The Second Mouse (23 page)

“Sorry, Mel,” he said with a laugh. “You just caught me by surprise.”

Mel smiled broadly. “Now you got it, Buckwheat—surprise is the name of the game. Let me show you the rest of the setup.”

The next morning, as was his habit, Ellis phoned his mother at the hospital to find out how she was doing. He was alone—after their midnight field trip with Mel, they’d gone their separate ways, and from Mel’s punchy mood, Ellis could only imagine how things would play out for Nancy.

Nevertheless, he was feeling good. As they’d crept from spot to spot at the airport, and the plan had been rehearsed, he couldn’t repress the hope that he and Nancy might turn the tables after the Niemiecs had been dealt with and get away with enough dope to finance them forever. There was some irony worked into it, too—it was Mel’s trap, after all, with the dope as the cheese, except that he and the Niemiecs both would end up as the losers . . . somehow. And with Canada so close, Ellis had no trouble imagining it as the stepping-off place to an island beach far away, where he envisioned them taking in the sun and catching up on the good life.

His mother, as if infected by his mood, sounded sharper and more upbeat than recently, when the lethality of her disease had been visibly marking its progress.

“Ellis, I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” she said in her weak voice, “but I want you to know how happy you make me feel.”

“No problem, Ma. How’re you doin’ today?”

“Pretty chipper. Is Nancy okay?”

“She’s good. You sleep all right last night?”

“Oh, yes. After all the excitement, I was pretty tuckered out.”

Ellis made himself more comfortable on the couch. He could never tell how long these conversations might last, they were so dependent on her energy. But she seemed to be riding high.

“Yeah? You guys win big at bingo or something?”

“No, no,” she said. “The police were here. It was all very mysterious.”

Ellis froze. “What?”

“The police. Well, one of them. A real nice man. He kept telling me to call him Joe.”

“What did he want?” Ellis asked, trying to keep his voice calm, his optimism of moments earlier vaporized.

“It was pretty silly—even he admitted that. Remember the pendant I lost?”

“Yeah.”

“It turns out that nurse who helped you get it back got in a heap of trouble. You might want to write her and thank her again.”

“What happened, Ma?”

“Nothing much, really. Joe was saying it was just routine but that every little bit of garbage, no matter how small, is tracked. He seemed pretty embarrassed by it, but he had to do his job.”

Ellis was standing up, his hand tight on the receiver. “I don’t understand. What did he want?”

“Are you okay?”

He rolled his eyes, angry at himself for revealing his anxiety. “I’m fine. Just a little tired. Why would the police be interested in your garbage, Ma? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s the Homeland Security thing, Ellis. You know that. Everybody’s so cautious nowadays. According to Joe, the pendant being returned must have been picked up by the system somehow, so they sent somebody to check it out. It was just a conversation. You could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I mean, we talked more about you than the pendant.”

Ellis dropped his hand with the phone to his side and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, still hearing his mother’s voice going cheerily on. He felt as if the floor had given way beneath him.

Slowly, he brought the phone back up to his ear. “Ma,” he interrupted her, “did you get this guy’s last name, or what department he was from?”

His mother paused. “I’m not sure. I know he was from Vermont. There was something about a bureau when he introduced himself—at least I think so.”

“The Vermont Bureau of Investigation?”

“Yes. That was it. I’d never heard of them before.”

“I have,” her son admitted sadly, and did his best to wrap up the conversation as quickly as possible.

Afterward he sat on his couch, where he’d first made love to Nancy, and stared out the window. A row of old and battered parked cars littered the lot in the middle of the day as if in testimony of their owners’ success rate at finding employment.

Damn, he thought. What was coming down the tracks at him? He knew goddamned well no cop was interested in a dime-store pendant being extracted from the trash. Especially a cop from the state’s major-crimes squad. They had to have tumbled to the bag he’d stolen to frame Mel, which was still stuffed in his car trunk. But how the hell had they gotten from the bag to his mother’s pendant?

He rubbed his temples with the heels of both hands. He hated sorting out things like this. He felt trapped back in eighth grade math class.

