HardScape (16 page)

“You look all shook up.”

I said I was upset about wrecking Connie's car. I could tell Steve thought I was overdoing the manly bit about not reacting to an automobile accident, but I didn't like going into the fact that some son of a bitch had deliberately run me off the road.

“What'd you do to your hand?”

“Cut it on the horn.” I unwrapped the handkerchief I'd wrapped around it and let Steve clean it off and Band-Aid it. Then I went home and telephoned Alex Rose.

“The state police found forty thousand cash in Renny Chevalley's garage.”

“I heard,” said Rose.

“What do you think?”

“I think it looks like he was flying dope for a living.”

“Have you found anything new?”

“I told you I'd look when you found some convincing reason to. Forty big ones in a shopping bag does not fall into that category.”

“How are you doing with Rita Long?”

“Mr. Long's lawyers sprung her.”

“I know.”

“It's a start.”

“That's it?”

“We found a ballistics expert who will testify that the shot could have come from the woods.”

“Great! Is he a heavy hitter?”

“Yeah. He used to work for Robert DeAngelo.”

“DeAngelo's the Plainfield M.E.”

“My guy learned everything he knows from him.”

“Is that good?”

“The lawyers ought to have fun with it.”

***

I dropped in on Connie. She was still sleeping, so I went down to the drugstore to pick up a prescription Steve had called in and ran into Al Bell, who had found Renny on his airstrip. The old pilot was inquiring, loudly, if his batteries had come in on special order. They had, and I helped him load them into his hearing aids. He's a kid by Connie Abbott standards, and still an ace pilot, but of an age that his fingers are clumsy. Mine weren't much better, shaking at slow-motion replays of the van growing large in the Lincoln's windows. I braced my hands on the counter and finally got the batteries in their slots. Al screwed the little flesh-colored amplifiers into his ears, fiddled the volume knobs, and shouted, “Say something.”

I said something and his face lit up. “Now you're talking.”

Walking out to the cars, he explained that the only problem with his superior Japanese hearing aids was their odd battery size. “Been deaf for a week. They cut out together.”

“How'd you happen to hear Renny's plane land?”

“Didn't. Car went by the house like a bat out of hell. Later, I got to thinking maybe some kids were messing around, so I drove up to check my plane.”

“You saw a car? What kind of car?”

“Like I told the cops, all I saw was his dust through the privet hedge.…Sorry about Renny. Tough way to go, getting shot.”

“Must have been a shock, finding him.”

“I didn't realize he was shot. I thought he'd cracked his head on the windshield. Took his pulse. Dead as a rock. Poor kid. He was really making something of himself.…Say, heard you got mixed up with that lady who shot her fella.”

“No, Al. I was just there appraising the house.”

“Hell of a woman.”

“You know her?”

“Sure. Had 'em up for drinks. They were supposed to come to dinner next week.”

I shouldn't have been surprised. Alexander Bell, like his namesake great-great-great-uncle, had been a famous inventor in his day. Still was, actually, with a consultancy to the U.S. Air Force. He flew around the country in his old P-51 Mustang, which he had bought new, surplus, after World War Two, and, being of the family he was, he knew everyone who was anyone. If new people who sounded interesting like Jack and Rita Long moved into town they'd receive an invitation to come up to Bell Farm for cocktails. If they
proved
interesting, they'd get invited back to dinner, where the food was indifferent but the company sparkled. I'd attended dinner occasionally, on Connie's coattails, and once or twice when they needed an extra man who knew the correct direction to push a soup spoon. (Al couldn't have cared less whether I snorted it up a straw, but Babs was a stickler, and if a guest didn't possess some startling quality, he had damned well better know how to conduct himself at table.)

“Hell of a woman,” Al repeated, his leathery face glowing at the memory. “How the hell she got hooked up with that cold fish of a husband, I couldn't understand. Babs knew something of his family, but good Christ, Ben, what a bore. All takeovers and mergers and—you know, that kind of crap you used to do—but not a goddamned thing to say on any subject worth talking about. There she sat all dark and mysterious and then
boom
! that big smile bright as a supernova. I thought, Oh Lord, to be seventy again.”

