Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (7 page)

For the first time, I didn’t mind being intimately involved.

Tony and I left Tyler to do a final sweep of the place and were almost back to the car when I saw Dennis DeFlorio’s grimy sedan, dust-covered and blotched with rust, nose into the driveway and grind up the hill to join us.

I waited for him, one arm crooked on the open door, my foot perched on the rocker panel, while Tony took advantage of the pause to fire up his ever-ready companion once again.

Dennis pulled alongside and heaved himself out—a round man, unhealthy in appearance, who even in a coat and tie looked somehow untucked and disheveled, an effect heightened by his pants being stuffed into the tops of a pair of laceless, ancient hunting boots. I saw Tony examining the entire package like a slightly dismayed anthropologist.

After he’d led the search of the grounds, Dennis had coordinated the neighborhood canvass, but he hadn’t actually come face-to-face with me since the start of all this and was the least successful at hiding his discomfort at my personal connection to the victim. He scratched his ear, looked at the house, the ground, the cars, and everywhere else but at me, and aside from an undirected half wave of the hand, accompanied by a muttered, “Hi, Joe,” he finally ended up addressing Brandt exclusively.

“Hi, Chief. Dispatch said you were here, so I thought I’d give you what we got so far.”

Brandt smiled and nodded, transparently amused with Dennis’s anguished pantomime. “Shoot.”

DeFlorio pulled a battered notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “It’s not a great neighborhood for this—not too many houses, and they’re pretty far apart—but so far I got a jogger goin’ by around ten, a dog barking maybe an hour later. The hottest lead is a car leaving this driveway a half hour after that—”

“That was me,” I interrupted.

Dennis pursed his lips, obviously taken aback, but then carried on, his eyes glued to the page, still ignoring my existence. His voice, however, was just a shade flatter, “—another vehicle a few hours later, and then two male voices talking in the road about half an hour before dawn.”

“Explain that last one,” Brandt said.

“It’s a little vague. I think it might’ve been two guys walking—for exercise, you know? The person who heard it said there was no sound of an engine—just two voices going by slowly, talking normally.”

“You find out who they might’ve been?”

Dennis shook his head. “But not everybody’s home. At work, you know? And if they were exercising, they could’ve come from a mile away or more. I just did the local area. I didn’t mention it, but Ms. Zigman’s car was also seen leaving her place at a little before four.”

“Anything more on the second car you mentioned?” I asked.

He finally gave me a furtive glance, as if checking to see that I hadn’t fallen to pieces. “Not too much—it might’ve been a truck, though, and technically, counting Ms. Zigman’s, it was actually the third vehicle seen. The only one who heard it was an old guy who lives about three houses down. He was going to the bathroom when it went by; saw the lights through the window. Said he could tell by the way they jiggled and were high off the road that it was either a truck with a cap on the back, or something like a Bronco, with a squared-off look to it. It was a dark color anyway—like dark blue or green, maybe.”

“He’d never seen one like it in the area before?”

Dennis was becoming more relaxed with my presence. “He might have. He said he’d have to think about it a little and get back to me. Maybe he’s got something and maybe he just likes the attention. I guess we’ll find out.”

Brandt checked his watch impatiently. “So basically, except for someone seeing Joe’s car leaving this driveway, we don’t really have anything yet.”

Dennis pursed his lips again, obviously put out. “It’s a little early—and nobody told me Joe’d been here last night. I thought I had something.”

Tony backed down. “No—you’re right—we screwed up there. Should’ve told you.”

“Dennis,” I asked him, “what time was the truck or Bronco spotted?”

He checked his notes. “About 4:15.”

That was disappointing. Gail had remembered 3:37 as the time she’d finally freed herself. “What about anything before last night? Did anyone see anything unusual over the past week or so?”

DeFlorio shook his head. “No. I asked, but all I got was the usual: postman, UPS trucks, yard men, garbage truck, normal traffic… Stuff like that.”

“The ten o’clock jogger?” Tony asked.

“Nope. There are a few regulars, but nobody running that late.”

“You know that from the runners themselves, or from people watching them?”

