The Ragman's Memory (39 page)

Quietly, as if entering a church, the three of us filed in, Gail going directly to the window and taking the chair opposite Bernie’s. She placed Georgia in his lap without a word.

He took his eyes off the snow and looked down at the cat, smiling. “Hello, Ginger—where did you come from?”

“I thought you’d like some company,” Gail said softly.

Andrews quietly lifted a chair and placed it nearby. Bernie glanced at him but otherwise kept his attention on Gail.

“I always love your company, Lou. You know that.”

I moved within his sight, so he knew I was there, but settled on the bed across the room—a mere shadow in his peripheral vision.

Gail took her cue from the name he’d given her. “How are you doing, Dad?”

His hands began to unconsciously stroke the cat. He went back to gazing out the window. “Too many dreams.”

“Bad dreams?”

“Uh-huh.”

She waited for more, got nothing, and so prodded him with, “What are you looking at?”

“Anything—anybody.”

I could almost feel her trying to follow, remembering what Andrews had told us. “Are they out there?”

“You bet. They wear white uniforms, so we can’t see ’em.” Georgia stretched in his lap. He looked at Gail. “Is Lou here?”

After a split-second hesitation, she said, “She’ll be here soon.”

Very gently, Andrews leaned forward and removed the cat from Bernie’s hands, placing her on the floor, where she wandered off in my direction, her job done. The psychiatrist took a short, blunt, smooth stick from his pocket, and placed it across Bernie’s palm. The old man’s fingers curled around it and he lifted it to his cheek, his expression darkening.

“Gotta have a gun,” he murmured. “Gotta keep alive.”

“When did you last sleep, Private?” Andrews asked.

Bernie snorted gently.

“Who knows?” He shivered.

“Cold?”

Bernie nodded. The shivering intensified. He stamped his feet. “Wish I could feel my feet.”

“And you’re hungry,” Andrews stated. “And scared.”

Bernie’s voice was pitiable. “I want to go home.”

“Gotta keep alive to get home.”

“Right—keep alive.” Bernie’s eyes were now glued to the view outside. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright, the stick gripped in his hand like the butt of a pistol. Instinctively, we all looked outside and saw a dog cut across the snowy ground, just at the edge of the light.

“What was that?” Andrews asked. “Was it them?”

Bernie slipped off his chair and crouched by the windowsill, barely peering over the top. “Yeah.”

“But they’re dressed like us.”

He placed his finger against his lips. “Listen.”

Andrews got down next to him, in front of Gail’s knees. I noticed her face was frozen, her eyes intense—almost fearful. “That’s German they’re speaking,” he said.

“Right,” Bernie agreed. “The spies.”

“Who’re ‘Dem Bums’?” Andrews asked in a whisper.

“Brooklyn Dodgers,” was the quick reply.

“Where’s L’il Abner live?”

“Dogpatch, USA.”

“They don’t know any of the answers.”

“Damn Krauts—why do they have to dress like us?”

“’Cause they’re out to get us, Private—just like they got Johnnie.”

I stretched my own memory back to when I first met Bernie, right after he’d attacked the other patient. “They got Johnnie,” he’d said at the time. I was impressed Andrews, with all his other patients, had remembered that small detail from Bernie’s file.

An important detail, too. Bernie grabbed Andrews’s sleeve. “God damn you, Johnnie. I told you not to sleep there. You gotta hide. They look for you where it’s warmer. They know where we’ll be.”

“I’m tired,” Andrews said in a sagging voice.

“You die, I’m all alone, you bastard… ” Bernie’s hand dropped, and his gaze shifted to me, far across the room. “I’m all alone.”

Andrews gestured to me to come forward slowly. “But you saw the man who killed Johnnie, right?”

Tears were flowing down Bernie’s face. “I was so close, I could’ve touched him. I was scared… So scared. I didn’t want to die.”

Andrews pulled Gail off her chair so she would be kneeling with them in a tight group. “Johnnie’s mom needs to know, Bernie, so she can get some peace. She needs to know who killed Johnnie. We all need some peace. We all want to sleep.”

Andrews motioned to me to crouch before Bernie, who stared at the bandage on my head with wide eyes. Andrews nodded, and I silently removed a stack of pictures from my breast pocket and handed them to Bernie.

“Krauts, Bernie,” the doctor suggested. “Which one of them killed Johnnie?”

