Occam's Razor (19 page)

I nodded deeply in her direction in a mock salute. “I should never have thought otherwise. And I’m sure you’ll knock ’em dead.”

But I had my concerns, both real and imagined.

LEVERETT, MASSACHUSETTS, IS BETWEEN AMHERST
and the Vermont border on one axis, and Interstate 91 and the Quabbin Reservoir on the other, which puts it neither in a popular recreational area nor along the highway’s heavily commercial corridor. Once home to the largest general store in the county—a hundred and fifty years ago—Leverett township covers some twenty square miles and contains four minute villages, almost no businesses at all, and just under two thousand commuters, retired hippies, stay-at-home workers, and a few retirees.

As Peter Manning had mentioned at the intel meeting the week before, it was an odd place to headquarter a trucking company.

Manning was with me now, riding shotgun as he’d promised he would, but outfitted in his absurdly resplendent state police uniform, complete with shiny black riding boots, peaked cap, and patent leather Sam Browne belt. If we’d been in his cruiser, I would have felt like a refugee being escorted out of the country. Since I was driving my car, however, it looked more like I’d kidnapped the lion tamer from a circus act.

The six-foot-four Manning obviously picked up on my quick fashion appraisal. He cast me a sideward glance as I negotiated the narrow, snowbanked roads leading into the heart of Leverett, and smiled. “I’m hoping,” he explained, “that the guy we’re about to visit shows more respect for the uniform than he has for anyone wearing it.”

“You shouldn’t have any problems, then. Who is he, anyway?”

“Charlie Timson. He’s actually a pretty good guy, for a sleazeball. Twenty or thirty years ago, he probably would’ve been just another good ol’ boy, playing cards with the sheriff every Saturday night. But what with trucking regs, insurance rates, and environmental laws, he either had to move to a more urban area or follow the line of least resistance.”

“You made it sound worse at the intel meeting,” I commented.

“It’s not good.” Manning sighed. “But we’ve just gotten used to it. No one’s as innocent as they used to be. This part of the state was once like Vermont. Not much of Boston’s shit ever reached us. Now we’re ankle-deep in it, and it’s getting deeper fast. Springfield’s where Boston used to be, and Holyoke, Northampton, Pittsfield, and the rest are all going down the tubes.” He waved a hand at the passing trees outside. “I mean, look around. This is Leverett, for Christ’s sake. The only income is from property taxes. And here we are, looking for a bad guy.”

He suddenly turned to look at me. “You ever been down here?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Old hippies on the north side, Amherst commuters to the south, divided by a row of hills. That’s Leverett in a nutshell.” He pointed ahead. “You want to take a left here.”

The roads were twisting and hemmed in by dense forest. Leverett seemed like a total wilderness.

“Timson operates just north of Rattlesnake Gutter. The Gutter’s like a deep ravine between two mountains, except there’s no stream bed. Nothing. I heard that fourteen thousand years ago, when the last ice age was wrapping up, hundreds of square miles of glacier water were backed up just north of here looking for a way out. It finally broke through and formed a miniature Grand Canyon. But when it was over, all that was left was a river chasm with no river—a gutter. Neat, huh?”

I smiled at his contagious enthusiasm. “We going to see it?” I asked.

But he shook his head sadly. “There’s a road down the middle of it, but they don’t clear it during winter. Probably worried some plow operator’ll take the Nestea plunge off one of the cliffs. Too bad we had that storm, or I could’ve showed it to you. Slow down here. Timson’s place is right around the corner.”

We came upon an old, rusting, corrugated building laden with snow, its dooryard haphazardly plowed so that only one of three truck bays was cleared. The place looked abandoned, with no vehicles or people in sight. I parked uncertainly near a snowbank and killed the engine.

“You sure he’s here?” I asked Manning. He opened his door to a blast of arctic air. “Oh, yeah. He holes up inside like a hibernating bear.”

I was only half out of the car when the bear in question appeared through a small door cut into the building’s side, dressed in an oil-smeared parka randomly hemmed with frayed duct tape. He looked like a creation gone missing somewhere between Jack London and John Steinbeck.

Charlie Timson was short, round, broad-shouldered, and stamped by a life of hard, rough work. But he was also graced by the thin polish of a working-class entrepreneur. The resentment I saw in his blunt face as he appraised Peter was almost instantly masked by the broad smile and proffered handshake of a man who had only slowly come to appreciate the advantages of a feigned friendly greeting over an extended middle finger.

