The Dark Root

by Mayor, Archer

“How ’bout you?” I asked him.

  “My wife…”

  “We’re going in to get her now.”

  We approached the entrance again, and flattened ourselves to either side of it.

  “You ready?” Ron finally croaked, and gestured to the house’s dark interior.

  I nodded.

  “Okay.”

  We swung inside, low and away from the doorway, cutting to opposite directions. Apart from the motionless figures of the two young Asians, the entrance hall was empty.

  On the radio, Ron let everyone know we were inside and gave orders to secure the area, surround the house, and enter from all possible avenues. As he spoke, I carefully went from one still body to the other, removing weapons and checking for pulses, all with one eye glued to the far doorway. There were no signs of life.

  Soon joined by reinforcements, we located Peter Leung’s wife in an upstairs bathroom. Her hands were tied behind her back, and she was lying in a puddle of water and vomit in front of the toilet. The two young men had been holding her head under water, trying to find out where she kept her valuables.

  After we cleaned her up a little and got a quick statement, we handed her over to the ambulance crew so she could go with her husband to the hospital.

  What followed then was a long, legalistic procedure of precise and demanding form. The house and the street in front of it were cordoned off. Tony Brandt arrived, as did, in quick succession, Alfred Gould—the local assistant medical examiner—State’s Attorney Jack Derby, and his investigator, Todd Lefevre. Also, since this mayhem had involved local police officers, a “post-shoot” team from the Vermont State Police was called in to collate the details and run the interviews. Several hours later, the large green truck from Waterbury carrying the state crime-lab people arrived to photograph, measure, and remove for later analysis a small museum’s worth of forensic evidence.

  Ron, the two patrolmen we’d left at the street’s entrance, and I were interviewed several times by different people, as were some of Peter Leung’s neighbors. Michael Vu was taken to the police department until his role in the shoot-out could be legally clarified.

  At some point, much later, after our stories had been officially recorded and we’d been cleared to speak to one another once more, I searched out Ron Klesczewski. I found him in the living room, sitting on a small hard-back chair, staring out the window.

  I pulled up another chair and sat next to him. He made no acknowledgment of my presence. Suddenly exhausted, I let out a sigh. “How’re you holding up?”

  He turned toward me, but his eyes were unfocused, his mind obviously snagged on the recent past. “Fine.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I said flatly, hoping to break through his blank expression.

  My words hung in the air before him. He blinked once slowly and looked at me more attentively. “What?”

  “We were almost killed, and we just shot four people to death.”

  He nodded deliberately and went back to staring out the window. “Kids,” he murmured. “It didn’t really sink in till a while ago.”

  “Dangerous kids,” I amended, “who were about to take our heads off.”

  His face became more animated. “What the hell was that all about? They couldn’t’ve been more than sixteen, seventeen. They would’ve gotten a slap on the wrist for this—been out in no time. Why come out blazing?”

  “They didn’t see it that way. You spend your whole life surrounded by corruption and violence and death, you don’t end up thinking much about the future. You take what you can when you can.”

  He was quiet for a while. “So stupid.”

  “You had no choice. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah—I guess.”

  “How’s the ear?” I asked.

  Unconsciously, his hand went up to his bandaged ear and touched it gently. “Throbs a bit. Amazing luck.”

  I laughed and spread my arms to show off a borrowed uniform shirt, my own having been taken as evidence. “Six holes in the jacket, one in the shirt. I can’t believe he missed me.”

  He shook his head and held up his hand, its thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart. “We came that close, and so fast. It could’ve been over before we knew what hit us. Get a tip, go on a drive, knock on a door, and—bam. You’re dead… Were you expecting anything like this?”

  I shook my head. “We get lulled into a false sense of security in this town. We think all that big-city crime is far away. Did you call your wife, by the way?” I added. “This’s been on the radio by now, maybe the TV, too. They’re going to make a big deal about it.”

