RAY parked in front of the gold-domed state-house on the corner of Center and Main in Concord, and found the AG’s office on the second floor.
Assistant State Attorney General Woodrow W. Whitaker had resigned a few years before, so Ray made nice with the attorney who handled extrajurisdictional contacts. The attorney gave Ray two minutes of his time, then left for a hearing a hundred miles away, telling the receptionist to find the closed file on Harlan Poole. She returned from the basement with two binders that smelled of pine disinfectant.
Ray settled in the corner of an empty law library and started reading. He built a time line as he read. Poole was last seen on July 9, 1963. T. K. Marcotte found him dead in the ditch on July 10, notified the state AG that afternoon. Troopers hit Stratham before the autopsy was over and went to work establishing Poole’s movements on the day he died.
Poole got off work in the Special Wing at two in the afternoon, haunted waterfront taverns until five, when witnesses saw him pick up a Navy wife as she punched out at a local fish cannery. The wife called the witnesses gossips and liars, until Woody Whitaker’s men threatened a polygraph. She admitted taking Poole back to her trailer court, where she claimed they played gin and drank rye, until he left just before seven P.M. She was the last witness to see Poole alive.
Next came the alibis, and again the troopers covered ground. Townies known to hate Poole were in bars, or jails, or out of town, or with their families, or working nights at paper mills and canneries. The husband of the carplaying wife was under the Mediterranean in a nuclear submarine. Poole’s own brother looked like a suspect for a while, although little pieces of the case—the twin burns, the stolen car abandoned Boston-bound—didn’t jibe. The brother cleared a polygraph with ease.
The Navy circle checked out too. Seth and Laura Zimquist saw a movie in town at seven-ten, The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen. The trooper running the interview had seen the movie and quizzed them about the ending. The Zimquists were home by ten, in time to share tuna casserole and table wine with Father Sedgewick.
Lem Childs had worked late on July 9. He was home by half past ten, and went to sleep reading Sarwer-Foner’s Dynamics of Psychiatric Drug Therapy. Sign-out logs and a night watchman backed him up.
Father Sedgewick was the last man interviewed by the troopers. He had said mass with another priest in town from five to six, kept an appointment with a sailor going through a divorce from six to eight, talked on the telephone with friends in five different cities from eight to ten, then saw the Zimquists for dinner. Woody Whitaker felt the hospital staff had sound alibis and no motive, and Ray, reading Whitaker’s notes two years later, agreed.
The second binder got interesting fast. Whitaker had made up his mind that the killer had come from the Navy hospital, and now the investigation doubled back. Father Sedgewick was requestioned, not by troopers, and not on Navy turf, but rather by Whitaker himself, in Concord. The priest was almost totally useless. No, Sedgewick didn’t know of any mental patients released from Special Wing. No, Sedgewick hadn’t heard that Poole had enemies.
Next came Lem Childs. Ray had somebody’s notes of Whitaker’s cross-exam of Lem Childs, and Ray imagined the scene.
Whitaker asked if Poole had enemies among the hospital staff.
Childs said that he had no enemies.
How about the inmates at Special Wing? Did they like Poole?
Childs pointed out that Poole handled security, and Special Wing was full of men suffering from severe mental disorders. Delusional men, violent men. Poole made few friends among them.
Did Poole ever get physical?
Childs sat pat. He made few friends.
Was Poole ever threatened by inmates?
These were men who saw the devil in the mirror, Childs said. These were men who thought you emitted signals and would gouge out your eyes to get at the transmitter.
Had any inmate ever threatened Poole and then been released?
Childs launched into a lecture: Nobody violent was ever released. Some came in violent, but these were treated and they improved. A few who were incurable were removed to other secure facilities. Only the cured were released.
Whitaker showed Childs pictures of Harlan Poole’s curious temple burns. Recognize these?
No, Childs said.
