Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (20 page)

“Good. That’ll be six-fifty.”

Willy stood and leaned across the bar, his powerful right hand splayed out on its surface as if he might vault right over it. “Don’t, Ray. I could come back alone.”

The fat man glowered, but kept quiet.

Outside, breathing in the cold, medicinal air, I asked Willy, “How reliable is he?”

Kunkle smiled confidently. “In legal terms? He’s as good as gold. I’ve used him on four affidavits in the past, and every one of them stuck.”

“Let’s hope we’re on a roll, then,” I muttered, and headed for the car.

PENDING DUNN'S APPROVAL,
we had all that we needed for a search warrant of Bob Vogel’s trailer—enough circumstantial evidence linking him to Gail’s rape to convince a judge we had probable cause. I didn’t write up the affidavit as soon as I got back to the office, however. I still wanted to determine that our guess about why he traveled the back roads to commute from work was correct, and for that I needed to contact both the Department of Motor Vehicles and Helen Boisvert, Vogel’s probation officer, neither of whom would be available until morning.

I also wanted to get some sleep before tackling this next crucial step. Cops march to ever more precise legal drummers as they follow an investigation toward its hoped-for finale in court, and the further they proceed, the more paranoid they become, increasingly convinced that something they do or don’t do will result in some lawyer destroying their case. I didn’t want to embark on that road with the little sleep I’d gathered over the last two days. The tradeoff of a little time lost for a clear head in the morning seemed more than a bargain.

I therefore left my office at 3:30 a.m.—after dictating my daily report for Harriet to transcribe later—as exhausted as I could ever remember feeling, and virtually sleepwalked the few blocks to my apartment, not trusting myself to drive.

But things didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped. Throughout the few hours I’d planned to spend sleeping, I kept working and re-working the case in my mind, reviewing the steps we’d taken, the facts we’d amassed, knowing of the general scrutiny that awaited our results. For as soon as that affidavit was filed, it would become part of the public record, available to Katz and his colleagues, to Susan Raffner and hers, to Dunn’s opponent, Jack Derby, and to the selectmen and any other politician or advocate with a point to make. Headlines would follow, speeches by Dunn, Derby et al., debates in the press, more marches and demonstrations—and through it all, I hoped, Gail might begin to find solace knowing that the man who had permanently affected her life was about to be similarly treated.

Assuming we’d done our jobs right.

As a result of all this mental thrashing, I returned to the office in as bad shape as I’d left it—my eyes burning, my temples tender to the touch, and my head resonating with a buzz as pervasive as an overworked boiler in the basement.

As I crossed the threshold, Harriet’s expression told me I looked as bad as I felt. “I know, I know. Bad night. Could you do me a favor? Contact DMV and run a license check on Robert Vogel—find out if he’s legal, and if he has a car registered to his name.”

She nodded wordlessly, and allowed me to escape to my glassed-in cubicle without any maternal admonitions.

I sat heavily in my chair, wishing to hell I could somehow shake off my exhaustion, or at least make it less visible, and looked up Helen Boisvert’s number in my address book. I called her emergency private line and was met by a voice both preoccupied and irritated.

“Helen, it’s Joe Gunther. I’m sorry to butt in but I need a quick piece of information about Bob Vogel.”

“Fine—come by in forty-five minutes.”

I pushed harder, still reluctant to reveal more than I thought she needed to know. “It’s real quick, and I’m scrambling for time.”

There was a pause, followed by a half-strangled, “Shit—hold on.”

I heard her talking to someone in the background, explaining that she needed privacy for just a few minutes.

“What do you want?” she asked when she got back on the line.

“How does Vogel commute to work?”

There was dead silence. I imagined her struggling with the urge to rip the phone out of the wall, but her response when it came was strangely placid. “Hold on a sec—let me grab his file.”

During the pause, Harriet poked her head in through my door and half whispered, “Bob Vogel has no driver’s license, and no vehicle registered in his name.”

I gave her a nod as Helen got back on the line. “He car pools with a guy named Bernard Reeves. Did Bob do something to screw that deal up?”

