“You asked him anyway?” I inquired.
“’Course I did—he was clueless.”
“Mr. Manning,” I asked, “when did you notice you’d been robbed?”
“As soon as we got inside. For one thing, it was cold, from the broken window. But the small TV was missing from the kitchen. Peggy noticed that right off, no surprise.”
We both caught the sardonic tone of voice again.
“Where’s your wife now?” Willy asked.
“She went back to the city. Anyhow, after that, I started looking around. Whoever did it was obviously low rent—missed the paintings and ceramics and grabbed whatever he could sell fast.”
“And the watch was on your bedroom dresser?” I asked, recalling Snuffy’s report.
“Yeah, out in plain view. You want to see where everything was?”
I shook my head. “The sheriff’s people took photographs and made diagrams. Just out of curiosity, though, pretending this isn’t the smash-and-grab we’re all assuming it is, can you think of anyone who might’ve done this to get back at you for some reason?”
The other man was genuinely nonplussed. “Get
back
at me? For what?”
Willy rose abruptly and studied Manning, cradled by his overpriced sofa like a silver spoon on velvet. “Can’t think of a thing,” he said in an angry, flat voice and headed toward the front door. “I’ll be in the car.”
Manning and I watched him leave.
“Touchy guy,” he commented.
I stood up also. “Yeah… Well, I don’t think so. You told the sheriff you thought one of his deputies might’ve been involved in this and that you also suspected the mountain’s security force.”
Manning shook his head disdainfully. “I said that to get his attention—like hitting a mule with a two-by-four.”
“So there’s no truth to it?”
“I don’t know,” he said with disgust. “That’s your job.”
· · ·
I found Willy sitting quietly in the car, staring out the window at the view.
I didn’t start the engine immediately. “Am I going to have problems with you on this?”
He remained looking straight ahead. “I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“And?”
“Not if I don’t have to spend any more time with him.”
I turned the ignition key. “Deal.”
IT HAD BEEN WHOLLY APPROPRIATE TO DRIVE OUT TO
Tucker Peak on a Saturday on Snuffy Dawson’s request, but given the low profile of the crime and our own budgetary constraints, I was now happy to drop Willy off outside the office and just quickly double-check by phone that the sheriff’s deputies had filed the initial paperwork, processed the evidence, and set all the appropriate electronic inquiries into motion. After that, I headed back home to my woodworking shop.
Not that my project there was anything monumental. In fact, I was replacing an elaborately shaped but cracked wooden seat from a chair belonging to Gail Zigman, the woman with whom I’d eccentrically shared my life for just under twenty years.
We weren’t married, and we didn’t live together, although we had briefly not long before. But through thick and thin, some of it quite traumatic, we’d proven to ourselves and to each other that we were as closely intertwined as any couple we knew.
Gail was younger than I, born to privilege in New York City. Well traveled and highly educated, she had come to Brattleboro at the height of the commune movement to try living a life far different from that of her parents. Living the countercultural life in Vermont hadn’t been a waste of time. It had opened her eyes to values she still held dear. But it had also been relatively short-lived. Within a few years, she’d yielded to an ingrained and natural ambition and had joined the town’s business and political world, growing and evolving over a couple of decades from successful Realtor to selectman to deputy state’s attorney, to where she’d recently become legal counsel to VermontGreen, the state’s preeminent environmental group, based in the capital city of Montpelier.
Now, Gail was one of that growing class of professionals who’d taken advantage of computers, faxes, and cell phones to stretch the lines connecting her to the office. When the state’s citizen-legislature was in session, roughly from January to April or May, she lived in a condo in Montpelier so she could watch the political pot. The rest of the time, she worked out of the house we’d once shared in West Brattleboro, from which the chair I was repairing had come.
As foolish as it sounded for a man of my years, I was intent on returning to my repair job less for the daunting task of making a new piece match an old chair, and more because handling it brought me at least tangentially closer to Gail.
