McMansion (13 page)

“He said that you would be really something after you learned to pivot in the direction the situation demanded.”

“Yeah, well I didn't.”

“Until you drove the new machines?”

Jeff Kimball reached into his jump suit to scratch. “Well that's the weird thing. Even with the joysticks, I usually rotated left. So maybe he was on to something. Funny. I never thought about that until you asked.”

“So he wasn't too old-fashioned to teach you?”

“I didn't mean it that way. Sherman gave me a good start. I mean my dad was supposed to teach me, but he was too busy.”

I sat up straight. “Your father was supposed to teach you?”

“He got busy. He had a big deal going down.”

“I wasn't aware your father could drive a bulldozer.”

“Oh, yeah. He worked his way through college. Driving them in the summers. One time he took a whole year off working on an Interstate. Federal money is really big. Union. He got in the union, he was doing fine.”

“But he was too busy to teach you. And you'd seen Sherman at high school career day?”

“You should have seen him at the school. He was all snaggily toothed. Everybody was afraid of him. Even the teachers. But I liked him. He treated me like…he treated me like I wasn't shit. I felt bad when he went to jail.”

“He's out on parole.”

“Oh, yeah? Good. I hadn't heard. I was away.”

“Mind me asking where?”

“All over. Arizona. Maryland. Pennsylvania.”

“I spoke with Jennifer.”

I caught the sidelong flash in his eye again. I trust nobody. “Yeah, she told me she was going to see you.”

“She thinks you're innocent.”

“I am, for God's sake.”

“Unfortunately she couldn't offer anything to prove that.”

“How could she?” Jeff asked. “She wasn't here.”

“What happened to your eye?”

“Some asshole slugged me.”

“You want me to try to get you transferred or put into protective?”

“He won't do it again.”

“You sure?”

Jeff raised his left hand, which he had been holding under the table. A row of cuts across his big knuckles suggested the slugger would leave the jail with fewer teeth than he had entered. “I'm sure.”

I left, troubled. The kid could defend himself with his fists. Until the cops hauled in some hard case who'd stick him with a shank.

***

Across the street from the jail, the Court House Diner was frequented by jail guards, lawyers, judicial marshals, Plainfield cops, and state troopers from the barracks. I ordered their memorable tuna salad sandwich, no fries, and black coffee. Earlier, passing through the courthouse on my way to the jail, I had seen a familiar face on the witness stand. I dialed her cell.

“I saw you telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Got time for lunch at the diner?”

Detective-Sergeant Marian Boyce and I had bachelorhood in common. She was trying to change her situation—mainly, I knew, for the sake of having a full-time man around for her little boy—and had been seeing a pleasant Pratt and Whitney engineer for a while.

“Already ate.”

“Coffee?”

“I can't if it's social. I promised myself I'd behave myself.”

“I want to pick your brain.”

While I was waiting for her, the jail guard who had given me a hard time the last time I'd visited Jeff came in. He started to scowl. I stuck my hand out and said, “I'm sorry if I leaned on you the other day. I'm just worried about that kid.”

The guard did the right thing. “No problem.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“I'm just getting take out.”

“So I'll buy you a take out. It's on the lawyer. Have a dougnut, too.” I ordered from the counterman.

“I hear they're making you do overtime.”

“Yeah, laying off some and working the rest of us harder. You want to get a day in the woods and instead they call you in last minute.”

“The indoors is the tough part, isn't it? I'm a real estate agent. The thing I like most is getting outside.”

“I'd give anything to do a job like that.”

“Take a course for the license. It's the kind of thing a lot of people work on the side to get started.”

His container came. We shook and he left.

Marian Boyce walked in wearing her trial outfit: a calf-length skirt, low heels, white blouse, and a blue blazer cut large under the left arm for her shoulder holster. The fact she was wearing a skirt meant that her ankle gun had migrated north to reside in a nylon thigh holster. The hands-off look in her gray eyes signaled loud and clear, “I fully intend to ‘behave,' so don't ask if it's the red one you gave me Valentine's Day.”

Among her excellent qualities was directness. “I'm glad you want to pick my brain. That way I can see your face and keep my word.”

“Your hair looks great.”

“Too busy to cut it. You look great, too.”

“Really?”

“Actually, no. You're looking a little ragged.”

“Thanks.”

“Don't you work out anymore?”

“Not so much, lately. How's law school?”

A big grin broadened her face and lit her eyes. She tossed her head and her hair, a little longer than usual, fanned prettily. “Top of my class. Of course it's only night school. But, still number one.” Sergeant Marian's long-range plan, after she retired from the State Police, was to get elected governor of Connecticut. Just like Vicky McLachlan. I was the other thing they had in common. Or used to.

