Mausoleum (18 page)

“Started what? You blackmailed a guy because he was an illegal who couldn't go to the cops.”

Sherman tried to sit up straighter in bed. “I didn't blackmail him, first,” he said staunchly. “He threatened
me
. Said he'd kill me if I said I saw him. You expect a man to abide that attitude?”

“He threatened you first?”

“Yeah. Had nothing to do with being illegal. He threatened me. So I threatened him back.”

“With blackmail.”

“What's wrong with making a couple of bucks while I protect myself?”

“It might explain why he kept trying to kill you.” In fact I was immensely relieved to discover that my cousin was not a vicious bigot, and not one bit worse than the conniving thief and weasel I had always believed him to be.

I suggested to Sherman that he pass a message to Angel that he was not going to blackmail him anymore, and stay in the hospital as long as he could. Sherman said he was planning on borrowing a shotgun, sawing off the barrels, and going down to Waterbury.

“On crutches?”

“I'll be on a cane before you know it.”

“Why not just call it a draw? I mean, come on, you got lucky with a nice girl. She found you a hotshot lawyer. Why not move on?”

Sherman admitted that he had also been thinking along those lines, because serving hard time for murdering Angel while he knew a girl like Lorraine on the outside would be a real pain.

I drove Sherman's mother home. She said, “Sherman met somebody.”

I said, “Nice girl.”

Sherman's mother said, “Are you sure?”

I said, “She's an interesting person.” We rode the rest of the way in silence, an uncharacteristically glum Aunt Helen thinking God knew what, while I wondered if attempting to locate Angel would be counterproductive. It would gobble up a lot of time on the doubtful premise that he knew anything more about Brian's murder than Sherman did. I was curious, of course, what an illegal immigrant from Waterbury had been doing in Brian's mausoleum. It was unlikely he came to Newbury's burying ground to steal; that sort of activity was best left to locals who wouldn't be noticed, like Sherman. Although, as Sherman had noted, bicycle shorts on a summer weekend looked local. Pedaling a bike, wearing helmet and sunglasses he would look to cursory glancers like just another “desirable inhabitant.”

Maybe Angel had known Brian Grose. Dealings with Brian Grose could have ranged from rewiring his Eternal surround sound system to delivering recreational drugs. Or—if he really was the stone killer Sherman claimed—carrying out a hit only to discover that someone had beat him to it. But with what weapon? Bare hands?

Soon as I dropped Sherman's mom at her trailer, I gave Marian Boyce a ring. I hadn't seen her around town since Friday evening at the flagpole. That she rang right back told me nothing. Only the mobile service could have pinpointed whether she was in the General Store or on the moon.

I said, “Thanks for calling back. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but this is business. Are you still on the Brian Grose case?”

“None of your business.”

“I only ask because I haven't seen you around. I wondered if you and Arnie had been ‘ICEed' by the Feds. So to speak.”

Marian, who knew the power of silence, remained silent.

I said, “Do you know any Angels in Waterbury?”

“I know one whom I intend to nail some day for converting semi-automatic rifles into assault weapons. And I believe you do, too.”

“I've heard of him. No, this one shoots. And hacksaws Harley brake cables.”

“Is this about your jailbird cousin cracking up his bike?”

“That had nothing to do with brake cables.”

“Then why are you asking?”

“Trying to save time.”

“At tax payers expense. “

“I'll pay you back. If you're still on the case.”

“How?”

“By telling you that I am reasonably sure that two different people entered Brian's mausoleum
after
he was shot.”

“You claimed that the door was locked when you found the blood and called 911. Trooper Moody confirmed that it was locked when he got to the graveyard and secured the scene. It remained locked, despite the worst efforts of three of your cousins, until the treasurer of the Village Cemetery Association arrived with a key.”

“The door was locked
after
the two different people left the mausoleum.”

“Which one locked it, Sherlock? Last one out?”

“Neither.”

Marian was satisfyingly silent for a full second. Then she nailed me right between the eyes. “Which one was Cousin Sherman?”

“What do you mean?”

“Of the two different people you imagine entering Brian's mausoleum, do you imagine your cousin was the last one out?”

I countered with a less satisfying, “You've had your payback, but you haven't told me a damned thing.”

Marian laughed. Then she said, “Okay, okay. We've heard about an Angel. Haven't had the pleasure of meeting him, yet.”

“Is he a suspect?” I asked. Sharp as Sherman was, maybe he missed spotting Angel's gun. Maybe a hungry raccoon failed to notice a plate of raw liver.

