The Coal Black Asphalt Tomb: A Berger and Mitry Mystery (Berger and Mitry Mysteries) (2 page)

“I’m sure it will.”

“The boys at public works can take care of the sidewalks after they’re gone.”

“I’m sure they can.”

“But step one is those darned trees.” Glynis puffed out her cheeks. “And you know how irrational some folks can get about such things. Don’t get me wrong: I understand about wanting to keep things as they are. But great gosh almighty, we’re talking about three half-dead maples, not the lighthouse out on Big Sister. Four different licensed arborists have pronounced them diseased. The darned things are likely to come crashing down on the power lines any day now. They
have
to go. But certain people refuse to face facts.” Glynis glanced up and down the hallway, then lowered her voice. “My mother has heard a rumor…”

“What kind of rumor?”

“A few of the old-timers are talking about staging an Occupy Wall Street type of protest. Meaning there may be a small, tasteful stink when the tree crew shows up this morning. I need you there in case it gets unruly, Des. Not that I think it will. But I’ll feel better if you’re there.”

“I’ll be there. Do you have any idea who’s leading the protest?”

“A very good idea. It’s Sheila Enman.”

“The old schoolteacher?”

“Old battleship is more like it. Apparently, those trees are very special to her. God knows why. She’s been telling people that we’ll have to remove them over her dead body. Sheila is ninety-four years old. Can’t get around without a walker. Can’t drive a car. I can’t imagine how she’ll even get there from her house.”

Des showed Glynis her smile. “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea how.”

C
HAPTER
2

S
CAREEEEEEEE …

Mitch had been up since well before dawn in his antique post-and-beam caretaker’s cottage out on Big Sister Island. A big fire was roaring in his fieldstone fireplace and at this very moment none other than Mr. James Brown himself was exhorting him to “Get on up” by way of the digitally remastered funk classic “Sex Machine,” which Mitch had discovered was absolutely incredible to sit in with on his sky blue Fender Stratocaster with its monster stack of twin reverb amps. Feeling it, bringing it, blasting his riffs off of Bootsy Collins’s thudding funkadelic bass.

Eeeee-yahhhhhh …

By the time the sun came up Mitch had already devoted thirty minutes to his yoga practice, powered down a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal and watered the tiny green shoots that were germinating in seed trays under the grow light in his bay window. Then he’d polished off one of the two freewheeling essays he wrote every week for the e-zine he’d gone to work for after he’d resigned as lead film critic for what used to be New York’s most distinguished newspaper before it was gobbled up by an evil media empire. Today’s essay, “The Unbearable Lightness of Spencer Tracy,” was a reflection on how it was possible that a man who’d been universally lauded as the greatest actor of his generation, an Oscar nominee for Best Actor a record nine times and back-to-back winner in 1937 and 1938 for
Captains Courageous
and
Boys Town
, didn’t happen to be the star of
one
movie that was on anyone’s top ten, top twenty or even top fifty list of the greatest English-language movies of all time. Even those fondly remembered comedies Tracy had made with Katharine Hepburn such as
Adam’s Rib
and
Pat and Mike
were stale beer compared to the fizzy champagne of
Bringing Up Baby
, the screwball classic she’d made with Cary Grant—who never won an Oscar. Meanwhile Joseph Cotten, who was never even nominated for an Oscar, had starred in two of the greatest movies of all time:
Citizen Kane
and
The Third Man
. And Dana Andrews, no one’s idea of an Oscar-caliber talent, had played the male lead in two of Hollywood’s most beloved classics:
The Best Years of Our Lives
and
Laura
. So what was the deal? Had Tracy been overrated at the time? Were Cotten and Andrews simply lucky to have landed in such great movies? Or were those movies great because they were in them? For a screening-room rat like Mitch, such questions were a gourmet meal he could feast upon for hours.

Scarreeeeeeee …

In the silence after the final emphatic note of “Sex Machine” Mitch heard a thud against his door. Quirt, Mitch’s lean, mean outdoor hunter, was announcing his proud return home by banging his hard little head against the door. Mitch opened it and was immensely gratified to find a fresh-killed bunny on the welcome mat, sans head.

