Occam's Razor (25 page)

She didn’t answer, but I could tell I’d hit home.

“I’ll admit he might’ve gone a little overboard. Tell me that’s out of character.”

“I suppose,” she grumbled.

“Now let me ask you something: In the midst of all the fireworks between you and Andy, did you really settle in your mind if he was or wasn’t connected to Conyer? Be honest here, ’cause if you have any doubts, I’d be happy to be the bad guy—finish the research and talk to him directly.”

She spoke dully. “They just hung out together. No big deal.”

I didn’t say anything. The silence stretched between us until she was forced to look up. “Would you mind?”

“Nope. It’ll probably make things even tenser at home, though. After Willy, Andy’s going to feel we’re gunning for him.”

She rubbed her forehead harshly. “Damn. It wouldn’t be an issue if he’d just been straight with me… No, you go ahead. I don’t think you’ll find anything, but it’s got to be done. If it turns out I was wrong about him, and I gave him special treatment, I’d have to quit my job. I couldn’t look anyone in the face.”

It was a little melodramatic, reflective of her youth and passion. I merely nodded and said, “Will do. Who else did you find out about yesterday? Conyer’s brother Tim said he’d been hanging out with Jamie Good and company, wanting to be around the big boys. Is that the sense you got?”

She nodded, slowly regaining speed. “Yeah, the bartender was pretty good on Conyer. Said he didn’t pull much weight. He also said that the last few times he was in, he acted different, saying he was up for a promotion. Nobody paid much attention. I called the garage he worked at. His boss just laughed at the promotion idea—said he didn’t know why he hadn’t fired Conyer long ago. His work habits were a little irregular.”

“So no tight buddies you could find?”

“Not tight like you or me might have, but he did have people he either looked up to or who looked up to him.”

“The last being younger people?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Billy’s other hangout was the teen center. The folks there thought he was obnoxious but harmless enough—basically a bad Marlon Brando imitation. I’ve got leads on a few people who might be able to tell me what Conyer was really up to. It’ll just take some time to find ’em.”

I got up. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“You going to talk to Andy now?” she asked a little nervously.

“Thought I might as well get it out of the way. I’ll try to keep it relaxed.”

She frowned. “Not on my account. Just do it right. If he can’t live with what I do for a living, I need to know that.”

“Okay.” I turned to go.

“Joe?”

I looked over my shoulder at her.

“Thanks.”

· · ·

Naughton Lumber was a huge, sprawling place—a combination of enormous long sheds and vast expanses of open ground covered with towering pillars of stacked lumber, each capped with a gray mantle of old snow. Logging trucks, eighteen-wheelers, and forklifts ambled up and down the corridors created by these structures, as did occasional groups of men, warmly dressed in clothes that had been picked at and torn by constant exposure to rough wood. The air was full of the muffled, high-pitched whine of saws and planers, mixed with the sweet tang of raw lumber.

The foreman directed me to the molding shop crew boss, who escorted me to where Andy Padgett was operating a gigantic, threatening, screaming machine. Wearing ear protectors against the din, the crew boss tapped him on the shoulder, pointed to the front of the building, and gestured to both of us to leave.

Before taking the lead, Padgett gave me a hard, appraising look.

We ended up in a snack bar of sorts, built like a parked mobile home against one of the huge shed’s walls. It was long like a diner, harshly lit with fluorescent strips, and at the moment totally empty. The walls were obviously heavily insulated, since from the moment we stepped inside, the howling behind us was instantly muffled to the level of industrial white noise.

Padgett stepped up to a bank of vending machines lining one wall, removing the earplugs from around his head. “You want something?”

I sat at a Formica-topped table. “No—all set. Thanks.”

He fed the machine with change, pushed a button, and watched as a plastic cup noisily filled with hot tea, which he then carefully brought to the table, smiling awkwardly. “Drink this stuff all winter. Damned if I know why. Never touch it the rest of the year.”

He sat opposite me and pulled off his watch cap, sprinkling his lap with a fine shower of sawdust. “Guess you’re here about Billy Conyer,” he commented.

“Yeah,” I said mildly. “I heard you knew him.”

“Sammie sic you on me?” His tone of voice was pleasant enough, but the smile accompanying it was forced.

