FrostLine (7 page)
Spring came and lingered, warm and remarkably dryâa sensual spring that early on obliterated all memory of winter. It should have been a wonderful spring to fall in love, and had I had my wits about me I'd have abandoned the past to do so.
Summer got better, though not at first.
Despite our best efforts to warn the voters that Steve LaFrance stood for the supreme rights of the greedy, Vicky trailed in the first selectman primary. She had everything going for her, a solid record of hard work, rock-ribbed honesty, and her cheery good looks. But Steve enjoyed the free backing of the radio and TV talkers who had learned that the appearance of a sense of humor could convince a worried electorate that cutting education, withholding food and shelter from helpless children, and bulldozing environmental protections wasn't really short-sighted, mean-spirited and corrupt.
Then one day Vicky asked me to drive her to Hartford, the state capital, where she had lunch with a fellow of high estate in Connecticut's Department of Transportation. Lord knows exactly what transpired in Le Bistro: suffice it to say wine had flowed and she slept with her head on my lap all the way home.
Soon after, yellow machines repaved Main Street and the shoulders of Route 7 for miles in both directions with asphalt as smooth as a baby's bottom. Caravans of minivans set out for the Danbury Mall and within four days every man, woman and child in town owned Rollerblades.
Wrist sprains and road rash abounded, and old Doctor Greenan was considering returning to Yale to brush up on fractures. But the voters were happy and Vicky, who conducted the rest of her campaign on tiny wheels, locked Steve LaFrance back in his Liquor Locker, where he could listen to talk-media to his heart's content. As Aunt Connie put it, “Thank God for our school children, not to mention Victoria's ambition to get elected Governor of Connecticut.”
More good news was a very satisfying, hard-earned commission for selling the Yankee Drover Inn: hard earned, because the seller was a jerk and the buyers were pleasant, but still shrewd: satisfying, because they would run a friendly joint a short crawl from my front door. The sale more than made up for my (perverse?) refusal to list ugly McMansions, not to mention Mr. Butler reneging on my land deal, and when school let out I could afford riding camp for little Alison. In my innocence, I even thought that I had defused the cat debate.
The couple of times I bumped into Dicky Butler, he was in town running errands for his father. He looked healthy: a ruddy tan suggested he was helping on the farm; only the deerskin gloves flapping from his pocket reminded me that he was marking time. He kept mostly to himself and didn't go looking for trouble. But trouble found him.
Some high school dropouts jumped him in the only alley in townâa short-cut between the General Store and the Town Hall theater parking lotâhoping to gain a name for themselves, losing teeth instead.
Trooper Moody bullied the victims into pressing charges. Tim Hall defended Dicky at a pre-trial hearing over in Plainfield, the county seat. Ollie had prepared his case diligently. Too diligently.
Tim, prepped by Ira Roth, asked Ollie to clarify the dates the incidents occurred. Then, professing astonishment that Dicky had assaulted all four men on the same day, he asked for the precise time of the incidents. The judge finished it for him, remarking acidly that a reasonable jury might conclude that the one man attacked by four had a right to defend himself. Then His Honor wondered aloud whether Dicky's false arrest suit against Trooper Moody might have influenced this investigation.
Fourth of July, a biker from Derby named J.J. Topkis sucker-punched Dicky in the White Birch Tavern. Wide Greg, proprietor, reported that Dicky was a real gentleman about it, paid cash for the window through which he threw the biker, who figured prominently in outstanding warrants and did not wait around to press charges. (By the time Trooper Moody commenced his investigation, witnesses had called it an early night and Wide Greg was too busy sawing plywood to volunteer much information.)
But Ollie went after Dicky anyway.
I was driving mournfully home, late one night on the Morrisville Road, from dinner at the country house of Rita Long, a young widow who breezed in occasionally from New York or Hong Kong to thump my heartstrings like a heavy metal bass player. She was leaving in the morning for an indeterminate length of time and while the Fraser Morris gift basket of
pâté de fois gras
on the seat beside me was typically generous, it offered little consolation. Suddenly I saw Ollie's flashers strobing the night red and blue. I slowed down for a look. The cruiser's roof and search lights had pinned an elderly Ford pickup truck that looked like Dicky's father's.
