Cutter's Run

by William G. Tapply

  He nodded. He was gazing kindly at her. Studying her, it seemed to me.

  Susannah turned to me, then shifted her gaze to the sheriff. “Who…?”

  “We don’t know,” he said.

  “It was the middle of the night,” she said. “I was the only one here. I would’ve heard something.”

  “You didn’t? Voices? A car door slamming?”

  She shook her head. “No. Nothing. My bedroom’s in the front of the house. I heard him get up and go out back, like he does every night. I—I didn’t hear him come back in, so I went down there. And—I found him.”

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  She told Dickman exactly what she had told Alex and me. In the middle of her recitation, Alex came out with coffee. She put the carafe on the table and went back inside.

  When Susannah finished her story, Dickman said, “So who would want to kill your father?”

  Susannah shook her head. “Nobody. That’s crazy. He knew everybody in York County. Not everybody loved him, I know. But my father had no enemies. Certainly not the kind who’d want to kill him.” She narrowed her eyes at Dickman for a moment, then turned and looked at me. “He thinks I did it,” she said.

  “Now, Susannah,” he said softly. “I think no such thing. Somebody did kill him, and since we have no suspects, everybody is a suspect, and the more information we can get, the easier it will be to eliminate some of them.”

  “Right,” she said. “And did anything I told you eliminate me from your list?”

  He shook his head. “I guess not. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe you. I want you to give more thought to who his enemies were and who might stand to gain from his being dead.”

  “Besides me,” she said.

  Dickman lifted his mug and took a sip. “Anything you can think of, you tell me.”

  She shrugged. “What happens next?”

  “The state boys’ll be along soon,” he said. “I’m afraid this crime scene’s pretty messed up, but they’ll do their forensics, maybe get lucky and find a bootprint or cigarette butt that doesn’t match any of ours. They’ll want to question you all over again. They’ll talk to the neighbors, folks in town. People Noah did business with, who owed him money, who he owed money to, anything like that.” He took another sip of coffee, then put down his mug, picked up his hat from the table, and stood. He looked from Susannah to me. “Anybody you talk to, just leave it that he died. It’s not much, but right now me fact that only us and the one who did it know he was strangled gives us a little edge.” He hooked his sunglasses over his ears. “I am sorry, Susannah. Sorry about Noah, and sorry to have to ask you these questions. But you want to know something?”

  Susannah was looking up at him without expression. “What?” she said softly.

  “Somebody did kill him,” said Dickman. “And I’m going to figure out who.” He turned to me. “Want to walk me back to my vehicle, Deputy?”

  I got up and followed him. When we got to his truck, he leaned against the fender and squinted at me. “Did she talk to you about it before I got here?”

  I nodded. “She told it the same way to you as she did to me.”

  “No contradictions?”

  “None.”

  “Like she’d rehearsed it?” he said.

  “No. Like it was the truth.”

  He gave his head a little shake. “She is the most logical one, Brady.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “She took care of him. I can tell you, she loved him. She’s heartbroken.”

  He shrugged and held up his left hand with three fingers extended. “Means,” he said, bending down his left forefinger with his other one. “She’s a strong girl, he was a weak, spindly old man. It’d be simple enough for her to do it.” He folded down another finger. “Opportunity. She was there. As far as we know, the only one who was. And—” he bent down the third finger—“motive. Well, who knows? Insurance? His property? An argument? A family thing?” He shrugged. “Usually, of course, it’s money. He was a widower, she’s an only child.”

  I shook my head. “Christ, Sheriff.”

  He gazed off into the distance. “It’s hard to imagine that Susannah did this,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean she’s not a good suspect.” Then he narrowed his eyes at me and shook his head. “Hell, Brady. You’re a lawyer. You know how it goes. Anyway, we got something to ponder, you and I.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’ve got to ponder whether there’s a connection between Noah’s murder and Charlotte Gillespie’s disappearance.”

