Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (18 page)

She finally managed to mutter, “Joe.”

“I know you’re busy. I just wanted to wish you luck and tell you I’ll be out there. I’ll get out of your hair now.” I waved awkwardly, turned, and bumped into Susan Raffner, who’d seen enough to understand what had happened.

She grabbed my arm and gestured to Gail, who was only slowly recovering her composure. “Why don’t you both take five in my office? I’ll sort things out here. I think we’re in pretty good shape—not to worry.”

She ushered us both out and down a short hallway, steering us into a large, comfortable corner room filled with bookshelves, overstuffed furniture, and an enormous, cluttered antique desk. She closed the door behind her, leaving us alone.

Instinctively, I reached for Gail’s elbow, startling her and making her pull away. “I’m sorry. I should’ve called or given you some warning. I just wanted to see you, to wish you good luck tonight—let you know I was here… ”

She held up her hand, shaking her head. “It’s okay. You just caught me by surprise. I hoped you’d come by—I guess I thought it would be earlier, and then I forgot all about it.”

She looked at my face and half smiled, moving closer and taking my hand in hers. “I didn’t mean to flip out on you. I feel a little like a juggler on center stage… I just lost my concentration for a second.”

Her voice was still taut, but at least the cause of her tension was no longer me. She was one of the strongest women I’d ever met, but I knew—and I half suspected she did, too—that in the long run she was going to have to let down her defenses, allow the pain and the anger and the loss to flush through her, and then rebuild herself from the inside out.

But that wasn’t now. This time she needed all the stamina she could muster.

Still, I felt bound to ask if she was thinking ahead. This was someone, after all, who was fully aware of how deep rape cuts the soul, even before she’d experienced it personally. “You sure you want to do this? So soon after?”

She gave a lopsided smile and shook her head. “I’d really like to escape to a deserted island for a few months.”

“That could be arranged,” I said quickly. She turned and settled into the huge, soft armchair near the window, looking exhausted. Again, she shook her head, but with no smile this time. “I can’t, Joe. I need to stick this out.”

We’d debated her beliefs too often for me not to understand what she meant. In her view, leaving town, even though wounded, would be to concede to her attacker, abandoning the very principles in which she and her colleagues put their faith. Besides, the die was already cast.

All of which left me with few options. “Would you like to know how the investigation’s going?” She didn’t react at first and then answered slowly, almost shyly.

“Do you have a suspect?”

“We’re looking at someone. He doesn’t know it yet.”

“Someone I know?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

Her eyes widened. “It could be a stranger?”

“Possibly. If this is the guy, that’s how he’s worked before.” I probably should have tried Vogel’s name out on her, but something told me she didn’t want to know—not yet.

She nodded, studying the floor. After a few moments, she pushed herself slowly and awkwardly out of the chair, like a woman twice her age, and came to me. “Thank you—that did help.”

“One question?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Are you on the Victoria’s Secret mailing list?”

She actually laughed then and looked slightly embarrassed. “I didn’t ask for it. It was sort of an inside joke—feminist black humor. You found a copy at the house?”

I nodded and lied. “Yeah—it seemed a little out of character.”

She touched my cheek then, and I was careful not to react beyond smiling.

“Thanks for being there, Joe.”

I nodded. “Good luck tonight.”

“Where’re you going to be?”

“In the background.”

She nodded wistfully, and as she turned toward the door, her face became more composed, a little harder—a face for the outside world. She smiled at me one last time as she left the room. “I like the eau-de-Vicks, by the way—very subtle.”

· · ·

Two hours later I was standing in front of the darkened Municipal Building, high on the slope overlooking where Main Street split in two at the tip of the courthouse lawn like the water before a ship’s bow. Heightening the image, a long, wide, undulating stream of flickering candlelight slowly flowed down Main from the south, breaking before and surrounding the building like phosphorescence, a credit to Gail’s dramatic flair.

I crossed the steep lawn diagonally, seeing that Gail, Susan, and the other leaders of the march had opted for the route closer to where I was. I joined the crowd at the curb.