“Why, thank you, Quirt,” he exclaimed as the cat darted inside to the kibble bowl that he shared with Clemmie, who seldom roamed outside or went after anything more menacing than a dust bunny. “I feel cherished.”

Quirt had been bringing Mitch a gift every morning for the past week. April was officially headless-bunny season out on Big Sister Island, the forty wooded acres of Yankee paradise that Mitch was lucky to call home. There were five houses on the island, not counting the old lighthouse—the second oldest in New England—and his own two hundred-year-old post-and-beam caretaker’s cottage. The island had its own beach, tennis court and dock. A rickety quarter-mile wooden causeway connected it to the mainland at the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve.

Mitch put on a heavy sweater and work boots and went tromping out into the chilly morning fog on burial detail, inhaling the fresh sea air. The deep snow cover from the long, hard winter was gone. The ground had thawed. He could smell the moist, fertile earth. The snowdrops and daffodils were up. The maple trees in the woods were showing their red buds.

By the time he got back to his cottage, Bitsy Peck, his neighbor and garden guru, had arrived with her garden cart laden with cold frames for his seedlings. Bitsy was a round, snub-nosed, bustling little woman in her fifties who had welcomed Mitch from the day he moved out to Big Sister.

“It’s time to force your little charges out into the great outdoors,” she informed him, standing there in his driveway in her denim overalls, floppy hat and garden clogs. “I’ve also brought you some extra cabbage seedlings. You need to grow
a lot
of cabbage this year, Mitch. More and more studies are finding that sauerkraut is a powerful natural aphrodisiac.”

“And you’re telling me this because…”

“Des is a big healthy girl. I want you to be able to keep up with her.”

“Thank you, Bitsy. I think. But I don’t know how to make sauerkraut.”

“Not a problem, I can teach you. Believe me, by this fall you’ll be pickling like a master.”

Bitsy was always happy to share her garden wisdom. Also her insider’s knowledge of Dorset. There wasn’t anyone or anything she didn’t know about. It was the Pecks who’d first settled Dorset way back in the mid-1600s. Bitsy lived alone in her mammoth, natural-shingled house with its turrets and sleeping porches and amazing water views in every direction. Her husband, Redfield, was no longer around. And her daughter, Becca, a recovering heroin addict, had moved out to San Francisco. Mostly, the lady gardened. Hundreds of species of flowers, herbs and vegetables grew in her terraced beds. Gardening kept her sane. Or at least sane by Dorset standards.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Mitch said, steering her toward the muddy clearing where he had his picnic table and Adirondack chairs. The soil underneath them had gotten so compacted that grass would no longer grow there. “What would you think about me putting in a patio here?”

“Why, I think it would be wonderful,” she exclaimed. “And I have
all
sorts of bluestone left over from the last walkway I put in. It’s just taking up space in my barn. I’ll bet we can fashion something that’ll be just right for you. I’ll stop by later this afternoon and we can conversate about it.”

“We can what?”

“Conversate.”

“Bitsy, that’s not a real word.”

“It mostly certainly is. Becca uses it in her e-mails to me all of the time.”

“That doesn’t make it a real word. We
converse
. We don’t
conversate
.”

Bitsy heaved her chest at him impatiently. “Mitch, we don’t have time for this right now. Not if we’re going to be there before ten.”

He glanced at his watch. “You’re right. If I don’t pick up my prize package by 9:30, she’ll blow a gasket. I’d better scoot.”

“Me, too. I’ve got at least five very anxious people waiting for me at the senior center.” She grinned at him conspiratorially. “Why do I feel like we’re plotting to overthrow the government?”

Mitch grinned right back at her. “Because we are.”

*   *   *

His prize package, a ninety-four-year-old retired high school English teacher named Sheila Enman, lived in the lush farm country north of the village, in an old red mill house that was built right out over the Eight Mile River at the base of a twenty-foot waterfall. Sheila had lived there since she was a little girl. Back in those days they generated their own electricity, she’d once told him. And Sheila had attended an actual one-room schoolhouse.

The morning fog was starting to burn off as Mitch piloted his bulbous kidney-colored 1956 Studebaker pickup up Route 156, two hands on the wheel and one of his new toothpicks parked snugly in the corner of his mouth. Hawks circled lazily overhead. Depending on where his gaze fell it was either winter or spring. The magnolias, weeping cherries and Korean azaleas were already in full bloom while the oaks and birches remained bare and iron gray. The wild blackberry, lilac and forsythia that grew in a tangle alongside of the road had just begun to green up.

