The Company She Kept

by Archer Mayor

“Still…”

  “I saw Sam in here yesterday, chatting with Chris Hartley. They may’ve been just catching up, but the conversation looked pretty intense, and I know Sammie can get like a dog with a bone. I was just yanking your chain, though, so don’t jam her up, okay?”

  “Got it, David. Thanks again.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Joe hesitated, sensing that his friend had something more on his mind. “What?”

  “It’s probably nothing. Well, it’s certainly nothing I can do anything with,” Hawke admitted. “But the footprints that were photographed at the scene of the hanging?”

  “What about them?”

  “I can’t really put this in scientific terms, but they’re a little odd. In and of themselves, they’re just rubber-soled, size-eleven boots, from all appearances—standard Vibram soles, available at any Walmart. But I think the person wearing them had something physically abnormal going on. Call it an irregularly irregular gait.”

  “A limp?”

  Hawke laughed self-consciously. “I knew I shouldn’t’ve brought it up. It’s too vague. A limp would be regularly irregular. What I’m talking about isn’t that. It’s more subtle—call it a randomness in structure. It’s as if the footprint owner had a bilateral leg tremor that made each foot land ever so slightly differently every time he stepped on the snow.”

  “But you can’t say for sure that he has a disability.”

  “No. In fact, what I’m seeing might have been induced by stress or weight. Could’ve been that he was carrying something that made him stagger erratically—but just a bit.”

  “All right,” Joe said after a pause. “Thanks. If inspiration strikes in the middle of the night, don’t hesitate to call.”

  He pocketed the phone thoughtfully and noticed Lester standing in the open door of what they were calling the Case Research Room.

  “Everything okay?” Lester asked.

  “Hypothetically,” Joe posited, as if resuming a different conversation, “if Nathan Fellows was framed, it had to have been by someone who knew him.”

  Lester went along. “Maybe not. They could’ve just heard about how mouthy he was.”

  “They had his return address—or at least his hometown.”

  Spinney nodded. “Okay. Yeah.” He indicated the room behind him. “So far, except for the one letter supposedly written by him, we’ve found nothing. Not from him, not about him, nothing.”

  “But there wouldn’t be, would there?” Joe countered. “That’s the point—to send us in the wrong direction.”

  Lester blinked slowly. “Where’re you going with this, boss?”

  Joe pursed his lips before replying. “Guess I’m just trying to find a loophole somewhere. You kill someone because you’re really pissed off at them.”

  “Or you’re drunk or on drugs,” Lester added, “and you have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “Okay, but let’s assume it wasn’t that spontaneous, mostly because everything else about this seems well thought-out.”

  Lester wasn’t giving up so easily. “But it could’ve been spur-of-the-moment. That letter from Fellows could’ve been planted after the fact. Remember: It didn’t have a stamp, and therefore no postmark showing when or if it was actually mailed. We might be dealing with a quick thinker—he kills Susan, says, ‘Oh, shit,’ and starts building his beaver dam with the few hours he’s got before the alarm is sounded. Then he sits back and watches us run all over the place.”

  “Meaning he’s watching us now?”

  Spinney shrugged. “Could be. You wouldn’t do this unless you were stuck in plain sight. On the other hand, given how many people knew or worked or fought with Susan Raffner, we’re talking half the state’s population.”

  “That call I just got was David Hawke, saying they found Susan’s fingernail in the back of her own car.”

  “So she was stuffed away, still alive, and driven somewhere?”

  “Yeah, but only partway. The tire tracks at the hanging didn’t belong to her car, so her killer had to have switched. Not only that, but Hillstrom said the second head injury killed her instantly, which suggests she received it after being confined.”

  “Fitting the scenario that she was grabbed, pushed around, and hit on the head earlier, maybe rendering her unconscious. Could be she woke up in the car and tried to get out.”

  “Which,” Joe explained, “she couldn’t because of the dog cage she’d had fitted in the back—a detail I hadn’t thought of. She was probably yelling at her attacker as they drove.”

