I dearly wanted to be gone from here. “Like I said, talk to him.”
He shook his head. “I got the official line, Joe-I’ll run it like you want me to: ‘The police and Raffner and Gail are cozy as all hell.’ This is just for me.”
I looked at his face more carefully then, startled by his apparent candor, and noticing for the first time how exhausted he seemed. I began to understand what was eating at him-it had less to do with my position and more to do with his. “I guess things were a little more clear-cut back when you were a hired gun.”
He went back to his chair and sat down heavily. “I went after the story, pure and simple. I fought you guys to get it, and I fought the editors here to run it the way I wrote it.” He paused a moment before adding, “I’ve had to widen my views a little.”
I sighed inwardly, feeling less on the spot. At the beginning of this conversation, his blatant intention had been to lead me into an indiscretion, even, I suspected, after he’d shut the door and played “off the record.” But I sensed now he’d slipped off that track, distracted by the pressures of his new job. He was sounding like a man who had no one to talk with.
“The owners breathing down your neck?”
“They don’t know this business-not at this level. They saw USA Today go through the ceiling and thought, ‘Hey-why not us?’ All their money comes from shopping malls and condo villages. They have no idea a tabloid tattler just raises the hackles of a town like Brattleboro.”
I thought of the damn-the-torpedoes ambition that had marked most of Katz’s career as a reporter. “And you hope Gail might be the story to turn them around?”
He caught the tone of my voice. “Look, we’re not exactly best friends, but we have worked together in the past, right? And besides the all-reporters-eat-shit paranoia you guys call normal, have I ever really stuck it to you-at least when you didn’t deserve it?”
“That’s too many qualifiers, Stan. If you were a used car, I don’t think I’d buy you.”
He became abruptly more animated. “Cut it out. I’m trying to do something you ought to be supporting here. The shopping-mall kings want short, dirty details and peek-a-boo photos. I want this paper to be a public forum, where this town can share its views-”
“Like it used to be.”
“Fine-only better, but if I don’t get the PD to help me, it’s not going to work and the paper’ll go down the tubes.”
“And you’ll be out of a job.”
His face fell into a scowl. “That’s not the point. I can get another job.”
“But your résumé wouldn’t look as good.”
He began to respond angrily, but I gestured to him to wait. “All right, all right. I’ll pass this along to Tony. But if you want us to open up more to you, you’ll probably have to make some show of good faith.”
“Like what?” His eyes narrowed instinctively.
“Tony’s the one to work that out with, but-just as an example-I don’t think it would hurt if you let us see some of the articles you’re about to print concerning us, just so we can correct the mistakes.”
His jaw tightened. “No way.”
I reopened the door, relieved at least that my involvement in the case had been forgotten for the moment. “Well, like I said, it’s not my department. Talk to Tony. In the meantime, giving us a fair shake in the paper might help win him over.”
He nodded distractedly, his enthusiasm blunted by my unsympathetic self-interest, and he didn’t even look up as I left. I did understand his position, even though I’d made little effort to show it. He’d never had the responsibilities he was facing now, nor had he ever had to build bridges of mutual trust, at least not of this magnitude. And time was running out for him. The paper’s circulation was dropping.
As I walked through the darkness to my car, I wondered what a thawing out between the paper and the department might entail, and how far Katz was willing to go. After all, how much credibility do you give a man under pressure?
The irony of the question-and that I was the one asking it-was not lost on me.
Driving slowly down Putney Road, back toward town, the disappointment I’d felt following the intelligence meeting returned in force. Despite what I’d told Stanley, not finding an MO that clearly fit the case was a serious setback. It meant we had nothing to help us differentiate among the growing number of suspects already coming our way. Tyler had gloated over his single strand of red wool and said, “This little baby will place him at the scene.” But it was a precarious boast at best and would be a downright hollow one if we never found a him in the first place.
I was about half a mile from the end of the Putney Road commercial strip, close to where it dips down to the bridge which connects it to one of Brattleboro’s older and more affluent residential neighborhoods, when my portable police radio put out a call to a nearby restaurant for a reported brawl.
I paid little attention to this-it being a natural for a patrol unit-until Dispatch followed the call with an inquiry of my whereabouts. I keyed the mike and answered, “M-80 from O-3; I’m on the Putney Road near the bridge.”
“This one might be of interest to you.”
I took my eyes off the road and glanced quickly at the radio, as if some further explanation might appear in spectral writing. With half the town monitoring our radio conversations-a practice so peculiarly widespread, we referred to our unseen audience as “scannerland”-some of our messages became cryptic to a fault. I therefore knew better than to ask for details and merely responded, “10-4. O-3 is responding.”
The restaurant in question was located right at the edge of the Retreat Meadows. Once a flood plain of fields belonging to a local drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation facility named the Retreat, it was now, thanks to a dam farther down the Connecticut River, a scenic, lake-like pocket that marked the confluence of the Connecticut and the West Rivers. The restaurant’s broad veranda had become an idyllic platform for watching canoeists, fishermen, and outboard-motor enthusiasts in summertime, and ice fishermen and skaters during the winter months.
No one was watching now, however. Not only was it jet black by now, but the action was most distinctly in the dirt parking lot to the restaurant’s rear. As I left the Putney Road and cut back down a narrow switchback leading to the shore, my headlights picked up a large throng of people clustered around two stationary vehicles.
I stopped at the crowd’s edge, let Dispatch know I’d arrived, and was told a patrol unit was about five minutes away. Relieved by that bit of news-these kinds of disputes were famous for drawing indiscriminate blood-I removed my badge from my pocket and, using it as a combination calling card/battering ram, began slowly to edge my way into the center of the crowd.
I heard the fight before I saw it, and so recognized at least one of the participants. Mary Wallis’s authoritative voice cut through the night air like the railing of an outraged nun. I immediately began to rue Dispatch’s apparently warped sense of humor.
My dread, it turned out, was justified. When I reached the front row of spectators, I found that Wallis had fixed her wrath on none other than Jason Ryan-our unlikely primary suspect. He was sitting in his car with the windows up and the doors locked, nursing a split lip with a bloody handkerchief. She was standing next to the car; yelling invectives and finally pounding on his driver’s-side window with her shoe.
My appearance, signaled by the parting of the crowd, caught both her attention and her rage. “Why isn’t this man in jail?”
I approached her and gently reached for the shoe. “As far as we know, he’s done nothing to deserve it.”