Winter at the Door (7 page)

Now rolling down deserted Main Street no-hands, he pulled a half-smoked roach from his jacket pocket, lit up with a quick, deft flick of his Bic, and, while inhaling the sweet, harsh smoke, approached the turn at the potato barn on the corner.

The barn loomed huge and silent, the harsh white security light on its rickety porch casting weirdly angled shadows from the posts that held up its shingled overhang. Decades of stomping by the booted feet of laborers had worn deep cups in the granite slabs of its front steps; from its windows, tall and narrow like vertically slitted eyes, he could imagine dark watchers peering.

Then he was past it and around onto the dark, unpaved lane. Slowing, he rolled past small houses where people were already asleep in front of TVs flickering vividly behind drawn curtains, until at the end he braked his bike silently to a halt.

This last house on the street was the one the cop lady had rented; he knew because his mother had overheard it in the Food King, and mentioned it at dinner just as a matter of general interest. Now the house was completely dark, nothing moving in it or on the street outside. Standing there finishing up the roach, he thought that most of the people asleep in these houses might as well remain there, dreaming forever.

If they even remembered how. Certainly there was nothing to dream about in Bearkill, Maine. Nothing to get up for, either. Not unless you really, really wanted something.

Out, for instance.

And you’d come up with a way to get it. Turning toward the other end of the street, he spotted a familiar van sitting under the corner streetlight by the hulking shape of the potato barn.

Watch her
.

Lizzie’s office in Bearkill looked no more encouraging the next morning than it had the day before. But she’d already decided what to do about that.

Getting the hell out of Dodge would be my first choice
, she thought wryly, but instead, after switching on the lights for an even better view of the drab space, she went back outside again and walked down the chilly street to the Food King.

Paying for a coffee from the deli in the store, she met the cashier’s curious gaze. “Do you happen to know anyone around here who does chores? Cleaning, painting?”

The clerk blinked twice. “You stay right there.”

The woman in line behind Lizzie wore an oversized U. Maine sweatshirt, pink flannel PJ pants with the silhouette of a black cat and the phrase
BAD KITTY
repeated on them, and pink plaid sneakers.

“Hey,” she protested at the delay.

The cashier held a hand up, the register’s phone to her ear. “I don’t know what it pays,” she said into it in tones of strained patience. “You’ll need to work that out with her.”

The woman in the pink PJ pants tapped her wrist impatiently with an index finger, then seemed to notice Lizzie.

“Terrible service in here,” she confided. “I can remember when it was much better.”

The cashier hung up. “Christ on a crutch, Cynthia, you’re so old you can remember the animals lining up two by two.”

She thrust change at the woman, who hurried out with her purchases. Then the cashier turned back to Lizzie. “Okay, my kid’s coming down here to work for you.”

And before Lizzie could protest that she’d meant an adult who had some skills and experience, someone who could do painting and carpet laying and maybe even a few repairs, the woman added:

“He’s smart.” She said this like it was something Lizzie was going to have to make allowances for.

“But he’s big, he can lift stuff, and he’s got nothing on his record, not even any points on his driver’s license.”

“I just need him for chores, not to be a getaway driver,” Lizzie joked. But humor wasn’t the cashier’s strong point.

“Whatever. I’m just telling you he’s honest, mostly. You won’t have to worry about him ripping you off or anything.”

On that ringing endorsement, Lizzie agreed to at least talk to the kid, who flew up on his bike out in front of her office ten minutes later, and who turned out to be Tattoo Kid.

Or Spud, as he informed her that he was called.

“He was as surprised as I was,” said Lizzie a few hours later, following Cody Chevrier up a long dirt driveway.

It was just after noon, the pale blue shadows of the big old trees already beginning to lengthen and the tannic-scented air out here growing even colder.

“Yeah, well,” said Chevrier over his shoulder. Ahead of him a huge black and tan hound that the sheriff had brought with him ambled along, sniffing. The dog had long, glossy ears and great big black-toenailed paws. Drool hung gleaming from its lips.

“Spud’s different. Kind of a misfit, all that stuff stuck in him, the jewelry and piercings, and the tattoos. Feel sorry for the kid, tell
you the truth. I think he’s got a brain in that big head of his, somewhere.”

