The Marble Mask Page 22

  “But if you were asked, we’d get a passing grade?” I persisted, knowing such a conversation would be taking place at higher levels, if it hadn’t already.

  “Nobody gives a shit what I think, and we’re probably stuck with you people anyhow, so who cares?”

  He relented after I made no comment and turned toward me.

  “Look, I know you didn’t create this thing, and I don’t much care why you joined up, although it’s obviously working for you. But maybe that’s what does bug me about it. I’ve done okay in this department. I got a good chief, we get our fair share of action, and I’ve had some pretty interesting assignments. With VBI coming on, that’ll probably all change. We won’t need detectives in-house, and I’ll be back to pulling over speeders.”

  “Not necessarily,” I argued. “We only handle major crimes—cases you’d hand over anyhow, just like you said. Your department will still need plainclothes officers. The only difference’ll be that if you ever want to move up, you won’t have to wait for the chief to leave—you can apply to join us and get career options you can’t even dream of now unless you join the state police and virtually start all over again.”

  He shrugged, unconvinced. “If that’s true, then every hotshot in the state’ll be lining up to join and I won’t have a chance.” He pointed to a log-built home on our right—well-appointed but low-key. “That’s it.”

  I swung up the driveway, distressed if not surprised by his answer. Cops were often bureaucratic fatalists, resigned to any and all change doing them dirt in the long run—and convinced that there was nothing they could do about it. The Gary Smiths of this world would have to be led to any new realities, not pep-talked to them—prior disappointments and a natural conservatism dictated that.

  Mike Sawyer stepped out onto his wraparound porch before we got out of the car. He was as bald as an egg, thin, small, and straight-backed, immaculately dressed in very expensive slacks and a thick cardigan sweater. Had he been wearing a white cap, I would have thought myself about to board a yacht.

  “Mr. Sawyer?” I called out from where I’d parked.

  “Who are you?” he asked without preamble.

  “We’re police officers,” I said, keeping it simple. “We were wondering if we could ask you some questions.”

  He didn’t move from looking down at us, his hands on the wooden railing before him. “About what?”

  I made a gesture of slapping my sides with my arms. “Kind of cold out here. Mind if we come in?”

  He obviously did but luckily was old and well mannered enough not to say so. He indicated a set of broad steps to his right and motioned us to join him. We shook hands formally, exchanged names, and he ushered us stiffly across the threshold.

  We entered a heavy-beamed living room with a pile of brightly burning logs in the fireplace and some classical music playing in the background.

  “This is very nice,” I said.

  “It’s functional. What do you want?”

  I faced him, noticing for the first time just how old he was. Sawyer’s clothes were so luxuriously thick and well tailored that from a distance they’d given him a youthful, fashionable flair. But up close I saw how his neck and head protruded from them like a turtle’s from its shell—bare, wrinkled, withered, and frail.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

  “No. I’d like an answer.”

  I remembered how the unpleasant maître d’ had described Sawyer as a tough guy with demanding expectations.

  “We’d like to ask you about Gaston Picard.”

  His expression remained the same. “What about him?”

  “You met him several days ago over lunch. We were wondering what you talked about.”

  “I doubt that’s any of your business.”

  I began to reassess the turtle analogy. “It is, actually. We’re conducting a murder investigation.”

  “Good for you. Do you have a warrant?”

  “Do we need one?”

  He smiled thinly. “My question comes first, and yours just gave me the answer. If at some point you feel you do need a warrant—and can get it—then maybe we’ll continue this little chat.”

  That was our exit line, except for my unwillingness to take it. “I get your point, and you’re perfectly within your rights, but can I ask you a couple of general things? They’re more history questions than anything else.”

  He looked at me curiously for the first time. “History questions?”

  I moved into that small opening. “Yeah. I heard you used to run the best restaurant in town—Michael Sawyer’s.”

  “That’s common knowledge.”

  “So I just found out. When was that in operation?”

