Wreck the Halls (17 page)

“And Merle didn't like it,” said Teddy, “that someone from away was cuttin’ into his customer base. Get it? Cuttin’ in? And Merle, he started talkin’ about Ben.” He smiled at his own joke. “Tales out of school, you might say,” he added, chuckling again.

“So Merle started some nasty rumor about Ben?” Could that explain the tongue references?

“Ayuh. Said Ben left bone chips in the meat. And other icky stuff I won't go into.” Teddy made a face. “Ended up that nobody wanted Ben Devine handling their edibles anymore.”

He wiped his hands on the bar towel, tossed it in the dirty linen hamper. “And Carmody started doing more business after that but it wasn't enough for him. He kept after Ben in the flappin’-his-yap department. Just kept talkin’.” He began flicking at the bottles behind the bar with a feather duster. “Hear Merle tell it, Ben was the real killer that O. J. Simpson's been lookin’ for.”

He flicked a bottle of Galliano, squinted at it, and flicked it again. The Harvey Wallbanger, I gathered, had been out of favor for a while. “Merle kept bad-mouthin’ Ben any way he could, and Ben didn't like it.”

All of which presented another motive neat as a butcher's package. So far by my count we had love for Peter Christie, money for Melinda, vengeance for Ben, and self-preservation for Faye Anne, herself; if there'd been an Olympic event for racking up mortal enemies, Merle would've won the gold.

“Why did Ben leave the college?” Ellie wanted to know. “Have you heard anything about that?”

“Well,” Teddy replied uncertainly, “what I heard was,
folks there thought he killed a fellow. But I don't know how much truth there really is in that.”

Ellie and I looked at each other. “Is that so?” she said mildly, waiting for more.

“Uh-huh. Some guy at the school he was at was s'posed to've disappeared. But they never found a body, was what I heard, and he never got charged with anything, Ben didn't. Only suspected hard, the story goes.”

“I’m surprised we've never heard about that,” I said.

Teddy shrugged. “You know how it is. Thing gets to be old news.” He waved at the street beyond La Sardina's front window. “And Ben keeps his head down pretty good. Guy's not around much, that's not the guy people're going to be gabbin’ about. ’Cept for Merle. And he's not going to anymore, either.”

Ted began rinsing the glasses: more hot water, then onto the rack for drying. I wanted to plunge my hands into the steaming soapy basin.

“Not,” he added, “that anyone was too hot on hearin’ Merle gab. And toward the end, there, I didn't have to, ’cause he was hangin’ out more at Duddy's. Glad to lose that business.” He picked up the rack of glasses, moved it toward a pad of towels he'd prepared for it. “Ben's an okay guy in the bar, here, though, the few times he's come in. Quiet drinker, not a smart-ass, and in my business I like that.”

He set the rack down. “Only thing is,” he added, “you don't want to bad-mouth that sister of his, Melinda. You know her, lives up to North End? That damn-fool woman, all skin and bones, never wears a jacket?”

We indicated that we did.

“Fella made the mistake once of mentioning her name wrong when Ben was in, I had to order a new bar mirror and a dozen beer glasses.”

“That's what I heard from George, too,” Ellie said to me, sotto voce.

Ted peeked at himself in the replacement mirror, patting a dark hairpiece so perfectly made and well-arranged you'd never have known he had it, but for the betraying gesture. “I guess Ben'd do about anything for that Melinda,” he said.

Or unless you'd known him before he got it; three months earlier when he'd first put it on, it had been the talk of the town. “Met her a few times, too, in here, and I didn't notice much pleasant about the woman, myself. But,” he let his hand drop self-consciously as he caught my eye in the mirror, “I guess that's true about blood bein’ thicker'n water.”

“Right,” Ellie agreed thoughtfully. “I guess it is, at that. Does he talk about anything when he's here? Ben, I mean?”

Teddy nodded. “His travels, after he got out of the service. ’Specially Africa and Belgium. When he does talk, it's about how he liked those places. But not,” Teddy added, “what he did there.”

“Africa and Belgium,” Ellie repeated. “Where diamonds come from, and where they get bought and sold.”

