A death of this sort in a town the size of Brattleboro, with an average of one homicide every three years, would be front-page news for days, and that was only if we cleared it up fast.
I approached Ernie Wallers casually, taking time to wipe a spot on the truck’s running board before sitting next to him. It felt good to be out of the sun.
“Pretty bad deal, huh?”
He shook his head, his eyes on the ground in front of him.
“Sure as hell didn’t make my day.”
“I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, from the police department. You’re Ernie Wallers, right?”
He gave me a cursory glance and a slight nod. “The guy was murdered, wasn’t he?”
“Dunno yet. It’s a pretty good guess. I hear you were taking soil samples when you found him; what made you dig him up? Didn’t he just feel like a rock or something?”
Wallers straightened slightly and took a deep drag on his cigarette, which was burning perilously close to his fingers. “No way. We’re putting clean fill in there-I would’ve dug it out if it had been a rock. Besides, it was a little soft when I pushed. I didn’t know what the hell it was-just that it wasn’t supposed to be there.”
I looked around. “What do you use for your soil borings?”
He pointed to a long, thin cylinder a little thicker than a walking stick. One end of it was protruding from the back of a nearby pickup truck.
“You pound that in, or twist it?”
“Twisting’s best. That’s what I was doing.”
I made a mental note to have Tyler check out the end of the probe, and to match whatever he found to the mark it would have left on the body. “Did you notice anything unusual about the dirt before you went for a sample-like footprints or any signs of digging?”
He shook his head. “Just the opposite. I tested there because it looked cleaner than anywhere else. There were footprints-we walk back and forth along there all the time-but not as many, like they’d only been put there today.”
“And that layer of dirt has been there longer than that?”
“Yeah.” Wallers’s voice was picking up interest, now that I’d warmed him up. He got to his feet and I followed him over to the jagged edge of the road. He pointed to the two-hundred-foot long ledge below us. “The way this works, we build up a few feet of wall, and then we fill in behind it, from left to right. Then we tamp it down with a compactor, do some borings to make sure the soil is compressed to within specs, and start all over again. We’d compacted the spot I was testing around mid-morning yesterday. It took us the rest of the day to finish that layer to the far end, and today we’ve just been building wall. So we’ve been walking on that particular dirt for almost two days.”
“Why did you think that one spot was cleaner?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t give it any thought; not then. It just caught my eye, so I drilled it. I have to do a bunch of borings along the whole length of this thing anyway, so it doesn’t much matter where I do them.”
“Can you think back and remember if any of the footprints looked unusual or out of place?”
He smiled. “You mean before I dug that hole and covered them all up?”
I didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question for him and spilled milk for me-at least he’d been curious enough to dig in the first place, and smart enough to stop once he’d uncovered the hand.
Wallers bent his head and thought for a moment, his eyes half closed in concentration. I was pleased with his deliberate cooperation. In over thirty years as a policeman in this town, I’d encountered every conceivable reaction to questioning like this, from obsequious babbling to a wild punch. Thoughtfulness was a cherished rarity, especially at the start of a felony crime investigation.
He rubbed the back of his neck and gave a rueful smile. “I don’t know. The more I think about it, the less sure I am.”
“About what?”
“Well, I think there was something different. We all wear construction boots, with lug soles.” He made an impression in the dust to prove the point. “Maybe there were others there that were smooth, like yours.”
I stepped back, so that my print was next to his. He studied them both for a moment. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’m making it up with all the excitement. It was like an impulsive thing to bore right there, you know? I wasn’t really paying attention.”
I squeezed his elbow. “You’ve been very helpful. Sorry this had to happen.”
He gave a little humorless laugh. “Something I can tell my grandchildren some day.”
I left him and walked back to where Klesczewski was gathering an ever-growing collection of police officers, patrolmen, necktied detectives, and a group of men and women who had obviously been called away either from home or from the off-duty, part-time jobs many of them held down to buttress their meager municipal wages.
“Everyone here?” I asked him.
“Close enough to start handing out assignments.”
I nodded and glanced over the embankment. Tyler-short, thin, bespectacled, and in constant nervous motion-was organizing a small team of policemen/archaeologists to grid, sketch, collect, bag, and label the dirt covering the body. It would take them hours to dig down four feet, and days to sift the dirt and completely analyze what they found.
I turned my back on the construction site and the Whetstone Brook valley beyond it. Across Canal Street, the topography was just the reverse. Behind a low, four-business block of buildings fronting the street and a residential alleyway in back, the ground rose steeply to a wooded plateau that looked deceptively unpopulated. It actually held almost a fourth of the city, but from where I stood, I could just see the roofs of a couple of the older homes high against the skyline-the rest looked like wooded wilderness.
“Not a great place for finding casual eyewitnesses, is it?”
Ron Klesczewski was standing next to me, scanning the same view.
He was right. The street had been blocked off for days; the four businesses opposite the scene were closed at night, as were the warehouses on the other side of Whetstone Brook. To the right of the small block of businesses was a school, to the left were four similar weather-beaten homes of dissimilar colors. On our side of Canal, there was a destitute apartment building clinging to the slope at one end of the retaining wall, and tiny Ed’s Diner at the other end, neither of which had many windows facing the gap between them. Last but not least, this was one of the town’s most rundown sections, populated by people whose pride ran more on what they wouldn’t tell the police than on what they could.
I sighed and turned toward the hot and sweating group clustered in the dusty middle of the street. “Looks like we have a murder. It’s an educated guess that it occurred sometime last night. Go for the obvious places”-I pointed at the dilapidated apartment building and the four small houses opposite it-“but don’t miss the possibility that people were out strolling, that windows were open, that things might have been heard but not seen.”
I aimed my fingers across the narrow valley at the buildings clinging to the slope below Elliot Street. “I’d check over there. It looks far away, but some people have binoculars and telescopes. On a hot night, they tend to hang around the windows, trying to catch the cool air. The high-rise is good for that.”
The high-rise was actually the Elliot Street Apartments, a seven-story, modern brick federal housing project, whose broad but distant front directly faced us. I’d found in the past it had many of the same advantages of a first-class intelligence listening post-it was tall, centrally located, had balconies facing every which way, and was jammed with aspiring spies.
“One thing to remember, for those of you who haven’t done too many of these canvasses: We don’t have anything so far. The trick is to make people open up, to give you what they’ve got. Don’t rush them, don’t finish their sentences for them, let them gossip if necessary. Somebody might know somebody who knows somebody who saw something, and we won’t find that last somebody unless we’re all ears right now. Good luck. Ron will give you specific assignments.”