Bernie looked at the stack in his hand, hesitating. The light from the street lamps was strong enough to see the pictures, but I worried the leap from memories to reality might prove too wide. In his mind, Bernie had transformed a stick into a gun, and Gail into three completely different women. What would he do with what I’d handed him?

Andrews seemed intent on the same problem. He gently removed the top picture from the pile—one of Eddy Knox. “This him? The one who killed Johnnie?”

Bernie touched the photo with his finger.

“No.”

Andrews replaced it with another, this one of Willy Kunkle.

“No.”

A third came up. Bernie shook his head.

Andrews put the whole stack in his hands, his voice firm. “Look through them, Private. Find Johnnie’s killer—the man who strangled him as he slept.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Bernie did as he’d been told, peeling off pictures one after the other, moving faster, shifting his position so I could no longer see which ones he was looking at.

And then he stopped, one picture held out before him, crying openly now. “Johnnie… God damn it… ” He took the photo and placed it, facedown, against Gail’s breast. Her hands closed on his and he bent over, his cheek against her stomach.

Andrews began rubbing Bernie’s back, mouthing instructions soundlessly at Gail, who by now was crying also, a victim of her own nightmares. “Thank you,” she said with difficulty. “Thank you for helping me. Thank you for letting me sleep again.”

She raised his head in her hand and kissed him on the cheek. Andrews rose and helped Bernie to stand, and then escorted him to the bed. “Lie down. Your job is done. You’ve brought peace to yourself and others—peace and quiet. The war is over, Bernie. Time to sleep.”

He helped Bernie stretch out, smoothed his bathrobe and arranged his pillow. Bernie looked up at us all for a moment and smiled. “My friends,” he said quietly and shut his eyes, sighing deeply.

Georgia, who’d been curled up at the foot of the bed, rose, stretched, and resettled into the crook of Bernie’s arm. Instinctively, his fingers lost themselves in her fur.

We crept out, followed by the sound of her purring.

In the hallway, squinting in the glare of the overhead lights, we stood a moment in a tight circle, emotionally spent. Then, without comment, I extended my hand to Gail. She gave me the photograph.

I looked at it for a moment, trying to untangle the emotions it stimulated—the questions, the arguments, the doubts, and finally the acceptance that it might all be starting to make sense.

The picture was of Junior Chambers, NeverTom’s reclusive brother.

I WAS PACING THE FLOOR OF THE SQUAD ROOM
when Ron Klesczewski entered, a concerned expression on his face. I had called him at home from the Skyview and told him to meet me at the office. Ever since the birth of his first child, I’d grown reluctant to disturb him after hours. Tonight, however, I had no such concerns. After so many frustrations and false hopes, I was angry, elated, worried, and most of all anxious to move forward.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“You’ve been digging into Hennessy and Levasseur. I need to know if Ben Chambers’s or BTC’s name ever surfaced in any of Hennessy’s black market dealings—before the convention center came up.”

He raised his eyebrows and removed his coat, draping it over the back of his chair. “How long before?”

“Could be years. I’m looking for some initial contact.”

He unlocked his desk and slid open a full filing cabinet. “You got it.”

I retreated to my office and called Tony Brandt at home. “Bernie pegged Ben Chambers as Adele Sawyer’s killer.”

Brandt remained silent for a long time, letting me twist in the absurdity of what I’d just said. I was glad I hadn’t broken the news to Jack Derby yet. Mercifully, Tony merely pointed out, “Maybe not the ideal witness. What else do you have?”

“I’d like to try something. Part of the reason people haven’t been willing to squeal on the Chambers brothers is fear of reprisal. But if word got out that their boat is sinking, that might change. Newspaper articles like this morning’s are not lost on people like Fallows and Matson, and even Hennessy. If they see that Tom and Ben are under fire, they’re going to be a lot more eager to cut a deal with us, not only for their own advantage, but to make sure both brothers get properly declawed.”

“Funny you should mention that article. Nice piece of timing. I never did hear back from NeverTom’s lawyer.”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely. “Lucky break.”

Brandt left it at that. “So what’re you after?”

“I want to bring Garfield, Knox, and Matson in again, tell them they either testify against the Chamberses now or go down with them. If it works, they may give us the evidence we’ll be pretending we already have—at least enough to stimulate a warrant.”