“Mostly people watching. I talked to one woman who jogs, but she goes out in the morning, around eight. Everyone else I interviewed was pretty old—retired. I’ll have to come back later to check on the ones who work. They’re probably the health freaks.” He made the last statement with understandable scorn, given his own physique.

I turned away and looked across the valley to the east, the distant gray mountains of New Hampshire forming an almost seamless bond with the dull sky overhead. Before this day was finished, we’d have dozens of reports like Dennis’s, involving dozens of innocent people, that would have to be checked out, from the postman to the joggers to the old guy peeing in the middle of the night. Until something or someone fit the circumstances and the time slot of Gail’s attack, we would have to cross and recross the terrain before us, looking at every detail like hyperactive bird dogs.

It wasn’t the stuff of movies—but it was the way things worked. Somewhere out there, there was evidence to be found, people who knew things maybe they didn’t even realize—all rungs on a ladder we had to build from scratch, hoping it would lead us where we wanted to go.

I HADN'T FORGOTTEN WHAT
Mary Wallis had told us about Jason Ryan. Upon returning to the Municipal Building, I went to find Billy Manierre in his well-tended cubbyhole built into a corner of the patrol officers’ room.

Billy had been with the department longer than any of us. White-haired, avuncular, and no more capable of passing the department’s physical fitness test than I would be of surviving a fall off a high cliff, he had evolved into more than the mere head of the patrol division. Over the decades, he’d achieved the rank of confessor and blue-collar guru. Always in uniform, and always even-natured—the calm in the midst of the proverbial storm—he generally held court from an office with the most used and most comfortable guest chair in the department, supposedly lifted from the new courthouse across the street.

He was sitting at a typewriter parked on the edge of his desk when I poked my head around the door. There was a form rolled onto the platen, but Billy wasn’t filling it in; he was staring at the keyboard with the stolid indifference of a frog in a pond, seemingly willing it to do his work for him.

“Not inspired?” I asked.

He sat back and smiled at me wistfully. “It’s hard doing things you don’t see any point to. Have a seat. Tell me how you’re holding up.”

“I’m all right. Focusing on the job helps.”

“And Gail?”

I sat down slowly, wondering when my answer to that would begin to hold more promise. “I don’t know. Not a hell of lot’s ever happened that we haven’t been able to talk about… sooner or later… ” I left it hanging. It hadn’t been my intention to use him as a sounding board, but stimulating that kind of impulse in people was part of Billy’s talent. When he’d been in his prime and on the street a lot more, it had made him a very good cop.

He smiled now and folded his hands across his ample belly. “Give it time. She knows you’re there. Sooner or later she’ll let it all out—not that you came here to listen to any words of wisdom from me.”

“Who knows?” I answered truthfully, “I could’ve gone elsewhere to dig up what I’m after. Don’t sell your talents short.”

He looked pleased. “So what do you need?”

“I heard Jason Ryan got a little carried away at the last selectmen’s meeting, and that they called on us to escort him out. Nothing’s in the files—you know anything about it?”

He was still for a moment, mulling it over. I knew he knew—one of the other secrets to his success was that nothing happened in the department, or the building for that matter, that he didn’t know about. The question he had to be pondering, therefore, was how much trouble this little oversight could cost one of his people.

“Problems?” he finally asked.

“Probably not. I just want to talk to whoever did the escorting. Ryan’s been presented as a suspect.”

Billy’s eyes grew round. “On the rape? Ryan? Jesus, I don’t see that.”

“Maybe not.”

He nodded solemnly. “Talk to Al Santos.”

I pushed myself out of the chair. “He out on patrol now?”

“Yeah—Maxine’ll find him.”

I moved to the doorway and looked back at him, giving in to an irresistible urge. “Why wasn’t anything filed on Ryan?”

He gave me a sorrowful face. “Oh, Joe—all that paperwork for nothing. He was just doing what he always does.”

I smiled and waved good-bye to him, crossing the officers’ room to get to Dispatch and Maxine Paroddy next door, but in fact I wasn’t all that amused. I wouldn’t have traded Billy Manierre for the best that New York or Boston or L.A. might have to offer, but I also knew that sometimes innocuous events—like Jason Ryan’s little outburst against a woman who was raped a few days later—should damned well be in a file somewhere, paperwork or not. It was always possible that a warning sign like that might be noticed before it was too late.