We didn’t live apart because of any friction. We didn’t argue, or dislike each other’s politics or eating habits or taste in late-night movies. It was more that since we’d met later in life—I a widower and a settled, lifelong cop; she a professional woman increasingly eager for a new challenge—we’d already come to terms with the bachelor lives we’d adopted. We instinctively needed more breathing space than a younger couple and were less willing to compromise for the sake of steady companionship.
In the end, it had been neither easier nor harder than an old-fashioned marriage. It had merely evolved into something rich and rewarding enough to keep us coming back for more.
So, I kept at my project for the rest of the weekend, until by Sunday night I fitted a reasonably antiqued seat between the old and slightly battered legs, arms, and back of a hundred-year-old wooden chair, knowing that the effort I’d put into it would count for more with Gail than just good craftsmanship.
· · ·
It was with similar anticipation that I returned to the office on Monday morning to see what the computers had coughed up concerning William Manning’s missing items. For me, an investigation, no matter how apparently trivial, shared many of the elements of a woodworking project. They both demanded thoughtfulness, patience, and attention to detail, and both promised to disappoint if handled carelessly. But neither one was entirely successful if only followed by the numbers. Strong elements of intuition and creativity always featured in the end result.
It was also true, however, that encouraging momentum was sometimes slow to build. When I checked for reports from our queries of two days ago, I found nothing.
Or, as Willy put it more succinctly, “We got shit. No hits on the fingerprints, the MO, the sheriff’s neighborhood canvass, nothing from the caretaker, who I interviewed yesterday, and no news on any of our rich boy’s toys. I still think he did it himself for the insurance.”
Sammie Martens was standing by a small counter that held a coffeemaker and a few cups. Small, slight, and as tough as sinew, Sammie was ex-military like Willy and me, but—perhaps because she was barely in her thirties—she still maintained the spit and polish both of us had long since dropped. She was also intense, ambitious, and extremely loyal, a combination that occasionally got uncomfortably tangled up in itself and dropped her into dark moods of self-doubt and frustration. She and Willy were the only erstwhile Brattleboro police officers to accompany me in the shift to VBI, a move that had effectively robbed the town’s detective bureau of three-fifths of its manpower. We’d been working as a team for over ten years, as a result, and had become more like family members than mere colleagues.
“You know most of that stuff won’t be coming in for days,” she told him. “You’re just pissed off because you don’t like the guy and you think the case is beneath you, but you still can’t resist being interested in it.”
Willy looked at her balefully. “Oh, right. Like I’m staying up late at night sweating this out.”
“You drove me all the way back to Tucker Peak to talk to the caretaker on a Sunday,” she said, smiling and taking her first sip of coffee. “The sheriff’d already done that.”
Willy scowled.
“Did you learn anything new?” I asked, surprised and curious.
But feeling cornered by now, he didn’t take it well. “Right—you, too. Don’t be bashful. Pile it on. You saying we shouldn’t double-check the other guy’s work?”
Sammie was walking slowly across to her desk so she wouldn’t spill her drink. “Willy, give us a break. It’s too early for opera.”
He didn’t respond, but I noticed him hiding a smile as he pretended to dig around in a lower drawer. Willy and Sammie, after years of bickering while working for me downstairs, had recently and suddenly become a romantic item, just prior to joining VBI. It was very low-key. I was one of the few who even knew of it, and it had seemed at the time as likely as a bullfrog courting a bird. But it appeared to be working. Sammie’s nearly obsessive, jagged, driven style had been softened, and the angry fire that raged perpetually inside Willy was running just a few degrees cooler.
The office door opened with a bang, and a tall, skinny man with a tousled shock of blond hair entered, saying something pleasantly suggestive over his shoulder to Judy, our secretary, who sat alone in the small waiting area between our office and the hallway.
Lester Spinney was the final member of the “Southeast” team, VBI being divided into four cardinal divisions around the state, with the fifth residing at the Department of Public Safety headquarters in centralized Waterbury. Lester and I had known each other since we’d worked together on a homicide in the state’s isolated Northeast Kingdom region a decade earlier. He’d been a detective with the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation then, and (as far as I was concerned) had now become the perfect poster boy of how and why VBI benefited all capable, ambitious Vermont cops, regardless of where they’d started out.