Ollie levered his six foot five inches out of his cruiser, one hand near his gun, and in the other a long five-cell halogen Mag light that he had been known to confuse with a nightstick. Distracted by all his candlepower, or gripped by rage, he didn't notice my lights coming up behind him. In one swift fluid move he yanked open the pickup truck door, pulled Dicky out by the shirt, and threw him to the road. A wine bottle fell out after him and shattered on the pavement.
Dicky was drunk. Trooper Moody let him climb halfway to his knees before he kicked him. He lined up another kick. I blinked my high beams, about as stupid a move as interrupting a wolf in the middle of dinner.
Ollie motioned angrily to keep driving.
I stopped the car, turned on the dome light to signal I wasn't a threat, put both hands in plain sight on the steering wheel, and closed one eye before he could blind me with the Mag.
“Move it,” he shouted.
I turned off the ignition.
He strode nearer and recognized the Olds. “Get the hell out of here, Ben.”
“The man's drunk. He can't defend himself.”
“Move it!”
“I'm a witness.”
“Say what?”
“You're beating up an unarmed citizen. I'm a witness.”
“I'm telling you once more, get the hell out of here.”
“Can't do that, Ollie.”
***
Handcuffed together in the back of Ollie's cruiser, charged with DWI (Dicky) and obstructing justice (me) we took the opportunity to review in low tones Dicky's father's problems with Henry King. Blizzards of paper had struck the Butler farm, courtesy of King, Inc.'s legal staff. For a while Ira Roth had shoveled him out, but now he was busy with a murder trial.
Worse than the paper blitz was King's helicopter.
“Son of a bitch is buzzing the house,” said Dicky.
“You mean when he takes off?”
“He whips right over the house. You know what it sounds like to Pop? Sounds like he's back in Vietnam. Woke up last night screaming some door gunner's going to blow him away by mistake.”
“Does it happen often?”
“Too often. He's getting pissed,” said Dicky. “He's got a slow fuse, but the helicopter's really bugging him.”
“Does he think they're still watching him?”
Dicky looked at me, his face just visible in the instrument glow from Ollie's dashboard. “Nobody's watching him.”
“I wonderedâ¦.What about the phone taps?”
“Maybe Pop's a little extra suspicious, if you know what I mean. Not his fault, the way that son of a bitch treats him.”
“Shut up back there,” growled Ollie.
“Fuck you,” said Dicky, which was even stupider than me interfering with a trooper on a dark road. Without even slowing the cruiser, Ollie whipped the Mag light around in a backhand sweep. It crunched into Dicky's head, scattering lens, batteries, halogen bulb and Dicky onto my lap. I felt for his pulse.
Ollie drove a couple of miles in silence. Finally he said, “You jailbirds have gotten kind of quiet.”
“I think you killed him, Ollie.”
“Bullshit.”
But he stopped the car, turned the lights on and had a look. Dicky stirred. Ollie slapped his face. Dicky fended him off, groggily. A huge purple bruise was radiating from the point of his cheek bone.
“See that bruise, Ollie?”
“Looks like another assault charge for old Dicky.”
“I'll make you a one-time offer, Ollie. Take us back to our vehicles. Drop the charges. We won't file a complaint. But if you take us into Plainfield, you're looking at a year in court.”
Ollie had reptile eyesâdirty windows on a dull soulâbut when warring with Newbury's resident state trooper, it paid to remember that reptiles have prospered long on the planet.
“You threatening me, Ben?”
“I'm threatening you with misery,” I said. “You may beat it, but you're going to spend a lot of time in court.”
I could almost see him wince at the thought of all those days indoors. “My sergeant'll back me all the way against a pair of jailbirds.”
“You watch this âjailbird' put on a suit and tie and smile at that juryâ¦.Besides, after a fight like that, will your sergeant back you next time? And let's not forget Dicky's false arrest suit.”