  “Sixty-four to eighty-nine.”

  That was a letdown. “What did you do before then?”

  “I ran other restaurants.”

  “In Stowe?”

  “Yes, and elsewhere.”

  “When did you open your first one in Stowe?” I asked, sensing I was slowly getting where I wanted to go.

  Sawyer moved over to the front door and opened it. The sudden cold air matched the change in his tone. “I don’t recall—old-timer’s disease,” he said, tapping his very sound head with his fingertip. “Make sure you bring some paperwork next time you come.”

  · · ·

  “That was useful,” Gary said once we were heading back down the hillside.

  “I thought so,” I admitted.

  He gave me a scornful look. “How?”

  “Because he threw us out just as I was getting to when Jean Deschamps was killed. We’ll have to hassle the town clerk some more to get the records, but I’ll bet money that man was around Stowe in the mid-forties, which makes him the first solid connection we’ve got between the whole Sherbrooke bunch and Stowe besides Jean’s frozen body.”

  Gary Smith smiled. “You think he’s the one who kept the body on ice?”

  “He’s a good candidate. They didn’t build home freezers then like they do today. You’re too young to know that, but when I was a kid, I remember the wonder of step-in freezers the size of bedrooms. The first one I ever saw was in a restaurant.”

  Chapter 21

  WE’D ALL BUT TAKEN OVER THE STOWE TOWN clerk’s office, much to her distress, and exacerbated matters by staying on past closing, an affront to procedure that had taken several phone calls to make acceptable.

  Now we were sitting around a large wooden table—Tom and Sammie still comparing the Special Service Force roster with Stowe residents of the time, and Gary Smith and I poring over unwieldy bound volumes of voting, tax, and real estate records that had gradually spread across every available flat surface. Working the computer data banks in Waterbury, Paul Spraiger was trying to find out what he could about Michael Sawyer before he’d come to Stowe. Willy, as usual, was off doing something he hadn’t deigned to share with the rest of us.

  Gary finally leaned back in his chair, reached toward the ceiling with both hands in a stretch, and laconically announced, “Think I got it.”

  “What?” I asked as the other two glanced up.

  He tapped the book before him with his finger. “Says here Sawyer bought a residence on the edge of town in ’46, turned it into a restaurant the same year—something called the Snow Bank—and held it until…” he paused while he pulled another open book toward him and consulted its pages, “1951. That’s when he sold out and opened another place nearer downtown named Mike’s, which he held onto till Michael Sawyer’s opened in ’64, like he told us.”

  “Fancier and fancier each time,” Sammie commented.

  “I guess,” Gary agreed. “Doesn’t go into those kinds of details here.”

  “He must’ve been doing pretty well to create the first restaurant out of a remodeled house and then go upwardly mobile just five years later, especially since Stowe hadn’t hit the big time yet,” I said.

  “Could be Sawyer was as good as they say he was and just caught the wave of
the future,” Sammie suggested.

  I chewed that over for a few seconds. “Maybe. I just can’t shake the feeling of a whole lot of birds suddenly landing in the same tree. Picard, Sawyer, Deschamps—”

  “Guidry,” Willy added from the doorway, where he’d typically appeared without making a sound.

  “Meaning?” I asked him.

  He strolled over to a chair, taking his time to settle down. “I been bugged by a couple of things, so I decided to check ’em out. Remember what that note said? The one that Marcel was supposed to have written to his old man, inviting him down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He said ‘we’re’ having a good time down here. And ‘come down and join us,’ as if he wasn’t alone. Always made me wonder.”

  “You figure it out?” Gary asked.

  Willy made a face. “Not really. It’s weirder than that. I didn’t have anywhere to start with Marcel, since the letter was the only thing we had connecting him to Stowe. So I went back to the Alvarez register at the old Snow Dancer Hotel and looked at it closer up, thinking that if Jean checked in, maybe the son did, too, under another name—or somebody else we’d recognize.”

