Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries) Read online

  She stared hard at me suddenly, the tears finally pouring down her face in earnest. The piano wire was broken, and her voice was ragged and full of pain. “It made me mad—so mad. I told him, ‘You come. I’ll be here,’ and I got my husband’s shotgun out of its box and I waited—a long, long time. And then I killed him—that… bastard.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth and she folded in on herself, sobbing. The ambulance attendant glared at me. A little self-consciously, I reached over and patted her back. After she’d calmed down a bit, I placed one of the pictures we’d found of Phillips and his dog in her lap. “Do you recognize this man?”

  She didn’t touch the photographs. She became utterly motionless. My hand on her back could feel the distant thump of her heartbeat—her only sign of life.

  Still without moving, she asked, “Is this the man outside?”

  “We think so.”

  “Mr. Phillips.”

  I sat opposite her again. She wouldn’t look at me. “You knew him?”

  “Yes.”

  “From where?”

  “Jury duty. We served together. He used to pass that very picture around. He loved that dog like I loved Albert… I don’t understand… He was nice. He was the last one to vote guilty. He said he couldn’t condemn another man, no matter how horrible what he did.”

  “It’s not your fault; you know that, don’t you?”

  She thought a while before answering. “No.”

  She wasn’t the only one.

  2

  ORCHARD HEIGHTS IS AN EXCLUSIVE developer’s dream come true. Once a farmer’s rolling field off Orchard Street west of downtown, it sits high enough to both “afford” a view and to overlook but not actually see Interstate 91, which separates it from Brattleboro. The field consists of five low hills, each crowned with a $200,000 ranch-style house that looks down on a narrow, winding street, fed like a stream by one slim driveway per house. Token trees have been planted tastefully here and there, hitting a medium between privacy and the view. In all, the effect is so carefully manicured that even the mountains, the snow, and the distant woods look totally artificial, as if some low-key, expensive Hollywood set were awaiting the arrival of the camera crew.

  The sun’s first predawn pallor was just staining the far horizon as I turned off Orchard Street into the Heights in George’s borrowed squad car. I didn’t need to check for the house number—I recognized it from the photo in Phillips’s puppy album. It would have been hard to miss in any event. Of the several homes I could see, it was the only one lit up like a bonfire, complete with strings of Christmas lights. It was a tan brick, one-story affair with columns in front and a carport on the side—as unique to Vermont as to Pasadena, California.

  One half of the paneled double front door jerked open as my finger approached the bell. A wreath hanging on the door’s knocker fell to the ground and rolled into the snow. The woman I’d seen holding the poodle stood before me, fully dressed and made up, her face drawn and anxious.

  Her eyes flicked from me to the police car and back again. “Oh shit,” she muttered and turned and walked away. I followed her in and closed the door behind me.

  Through the hallway, I saw her sit down on a living room couch. She crossed her arms tightly over her stomach and stared furiously at the floor—a curious mix of sorrow and rage. As I entered the room, its festiveness struck an incongruous note: the fire was burning, the tree lit up, poinsettias and evergreen boughs abounded, and strings of cranberries and popcorn laced back and forth in front of the mantelpiece. Christmas had been over a week ago, yet all this looked like a permanent display, as in a museum of American culture or an advertisement for Smirnoff vodka.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I’m afraid he is.”

  “That stupid dog.”

  Her tone was so flat I couldn’t tell if she meant her husband or the poodle in the pictures, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to ask; her reactions were odd enough already. I waited hopefully for more, but she was silent, so I sat on the end of the armchair opposite her and kept quiet, watching her rocking back and forth in her seat. I don’t get much practice telling people their companions have had their necks atomized by little old ladies with shotguns.

  “Mrs. Phillips?” I finally asked.

  “What?” She didn’t look up, but she didn’t explode either.

  “What was your husband doing out there?”

  “Getting the dog.”

