“Be interesting if Mark wins the election.”
Win nodded in agreement. “No argument there. Of course, there’s no proof any of it’s true.” He paused and then added, “On the other hand, Danny had no qualms about killing someone for the cause. I suppose that shows a certain prejudice.”
I laughed with my mouth full.
Win smiled at my reaction but then became serious again. “I don’t know, Joe. All I’ve learned tells me you’re on the right track, trying to connect Danny to Mark on this killing, but I’m damned if I know where you’ll find the evidence.”
We both ate in silence for a while, chewing as much on the information as the food. I suddenly paused in midbite, however, struck by an odd revelation. “You know something weird?” I told him. “I’ve never even met Danny Mullen. It’s almost like he was the puppeteer in this whole thing-pulling the strings, but always out of sight.”
“You’d like him,” Win said. “He’s like his brother that way. Very good-natured, very approachable. I guess it goes without saying he does have a temper, though.”
I couldn’t argue with that. The voice I’d heard on that tape recording had hardly been good-natured.
“What’re you doing for Reynolds now?” I asked after another pause. “You implied you’re still under contract.”
Despite our both being trapped in a booth together, I could almost sense him stepping back. “Yeah, I’m checking a few odds and ends. Mostly wrapping things up. The primary’s almost here, so it won’t be too much longer.”
I gave him a long, level look. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
He smiled benevolently. “You know the rules, Joe. If I find anything you can move on, I’ll call you in a heartbeat.”
We finished our snack, exchanging gossip and updating one another on what we were up to. Win observed that the way Gail was going, she’d probably wind up governor herself someday, and I didn’t disagree.
After we parted, however, I didn’t wait to get to the office to act on what Win had refused to tell me. Driving back toward downtown, I called Ron on the cell phone.
“I just had coffee with Winthrop Johnston. He’s been digging into the Mullens. I think he’s found something he won’t talk about. It’s nothing criminal-he would’ve fessed up to that-but I want to know what it is. Get everyone working on this, including the BCI people, and let’s see if we can track who he’s been talking to.”
“Why bother if you know it’s not criminal?” Ron asked.
“Because he wasn’t hired to put Mark Mullen in jail. He’s just looking for dirt that’ll get Reynolds the election. If we dig a little deeper in some of the same holes, we might just get lucky and find something to prosecute.”
30
Marcia Wilkin lived in Bristol, Vermont, a small town northeast of Middlebury, tucked into a steep-sided narrow gap between the Hogback and South mountains, and hard up against some of the most dramatic, rugged areas the Green Mountains have to offer-Camel’s Hump, Sugarbush, and Mad River Glen among them. Driving out of the Champlain valley toward the axelike incision splitting this solid wall-under a flat, gray skillet of ominous, snow-laden clouds-I felt I was about to be swallowed alive by a dark and looming menace so vast and intractable that no one would bother looking for me once news of my disappearance leaked out.
It was now late November, closing in on a year since we’d discovered Phil Resnick across the railroad tracks in the middle of the night. A year in which law enforcement in Vermont had been threatened with total overhaul and undergone a major readjustment, in which a bright political star had clashed with one of the state’s Democratic standard bearers-and begun a battle they were waging even now-and in which a stack of dead bodies had been attributed to ambition, paranoia, and greed, but whose final rationale had yet to be explained.
And which had stimulated this trip.
According to our research, Marcia Wilkin had not only known both Danny and Mark Mullen as young men, but-we strongly suspected-maintained powerful and secret ties to them to this day.
Unfortunately, that still didn’t give us much. Danny Mullen, in jail awaiting trial for murder, hadn’t said a word since the day he’d been cuffed. It was only wishful thinking on my part, therefore, that Marcia Wilkin had the answers Danny was refusing to divulge. But by now-weeks of interviews, computer searches, and brainstorms later-it was all I had left to go on.
It had been a generally riotous fall. The September primary hadn’t followed anyone’s forecast. Most people I knew had entered the polls confident Mark Mullen would carry the day-despite all the bad publicity-only to discover the next morning that Jim Reynolds had won. Saint Sebastian, riddled with the arrows of his opponent’s devious ways, had pulled off his message of principle over politics.
But whether convinced that Reynolds was no paragon of either purity or innocence-a suspicion I shared-or merely yielding to his own thwarted ambition, Mark Mullen had thrown over the applecart of convention, declared himself an independent candidate, and stormed undeterred toward the November general elections, to the outrage and consternation of his party.
The chaos attending this move had revived national interest. Once again, articles, news reports, and TV shows were featured daily about the man-who-would-be-governor-come hell or high water-and whose brother was suspected of murdering on his behalf, turning the whole political contest into a carnival.
Little did we all realize that we were only two-thirds into a three-act play. With the same quirkiness that had once stimulated the state’s voters to elect a Democrat, a Republican, and an ex-Socialist each to Congress, they once again befuddled the pundits by splitting the vote four ways in November. The Republican, given no real chance to begin, limped across the line in third place, just ahead of a Liberty Union candidate, who, by miraculously winning fifteen percent of a disgusted electorate, further inhibited either Reynolds or Mullen from capturing a majority, although Reynolds did end up with the higher popular count.
But the rules were clear. According to the state’s constitution, a winner had to collect more than fifty percent of the vote. Shy of that, a legislative joint assembly got to choose from between the two top candidates. Mullen and Reynolds were to face off one last time in early January.
And convinced as I was that Mark Mullen had more than passively benefited from his brother’s scheming, I also had to admit that he’d survived so far not just because of the average Vermonter’s love of the absurd, but because, at long last, he’d stepped out from behind the machine of his own making and identified himself to the people as one of their own-born poor, proud, and willing to fight against the odds. As questionable as his integrity and his goals were, Mark Mullen on the stump came across as the genuine article, as homespun and honest as Reynolds appeared lofty, rich, and arrogant.
Not that I had any doubts that when it came time for the two men to lobby their erstwhile fellow legislators prior to the January vote, Mullen would come out on top. Not only was he a better back-room manipulator than Reynolds, but he’d just finished being the titular leader of one hundred and fifty House members. Reynolds had merely been one of thirty Senators, even if an important committee chair. It reminded me that while Saint Sebastian survived those arrows, his enemies had his head in the long run.