“Alice Sims didn’t just ask him a lot of questions-he answered them.”
“While he was handcuffed to the pole?”
“Yup.”
“Jesus, she’s meaner than I thought. That’s pretty heartless.”
“Pretty obnoxious too. The morning edition already has the story on page one and every asshole in town has been calling up with one tune or another.”
“So that’s why Max is so pissed off.” Murphy chuckled.
“Yeah. She bawled me out too. Still, it’s no joke. This could become a great local gag, right up there with pet rocks. At least that’s the way the selectmen seem to see it, or the ones who called the Chief, who then had the good graces to sic them onto me.”
“Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Yeah.” Frank pulled at his lower lip, which was a form of “period-paragraph” body language he’d developed for changing the subject. “What about last night’s shooting?”
I shrugged. “You seen George’s report yet?”
Murphy nodded.
“Then you know what we found. Tyler and some uniforms are going over the house today, dusting for prints and all… I doubt they’ll find much more than we got. They’re going to re-interview Reitz once she gets back on keel.
“I visited Jamie Phillips’s house and talked to his wife. She had this wild story about their dog being kidnapped and held for ransom-a thousand dollars to be paid at Thelma Reitz’s back d“ z’s boor. The message was: ‘Don’t knock-walk right in.’ Unless it was a setup to have him blasted by Reitz, that’s a pretty unlikely deal.”
“So you believe her?”
“No reason not to yet. I have someone looking into the Phillipses as an item: whether they got along, if they had any money problems, possible insurance angles, stuff like that. He was a little strange, I guess-had a real thing for the dog. And she was the one who let it out of the house the day it got snatched. There might be something there, but again I doubt it. We’ll talk to everybody a few more times just to nail it down, but if gut instincts are worth anything, I’d say what we see there is what we got. There is one interesting little tidbit: both Phillips and Reitz served on the Kimberly Harris jury.”
Murphy sat up straight, suddenly agitated. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope. I was about to pull the jury list when you hit me with Woll.”
“Oh, Christ, not that again. Once was bad enough.” He stood up, no longer jocular. “Do what you will, but keep it under your hat, okay? No mention of it in the daily reports, no chitchat with anyone but me. After the Woll thing, people are going to have us under a microscope for a while and I don’t want them catching sight of you digging up Kimberly Harris. You got that?”
I snapped a salute. “ Oui, mon capitaine.”
He gave me a deadly look and left. Murphy would never have been described as a laid-back, laconic type, but his reaction surprised me. The Harris killing had been sensational in itself, but its solution had been quick and easy and the legal rigmarole hadn’t hit any snags from start to finish.
I shook it off and left my office, heading for the central corridor and the stairs leading up.
A familiar voice stopped me as I put my hand on the handrail. It was Stan Katz, the reporter I’d seen at the Reitz house. “Hi, Joe. Running for cover?”
I didn’t care for Katz-he had too much ambition and too little tact. “Meaning?”
“No offense. Just a little joke. What with Woll’s car being hijacked, I thought you guys might be a little shy of the press.”
“Stanley, I’m always shy of the press, you know that.”
He smiled. “That’s true. You could never be accused of being one of my prime sources.”
“So why do you keep trying?”
“It’s the job. So what about Woll?”
“Nothing. We’re working on it. We’ll let you know. Why are you on this anyhow? I thought it belonged to Alice Sims.”
“She answered the phone, that’s why she went. This is my beat.”
“So you hip-checked her, huh?”
“I’m the police reporter.” His tone regained the familiar competitive edge I was used to-no more chitchat, as Murphy put it. I began to climb the stairs. “Jheistairs. oe, what about the shooting last night?”
“What about it?”
“Who was the stiff?”
“We’ll let you know soon, Stan, along with everybody else.”
“What was a guy like Phillips doing on Clark Avenue in the middle of the night? It’s sort of off his beaten track, isn’t it?”
I came back down the stairs. “Stanley, just because you’re so brilliant and I’m so dumb, stupid games like that aren’t going to make me spill my guts. So back off. Do what you’ve got to do, but save the Woodward- Bernstein imitation for the other guys, okay?”
He gave me a look as if I’d just grounded him for a week, but he had the courtesy to keep his mouth shut.
If the average waist-level temperature downstairs was seventy degrees, as it probably was today, the second floor was about eighty-five. I walked slowly down the corridor to avoid working up a sweat and went through the door marked CLERK OF COURT.
A young woman in an appropriately summery blouse looked up and smiled. “Hi, Lieutenant. We haven’t seen you up here in quite a while.”
I let out an exaggerated puff of air and patted the top of my thinning gray hair. “People my age have to watch what they do. The stairs you dance up without a thought could kill me.”
She laughed. “From what I’ve seen, they’d have to be loaded with dynamite to do it.” She suddenly leaned over the counter and poked me in the belly and then shook her hand as if she’d hurt her wrist. “Look at that-hard as a rock, see? And cute, too.” She was laughing now. “And I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
I felt my cheeks warm up. “All right, enough. Could you do me a big favor?”
“Shoot.”
“Get me the jury list for The State of Vermont versus Davis?”
She furrowed her brow. “When was that?”
“About three years ago, maybe a little more. It was that big murder thing.”
“Oh-the black guy. God, I remember that.” She looked around, glancing through a half-opened back door. She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “And you want that right now, of course-an emergency.”
I shrugged, but she quickly laid her hand on my arm. “It simply can’t wait, right? I mean, you don’t have time to go through normal channels.” She drew out the word “normal.”
I smiled-a little slow this morning. “Absolutely not. It’s an emergency.”
“Boy-you guys, so pushy,” she said in a louder voice, walked over to the door, and spoke to someone out of sight. “I’ve got to go upstairs for some files-police priority request.”
“Get it in writing,” was the only response.
The young woman gave me a thumte, ve me abs-up and went to a large filing cabinet to took up the file number. She scribbled it on a small pad and then handed me a form from her desk. “You can fill out the request while I’m looking. Follow me-you’re in for some more exercise.”
We climbed to the top floor and an environment of Saharan hostility. The air was breathlessly hot, forcing both of us to pause on the landing. With sweat already prickling my forehead, I peeled off my jacket and draped it over the banister.
“My husband says they ought to sink an insulated shaft down the middle of the building and put a fan in it to suck some of this heat downstairs. It wouldn’t be much to look at, but it would be cheaper than anything else they’ve come up with.”
“Nothing’s cheaper than doing nothing.”
She laughed and set out on her search. We wandered from room to room, turning on overhead lights and checking the labels on stacks of brown boxes and dented filing cabinets. I remembered reading My Brother’s Keeper
