He finally paused long enough to notice neither one of us had said a word. This was typical James Franklin.
“Sorry. Right… This guy has a concussion, facial fractures, a few missing teeth, four broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. Basically, beaten to a pulp. But he’ll live. That answer your question?”
“One of them. Will I be able to talk to him?”
Franklin grabbed a sealed package from the shelf of the supply room we’d escorted him to. “Fine with me, but it’s up to him.”
· · ·
Walter Skottick would have looked like a movie mummy if it hadn’t been for the oxygen tubing up his nose and the tufts of beard poking out from between the bandaging. He was so still I wasn’t sure he was breathing. Sammie and I stood at the foot of his bed for a moment, I toying with the fanciful notion that the hospital staff would soon discover their patient had died unnoticed under all their packaging.
“Mr. Skottick?” I said gently.
The one nonswollen eye opened. The voice barely emanating from the dressings managed to say, “Wha?”
“It’s Joe Gunther, Mr. Skottick. We met earlier—about Marty Gagnon.”
One hand flapped anemically on the bed sheet. “Wha’ the hell you do to me?”
Sammie furrowed her brow, not having been at that first meeting. “What do you mean?”
“Fine till you came,” he answered and then stopped to gasp for breath.
“Mr. Skottick,” I said. “I know you feel lousy, but we need to ask you some questions if we’re going to get the person responsible for this.”
“Didn’t see.”
“Was he wearing a mask?”
“Yeah.”
“How did he get in? You were inside, right?”
He nodded weakly. “TV. Behind me.”
“He came up behind you?”
“Yeah.”
“And he was looking for Marty Gagnon. What did he say, exactly?”
“Just where—’gain an’ ’gain—where, where, where.”
“But he didn’t say why?”
“No.”
“Why did he keep beating you? You put up a fight?”
“At first… not much. I didn’t know. I told him cops came.”
“You told him about our visit?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get any other calls about that watch, besides ours?”
“No.”
“Okay, Mr. Skottick. One last thing, and please don’t take offense, ’cause you may not like it. But are you being totally straight with us? About the watch and this attack, both?”
The man’s entire body shifted with frustration under the sheets. His hands balled up into fists. “Shit. I wanted… sell… car—that’s all.”
“All right, all right,” I tried soothing him. “I had to ask. We’ll get this guy. You just work on getting better.”
Sammie and I stepped out into the hallway.
“You think he’s telling the truth?” she asked.
I waggled my hand back and forth equivocally. “Could be. Dumber things have happened. What’s interesting to me is how his attacker found out about him. If he did chase down some of Marty’s friends first, like I’m thinking, then Skottick may be just the latest of a string of such interviews. I’d like to know what Marty did or didn’t do, saw or didn’t see, that got whoever this is so interested in finding him. And does the stealing of the watch, or anything else from the Manning house, have anything to do with it?”
Sammie knew better than to respond.
“Since the cat’s obviously out of the bag,” I continued, “we might as well go after Marty’s known playmates.”
· · ·
Marty Gagnon’s criminal record was as stuffed as a phone book with names and addresses of promising “past-known associates,” many of which we got from our erstwhile colleagues at the Brattleboro Police Department. Ron Klesczewski, part of our old squad, was still there, along with J.P. Tyler, who’d been our forensics man, and it was Ron who came upstairs to our office early the next morning with the PD’s internal file on Gagnon—those investigative tidbits that didn’t merit being injected into the state or national data banks.
So, allowing Sammie to sleep late and letting Lester work on his caseload, I had Ron and Willy help me compile a contact list of the most promising among Marty’s circle. As soon as he saw the name Don Matthews, however, Willy put him at the top of the heap.
”Of all these losers,” he explained with the sure-footedness of a museum curator, “Don’s the best at handling hot property. I’d start with him.”
“He still around?” I asked Ron.
“Around and off the leash. He finished his parole three months ago. Got a job up in Springfield at the battery plant.”
