Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (11 page)

While Ellie gathered more tools and equipment, Jake slammed the last nail into the last of the four plywood boxes she was building.

Forms, they were called. Sam wanted some anchors for a few rowboats he’d fixed up and was planning to sell, out at the Boat School, and there were still enough tacky patches on the porch primer to keep her from working any more on that project today.

So, since she wasn’t too busy with
that
to do
this
, and she
did
know how to put a batch of concrete together … Besides, she couldn’t refuse Sam such a simple favor when he’d worked so hard refurbishing those rowboats.

Or it would’ve been simple if the Romans had been doing it, she decided as Ellie hauled the garden cart across the lawn.

“Limestone, calcium, iron, aluminum,” Ellie recited. “Those are concrete’s main ingredients.” She was just brimming with interesting facts this morning.

“Did you know
that
?” The boxes to pour the concrete into now stood ready and waiting.

“No,” Jake replied, glancing nervously at the forsythia and bay-berry bushes edging the yard. No strange faces peeped through the shrubbery at her.

But she still felt … observed, somehow. “No, I didn’t know that, either.” Watched, as if …

With an effort she turned back to Ellie, who was trying hard to cheer her up. “But then the recipe got lost,” Ellie said.

Which got Jake’s attention, finally. “Really? For concrete? Do you mean they just …”

“Uh-huh.” Ellie nodded emphatically, which caused even more of her pale red hair to fall from the loose chignon she’d pinned it into.

“Yep. Just forgot how to make it,” she went on. “I guess what with
their empire shrinking and so many of their far-flung colonies rebelling against them and all, they got preoccupied.”

“Huh,” Jake said, distracted again as she dug in the pocket of her canvas work apron. She laid a level on two corners of a wooden form, then set a carpenter’s square into one corner to ensure the final product would be rectangular and not some other, more exotic geometrical shape, as Ellie continued:

“And can you imagine what a drag
that
must have been? Last year, you could build a terrace or a bunch of massive foundation blocks or a spillway for your canal.…”

“No kidding.” Jake paused in the act of shifting a forty-pound sack of cement to the other side of the lawn cart.

“But
this
year …”

It was a law of nature, apparently, that forty-pound sacks were always on the wrong side of the lawn cart.

“… 
this
year, it’s back to mud, sticks, and stones,” Ellie finished.

And that by the time you discovered that the forty-pound bag was on the wrong side, the cart’s wheels were always stuck.

“But
how
did it get lost? The recipe, I mean.”

Because that was the difference between concrete and cement: what you added, and the proportions you added it in. Sand, stone, and water; how much of each you used was the key to the result.

“Rome fell. Attila the Hun and so on,” Ellie explained. “So I guess with barbarians sacking and vandalizing from the outside, and then all the plotting and poisoning that was going on on the inside, well, a lot of things must’ve gotten misplaced.”

With the tip of a penknife, Jake tried loosening the string that tied the top of the cement bag shut. As usual, the bag tore before the string loosened; yet another of the laws of nature.

Concrete-mixing nature, anyway; a small gray cloud of cement dust puffed out of the bag.

“And nobody found it again until the sixteenth century,” said Ellie, meanwhile filling big plastic buckets with the hose. They’d also set a wheelbarrow full of construction sand nearby.

Or rather, Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, had set it there for them; filled with sand, that wheelbarrow was
heavy
, and he was the helpful type.

“Which is when a British guy finally figured it out again,” Ellie went on with the story.

Jake looked around at the sand, the cement, the forms, and the buckets of water. Also at the concrete-mixing tray, made of heavy-duty black plastic and the size of a child’s wading pool.

In fact, until they pressed it into service for this job, it had been used as a wading pool. But little Lee was with her dad for the afternoon, and they planned to have it cleaned up by the time she got home.

So: water, forms, ingredients, tools … “You know what?” Jake remarked in surprise. “I think we’re ready.”

To mix, she meant. She stood up straight, her back creaking warningly at the movement even without having hauled any sand.

