by Justin Scott
“It’s about the only one I’ve ever seen that deserves the phrase, ‘Would you join me in the library?’”
I wandered for a few minutes, trailed by a proud King pointing out details. “Wonderful,” I said. “It looks like it’s been here for a hundred years.”
“It was in its last house for three hundred years.”
“The books or the wood?”
King grinned, utterly happy with his house. His pleasure was so open that it was infectious, and I found myself liking him a lot more than I had expected to. “The woodwork’s from England. The books are mine, since graduate school.”
First I’d heard that graduate students’ books were leatherbound.
“My thesis advisor bequeathed his library to me.”
I’d read that somewhere. King had published that thesis before he had his doctorate. It had made him famous and attracted a new mentor, a Texas oil millionaire with ambitions to walk the halls of power and the patience to cultivate the young. I wondered if King still took his calls. The former secretary of state at his lunch table and the cashiered spy wore the quick-to-please expressions of those permanent house guests the very wealthy keep around for their amusement.
“Sit down.”
We sat at either end of a tufted green leather chesterfield. King pointed an infrared zapper at the fireplace and flames engulfed the birch logs stacked on the grate. “Do you know why I asked you here?”
“I assume you want to buy some land.”
“No.”
I felt a little adrenalin surge of excitement. Call it greed. If Henry King was selling Fox Trot, the commission would take care of a modest man’s shelter and transportation needs into the next century. He waited. I said nothing. If he was selling, we had already begun negotiating my percentage, and one thing I had learned on Wall Street was when to be silent.
“Aren’t you curious?” he asked.
“Well, if you’re not buying, you’re selling. Why else would you invite a real estate broker to lunch?”
“I’m not selling. And I’m not buying. At least not now.”
I keep an affable smile handy for disappointments. “Why not give me a ring when you decide? In the meantime, if you’re looking for a ballpark appraisal, I’d be delighted to look around and give you a number. No charge, of course.”
My free appraisal offer was more sincere than my smile. I’d been hoping for a close look at the place. And once he made up his mind to buy or sell, he might think of me first. Turned out he already knew me—or thought he did.
“I’ve got a problem,” he said. “From what I hear you can help me with it.”
“You keep alluding to hearing things about me. What do you hear?”
“I hear that you—shall we say—fix things.”
“That’s what I hear about you.”
“I fix things internationally. I hear you fix things locally.”
“You’ve heard wrong,” I said. “I sell houses and land.”
“You bring buyers and sellers together.”
“The normal function of a broker,” I said, stressing “normal.”
King gave me an indulgent smile. “A broker’s connections are his stock in trade. I hear you’re connected, that you know everyone worth knowing in Newbury.”
“I’ve heard you’re having a problem with your neighbor. Is that what this is about?”
“That crazy old farmer is a thorn in my side.”
“Most neighbors are. They’re worse than relatives; you can’t get away from them.”
“He’s making threats. He’s undermining my sense of security in my own home. I want it stopped.”
“First of all, if we’re talking about Mr. Butler—”
“We are.”
“First of all, that ‘crazy old farmer’ is younger than you are.” He had fathered Dicky while on R&R from Vietnam when he was only eighteen, which put him late fifties, at most, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. “Second, if you think he’s crazy, you should meet his son.”
“So I’ve heard. Fortunately, they’ve locked him up and thrown away the key.”
“They just found it. Appellate Court overturned his conviction.”
“Why?”
“Apparently the rule of law took precedent over what had seemed like a good idea at the time. He’s probably home by now.”
“Good Christ.”
“Making this an excellent time to resolve your dispute.”
To my surprise, King looked embarrassed.
I asked, “What is your dispute?”
He couldn’t meet my eye. Suddenly I realized what he had done. “Okay. I get it. You want to buy his place, right?”
“It cuts into my property. The old boundaries are so odd. It cuts right into the heart of my property.”
“You figured you’d negotiate directly, him being your neighbor and all.”
“Not to save commissions. The money means nothing. Abbott, do I have to spell it out to you? I admit it was ego. I figured any man who could get Reagan and Deng to the same table could persuade some stupid old farmer to sell his farm.”
“I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Butler is not old. The war may have made him crazy. But he’s never struck me as stupid.”
“It never occurred to me in a million years I’d need a real estate agent. Hell, I bought this place direct from Zarega’s executor.”
“Ira Roth.”
King winced. “The way you say ‘Ira Roth,’ are you implying I paid too much?”
“You paid market value,” I said, mustering all the tact that is a broker’s stock in trade. The price of Fox Trot was public record. Ira was a brilliant criminal lawyer. But the deal he’d cut for Mr. Zarega’s heirs suggested he had missed his calling. Or maybe Henry King was telling the truth when he claimed that money meant nothing to him. Although in my experience guys who profess not to care about the money are usually too insecure to admit they care very much.
“I got nowhere with Butler. Worse, he got the idea in his head that I’d insulted him. He threatened to shoot me if I stepped on his land.”
“Had you?”
“Had I what?”
“Stepped on his land.”
“I had one of his fences repaired. His cows were getting out.”
“People around Newbury are kind of touchy about property lines.”
