FrostLine

by Justin Scott

“Speaking of Josh. He warned me off you, you should know.”

  “You didn’t listen.”

  “Does he do that often?”

  “You’re the first,” she smiled. “He knows me too well.”

  “Are you safe around him? I mean, is he obsessed or something?”

  “Don’t worry about me, Ben. If I didn’t feel safe Henry would fire him.”

  Julia looked at her diamond-crusted watch. She had carried it in her bag, last night. It would have been ostentatious in the Yankee Drover. And scratchy in bed. But I recalled my years of sending ladies Rolexes instead of roses, and couldn’t help but notice room on her other wrist for a Cartier bracelet.

  “Gotta go. Thanks for a great time.” She kissed me on the mouth. “Many great times.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about before.”

  “Don’t be. You’ve got a lot of balls in the air—Oh, Jeez, that sounds—I meant—”

  Julia laughed. “You’re blushing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I am. You deserve better. I’m really mad at myself for taking it out on you.”

  She scooped her flowers off the kitchen table and cradled them to her breast. “It’s like there’s two of me. Rational and irrational. I’m caught between them—and so are you.”

  One last kiss. Then another, interrupted when Alison banged on the screen door. “DaNang? Walk time! Oh….Ben, what happened to your face?”

  “Slipped in the shower. Come in. Come in.”

  She came, downcast eyes taking in the flowers and the breakfast dishes.

  “Alison, I’d like you to meet Ms. Devlin. Julia, this is Alison Mealy, my neighbor.”

  Alison extended her hand, as I had taught her, and said, “How do you do?”

  Julia shook her hand and said, “Oh, I’ve heard so much about you. How are your riding lessons coming along?”

  Alison shuffled her sneakers and mumbled that they were going to start jumps today.

  “Good luck. It’s very nice to meet you. Bye, Ben. We’ll talk.”

  Alison watched her hurry down the drive. “Is she buying a house?”

  “If I’m lucky.”

  “She’s kind of skinny.”

  “She works out a lot.”

  Alison’s gaze swept again the toast plates for two. “Do you trust her?”

  “I beg pardon?”

  “She wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

  “Maybe she was surprised to see you just then.”

  “I don’t like her.”

  “She’s very nice,” I said, gently.

  It had taken her ages to cotton to Marian and then only because she adored Marian’s five-year-old, Jason. She was polite to my friend Rita, but never warm, though a ride in Rita’s Jag convertible had melted her some.

  “You haven’t said anything about my hair,” she said.

  “I noticed it’s longer.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure.”

  She laid a hand partway down her shoulder. “When it gets to here, Vicky’s going to make me curls.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “There isn’t anyone who knows more about curls than Vicky.”

  She was loyal to Vicky. Vicky who did her hair for her. Vicky who let her watch her make up. Vicky whom Aunt Connie said Ben ought to marry before he lost an excellent woman.

  She tugged at her hair as if to accelerate the growth. “Can I ask you something, Ben?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why do you trust her?”

  “Julia? Because we’re very similar. We think alike.”

  “Oh, that’s a great reason.”

  “DaNang likes her.”

  “She probably fed him behind your back. Let’s go, DaNang! You traitor.”

  “Hey, Alison! Where’s that Clarion I was saving?”

  “Under his dish.”

  The Police Report indicated that Trooper Moody had had an unusually busy weekend, even before the biggest dam in his territory was blown to bits. There’d been a slew of traffic accidents and several break-ins. On top of that, Plainfield Barracks had issued him a new laser speed detector, which he had put to enthusiastic use. Scooter had published a photograph of him pointing the damned thing at the camera like a Klingon death ray. It had worked so well that I was going to need help tracking down everyone he’d nailed.

  I telephoned Aunt Connie and read her a list of speeders starting with Mildred Gill and ending with Al Bell.

  “I read all that in the Clarion,” she said. “Are you aware that none of these people are younger than seventy-five?”

  “I’m giving you the older ones.”