Simple or not, the job was not for the faint of spine. But around her on the grass lay the four plywood forms, shimmed beneath with shingle scraps so their tops were level. Near them lay four galvanized eyebolts with brackets.

Concrete blocks, after all, made lousy anchors unless you could tie something to them. She turned to the cement bag.

But just then from the open kitchen window wafted the aroma of frying linguica, a kind of Portuguese pork sausage with onions, garlic, and paprika mixed in. With it Bella was making kale soup, the fragrance an invisible ribbon of tantalizing promise.

The ribbon seized Jake’s nose. Her stomach made sympathetic growling sounds. And mixing and pouring the concrete would surely take another hour at least, whereas if they stopped now …

“Tools,” Ellie said helpfully; she’d smelled the linguica, too. And somehow, Ellie always required huge amounts of nutrition to maintain her sylphlike form.

“We should go in and make a list, to be sure we’ve got the right ones,” she added.

This, of course, was merely an excuse for going in; the required tools—trowels, shovels, smaller buckets for doling out water from the bigger ones—were already there with the rest of the equipment.

But once they got inside, Bella would urge lunch on them, which was Ellie’s real plan; not only was she hungry herself, but she took her friend-care responsibilities seriously.

Jake smiled. “Okay,” she agreed, putting down her shovel. But just then Wade drove into the driveway.

He didn’t look happy. A needle of alarm pierced her. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously.

“Nothing.” He crossed the yard and put an arm around her. “I heard from a few people, that’s all.”

She followed him to the back porch. “Wade, you told, didn’t you? You put the word out about Steven Garner, and—”

“Hey, it never hurts to have your folks know you might need them to watch your back.”

“So? Did somebody find out something …?”

Bad
, her mind finished, grimly. Wade paused at the door. “No. Well, not exactly. But I called a few guys and they called a few guys.”

When Wade called his buddies, it was like casting a fishnet. It always caught something.

Not always something good. “Gave them a description of your pal.”

Jake nodded eagerly. “And?”

“And nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him. Well,” he amended, “downtown last night, one guy said he might’ve seen somebody like that nearly getting pounded by a few hooligans. But he didn’t see him up close, and Bob Arnold broke it up before it could turn into anything. And after that—nothing.”

He held the door open for her. Inside, the kale soup aroma was warmly comforting. “The state cops are here, by the way,” he added. “They still think the girl on Sea Street was accidental.”

A sound from the street cut him off, one bright, sharp
brring!
A
bike bell … the too-familiar sound revived her earlier feeling of being watched; turning to the door, she scanned up and down the sunlight-flooded street.

On it, though, there was no sign of any bike or rider; if it had been him, Steven Garner Jr. was gone.

But in her heart, she knew now that he would be back.

SHE DIDN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. BUT SHE HAD NO CHOICE
. A blast from the past was here, and she could either warn them about it or not.

“Listen up, everyone,” she said when she had gotten them all gathered around the dining room table.

Bella served the soup, accompanied by hot, crusty sourdough rolls and glasses of sparkling apple juice made from the windfalls she and Jake had collected the previous autumn. Then she sat, too.

“What’s happened?” she asked, clasping her large, bony hands anxiously together.

“I’ll tell you,” said Jake reluctantly. “Right now I’m going to tell you all about it.”

Wade knew her history, of course, and her dad did, too. But the others didn’t; she’d never wanted them to.

“Eat some of your soup first,” Ellie said kindly. So she did, hoping it would give her strength. Then she began:

“Back in the city, I was a complete jerk.”

Bella’s bony face took on a rebellious look. “No,” Jake told her stepmother, “let me finish.”

She looked around at the others. Sam, especially, was not going to like this.

“See, I was a money manager. Freelance. An advisor to the rich and loathsome,” she added with a crooked smile.

She’d also been (1) married to a brain surgeon who thought that fidelity was only the name of a large investment firm, and (2) the
mother of a boy who at age twelve was so worldly-wise, he already had his very own stash box, stocked with his own marijuana and rolling papers.

But never mind that now. “Sam and his father and I lived in a coop building so exclusive, even the pets had trust funds.”