“I’m touchy about property lines. I understand. I was just trying to help.”
“Cows do much damage?”
“They would have if we had the gardens in. They bring flies. The flies follow the herd. You couldn’t sit outside last August.”
“That’s why they invented screen porches.”
King turned a lot less affable. “Mr. Abbott, I haven’t worked my whole life to be trapped indoors on my own property.”
“How do I fit into this?”
“I’m aware that I’ve poisoned the well with my offer to buy his farm. You’re welcome to try as a real estate agent, but I don’t hold much hope.”
“Sounds that way.”
“I’d like you to reason with the man.”
“Why not just ignore him? You won’t be the first neighbors who don’t talk.”
“I want those cows away from my house.”
“How close are they?”
“Close enough to spread flies that bite me and my guests. I had a Saudi prince here last summer who left with a welt the size of a tennis ball.”
“Could I see a property plan?”
He had it ready, spread out on an antique billiard table in the game room. Clipped to it was a one-page lease notarized in 1985.
“You see the problem?”
The map showed something that wasn’t visible on my aerial photos: Mr. Zarega had leased a cow pasture to Mr. Butler for a dollar a year until Butler died.
“I’m not a lawyer, but this looks solid.” The lease’s brevity was exceeded only by its precision.
“It
’s not even his land.”
“In effect, it is.”
The pasture was long and narrow and cut into Fox Trot like a knife. On days the cows were on it, and took it into their collective heads to bunch at the lower end, they would launch a few flies into Fox Trot’s rarified air. Flies with teeth honed on cowhide.
King said, “I can’t understand why Zarega would have agreed to such an arrangement.”
“They were friends.”
King snorted derisively, offering an unpleasant reminder of the melting pot he’d escaped fifty years earlier: “A wop from the Bronx and a Connecticut redneck?”
His contempt sounded real, which annoyed me, and I said, “Our traditional slur is ‘swamp Yankee.’ Though, like most slurs, it’s evolved into something of a compliment lately.”
“I stand corrected,” King replied icily. “But you get my point.”
“Your point misses the point. It was a genuine friendship. Mr. Zarega really was a recluse and very, very old. Mr. Butler had his problems after Vietnam. Somehow they hooked up. And the way I heard it, when the old man was ill Mr. Butler would be up here every day.”
“My lawyers say I can’t break the lease.”
“Ira Roth drew it up.”
“I feel like a damned fool. It was right there in black and white, but I didn’t realize the distances until I’d been here awhile. I’m a city boy.”
I’d seen stranger deals. When ordinary people sought mortgages, the banks demanded zealous title searches. Buying for cash you were on your own.
I said, “Mr. Zarega’s house was farther from the fence. At any rate, they’re not going be on this pasture that often. It won’t sustain them.”
“Am I supposed to hope that he doesn’t put his cows in there on days I’ve got clients visiting? I won’t be able to use the goddammed swimming pool. Am I supposed to put screens over my pool? And my tennis courts?”
I had no answer beyond, “Flies go with farmland.”
“I’m hiring you to reason with Butler. You’re local. Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
“Who told you I was a pisser?”
King smiled easily. “I can’t reveal my sources.”
“Why’d you ask?”
“Let’s get on the same page, Mr. Abbott. Do you understand that I regard this as a very serious matter?”
“Do you understand that you’re in a classic country-city clash? You’ve got a lovely estate here, cheek by jowl with a cow farm. You pay for all this with money you earn elsewhere. Mr. Butler earns his right here. You’re a new arrival. He’s third generation. I could go on, but I think you get my point.”
“Exactly why I intend to hire the best qualified person to resolve it for me. It’s beyond the lawyers. I need a local fixer. You’re a local fixer—don’t interrupt—Not only that, you’ve worked as a private detective—don’t interrupt—I know you have no license and I don’t care. I do care that you learned your trade when you served with Naval Intelligence.”
“This is more a job for a psychiatrist.”
“The one I send my staff to charges one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Would that be sufficient?”
We know that my real estate business was not exactly booming that March. Although, having experienced first hand the financial markets’ ephemerality—evanescence I myself had once contributed to as an overpaid, underaged Wall Street shark in an earlier life—I had diversified my listings, scouring Newbury for commercial space to rent to the new wave of start-up businesses being founded by the recently fired. So I wasn’t starving, yet.
But the Olds was getting very old and if a fresh coat of paint wasn’t applied soon to the aforementioned snowy clapboards the word “shabby “ would affix itself to the directions I e-mailed customers: “The Georgian house near the flagpole.”
I was marveling how diplomat King had blundered into this clumsy affair, when he reminded me that he was no dummy. “Look at it this way, Abbott. Not only do you pick up a fat fee for making peace, but you’ll get your full commission on any land you can get him to sell me.”
“Would that include your buying the lease?”
“I will buy the lease and every damned acre he’ll sell me besides.”
I nodded, tempted by the chance to swing a land deal.
King raved on, “I’ll buy his whole goddammed house. Hell, I’ll buy him a mountain he can move to.”
“You’re offering to buy him another place?”
“As long as it’s on the other side of town.”
