“Is that a subtle way of telling me not to touch the Harris thing?”
His eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that bullshit? I’m just being helpful. Isn’t that why you came over?”
I didn’t answer, much as I was tempted. Slowly he turned away and took another swig from his glass. He looked suddenly deflated. “It’s been a long day. Do what you have to do, Joe, but keep it under your hat and make damn sure you keep your priorities in order. A lot of people in the department were happy to see Davis go down. If they find out you’re digging into that stuff, you’re going to start feeling the heat, even if you can tie it together with what’s on our plate now. And if the press gets the slightest whiff of it, we’ll never hear the end of it. Have you told everyone to keep their mouths shut?”
“I think I convinced Wodiska. Woll’s the only one I can order. Will you back me up on Harris?” He paused before answering. “I’m not here for long; they know that. My backing isn’t going to be worth diddly.”
“Will you do it anyway?”
“You haven’t convinced me yet. As far as I’m concerned, the guy who set up the Reitz-Phillips thing and Woll’s mugger are two separate people, and neither one has anything to do with Harris.”
I rose and returned my half-empty glass to the bar. “All right.” I put my coat back on and headed for the hallway. “See you tomorrow, Frank.”
“Hey.” I turned around, and he hoisted his glass at me. “I’ll be thinking about you in Florida.”
“Sure.” I hated to admit it, but right now part of me wished he was already there.
5
The weathergirl with the poodle hair was wrong: it was already snowing as I left the Murphy house. From where they lived high on Hillcrest Terrace-an area my friend Gail Zigman, who was a Realtor, described as “middle-class, non-intellectual”-I could see the light below on Western Avenue, Brattleboro’s main artery to West Brattleboro, and the glistening snake of Interstate 91, twisting its way north along the Connecticut Valley floor. The scene looked safely Christmas-like, all twinkling lights and snowy motes. Most of the other houses on the block added to the mood with lingering holiday mementos: wreaths on doors, snowmen, colored lights, even an illuminated Santa on a roof, complete with blinking HO-HO-HO.
I don’t know what made me notice the dark green Plymouth Duster parked across and down the street. Maybe it was that I had once owned a Duster and had considered it the best car I’d ever had; maybe it was that the snow hitting its hood melted instantly. I couldn’t see through the windshield. In any case, at the time I didn’t give it much thought.
I drove down to Western, caught the interstate to the exit below, and bought some groceries at the Finast nearby, not far from Thelma Reitz’s house. I then retraced the route I’d traveled a very long day ago.
Brattleboro is an appealing town, at least to me. Modernization and the trendy urban remodelers have all but passed it by, settling for the outlying areas like the Putney Road north of town to set up their shopping plazas and fake colonial restaurants. The city itself, whose heart is the T intersection of Main and High, hasn’t changed much from its industrial nineteenth-century heyday, when two organ companies, one sewing-machine company, and a factory turning out baby carriages guaranteed a healthy income for most of the town.
There’s a pretty good reason developers stay away from down-town-apart from the challenge of tearing down the massive red-brick buildings that line the major streets-and that’s the hills. Brattleboro has a hard time gathering together a single flat acre. For reasons I’ve never figured out, the original settlers passed up the more spread-out regions to the north and south and planted their town on a crazy quilt of slopes and ravines tumbling precipitously down the banks of three rivers-the Connecticut to the east, the West River to the north, and Whetstone Brook, which neatly slices the town in two.
Homes and businesses, large and small, brick and wooden, hang on to the hills for dear life, like a haphazard collection of Matchbox toys left scattered across a rumpled blanket. The streets conform to the topography, plunging straight down or twisting back and forth, sometimes barely gripping the sharp inclines. It is not unusual to have a wall of trees, rocks, and grass on one side of a house, a view of the neighbor’s rooftop on the other.
All thi Fw os is covered with a thin layer of generations-old city grit. A Dunkin’ Donuts has incongruously appeared smack in the middle of downtown-with all the architectural finesse of a broken-down spaceship-and a few other buildings have been built with more sensitivity to their older neighbors, but generally the place is pretty static. The rich live in old rich homes of Victorian excess, the poor live in old poor homes that look like small-town slums all over New England-wooden, peeling, ramshackle, and depressing on a sunny day. Vaguely speaking, Whetstone Brook marks the DMZ below which the handful of “haves” rarely wander, but above which the more numerous “have-nots” have established a few minor toeholds. Gluing the two together, as always, is a majority middle class, which more than anything else has given Brattleboro its identity. It’s a regular-people kind of town.
My apartment represented this smorgasbord rather well. Located on Oak Street-an area Gail labeled “intellectual-young rich”-it was on the top floor of an ineptly remodeled Victorian townhouse on the corner of High Street, a short stroll from both the Municipal Building and downtown. There were two other tenants, both as young and as rich as I, and all three of us had been living there for years. Trying to explain this anomaly, Gail figured we could afford it either because the High Street traffic noise had kept the rent low, or because our benevolent octogenarian landlady, Miss Brooks, had never seen fit to raise it. Personally, I never much noticed the traffic.
I did, however, notice the Plymouth again. As I put down the groceries to open my mailbox, it passed quietly down the street. The snow was falling harder now, and I couldn’t make out the plates.
I’d never been tailed before, so I had to wonder if it wasn’t coincidence. Neither Hillcrest Terrace nor Oak Street are exactly off the beaten path, and it was early enough that a good many cars were still on the roads. Conceivably, it could even have been a different car.
But I didn’t believe any of that. As I climbed the creaking, carpeted steps up to my door on the third floor, I knew in my bones someone was watching me.
The apartment was, of course, quite empty. There was no reason it shouldn’t have been. I dumped the mail on the living room coffee table and the groceries in the kitchen and went into the bedroom to change into a pair of comfortable furry slippers.
I then fixed dinner-diced, fried Spam stirred into scrambled eggs and peas, a glass of milk, and a half can of fruit cocktail for dessert-and settled down in a large, slightly bedraggled armchair to read the mail. I tend to do this every night and rather thoroughly at that. Catalogues, mailers, the free Town Crier, all of them get the same attention as the occasional letter and the morning Reformer. I even fill out the sweepstakes, idly wondering what I’ll say to Ed McMahon when he hands me my million-dollar check. Habits, now old, born of comfortable isolation. I hadn’t dropped by the Murphy’s after their dinner hour to avoid Martha’s cooking, which was indeed better than my own, but only because I wanted the evening to myself, as usual.
My wife Ellen died of cancer about eighteen years ago. We’d been married eight years-she’d been a teller at the bank I use to this day. She couldn’t have children, and for some reason we never thought of adoption, so we paid a good deal of attention to each other, going to movies a lot, planning picnics and day hikes for the weekends K th so, reading books aloud while she sewed or I built plastic airplanes for Murphy’s kids.