Occam's Razor (2 page)

“Yes, ma’am.”

I crossed over to her, grabbing a chair from under the kitchen table as I went. The apartment was an efficiency, each wall staking claim to a different domestic function—bedroom, living room, kitchen, or bathroom—and each losing its identity just a foot or two into the room, where a generalized heaping of disassociated jetsam defeated all rhyme or reason. It looked like a neighborhood tag sale right after the last shopper had torn it apart.

I placed the chair opposite her and sat down. “What would you like to tell me?”

She shook her head emphatically, as I feared she might. “Not so fast. I don’t want to do this again. I tell you once, here and now, and that’s an end to it.”

I tried looking sympathetic. “We’ll try to make it work that way, but since I don’t know what you’re going to tell me, I can’t make any promises.”

It was like throwing meat to a wolf. She leaned forward, her face pinched around a pair of glittering eyes. “Just what I thought. They do that at the hospital, too. I’m no whiner. It takes a lot to get me down. So when I call for help, I’m in real pain. And I don’t trust them to begin with, so why would I go see them unless I was really hurting?”

I nodded without comment, since I had no idea what she was talking about.

“But when they come in here from the ambulance, putting their hands all over me, they always ask me a bunch of stupid questions like they think I’m making it up. You think they even listen to what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I do,” I had to admit.

She held up a yellow, skinny finger. “Well, you don’t know much. They may write down a lot of stuff, but the doctors at the ER throw it out. You know why?”

I remained rigidly uncommitted.

It didn’t matter. She stared at me as if I’d just called her a liar. “So they can ask me the same dumb questions all over again. I asked them why they do it, and they told me they wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything out. Can you believe that? Like it’s my fault they won’t listen.”

I got the point. I held up my hand like a traffic cop and spoke loudly to interrupt her. “Tonight, I promise no one will ever ask you the same questions again.”

She stopped in mid-sentence. “You do?”

I glanced at Ron, who looked as startled as she did.

“Yes,” I said. “Now, what did you see or hear that might help us out?”

Her entire demeanor changed from the outraged citizen to the confidential source. Her body relaxed, curving toward me, and she turned her head slightly away from Ron, as if excluding him from the conversation.

“It was creepy,” she said softly.

“I bet it was.” I matched her whisper. “Can you describe it?”

She motioned to me to lean into the acrid odor surrounding her like a fog. Our noses were almost touching by now. “I thought it was aliens at first. It was their talking that woke me up. They had a big bright light, bright enough to bounce right off that ceiling.” She glanced up sideways, reliving the moment. “I could see that man, with no head and no hands, and them around him. And then they began doing things to him…”

She paused as Ron edged toward the front door, shaking his head with disgust. “What?” Her voice had regained its querulous pitch.

“That was us,” he told her.

Edith Rudd straightened and looked at me, startled and uncertain. “What?” she repeated, this time sounding more like a surprised child.

I reached out and laid my hand on hers. “What you saw was the police trying to figure out what happened,” I explained, as Ron left the room, no doubt hoping to escape his own embarrassment. “We needed that light to see better.”

She continued watching my eyes, and I held her gaze, smiling slightly. Suddenly her tears welled up. “It looked so terrible.”

“I know, Mrs. Rudd. I’m sorry you had to see it, and I’m sorry we woke you up.”

She glanced away to the floor and sighed, her whole body trembling slightly with the effort. “Thank you,” she almost whispered.

I squeezed her hand, feeling the sharpness of her knuckles under my thumb. “Thank
you
for trying to help.”

She looked back at me then. “What’s your name again?”

“Joe Gunther.”

“I was awake before then—before the light came on. I wasn’t really sleeping.”

I nodded encouragingly. “Bad night?”

“I have a lot of them. I was looking out the window at the stars in the river when I saw them. They pulled him out of a car and put him on the tracks, just the way you found him.”

“He didn’t resist?”

“I think he was dead already. They laid him out like he was a sofa pillow.”

“How many?”

“Three that I could see.”