He tried to think clearly. Maybe he was being paranoid. His mother had said the guy was bored and apologetic, that he’d said his investigation was purely routine. Wasn’t it possible that the VBI was given this kind of job just because of the national mood—purely routinely? Everyone
was
so cautious nowadays, like she said.

Maybe that’s all there was to it.

But he didn’t really believe that. Not really.

Joe stared at Willy. “You are kidding me.”

Willy smirked with satisfaction. They were in a borrowed conference room at the Bennington PD, along with Sam, Lester, and the ever-affable Johnny Massucco, now assigned to them as official liaison.

“Nope,” Willy said. “Ellis Robbinson and Mel Martin are joined at the hip.”

“I can vouch for that,” Massucco said. “They pop up in each other’s files all the time. At one point they even lived together, the wife and the two guys, before Robbinson found his own place.”

Sam laughed. “Well, apparently that part’s gotten complicated, unless it always was.”

Joe raised his eyebrows at her. “Oh?”

“We poked around Ellis’s apartment complex, under the radar. Willy fits in really well over there . . .”

“You should know,” Willy threw in.

“. . . and we found a neighbor,” Sam kept going, “who saw Nancy Martin more than once go inside for a few hours at a time. The neighbor had no doubt what they were doing.”

“Does Mel ever come over?” Joe asked.

“Not with her, and not in a long time.”

“Do you have a timeline for this affair?”

“We think it’s new,” Willy answered. “Without tipping off who we were, we talked with some of his coworkers after hours. He’s been real happy just recently, and he doesn’t deny it’s because he’s getting his rocks off.”

“He mention her by name?” Joe asked.

“Didn’t have to—one of his pals saw them in a pickup truck in town. He said their relationship was crystal clear.”

Joe turned to Massucco. “You know anything about this?”

“News to me” was the response. “When they all shared the trailer, it never came up.”

Joe nodded. “The reason I’m interested is that I traced the source of that missing radioactive garbage bag. Looks like Ellis Robbinson stole it while he was visiting his sick mother at the hospital, accompanied by someone fitting Nancy Martin’s description.”

He placed both hands on the tabletop for emphasis and added, “All of which means we’ve got even more going on we know nothing about—namely, what’s the story behind the bag? The Fusion guys talked dirty bomb because that’s their thing. But what if it’s tied to this romance between Mel’s wife and his best friend? What’re Nancy and Ellis up to, and is Mel in on it in any way?”

Lester raised his hand. “We keep dismissing the dirty bomb idea. Couldn’t that be an option?”

Joe shook his head. “I double-checked with the hospital. The half-life of the stuff in the bag was over almost from the start. It’s just trash now.”

He looked at Sam again. “What else?”

“Not much. We saw the pickup Mel bought from Newell outside his trailer, so he’s still driving it. We didn’t tail him anywhere, ’cause we didn’t want to spook him, so we’re a little vague about his movements. He is on the move, though. The pickup comes and goes all the time—’course, some of that’s Nancy getting a little afternoon delight, and Mel also has his Harley.”

“Does Mel work anywhere?”

Willy shook his head. “Nope—happy ward of the welfare state. He’s definitely got something going, though, just from the way he’s cruisin’ around, looking over his shoulder all the time. You can almost see the fuse hanging from his butt.”

Joe nodded, pushed himself away from the table, and began pacing the breadth of the room. “I had a small talk with Conrad Sweet’s parole officer.”

“Who?” Willy asked.

“High Top,” Sam answered.

“He still hasn’t heard from the kid,” Joe continued. “One second he was there, the next he wasn’t. Johnny, your department was asked to help look into that, right?”

“Right,” Massucco confirmed, sitting slightly straighter in his chair. “High Top’s a local boy. Been a customer of ours since he was eight or so. Parents were a mess; older brother from a different father is doing time up north for sexual assault of a minor, but he was High Top’s primary influence before we nailed him. High Top himself’s never gone for the violent stuff. He mostly steals, hustles small-scale dope deals, and earns his nickname. The only times I’ve ever seen him, he’s looking like a space cadet.”