“Terrific woman,” I agreed.

“So how'd you get mixed up with her?”

“Are you sure those batteries are charged, Al? I just told you, I'm not mixed up with her.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.” Al had a reputation for chasing skirts. I don't know what he chased any more, but he seemed to assign to me some of his fantasies. Lowering his voice, conspiratorially, he glanced up Church Hill in the direction of Town Hall and asked, “How you making out with the government?”

“Friends.”

“The best way.” He nodded enigmatically, then climbed into his jeep and roared off.

I went home and telephoned Trooper Boyce. She was out and returned my call around five. “What's up, Ben?”

“Some son of a bitch ran me off the road. Almost killed my aunt and me.”

“I heard,” she said coolly. “Any witnesses? Get a license plate?”

“You've been talking to Trooper Moody.”

“And
you've
been talking to the wrong people, bugging them about your cousin. That's a no-no, Ben.”

“In other words, you don't buy Trooper Moody's story that I was speeding.”

“In other words, get out of my face. It's my investigation, my job, not yours.…How's your aunt?”

“Sleeping it off.”

“I hear she's very old.”

“She ran away from boarding school to be a nurse in World War One.”

“Really? Wow, I didn't think anybody was alive from then.”

“What's the story on the cash you found in Renny's garage?”

Marian was silent for a while. Then she surprised me: “Take me to dinner. Maybe I'll fill you in.”

“I'll bet if I asked Sergeant Bender, he wouldn't ask me to take him to dinner.”

“You don't owe him a meal.”

“Good point.”

“Besides, he's working tonight, and even if he weren't, he'd hang up on you because it's none of your goddamned business.”

“Why would you talk to me? Other than dinner?”

“Sergeant Bender and I have different standards and different agendas. Where shall we meet?”

“It's lobster night at the Yankee Drover.”

“You're on. I can make it by six-thirty or so.”

“I'll wait for you in the cellar bar. The door's right off the parking lot.”

I got there early and suspected Marian would be late, so I ordered a glass of white wine. I was halfway through it when she arrived in blue jeans and a snug sweatshirt dressed up with a collar. “This is how I eat lobster down in New Haven. I hope I'm not too casual.”

“Perfect.” I looked her over, wondering where she'd stashed her gun. Her bag was too small and her clothes intriguingly snug. “Ankle holster,” she said with a friendly smile. “Do I get a wine too?”

I told her the town was hers, which turned out to be prophetic.

Chapter 14

Wine in the cellar bar. Lobster upstairs at the Wednesday-night all-you-can-eat $21.99 special. Not a bad life. Particularly in the company of an attractive, sure-of-herself brunette.

Marian Boyce had apparently concluded that a man who had had a life in New York City could be trusted to applaud her ambitions. Not that she needed applause, she just didn't want to be put down for them. (I was no stranger to this trust. When I taught the real estate workshop at the high school's career day, kids confided dreams that would curl the toenails of their dairy-farmer parents. I was proof that the shiny world television promised was out there, waiting for them.)

Marian's cop father, she told me, wanted her to hang up her gun and have babies, before she got shot like he had. But she was gunning for sergeant, master sergeant, lieutenant, captain, then major and a division command. That was just the beginning. She planned to retire from the state police after twenty-five years and, still in her early forties, graduate law school and hit the big time—get elected Hartford or New Haven state's attorney and then the Executive Mansion.

“I'll be governor at fifty. What do you think?” This all spewed out with happy abandon, and total confidence, and an unwavering grin.

“I have a friend you ought to meet.”

“Told you, I have my hands full.”

“This is a woman. Our first selectman, Vicky McLachlan.”

“Yeah, I heard about her. The hair.”

“You might end up running against that hair.”

“I'll win in a walk. She won't have a chance against my law enforcement background. Maybe I'll let her be lieutenant governor. So what about you?” she asked, as we headed back for thirds. “What are you doing with your life?”