“What can I do for you?” he asked in a consciously neutral voice. Peter and I had earlier decided that I’d take the lead, leaving him to play the implied muscle.

“Charlie Timson? I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, of the Brattleboro Police Department. This is Sergeant Peter Manning. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions.”

His small, careful eyes widened slightly. “Brattleboro? Haven’t been up there in a while.” He made no move to invite us inside, no doubt hoping to keep things short.

“This actually concerns one of your trucks.”

He acted out a lapse of memory, scratching his head. “Oh, right—the ten-wheeler. What a pain in the ass.”

“It may be a little more than that. You mind if we step inside?”

He checked his watch and sighed irritably. “I don’t have much time. You know I’m not responsible for whatever people do with those trucks, right? It’s in the lease. I don’t know anything about what happened up there, except that until I get it back, I’m out one truck. I told that to whoever called me from your office.”

“Things have developed since then,” I explained.

That was Manning’s unspecified cue. As Timson opened his mouth, presumably to stave us off in another way, Peter stepped up next to me, towering over both of us, and stared down at him. “Cut the crap, Charlie. It’s a murder now.”

Nothing came out of Timson’s open mouth for a moment. When it did, it had no punch left to it. “I’m not involved in that.”

“Then invite us in,” I suggested.

Without another word, he turned on his heel and led the way into the ramshackle building.

The interior was a huge metal cavern—dark, echoing, and inhabited by the enormous shadows of an assortment of trucks, backhoes, and service equipment. Parked against one wall, a trailer was incongruously perched on its wheels, as if ready for instant flight, its windows providing the only light.

The building was almost as cold as outside.

“Not doing much work these days?” Peter asked Timson’s back.

Marching toward the trailer, Timson didn’t bother turning to look at him. “I do just fine.”

The office beyond the trailer’s flimsy door looked like a gang of vandals had ripped it apart. The chairs were torn and stained, the carpeting was in shreds, there were holes in the wall paneling, and paper was strewn everywhere. Timson wandered through it unaffected, heading for a battered metal desk at the far end, behind which he barricaded himself in a squealing chair. Peter and I remained standing.

Timson’s voice regained its previous strength. “So what’s this bullshit about a murder? I didn’t hear nothin’ about it.”

“The driver of your truck was killed,” I told him, “which naturally makes us a little curious about your role in the whole deal.”

His features contorted into a dark scowl, but again Manning interrupted him. “Charlie, think about what’s happening here. It’s not about poor maintenance, or sloppy records, or playing shell games with your trucks. A man’s head was crushed under a locomotive. The rig he’d been driving was loaded with haz mat, probably supplied by the Mob. I’m not saying you know anything about that, but if you don’t think we can’t use it to drag your butt in front of a judge, you’ve been living on another planet.”

“I
don’t
know anything,” he complained, spreading his arms wide. “I swear. You saw what I got in the shop. The leases I sign out sometimes don’t come back for years. The customers do the inspections, the maintenance, and everything else. I just send ’em a check, or deduct it from their lease. Somebody wants a truck, and I got a lease running out, I send ’em to where it is and do the paperwork by mail. I got something like twenty rigs out there, and
I
lease over half of those myself, for Christ’s sake. I never see any of ’em till some shit like this comes down.”

“You’ve had enough time to check your records since one of my men called you,” I said. “Who did you contract that truck out to?”

Timson shook his head. “I told you then, I don’t got it to look up. I can’t find those records. I did try—looked all over the place, but you can see what…”

His voice trailed off as Peter grasped the edge of his desk, and pivoted it to one side as if he were opening a door, exposing Timson on his creaky chair as though he were a hedgehog perched on a stool.

“What the hell’re you doing?” he asked nervously, grasping the chair’s arms.

Manning stepped into the void the desk had filled and stood so close to Timson their knees were almost touching. Timson’s head cranked far backward to look up into Manning’s face.

“You can’t do this, you know?” His voice sounded strangled.

Manning ignored him. “I thought we had an understanding, Charlie. We’re investigating a homicide, and you’re a member of the public, eager to help us do our job.” He pulled a long legal document and laid it on the other man’s lap.