“Any ideas where he disappeared to?”

“Not a one. We interviewed all his contacts and got nowhere.”

“His PO thinks something bad happened,” Joe told them. “He said High Top could be a smartass but was otherwise harmless, and he was regular as rain when it came to checking in, since he didn’t want to go back to jail. Did any of you come across anything in your digging that might connect him to the Martin-Robbinson trio?”

“Only Piccolo’s,” Massucco said.

They all looked at him.

“That’s—or was—one of his hangouts. It is for Mel Martin, too.” He tilted his head equivocally to one side. “Of course,” he added, “the same thing could be said for half the lowlifes in this town, so that’s hardly a neon arrow.”

“Martin’s into drugs,” Willy said flatly.

“True,” Massucco agreed. “But it’s not his primary line. He’s mostly a thief and a bully—more into beating people up.”

Joe was by this time leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets, too restless to sit at the table with the others.

“All right,” he said. “What about the whole reason we’re here, which is Michelle Fisher? Has anyone found anything connecting her to Mel, Mel to Newell Morgan beyond the sale of the truck, or for that matter, anyone to anyone?”

Lester asked almost mournfully, “You all read my report?”

“Yeah,” Willy conceded, “but that was it, right? The two old snoops that live on her road, seeing Newell’s truck go by?”

“That’s all I could find.”

“And they weren’t even sure who was at the wheel each time.”

Sam tried supporting Lester. “Newell didn’t sell the truck until after their last sighting of it.”

“They said one thing,” Lester spoke slowly, “that didn’t make it into my report, mostly because they didn’t actually see it.”

Predictably, Willy let out a laugh. “That stopped you?”

“I asked them,” Lester continued, ignoring him, “if they could see how many were in the passing truck from their angle, and they said no.”

“Meaning Newell and Mel could’ve ridden together at some point, like on a training run,” Sam suggested.

Joe rubbed his forehead. “Okay. Let’s back up a little and see what we’ve got.” He began counting off items on his fingers as he resumed pacing. “We’ve got Michelle dead of propane poisoning and clear signs of how that was both done and covered up. We’ve got circumstantial evidence pointing at Newell Morgan having an interest in her, being resentful of her, and finally benefiting from her death. We’ve got Newell establishing a firm alibi for the time of that death, but also selling his truck to a man with a known history of violence who could have functioned as the agent of Newell’s intentions.”

“Meaning we ought to lean on Mel to see if he’s got an alibi,” Willy cut in. “Along with a fattened bank account.”

“And if Newell has a thinner one,” Sam added.

“We don’t have enough probable cause to get warrants for that,” Joe cautioned.

“Plus, Michelle’s house is for sale,” Lester said.

They all stared at him.

“So what?” Willy asked.

“That may be the money—or part of it—that’ll end up in Mel’s pocket if this was a contract killing,” he said.

Joe smiled at the notion. “Les is right,” he agreed. “Newell’s on disability. His wife works at a bottom-level job. They’ve got their own house and she says they’re okay, but my bet is, that’s about it. If Newell did want Michelle killed but didn’t have the cash to pay for it, selling that house becomes crucial.”

“Wow,” Sam murmured. “So the house she lived in was the symbol of her happiness, and the grubstake to finance her death.”

“Could be,” Lester said.

“So how do we find out, if we can’t get warrants?” she asked.

Joe was staring at the floor, thinking. “We approach them from another angle,” he mused.

They waited for him to explain.

He looked up at them after a few moments. “If these two guys are in cahoots, they built a plan. They scouted the scene, maybe. They set up a cover story for Newell, and probably for Mel, too. They built all their defenses facing the direction they expected us to come from.”

Willy smiled and tilted his chair onto its back legs. “Right,” he said. “But we have a back door.”

Joe nodded. “Exactly. We do have enough to get a warrant for Ellis for stealing that trash bag.”

“And maybe enough to pick the girlfriend up as an accessory,” Willy added.

