Triple Witch (30 page)

I swung the bar again at the portion of old, unsalvageable, collapsing plaster I was bent on replacing. Then without warning a bright thing flew shiningly out of the hole at me, landing with a metallic
clink
on the bare floor.

It was a spoon, a silver teaspoon. The last time I’d seen one like it, bright silver in an elaborate pattern with a filigreed
M
on the handle, I’d been putting it back on the mantel from which it had again fallen, down in the dining room.

Possibly, I thought, there were two spoons: one there, one here.

But even then, with the bright morning sunshine pouring in through the tall, wavery-glassed windows, I didn’t think so.

Not really. I put the spoon in my pocket.

44
“Has Sam come back yet?” I asked Ellie.

While I was upstairs, Ellie had wiped down all the kitchen woodwork with Murphy’s Oil Soap, washed the windows, and begun making pesto out of approximately a bushel of fresh basil, which was what had been in the paper bag she’d been carrying when she arrived.

“No,” she said. “Victor, either.”

Out on the counter were a bottle of olive oil, a head of garlic, a chunk of Parmesan, and a pile of shelled walnuts. She had stripped the leaves from the basil and was stuffing them into the blender with the rest of the ingredients, and the kitchen smelled like heaven.

“You know,” she said, pouring olive oil into the blender, “we’re operating on a lot of blue-sky theory in
the Willoughby department. What we need, which we can’t seem to get, is facts.”

She let the rich, green mixture puree to a thick paste. “We need,” she finished, “Ned Montague.”

Spooning pesto into a freezer bag, she sealed it and put more ingredients into the blender, for another batch.

“I say we tell Ned that we know more than we do. Fake like mad, get him confused, tell him he’s going to get blamed for all of it, murders included, unless he tells us absolutely everything he knows, or even thinks he knows.”

“I doubt he’ll tell us anything, anyway. And what’s to stop him from telling Willoughby, afterwards, and Willoughby sending his British buddy to silence us? The way, maybe, he did the other three?”

Ellie frowned. “Well, there’s that little gun of yours,” she offered. Her confidence in me can be frightening.

“But no matter what happens,” she went on, “we need facts. Because when we do go to Arnold and the state police, they’ll need enough to be able to act fast, won’t they?”

She dusted her hands off. “So,” she finished, “do you want to call Ned? Or shall I?”

In the end, I let her do it. And while I was right about Ned being summoned back from his trip—he answered the phone, Ellie said, which he couldn’t have if he’d gone all the way to New York—I was wrong about him giving us the silent treatment.

One ultimatum from Ellie and one half-hour later, he was in my cellar, spilling his guts.

45
“I have a little girl,” Ned Montague said aggrievedly. “She needs an operation. Where was I going to get the money? These guys who work the docks, or on boats, they’re bigger than me, stronger. You can’t make money as a dockworker, anyway. Not,” he finished, “real money. The kind Willoughby’s got coming out of his ears.”

He looked up, his eyes gleaming weakly under the cellar worklamps. He’d insisted we come down here before he would talk, as if we’d wired the kitchen for secret recording, or something.

Which if I’d thought of it, I would have. But I hadn’t.

“So I said I’d drive the truck for him. What’s the harm? Everything was okay,” he added sullenly, “until you two came along.”

He turned toward me. “What the heck were you doing out there last night, anyway? He was already nervous, and now that you’ve got him all hot under the collar, there won’t be more trips for a long time, maybe never. And what do I do for income? Huh? Answer me that.”

“So you were getting paid to bring loads of money back in the truck, with the llamas for cover in case you got stopped.”

He shrugged miserably, in assent. “I didn’t even know it was money, at first. I don’t see how you two found out all this.”

“That’s why the trip checks,” I went on, not telling him we were guessing. “To make sure you
wouldn’t
get stopped on a silly violation like a bad turn signal or faulty brake light. The llamas were in case that happened anyway, just extra insurance.”

“What about the drugs?” Ellie asked. “Have you been making a little spare change off those, too? Maybe,” she added, “Ken had some left. Out at his trailer, after he died.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “let me make sure I’ve got this. Ken started out doing a little dope smuggling.”

Something about that still didn’t sound right to me, but I let it go for the moment. “Then Willoughby hired him. Same deal, but now Ken’s doing it in reverse: smuggling money out.”