  “That may’ve been what bought her the second blow on the head,” Lester mused.

  They paused, considering the variables. “That bruise across her back,” Joe suggested softly. “You could get that from the edge of a car trunk.”

  Spinney didn’t respond, since each of them knew that was but one possibility.

  Instead, he asked, “Hawke have anything else?”

  “Not that he shared. He did say they were still processing the car, which—given the fingernail—I’m glad to hear. Somebody drove the damn thing at the end. We know that for a fact. Susan did not park it in a junkyard herself.”

  Lester glanced over his shoulder, prompting Joe to say, “Go back to it, Lester. Thanks for hearing me out.”

  “You got it, boss. I’ll let you know when we find the signed confession.”

  He closed the door behind him, leaving Joe in the semi-gloom of the hallway. The basement of the municipal building also made him think of the bowels of some pre–World War I ocean liner—not that he had any vast experience with those. But it was high-ceilinged and tenebrous and long and narrow—not to mention imbued with just the right aura of decay. It seemed a perfect match for his increasingly pessimistic mood.

  He reviewed his seemingly random and largely pointless exchange with Spinney, returning to his question at the beginning of it.

  Why and how, specifically, had Nathan Fellows been made the patsy in all this—assuming he had been?

  Joe checked his watch and decided to drive back north, to revisit Nate’s old neighborhood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For Joe, one of the enduring attractions of being a major crimes investigator was the freedom to follow his hunches. After decades of trying on most jobs that his profession had to offer—at least within Vermont’s limited sphere—he was where he’d always aspired to be, which was neither the top honcho, assailed daily by media types and hand-wringing politicians, nor among the rank and file, having to spend days in a windowless room raking through a dead woman’s files.

  As he eased out of his car in the Newport police department’s parking lot on Field Avenue, he was once again struck by his good fortune—especially having just left Spinney in that Brattleboro basement.

  A redbrick building among a cluster of similar brethren—the library and the courthouse among them—the PD was the clear winner for ugliest duckling. Not that it didn’t have some historical gravitas, assuming one’s taste ran to the flat-roofed, heavy-browed, nineteenth-century armory look.

  A man in a black overcoat and leather gloves exited the building and waved to Joe as he was halfway across the lot. “Hey, there. Long time, no see. What’s it been? A few days? I don’t see you for five years. Now I can’t get rid of you.”

  Following Cila’s shooting, Joe had seen police chief Bill Mares, but only on the fly, as Cila was being prepped for transport via helicopter to the hospital.

  They shook hands, and Joe’s companion took his elbow and steered him toward Main Street at the corner, explaining, “It’s colder than a witch’s tit today and I’m hungrier than hell. Grab an early lunch? That work for you? On the phone you said you just wanted to pick my brains—always better when they’re being fed.”

  “No problem,” Joe agreed, not seeing much option anyhow. “You guys busy this time of year?”

  “Aside from police-involved shootings?” Mares laughed. “Not too bad. The weather’s a trade-off—we get more
domestics when everyone’s cooped up, but I can’t complain. How’re you coming with the case? Oh”—he suddenly changed tone—“and how’s Cila doin’?”

  “She’s fine,” Joe told him. “From what I hear, there won’t be any permanent damage. The case … I can’t say that’s as healthy. One of the reasons I’m here.”

  “Yeah,” Mares sympathized. “I figured as much.” He guided them across the street and down the block to a small restaurant with partially steamed-up windows.

  “You’ll like this,” he said. “Quiet, fast, cheap, friendly, and you can pronounce what it serves.”

  He navigated the length of the place with the ease of a man at home, and settled into the last booth of a long row, facing the door. The booth having high bench backs, Joe didn’t mind settling in opposite him, conceding that since it was Mares’s patch, he was entitled to choose the catbird seat.

  The chief called out to the woman behind the counter, “Shirley, we might need a menu for my friend.”

  Joe turned to add, “Just a bowl of soup and a Coke will do me. Your choice on the soup.”

  Mares said no more to her, and Joe surmised that he’d long ago settled on a meal that he enjoyed every time he dropped in.

