Presumption of Guilt (10 page)

Her face brightened further. “Oh, sure. Go straight up. She's at her desk on the second-floor landing. You can't miss it.”

The scene upstairs resembled the one below, if with more desks, more young women sitting at them, and the wall lined with office doors—brass plated with the names of their occupants. McGee, Conklin was Brattleboro's largest law firm, and accordingly stuck-up in appearances—at least to Willy's eye.

A severely coiffed, pinched-faced blond woman—a pale, unhappy facsimile of Sharon Mitchell—looked up at him as he reached the landing.

“Yes?” she asked.

“You Julie Washburn?” he inquired quietly, approaching her desk.

Her face shadowed slightly. “Do I know you?”

None of the other legal aides or secretaries were paying attention to them, but he only discreetly showed his badge. “I was hoping we could have a very quick chat, somewhere quiet. Just take a minute,” he said.

“What's this about?”

“Your father.”

The set of her mouth told him this was no more to her than a second shoe dropping, and Willy imagined the phone call from mother to daughter that had preceded his appearance.

Julie Washburn rose and gestured to him to follow her down a corridor to a small conference room. She shut the door behind them.

“My mom told me,” she said immediately, facing him without further explanation. Sharon had implied that Julie weathered life unhappily following Hank's disappearance. That much was apparent in her watchful, suspicious eyes.

He decided to match her blunt tone. “Yeah. Sorry to drag this back up. You remember your dad?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well?”

“I liked him. He was fun.”

“Greg's older. He probably remembers more. I want to talk with him, too. We're having to dig pretty deep after all these years. You have any memories about when your dad dropped out of the picture? Any impressions that've stayed with you?”

She paused for a moment, but her response was merely, “Not really.”

“What about your mom? How did she change afterward?”

Again, Julie appeared to consider a response, before settling for, “It was years ago. How would I know?”

Willy conceded her point, and asked, “Where's your brother hanging his hat?”

“Greg?” she asked, caught off guard.

“You got another?”

A small crease appeared between her brows. “Why do you want to talk with him? He was a kid then.”

Willy had consulted a couple of law enforcement databases after Sharon failed to supply an address. They had yielded a recent address of one of Brattleboro's more decrepit flophouses. Greg had been a passenger in a vehicle pulled over for erratic operation, two months earlier. The driver had been arrested for a criminally suspended license, while the other occupants had been required to show their IDs, as was standard good police practice. To Willy, Greg's presence in the computer had implied that while he hadn't done anything illegal yet—or at least been caught at it—he was likely treading on precarious ground. In any case, Willy had checked the place out and found that Greg had moved on.

Julie Washburn picked up a pad from the conference table behind her and wrote down the address of a little-known cluster of cabins on the Brattleboro—Dummerston line, tucked away in the wooded hills.

Without much further ado, Willy thanked her and took his leave, having registered the turmoil behind her tightly controlled veneer.

Not that he was surprised—or even cared all that much. He'd spent a professional lifetime looking into the faces of youngsters who'd been stepped on by adults—sometimes literally. After a few years, the pain had virtually ceased to impress. What did the bumper sticker say?
LIFE IS SHIT AND THEN YOU DIE.
Worked for him.

Most of the time.

*   *   *

Willy didn't know it for a fact, but he suspected the cabins Julie had identified might have found their origins either during the early car-camping days of the late '20s, or from the need to house Roosevelt-era CCC crews. Whatever the truth, they had that vintage appearance, although updated and modernized, and had become a little-known and cherished Brattleboro hideaway. There were some four separate, single-story buildings, all told—the larger two of which had been partitioned into small apartments—scattered along a steep, twisting, dead-end dirt lane that had been cut through the trees and into a rolling, grass-covered, south-facing meadow.

It was quiet, peaceful, pretty, isolated, and so far off the beaten track as to leave the track behind. In truth, as he rolled to a stop, Willy was at a loss about where to park—the road having simply petered out beneath him.

