“I thought so,” I admitted.
He gave me a scornful look. “How?”
“Because he threw us out just as I was getting to when Jean Deschamps was killed. We’ll have to hassle the town clerk some more to get the records, but I’ll bet money that man was around Stowe in the mid-forties, which makes him the first solid connection we’ve got between the whole Sherbrooke bunch and Stowe besides Jean’s frozen body.”
Gary Smith smiled. “You think he’s the one who kept the body on ice?”
“He’s a good candidate. They didn’t build home freezers then like they do today. You’re too young to know that, but when I was a kid, I remember the wonder of step-in freezers the size of bedrooms. The first one I ever saw was in a restaurant.”
Chapter 21
We’d all but taken over the Stowe Town clerk’s office, much to her distress, and exacerbated matters by staying on past closing, an affront to procedure that had taken several phone calls to make acceptable.
Now we were sitting around a large wooden table-Tom and Sammie still comparing the Special Service Force roster with Stowe residents of the time, and Gary Smith and I poring over unwieldy bound volumes of voting, tax, and real estate records that had gradually spread across every available flat surface. Working the computer data banks in Waterbury, Paul Spraiger was trying to find out what he could about Michael Sawyer before he’d come to Stowe. Willy, as usual, was off doing something he hadn’t deigned to share with the rest of us.
Gary finally leaned back in his chair, reached toward the ceiling with both hands in a stretch, and laconically announced, “Think I got it.”
“What?” I asked as the other two glanced up.
He tapped the book before him with his finger. “Says here Sawyer bought a residence on the edge of town in ’46, turned it into a restaurant the same year-something called the Snow Bank-and held it until…” he paused while he pulled another open book toward him and consulted its pages, “1951. That’s when he sold out and opened another place nearer downtown named Mike’s, which he held onto till Michael Sawyer’s opened in ’64, like he told us.”
“Fancier and fancier each time,” Sammie commented.
“I guess,” Gary agreed. “Doesn’t go into those kinds of details here.”
“He must’ve been doing pretty well to create the first restaurant out of a remodeled house and then go upwardly mobile just five years later, especially since Stowe hadn’t hit the big time yet,” I said.
“Could be Sawyer was as good as they say he was and just caught the wave of the future,” Sammie suggested.
I chewed that over for a few seconds. “Maybe. I just can’t shake the feeling of a whole lot of birds suddenly landing in the same tree. Picard, Sawyer, Deschamps-”
“Guidry,” Willy added from the doorway, where he’d typically appeared without making a sound.
“Meaning?” I asked him.
He strolled over to a chair, taking his time to settle down. “I been bugged by a couple of things, so I decided to check ’em out. Remember what that note said? The one that Marcel was supposed to have written to his old man, inviting him down?”
“Yeah.”
“He said ‘we’re’ having a good time down here. And ‘come down and join us,’ as if he wasn’t alone. Always made me wonder.”
“You figure it out?” Gary asked.
Willy made a face. “Not really. It’s weirder than that. I didn’t have anywhere to start with Marcel, since the letter was the only thing we had connecting him to Stowe. So I went back to the Alvarez register at the old Snow Dancer Hotel and looked at it closer up, thinking that if Jean checked in, maybe the son did, too, under another name-or somebody else we’d recognize.”
He shifted in his seat as we waited. “There was nothin’. I checked it three times.”
“Willy,” Sammie barely muttered in a warning tone.
“Okay, okay,” he answered. “I guess Alvarez was a pretty snotty guy. Turns out he had a coding system for when anyone arrived with hired help. The guest would be registered like normal, but the slave-maid, butler, chauffeur, whatever-was just marked down by a symbol next to the guest’s name. Deschamps had one of those marks.”
“No shit,” Tom said.
“That’s what I thought, so I drove back to Richford to talk to Arvin Brown again. We never asked if anyone was with Deschamps when he walked into Brown’s place. Turns out he had a chauffeur. He didn’t come in, but Brown delivered him some grub in the car. The description pretty much fits Pierre Guidry. I asked how he could still remember that, and he said the whole night was burned into his brain-plus he thought the chauffeur was as much an asshole as his boss was like a movie star.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“That’s not all,” Willy continued. “Since we’re hot after Mike Sawyer, I asked Brown about him, too. He knew Sawyer-asked him for a job once. Said the guy was a prick and that everyone hated him except the customers, since he brown-nosed them and they didn’t give a shit anyhow. I drew a blank trying to connect the dots between Sawyer and any of the other players, but Brown did tell me the rumor mill was running hot and heavy when Sawyer set up his first restaurant…”
“The Snow Bank,” Gary added.
Willy looked at him dismissively, which made me think of Gary’s comment about Kunkle earlier. “Whatever. The thing is he paid cash on the barrel-head for the place and paid the same way to fix it up.”
“They speculate where he’d come from?” Tom asked.
Willy smiled. “Yup. You’ll love this-Canada. He said ‘out’ and ‘about’ like a Canuck. But he never owned up when he was asked-just told people to piss off.”
“Your kind of guy,” Gary said.
Willy laughed. “Yeah-probably right.”
“But what’s that tell you about the ‘we’ reference in Marcel’s supposed letter?” Sammie asked.
Willy tilted his head to one side. “Nothin’. That part’s still got me goin’. I did ask Brown if we might be able to get some more dirt on Sawyer, though, and he coughed up a woman named Amy Butynski. Used to be one of his waitresses. Brown said she was smart, had done okay for herself, and still lived in town. Sounded like he once had the hots for her, but I don’t think he ever scored.”
“That’s relevant,” Sammie commented peevishly.
Willy laughed again. “I think so,” and he raised his eyebrows at her. She stared at her paperwork, her face reddening.
“Sammie,” I said. “Why don’t you call Lacombe and ask him to run a check on Sawyer? And tell Paul what we’ve got-maybe it’ll help him in his digging.” I checked my watch and then looked at Willy. “It’s still not too late. You want to go visit Ms. Butynski?”
The address Willy had took us north of town on Route 100. As we drove slowly through traffic, I seized the same opportunity I’d taken with Gary earlier. “How’re you liking this detail so far?”
“Why?” he asked. “Want to fire me?”
I shook my head. “Nope-straightforward question.”
“I doubt that. How many have asked you to can me so far?”
“Nobody. One of them said you were a little over the top. I thought that was pretty mild given the shit you’ve handed me over the years. That was a nice piece of work, by the way, chasing down Guidry.”
After a moment’s silence, he answered my question, “It’s okay. I didn’t think I’d like being out of Bratt.”
“Having Sammie around must help.” He didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it, either.
“I have an idea about who ‘we’ and ‘us’ were in Marcel’s fake letter,” I said. “When Paul and I interviewed Marie Chenin, I asked her as we were leaving where Marcel had been when his father disappeared. She didn’t know. But when I asked the same thing about Picard and Guidry, she looked like I’d just told her about some favorite relative dying.”
Willy looked at me but remained silent.
“Let’s say,” I continued, “that this whole let’s-keep-the-trip-to-Stowe-a-secret routine was a crock-cooked up so everyone could claim ignorance at the time and stop any police investigation dead in its tracks.”