The Sniper's Wife

by Archer Mayor

  His morning rounds completed, Willy circled the courthouse, cut around the block, and parked in the lot behind the municipal building.

  Upstairs, Sammie Martens paused by the window at the end of the central hallway just outside the ladies’ room, holding a pitcher of water intended for the office coffee machine. She saw Willy get out of his car, cross the parking lot, and vanish from view as he entered the building.

  She waited to greet him, knowing he’d come straight up, as usual. She preferred seeing him first in private, if possible, especially if they hadn’t spent the previous night together. It helped prepare her for whatever mood he might be in. Dark to middling was the standard she’d grown used to before they’d become intimate, although nowadays, she was happy to note, there was the occasional suggestion that he was lightening up.

  She listened in vain for his footsteps coming up the stairs, eventually resting the pitcher on the windowsill. It seemed he’d run into someone in the lobby.

  She glanced out the window again, attracted by a sudden movement below, and saw Willy running back to his car, fumbling for his keys.

  Surprised, she returned to the office, placed the water beside the coffeemaker, and addressed the older man sitting behind one of the four corner desks.

  “Joe, did we just have a call come in? My pager didn’t go off.”

  Joe Gunther looked up from what he’d been reading and gave her a thoughtful look before answering. “Not that I know of.”

  “I just saw Willy go running back out of the building to his car.”

  Her boss sat back in his chair and pursed his lips. “Maybe he forgot something at home.”

  She wasn’t convinced. “Maybe. It didn’t look like that. I saw him drive up like usual and waited for him at the top of the stairs for almost five minutes. He never made it.”

  Sam was suddenly struck by her own odd choice of words.

  Gunther was used to Willy’s ways. In the past, it had usually paid to give him a little leeway, and sometimes much more than a little. Whether Willy was the son Joe had never had or merely possessed by a spirit Joe found perversely irresistible, the bottom line remained that Willy Kunkle was one of the most instinctive police officers Joe had ever worked with, and therefore worth a little more than the usual slack.

  “Give him half an hour, Sam. That’ll allow for a round trip home and then some. After that, we can start shaking the bushes. If he’s on to something, the first thing he’ll want is to be left alone.”

  Sammie Martens went back to making coffee, unsatisfied and faintly apprehensive.

  Exactly one-half hour later, she glanced at Gunther again, who merely caught her eye and nodded without comment. Sammie picked up the phone and called Willy’s house.

  There was no answer.

  Frustrated, she rose and headed for the door. “I’m going downstairs—see if I can find out what set him off.”

  She turned into the radio dispatch area on the first floor and rapped on the bulletproof glass separating the dispatchers from the public. A woman half rose in her seat to peer over the console between them. “Hey, Sam.” Her voice was made metallic by the two-way intercom. “What’s happenin’?”

  “I’m looking for Willy. You see him this morning?”

  The woman’s expression registered surprise, then confusion. “He didn’t tell you guys?” She gestured to the side. “Come around to the door.”

  Sammie moved down the hallway to a locked door that opened almost as soon as she reached it. The dispatcher took her through the patrol officer’s room to an empty office normally used by the PD’s parking enforcement division, calling through the door of her own office as she did so, “Wayne, cover for me a sec, will you?”

  “It was kinda funny,” she explained to Sammie. “We got a call from a New York City detective asking if we could send an officer to locate someone named William Kunkle, who supposedly lived in Brattleboro. I started laughing and told him no one went out of their way to dig up Willy if they could avoid it. The guy was dead quiet, so I explained that Willy was a cop who worked upstairs. Which was exactly when Willy walked by the window. So I shouted to him to take the call on the wall phone. I was watching when he answered. He looked really intense for a couple of minutes, and then he hung up and vanished, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I figured he was booking it upstairs to see you.”

  Sammie Martens shook her head. “I saw him through the window, running back to his car. What was the name of the New York cop?”

  “Hang on.” The woman crossed the narrow hallway into the dispatch area and retrieved a pad from her console desk. “Detective Ogden.” She handed the pad over. “That’s the number.”

  Sammie placed her hand on a nearby phone. “This okay?”

  The woman nodded before resuming her seat at the console.

  Sammie dialed and heard a deep, clear, almost radioquality male voice pick up on the other end. “Detective squad—Ogden.”

  “Detective Ogden, this is Special Agent Samantha Martens of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation in Brattleboro. You just talked to a colleague of mine, Willy Kunkle?”

  “That I did.” “I don’t want to step on any toes here, but could I ask what you talked about? He took out of here like a jackrabbit and didn’t tell us what was up.”

  There was a long hesitation.

  Sammie tried to help the man out. “I could have my supervisor call you. Or you can call him, so you’d know for sure I am who I say I am. VBI’s in the phone book.”

  Ogden relented. “It’s nothing that confidential. We were looking for a next-of-kin for a DOA we have down here.”

  Sammie was stunned and increasingly confused, having had to make a few calls like that herself. “Oh, my God. One of his family? But why call him? He has relatives right in New York that could act as next-of-kin.”

