Shadow of Death (28 page)

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Authors: William G. Tapply

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BOOK: Shadow of Death
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Dalton climbed back up to where the other three boys were. “No ambulance is gonna help him,” he said. “It's too late. We killed him.”
“
You
killed him,” said Oliver again.
“No,” said Albert. “He's right. We all did it. It's all of our faults.”
“Shut up,” said Dalton. “Lemme think.”
The four of them crouched there on the boulder with the snow swirling around them and Bobby Gilman's body twisted on the rocks below them, and after a few minutes, Dalton said, “Here's what we do. We tell them we were climbing the Parker Trail, and—”
“That's over the other side of the mountain,” said Mark Lyman.
“Exactly,” said Dalton Burke.
“If they go looking there—”
“Exactly,” said Dalton again. “That's the point, you idiot. We tell them we all got separated in the blizzard, and when we got to the bottom Bobby wasn't with us. That's all. Keep it simple. We waited for him to show up 'til it got dark, and then we thought about going back up there to look for him, but we decided it'd be better if we went for help. They'll go looking over there on the east side.”
“They won't find him,” said Albert.
“Exactly,” said Dalton for the third time. “They might never find him. So we make a solemn vow, okay? We stick to our story for the rest of our lives. We promise never
ever
to tell anybody what really happened.”
He held out his hand and the other three boys put their
hands over his the way they did in the huddle before going out to play a game of basketball.
“Promise?” said Dalton.
The other three nodded.
“Our secret,” Dalton said. “Forever and ever. Say it.”
“Forever and ever,” said Mark Lyman and Oliver Burlingame and Albert Stoddard.
 
 
“Wow,” I said.
Horowitz nodded. “Got another beer?”
I went inside, snagged two more bottles of Sam from the refrigerator, and brought them outside.
“Dub and Harris Goff,” I said. “They were Bobby Gilman's brothers.”
“Half brothers, actually,” said Horowitz. “Same mother, different fathers. Old Man Goff got drunk and drove his pickup into a telephone pole when Dub and Harris were little. Rebecca Goff married Andrew Gilman a year later, and a couple years after that she gave birth to Bobby. Harris and Dub both claim they liked little Bobby, did their best to protect him. He was always a small, fragile boy. The apple of his mother's eye. She spoiled him.” Horowitz took a swig of beer. “When Bobby disappeared, Rebecca shut herself in her bedroom and never came out. On Columbus Day a year to the day from when those boys climbed Mount Monadnock she swallowed a bottle of Valium. Dub and Harris were off to college when that happened. They worshiped their mother, knew she'd killed herself because of what happened to Bobby, and being the kind of men they were, they figured somebody had to be responsible for it. To men like the
Goffs, nothing just happens because it happens. They've got to have somebody to blame for everything.”
“In this case,” I said, “they were right.”
Horowitz shrugged. “It festered with them for thirty years. It wasn't what happened to Bobby that upset them so much. It was their mother killing herself. Finally they decided to do something about it. Everybody in town knew who those boys were who were with Bobby Gilman that day. So the Goffs tracked down Oliver Burlingame in Missouri and got the story out of him. Then they went to Mark Lyman and Dalton Burke and Albert Stoddard and convinced all of them to give their versions. The one I told you seems to be their best synthesis of what happened that day.”
“So they killed Burlingame and Lyman and Albert Stoddard,” I said.
“First they extorted them,” he said. “Told them they'd leave them alone and not report the story if they paid them money. They all sent monthly checks to the Goff brothers' post office box. It was a tidy income for the Goffs for a while. But they got greedy, kept demanding more. Finally Burlingame and Lyman refused to keep paying. So the Goff brothers tracked them down and killed them.”
“What about Albert Stoddard?” I said.
“Last summer when the Goffs learned that Stoddard's wife was running for senator, they put the squeeze on him, threatened to go public with the story, ruin Ellen's chances to get elected if he didn't pay them more. For a while he endorsed his biweekly paychecks and sent them to the Goffs, but he knew he couldn't do that forever. So just a couple weeks ago he decided to have it out with them. He drove up to Southwick and holed up in his old camp, hoping to make some
kind of deal. The Goffs claim they were working it out with Stoddard when Cahill showed up. Gordie already had most of the story, and there was no way they could make a deal with him. No one could make a deal with Gordon Cahill.”