Joe crossed over to the door and opened it. “Let’s round ’em up and have a chat.”

Chapter 20

S
he loved riding on the back of a bike. The noise, the vibration of the engine, the sense she always got of almost flying at ground level were all memories of her past that she didn’t regret in the least and loved to revisit, especially now that she was once more with a man she believed she could trust.

At least for the moment. Not that Ellis wasn’t dependable. Of that she had little doubt. But she wasn’t kidding herself about the life they were facing—or, more precisely, the length of it. Even if they were successful in eliminating Mel, stealing the dope, and staying clear of the law, they were still looking at a future on the lam.

But today they were merely on a day trip. Mel was all consumed with his plans; they’d been all consumed with each other and, lately, their own big plans. Ellis had finally suggested a miniature breakout—a chance to enjoy the fresh air, the sun on their backs, just to taste what freedom might be like.

It was a great idea. Nancy’s emotional claustrophobia had been worsened by the mounting gloom on both their parts. It was nice simply to ride away from it all, even briefly, and soak up the scenery and warmth of a summery Vermont day.

Perhaps presciently, they’d chosen Pownal, and the site of the abandoned racetrack there, for their trip. A huge oval laid out near where the road overlooked it, the track started life in the sixties as a horse racing venue, switching gears in midcourse to feature greyhounds. But it had closed about ten years ago, and, despite the occasional plan to use it somehow, from gambling to housing development, it remained empty, ghostly, and weather-beaten—a testament to high hopes, big dreams, and ventures run aground.

It was a setting strangely in keeping with their mood, and they celebrated the choice by taking the Harley onto the vague grassy footprint of the track, through a break in the chain-link fence, and spinning around and around the oval, throwing up dust and scattering dirt into the banks.

Later, they sat on a hill gazing down at their handiwork, eating sandwiches and drinking beer, yielding to the temporary illusion that they had nothing to worry about.

Nancy was still enjoying that feeling on the way back north toward Bennington, wondering not just if but when the fantasy of such simplicity might become fact. This made her completely unaware of the car that swung in behind them as they passed the cemetery below town.

Ellis leaned slightly to the left, abandoning Route 7 as it began filling with traffic, and took them up Monument Avenue—narrower, tree lined, and dappled with sun filtering through the leaves. He, too, was inattentive of the following car.

Holding on to Ellis’s waist, Nancy resumed daydreaming. If things did work out and Mel could be eased into the woodwork, what would they do then? Where would they move to? It wasn’t the first time she’d engaged in such fantasies. If pressed, she’d have admitted to having done nothing else from the day she left home as a teenager.

The bike began to slow. Nancy looked up and saw a couple of cars in the far distance, next to each other and blocking the road.

“Cops,” Ellis said.

She leaned in so her mouth was near his left ear. “They don’t have lights.”

“I can smell it,” he said, slowing even more. He straightened slightly. “And there’s one behind us. Shit.”

He checked what he’d seen in the rearview mirror by swinging his head around. “We gotta get out of here.”

“Ellis, maybe not. We haven’t done anything.”

“You haven’t. I’m an accessory to murder, and they probably think I’m a terrorist, too.”

He swung the bike around in a tight circle, putting their backs to the roadblock and facing the single approaching car.

“Hang on.”

He gunned the throttle, and she felt the bike heave forward beneath her, its rear wheel squealing. Ahead of them, the car fishtailed slightly and positioned itself so that it could move forward or backward, depending on how the Harley tried to cut around it.

Nancy could feel Ellis’s body tense.

“Okay, here we go,” he shouted back at her, and launched up a driveway to their right, marked “Southern Vermont College.” Behind them, sirens began to wail.

Southern Vermont College occupied the once remote five-hundred-acre Everett estate, carved into the side of Mount Anthony. Neither Ellis nor Nancy knew anything about the place—or more important, whether there was another way off the campus.

They were aimed at a huge, pale hangar-size building up the hill and slightly to their right, opposite what looked like an apartment complex. Ahead and higher still, the steep drive continued toward something huge with multiple pointed red roofs. Ellis hung left at the complex, not wanting to go any farther up and hoping to double back somehow onto Monument Avenue. The sirens were closing in. Nancy glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw that the previously nondescript cars were now sparkling with hidden blue strobe lights.