She accepted coffee and let me talk her into a cranberry scone. “What's up? You're on the bulldozer kid?”

“The only crime in Newbury this year.”

“Who hired you?”

By all that was right and decent, the person buying the coffee was supposed to ask the questions, but Marian was a cop, and a cop's daughter, and could not help herself.

“Ira Roth.”

“Not the kid's father?”

“The kid's father hired Ira.” Why, I wondered. Why are you asking? You must know all this already.

“And you hope you'll find enough mitigating factors to gain the kid parole after he serves his first one hundred years?”

“Not funny. The kid didn't do it.”

She gave me a look and said, “Kid on bulldozer on victim?”

“He was sitting on the bulldozer and the bulldozer was sitting on Billy Tiller. Question is, in what order they got there.”

Marian laughed.

I said, “I don't believe he did it.”

“Whatever you say. It's not my case, anyhow.”

“I know. Clinton and Brady have it.”

“You realize, of course, that I can't talk about that investigation.”

“Of course not.”

“So what are you picking my brain for?”

“Old case. No longer active.”

Marian touched her lips to her coffee and probed me with her lovely eyes. It took her two seconds to decide, “Last year's crime. The Main Street shooting.”

“Am I right in assuming that with the victim dead of new causes, last year's shooting is old news?”

“Technically, no. But I'm comfortable chatting in general on that subject.”

“Who did it?”

“If I knew he'd be locked up.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“If I thought I knew who did it I'd be on him like paint.”

“Who did you speculate did it?”

“Speculating can get a girl in trouble.”

“It was your case. Yours and Arnie's.” Detective-Sergeant Arnie Bender was her partner, a small, weaselly fellow she did not like that much. Except that she knew he was almost as smart as she was—and as brave—which made him an asset.

“Was the kid a suspect?”

“One of several.”

“So now with the new charges you're assuming it was him then, too?”

“No. Jeff Kimball stopped being a suspect when we discovered that he had been arrested the same afternoon as the shooting.”

“How far away?”

“On top of a redwood tree in Oregon.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Maybe he and his big shot father thought it wouldn't help his defense. All this ELF stuff has the state's attorney dreaming U.S. Senate.”

“I heard.”

“The redwood arrest cinched it. He's tracking ELF arrests in ten states and looking forward to TV every day of the trial.”

“You might put out the word that the kid getting shanked in that jail across the street would not help the state's attorney's campaign.”

“It's not a shanking kind of jail. It's a glorified holding pen.”

“The kid is something of a stubborn hothead. And since he can handle himself fairly well, it's only a matter of time until a fellow holdee sharpens something.”

“I'll mention it. Thanks. Any more questions?”

“Who was on your shooting list?”

“I can't tell you names of suspects.”

“Can you tell me the motivations you uncovered?”

Marian thought about that a moment and grinned. “Sly. Very sly, Ben. Sure. Let's see, we had an unpaid subcontractor, an aggrieved landowner, an aggrieved neighbor, an aggrieved truck driver, an aggrieved former employee, a jealous husband, and a cheated drug dealer—Ben, you look surprised.”

It didn't take a mirror to know that my jaw was hanging slackly.

“Okay,” I said. “I've talked to subcontractors, landowners, neighbors, truck drivers, customers, and employees. But a jealous husband? And a drug dealer? Both are off the charts.”

Marian grinned again. “Maybe you're looking at the wrong charts—by the way, there was one other suspect.”

“An aggrieved what?”

“Real estate agent.”

“Really? What was his motivation?”

“He had written a lot of angry letters to the local newspaper complaining about Billy Tiller's projects. And spoke out against them at zoning hearings. Seemed to have a real thing about Mr. Tiller.”

“Very funny.”

Marian raised a cautioning hand. “We didn't think it was funny at all. Statements like, ‘We must find some way to rid our town of the developers destroying it.' And, ‘Face it, the developer is the enemy. His profit is based on our loss.' Pithy, Ben. Almost witty. But statements like that made this real estate agent a prime suspect.”

“Except that I was standing next to Billy Tiller at the time of the shooting and was fortunate I didn't get shot myself. Did the drug dealer indicate his beef with Billy?”

“May I ask you something, Ben? Do you know how to run a bulldozer?”

“What?”

“Maybe you were not the shooter last year. Although, there was a theory among some of the investigators that you could have been talking to Mr. Tiller to make him a stationary target for a hired shooter.”

“That is insane.”

“Do you know how to run a bulldozer?”

“No.” I hate lying. Even for self-preservation.

