The Ragman's Memory Page 21

  Emerging from the bottom of the one closet, Ron merely gave me a shake of the head.

  “Okay,” I told them. “I’m going to find Annabelle Tuttle, the listed next of kin. I’ll see you all at the office.” I checked my watch. “Let’s shoot for a noon meeting. Supposedly, Dr. Riley’s coming over. If one of you could get a statement from him, that’d be great.”

  As I entered the building’s lobby from the stairwell a few minutes later, a harassed-looking man, his hair tousled and his coat unbuttoned, came banging through the glass-paned double doors.

  I took a guess. “Dr. Riley?”

  He stopped dead in his tracks. “Yes.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Gunther—Bratt PD—”

  Before I could get any more out, he interrupted me by grabbing my arm, stepping close and asking in a hoarse whisper, “What the hell’s going on? I heard Adele Sawyer’s death was being called a homicide—that I screwed up the death certificate.”

  I considered soothing him, pointing out that the postmortem results hadn’t come in yet. But then I decided to hell with it. I didn’t like the priority of his concerns. “You did.”

  His face went slack and his cheeks reddened.

  I relented a bit. “Look, nobody’s going after you. The mortician noticed some bruises around the neck. My forensics guy told me they probably surfaced after rigor mortis began setting in and the blood drained away from the neck area. She normally had a flushed complexion, right?”

  “Yes—it was tied in with her breathing problems.”

  “That’s what hid the bruises. The missed cause of death is no big deal—since we caught it—but you might want to be more careful next time.”

  He stiffened slightly but took it without comment, which I appreciated. From his opening line, I’d figured him for more bluster. “The problem now,” I continued, “is to find out who killed her. Was she one of your regular patients?”

  “I’ve been treating her for about five years.”

  “A joyride?”

  His pinched face cracked a thin smile. “I guess you’ve heard about her. Pretty unpleasant person.”

  “How long had she been dead when you got here?”

  He frowned. “She’d definitely begun to cool, but there were no signs of rigor. I’d guess two or three hours at most.”

  “Anything unusual about her medical history?”

  “Nothing a little physical self-respect wouldn’t have headed off. She smoked, ate poorly, never exercised, and was in a constant rage. Whoever killed her obviously had no patience—another six months and she would’ve spared him the effort.”

  “Is that a medical estimate?” I asked.

  The smile returned. “Probably more like wishful thinking, if that doesn’t put me on the suspect list. She should’ve been dead years ago, so I suppose she might’ve lasted a few more. The autopsy will give you the best answer to that one.”

  · · ·

  Given all of Brattleboro’s neighborhoods, Spruce Street was purely middle ground. Shoved up hard against a hilly, wood-choked wilderness area, it contained a few solid, vaguely stately homes, scattered among a wider sampling of more bedraggled, tenacious, middle-class residences, pristine examples of which had been popular in family-hour TV shows in the fifties. Annabelle Tuttle lived in one of these.

  I parked across the street from her address and looked at the building for a moment, studying the peeling paint, the odd shutter or two in need of repair, the furrow carved in the snow from porch to driveway, the width of one shovel. I guessed the occupant to be single, living alone, no longer young, and on a diminished income.

  I got out, navigated the narrow path to the weather-beaten porch, and pushed the doorbell.

  The woman who opened up a minute later was white-haired, slightly stooped, and looked permanently fatigued.

  “Mrs. Tuttle? My name is Joe Gunther. I’m from the Brattleboro Police Department. I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

  She registered no surprise, but stood back to let me in, shivering slightly in the draft of cold air that accompanied me. “I suppose this is about Adele. They called me already.”

  I stood in the overheated hallway, wondering if I should presume to remove my coat. My hostess made none of the usual gestures to indicate I was invited to stay. “That was last night?”

  She let out a tiny snort of derision. “More like two o’clock this morning.”

  “Right. We were wondering why you hadn’t come by the Skyview to pick up her things, or contact Guillaume’s to see about the arrangements.”