Illuminated as they were by the gentle flickering of their hand-held candles, the women seemed both serene and somehow otherworldly, like harbingers of some truth only they fully comprehended. Certainly some of the people watching them were at a loss. As Gail drew near to us, her face upheld and her long hair loose and flowing down her back, I found myself next to two young men dressed in jeans, work boots, and denim jackets. They’d been chatting quietly together before I arrived, their hands buried in their pockets against the evening chill. The three of us—I standing slightly back of the other two—watched those women, united in a common cause, making a statement all the more powerful for its silent and symbolic eloquence.

One of the young men leaned toward the other slightly. “Is that the one that was raped?” he asked quietly.

His companion muttered, as if muted in awe. “Yeah. Third from the left.”

“Pretty,” whispered the first, “I’d fuck her in a minute.”

· · ·

Bob Vogel’s station wagon was a twisted, rusting, spring-shot heap, the standard ornament on a run-of-the mill backwoods Vermont lawn, and reminiscent of his next-door neighbor’s. Except it was parked in the Jamaica lot of New England Wood Products, where Vogel worked the four-to-midnight shift.

Willy Kunkle and I were in my car far to the rear of the lot, beyond the reach of the anemic floodlights attached to the distant warehouse’s corrugated walls. We were completely wrapped in a couple of thick wool blankets I kept stashed in my trunk for just such occasions. It was 11:45, and I was having serious problems keeping awake, even with the cold. Willy was snoring peacefully, wedged in the corner, looking utterly content.

For me, unlike for Gail and her colleagues, the parade had been a melancholy affair. They had been pleased by the attendance, the coverage—by several outside papers and radio stations, and even WNET-TV from White River—and by the overall tone of the evening. Among other luminaries, Jack Derby—Dunn’s opponent in the SA’s race—made a speech, suitably brief and stirring, which hit home all the more by highlighting Dunn’s absence.

Afterward, there’d been a song or two sung by the crowd, and then, on cue, all the candles but Gail’s had been extinguished—over three hundred all at once—and Gail had quietly placed hers on the steps of the courthouse. It had been both theatrical and magical and had left many of the spectators wiping their eyes.

And yet I had left feeling depressed, the voices of those two young men still echoing in my ears, enhanced by several other comments I’d heard in the crowd. Gail and her supporters had their cause to rally around and their enthusiasm to maintain their faith. I just had a thorough working street knowledge of the odds stacked against them.

Naturally enough, Gail had been unapproachable following the rally. Flushed by their perceived success, her supporters had surrounded her like an enveloping cocoon and had virtually carried her away to Susan’s house to celebrate. Stimulated as they were—or, perhaps, depressed as I was—I felt they were ignoring the look in her eyes, which I saw only from afar as she was whisked by. She appeared wrung out and haunted. I hoped Susan would find time to focus on her friend, and not get swept up in the fervor of making a well-timed political point.

It was in this bitter mood that I decided to personally step up the investigation of Bob Vogel—starting that night.

Willy Kunkle stirred next to me, peered at the watch on his right wrist, and let out an exaggerated sigh. “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? This schlunk is going to get in his car, drive home, and hit the sack, leaving us with bupkis.”

I checked my own watch—just a couple of minutes shy of midnight. “Maybe. You’re getting overtime.”

He grumpily buried himself slightly deeper into his blanket. “That’s no shit.”

A flow of people began spreading out over the surface of the parking lot from a small door in the building’s side, to be absorbed here and there by dozens of cars. Vogel’s heap remained ignored for some ten minutes before a narrow shape, otherwise indistinguishable from this distance, finally hesitated by its side, worked the lock, and then settled inside. A black, oily cloud erupted from the station wagon’s tail pipe and drifted over the rest of the car on a gentle breeze, making the subsequent appearance of head-and taillights look like the distant glimmerings of a lighthouse on a foggy night.

“Jesus,” Willy muttered, “couldn’t we bust him on that alone?”

I waited for the car to make its way to the lot’s entrance before I started my own engine and followed discreetly. There was enough traffic around that I wasn’t overly concerned about being spotted, but we were a long way from West Brattleboro, and I didn’t want Vogel to get a fix on my headlights too early.