Ned nodded.

“Once Ken was gone, you picked up the last of the heroin and sold it. Heroin that he’d been selling to kids around town, good kids basically, messing up their heads.” Nope. It didn’t sound right at all.

Ned gazed shamefacedly at the cellar floor. “Yeah, I got rid of the last of it. Found it when I went out there, stuffed in the glove box of that old car, sold it around, but only to the people who’d already been buying it.”

Great. Like that made it okay.

“But I didn’t,” he pleaded, “know how bad it would be, with people doing crimes to get the money for it. I just thought, hey, dumb kids want to get high, what do I care? And there isn’t going to be any more. So I thought, what’s the point of wasting it? But I don’t know anything about any of that other stuff. Tim and Kenny, or the girl.”

“Hallie,” I said. “Having some trouble remembering, are you, Ned?”

He nodded hard. “Well, I’m nervous. If any of this gets out, I could be in a lot of trouble. Even though all I did,
all
I did, was drive Mr. Willoughby’s truck. Hey, after it got loaded in New York, I never even looked inside.”

He looked back and forth at Ellie and me. “Never even,” he implored, “got
out
of the truck while I was down there. No,” he emphasized, “personal involvement.”

“So who killed them—Ken, Hallie, and Tim?”

“Ike Forepaugh,” he replied reluctantly. “It must have been him. Way I figure, Willoughby hired him to do it.”

“Why?” Ellie demanded. “Why would Willoughby want Ken dead?”

Ned sighed heavily. “I think he figured Ike was a better guy in the long run to do those boat runs. He was tougher and smarter. Not, you know, like Ken. And if any bigger things came up, problems, Ike was equipped. He’s a real bad dude.”

“Willoughby didn’t want Ken around after he fired him,” Ellie theorized aloud. “Ken might talk about the whole thing, and get Willoughby in trouble. So he wanted to get rid of him.”

Ned nodded sorrowfully. “I guess that must have been it.”

“What about Tim and Hallie?” I pressed. “Why would Ike kill them? Was it also on Willoughby’s orders?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know about the girl. But maybe Willoughby told Ike to get Tim, too, in case Ken had been talking to the old man.”

Tim had indeed been blabbering about Ken’s “big deal.” It was possible Willoughby had gotten wind of this.

“Bottom line, you drove a little truck and you sold a little heroin, and that was it,” I said.

Ned began nodding again. “That’s right. I just—”

A sound from the cellar steps interrupted him. “Isn’t that enough?” Peter Mulligan inquired harshly.

He was carrying a hunting rifle.

“Peter,” I said gently, much more calmly than I felt. “Peter, where did you get that?”

He glanced at me, annoyed. “Upstairs. I found it.”

“Here?” That couldn’t be right. Wade secured firearms, his own and any repair items in the house, at least as thoroughly as I did. So I thought Peter was confused, which considering the size of the weapon he was wielding did not reassure me.

But where he’d gotten it was less important than what he meant to do with it, just at the present moment.

“Peter, I want you to put the gun down.”

He didn’t, and he didn’t take his eyes off Ned, either. “You killed her. Ultimately, you’re the reason she died. And because of you my life is over, too. I lived,” he declaimed tragically, “for Hallie Quinn.”

Ned’s eyes looked ready to pop out on springs. “What do you want?” he sputtered frightenedly.

“Shut up. I’ve been listening to you,” Mulligan said. “I’ve heard what I needed to hear, that you sold heroin to Hallie. I begged her to get off it, and after Ken Mumford turned up dead, I thought finally she would. No more supply. But
you
”—he spat the final word venomously—“you kept selling it to her.”

He aimed the rifle. “You were behind the drugs all along.”

Which made, actually, no sense whatsoever. Until he got the job driving for Willoughby, Montague hadn’t had two extra pennies to rub together.

And neither had Ken. But Hallie had.

That glove box, I thought, in that old car. Ken’s trailer, so isolated, would have been perfect. Her room’s expensive decor, her not selling the silver medallion, yet having enough money to buy drugs and go regularly to Portland …

Ken had been doing the smuggling part, all right. But Hallie had been the brains of the operation, I’d have bet anything.

