The Catch (28 page)

Instead, although watched over by several tucked-away
people with guns, all that appeared at the suspect’s house two mornings after Willy’s revelation were Joe and Willy himself. And Joe was there only as company.

But the plan proved well thought out. On a bright and sunny morning, with the sounds of summer building with the heat, Willy rang the bell, the door opened up, and Shirley Sherman stepped out before them, a dish towel in her hands.

Her expression settled between pleasure and calculation upon recognizing Willy.

“You’re back,” she said neutrally.

“Hey, Shirley,” Willy greeted her. “This is my boss, Joe Gunther.”

Joe nodded wordlessly. Shirley stayed rooted in place.

“We put it together,” Willy continued. “We got you on Brian’s cruiser tape, and we’re gonna match the bullet to your.45.”

She lifted her chin half an inch, as if warding off the slightest of long expected blows. “I was kind of hoping it would be you.”

She glanced over their shoulders, as if surprised to see only the driveway and the fields across the road. She raised her eyebrows slightly. “You want to come in?”

“Sure.”

She walked stiffly ahead of them, turning as Joe closed the door after issuing a quick thumbs-up to those covertly watching from outside. Both he and Willy were wired for sound.

“You want coffee?” she asked.

Willy hesitated, but Joe wanted her sitting down as soon as possible. “We’re good, thanks.” He made a
sweeping gesture with his hand toward the assembled living-room chairs. “Be all right to talk here?”

She shrugged and chose a fake antique ladder-back near the fireplace. Paranoid about anything going wrong at this late stage, Joe scanned the area near her for any potential weapons. There were none. He and Willy perched on the edge of armchairs, roughly to either side of her.

“Shirley,” Joe began, “I’ve got to advise you that you don’t have to talk to us, if you don’t want to.”

But she’d already held up a hand in protest. “Don’t worry about that. I know what I did. I can live with the consequences.”

“So you did kill Brian Sleuter?” Willy asked formally.

“Yes,” she answered, and then dropped her gaze to the rug. “I was driving home when I saw his blue lights. I didn’t know it was him at first, of course. But I recognized him as I passed by. That’s when it grabbed me.”

In the following silence Joe asked, “The urge to kill him?”

She nodded. “I had the Colt with me. Don’t know why—threw it in the car at the last minute. I do that sometimes, just for what-the-hell. Never know when you might see something to plink at.”

“You didn’t know he’d be on that road, on patrol?” Willy suggested.

“I knew he was out. I didn’t know where. And I wasn’t looking for him. I was driving back from Middlebury. I’d been at a bar down there.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Just seeing him. Something snapped. I didn’t even think much about it.
I parked over the rise, walked back with the gun, popped him where he sat, and left.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. Didn’t even look at who was in the other car. I didn’t care.” She looked up at Joe. “I couldn’t believe it when the papers started talking about drug runners and all the rest. That was all pure dumb luck.”

“Why did you do it, Shirley?” Willy asked.

For the first time since he’d first met her, Willy thought she looked not only her age but older—almost hollowed out.

“I know it sounds weird,” she said. “But Bri and I always kind of connected, in our funny way. I should’ve hated the guy, the way he treated Kathleen, but …” Her voice trailed off.

“You were lovers?” Joe suggested.

She tilted her head to one side. “I never liked that word. Sounds phony.”

“Still,” he pressed.

“Yeah—whatever.”

“Anyhow, you had a fight?” Willy filled in.

She laughed bitterly. “He dumped me, is more like it. I knew he would. I mean, look at me.” She placed her hands on her round thighs.

She gazed at each of them in turn before adding, “I’m not an idiot. I know what this is. But you don’t know what he said to me. I hated him more for that than for what he did. He was just a man—they’re all shitbags. But Bri was a mean man.”

Wantastiquet Mountain is in New Hampshire, right across the Connecticut River from downtown Brattleboro. It is of classic rounded, ancient New England
dimensions—and provides a backdrop for the town as tangible as the place’s own history. It is also a favorite place for hardy hikers to climb, in order to look back and enjoy a view like that from a low-flying plane.

