“There were no headlights. That’s why I started looking in the first place. Cars drive along the tracks at night all the time-dopers, prostitutes, you name it. But they all use their headlights till they park. When I noticed this one being so secretive, I got curious.” She stopped again and rubbed her cheek with her palm. “I wish I hadn’t.”
“What time was this, Mrs. Rudd?”
“Around one, I guess.”
“Did you hear anything?”
There was dead silence in the room. I heard Ron’s footsteps returning from the landing and hoped he wouldn’t alter the mood. But he was hypersensitive by now, and stopped before coming into view.
Finally Edith Rudd sat back in her seat, as if suddenly releasing an enormous weight. “I heard the train.”
I returned to my chair. “My God. You saw it happen?”
She seemed more sure of herself now, almost surprised at how easy it had been. “The train blocked the view, but I saw the before and after.”
“And the men in the car?”
“They’d left by then. The train comes by at one-thirty every night. They waited a little while after laying him out, probably checking to see if anyone saw them, but then they drove off.”
“What kind of car was it?”
A small flash of irritation crossed her face, and I sensed she was recovering. “It was nighttime.”
I smiled and shook my head, trying to regain her confidence. “No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what make or model,” I lied. “I wondered if you could tell whether it was a station wagon or a sedan, light or dark, large or small-something like that.”
“Oh. Let’s see. I guess it was a large sedan, I suppose dark-colored, but there I’m not so sure.”
I rose to my feet and shook her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Rudd. You’ve been a big help. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? This must’ve been a shock.”
She answered by struggling out of the sofa’s grip and escorting me to the door, tapping me on the elbow as we went. “I’m fine. I’m a tough old bird.”
I paused at the door, aware of Ron fading out of earshot down the hall again. “Why did you tell us that tall tale earlier? You knew it was us down there with the light. I bet you even recognized me.”
She smiled coquettishly, revealing a row of darkened, misshapen teeth, and tilted her head in Ron’s direction. “I could tell he didn’t like me. And he called me Edith, just like the nurses and ambulance people.”
2
Ron Klesczewski stopped me at the bottom of the stairs, just shy of the building’s front door. We could see through the glass the first wave of morning traffic filling the streets, passing before us in quick, familiar flashes.
“I screwed up. I should’ve read her better.”
I laughed and shook my head, having told him on the way down what Edith Rudd had seen. “I don’t think so. If I’d been the first one in, she would’ve handed me what you got-pure luck of the draw. She had to tell one of us the truth. It was piled up inside her like water behind a dam. You know if the canvass has dug up anyone else?”
He unclipped a portable radio from his belt. “I’ll find out.”
I stopped him. “It’ll keep-I was just wondering. I’m going back to the office. We’ll all compare notes around lunchtime, anyhow.”
We parted company on the sidewalk, Ron heading for the next door on the block, and I walking north, through Brattleboro’s heart, toward the Municipal Center at the far end of Main Street.
I needed to do more, however, than just jar my sleepless brain with a brisk walk in the bone-chilling air. I found it useful, when I needed to think, to get away from home and office both and to wander the streets I’d patrolled since first becoming a cop. For decades now, I’d watched Brattleboro going through its growing pains, from the post-World War backwater days to the arrival in the sixties of the interstate and the hippies, both of which had infused the town with their separate brands of vitality. There were communities like this that were all but dead in the water, and others so bent on making a buck that they’d turned themselves into strip malls. But Brattleboro, with its mixture of old and new, homegrown and flatlander, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, had acquired an opinionated, contradictory, irritating, but life-saving energy that seemed destined to defeat the doldrums that had doomed so many other towns.
The interstate, and Brattleboro’s proximity to the Massachusetts border, had brought darker things, too, of course, and I was wondering if what Edith Rudd had seen last night wasn’t one of them. In the past ten years, our homicide rate had climbed to one a year, and sometimes more. The disintegration of the cities to our south, Vermont’s reputation for being friendly to the down-and-out, and the role of this town as an employment hub all conspired to make it an incubator for illegal activity. Increasingly, we’d had to deal with everything from youth gangs to drug sales and school violence. Whacking some poor rummy and placing him on the train tracks still made us sit up straight, but it no longer stood out as it would have ten years ago.
It also didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Why kill a bum, when, since he was delivered by car, pocket change and/or spontaneity probably hadn’t had much to do with it? Why place him on the tracks, perhaps already dead, and make such an effort to destroy his head and hands? Why disguise him as a bum in the first place, when, as I was beginning to suspect from his clean underwear, he wasn’t a bum at all?
For some reason-and at great risk-the man’s body had been deposited where it would quickly be found, while pains had been taken to keep his identity a secret.
By the time I reached the Municipal Center, my nose and cheeks had gone numb, a problem quickly remedied by the wall of hot, desert-dry air that smacked me in the face as soon as I opened the front door.
Well over a hundred years old, like its brethren down the street, the building had been repeatedly chopped up by successive tenants, each one in need of a completely different floor plan. Heating this constantly changing environment had, I believed-despite protests to the contrary-finally defeated the people in charge, who had settled on the time-proven principle that if you make it hot enough at the bottom, the top will eventually get warm.
Unfortunately, the police department was located on the ground floor, with its holding cells, locker room, and gym in the basement. Had we been Bedouin Arabs, this might’ve been ideal, but we weren’t, and it wasn’t.
Shedding my outer clothing as I walked down the central hallway, intending to enter one of the two side doors leading to the detective bureau on the right, I was stopped by a uniformed officer exiting the patrol division’s large communal office area on the left.
“Joe, you got a sec?”
I took my hand off the doorknob. “Sure. What’s up?”
Marshall Smith had been with us almost ten years, longer than most, and yet had maintained a newcomer’s hesitancy, as if ready to accept the first invitation to go away. “I just got back from a call at the parking lot between Bickford’s and the railroad tracks. There’s a wrinkle to it Captain Manierre thought you should hear.”
“Be my guest,” I said, twisting the doorknob.
Smith held back. I noticed then he was still dressed for the weather. “Actually, I was wondering if you had time to take a look at it now.”
I began putting my coat back on. “Why not?”
We left by the double doors at the rear of the building, which gave onto a large parking lot we shared with the State Office Building across the way.
“So what’re we going to?” I asked as we aimed for one of several white patrol cars lined up in a neat row-a highly visible symbol of police spending that never failed to catch flak at the annual town meeting.
Marshall swung in behind the wheel of one of them. “It’s an abandoned truck-a ten-wheeler dump unit.”