by Noel Hynd
“I said a hopeless old goat, not a punked-out young goat,” he answered. They both laughed.
“I'm withdrawing the question,” she said.
He shrugged. “Good.”
Julie Steinberg put her head down and wrote for several seconds, maybe half a minute. Then she began speaking without looking up.
“Remember, Frank. You have to be honest with me. Right?”
“Right,” he answered.
Her brown eyes came up, sharp as thorns. “How long have you been going past the two-drink limit in the evening?”
He sighed. “Last night was the first time.”
She waited.
“Honest,” he said.
“So it coincides with this current case?”
“Well, yes.”
Julie Steinberg smiled. “Doesn't that suggest something right there?” she asked. “You're under pressure. Troubled. A final winter is coming to New Hampshire. You feel comfortable with an extra drink, but if you examine the results, you're making things worse. Not better.”
He weighed her words and felt a sinking feeling. He knew where she was leading him.
“Frank, you cannot drink alcohol at all. You think you can handle it, but you can't. The spirits of the dead do not just step out of the woods and they do not carry on telepathic messages with you.”
“How do you know they don't?” he asked after several seconds.
“You just told me you didn't believe in such things,” she countered.
“I don't believe in such things.”
“Then you're contradicting yourself. Try to reason this out.”
He shook his head. “Help me reason it out.”
“Certainly. In the entire history of human civilization,” she said, “no one has ever proven the existence of a disembodied human spirit. Not once. Nor is telepathy found in any of the precise sciences.”
“Then where does what I saw come from? And where do these messages come from? The ones that I'm hearing.”
Dr. Steinberg leaned back in her chair. She tapped a finger to the side of her head, then pointed a red fingernail at her patient. And she smiled, to make it all perfect.
“From your own imagination, Frank. Gary Ledbetter wasn't outside your house, and no one else was, either. That's why there were no footprints in the snow. But combine your final uncertainties about his case with the pressures of ending your career successfully, mix them both with alcohol and .. .boom!”
She clapped her hands once to make the point.
“Sure,” he said, “but-”
“Was this the only man you ever arrested who was eventually executed?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“It's natural that you should feel some guilt,” she said. “But you shouldn't. Doubts are normal concerning an event of that magnitude.” She shook her head gently. “You might be having an extreme reaction to this, but not an abnormal reaction.”
He nodded.
“And you're going to have to drop the booze. Cold turkey.”
He settled back in his chair, obviously displeased. “Aw, come on,” he finally said.
“I can't give you any other advice, Frank. I'd be a quack if I did.”
He studied the carpet. Their eyes met in silence. Then a small wave of relaxation overtook the doctor's office. In the light of day, things that reared up as demons at two A.M. slipped neatly and obediently into place. And maybe, just maybe, O'Hara reasoned, he could get through a few weeks on non-alcoholic beer and Coca-Cola Classic.
The psychologist continued. Softly. Very soothing feminine intonations.
“You have to reject the reality of spirits of the dead and telepathic messages,” Julie Steinberg said. “And you have to do that with a clear head. Further, if you can't curtail your drinking by yourself, I'm going to ask Captain Mallinson to send you to the AA or somewhere else for treatment of substance abuse. And that will hold up your retirement.”
“Oh, hell. Don't do that.”
“Then do what I'm asking, Frank,” she said. “The decision is in your hands. I'm being tough on you because your life and future are in your hands. Not my hands. Your hands.”
He sighed again and nodded. Their eyes met.
“'Tough love,' huh?” he asked.
“Call it what you will.” She managed a smile. “You came to me for help. That's what I'm trying to provide. All right?”
For several seconds he thought about it. “All right,” he finally agreed.
*
O'Hara returned to state police headquarters and went to his office. The files on the Karen Stoner case should have been on his desk by now. They weren't. He went downstairs to retrieve them himself.
Central Records was jammed into the basement of the police headquarters building. The official word was that CR was located there for the convenience of the detective bureau. Everyone in the building knew better.
When the new headquarters had been planned in 1986, a location across the street had been designated as the future annex for police records. Files, paperwork, court proceedings, and evidence from all previous investigations. Great location, plenty of logic to the proposal. There was even talk about computerizing everything and giving every homicide dick a desktop terminal. The high-tech, no-shoe-leather approach to case resolution. Real modern for a hick state.
But then came the stock market crash of 198'7. Boston Yuppie money stopped moving into the south-eastern section of New Hampshire. There went the state tax base. The records annex and the computers were great ideas whose time had already gone.
For nineteen months crates of old records languished in a warehouse in Preston-actually a barely heated converted barn that still smelled of horse dung. Every cop, when he needed a file, had to go over to the barn and pick through the accumulated mess until he found what he wanted. No concise inventory was ever established, few files were ever checked out properly and much was not returned. So in July of 1991 the last seven years of material (or at least what the filing clerks could find of it) was shipped back to Nashua and crammed into the drafty basement at headquarters.
Once there had been a clerk, a short, tubby, genial, puffy faced spinster named Rose Horvath. Rose had sat in this claustrophobic chamber from nine A.M. to three P.M. five days a week, reading romance novels between the occasional records inquiry. Rose had been playing out a few final years on the state payroll before retiring.