  She was a short woman and had been gazing at the middle button of my coat so far, but at that, she looked up my frame and nailed me with a hard stare. “That’s a concern of yours?”

  “It’s a source of curiosity. You’re the only one listed as next of kin.”

  “Sisters,” she said, as if talking about the flu. “We weren’t close.”

  “All that’s left of the family?”

  The snort was repeated. “The family’s large enough. I was the only one who volunteered to be contacted. The nursing home had to have someone to call. Why are you so interested?”

  For the sake of form, I took a shot at solicitude, although I doubted it was necessary. “Mrs. Tuttle, I’m afraid I may have some shocking news. Would you like to sit down?”

  “No.” Her eyes on me didn’t waver; her face didn’t change expression.

  “We don’t think your sister died of natural causes. She was murdered—strangled to death.”

  I’d added the last bit for effect, but all it registered was a bitter half-smile. “One of her housemates, no doubt.” She sighed, and then added, “Maybe I will have that seat. Come.”

  I followed her into the living room, gratefully removing my coat. We sat on opposing hard, straight-backed couches. She seemed as composed as ever—just a bit more tired. I thought perhaps the brevity that had so offended Sue Pasco on the phone may have been merely weariness and economy.

  “My sister,” she began, “was an angry, disappointed woman. She married badly twice in a row, had three kids who won’t talk to her anymore, and got fired from every job she ever had because of her mouth. Every comment was taken as an insult, every look was an accusation. To say nobody loved her misses the point. Nobody even liked her, including me.”

  I sat there in silence for a moment, wondering when I’d last heard such an eloquent and devastating tribute. “Apart from you, did she keep in touch with any other family members?”

  “No. And she didn’t with me, either. The Skyview put my name on her application form—she didn’t. Who killed her?”

  The bluntness of the question caught me by surprise. “We don’t know yet. I was hoping you might be able to help us with that.”

  “I never visited her—never knew any of the people she was living with.”

  “I was thinking more of outsiders—someone who might have come to see her.”

  “I don’t know who that could have been. I doubt she had any friends, and I already told you about the family.”

  “How about her possessions? Did she have any property or assets that might benefit anyone?”

  Annabelle Tuttle shrugged and sighed, focusing on a distant chair. “No—everything she had was in that room. She had no money. I paid for a few things—a pair of slippers or some new underwear—but it never came to much. To be cruelly honest, she was always a burden, and it looks like she still is, even in death.”

  I stole a glance at my watch, realizing the time for the staff meeting I’d asked for was drawing near. I stood up. “Are you the only family member who lives in the area?”

  She looked up at me. “Oh, no—most of them do.”

  “Would it be all right if I sent somebody by to collect their names and addresses later today?”

  Her eyes slid away from my face and grew unfocused and dull. “That would be fine.”

  I moved partway to the door and then hesitated. “Are you all right, Mrs.
Tuttle? Is there someone I could call to keep you company?”

  She smiled slightly—sadly, I thought. “No. That’s all right. I don’t really know what to do with company anymore.” She paused, and added, “It doesn’t seem like anyone in my family was much good at it.”

  · · ·

  The noise from the people milling around outside my office drowned out Beverly Hillstrom’s opening words on the phone. I caught the edge of the door with my foot and swung it shut. “I’m sorry, Doctor. What was that?”

  She spoke a little louder. “I said, ‘It’s definitely a homicide.’ Your Mrs. Sawyer was strangled. The assailant used his left hand on the mouth, and his right hand on the throat. I’ll be faxing you the details as soon as I have them typed up.”

  “Did you find anything else? Drugs, alcohol—”

  “Phenobarbital? No—I’m afraid not, Lieutenant.”

  I hesitated a moment before changing subjects, still rankled by the release of Milo’s cause of death to the media. “By the way, does your office have a protocol concerning when a cause of death is made public? Some specific time lapse, for example?”

