by Archer Mayor
“You didn’t answer,” Gail said, her hand in mine.
That I hadn’t, although less from willfulness than from simple inability. Inside, I was still as cut up and bloody as I’d felt sitting in court, listening to Coffin describe me as the frustrated, impotent, older boyfriend of a rich, indulgent woman. Self-serving name-calling by an arrogant politician, perhaps, but with elements of painful truth. Combined with everything else that had been hitting me at the time, such debasement had seemed in context. But I hadn’t been a total victim through all this. Few people truly are. Ahead of me was the task of sorting through the extent and nature of my own culpability—alone and with care. And that included scrutinizing Coffin’s portrayal of my relationship with Gail.
I gently squeezed her fingers, and led her toward the crosswalk. “I’m okay. But I’ll feel better after you treat me to a Dunkin’ Donut.” Gail came along without comment, but I felt her eyes on me as we waited for the light to turn green.
Excerpt
If you enjoyed The Disposable Man, look for Occam’s Razor, tenth in the Joe Gunther series.
Occam’s Razor
IT WAS COLDER without the snow, and felt darker as a result. Even with the starlight and the feeble seepage from the streetlamps around the corner, my eyes took longer to adjust than I expected.
The police officer at the bottom of the Arch Street alley looked up at me quizzically as I hesitated beside car, my hands burrowing deep inside my pockets. “You okay, Lieutenant?” He was stringing a yellow “Police Line” tape across the way.
I shuddered and nodded, walking down the paved incline, careful of its neglected, broken surface. “Sure, Bobby. Still half asleep.”
He lifted the tape to let me pass. “Know what you mean. I been on nights for a week already. Still can’t get used to it.”
He was fresh from the academy, eager and curious, and if statistics were any guide, either destined to learn the ropes with us, and then enter the private sector, disillusioned and bored, or angle a job with the state police, assuming he passed their scrutiny.
“Who’s here already?” I asked him.
“Detectives Klesczewski and Tyler. Officer Lavoie’s with them. Sheila Kelly’s closing the other end off.”
I smiled at his titling everyone except Sheila. It wasn’t sexist. She’d been his supervisor, before we’d let him loose on his own. She was the reverse of the trend, ten years with the Burlington PD, come to us in search of a slightly mellower pace. Bobby looked to her as a kid might to an older sister.
I continued to the corner, where the Main Street buildings above and behind me showed their backs to the train tracks and the Connecticut River beyond. Typical of many old, red-brick New England towns, Brattleboro, Vermont faced away from the serenity and beauty of the river, having chosen well over a hundred-and-fifty years ago to regard both it and the railroad paralleling it as unsightly commercial conduits. In its heyday, this stretch of ground, unseen by the gentry, had been a coarse and bustling string of loading docks and receiving bays, feeding businesses two floors above, whose windows had glittered with the primped and polished end results.
Now the area was forlorn and ignored, a parking place for dumpsters, the homeless, and for teenagers seeking illicit time alone. High overhead, out of sight in the gloom, dotting the curved, fortress-like wall following the river’s bend, were hundreds of dingy rear apartments, an increasing number of which were being transformed into tastefully renovated lofts or rendered by the town’s excess of psychologists and therapists into peaceful, sunlit havens-drawn to the very scenery that their predecessors had ignored. Most, however, still belonged to the marginally-solvent welfare dwellers holed up in small, dark, cluttered dens, surrounded by commerce, and benefiting from none of it.
With theatrical abruptness, a tripod-mounted halogen lamp burst the darkness ahead of me with a brief electrical hiss. It was facing away from me, down and across the tracks, so the effect wasn’t blinding, but more fancifully melodramatic. Its harsh light destroyed any subtlety or nuance, revealing everything in its arc in angular, brittle starkness—while consigning everything outside it to simple nonexistence. The soiled, damaged brick walls; the cinder-stained gravel of the railroad bed; the parallel crescent of gleaming tracks, and the flat black slab of river water beyond—were all briefly frozen in that initial flash of light, like a startled, disheveled partygoer caught in the glare of an instant camera. And just as quickly, it all became mere background to the item at center stage—and the reason for our gathering in the middle of a freezing January night.
Perpendicular to the outermost track, his feet toward the river, lay a man in a thick, long, dirty coat. He had no head or hands—they’d all been resting on the track when the last train had passed by, and what was left of them didn’t merit much description. But they lent the scene its one source of bright color, and to the entire picture a grim sense of purpose.
Standing over the body was Ron Klesczewski, that night’s detective on call. J.P. Tyler, our forensics man, had just plugged in the lamp.
