by Archer Mayor
“If that’s how things pan out, yeah.”
“Helen was arrested for robbing a gas station on Canal Street.”
Sam’s lips parted in astonishment. “What?”
Joe knew not to answer that.
“When?”
“Late last night.” She thought back, realizing it was shortly after she’d checked into the motel.
“Are you sure?” she asked, hands on her knees, as if ready to leap to her feet.
His response was steady and calm. “We have her on surveillance tape, and the clerk confirmed it through a photo lineup. We also have witnesses who saw her come and go at that time, leaving with the same bank bag the clerk’s seen handing her in the video.”
“What does Mom say?” Sam asked, unaware of how she’d referred to Helen.
Joe noticed, however, and took note. “She’s not talking. She invoked legal counsel.”
“That’s bullshit,” Sammie burst out. “She doesn’t know any lawyers.”
“She was assigned a public defender.”
Sam released the grip on her knees and slumped back. “Why?” she asked, her eyes on the floor between them.
“We’d like to know the same thing,” Joe conceded. “Had she been complaining about finances?”
She looked back up at him. “No more than usual. But it’s not like we’re in touch a lot.” Her eyes widened slightly with an idea. “She must’ve said something when you arrested her, didn’t she?”
Joe shook his head. “Not coherently, and we caught up to her at her home. Doug was running interference, telling her not to talk to us.”
Sam looked disgusted. “He would know, I bet. Probably has a record a foot long.”
Joe made no comment.
“What happens now?” Sam asked.
“We had to lock her up pending arraignment. Then it’s up to the judge whether she gets bail.”
“What’s that usually run?” Sam asked.
“I couldn’t tell you. She told the clerk she had a gun, so technically, she’s facing armed robbery.”
“A gun,” Sam exclaimed. “She never held a gun in her life.”
Joe wasn’t dismissive, but his tone made the realities of the situation clear. “That may be true, Sam, but just mentioning one in a deal like this is enough to ramp up the charge.”
“Jesus. So she could be in jail for a while.”
“Possibly.”
Sammie mulled over what he’d told her and finally said, “What I’m hearing is that your part is done. Is that right?”
“Essentially,” he said. “The state’s attorney might ask us to chase a few things down, but on the face of it, we have no reason to think this didn’t happen the way it looks.”
He paused to gaze at her carefully before adding, “Unless there’s anything you can tell me that might steer us in a different direction.”
She heard what he was asking and resisted answering with any platitudes about her mother’s obvious innocence. He had explained what they had—probably against his department’s procedures, in fact. Her personality demanded now that she respond in kind, by not getting irrational and emotional, but by challenging his case with one of her own.
Helen had come onto Joe Gunther’s radar by chance. Sam had known her all her life. That should be an advantage. The police had reached their conclusion based on empirical evidence; it was up to Sam to do the same based on character.
She rose to her feet and returned the handshake he’d offered earlier, replying, “Thank you, Mr. Gunther. I don’t have anything to say right now. If I think of something, I’ll let you know.”
He stood with her, taking a business card from off his desk and handing it to her. “Fair enough, Sam. Thanks. There is one favor I would ask.”
“Okay.”
He opened the door and escorted her into the squad room. “Please, aside from thinking about this or maybe talking to a few people, do not investigate anything on your own, all right? If you get an idea you think has merit, call me, day or night. I don’t ever pretend to have all the answers, and I always benefit from the wisdom of others, but this is my job. If you try to do it instead, it could get both you and your mom into a lot of trouble.”
Sammie thanked him and made some reassuring parting comments, but as she returned to the parking lot, she had absolutely no doubt whatsoever about her course of action.
For his part, Joe Gunther, who was also the squad’s lieutenant, paused a moment, thoughtfully watching the door Sam had just exited. His boss, Frank Murphy, who’d been typing earlier, looked over at him. “Good-looking girl, Joe. What ya got going?”
Joe turned to smile at him. “Helen Martens’s daughter, fresh back from the military. As she sees it, she comes home, gets thrown out of the house by mom’s boyfriend, then hears mom’s been arrested for armed robbery. Hell of a weekend. Speaking of which, what’re you doing here? I thought you’d clocked out.”
Murphy gestured to the typewriter. “Paperwork. I like to do it when things are quiet. I was told the whole Martens thing was squared away.”
“It is,” Joe reassured him. He glanced once more at the door, wondering what he might have quite consciously set in motion, and added, “Unless it’s not. Just an unexpected wrinkle.”
* * *
Sammie stopped by the gas pumps and studied the station like an appraiser. It was dark by now, and getting colder. A mild storm was expected soon, promising three to six inches, not that Sam or anyone else around here paid much attention. Snow was a fact of life here. You either took it in stride or you left. The joke she’d heard was that Vermonters vacation in Maine and die in Florida. So far, she hadn’t even made it to Maine.
Plus, she liked winter’s adversity. It had helped make her what she was.
And she would need that kind of mettle now. She unconsciously smoothed the uniform she’d changed back into at the motel, adjusted her cap, and strode into the gas station as if she intended to take it over by force.