Ray knew that Seth Zimquist was interviewed too—the index in the front of Volume One listed a Zimquist deposition—but there was nothing in the file. Ray found the tab where the depo should have been, and saw that it had been razored from the binder.
Whitaker petitioned the Navy for a roster of Special Wing patients. He opened politely, and the Navy, citing the confidentiality of medical records, politely declined. Whitaker responded that he only needed names of ex-patients, no details of the treatment sought or given, nothing medical at all. The Navy replied, by hand delivery, that the Special Wing had been terminated the previous week, and the records were “unavailable.” Whitaker and the Navy were on a collision course.
Ray reached the end of the second binder and asked the secretary for the rest of the Poole file.
“The rest?”
“I’ve got Volumes One and Two in here, but the file’s incomplete.”
She went down to the basement and came back apologizing. “You’re right,” she said, smiling, and gave Ray Volume Three, a single binder, very thin. Ray opened it and found a typed form closing the case over the signature of Woodrow W. Whitaker, Assistant State Attorney General, September 18, 1963.
Ray stared at the signature, trying to figure it out. Woody Whitaker had run a nice case. He took the probe to the patient population, likely an ex-patient, and knew he had struck oil when the Navy shut the Special Wing down. Then, closed. Had the Navy gotten to Woodrow Whitaker? Was there any other explanation?
Ray returned the binders in a stack to the secretary.
“Hope it helped,” she said.
“Helped a lot,” Ray told her. “Woody Whitaker knew his job.”
“Woody was the best we had,” she said. “For twenty years young prosecutors came in and tried to be just like him.”
“Where can I find him now? He’s not dead or anything, is he?”
She smiled. “Oh no.”
Ray smiled back. “He got an office in town?”
“No,” she said. “Woody inherited some money and moved back home—a little place called Warsaw, up north.”
“Inherited money, huh?”
“Yes.” She laughed. “We should all be so lucky.”
They agreed they everyone should be that lucky. “When was that?” Ray asked.
She thought back. “It was in September, I remember—couple years ago now.”
WARSAW, New Hampshire, was a clapboard church, a general store, and a monument to the Civil War dead. In the store, an old man wearing bib overalls was stacking tins of Quaker Oats.
Ray said, “I’m looking for a lawyer.”
The old man stopped and rubbed his bald head. “Ain’t got none,” he said. “Thank God.”
“His name is Woody Whitaker,” Ray said.
The old man shook his head. “He’s gone. Just last year.” The man said this as if a year were an hour in Warsaw, New Hampshire. “He was living at his folks’ place when he moved back from Concord. Didn’t take, though.”
“Didn’t take?”
The old man hooked his thumbs in his overalls. “Woody in trouble?”
“No,” Ray said.
The old man gave Ray directions to the Whitaker place, and Ray headed up the valley on a narrow turnpike. In a block, Warsaw was gone.
The Whitaker farm was a spent-looking spread on stony land off the road. Ray parked his car in a patch of mud between a ramshackle house and a barn that sagged in on itself. The pastures were empty. A light rain fell.
Ray knocked on a screen door, and a woman opened up. She wore a housedress and work boots and took Ray at first for a tax collector.
“I’m looking for Woody Whitaker,” Ray said. “I’m a prosecutor.”
She kept the screen door open with her leg. Cats curled around her ankles and chased each other across the floor. She ignored the cats and looked at Ray’s mud-spattered car, or maybe at the empty pasture and the sagging barn.
“Do you know him?” Ray asked.
“He in trouble?” she asked. This seemed to be the first question everybody asked about Woodrow Wilson Whitaker.
“He might be,” Ray said. “I need to talk to him. If I can’t find him, he might be.”
The woman disappeared inside the old farmhouse, letting the screen door hang open. Three cats escaped between Ray’s feet. They ran halfway to the barn and stopped there, confused, then walked in circles. The woman came back with a mauve envelope, torn open, ink smudged.
“Woody came home after he left the attorney general’s,” she said. “Stayed a few months, then he moved on. He sent that letter last year.”