He got out and looked around, absorbing the sounds of birds, a soft breeze, and the warmth of a weak spring sun. The most distant cabin was his destination, one of its doors numbered
3
.

It was midday, in the middle of the week. Not a good time—most would imagine—to find anyone at home. Cops in Vermont, however, rarely paid heed to such conventions, since their primary clientele didn't either.

Sure enough, as he approached the door in question, it opened to reveal a heavy, middle-aged bearded man in a T-shirt and jeans.

“Who're you?” he asked, neither friendly nor hostile. He looked vaguely as if he'd just woken up, although Willy suspected the effect was permanent.

“I'm a cop,” Willy told him, not bothering to show his badge. “That okay?”

“Depends. What've I done?”

“Nothing I know about.”

The man pointed his chin at Willy's left side. “What's wrong with your arm? You okay?”

What was it with this family? Willy wondered, but he was impressed by the care he heard in the question. “Yeah,” he said. “Old injury. Thanks for asking.”

“No biggie. What's up?”

“Are you Greg Mitchell?”

“Yeah.”

Willy considered his options and chose to go straight to the point. “You talk with your mother lately?”

The man's mouth opened slightly. “She all right?”

“Fine. Perfect. I just wanted to know if you'd talked.”

“No.”

“Then I guess I've got some news for you. Not sure if you'd call it bad, exactly, since it's kind of ancient, but you might find it helpful.”

The man instinctively touched the doorframe, as if for possible support. “What is it?”

“We found a body a couple of days ago. You mighta heard about it in the news. It was your father.”

The tradition among cops was to add, “Sorry for your loss,” but Willy didn't truck with that. He wasn't sorry, and he wasn't always sure when a survivor might not agree with him.

So he stayed silent, as did Greg Mitchell, who continued staring at him for several seconds before asking, “My mom know?”

“Yeah.”

“And Julie?”

“Yeah. Your mother told her, but she didn't know how to reach you. Julie gave me this address.”

Greg dropped his chin to look at the dirt patch between them. “Yeah. Things've slid a little between me and Mom.”

“Bad feelings?” Willy asked.

“Not really. More disappointment,” Mitchell acknowledged. “I been a letdown to her my whole life. I figured maybe I'd just … I don't know … drift away somehow.”

“You chose a good spot for it.”

Willy let the silence swell between them—an old interviewer's gambit.

“You wanna come in?” Mitchell finally asked. “I got coffee.”

“Sure.”

The cabin's interior came as a surprise, given Willy's knowledge of Mitchell's previous digs. Blond pine walls and vaulted ceiling; broad, double-glass doors overlooking a small deck—all of it flooded with sunlight. It was modern, bright, cheery, and in startling contrast to its hulking slow-moving denizen. It made Willy think of a local bear breaking in and calling it home—Goldilocks in reverse.

It was tiny—a single room, half of it filled with a bed, the other half by a kitchenette and a closet. A small bathroom was at the end. There were about as many possessions lying about as in a standard abandoned motel room. Greg Mitchell was not making a big dent on the world.

“Nice place,” Willy complimented him, as Mitchell led him to the counter holding a coffeemaker and poured him a mug taken from an overhead cabinet in which only two mugs resided. “How can you afford it?”

Mitchell didn't take umbrage. “I cleaned up,” he said with a ready frankness common to many twelve-step program attendees. “Stopped drinking and doing drugs. Don't know if it'll stick this time, but I'm tryin'. Means more money in the bank. I got a job at the Cumbie in West B. You want sugar or something?”

Willy chose not to further stress the man's resources. “I'm good.”

Near the bed was a small table with one chair. Mitchell sat on the edge of the bed and indicated the chair. “Have a seat.”

Willy did so, asking, “Did you miss your dad?”

Mitchell let his large, blunt, workingman's hands dangle between his knees. “Been a long time.”

“Still. It can be hard having a ghost as a father.”

Mitchell looked up at him. “You, too?”

Willy considered that. He had been born in New York City, and sometimes wished more of his family had been ghosts—instead of what they were. “Something like that,” was all he said.