I gestured to the nearby window, narrow and smudged, and raised my eyebrows. “You mind?”

I rose and peered through the glass. The apartment was almost directly above where we’d spent the early morning hours.

“Were you able to recognize or see any of them clearly?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “They were all in coats and hats. And it was dark.”

“How about when they passed in front of the headlights? Did you see anything unusual then?”

“There were no headlights. That’s why I started looking in the first place. Cars drive along the tracks at night all the time—dopers, prostitutes, you name it. But they all use their headlights till they park. When I noticed this one being so secretive, I got curious.” She stopped again and rubbed her cheek with her palm. “I wish I hadn’t.”

“What time was this, Mrs. Rudd?”

“Around one, I guess.”

“Did you hear anything?”

There was dead silence in the room. I heard Ron’s footsteps returning from the landing and hoped he wouldn’t alter the mood. But he was hypersensitive by now, and stopped before coming into view.

Finally Edith Rudd sat back in her seat, as if suddenly releasing an enormous weight. “I heard the train.”

I returned to my chair. “My God. You saw it happen?”

She seemed more sure of herself now, almost surprised at how easy it had been. “The train blocked the view, but I saw the before and after.”

“And the men in the car?”

“They’d left by then. The train comes by at one-thirty every night. They waited a little while after laying him out, probably checking to see if anyone saw them, but then they drove off.”

“What kind of car was it?”

A small flash of irritation crossed her face, and I sensed she was recovering. “It was nighttime.”

I smiled and shook my head, trying to regain her confidence. “No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what make or model,” I lied. “I wondered if you could tell whether it was a station wagon or a sedan, light or dark, large or small—something like that.”

“Oh. Let’s see. I guess it was a large sedan, I suppose dark-colored, but there I’m not so sure.”

I rose to my feet and shook her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Rudd. You’ve been a big help. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? This must’ve been a shock.”

She answered by struggling out of the sofa’s grip and escorting me to the door, tapping me on the elbow as we went. “I’m fine. I’m a tough old bird.”

I paused at the door, aware of Ron fading out of earshot down the hall again. “Why did you tell us that tall tale earlier? You knew it was us down there with the light. I bet you even recognized me.”

She smiled coquettishly, revealing a row of darkened, misshapen teeth, and tilted her head in Ron’s direction. “I could tell he didn’t like me. And he called me Edith, just like the nurses and ambulance people.”

RON KLESCZEWSKI STOPPED ME
at the bottom of the stairs, just shy of the building’s front door. We could see through the glass the first wave of morning traffic filling the streets, passing before us in quick, familiar flashes.

“I screwed up. I should’ve read her better.”

I laughed and shook my head, having told him on the way down what Edith Rudd had seen. “I don’t think so. If I’d been the first one in, she would’ve handed me what you got—pure luck of the draw. She had to tell one of us the truth. It was piled up inside her like water behind a dam. You know if the canvass has dug up anyone else?”

He unclipped a portable radio from his belt. “I’ll find out.”

I stopped him. “It’ll keep—I was just wondering. I’m going back to the office. We’ll all compare notes around lunchtime, anyhow.”

We parted company on the sidewalk, Ron heading for the next door on the block, and I walking north, through Brattleboro’s heart, toward the Municipal Center at the far end of Main Street.

I needed to do more, however, than just jar my sleepless brain with a brisk walk in the bone-chilling air. I found it useful, when I needed to think, to get away from home and office both and to wander the streets I’d patrolled since first becoming a cop. For decades now, I’d watched Brattleboro going through its growing pains, from the post—World War backwater days to the arrival in the sixties of the interstate and the hippies, both of which had infused the town with their separate brands of vitality. There were communities like this that were all but dead in the water, and others so bent on making a buck that they’d turned themselves into strip malls. But Brattleboro, with its mixture of old and new, homegrown and flatlander, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, had acquired an opinionated, contradictory, irritating, but life-saving energy that seemed destined to defeat the doldrums that had doomed so many other towns.