· · ·
Sitting next to me in my car several hours later, Willy stretched his right arm out straight and checked his wristwatch. “Matthews is on the graveyard shift, so he should be at home catching Z’s by now. I called his supervisor, and he told me odds and ends have been going missing ever since Don started working there, mostly from the locker room. No proof—surprise, surprise—but I figured we could use that to squeeze his nuts a little.”
We finished our meal of greasy offerings from a fast-food place in Springfield, Vermont (about forty minutes north of Brattleboro), and drove a few blocks, past a near-derelict shopping mall with half its parking lot unplowed, and into a neighborhood of two-story apartment buildings lined up like shoeboxes left too long in the rain. Both sides of the narrow street were dotted with rusting cars and dirty snow. Many of the windows were boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting, and the top edges of several of them had been licked with black soot from past fires, both arson and freebasing being popular time-killers here.
“What number?” I asked. Willy merely pointed through the windshield at the next address, and said, “Apartment 114. Rear.”
“There a back door?”
He nodded, pulling into a parking place in front of a pickup with three wheels. “There’s a fire escape, according to my source. You want me to cover it?”
“Sure,” I said, surprised by the offer. Willy normally prided himself on kicking in doors.
He swung out into the sharp cold air in one graceful movement. “You got it. Give me five minutes to set up.”
I stood by the car as he strode off, the odd asymmetry of his gait as familiar to me as my own brother’s. Despite the bureaucratic hassles I continued to take on to keep this man employed, I still enjoyed seeing him in action. Under his thick, hard-boiled exterior was a passion rarely seen in a veteran of any job—one which found outlets in old-fashioned justice, a reserved but endearing affection for Sammie, and even—I’d discovered once but was angrily sworn never to reveal—a remarkable ability to pencil sketch, something he indulged in while sitting alone on stakeouts.
I checked the time. Five minutes. I crossed the uneven sidewalk, went up the path to the scratched glass lobby door, and entered the building.
The heat was instantly unbearable: arid and rancid with the stench of unwashed bodies. I could hear people muttering through the thin walls around me, yelling, playing music or the TV, all in the middle of a weekday, like worker bees laboring in a hive. Except that they weren’t producing anything—at least anything legal.
I took the stairs, having learned the hard way about the reliability of elevators in such buildings, and opened my coat wide, both to cool off and to give me better access to my gun.
At the second-floor landing, I came to a T-junction of poorly lit hallways and took the one heading straight back, reading what numbers there were off the battered hollow-core doors. One-fourteen was the last one on the left.
I knocked loudly. Willy had described Don Matthews as tall, nervous, skinny, and wearing a ponytail, not at all like the hairless round runt who opened the door after the third pounding. So much for Matthews’s catching some sleep after a factory shift.
I showed this man my shield. “Police. Who’re you?”
His thin, unshaven face paled. “What?”
“You’re not Don Matthews, so who are you?”
He groped for an answer. “Ah… Ted… Smith.”
“I need to talk to Don—right now.”
His eyes darted over my shoulder, checking the hallway. “Oh… Yeah. Well, he’s kind of busy right now.”
“Let me in. I’ll wait.”
He looked slightly alarmed. “Hey, no. I mean, he’s in the bathroom… Look, it’s not my place, like you said, so I can’t really let people in uninvited. It may not be legal or something, right?”
“You got something in there you don’t want me to see?” I asked.
He licked his lips. “I don’t got nuthin’. It’s just private property, is all.”
There was a sudden sound of glass breaking behind him. Startled, Smith turned to look, inadvertently opening the door wide enough for me to see a man standing on a table against the far wall, his hand halfway through the window he’d been trying to open. His description fit Don Matthews.
“Don’t move,” I yelled. “Police.”
I might as well have fired a starter’s pistol. The man on the table threw himself at the window, falling outside, while Ted Smith made a feeble attempt to push me across the hallway. I pushed him back as I entered the room but tripped over his legs when he stumbled before me. I fell to my knees and felt his hands groping for the gun under my coat. I twisted around, rolled onto my back, and planted a heel between his eyes, stunning him like a cow.
“You son of a bitch,” I snarled, “consider yourself busted.” I then regained my feet, ran to the now empty window, and yelled outside, “Willy—he’s coming down the fire escape.”
