Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries) Read online

  “I work nights. I didn’t get home till six this morning.”

  “Where do you keep the shotgun?”

  “In my pickup.”

  “And you didn’t notice it was gone?”

  “I wasn’t in the pickup. I drove with a friend. We switch off like that—it saves gas.”

  “A car pool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it was his turn last night—or this morning, I mean?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t touched that pickup since yesterday, or the shotgun.”

  “You didn’t cut the barrel down?”

  His tone picked up a little heat. “Shit no. That thing was like a collector’s piece. It was my father’s, a real nice gun. I wouldn’t fuck it up like that.”

  I nodded and sat opposite him. “No. That makes sense. So you figure someone stole the gun, maybe last night after you’d gone to work, sawed it off, did his number on our patrolman, and then planted both the gun and the car at your house after you’d gone to sleep. Is that it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “How close is the next house? Can you see it from your place?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not far, but there’s trees in the way.” He suddenly leaned forward, pleading again. “I swear to God I didn’t do any of this.”

  I held up my hand. “Hey, I’m a believer. I don’t think you did either. We’re going to have to check it out some more, but I think you’re telling the truth. Like you said, you’re not stupid, right?”

  He nodded hopefully. “Right. I mean this is all too crazy.”

  “Right,” I agreed. I pretended the sheet of paper I had in my hand related to his case. “Wodiska… That really rings a bell.”

  “I never done anything.”

  “No, no. I don’t mean that. It’s something else. It’s like I read your name in the paper or something. Did you win a trophy or something a few years back?”

  He sat back in his chair, the anxiety cleared from his face. “The only time I been in the paper was for that trial.”

  “What trial?”

  “The one with the nigger. You know, the murder case. Real steamy stuff. I got interviewed ’cause I was on the jury.”

  I slapped my forehead. A little hammy there. “Right, that’s it. The Harris case.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Sure. I remember now. You guys didn’t waste any time there, did you?”

  His voice became slightly defensive. “He was guilty, wasn’t he?”

  I spread my hands. “Hey, we thought so. In fact, I remember a few of the guys complaining you took as much time as you did.” I got up and put some money in the soda machine. “You want something? I’m buying.”

  Whatever apprehension he had left disappeared. “Sure. Pepsi?”

  I pushed the button and passed the can to him.

  “We took so long ’cause of that little fruitcake with the puppy pictures. He made a big deal about making up his mind, but he didn’t fight for long. No one else believed him. Real pain in the butt.”

  “Did you ever keep in touch with any of the jury members after the trial?”

  “No. There was one good-looking girl, but I never did anything about it.”

  “Hey. You shouldn’t waste your opportunities.”

  He grinned—an amazingly unappealing hunk of humanity. “Yeah, well…”

  I got up and hesitated. “You never got hassled after that trial, did you? I heard one of the jurors got some crank calls.”

  “Crank calls?”

  “Yes, like from people who were mad you convicted Davis.”

  “Mad? Hell, nobody was mad. They were mad at him—a nigger flatlander up here, pretending it was New York or something. He got what he should of got. Everybody knows that.”

  I shrugged and half-turned to leave. “Right… By the way, I have a feeling somebody from the press is likely to ask you about all this. We’ve been made to look pretty silly, and the news guys always love that. Come to think of it, whoever did this made you look pretty stupid too. Good headline stuff—give people a laugh.”

  “Yeah. Well, the press can go fuck itself. I’m gonna give them squat.”

  Music to my ears.

  4

  MARTHA MURPHY OPENED THE DOOR and looked at me from top to bottom, shaking her head. “If you’d have come an hour earlier, I could have put a healthy dinner in you.”

  I slid past her. “Good to see you too. I’ll have you know some twenty-two-year-old all but propositioned me today, stimulated entirely by my fabulous physique.”

  “Twenty-two? Joe, she was looking for a father figure—probably wanted to feed you some proper food.”

  I hung my coat up in the hallway, something I did in this house almost as frequently as I did in my own. “You still worked up over that dinner I served Frank a few weeks ago?”

  “Mayonnaise, pickle and Velveeta sandwiches… I mean, really.”

  I kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t you ever walk on the wild side?”

  “Sure, but I try not to kill myself. You should have seen what that meal did to his system.”

  “Hell, that was probably all the scotch he poured on top of it.” That hit a nerve, and I was sorry I’d said it. I patted her shoulder. “Okay, you win. Beans and sprouts from now on.”

  She shook her head and sighed. I worked my way back to Frank’s den beyond the kitchen. He was lying on a brown vinyl couch in front of the television watching the news. There was a tall glass of scotch on the floor by his hand.

  “Hi, Joe. You want a drink?”

  I shook my head. I’d given up drinking several years ago. Frank knew that, but there’s something inside a hard-drinking man that can only see abstinence as a passing and regrettable phase. And Frank was a hard-drinking man; I’d seen him absorb five stiff scotch-and-sodas and not show a hair out of place. The only visible evidence of his daily drowning was an ever-expanding soft gut and a growing inability to move quickly—physically and mentally. I’d thought about going the same route after my wife Ellen had died many years back, but watching Frank even then had kept me straight. Unfortunately, either despite or because of Martha’s concern, Frank had kept right on going.