  He wasn’t wrong. With Joe’s fresh-from-the-can New England clam chowder came a thick Reuben and fries for Mares, along with a thermos of black coffee.

  “Why’re you still looking into Nate Fellows?” Mares asked as he wrapped his thick fingers around the Reuben. “I thought you’d written him off as a fall guy—at least, that’s the rumor.”

  “It’s why, and if, he was chosen that’s got me curious,” Joe explained. “It’s like an itch I can’t reach.”

  Mares took a large bite and chewed meditatively. “I hate those. Who iced the senator if not him?”

  Joe brushed the question away. “We’ve got a small army working on that.”

  “And a checkbook from heaven to pay ’em,” Mares commented with envy.

  Joe couldn’t argue. “I haven’t heard any grumbling about expenditures. Were you able to poke into Fellows’s background?”

  Mares took a swig of coffee as Joe sampled his soup. “Yeah. ’Course I have no clue what you got already, which is probably everything.”

  “No,” Joe reassured him. “Once we started thinking he’d been set up, we pretty much dropped him, which may’ve been a mistake.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mares tried setting him at ease. “Nate was a dime a dozen. Maybe more over the top with all the Nazi crap, but otherwise your average brain-dead, wife-beating, beer-guzzling, jail-happy piece of shit who couldn’t keep his act together if you gave him a million bucks. No mastermind—that’s for sure—so you were probably right not to give him much thought.”

  Joe was used to the dismissive litany dear to the hearts of so many cops—also sometimes a cynical mantle worn out of self-protection and pride. But he was actually struck by one detail he hadn’t heard before.

  “He had a wife?”

  “Yeah, not that he acted like he knew it. Kids, too. Of course, they got farmed out to foster care years ago. I called DCF just before you got here, to brush up. Our interactions with Nate hadn’t involved family stuff in a long time—just the usual drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, DUIs, license suspended, and the rest.” He paused to take another bite. “Anyhow, records say he was married to a Stacy Barton.”

  “But this is ancient history.”

  “It is if your average life span is thirty-two, like for most of these geniuses. I’d guess Nate and Stacy went their separate ways ten years ago or more. I wouldn’t swear they haven’t been in touch since, though. A lot of these girls are like moths to a flame. You tell ’em they’re flirting with disaster, the evidence piles up—with trips to the emergency room or detox or jail—and it still does no good. It’s like a kinky attraction. I know nothing about this couple, but we’ve all seen it before, haven’t we?”

  “Sad to say,” Joe agreed. “Okay, then, what about someone else? A new girlfriend, a regular drinking buddy—someone here in town he hung out with?”

  Mares’s face brightened, while he paused to eat some more before responding. “Wylie Dupont. You’ll love him. Complete opposite of Fellows. Nate was all ’tude, all the time. In your face, ‘Whatcha gonna do about it?’ Fight first and ask questions later. Wylie? A real doofus. Kinda sweet, pretty stupid, and totally harmless. For a paranoid like Nate, Wylie must’ve been perfect—no threat whatsoever.”

  Joe pushed away the soup that he’d been working on throughout and pulled out his notepad. “You got a location on him?”

  Mares rattled off a Bay Street address. “He rents a room. It’s a flophouse. He’s been there for years. That’s where I’d start. He works odd jobs—burning burgers, pumping gas, bagging groceries—but only when he has to. He also steals. We’ve caught him a few times, but he’s good enough to get away with it most of the time—doesn’t take too much, doesn’t brag when he does, doesn’t flash the cash or go crazy to attract our attention.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “How ’bout anyone who hated Nate’s guts?”

  “Ah. Less easy to define. We did—I can tell you that. You know how it goes—you get a population of a few thousand people, you tangle pretty much all the time with the same fifty or a hundred badasses. And inside that group of frequent flyers, you get the select few who just bust your balls like clockwork. That was Nate. And we weren’t the only ones. He just had that effect on people.”

  “And yet he was employed when we found him,” Joe commented.

