FrostLine (3 page)

That was what I had come for, so I followed him out of the room, pausing to thank Mrs. King for the coffee. She gave me her very soft hand and a bruised up-from-under blue-eyed smile. I hoped to catch a better smile from Julia Devlin, but she had fixed the
New Republic
man with a gimlet stare.
He
was smiling the smile of a writer who had the lead for his story, a smile that faded as Julia advanced on him for what looked like a severe recital of the ground rules under which journalists were invited back to Fox Trot.

King was waiting in the hall. “Let's go, Abbott.”

“I think I'll come back later.”

“What for?”

“You're a little upset and you've just demoted me from Mr. Abbott to Abbott. I have to go see someone. So why don't we connect around four when everyone's calmed down?”

King surprised me with a big laugh. “They told me you were a pisser.”

“Who told you I was a pisser?”

“Let's talk. I'll behave. You want a drink?”

“Little early for me.”

“Yeah, me too.” He took my arm in a warm, friendly gesture and we walked down a broad hall and into an absolutely exquisite library.

“I'm nuts for this room,” he said. “You like it?”

“It's about the only one I've ever seen that deserves the phrase, ‘Would you join me in the library?'”

I wandered for a few minutes, trailed by a proud King pointing out details. “Wonderful,” I said. “It looks like it's been here for a hundred years.”

“It was in its last house for
three
hundred years.”

“The books or the wood?”

King grinned, utterly happy with his house. His pleasure was so open that it was infectious, and I found myself liking him a lot more than I had expected to. “The woodwork's from England. The books are mine, since graduate school.”

First I'd heard that graduate students' books were leatherbound.

“My thesis advisor bequeathed his library to me.”

I'd read that somewhere. King had published that thesis before he had his doctorate. It had made him famous and attracted a new mentor, a Texas oil millionaire with ambitions to walk the halls of power and the patience to cultivate the young. I wondered if King still took his calls. The former secretary of state at his lunch table and the cashiered spy wore the quick-to-please expressions of those permanent house guests the very wealthy keep around for their amusement.

“Sit down.”

We sat at either end of a tufted green leather chesterfield. King pointed an infrared zapper at the fireplace and flames engulfed the birch logs stacked on the grate. “Do you know why I asked you here?”

“I assume you want to buy some land.”

“No.”

I felt a little adrenalin surge of excitement. Call it greed. If Henry King was
selling
Fox Trot, the commission would take care of a modest man's shelter and transportation needs into the next century. He waited. I said nothing. If he was selling, we had already begun negotiating my percentage, and one thing I had learned on Wall Street was when to be silent.

“Aren't you curious?” he asked.

“Well, if you're not buying, you're selling. Why else would you invite a real estate broker to lunch?”

“I'm not selling. And I'm not buying. At least not now.”

I keep an affable smile handy for disappointments. “Why not give me a ring when you decide? In the meantime, if you're looking for a ballpark appraisal, I'd be delighted to look around and give you a number. No charge, of course.”

My free appraisal offer was more sincere than my smile. I'd been hoping for a close look at the place. And once he made up his mind to buy or sell, he might think of me first. Turned out he already knew me—or thought he did.

“I've got a problem,” he said. “From what I hear you can help me with it.”

“You keep alluding to hearing things about me. What do you hear?”

“I hear that you—shall we say—fix things.”

“That's what I hear about you.”

“I fix things internationally. I hear you fix things locally.”

“You've heard wrong,” I said. “I sell houses and land.”

“You bring buyers and sellers together.”

“The normal function of a broker,” I said, stressing “normal.”

King gave me an indulgent smile. “A broker's connections are his stock in trade. I hear you're connected, that you know everyone worth knowing in Newbury.”

“I've heard you're having a problem with your neighbor. Is that what this is about?”

“That crazy old farmer is a thorn in my side.”

“Most neighbors are. They're worse than relatives; you can't get away from them.”

“He's making threats. He's undermining my sense of security in my own home. I want it stopped.”

“First of all, if we're talking about Mr. Butler—”

“We are.”

“First of all, that ‘crazy old farmer' is younger than you are.” He had fathered Dicky while on R&R from Vietnam when he was only eighteen, which put him late fifties, at most, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. “Second, if you think he's crazy, you should meet his son.”

“So I've heard. Fortunately, they've locked him up and thrown away the key.”

“They just found it. Appellate Court overturned his conviction.”

“
Why
?”

“Apparently the rule of law took precedent over what had seemed like a good idea at the time. He's probably home by now.”

“Good Christ.”

“Making this an excellent time to resolve your dispute.”

To my surprise, King looked embarrassed.

I asked, “What
is
your dispute?”

He couldn't meet my eye. Suddenly I realized what he had done. “Okay. I get it. You want to buy his place, right?”

“It cuts into my property. The old boundaries are so odd. It cuts right into the
heart
of my property.”

“You figured you'd negotiate directly, him being your neighbor and all.”

“Not to save commissions. The money means nothing. Abbott, do I have to spell it out to you? I admit it was ego. I figured any man who could get Reagan and Deng to the same table could persuade some stupid old farmer to sell his farm.”

“I've got to tell you, Mr. Butler is not old. The war may have made him crazy. But he's never struck me as stupid.”

“It never occurred to me in a million years I'd need a real estate agent. Hell, I bought this place direct from Zarega's executor.”

“Ira Roth.”

King winced. “The way you say ‘Ira Roth,' are you implying I paid too much?”

“You paid market value,” I said, mustering all the tact that is a broker's stock in trade. The price of Fox Trot was public record. Ira was a brilliant criminal lawyer. But the deal he'd cut for Mr. Zarega's heirs suggested he had missed his calling. Or maybe Henry King was telling the truth when he claimed that money meant nothing to him. Although in my experience guys who profess not to care about the money are usually too insecure to admit they care very much.