Ray turned the envelope over in his hand. A sheet of cheap notebook paper, folded once, poked out. Drops of rain fell on the paper as Ray held it, and the ink ran. Ray hunched to protect the writing from the rain and saw the words sorry, mistake, goodbye. Ray looked at the torn flap and saw the return address: c/o Postmaster, Great Nor’n Timber Co, Chute’s Gap, NH.
The woman took the letter back and pulled the screen door closed. “Mind the cats when you leave,” she said.
“If I find Woody…” Ray said through the screen.
“Yes?”
“Well,” Ray said, “you got a message for him?”
“Tell him you saw his little sister,” she said. “Tell him we got foreclosed. Tell him I’m living on apples. Tell him I’m the last one left.”
Ray backed off her place and got on the road. Woody Whitaker hadn’t retired on an inheritance; his family was broke. Ray wanted to ask Whitaker why he had taken a bribe from the Navy to close the Poole killing as an accident. Ray pulled over to find Chute’s Gap on his map. His finger traced a route a hundred miles into an empty corner of New Hampshire, the wedge between Quebec and Maine. Chute’s Gap was on the fringe of the Northern Tier, huge concessions ceded to the timber syndicates a lifetime ago. On Ray’s map the empire was labeled simply PRIVATE.
Ray had dealt with the locals up here once before. A Boston gunsel named Curly McCarthy skipped bail and ran for Canada. A month later, Ray got a call from a man who identified himself as a game warden for the Great Northern Timber Company. The warden said they had Curly McCarthy.
“Found him at an Indian camp,” the warden said. “He was stirring up trouble.”
Ray asked the usual questions, basic facts he would need to extradite McCarthy, but the warden was vague. The Indian camp was either in New Hampshire or in Maine, or possibly Canada, the warden wasn’t sure. He said he didn’t think the company would be pressing charges, as if the company held the powers of prosecutor, grand jury, and judge.
“Just come get him,” the game warden said.
Ray told him it might take a week to get a DA’s investigator up to the Northern Tier. The warden was unfazed. “He ain’t going nowhere.”
When Ray’s men finally got to where McCarthy was, they found that he had been shot—it was never clear by whom. Two bullets in the back.
“Tryin’ to escape,” the game warden said, as if it happened all the time.
Ray later told a law school classmate who was originally from Bangor about the Curly McCarthy episode.
The Maine lawyer laughed. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “The stature books refer to the top half of Maine as ‘unorganized land.’ It is, to my knowledge, the only place east of the Rockies with no form of local government whatsoever. Takes up an area bigger than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined.”
The valley turnpike became New Hampshire 3, and Ray went north and east seventy miles through mill towns and mountain hamlets too small to name. At Lancaster, the state road met the big river in these parts, the Connecticut. Barges from the Great Northern floated downstream to the pulp mills, riding low.
Ray left New Hampshire 3 in Clarksville, heading east on a narrow asphalt ribbon, a straight shot, thirty miles through a dense forest of firs. He was nearly forced off the road by trailer-trucks hauling logs and doing forty. He expected to find Woody Whitaker somewhere around Chute’s Gap by nightfall. There was a lot at stake, but Ray was in no hurry. He pulled over and let the logging trucks pass, knowing he was on Great Northern’s land now.
The asphalt turned to well-maintained gravel and forked in four directions just beyond a cabin. Ray could see a dozen shacks in a cleared acre of woods where the road forked.
Ray parked his car in front of the cabin. A weathered sign hung over the porch:
TRIBAL AGENT FRONTENAC-HURON PEOPLES US POST OFFICE, CHUTE’S GAP, NH JUSTICE OF THE PEACE
COMPANY STORE—CHITS ONLY
ROYAL STUBBS, JR.
Prop
A dog barked miles away. Someone in the settlement was burning pine.
