Several decades earlier, the Putney Road had been farmland, much of it owned by an old and canny operator named Benjamin Chambers. Less a farmer than an instinctive broker of almost anything salable, Chambers had taken a gamble on where and when Interstate 91’s umbilical cord would eventually connect the state to the rest of the country-thereby christening Brattleboro as the “Gateway to Vermont”-and had managed to buy, trade, and some said steal a mosaic of properties lying directly in its path. By the time the federal grand plan became reality in the sixties, old man Chambers was sitting on a pot of gold.
Never had gold looked so unattractive. I was struck as always by the contrast between Brattleboro’s northern residential section, which featured some of our oldest, stateliest homes, and where the Putney Road “miracle mile” began. It was like having a McDonald’s sharing a wall with a grand Victorian mansion.
On the other hand, Putney Road was also where a great many locals did their shopping or came to work, not only from Brattleboro but from towns all around. It had helped make Brattleboro a hub community, and its commercial vitality had carried the town through times that had steadily eroded nearby places like Springfield, Vermont, and Greenfield, Massachusetts. In fact-almost emblematically-one of the state’s largest employers, a gigantic wholesale groceries supplier, occupied the northernmost end of the road. None of that made the strip any less of an architectural eyesore, but it highlighted the reality that had Brattleboro been only old bricks, elegant homes, and quaint shops, it would have gone belly-up years ago.
About midway up the street, however, the dark side of the more-commerce-the-better philosophy loomed into view on my left. Like a missing tooth in a hundred-watt smile, a dark, abandoned building site interrupted the seamless string of fluorescent signs, bright windows, and glowing, snow-covered parking lots.
A proposed fifteen-million-dollar hotel/convention center complex-not as big as the two in far-off Burlington, but the only one of its size in the whole southeast quadrant of Vermont-its developer, Gene Lacaille, had run into financial difficulties and had dropped it, half-built, into his banker’s lap.
It was painful proof that the Putney Road money machine was not a guaranteed thing. As I drove by the lifeless site, still filled with equipment but clotted with untouched snow, I imagined a cluster of high-echelon bankers burning the late-night oil downtown, wondering how in hell to extricate themselves from this one.
I drove on for another half mile and turned left onto Black Mountain Road. The Brattleboro Reformer, where I was scheduled to meet both its editor, Stanley Katz, and his radio rival, Ted McDonald, had its low-profile office building tucked away on a small bluff between the shoulder of Interstate 91 and an overpass bridge. I had under forty minutes before they started rolling the presses at eleven.
The parking lot was almost empty. A morning paper, the Reformer was only fully staffed during the mid-afternoon overlap period when the nine-to-five workers and the news crew shared the same roof for a few hours. By this time of night, only the hard core remained-the night reporters, an editor or two, the press operators, and the back-room people responsible for getting the product delivered. It was a thin crowd, and sometimes a rowdy one, befitting a bunch whose days ran upside down.
I parked in a poorly plowed visitor’s slot and began slogging my way toward the front door, marked by a peeling flagpole and a huge, dead, snow-capped potted plant. The walkway hadn’t been shoveled, but compressed by countless footsteps, which had also made it hard, uneven, and slippery. A year ago the building, if not the product, had been in better shape. A Midwest conglomerate had poured money into the place, hoping to create a USA Today of Vermont-with glitzy colors, bite-sized articles, and screaming headlines, jammed into a tabloid-sized paper designed to be read in a subway…
Except that the more the old Reformer was twisted out of shape, the more subscribers switched over to the more traditional Rutland Herald.
Several months ago, the employees, facing either layoffs or bankruptcy, had banded together, rounded up a few local backers and several banks, and had bought the paper. Now it was its old broadsheet self, printed in conservative black and white and operating on a shoestring. Watering plants, painting flagpoles, and even hiring someone to shovel the walk had all fallen under the heading of needless expenses. But an era of crazed flatlander yuppiness had been survived, and I wasn’t about to fault the staff ’s hard-won victory with petty complaints of a broken neck. So I chose my footing carefully and made my way slowly to the front door.
Beyond the double glass doors of what had been a sharp-looking modern building fifteen years earlier, the air in the large, central newsroom was stale and motionless-the ventilation kicking in only intermittently to save money. The rug beneath my feet was soiled and worn, the lighting turned off except where strictly necessary, and the trash cans overflowing for lack of a janitor. The effect suggested a futurist movie where everyone worked in shabby, fluorescent boxes on a planet where everything was dying and energy was at a premium. Supporting the notion, the only people I could see were sitting in a centralized cluster of desks, hunched before computer terminals, their faces bathed in a lifeless, electronic shade of blue.
I watched them in silence for a few seconds, impressed that they had worked so hard for such a seemingly dismal result, and remembered how Katz had once said that newspapering demanded equal parts love and dementia.
As a cop, I had little use for newspeople. I thought they were sloppy, cynical, exploitative, self-righteous and thin-skinned. But I realized I was probably wrong, since their view of us was as lazy, close-minded, arrogant, and paranoid. Whatever the truth, we were stuck with each other and had no choice but to cooperate.
A door opened to one of the small conference rooms lining the far wall, and a thin, pale, exhausted-looking man in a rumpled shirt leaned out and fixed me with dark-rimmed eyes. “Joe. Come on in. Ted’s already here.”
I crossed the room, aware of several faces looking up from their screens to murmur greetings. I waved back to them collectively and shook Stanley Katz’s hand.
“I’d offer you coffee, but we’ve gone through our nightly allotment. Budget crunch-sorry.” He ushered me over the threshold, closing the door behind us.
A small conference table occupied the center of the room, and sitting at its far end was a man as fat as Stanley was thin, placed like a Buddha awaiting an audience. His pudgy hands were wrapped around a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, which he raised in salute as I nodded my greetings. “Gotta’ plan ahead, Joe. These guys don’t have a pot to piss in.”
“We don’t have time to piss, Ted,” Katz shot back. “We got to do more than supply five minutes of gossip for every hour of canned music.”
But he was smiling as he said this. Having once told me he thought Ted McDonald was a fat slug “woodchuck”-the local pejorative for a dim-witted native-born-he’d also frequently conceded that Ted had integrity-and a network of informers he envied.
I sat opposite them both. “I wanted to let you know what was really going on, since for the past several hours, Ted’s been reporting we found a body off Hillcrest Terrace and that foul play is suspected.”