Walking up to the counter and the soft, round, young man behind it, her back ramrod stiff and her manner direct, she inquired, “You were on duty when the robbery occurred?”
His eyes widened at her martial appearance, taking in the ribbons and polished brass. “Yeah,” he said doubtfully.
“Then you assisted the police in their duties,” she stated as a fact.
“Me and the manager. But he’s not here. I can call him.”
“No need,” Sam declared, explaining, “As you can see, there are some higher-level ramifications to that investigation that have come to light, but your assistance alone should suffice.”
The clerk was looking increasingly nonplussed. “The military?” he asked.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Sam replied severely. “I do need access to the tapes from your video cameras, though.”
“They took ’em,” the young man explained.
Sammie allowed her expression to harden visibly, as if she was running out of patience. “I’ve processed those,” she said. “I’m talking about the others.” She pointed not at the camera mounted high and behind the clerk, but to another across the room, near the lavatories, adding, “And the exterior units.”
He blinked at her, thinking hard. Sam’s moment of truth. He then nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am … sir,” and led the way to an unmarked door behind the counter.
Beyond the door was a small, cluttered, windowless room, used as an overflow area for almost anything without an obvious resting place, from boxes to mops to extra aprons and uniforms—plus a small stack of recorders and a dusty TV set.
The clerk gestured vaguely in that direction. “That’s it. The tapes are on the shelf above, but what you want is still in those two machines. It’s pretty much like your home system. I can show you, if you want, but I gotta keep an eye on the door.”
“Not to worry,” Sam reassured him. “I’ll sort this out. You return to work.”
She waited for the door to close behind him be
fore taking a deep breath and doffing her cap to wipe her brow.
“So far, so good,” she said to herself, and she sat down before the small pile of electronics.
The young man had been right; the surveillance system was straightforward. She was glad of this for several reasons: The clerk might wake up to the absurdity of her premise; the manager could return and be told about her; and, finally, she really had no idea about what she was hoping to find.
She was convinced, however, that time was in short supply.
The footage shot from above and behind the clerk was missing. An official receipt for the removal of evidence had even been taped to the shelf’s edge before her. What had inspired her visit here, however, was the certainty of the police’s belief that they had all they needed, which suggested to her that they must have therefore left something behind. It was Sammie’s belief that when people sounded the most convinced, they were most likely to have let down their guard. She’d seen this principle borne out during military exercises, and—sometimes to her own advantage and self-protection—on display among her mother’s various lovers.
Using trial and error, Sam eventually located the time slot when her mother could be seen approaching the clerk’s counter, standing there while he opened the till, and then retreating. The image, taken from over the lavatory door, was grainy, distant, captured from the back, which is presumably why the cops hadn’t bothered with it. Sam had to admit that if you didn’t know Helen, you wouldn’t have even recognized her from the footage.
It served its purpose, however, supplying not only the proof of the act itself—which Sam conceded she needed emotionally—but a precise time she could use as reference in checking the tapes from the two exterior cameras she’d noticed on the way in.
She needed these to confirm a hypothesis born in Joe Gunther’s office—a personal theory that one of the tapes confirmed five minutes later. On the very next video she watched, she saw Helen drive into the gas station, pull into a parking place not far from the air pump, and walk toward the store, soon to be picked up by the two cameras inside.
But none of that featured what Sam was after. She kept her eyes on the seemingly empty car, its driver’s-side window a bland and featureless rectangle. Soon enough, just as she’d hoped, yielding to the curiosity she was banking on, someone leaned in from the cut-off passenger’s side of the car and peered through the window for a better view.
The face—bearded, pale, and visibly etched by tension—belonged to Helen’s current live-in, Doug Hammond.
“Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” Sam said, hitting the eject button on the recorder and slipping the tape into her pocket.
Chapter 3
Sam was back at the police station half an hour later, dressed in civilian clothes. The same humorless, skinny dispatcher was still behind her thick sheet of glass, and still speaking in a monotone.
“Help you?”
“I’d like to talk to a detective,” Sam said. “Is Mr. Gunther still in? He’s the one I met earlier.”
“Went home,” was the response.
Sam waited, got nothing more, and so followed with, “Is there somebody else?”
The dispatcher stared at her motionlessly for a slow count of three, as if waiting for some celestial force to make Sam disappear, before reaching for the phone and saying something inaudible.
“He’ll be right out,” she then announced.
The man who opened the door Sam had used earlier was not Joe Gunther. He was shorter, rounder, had less hair, and impressed Sam a lot less.
He didn’t offer to shake hands.
“What’s up?” he asked, pleasantly enough.
“I’m Samantha Martens,” she began. “I met with Joe Gunther earlier? I’m Helen Martens’s daughter.”
She waited for him to pick that up and run with it, but instead, he merely prompted her, “Okay.”
“Mr. Gunther said that if I thought of anything that might be relevant to the case, I should let him know.”
This, she thought, would do the trick, encouraging the man to usher her back for a debriefing.
Once more, however, he repeated, “Okay.”