“Where were you last Sunday afternoon?”

“Home.”

“Alone?”

“Reading.”

“Not showing houses? Isn't Sunday a big house day?”

“It was raining. I had one appointment in the morning and I was alone the rest of the day.”

Marian nodded. “Yeah, it was raining. But with all the things you learned from your backwoods Chevalley cousins—hunting, shooting, poaching, logging—you never learned how to drive a bulldozer?”

“Never.” Of course they taught me to run a bulldozer. Chevalleys were born on machines. But she had not read me any rights and I owed her no truth if she insisted on playing this game. “By the way, if I did the crime, why am I trying to get the kid they arrested off?”

“You're a romantic. You'd rather see a genuine bad guy do your time. Not some poor, innocent kid.”

“Did the drug dealer indicate his beef with Billy?” I asked again.

She smiled, shrugged, and sat silently a while. I could not for the life of me read to what extent she was busting my chops or to what extent she thought she was on to something. It made me uncomfortable enough to repeat the question a third time.

She said, finally, “We heard rumors about a drug dealer claiming he had not been paid.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Enough. You've had your freebie, and then some.”

“Thank you. One more question.”

“Try me.”

“Nobody was charged. But did any of these suspects stand out?”

“Oh yes.”

“Which one?”

“I told you. No names.”

I sat there shaking my head. “The drug dealer makes absolutely no sense. I have never heard a single world about drugs and Billy. He was never the type to risk a drug deal. Unless, of course, he was desperately broke and going under and needed the money.

“Like the car guy who got stung trying to save the company with a cocaine deal?”

“His name was DeLorean. But I see nothing in Billy that was that broke.”

Marian nodded affably and saved me a bunch of wasted time. “That was the conclusion I came to.”

“Of course, the government was on him for withholding taxes.”

Marian stopped grinning and said, seriously, “I was told that tax case sucked. The government was barking up the wrong tree. As for his other government problems, money would not have helped.”

“So that leaves a jealous husband.”

“Right up your alley, Ben.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Look for a grieving wife who hasn't been widowed.”

Chapter Fifteen

The clatter of diner dishes and the murmur of nearby conversations seemed to fade as if Marian had drawn a lead curtain around our booth. “I am amazed,” I said in all honesty. “I never would have thought of any husband being jealous of that fat slob of a builder.”

Marian said, “I love having you in my debt.”

Stupid as I have been about women, I'm always surprised to discover that they can be stupid, too. Love, Marian was telling me, had made a blustering, bullying, sixty-pounds-overweight, land-raping developer with the social skills of a wildebeest appear attractive to some married woman who should have known better.

“Wait a minute! If that husband is the prime suspect, why are you telling me?”

“The boys running this investigation don't believe he did this murder. Neither does the state's attorney.”

“Why not?”

“Because the jealous husband was not found sitting on the bulldozer on top of the murder victim.”

“So why are you telling me?”

“I have nothing to lose.”

“I'm flattered.”

“Why?”

“You're suggesting you have me to gain.”

Marian laughed and stood up from the booth. “I can have you any time I want.”

“Lording that fact over me is beneath you.”

She laid a strong hand on the back of mine for a moment. “You're right. I apologize. Thanks for the coffee. Great to see you.”

“Thanks for the tip. Love, not money. Love, not a rip-off.”

“I don't see what you're thanking me for. It doesn't do anything for you. None of last year's shooter suspects were the person Trooper Moody arrested driving the murder weapon when he was discovered on top of the victim. That person was your client.”

“You're all so locked into that image. None of you can see past it.”

“We don't have to see past it. The guy who did it was caught doing it.”

“I know it looks that way, but—”

She interrupted me by touching my hand, again, and saying with a smile, “I think this whole attempt to get useless information out of me was a sneaky, underhanded ploy to talk me into misbehaving with you.”

I grabbed her hand. “One more question.”

“No, I won't sleep with you. You had your chance. You let it drift away.” Her eyes had gone dark.

“We were having a great time.”

“Joyous,” she said. “But there comes a moment when you have to open your eyes and ask where is this going.”

“You could have asked.”

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“The one with the child can't ask, Ben. She has to be asked. Or she'll never know if there's room for both of them.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. That was as definitive as a car wreck, completely irreversible. I wished I had asked.

She knew what I was thinking. She said, “Forget it. The timing wasn't right. I have a six-year-old. He fills a lot of spaces. You've got a twelve-year-old in your barn and a ninety-year-old across the street filling your spaces.”

“It's not the same.”

“Of course it's not the same. But it's not nothing, either.”

“It wasn't about your child.”