When he arrived at the red mill house Mitch found the old white-haired schoolteacher standing in the driveway waiting for him, her knobby, arthritic hands clutching her walker for dear life.

“It’s about time you got here,” she barked at him fiercely. “I was afraid you weren’t going to show up.”

“I told you I’d be here, Sheila.”

“Mitch, men have been disappointing me for more than eighty years. Forgive me if I got dubious.”

He helped her into his truck, depositing her walker and shoulder bag in back. The shoulder bag was extremely heavy. It also clanked when he set it down. He jumped back in and started his way back down Route 156, Sheila riding next to him in her ratty yellow cardigan, dark blue slacks and bone-colored orthopedic shoes.

Sheila was a classic cranky Yankee—feisty, opinionated and stubborn beyond belief. But once Mitch got to know her he discovered that she was a sweetie. And sharp as can be. Age hadn’t slowed her mind one bit, just her big-boned body. She’d had a bad hip for years but refused hip replacement surgery. Also refused to abandon her house for an assisted-living facility. Mitch brought her groceries three times a week, picked up her mail at the post office, shoveled her driveway and did odd jobs around the house for her. She paid him with tubs of her homemade tapioca pudding. As far as he was concerned, he was getting the best of the deal.

“I made some calls,” he informed her as they drove along. “Channels Three, Four, Eight and Nine.”

She looked at him hopefully. “Do you think they’ll send someone?”

“I know they will. Local news broadcasts are all about visuals. We’re giving them a visual. It’s tailor-made for them.”

“Good. Because I will not be shoved aside.”

“Not to worry, Sheila. You won’t be.”

She continued to look at him. Or, more specifically, at his new toothpick.

“Something the matter?”

“Why, no,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

Bitsy beat him there. When Mitch pulled up she and her minivan load of five angry, sign-wielding old ladies were already gathered outside of the Congregational Church holding their
SAVE OUR TREES
signs. He fetched Sheila’s walker and shoulder bag for her and dutifully helped her do what she’d come to do—which was chain and padlock herself to one of the three gnarly old maples out front like a nonagenarian eco-freak, her walker positioned before her for support.

Their timing was excellent. Less than a minute after Mitch had snapped the padlock shut for her, a big bucket truck from Shoreline Tree Service came rolling up, along with a truck towing a wood chipper. Two more vehicles trailed close behind them. One was a town-owned Toyota driven by Dorset’s first selectwoman, the other a Crown Vic cruiser piloted by Mitch’s ladylove.

“Good morning, Master Sergeant,” he said, beaming at her as she strode across the lawn toward him, squaring her big Smokey hat on her head. “Would you slap me down if I mentioned how pert you look today?”

Des narrowed her pale green eyes at him. “Did you just say
pert
? I don’t do
pert
. Fluffy little princesses named Amber do.…” She trailed off, frowning at his new toothpick.

“Something wrong?”

“Why, no,” she replied as the Channel Three news van pulled up. The Channel Eight van was right behind it. “What are
they
doing here?”

“Someone sort of called them.”

“Someone sort of media savvy?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of like yourself?”

“Well, yes, now that you mention it.”

“Mitch, please tell me why you did this.”

“Because Sheila asked me to. What was I going to tell her—no?”

The vans from Channel Four and Channel 9 arrived now. As the news crews got set up, a tall young guy with a camera came out of the offices of
The Gazette
, just down the street, and started taking photographs. What with the half-dozen protestors, Mitch, Bitsy and the guys from the tree crew it was turning into a full-fledged crowd by Dorset standards.

Glynis was not pleased. In fact, the first selectwoman was downright steamed. She marched right over to Sheila and declared, “This won’t accomplish a thing, Miss Enman. These trees are diseased and dying. They have to make way.”

“I’m diseased and dying, too,” Sheila roared in response as the TV cameras rolled. “Are you going to haul me away, too? And don’t you dare lecture me, Glynis. I can still remember you running around at the Memorial Day parade with your diaper full of poop.”