I should have been more tuned in to her peevish state of mind and kept my mouth shut. But I was operating at low voltage, and feeling a little guilty about keeping her out of the loop. “He’s driving around the back roads like a rumrunner.”

I heard the click of Helen’s lighter being ignited in the background. “That little peckerhead. You got any other questions?”

I quickly requested Bernard Reeves’s address and phone number and let her get back to work.

· · ·

Bernie Reeves’s phone was answered by a cheery-voiced woman. Without identifying myself, I asked for Mr. Reeves.

Her voice immediately chilled. “Are you selling something?”

I looked at the phone in surprise. “No. I’m just looking for some information, and I heard Mr. Reeves was the man to call.”

“About New England Wood?” She had regained about half of her previous good humor, obviously disappointed I was not calling for her.

“Indirectly, yeah.”

“Why don’t you call back in about two hours? He’s still asleep—he works the night shift.”

I thanked her and hung up, not even remotely interested in waiting two hours. Bob Vogel’s personal file still hadn’t arrived from the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, which meant we were on the brink of getting a search warrant for someone we still knew too little about. The opportunity to at least nail down Vogel’s peculiar commuting, therefore, despite its presumably mundane explanation, played larger in my mind than it might have otherwise. I grabbed my coat from the hook behind the door and told Harriet where I’d be, too tired to bother lining up someone to ride shotgun.

Reeves lived along the no-man’s-land stretch of Western Avenue between Brattleboro and West Brattleboro—a narrow umbilicus, half residential, half commercial, that had linked the two communities for over a hundred years. Despite West Bratt’s long-lost political and municipal independence from its overwhelming neighbor, this stretch had still resisted becoming more than a minimal concession to the alliance. West Brattleboro prided itself on its separate identity, even though it had little left to show for it.

The address Helen Boisvert had given me fit a modest, tidy, one-story frame house set back from the street on a steeply sloped, well-tended, quarter-acre lot—as unique to this town as swing sets, the Lions Club, and fast-food franchises.

I parked in the driveway and rang the front-door buzzer protruding from under a small wooden sign proclaiming this “Bernie and Edith’s.”

A small, middle-aged woman with short, suspiciously gray-free hair greeted me with a quizzical but pleasant, “May I help you?”

I showed her my badge, a gesture I generally bypassed unless I was either treading on legal thin ice or trying to make an impression. “I’d like to speak with Bernie Reeves.”

She recognized my voice. “You just called here. I told you he was asleep.”

“I understand that, but I’m afraid I need to talk with him now.”

Her eyes widened and her shoulders slumped in fear. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

I smiled encouragingly. “This doesn’t involve you directly, Mrs. Reeves. I just need some information—but I need it now.”

Defeated, she backed out of my way and invited me in. “I’ll go get him.”

I stood for a few minutes in a small, overstuffed living room, its windows lined with glass and porcelain trinkets, its curtains and furniture decorated with clean but faded flowers. Two recliner armchairs separated by a small table faced a large television set whose blank, shiny screen seemed poised to mesmerize at the touch of a button. It made me think of some predatory magician taking a brief nap.

Mrs. Reeves returned with her husband in tow, bleary-eyed and disheveled, still tucking his shirt in over a well-founded beer gut. He looked at me warily but without fear as his wife moved to one side.

“What’s up?” he asked. His voice was neutral but pleasant—that of a man with nothing much to hide.

I showed him the badge I was still holding in my hand. “I was wondering if we could chat a little—in private.”

Mrs. Reeves furrowed her brow angrily and left without a word. He smiled as she went and lifted his eyebrows at me as she slammed a distant door behind her. “That didn’t win you any points. She’s going to give me the third degree anyway.”

“Sorry, but I’d like to keep this confidential for at least a day or two.”

He pointed to the sofa and sat in one of the armchairs. “I can hold out that long—depending on what it’s about.”

I settled on the edge of the sofa and watched his face carefully. “Bob Vogel.”

His eyes narrowed and his mouth turned down, half in disgust, and half, I thought, in apprehension. His hands found one another and his fingers knotted together nervously. I was glad I’d decided to do this in person instead of on the phone.