He moved away from its glare and joined me in the darkness, like a technician stepping offstage to check his work. “I didn’t see calling the paramedics. Got hold of everybody else—the ME, the SA’s office, more backup. Gail not on tonight?”
Gail Zigman was a deputy state’s attorney, and the woman I lived with. “No,” I answered. “I forgot to ask who was when I left.” I gestured with my chin down the tracks. “What’ve we got?”
Tyler shrugged. “Little early to tell, and I don’t want to do too much before the ME gets here, but it looks like a bum who ran out of rope.”
“Suicide?” I asked mildly.
“Probably. Although you don’t usually find them with their hands on the track.”
Before moving any closer, I said, more to myself than to him, “Unless he was already dead.”
About the Author
Over the years, Archer Mayor has been photographer, teacher, historian, scholarly editor, feature writer, travel writer, lab technician, political advance man, medical illustrator, newspaper writer, history researcher, publications consultant, constable, and EMT/firefighter. He is also half Argentine, speaks two languages, and has lived in several countries on two continents.
All of which makes makes him restless, curious, unemployable, or all three. Whatever he is, it’s clearly not cured, since he’s currently a novelist, a death investigator for Vermont’s medical examiner, and a police officer.
Mayor has been producing the Joe Gunther novels since 1988, some of which have made the TEN BEST or MOST NOTABLE lists of the Los Angeles and the New York Times. Mayor has also received the New England Booksellers Association book award for fiction.
Find him online at www.ArcherMayor.com
Also by Archer Mayor
The Joe Gunther Mysteries
Open Season
Borderlines
Scent of Evil
The Skeleton’s Knee
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
The Dark Root
The Ragman’s Memory
Bellows Falls
The Disposable Man
Occam’s Razor
The Marble Mask
Tucker Peak
The Sniper’s Wife
Gatekeeper
The Surrogate Thief
St. Albans Fire
The Second Mouse
Chat
The Catch
The Price of Malice
Red Herring
Tag Man
Paradise City
…And Don’t Miss
Paradise City
A Joe Gunther Novel
By New York Times Bestselling Author Archer Mayor
Out in October 2012, from St. Martin’s Press
Find Archer online at: www.ArcherMayor.com
Preorder soon at www.us.macmillan.com
Copyright
This digital edition (v1.11) of The Disposable Man was published by MarchMedia in
2013.
If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.
Copyright © 2012 by Archer Mayor.
ISBN: 978-1-939767-08-0
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Errata
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Also by Archer Mayor
Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed—and others set-up—seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man. Signs suggest that a three year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it’s a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.
Also by Archer Mayor
Seconded to the State’s Attorney’s office, Lt. Joe Gunther is in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom investigating a minor embezzling case. It’s a pleasant distraction, and a chance to reconnect with old friends, but when a house fire reveals itself to be arson, compounded by murder, Gunther can’t help but investigate. Suddenly, he finds himself enmeshed in a web of animosity between put-upon townspeople, the state police, angry parents and members of a reclusive sect. Murder follows murder, yet no one seems to be telling Gunther the whole truth—not even his childhood friends—and truth is what he desperately needs if he’s to stop the killings.
Also by Archer Mayor
When the body of a fast-living young stockbroker is found in a shallow grave, suspicion first falls on a cuckolded policeman. Lt. Joe Gunther investigates the increasingly bizarre details of the crime, but finds that he’s too far behind events to prevent a second murder. Indeed, whoever is responsible always seems to be a few steps ahead, as if there’s a leak on the force. Sweltering August heat does nothing to calm the increasingly agitated town selectmen, who demand results.
Also by Archer Mayor
When a reclusive market gardener’s death proves to stem from a 20 year-old bullet wound, Lt. Joe Gunther is presented with a very cold homicide to solve. But who was the victim exactly? A deeply private man eking out an ascetic existence from a hardscrabble mountain field, Abraham Fuller was virtually unknown to his neighbors, in the manner of someone pursuing more than mere solitude. The discovery of a duffle of unmarked bills and a body buried in the garden patch suggests that Fuller had motives beyond misanthropy. Nor is it such a cold case either, as someone seems willing to kill to ensure that old secrets remain buried.
Also by Archer Mayor
Gail Zigman, town selectwoman and Joe Gunther’s companion of many years, is raped, and the detective finds himself caught between the media, local politicians, and a network of well-meaning victims’ rights advocates as he tries to put his own feelings aside and follow the trail of evidence.
