The Disposable Man (36 page)

Which was why Tony and I were now sitting in Derby’s conference room. All I could rally in my defense was a lifetime in law enforcement, a good performance record, and the hope that Vermont’s small cadre of decision makers might see their way clear to making an exception in my case. But those were slim chances. I had thumbed my nose at the court, regardless of circumstances. Even if they didn’t hit me with time, fine, or probation, I’d still be saddled with the commission of a crime. And thereby lose my career.

There’d been but one strategy left, and to his credit, Jack Derby had thought of it. Since there seemed to be no way to duck this particular legal bullet, Derby had called on the one man in the state with the power to make it simply disappear.

The door opened and Derby stepped in, accompanied by Gail. “Thought you’d like to see a friendly face,” he said, as they both sat down.

I watched them cautiously. “Do I need one?”

Derby laughed, removing any doubts. “Just so you can celebrate. The governor’ll be granting you a pardon later this week. Your record’s clean.”

I’d been preparing myself for a likely disappointment, knowing pardons were all but unheard of, especially from a tough-on-crime governor like our current one. Now I didn’t know what to say.

Derby removed the need, his own obvious glee needing further outlet. “Better still,” he added, “it also means Fred Coffin’s been handed his lunch by the same man he was ass-kissing for a judgeship. I love it when irony works in your favor. Apparently the governor’s a big fan of yours—and not so big on ambitious nitpickers.”

“Coffin’s been fired?” I asked, stunned by such a reversal of fortune.

“Oh, no, although he’ll probably wish he had been. He’s still at the AG’s, and unless he quits, nobody’ll let him forget how this turned out. Given his track record, payback’ll be terrible.”

He paused, brought up short by having flown his colors so openly. When he spoke again, it was in a much more muted tone. “Well,” he inaudibly slapped the tabletop and rose to his feet, “I’ll leave you to it. Congratulations, Joe. I couldn’t be happier for you.”

He leaned forward, shook my hand, and was gone.

Tony got up also, smiling to himself. “I didn’t realize Fred had pushed his buttons quite so hard. Interesting working in a state this small.”

He paused at the door, looking back at me. “See you tomorrow morning?” I smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Tony. I appreciate it.”

He shrugged. “I blame it all on Kunkle. He’s a bad influence on you.”

I sat still, staring at the polished tabletop after he’d left, lost in thought. Gail reached out and squeezed my hand. “How’re you doin’?”

I leaned forward and kissed her knuckles. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jack Derby’s office was on the second floor of a bank building located downtown on Main Street. When we stepped out onto the sidewalk, the evening rush hour was clogging the road. Brattleboro wasn’t designed for heavy traffic and had never figured out how to deal with it. I looked up and down the block, thinking of all I’d seen happen in this town, feeling a great sense of relief to be back on familiar ground.

“You didn’t answer,” Gail said, her hand in mine.

That I hadn’t, although less from willfulness than from simple inability. Inside, I was still as cut up and bloody as I’d felt sitting in court, listening to Coffin describe me as the frustrated, impotent, older boyfriend of a rich, indulgent woman. Self-serving name-calling by an arrogant politician, perhaps, but with elements of painful truth. Combined with everything else that had been hitting me at the time, such debasement had seemed in context. But I hadn’t been a total victim through all this. Few people truly are. Ahead of me was the task of sorting through the extent and nature of my own culpability—alone and with care. And that included scrutinizing Coffin’s portrayal of my relationship with Gail.

I gently squeezed her fingers, and led her toward the crosswalk. “I’m okay. But I’ll feel better after you treat me to a Dunkin’ Donut.” Gail came along without comment, but I felt her eyes on me as we waited for the light to turn green.

If you enjoyed
The Disposable Man
, look for
Occam’s Razor
, tenth in the Joe Gunther series.

IT WAS COLDER
without the snow, and felt darker as a result. Even with the starlight and the feeble seepage from the streetlamps around the corner, my eyes took longer to adjust than I expected.

The police officer at the bottom of the Arch Street alley looked up at me quizzically as I hesitated beside car, my hands burrowing deep inside my pockets. “You okay, Lieutenant?” He was stringing a yellow “Police Line” tape across the way.

I shuddered and nodded, walking down the paved incline, careful of its neglected, broken surface. “Sure, Bobby. Still half asleep.”

He lifted the tape to let me pass. “Know what you mean. I been on nights for a week already. Still can’t get used to it.”

He was fresh from the academy, eager and curious, and if statistics were any guide, either destined to learn the ropes with us, and then enter the private sector, disillusioned and bored, or angle a job with the state police, assuming he passed their scrutiny.

“Who’s here already?” I asked him.

“Detectives Klesczewski and Tyler. Officer Lavoie’s with them. Sheila Kelly’s closing the other end off.”

