Litchfield was in her mid-twenties, thin to the point of scrawniness, and equipped with spiky purple hair and all the standard hardware accessories, from tongue and eyebrow posts to a half dozen earrings running up each lobe. She also sported a rose tattoo on her temple, which I rather liked.
I had her sit in a straight-backed chair in the corner, while I remained standing. “Would you like me to call you Janice or Miss Litchfield?” I asked her.
She was sitting slouched over and knock-kneed, scratching at one set of painted nails with the other. “I don’t care.”
“All right. We’ll make it Janice. You want a soda or some coffee?”
“No.”
“Anyone tell you why we asked you to come here tonight?”
“No-I figured it was about Brenda.”
“How did you hear about that?”
“I just heard. Everybody did. It’s all over town.”
“They saying who did it?”
“No.”
“You have any ideas about that?”
“No.”
I reached back in time. “How long have you known Brenda?”
“Since before high school.”
“Middle school or around the neighborhood?”
“Middle school. I knew about her when we were kids, but I didn’t know her.”
“What was she like?”
Janice hunched her shoulders slightly, eyes still glued to her fingertips. As far as I knew, she hadn’t looked at me once yet. “Normal-you know.”
I had no idea what defined normal here, although I had my suspicions. “You describe her as a follower or a leader?”
“Kind of a leader, I guess.”
“How was she with boys?”
“Pretty tough. She didn’t take no shit from them.”
“That get her into trouble with them?”
“Nah. They kind of like that-sometimes.”
“Until they don’t get what they want?”
She looked up quickly, and just as quickly dropped her gaze. But I’d seen the smile. “You mean sex? That wasn’t a problem. She wanted it, too. She just didn’t let them control her.”
I picked up a feeling of envy there. “So what happened after high school? You two keep in touch?”
“Sure. We were best friends.”
“You must be pretty sad she’s dead, then.”
The fingers suddenly stopped their nervous dance. Her head tucked in just a fraction more. “Sure.”
I paused, considering my course. “Must be scary,” I finally said.
She didn’t answer.
“The two of you did some risky things together.”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“You worried that’s what got her killed?”
“Sort of.” It was barely a whisper.
“You may be right, Janice.”
Silence filled the room. I crouched next to her so I could look up into her face. Her expression was rigid with concentration. “Janice, I’d like to stop whoever did this from doing it again. What were you and Brenda up to that might’ve killed her?”
Her eyes slid over to me at last, her chin trembling slightly. She sounded bewildered. “It could’ve been anything.”
Of that, unfortunately, I had no doubt. For the next hour, I extracted details of a life as haphazardly brutal and careless as any in the urban front lines to our south. We kid ourselves in Vermont that because of the trees, fields, and our thinned-out, monochrome population, life is somehow saner up here. But it isn’t architecture, density, or racial mix that breeds despair and self-destruction. It’s the training and instincts we supply our young at home, and there Janice Litchfield and Brenda Croteau and a few thousand others like them had been as shortchanged in bucolic Vermont as any shattered child in the ghetto.
By the end of my session with Janice, I was armed with a long list of names, and a sense of confusion as deep as her own. Given what I’d learned, Brenda could have been killed for drugs, sex, money, or because the type of coffee she drank wasn’t the right brand. I was certainly no longer wondering how she could afford to live beyond the means of a welfare recipient.
Later, close to midnight, Willy, Sam, and I met around the long table in the conference room adjacent to the squad room. Each of us had pads of paper covered with notes.
“Okay,” I began. “Willy, why don’t you start off?”
Kunkle looked like he’d just stepped into something disagreeable. “If there was any justice, Jamie Good would be a permanent boy-toy in some federal pen. That guy is the slimiest piece of shit I ever met.”
“Meaning he gave you nothin’,” Sammie interpreted.
“I wanted to rip his head off.”
“Were he and Brenda tight?” I asked.
“He said they knew each other, had slept together, done drugs together. But that’s like asking puppies if they piss on the same newspaper. He said it didn’t mean a thing, and I believe him. I know his type, and I know him personally. He was having fun in there. I don’t think he killed her.”
“He know who did?”
“He’d like to. That’s the one thing that got him down. He would’ve loved to have held that over my head, but he couldn’t.”
“Or didn’t,” I suggested.
“He’s not that self-restrained,” Willy countered, “and I know him well. Much as I hate to admit it, I think he’s clean.”
We both looked at Sammie.
“I can’t say the same about Dwayne Matthews,” she admitted. “He says they were getting along fine, that he last saw her day before yesterday, around noon at her house, but he’s cagey. Denies ever doing drugs, although we got him down as a probable dealer; said he didn’t have a record, till I put it in front of him.”
“What kinds of stuff?” Willy asked.
“Penny-ante-disorderly, assault, petty theft, B amp;E, possession-usual kinds of recreation. Nothing armed, nothing lethal, nothing that had upward mobility written on it. We’ve never actually caught him at anything.”
“Janice told me Brenda was into everything that moved,” I said, “and usually got paid for it. Did Dwayne share that opinion?”
“Not really,” Sammie answered. “He called her a wild chick, but it was hard to tell if he meant sexually, criminally, or socially. He was real evasive. He did say he thought she drank too much and overdid it with dope. Gave me some sanctimonious shit about how he’d told her it was a bad influence on the baby.”
“I did a record check on Brenda,” Willy said. “Maybe Dwayne was vague because he didn’t know where to start. Her sheet covers prostitution, drunk and disorderly, possession of and selling a controlled substance, assault, probation violations, receiving stolen goods. My kind of woman.”
“That would explain hanging out with Jamie Good,” Sam muttered.
“Neither of you knew about her before?” I asked. “With a reputation like that?”
“It’s from here and there,” Willy explained. “She traveled around, mostly in-state. Good’s a hometown boy. Brenda was a wanderer.”
I wondered if we’d end up going outside of Brattleboro for our solution. Generally, these types of crimes occurred close to the nest, but Brenda’s restless background left that door wide open.
First things first, though. I tapped my pad with my fingertip. “Let’s compare the names each of them gave us. See if we can come up with some kind of family tree. Maybe someone’ll stand out.”
There are two major groupings for homicides: the slam-dunks and the who-dun-its. The slam-dunks, luckily for us and unhappily for fiction writers, are by far the most common. Someone gets pissed off, lashes out, and either waits remorsefully for us to arrive or at most hightails it home, leaving ten witnesses behind to point the way. With these, we sift through an excess of testimony, making sure the perpetual contradictions are explained (he was left-handed, he was right-handed; he was fat and short; he was tall and skinny). Basically, it amounts to legalistic traffic control, done in close cooperation with the prosecutors inheriting the ball.
Who-dun-its are much rarer. With them, we’re left on our own, interviewing people who don’t want to talk to us, conjuring up scenarios based on evidence and not wishful thinking. There’s also a sense of lost time, lost opportunity, and ever-vanishing prospects. Who-dun-its are like being adrift in a rowboat with the tide pulling you out to sea. Unless something turns up to reverse the trend, all that’s left is to watch the shore slowly sink into the horizon. In the movies, who-dun-its are action-packed, thrillingly progressive, and ultimately successful. In reality, they are slow, plodding, and often end up nowhere. If a bad guy in this country has the smarts to knock someone off with just a modicum of discretion, chances are pretty good he’ll never be caught. All the science, the networking, and the inspiration don’t come to much if you don’t have a name to begin with.