Brandt barely hesitated. “Okay. I’ll call Derby. I want him here for this.”

· · ·

I chose to interview Harold Matson, the bank president, playing good cop to Sheila Kelly’s bad cop. And since Matson had a lawyer stuck to his side like a pilot fish, I asked Jack Derby to stand by too, in case I needed some quick advice.

But Sheila had done her homework well. Showing no emotion other than a surprisingly implacable toughness, she took Matson to task, point by point, through a tangled web of intrigue involving both Chambers brothers and the Bank of Brattleboro. Matson’s lawyer ran interference at first, until the brothers were shown to be exposed and vulnerable. Then he began fishing for ways his client might escape prosecution with the least possible damage. As I had hoped, two hours later we’d gotten Matson to agree to testify against Ben and Tom Chambers in exchange for the loss of his job, a probationary sentence, and a modest fine. To my private satisfaction, Matson mentioned that the article exposing NeverTom in the
Reformer
had been a major influence in his decision to come clean.

Sammie and Marshall Smith fared equally well with Eddy Knox. In exchange for leniency, he gave a chapter-and-verse reading on how to corrupt a public official. The biggest difference between Matson’s and Knox’s testimony, however, was that while the latter still maintained that all clandestine communications between NeverTom and him had taken place on the phone, the former owned up to having face-to-face meetings. This, as we all knew, was a critical distinction—as it would be to the judge we’d be asking to sign our warrants.

The zoning administrator, Rob Garfield, proved a dead end. Increasingly angry at being put under our microscope, he denied any knowledge of skullduggery, and further informed us that if we bothered him again without presenting hard evidence, we would be made to regret it. Tony Brandt, when he heard, merely rolled his eyes.

The final piece of truss work we tacked into the affidavit for search warrants of all and any paperwork of both Ben and Tom Chambers was Ron’s discovery that, four years earlier, Paul Hennessy had built a small rental property for Ben using one of his dummy fronts, thus establishing a connection between the two men that predated their mutual involvement in the convention center project.

By ten o’clock that night, I was on a private phone to Stanley Katz, telling him what we had, and what we were about to do with it.

He took everything down without comment before finally asking, “If you’ve got enough for a warrant, why’re you giving me all this?”

I was bluntly honest with him. “Because we might not find anything. I want Fallows and Hennessy to know it’s safe to come out of hiding, and I want other people who might’ve been screwed by these two creeps to know that now’s the time to speak up.”

“What about the Sawyer murder? Does she tie into this?”

I hadn’t told him about Bernie’s revelation. Tony’s reaction earlier had been all the encouragement I needed to keep that one under wraps. “We’re making progress, but it’s still too early. With any luck, and if we can get this Chambers avalanche rolling, all sorts of things will show up in the debris.”

“Are the Chamberses implicated in the murder?”

“Off the record? I can give you a strong ‘Maybe.’ ”

To my surprise, he dropped it. “Well, I got enough for now anyhow. I sure wish you’d stop calling me so close to deadline. This late night crunch routine sucks.”

I took that as a thank you and hung up.

· · ·

As the affidavit was being prepared and a judge rounded up to sign it, I had patrol cars check out both the Chambers residence and the BTC offices on High Street, to see if I could locate both brothers. From the reports that came back, it didn’t seem that anyone was at the house. The lights at the office, however, were still burning brightly.

“Damn,” I muttered to myself.

Tony, still in my office, picked up my concern. “Is that a problem?”

“Could be. Ted McDonald told me once that NeverTom had informants all over town. If he caught word we brought Matson in again, he might’ve decided to cover his ass and destroy all the evidence. I’d like to move with that warrant as soon as we get it signed.”

Tony stood up, a small smile on his face. “Mind if I join you?”

It was an unusual request. The chief was less a cop than an administrator nowadays, but he had come up through the ranks. I also knew that for this bust in particular, he wanted to be there when the tables were turned on one of the most antagonistic selectmen he’d ever had to deal with.

“It would be a pleasure,” I told him.

· · ·

BTC Investments owned one of the old brick buildings that stood on High Street’s steep slope, just before it T-boned into Main. Tall, narrow, and unremarkable architecturally, these structures looked painfully jammed together, as if the first one at the bottom of the hill had suddenly ground to a halt at the traffic light and forced all the others to collide and compress like passengers in a bus wreck.