“You did kind of sneak up on her—not letting her know.”

He busied himself with his cup for a moment, swirling its contents around before bringing it to his lips for a tentative sip. “Yeah,” he finally admitted. “Would’ve spared myself some grief if I had, I guess.” He looked at me directly. “I didn’t know the guy that well, you know. I told her that. I had a few drinks with him, listened to his bullshit. That was it. He was just another guy at the bar.”

“You couldn’t have told her that right off? Something like, ‘Holy cow, I used to drink with him’?”

“I said I messed up. I don’t see what the big deal is. You people are too damned touchy.”

“That surprise you?”

“Kunkle’s pretty surprising, you bet. She tell you what he did?”

“Yeah, and I’ll talk to him about it. He gets a little overprotective.”

His thick brows gathered in anger. “Guy’s a jerk. Everybody knows it. Makes you all look bad. I’m not too sure what he did was even legal.”

“Mr. Padgett,” I stopped him, getting a little hot myself. “What he did was make some minor inquiries. Not too surprising, given your coyness with the truth.”

He stood up abruptly. “I don’t have to take this shit. I’m not some fucking criminal, you know. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

I waved my hand at him tiredly. “Sit down. My God, why is it everybody’s got a burr up their butt today? Talk about being touchy.”

He surprised me by smiling. “Sammie run you up the flagpole, too?”

I decided to play along, if only to calm him down. “Why should I be any different?”

He resumed his seat, his pleasant demeanor back in place.

“You know,” I told him, “the only reason I’m here is because Sam felt she was too emotionally involved with you to conduct a run-of-the-mill interview herself. It’s standard procedure. If you’re too tight with a person, you switch off with someone else. That’s all that’s going on here. You happened to know Billy Conyer, and we need to find out what that amounted to.”

“Which is nothing.”

“These things are like jigsaw puzzles,” I persisted, “made up of hundreds of seemingly meaningless pieces. All I want is your one small piece.”

He finally relented. “Okay, shoot.”

“How long ago did you first meet Billy Conyer?”

“A few years. I don’t remember exactly. It was at the Dirty Dollar. And it wasn’t a big thing. I just began to notice him as a regular. I tend to drink at the bar instead of at a table. You get to hear more bullshit that way, talk about the game on the tube, meet people as they come and go for their orders. It’s more sociable.”

“And Billy did the same?”

“Off and on. He’d rotate from table to table and then wind up at the bar after everybody had told him to shove off. He was like a bug that way—always in your face, buzzing away.”

“You never told him to shove off? Sounds pretty obnoxious.”

“Nah. He was harmless. And he could tell a good joke.”

“He ever talk about himself—his family, friends, job, any big dreams?”

Padgett looked reflective and took a swig from his now cool tea. “His family. Said he’d had one brother OD, another who was a wimp, a third who walked around like a caveman. He made it funny. Job? I think he worked in a garage. I’m not sure about that.”

He paused.

“The bartender mentioned him talking about some good prospects coming his way lately,” I said.

He flicked his hand dismissively. “Oh, hell, they all talk like that. It’s the lotto or some relative dying. I never believe it. Is that why he got shot? He rob that guy the paper says he killed?”

I ignored the question. “You said he went from table to table. What was he doing?”

“Schmoozing. That’s one thing. When he did hang out with me at the bar, he’d talk a lot about who so-and-so was, and how they were connected to whatever.” He suddenly laughed. “As if it amounted to anything. I mean, shit, to be one of the high-and-mighty at the Dollar all you need to do is draw a regular welfare check.”

“Still,” I countered, “a few of them do all right. Jamie Good, for instance.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Who else?”

“Walter Freund. Jimmy Lyon hung out there whenever his wife would let him. Donnie Carter—the guy I work with. Hell, there’re a lot of ’em. But nobody’s rich. The real success stories just got jobs, like me.”

“You ever drink with Good?”

“Nah. He was a table regular. Liked to have people like Billy hanging around, making him feel special. Billy sucked up to him a lot.”

“Freund’s name keeps coming up. What’s he like?”

“Not as noisy as Good. He’s a little creepy. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with him.”

“And Owen Tharp?”

Padgett looked disgusted. “He was pathetic. Made Conyer look like a captain of industry.”