  “Yeah,” Mares agreed. “Recently. He was smart enough, and capable. Good with his hands. But it would never last. On that level, he was like his buddy Wylie, but where Wylie can never qualify for much more than taking out your garbage, Nate could sell himself—until he actually got the job, of course. Then he’d turn into a jackass and get himself canned. Regular as rain.”

  “Okay—that’s his institutional reputation. What about one-on-one? Did he ever send anyone to the hospital or get into a feud or target somebody for special attention?”

  “Like gays?”

  “No. Someone specifically, who might’ve decided to pay him back.”

  Mares poured himself a third cup of coffee, having demolished the sandwich. “Oh, I get you. Huh. God, the guy was so busy pissing everybody off, I’m having a hard time picking out just one.” He paused to think and take another sip, before admitting, “Nothing stands out, Joe. I’m sorry. Maybe that’s where Wylie’ll come in handy, specially now that Nate’s dead. I would guess he’s dyin’ for company.”

  * * *

  Sammie Martens pulled into the Rutland Plaza shopping center’s vast parking lot, its stark modernity at odds with the row of ornately decorated, turn-of-the-century buildings directly across the street—standing shoulder-to-shoulder as if in defense of an older, less efficient, but more artistically sensitive time.

  She was feeling forlorn, unsure of her motives or even her loyalties, amid the ghosts of her decade-old fiasco. Back then, the generalized relief over her survival had allowed everyone to more or less move on. But now, once more in Rutland—to which she hadn’t returned since—her adrenaline of a couple of days ago, stimulated by hopes of redemption, had yielded to a fear that she might be not only repeating history, but involving the father of her child in the process.

  She checked her watch. She was here to meet Willy, who was coming from another direction. She’d actually cooked up an excuse not to ride with him, in order to arrive sooner and allow some time to drive around the city, reacquainting herself with the geography.

  Rutland was not a complex socioeconomic puzzle. A working-class, ex-railroad and marble quarrying center, it had the standard big-town skeleton of rich and poor neighborhoods, historic downtown, and a couple of tacky commercial strips. It also had the railroad, was the state’s third largest city, and a major urban hub.

  And it was home of the Gut, a mysteriously named neighborhood,
literally located beyond the railroad tracks, that had long been the recipient—often unfairly—of people’s disparaging comments. Nevertheless, the Gut had historically attracted most of the city’s more active drug business, which had only grown as of late.

  That last development had only further darkened her mood, seeing her old stomping grounds slip by. The so-called war on drugs had been invoked enough times to drain the phrase of meaning. Which didn’t mean that Vermont’s recent headlines for heroin abuse weren’t well deserved. The forces that Sam had tried to staunch had only expanded, and their lethality had spread with heroin’s increasing purity and affordability.

  Was it therefore wrong of her to have seized on a vague connection between the high-profile murder of Susan Raffner and the overall drug trade, possibly to the benefit of addressing both?

  It was a stretch. She knew it. But with Willy’s help and encouragement, she’d been loath to resist the temptation to coincidentally correct an old embarrassment, while making some headway on a stalled case.

  Some old impulsive habits were harder to break than others.

  “If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

  She snapped out of her reverie at Willy’s voice in her ear, and twisted around to find him inches away from her side window.

  She rolled the glass down. “Jesus. How long you been there?”

  He jerked his thumb to the back of the car. “I parked right behind you. Where were you?”

  She rubbed her forehead. “Wondering if this is such a great idea.”

  He walked around and got into her passenger seat. “Ah, scruples,” he sighed. “I always wondered what it was like to drag those around.”

  “Fuck you,” she said. “You got more scruples in that stupid arm of yours than anyone I know. You just pretend you’re a tough guy.”

  He didn’t argue the point. “You wanna call this off?”

  She cut him a look. In the old days, he would have been all derision and taunting. Such a question now reinforced her high opinion of him.

  Which didn’t mean she was buying it. “So you can turn cowboy and maybe get yourself killed? I don’t think so. If we’re about to end our careers, I’d just as soon do it together.”