Joe was sitting on a large rock near the summit, but without eyes for the untidy urban sprawl below him. Instead, he was looking at Lyn, also adorning a rock, about ten feet away and slightly downhill so that he couldn’t quite see her face. She was perched there like a slim schoolgirl, hugging her knees, and—he knew—not enjoying the view, either.

He had just finished telling her of what he’d found in Maine or, worse, what he hadn’t. She’d taken the news quietly, numbness quickly replacing shock, and then had asked for a little privacy in order to gather her thoughts.

He wished her well there. Years earlier, she, like so many others hit with a family tragedy, had been able to make her peace and move on. She’d constructed a cubbyholed chest of emotional keepsakes and then sealed off a select few of its compartments.

He knew what damage he’d just done to that structure. What he didn’t know was how she would cope with the resulting jumble.

He took his eyes off of her long enough to glance at the town that he’d called home for his entire adult life, and to which she had moved, in large part to be near him.

Two people were in jail—a woman scorned by a younger man, and Wellman Beale, for some minor drug charges cobbled together because he couldn’t be touched for a double homicide. The others—Luis Grega and
Alan Budney—remained enigmatic, because they either were lying low or were perhaps pinned down by weights at the bottom of the ocean.

A little justice, hampered by limitations, had been erratically meted out—by pure luck, by paltry legal finesse, or by vicious Darwinian selection.

The rest of it would have to wait, to fester with time, threatening to bring havoc at any moment.

Joe returned to watching Lyn, waiting for any sign to which he could helpfully respond, fearing—given his growing love for her and the nagging weariness dogging his meditations—that he might be left hanging for a very long time.

He could only trust that the wait would reward them both.

Here’s an excerpt from Archer Mayor’s next novel,
The Price of Malice
—available soon in hardcover from Minotaur Books!

Willy Kunkle gently removed his one functional hand from the bare back of the woman stretched out beside him and reached for the softly buzzing cell phone on the night table. Unlike Sammie Martens—the woman in question—Willy had been termed a “vigilant sleeper,” which sounded like psychobabble to him. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him that he slept like shit.

“What?” he asked in a muted growl, noticing the first pale hint of dawn against the window shade.

“That you, Willy?”

It was Ron Klesczewski, Brattleboro, Vermont’s chief of detectives, an old colleague of Willy’s before he and Sam had left the PD to join the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, a new, state-wide, major crimes unit. As far as Willy was concerned, Ron was a perfect example of the Peter Principle. Way too touchy-feely for Willy’s taste, he’d never have landed the top job if the rest of them hadn’t jumped ship.

“Jesus, Ron. Who do you think it is? You called me.”

Ron laughed, unfazed. “I’m just used to you yelling into the phone. You sound downright demure.”

Willy rolled his eyes, as much at the word choice as at Sam’s stirring from all the noise.

“What the hell do you want?”

“You’re the VBI on call, according to your dispatch,” Ron explained brightly, “and I got something for you.”

“You lock your keys in the car again?”

Klesczewski ignored him, slowly enunciating, “Homicide.”

Willy smiled abruptly, his mood improved as if by the flick of a switch. “Say that again for what’s-her-name.”

Ron repeated himself as Willy dangled the phone just above Sammie’s exposed ear. He was rewarded as her eyes opened wide and she sat up in one fluid motion.

“Who is that?” she mouthed silently.

“Your buddy Ron,” Willy said, bringing the phone back to his mouth. “Throwing us a local, at last. What is it, in under a thousand words?” Willy asked Klesczewski.

“Single white male, done in with a knife; unknown assailant,” Ron responded, his smile almost audible. He then gave the exact address on Manor Court, off of Canal, between Clark Street and Homestead—a hard-luck neighborhood a stone’s throw from downtown. He hung up without further ceremony, having given Willy only precisely what he’d requested.

Willy laughed and closed the phone. “That boy’s growing balls.”

Sam was already across the room, getting dressed. “A minor miracle, given how much you bust ’em.”

The name, Manor Court, sounded like a mass-produced, nineteen-seventies, Northeastern development, in the
way that Flamingo Estates brought to mind a Florida flophouse of fifty squirrel-sized apartments. In fact, it was not a development, or a court, and hadn’t been touched by a builder’s level in 150 years. It was a residual holdover of Brattleboro’s nineteenth-century industrial past, when the town cranked out everything from parlor organs to baby carriages and had neighborhoods so clearly class-divided, it felt like some residents required passports for travel.