“Some people think he is,” she said, reminding me that her brain was working a different track than that of her temporary colleagues from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Does Angel happen to have a hot rep as a driver?”

Marian actually sounded impressed when she said, “As a matter of fact yes.” She even added an admiring, “My, my, you've been busy.”

So Al Vetere was not a complete fool.

“How the hell big was that gun?” I asked casually, trading on my new-won respect.

“Goodbye.”

“Wait. Wait.”

“For what?”

“You know as well as I, neither of those immigrants killed Brian Grose.”

“I know nothing.”

“The real killer, who locked the door after Sherman and Angel came and went, is laughing at us.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” she said, so soberly that I wondered if she had the same feeling I did about this murder.

“It's about tears, isn't?” I asked.

“Ben?”

“What?”

“This Angel? If it's the same Angel? Don't mess with him, Lone Ranger. He's as bad as they get.”

“I'll be very careful, thank you.”

“Goddammit, don't you listen? I'm warning you to stay away from the man—what, Arnie?”

I heard Arnie Bender say, “Gimme the phone—Jailbird, you there? Listen to what your friend is telling you. Her and me we get in trouble with this Angel, we call for back up. Another major crime unit. SWAT team. A thousand road cops. The Connecticut National Guard. Okay? You get Angel trouble, who you gonna call? Your ninety year old grandmother?”

“She's my great-Aunt, but I get your point, Arnie. Thank you for caring.”

As soon as they hung up on me, I dialed the number I had snared for Father Bobby. A wary “Hello” told he hadn't had time to swap cells.

“It's Ben Abbott in Newbury.”

“Why are you calling me? I told you I would call when I had something.”

“I'm looking for a bad guy named Angel. Know any?”

After a long pause, Father Bobby asked, “Does he sell guns in Waterbury?”

“Not that one. I know that one. This one has a rep as a driver.”

“It is not an uncommon name.”

“Acquaintances refer to him as a stone killer. Does that ring any bells?”

“I am not a gangster, Mr. Abbott. I'm a priest. The only way I would know a man like that would be if he confessed, in which case I would not be free to confide in you. Please don't call me again.”

“Any word on Charlie Cubrero?”

“Not yet. I have put feelers out. I've received nothing back.”

“Father, talking to you is like asking the cable company what's wrong with my internet connection.”

“Perhaps you should convert to DSL,” said Father Bobby and I was hung up on again for the second time in a row.

Chapter Sixteen

I walked as fast as I could up Main Street and knocked on Lorraine Renner's door. “In here,” she called through the screen. She was in the birth/editing room. “Hey, it's you. How you doing?”

“I saw Sherman in the hospital. He's in pretty good shape, all things considered.”

“Yeah, we talked on the phone. What's up?”

“Sherman said that you said that you wondered if Brian was ‘gaming' something—working a scam.”

“Sherman has a big mouth.”

“Sherman is so pumped about meeting you that he couldn't help bragging a little.”

Lorraine smiled. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. He's pumped. So am I. Boy, I gotta tell you, Ben. The things you don't plan for. A twenty-year-older-than-me felon. Barely house broken. He smiles, and I completely lose it.”

I nodded encouragingly, although leer would best describe a Sherman smile. “I found it interesting that he didn't seem to be lying. Or exaggerating.”

“Did he happen to mention the documentary?”

“It came up.”

“He's the first person I've told anything about it.”

“Yeah, I wondered why it didn't come up when we talked.”

“It's a very complicated ‘rights' situation. I've got all this footage about Brian. In theory it's the mausoleum company's, but only in theory—they haven't seen it. They don't know it exists and couldn't care less, I'm sure. But I do. I mean I'm really intrigued. It's a unique situation, to have all this tape on somebody who suddenly got murdered.”

“Sherman said something about clues?”

Lorraine shook her head. “I don't know if we should be talking about this.”

“I'm not a cop. I'm only trying to find out who killed him. I don't see how that would hurt your film.”

“I don't know.”

“I mean it wouldn't hurt to find out who did it, would it?”

“That's what I mean,” she said, suddenly eager to explain. “The clues would lead us to the murder. Right? Don't you think?”

Everyone wanted to be a detective. I said, “It would probably help the film. Give you an ending. So what are the clues?”

“He got a telephone call when I had him wired with a radio mike.” He said, ‘I told you never to call me here,' and hung up.”

I said, “If the first phrase ever spoken on the telephone was Alexander Graham Bell calling to his assistant inventor, ‘Watson, I need you,' the second must have been a cheating spouse saying, ‘I told you never to call me here.'”

