The Question of the Felonious Friend

by E. J. Copperman

  As John Lennon was beginning the vocal on “Come Together,” I sat down at my desk to retrace my steps and examine the question from perspectives I had not yet considered, a practice I have found helpful in the past.

  First, I researched the name Richard Handy in the Somerset County area. The criminal record (charged with selling contraband) was there, and little else followed it. The only obituary that had been published online or in print listed the name of his aunt, Audrey Seldin, as his only survivor. His parents’ names were not listed. Clearly, Richard had not been married and had no children, which was not in any way a surprise.

  Tyler Clayton’s name, absent his recent arrest for Richard’s murder, did not yield anything even that illuminating. He was listed among graduating students at Franklin High School ten years earlier. He had, apparently, taken some courses at Middlesex County College following graduation but had not received the associate’s degree that institution offers. He did have a Facebook page, which I accessed through Ms. Washburn’s account (with her permission) since I do not participate in social media. But Tyler rarely posted, except to discuss Swords and Sorcerers or video games.

  He had three Facebook friends listed. One was his brother Mason, one was his sister Sandy Clayton Webb, and the other was Richard Handy.

  Perhaps I had been mistaken in my answer to Tyler’s question, I thought as George Harrison was singing “Something.” If I had believed that Tyler truly had shot Richard, it might have been possible I’d be feeling partially responsible now. But I knew that wasn’t the case, so I pressed on.

  Besides, the difference between a Facebook friend and a true compatriot in life is often quite pronounced, I am told. This might have been one more way Richard had tried to convince Tyler he was a friend while simply trying to keep the exorbitant tips coming.

  I was convinced that the hundred dollars per day was the key. But I still had no tangible evidence the payment was made more than the one time Ms. Washburn and I witnessed it. Hacking into Tyler’s bank account would not be simple, but it would be possible after a large number of steps, not the least of which was determining in which bank he deposited the money he made from his job at the Microchip Mart. It would be a long process and not one I could successfully complete tonight.

  I could call Mason Clayton and ask about Tyler’s finances, and I might even get a response. But again, making phone calls is not my favorite thing. I am awkward and nervous on a call when I am not very well acquainted with the other party. I tend to choose the wrong word or to forget key questions. I am still somewhat anxious even in face-to-face conversations, but the telephone adds a layer of difficulty in that I cannot use my learned skills of reading another person’s facial expression. I was, in short, not going to call Mason tonight.

  Instead, I would look into his finances. But first I would compile data on Mason and his sister Sandy Clayton Webb.

  Knowing the people for whom one works is not always an imperative in my business. Someone who asks about the comparative gravity of the Empire State Building to the Leaning Tower of Pisa does not invite further investigation (acceleration of an object dropped from any height is a constant, but velocity will vary until terminal velocity is reached because of the density of the atmosphere). But in this case, having some insight into my client and the people involved in the question could prove helpful.

  I began with Sandy because she would probably require less time to research. Her personal life was in some ways a matter of public record: Her marriage and divorce were listed in local newspapers, as were the births of her children.

  Digging just a bit deeper, I found that Sandra Clayton had graduated from Franklin High School fourteen years earlier, had attended Montclair State University, earning a degree in business administration. There she had met Thomas Webb, shortstop of the Montclair baseball team (which had not compiled a very impressive record) and married him ten years before she and I had met at Questions Answered.

  They had two children. Brynna, age seven, was currently a second-grader while her younger brother, Douglas, was attending kindergarten at the Hillcrest School in Franklin Township. Their parents had divorced fourteen months earlier, according to a legal announcement in the Home News-Tribune.

  Sandy had been working as an industry analyst at Bessemer Trust in Woodbridge before her daughter was born, and returned to work with a smaller firm on a part-time basis two months before her divorce had been finalized. I could only assume she was also receiving alimony and child support from her ex-husband Thomas Webb, who was chief operating officer for an investment firm in Newark. She had not sold the house the couple had bought before the birth of Brynna, and had not missed a mortgage payment or incurred any other blemish on her credit report.

  In short, Sandy’s information was not terribly interesting.

  I did not know Mason’s banking information either, but that would not be necessary for the kind of research I intended to do. So I began by running a general search on Mason’s name and received over fourteen million hits on Google. By placing quotation marks on either side of the name, however, I could infer to the search engine that those words in that order were necessary to the search, and that cut the results to only 5,600 hits. A much more manageable number.

  At that point, Paul McCartney began to sing about “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a very odd bouncy song about a serial murderer. But since Richard Handy was not killed with a silver hammer (the fictional Maxwell’s victims are a woman he knew from a class, the professor who taught the class, and a judge sentencing him for the previous crimes, which makes little narrative sense), the song was merely background music, not a source of information or inspiration.