I started to answer, but when we sat down again she remembered a night course she was taking at WestConn—“History of Wall Street, 1920–1990.” “You guys were a piece of work.”

“We had our fun.”

“Now the markets are booming again.”

“Low interest rates are making a lot of players smart, same way junk bonds did when I was there.”

“You miss it?”

I wasn't about to proclaim my innocence to a cop, even on her night off, so I said, “I'm banned, as you probably know, but even if I managed to clear my name, I doubt I'd go back. I'm happy in Newbury.”

Marian went along with the change of subject, gracefully, I thought. “It's a beautiful town.”

“Want to buy a house?”

“On my salary I was lucky to buy a little condo in Plainfield. Of course, in this market, if I sold tomorrow I'd still owe the bank.” She snapped a claw with her fingers and popped the meat between her lips. “Can I ask you something? What's it like to make a ton of money and then go broke?”

I laughed and drank some wine. “It's been years now, but it still hasn't hit me. I know I have bills to pay I never used to worry about. And I have no plans to buy a new Jaguar. But I still don't
feel
broke, most of the time.” After some more wine, I said, “When I see some poor homeless guy on the road, I know it could be me in a few bad years—I'll bet you never see that happening to you.”

She looked briefly startled but recovered with a laugh. “I'm vested in a growth industry.”

Todd Gierasch, the be-zitted kid bussing tables, hauled off her third gutted lobster tail. I asked if she would like more. “I'm ahead of you,” she protested, with a glance at her watch. I went along and had a third while she had a fourth. They were small. Franco finds some miniature breed with a titanium shell for all-you-can-eat night.

“You were going to tell me about the forty thousand dollars cash they found in Renny's garage.”

“Officially?”

“I'd like the official take and then your take.”

“You look ferociously serious, Ben.”
She
looked mildly flirtatious. Once again, I felt a little sorry for the two guys who thought they were getting somewhere with her. Adults, presumably, who could take care of themselves.

“Seriously, Marian.”

“Okay.” She pushed back her plate and said Yes when Todd darted over with coffee. Across the restaurant, Franco wiped his brow; the deal was, once coffee was poured, the lobsters were history. “Okay. Officially, you can use your imagination to see how it looks to our investigation. We got a garage mechanic murdered in a plane full of coke. We find major cash hidden on his premises. We conclude that he did not earn this money replacing ball joints.”

“Does Sergeant Bender read it that way?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

Marian hesitated. “Understand I can't discuss cases with civilians?”

“Not to mention felons.”

“Felons I can relate to,” she smiled. “At least they've been around some of the same blocks I have.”

“Seriously,” I prompted again.

“Don't quote me.” She raised a finger in a very serious warning.

“I won't.”

“It's too pat. …” I waited. She took her time. “I'll buy your cousin running coke. Why? Means: the plane. Need: heavy debt. Connections: felonious relatives—and I don't mean your kind of felonious, I mean heavy hitters. I won't mention names. You know who I'm talking about.”

I said, “Chevalleys aren't that heavy.”

Marian gave me her thinnest smile. “I'm playing straight with you, Ben. You know damned well I'm not talking about Chevalleys.”

“Just testing.” I knew she meant Jervises.

“Ben, I'm good. If I were male I'd be Bender's boss. I will be anyway.”

A paranoid question rattled my brain at that point. Was she pretending to be open with me to lull me into trusting her? Did she really think
I
was suspect in Renny's shooting?

“Sorry. I know the relatives you mean. So you think Renny had the means, the motives, and the connections to run coke. Where's the
but
?”

“But I walked through his garage. He could serve his own lobster night on the floor, the place is so clean. I go into his machine shop. It looks like diamond cutters work there. I check out his front office. Brain surgeons should be so orderly. This isn't a man who stashes forty thousand dollars in a shopping bag in the back of a closet—a closet, by the way, that contains neatly sealed boxes of tax records, clearly labeled, right down to the year they're supposed to be thrown away.”

“Thank you,” I said, sitting back and feeling better than I had since this whole mess started. “That's the Renny
I
know.” The Renny who could turn Detroit iron into chrome. “So where did the money come from?”