  Either I hadn’t kept my tone of voice lighthearted enough, or Hillstrom had been adversely hit by this general topic before, because her response was a frosty, “Do you have a complaint?”

  “No. I just dropped the ball when I forgot to ask you to sit on the Milo Douglas results earlier, and I wanted to know what kind of time window I have available for future reference.”

  Apparently mollified, she answered, “There is no protocol. Unless told otherwise, we release our findings as they are completed. In point of fact, I hadn’t gotten around to Mr. Douglas before the media contacted us.”

  I sat dumbfounded for a moment. “They called you? Who did?”

  “Your own paper—the Reformer. I don’t recall who, precisely.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I murmured.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked, her voice guarded again.

  “No, no. I’m just wondering how they found out about it.”

  19

  THE MEETING STARTED LATE—testimony to the number of people who had been asked to attend. The whole squad was there, along with Jack Derby, Tony Brandt, Gail, our head of Patrol, Bill Manierre, and three of his people—Sol Stennis, Marshall Smith, and a new transplant from the Burlington PD with ten years’ prior experience, Sheila Kelly. Kelly was here because much of the last three years on her previous job had been spent on financial fraud cases.

  I leaned forward and rapped the conference room’s tabletop with my knuckles. The buzz of conversation slowly subsided. “I just hung up on the Medical Examiner. Adele Sawyer is now an official homicide. That means we’ve got to reorganize and reassign the cases we’ve been working on. So far we have Mary Wallis—missing under suspicious circumstances; Milo Douglas—dead from rabies, but through no known means of infection; Shawna Davis—cause of death unknown but considered a homicide; the hotel/convention center complex project—possible shenanigans ranging from corruption to blackmail; and now Adele Sawyer. Some of these cases overlap, but for clarity’s sake I’m keeping them separate.”

  “Given the workload we’re facing, I’m moving Milo and Shawna to the back burner. Nothing new has come up on either one of them, and if we’re right about Shawna’s close ties to Mary Wallis, then I’d just as soon put more heat under the Wallis case, on the chance she might still be alive.”

  I got up and went over to the white board mounted on the wall, a felt-tipped marker in hand. “Because, despite some differing opinions in this room, I don’t think Wallis took off under her own power. I think she was grabbed. She knew something, and someone was afraid she would eventually tell it to us.”

  I wrote “Shawna” and “Milo” next to each other at the top left corner of the board but left the spaces below them blank. “Unfortunately, while Mary Wallis is a top priority, we’re stuck for options on what to do for her. We’ve put everything available into motion. Photos and descriptions have been issued to all major agencies in New England, along with the bigger newspapers. The Reformer has agreed to play the story big and get it on the wire services. And each of her personal contacts has been asked to let us know as soon as they hear anything. We’ve been reduced to waiting for a break.”

  I wrote “Mary” on the board and left it blank under her, also. “Okay—the building project. This one gets a little more complicated. Ron, Gail, and Justin Willette worked together to come up with a few possibilities here. There’s a chance that during the permitting process, the wheels might’ve been greased to speed things along. One person has claimed he was coerced to support the deal.”

  I glanced at Gail, who merely nodded her assent. “Ned Fallows,” I went on, “says Tom Chambers blackmailed him with proof of some prior malfeasance, the nature of which Fallows won’t identify.”

  There was a predictable muttering around the table.

  “Fallows is also saying he won’t corroborate that story, no matter how much pressure we put on him.”

  “Screw him,” Willy said. “Hit him with a subpoena and force him to talk.”

  “About what?” I asked. “Right now all we’ve got are two conversations I had with him. His attitude is that if he clams up, we’ll have no proof he was forced to vote for the convention project—nor will we find out what crime he committed in the first place. We need to do the same digging Tom Chambers did to force Fallows to spill the beans.”

  “And that,” I waved a hand in his direction, “is what I want Ron to do.”