Previously, Rose had worked as a secretary in the governor's office during the inspired reign of John Sununu. Then she had found a situation with the Nashua district attorney after Iron John moved to the cushy federal payroll in Washington. Later in her career, Rose had been a secretary in state police homicide. O'Hara had always been unfailingly courteous to her while others treated her like dirt. He also used to give her a two-pound Whitman Sampler for Christmas, which she usually had finished by the evening of December 26. In return, she told O'Hara anything she had seen, read, overheard, or suspected in any of the offices in which she had worked.
It was a wonderful relationship, O'Hara and his plump Rose. He fed her addiction (chocolates), and she fed his, professional tips and department scuttlebutt. But like most perfect relationships, this one, too, was doomed. The bureaucrats fired her late in 1992, seven months south of her full twenty-year pension, a casualty of the state's economic wreckage. She now lived in the town of Bennington, New Hampshire, with six cats.
So when O'Hara entered Central Records and turned on the light, he was alone, although Rose's desk and chair were unmoved from where she had last occupied them. Even her well-worn posture cushion remained-battered, curved foam rubber, crushed at its center-tied to the chair by brown twine. Less apparent was the background of the Karen Stoner case, which was buried somewhere before him.
O'Hara tried to remember how the room was organized. Then he remembered that it wasn't organized at all. All homicide arrests had been grouped together, convictions together with cases dropped for lack of evidence. Killers rubbing shoulders
with the innocent.
O'Hara went immediately to work. There were seventeen cabinets of murder cases from 1985 onward. When he started opening drawers he found decaying, mildewed folders of occurrence reports, trial transcripts, indictments, and countless water-stained mug shots.
Some of the cabinet drawers hadn't been opened for years. There was a particularly New Hampshire touch to these files, O'Hara noted. They had been in a filthy barn which had been stifling, then freezing, trapping moisture within the folders. Many pages were stuck together and needed to be pried apart with a sharp blade. And in each case's records, there was usually a picture of the victim or victims, sometimes clipped right to the photo of the convicted perp.
O'Hara growled a low profanity to himself as he began his search. Within the files themselves, he found another layer of disorder. The alphabetization had been in connection to the county where the murder had occurred, then assigned the number of the homicide for the year. Smaller counties tended to have few murders. O'Hara remembered that Karen Stoner had been found in the basement of an abandoned garage in Antrim. Thus she rested in peace under “Cheshire County 11-13-86.”
O'Hara located her file and pulled it.
Then he pulled the linked file on Gary Ledbetter. He placed his hands on three thick manila folders and withdrew them. Then he stopped because he heard something.
Muffled gunshots. A fusillade of six in quick order. Then another volley of eight, higher caliber and more rapid than the first reports.
For a moment, O'Hara felt a flash and stopped breathing. Then he relaxed. The state police indoor pistol range was on the other side of this room. There was seven feet of solid cement between him and the ass-end of the target range. Nonetheless, when O'Hara took a space at a table, he chose one around the corner of the room. Finally, he settled in to contemplate some of the horrors which earned him a living.
He read carefully.
Ledbetter, Gary, the file began. Born in Metarie, Louisiana, 02-25-65. Arrested in Peterborough, New Hampshire, 01-15-87, charged with homicide, degree two, maximum rap under the law.
There were several separate envelopes within Gary's file. Some of the early ones were familiar. O'Hara found his own arrest report. He remembered typing it and signing it. Police officers normally took to typewriters the way fish took to bicycles, but O'Hara's case summaries and arrest reports were not embarrassments of misspellings and abominations of grammar. They were concise and properly detailed.
He took a moment on Envelope Two. The original incident report. O'Hara reread his own summation. Decapitated female torso found in the basement of a converted garage. He remembered the day with a chill. The stench. The obscenity of the discovery. The pink-ribboned box containing the severed hand. The head of Karen Stoner placed on a mock altar before the nude, bloody body.
He cringed anew. He recalled the feeling of his knees involuntarily buckling and how he tried to make like a veteran criminologist so that he wouldn't barf. The hunt for the killer came back. The questioning of Karen's friends. The first time he laid eyes on Gary. Gary's lies. . . .
Not me, man. I didn't hurt no doughnut shop waitress.
“Yeah, Gary,” O'Hara whispered. “It's past history. Shut up and let me read.”
I was innocent, man. You 're starting to suspect so yourself.
“Get out of my head.”
Gary fell silent.
The first four envelopes contained evidence which O'Hara had assembled. The next three contained material assembled by one Ben Ashton.
For a moment, O'Hara drew a blank. Then Ashton himself came back. Too clearly, the way the pain of an abscessed tooth comes back.
Ben Ashton had been the state attorney general in 1987. A little thirty-one-year-old prick with lofty ambitions and a common sense IQ to match his sleeve size. University of New Hampshire Law School, Dartmouth College undergraduate. Gained admission to both places on family suck. O'Hara always wondered who had taken Ashton's law boards for him; probably the same dude who took his SATs. It was inconceivable that he could have scored well on either by himself. The guy was a dolt.