I stared at her in surprise. “You said you wanted some. So I went on-line and read up on them,” she told me, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

Which for her it was; she may be only an Eastport girl—a designation in which she takes justifiable pride—but she is the perfect living example of acting locally, thinking globally. If I wanted a little jar of pure radium, it's a good bet Ellie could find out how to get one for me.

“Yeah, well, he's not flashing a Diamond-Jim-sized bankroll around, that's for sure,” Teddy commented. “Two beers, max. Not the fancy stuff, either. Just whatever's on tap.” He dumped Ben's ashtray in a metal container he kept for the purpose, as we gathered our things to go.

“Not very productive,” Ellie commented as we stepped out the door into the icy wind rushing off the harbor, and she was right:

For all Ben's apparent willingness to meet with us—we'd called Melinda's, and he'd surprised us by being there and coming down to the bar on very short notice—all he'd really given us was a silent warning: that he wanted to be left alone.

And that we'd better, if we knew what was good for us. Other than that, we went out into the cold, bright day no wiser than before.

Which was very unwise indeed.

Ellie and I
parted outside La Sardina; she had a load of nails and tar paper coming for her kitchen roof work, and George was out scalloping, again.

Different boat, of course. “He says after a close call like that, if you don't go back out right away, you never will,” Ellie said. “He says you'll walk around drowned on dry land, the rest of your life.”

Which I thought was better than the alternative, but never mind; George, we both knew, would work till he dropped or until someone poleaxed him. And at least he wasn't feeding whole trees into the debarking machine over on the mainland, which Victor always said was a job so dangerous that any man who worked at it should bank his own blood, as a precaution.

So she went home to take delivery of rebuilding materials and I went back to my own house, which in my absence had begun smelling like a cat-food factory in the middle of July.

Well, it was better than the blood smell.

Still… a lot like a cat-food factory.

“Hi,” Wade said cheerfully as I came in, dropping a bay leaf into an enormous steaming kettle on the stove and replacing the lid. His face was like a six-year-old's on Christmas morning.

“Mmm,” I said, sniffing. “Smells… interesting.”

It was one word for it. I put my arms around him, reminded again of one of those whole trees; Wade is the sort of man whose muscles don't show on the outside, particularly.

“Salt fish dinner,” he said, peeking into the pot once more. A wave of ferociously potent aroma steamed up into my face; I reeled back.

“In the old days, people around here used to live on salt fish all winter.” He started peeling another potato. On the counter already were a whole quartered cabbage, a jar of pearl onions, and a pound of bacon.

“They used to survive crossing the Rocky Mountains by eating their shoes, too,” I commented. “And sometimes by eating each other.”

He only grinned. “You'll see,” he said, draining the onions and separating the slices of bacon, laying them in the cast-iron skillet. The smell of frying began partly obliterating the aroma of fish.

But only partly. “My uncle,” he confided enthusiastically, “used to make this all the time.”

Uh-oh. If you want to get me really doubtful about a food item, tell me your uncle used to cook it. “My uncle used to cook things, too,” I said, washing my hands at the sink. “Usually they were things that he'd hit with a load of buckshot that could've blown a hole right through the side of the barn.”

Also, the things were usually squirrels, these being the only live creatures in the county without the sense to hide when my uncle got out the shotgun. Mothers kept their children indoors when they heard him blasting away with it, cursing when he missed and rebel-yelling on the few occasions when he didn't.

Back then, I’d hated squirrel. I saw it as a symbol of all that I’d lost, along with my parents: eating stuff that I had to pick the buckshot out of before I could chew it. But when I
moved back up North and saw the fat, half-tame ones gamboling in the parks, I’ll admit I felt comforted, knowing that if worse came to worst at least I would never lack protein.

“Anyway,” Wade said, “it has to simmer for a while.”

“How long?” I looked around at the house I lived in now: high ceilings, generous rooms, and everywhere that sense of balance and proportion like an elegantly solved equation. Then I glanced into the telephone alcove. The machine was blinking.

“Oh, about fifteen hours,” Wade answered, meaning the fish. “You change the water three times,” he added matter-of-factly. “To get the salt out and make it nice and tender.” He rinsed the jar the onions had come in, and tossed out the fish wrappings.