  Even with the possibilities already greatly reduced, it was fairly simple to eliminate a great many of the suggested links the search provided. Some referred to places, others to parts of longer names. Many were simply references to Facebook, suggesting I look for “people named Mason Clayton” on that site, which would be a measure of last resort. By cutting down on the unlikely and clearly useless references, soon the possibilities were reduced to only 307 suggestions and I began examining those more carefully.

  Eventually I could determine that Mason Clayton was thirty-seven years old. He was unmarried and had always been so. He had no arrest record at all. The home he occupied was his own, purchased from his mother Eleanor’s estate died four years earlier. He had paid his sister Sandy and brother Tyler, the other heirs, $256,000 for the house, on which he had a mortgage currently worth $197,542 from Valley National Bank, information which would make investigating his finances considerably less difficult if that became necessary. Mason had not missed a mortgage payment since buying the house, but recently two payments had been one week late in arriving.

  On the surface that did not seem unusual. But online sources also disclosed that Mason Clayton was not an employee of a company that did light construction and power washing of homes and industrial buildings. That was the information Ms. Washburn and I had been led to believe by Sandy and by Mason, but county records filed seven years earlier told a different tale.

  At that time, papers filed with the county clerk of Somerset indicated that Mason Clayton was in fact the owner of a power washing and roofing company called Able Home Help, of which he was the only operating officer listed. Instead of being an employee as we had been told, Mason was the proprietor of the company. Either both he and Sandy had deliberately misled Ms. Washburn and myself, or Mason had also lied to his sister and kept his purchase of the business from her.

  That was curious, but not worthy of serious concern on its own. Family dynamics, since Mother is the only relative I have ever known on a daily basis, are not my strong suit, but I am aware they are often complicated. Mason wanting to keep his ownership of his business from his sister (and one assumes his mother and brother) was his own affair. It had occurred years before Richard Handy’s murder and appeared to have no
connection to that incident, which was at the core of the question Mason had asked me to answer.

  His business dealings took an ominous turn, however, only three months before Richard’s death. At that time, Able Home Help had filed for Chapter XI bankruptcy protection against its creditors, which included suppliers of construction materials, a company providing liability insurance for Mason’s employees and clients, and Ms. Annette Cantonara, who apparently had been owed $32,000 by the business for faulty work done at her home, which had been repaired but for which she had paid another contractor to complete.

  I looked at the time on my iMac; it was 9:03 p.m. I exhaled; that was not too late to telephone Ms. Washburn. Her voice on the other end of a call does not create any of the anxiety I would have speaking to even an occasional acquaintance. I took my cellular phone from my pocket and called her.

  “What’s going on, Samuel?” she asked. Ms. Washburn knew if I was calling after business hours, there must have been a development in the question.

  I told her what I had discovered about Mason and Able Home Help. Ms. Washburn’s voice was slightly strained for reasons I could not discern, but she said, “That’s interesting, but I’m not sure it has anything to do with the question we’re answering, does it?”

  “It does,” I said, “when it is noted that there is a second partner listed on the corporation papers for Able Home Help. Tyler Clayton.”

  Eighteen

  “I don’t understand,” Ms. Washburn said as she drove the next morning. “I’ve had a whole night to think about it and I still don’t understand: Why would Mason put Tyler on his corporation papers as a partner and not tell him?”

  I too had thought about this overnight. “We can’t be sure Tyler didn’t know,” I said. “Since Richard’s death he has not been especially communicative. But the idea that Tyler might need some income later in life, as a trust fund of sorts, might make sense. When we see Mason we will ask.”

  Ms. Washburn did not look especially satisfied with that explanation, but she did not comment. “How do you want to play this meeting with Detective Hessler?” she asked.

  “Play?” I said. It did not occur to me that seeing the detective again would be similar to a game, with winners and losers.

  “Yes, Samuel. It’s something people say. How should we approach the situation? The detective is a police officer and we’re Questions Answered, a private company that has no standing in the criminal justice community. What do you think will be the best tactic to get him to actually tell us something that might be helpful? What do you have planned?”

  We were only four minutes from the Somerset police headquarters by my estimation and that of Ms. Washburn’s global positioning satellite device. There was no longer much time to discuss strategy. “It never occurred to me that we would need a plan of action,” I said. “I intend to ask the detective questions and see what his answers will be.”

  Ms. Washburn sighed just a little. “This might be a very short meeting,” she said.

  Indeed, at first it appeared Hessler would not see us at all. Despite Ms. Washburn having called ahead to ask him for a meeting, the detective had not alerted the dispatcher working at the front desk and she almost refused to allow us into the detective’s office. When I insisted she page Hessler and ask if we should be allowed in, she finally capitulated and we were eventually led into the bullpen area inside. Hessler, as a lead detective, had one of the larger, more private cubicles.

  “Why should I talk to you?” he said, as if asking for a reminder. “What can I possibly gain in this investigation from talking to you?”

  “Possibly the correct answer to the question of who killed Richard Handy,” I suggested.

  “I know who killed Richard Handy. Tyler Clayton killed Richard Handy. He told me that himself.”