  He grinned. “Wish to hell my regular deputies were as quick as you. Look. We got swastikas and we got a member of the KKK who shoots at people with his shotgun and we got a missing woman and a poisoned dog, and now we got a murdered old man, and any one of them is a once-in-a-decade sort of thing for a quiet little town like Garrison. I’m not much for coincidence, Brady. I believe in reasons and explanations and connections.”

  “We’ve also got two threatening phone calls,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Two?”

  I nodded. “Alex got another one last night while I was away. He said I should turn in my badge.”

  “Well, I’m damn sorry about the phone calls. But on the other hand, it sounds like we’re getting to somebody.”

  “Arnold Hood?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Could be. Somebody’s spooked. It sure seems to confirm that something did happen to Ms. Gillespie, all right.”

  “And now Noah.”

  Dickman nodded. “Okay, Deputy, give me a scenario.”

  I gazed up at the sky. “Noah and Charlotte?” I looked at him and smiled. “Maybe…?”

  He shrugged. “He was a widower. Lived alone, except when his daughter visited. Charlotte was living alone, too, and right next door, practically. A pair of lonely people. She was good-looking, you said. He was—well, maybe a woman would’ve found Noah attractive. Hardly the world’s most bizarre scenario. Then what?”

  “Somebody found out about it,” I said. “And didn’t like it. Killed them both.”

  He arched his eyebrows.

  “Like Susannah, you’re thinking,” I said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Charlotte was divorced,” I said. “There’s an ex-husband somewhere. Alex thinks Charlotte had been abused. There’s an ex-boyfriend, too. Maybe more than one.”

  Dickman sighed. “See? The world is full of suspects.”

  “Maybe Noah intended to marry Charlotte, make her his heir, deprive Susannah of her rightful patrimony…” I shook my head. “That’s dumb. Susannah didn’t do this.”

  Dickman was smiling at me. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe somebody didn’t like what was going on between them, and killed them both.”

  “Someone who didn’t approve of a white man and a black woman.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Or maybe Noah…”

  Dickman nodded. “Maybe Noah killed Charlotte.”

  “But why?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “And then somebody else, avenging her death, went after Noah.” I shook my head. “Jesus, Sheriff. It must be terrible to have to think this way for a living.”

  “You’re the one doing the thinking here,” he said. “And you’re doing a damn good job of it, for a city lawyer. But listen. If it’s not Susannah, whoever it was must’ve known that Noah went out on the deck to take a piss in the middle of the night. He—or she—was waiting for him. He was old and weak. He’d be easy to kill.”

  “I’ve got the feeling that everybody in Garrison knows everything about everybody else,” I said.

  Dickman smiled. “True enough.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Susannah about Noah and Charlotte?” I said.

  He shook his head. “That seemed… indelicate, under the circumstances. I gave her the chance to volunteer Charlotte’s name, and she didn’t.” He put his hat on, turned, and climbed into his car: He sq
uinted up at me through the open window. “Now you listen to me, Deputy Coyne.”

  “What?”

  “Noah Hollingsworth’s murder is not your case. You understand?”

  “Even if it’s connected to Charlotte’s disappearance, and those phone calls we’re getting?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely. Remember, we still don’t know she’s disappeared. There’s no evidence whatsoever that she’s the victim of anything except somebody spray-painting a vile symbol on her outhouse door. Your case is about swastikas, and that’s all it’s about. This one here’s about murder.”

  “What if we find out Charlotte was murdered?”

  “If we learn she was, then that won’t be your case, either. Don’t forget. I am the sheriff around here, and you are my deputy. I give the orders, and I order you to keep your nose out of murder cases.” He slid on his sunglasses and adjusted them around his ears. “And stay away from Arnold Hood.”

  “What if I quit?”

  “You can’t quit unless I say you can. I’m the boss.”

  I smiled. “What if I don’t tell you what’s on the floppy disk Ellen Sanderson gave me last night? What if I decide not to tell you who got Charlotte fired because she refused to fudge some numbers, cover up something for them?”

  Dickman reached out through his car window and grabbed my wrist. “You better tell me, pal. Right now.”

