Occam's Razor Page 18

  “You know how long it’s been missing?”

  “Two months,” he said without hesitation.

  I let those two words hang in the air a moment. Two faint plumes of near-freezing air escaped from his nostrils as he waited me out.

  “You thought enough of this hammer,” I finally said, “that you marked it and registered it with our department. Now you say you didn’t report it missing because it could’ve been lost in this mess, even though you know it disappeared exactly two months ago.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “We think it was used to kill a man.”

  His lips compressed, his hands grew still, and he seemed suddenly transfixed by something hovering in the middle distance just over my left shoulder.

  “Tell me who took it, Ben.”

  “You sure you’re not yankin’ my chain?”

  This time, I kept silent.

  He sighed, returned the cylinder to the bench top, and stood before me with his big hands by his sides, empty and useless. “My nephew—along with a bunch of other stuff. Billy Conyer. You guys know him.”

  We did that, but not only because he was a regular customer. He’d also been mentioned by Janice Litchfield as a friend of Brenda Croteau’s.

  · · ·

  The rooming house where Billy Conyer lived on Elliot Street was one of the worst examples Brattleboro had to offer. A warren of tiny, dark, evil-smelling cubbyholes, it was as famous for its transient inhabitants as for the illegal activities they practiced there. The lighting was haphazard, the plumbing erratic, the heating quirky, the walls looked like Swiss cheese, and the stench was a combination of rotting food, unwashed bodies, and backed-up toilets. It was a place EMTs, firefighters, cops, and building inspectors all got to visit regularly. One hot summer night a few years back, when the local ambulance had gone racing by the nearby firehouse to respond to yet another call at that address, the on-duty firefighters had lined up in front of their open bay doors and saluted the rescue crew by waving fistfuls of rubber gloves at them.

  It was that kind of place.

  And now it was our turn.

  We’d taken our time, made sure the crime lab could match the blood on the hammer to Phil Resnick’s DNA, and had discreetly studied Conyer’s habits for several days running, using one of the windows at the firehouse as an observation point.

  The night we chose to move was possibly the coldest of the year so far, and dark as the inside of a closet. It was tailor-made for keeping people indoors, their eyes accustomed to the lights within.

  There were six of us, including Sammie and me, all dressed in black, sporting thick armored vests and short twelve-gauge shotguns. Willy, dressed as a bum and equipped with a radio, had been stationed on the inside, slumped in a smelly, inert pile in a corner of the hallway leading to Conyer’s apartment. We’d watched Conyer enter the building just before midnight, heard Willy report him opening his apartment door, and seen his light come on behind his tattered shade—and go off an hour later.

  We’d then waited another thirty minutes, to let him fall asleep.

  “Any sign of him?” I radioed Willy, who was equipped with an earphone.

  “No,” came the quiet reply. “I listened at the door five minutes ago. Not a peep.”

  “Okay. We’re in motion.”

  I gave the prearranged signal, and we all moved from various positions inside and around the building, quietly convening at opposite ends of the hallway Willy was monitoring. At our arrival, he faded back to stand guard outside, along with a couple of other unobtrusively placed uniformed officers.

  The heat inside the building was terrific, making us all sweat under our heavy protective gear. As we took our places to either side of Conyer’s door, I became aware of how our faces were dripping wet in the harsh overhead light.

  I nodded to the man near the switch at the staircase. He killed the overhead lights. For a long couple of minutes, there was no sound, no movement while we waited for our eyesight to adjust to the semidarkness, alleviated only by two bright red exit signs, miraculously still functioning. Then I murmured into my throat mike, “Let’s go.”

  The two men holding the short battering ram between them swung it back once and smashed through Conyer’s lock with a single splintering crash. Then they dropped the ram and fell off to either side, pulling out their sidearms, while Sammie and Ward Washburn burst through the door screaming at the top of their lungs.

  It was textbook perfect, except that as Sammie shouted, “It’s empty,” a door halfway down the hall banged open, and Billy Conyer appeared, half naked and with a gun, his face gaunt and his eyes wide, his body glowing red in the light from the exit signs.

