“Because Croteau had spiked her dope,” he finished.
“Except,” I said, “that her dope wasn’t spiked. It was a straight overdose.”
He didn’t speak for a few seconds, digesting what I’d said. I knew this meant more to him than the sum of its parts, since he had been the one to receive Owen Tharp’s confession. Unlike the rest of us, he’d heard the inflection behind the words and studied the face of the man uttering them. Instinctively, he’d been burdened with more than mere content. He’d been witness to meaning as well.
I didn’t doubt such distinctions had gone unnoticed at the time. Now I was hoping I’d triggered their reconsideration.
One of Willy Kunkle’s saving graces-so few in a man in need of so many-was his grasp of human character. He was dismissive, offensive, and occasionally abusive, but largely, I thought, because he’d been saddled with insight so clear as to make life almost unbearable. He saw through cant and affectation and self-service and moral cowardice with ease, and yet-for a lack of training or experience or pure simple faith-could find little with which to fight it. Except rage.
And the anger had been all that most people had been able to see, including Jack Derby. Which was too bad, because Willy, as I think Sammie also understood, knew more about the human animal than almost anyone I’d met. It was his secret and his curse.
It was also what prompted him to finally say, “I hate to admit it, but old Gail may be on to something.”
“If you do this, and it leads where she thinks it will, we’ll undoubtedly catch unholy hell from her boss. He’ll say we were working for Reggie McNeil.”
You might be. I’ll just be trying to put another bastard in jail.”
Over the next few weeks, life became an odd, slow, carefully paced minuet of assembling facts on several segregated levels. The detective squad-helped by the patrol division in dealing with the weekly menus of B and Es, bad check reports, and minor drug busts-constructed a paper trail of Billy Conyer’s last few months of life. Willy, while fulfilling his role in this effort, additionally wandered farther afield, examining the growing tentacles that linked Conyer’s world to Tharp’s, working discreetly, alone, and at odd hours of the day. He and I met occasionally to discuss what he’d discovered and wonder, like questioning chemists, whether any promising solutions were in the making. Meanwhile, Tony Brandt conducted his own investigation in pursuit of the department’s leak, fueling a paranoia that is never far from a police officer’s mind in the best of times.
In the background, Gail, who had no idea what Willy and I were up to, tried not to press me when we were at home, where we labored instead to bury our emotional concerns in a predictable domestic routine, using the pretense of overwork to stave off the inevitable reckoning.
The irony to this stage of a major investigation is that it looks so deliberately paced. The popular notion of a police department handling several homicides at once is that everyone works around the clock. In fact, it’s usually too much to ask-either of people’s passions or the department’s budget-to keep up an around-the-clock schedule.
So we all eventually became like workers on an assembly line, busy building parts of what we hoped would be an overall final product.
Ron, as usual, managed the information as it arrived, assigning it a roosting spot and keeping track of it on several oversized charts he’d rigged up in the conference room. On a daily basis, we met there and compared notes, watching the charts for changes as devoted stockbrokers might a ticker tape.
This scrutiny had an entertaining side effect. Many of the people we were watching led lives that defied the norm. We grew attached to favorite characters and either cheered or bemoaned their actions as we learned of them-as when, for example, we discovered that Billy Conyer’s brother Brian had at least once gone to bed with Brenda Croteau’s mother. Soap operas couldn’t compete.
Adding to this tangle of loyalties and associations were the moves and countermoves of Gail and Reggie McNeil, who were also involved in much the same research, racing one another to load up on their witness lists, ascertain competency, and determine who would depose whom and to what purpose.
Owen’s confession fell early to this maneuvering, when McNeil filed a motion to suppress on grounds that Owen had been too cold, exhausted, and scared by the likes of Willy Kunkle to know what he was doing.
And all of this played out to a steady drumbeat of newspaper articles, radio reports, and the occasional piece on the nightly TV news, alternating with an equally endless stream of updates on the progress of the Reynolds Bill through the state Senate.
Which was reasonable, given that the latter began taking on a life of its own, spreading in notoriety to the Boston media and beyond. Reynolds’s rugged likeness cropped up in magazines and TV programs far outside the region, and as the month of March slowly approached-and Vermont’s famed plethora of town meetings along with it-the name of Jim Reynolds became increasingly linked to the looming vacancy in the governor’s office. The early flurry of concern stimulated by Katz’s articles was slowly replaced by a naive overconfidence among Reynolds’s growing boosters that his idea might actually become reality-despite the ominous silence on the issue from both the speaker of the House and the various spokesmen from the law enforcement community. My personal feeling remained that, like the iceberg awaiting the Titanic, some pretty formidable forces were standing ready to stop Reynolds cold in his tracks.
On a brighter note, however, it looked like one of his early obstacles-and ours-would be melting to more manageable size. Stan Katz called me at my office one afternoon, more muted and abashed than I’d ever heard him be.
“What’s up?” I asked with real concern, thinking he’d been hit by some personal loss.
In a sense, he had. “I figured you’d like to know who’s been feeding me that false information.”
“About Reynolds?” I asked, struck by his use of the word “false.”
“Yeah. It was one of your boys in blue, like you thought. Cary Bancroft. You might want to tell Brandt. I got him on tape, had one of our photographers take a shot of us meeting-the works.”
Bancroft hadn’t been with us long and had made little impression on me. I’d written him off as one of the young transients that traipse through our department virtually without leaving footprints. I sensed now I might have been right about the length of his tenure but certainly not about his invisibility. This one was going out with a bang.
“Why, Stan? He was making you headlines.”
“I did like you said,” he admitted, sounding even more depressed. “I looked a gift horse in the mouth. I’m not sure what I did was legal, so I won’t give you the details, but I found out his bank account’s been getting padded at my expense. He was paid to feed me stories.”
“Who by?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t know. It was the old voice-on-the-phone routine, along with anonymous cash deposits. You want to chase it down, I’d start with the anti-Reynolds crowd, but good luck finding the source. To save a little face, I tried like hell to find out-I’ve known about this for a few weeks now-but I got nowhere. So it’s all yours.”
His dark mood precluded my being able to needle him, much as I was tempted. Instead, I tried my best being sympathetic. “Jesus, Stan, I am sorry. You can still make a little hay out of it when Brandt shows him the door-maybe make it into a cautionary tale. It’d be a good story.”
But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Fuck you, Joe. And if you guys do make a big deal out of this, you’ll live to regret it. I’m handing him over ’cause he broke the rules and he made me look like a jerk, but don’t push your luck. I’m still as ready as ever to chap your butts if you screw up.”