The cabin was unlocked. Ray stepped inside a cramped, shedlike room full of canned food and mothballed woolens, mapling pails, mousetraps and bear traps, a case of shotgun shells, a barrel of nails, spades and shovels, coiled hoses, snowshoes, old calendars, skis—it was as if the contents of a large farmhouse had been stacked inside one room.
The back of the cabin was one big room with no door. Ray put his head in and saw a man lying on a canvas cot in a flannel shirt and long-john bottoms. On the floor next to the cot was a bottle of no-name bourbon. A lantern hung on a nail over the cot, filling the room with jumpy light. The place smelled of compost, rotgut, and kerosene. A small transistor radio played softly, the crop report in French. The man on the cot was pie-faced drunk.
“Hello?” Ray said.
The man sat up. He was fifty or sixty, with a face of silver stubble. He swung his feet around, felt for the bottle on the floor, nudged it aside, and brought a well-oiled German Luger from someplace under the cot. The pistol and the radio were the only modern things in sight.
“Who in blazes are you?” the man said.
“My name is Ray Dunn. I’m with the DA’s Office in Boston. Are you Stubbs?” Or are you Whitaker?
“Got ID?” the man asked.
Ray held his creds open for the man across the room, who squinted at them.
“Toss ’em here,” he said.
Ray underhanded the leather shield case onto the cot. The man looked it over, inside and out, and threw it at Ray’s feet. Ray stooped and picked it up.
“I’m Roy Stubbs,” the man said, laying the gun on the blanket by his thigh. “Drink?”
Ray said no and pulled up a crate.
“Nobody told you to sit down,” Stubbs said.
Ray sat down. “I’m looking for a man who lives up here.”
“Frontenac?” Stubbs asked.
“No.”
“White man, huh? He a logger?”
“No. His name is Whitaker. He came from Concord by way of a little town called Warsaw. He was here as of a year ago.”
Stubbs knew the name and knew the man; his face said so. “There a reward on Whitaker?” he asked.
“No,” Ray said.
“Then I don’t know him.”
Ray said, “I’ll give you twenty bucks to show me where he lives.”
Stubbs’s face was red and sweaty, but his features were composed. His eyes followed the lantern light playing on the eaves. “Hunnid,” he belched.
“Twenty-five,” Ray said.
Stubbs pulled on Army trousers and laced up his work boots. He took a blue wool greatcoat from a peg and tucked the Luger in his waistband.
Ray followed Stubbs up the gravel road toward the shacks. There teenaged boys sat in battered lawn chairs, drinking cans of Pabst and giving Ray and Stubbs the evil eye. The teens looked shifty and tough. Ray couldn’t tell if they were Indian or not, but he knew they hated Stubbs.
“Whitaker showed up last March,” Stubbs said, as they passed the teens. “I seen his type before. Looking to wind up someplace nobody knows him, the end of the earth. He found it here, and settled in.”
Stubbs stopped in front of the shacks. “This here’s the Indian camp. Sorry place for a white man, huh?”
Stubbs walked between the shacks to the last one, which stood against the woods. He knocked on the door and hiked his pants to expose the pistol butt.
The woman who opened the door wore a plain skirt, a shirt big enough for a burly man, and cracked black wing-tip shoes, also outsized. Over her shoulders, like a shawl, was a man’s worsted wool suitcoat, charcoal gray, nicely tailored, and scrubbed threadbare.
Stubbs called her Sissie. “Meet Mrs. Whitaker,” Stubbs said to Ray. “Sissie, this is Mr. Dunn from Boston. He’s paying me a hundred U.S. dollars—”
“Twenty-five,” Ray said.
“—to see your husband,” Stubbs said to Sissie. “Is Woody available?”
Stubbs slapped her rump as she passed. Sissie walked a little ahead of them down a path, under laundry on a line, through a stunted garden, past a rusted-out De Soto, to a fouled creek where an old woman drew water in a plastic pail.
