The Death at Yew Corner (6 page)

The galvanized tub looked anything but ominous. She moved the small ladder stool toward the tub in which Bunting had died. She stepped up the ladder, let her feet dangle over the edge, and then jumped lightly into the empty tub. It was chest high, and she tried to imagine the buoyancy she would feel if it were filled with water. The hot and cold faucets were at the far side of the tub placed on the intake pipes near a temperature gauge that was three-quarters of the way down the side of the tub. She stood near the pipes and leaned over. Her fingers were barely able to brush the spigot handle. It seemed unlikely that the five-foot-two-inch Fabian Bunting would be physically capable of turning on the faucets from inside the tub. She discounted the possibility that her old teacher had adjusted the water from outside the tub and then crawled inside. The woman had just undergone a hip operation and had been confined to a wheelchair.

The evidence seemed more conclusive than ever that Bunting had been placed in the tub and then the scalding water had been turned on.

Bea climbed out of the tub and was about to push through the swinging doors when she noticed the two men.

Gustav Tanner was sitting on the edge of the station counter with his legs dangling off the side. Maginacolda leaned against the wall with the same insolent look that Bea had observed in the office during Rocco's interview. There was an intimacy between the two men. Maginacolda was speaking while Tanner seemed to be listening with great interest.

Tanner looked out of character. He always assumed the mantle of the irate manager and officious administrator. Casual banter with an aide seemed wrong, particularly when it was an employee who had once been a union steward.

Maginacolda noticed her. He jerked away from the wall, rushed toward the PT room doors, and pulled her into the hall. “What in hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for the ladies room.” He pushed her against the wall. “Hey!”

Tanner trembled in rage. “Who let you in?”

“I walked through the front door.”

The two men exchanged a quick look. Tanner shook his head. “Just get her out of here and don't let her back in!”

She was firmly escorted to the main entrance. Before the front door swung shut, Maginacolda grasped her arm painfully. “I wouldn't come back. Understand?”

Bea walked to her truck. She would tell Lyon what she had observed, but the physical abuse might better be left unsaid.

Afterward was nearly her favorite time. They lay flank to flank. A soft peace filled the bedroom as she nuzzled against Lyon's shoulder. His hand brushed lightly along her neck and she knew he was still awake.

“Thinking?”

“In a lazy way. I can't figure out what's going on at the nursing home.”

“You worry about finishing your book. I'll think about Tanner and the other one.” She sighed. “At least I'll think about it in the morning.”

He reached across in the dim light and picked up her bare arm and looked at the black-and-blue marks on her bicep. “What happened to you?”

She looked at the bruise that Maginacolda had made. “Oh, I don't know,” she lied. “I must have fallen against something.”

“Bea?”

The shrill ring of the phone saved her. He reached for the receiver on the bedside table. “Uh huh … Right … Rocco, do you think it might be Rustman?… Yes, I'll come and bring Kim to make the ID.… No, that's all right.” He hung up and slid from the bed.

“They've found the body?”

“All my fancy theories and balloon trip wasted. The body's behind the convalescent home.”

“You want me to come?”

“No, get some sleep. It's after midnight.”

“I won't be able to sleep a wink until you get back,” she said, and was asleep before his car left the driveway.

4

A dead wrist with limp fingers was draped over the edge of the wooden concrete form like fingers trailing the water from a slowly drifting canoe.

The construction site at the rear of the Murphysville Convalescent Home was partially illuminated by the headlights of three police cruisers. Lyon parked the pickup next to car MU-1 and stepped over beams and sand toward a wooden frame where Rocco stood.

Rocco glanced at him and then pointed to the concrete form filled with hardening cement where the hand dangled.

“How was it found?”

“Couple of aides on the midnight shift came out here for a smoke.”

The assistant medical examiner scowled down at his muddy shoes as he picked his way across the construction site toward them. His frown deepened when he saw the protruding hand. “Oh, Christ. This one's going to be a mess.”