“I know that. You did the same stupid thing with Vicky McLachlan and she didn't have kids.”

“I don't see a comparison.”

“Screw you. I ran into her in Hartford. We had some wine.”

I tried to crack a joke. “I don't know what you two could have talked about that would do me any good.”

Marian replied very seriously. “If you're ever going to connect, you'll have to open your eyes to the moment when it's time.”

“I'll keep it in mind.”

“And act when it's time.”

“I'll try to remember.”

“Goodbye, Ben.”

My face must have ratted out my heart, because she blurted, “Hey, I don't meant goodbye, goodbye. Call anytime. It's always nice to talk. But only talk. Bruce is a decent guy. He's good to me and good to my child. I can't betray him anymore. But it's always nice to talk.”

“Thank you. Let me ask you something.”

She looked wary. “What?”

“Not about us.”

She looked relieved. Even grateful. “What?”

“Were you putting me on about do I know how to run a bulldozer?”

Marian said, “Motivation and no alibi? Was I kidding? Are you kidding?”

“That's not an answer.”

“It's all the answer you're getting.”

“Here's another question. Does the jealous husband know he was a suspect?”

“I don't know. We never had enough to lean on him. He was just one of many we interviewed.”

I masked a spasm of delight with a wistful expression as she strode out. I upgraded it into a wistful leer when she turned in the doorway to wave goodbye. Neither expression took much effort, as they were genuine. Everything she had said was true. I had blown a great chance with her. She was lovely to look at, lovely to make love with, and she was one of the very few people I knew in whose presence I never felt bored or lonely. So I was honestly wistful. And honestly sad. But I was also deeply pleased. She had accidentally dropped a huge clue.

While investigating the Main Street shooting, she and Arnie Bender would have leaned hard as hell on suspects like the drug dealer and the truck driver. But they hadn't leaned on the jealous husband. Which meant that he was higher up the Newbury food chain. Not some poor working slob. Whoever Billy had been cheating with was married to a Newbury mover and shaker.

I threw money on the tabletop, bolted out the door. Marian was standing on the sidewalk, on her cell. She winked. I winked back and ran faster.

A great clue, to go with a generous gift. What a gift! Somewhere in Newbury was a sad-eyed woman with inside information. A woman who knew things about Billy that no one else knew. Trying to imagine them trysting in a motel or hayfield, I came up with no palatable visuals. But might not pillow talk have touched upon Billy's latest scams? Didn't lovers confide their fondest hopes? Their darkest fears? Had he whispered the name of someone—other than her husband—who wanted to kill him? Or did she know in her heart that there was no one else? Did she wonder or fear or know that her husband had killed Billy with the bulldozer?

I drove pedal-to-the-metal back to Newbury, to meet her at the funeral.

***

The Newbury Funeral Home occupied the old Taylor House, an eighteenth-century Colonial on Main that the last Taylor sold in 1927 to a mortician whose family has been burying Newburians ever since.

Billy's coffin looked fabulously expensive. It was made of bronze and brushed bronze fittings and was closed tighter than the time-locked vault at Newbury Savings and Loan. Closed or open hardly mattered, as I was the only person there other than six hired pallbearers lined up to carry him out to the hearse.

A single flower lay on the casket, a peony of an old, single variety with yellow petals pale as ghosts and a thick cluster of gold stamens in the center. Whoever had left it had not signed the visitors' book. No one had, except for me.

Don Brooks, a tranquil gray-haired man, whose father had buried my father and whose grandfather had buried my grandfather, walked in, shook my hand and called to the pallbearers, “Shall we go, Señors?”

Until recently, there was never a shortage of pallbearers in Newbury. Most people, but for the very, very old, could count on their church congregation or friends from high school if they hadn't enough family left to hoist their casket into the hearse and up the slope of the cemetery. With so many new and unconnected people in town, it wasn't always possible to raise a quorum of pallbearers, so Don Brooks, who was not the sort to install mechanical devices, drove down to Kohl's for the spring sale and bought blue suits for six strong immigrant Guatemalan landscapers who routinely worked seven days a week and were glad to pick up extra cash to send home. Being country people and devout they brought dignity to the task, got the heavy bronze container loaded with the quiet efficiency of a team used to working together, and piled into a van behind the hearse. Don Brooks drove the short distance to the cemetery, which climbed the hill behind the Ram Pasture.

I followed and parked a distance from the raw earth that Sherman had dug out of the ground with Donny Butler, who was sneaking a smoke behind the MacKay family mausoleum, which jutted from the hillside like a misplaced walk-in closet. I looked everywhere for a grieving woman, but no one else had come. My gaze drifted down the hill toward the old part, which was heavily sprinkled with weathered Abbott headstones, and my father's grave.

