HardScape (9 page)

Freddy Butler gave me a hard stare. He was a weaselly little guy who hung around some of the Jervises. He drove a new four-wheel-drive Ford pickup with a show bar and flame decals, though he hadn't had a job since the lumberyard went bust.

Someone else mumbled, “I hear they drive the stuff in same as grass.”

“Who up here would buy that much?” I asked.

“Maybe there's some more spics with a factory.”

“They wouldn't need Renny,” Joe Charney scoffed. “What do you think, Renny flew it from Colombia in that little plane?”

“I don't think Renny flew it from anywhere,” I said, a pronouncement met with silence. We batted it around awhile. Few thought smuggling cocaine was the end of the world, though most, but not all, agreed it was pretty stupid, especially since you could get murdered doing it. Pink wandered over from his tree, fished a fresh Bud out of his truck, and stood shaking his head. “This whole damned thing don't make no sense. Somebody's bangin' us.”

“Did you know he was flying again?”

“Told me he was flying some charter jobs. Taking rich people out to Block Island.”

“Where'd he get the time?”

“Made the time. The bucks were good. Needed the bucks.”

“Was he doing it a lot?”

“Once, twice a week most of the summer.”

“Where'd he get the plane?”

“I don't know.”

“I mean what airport did he drive to? He didn't fly out of Al's field, did he?”

“I don't know. Maybe he drove down to Oxford. They got an airport. Maybe he flew out of somebody else's field right here.”

“But where'd he get the plane?”

“I don't know.”

I slipped a hand around Pink's thigh-sized bicep and walked him back to his tree. “Pink. Do you think he was flying dope?”

“I don't know.”

“Pink, for crissake, it's me. Was he flying dope?”

“I know it's you. I don't know. I ain't his nurse.”

“Would Betty know?”

Renny's big brother regarded women as flawed food-and-sex machines. “If Betty found coke she'd powder the baby's ass with it.”

“So who would know?”

“I don't know,” said Pink, looking away.

“Come on.”

“I don't know.”

“Pink, give me a break.”

“Maybe Gwen Jervis.”

“
What
?” I was astonished. Between my real estate business and my far-flung family, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot going on in Newbury that I didn't know about. “Gwen Jervis?”

“Hey, you give women a couple of babies, they don't want to do it any more. Renny's normal. Guy's gotta get his ashes hauled. Right?”

“Gwen?”

“You got a problem with that?” Pink, never far from looking dangerous, began to look very dangerous.

“Well, she's his cousin and—”

“They're not making babies, they're just doin' it.”

“Okay. I'm just a little surprised. I thought things were great with Betty.”

“Long as Renny had Gwen, things were great with Betty,” said Pink. “You don't know shit about life, do you?”

I went back to the others and asked bluntly whether anyone had heard any talk at all about my cousin flying coke. I got some shrugs and some “No”s and “No way”s, while a concerted shuffling of boots and battered running shoes separated me and the group. All but Freddy Butler, who draped one elbow on his flame-covered hood and gave me another hard look.

“You're going to piss some people off if you don't shut up.”

In school Freddy had been the little kid who made friends with the bully, so I didn't take him very seriously.

“What people, Freddy?”

“I'm just saying you don't want to step in the middle of something.”

“Because for a second there it sounded like you were threatening me.”

“Not me, Ben.”

***

There are four corners on Main Street at the flagpole and three churches. The fourth corner is the Yankee Drover Inn, in whose cellar bar I would ordinarily be reading the Sunday
Times
with a Bloody Mary. Instead, I was across the street sitting next to Aunt Connie in the front pew of the Episcopal church, listening to a hastily written sermon on the subject of the Sixth Commandment. Ordinarily, Reverend Owen would have dusted off his regular Autumn Sermon—“To everything a time, a time for sleep and death”—but while our two killings had occurred too late for the morning papers, he'd risen to the occasion. There wasn't much he could say about Ron without getting heavily into the Seventh Commandment, and besides, nobody knew him. But Renny was local, and to give Landon his due, he never once credited the cocaine story. He just stuck to the fact that Renny had been murdered.