Traversing the hillside on what turned out to be a parking lot, Ellis poured on the speed, heading around a slight curve in front of the apartments, to discover at the far end that a police car was closing in from a feeder road below and to the left. Not only that, but a large pond had appeared on the right, just past the apartments, and the parking lot petered out to a narrow drive.

Ellis took off across country at a slight angle, roughly parallel to the pond—terrain to which the Harley was poorly suited.

Nancy screamed as they hit the first series of dips and humps.

“You okay?” Ellis yelled back at her.

“Yeah,” she answered before reclenching her teeth. She felt as if she were walking on a tightrope—so precariously perched, she didn’t dare to look down, didn’t dare even to think.

Somehow or other, in defiance of gravity and common sense, Ellis reached the upper end of the same feeder road the police car was still traveling. He hit the smooth surface with an explosion of power, causing Nancy to almost lose her grip on him, and aimed, engine screaming, for the school’s showcase centerpiece, Edward Everett’s eccentric, Norman castle-like mansion, built in 1914. Beyond that, however, all Nancy could see were the trees clotting the rest of Mount Anthony. It looked as though they were heading into the top end of a box.

The road ended at the narrow end of the mansion’s enormous rectangular parking lot, which was located to the building’s south side so as not to interfere with its view down the mountain, to the east.

Ellis, in a last desperate attempt to find a way back into the valley and Bennington beyond, shot off toward the mansion, hoping there might be a road beyond it. Nancy watched the fairy tale structure, red-roofed, ornate, absurdly otherworldly, grow in size before them as Ellis aimed for the narrow alleyway to its rear.

It wasn’t to be. There was no road. It was a dead end. Again Ellis slammed on the brakes, kicked the bike into a skid, and swung the large machine around to face the direction he’d just traveled from.

For the few seconds they had left, they watched four cars abreast, all with blue lights firing like flashbulbs, bearing down on them.

“
Down the hill,
” she shouted, pointing at the steep grassy slope back down toward the main driveway, in effect suggesting closing the circle they’d begun by entering the estate.

But Ellis shook his head, patting the Harley’s gas tank. “I know what she can do. It won’t work with two of us on board.”

Without hesitation, Nancy stepped back off the machine’s rear seat, leaving Ellis alone on the bike.

“Go.”

He whipped his head around. The cars were so close, they were skidding to a halt.

“You can’t.”

“Go,” she repeated. “I’ll be fine. I haven’t done anything.”

It took him a split second. “I love you,” he told her, and gunned the throttle one last time.

The Harley roared across the parking lot, its lightened tail end slithering to and fro, before Ellis jumped it over the lower embankment, hit the downward slope like a circus performer, and, barely under control, proceeded toward the distant road far below.

Nancy stood in the parking lot, feeling utterly alone, even the growl of the bike vanishing by the instant. Her legs were trembling with exhaustion and spent adrenaline.

Seeing Ellis reach the road safely and speed off toward Monument Avenue and freedom, she turned to face their pursuers.

The violence she’d expected to follow—shouted commands, drawn guns, handcuffs, being thrown to the ground—none of it came about.

Instead, with the dust swirling around them in the sun, the four cars remained quiet, their lights flashing silently, and a single man in a jacket and tie got out and approached her at a slow, almost leisurely pace.

She watched him carefully, anxious about what he might do. But his hands were open and loose by his sides, his gait relaxed, and as he drew nearer, she saw that his face, older and friendly, was calm, almost reassuring.

He nodded his greeting as he stopped near her. “Nancy?” he asked.

She nodded back, not sure she could trust her voice.

He smiled slightly, which touched his kind eyes. “My name’s Gunther. We should probably talk.”

It wasn’t a friendly room—small, bare, with a steel table bolted to the floor and two metal chairs. There were strategically placed bars on the wall, at waist level, that Nancy figured were used for handcuffs. The lighting was fluorescent and harsh, the floor gray concrete. There was a camera mounted high in one corner.