Attorney General Ashton: Tiny events from the past bubbled up in O'Hara's memory almost faster than he could correlate them. There had been something about an anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-gay letter that Ashton had signed in his Dartmouth days. The letter surfaced during his campaign. Ashton had denied it, then claimed he didn't remember it, then apologized for it, then claimed it was a forgery. Not that it offended more than a few hundred people in the state. Fact was, it solidified his yahoo credentials among certain elements of the electorate.
Now, in 1993, Ashton's name still popped up in some political circles in the state. He was in private law practice, and a darling of the neanderthal wing of the Republican party. Behaved like the Duke of Des Moines, the big fish in the small pond. Back in the gung ho eighties, Ashton had secured his nomination as state Attorney General in return for many political favors done by his daddy. The year he won election, his party won in spite of him, not because.
O'Hara had been rid of Ashton since 1990, the year the voters threw a lot of the bastards out of office. But the memories came back. None of them good. Ashton barely knew state law, much less the Bill of Rights, much less how to prosecute. He had a great relationship with Wilhelm Negri, publisher of the New Hampshire American, however, who was tight with Ashton's family, so he received friendly press. But despite good PR and his vocal pro-cop public stance, a lot of police didn't like Ashton. He had blown too many big cases through incompetence.
O'Hara opened the files containing evidence assembled by the A.G.'s office in the Ledbetter case. He began to turn pages. How was this for irony? Ashton had assembled little more than O'Hara had already provided. Had Ashton prosecuted, he would have had to call O'Hara as a chief witness. Ashton and O'Hara had locked horns many times. The bad feelings between the two men were mutual.
O'Hara's finger began to drum on the reading table. A constant tapping on the same spot.
Lazy bastard, O'Hara mused. Ashton had never built his own body of evidence. Then a thought reached O'Hara. It was a given that Ashton was a lazy bastard. But had he actually never planned to prosecute the case? If not, why not? He couldn't possibly have expected Gary to cop a guilty plea.
O'Hara followed this line of thought, flipping ahead to more evidence in envelopes. Forensic reports. Fingerprints. Photographs from Leonard the photographer, the Mathew Brady of New Hampshire homicide. A windy discourse on blades from Dr. Paloheima.
But where had the A.G.'s own investigators been? Hell, this was a high-profile murder case. What kind of prosecution had the State intended to build? From what O'Hara saw, the in-state investigation stopped the day O'Hara had been pulled off the case.
Had Ashton not planned to try the case because Florida planned to prosecute it? But how would Ashton have known that so early? O'Hara thought back and he recalled the shrill editorials in the New Hampshire American, and the strange jurisprudence which suddenly had the case whisked out of state so that Gary could face the hot squat instead of twenty-five to life.
Or had Ashton just been his usual incompetent self, started to assemble a flawed case and then been saved when Ledbetter was extradited?
O'Hara reexamined his own thoughts. A flawed case? The one against Gary Ledbetter?
Not guilty, man.
What was going on here? O'Hara had never seen any of this before. Seven years earlier, O'Hara had been tuned into the basic “I.A.P.I.” of the Stoner case: identification, apprehension, prosecution, and incarceration. Not the backstage bullshit. And he and Carl Reissman had done the I.A.P.I. step by step. Resolutely and by the book.
None of this stuff that he had assembled before him today, O'Hara recalled, had ever been intended for general viewing, much less a private reading by a state cop. What was in this file seemed to be an abridged version of what had been left over in Ben Ashton's briefcase when he dumped the case to Florida.
A flawed c
ase? Flawed where? Flawed how? O'Hara's impression of the state prosecutor plummeted to a new low. And the sloppiness of what was assembled was breathtaking. Envelopes Eleven and Twelve were missing.
O'Hara flipped ahead in the file to see if Eleven and Twelve were out of order. But they weren't. They were gone.
Why? What had been in them?
It would be nice if you knew, man. O'Hara wasn't sure if that was Gary talking or himself. Real nice. Silky tone. “Big Easy” accent. Gary all the way.
O'Hara found Envelope Thirteen and saw that it marked a continuation of correspondence surrounding the case.
O'Hara kept opening files. Now what the hell was this? Right after O'Hara had been pulled off the case, some of the big shots in the state started to take a more active interest.
Gary speaking: See? See? See? I got some friends in important places in New Hampshire, man.
O'Hara whispered. “What were you talking about, Gary?”
You never believed me, did you, you lousy fuckhead?
“So what were you trying to tell me?” O'Hara paused. “Come on. Tell me now,” he said.
Fuck you, pal! Burn in hell!
The correspondence in Envelope Thirteen continued from the two missing envelopes. It didn't take a genius to guess that it should have been “lost” with Eleven and Twelve.
“Oh, dear Lord,” O'Hara whispered when he saw what was in front of him. Included was a memo about the case from the governor of New Hampshire.
O'Hara read the governor's words to his own A.G.: “. . . hoping that this sordid matter will reach a speedy conviction and conclusion . . .” and “. . . am certain that you understand my ongoing interest in the case. . . .”