“That left the interrogation, which we conducted a couple of hours ago. After telling him we knew he’d been corrupted, and that a direct cause-and-effect line had been drawn between his sudden wealth and his glowing report on the convention center project, we got him to fess up and admit that Thomas Chambers had been the source of the money.”
Riding a small murmuring of comments, Jack Derby’s voice rose to the surface, “How was that money delivered?”
Sammie allowed a wry smile. “You mean, does it have NeverTom’s fingerprints on it? No. Knox said they were all cash payments, mailed to him in plain white envelopes. The only connection we could make on paper was that Chambers sponsored Knox for membership in an elite Keene golf club. That’s something a newspaper or a rival politician might make hay out of, but it doesn’t break any law we know of.”
“How was contact made initially?” Gail asked.
“By phone. In fact, all contacts were made by phone. Chambers made it clear that if Knox ever approached him in person on this subject, the money would dry up then and there.”
There was a telling silence in the room at this disappointing news, which Gail broke quietly. “There was never an exception?”
“No.”
“Great,” Derby muttered. “We can basically throw that one out, unless the phone records can tell us something.”
Marshall Smith shook his head. “I asked a friend at the phone company to take a discreet look at NeverTom’s bills. They must’ve all been local calls. Plus, Knox told us he was only contacted at the office, when a call from someone like Tom Chambers would’ve appeared perfectly legit.”
My mind suddenly clicked on something obvious. “What about Ned Fallows? He doesn’t have a phone, but with NeverTom nervous enough to threaten suing us, he might’ve contacted Fallows in person or by mail to keep the pressure on.”
“I want to talk to Fallows myself,” Derby said darkly. “He’s beginning to piss me off.” He turned to Gail. “Can you have someone pick him up?”
She nodded, taking notes, her face as blank as I knew her feelings were not.
“If that’s all we got on Knox,” Tony asked, “do we even have enough to prosecute him?”
“I doubt it,” Derby admitted. “Even with his confession, it might be shaky, depending on who he got to represent him. You can get him fired, but you’d have to fight for anything more. Maybe the IRS would be interested.”
Willy Kunkle crushed the Styrofoam cup in his hand and tossed it toward the wastepaper basket in the corner, missing by three feet. “That’s fucking great.”
“All right,” I said, overriding a brief resurge in conversation. “Sheila and J.P.-what’ve you got on Harold Matson?”
“Not much,” J.P. admitted. “He got defensive fast and tried to argue various points, all of which Sheila was able to win, but the issues were basically procedural. Without legal authority to get into B of B’s records, we didn’t have any proof of unethical or illegal activity. When we popped the Chambers brothers on him, I thought we nearly had him-there’s clearly a connection between them-but he shut down, demanded a lawyer, and was out the door five minutes later. We just didn’t have enough hard evidence to make him bleed.”
“Have you been able to look into Ben Chambers?” I asked.
“I was about to ask the same thing,” Gail joined in. “Seems he’s the most direct beneficiary here.”
Sheila answered. “We watched for his name during our paper chase, and asked a few of our contacts, but there’s not much there to investigate. He has a checking account locally-not with B of B-and of course a small suitcase of land titles, again with other banks, but the bulk of his assets are out of state, probably in Boston and New York. Again, with no legal muscle, we weren’t able to do much. It all sure confirms how private he is, though, especially compared to his brother. An amazing number of people have never even met the man, and the few who have said he’s a pretty strange bird-quiet, shy, apologetic. I guess he’s a true nerd-happiest in front of a computer, trading stocks and doing deals long distance.”
“So all the stuff you dug up points to Thomas, not his brother?” I asked.
“Right.”
“All the more reason to dig deeper, then,” I said, unsuccessfully masking my disappointment. “On a brighter note, we do have the goods on Paul Hennessy.” I leaned forward and retrieved a sheet of paper from under one of the pizza boxes. “Along with a listing of all his properties, courtesy of Ron’s diligent spadework. When we do get our hands on him, we’ll not only have enough to chuck him in jail for a long time, but we’ll have some left over to trade for his partner’s name. We have a Be-on-the-Lookout all over New England, so it shouldn’t be long before we hear something.”
“You wish,” Willy said softly.
“It’s more than that,” I told him. “Whoever this partner is, he ended up giving Hennessy the screwing of a lifetime. We’ve frozen every asset we can find, so unless he has a Swiss bank account, which he doesn’t seem bright enough to have thought of, all Hennessy should have left is a desire to beat the shit out of the guy who put him in this mess.”
“Hope he doesn’t look in the mirror,” Willy said to general laughter.
“All right,” I continued. “Everything else seems to be on track. Willy, I take it there’s nothing new on Sawyer?”
“Nope,” he said with his usual eloquence.
“Gail and I are meeting with Bernie, the patient we think may have seen the killing. Our session with him is going to be orchestrated by his psychiatrist, but we’ve been warned not to expect much.”
I stood up, indicating the end of the meeting. “Let’s wrap it up for tonight. Remember, Sammie is putting together a time line tracking everybody’s alibis, so any relevant information you get should be handed over to her ASAP. As we’ve just found out, knowing who the bad guys are and proving it are two different things.”
It was still snowing hard later that night. Over a foot of it had accumulated on the ground. The sky overhead was as black as a grave, making the appearance of white snowflakes from its midst a little startling, and vaguely magical.
I was standing on a steep hill overlooking Brattleboro from the north, next to one of its oddest landmarks-a sixty-five-foot stone tower built by patients of the Retreat as a therapy project in the 1890s. The Retreat is a famous, 160-year-old alcohol and rehabilitation center, but one of its biggest attributes locally-aside from being the butt of many a teenage nuthouse joke-is its maintenance of hundreds of pristine acres within the town limits. Be it farmland or field and forest, this property does much to enhance Brattleboro’s distinctly pastoral appearance. Aside from the eccentric tower, the Retreat keeps this vast ownership demure, and does its best to only gently acknowledge its careful and costly stewardship-usually only when it needs to flex a little political muscle. Word had gotten out that tangling with the Retreat was not a great career move.
The tower was part of a recreational area-a crosshatching of trails in a tangle of trees that gave people the pleasures of nature within earshot of downtown traffic. But during the winter, and especially on a night like this, it marked the most isolated of spots-dark, silent, and empty, although ringed by the town’s snow-blurred lights and serenaded by the dulled scrapings of invisible passing snowplows.
Snow has a unique way of isolating everything within its mantle. Early in the morning, before the curtains are drawn aside for confirmation, one can sense the presence of new snow upon the ground. There is a muted quality to the air’s resonance all around, akin to the emergence from a deep sleep. Standing in its midst, as it is still falling, that feeling becomes as blatant as the numbing of one of the five human senses-with the added confusion of not knowing for sure which one of those senses has been lost.