  “Yeah. She was crying. I told her it would be hours before I could get home. She’s pretty upset.”

  I squeezed his shoulder. “Go home, then. Give her a hug. You’ll have to come back to the office for a post-stress debriefing tonight, but that gives you a couple of hours at least. Leave your phone off the hook. We’ll page you if we need you before then.”

  He looked at me doubtfully, but I rose and took his elbow in my hand, forcing him to stand. “Go on. I’ll see you later.”

  He nodded tiredly and walked toward the door.

  I stopped him just as he reached the threshold. “Thanks for what you did today. You not only went by the book, with no mistakes, but you probably saved my butt as well.”

  He gave me a wistful half smile. “Thanks. You, too, Joe.”

  · · ·

  It was getting dark outside. In an odd replay of what Ron had been going through a short time earlier, I found myself sitting on an upstairs bed in the Leung home, my back against the headboard, my eyes watching the endless flickering of red and blue lights reflecting off the ceiling. I wasn’t traumatized by what I’d just gone through but, like Ron, I was experiencing the weight of the day’s events, and feeling very, very tired. Despite Hollywood’s willful misperception, killing a person wasn’t something a cop ever took in stride, especially if your beat involved but a single homicide a year, as it did in Brattleboro.

  I was still lost in my thoughts when Tony Brandt’s voice softly broke the silence. “Joe? You in here?”

  I could see his pale shadow settling into a nearby armchair. “Yeah—kind of sorting my brain out.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to be heading back? We’re basically done here. The debriefing’s in half an hour.”

  “I will soon.” I jerked a thumb I wasn’t even sure he could see toward the window. “What’s happening out there?”

  “’Bout what you’d expect. Phones flying off the wall, politicians scrambling for an inside angle so they’ll look informed, reporters swarming like proverbial locusts, cops wondering how the hell the whole thing went down. I’ve already held one press conference, along with Mitch Gauthier—he’s heading the VSP post-shoot team.”

  “How’s he seeing it so far?”

  “Right now, he says it’s clean. He does think you two were a little casual in your approach, given you thought this might’ve been an extortion, but that’s hindsight, and he knows it. He does credit Ron having the SRT close by. He’ll back you up—he won’t have any reason not to. And Derby’s already issued a preliminary decision clearing you both, pending Gauthier’s investigation. So you’re back on the job whenever you’re ready.”

  “What did Michael Vu say?”

  “That he was stopping by to see his old pal Peter Leung. That he can’t believe Brattleboro has joined the ranks of New York City. He claims he had no idea what was going on inside the house, and that he’d never laid eyes on any of the hoods, including Vince Sharkey.”

  “So he’s out?”

  “Free and clear. But you know what that means. Our screwing up this little deal cost him plenty in clout. He’s going to have to move fast to save face.”

  I shook my head mournfully. “Christ, if only I hadn’t pulled the plug on Sharkey’s tail, some of this could’ve been prevented.”

  Instead of letting me off the hook, however, Tony slipped in one of
his own. “If you hadn’t put that bee up Sharkey’s nose about Sonny screwing him, you wouldn’t have needed the tail in the first place. That was your first mistake.”

  He was right, of course, and it reinforced how little control we had over this case, and how desperately I had been grasping at straws. With today’s events, we were now engaged in the bloodiest investigation in the police department’s history, and I still was no clearer on where we were headed than when I’d been staring at Benny Travers’s charred remains.

  Something was going to have to break soon, or Tony’s irritation was going to be the least of my troubles.

  10

  GAIL STIRRED NEXT TO ME, and I turned my head to look at her, happy to have her back home, regardless of the reasons. I had tried to call her yesterday, before news of the shooting reached her otherwise, but she’d been unobtainable, and I’d been forced to lay down a paper trail of calming messages instead. Notwithstanding that the gist of those had been to tell her to stay put and not worry, by the time I found her waiting for me after the post-stress debriefing, I was delighted she’d ignored them all.