“We were waiting for you before we pulled it out, doc.”

An ambulance backed toward the concrete form and two attendants unrolled a body bag and stood waiting by a stretcher. Rocco signaled to two patrolmen who cautiously approached the hardening concrete. They stepped into the form. The mixture slurped up the sides of their hip boots. With a mutual nod they reached down and struggled to free the body from the cement. The corpse, covered in oozing white, slowly emerged, and they rolled it onto the body bag.

The medical examiner stooped near the corpse and swabbed some cement from the face. His hand gently brushed the windpipe and then he pried open the jaws and peered into the interior of the mouth cavity with a penlight.

“Probable death by gross asphyxiation. I'd take a rough guess at time of death as within the last two to three hours. I'll get you more precise info when I've had it on the table.”

“Good Lord!” Tanner stepped toward the body. It was obvious that he had dressed quickly as striped pajama bottoms stuck out below his pants. “It's Mike.”

Rocco turned in surprise. “It's not Marty Rustman?”

“Of course not. Its Mike Maginacolda. He's still got on his hospital whites. Rustman and Mike don't look anything alike.”

“It sure isn't Rustman,” Kim said from Lyon's side.

“Oh, Christ! This I don't need,” Rocco said. He vented his anger by yelling at the surrounding police. “All right! Don't stand around like dummies. You know what to do.”

Lyon and Kim retreated to the periphery of activity as a large searchlight was brought to the site. A portable generator coughed to life and the area was immediately bathed in glaring light. Rocco gave directions for a minute search of the area as a photographer completed pictures.

Kim shook her head as Lyon turned the key in the ignition of the pickup. “I don't understand what's going on here.”

“What was the relationship between Rustman and Maginacolda?”

“That's what's so damn strange. They hated each other. You have to understand that they were really enemies. Maginacolda was steward for the other union, a cruddy outfit that everybody knew had sweetheart contracts with management.”

“Which Rustman was trying to break?”

“Which he was breaking. We were winning the strike, Lyon. And we had already won the election for representation. It was a question of time until … that was when Marty disappeared. Now, more than half my people have gone back to work.”

“I can't imagine how kidnapping Rustman in order to break one strike at a relatively small convalescent home would be justified in anyone's mind.”

“It wasn't just Murphysville. This was Marty's first attack against the Shopton Corporation. They own a whole series of homes plus other businesses. Each one has the same union deal.”

“That certainly gives Rustman's disappearance more significance.”

She hated them.

As she stood before them she felt irrational, hating a living thing with such fervor. She had tried poison—iron sulphate in a mixture of two pounds to a gallon of water, but still they flourished.

Bea Wentworth hated ignorance, people with closed minds, and weeds. On this particular morning she thought she might even reverse that order. The Japanese honeysuckle, a rampant vine with dingy white flowers, had captured the side of the parapet wall on the patio. Every solution she applied seemed to increase rather than hinder their growth. Four weeks ago she had pulled them by hand, back- and knee-breaking work that seemed to propagate them further.

“Somehow you're going to get it,” she said aloud. She sat cross-legged on the patio and examined her enemies. Intruder weeds, particularly the Japanese honeysuckle, should be burned out. She wondered if the governor would arrange for her to borrow a flamethrower from the National Guard. Dunbar's Hardware probably sold a small garden unit, but her innate New England frugality made her hesitate to spend the money. There must be another way.

She could hear Lyon's typewriter in the study and knew that he was nearly finished with the book. Lyon … yes … his toy!

Lyon sometimes felt that for a writer they were the two nicest words in the English language. He centered the typewriter carriage, flipped the paper down six spaces, and typed them carefully: The End. He leaned over his machine, drained from weeks of emotional effort and all-consuming work.

The loud
whoosh
outside the study window made him reflexively push his desk chair back and retreat across the room. He knew what it was. When the
whoosh
was repeated, he saw flame spatter up toward the window. He dashed for the door.