The interstate, and Brattleboro’s proximity to the Massachusetts border, had brought darker things, too, of course, and I was wondering if what Edith Rudd had seen last night wasn’t one of them. In the past ten years, our homicide rate had climbed to one a year, and sometimes more. The disintegration of the cities to our south, Vermont’s reputation for being friendly to the down-and-out, and the role of this town as an employment hub all conspired to make it an incubator for illegal activity. Increasingly, we’d had to deal with everything from youth gangs to drug sales and school violence. Whacking some poor rummy and placing him on the train tracks still made us sit up straight, but it no longer stood out as it would have ten years ago.

It also didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Why kill a bum, when, since he was delivered by car, pocket change and/or spontaneity probably hadn’t had much to do with it? Why place him on the tracks, perhaps already dead, and make such an effort to destroy his head and hands? Why disguise him as a bum in the first place, when, as I was beginning to suspect from his clean underwear, he wasn’t a bum at all?

For some reason—and at great risk—the man’s body had been deposited where it would quickly be found, while pains had been taken to keep his identity a secret.

· · ·

By the time I reached the Municipal Center, my nose and cheeks had gone numb, a problem quickly remedied by the wall of hot, desert-dry air that smacked me in the face as soon as I opened the front door.

Well over a hundred years old, like its brethren down the street, the building had been repeatedly chopped up by successive tenants, each one in need of a completely different floor plan. Heating this constantly changing environment had, I believed—despite protests to the contrary—finally defeated the people in charge, who had settled on the time-proven principle that if you make it hot enough at the bottom, the top will eventually get warm.

Unfortunately, the police department was located on the ground floor, with its holding cells, locker room, and gym in the basement. Had we been Bedouin Arabs, this might’ve been ideal, but we weren’t, and it wasn’t.

Shedding my outer clothing as I walked down the central hallway, intending to enter one of the two side doors leading to the detective bureau on the right, I was stopped by a uniformed officer exiting the patrol division’s large communal office area on the left.

“Joe, you got a sec?”

I took my hand off the doorknob. “Sure. What’s up?”

Marshall Smith had been with us almost ten years, longer than most, and yet had maintained a newcomer’s hesitancy, as if ready to accept the first invitation to go away. “I just got back from a call at the parking lot between Bickford’s and the railroad tracks. There’s a wrinkle to it Captain Manierre thought you should hear.”

“Be my guest,” I said, twisting the doorknob.

Smith held back. I noticed then he was still dressed for the weather. “Actually, I was wondering if you had time to take a look at it now.”

I began putting my coat back on. “Why not?”

We left by the double doors at the rear of the building, which gave onto a large parking lot we shared with the State Office Building across the way.

“So what’re we going to?” I asked as we aimed for one of several white patrol cars lined up in a neat row—a highly visible symbol of police spending that never failed to catch flak at the annual town meeting.

Marshall swung in behind the wheel of one of them. “It’s an abandoned truck—a ten-wheeler dump unit.”

He started the already-warm engine and headed toward the street. The heater immediately began blowing hot air across our faces. “The manager at Bickford’s noticed it a few days ago,” he resumed. “People leave their vehicles there all the time, usually because they’re carpooling, but rarely more than overnight. And nobody leaves a truck for that long. There’s too much money wrapped up in it. They’re guessing it might’ve been there for almost a week.”

“This a company rig?” I asked as we gained speed up the Putney Road, which starts out as one of the high-class sections of town but then becomes, over the confluence of the West and Connecticut rivers, a commercial strip as uniquely Vermont as a Coca-Cola can.

“Not so you can tell. There’s nothing on the door, no papers inside the cab. Since there’re no license plates, I ran the vehicle identification number through the computer and found it was leased from Timson Long Haul outside Leverett, Mass, but the guy I talked to there wasn’t too helpful. Said he didn’t have his records handy, and that he’d have to dig around and call me back. He’s probably cooking up something bogus right now. I was doing an off-line search of the registration through NCIC, just to see what I could find, when Ron radioed in saying you were heading for the office.”