  “Right now, I don’t know,” I said. “Want me to try to find out?”

  “Bet your ass I do.”

  “Then,” I said, “you’d better be nice to me.”

  CHAPTER 26

  AFTER SHERIFF DICKMAN DROVE away, I went around to the back of the house. Through the glass doors I could see Alex and Susannah in the kitchen cleaning up the breakfast mess. Mostly it was my mess. I’m a sloppy and inefficient cook. I use more utensils than I need to, I tend to spill things, and I hate to clean up.

  Alex was at the sink rinsing dishes and loading them into the dishwasher. Susannah was gathering them from the table and counters and piling them beside her. They worked slowly with frequent pauses, and I could see that they were talking about serious matters.

  I sat on the steps and lit a cigarette, and a few minutes later Alex came out and sat beside me. “I’m going to stay with Susannah for a while,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t—”

  “Not you,” she said quickly. “I think it would be best if it was just me. She’s got a lot on her mind. I think it would be easier for her…”

  “Sure,” I said. “A girl thing.”

  “She needs to talk,” said Alex, as if that explained it. Which I suppose it did.

  I nodded. “Okay. I’ve got plenty to do.” I stood up. “I’ll go say good-bye to Susannah.”

  Alex put her hand on my arm. “You okay?”

  “I’m sad about Noah,” I said. “I’m sad for Susannah. I’m sad for all of us. Angry, too.” I smiled. “Otherwise, sure. I’m fine.”

  I went into the kitchen, gave Susannah a hug, and said I’d be back. She held on for a minute or two, and when she pulled back, her cheeks were wet.

  Alex followed me to the car. “Give me a call later on,” she said.

  When I got back to the house, I put on some coffee. Then I went to Alex’s office, turned on her computer, and inserted the disk Ellen Sanderson had given me. A minute later the screen was again filled with rows and columns of numbers and combinations of letters that looked like acronyms. It probably would’ve made logical sense to an accountant, but none of it made any more sense to me now than it had the night before.

  I went to the kitchen, poured a mug of coffee, brought it back to the computer, and studied those numbers and letters some more; I wondered if there was some secret code embedded in them. That struck me as unlikely.

  I scrolled through it slowly, and then, at the very end of the file, I found: “Account #147. First quarter, 1997. C. Gillespie, CPA.”

  Ellen had guessed that the disk was “insurance” for Charlotte. If so, then this one—number 147—must have been the account that had gotten her fired, and somewhere in those numbers a trained person could probably find the discrepancy that Charlotte had refused to change.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the Keith agency. When Ellen Sanderson answered, I said, “It’s Brady. Can you talk?”

  “Yes,” she said. “For a minute. Look, I’m sorry, but I haven’t had a chance—”

  “It’s account number one forty-seven,” I said. “The first-quarter report. On that disk you gave me. As you said, it’s all just a bunch of numbers. I can’t make any sense of any of it. But I’d like to know what account this is.”

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s almost lunchtime. I’ll call you back within an hour. Knowing the account number will make it easy. You said one forty-seven, first quarter?”

  “Right.”

  “If you don’t hear from me,” she said, “send the cops. It means they caught me.”

  “Jesus, Ellen. Don’t take any chances.”

  She laughed. “I’m just kidding. Don’t worry about me.”

  After I disconnected from Ellen, I went upstairs, retrieved my personal phone directory, and jotted down Skip Churchill’s e-mail address.

  Churchill is an accountant who works out of his home in Belmont, just outside Boston. I handled his divorce for him a couple of years ago, and as usually happens with my clients, we became friends. He always said if I ever needed a favor of the accounting variety, I should call on him.

  So I downloaded the contents of the disk to a file and e-mailed it to Skip. Then I took the phone and a mug of coffee out onto the deck, where I slumped in a rocking chair. I called Skip, got his answering machine, and told him to check his e-mail and give me a call.

  I rocked and gazed at the countryside. More and more autumnal color was showing up every day, little patches of gold and auburn and crimson splotched against the green. New England autumn, of course, can be spectacular to look at. But it always depressed me. It was the season of death.