Chevrier paused, considering. “Old man’s a prick, I can tell you that much. But Spud’s never given anybody any serious trouble that I ever heard. You could do worse.”

The dog scrambled up onto the screened porch of the mobile home at the top of the drive, nosing the screen door open as if he’d done it before and slipping eagerly inside.

“I hear you had some excitement in town last night,” said Chevrier.

Area 51, he meant. She still had the little gun. “Yeah. Is there a problem?” They followed the dog in to where a bentwood rocker and a wicker chair faced a table with magazines on it.

“Nope. Henry’s pretty ticked off, I saw him in the diner this morning. And his knee hurts, I had to talk him out of visiting you about it.”

Missy had predicted as much. “Yeah, well, he’s lucky it’s just his knee. But seriously, do I need to …”

Hey, a citizen had been injured, Chevrier could very well be getting flak from somewhere about it.

But he shook his head. “You’re fine. Missy Brantwell’s a good friend to have. Her dad’s an important guy around here, has a big farm and he keeps a lot of people employed on it.”

She absorbed this without comment. For one thing, she wasn’t sure Missy felt the least bit friendly. And anyway:

“Do me a favor. Next time, don’t talk Henry out of visiting me, all right? He’s got a quarrel with me, I’ll deal with it.”

She pulled Henry’s little gun out of her bag. “Meanwhile you might want to find a reason not to give this back to him.”

He took it, looking pleased at the discovery that someone had managed to disarm Henry. “Fair enough. He’s got an old felony record, no big deal nowdays, but he’s not supposed to be having one of these at all.”

But he clearly didn’t want to make an issue of it any more than she did. “Anyway, this is Carl Bogart’s place.”

Chevrier looked around the screen porch. “He was the sheriff before I got the job, then his wife, Audrey, died not long after he retired.
Started reloading shotgun shells and repairing guns for people, putting sights and scopes on them, and so on.”

He stopped, frowning. “And then about two weeks ago he put a bullet in his head. Supposedly.”

“Supposedly?” No one had touched the house, or at least not out here on the porch. On the table lay a pair of men’s trifocals with tortoiseshell rims and lenses as thick and distorting as the eyepiece in a security peephole.

She glanced questioningly at Chevrier, who nodded. “Yeah, he had the cataracts pretty bad. S’posed to get ’em out, but he kept putting it off. Then—”

He made an explosion gesture with his hands. “Kerblooie. His weapon started looking like a better solution to him. So sayeth our county medical examiner.”

“Only you don’t think so.” She sat in the wicker chair. The dog padded around the porch, sniffing, then came and dropped his head heavily into her lap, still drooling.

The dog’s name was Rascal, and he smelled worse than any dog she’d ever met, like old socks mixed with tuna fish.

“Nope,” said Chevrier. The rocker creaked as he sat.

“In fact I know he didn’t. Try telling that to anyone else, though,” he added, reaching out to smooth the dog’s long ears.

“What do you mean?” Lord, but the dog reeked: his breath, mostly, she realized. Lifting the animal’s upper lip with a finger, she exposed his reddened gum line and his teeth, brown with tartar.

Chevrier sighed. “I mean he wouldn’t have done it, that’s what,” he replied, clearly tired of having to say it.

Especially when no one listened. It hit her that maybe he was a little nutty on this topic, that maybe he’d gotten her up here to support him in a theory that everyone else had already written off as unbelievable.

Unbelievable and also wrong, the first not necessarily being the same as the second, in her experience. But: “Why?”

The dog dragged its muzzle from her lap and sank to the floor. Outside, afternoon crept over the clearing, the silent shadows lengthening across the grass freckled with fallen leaves.

A breeze rattled the bare branches nearby. The dog’s warmth felt good on her feet. “How can you be so sure he didn’t …”

“Insurance.” Chevrier sounded certain. “He had all the usual benefits, including the life insurance he’d had since he came on the job. But about a year ago he called me, asked me to drive him to a doctor in Montreal.”

She turned in surprise. “His doctor was in Canada? Why? And why couldn’t he drive himself, was he that sick?”