  We didn’t talk much during the short drive home. The emotion of our initial embrace had rendered most of that redundant and trite. And afterward, we immediately went to bed. At first we were content to merely hold one another, knowing the following morning would be ours to enjoy alone. But that had finally proven inadequate. Giving in to a need more demanding and soothing than sleep, we’d made love as long and as passionately as I could ever remember. Only then did we stop fighting exhaustion and give in.

  And yet I woke early, the dawn’s light not quite washing the skylight overhead. I hadn’t been wracked by nightmares, or by misgivings concerning Ron Klesczewski’s shaky mental state. It was the persistent frustration of the night before, coupled with the knowledge that, by killing Henry Lam, I’d eliminated one of the few suspects who might have been of use to me.

  Gail opened one eye, half veiled by long brown hair, and stretched her arm across my chest. “Yesterday catching up with you?”

  “Not the way you mean. The sole effect of yesterday’s fireworks will probably be to attract some federal agency who’ll swallow the case whole and leave us looking like dumb yokels.”

  She watched me for a few seconds in silence. “What was it like, being shot at?”

  I thought back, pretty sure where she was heading. “A slow-motion blur, mostly. I just remember thinking I better do everything right.”

  “How ’bout now?”

  “I don’t know… It’s over,” I said dismissively.

  She scowled slightly and sat up straighter.

  “How are you doing?” I thought to ask, just a bit too late.

  “The first radio report said a shooting with three dead and one cop wounded. All the way to Brattleboro I tried to keep calm, but after what happened to you last year, I knew the cop was you. That your luck had run out.”

  Last year I’d been knifed by a man on the run and had spent several weeks in a coma. “I tried to reach you.”

  She gave me an odd glance, and I realized I’d selfishly missed her point. “The whole drive down, I wasn’t telling myself that you’d be all right. I only thought about how I’d react to hearing you were dead.”

  As she finished, I saw a tear cascading down her cheek, wetting the rumpled sheet she’d pulled up to her chin.

  Embarrassed, I put my arm around her and drew her against me, kissing the top of her head.

  She returned the hug. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “There’s not much anyone can do about it anyway.”

  The silence that filled the room made a lie of that statement, and I found myself forcing the obvious words into the void. “I could quit. God knows I’ve put enough time in.”

  But mercifully, she shook her head. “You can’t do that. I don’t want you to, either.” She craned her neck up and kissed me softly. “Thanks for saying it, though.”

  I frowned, suddenly unsure to what degree I’d meant it, imagining the media circus I knew was almost upon me. “Sure.”

  “So, you’re worried the feds will take the case away?” she resumed in a stronger voice, as if setting off on a brisk walk.

  I took her lead, leaving the fear and concern behind us. “They can only do that if Jack Derby says they can. But I’m worried he’ll feel politically exposed enough to try to find a buyer—based on the premise that we don’t have the manpower, the resources, or the ability to deal with it.”

  “Do you?”

  I smiled at her bluntness—and the return of a direct, clear-eyed manner I both cherished and needed. “No. But we have the self-interest.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “A few weeks ago, a bank security investigator—an ex-FBI agent, in fact—told me about an employee who’d wired sixteen thousand dollars of the bank’s money to a dummy address in another state, just before she blew town. The bank was local, with no branches in the other state, so the investigator had no jurisdiction. But interstate wire fraud is a federal offense—an FBI specialty—so this man called his former employers and tried to sell the case to them. They took down all the information, but they warned him not to expect anything—that it was too small. Not worth the overhead to pursue.”

  Gail scowled. “That’s hardly the same thing. You’ve got a pile of dead bodies, for crying out loud. They can’t ignore that.”