  “It’s not that easy. The woman we have isn’t strictly family. In fact, we don’t know who she’s related to. All we found in her apartment were her divorce papers from Mr. Kunkle. That’s why I called him. I was looking for a blood relation and thought he could help. I didn’t realize he took it so hard. That didn’t come across in his voice.”

  Sammie nodded at the familiarity of that. “Did he give you a name?”

  “Her mother’s, but he said it would be a waste of time. And he was right. I just hung up on her. Told me her daughter had been dead to her for years already—that she didn’t want anything to do with her. Actually, I’m kind of glad you called, ’cause we need a definite ID on this woman—”

  “Mary,” Sammie interrupted. “That was her name.” Ogden was caught off guard. “What? Oh, right. Sorry. Did you know her?”

  “We met once, a long time ago. Department picnic.”

  “Okay. Well, anyway, we really need someone to ID Mary, and it’s looking like William might be it, if he’s willing. Mary’s mother said that would suit her fine.”

  Sammie was filled with sadness, anxiety, even a perverse pinch of jealousy. She’d only met Mary Kunkle that single time, true enough, but she knew of their history as a couple, and the guilt that Willy carried for having beaten her once in a drunken rage and bringing the marriage to ruin. Never an emotional brick at the best of times, Willy was going to take this hard.

  “What did she die of?”

  “We’re looking good for an accidental overdose. You think you could help me out?” Ogden asked.

  Oh, Christ, Sammie thought, the word “overdose” rising like a snake from hiding. Now she knew for sure what channel Willy was on, which made her all the more fearful. “I don’t think I need to,” she answered. “He’s already on his way.”

  Chapter 2

  It was nearing dark when Willy Kunkle approached the city. It shouldn’t have been that late. It normally took under five hours to drive from Brattleboro to New York, and he’d gotten the call from Ogden first thing in the morning. The traffic wasn’t to blame, however. It had been the turmoil in his head that had slowed him down a
nd finally forced him off the road somewhere in Connecticut. He’d ended up going for a long, aimless walk before finding himself at a diner, drinking countless cups of coffee and pushing something slimy and uneaten around a plate with his fork.

  None of it had helped. If he’d been more focused, he would have recognized the dangers of reverting to old, destructive, brooding habits, and moved to avoid feeding them. Increasingly, Willy had found that his best chance for peace of mind was in simply getting things done. He didn’t talk about most issues, large or small. He definitely didn’t ask how other people felt about them. He avoided even thinking about them. He just set himself a task, from cooking dinner to running an investigation to making love with Sammie, and then he did it. The trick was to get down that corridor between conception and goal without wasting time, without opening doors along the way, and without suffering fools who might try to make him do so. That’s how he’d finally dealt with the nightmares after ’Nam, how he’d beaten off the alcohol, and how he’d learned to cope with the crippled arm. It’s how he’d partitioned off what he’d done to Mary and what the attending loss of self-respect had cost him.

  He’d finally concluded at the diner that he would therefore cut his ties to Vermont and to Joe Gunther, Sammie Martens, and the hope they represented. That way, if he didn’t survive this trip down memory lane, if he slipped and was dragged under as was already beginning to happen, at least he’d have gone down alone, leaving behind only the memory of the world’s most irascible colleague, friend, and lover.

  And there was a hardheaded correctness to this that he willed himself to believe: He’d be goddamned if he was going to be the kind of excess emotional baggage for others that he’d always claimed others were for him.

  However, as he crossed the Harlem River on the Henry Hudson Bridge with his pager off, and passed the very neighborhood he grew up in and where his mother still lived, he knew in his gut there would be enough baggage to go around for everybody.

  And it wouldn’t be long in coming.

  The visit to Bellevue only aggravated the roiling anxieties Willy was trying so hard to tamp down. Even with a recent and extensive remodeling, the huge hospital and the familiar journey to the morgue reached up like a stifling fog to constrict his throat. As a rookie New York cop so many years before, he’d made this trip a half dozen times, collecting paperwork or dropping things off to help in some busy detective’s investigation. He’d enjoyed being part of something outside a patrolman’s routine and had found the morgue’s forensics aspects interesting and stimulating: all those racked bodies offering entire biographies to those clever and motivated enough to decipher them. These visits had helped him to believe that although at the bottom of the ladder police work left something to be desired, the promises it held justified sticking it out for the long run.

  Of course, that was before he’d drowned all such thinking in the bottom of a bottle.

  The white-coated attendant greeted him at the reception area with little more than a grunt, and he followed him down a long, windowless, antiseptically white hallway, through a pair of double doors. There they entered a huge enhancement of Willy Kunkle’s memory of the place: a tall room, shimmering with fluorescence and equipped with two opposing walls of square, shiny floorto-ceiling steel doors. The sight of it made him stop in his tracks, struck by the image of a storage room full of highend dormitory refrigerators, stacked and ready for shipment, gleaming and new.

  The attendant glanced over his shoulder. “You are all right?” he asked in broken English.

  Willy sensed the man’s concern was purely self-interested. He didn’t want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he’d been enjoying out front.

  “Yeah.” Kunkle joined him almost halfway down the row of cold cubicles.