  That seemed a decent enough opener for something more comprehensible, but she obviously didn’t think so. As if having explained all there was to explain, she lapsed back to her silent rocking.

  I got up and took off my coat. “Could I have a glass of milk?”

  That seemed to do it. She looked up at me as if I’d just walked in. “Milk? Of course. I should have offered.”

  She got to her feet and efficiently marched through a set of swinging double doors to the dining room and the kitchen beyond—the perfect hostess skating on ice. I followed her.

  The kitchen was enormous, white and dazzling. No appliance was below industrial quality, no pot or pan lacked either a copper bottom or a French-made high-gloss paint job. Knives worthy of a Swift packing plant gleamed along magnetic wall strips, yards of thick unscratched cutting-board counter space stretched in all directions. Just as the front room was pure Family Circle, the kitchen was high-tech Gourmet magazine.

  I sat down at an island separating production from consumption. Behind me was the eating area—table, chairs, a sofa, two La-Z-Boys and a TV set; in front, where Mrs. Phillips had set to work, were the makings of the cleanest, most expensive, futuristic greasy spoon I’d ever seen.

  She didn’t talk nor did I. By chance, I’d hit on the best possible therapy for her, and I wasn’t about to screw up what dumb luck had handed me. But I was starting to regret I hadn’t ordered breakfast.

  She made a pot of tea for herself, and as I watched, her distress surfaced through her automated gestures. She put water on to boil but not enough for a single cup, much less the pot, and had to start over. She took a bag of lemons from the steel-faced fridge, ignoring several precut slices, and carved up a new one with a dull butter knife, butchering the lemon in the process. She grabbed a glass the size of a tankard and poured my milk into it until it overflowed. It was not a comfortable performance to watch.

  Finally, her Christmas-bright dress splotched with the debris from her efforts, she loaded up a tray, moved it from her counter to mine, and unloaded it.

  “Sugar?” she asked.

  “No, thank you. I’ll just take the milk.”

  Her perfect, brittle smile twitched just slightly. “Of course. How silly, I forgot.”

  I reached gingerly for the milk and slid it toward me without spilling too much. Mrs. Phillips perched on a stool and began poking at the tea bag inside the pot with the butter knife—she’d forgotten a spoon.

  “Do you feel you can talk a little?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer at first but just kept jabbing away. Finally the bag punctured, releasing a flurry of tea leaves, and she stopped.

  She bit her lower lip and put both her hands to her cheeks. Her eyes were dry and terribly, terribly sad.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about all this.”

  I smiled at her. “Don’t worry. You should see where I usually go for breakfast.” I paused, and she placed her hands flat on the white counter. Her wedding band, unlike Thelma Reitz’s, rested around her finger—an attractive and impermanent piece of jewelry. “Why was your husband out there tonight?”

  “He went to pay the ransom for our dog, Junior. Jamie was very attached to him. He even carried around pictures of him.”

  I refrained from blurting out that I had seen them. “How long had the dog been missing?”

  “Several days—long enough to make Jamie really frantic.” She shook her head slightly. “It was my fault, I guess. He didn’t say that, but it wouldn’t have happened with him.”

 
“What wouldn’t?”

  “Junior wouldn’t have been stolen. Jamie always took him for walks, you know? On a leash? It always seemed so stupid to me—I mean we’re almost out in the country. I used to just let him out when Jamie wasn’t around and call for him after he’d done his business. He’d always come back. When he didn’t that last time, I had to tell Jamie what I’d been doing.”

  “Was he upset?”

  “He was stunned. Not angry with me though. He never was.”

  She stopped speaking for a few seconds. “That dog was like his child. We don’t have any children; and Jamie didn’t have any by his first wife.” She held up her ring finger. “We haven’t been married very long—just four years.”

  “And the kidnapper called?”

  “Yes—yesterday. He told Jamie to deliver a thousand dollars to a certain address or he’d kill Junior.”

  “Was there anything more specific about those instructions? A time or a certain door to be used, or some special clothing that your husband was supposed to wear?”