“So they killed Albert in Gordie's Corolla,” I said.
“Yep,” said Horowitz. “They tried not to make any of their murders look like murder. A fishing accident, a suicide, and a car accident. They thought they were pretty clever.”
“Blowing out a tire with buckshot?” I said. “Then dousing him with gasoline? That's clever?”
“I didn't say they actually
were
clever,” said Horowitz. “Just that they thought they were. They were quite proud of what they did to Albert Stoddard. Especially the skid marks on the road and the way they made the car hit the tree.” He shrugged. “They did have us thinking it was Cahill in that Corolla, I'll give them that.”
“Has the M.E.—?”
“Not yet,” he said quickly. “They finally figured out to check his goddamn dental records.” He shook his head. “Damn sloppy all around. The M.E. All of us. Rule number one: Don't make assumptions. Just because he was in Cahill's car, had Cahill's wallet in his pocket …” Horowitz tilted up his beer bottle, drained it, and slammed it down on the table. “Sloppy,” he repeated.
“You want another one of those?” I said.
He waved the back of his hand. “Two's enough.”
“So,” I said, “who called Albert in sick at the history department? One of the Goff boys, huh?”
Horowitz nodded. “That was Harris. Guess they figured you'd stop looking for Albert if you thought he was just out sick.”
“They figured wrong.”
He smiled. “One would be tempted to observe that they aren't too bright. Except they did manage to carry off two murders without raising any suspicion.”
“Burlingame and Lyman.” I shrugged. “They killed old Farley Nelson because he'd figured out what was going on?”
“So they say,” said Horowitz. “The old guy was going to tell you the story I just told you, or something close to it. He'd figured out it was the Goff brothers, and when they confronted him, he didn't try to hide it.”
“Bastards,” I muttered. “One of them kicked me and whacked me on the top of the head when I went to Albert's camp. He poked at my balls with the muzzle of his shotgun.”
Horowitz nodded. “They mentioned that.”
“Never said a word the whole time,” I said.
He shrugged.
“So,” I said after a minute, “what was their plan for Gordie?”
He shook his head. “Dub held his leg on top of a cement block, and Harris smashed his shinbone with the back end of an axe. Then they locked him in that room in their cellar, fed him morphine pills, and let the infection fester. They were waiting until Cahill was close to dead with that busted-up leg. Then they were going to dump him in the woods out behind Stoddard's camp, let him die. They figured by the time his body was discovered, everyone would assume he'd broken his leg out in the woods and died before he could crawl out. They liked what they saw as the irony of it.”
“Sort of like what happened to Bobby Gilman,” I said.
“Sort of,” said Horowitz. “Close enough to it for Dub and Harris Goff.”
“And what about Dalton Burke?”
He smiled. “Mr. Burke has been quite cooperative. He
confirms the Goffs' story pretty much the way I told it to you, except Burke claims it was Oliver Burlingame who actually gave Bobby Gilman that fatal shove.” He shrugged. “We'll never know, really. Burke's the last living witness.”
“So why didn't the Goffs kill Burke?”
“Simple,” said Horowitz. “Dalton Burke makes a lot of money. He could afford to keep paying them. They were planning to squeeze him dry before they killed him. Saving the best for last was the way Dub put it.”
“Is Bagley going to prosecute Burke for what happened to Bobby Gilman?”
He shook his head. “Don't see how. Thirty-year-old case. No evidence, no other witnesses. Me, I've got the Albert Stoddard murder to worry about.”
“Are you worried?”
“I always worry,” said Horowitz.
T
wo weeks after I found him in the Goff brothers' cellar, I was sitting beside Gordon Cahill's hospital bed in his private room in the Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His right leg was encased in an ankle-to-hip cast. Three plastic bags hung on an aluminum rack beside him and dripped fluids through a transparent tube into an IV sticking into the back of his left hand.