On the far side of the creek, all alone in a small clearing, was a single new grave, marked with a board stuck in the soil:
WOODY WHITICKER
1917-1964
“Woody stepped out—you just missed him,” Stubbs cackled. The joke was on Ray, and Stubbs made the most of it. He laughed until he coughed. Sissie bent over and pushed the plank deeper into the ground.
“How did he die?” Ray asked her.
Stubbs answered for her. “Smallpox,” he said. “Runs riot among the Frawnts, don’t it, Sissie? See, the Frawnts don’t have an immune system like us, and sometimes a white man goes with the Indians and he loses his immunity too.”
Ray realized that Sissie was wearing the remnants of Whitaker’s civil servant clothes—the shirt, the wing tips, the suitcoat, all from good haberdashers in the state capital. Ray wondered what Sissie had first made of Whitaker when he showed up in Chute’s Gap with his lawyer talk and his suit and tie and his fancy shoes. Ray wondered what she made of Mr. Dunn from Boston, with his suit and tie and fancy shoes, and expensive questions about the dead.
Back at Sissie’s shanty, Stubbs cleared his throat. “How ’bout it?” he asked Ray. “You can’t talk to Sissie’s husband, but you can do whatever you want with her.”
Ray avoided everybody’s eyes. He noticed that the teens were still in the lawn chairs by the road, watching everything Stubbs did.
“It’s a long, cold trip back to Beantown,” Stubbs said. Sissie stood in the bad light by her shanty, and pulled the suitcoat close.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Ray said and walked off.
Stubbs followed him. “Now,” he said. “About the reward.”
Ray said, “Deduct it from Whitaker’s money.”
Stubbs’s eyes narrowed. “What money?”
“The money you stole off him after he died, or maybe before he died—it doesn’t matter. I’ll bet it’s all in a box under your cot. Am I right, Roy?”
They were standing in front of Stubbs’s cabin. Ray looked over and saw the pistol leveled.
“Hit the road,” Stubbs said.
Ray smiled. “Scared of robbers, Roy? Damnedest thing about money: when you have a little, you’re scared of losing it, and when you have a lot, you’re more scared of losing it.”
Ray got into his car, and Stubbs went inside. Ray looked up the gravel road toward the shanties. He was thinking about a prosecutor who sold out, and couldn’t live it down, not inside, not where it counted. He was thinking about Whitaker fleeing from his selfdisgust from Concord to Warsaw to here. That was Whitaker’s route and, later, Ray’s. That was what happens to tainted lawmen: they corroded inside out and wound up easy pickings for Royal Stubbs or Johnny Cahill. Ray sat in his car a long time as the light faded in the deep woods. He started his car and let it idle.
Before he left, he would do something in memory of Woodrow Wilson Whitaker—not the man who took a bribe and called it “inheritance,” but rather the other man, the younger man, the one who knew his job and did it. For him, Ray drove up the gravel road and pulled over in front of the three teens still killing time in the secondhand lawn chairs.
“He has a lot of cash in the back room,” Ray said to them, leaning out his window. “I just saw it with my own eyes. If you wait a few hours, he’ll be too drunk to aim the pistol.”
IT WAS a seven-hour drive to Boston. Ray got back to the state highway by eight and took a room in Lancaster. That night, for the first time in his life, he saw the aurora borealis.
He was up again an hour before dawn and drove fifty miles before he found a place with the lights on and coffee brewed. At Franconia, he hit the interstate. He began picking up Boston radio stations as he came out of the mountains near Plymouth, New Hampshire. Ray played the dial, getting odd patches of reception, a few seconds of Top 40, radio mass for shut-ins, a snippet of Morty Moore the Mortgage Magician screaming “Sixty-Five in ’65,” then static. As Ray drove south, the radio reception improved. He was twenty miles above Massachusetts when he tuned in, steady and clear, to WEEI-Boston, all news, all the time, and the big story of the day:
“A police tragedy in Boston,” the announcer said. “A raid by Narcotics detectives erupted in gunfire this morning. One man is dead, and another is wounded. We’ll give you details as soon as they are available….”