“I did miss him,” Mitchell recalled. “I look back now, I realize he filled my life when I was a kid. I'd sit in school, looking forward to getting home and seeing him after work.” He spread his hands apart, as if detailing the length of a large fish, and added, “He was like a huge presence—more of a feeling than a man.” He paused before saying, “Course, that's just how I remember it. He was probably just a dad, and I was a bratty kid.”

“But he went into thin air,” Willy suggested. “Like a puff of smoke.”

Mitchell was studying the floor and nodded several times. “Yeah—he did.”

“You remember that happening?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me.”

Again, Mitchell was quiet, either drifting again, or gathering his thoughts. “It wasn't like a puff of smoke, like you said.”

“Okay.”

“There was a sort of buildup. My folks fighting. That was hard. Julie and I would talk about it. Or I guess she would ask me and I would try to answer. But we were small. I didn't really understand, and I felt I was supposed to make her feel better, if I could.”

“What were they fighting about?” Willy asked, pulling him back. He was a cop, after all—not a shrink.

Mitchell seemed to get the message. “Right,” he said. “Well, my dad moved out, if that tells you anything.”

“You think there was another woman?”

Mitchell shrugged. “There musta been, but that's not what I picked up. What I got was that my dad was unhappy, and I felt I was probably the reason. You know how kids do. I wasn't doing great in school, and I was nowhere near the athlete he'd been, and I was useless helping him with chores. I mean, I know now that they were most likely on the outs 'cause of their own baggage. But back then? I felt caught. Nobody was happy anymore, including Julie, and I couldn't fix it.”

Willy tried again. “Children sometimes overhear what their parents are fighting about. How 'bout you?”

He nodded. “There was one night. She yelled at him. She never did that—she's pretty buttoned down. Julie gets that from her. But she yelled that he smelled. I couldn't figure it out. ‘I can smell it on you,' or something like that. I can guess what she meant now, but I never knew for sure.”

Willy changed his approach. “Let's look at the broader picture. Who do you remember of their friends?”

Mitchell's face cleared somewhat. “BB was the one we saw the most. He was over all the time, like an uncle.”

“How did he act?”

“Fun. He played with us and horsed around, and made my mom laugh. He used to tickle her, which amazed me, 'cause she wasn't big on being touched.”

“You think he was maybe doing more than tickling?” Willy risked asking.

But Mitchell just laughed shortly. “I wondered about that. After Dad disappeared, BB was over a bunch for a while, and I was pretty sure he was after what you mean.”

“How did she react?”

“She didn't hate it. I never heard her yell at
him.
And I thought I interrupted them kissing once. But right after, he stopped coming over, so I don't know what happened.”

There was another pause, after which Mitchell asked, almost shyly, “How did my dad die?”

Willy didn't think he had much to lose. “Somebody killed him.”

Mitchell's face went slack and his body sagged. “I thought it might've been an accident. He'd just hurt himself when I saw him last—had his arm in a sling.” He passed his hand across his forehead. “Who killed him? Why?”

“That's what I'm looking for from you,” Willy told him.

Mitchell was nonplussed. “Me? What would I know?”

“You hang out with your dad much? Drive around with him, seeing his pals?”

“Sure. I loved doing that.”

“Who do you remember? You stopped with BB. Weren't there others?”

“Oh, yeah. There was Johnny. He was always around.”

“Lucas?”

“He worked with Dad and BB. They had a company together. Roofing. You probably knew that.”

“That's okay. Where was Johnny in the pecking order?”

“Dad and BB ran things—at least that's what I thought. Johnny didn't become a partner till later.”

Willy was interested in that. “Would you say Johnny moved into your dad's spot?”

But Greg wouldn't go that far. “Not really. What I remember is BB managed the company on his own for a year or so. Johnny worked for him, along with a bunch of others, but it wasn't till later that he became management. I guess he deserved it. Not that I'd know much about it, but he's high on the hog now, so he musta done something right.”