He was pleased by my instant endorsement. “Sure. Okay. I’ll get right on it.”
I went back across the way to bring the chief up to date.
Tony Brandt recommended a different tack. After I updated him on Reynolds’s office break-in, his hiring of Winthrop Johnston, the sighting of his car at a probable murder scene, and the call I’d gotten about him from Stan Katz, Tony opted for the direct approach.
“He’s running for the state’s top job, for Christ’s sake, or he will be as soon as he makes enough hay out of this bill. I think you should hit him with what we got, even vague as it is. That way, he can’t complain later he didn’t know of our suspicions from the get-go. It pulls the politics right out of it.”
He leaned forward for emphasis. “Plus, if he is guilty, one brief chat with you will make him sweat bullets like nobody’s business, especially when you tell him you’re there because Katz pointed the way. He may even solve this thing for us-which also means you better assign people to watch his wife and secretary ahead of time, just in case that conversation leads to any sudden flurry of activity there. We don’t need a certain automobile to spontaneously catch fire by accident, do we?”
I had to respect Tony’s zeal, especially since I knew he’d voted for the man. I rose to my feet. “Okay. I’ll keep you informed.”
The drive to Montpelier takes under two hours-north along Interstate 91, halfway up the state’s eastern edge, and then northwest on I-89 through the middle of the Green Mountains. It is a trip epitomizing the Vermont so well-known to the rest of the country-deep, ancient, river-cut valleys slicing through dramatic waves of forested mountains, dappled here and there by white-coated clapboard villages and the ever-rarer cow-appointed field. Even looking as it did now-made drab and scabby by winter’s blight without the face-saving grace of a pristine coat of snow-one could sense the richness awaiting spring and summer. Vermont is not a wilderness like what stretches for untold miles out west amid the Rockies. This is land as much carved by humans as by glaciers long gone. A stroll in the densest woods will yield countless stone walls built by farmers who went broke around the time of the Civil War. Vermont, touted today as a bastion of undisturbed nature, has been worked and reworked by inhabitants who at one time had eighty percent of it under cultivation, but who have never really figured out how to exploit it to their own best advantage. At every election, along with the standard arguments about education, taxation, and jobs, the debate about how to use Vermont’s photogenic acreage rages on-all while tourism remains the state’s largest industry.
That was one reason this sudden interest in law enforcement was so peculiar. Never before had the subject been of much use to politicians, who, as long as they paid lip service to the state police and sheriffs-otherwise generally neglected-could all but ignore the rest of us with impunity. Few people in government cared how municipalities dealt with crime, and those who did were content to think that the state police or a few federally funded task forces were enough to keep chaos in check. The almost seventy agencies being talked about now had been largely left to themselves to standardize communications, integrate databases, and join the growing national trend to fully share information. The state police, for all the flak they got for being elitist, aloof, and self-serving, were actually responsible for many of these breakthroughs, but there remained a lot of bad blood for past transgressions never forgiven or forgotten. It was unfortunately typical that the preventable deaths of a few children had been necessary to get the topic on the political agenda. It would also be typical, I thought, if the whole subject just as conveniently disappeared once the current electoral season ran its course.
Which was why I had mixed feelings about Jim Reynolds coming under our scrutiny in such an odd manner. In a world where political leaders were increasingly susceptible to ruin through bad PR alone, I wondered about the timing of this discovery.
Not that history hasn’t taught us how arrogant, stupid, greedy, and short-sighted the political animal can be.
Montpelier is located right in the middle of the Greens, straddling two rivers that periodically dam up with gigantic ice floes and flood downtown with freezing water. A purely political creation, it cannot tout the commerce of Burlington, the skiing of Stowe, or the granite quarries of Barre as its reason for being. It thrives because, in 1805, it won out in the battle over what town would become the state capital.
In this context, it is fitting that Montpelier’s two most prominent features are a tiny, gaudy, gold-domed capitol building, and the lurking presence of a tree-cloaked, gargantuan life insurance company perched atop a hill and overlooking the town like some faceless, obscurely threatening capitalist shadow. The one had all the slightly absurd sparkle of democratic pomp and hopefulness, often confused with power, while the other oozed of money and influence, about whose clout few had any doubts.
In between them lay a modest, bustling town of white-trimmed red-brick buildings, accessorized here and there with the inevitable monolithic government structure-gray, bland, and built of granite. Montpelier is cradled in the palm of a cluster of hills and exudes a feeling of warmth and community, although, in fact, it is missing some of a normal town’s sense of balance. Heavy on restaurants, bars, hotels and inns-befitting a transient population used to being catered to-it lacks some of the basics that a similarly sized permanent crowd might have naturally expected, like a shoe store.
One stubbornly provincial detail has been maintained, however. Despite the seasonal onslaught of cars, flocking to the State House like bees to a hive, parking stinks. If I hadn’t uncovered all of Montpelier’s nooks and crannies from prior visits, I would have discovered them by the time I finally squeezed my car into a dubiously-legal spot a half mile from my destination.
The walk was pleasant, though. It was brain-numbing cold, but aside from having to rub my nose now and then to revive its circulation, I didn’t pay this much heed. It is said that Vermont is annually visited by nine months of winter and three more of damn poor sledding. While it’s really not that bad, we’ve learned to take poor weather in stride.
It was also sunny, which made the approach to the capitol building particularly gratifying. One of only fourteen state legislative domes to be coated in gold, Vermont’s is all the more astonishing because of the structure it caps. The State House is perhaps the smallest of its ilk in the nation and, while handsome, is rather plain, making its topknot as quaintly out of place as a silk derby on a farmer.
Constructed of light gray granite, the building is the awkward result of a tangled birth. Actually the third incarnation of a legislative home, after the fiery deaths of its predecessors, it is fronted with an enormous columned Greek portico-all that’s left of structure number two-which now looks as if it had been glued on as a classy afterthought. Adding to the lopsidedness, the dome does not sit back, like a lord in a rowboat, but instead crowds to the front, making the decorative columns look more like buttresses put in place to keep the dome from falling into the front yard.
As if in homage to a debate-based form of government, many of these peculiarities rose from bitter arguments between the original Boston architect and his practical-minded, stubborn superintendent.
The end result, however, belies such visual snags, for the State House is in the end a jewel box of a building, reflecting all the excesses and ambition of a diminutive rural state long lost in the wake of a bustling nation’s consciousness. Where Albany and Washington, DC, have their perfectly proportioned, cold temples by the handful, it seems fitting that Vermont’s sole offering-much cherished and restored-looks as if it has been constructed of dearly purchased, high-quality spare parts. It is a reflection of pride and pragmatism commingled.