“Is there any way you could just keep me out of it?”
“Sure. It’s just an address. I could have gotten it from any confidential source, as they say. Of course, if and when we catch him, the State’s Attorney might want to ask you about Cioffi’s dealings with you, but that’ll all be through proper channels. This conversation will never come up.”
He quickly nodded once-a man used to making fast decisions.
“Okay. Follow me.”
The name of the town in New Hampshire was Gorham, a small pinprick on the map just north of Mount Washington, high in the middle of the state. The name Cioffi had told Cramer to use on all correspondence was John Stanley.
I arranged to have Cramer send an overnight letter in twenty-four hours to Cioffi stating that he would Express Mail the first check in two days. With any luck, that would give us three days to infiltrate the Gorham area without attracting attention and to be in place when Cioffi came to collect his loot.
On the surface, it looked pretty straightforward. But as I sat on the tiny lurching seat of the puddle-jumper flying me back to Keene, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d hooked something unusual swimming in murky waters. Whether I could reel it in-or it would pull me overboard-was something I wouldn’t know until it actually happened.
I had gone from having too few pieces of this puzzle to having an excess. How did shady union dealings, a sudden promotion, Cioffi’s lucrative interest in the stock market, and Pam Stark’s jump in income and subsequent death all coincide? And the fact that Cioffi graduated from the accounting department-had Cioffi discovered something scaly in the numbers? Did it have anything to do with unions? Who would decide a promotion like that, and how did they tie in? And was Pam more than a simple gold digger? And what about the fact that the fetus within her be longed to neither Davis nor Cioffi? Despite the scant attention it attracted, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the pregnancy was more than a biological penalty being paid by a modern promiscuous girl.
There were other things nagging. Why the elaborate frame, assuming Davis was indeed framed? Why not a simple bullet in the head-clean, efficient, unsensational?
And finally, what about Stark? Was he simply a neurotic father run amok? Or did his intelligence background have something to do with all this? Who were the people he’d warned me about-the people who’d killed Frank? And what had become of them? Since Frank’s death, things in that quarter had been totally still-lurking like some wild animal waiting for the kill.
But Stark consumed my thoughts most, thoened.
I looked out the window at the darkening black-and-white landscape below-shadowed fields and stark forestland, the flat pale disks of frozen ponds, an occasional house, its lights just beginning to glimmer. I floated between two realities: one serene and unreachable, being swallowed up by the night, the other violent and calculating, lurking just beyond my comprehension.
28
I got back to the office around six that evening. It was already dark, and moonless. The radio cautioned about heavy snow in the near future; how far in the future was uncertain. Very helpful.
By the sounds that greeted me as I pushed through the Municipal Building’s double doors, I wouldn’t have guessed quitting time had come and gone an hour ago. The place was as jammed as it was in preparation for George Bush’s little pre-election pep rally in the eighties.
I sought out Brandt in his cloudy office, leaving the door half-open to allow some minimal circulation.
He looked up at my knock. “Close the door. What’d you find?”
“You might think I’m losing my marbles, but I’d like to tell you that outside in the parking lot, if you don’t mind.”
Brandt glanced around and smiled. He got up and put on his overcoat, and we both went into the dark, cold night.
He stopped when we were about equidistant from everything but cars. “We did have the place swept, you know-never found a thing.”
“Humor me-he’s screwed us enough times. I don’t want to underestimate him now.”
“All right. What have you got?”
“Cioffi will be waiting for his money, addressed to John Stanley, at a post office box in Gorham, New Hampshire, in three days.”
Brandt positively grinned. “Hot damn.”
I gave him the details, which he absorbed with little nods and grunts, his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed deep in his pockets. I also filled him in on the peculiar swirl of coincidences that had so changed Cioffi’s life three years ago.
Brandt continued nodding. “Yeah. Complicated fella all of a sudden, isn’t he? By the way, your friend Kees called in his report on those blood samples you had delivered.”
“So soon?”
“He said it saves time when he knows what to look for.”
“Is Cioffi our man?”
“To a T. The semen was definitely his. Can we go back inside now?”
I ushered him toward the building. The place and the date of Cioffi’s plannedumed an reappearance were the only two pieces of information I deemed crucially confidential. Considering the growing number of people tied up in this investigation, everything else was fast becoming common knowledge.
I settled into Brandt’s guest chair after taking off my coat and rubbed my eyes with my palms. Kees’s report on the semen was the first and only rock solid evidence we’d gathered despite all the dust we’d kicked up. In legal parlance, it placed Cioffi at the scene of the crime, but I’d been mulling this one over so long now, legal parlance was no longer enough. “I wonder what the hell happened in that room?”
Brandt sat and put his feet on his desk. He twitched his chin up in half a nod. “I know what you mean. Things are so tangled now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the man’s semen did get delivered without him.” He paused and pursed his lips, “I almost hate to tell you this, considering, but your little duckling Kunkle has come up with something that isn’t going to help much.”
I raised my eyebrows, but he merely answered by picking up his phone and asking Kunkle to join us. There was a knock on the door in less than a minute. Kunkle entered carrying a thick file.
“How was your trip?” The civility stunned me. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if he’d kissed me. “Good. If everything works, we’ll have Cioffi in the bag pretty soon. Tony says you’ve found a monkey wrench.”
Kunkle laid the file on the desk before me. “Yeah. I think I have. We all figured Cioffi’s convention schedule was a perfect cover for all those trips ‘Louis Armstrong’ took with Pam Stark, right?”
“Yeah.”
He bent over and flipped open the file. “Well, I ran a comparison check between his appointment calendars and the passenger manifests we got from the travel agents on Stark and her boyfriend. They don’t coincide.”
“But he filled in the appointment calendar, right?”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought-he was covering his tail. So I got a warrant for the tickets he bought-from a different travel agent, by the way-and matched them to his books. They fit.”
“So Louis Armstrong is not Cioffi.”
Kunkle shook his head. “Not according to the records. I’ve started the paperwork to track whether he was actually seen at those conventions, but I have a feeling they were legit.”
He was quiet. I looked at Brandt, who gave me that little smile. I sighed. “So we’ve got Davis, who might have been framed, Cioffi with the semen, which might have been planted, and Louis Armstrong, who might be the father. We also have the remote possibility that all three are innocent of her murder and that a fourth guy did it, or that all three were in her room that night and did her in together.”
“And on and on,” Brandt muttered.
I shrugged. “Well, what the hell. Let’s go with what we’ve got.”
Brandt dropped his feet off his desk. “Suits me. There is one other item, though. The good colonel located Dr. Duquesne and squeezed him about Cioffi.”