He asked the congregation to join hearts with our neighbors in the Catholic church across the street—Renny's church—whose parishioners would be mourning one of their own. This was no small thing, considering that there were many old people in our congregation who had been raised to believe that Catholics kept guns in their churches for the day the Pope would order war on the Protestants.

As we shuffled out after the benediction, on line to shake Reverend Owen's hand, Connie asked, “Where was your mother? I thought we'd see her there.”

“Aunt Frances told me she had just left.”

“Well, sometime this week it would be nice if you would drive over there with me. I've not seen her in some time, and I heard she's a little low.…You do see her regularly, don't you?”

“I go for dinner.”

“How often?”

“I'll call her. Maybe we could drive over Wednesday.”

“Landon,” she said as she pumped the minister's hand. “That was an excellent sermon.”

“Sad days,” he said. He was young and, I knew, wavering in his faith. He'd told me one night sitting on the lawn in front of the church that he felt useless when his parishioners' lives got twisted. He was thinking about going back to school to study psychology. It seemed a practical thing to do, but the decision to leave the church was tearing him up.

***

Oliver Moody was directing traffic as the Catholic, Congregationalist, and Episcopal parking lots emptied simultaneously. He held everything up for Connie to cross the street. Whatever he held for me in his gaze was hidden behind his sunglasses. I walked her home, offered her lunch at the Yankee Drover. She said she was ready for a nap. I wandered back across, without Oliver's help this time, into my office to check my silent answering machine, left a note on the door where I could be found, then walked to the General Store for a paper, and finally into the cellar bar of the Yankee Drover, where I ordered a Bloody Mary and a burger and settled into the cool dark. The place was nearly empty, as it would remain until the regular parishioners drove their wives and mothers home. Tony Franco, the owner, who tends his own bar on Sundays, set down my spicy, straight-up Bloody and said, “There's a guy in the booth asking for you.”

I watched in the back bar mirror as he emerged from the shadows. He had exchanged his “country” clothes for a “Sunday best” suit, neatly tailored for his ample frame.

“Home at last?” said Alex Rose. He looked smug as a CNN correspondent in the middle of a brand new war.

I said, “Your camera's in the mail.”

He said, “They're gonna arrest Mrs. Long for murder.”

Chapter 10

Renny held a monopoly on my emotions, and at first the strongest feeling I could rouse for Rose's news was surprise that the New York P.I. knew his way around my town better than I.

“Where'd you hear that?”

“I bought a friend in the Plainfield state trooper barracks. Tipped me off in time to get Mr. Long up to the house with a limo load of lawyers.”

“Shouldn't you be holding their coats or something?”

Rose's beefy face got hard at the edges. “You got a problem with me?”

“I got a problem with everybody at the moment. I just lost a friend. If you don't mind I'd rather drink alone. Even if you do mind.”

“Your cousin Renny. I'm sorry, fella. I didn't know you were close.”

I turned back to the political cartoons in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday
Times
and stared at a gag line I'd already read three times.

Rose said, “Rita's innocent.”

“I know that.”

“She didn't shoot him.”

“You don't have to convince me.”

“I want to know exactly what you saw when you found the bastard. They're basing the case on the M.E.'s opinion of the angle of entry.”

“He wasn't a bastard. He seemed like a decent guy.”

“Screwing his friend and partner's wife.”

“She chose well. So did he.”

“That why you didn't do the tape? You fell for them, didn't you? You liked them as a couple. I'm not surprised. I had a witness in New York, a gay waiter, raving on about how romantic they were.”

I raised the paper and tried to read Anna Quindlen, who was pulling hard for another Pulitzer with a piece about forty-year-old male dropouts and the families they left behind. No problem; I had a few years to go, and no one to desert when I got there.