  “I don’t remember the address, but he had to go to the back door of the house at two this morning and just walk in. He wasn’t supposed to knock. There was no mention of clothing.”

  “The thousand dollars didn’t have to be in mixed bills, or old currency, or something like that?”

  “No.” She passed a hand across her forehead, picked up the unused pot of tea and poured it into the sink. With her back still to me, she asked, “How did he die?”

  “He was shot. The house he went to belonged to an old lady who’d been terrorized by threatening phone calls. She fired before she even saw him.”

  Her head drooped forward onto her chest, and she leaned on the sink. “Don’t tell me he went to the wrong house.”

  “No, I’m afraid he didn’t.”

  She turned and stared at me with a look of disbelief. “Then what are you saying? What happened?”

  This was more than I wanted to admit at the moment, but I couldn’t turn her away now. “My guess is that the old lady was used to kill your husband.” I held up both hands to stop her from responding. “Mrs. Phillips, like I said, it’s a guess. This thing just happened. I’ll need more time to nail it down, but you asked, so I told you. But I’d like you to not tell anyone else, okay?”

  She nodded. “Did Jamie ever mention the name Thelma Reitz?”

  “Is that the woman who shot him?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought for a moment. “He may have—I don’t remember it.”

  “They served on a jury together.”

  Again, the hand went to her face. “Oh, no.” She crossed over, grabbed the glass of milk I hadn’t touched yet, and poured it into the sink, leaving a trail of white droplets across the counter and floor. “That was the worst experience of his life. He couldn’t sleep, he almost stopped eating, he had to be treated for stomach troubles. I thought he was getting an ulcer. That trial nearly did him in.”

  I was thinking maybe it had. “What trial was it?”

  She whirled around from washing my glass. “You don’t know? It was the Kimberly Harris murder. My God. I heard about that case until I was blue in the face. Every single thing he heard in that courtroom he brought home to me. He went over it again and again, as if he were judge and jury wrapped up into one. I remember Thelma—he never told me her last name. I never thought I’d forget any of them. She was the one he accused of going with the crowd—of not having a mind of her own. First he’d persuaded her to vote his way, then when the majority voted against him, she switched without a second thought. For months after the trial, it was all he could talk of.”

  “You mean Thelma?”

  “No. All of it. Thelma was just a piece of the whole thing. He didn’t have it in for her—he pitied her. He said she’d been following men’s orders for so many years she was totally incapable of original thought. It was just the whole thing. And the guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  She was still holding the wet glass. “Well, he voted with the majority too. He did the same thing Thelma did in the end. After all that anguish, he caved in. He hated himself for it. He said he should have stuck by his guns and caused a mistrial, or whatever it’s called—you know, when the jury can’t make up its mind.”

  “Was this trial still an obsession with him?”

  For the first time, her expression changed gradually. Her face lost its tension and became softer and more reflective. Her eyes slid off me and focused somewhere beyond the walls around us, and she smiled in sad remembrance. In the last five minutes, at some point I hadn’t recognized, she’d accepted his death. It occurred to me then that she was built of sterner stuff than I’d imagined.

  “You obviously didn’t know Jamie. I suppose the trial had become an obsession. But that word isn’t right—it’s too negative for him. I mean, the trial was a negative thing, but that was the exception. Jamie went from enthusiasm to enthusiasm—even the trial was kind of like that. He got totally involved in things—to where you’d think he was becoming a little nutty—and then he’d focus on something else. Most of the time, they were harmless enough—the dog, this kitchen, Christmases were big. I think even I was one of them. All of them—or I should say all of us—were possessions. We weren’t discarded after our time—he treated me at least as well as he treated Junior, and that’s saying a lot—but we just weren’t the latest acquisition.”