“Really.” I turned my back on the dratted phone, cautiously approaching a bit of salt fish that hadn't made it into the pot. Picking it up, I touched my tongue to it very briefly, whereupon every single cell in my body absorbed approximately twelve times the lethal amount of sodium.

“Gack,” I said, grabbing a glass from the cabinet. Also, that salt fish was so hard you could have ground it up and spread it on the roads; it would have given traction while dissolving the ice.

And the pavement beneath. “It will be a lot better,” Wade said gently, “after it's cooked.”

“I hope so,” I gasped between big, salt-diluting gulps of water. The machine was still blinking at me. “Where's Sam? And doesn't anyone answer the phone in this house except me?”

“Down at the post office waiting for a package. Him and Tommy, all excited about something they ordered on-line for Sam's school project, supposed to come yesterday but now they think it's coming today. And I’d have answered it but I wasn't here, and no one ever calls me on that line, anyway, do they?”

He forked the bacon strips out of the pan, blotted them on a pad of paper towels and wrapped them in foil, finally put the drained onions back in the jar and capped it, and put it away. When Wade cooks, it's like someone preparing for a rocket launch.

Which I sincerely hoped our salt fish dinner experience was not going to resemble. “Wouldn't you rather know what you're ignoring?” he added, angling his head at the telephone alcove.

I could've asked him the same. The answer was similar, too: no. But that little red light would keep on winking slyly at me until I found out. So I pressed the play button and the first call was Victor, of course, moaning yet again about his romantic trouble, the subject of which I found as interesting as the smell of that fish.

The second call was from Melinda Devine, who was becoming as unwelcome and seemingly ever-present to me, lately, as Willetta Abrams was to my long-suffering—and long-winded—ex-husband.

The third call was from Faye Anne Carmody's court-appointed lawyer, Geofrey Claiborn.

Having a defense
lawyer who believes you is in my opinion highly overrated. The idea, when it comes to lawyers, is to have one who can get other people to believe you. And in that department, as in so many others, lately, Faye Anne Carmody was apparently out of luck.

“Three hundred thousand,” said Claiborn when I called him back. He sounded about fourteen years old. “A chunk in cash, the rest against real property.”

As he was speaking it came over me again suddenly, the thing I’d been missing until I’d seen Ellie's photograph album: that Faye Anne was as real, as physically real and in
trouble as the men who had been on that doomed boat last night.

“I argued for less,” Geofrey Claiborn said.

Well, of course he had. I sat down in the phone alcove. Faye Anne was sitting somewhere, now, too; the wings of disaster had not merely brushed her. They enfolded her, holding her in their dark embrace.

“… lucky to get any bail at all,” Geofrey was saying. “But they'll probably revoke it altogether, you know, when the DA gets his ducks in a row, ups the charge, and gets himself a grand jury indictment.”

There's no bail, in Maine, for capital murder: the flip side, I guess, to there being no capital punishment, either. But in Eastport, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar bail judgment is equivalent to requiring the accused to put up a lung and a kidney. Any dim thought I might've had about getting Faye Anne out of custody for the duration went right out the window.

“But the part about cutting the guy into pieces hit hard,” the young attorney went on. “The judge says it was heinous.”

“Yeah, well, no arguing with that.”

I sat there struck with the unwanted realization that had come over me. In each other's hands. “So what's next?”

“Well, there'll be a bunch more hearings. What that'll be, the judge will send the case along to Superior Court. See, in Maine we have a two-tiered system where…”

I knew about the two-tiered system: little crimes, local court. Serious crimes, Superior Court. Maine has a pool of judges who travel around on a regular schedule to the district courts, mostly for the formality of hearing people plead out to nonviolent crimes: DUI, hunting and fishing violations, minor auto stuff, and the ubiquitous “theft by unauthorized taking,” which covered all kinds of sticky-fingered activities.

But this was the big time. “Then there'll be the trial, of course. It'll probably take a couple of days, unless she decides to plead guilty. Then…”

“Wait a minute.” I gathered myself together. “A couple of days? I mean, I know she can't afford all the expensive bells and whistles.”

If she could have, the first thing she'd have done would've been to hire an attorney, or Ellie would have gone out and hired one for her, not have waited until the court appointed one.

“What kind of defense are you planning, Geofrey, one built of Tinkertoys?”