Rose said, “Let's get back to when you found the body.”

“Why are they charging Rita Long?”

“Her shotgun. Her fingerprints.”

“Powder test?” I asked through the paper.

“Passed it But she could have scrubbed. Or she could have worn a glove.”

“Anyone suggesting a motive?”

“Lovers' quarrel.”

“Bull.”

“Old reliable. Juries do love the lovers' quarrel.”

“Long's standing by her?” I asked.

“One hundred percent.”

“Why? I thought he wanted a divorce.” I lowered the paper. Guys were coming in to the bar, discussing whether the Boston Red Sox would disappoint us in the playoffs. The optimists were betting they'd wait to disappoint us in the World Series. This occasioned some shouting.

Rose raised his voice to be heard. “Why? Hey, just because he's rich doesn't mean he's smart. Maybe he loves her. Maybe he figures with Ron out of the way, he's got a clear field with his wife again. Catch her on the rebound.”

“Who was Ron?”

Rose looked surprised. “You don't know?”

“Nobody told me. How should I know? I just know she called him Ron and he used to be Long's partner, a fact you neglected to mention.”

Rose did not apologize. “Ronald Pearlman,” he said. “Sold his father's furrier chain before the fur market crashed. Bought a Hong Kong chip factory and merged with LTS.”

“LTS? What is that, Long Techno-Something?”

“Long Technical Systems. I thought you knew all this from your M&A days.”

“I worked my miracles in the Rustbelt—Rita told me Long bought Ron out.”

“He hates partners. Ron had brought him excellent manufacturing capability, but once he had those offshore factories, it galled him that Ron would split the profits.”

“Did they fight?”

“Over what? Ron goes from let's say ten million bucks from his father's business to two hundred and fifty million bucks for his Hong Kong operation. The guy's thirty-eight with enough money to buy Rhode Island. He's got it all.”

“Except his own wife.”

“Some guys are greedy.”

I wondered why, if Rita wanted to run off with Ron, she had wanted to sell the Castle when he had a quarter billion bucks in the bank.

“How'd he parlay ten million into two-fifty?”

“First you answer my questions. Then I'll answer yours. What did you see when you found the body?”

I asked Franco for a refill. Rose ordered a beer. Then I told him everything I'd told the state police. Rose asked some intelligent questions, and when we had hashed it out he asked, “So you still think he was shot from the woods?”

“Hey, I didn't do the autopsy. I heard Steve guess it was close range. The woods were about fifty yards off.”

“How far was the tower?”

“Eighty yards.”

“Long shot with a deer slug.”

“That's what I thought.”

“They think she shot him from the tower.”

“That will be a tough one to prove.”

“They don't seem worried.”

“So how'd Ron Pearlman multiply ten million dollars into two hundred and fifty million?”

“He was well connected in Hong Kong from his old man's fur coat factories. The government gave him grants to expand. Hot operation. The chip factory had some new process. A bunch of different American outfits wanted to control it for their own exclusive supply. They got in a bidding war. LTS won.”

“Connected, smart, and lucky.”

“Great combination,” Rose agreed. “I'd be envious, if he weren't dead.”

“I don't buy the lovers' quarrel.”

“I was hoping you'd say that.”

“Why?”

“We'll expect you to tell it to the jury.”

“What?”

“If it comes to a trial—and that's certainly what the state's attorney has in mind—we'd like you to appear as a sort of character witness.”

“I'm not sure I'm following you,” I said, though I had a bad feeling I was.

“You saw them together, right?”

“Briefly. Like I told you on the phone.”

“Well it's too bad you blew the taping, but at least you saw them together. No one else has. They were really careful in New York. I got a shot of them getting into a cab, and some waiters who'll testify they had lunch together. But in you I've got a well-connected local guy who can persuade the jury that Ron and Rita were deeply—nonviolently—in love.
Nonviolently
being the operative word here.”