  Pierre Lavoie had been standing by the light switch at the end of the hall, where he could also guard the top of the stairs. Now he was not only blocking Conyer’s escape route, but he was standing where any bullets that missed Conyer might hit him.

  I don’t know who yelled, “Don’t move.” All of us, from the sound of it. But it still didn’t work. Billy Conyer fired twice at me, then swiveled on his bare heel and crouched low to shoot at Pierre.

  But Pierre had instantly assessed his own predicament. Instead of trying to return fire—and possibly hitting us—he simply launched himself down the staircase, vanishing as if the earth had swallowed him whole.

  Conyer quickly straightened, apparently astonished by what had happened, and presented us with his glistening back. “Don’t move,” I yelled again. “Police.” He either wasn’t thinking or had seen too many movies. In one of those moments every police officer dreads, will never forget, and will always hold in doubt, Conyer disobeyed and turned. But whether he planned to shoot again or was actually going to surrender and had simply not dropped his gun, none of us would ever know. Faced with a pointed weapon, we all fired in unison, feeling more than hearing the explosions, and watched as his body was thrown to the floor like a rag doll, spattering the walls nearby with blood.

  · · ·

  I had no idea of the time when I crept into our bedroom. My head hurt, my brain was in a fog, and my body felt numb. Conyer had been shipped up to Burlington for autopsy, a preliminary post-shoot investigation had been conducted by the state police, the state’s attorney’s office had been notified, and Jack Derby himself had showed up to be briefed. So far, everyone was calling it righteous, which did little for the soul.

  Gail stirred as I tried to remove my clothes quietly in the dark.

  “Joe?”

  “Yeah. It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

  “What’ve you been doing?”

  “A little late-night workout with the boys.”

  She reached out, turned on the light by her side of the bed, and squinted across the room at me. “What’s that mean?”

  I was sitting on the edge of a chair with one shoe in my hand. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Enough had been said tonight already. I needed to think quietly, if not sleep, and put the image of Conyer collapsing in on himself into that mental cupboard where I kept all its brethren.

  “There was a shooting and a long post-shoot. Everyone’s fine, though, except the bad guy.”

  The squint faded as her eyes adjusted to the light. “You don’t look so fine. And what’s with the ‘little late-night workout’? You hate that John Wayne crap.”

  I stared at her for a long moment, struggling to sort out my reactions. Her initial show of concern was so at odds with this last comment, I wasn’t sure where to start.

  “Sorry,” I said lamely.

  “Who was killed?” she then asked.

  I sat back, dropped the shoe, and rubbed my eyes, feeling the echoes of question after question lapping against my head like waves on a fragile sand dune. Of all the people I’d spoken to tonight, she was the most important to me, but it took all my reserves to merely say, “Billy Conyer.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “Friend of Brenda Croteau.”

  Sh
e sat up angrily. “What? I don’t understand. You’re not working the Croteau case. What’s going on?”

  I got up slowly and crossed the room to sit on the bed beside her, resolved to go through it one last time. “We got a lead on who killed Resnick. Turned out to be Conyer. We raided his place tonight—thought it was a one-room apartment. He’d chopped a hole into the apartment next door, and the one beyond that, and that’s where he was sleeping. I don’t know if it was for security or just because he thought it’d be fun. But when we broke through his door, all we found was an empty room. He came bursting into the hallway two doors down, gun blazing, and we had to take him down. I have no idea how or whether he’s connected to your case. When his name first came up, I should have let you know. It slipped my mind. He never played more than a bit role in the Croteau research—I think Janice Litchfield mentioned him once in passing. Sorry if I messed you up.”

  She put her hand on mine, suddenly more conscious of my state of mind. “I’m the one who’s sorry. Talk about misplaced priorities. Was it bad?”

  “We used shotguns—pretty ugly.”

  “Did he shoot at you?”

  I nodded. “Marshall caught one in the vest. He was the only one hit. He’s fine.”