As the blue-suited Guatemalans pulled the casket out of the hearse, I was surprised to feel an immense sadness. My thoughts jumbled about as I inquired of myself what was going on in my head.

Certainly I didn't mourn Billy Tiller. Of course, all deaths are sad. And some, as Georgie Stephanopoulos said so passionately, were terrible. But there was no denying that Billy's lifted a black cloud from the town's future; new houses would still be built, but not so many, and not so ugly, and not spreading destruction as far. So I was not mourning Billy. This was not like my father's funeral, when everyone crowding around the grave knew that Newbury had lost its champion. Yet the sadness was real, and when I finally grasped the cause, I knew that only action would ease the sting. I stepped forward and spoke to the lead pallbearer.

“Excuse me, may I take this end?”

Don Brooks nodded permission, and I grabbed the sturdy swing handle closest to the front. The sun went behind a cloud and the breeze that followed it threatened the peony, which had stayed in place through the loading and short drive. The man whose place I had taken crouched down, picked up a stone, and placed it gently over the stem so it wouldn't blow away.

We lifted on Mr. Brooks' quiet count to
tres
. It felt as light as Sherman Chevalley had predicted. Maybe it was because the small men lifting with me were unusually strong, but I flashed, of course, on the D4 spinning mad circles on top of Billy, and thought again of the “no-blooded” hands on the controls.

Just then a medium-size Lexus came crunching up the gravel. The door flew open and E. Eddie Edwards ran from it, hauling on his jacket, straightening his necktie, and calling, “Hang on! Sorry I'm late—Ben? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Too many strangers,” I said.

Edwards brusquely shouldered aside the man gripping the handle opposite, and we started for the grave. A tall man, he looked down at me over the coffin and muttered, “I always figured you were sentimental.”

“Why do you think I complained about his cheesy developments?”

“My great-grandmother used to say, ‘We reap what we sow.'”

The fabled Samantha. I thought he was talking about Billy, but I wasn't sure. I left it at that. It seemed enough conversation over a man's coffin. Edwards was not through, however. “By that, I mean,” he added, “that if we alienate enough people we will die alone.”

A grotesque thought wormed into my head: Murdered people never die alone.

E. Eddie Edwards seemed on the verge of another pronouncement. I decided to tell him to shut the hell up. But when I glanced toward him to do that, I saw his face working, and it struck me, belatedly, that while I may have hoisted a corner of Billy's casket on a vague principle that a man ought to have some acquaintance at his burial, Eddie Edwards might actually have cared for his former boss. How many years had he worked for him? How many years had Billy and his trusty “Evil Engineer” scammed the town? How many wins had they notched together at P&Z?

Edwards said, “At least they caught the jerk who did it. There's a certain relief in that.”

“Where's the minister?”

“Billy told me he didn't want clergy.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“When his mother died.”

We reached the hole in the ground, rested the casket on three strong straps laid out on the grass, and used them to lower it into the hole. I looked around the cemetery again. Still no grieving woman.

With neither the minister nor the priest in attendance there followed an awkward silence and some foot-shuffling confusion. Then Eddie Edwards rose to the occasion, addressing the Guatemalan gardeners, Mortician Brooks, and me like commissioners of an extraordinary Planning and Zoning session.

“I worked for Billy Tiller for many years. I watched him grow from an inexperienced kid, accustomed only to being an employee, into a savvy businessman. No one ever said he didn't work hard. And he leaves behind a legacy that Newbury will always cherish.”

Every muscle in my back stiffened.

Edwards sensed a volcano starting beside him and he shifted gears smoothly. Instead of naming oversized, shoddily built McMansions as Billy's legacy, he said, “Billy Tiller leaves a legacy of open spaces donated to Newbury in perpetuity.”

True, though we both knew that in every case those were open spaces that Planning and Zoning and appeals courts had already ruled off-limits to building anything larger than a breadbox.

Walking back to the cars, Edwards said to me, “One thing Billy really understood. You can't stop progress.”

“Sounds like another great-grandmother saying.”

“She was right.”

I said, “I wonder who left that peony on the casket.”

“That was a fairly rare botanical species,” Edwards answered. “
Paeonia mlokosewitschii
. Kind you'd find in your great aunt's garden. Maybe somebody reached over her fence and stole it for Billy.”

“Did Billy have any girlfriends?”

“None that I heard about.”

“Was he dating anybody?”

“No one he told me about.”

“Would he have told you?”

“I don't think so. He was pretty much a loner. I mean you just saw at the cemetery.”