A noise behind me made me spin on my heel, my gun out, in time to see Smith crawling out the door. “Don’t move, Ted, or I’ll shoot your ass off.”
He froze, his upper body already out in the hall. I pulled out my handcuffs, dragged him back inside, and attached him to a water pipe running up the wall. “Stay there. I’ll be back.”
I returned to the window, being careful of the broken shards, and climbed out onto the wooden fire escape, leaning over the railing to see the alley below. Willy’s thin, pale face was staring up at me.
“You got him?” I shouted.
“Almost,” he answered calmly and then gestured with his arm as if directing traffic. “Come to Poppa, Don.”
I started down the rickety stairs through the opening in the landing and almost immediately saw our quarry poised on the next level between me and Willy below—gaunt, hollow-eyed, his ponytail almost reaching his waist.
I pointed my gun at him. “Stay where you are. We’re police officers.”
But he obviously knew I wouldn’t shoot unless he threatened me, and he had other things in mind than fighting. Instead, he jumped up onto the railing, positioned himself like a diver as I came off the stairs to stop him, and threw himself into the void, sailing over both Willy’s head and a sagging chain-link fence cutting the alleyway in two, and landing with a crash onto the roof of a parked car, blowing out its windshield in the process.
Willy stared helplessly through the fence. The man on the other side rolled off the roof, landed in the snow on the car’s far side, and scrambled to his feet to race down the alley for a clean getaway.
“Get the car, Willy,” I yelled as I continued down the fire escape as fast as I could, opting against the airborne route.
Instantly accepting his inability to climb the fence with just one arm, Willy took off in the other direction as I struggled with the wobbly chain link, landing in an untidy but intact pile on the same semi-destroyed car.
I still had our man in sight, his greasy hair swinging like a horse’s tail behind him. He was as scrawny as a scarecrow and, from the quick glance I’d gotten, seemed nearly as fit. If I managed not to lose him, I figured even I could wear him out. There was no way this clown would last too long on adrenaline alone. I hoped.
Unfortunately, his athletic prowess wasn’t put to the test. After rounding the corner at the alley’s mouth, I found myself staring at an empty sidewalk.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
I saw a man across the street, sitting on a bus stop bench, looking up from his reading, staring at a spot only thirty feet ahead of me, as if he’d just seen something interesting. It was all I needed. As the spectator returned to his newspaper, I jogged to the spot, found a door between two businesses, and waited until Willy drove into view a block away. I waved at him, pointed to the door, and entered.
I was in a lobby facing a broad set of stairs heading up to the second floor. Unlike the apartment building I’d just left, this place was quiet, odorless, and except for the fluorescent lighting humming overhead, seemingly abandoned.
I unholstered my gun again. Wisdom dictated waiting for backup. Experience suggested my quarry would take that time to disappear entirely.
I headed upstairs.
On the landing, I found four doors, all labeled, three with business names—a lawyer, a barber, and an accountant—and the last a rest room. Apparently, business was bad enough that either everyone had gone home or had simply died at their desks years back. I could hear no phones, no keyboard tapping, nothing except the lighting and the same muted mechanical murmur that all commercial buildings seem to exude, like a person’s breathing.
Logic suggested the bathroom. It was possible the guy went to a friend’s office or was behind one of those doors holding the occupants hostage, but more likely he’d holed up where he felt more at ease, around a bunch of toilets.
Unless he’d gone in there to use another window.
I decided not to take the chance. I approached the door, planning to open it from the knob side, so as not to be in its way when it swung back, when it suddenly did just that. The door hit my foot and threw me off balance, and the long-haired man came barreling out, slamming into me like a linebacker on his way back down the stairs. I went flying against the opposite wall, my gun clattering across the floor, and felt the wind get knocked out of me by the impact.
“Damn,” I swore, by now seriously angry. I staggered to my feet, lurched to the top of the stairs, ripped a fire extinguisher off its wall bracket, and threw it with all my strength at the man about halfway to the ground floor.
It caught him behind the knees and sent him sailing head first into the lobby, where he landed with a terrific crash.