  Following a long silence, she murmured, “I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

  God knows Gail had gotten her lumps over the years, either seeing me being patched up in the hospital or suffering herself at the hands of her own assailant. But she’d still always viewed my world as a bit of an abstraction, even now that she was a prosecutor. She didn’t share my knowledge of the streets, or of the people inhabiting them. It was an ignorance I had taken for granted so far, but which had lately begun to chafe on me, especially now that she was deciding which of my collars got deals and which went to jail.

  Without being fully aware of it, I’d come to see her differently in her new job. From rape victim to fighter to law student to the present, she’d built herself over, with motivations and goals far different from those I’d known when we’d met. I’d done what I could to be supportive—moving into this house, in which I’d never felt fully at home, encouraging her when she’d given herself totally to her law studies. But I realized that the distance I was feeling between us wasn’t solely due to her gaining speed and my staying put. It also involved a discomfort on my part with living so close to so much constant energy.

  She squeezed my hand to remind me that I hadn’t said a word for several minutes. “You okay?”

  “I will be,” I said. “I’ve been through shootings before. I just have to give myself a little time to process it.”

  “I’m sorry I mouthed off.”

  It was a comment normally deserving of a dismissive, “It’s all right,” letting the trauma of the shooting act as a cover-up for unspoken feelings. But, paradoxically, I didn’t have the strength right now to take a quick and easy out.

  “Maybe that’s become par for the course lately, on both our parts,” I said tentatively, unsure where I was heading, or even why.

  Her hand slipped off of mine. “What do you mean?” Her voice was careful.

  “That we’ve changed.”

  I knew I should say more, but I couldn’t find the words.

  She surprised me by simply saying, “I know.”

  I turned from staring at the floor to meet her eyes, astonished that she might have been sharing what I’d thought were one-sided misgivings. “You feel the same way? What happened?”

  She looked at me sadly. “Maybe more than we could handle, starting with who we are and where we came from.”

  I understood what she meant. She was a child of privilege, and I the son of a make-do farmer. We’d come like travelers down separate roads and had found peace and joy on a common path. Our pasts, and the influences that had forged us, hadn’t much mattered in a shared but busily distracting life.

  We’d even prided ourselves on surviving tests of fire—the stresses of my job and its dangers, the political wrangles Gail had been sucked into over the years. We’d seen those as the worst of hurdles, easily jumped.

  Until we’d hit the rape.

  I touched her cheek with my fingertips. “I love you, Gail.”

  She smiled, barely. “So what do we do?”

  I kissed her. “Go to sleep. Trust to instinct. This’ll work itself out. I don’t know how—I’m not even sure what the problem is, really—but we’re friends first and foremost, and I think that’ll see us through.”

  We left it at that, but it was a restless night, filled with things left unsaid.

  16

  THE MORNING AFTER, I COULD STILL SMELL the gunpowder in the stagnant air of the hallway. It was very quiet, the street sounds barely audible through the walls. Yellow police tape had been strung up to isolate the entire floor, adding to the museum-like quality of the place. Conyer’s blood had dried to a nondescript brown.

  I paused on the landing and looked down the corridor, beyond the coagulated pool and the scars the buckshot had left along the walls, trying to put aside the memories for the job at hand. It was hard to forget the bright flashes from Conyer’s pistol, not knowing if I would suddenly feel the numbing impact of a bullet.

  Ron Klesczewski stepped into my line of vision from a side door, snapping me out of my reverie. “Hi, Joe. Heard you were headed this way. You get any sleep?”

  From the look in his eyes, it was obvious he knew I hadn’t. “No.”

  He smiled sympathetically. “Well, we may have lost out on a chat with Billy Conyer, but he left enough behind to keep us busy for a while.”

  I drew abreast of the door we’d forced open just eight hours earlier. Given the outcome of that visit, our search of Conyer’s digs had been delayed by the post-shoot team’s priorities.

  I peered over Ron’s shoulder at the room beyond. “I just hope it’s enough. I want to get moving on this.”