Jamaica is located near the Stratton Mountain ski resort, a couple of state parks, and a scenic reservoir, all of which make it a magnet for “seasonal visitors,” in chamber-of-commerce parlance—“flatlanders” to the locals so dependent on their money. As a result, the road passing through it, Route 30, is wide and well maintained—a quick and pleasant way to meander through several quaint villages on a forty-five-minute trip to Brattleboro. It was anticipating this trip that we eventually pulled out onto Route 30 and headed southeast, a good half mile and several cars behind Bob Vogel’s belching, poisonous, but fast-moving vehicle, easily identifiable even at this distance because of its mismatched taillights, one of which had been made vaguely legal by covering a bare white bulb with pink-tinted cellophane.

We hadn’t gone more than a mile, however, to the center of Jamaica village itself, before our travel plans were abruptly revised.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Willy asked as Vogel turned right off of Route 30 and then almost immediately left at a fork in the road.

I slowed down at the corner and waited until the taillights ahead were over the crest of the hill he’d taken. “Beats me—that goes to Wardsboro.”

Willy’s voice became peevish as he realized that his hopes of a quick trip back to Vogel’s place were about to be thwarted. “I know that, but if he took Route 100 farther down, it would take him half the time.”

“Maybe he plans to stop along the way.” My interest, unlike Kunkle’s, had suddenly sharpened, dissipating my earlier fatigue. “Who do we know around here?”

Willy hesitated a moment, grasping the gist of my question. “How ’bout Freddie Gibbons?”

I shook my head. “I think he moved to New Hampshire. Besides, he was a car thief.”

“Well, if anyone needs a car, this guy does.”

We continued in silence for a while, keeping far enough back to catch only occasional glimpses of our quarry. After a quarter of an hour, the first houses of Wardsboro village slid by on either side of us, quickly joined by the church, the town hall, and a typical New England group of white-sided, green-shuttered homes. Willy muttered, “Better close up—Route 100 is just ahead.”

I sped up slightly, saw Vogel slow down at the stop sign, and then watched him turn left. “He’s going the wrong direction, back north toward Route 30.”

Now Willy’s curiosity matched my own. “Did we miss something? A drop-off, maybe?”

I shrugged. “It’s possible.”

A few hundred feet beyond, Vogel veered right off of Route 100, crossed a bridge, and headed for Newfane, five or six miles farther along. At that point, nervous that even infrequent glimpses of us in his rearview mirror might tip him off—especially along this much more isolated dirt road—I killed my headlights and drove by moonlight alone.

This proved easier in theory than in fact. The moon was not full, the sky smeared with occasional clouds, and the air thick with the dust kicked up by the car ahead of us. Both Willy and I ended sitting bolt upright in our seats, craning forward in a futile effort to better see into the gloom, all while traveling at the breakneck speed set by our unsuspecting target. Several times I had to swerve at the last moment to avoid the ditch, and once, despite Willy’s last-second warning, I ran over something large and furry which made me break into a thirty-foot skid that almost put us into a tree.

We both knew this road ended up turning back into pavement above Newfane village, where thicker traffic would allow us to turn on the headlights and stop driving like two suicidal blind men, so our disappointment was keen—and in Willy’s case vocal—when Vogel turned right onto Grout Pond Road, thwarting our hoped-for relief.

“What’s that stupid son-of-a-bitch doing? We’re going to get killed because this dumb bastard doesn’t know where the hell he is.”

But I was beginning to see a pattern. “He’s avoiding the village—and Route 30 again.”

Kunkle grabbed the dashboard as I half slid off the road on a curve, my rear wheels spattering gravel as they groped for some traction. “Why? He doesn’t have any warrants.”

“The car must be uninspected. If he gets caught while he’s on probation, he could get his ticket punched—at least I think that’s what he’s afraid of. And at the speed he’s going, I’d guess he takes this route every night—looks like he knows every curve by heart.” We both hit our heads against the roof as I lurched over a half-buried boulder.

Whatever his reasons, Bob Vogel was wending his way home, by as straight a route as such linked dirt roads as Hobby Hill, Baker Brook, and Sunset Lake would allow. By the time we finally reached Route 9 in West Brattleboro and unobtrusively merged our headlights with those of the steady trickle of late-night traffic, the effects of a smooth road and clear vision were almost anticlimactic. We were so tired from trying to keep the car on level ground through sheer will power alone that we barely noticed such effort was no longer necessary.