Brandt stood as they entered, smiling as the affable host. They remained grim, their eyes shifting from him to me to the two available chairs. Dunn showed no hesitation; this was more his arena than theirs, so he sat immediately. I had moved to lean against a filing cabinet, and Wilson took what had been my seat. Nadeau looked uncomfortable and ended up standing by the door, as if foreseeing his fate in this company.
Dunn played up his insider’s role by looking at me and ignoring the topic at the front of everyone’s mind. “Is Cappelli going to make it?”
I shrugged. Obviously Brandt had been doing his homework, passing along the tidbits to Dunn. “Can’t tell yet. He’s still unconscious. I did get the impression he’d come out of it, though.”
Nadeau nodded in a show of mock knowledge, but Wilson’s already high blood pressure was no longer interested in such face-saving games. Nor was he interested in side issues. “Who the hell is Cappelli?”
Brandt smiled again, as did I. Tom Wilson may not have been our town manager of choice, but he was fairly free of pretense. “The driver who went off the bridge.”
Wilson rolled his eyes, suddenly sidetracked. “Would someone mind telling me what the hell that was all about? And why did Dirty Harry here have to turn this place into a Hollywood back lot?” He glared at me.
I cleared my throat. “We went to interview him. He started shooting and ran for it.”
“Interview him about what?” Nadeau’s voice seemed out of place.
Dunn cut straight to the heart of Brandt’s strategy. “I would suggest that’s an inappropriate question. If we are all to remain in this room for this conversation, we’d better stick to general topics.”
“General topics?” Wilson choked, back on course. “Weren’t you aware of what was going on in that hallway? We’ve got two murders on our hands; our police force is so stretched out it can’t even issue parking tickets; we’ve got high-speed chases, a pissed off motorist who almost got killed by a hotshot cop, and I just got a call from the company that employs the bridge workers who almost went for a terminal swim in the river-they’re wondering if police negligence might have had anything to do with that. And that’s not the worst of it,” he added, holding up a hand to stop any interruptions, none of which I saw forthcoming. “The worst of it is that that bastard Katz is crawling around asking what we know about a Brattleboro policeman killing one of our bright young local businessmen.”
He fixed both Brandt and me with a baleful eye. “Do you two catch a certain theme going here? Did the word ‘police’ crop up a half-dozen times just then? We don’t have any general topics, James; we have problems, and most of them seem to be coming from here.”
Dunn stuck to his position. “Then I suggest we change the forum of this meeting. Tony should perhaps have separate conversations with each of us.”
“I didn’t ask for company here. I need some answers. Luman Jackson, as vice-chair of the selectmen-that means officially-has been blistering my ass. Christ, news of the car chase was still on the radio when he rang up last. I didn’t even know what the hell he was talking about. That made me look stupid, and I am goddamned well not going to look stupid to an asshole like him just because you guys aren’t talking. I don’t give a flying fuck if it’s appropriate or not; I want to know what’s going on. Do we suspect that one of our own cops is a murderer?”
His face was beet red at the end of this tirade, and the rest of us watched in silence for a moment, as if more interested in seeing a blood vessel explode than in addressing his question.
This time, Brandt cleared his throat, but Dunn stepped in again, as unperturbed as before. “Wait, Tony. Tom, I understand the pressures being brought to bear here, but it would be entirely wrong to cater to them. Perhaps we can hone our own focus a bit. Gary, why are you here?”
Nadeau looked as if he’d just been discovered eavesdropping on grownups. “Katz came by my office, too. John Woll is a town employee, and I’m legal counsel where town employees are concerned. My problems may look minor compared to Tom’s, but if Woll is seriously being considered as a murder suspect, I feel I should be intimately involved in the discussion.”
“I disagree,” Dunn stated flatly. “If there were charges pending against Woll, they would be criminal in nature. Your involvement in that case would be limited to writing the letter that suspends him from employment, and you would do that only once Chief Brandt and I had advised you to. Aside from Mr. Katz’s innuendos, however, I have heard nothing to indicate that any of that is germane.”
Now we could watch Nadeau turn fuchsia. He didn’t pull out a knife and stab James Dunn in the heart, as he understandably might have. Instead, he paused a moment to select his words. When they came out, I was impressed at their cogency, and at the restraint in his voice. “That may be true. It still remains that this high-speed pursuit has started talk of one lawsuit and might lead to another from the bridge people Tom mentioned. Both of those would land squarely in my lap, and both have their origins in the police investigation that led to that car chase.”
The State’s Attorney took it in full stride with a wide smile. “Excellent. Then we have no problem. As soon as the police department and my office have determined Officer Woll’s culpability in all this, we’ll let you know. And we’ll try to expedite matters quickly so you might have time to head off any lawsuits.”
There was a very long and awkward pause, during which Gary Nadeau let out a small breath of air through slightly flared nostrils. Finally, he put his hand on the doorknob. “All right. The sooner the better.”
Dunn smiled. “Absolutely. It’ll be among our highest priorities.”
But the door had slammed halfway through the sentence.
“You’re a prick,” Wilson said.
“Perhaps, but I’m also correct. We haven’t the slightest idea how much Katz has collected. To presume too much and allow Nadeau to take confidential information directly to the selectmen would be extremely ill-advised.”
“I talk to the selectmen, too.”
Dunn nodded. “That’s true, so part of what I said to Gary applies to you also. However, some of your concerns are legitimate, and I think we ought to give you credibility for your next encounter with the press.”
Wilson looked at him as if he wanted to scrape him off his shoe. “That’s very big of you, James. I didn’t see you looking too credible out there a few minutes ago.”
“They were interested in car chases. It wasn’t my concern. When Katz publishes what he knows about John Woll, we’ll be faced with an entirely different situation. In fact, we might consider beating him to the punch, holding an official press conference and blowing his exclusive.”
I was fascinated with what had transpired here. In some five minutes of razzle-dazzle, James Dunn had convinced both Wilson and Nadeau that he was the man with all the answers, and that Brandt, myself, and indeed the entire police department had been acting with both his knowledge and his blessing. That he might be just as ignorant as they were had never been allowed to cross their minds.
Brandt, probably having anticipated all this, played an equally cool and rational role in addressing Wilson. “Let me try to put it in terms you can use without offending James’s sense of legal propriety. John Woll is not under investigation as a murder suspect. His name has, however, come up in a few compromising places, which is precisely what got Katz all worked up.”
“Katz all but claimed Woll killed Jardine because Jardine and Woll’s wife were fooling around,” Tom protested.
Brandt passively downplayed it. “They were all in high school together. In fact, John Woll is one of the few on our force who was born and brought up in this town. There are people around here who probably saw his first bowel movement-that kind of intimacy can work against you in bad times.”