His eyes looked hollow, and there were more wrinkles on his face and neck than I remembered. It looked like he'd lost a lot of weight. But there was a healthy flush on his cheeks, and he was smiling. He looked a thousand times better than the last time I'd seen him.
Donna had called me the day before and told me that Gordie had finally been moved out of the ICU. It had taken them ten or eleven days to knock down the infection. Then they operated on his leg. There would be two or three more operations, the doctors were saying. Gordie's shinbone had been splintered.
They were still weaning him off the morphine. The Goff
brothers had encouraged him to swallow as much of it as he wanted. He'd quickly become seriously addicted.
“So you're going to make it,” I said to Gordie.
“They tell me it was touch and go for a while,” he said. “They said if they'd got me a day later it might've been too late. You saved my life.”
“I was the one who got you into it in the first place,” I said. “It was the least I could do.”
He smiled. “Good point. Thanks anyway.”
I nodded. “I'm dying to know how you tracked down Albert Stoddard so fast.”
“You want me to divulge my trade secrets?”
“I promise not to tell.”
Cahill turned his head and gazed out the window. His room was on the first floor, and his window gave a pretty view over a rolling meadow to some distant hills. The low-angled afternoon sunlight played over the crimsons and golds of the autumn forests. The foliage was just at its peak. “Donna wants me to quit,” he said after a minute.
I didn't say anything.
“She told me how unhappy she is,” he said. “How she worries all the time. How she felt when Horowitz told her I was dead. How it was almost a relief.” He turned and looked at me. “She says she refuses to go through that again. She says if I go back to investigating she's going to divorce me.”
“What're you going to do?”
He shook his head.
“Sounds like a no-brainer to me,” I said.
“Yeah, you're right. It should be. Except I really love the work, you know? It's what I'm good at. It's what I do. It's what I am.”
“Is Donna serious, do you think?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “She's serious, all right.”
“So … ?”
“It was his tax returns,” said Gordie.
“Huh?”
“Stoddard. His tax returns told me how to find him.”
“Hell,” I said. “I looked at them. I didn't see a damn thing.”
“You're not a trained investigator,” said Gordie with a smile. “Albert Stoddard deducted the property taxes he paid to the town of Limerick in the state of New Hampshire on his federal income tax returns. One phone call to a chatty woman in the Limerick assessor's office told me everything I needed to know.”
“So you drove up there?”
“Yep. Found his place, saw his Volkswagen was there, took a couple photos on my digital camera. Finding Stoddard wasn't the problem. You hired me to figure out what he was up to. That's what got me in trouble.”
“What happened?”
“I came home, spent some time on the Internet, then went back up there the next day. Sunday, this was. The Volkswagen wasn't there, so I hid my car and walked in through the woods. I thought I was being careful. I thought I might find some answers inside that old camp.” He shook his head.
“The Goff brothers?”
He nodded. “They were waiting for me, as if they knew I was coming. Took me by surprise. Pointed a shotgun at me and hauled me back to their cellar. Then they busted my leg, and that's really the last thing I remember.”
“How'd you figure out the Bobby Gilman connection?” I said. “Donna gave me those printouts.”
“Something the woman at the Limerick assessor's office mentioned,” he said. “The Internet has made the PI's job almost too easy. I could've done the whole job on my computer and telephone, never left my office.”
“Maybe that's your answer,” I said.
“To what question?”
“The question of your career and your marriage.”
Cahill looked at me and cocked his head. “You mean, limit my work to sitting at a desk playing on machines?”
I shrugged. “You could hire other guys to do the legwork. Do you think Donna would go for it?”
“I've been a cop of one kind or another all my life,” he said softly. “I like the action. I like dealing with people. Good guys and bad guys both. Playing with computers isn't exactly my idea of action. The real question is, would
I
go for it?” He shook his head. “Put it this way,” he said. “The doctors wanted to amputate my leg. They said if they didn't I might die. I told them, fuck it. Without my leg I couldn't do what I do, wouldn't be who I am. Might as well die. So now I've got my leg. What good are two functional legs if you don't do legwork?”
I smiled.