  “You have any tonic water?”

  He lugged himself out of the couch and ambled over to a freestanding bar set up near the wall. “Still on the wagon, huh? I don’t see how you can drink tonic water without something to kill the taste.”

  He filled my order, handed me a glass and motioned to the couch. “Take a load off. I’m finding out who was asshole of the day—at least according to the TV. I’ve got my own opinion, of course.”

  “John Woll?” Murphy grunted. “That’s not a bad place to start.”

  “It was hardly his fault.”

  “Oh, hell. I said ‘of the day,’ and the day’s almost up. I’ll find someone else tomorrow. Besides, what I think doesn’t matter much anyway.”

  I cupped my ear. “What’s this? Violin music time?”

  He glanced at me and shook his head. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m getting sick and tired of being the resident lame duck.”

  “No one listening anymore?”

  “Oh, they listen. They just don’t pay much attention. I know what’s going through their minds: if we just stall him long enough, he’ll be gone and we can forget about it. I can’t say I blame them. It’s just a lousy way to wrap things up. I’ve given those bastards a lot of good time.”

  He leaned forward and turned up the volume a bit. The sports report was beginning—Frank’s idea of heaven.

  As slow as he had become, his insight hadn’t suffered any. He was right about what people were thinking. He was retiring in four months, after thirty-five years on the force; it was the last chance a lot of folks had to subtly let him know they weren’t heartbroken.

  I thought that stank. He was a good cop and a better friend. When I came out of Korea, I was twenty years old and scarred by something nobody wanted to hear about. Korea was t
he “action” between the Good War—World War II—and the Living Room War—Vietnam. We had racked up almost as many casualties in three years as they had during ten years in Vietnam. The Vietvets complained that people spat at them when they got back home; most of us didn’t stimulate even that much attention.

  Also, warfare had revealed sides of humanity I’d never dreamed of, growing up in the hills of Thetford, Vermont. I’d witnessed extremes of boredom and action, of cowardice and foolhardy bravery, of viciousness and grace. I’d been touched by an experience so concentrated and searing that my former life, beckoning from my father’s farm, no longer seemed possible.

  I floated for a while, utterly at sea. I was decommissioned in California, so I stayed there and spent a few years going to college in Berkeley. That was when the Beat movement was just beginning to stir, a phenomenon that filled my suitcase with some pretty strange books and all but finished the metamorphosis of one erstwhile farm boy, but it still hadn’t settled my mind one bit. So I quit and came back home, hoping something might switch me back on track.

  But I’d become rootless, frustrated and alienated, and Vermont’s green hills did little to soothe. That’s when Murphy rounded me up. He was older by nine years, a veteran not only of Korea, but of World War II. I’d known him earlier; he’d been reared nearby in Ely, an older brother of sorts to a lot of kids my age—or if not a brother, then a cousin maybe—the only teenager in the area to have fought overseas and killed people and won medals. He listened to boys my age, and some girls too, I imagine, with a wisdom and sympathy we couldn’t find in the adult world. And he managed to track me down after California, although by that time he lived in Brattleboro, some seventy-five miles to the south. To this day, I’m not sure how or why he did that. I have the sneaky suspicion that my mother may have called him.

  In any case, he got me interested in the police force he’d been on for several years already. It mimicked some of the more pleasant aspects of military life—that combination of specialness and fraternity—and it replaced the muddiness of my life with the welcomed rigidity of rank, paperwork and assigned tasks. It also meant carrying a gun—the ultimate symbol of the simple answer to a complex world—and it gave me a chance, every once in a while, to do something which by that time in my life was becoming an elusive quality. Korea and California had fouled the clear moral waters of my upbringing and had left me nostalgic for the innocent idealism of my younger years.

  During my first weeks as a Brattleboro cop, I thought I’d finally found the solution. I was to walk the line between the good guys and the bad, keeping one from being done in by the other. Real Lone Ranger stuff, complete with silver bullets, or at least close enough. The fact that I started out directing traffic and ticketing cars didn’t matter. I was a Lawman—the armed instrument of Might and Right.

  Not that Murphy instilled that simple-minded notion in my brain. That was my own doing, and I was quickly disabused. The younger, probably wiser Murphy showed me that most bad guys were usually regular joes with a screw loose—barring a few exceptions. But even while I was reluctantly conceding that the world was more gray than black and white, its complexities and contradictions stopped bothering me as much. The gun lost its appeal as I began to rely more on my instincts than on its authority. I came to see it finally as the unreal thing it is: the admission of your brain’s collapse under panic and impotent rage. For that personal growth—even rebirth—I had Frank Murphy to thank.

  The wide-eyed awe I had for him during those early years died the same peaceful death as my polarized view of human nature. But it, like the latter, was replaced by something more realistic and worthy. I came to love Frank as a fellow flawed human being, with whom I could disagree and argue and yet always respect. It rankled me to see him being kicked around by those who only saw his crusty armor.

  “There’s no reason not to leave now, you know. The benefits aren’t going to change any.”