One paradoxical aspect of the Vermont State Police—or VSP in acronym-happy cop-talk—was that while it was Vermont’s premier law enforcement agency, in terms of size, budget, and quality, it was also a traditionally structured organizational pyramid. The more capable and upwardly mobile an officer became, the less likely it was he or she would be given an open slot in a timely manner. Highly deserving, experienced people were finding themselves either standing in line, praying for providence, or looking for jobs elsewhere.
Spinney had opted for an alternate route, in fact declining a VSP promotion that would have anchored him to a desk in order to join the attorney general’s office and keep working investigations. The only downside was that he’d exchanged being a part of a large, companionable organization of fellow cops for working with a bunch of lawyers. Educational perhaps, but also socially isolating—and he was a famously sociable person.
Enter VBI.
“Hello, boys and girls,” he said, trying to simultaneously shuck his coat and not drop an oversize box of Dunkin’ Donuts. “I thought I’d take the edge off a Monday by putting your minds on your stomachs.”
“It’ll take more’n that,” Willy grumbled.
Spinney smiled broadly and reached into the box. “Just what I thought, Grumpy, which is why I got you an extra big cinnamon roll.” He laid it with a flourish on Kunkle’s desk, complete with a napkin. Willy rolled his eyes but was eating Lester’s offering within five minutes. The rest of us didn’t bother being coy.
“How’s your caseload, Lester?” I asked with my mouth full, having already quizzed the other two on their work.
He’d replaced Sammie at the coffee machine and was pouring himself a cup. “The homicide in Springfield looks pretty straightforward, just lining everything up for the prosecution. The arson at that farm in Rockingham might take a bit more. It’s still a toss-up between the son and the neighbor. I’m leaning toward the neighbor. Why? Got something going?”
“Yeah,” Willy said sarcastically. “Better put all that on hold. We’re in the big leagues now.”
“Burglary at Tucker Peak,” I answered. “About fifty grand worth of stuff. We got it from Snuffy Dawson because of a twenty-thousand dollar watch and the fact that he’s already got his hands full with a bunch of protesters.”
Lester whistled and, unlike Willy, didn’t question our involvement. Instead, he came up with an immediate suggestion. “You try the Internet auction houses yet?”
Sammie looked up from her paperwork. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Next best thing to a pawn shop, and with a much wider clientele. If I ended up with something like that, that’s how I’d move it.”
He crossed over to one of the several computers we had around the room. “Want me to try?”
To pay Willy his due, he was the first one by Lester’s side as he sat down before the monitor. Willy read the description of the watch aloud from the case file.
Spinney started with eBay and began his search, talking as he did so. “There’re a bunch of these sites nowadays—dime a dozen—and we may be jumping the gun a little, but it can’t hurt.”
He wasn’t successful at the first three sites, and I could sense Willy’s restlessness escalating. He was not a man given to hands-off police work.
Lester suddenly sat back in his chair with a satisfied grunt. “Talk about lucky. The seller even put up a photograph of it.” He hit a button on the screen and popped up a picture of a gaudy, oversize diving watch, complete with gold inlay and small diamonds.
“That it?”
Willy pulled out William Manning’s picture of the watch. “No shit.”
Lester began manipulating the computer mouse. “Okay, now we backtrack it to the seller and keep our fingers crossed he has more than just an e-mail address. And… ,” he paused a moment for the information to appear, “there you go: Walter Skottick, Old Route 5, Putney, Vermont—complete with phone number.”
There was a telling moment of silence while everyone except Lester digested the ease with which he’d just conjured up the watch’s location.
Willy was the first to break the spell. “Let me have that number.”
He reached for Lester’s phone, tucked the receiver under his chin, and dialed.
“Mr. Skottick?” he asked in a theatrical upper-class accent. “W. Graham Morrison here. Are you the person selling that marvelous timepiece on the Internet?”
He paused and elaborated, “That’s correct, I did mean the
watch
. Well, believe it or not, you and I are almost neighbors—quite unusual, all things considered. I live in Boston, so I was wondering if I might take a look at it in person. It’s so much more compelling than seeing just a photograph.”