“What was so special about it?” Willy asked. “Besides the cost?”
Manning responded to the implication. “Yeah, that would stick out for you guys. The cost is irrelevant. It was a custom job, from my son on my sixtieth birthday. It’s a sentimental thing, one of a kind.”
“You have a picture of it?”
He gave us a sour smile. “Yeah, I do. The insurance company made a big deal out of it, bastards.” He reached over to a long table behind the sofa, opened a wooden box, and pulled out a wad of photographs. “I had these delivered to me this morning. It’s everything that’s missing, including the watch.”
He extended the pictures to me but didn’t bother getting up, forcing me to cross the rug again to take them. I was half tempted to tear a page from Willy’s manual of style by fake kissing the man’s ring.
Instead, I returned to my roost and handed the photos to Willy to study. He pointedly tucked them into his pocket without a glance.
The sooner I was out of this gladiator pit, the better, I thought.
“Did you sense anything unusual when you drove up this last time?” I asked.
Manning shook his head but then answered in contradiction, “Yeah. Some snow had drifted onto the deck, in front of the front door, but it had been swept clean. I thought it was the caretaker, at first, why, I don’t know. Dumb yokel wouldn’t know a broom if he fell over it. It was obviously to get rid of footprints, but I didn’t figure that out till later, when I found the broken window they used to get in, around the far side of the porch.”
“You asked him anyway?” I inquired.
“’Course I did-he was clueless.”
“Mr. Manning,” I asked, “when did you notice you’d been robbed?”
“As soon as we got inside. For one thing, it was cold, from the broken window. But the small TV was missing from the kitchen. Peggy noticed that right off, no surprise.”
We both caught the sardonic tone of voice again.
“Where’s your wife now?” Willy asked.
“She went back to the city. Anyhow, after that, I started looking around. Whoever did it was obviously low rent-missed the paintings and ceramics and grabbed whatever he could sell fast.”
“And the watch was on your bedroom dresser?” I asked, recalling Snuffy’s report.
“Yeah, out in plain view. You want to see where everything was?”
I shook my head. “The sheriff’s people took photographs and made diagrams. Just out of curiosity, though, pretending this isn’t the smash-and-grab we’re all assuming it is, can you think of anyone who might’ve done this to get back at you for some reason?”
The other man was genuinely nonplussed. “Get back at me? For what?”
Willy rose abruptly and studied Manning, cradled by his overpriced sofa like a silver spoon on velvet. “Can’t think of a thing,” he said in an angry, flat voice and headed toward the front door. “I’ll be in the car.”
Manning and I watched him leave.
“Touchy guy,” he commented.
I stood up also. “Yeah… Well, I don’t think so. You told the sheriff you thought one of his deputies might’ve been involved in this and that you also suspected the mountain’s security force.”
Manning shook his head disdainfully. “I said that to get his attention-like hitting a mule with a two-by-four.”
“So there’s no truth to it?”
“I don’t know,” he said with disgust. “That’s your job.”
I found Willy sitting quietly in the car, staring out the window at the view.
I didn’t start the engine immediately. “Am I going to have problems with you on this?”
He remained looking straight ahead. “I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“And?”
“Not if I don’t have to spend any more time with him.”
I turned the ignition key. “Deal.”
Chapter 3
It had been wholly appropriate to drive out to Tucker Peak on a Saturday on Snuffy Dawson’s request, but given the low profile of the crime and our own budgetary constraints, I was now happy to drop Willy off outside the office and just quickly double-check by phone that the sheriff’s deputies had filed the initial paperwork, processed the evidence, and set all the appropriate electronic inquiries into motion. After that, I headed back home to my woodworking shop.
Not that my project there was anything monumental. In fact, I was replacing an elaborately shaped but cracked wooden seat from a chair belonging to Gail Zigman, the woman with whom I’d eccentrically shared my life for just under twenty years.
We weren’t married, and we didn’t live together, although we had briefly not long before. But through thick and thin, some of it quite traumatic, we’d proven to ourselves and to each other that we were as closely intertwined as any couple we knew.
Gail was younger than I, born to privilege in New York City. Well traveled and highly educated, she had come to Brattleboro at the height of the commune movement to try living a life far different from that of her parents. Living the countercultural life in Vermont hadn’t been a waste of time. It had opened her eyes to values she still held dear. But it had also been relatively short-lived. Within a few years, she’d yielded to an ingrained and natural ambition and had joined the town’s business and political world, growing and evolving over a couple of decades from successful Realtor to selectman to deputy state’s attorney, to where she’d recently become legal counsel to VermontGreen, the state’s preeminent environmental group, based in the capital city of Montpelier.
Now, Gail was one of that growing class of professionals who’d taken advantage of computers, faxes, and cell phones to stretch the lines connecting her to the office. When the state’s citizen-legislature was in session, roughly from January to April or May, she lived in a condo in Montpelier so she could watch the political pot. The rest of the time, she worked out of the house we’d once shared in West Brattleboro, from which the chair I was repairing had come.
As foolish as it sounded for a man of my years, I was intent on returning to my repair job less for the daunting task of making a new piece match an old chair, and more because handling it brought me at least tangentially closer to Gail.
We didn’t live apart because of any friction. We didn’t argue, or dislike each other’s politics or eating habits or taste in late-night movies. It was more that since we’d met later in life-I a widower and a settled, lifelong cop; she a professional woman increasingly eager for a new challenge-we’d already come to terms with the bachelor lives we’d adopted. We instinctively needed more breathing space than a younger couple and were less willing to compromise for the sake of steady companionship.
In the end, it had been neither easier nor harder than an old-fashioned marriage. It had merely evolved into something rich and rewarding enough to keep us coming back for more.
So, I kept at my project for the rest of the weekend, until by Sunday night I fitted a reasonably antiqued seat between the old and slightly battered legs, arms, and back of a hundred-year-old wooden chair, knowing that the effort I’d put into it would count for more with Gail than just good craftsmanship.
It was with similar anticipation that I returned to the office on Monday morning to see what the computers had coughed up concerning William Manning’s missing items. For me, an investigation, no matter how apparently trivial, shared many of the elements of a woodworking project. They both demanded thoughtfulness, patience, and attention to detail, and both promised to disappoint if handled carelessly. But neither one was entirely successful if only followed by the numbers. Strong elements of intuition and creativity always featured in the end result.
It was also true, however, that encouraging momentum was sometimes slow to build. When I checked for reports from our queries of two days ago, I found nothing.