A hot-air balloon only a few feet from the house was in distress. The accident might kill the operator. He hoped he could aid him before the wind caught the envelope and pushed it off the edge of the parapet and down the ridge into the water below.

He stopped in the patio doorway in amazement. Bea, dressed in a scanty halter and frayed shorts topped by a floppy hat, had his balloon propane tank in a wheelbarrow. She was balancing the burner against her waist as she aimed flame at the recalcitrant weeds growing along the parapet wall.

“Beatrice! That's overkill.” She didn't seem to hear and flipped the lever for another burn. Lyon heard the phone in the kitchen and tumbled the receiver from its place on the wall.

He spoke briefly to Rocco and hung up. He picked up Bea's hearing aid from the kitchen counter and went out on the patio. He caught her attention and slid the small device into her ear. “Rocco just called. I think we had better go down to police headquarters.”

She looked at the charred weeds. “You go. I have to finish these finks off.”

“I think you had better come along. It's about Kim.”

She looked at him in alarm. “Something's happened to her?”

“She's been arrested.”

Kimberly Ward stood impassively before the camera as Jamie Martin adjusted the small sign hanging around her neck. White letters against a dark background spelled out her name, Murphysville P.D., and the date. Martin finished the adjustments and stepped back behind the camera.

Rocco slouched against the wall with arms akimbo observing the proceedings as Lyon and Bea came to the door.

“What's the charge?” Lyon asked.

“Assault.”

Jamie Martin finished three sets of pictures and removed the sign from Kim. He began to fill out a form at a waist-high table. “Have you ever been arrested before, Mrs. Ward?”

Kim shrugged. “You want everything?”

“All prior arrests. We'll find out eventually from the FBI files.”

“Thirty-two times.”

The young officer looked startled and stopped writing. He glanced at Kim and then over to Rocco. “Thirty-two?”

“Get them all,” Rocco said without smiling.

“The form's not long enough, sir.”

“Use additional sheets.”

Jamie Martin pulled a stool over to the table and sat down in a hunched position prepared for a long writing assignment. “Start from the earliest.”

“1964, Selma, Alabama. Three times. I think they called it trespassing, or was there one trespassing and two unlawful assemblies?”

“I'll put trespassing.”

“The Welfare Mothers' march in Hartford. That was in sixty-eight or was it sixty-seven?”

“Sixty-seven,” Bea said.

Kim continued a recitation that seemed to cover every protest and civil rights march on the Eastern seaboard.

“Please tell us what's going on,” Lyon said.

“You know, I have more to do than busting Kim. Somebody stole a damn dump truck from Wainwright Construction.”

“Whom did she assault?”

“Mary Washington.”

“She's one of the workers at the home, isn't she?”

“She's become a scab, not a worker,” Kim replied as Jamie Martin began to roll her fingers on a fingerprint chart. “She broke the line and went to work.”

“Kim slapped her,” Rocco said with resignation.

“Twice,” Martin added.

They finished the fingerprinting and the patrolman gave a powdered solution to Kim to cleanse her hands. “I shouldn't have hit her, but God, it's been a bad day. I think we're losing the strike. All that suffering, and we lost. To make matters worse, somebody broke into the union office and stole about three grand of ours.”

“That's in Hartford, thank God,” Rocco said. “Pat's got the case.”

“Why do you keep so much cash around?”

“It was emergency strike money, all we had. We parceled it out to those who needed it the most. Marty kept it in cash hidden in the office.”

“Any forced entry?” Lyon asked.

“No. They must have slipped the lock and knew right where the money was.”

The uniformed officer had another form and looked at Rocco. “Own recognizance, Chief?”

Rocco nodded. “As long as Mrs. Ward promises not to pull an Angela Davis on us.”

Kim glared. “And how come there aren't any brothers in your fascist gang, Chief?”

“Because the brothers who live in this town won't work for the lousy money we pay.”

“I'll bet.”

“Now damn it, Kim!”

Lyon took Rocco's arm and led him down the hall. “What about the investigation.”