She extracted the cassette she’d brought with her and proffered it. “I got this from the gas station. I don’t guess you thought it mattered—for which I don’t blame you. But it shows my mom actually arriving at the station, from outside, and you can see she wasn’t alone. She’s got company in the car.”
“Does her company get out?” the short detective asked.
Sam blinked. “No. But I know he was behind why she went there to begin with.”
He glanced down at the tape still in her hand. “You can see that?”
“You can clearly see him leaning over and staring out the driver’s window, waiting for her to come back out with the money.”
“Then what?”
Sam hesitated. “She comes out and they drive away. It’s Douglas Hammond, the guy she lives with.”
The man nodded and finally took the tape. “Great. Thanks. I’ll add it to the case file.”
He stepped away and made to vanish through the door adding, “’Preciate your coming in.”
“That’s it?” she asked, her shoulders slumped and her hands open by her sides. “Are you going to tell Gunther?”
“Sure.” His hand was now on the frame of the open door.
“I don’t even know your name,” she said, feeling at once let down and a little foolish.
“Dennis DeFlorio,” he told her, and closed the door.
She stood alone in the empty, high-ceilinged hallway, surrounded by the ghosts of everyone who’d walked this floor for over a hundred years, back to when most of them had been students. Now a majority of those people were dead and gone, like the school, replaced by cops and town bureaucrats and judges and lawyers upstairs, where they held court. One long, faceless parade.
What had she expected? For that matter, what did she even know that they hadn’t already considered? Doug lived with Helen. Why shouldn’t he be in her car? The fact that Sam didn’t like him didn’t alter that the interior camera of that gas station had captured only Helen in the act, as had the clerk’s sworn testimony.
Sam had perhaps been misled by Joe Gunther’s manner—almost fatherly in its thoughtfulness. DeFlorio was what she was used to and had expected from the start: standoffish, and less supportive and sensitive. But in his shoes, she realized with a bit of a start, she would have behaved the same way. The police had made their case, and she’d done nothing to alter it. She was alone in understanding the inner essence of her mother, and in recognizing how fictionalized was the image of Hell-on-Wheels Helen.
Her mom was a victim and always had been—needy, subservient, and self-denigrating. There was no way on earth she would have robbed that store unless directed to.
It was therefore up to Sam, who alone grasped that fact, to bring the true story to light.
And, she suspected—reflecting that her own ejection from Helen’s apartment may have been connected to this—time would be a crucial factor.
What was Doug up to?
* * *
Sam was back in her car. It was late, and the storm had come and gone, leaving three inches of “white stuff,” as some referred to it, in its wake. She was grateful for this. It had covered her car, helping to blend it into the background, the thin screen of snow allowing her to sit unobserved across from Helen’s apartment—aside from a small patch that she’d opened on the windshield, just big enough to peer through with a telephoto lens.
The lights were on upstairs, and she could see Doug’s bearded, bald shadow pacing restlessly back and forth. Minutes earlier, to her satisfaction, he’d even lifted one of the flimsy window shades and looked out at the street, leaving the shade up afterward.
It didn’t take long for her patience to be rewarded. A car pulled up a few feet from the building’s entrance, ten yards from a street lamp, and two roughly dressed people got out. One was another bear
ded man, very skinny, and the other was clean shaven, slight of build, and androgynous, with a knitted watch cap pulled low. Possibly a woman. They proceeded watchfully, careful of their surroundings. Sam took that as an indicator and snapped a couple of shots of each of them. She’d put a fresh roll of Tri-X into the camera and knew she had twenty frames left before she would need to reload.
Her suspicions were confirmed when Doug’s face reappeared at the window above. He knocked on the glass and gestured to the newcomers to come up. Sam widened the angle of her lens to catch the two entering the building, with Doug still framed in the window.
He then lowered the shade again, implying that he was either completing an action he’d overlooked upon first checking the street, or indicating that everyone he’d been expecting had arrived.
After a couple of minutes’ reflection, she decided it was the latter.
She wracked her brains about what to do next, however. It was reasonable to her that Doug had conjured up emptying the apartment of both Helen and herself in order to open the field for this meeting. That also reasonably suggested that the three were up to something at once covert and illegal. Sam’s dilemma was in figuring out how to uncover what they were planning.
A host of thoughts crossed her mind. She could use her key and enter the apartment without being spotted, to hide in her old bedroom and eavesdrop. She could beg entrance to one of the neighbors’ places and try listening through the notoriously thin walls, with which she was familiar from long experience.
Or she could simply wait and watch.
As unsatisfying as it was, the latter option was the only realistic one.
Her eye still on the windows and the occasional movements she could still see crossing them, she settled in and made herself comfortable. In this, she had some training. Her military experience had partly involved cold-weather exposure and readiness. She was young, fit, and properly dressed; she even had a wide-mouth bottle for pee breaks. She had snacks, fluids, the outside temperature wasn’t too bad, and she was a past master of the power nap. She also suspected—knowing Doug slightly, and having instinctively recognized the general category of his visitors—that they would be lubricating their planning with serious quantities of beer and most likely pass out around dawn, to spend a good part of the next day sleeping.