Chevrier shook his head. “We’re pretty close to Canada, you know. People go back and forth all the time. And no, he wasn’t sick that anyone knew. But on the way up there he swore me to secrecy and then he dropped a bomb on me. He thought he had lung cancer. He’d been suspecting it for a few months.”

The sheriff sighed. “So first he’d bought himself a big new policy, got it all set up and squared away, then he waited a few months before getting his suspicions confirmed so the insurance company couldn’t get out of paying benefits on account of a preexisting condition.”

“Which he had? He was right about the cancer?”

Chevrier nodded again, grimly. “Yup. He’d done his homework about it, too—doctor in Montreal turned out to be one of the top guys for that kind of a tumor. But there wasn’t a whole lot that even he was going to be able to do for old Carl.”

“Because he’d had to wait,” she guessed. “So as not to have that preexisting condition problem …”

“Yeah.” Chevrier stuck his hands in his pockets, recalling it. “And while he was waiting, this big tumor of his was growing, getting even bigger until it was blocking off half his windpipe.”

She got up, zipped her jacket, and shivered inside it. “That kind of thing can get ugly. It must’ve been hard for him.”

“Yeah. He was uncomfortable. Struggling, not to put too fine a point on it. But I’m telling you, the guy was determined.”

Not to kill himself, Chevrier meant. He saw her getting it. “Yeah, because if he committed suicide, the insurance wouldn’t pay off.” He went on:

“Bogie had a grandchild with birth defects, see? Her care’s very
expensive. The death payout on the policy would’ve given his son and daughter-in-law a break. On the money angle, anyway.”

“But not anymore.” She sniffed at her hands; not only did the dog stink, but now so did she: hands, clothes … everywhere that Rascal had touched radiated the stench of Eau de Mutt.

Chevrier got up. “No,” he said glumly, shoulders slumped. “I talked to the son. They’re probably going to lose their house and move here, the kid’ll have to quit her special school and therapy.”

He looked around at the roughly furnished porch and the unkempt yard outside, frowning as if trying to imagine how a disabled kid would cope in it. “He would never have let that happen.”

Probably this place could be cozy at night with the lamps on, but now in the bluish light of a cold autumn afternoon the porch felt lonely and discouraging.

“How long did he have?”

Rascal got up, stretched, and padded to the screen door, where he stood watching a squirrel race back and forth on the driveway. The dog’s tail kept time with the squirrel’s activity.

“To live?” Chevrier laughed without humor. “To look at him, you’d still have thought it might be forever. But he told me the doctors said a month, maybe a couple of weeks. Said it would be fast, once it really all started to go south. But the insurance company investigators said the pain made him put a bullet in his head instead.”

He made a face. “Course they did. It’s in the company’s own interest to think that’s what happened, isn’t it?”

Getting up, he pulled open the screen door. Rascal scrambled out, ran to the tree where the squirrel had taken refuge just in time, and stood there gazing up yearningly at it.

“So they don’t have to pay out. And it’s true, he did try to commit fraud on them, I’m not denying that part. But I’ll tell you what,” said Chevrier with sudden fierceness, his eyes on the dog.

“I knew Carl Bogart a long time. I know what kind of cop he was and what kind of man he was, and I know for a fact that he could have done a whole damned year with a red-hot poker stuck in him if it meant his family would be better off afterwards.”

He turned toward her, his eyes gleaming moistly in the light filtering in through the porch screen. Behind him, Rascal tipped his head as if inviting the squirrel down.

“And I’m telling you that Carl didn’t kill himself, no matter how well someone set it up to make it look like he did.”

He sighed heavily. “Anyway, I just wanted you to see Carl’s place, get a feeling for what kind of guy he was.”

So that was it. Neat, sweet, and complete, as her old Boston patrol partner Liam O’Donnell used to say. Chevrier thought that somebody had killed his friend.

Just not
completely
complete. “There are,” she said slowly, wanting to be sure she understood, “three others like this? Cops dead, you don’t like the explanations?”

Three of them now that he’d told her about, and one more. He nodded slowly and with appreciation for the unlikeliness of it. “Yeah. You’ve been thinking about it, huh?”

She had. It had been running along in the back of her mind ever since he told her the real reason he’d hired her here. An experienced murder cop was about as useful as a fish on a bicycle in Bearkill—