“What about him?”

“According to his probation officer, you’re supposed to be his car pool to and from work. I gather that’s no longer true.”

He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and paused. His face had become pale. “Why do you care?” he finally murmured.

“When did you two stop riding together, Bernie?” My position on the edge of the sofa gave me a little leverage over him, trapped as he was in the embrace of the soft chair. I let my voice take advantage of the implied authority.

“A month—maybe a little longer.”

“You knew you were supposed to contact Helen Boisvert, didn’t you? What happened?”

Reeves glanced out the window behind me, apparently hoping some gorilla’s arm would suddenly appear and whisk me away. “I meant to. I guess I forgot. Didn’t seem like that big a thing.”

The tension in his voice told me otherwise. “Why didn’t you call her?”

“He said I shouldn’t tell,” he almost whispered.

“Did he threaten you?”

Bernie Reeves nodded toward the back of the house, where his wife could be dimly heard moving about in the kitchen. “Her. He said he’d take it out on her if I told anyone.”

“You guys get in a fight?”

Now that his secret was out, Bernie regained some of his composure, his voice strengthening slightly. “It was all right at first. The supervisor asked me to help him out since we were on the same shift and didn’t live too far apart. I figured Vogel had done his time, and if the company was willing to take him on, that was okay with me. He gave me the creeps, though—talking the way he did. I guess he picked up on my not liking him much. Said he didn’t need me acting superior and that he’d get him his own car. That’s when he told me not to tell anyone or he’d come after Edith.”

“Why didn’t you call us, or Boisvert? You knew he was on probation. Either one of us could have yanked his chain.”

He gave me a look of utter contempt. “That son of a bitch is crazy. He said that no matter what happened to him, he’d come back sooner or later—that he never forgot anyone who fucked him over.”

Reeves shifted angrily in his seat and tried to paint a slightly more stalwart portrait of himself. “I might not have cared much for myself, but Edith’s alone here most nights. What the hell could I do?”

I shook my head, utterly unswayed. I had spent a professional lifetime listening to people convince themselves that their self-preservation was the same as high moral ground. As far as I could see, Bernie Reeves’s spinelessness had eventually led to Gail’s rape.

I struggled to keep my voice neutral. “You said Vogel gave you the creeps. What did you mean by that?”

“When we started the car pool, I tried to make small talk, you know? Break the ice a little. I didn’t know the guy—we work in different sections of the plant. I thought I’d be friendly. But whenever we talked about women—you know how you do with another guy—he got really weird. When we talked about girls in the plant, say—he’d say things like, ‘She’d look better with my dick in her mouth,’ or real violent stuff, especially about women who stood their own ground or were a little snotty to him. We’ve got some tough ones at the plant.”

That single word cut through the weariness clouding my mind. Gail’s attacker had called her a “snotty goddamn bitch.”

“Is that how he described those women? As snotty?”

“You mean, is that the word he used? I guess so. I couldn’t swear to it.”

I paused, disappointed by his faulty memory. “Did he ever talk about what he’d done with women?”

His lips tightened and looked uncomfortable again. “A little.”

“He told you what he’d done time for.”

It wasn’t a question, but he answered anyway by the way his eyes suddenly dropped to his hands.

“What did he do, Bernie? Start bragging?”

He nodded, back to whispering again. “I told him I thought he was twisted. He pulled a knife and made me swear to keep quiet. And he said the car pool was over—that he’d take care of himself, and that I better keep quiet about that, too, or he’d do to Edith what he’d done to those others.”

“And you believed him.”

He leaned forward then, no longer tentative or doubtful of his motivations. “Damn right I did. He scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know if he was going to cut my throat or not. What did I care if he drove himself to work? It sure as hell meant more to him than it did to me, and I wasn’t about to risk my life over it. I just wanted to be rid of him.”

“Did you see him after that?”

Reeves shook his head emphatically. “I’d see him from a distance, maybe, but I’d steer clear. He didn’t mess with me, and I sure as hell didn’t mess with him.”

“So you don’t know what he was wearing at work two nights ago?”