  The attendant consulted the clipboard in his hand one last time and pulled open the drawer directly before him with one powerful, practiced gesture.

  Like a ghost appearing through a solid barrier, the white-draped shape of a supine woman suddenly materialized between them, hovering as if suspended in midair.

  The attendant flipped back the sheet from the body’s face. “This is her?”

  Willy watched the other man’s face for a moment, looking for anything besides boredom. He thought he might be Indian, but in truth, he had no idea. He’d recently heard that forty percent of New York’s population was foreign-born, now as in 1910.

  The man scowled at him, suspicious of Willy’s expression. “You see?”

  Willy dropped his eyes to the woman floating by his waist, looking down at her as if she were asleep on the berth of a spaceship and they were about to share a voyage to eternity.

  He studied her features, feeling as cold as she seemed, his heart as still as hers. A numbness filled him from his feet to his head, as if he were a vessel into which ice water had been poured.

  Romantics would have the dead appear as marble or snow sculptures. The reality was far less remote and pleasant. Whatever blemishes the deceased once had were enhanced by death’s yellow cast, and the tiny amount of shapeliness the musculature had maintained even in sleep was lacking, allowing the cheeks to pull back the smallest bit and the entire face to strain against the boniness of the skull beneath. This was truly a corpse, and little else.

  He reached out slowly, but stopped short of touching her, struck by the vitality of his large, powerful right hand next to her drained, thin, mottled face, the same face he’d reduced to tears a dozen times over. She looked tired, as if the sleep she was engaged in now were of no use to her whatsoever. For some reason, that made him saddest of all. Surely she’d wished for some peace and quiet when she’d opted for this state. It almost broke his heart to think she hadn’t been successful.

  The attendant sighed. “It is Mary Kunkle?”

  He’d butchered the last name. Willy glanced down the length of her shrouded body and noticed a toe tag ludicrously sticking out from under the far end of the sheet. It made her seem as if she were for sale.

  He moved down to read the tag. It had her name and an address in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge.

  That small detail triggered the dormant analytical part of his brain and made him lift the sheet off her left arm. The detective on the phone had said she’d died of an overdose, and there, as stark evidence, was not only the single fresh wound of a needle mark in the pale, skinny crook of her arm, but ancient signs of similar abuse clustered about it like memories refusing to disappear.

  “Yes, that’s her,” he finally answered, stepping back, allowing the attendant to flip the sheet back over Mary’s face with all the detached flair of a custodian covering a sofa.

  Willy stepped out into the city at night—huge, enveloping, teeming with life, extending for miles beyond reason. He looked around at the vaulting, gloomy, light-studded buildings looming over him like haphazardly placed monoliths, their black profiles outlined against a sky whose stars had been blotted out by the dull ocher stain of the city’s reflected glow. He knew it was a cliché, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of being just one of a million insects lost in an enormous ant farm, each a part of something whole, and yet, perhaps precisely because of that, utterly isolated. Mary had been one of them, and now lay dead, unnoticed and unmourned, for all he knew. He’d been one of them, too, and was feeling the ambivalence of being back in the fold. He wondered if erstwhile prisoners of Alcatraz felt the same way when they returned as ancient tourists.

  The air had turned cooler and felt good against his forehead. He was hot and slightly dizzy, still teetering over the abyss between his past—exemplified by this city and the body in the morgue—and what he’d once thought was his future, but which all of a sudden was feeling impossibly remote. He stood on the sidewalk struggling to make sense of this time warp, worrying that the weight of the past would prove too heavy to shake off.

  The smart thing would have been to get ba
ck in his car then and there and return to Vermont. He’d signed the morgue’s paperwork on the way out. The police and other authorities would be satisfied with his service and would know where to find him in any case. He could even make arrangements for Mary’s disposal long-distance, perhaps shipping her to her mother as a small poetic gesture.

  But he knew he wouldn’t be doing any of that. He’d known it on the drive down. Mary’s death had made clear the need to settle issues he’d tried to abandon by escaping New York, but which had continued to cripple him as surely as any rifle bullet.

  The real question, therefore, wasn’t whether he would stay in the city to discover what had pushed Mary to virtual suicide. It was whether the small glimmerings of hopefulness he’d recently been acquiring in Vermont would be strong enough to fight the undertow he could already feel tugging at his ankles.

  He shivered and pulled his light coat tighter around his neck. The twilight season between winter and summer was hard to call spring in a world of concrete and steel. The days were pleasantly warm, but the nights still held a snow-sharpened edge. Burying his hands in his pockets, he set off toward the Lower East Side, some thirty blocks to the south.

  The decision to walk had immediate benefits. It put him in motion, it let him blow off steam, and it took him outside of his own head, a place he knew wasn’t the healthiest of environments. In a telling paradox, however, walking these streets helped resurrect memories he’d been struggling to suppress since hitting the city limits.

  He’d grown up in New York, near the George Washington Bridge at the north end of Manhattan. He knew these urban sounds and moods in particular, and was familiar with the almost organic energy that seeped from the city’s pavements like a steady pulse, twenty-four hours a day. Alone in the middle of a darkened street, you knew you were amid a huge number of people. You could almost hear their collective breathing.