The reptile blinked.
***
Henry King got lucky too.
The dry spring made digging his lake a piece of cake. And then, in mid-July, just after they finished pouring the dam, Newbury got inundated with a week of rain that saved the farmers and filled King's twenty-acre hole in the ground to the brim. This called for a celebration: the first week in August, printed invitations summoned all who were anybody to a gala christening of “Lake Vixen.”
I was surprised I got one. I must have been on the “Newbury's First Families” list, because I sure hadn't made the distinguished service listânot after botching King's assignment to make peace with “that crazy old farmer.” Surprised, but glad. I hadn't seen Julia Devlin since March and the one time I managed to dream up an excuse to drop by Fox Trot she and King had just lifted off in King's helicopter.
At our next Tuesday afternoon tea I asked my Aunt Connie if she would like to drive up to the party with me.
“I'm not going.”
We were ensconcedâas we had been weekly since I was eight years oldâin the alcove contained by the bay window of her dining room. A warm breeze tugged the sheer curtains and wafted perfume from her rose garden.
“You don't need an invite. Come as my guest.”
“âAn invite'?” she echoed, a combative glint in her eyes.
Her eyes are clear as glass, and stony blue when she gets feisty, which is most of the time. “I wonder,” she said, “about a person who would kidnap a verb when there exists a perfectly serviceable noun. To encounter one in my own family comes as something of a shock.”
“Sounds to me like you're put out because you didn't get an invitation.”
Connie's manner, her bearing, and her standards reflect the sort of breeding that lost currency when World War One turned our Republic into a superpower. In addition, she possesses an innate kindness, what she would call in another person, Christian decency. But nothing obliges her to suffer fools gladly. Especially foolish nephews who forget that when men like Henry King court social acceptance in Connecticut, they had damned well better court Connie Abbott.
“Of course I received an invitation.”
“If you're worried about standing around in the sun, I'll run you home whenever you want. Though, from what I saw of the place, you can expect every comfort, including cool shade for the generationally challenged.”
I looked for another thin smile. But she was through with word games, and suddenly deadly serious: “I am not going to Henry King's party.”
“Why not? I saw people you know. Wills the younger asked for you, backhandedly.”
“That horse's behind.”
“So why aren't you going?”
“For the same reason that any decent American with a memory longer than two weeks would not go. Even that loathsome video couldn't conceal the fact that Henry King's prevarication, treachery and arrogance cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers and God alone knows how many Vietnamese.”
“You've been talking to Mr. Butler.”
There are over a hundred Butlers in Newbury, but she loves the town the way a girl loves her dollhouse, and knew precisely which Butler I meant.
“Farmer Butler was wounded three times in Vietnam. Unless he suffered total brain damageâor is pathologically forgivingâI should imagine he'd like to punch his new neighbor in the nose.”
Should have talked to her before I went up there last March with my foot in my mouth.
“You know, King told me his feelings about the war andâ”
Color rose in Connie's cheeks.
“At best he was as out of touch with reality as the Soviets were in Afghanistan. At worst, he was motivated by a thirst for power.”
“Well, he admitted to doubts andâ”
“He's a brilliant self-promoter, Benjamin. Don't be fooled. He saw years ahead of his competitors that the power that modern communications took away from the State Department would fall into the hands of an individual who spoke for the president. He was ready with a catcher's mitt.”
“I'm not saying I bought into everything he believes, and I don't know that much about the war, but I do think, relatively speakingâ”
“I think it was Dr. Johnson who said, âWhen a moral relativist comes to dinner, I count the spoons.'”
***
I tried again the morning of the party. I found her reading the
Times
in her old-fashioned garden and I asked whether she had become a little more open-minded on the subject of Henry King.
“If I were that open-minded, my brain would fall out of my skull.”
“Let me ask you something. Would you prefer I didn't go?”
“I can't make that decision for you.”
“But what would you prefer?”
Connie thought about it. Finally, she said, “Go. When children fight their elders' wars we get the Middle East.”