She paused, took another spoonful of soup. Her neighbors in the city had regarded the smell of cash as aromatherapy, and she’d been no different.

At first. “So on the plus side, we had plenty of money,” she said. “But on the minus side, some of it was dirty, because some of my clients were so crooked, their limos should’ve been fitted with machine-gun turrets.”

And though she’d tried to ignore this fact about them, in the end, she couldn’t. After a while it had gotten so bad that she couldn’t buy a Ferrari, a new pair of Jimmy Choos, or a baby grand piano for the apartment where no one ever played so much as “Chopsticks,” without seeing a body in a car trunk or a forehead with an icepick in it, through the lens of her mind’s eye.

“So eventually I gave it all up.”
Not soon enough
, she added mentally as around the table, they all listened with interest.

Again she was tempted to mention a certain philandering brain surgeon, so chronically unfaithful to her that his nickname around the hospital was Vlad the Impaler.

But that was no excuse. Besides, it would be unkind to Sam. “Just before I did, though, I got a visit from a fellow I knew.”

Once, Steven Garner Sr. had been a regular client of the loan sharks in a certain New York crime family, one whose cohorts included guys with colorful nicknames like Sticksy and Bones.

Not to mention Jerry “Da Bomb” Baumann. But by the time Garner came to her office, he was out of favor with his preferred lenders, on account of being too fond of dogs and horses.

“Specifically, ones he could bet on,” she continued. “He owed so much money and repaid so little of it, he’d put his pals in an impossible position.

“If they killed him, as they were threatening to do, they’d never get their money back. But if they didn’t, they would never get any back from anyone else, because no one would be scared of them anymore.”

“Wow,” said Sam. He’d never heard any of this before. “So then what’d they do?”

She smiled at him.
You poor kid, it’s no wonder you got so messed up
.

She replied, “They decided to cut their losses. If he didn’t have fifty grand by the next day, he was guaranteed a spot in the nearest landfill.”

So his pitch to her had been simple. No promises, no guarantee of a payback. She went on with her story. “A guy like that, you had to admire him. Just ‘Lend me the money, or they’ll kill me.’ ”

“And they were your clients?” Ellie asked. “The men who were threatening to kill him?”

She was trying to sound nonjudgmental, but Jake could tell she was a little shocked. Who wouldn’t be?

“No, not those guys.” Fellows with names like Sticksy and Bones had never darkened her door; even Da Bomb had found it only by following Garner, probably.

“But their bosses were, some of them.” The higher-up men in politics, banking, and law … the power, in other words, behind the cashmere-coated thugs everyone else thought headed organized crime in the city back then.

To them, Jake’s unlucky visitor was just so much machine-gun fodder. They’d have him killed in the afternoon and eat dinner heartily with their families that night as usual, because when you were in their line of work, sooner or later you had to make an example of someone.

Still, she wasn’t a fool, and she wasn’t about to hand over fifty grand on the strength of a sob story. “So I refused.” She finished the tale, looking around at the faces staring wide-eyed at her over their soup bowls.

“Wow,” breathed Sam again. “I never knew you’d worked with such serious …”

Criminals
. The kinds of guys who would kill you as soon as look at you. Not that she’d seen it that way at the time.

But back then, she hadn’t really looked at it very much at all, had she? She’d kept her own eyes conveniently averted from what she’d done, whom she’d done it for …

“Yeah, well,” she said inadequately. “It’s not something I’m proud of. When your dad died …”

In a cruel irony, Sam’s father, Victor, had succumbed to the kind of brain tumor he’d spent his life saving other people from getting demolished by.

“… I did an accounting of all our money,” she went on. “His and mine, and whatever came from crooks, as best I could figure, I donated to a victims’ rights organization.”

Which had hurt more than the fifty grand would have, not that it had set things right. It didn’t even begin to wipe out all the harm she’d done. And it didn’t make her feel any better now, either.

What she had been back then was the dark place in her soul, and she would never really be able to make up for it. Even now, she still had nightmares about it. And in one of them, a guy with big ears and a really bad gambling habit asked her for money.