  He shifted in his seat as we waited. “There was nothin’. I checked it three times.”

  “Willy,” Sammie barely muttered in a warning tone.

  “Okay, okay,” he answered. “I guess Alvarez was a pretty snotty guy. Turns out he had a coding system for when anyone arrived with hired help. The guest would be registered like normal, but the slave—maid, butler, chauffeur, whatever—was just marked down by a symbol next to the guest’s name. Deschamps had one of those marks.”

  “No shit,” Tom said.

  “That’s what I thought, so I drove back to Richford to talk to Arvin Brown again. We never asked if anyone was with Deschamps when he walked into Brown’s place. Turns out he had a chauffeur. He didn’t come in, but Brown delivered him some grub in the car. The description pretty much fits Pierre Guidry. I asked how he could still remember that, and he said the whole night was burned into his brain—plus he thought the chauffeur was as much an asshole as his boss was like a movie star.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “That’s not all,” Willy continued. “Since we’re hot after Mike Sawyer, I asked Brown about him, too. He knew Sawyer—asked him for a job once. Said the guy was a prick and that everyone hated him except the customers, since he brown-nosed them and they didn’t give a shit anyhow. I drew a blank trying to connect the dots between Sawyer and any of the other players, but Brown did tell me the rumor mill was running hot and heavy when Sawyer set up his first restaurant…”

  “The Snow Bank,” Gary added.

  Willy looked at him dismissively, which made me think of Gary’s comment about Kunkle earlier. “Whatever. The thing is he paid cash on the barrel-head for the place and paid the same way to fix it up.”

  “They speculate where he’d come from?” Tom asked.

  Willy smiled. “Yup. You’ll love this—Canada. He said ‘out’ and ‘about’ like a Canuck. But he never owned up when he was asked—just told people to piss off.”

  “Your kind of guy,” Gary said.

  Willy laughed. “Yeah—probably right.”

  “But what’s that tell you about the ‘we’ reference in Marcel’s supposed letter?” Sammie asked.

  Willy tilted his head to one side. “Nothin’. That part’s still got me goin’. I did ask Brown if we might be able to get some more dirt on Sawyer, though, and he coughed up a woman named Amy Butynski. Used to be one of his waitresses. Brown said she was smart, had done okay for herself, and still lived in town. Sounded like he once had the hots for her, but I don’t think he ever scored.”

  “That’s relevant,” Sammie commented peevishly.

  Willy laughed again. “I think so,” and he raised his eyebrows at her. She stared at her paperwork, her face reddening.

  “Sammie,” I said. “Why don’t you call Lacombe and ask him to run a check on Sawyer? And tell Paul what we’ve got—maybe it’ll help him in his digging.” I checked my watch and then looked at Willy. “It’s still not too late. You want to go visit Ms. Butynski?”

  · · ·

  The address Willy had took us north of town on Route 100. As we drove slowly through traffic, I seized the same opportunity I’d taken with Gary earlier. “How’re you liking this detail so far?”

  “Why?” he asked. “Want to fire me?”

  I shook my head. “Nope—straightforward question.”

  “I doubt that. How many have asked you to can me so far?”

  “Nobody. One of them said you were a little over the top. I thought that was pretty mild given the shit you’ve handed me over the years. That was a nice piece of work, by the way, chasing down Guidry.”

  After a moment’s silence, he answered my question, “It’s okay. I didn’t think I’d like being out of Bratt.”

  “Having Sammie around must help.” He didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it, either.

  “I have an idea about who ‘we’ and ‘us’ were in Marcel’s fake letter,” I said. “When Paul and I interviewed Marie Chenin, I asked her as we were leaving where Marcel had been when his father disappeared. She didn’t know. But when I asked the same thing about Picard and Guidry, she looked like I’d just told her about some favorite relative dying.”

  Willy looked at me but remained silent.