I smiled at his titling everyone except Sheila. It wasn’t sexist. She’d been his supervisor, before we’d let him loose on his own. She was the reverse of the trend, ten years with the Burlington PD, come to us in search of a slightly mellower pace. Bobby looked to her as a kid might to an older sister.

I continued to the corner, where the Main Street buildings above and behind me showed their backs to the train tracks and the Connecticut River beyond. Typical of many old, red-brick New England towns, Brattleboro, Vermont faced away from the serenity and beauty of the river, having chosen well over a hundred-and-fifty years ago to regard both it and the railroad paralleling it as unsightly commercial conduits. In its heyday, this stretch of ground, unseen by the gentry, had been a coarse and bustling string of loading docks and receiving bays, feeding businesses two floors above, whose windows had glittered with the primped and polished end results.

Now the area was forlorn and ignored, a parking place for dumpsters, the homeless, and for teenagers seeking illicit time alone. High overhead, out of sight in the gloom, dotting the curved, fortress-like wall following the river’s bend, were hundreds of dingy rear apartments, an increasing number of which were being transformed into tastefully renovated lofts or rendered by the town’s excess of psychologists and therapists into peaceful, sunlit havens-drawn to the very scenery that their predecessors had ignored. Most, however, still belonged to the marginally-solvent welfare dwellers holed up in small, dark, cluttered dens, surrounded by commerce, and benefiting from none of it.

With theatrical abruptness, a tripod-mounted halogen lamp burst the darkness ahead of me with a brief electrical hiss. It was facing away from me, down and across the tracks, so the effect wasn’t blinding, but more fancifully melodramatic. Its harsh light destroyed any subtlety or nuance, revealing everything in its arc in angular, brittle starkness—while consigning everything outside it to simple nonexistence. The soiled, damaged brick walls; the cinder-stained gravel of the railroad bed; the parallel crescent of gleaming tracks, and the flat black slab of river water beyond—were all briefly frozen in that initial flash of light, like a startled, disheveled partygoer caught in the glare of an instant camera. And just as quickly, it all became mere background to the item at center stage—and the reason for our gathering in the middle of a freezing January night.

Perpendicular to the outermost track, his feet toward the river, lay a man in a thick, long, dirty coat. He had no head or hands—they’d all been resting on the track when the last train had passed by, and what was left of them didn’t merit much description. But they lent the scene its one source of bright color, and to the entire picture a grim sense of purpose.

Standing over the body was Ron Klesczewski, that night’s detective on call. J.P. Tyler, our forensics man, had just plugged in the lamp.

He moved away from its glare and joined me in the darkness, like a technician stepping offstage to check his work. “I didn’t see calling the paramedics. Got hold of everybody else—the ME, the SA’s office, more backup. Gail not on tonight?”

Gail Zigman was a deputy state’s attorney, and the woman I lived with. “No,” I answered. “I forgot to ask who was when I left.” I gestured with my chin down the tracks. “What’ve we got?”

Tyler shrugged. “Little early to tell, and I don’t want to do too much before the ME gets here, but it looks like a bum who ran out of rope.”

“Suicide?” I asked mildly.

“Probably. Although you don’t usually find them with their hands on the track.”

Before moving any closer, I said, more to myself than to him, “Unless he was already dead.”

Over the years, Archer Mayor has been photographer, teacher, historian, scholarly editor, feature writer, travel writer, lab technician, political advance man, medical illustrator, newspaper writer, history researcher, publications consultant, constable, and EMT/firefighter. He is also half Argentine, speaks two languages, and has lived in several countries on two continents.

All of which makes makes him restless, curious, unemployable, or all three. Whatever he is, it’s clearly not cured, since he’s currently a novelist, a death investigator for Vermont’s medical examiner, and a police officer.

Mayor has been producing the Joe Gunther novels since 1988, some of which have made the
TEN BEST
or
MOST NOTABLE
lists of the Los Angeles and the New York Times. Mayor has also received the New England Booksellers Association book award for fiction.

Find him online at
www.ArcherMayor.com

Open Season
Borderlines
Scent of Evil
The Skeleton’s Knee
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
The Dark Root
The Ragman’s Memory
Bellows Falls
The Disposable Man
Occam’s Razor
The Marble Mask
Tucker Peak
The Sniper’s Wife
Gatekeeper
The Surrogate Thief
St. Albans Fire
The Second Mouse
Chat
The Catch
The Price of Malice
Red Herring
Tag Man
Paradise City

…And Don’t Miss

By
New York Times
Bestselling Author Archer Mayor
Out in October 2012, from St. Martin’s Press

Find Archer online at:
www.ArcherMayor.com

Preorder soon at 
www.us.macmillan.com

This digital edition (v1.11) of
The Disposable Man
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Copyright © 2012 by Archer Mayor.

ISBN: 978-1-939767-08-0

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