Every morning he walked from his house off Route 129 in Walpole, Maine, down to Hanley’s Market. He bought whatever supplies he needed there, and even though it was one of those small combination gas station/markets, the food was surprisingly good. They even had pizza that was halfway up to New York standards.
On the way back he always stopped at the Walpole Barn, which sells oysters from the local river, wine, and an assortment of unique gift items that their slogan says are “products for a good life.” Eric knew all too well that no one had invented a product that could turn his life around.
Eric frequently bought wine and oysters, and he planned to buy a lot more of them once Stephanie replenished his dwindling money supply. The irony was that he had access to a fortune in diamonds, but no way to turn them into cash he could use. It was frustrating, but not nearly the worst part of his predicament.
The owner of the Walpole Barn was a man named Warren Storch, who seemed to be a friend of everyone in the community. Eric enjoyed his company; it was pretty much the only human contact he had. But of course he could not tell him anything about who he was or why he was there, so it made the conversations fairly one-sided.
Eric took a chance the first time he met Warren. Warren was renting storage space in a second barn he had in the back, and Eric took the space. He brought the materials under cover of darkness and locked them up; Warren could have absolutely no idea how incredibly valuable the items in his barn were.
The round-trip walk, including stops, was about an hour and a half, and it was the highlight of Eric’s day. He spent the rest of each day watching television and surfing the web, looking for news stories that might relate to the police search for him, or the major incident that was going to happen miles down the road.
But today was the day Stephanie would arrive with Zoe, so this day was going to be different.
And in fact it was very, very different.
Eric got home and put the groceries and wine on the kitchen table. He was about to unload it when the voice behind him said, “Hello, Eric.”
Eric turned, but not to find out who the speaker was. That voice was indelibly planted in his brain. It was the voice of the man who had killed Michael Caruso, and was now going to kill him.
He was surprised to see that Healy was not holding a gun, and had simply pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down. “It’s been a while,” Healy said.
Even in his fear, Eric sneered. “Yeah, I haven’t seen you since you shot Michael in the head.”
Healy shrugged. “Had to be done to show we’re serious. He wasn’t anxious to cooperate.”
“And you think I am?”
“I think you want to live. And I think you want your girlfriend to live.” Then Healy smiled. “And your dog as well.”
“What exactly do you want?” Eric asked.
Healy smiled again. “Very simple, Eric. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. I want us both to make a whole shitload of money.”
This is not the first time I’ve been stuck in a car with Marcus. One time we were actually on a stakeout together, and I found myself hoping that our target would show up and shoot me. Conversationally, it’s like being alone, but not nearly as good as actually being alone. Marcus simply does not say anything, and I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Or if he’s thinking.
I learned last time that Marcus listens to classical music, and this time we again agree to share the radio. I get it for an hour; he gets it for an hour. I opt to devote my time to sports talk radio, since I’m obviously an intellectual.
I don’t know what it is that he listens to; just a bunch of stuff without words. Classical music is not really my thing, and I know absolutely nothing about it. If you told me you saw Brendel play Brahms last night, I would ask you who won.
We follow Stephanie at a distance, but it’s immediately clear when she gets on 95 North that we were correct in our assumption that she’s heading to see Eric. We can get closer as she gets farther north, but Marcus is not afraid of losing her, and since I’m afraid of Marcus, I don’t question his strategy.
Stephanie stops twice along the way, once in Connecticut and once in New Hampshire. At each stop she walks Zoe, and then pulls into the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant. She obviously doesn’t feel comfortable leaving Zoe alone in the car, which wins her points in my book.
We stop once ourselves, to get something to eat and use the restroom. Marcus orders seven double quarter pounders at McDonald’s, and proceeds to devour them in an instant, while I drive. One minute they are there, and the next minute they are not. If it wasn’t for the fact that I didn’t feel a rush of air in the car, I would think he must have thrown them out the window.
We reach New Hampshire, and it feels like just moments later that we’re in Maine. There’s still another two hours to go until we reach Walpole, which, in terms of car time spent with Marcus, will feel like two weeks.
We get off the highway in Brunswick, and then go through a series of towns along the coast. We enter Wiscasset, which immodestly has a sign proclaiming it the prettiest town in America. I’m not prepared to fully buy into that, although I will admit it’s prettier than Paterson.
We go through an even prettier town called Damariscotta, which is only a few minutes from Walpole. Marcus seems to perk up a bit, and gets closer to Stephanie. He clearly has no intention of losing her now.
We make a right turn on Route 29, and the sign says that we are in Walpole. Marcus keeps at a distance but we have Stephanie’s car in sight, as she goes another mile before making a left turn. Then she makes a right turn onto a dirt road, which our GPS shows is less than a quarter of a mile long. Marcus stops without turning onto that road, shuts the car off, and opens his door. I sense it’s time to get out.