  “Let’s say,” I continued, “that this whole let’s-keep-the-trip-to-Stowe-a-secret routine was a crock—cooked up so everyone could claim ignorance at the time and stop any police investigation dead in its tracks.”

  “Meaning everyone knew Guidry was along in his chauffeur mode. That would explain Jean keeping a high profile while he was in Stowe.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “But then why would Chenin look so surprised by my question?”

  Willy smiled. “’Cause it wasn’t Guidry that got her thinking. It was Picard.”

  “And two makes for ‘we,’” I said.

  “So the two of them killed Jean together?”

  I equivocated there. “I think they rigged the letter framing Marcel. It still doesn’t make sense to me why they would’ve killed Jean.”

  · · ·

  Amy Butynski lived in a handsome, three-story brick house with white trim and a slate roof. There were two bright lanterns mounted to either side of the front door and a neatly shoveled path connecting the driveway to the walk. As Arvin Brown had told Willy, it looked like life had been good to his old flame.

  A striking woman answered the door—tall, slim, white-haired, and yet remarkably youthful in appearance. Her face and hands looked twenty years younger than I knew they were—assuming I was right about her identity.

  “Are you Amy Butynski?” I asked.

  She smiled broadly, displaying a row of perfect white teeth. “I was. It’s been quite a while since anyone called me that. It’s Sommers now.”

  We fished out our shields and told her who we were. To my relief she didn’t take us for health inspectors. Instead, she merely drew back and invited us in, calling out to her husband as she did so.

  We were ushered into a pleasant living room by both of them, he being a stocky man with an open face and an easy demeanor, unintimidated by our appearance at his door.

  After disposing of the usual chatter about whether we wanted coffee or something to eat, Amy asked us, “Why was it you wanted to see me?”

  I smiled apologetically. “It’s a little off the wall, to be honest, and as you guessed, it deals with ancient history. We heard you once worked as a waitress for Mike Sawyer at the Snow Bank.”

  She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, my gosh. That was a long time ago. I haven’t thought of those days in ages. What could you possibly want to know about?”

  “We need all the help we can get, actually,” I told her. “So maybe the best thing would be to start with some general questions, like how long you worked there?”

  She
was sitting beside her husband on the couch and now casually took his hand in her own—a long-standing habit, it appeared, born of easy companionship. My sympathy with Arvin Brown’s sense of loss was tempered by the guess that his intended had found her own perfect mate.

  “Let’s see,” she began. “I was about sixteen when I started. That would make it 1946.”

  “Just after Sawyer opened the place,” I said.

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten that. Anyhow, I stayed on until about 1949. It was all I could take of the man.”

  “Difficult?”

  She laughed. “A perfect monster—treated everyone terribly, except the guests, of course. They all thought he was heaven.”

  “Why’d you stay on so long if he was that bad?” Willy asked.

  She looked a little sad as she explained, “I needed the money. My family wasn’t very lucky in that area, and the tips were some of the best in town.”

  “She wouldn’t tell you,” her husband said, “but she was supporting the whole family back then. Her father had been crippled in a logging accident, her mother was sickly, and she was the oldest of five kids.”

  She squeezed his hand harder. “They don’t need to hear all that.”

  I moved on. “Still, it must have been tough working there.”

  “It wasn’t so bad. You had to get used to him, is all, and a lot of people couldn’t. His bark was worse than his bite by far.”

  “Had Mike been in the restaurant business long? Seems an odd thing to choose if you’re short-tempered.”

  “I’m not sure he had been, now that you mention it. For one thing, he wasn’t that old—in his twenties somewhere. But I also remember thinking he was learning the ropes as he went. He made some mistakes a real professional probably wouldn’t have—things like under-ordering supplies and not having enough food on hand for a Friday night. He was smart, though, so that happened pretty rarely, and in no time flat he was right in his element. Went on to become quite famous, around here at least. I suppose you already know that.”

  “We’d heard rumors,” I conceded. “Did you have any idea of his background? Had he fought in the war, for example?”