“No, this wasn't like cheating. He was talking to a guy.”

“How do you know it was a guy? Did you hear a man's voice?”

“It wasn't like he was talking to a woman. Wasn't like he was screwing her—or him—it was business. But not business, business. Not an investor. Like somebody you shouldn't be talking to. Here, you listen, you decide. I got it on tape.”

She played it for me, and I agreed that Grose sounded pissed-off and maybe, slightly scared. It did not sound like sex, love, or ordinary business.

“Interesting,” I said, “What other clues?”

She popped another tape in the machine. “Look at this.”

The camera swooped in on an open drawer.

“The hell is that?”

“A drawer in his kitchen desk.”

I said, “Remind me never to let you in my house with a camera.”

Lorraine laughed. “First rule of shooting a documentary film: hose down
everything
on the assumption you can't come back to shoot what you missed. Do you see what's in the drawer?”

“It looks like about a hundred credit cards.”

“That's right,” said Lorraine.

“And what clue is this?”

“All I know is when I get a freebie credit card offer in the mail I take it because I can use a new one to pay the last one. But I'm not living in a gazillion-dollar house. Why would a rich guy have so much plastic?”

I said, “Good question.” In fact, gaming credit card offers matched Banker Dan's hint about financial difficulties. “What else?”

“His library was off limits. He never let me shoot in the library.”

“When you shoot that walking baby home movie, do the parents let you in every room in their apartment?”

“Yeah, but Brian kept it locked all the time. Major lock. Here. I shot it.” Lorraine's camera lingered on an ASSA high security lock cylinder for a mortise deadbolt. It looked too expensive for even Mike's Hardware to stock, and of a heavy duty grade I'd expect on the front door instead of the library—if not an Iraqi arsenal.

“What do you think it means?” she asked.

“Beats me,” I said. When I asked about any other clues, I was not surprised to hear that “Don't call me here,” a drawer of credit cards, and a locked library were the extent of it.

***

Nonetheless, after dark I put on my wood-chopping boots and a long-sleeve shirt, and tucked my pant legs into thick socks which I sprayed with Off! to discourage deer ticks. (It was late in the summer for Lyme disease—the little bastards are most dangerous in June—but tonight I was taking enough chances already.) Then I grabbed a backpack with a few things in it and went for a drive.

The streets were Sunday evening quiet. No traffic to speak of, a lot of people off on vacation, others early to bed to get a jump on Monday morning. No ICE agents. No Major Crime Squad investigators. And Ollie's cruiser was parked outside the little cottage the town supplied for his residence.

Coast clear, I drove out of town and up Mount Pleasant Road, past the twisted black lines of Tom Mealy's skid marks, which still showed in the headlights. Up and over the top of the hill, I stashed my Pinkerton rental on the service road just inside a stretch of Forest Association land. I waited ten full minutes for my eyes to adjust to starlight, slung my pack over my shoulder, and walked along the edge of the woods until I got to the stump-pocked open section that Brian Grose had been clearing surreptitiously, until the Forestry Association threatened to sue him into oblivion. I worked my way through the trees quick action had spared and emerged on his side lawn.

The house was dark.

I stood there for a while, scoping out the swimming pool and the tennis court, not moving, except to slowly, quietly swat mosquitoes. Satisfied that I was alone, and not particularly surprised, I walked quickly across the grass, aiming for a sunroom that had a trellis. The house was quite new, of course, but some landscape architect had billed Grose to uproot another client's ancient wisteria vine and secured it to the trellis; and it had settled in nicely, as wisteria will. I assumed that the landscape designer or gardener did not know much about wisteria; or didn't particularly care that, left to its own devices, the wisteria would soon pull down the trellis and much of the sunroom with it. To me, it offered a stairway to the roof, if not the stars.

I changed out of boots into grippy-soled running soles, and put on pig-skin driving gloves, climbed onto the sunroom roof and from it onto the steeply pitched main roof where I crept precariously around for awhile looking for a skylight not wired to the burglar alarm.

The first two I found were the type that opened and they were wired. The fact that I knew how to circumvent a house alarm did not mean that I was good at it. It's a skill best honed by regular practice, but as a trustworthy Realtor with keys to many houses, it is very rare that I find myself breaking and entering in the illegal sense. Very rare. Which was why I was prowling the unpleasantly-steep roof for a fixed-glass skylight, the kind that didn't open for venting. I found two and chose the one that a toilet vent pipe suggested it lit a bathroom.