  “People our age don’t speed.”

  “The laser doesn’t lie,” I said. “And apparently it allows him to get you coming or going, which you might remember next time you unleash your Lincoln.” (Her thirty-year-old Continental was powered by a pre-pollution-control, pre-guzzler-tax engine Lincoln had built to compete with NASA’s moon shots.)

  “Just ask what time were they stopped? How long did it take Ollie to write the ticket? And what was his mood?”

  “Triumphant, I’d imagine.”

  “Please don’t put words in people’s mouths. Just get their impressions.”

  “They’ll get the impression that I’m the biggest busybody on Main Street.”

  I then got on the phone to several younger ticket recipients whom I knew personally. Indignation ran high, shame low. Steve LaFrance’s “Thirty-two fucking miles an hour in a thirty zone,” pretty much capsulized their mood. As to Ollie’s mood, smug and gloating were terms repeated frequently.

  All remarked, too, on the briskness of the encounter. He had wasted no time on unnecessary registration checks and less on his famous lecture that concluded with an ominous, “I don’t want to have to pull you over again,” when you both knew he just couldn’t wait to pull you over again.

  I phoned my condolences to a couple of Danbury Hospital patients recovering from a River Road head-on. Ollie, it seemed, had proved Solomonic in an attempt to hasten the investigation, slapping both colliders with “excessive speed for conditions.” A Jervis had been nailed for DWI. Abe, a half-breed—Jervis father, Chevalley mother—who might talk to me. No way I could phone him, however. The telephone company has never run lines into their woods, knowing full well they’d be pulled down for copper. And while, like any respectable modern criminals, they used cell phones and beepers, these numbers were guarded closely. So I drove out to the River End Bar, a dirt-road juke-joint in the deep north woods that made the White Birch look like the Rainbow Room, hoping to find Abe Jervis bonded to a barstool.

  He wasn’t. Working, I was told. I bought a six-pack from Matthew Jervis, who owned the dive, being among the very few of the clan without a record. Then I drove rut tracks and lumber roads for an hour or so, and finally found Abe hard at work in an open-air bodyshop chopping some poor guy’s Toyota four-by.

  It was a clearing in the woods about the size of a suburban backyard, littered with skeletons of cars and trucks rusting in the bug-infested sunlight. Noise from their gas-powered compressor for the air tools masked my approach and I was inside the clearing before they noticed.

  Skinny teenagers ran into the trees.

  Abe stood up with a resigned expression that turned to relief when he recognized me. Pushing fifty, hard, he had a Willie Nelson ponytail, the scars and broken teeth of a fearless man who’d lost more fights than he’d won, and eyes used to groping through a chemical haze. It was even money whether he remembered he owed me a favor.

  While his clansmen crept back suspiciously, debating whether it was worth trying to strip my car, I asked him about his arrest.

  “How late, we talking?” I asked, after we had popped a couple of Buds and established month and day.

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Midnight?”

  “Ye
ah, midnight.”

  “Newspaper said Ollie released you on your own recognizance.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you get home?”

  “Hitched.”

  “Lucky he didn’t lock you up.”

  “Yeah, I figured I’d be sleeping in Plainfield. ’Stead he just lets me go.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he beat you up?”

  “Naw. Slapped me around a little—I could tell his heart wasn’t in it—confiscated my keys and sent me walkin’.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “You know what I think?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think Ollie’s gettin’ old. If he weren’t gonna lock me up, he shoulda kicked my ass, ’steada just letting me go. Shoulda happened, right? A man used to know he gets caught alone by Ollie Moody, he’s gonna get his ass kicked. Now a man don’t know if he’s coming or going.”

  “Where’d he go when he left you?”

  “Whole goddammed world’s going to hell.”

  I passed him another warm beer. “Which way did Ollie go?”

  “Morrisville Road.”

  “East?”

  East to Morris Mountain, Fox Trot, and the Butler farm. “Midnight?” I asked again, and Abe Jervis said that sounded right to him. Though it could have been one or two. Or maybe three.

