I broke away from the huddle and crossed to where State’s Attorney James Dunn was getting out of his car. By Vermont law, an appointed representative from the SA’s office is supposed to make an appearance at the scene of a possible homicide. Usually, it’s the low man on the SA’s totem pole. In Brattleboro, it’s usually The Man Himself.
James Dunn was tall, pale, thin, and arrogant-a stone gargoyle who’d given up his perch to settle disdainfully among us mere mortals. He was good at his job, knew the law inside out, played no favorites, and kept his private passions to himself, except for this one-he loved to see the bodies. No matter the hour or the weather, if we ever came upon a corpse, or even someone close to being one, James-never Jim-Dunn made the show. He never got in the way and was occasionally useful, but I thought this morbid appetite a little odd. And it often made me wonder about his social life.
“You found a hand?” he asked with a single raised eyebrow.
“A right hand; buried behind the retaining wall. We’re assuming it was put there last night.”
He slammed his car door and took long, elegant strides toward the embankment. He was also a bit of a dandy-a lifelong bachelor with an affinity for English clothes. Even in this heat, he wore a dark and natty suit and refused to yield even the slightest sheen of sweat. “Is the hand attached to anyone?”
“Presumably. We’re finding that out now.”
J.P., whether following established technique or simply giving in to curiosity, had dug another funnel in the dirt, similar to the one that encased the hand. At the bottom of this one was a man’s face.
Tyler was delicately whisking away granules of dirt from the body’s mouth, nose, and half-open eyes with a camel’s-hair brush when we arrived at the edge of the road. He leaned back upon hearing us and glanced up. “Look familiar?”
My own mother wouldn’t have looked familiar. Flat and one dimensional at the bottom of the hole, the pale face looked more like an ancient ceremonial ivory mask, waiting to be discovered and hung on some museum wall.
Both Dunn and I shook our heads to Tyler’s question. He resumed his excavating.
I heard Detective Sergeant Dennis DeFlorio, his voice small and tinny, calling me on the radio I had hooked to my belt. “Go ahead,” I answered.
“You still on Canal Street?”
“Ten-four.”
“Can you meet me on the south end of Clark?”
Clark was the short, horseshoe-shaped residential alleyway behind the small block of businesses facing Canal. Its one-way entrance cut between the businesses and the school to the block’s right, and its outlet appeared back on Canal several hundred yards closer to downtown. Its only function was to provide access to some browbeaten apartments that were shoved hard against the steep wooded slope I’d been studying earlier. As elsewhere in this geographically topsy-turvy town, every square inch of flat land had buildings clustered on it like cows bunched together on hillocks during a flood.
I started down Clark Street and found DeFlorio coming toward me, his round face red and glistening. The opposite of James Dunn, Dennis was short and fat, given to soiled ties, loose shirttails, and to buckling his belt somewhere out of sight under his belly.
“What’s up?”
“Well, I figured if I lived here, Clark being the dump it is, I’d be out taking a walk on a hot night, just to get away, you know? Like last night.”
The one slightly irritating thing about Dennis was his propensity to beat around the bush, as if every declaratory sentence had to be prefaced by an enticing roll of the drum.
“So where did that lead you?”
He looked surprised at my thick-headedness. “I know nobody could of seen or heard anything from here, but I figured I’d ask anyway, especially to see if my theory was right.”
“And it was.”
“Yeah. I think I nailed down the time of death.” He flipped open the cop’s ubiquitous notebook he held in his soft, damp hand. “A guy named Phil Didry said he was walking along Canal around three this morning when he saw a police car parked with the engine running, right where the body is buried.”
“One of our cars?”
“Yeah, I figure someone on the graveyard shift. All we got to do is find out who it was, and we’ll have a pretty good idea when the body got planted.”
I looked quizzically into his beaming face. “I don’t follow you.”
DeFlorio’s smile faded slightly. “Don’t you see? We can ask him what it looked like-the dirt. If it was disturbed, then the burial happened before three; if it wasn’t, then it happened later.”
“Dennis, the dirt never did look disturbed.”
He looked at me blankly, trying to register this anomaly.
“Did your witness see the policeman?”
“No. I don’t think he wanted to hang around. None of these people are too pure, you know.”
“So what makes you think our patrolman was over the embankment? He might have dropped into Ed’s Diner for a coffee.”
DeFlorio made a fast mental run for safety. “I know that-I just meant on the off chance that if he did take a look, it would help nail down the time.”
I pursed my lips and nodded thoughtfully. “It’s an excellent point, Dennis. We’ll check it out.”
I shook my head as DeFlorio retreated back up the street to shake out some more gems. Not that his witness wasn’t a good find, but DeFlorio’s conclusions rubbed in a fact as painfully obvious to me as it seemed inconceivable to Hollywood: Cops are neither routinely corrupt nor preternaturally heroic, and damn few of them are endowed with the instincts of a Sherlock Holmes. They put in their hours, spending half of those doing paperwork and the other half dealing with cranky citizens, and then they go home.
In Brattleboro, their problems are compounded. The pay approaches the absurd and-where a homicide or bank robbery comes around once in a blue moon-the boredom can be mind-numbing. It was not an environment to attract either geniuses or careerists. Observations like that, however, can cut close to the bone. I’m no genius either, but no one could say I hadn’t made this business a career. It’s all I’ve done professionally since getting out of the service in the mid-nineteen fifties. Of course, my introduction to police work was different. The pay when I entered wasn’t so balefully lopsided, and the neighborhood foot-patrol cop was a popular and respected figure in a small, almost provincial town where crimes were infrequent, unsophisticated, and easy to solve, and the need for a detective squad didn’t even exist. We’d also had to contend with a quarter of today’s paperwork. By the time it had all begun to change, I’d found myself too settled in to do otherwise.
Klesczewski met me back on Canal, where I noticed James Dunn was still hovering at the edge of the road, like a raptor looking for mice far below.
“What did Dennis want?”
“He found someone who saw one of our patrol cars parked out here around three this morning.”
Klesczewski raised his eyebrows. “That might be handy. You know who it was?”
“Not yet. I’ll get hold of George Capullo later.” Capullo was the sergeant for the graveyard shift, and the one who handed out assignments.
“Well, I got something, too. It’s not much, but I figured you ought to take a look.” I thought back to the way DeFlorio had delivered his report; had it been Klesczewski, he would have escorted me to meet the witness and forced me to interview him all over again, just so nothing was left out. It had never surprised me the two men generally kept their distance from one another.
I followed Klesczewski toward Ed’s Diner and the concrete barricade the road crew had set up weeks ago, which we were now using as a police line to keep out the public. My heart sank a little as we drew near, for standing on the other side of the listless yellow police line we’d strung across the road was the Brattleboro Reformer’s courts-’n’-cops reporter, Stanley Katz.