“Wait a minute—”

“I know you don't want to stand up in court and admit you were sneaking around the woods taking pictures.”

“You're right about that.”

“But you were. And Mrs. Long's freedom lies in the balance.”

“You're forgetting my rep. The prosecutor will eat me for breakfast. He'll discredit me to discredit my testimony.”

“I don't think so.”

“He will.”

“Oh he'll try to destroy you. No avoiding that. But he can't discredit your testimony. I don't care how much of a sleaze he reveals you to be, the jury will get that those two people adored each other.”

“I don't want to be destroyed here. This is my home.”

“Sorry, fella. You want that woman to sit in jail for the rest of her life for something she probably didn't do?”

“Probably?”

Rose shrugged. “Whether she blew him away is not the question. The question is Will she serve time for it? Now Mr. Long is up there with four of the top lawyers in New York to answer No. And I'm out hustling witnesses, to answer No.”

I started to protest. Rose cut me off. “This is not debatable. We'll subpoena you. You'll testify for the defense. And then you'll duke it out with the prosecutor. No one's asking if you
want
to do this. You're doing it.”

“And if I refuse to testify?”

“Look what happened last time.”

I would have decked him right there in the cellar of the Yankee Drover, but whether I wanted to testify wasn't the issue, because I'd seen something at the Castle that Rose had not. Rita's spooky drawing would steamroller any sympathy I could build for the loving couple.

So instead of knocking him off his barstool, I said, “I'm sure she didn't do it. I'll do what I can to help her. But I'll tell you right now, anything I say won't help one damned bit the second the jury gets a load of one of Mrs. Long's drawings in the studio.”

“Which one?”

I described the figure of Ron, naked with skull. “Like I say, I'm sure she didn't kill him, but if you let them get her as far as a trial, they'll show that picture. Any twelve northwest Connecticut jurors will take one look and say, Yup, a woman who'd draw a picture like that would shoot a man as soon as look at him. They'll make me testify I saw her draw it and it'll hang her.”

Rose took a leather-bound notepad from his jacket and opened it to the first page. “Bear with me just a minute.…Just checking their warrants.…No. There's no such picture.”

“It's on the smaller easel. The cops must have seen it. Ask your friend at the barracks.”

“No, I was just up there. The big one was a landscape—the view from the turret, as a matter of fact—”

“The little one. On the smaller easel.”

“No. That was a landscape, too. A pond and a fence. I don't know what you saw, but it wasn't there now and there's no mention of it in the warrants.”

“You took it.”

“No. You said the cops would have seen it yesterday. I wasn't there yesterday. Just you and her and Ron.” He closed his book and pocketed it with a satisfied smile.

I said, “There was someone else.”

“Who's that?”

“The shooter.”

“Right,” said Rose. “The shooter.”

“You think she killed him, don't you?”

“The jury won't give a rat's ass what I think.”

“But you think she did it.”

“I don't
care
if she did it. My job's to help get her off. Wake up, fella. Mr. Long's paying for a program here: top criminal lawyers in court; me backing them up on the street. The man who's paying says his wife will not go to jail.”

“Does he believe his wife killed her lover?”

“The state's attorney has a pretty thin case so far. Mr. Long's strategy is to scare off an indictment. Trouble is, you got a small-town prosecutor here who sees a chance to get famous trying a rich, beautiful defendant. So if it comes to a trial, you're on, my friend.

“I asked you if Long believes his wife killed her lover.”

“He doesn't confide in the help.” Rose got up from his stool. I put my hand on his elbow. He gave it a get-out-of-my-face look. I curled my fingers until I had his full attention.

“If I testify, I have to testify I saw her drawing.”

He tried to pull away. “I thought you said she's innocent.”

“She is, but I can't lie for her.”

I let go. Rose flexed his arm, muttering, “With a friend like you, she won't need enemies.”

I switched to bourbon old-fashioneds. I'd had enough tomato juice, and felt like something sweet.