Manor Court had once been an open-ended street, which, as with some rivers, implied a sense of cleansing circulation. But subsequent traffic engineering had turned it into a J-shaped dead-end, a tidal pool of sorts, located in a section of town relatively downtrodden to this day. The dominant architecture was both the famed working-class “triple decker” so much in evidence in a hundred other soot-stained, reinvented, ancient New England towns, and a less definable, two-and-a half story structure—often clad in scalloped, gray, pressed board siding—whose sole distinguishable attribute was that it didn’t look like anything more than a roof over four walls of marginal integrity.

The address Ron Klesczewski had offered was one of the former—and therefore of modest historical merit—minus any grace notes of subsequent care or maintenance. In fact, as Willy swung out of the car he and Sammie shared to get there, he wondered if the electrical and phone lines looping in from the nearby utility pole weren’t the only modern amenities added over the prior seventy-five years.

Including the paint on the walls.

“You ever been here?” he asked his partner.

Sam was reaching into the back seat to grab a canvas shoulder bag she favored for crime scene investigations. “Seems like our kind of place, but I don’t know for sure.”

Willy was standing by the car, studying the structure in the slowly growing dawn. It was peeling, sagging, and gaping where stair and balcony railings had vanished over time. His left hand, as always, was stuffed into his pants pocket—the useless tail end of an arm crippled years ago by a rifle round received in the line of duty. His powerful right hand remained empty. No extra equipment for him, not at this early stage.

“A hanging—about eight years ago.”

Sammie pulled her head out of the car. “What?”

“A hanging,” he repeated. “That’s it. About eight years ago. That’s how I know this dump.”

She smiled, if just barely. Trust him to remember that—and almost everything else, in fact, except the everyday rules of social conduct. In that way, he reminded her of an idiot-savant who could play the concert piano, but not read a comic book. The man was a dinosaur, an old-fashioned, old-school cop, a black-and-white man in a colorful world. She loved him for that, among other quirks.

She adjusted her bag and motioned across the street. “Shall we?”

There were already two PD cruisers parked by the curb, along with an unmarked Impala that should have had “cop” stamped on both doors. A couple of patrolmen were stringing crime-scene tape around the building, and a third was loitering by the entrance at the top of the rickety porch steps, clipboard in hand.

A broad smile creased his weather-beaten face as he caught sight of them approaching.

“Oh, oh—watch out. It’s the cavalry.”

The two of them spoke simultaneously, Sam saying, “Hey, Zippo. How you been?” while Willy responded, “It’s the brain trust, asshole, come to save your butt again.”

Zippo just laughed, knowing them both well. “Beauty and the Beast. God help us.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and applied pen to clipboard as he spoke. “Second floor, apartment three.”

They filed by, into the fetid embrace of the dark, malodorous first-floor lobby, stifling even at this early hour. Summer had kicked in at last, following a winter of more snowfall than the region had seen in years. Typically, it had taken barely a week for everyone to switch from enjoying the warmth to complaining about the heat. New Englanders tend to be hardier in the cold than they are in its absence, making Florida as the terminus for so many of them conceptually rational only because of its universal air-conditioning.

“Jesus,” Willy groaned. As Sam well knew, the man—despite his marginal manners—was a neat-freak at heart, and while he spent most of his time working in these environments, his soul quailed at the squalor.

At the second-floor landing, they were met by a poster boy for the average American male Caucasian.

Sammie walked up to him and gave him a hug. “Ron, it’s great to see you. How’s the family?”

Ron nodded to Willy over her shoulder. “Hi, guys. Everybody’s great. How’re you doin’, Willy?”

Willy frowned and glanced at the open door of the nearby apartment. “I’m doin’. This the place?”

Ron broke from Sam and bowed slightly at the waist in mock homage. “It is. We’ve staged down the hall, there. You can get a Tyvek suit and booties and the rest from Phil. I also called the crime lab. Their ETA is maybe another two hours.”