“You ever see him lash out?”

“I barely heard him speak. I couldn’t believe he knifed that woman. Are you sure you have the right guy for that? Just seems so unbelievable.”

When I didn’t answer, he looked at his watch. “I gotta get back. This going to take much longer?”

“Just a couple more,” I said. “You mentioned both Lyon and Carter. Those were two of the men you were playing poker with that night, weren’t they?”

“Yeah, them and Frankie Harris.”

“Harris didn’t frequent the Dirty Dollar?”

He hesitated a split second. “I might’ve seen him once or twice. He wasn’t a regular.” He stood up. “You said a couple. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

He moved toward the door.

“What about Brenda Croteau?” I asked. “She hung out with that crowd.”

He put his hand on the doorknob. “Could be, but I didn’t. I only saw ’em when they were drinking at the Dollar. Do me a favor, will you?”

“What’s that?”

“Tell Sammie what a good boy I was.”

I watched him leave without comment. To be honest, I had no idea what kind of boy he was.

TO A NATIVE-BORN VERMONTER,
driving across New Hampshire is a little like walking on a rival team’s playing field. It’s not an infraction of the rules, or even in bad taste, but it does feel kind of funny.

On the map, they look like mirror images of the same real estate—two similarly sized wedges fitting together to form a rough rectangle. New Hampshire has the sea, Vermont, Lake Champlain; New Hampshire’s largest towns are near Boston to the south, Vermont’s are to the north, not far from Montreal. Both pride themselves on their mountains, their maple sugar, their cows, and their sense of independence.

And both couldn’t be further apart.

The rivalry between them predates the Revolutionary War, when New Hampshire claimed sovereignty right up to the New York border, declaring present-day Vermont to be the “New Hampshire Grants.” That was actually fine with the few settlers living there, except that in 1764, King George III stuck his foot in it again by giving Vermont to New York, whose governor had taken exception to New Hampshire’s high-handedness. This allowed a very belligerent Ethan Allen—with his Green Mountain Boys and the fortunate timing of the American Revolution—to create in 1777 not just a new state but a wholly independent republic, which didn’t join the Union for another fourteen years.

Referred to colloquially as Vermont from its birth, the new republic was officially named New Connecticut, revealing how ambiguous its residents had become.

Maybe as a result of this contentious start, both New Hampshire and Vermont have forever after eyed one another like suspicious twins and made great hay about their differences.

It was hard to admit, therefore, that the actual drive across New Hampshire to Portland, Maine—where Ron had set up a meeting with the prosecutor in Reynolds’s old case—was more pleasant at this time of year than a similar trip would have been across southern Vermont. At home, the Green and Berkshire mountains link up between Brattleboro and Bennington, making passage across their backs scenic but perilous in all but good weather. New Hampshire is only gently hilly and benign at the same latitude, influenced by the seashore to the east and the Massachusetts plains to the south.

Not that we had bad weather to contend with. The whole region had settled into a routine after that one major storm, with perfectly bearable alternating periods of grayness and sparkling sun. The day Ron and I had chosen for our drive was of the blue-skied, ice-cold variety so favored by skiers and longed for by those going bonkers with cabin fever.

We didn’t discuss work at first, taking advantage of the outing to simply enjoy the scenery. Traffic was light and the roads were in good shape, so the feeling encouraged more talk of home and family than of major crimes and office squabbles. Ron had a wife and a small child, of whom he was inordinately proud. Where many male cops referred to their mates as “the wife” on a good day, Ron carried pictures in his wallet, bragged about his small family at the drop of a hat, and made no bones about the delights of going home at the end of the day.

It was a healthy tonic for me to hear him go on about such domestic bliss, and so I encouraged him until we’d passed through Concord on our way to Manchester and then due east.

At which point, making a reasonable transition, he brought up Sammie Martens.

“You think she and Andy are going to become a permanent item?” he asked hopefully.

It had been several days since my chat with Andy Padgett, and I hadn’t said a word to anyone about it. I had double-checked some of what he’d told me—speaking with the bartender Sammie had recommended, for instance—but I’d only covered the basics. I hadn’t probed deeply, both for my sake and hers, and hadn’t found reason to in any case.