  ***

  Back in civilization, I found Connie in her rose garden. She’d fallen asleep reading the Wall Street Journal. My shadow crossed her as I reached for the paper and she awakened with a puzzled smile. “…Loveliest dream…Hello, Ben.”

  “Like some tea?”

  I brought tea pot, hot water, china, and shortbread out to her. She put down the Journal with an indignant snort. “I cannot understand why this otherwise excellent newspaper puts the comics on the editorial page.”

  “How’d you make out with your fast-lane friends?”

  Connie snorted again. “No shame. They’re proud! Trooper Moody spiced up their lives.”

  “What did they say about Ollie?”

  “His usual holier-than-thou self. A bit short. Very little time spent on lectures. What did your friends report?”

  “The same. Except they’re not proud. They’re mad as hell.”

  “What’s this about, Ben?”

  “Trying to figure out how he spent his time that weekend.”

  “I wrote it all down.”

  He had been very busy in the hours between the Thursday that Mr. Butler had turned his sticks and the Saturday afternoon King’s dam exploded. Twenty-seven speeding tickets in three days—how his new laser toy missed me I’ll never know—six accidents, traffic control at two fires, domestic disturbances, a scuffle of teens in the Big Y parking lot, burglary investigations.

  Eventually, I could account for his waking hours. Except for one long, three-hour gap between ten o’clock Saturday morning and one o’clock when he issued an octogenarian a speeding ticket on 349, fifteen minutes from the Butler farm.

  Waking hours. But while normal humans being slept, Ollie could have snuck up Morris Mountain and transferred Mr. Butler’s dynamite to King’s dam. Then, Saturday before one, killed Dicky Butler after Josie dropped him off, and carried his body to the lake? But where had he hidden his cruiser? The big gray Ford stood out like a lion on the prowl.

  I was getting nowhere.

  ***

  Mike’s Hardware was between the dry cleaner and the Big Y.

  If there’s a happier man in Newbury I’ve never met him. Mike came home from the Vietnam War with medals he’ll never discuss and a GI Bill accounting degree. For years he had commuted up to Pratt and Whitney’s financial office. Then one day he seized his dream and leased the old hardware store.

  In the teeth of the shopping mall warehouse home centers he kept it personal. You can buy a wing nut from Mike, a single cotter pin, or three lock washers. He’ll beat Ag-Way on 17-gauge deer fence wire and NAPA Auto Parts on windshield wipers, and he discounts Makita power tools. You’ll pay more than elsewhere for your wheelbarrow, but it comes assembled by the scads of relatives he’s got working for him, and if it won’t fit in your car they’ll drive it home for you. On slow mornings, after the contractors have bought their supplies, Mike can be found crouched on a stool sorting his nuts and bolts drawers, happy as Silas Marner.

  Happy, at least, until I asked him about his encounter with Sergeant Marian Boyce of the Connecticut State Police. “Ben, I swear I wouldn’t have told her a thing, but she found some old biddy who’d heard it too, told her I was there and heard the whole thing. Which I did. She leaned hard, she knew she had me.”

  “Who was the old biddy?”

  “Edna Crampton.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Miss Crampton had branded the English language on fifth graders’ brains for forty years. Steel bear traps were slower and gentler than her mind. And her hearing was as acute as a grand jury would expect of the choir mistress of the Newbury Episcopal Church.

  “Did Mr. Butler really say he would blow King’s dam?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “The only thing Miss Crampton heard was the dam and that’s all I’m repeating.”

  “I’m trying to get him out on bail. Can you help us?”

  “Trust me, man. It won’t help.”

  “Trust me. Let me decide what’ll help.”

  Mike reached into the five-sixteenths hex nut drawer and extracted a three-eighths that some barbarian had returned there by mistake. “If I’m the only one who heard it, it’s safer with me.”

  “Mike. Give us a break. We’re beating the bushes for anything. What else did he say? Look, did King hear it?”

