I’m not involved in that.”

  “Then invite us in,” I suggested.

  Without another word, he turned on his heel and led the way into the ramshackle building.

  The interior was a huge metal cavern—dark, echoing, and inhabited by the enormous shadows of an assortment of trucks, backhoes, and service equipment. Parked against one wall, a trailer was incongruously perched on its wheels, as if ready for instant flight, its windows providing the only light.

  The building was almost as cold as outside.

  “Not doing much work these days?” Peter asked Timson’s back.

  Marching toward the trailer, Timson didn’t bother turning to look at him. “I do just fine.”

  The office beyond the trailer’s flimsy door looked like a gang of vandals had ripped it apart. The chairs were torn and stained, the carpeting was in shreds, there were holes in the wall paneling, and paper was strewn everywhere. Timson wandered through it unaffected, heading for a battered metal desk at the far end, behind which he barricaded himself in a squealing chair. Peter and I remained standing.

  Timson’s voice regained its previous strength. “So what’s this bullshit about a murder? I didn’t hear nothin’ about it.”

  “The driver of your truck was killed,” I told him, “which naturally makes us a little curious about your role in the whole deal.”

  His features contorted into a dark scowl, but again Manning interrupted him. “Charlie, think about what’s happening here. It’s not about poor maintenance, or sloppy records, or playing shell games with your trucks. A man’s head was crushed under a locomotive. The rig he’d been driving was loaded with haz mat, probably supplied by the Mob. I’m not saying you know anything about that, but if you don’t think we can’t use it to drag your butt in front of a judge, you’ve been living on another planet.”

  “I don’t know anything,” he complained, spreading his arms wide. “I swear. You saw what I got in the shop. The leases I sign out sometimes don’t come back for years. The customers do the inspections, the maintenance, and everything else. I just send ’em a check, or deduct it from their lease. Somebody wants a truck, and I got a lease running out, I send ’em to where it is and do the paperwork by mail. I got something like twenty rigs out there, and I lease over half of those myself, for Christ’s sake. I never see any of ’em till some shit like this comes down.”

  “You’ve had enough time to check your records since one of my men called you,” I said. “Who did you contract that truck out to?”

  Timson shook his head. “I told you then, I don’t got it to look up. I can’t find those records. I did try—looked all over the place, but you can see what…”

  His voice trailed off as Peter grasped the edge of his desk, and pivoted it to one side as if he were opening a door, exposing Timson on his creaky chair as though he were a hedgehog perched on a stool.

  “What the hell’re you doing?” he asked nervously, grasping the chair’s arms.

  Manning stepped into the void the desk had filled and stood so close to Timson their knees were almost touching. Timson’s head cranked far backward to look up into Manning’s face.

  “You can’t do this, you know?” His voice sounded strangled.

  Manning ignored him. “I thought we had an understanding, Charlie. We’re investigating a homicide, and you’re a member of the public, eager to help us do our job.” He pulled a long legal document and laid it on the other man’s lap.

  “That’s a duces tecum warrant to search these premises for any paperwork concerning that truck. It’ll give you all the cover you need to hide from the people you’re really worried about. We were just hoping you’d spare us stripping this place of every scrap of paper in it—including all licenses and operating permits—and taking the next six months to carefully go through it, looking for what you could hand over in two minutes.”

  “I’d sooner lose some money than my life,” he said.

  Manning was unsympathetic. “We issue the right press release, you won’t have that choice. Your playmates don’t like messes, Charlie, and you ain’t one of the family, so to speak.”

  Timson’s face darkened. “Get out of my way, asshole,” he growled at Peter, trying to summon a few shreds of self-respect.

  Manning stepped back. Timson got to his feet and then surprised us by lumbering up onto his desk and reaching for one of the acoustic tiles overhead. He popped it back with his fist, groped around its edges for a moment, and retrieved a single brown manila envelope.

  He handed it to me before climbing back down. “There. That’s all of it. And you found it on your own.”

  Manning smiled. “You got anything else interesting up there?”

  “Fuck you.”

  I opened the envelope and studied its contents.

  “Could you do that someplace else?” he asked peevishly. “I got things to do.”

  “It says here the truck was last leased to Katahdin Trucking of Portland, Maine. Any chance that even exists?”

  His answer for once sounded reasonable. “I’m supposed to know th
at?”

  · · ·

  Back in the car, Manning indicated the envelope. “That going to do you any good?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “Katahdin Trucking is probably only the second layer in God knows how many more, and I bet the deeper we dig, the harder it’ll be to find even this much.

  “It’s not totally useless, though,” I added. “At least we know we’re dealing with something organized.” I paused and thought once more of Jim Reynolds’s open filing cabinet filled with old cases.

  “And maybe something with history.”

  · · ·

  My next meeting with Jim Reynolds didn’t come at my instigation, however. Shortly after my trip to Massachusetts, I was summoned to Tony Brandt’s office.

  “Run down what we’ve got on the senator,” he requested after I’d settled into one of his chairs.

  “Not much yet,” I admitted. “But suspicions are growing. His name comes up every time we turn around. Somebody’s calling Katz, too, trying to link Reynolds to both illegal dumping—and by inference Phil Resnick’s death—and to Brenda Croteau.”

  Brandt raised his eyebrows. “Anything to it?”

  “Don’t know. It might be the same people who got us all excited about the Crown Vic—playing political hardball. I have Ron looking into Reynolds’s past, but so far he’s come up empty. I’ll keep at it, though.”

  Brandt studied me a moment. “You sound like there might be something there.”

  I gave him an equivocating wobble of the hand, tilting it back and forth. “It’s more like an itch I can’t reach. You heard about the one solid connection we did find between the two cases, right?”

  Brandt thought a moment. “Yeah—what’s his name? The poker player who was also one of Brenda’s customers.”

  “Frankie Harris. I’m just thinking that if there’s one, there could be others. After all, we still don’t know what we’re dealing with here. The Owen Tharp case looks simple enough, but with Resnick I have no idea. Three men execute a Mob-connected illegal dumper from New Jersey on the railroad tracks in the middle of the night, using a dummied-up copy of a car belonging to one of our state senators. What the hell’s that all about? And I can’t get that office break-in out of my head, either. Unfortunately, about all I’ve got are questions,” I paused a moment, watching his face. “Why do you ask?”