“I got nowhere with Butler. Worse, he got the idea in his head that I'd insulted him. He threatened to shoot me if I stepped on his land.”

“Had you?”

“Had I what?”

“Stepped on his land.”

“I had one of his fences repaired. His cows were getting out.”

“People around Newbury are kind of touchy about property lines.”

“
I'm
touchy about property lines. I understand. I was just trying to help.”

“Cows do much damage?”

“They would have if we had the gardens in. They bring flies. The flies follow the herd. You couldn't sit outside last August.”

“That's why they invented screen porches.”

King turned a lot less affable. “Mr. Abbott, I haven't worked my whole life to be trapped indoors on my own property.”

“How do I fit into this?”

“I'm aware that I've poisoned the well with my offer to buy his farm. You're welcome to try as a real estate agent, but I don't hold much hope.”

“Sounds that way.”

“I'd like you to reason with the man.”

“Why not just ignore him? You won't be the first neighbors who don't talk.”

“I want those cows away from my house.”

“How close are they?”

“Close enough to spread flies that bite me and my guests. I had a Saudi prince here last summer who left with a welt the size of a tennis ball.”

“Could I see a property plan?”

He had it ready, spread out on an antique billiard table in the game room. Clipped to it was a one-page lease notarized in 1985.

“You see the problem?”

The map showed something that wasn't visible on my aerial photos: Mr. Zarega had leased a cow pasture to Mr. Butler for a dollar a year until Butler died.

“I'm not a lawyer, but this looks solid.” The lease's brevity was exceeded only by its precision.

“It's not even his land.”

“In effect, it is.”

The pasture was long and narrow and cut into Fox Trot like a knife. On days the cows were on it, and took it into their collective heads to bunch at the lower end, they would launch a few flies into Fox Trot's rarified air. Flies with teeth honed on cowhide.

King said, “I can't understand why Zarega would have agreed to such an arrangement.”

“They were friends.”

King snorted derisively, offering an unpleasant reminder of the melting pot he'd escaped fifty years earlier: “A wop from the Bronx and a Connecticut redneck?”

His contempt sounded real, which annoyed me, and I said, “Our traditional slur is ‘swamp Yankee.' Though, like most slurs, it's evolved into something of a compliment lately.”

“I stand corrected,” King replied icily. “But you get my point.”

“Your point misses the point. It was a genuine friendship. Mr. Zarega really was a recluse and very, very old. Mr. Butler had his problems after Vietnam. Somehow they hooked up. And the way I heard it, when the old man was ill Mr. Butler would be up here every day.”

“My lawyers say I can't break the lease.”

“Ira Roth drew it up.”

“I feel like a damned fool. It was right there in black and white, but I didn't realize the distances until I'd been here awhile. I'm a city boy.”

I'd seen stranger deals. When ordinary people sought mortgages, the banks demanded zealous title searches. Buying for cash you were on your own.

I said, “Mr. Zarega's house was farther from the fence. At any rate, they're not going be on this pasture that often. It won't sustain them.”

“Am I supposed to
hope
that he doesn't put his cows in there on days I've got clients visiting? I won't be able to use the goddammed swimming pool. Am I supposed to put screens over my pool? And my tennis courts?”

I had no answer beyond, “Flies go with farmland.”

“I'm hiring you to reason with Butler. You're local. Maybe he'll listen to you.”

“Who told you I was a pisser?”

King smiled easily. “I can't reveal my sources.”

“Why'd you ask?”

“Let's get on the same page, Mr. Abbott. Do you understand that I regard this as a very serious matter?”

“Do
you
understand that you're in a classic country-city clash? You've got a lovely estate here, cheek by jowl with a cow farm. You pay for all this with money you earn elsewhere. Mr. Butler earns his right here. You're a new arrival. He's third generation. I could go on, but I think you get my point.”

“Exactly why I intend to hire the best qualified person to resolve it for me. It's beyond the lawyers. I need a local fixer. You're a local fixer—don't interrupt—Not only that, you've worked as a private detective—don't interrupt—I
know
you have no license and I don't care. I do care that you learned your trade when you served with Naval Intelligence.”

“This is more a job for a psychiatrist.”

“The one I send my staff to charges one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Would that be sufficient?”

We know that my real estate business was not exactly booming that March. Although, having experienced first hand the financial markets' ephemerality—evanescence I myself had once contributed to as an overpaid, underaged Wall Street shark in an earlier life—I had diversified my listings, scouring Newbury for commercial space to rent to the new wave of start-up businesses being founded by the recently fired. So I wasn't starving, yet.

But the Olds was getting very old and if a fresh coat of paint wasn't applied soon to the aforementioned snowy clapboards the word “shabby “ would affix itself to the directions I e-mailed customers: “The Georgian house near the flagpole.”

I was marveling how diplomat King had blundered into this clumsy affair, when he reminded me that he was no dummy. “Look at it this way, Abbott. Not only do you pick up a fat fee for making peace, but you'll get your full commission on any land you can get him to sell me.”

“Would that include your buying the lease?”

“I will buy the lease and every damned acre he'll sell me besides.”

I nodded, tempted by the chance to swing a land deal.

King raved on, “I'll buy his whole goddammed house. Hell, I'll buy him a mountain he can move to.”

“You're offering to buy him another place?”

“As long as it's on the other side of town.”

“I'll go talk to him,” I said. “But don't get your hopes up. I was just a friend of his kid.”

“You're
friends
with that criminal?”

I ignored that and said, “I noticed some heavy security at the gate. Are there any incidents I should know about?”

“This morning, Butler drove in here with a shotgun.”