The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [13]
“Yes. Georgia. She named her after Georgia O’Keeffe. You looking for a home for her?”
He shook his head. “I wish I was. She’s gone missing.”
Rubinstein frowned. “That’s too bad. She was such a homebody, too. I’ll keep an eye out for her.”
Joe leaned in her direction and stuck out his hand again. She got out of her chair to take it in her own, smiling.
“It was nice meeting you, Joe. Tell the other guy he has a good eye,” she said.
“Heard you went poaching the other day. Not nice, Saint Joe.”
Gunther shot his colleague an inquisitive glance. He and Willy Kunkle, a member of his small regional VBI squad, were tucked away in their second-floor office in Brattleboro’s creaky, drafty, eccentrically designed Municipal Building—a throwback to the 1800s—once a high school, and architecturally never more than an assemblage of forced-together puzzle pieces. The police department, the town offices, the historical society, and other odds and ends, including VBI and the low-watt community TV station, were all thrown together in a seemingly random pile.
“How do you mean?” Joe asked.
Willy leaned back in his chair and planted a foot against the edge of his desk. The desk was wedged into a corner, making access to the chair difficult—an elegant and loaded metaphor for its owner’s personality.
Willy smiled. “Ooh, so coy. What’s the VBI golden rule?” He dropped his voice to intone, “‘We will not serve where we’re not invited’?” He laughed before revealing, “You went poking into that natural outside Wilmington on your own. Matthews called this morning.”
“I was nearby when it came in,” Joe told him, hearing how lame it sounded. “I told him to throw me out if I wasn’t wanted. Was he complaining?”
Kunkle burst out laughing. “Right. Like some wannabe is going to bitch about Vermont’s very own Dick Tracy. Not likely. No, he was sweetness and light personified.”
As so often in these conversations, Gunther was struck by Kunkle’s ability to spice up sarcasm with biting insight. In Matthews’s place, per law enforcement’s confusingly pseudomilitary self-image, Joe would also have been hard put to uninvite a senior officer. That said, there were times when he wished Willy would stop juggling extremes and either straighten out and play to his strengths, or screw up badly enough to defeat all protection and get fired.
And protection was something Joe knew a little about, for it was he, time and again, who had been Willy’s sole guardian angel, arguing that he should be kept on the job when virtually everyone else wanted him gone—a paradox that even an otherwise pretty straitlaced Joe was hard put to explain. There was just something indefinably worthy about Willy, as both cop and human being, that Gunther missed whenever the man earned his occasional trips behind the woodshed.
They’d all almost lost him once. He received a sniper bullet in the left shoulder years ago while on a case, a wound that had permanently disabled his arm. The winner of an Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit—another Gunther suggestion—Willy had resumed his post, passing a modified police academy physical, and now used his withered limb as an intimidating prop to his already forceful personality.
Joe bypassed Kunkle’s point and went to what had stimulated it in the first place. “What did Matthews say? He hear back from the ME?”
“He was sending you an e-mail. I love it when people phone to say stuff like that. Kind of defeats the purpose.”
Joe was sitting before his computer, writing notes from his interview of Linda Rubinstein. He punched up his electronic mailbox. As promised, there was a message from Doug Matthews.
“Anything good?” Willy asked after a few minutes.
Gunther looked up over his reading glasses, his expression at once thoughtful and dour. “He’s calling it a natural.”
“Based on the ME?”
“Yeah.” The word came out slowly.
“You got a problem with that?” Willy asked.
His boss was equivocal. “Not exactly. Questions.”
This was pure music to Kunkle,