“So what would you do?” he said.
“Doesn't matter what I'd do,” I said. “But if you're stupid enough to pick your job over your wife, don't expect me to handle your divorce.”
He turned his head and gazed out the window. “She's been here every day,” he said. “Don't know what I'd do without her.” He was silent for a minute. Then he looked at me and smiled. “So did you hear about the two Eskimos who were out in their kayak hunting walruses up around the Arctic Circle?”
“Gordie, damm it—”
“It was about zero degrees out there,” he said, “and they were freezing their balls off, so they decided to build a fire. You can probably figure out what happened.”
“I assume the fire burned a hole in their kayak and they sank,” I said before I could stop myself.
“You got it,” said Gordie. He arched his eyebrows at me. “And the moral of the story?”
“Here we go,” I muttered.
“You can't have your kayak,” he said, “and heat it, too.”
 
 
At eight o'clock on the evening of the first Tuesday in November, Evie and I were snuggling on the sofa in our living room, sipping red wine and watching the returns. Evie had about as much interest in politics as I had in shopping for shoes, but her favorite shows had all been preempted by election coverage.
Albert's murder had been big news, of course. A few days after they realized Gordon Cahill was alive, the M.E. officially identified Albert by his dental records. There had been considerable embarrassment about their assumption that it was Gordie's burnt body in that Toyota. Some state rep on Beacon Hill was agitating for public hearings on the incompetence—or maybe it was corruption—in the medical examiner's office.
When Ellen Stoddard heard about Albert, she held a press conference announcing that she was suspending her campaign to reconsider her situation.
Her Republican opponent, Lamarr Oakley, to his credit, did the same. Not that he had many options.
Two weeks went by, and then Ellen announced that she
had decided to continue with her candidacy. She owed it to the voters of the Commonwealth, she said. She did not mention Albert.
Bobby Gilman's story, with particular emphasis on Albert's role in it, was big news in all the papers, of course, but when they resumed politicking, both Ellen and Oakley refrained from mentioning it—which was probably a smart strategy for both of them. It was one of those no-win subjects.
Throughout the final month of the campaign, the political pundits kept trying to weigh what they called the “sympathy factor” against the “scandal factor.” As election day drew near, they declared the race for senator between Ellen Stoddard and Lamarr Oakley “too close to call.”
The pollsters kept asking voters whether Albert Stoddard's murder, and the events of thirty-odd years ago that led to it, made them “more likely” or “less likely” to vote for Ellen. “No difference” was consistently the most popular response.
Now, on election eve, they were calling it a “dead heat” and predicting it would “go down to the wire.” Most of the other popular political clichés were being tossed around, too.
Evie and I had our stockinged feet up on the coffee table. I had my arm around her, and she was resting her cheek against my shoulder. Both of us balanced our wineglasses on our chests.
Henry had sneaked up on the sofa with us. He was curled in the corner with his back pressing against my hip.
“Did you vote for her?” Evie murmured.
“Sure.”
“All along I thought I was going to,” she said. “But when it came down to it, I couldn't.”
“You voted for Oakley?”
“I left it blank.” She hesitated. “She's cold, Brady. She's calculating and ambitious.”
“Cold and calculating and ambitious aren't bad qualities for a senator to have,” I said. “Anyway, I know Ellen. She's not really that way.”
“Since when did it matter what a politician was really like?”
“You're right,” I said. “It never did matter. It's all about perception.”
Ellen waited until nearly midnight to make her appearance at her “victory party” in the Copley Plaza ballroom. Her supporters applauded long and loud when she stepped to the podium. The TV cameras panned over the crowd. Several people appeared to be crying.
Her concession speech was warm and gracious. She congratulated Lamarr Oakley and thanked him for focusing his campaign on the issues. She said she planned to return to her work for the D.A. prosecuting criminals, but she did not discount the possibility that she might run for public office again in the future. She thanked the people who had worked for her and the citizens who had voted for her.
She was smiling. She looked confident. Pretty. Sexy, even.
Nowhere in her speech did she mention Albert.
I figured Jimmy D'Ambrosio had written it.

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