  Ms. Washburn gestured toward the two very functional but not comfortable-looking chairs in front of Hessler’s desk. “May we?” she asked. Hessler nodded and we sat down. “Now, detective, certainly you’ve been smart enough to research Tyler’s ASD.”

  “ASD?” he asked, as she no doubt had anticipated he would.

  “Autism spectrum disorder. And since you have looked into it, probably talking to his therapist Dr. Shean, you know that what he keeps repeating over and over again probably has nothing at all to do with the situation or the truth. Not to mention that a person with that kind of disorder is inclined to agree to anything after even moderate interrogation because he wants to give the people asking the questions what they want. So Tyler’s confession will get thrown out of court in about two minutes.”

  “The kid was found holding the murder weapon over the dead body of the victim with nobody else in that area of the store,” Hessler reminded us. “I’ll take my chances in court.”

  “Do you want to convict Tyler if he did not murder Richard Handy?” I asked. “Because the overwhelming evidence to this point suggests that he did not.”

  Hessler pointed his finger like a gun barrel. “Gun. Hand. Body. Confession. What evidence is there that says Clayton didn’t pull the trigger?”

  “There is the matter of hundred-dollar bills in the tip jar that were only for Richard Handy. There is the premeditation of bringing spray paint for the security cameras, which is inconsistent with Tyler’s behaviors, particularly if he were acting irrationally based on the answer I had given him to his question about Richard’s friendship. And there is this.” I gestured to Ms. Washburn and she produced the Tenduline die in its sandwich bag from her tote. She placed it on Hessler’s desk.

  “What is that?” Hessler said, reaching for the bag.

  “It’s evidence we found at the crime scene that apparently your team missed,” I said. “If you require a witness, Mr. Robinson the store owner was present when I found it.”

  “That doesn’t tell me what it is, or why I should care,” the detective responded.

  He was correct about that. I endeavored to correct my error. “It is called a Tenduline. It is a very specific, very unusual die used in the game Swords and Sorcerers, which I’m sure you know was a pastime of Richard’s.” I did not mention Tyler Clayton’s participation in the game because I saw no benefit to giving the detective that knowledge if he had not obtained it for himself.

  “And so did Clayton,” he said. Detective Hessler was not incompetent by anyone’s standards.

  “That is true. This is a very rare item, something that must be specifically ordered. There are very few of them in the country. And we found it lying in the area where Richard Handy’s body fell. It may have fallen from his hand when he hit the floor.”

  “So? He could have dropped a harmonica too. That doesn’t tell us anything about the way he died.”

  “Perhaps it does,” I said. “This is not the kind of thing a person carries around in his hand casually. Richard had it with him for a reason, and he was holding it at the moment he was shot for a reason.”

  “Okay, I’ll play along,” Hessler said. “What’s the reason?”

  “I don’t know. But consider this: When you arrested Tyler Clayton at the store, in what condition did you find his shoes?”

  Hessler squinted at me. “His shoes?”

  “Were they covered in blood?”

  Ms. Washburn grimaced. I did not understand why because I do not have an emotional reaction to the sight of blood.

  “Yes,” Hessler said. “The soles had blood all over them, and some milk too.”

  “How about the tops of his shoes? His trouser legs? His shirt? Any blood there?”

  Hessler looked at a photograph, probably of Tyler while being booked. “No. The rest of him was clean.”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that a man standing that close to another and shooting him four times would not have been stained with his blood?”

  Hessler frowned. Police officers do not care to have their work questioned
. To be fair, most people in all professions feel that way.

  “I’ll grant you it’s strange. But it doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “Nobody else in the store had that kind of spatter on them, either. And somebody for sure shot Richard Handy.”

  “Very well. May we have access to your evidence lab?”

  Hessler stared briefly. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “No.” Then he paused. “What do you want to look at?”

  “The security video from the Quik N EZ,” I told him.

  Hessler waved his left hand to dismiss the idea. “I’ve looked at it. You won’t be able to see anything. A kid walks in wearing a hood and bending over so his face is hidden. Then a hand comes up and sprays the camera. Three cameras, all the same. You won’t see anything.”

  “I don’t expect to see anything,” I told him. “I’m curious about what I will be able to hear.”

  It didn’t take long for Hessler to set up a viewing of the security video in the same interrogation room where we had seen Tyler Clayton after his arrest. A monitor mounted on the ceiling provided the picture and sound, which Hessler had a uniformed officer feed through an electronics console outside the room.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “We are listening,” I said.

  Before he could protest, the screen came to life. (It remained an inanimate object, but that expression indicates the recorded image appeared on the screen.) As expected, the image was divided into three sections on the screen: One showing the counter, one showing the entrance to the convenience store, and the third positioned in the back near the dairy display, where Richard Handy was shot.

  “Watch the entrance first,” Hessler said, although it was obvious that was what we should be doing.