  She finally put down the glass and dried her hands. “Jamie gave his love to me, and to Junior, and to building projects, and even to that dumb trial. If things had turned out the way he’d wanted, he’d have turned the hearts of every person on that jury, just like Henry Fonda did in Twelve Angry Men. The fact that he couldn’t do it really bothered him a lot, but he didn’t carry it around with him for too long. Maybe longer than usual, but it passed eventually.”

  “But he ended up betraying his own convictions. Why didn’t he force a mistrial?”

  She got a normal-sized glass out from a cupboard, poured a moderate amount of milk into it, and handed it to me before answering. “He was a social creature. If he couldn’t change someone’s mind after a good argument, he’d quit, and he wouldn’t bear a grudge.”

  I resisted saying how big I thought that was of him and merely muttered, “A man’s future hung on that good argument,” and drank my milk.

  But she took it in stride—better, in fact. “Was the man innocent?”

  I handed her back the glass. “Good point. I suppose not.”

  She was silent for a moment, looking at me. When she spoke, her voice was hesitant, even a little scared. “Where is he, now?”

  “He’s been taken to Burlington for an autopsy. They have to do that by law. They’ll bring him back, probably by the end of the day, or tomorrow at the latest.”

  “Will I be able to see him?”

  “Yes. In fact, someone will want you to, just to make sure.” This last part didn’t make me feel too good, so I tried to skate around it a little. She had settled down amazingly from when I’d walked into her house, but I didn’t want to presume too much, especially just as I was leaving. “Mrs. Phillips, he was pretty badly hit. His face is okay, but I think you should realize that you won’t be seeing someone who just looks asleep. It’s not like the movies.”

  I got to my feet and she let me get away with simply that much. “Thank you… Did you tell me your name? I probably forgot.”

  “Lieutenant Gunther—Joe Gunther.”

  She escorted me to the living room and my coat and held the front door open for me. I noticed she was still holding the glass. “Mrs. Phillips, is there someone I can contact to come stay with you? Even someone from the police force, just for a while—to help you drive or whatever? I mean, you’ll have your car returned to you today sometime, but still, you might want somebody to talk to, even if it’s about the weather.”

  She reached out and patted my shoulder, as if I were the one in need of comfort. “Thank you, Lieutenant, I’ll
be fine. There are people I can call if I need them.”

  Not your run-of-the-mill human being. As I drove back home to get the pajamas out from under the rest of my clothing, I thought Jamie Phillips had been wise making her one of his enthusiasms.

  3

  THE BRATTLEBORO POLICE DEPARTMENT is located in a hundred-year-old converted high-school building perched on a slope overlooking the junction of Main Street, Linden Street, and the Putney Road—a notorious traffic quagmire that the Board of Selectmen has never been able to straighten out, despite an inordinate number of expensive and ludicrous studies on the subject.

  From the vantage point of the usual five o’clock traffic jam, the Municipal Building, as it’s officially known, looks a little like Norman Bates’s gothic pile in Psycho, looming overhead—dark, ugly, and prickly with spires. It’s one of the few examples of architecture I know of without the slightest redeeming value. Added to that, its heating is satanic, its parking facilities a bedlam, its toilets a throw-back to primitive times, and its lighting a credit to Dickens. It is, however, cheap. So that’s where we live, occupying several rear offices on the ground floor, with five cage-like holding cells in the basement. I kind of like the old dump.

  I parked on the icy snowbank bordering the back lot and walked through the double doors leading to the building’s overlarge central hallway. To the left are the offices of Support Services, our name for the detective division, and to the right are the rest of them: Dispatch, Traffic, Parking, Patrol, the secretarial pool, and the chief’s office. Before the state police moved out to new quarters in West Brattleboro, they occupied the left, and we were all on the right. That arrangement lent itself to a lot of frayed nerves.

  In fact, stepping through the door this morning brought back memories of those days. There was a tension in the air quite beyond the usual grousing about the overeager furnace. I stuck my head through Dispatch’s open door to check in and was greeted with a “Where the hell have you been?”