Mrs. Reeves returned with her husband in tow, bleary-eyed and disheveled, still tucking his shirt in over a well-founded beer gut. He looked at me warily but without fear as his wife moved to one side.
“What’s up?” he asked. His voice was neutral but pleasant-that of a man with nothing much to hide.
I showed him the badge I was still holding in my hand. “I was wondering if we could chat a little-in private.”
Mrs. Reeves furrowed her brow angrily and left without a word. He smiled as she went and lifted his eyebrows at me as she slammed a distant door behind her. “That didn’t win you any points. She’s going to give me the third degree anyway.”
“Sorry, but I’d like to keep this confidential for at least a day or two.”
He pointed to the sofa and sat in one of the armchairs. “I can hold out that long-depending on what it’s about.”
I settled on the edge of the sofa and watched his face carefully. “Bob Vogel.”
His eyes narrowed and his mouth turned down, half in disgust, and half, I thought, in apprehension. His hands found one another and his fingers knotted together nervously. I was glad I’d decided to do this in person instead of on the phone.
“What about him?”
“According to his probation officer, you’re supposed to be his car pool to and from work. I gather that’s no longer true.”
He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and paused. His face had become pale. “Why do you care?” he finally murmured.
“When did you two stop riding together, Bernie?” My position on the edge of the sofa gave me a little leverage over him, trapped as he was in the embrace of the soft chair. I let my voice take advantage of the implied authority.
“A month-maybe a little longer.”
“You knew you were supposed to contact Helen Boisvert, didn’t you? What happened?”
Reeves glanced out the window behind me, apparently hoping some gorilla’s arm would suddenly appear and whisk me away. “I meant to. I guess I forgot. Didn’t seem like that big a thing.”
The tension in his voice told me otherwise. “Why didn’t you call her?”
“He said I shouldn’t tell,” he almost whispered.
“Did he threaten you?”
Bernie Reeves nodded toward the back of the house, where his wife could be dimly heard moving about in the kitchen. “Her. He said he’d take it out on her if I told anyone.”
“You guys get in a fight?”
Now that his secret was out, Bernie regained some of his composure, his voice strengthening slightly. “It was all right at first. The supervisor asked me to help him out since we were on the same shift and didn’t live too far apart. I figured Vogel had done his time, and if the company was willing to take him on, that was okay with me. He gave me the creeps, though-talking the way he did. I guess he picked up on my not liking him much. Said he didn’t need me acting superior and that he’d get him his own car. That’s when he told me not to tell anyone or he’d come after Edith.”
“Why didn’t you call us, or Boisvert? You knew he was on probation. Either one of us could have yanked his chain.”
He gave me a look of utter contempt. “That son of a bitch is crazy. He said that no matter what happened to him, he’d come back sooner or later-that he never forgot anyone who fucked him over.”
Reeves shifted angrily in his seat and tried to paint a slightly more stalwart portrait of himself. “I might not have cared much for myself, but Edith’s alone here most nights. What the hell could I do?”
I shook my head, utterly unswayed. I had spent a professional lifetime listening to people convince themselves that their self-preservation was the same as high moral ground. As far as I could see, Bernie Reeves’s spinelessness had eventually led to Gail’s rape.
I struggled to keep my voice neutral. “You said Vogel gave you the creeps. What did you mean by that?”
“When we started the car pool, I tried to make small talk, you know? Break the ice a little. I didn’t know the guy-we work in different sections of the plant. I thought I’d be friendly. But whenever we talked about women-you know how you do with another guy-he got really weird. When we talked about girls in the plant, say-he’d say things like, ‘She’d look better with my dick in her mouth,’ or real violent stuff, especially about women who stood their own ground or were a little snotty to him. We’ve got some tough ones at the plant.”
That single word cut through the weariness clouding my mind. Gail’s attacker had called her a “snotty goddamn bitch.”
“Is that how he described those women? As snotty?”
“You mean, is that the word he used? I guess so. I couldn’t swear to it.”
I paused, disappointed by his faulty memory. “Did he ever talk about what he’d done with women?”
His lips tightened and looked uncomfortable again. “A little.”
“He told you what he’d done time for.”
It wasn’t a question, but he answered anyway by the way his eyes suddenly dropped to his hands.
“What did he do, Bernie? Start bragging?”
He nodded, back to whispering again. “I told him I thought he was twisted. He pulled a knife and made me swear to keep quiet. And he said the car pool was over-that he’d take care of himself, and that I better keep quiet about that, too, or he’d do to Edith what he’d done to those others.”
“And you believed him.”
He leaned forward then, no longer tentative or doubtful of his motivations. “Damn right I did. He scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know if he was going to cut my throat or not. What did I care if he drove himself to work? It sure as hell meant more to him than it did to me, and I wasn’t about to risk my life over it. I just wanted to be rid of him.”
“Did you see him after that?”
Reeves shook his head emphatically. “I’d see him from a distance, maybe, but I’d steer clear. He didn’t mess with me, and I sure as hell didn’t mess with him.”
“So you don’t know what he was wearing at work two nights ago?”
“Nope. Didn’t even see him.”
I stood up and walked over to the front door. “Did he have any friends at the plant, that you know of?”
Having made his confession, Bernie Reeves regained his homeowner’s authority. He made a gesture as if to usher me out. “I told you what I know, and that was probably too much. The way you people work, I’m probably knee-deep in shit by now, right?”
“Everything’s relative, Bernie. Thanks for your time.”
Despite my ambivalence about his character, I felt Bernie Reeves had done me a double service. As I drove back toward the center of town, I now knew we’d gathered more than enough for a warrant-and I was personally convinced that we had the right man.
My optimism was apparently catching. The Municipal Center’s parking lot, normally pretty dormant, was teeming with activity. Cars and trucks bristling with antennas and sporting flashy logos of newspapers and radio and TV stations from as far away as Burlington were parked at odd angles all over the lot, their owners either fiddling with equipment or clustered in small groups sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. A news conference, a big one, was in the offing.
But my own confidence deflated suddenly at the sight, and settled unhealthily with the exhaustion pounding softly at my temples. I continued driving, parked around the corner, and entered the building from the far side, dreading the start of a circus that could only do us harm.
I went straight to Tony Brandt’s office, finding him, as I thought I might, in close company with James Dunn. They had their backs to the door as I entered, both of them standing over Tony’s desk, studying the contents of an open folder.
“Isn’t it a little early for a press conference? We don’t even have a search warrant yet,” I blurted out, my sense of self-preservation dulled by lack of sleep and irritation.