The pipe gave me something to brace against while I drilled holes in the plastic dome with a battery-powered Makita, inserted a Japanese key hole saw any Samurai would have been proud to own, and sawed four cuts that allowed me to remove the dome and duct-tape it to the shingles so it wouldn't slide down the roof into the patio. Under it, of course, was double-pane insulated glass. I taped it, scored its edges with a glass cutter, bashed it with the butt end of the Makita and pulled the top layer of glass away with the tape and secured it to the roof. Now came the part that could wake anyone sleeping in the house if I weren't careful, though I had no reason to believe that anyone was.

Again I taped glass. Again I scored the edges. In theory I could bash it open, but it would fall to the floor with an ungodly crash. There was a ninety-nine percent chance no one was around to hear. But just in case, I intended to keep as quiet as I had kept things so far. I drilled a hole through the tape, in the middle, then took a length of twine from my pack that I had pre-tied around the middle of a 10 penny finishing nail. I inserted the nail through the hole. When I pulled the string the nail spanned the hole, giving me a grip on the glass. I looped the twine around the vent pipe, and rapped the score lines with the Makita. The whole piece broke loose, quite suddenly, and hung from the twine.

I felt cool air rise from the room, grabbed the dangling taped glass, turned it diagonally and drew it up through the hole. Now, for the first time I turned on a light, a little Mag Lite, and shielding the narrow beam with my hands, discovered that I had managed to cut a hole in the roof over a hot tub.

It had a cover on it. God knew how strong it was, or if there was water in the tub. There had to be water in the tub. Brian hadn't planned to be shot in his mausoleum. He hadn't closed up his house. He had gone to the graveyard the Sunday before last to tour the Notables like the rest of Newbury and, unlike the rest of them, hadn't come back. So there had to be water in the damned thing.

On the other hand, everyone knows we live in an increasingly litigious society where the lawyers make the rules. Surely, hot tub covers, like swimming pool covers, had to be strong enough to hold an elephant. Disinclined to cell phone Grace Botsford at this late hour for an insurance agent's opinion, I swung my feet through the opening and grabbed the roof with my gloves, and took a chance. It was not a long drop so I wouldn't accelerate that much. I took additional comfort in the fact that while I'm not a lightweight, I'm not of Dennis or Albert Chevalley proportions, either.

I let go and immediately discovered that the cover would not withstand a lawsuit by the owner of an elephant; and that, while Brian Grose did not plan to get shot to death the Sunday before last, he had apparently not planned a warm soak later in the day, either, because the hot tub was anything but. It felt like I had fallen through the Ram Pasture skating pond in the dead of winter. God it was cold. I squished out, soaked from running shoes to waist band. The air conditioning which hadn't felt much cooler than the night breeze when I was dry, now felt like a Cape Horn gale.

I pulled off my shoes and socks and pants and wet underwear, grabbed a wonderfully thick towel from the rack and dried off. My shirt tails and the bottom of my sweatshirt clung in a chilly, wet way. I spotted a creamy white Turkish bathrobe, thick as the towel, pulled off the rest of my things, wrapped myself in the robe, and found a long hallway and padded down the stairs. If anyone asked, I was a privileged householder repairing to his library.

Which reminded me, I had left my backpack beside the hot tub. Halfway down the grand staircase I went back for the tools I would need to enter the library. Lock picking, like home alarm circumventing, was something I had been taught years and years ago, courtesy of the United States Navy, Office of Naval Intelligence. About all I remember of it was that lock picking is lot more difficult than rewiring an alarm, which was why I padded in robe and bare feet and pigskin driving gloves to the library door with little hope of opening it without a saw, though I vowed to at least try rather than wreck a perfectly fine door.

But it was not locked. The door was closed, as Lorraine had said. And the lock was the ASSA I had seen in her video. But when I tried the knob, it swung on quiet hinges. I stepped inside, cupped my Mag Lite to contain the beam and worked my way to the windows, where I found a switch that caused the drapes to slide almost soundlessly across the windows. Then I followed my Mag beam to the wall switches by the door, located a dimmer and brought the room lights up just bright enough to see shapes.

Like many modern libraries, it had no books. I exaggerate. Two narrow cases of uniformly bound leather volumes acted as a frame for a huge HDTV screen. It did house a handsome set of library steps and some beautiful library lamps and an antique library card catalog, and some library shelves filled with glass knickknacks.

A splendidly long and broad library table with carved legs and ornate, inlaid coaming filled one end of the room. On the table sprawled the reason Brian Grose had not allowed Lorraine Renner's camera in his library.

I felt behind for the wall switch to brighten the lights for a closer look. I felt, instead, something cold touch the back of my head.