  Ron stepped aside and let me in. The room was what we’d come to expect from the neighborhood—dark, stuffy, unclean, stripped of all but the essentials, and filled with the debris of a human being with little care for himself or his environment. Enhancing the flavor, the building’s heating system was still in overdrive, making the whole place feel like a sauna perched over a garbage dump. There was a jagged two-foot by four-foot hole in the side wall, which Conyer had created as a back door.

  Willy stuck his head through the hole and smiled at me. “Hey, there, boss. Decide to join us before noon?”

  “Drop it.”

  He laughed. “Oh-oh. Joe’s grumpy. Must’ve not gotten laid.”

  He didn’t know how close that cut. “What’ve you found so far, Willy?”

  “Mostly just the by-products of a disgusting lifestyle, but we haven’t been at it long.”

  “What’s the story on the three rooms? How was he able to cut through the walls with nobody knowing?”

  “I checked into that,” Ron said from behind me. “It wasn’t coincidence they were empty, like we thought last night. Conyer rented the other two under assumed names.”

  I looked at him closely. “How long ago?”

  He glanced at his notepad. “January eighth.”

  “Two days after Resnick was killed,” I said. “Anyone check if he had a bank account?”

  Willy laughed. “Yeah. I don’t think he was into banks. I got his assets in a suitcase here. Something under five grand.”

  “We checked the local branches,” Ron elaborated, “and we put it out on the wire. But he could’ve used an alias, like he did for the other two rooms. We might never find out for sure.”

  I turned back to Willy. “That money in new bills or old?”

  “Bit of both.”

  “New ones banded or loose?”

  “Loose.”

  “Check those for prints. If we get lucky, maybe Conyer’s contractor left a fat thumbprint on each as he shelled ’em out. Who’s working the friends and relatives angle?” I asked.

  Willy’s voice took
on a slight edge, no doubt matching my own. “Sam. She could probably use some help, if you’ve finished busting our chops.”

  I got the hint.

  · · ·

  I tried clearing my mind on the short drive to the office, freeing it of last night’s shooting, of my conversation with Gail, and of my overall frustration. I knew I’d been overly terse with Ron and Willy. With all of us under pressure and in need of sleep, I was supposed to be setting an example of grace in the face of adversity.

  Sammie was at her desk, poring over Ron’s notes. I sat in her guest chair, not bothering to remove my coat.

  She glanced up. “You look beat.”

  So much for that effort. “I’m okay. Willy told me you were chasing down Conyer’s family and associates.”

  She pulled a sheet of paper from the file before her. “Yeah. He spent most of his time with the twenty-something crowd—big on bar-hopping, hell-raising, and recreational dope.”

  “Looks like he was paid to do in Resnick. Willy found a suitcase full of cash.”

  She stared with renewed interest at the contents of her file. “Huh—well, if he was the lead man, it sure doesn’t sound like the guy I’ve been reading about. One report describes him as a born underling—not a doer. According to his criminal records, he acted out now and then—assault and battery, aggravated assault, destruction of private property—but he never went over the top, and he always got busted in a group, as if he couldn’t be aggressive on his own, or needed someone else to lead the way.”

  “So maybe he was at the bottom of a three-man totem pole.”

  She sat back, looking thoughtful. “That’s what I was thinking. He could’ve stolen that hammer to qualify as one of the team—like a rite of passage.”

  “Implying a big brother relationship somewhere,” I mused.

  Sammie played the devil’s advocate. “On the flip side, he did a pretty good Rambo imitation last night. Could be he finally grew some balls and put a gang together—maybe the Mob paid him to hit one of their own.”

  I shook my head. “I think he was being manipulated and felt he was in too deep to get out. That’s why he came out shooting. He must’ve been scared shitless—making holes in the walls, keeping his money in a suitcase, and sleeping three apartments over. When a small-timer becomes a murderer, he usually makes a mess of it—he doesn’t put together a complicated deal like what we’re trying to figure out. I think you’re right—someone was pulling his string.” I pointed my chin toward the paperwork. “So what’s your plan?”