Maxine Paroddy—ax-handle thin and highly efficient—was perched on her rolling secretary’s stool, gliding across the dispatch room’s polished floor to answer the radio, a phone nestled in the crook of her neck. She acknowledged the short message on her microphone, gave me a wink and a be-with-you-in-a-second gesture. Then she rolled back across the room, pulled a file from a drawer, and read from its contents into the phone, all with the grace of a dancer.

“What’s up?” she asked, after she’d hung up. You did not sit down to chat with Maxine. It was a waste of her time.

“Al Santos?”

She gave me a quick smile and pointed to the radio. “That was him checking in. He should be pulling into the parking lot right about now.”

Santos was our New York City Police Department transplant, on the payroll for years by now but still boasting a trenchant Bronx accent and a big-city union man’s ingrained prejudice that rank, like class, should have strictly defined boundaries. I didn’t give him the chance to get out of his cruiser once he’d cut the engine, but slid into the passenger seat next to him.

“Hey, Lieutenant. How’s it goin’?” His grin looked disarmingly bright beneath his thick black mustache, but his eyes watched me carefully. “I was sorry to hear about your girlfriend.”

I didn’t bother responding, both because I was tiring of it and because I knew he didn’t much care one way or the other. While we’d always been cordial to one another and had never crossed swords, his approach to me over the years had made it clear I was a “suit” first and foremost, and where he came from, suits were annoying, baffling, highly capricious creatures.

“I heard you threw Jason Ryan out of a selectmen’s meeting the other day.”

Santos chuckled easily, his eyes unchanged. “Yeah—and he was somethin’ pissed about it, too. Kept bitching about his constitutional rights; called me a Nazi.” His voice darkened suddenly, the suspicion briefly rising within view. “He suing us or somethin’?”

“Not that I know of. What was he so worked up about?”

He relaxed slightly, one potential bomb defused. “Dunno—they just called me once they got sick of him.”

“Was he angry at anyone in particular?”

Santos thought back a moment, and then he looked at me with his eyes wide, abruptly comprehending. “Holy shit—he was laying it on your old lady pretty… I mean, he was real mad at Gail Zigman. You thinking he did it to her?”

“I don’t know, Al. I’m just fishing around. What did you actually hear him say?”

He looked at me silently for a moment, and I was surprised by the renewed look of distaste on his face. It occurred to me that something in my tone had pushed one of his rank-conscious buttons—as if I were looking for answers without divulging my reasons—a typical “suit” stunt.

“You know the mouth he has on him,” he finally replied evenly.

I was impressed how irritated I was by that answer, and his attitude in general. I expected better from a fellow officer, especially during a major investigation, and the passing references to “girlfriend” and “old lady” returned to me with less innocence.

“Did he say anything threatening, either in their presence or when you were alone with him?”

“Nothing he hasn’t said before—called her a ‘flatlander dyke,’ and said the board was pussy-whipped.” He hesitated, perhaps worried that he’d overplayed his nonchalance, and tried for a shortcut, “Well, you know.”

I smiled good-naturedly, disguising my growing anger. “Yeah—nothing new there. And I suppose Gail handed it right back to him?”

He took my reaction at face value and smiled back. “Hey—you know how it gets sometimes.”

It was a neutral enough response, but I had my suspicions. My interest in Ryan temporarily faded. “Give a woman a title and a gavel, right?”

He rose to my expectations of him. “Yeah, right.”

“So Ryan was just blowing off steam?”

“Pretty much; I mean, he was disrupting the place. They did right to call me.”

“But what he was saying didn’t amount to much—in your book?”

“Not really.” Santos stole a glance at his watch.

“Just out of curiosity, did he suggest taking her down a few pegs while you were escorting him outside?”

Santos shifted slightly in his seat, perhaps sensing something unusual in my persistence. “Don’t take this personally, Lieutenant, but he did say something about a good fuck setting her right.”

I could feel the pressure building on my temples, but I kept my voice level. “You didn’t fill out a report on it, did you?”

“Didn’t see the point,” he admitted. I turned to face him, feeling free at last to vent some of my rage.