  “Except that most of those bodies were killed by us. Sensational maybe, but not a federal crime. The federal aspects of this whole mess involve things we haven’t been able to prove yet—organized crime, illegal aliens, money laundering, contraband weapons. If we had a longer reach, we could dig where we can’t now, in order to make a case. The feds have that reach, but they wouldn’t have the vested interest. In fairness to them, they’ve got enough on their plates without fooling around with a small local problem that may or may not grow bigger. Let’s face it, for all the noise this has generated, we don’t have much to go on.”

  Gail straightened up, her expression quizzical. “I don’t understand. If that’s true, then how could Derby unload the case?”

  “Because his problems are more political than legal right now. For him, there is no case—just a huge PR stink bomb. If he can get the U.S. Attorney’s office to assign it to an agency outside his jurisdiction—politely saying it’s more than us local flatfoots can handle—then he’s free and clear, especially since all the victims were either deadbeats or outsiders.”

  “Even though that agency won’t do anything with it?”

  “They might in the long run, but only if something else develops that makes it meaningful to them. Otherwise it’ll end up on a back burner.”

  Years ago, when Gail and I first met, she was far readier to use outrage as a means of spurring action. That was no longer true. She was as idealistic as ever, but over two decades as a businesswoman and a local politician, she’d become craftier.

  “Sounds like you and Derby need to get together. If he does want to kick the case loose, maybe there’s a way you could stay with it—keep everyone happy.”

  I mulled that over in silence. It was technically possible, but only if an unreasonable number off actors fell into place in the right sequence.

  “A sneakier approach,” she continued, sensing my skepticism, “would be to locate the kind of evidence that would attract federal attention. It might help you sell yourself as an integral part of the package.”

  I stared at her in wonder. “I shudder to think what’ll happen when you pass the bar.”

  She smiled.

  · · ·

  Ron Klesczewski wasn’t in the next morning. Stimulated by my talk with Gail, I’d come into the office early to talk on the phone with Dan Flynn, and had watched Ron’s empty desk outside my door throughout our conversation, increasingly concerned about where he might be.

  As soon as I hung up, I dialed Harriet Fritter on the intercom. “You hear from Ron this morning?”

  She hesitated b
efore answering. “He called in. He said he was taking the day off.”

  I tried interpreting what she hadn’t said. “He okay?”

  “He sounded terrible.”

  I cast back to his state of mind the day before, and to his listless behavior at the post-stress meeting later on. “I’ll give him a buzz,” I told her and punched a button for an outside line.

  The phone was answered almost immediately by a timid, hesitant, woman’s voice.

  “Wendy?” I asked, suddenly unsure of who was on the line.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Joe Gunther. Is Ron there?”

  There was a brief, telling hesitation before she said, “He’s not available right now. I’m sorry.”

  “Harriet told me he sounded a little rough this morning. How’s he doing?”

  Her silence made clear I’d unwittingly stepped through an open manhole. “Is everything okay?” I added.

  Her voice cracked slightly. “Not really. I don’t know what’s happening. He won’t talk, won’t eat, won’t sleep. I was so happy he wasn’t badly hurt… I don’t understand.”

  “Has he called the department counselor?”

  She sounded more hopeful. “Yes, this morning. He didn’t tell me what they talked about.”

  “That’s a good sign, though. Shows he knows he’s in trouble. I am sorry, Wendy. I totally misjudged how hard this hit him—people react so differently. Look, tell him I called, that I totally understand, and I think he’s doing the right thing. I’m putting him on administrative leave as of now. That way, he won’t have to worry about showing up at the office, and neither of you will have to worry about his paycheck. Okay?”

  “Sure… I guess so.”

  “I’ll tell the counselor what I’ve done, just so he knows. Do you think if I dropped by, that would be a good idea?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not right away.”

  I quickly retreated. “Just an idea. If it’s better that we all stay away—”

  “No, no. I think he should see you. But maybe after a couple of days.”

  “Of course. I’ll let you call the shots. If there’s anything we can do, though, don’t hesitate. And let me know if he gets any worse.”