Every lead seems to point to a single, obvious suspect, but is the evidence too perfect? Risking his friendship with Gail, the respect of his peers, and his own life, Lt. Gunther keeps digging, hoping to find out if the man they have in jail is rightly there, or if the evidence against him is tainted—"fruits of the poisonous tree."
Also by Archer Mayor
A brutal home invasion shocks Brattleboro’s small Asian community, but no one’s talking. Undeterred, Joe Gunther digs deeper and discovers a cross-border smuggling route carrying drugs, contraband, and illegal aliens into and out of Canada. Operating below the radar for years, competition between underworld rivals is bringing it into the light with deadly consequences. International jurisdiction is a complicated thing, and Gunther will have to collaborate with the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Mounties in the pursuit of justice.
Also by Archer Mayor
A small girl brings Joe Gunther a bird’s nest—made partially of human hair. In the search to put a body, and an identity, to the hair’s owner, Joe comes upon an unexplained death, a grisly murder, and a sudden disappearance. All seem to be entangled in a puzzling web of municipal corruption, blackmail, and industrial espionage. A shell-shocked World War II vet nicknamed “The Ragman” may hold the key to it all, if Joe can get him to talk before the murderer strikes again.
Also by Archer Mayor
Joe Gunther is seconded to the neighboring town of Bellows Falls to investigate harassment allegations against a fellow officer. What begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case comes to look more and more like a frame job as Gunther doggedly pursues the truth, and soon he finds himself feeling around the edges of a statewide drug distribution network. As always, Vermont itself is a major character in Mayor’s writing, with Bellows Falls standing in for any number of slowly decaying once-proud mill towns.
Also by Archer Mayor
When a local quarry yields up a garroted body with bad dental work and toes tattooed in Cyrillic, Joe Gunther figures it for a Russian mafia killing, rare as that might be in Vermont. But it’s so very… tidy. So very… professional. Then the CIA calls, inviting Gunther down to Washington for some friendly “assistance” with his case. Suddenly he’s caught up a shadowy game of cross and double-cross—manipulated by cynical cold warriors who seem not to have gotten the memo—and Gunther soon realizes that he’s a pawn that both sides are willing to sacrifice.
Also by Archer Mayor
The body was positioned so that the train neatly obliterated its head and hands. Dressed in a homeless man’s clothes with empty pockets, it might easily be passed-off as an unfortunate John Doe. And yet… Joe Gunther has a knack for knowing when things don’t quite add up, and the math in this case is all kinds of wrong. Add a toxic waste dumping scheme, a stabbing, and a whole lot of state politics… if Occam’s razor were applied to Gunther’s caseload, how many incisions would it make?
Also by Archer Mayor
There are old cases and there are cold cases, and then there are old, cold cases… Special Agent Joe Gunther, of the newly-formed Vermont Bureau of Investigation, didn’t expect the VBI’s first case to be a fifty year-old murder. Then again, the victim probably didn’t expect to get an icepick in the heart, spend half a century in a chest freezer, and be unceremoniously dumped on the slopes of a ski resort with his feet sawed-off. He was, after all, a man who commanded some respect.
Stirring up the past can be a dangerous business, and Gunther soon finds himself in a cross-border partnership with the Sûreté du Québec, investigating a Canadian mob family whose crimes date back to World War II, but who remain just as deadly as ever.
Also by Archer Mayor
The tony ski town of Tucker Peak, Vermont is experiencing a rash of condo burglaries. Normally this wouldn’t be a case for Joe Gunther and the newly-formed VBI, but when high-profile people have their high-value possessions stolen, names get dropped and strings get pulled. Turns out it’s just as well they called in Joe, since once they begin investigating the case suddenly develops a body count. Between drug-dealing, burglary, financial shenanigans, ecoterrorism, sabotage and murder, there’s something deathly serious going on behind the resort’s pristine veneer.
Also by Arc
her Mayor
The heroin trade is making serious inroads into Vermont, spilling across the border from Massachusetts, destroying families and ruining lives. Governor Reynolds, with one eye on re-election, decides that the VBI should be waging its own War On Drugs. Of course, it falls to Joe Gunther to draw up the battle plans. Not everyone wants to follow Gunther’s lead, though — particularly detective Sammie Martens, who launches her own undercover operation and quickly finds herself enmeshed a very unpleasant underworld. Gatekeeper takes a sober look at the problems of drug crimes and enforcement efforts.
Also by Archer Mayor
A barn fire is the kind of mishap that can spell doom for a struggling family farm. Just one of them in a community would be a small tragedy. A series of three, though—one of which kills a teenager and a herd of dairy cows—starts to look very, very suspicious. Which makes it a job for Special Agent Gunther and the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.