“I told her,” Mulligan ranted, waving the gun around, “I told her what would happen. That night on the seawall, I tried telling her one last time. But—”

“Peter,” I interrupted, “You didn’t tell me you talked to Hallie that night. You said you heard her arguing with someone else.”

Nobody had mentioned finding the medallion on Hallie’s body, either. “But it wasn’t someone else. It was you, wasn’t it? She was on the seawall that night, arguing with you.”

Suddenly he looked trapped. But fortified by the firepower he was holding, he tried bulling his way through
it. “
He
was the reason. I
told
her how much I loved her, I
tried
to make her see. She didn’t want to stop using and it was because of
him
.”

But I didn’t think so. “What did you do to convince her, Peter? Did you touch her? Maybe slap her, try waking her up to reality the way you did Corey Banks? Did you,” I proceeded carefully, “try pounding some sense into her?”

Just for an instant, that dead face came back to the land of the living. Peter looked at me, the way a drowning man looks at a life ring.

“Did your hands end up around her neck somehow? And somehow, by the time you had finished trying to convince Hallie to listen to you—Peter?” I asked it very gently.

“Peter, when you looked into her face for the last time, to see if she believed you … Peter, was that when you realized that Hallie was dead? Did you take the medallion, to remember her by?”

His face crumpled. “Hallie,” he muttered.

“Peter, do you have it now?”

Montague made a move.

“Get away!” Peter yelled, swinging the rifle at Montague.

“You’re lying,” I snapped at the boy, trying to bring him back to me. “Hallie wanted off drugs. She just didn’t want you.”

I was lying, too, partly. She hadn’t wanted anything but a way out of the small town she was stuck in, and she thought the money she was making would give it to her, with a little assist from Ken Mumford.

But if Peter would turn towards me, Ellie could jump him. Or if push really came to shove I could shoot him. The little .25 semiauto was right there in my pocket, and loaded; after the previous night, I thought I might never go anywhere without it again.

The Bisley was out, too; even full of dummies, it looked plenty threatening, which I’d thought might
come in handy. Trouble was, right now it was upstairs in my bag.

Besides, I didn’t want to point any gun at this kid unless I had to.

“I read your letters to her, Peter. Kind of short on things to amuse yourself with, aren’t you? Nothing to do but follow her around, spy on her. Like one of those stalkers you read about in the papers. That’s what people will say. Just another pathetic, delusional little sap.”

“Shut up!” He screamed it, his adolescent face taut with rage as he turned to me. “He made it happen, it wasn’t my fault, it was all because of him!”

He started toward Montague again, the rifle swinging wildly. Suddenly Ned moved faster than I’d have thought possible, seizing one of the heavy wooden shutters I’d been working on and bringing it down with a sickening
crack
onto Mulligan’s head.

Mulligan dropped as if shot, a trickle of blood leaking from his nose and another from his ear.

“Oh, my God,” Montague breathed. “He was going to shoot me!”

“Well, he’s not going to shoot you now, is he?” I snapped. “Get upstairs and call an ambulance.”

I knelt over Mulligan as Montague hesitated. “Listen, all the things we were talking about. Can we maybe forget about all that?”

“Get up there!” I bellowed at him, and he started to. But just then, a familiar voice sounded from the top of the stairs.

“Good heavens. What in the world are you people doing?”

It was Victor.

“The boy is hurt,” I told him. “Can you help him? We can call him an ambulance, but—”

But how long would it be before it got here, and once it got here, where would it take Mulligan? The nearest big-time surgical facility was, as I had emphasized to Victor in another context entirely, three hours
away. Looking at Mulligan, it was clear to me that by then he wouldn’t be a candidate for any kind of surgery other than the variety performed on autopsy tables.

Montague pushed past Victor, going to make the call.

“Wait. I’ll need you to tell them some things, when you talk to them.” Victor surveyed Mulligan, then came down the stairs and crouched over him, glancing at the broken shutter.

“This is blunt trauma?”

“Uh-huh. The kid was waving a rifle, not making much sense. So Montague bonked him. He hit him,” I added, “pretty hard.”

“No harder than I needed to,” Montague protested injuredly. “No harder than I needed to, to defend myself.”

“Shut up,” Victor advised him pleasantly. “Or I’ll cut out your
lingua glossa
.”