  He pushed his lips out in a pout. “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I said I’d leave May first, I’ll leave May first.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with that. It was damned near the only thing he had left.

  “When are you going to call it quits?” he asked, his eyes still on the screen.

  “I still have almost ten years to go before full benefits.”

  “You don’t really need them, do you?”

  I wasn’t sure where he was headed. “It wouldn’t hurt. Seems a small price to pay after all this time. I might as well do it right and get what’s coming, even if it is a mouse fart.”

  He didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. His total concentration seemed focused on whether Pepsi or Coke would win the taste test. “You want to make captain.”

  It wasn’t an accusation, nor was it a question. It just floated there, and given my druthers, I might have let it drift away. Instead, I gave it some serious thought for the first time. Another ad passed and the weather girl appeared. She’d changed her hair—made her look like a poodle. “I don’t know. Maybe. You don’t get out much; I’d miss that. I don’t want to end up playing footsie with the selectmen and the chief, and figuring out everyone’s schedule. I hate that stuff.”

  “It has its compensations… I can’t think of them, but they’re there. They told me so.” He got up and fixed himself another drink. “There’s something to be said for going as high as you can go. It feels pretty good. And you can get out if you don’t like it.”

  “Well, hell, I might as well shoot for chief then.”

  Frank chuckled and settled back on the couch. The report was more snow tomorrow. I’d never aired my ambitions before, probably because they weren’t much to talk about—the Brattleboro Police Department was hardly overloaded with roads to the top. But with Frank’s impending departure, that would change. I was next in line, the docs all said I had a body ten years younger than my age—despite the penchant for Velveeta and pickle sandwiches—and I was in no trouble with the powers that be. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but the thought of new responsibilities was very attractive.

  Frank’s voice cut in on my musings, in more ways than one. “How about coming down to Florida with Martha and me? We might could set up a business or something.”

  That caught me by surprise. In the past, during the bad times we’d shared, we’d both thought of leaving the force and doing something else. But that had been pure escapism, a safe way to let off steam. This was different. Despite the fact that his eyes were still glued to the tube, he was making a serious proposal—or at least sending up a trial balloon—and that put me in a jam. Not only was I still happy doing what I was doing, I also knew in my gut I couldn’t work with Frank in any other circumstance. Time, age, and self-abuse were catching up to him, widening the nine-year gap between us and making it a chasm. In many ways, he had evolved from a near brother to a near father, at least in the way he had aged. Of all the things I wanted least to do in my life, watching Frank Murphy disintegrate in retirement was the most repellent.

  That pissed me off. He had helped me out when I was on the ropes, both after Korea and California and after Ellen’s death. The least I could do was keep him company for a few years in Florida. But I wasn’t going to do it, even to put a new wind in his sails. The irony of our relationship was that he had taught me to stand on my own two feet—to look to myself before seeking the guidance of others. It was that education that was making me turn my back now.

  “Why Florida?”

  “Martha. It turns out that our entire married life, she’s hated the winters here.”

  “But she was born in Vermont.”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? She has the heart of a beach bunny. Going to live in Florida after I retire is the eleventh of her Ten Commandments. I can’t say no; she’s put up with me through a lot. I told her it was her call, no arguments.”

  “Do you know where you’ll go?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced over at me and smiled. “Surprised, huh? You
thought you knew everything.” The smile faded and he took a long swallow from his glass. “Maybe I was hoping that if I didn’t mention it, it might go away. It’s not too far from St. Petersburg—a trailer park, but fancy. You’d never guess to look at it. It’s near the water, has a bunch of tennis courts, a pool, stuff like that. It’s okay.”

  His voice was as flat as a board. If I’d had any doubts before, they were gone now. “I couldn’t do it, Frank. Florida’s not my style.”

  He leaned forward and punched the television off with a hard stab of his thumb. “Well, hell, I’m not surprised. Just thought I’d offer. You might have been nuts enough to say yes.”

  “What are you going to do down there? Do you know anybody?”

  “Naw. I suppose I’ll fish. There’s a lot of that down there. And suntans. I might work on one of those. There’s stuff to do—I just have to go down and find out about it.” He got up and freshened his drink and brought another bottle of tonic water over to me. “So what do you got on your mind? You didn’t come over here to shoot the shit.”

  I was more inclined to shoot the shit than he thought, but I respected his wish to change the subject. “I want to dig into the Harris case.”

  I sensed a palpable stiffening, fully expected. “Why?”

  “Because somebody else already has. It’s pretty evident Reitz, Phillips, and Wodiska were set up; I want to find out why.”

  His face darkened and he opened his mouth to say something but then closed it again. “Got any theories?” His voice was forcefully neutral, if that’s possible. I sensed he was doling out just enough rope for me to hang myself.

  “Not really. Maybe it’s revenge against the jury by some friend of Davis’s, or maybe one of the jury is after all the others. Or one is the target and the rest are a smoke screen. For damn sure the one man who stood out during the trial, and who dragged his feet when it came to convicting, is the only one dead so far.”

  “And what’s that tell you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Murphy had been standing through all this, and he now settled in to his favorite position on the couch. “You weren’t here when we busted Davis, were you?”