“I’ll go talk to him,” I said. “But don’t get your hopes up. I was just a friend of his kid.”
“You’re friends with that criminal?”
I ignored that and said, “I noticed some heavy security at the gate. Are there any incidents I should know about?”
“This morning, Butler drove in here with a shotgun.”
“Did you call Trooper Moody?”
“Well, he didn’t point it at anyone.”
“You mean it was in the rack.”
“In the back window. Very visible, very obviously there.”
“He’s not the only man in town with a shotgun in his truck. It doesn’t mean anything more than wearing a cap.”
“I found it very threatening. Frightened my staff. What if I had been entertaining clients when he came roaring up my driveway?”
“How’d he get past the gate and the spikes?”
“The place was wide open for my lunch guests. Now, I want something done about him before someone gets hurt.”
“What did he come for?”
“He was yelling to stay off his land.”
“Is this the fence thing?”
“Well…” King hesitated.
“Please,” I said. “I can’t talk to him if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I’m building a lake—here, I’ll show you.” He whipped aside the plot plan, revealing a landscape designer’s rendering of a twenty-acre lake to be formed by erecting a fair-size dam across a brook that started up on Butler’s farm, cascaded through their adjoining woodlots, and emerged from the leased pasture.
“Fantastic,” I said.
It sported an island, with a Corinthian avant-garde gazebo. One could imagine rowing out to it in the moonlight with a bottle of Moët and Ms. Devlin.
“That’s going to be a hell of a dam.”
“It’s going to be the biggest dam in the county,” said King. “But my engineers have to divert the stream to work on it. Run it through a temporary pipe, here.”
“Here” was on Butler’s leased pasture. I turned back to the plot plan and traced the topo lines.
“You know you could simplify this by running the pipes here.” I pointed to a gully well on his own land.
“My engineers—”
“Anything else I should know?”
“No. That’s pretty much my side of it. Why don’t you go hear his?” He took my elbow in a friendly way, again, and walked me back through the library. “I don’t know where the hell your coat is with the goddammed butler quitting.”
“I’ll find a closet near the door.”
“Here. Here’s something to amuse you.” He plucked a DVD from a shelf that contained a row of them and scribbled his signature on it. “A&E just shot my biography. It’s mostly kind. And fairly accurate.”
I didn’t know what to say but thank him, so I did, and hunted up my winter jacket. I looked for Julia Devlin on the way to my car. But the Range Rover herd had migrated to the old house, where King Incorporated had set up offices.
I wondered if Mr. Butler could make King so unhappy that he’d sell Fox Trot. The commission would beat amateur diplomacy hands down. Except he would blame me for failing to make peace and list with my competitors.
As I came down the driveway, emerging from Sherwood Forest and crossing the barraged meadow, I saw Mr. Butler’s rusty Ford pickup parked askew outside the gate. Nearby, Dennis Ch
evalley was pummeling a man whom Albert was holding in a firm grip.
I stepped on the gas and blew the horn. Mr. Butler was a little long in the tooth to be scrapping with twenty-year-olds. But closer, I saw that it wasn’t Mr. Butler the Chevalleys were beating up. It was Dicky, prison white, head shaved to a reddish stubble. He’d lost his jacket in the struggle and his bare arms were dark with tattoos.
In the time it took to stop the car and jump out yelling, the situation changed radically. Dicky Butler flung his head up and back, butting Albert’s chin. Albert staggered and lost his grip on Dicky’s arms. Dicky buckled him over with an elbow in the gut and tore into Dennis like a stump grinder.
Chapter 3
Dicky Butler was half a head shorter than the Chevalleys. But he was wide, and lightning fast. For every punch Dennis threw, Dicky slammed two into his face. The bigger man planted his feet solidly when he swung. Dicky’s feet moved like pistons—up-down-up-down—doubling the power of every punch and whisking his body out of range like quicksilver.
Albert roared to his feet and charged his back.
Dicky whirled to him, grinning, and decked him with a roundhouse right whose impact Albert increased by running into it. Before Albert hit the ground, Dicky whirled again and broke Dennis’ nose with a crack I heard from twenty feet away.
The gate was closed. I found a man door in the ironwork.
Dicky pivoted toward me. Hot eyes gauged a new threat while tracking Dennis, who was coming at him spitting blood, and Albert writhing on the ground. Before I covered the distance, he sidestepped Dennis—rabbit-punched him off his feet as he lurched by—and kicked Albert in the groin.
“Get out of my way, Ben. Not your fight.”
“Can’t. It’s family.”
Dicky went up on his toes, again, leading with his left, dropping his right.
“Besides,” I said. “You won.”
“I’m not done with ’em.”
“It’s over.”
“Get out of my way.”
I circled out of earshot of the brothers, to avoid forcing Dicky to defend his honor. “I can take you, Dicky. You’re tired.”
He measured me. He was tired. And no one floored two Chevalleys without sustaining damage. He was hunched over to the left where Dennis had landed body blows he’d feel for weeks. I was hoping his mind worked the way it used to. He wasn’t afraid of me—he wasn’t afraid of anyone—but he hated to lose.