Nevertheless, the man who’d introduced himself at the college didn’t seem any less peaceful or friendly. He’d brought her a glass of water, asked her if she wanted to use the bathroom. He’d even cupped her elbow supportively as he steered her to her chair, and asked if the temperature was all right.

“Am I under arrest?” she finally asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said immediately. “You can leave anytime you’d like.”

She hesitated, surprised by that, wondering what the catch might be. “Like right now?”

He smiled slightly. “Like right now.”

She frowned, troubled by her own ambivalence. In the old days, when this scenario had been discussed over beers, it had always been punctuated by admonitions to keep silent, be stern, tell them all to fuck themselves.

But now that she was in it, she felt differently.

“I was hoping you might hear me out first,” he then said. “Your choice, though.”

Nancy eyed him cautiously. “About what?”

“Ellis, for one thing,” he answered conversationally. “And Mel, of course.”

“What about them?” She was struck by his familiarity with their names, as if he’d known them for a very long time.

He gave her a slightly crooked smile—a gesture of sympathetic support. “Well, you’re in kind of a bind there, I would say, caught between the two of them.”

Her crestfallen look confirmed what had been somewhat of an assumption, if not a guess.

“I mean,” he added, “I doubt Mel will be too happy about what’s happened. He doesn’t strike me as a man to gracefully fade away.”

She swallowed hard, which was eloquent enough for Joe.

He leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table. “I saw what happened when we picked you up, Nancy. You took a big risk, getting off the bike so Ellis could get away. You didn’t know what we were after. And yet you did it. That was a sign of love. He knew it. I know it. I think you and Ellis have the real deal with each other, and believe me, that counts for something, especially in this world.”

She was visibly confused by now, confounded by what he was saying. “Why do you care about that?” she asked.

He let a small pause elapse before admitting, “Because Ellis is really jammed up, just when everybody wishes he wasn’t.”

“Everybody?”

Joe raised his eyebrows. “The people who count most—Doris, you. Me, for that matter, since I’m the one who could help.”

“How?”

“You ever hear of officer discretion?”

“No.”

“It’s like when you get pulled over for speeding. You don’t always get a ticket, right? In fact, you’ve probably played that game a little—being nice to the cop, calling him ‘sir,’ trying to make a good impression?”

She flushed slightly.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I do the same thing when I get stopped. ’Cause it works sometimes. You get off with a warning. That’s officer discretion. Law enforcement is built in large part on the trust that each officer will know to do the right thing, and that sometimes the right thing is to give good people another chance.”

“You could do that for Ellis?”

“Within reason, I can do that for anyone,” Joe said, sidestepping the question. “It gets trickier if some serious crime has been committed, but even then, after the state’s attorney gets involved, we work as a team to the same end.”

Nancy still wasn’t completely buying it. “What about all that accessory stuff? If you know about a murder, it’s the same as if you did it.”

Joe held up a finger, like a helpful teacher. “I know what you’re saying. Actually, you’re a little off—it wouldn’t be the same for simply knowing, not necessarily, but the idea is close. And it gets back to my point exactly: The same discretion I was talking about cuts both ways. If people try to mess with us, we sometimes mess with them right back—sad to say when they might’ve gotten off lighter by just cooperating.”

“Doesn’t sound very fair.”

“It is if you look at it the other way around,” he said, his expression cheerful. “Try this: You play ball with us; we play ball with you. Best of all in this case: Ellis gets the benefit.”

Nancy pursed her lips, considering her options. It was confusing, but she could sense that somewhere in all this, there might actually be some truth. She just couldn’t be sure of it amid her conflicting prejudices.

“I don’t think I have anything to say.”

It didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. He leaned back in his chair comfortably and made an expansive gesture with his arm. “Oh, sure you do. Maybe it’s a little hard to see right now, feeling hog-tied the way you are.”

She felt an odd tingle along the back of her neck, hearing him address out loud the very thoughts she’d just been having.