“I don't know, Ben.”

“But?”

“But what? What am I supposed to do with my marvelous intuition? Do I go to Bender and say somebody else stashed it?”

“Why not?”

“Because Bender asks, Who?”

“So you tell him, Somebody who wanted to frame Renny.”

“Then Bender asks, Who? again, and, While we're at it, Silly Marian, why? And, incidentally, Where would somebody not in the drug trade get that sort of cash? You withdraw that amount from a bank and there's a record. And a report filed. What I'm saying, Ben, is my boss would laugh me and my intuition out of the barracks.”

“When I played on the Street we always kept a safe full of cash. Slush fund, walking-around money, who knew? And I never heard of a hot outfit that didn't.”

“
Forty thousand
in an office safe?”

“I don't know how much. We did not tip the sommelier with Visa.”

Marian smiled gently. “Do you want me to tell Bender to round up the usual Wall Street suspects?”

“I'm not laughing, Marian.”

“Lighten up. All I'm saying is I don't have a thing to go on, other than my impression that the man ran a clean garage. Maybe he was a compulsive neatness freak. Maybe he just tossed the money in there and rushed out the door, intending to stash it in his safety deposit when the bank opened.”

“Did he have a box?”

She gave me her back-off look, warning me that she might share the occasional theory but never information. But I had the instant impression that she had searched Renny's box and found nothing but wills and insurance policies. I asked.

Before she could tell me aloud to mind my own business, little Alison Mealy came running into the restaurant, skidded past Franco, spotted me, dodged the owner's attempt to stop her, and pounded between the tables as only an eleven-year-old can pound in sneakers. “Ben!”

“Hello, Alison. What's up? Say hello to Trooper Boyce. Trooper Boyce, this is my neighbor Alison Mealy.”

“Ben, there's a man sneaking around your house.”

“What?”

“I went over to play the tape again and he's inside.”

I jumped up. “Come on, Marian. Do you still do simple burglaries?”

“Sit down, Ben.”

“What?”

“Sit down. If there's someone in your house, call the police.”

“You're the police.”

“I've had three glasses of wine. I can't even drive home, much less walk into your house with a badge in my hand.”

“Well, excuse me. I'm going over to see who the hell is in my house. Alison, stay here.”

“Sit down, Ben.”

I ignored her. “Where's your mother?”

“In the barn.”

“Okay, you stay here with Trooper Boyce. Have a coke and don't offer her any wine—Franco, Coca-Cola for the young lady. I'm going to find out who's in my house.” I had matched Marian glass for glass and was only vaguely aware that the wine was talking now.

Marian said for the third or fourth time, “Sit down, Ben.” She looked like she meant it. I figured it was my check and I'd sit when I felt like it. I headed for the door. Marian caught up in the foyer and took my arm.

“Don't. Use that phone. Call Trooper Moody.”

“I just want to scare them off.”

“What if they're armed?”

“Franco, can I use your phone?” He was staring openly from the reservations desk.

“Yes,” said Marian. “Use his phone.”

I dialed Oliver. “Somebody's burgling my house.”

“Who's this?”

“Ben Abbott. You want to come over and do something?”

“On my way.” He hung up.

“See?” said Marian. “Wasn't that more sensible?”

“I feel weird. My house is a hundred yards down the street and I'm standing here while somebody's invading it.”

“How about dessert?”

“You order. I'll be back.”

I caught her by surprise and was running down the sidewalk before she got out the door. I felt the blood pounding in my head. Some small cautious voice said, Look out, you'll get your head blown off. I was really surprised how angry I was; I hadn't realized how attached I had become to that house. Somebody was invading me and I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

I stopped at the foot of my driveway. Oliver wasn't in sight. Nor did I hear his siren. I heard Marian running up behind me. A shadow moved across one of the lighted windows in my office.

“Goddammit!” I charged up the drive, and threw open the side door to my office. There were two men. One was deep in the closet. The other, rifling my father's desk, reached inside his windbreaker.