“That’s a
duces tecum
warrant to search these premises for any paperwork concerning that truck. It’ll give you all the cover you need to hide from the people you’re really worried about. We were just hoping you’d spare us stripping this place of every scrap of paper in it—including all licenses and operating permits—and taking the next six months to carefully go through it, looking for what you could hand over in two minutes.”

“I’d sooner lose some money than my life,” he said.

Manning was unsympathetic. “We issue the right press release, you won’t have that choice. Your playmates don’t like messes, Charlie, and you ain’t one of the family, so to speak.”

Timson’s face darkened. “Get out of my way, asshole,” he growled at Peter, trying to summon a few shreds of self-respect.

Manning stepped back. Timson got to his feet and then surprised us by lumbering up onto his desk and reaching for one of the acoustic tiles overhead. He popped it back with his fist, groped around its edges for a moment, and retrieved a single brown manila envelope.

He handed it to me before climbing back down. “There. That’s all of it. And you found it on your own.”

Manning smiled. “You got anything else interesting up there?”

“Fuck you.”

I opened the envelope and studied its contents.

“Could you do that someplace else?” he asked peevishly. “I got things to do.”

“It says here the truck was last leased to Katahdin Trucking of Portland, Maine. Any chance that even exists?”

His answer for once sounded reasonable. “I’m supposed to know that?”

· · ·

Back in the car, Manning indicated the envelope. “That going to do you any good?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “Katahdin Trucking is probably only the second layer in God knows how many more, and I bet the deeper we dig, the harder it’ll be to find even this much.

“It’s not totally useless, though,” I added. “At least we know we’re dealing with something organized.” I paused and thought once more of Jim Reynolds’s open filing cabinet filled with old cases.

“And maybe something with history.”

· · ·

My next meeting with Jim Reynolds didn’t come at my instigation, however. Shortly after my trip to Massachusetts, I was summoned to Tony Brandt’s office.

“Run down what we’ve got on the senator,” he requested after I’d settled into one of his chairs.

“Not much yet,” I admitted. “But suspicions are growing. His name comes up every time we turn around. Somebody’s calling Katz, too, trying to link Reynolds to both illegal dumping—and by inference Phil Resnick’s death—and to Brenda Croteau.”

Brandt raised his eyebrows. “Anything to it?”

“Don’t know. It might be the same people who got us all excited about the Crown Vic—playing political hardball. I have Ron looking into Reynolds’s past, but so far he’s come up empty. I’ll keep at it, though.”

Brandt studied me a moment. “You sound like there might be something there.”

I gave him an equivocating wobble of the hand, tilting it back and forth. “It’s more like an itch I can’t reach. You heard about the one solid connection we did find between the two cases, right?”

Brandt thought a moment. “Yeah—what’s his name? The poker player who was also one of Brenda’s customers.”

“Frankie Harris. I’m just thinking that if there’s one, there could be others. After all, we still don’t know what we’re dealing with here. The Owen Tharp case looks simple enough, but with Resnick I have no idea. Three men execute a Mob-connected illegal dumper from New Jersey on the railroad tracks in the middle of the night, using a dummied-up copy of a car belonging to one of our state senators. What the hell’s that all about? And I can’t get that office break-in out of my head, either. Unfortunately, about all I’ve got are questions,” I paused a moment, watching his face. “Why do you ask?”

“Reynolds’s Judiciary Committee is about to vote out his bill—they’re taking testimony from supporters and giving it as much armor as they can before sending it out into the world. I wanted to know if we were sitting on some smoking bomb that would make that whole exercise a waste of time.”

“Not that I know of,” I answered carefully, adding, “Why would we care anyway?”

Brandt gave me an enigmatic smile. “Ah. Well, it’s not just what they’re doing in Montpelier—it’s what I’ve been asked to do for them, and where I’m hoping you’ll help me out. Reynolds is being pretty careful with this bill, despite all the ‘bold and radical’ crap in the press. For one, he made sure it was introduced by his committee and not by him alone—which gives it more clout—and now he wants to make sure the same committee gives it a dress rehearsal with as many tough questions as they can raise. Also, I think that by dragging that process out just a little, Reynolds is hoping to orchestrate it so that the other Senate committees that get to consider it won’t have much time to do so. My guess is he’s shooting to have the bill reach the House just before Town Meeting Day in March, so the speaker and his minions will get the message on the village level that the people are behind it.”