  “If he didn’t he was deaf.”

  “Wha’d he say?”

  Mike sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Ben.”

  “If I don’t, I’ve got Tim Hall and Ira Roth backing me up. I have client-attorney privilege. You can talk to me and it doesn’t go any farther. What did you tell the detective?”

  “Just that Richard Butler threatened to blow the dam.”

  “What else did he threaten?”

  “He told King to buy a bag of clothespins.”

  “Clothespins? What for?”

  “He said his party guests were going to need them.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Not to King.”

  “What did King say?”

  “The whole damned thing was King’s fault. And lousy luck. I mean how often does a farmer come in here, right? He finds what he needs in his junk pile or he makes it. So that damned day had to be the one day Richard’s in here trying to buy a Swiss Army knife.”

  “A Swiss Army knife? What for?”

  “Dicky’s birthday.”

  The knife display was next to the key-cutting machine. I’d peruse it occasionally, wishing it were as exciting as it had been when I was a kid.

  “He told me, first time he’d bought a birthday present in twenty years. He was really getting into it. Anyway, King’s in the next aisle raving to somebody about how he’s going buy his neighbor’s busted-down farm for back taxes. I mean how stupid can the guy get?”

  “He probably didn’t realize Mr. Butler was in the next aisle.”

  “Even if he didn’t know Richard was listening, it’s pretty dumb to go around Newbury bragging he’s going to rip off his neighbor. What kind of a jerk is he? It’s gotta get back to the guy you’re badmouthing.”

  “Apparently he’s not the most diplomatic diplomat.”

  “Yeah, well anyhow, Richard goes postal down the aisle, so mad he’s spitting, ‘It’s not for sale. Not for sale.’ That’s when he said he’d blow the dam.”

  “What did King say?”

  “He sounded kind of scared, like he believed him. He said, ‘That’s a very serious threat, Butler. I should re
port it to the police.’” Mike plucked an offending washer and restored it to its proper place. He looked up at me, a reflective expression on his face. “Richard seemed to catch hold of himself. I thought he was going to start screaming more, but he backed down a little. Mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Then he said, ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ That’s when he told him to buy the clothespins. Came back and stood staring at the knives until King left. Just blinking at them. You know, like when a kid’s trying not to cry?”

  “What’s the thing about the clothespins?”

  Mike looked around, confirmed we were alone in nuts and bolts and whispered, “I asked him, soon as King left. ‘Richard, what’s with the clothespins?’ He said if worst came to worst he was going to order a tank truck of liquid pig shit and spread it on that field he leased from old Zarega. You know the field I mean?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I’m not a farmer, but I hear it really, really stinks.”

  “I smelled it once. It was a long time before I ate another BLT. But who keeps pigs around here? Enough for a tank truck? That’s some kind of factory operation.”

  “Over in New York. Columbia County.”

  An hour drive. “Do you think he meant it?”

  “Sounded like he’d already talked to them. Said he just had to call and they’d send a spreader truck right to the field. He said it cost almost nothing. They’re glad to get rid of the stuff.”

  “What did he mean by worst comes to worst?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess it didn’t. Because he didn’t do it….You hear about the flies?”

  “Al Bell was telling me. It must have been funny as hell, till Dicky got killed.”

  “Pig manure would have been a lot worse than flies. Wonder why he changed his mind?”

  ***

  I walked back up Church Hill, thinking I’d grab breakfast at the General Store. Ollie went by in his cruiser. When he saw me on the sidewalk, he pulled a tire-squealing U-turn and shoved the passenger door open. It was amazing how he filled the big car.

  “Get in.”

  Very curious, I obeyed.

  Chapter 22

  The trooper was wearing his mirrored sunglasses, so God knew what was churning in his brain. The new laser speed detector sat on the seat between us. A night stick was clamped within easy reach and a locked clip held a stubby shotgun. Handy for fighting his way back to his main arsenal in the trunk. It occurred to me that the UN was missing a bet dispatching mere armies to enforce the peace.