  I put “Chambers” and “Fallows” up on the board under the heading “Project” and drew an arrow connecting Ron’s name to Fallows’. “We’ve also got a few other players we need to look at.” I added Eddy Knox, Rob Garfield, and Lou Adelman’s names. “These three are only guilty of being unusually supportive of the project so far. We need to examine their lifestyles, bank accounts, past histories, and finally conduct interviews with them. I’d like Sammie spearheading that, working with Marshall Smith.”

  I wrote all that down, with more arrows, and then circled “Tom Chambers” in red. “Here’s the catch. How to dig into the town’s richest political hotshot—not to mention one of our esteemed leaders—without his catching wind of it. The answer, I hope, lies in Chambers being the one common denominator among everyone in this group,” I tapped Fallows’s name and the three men Sammie and Marshall were assigned to. “Plus Harold Matson, the Bank of Brattleboro’s president.” I added his name to the list.

  “The B of B got its fat saved by Ben Chambers. If we think the permitting process was tainted, there’s a chance the funding was, too. J.P., find out how the financing was put together. I want you to work with Sheila Kelly—her expertise in this area should be an asset.

  “Assuming Fallows is right about NeverTom Chambers being corrupt, my hope is we’ll be able to catch Chambers in a pincer movement, between what we can get from the zoning and planning people, and what we can find out about the recent financial bailout. My other hope is that by following this approach, it might lead us to finding out what happened to Mary Wallis.”

  There was a muted stirring among most of the people in the room. I capped the pen in my hand and let them quiet back down. “For those of you who think we’re putting too many eggs in one basket by focusing on the building project, let me remind you how we all agreed earlier that coincidence was a bad thing to rely on.” I waved my hand at the board behind me. “Well, if all this isn’t coincidence, then what ties it together? The convention center has cropped up—however vaguely—with Milo, Mary Wallis, and through Wallis to Shawna Davis. At fifteen million dollars, it’s the biggest real estate deal this town’s ever seen, and that sum doesn’t include the financial benefits a lot of people are hoping will come their way once the center’s up and running.”

  I leaned on the conference table with both hands. “We have limited manpower we need to use wisely, to pursue the hottest and most available targets we
can locate. It may turn out that Milo died of rabies, pure and simple, and that Shawna was killed for reasons we haven’t even guessed at. But Mary Wallis is still out there—maybe alive—and everyone involved in creating the convention center is identifiable and can be interviewed. On the chance those two are connected, I think this approach is worth the gamble. If anyone disagrees, let’s hear it now.”

  “What about Gene Lacaille?” Willy said. “He got the whole thing started.”

  “He’s losing his shirt,” Sammie countered. “You know that for a fact?”

  I rapped the table again. “Hold it. We should and will look into him, but our caseload is enormous, and we haven’t even mentioned our latest addition.” I turned and wrote “Sawyer” on the board.

  “Right now, Lacaille does seem to have lost out heavily in this deal, and it’s unlikely he did that on purpose. So, our priorities and resources being what they are, he’s going to have to take a back seat. But,” I emphasized, “it should be noted that every lead on this board is subject to change. Names will be removed and added as we go along, and I don’t want anyone skipping details just because they don’t fit some particular assignment. Either hand over anything odd to the appropriate investigator, or let me know about it. Also, given the chance that some or all of these investigations might be linked in some way, and that we may end up with more on our plate, I want every new case that comes into this office looked at with a microscope—I don’t care if it’s a ninety-year-old cancer patient who dies in the hospital.” I tapped the white board with my finger. “Everything gets a review in relation to this.”

  I wrote Kunkle’s and Sol Stennis’s names under that of Adele Sawyer. “Okay—Willy, find out who knocked her off. This one’s out in the open—it’s already on the radio, and it’s going to be front-page news tomorrow. It’s a whodunit and it has a cast of dozens—the lady was not well liked, the night shift is thinly staffed, and most of the home’s residents are pretty much free to wander. And that’s not even considering someone from the outside. No need to tiptoe—take the place by storm if necessary and get this wrapped up fast. Billy?”