  I pondered what I knew. The cabin on Arnold Hood’s property was down the hill, over Cutter’s Run, and up the next hill from Noah Hollingsworth’s orchard. If Charlotte Gillespie had been murdered—and so far, I reminded myself, there was no actual evidence either to prove or disprove it—that made two murders within about a week and barely a mile of each other. And that, as Sheriff Dickman had said, was not the kind of coincidence one could easily swallow.

  I could come up with theoretical villains easily enough. Arnold Hood and Susannah made two, and there was William Keith, who’d fired Charlotte. Any of them could’ve had the means and the opportunity to murder Charlotte and Noah.

  But I couldn’t think of a motive for any of these suspects to kill both of them. Maybe Hood had killed Charlotte simply because he hated African-Americans. Or William Keith, because she threatened his business. But I couldn’t think of a reason for either of them to kill Noah.

  On the basis of a complicated and highly unlikely set of scenarios, I supposed I could make Susannah the killer of both Noah and Charlotte. But I’d have to ignore one thing that I didn’t believe she ever could have faked—her obvious devotion to her father.

  I had seen Susannah cry for Noah, out of love and frustration and worry. I had kissed her then, and she’d responded to me. As illogical as it was, I found it impossible to imagine that a woman I had kissed could be capable of patricide.

  But hell, I’d been wrong plenty of times before. Especially when it came to women.

  I’d been sitting out there for fifteen minutes or so when the phone rang. “It’s Ellen,” she said.

  “That was quick. What’d you find?”

  “Account number one forty-seven is, in fact, the firm that got Charlotte fired. It’s called SynGen, Inc. They’re right here in Portland, and we’ve had their account for several years. It’s a research laboratory. They have some ties to the University of Southern Maine, here in Portland. They’re financed mostly thro
ugh government grants and contracts with the university and a couple of private foundations.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense. Some of the acronyms on that disk—USOME, for example. The University of Southern Maine, I bet. And UMORO—U. Maine Orono. All those acronyms contained five letters. I remember thinking USFDA might be the Food and Drug Administration.”

  “SynGen has dealings with them,” said Ellen. “So I’m helping you, huh?”

  “You’re a secretary,” I said. “Secretaries always know a lot.”

  “Oh, I don’t know much,” she said. “But I know how to find it. What else can I tell you?”

  “You sure it’s safe there?” I said.

  “Here? In the office?” she said. “Right now, yes. Everybody’s gone to lunch. It’s just me, guarding the phones. I’ve got the SynGen file up on my screen. I can delete it in one second.”

  “Does that file give you any names?”

  “At SynGen? Sure. Hang on. Just let me punch that up… There. Okay. The president and CEO is a guy named Gerald Stasio. Two VPs—Roland Passman and Arthur Tate. Passman’s head of operations, and Tate’s the CFO. They’ve got seventeen employees, nine of them full-time, and two unpaid interns from the university.”

  “Have you met these three guys?” I said.

  “I’ve greeted them, brought them coffee, taken their phone calls. We secretaries don’t exactly get introduced to the clients, you know. Not as if we were real people. They come in a couple times a year to meet with—well, to meet with Charlotte, and since then, the three of them were in one time to see Mr. Keith. Who, by the way, has taken over that account. Mr. Keith and Stasio are hunting buddies from way back, I know that. When Stasio set up his firm, he retained Keith and Harrington to do his accounting. After they got it up and running, Mr. Keith turned the account over to Charlotte.”

  “Hunting buddies,” I repeated.

  “Oh, you know. They go out on Casco Bay in December, when it’s ridiculously cold, and shoot sea ducks so Mr. Keith can show off Raisin.”

  “Raisin?”

  “His black Lab. Mr. Keith is awfully proud of that dog. I guess he’s a pretty good retriever. They go deer hunting every fall, too. Far as I know, they’ve never actually shot one. I think they just go to drink and play cards and tell jokes about women’s breasts. Guy stuff.”