Marcus starts walking up the road, stopping every half minute or so to listen, although what the hell he is listening for I have no idea. I’m walking about five feet behind him, but I can’t say that I feel comfortable. I would feel better if I stayed in the car. I would feel even better than that if I had stayed in New Jersey.
We can see a small house in the distance, and Marcus has moved to the side of the road, where we are shielded by trees. We walk a little farther until the silence is pierced by a horrible shriek; I think it’s a woman’s voice, but I can’t be sure. What I can be sure of is that the owner of that voice is in some kind of agony.
Marcus takes off at a full run toward the house, and I do the same. I’m still behind him, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t get anywhere near him. I can now officially add very fast running to the list of Marcus’s physical talents.
I can’t tell if Marcus has drawn his gun, but I hope he has. Something terrible is going on in that house.
Marcus runs to the front door of the house, and all of a sudden there is no door there. Because I’m behind him, I can’t tell if he kicked it down, or if maybe the door saw him coming and fainted in fright. In any event, Marcus is in the house, and I’m in there moments later.
Moments after that I wish I wasn’t in there. Everything and everybody is in one room, mainly because the entire ground floor of the house seems to be one open room. There are four humans in the room besides me, but only two of them are living.
The other two, both male adults, are lying facedown on the floor, each in their own pool of blood. The backs of their heads seem to have exploded, no doubt caused by bullets.
Stephanie is shaking and sobbing, and Zoe is sniffing at one of the bodies. I suspect it is Eric, but I certainly can’t be sure, and I have absolutely no idea who the other victim is.
I go over to Stephanie and put my arm around her, and then I lead her outside. There is no sense in my even trying to stop her from crying; what she has just seen would devastate anyone.
Once we’re outside, I call 911 and report what has happened. My next two calls are to Pete, to give him a heads-up and tell him that he may need to vouch for Marcus and me, and then to Laurie, just because I want to hear her
voice.
I’m getting a little tired of seeing dead people.
Officers from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department arrive on the scene within three or four minutes, and cars keep pouring in. Based on the number of officers who show up, half the people in Lincoln County must be on the force.
I identify myself to the man who appears to be the lead detective, and miracle of miracles, he’s familiar with me because of high-profile cases I’ve handled, and TV appearances I’ve made. And even though I’m a defense attorney, he doesn’t seem to hate me.
They take us all back to the station house to question us and sort things out. On the way there, just a few minutes from the murder scene, we pass some kind of retail store called the Walpole Barn. There are four police cars in the parking lot.
“What happened there?” I ask the officer driving us.
“They had a break-in,” he says.
“You have a lot of crime here? I thought small towns were supposed to be crime-free.”
“Not today.”
Once we’re at the station we begin a process I’ve become all too familiar with, and one that goes on endlessly. The only positive is that they let us bring Zoe with us, and she gets put in a holding cell while the questioning takes place.
I don’t hold anything back in my responses; there’s nothing I have to say that can hurt my client. We’re all questioned separately, and I pity the cop who drew the short straw and is having to question Marcus.
I ask the detectives the identity of the other victim in Eric’s house, but if they know, they clearly have no intention of telling me.
I’m finding myself feeling protective of Stephanie, though I’m not sure why. The only reason we are here is that she lied to me about going to see Eric, and just the act of doing that was aiding and abetting a fugitive. These are not actions that I usually find endearing.
We don’t get out of the police station until seven-thirty in the evening, and there is no way any of us are going to drive back to New Jersey tonight. I get us three rooms at a place called Damariscotta Lake Farm in Jefferson because it has a nice restaurant, and I’m starved.
I drive there with Stephanie, me behind the wheel and her sitting in the passenger seat, sobbing. She doesn’t want to eat anything, and goes directly to her room. Marcus and I go into the restaurant, and he goes on an eating binge that has to be seen to be believed.
My plan is to drive Stephanie back to New Jersey in her car in the morning, leaving Marcus alone with Mozart. It’s been a long day, but I set the alarm for eight o’clock, because I want to get a fairly early start.
Tomorrow is not going to be fun, but it’s gotta be better than today.
Compared to this, the drive with Marcus is a laugh riot. We go slightly out of our way and make a quick stop at a place called the Walpole Barn. It was where I saw the four police cars when we went to the police station from the scene of the murder. It seems unlikely that a small town like this would have two large, police-related events that were so close to each other at the same time, without those events being connected.
I suggest that Stephanie wait in the car with Zoe as I go in. The owner, a man named Warren Storch, greets me and seems eager to share what happened. “I was renting storage space to a guy that was new in town, back there in that smaller barn.” He points in a direction behind where we were standing.
“What was the guy’s name?”
“He told me his name was Walter, but he paid in cash, so I can’t say for sure that was really his name, not after what happened. Anyway, he got himself killed yesterday, right up the road from here. And around the same time, somebody broke into that barn.”
“Did you see the thief?”
He shakes his head. “No, but they cleaned the place out.”
“What had been in there?” I ask.
“I don’t know; it wasn’t any of my business. I gave him a key, and he kept the place locked. Then yesterday the door was wide open, and it was empty.”
He has little more to offer, so I get back into the car and we’re on our way. Stephanie has barely said a word, and we’ve been driving for almost three hours. I’ve kept the radio off; even though I’d like to hear news reports about the shootings, I’m afraid of the effect it would have on her.
My second choice would be to listen to sports talk radio, but I don’t turn that on either. The woman has just experienced a devastating shock and is in mourning; I don’t think she cares whether the Giants should draft a running back or an offensive lineman.
Zoe is in the backseat, sleeping. Occasionally she wakes up, looks out the window, and then goes back to sleep. The trip must be going fast for her; I wish she and I could change places.
We stop to walk Zoe at a rest area. I take her on the leash and am surprised when Stephanie gets out of the car and walks alongside us. We walk about twenty feet, and then she says, “He hadn’t been the same for a while.”
I obviously know she is talking about Eric, so I just ask, “How so?”
“Something was on his mind, driving him. There was always something with Eric; usually it was work, but it could have been anything. He’d get into a topic, and it would consume him. It would be all he would talk about.”
“And that changed?”
She shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. But the difference was that this time he didn’t talk about it. He kept it from me; I think he kept it from everyone, except maybe Michael.”
“You have no idea what it was?” I ask.
“No,” she says, then is silent for a while. It’s not until we’re turning back toward the car that she says, “I think it was about money.”
“What do you mean?”
“Money was never really important to Eric; he could have made much more working in private industry. He wanted to be where he could do the best work.”
“And that changed?”
She nods. “One day he said to me, ‘What would you do if you won the lottery?’”
“A lot of people ask that question.”
“Not Eric,” she says. “I was surprised he even knew there was a lottery. You’d have to know him to understand, but the question came completely out of left field. And there were others. Once he asked me where I would live if I could live anywhere in the world. These were just not the kind of things Eric ever talked about before.”
“How long ago did this start?”
“Maybe a year. I think I noticed it for the first time after he came back from one of those conferences he was always going to.”
I ask her where the conference might have been, or what it was about, but she has no idea. To her they were boring scientific meetings, and she wouldn’t have gone to one if her life depended on it.
The second half of the trip home is the exact opposite of the first. Whereas she wouldn’t talk before, now she can’t seem to stop. It’s probably cathartic for her, so I just listen. I’m not above pumping her for information that could help my client, but I just don’t think she has any.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” she says. “I just wanted to help Eric, and I knew he didn’t kill anyone. Do you think people will realize that now?”
“I do,” I say, which is the truth. The logical conclusion is that the same person that killed Michael Caruso killed Eric. It isn’t necessarily true, but that will be the best guess.
“Do you think I somehow did something that led them to him?”
“I don’t,” I say, which is not the truth. I think his contacting her and asking her to come up there may well have in some way revealed his location, but I don’t know how. “What was in the FedEx package?” I ask.
“You knew about that? It was from Eric, a cell phone, the one he called me on.”
She gets quiet for a while, then, “Eric told me he paid someone to take Zoe from you.”
I’m not surprised by this, but glad to have it confirmed. “Did he say why?”
“He loved her, and he missed her. Don’t you think that’s
reason enough?” she asks.
“I do.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
“What would you like to happen?” I ask.
“I would love for her to be my dog.”
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Our goal is to find good homes for dogs with people who will love them. If Zoe went to Stephanie’s, it would be a good home where she is already loved. “I think that can be arranged, if you really want her,” I say.
Stephanie starts to cry, so I’ll take that as a yes.
I drop off Stephanie and Zoe at Stephanie’s house, and then drive home. As soon as she is out of the car, I turn the radio on. They are not yet reporting the name of the other victim, nor whether the police have any suspects. The only piece of information they are revealing is the one I was dreading, the fact that I was at the murder scene.
Knowing this, I’m not surprised that there is a media mob scene in front of my house when I pull up. I actually have trouble opening the car door because of the throng that surrounds my car, and they fire questions at me as I make my way toward the house.
It’s hard to hear everything they are saying, but the gist is that they want to know what I was doing in Maine, and if I have any idea who killed Eric Brantley. I just keep saying no comment, until I’m nearing my front porch, at which point I come to my senses.
None of these people have asked me about the Infante case, because they have no reason to make the connection. Here I have this golden opportunity to enlighten them, as well as the prospective jury pool out there, and I almost blew it. I have definitely lost a foot off my legal fastball.
I stand on my front porch and hold my hands up, asking for quiet. It’s sort of an impromptu press conference situation, as I am standing on the top steps and the media is in front of and below me. I am above the masses and they are hanging on my every word; I feel like I should sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”
Who Let the Dog Out? Page 9