FrostLine

by Justin Scott

King laughed the way you laugh when a crazy corners you at a party. “Just out of curiosity, how’d you read me wrong?”

  “You have a great motive—you want Mr. Butler’s farm—but I can’t see you killing him for it.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “And I also can’t imagine you destroying your new lake to get rid of the body.”

  “Another relief.”

  “But everyone else who might have killed him, didn’t.”

  Henry King laughed again. “Good thing you’re not a cop. It would cost me a fortune in attorney fees for a false arrest suit.”

  “Trooper Moody didn’t kill him. My lamebrain cousins didn’t kill him. J.J. Topkis didn’t kill him.”

  “Who the hell is J.J. Topkis?”

  “J.J.’s a biker with a hotshot criminal attorney who was hired by your man Secretary Bertram Wills.”

  “Bert Wills is from a patrician Connecticut family known for helping the less advantaged.”

  “J.J.’s become more advantaged since Josh Wiggens bought him a brand-new twenty-five-thousand-dollar factory-customized Harley-Davidson motorcycle—”

  “How Josh spends his money is his business. I know he came into some recently when his mother died. As for the ‘company’ Josh keeps—” he wiggled his hand in the gay slur gesture—“his young friends are his own business, too. He is always welcome in my house.”

  “Your ‘houseguests’ have been working real hard to use J.J. to hang Mr. Butler. Josh tipped Trooper Moody where to arrest J.J. Bert hired him a hotshot criminal attorney who cut a deal for ratting out Mr. Butler. Josh bribed him with a new Harley to keep his mouth shut. He even stopped J.J.’s gang from stomping me to death—against his fonder desires I am sure—in order to keep him out of jail on murder charges. My guess is next time J.J. steps out of line he’s going to end up dead.”

  “If you could prove this nonsense you’d have turned Josh into the police.”

  “Except you’re the one looking for Dicky’s glove.”

  “I’m not looking for the glove.”

  “Your knees are all muddy. You’ve been crawling around looking for Dicky’s glove.”

  “I tripped and fell. I was enjoying a walk in my woods. It’s very peaceful, here. Usually. I often stroll here, collecting my thoughts. I’m a city boy. Nature’s new to me. I find it very relaxing. Don’t you?”

  “Not when I run into hostile neighbors.”

  “That’s because you’re walking in someone else’s woods. Try your own, sometime. You’ll find them much safer.”

  “Let me make you an offer,” I said.

  “I’m not interested.”

  “I’ll give you the glove for free.”

  “I don’t want it,” he said.

  The mud on his knees said he did.

  “This whole thing is driving me crazy. I’m rooting around like a pig with a ring in his nose. I’ll give you the glove in exchange for the answer to one simple question.”

  King looked bored.

  I asked, “Do you want to be the star attraction at the biggest glove trial since OJ? Is that why you are hunting the glove alone?”

  “That’s two questions.”

  The plywood hole in the ground, Mr. Butler’s balding tire tracks leading up it, and the motley collection of dynamite sticks the Chevalleys had stolen from Fox Trot, made it three.

  “Is it true that your security people found dynamite in your dam the night before it blew up?”

  King’s smile turned reflective, his gaze opaque. He reflected for a long moment. Then he shrugged, still smiling. “May I frisk you, Ben?”

  “I’m not armed.”

  “For a tape recorder.”

  “Be my guest.”

  He patted me down, clumsily, but thoroughly.

  “The glove is in my Olds. Nearby.”

  “Do I have your word?”

  “I will give you Dicky’s glove,” I promised, but I was getting a queasy feeling that Henry King was playing more games with me than I was playing with him.

  He rubbed his chin. He removed his Iowa cap, ran cooling fingers through his silvery hair, and put his cap back on. “The answer to your question is, yes.”

  “Your people found dynamite in your dam the night before the party?”

  “Yes. Now go get the glove and bring it to my house.”

  “But they didn’t tell the cops.”

  “I was in London. The party was scheduled the next day. My staff made a decision to leave it there, disarmed.”

  “Is that why you roped off the area?”

  “Of course. And a good thing we did. The goddammed stuff went off.”

  “With Dicky Butler under it.”

  “He was drunk and fell asleep—Understand, Julia made a command decision based on all sorts of variables there’s no point in going into. It wasn’t her fault.”

  “You mean the ceramic engine deal.”

  King said, “You’ve been busy, Mr. Abbott. What a shame you didn’t put such effort into the job I hired you to do. Yes. That fucking engine. Julia and I were in constant communication, of course, and when they found the explosives, it still looked like I was going to forge an agreement I could announce at the party. Julia decided we could not have a police bomb squad swarming over the grounds. A decision I support fully, regardless what went wrong.”

  “How’d you know Dicky was drunk?”

  “I assume—”

  “You spoke like you saw him.”

  “I assumed—”

  “You said it like you knew it. You saw him drunk…”

  King looked around the woods. Then down the stream.

  I pushed him as hard as I knew how. “You got back from London late. Eight hours in a cramped aircraft with broken air conditioning. Julia picked you up in the helicopter. You were upset. You had botched the negotiations….”

  “You’re absolutely right. I had had a ghastly week in London. And a hellish flight home. No sleep. And I had two hundred people coming to a party where I had to pretend that Henry King was a winner. I had to restore my energy. So I walked up here and sat under a tree. That tree.”

  He pointed out a pleasant-looking ash near the stream. “I have a Victorian walking stick that opens into a shooting stool. Quite comfortable. I had already discovered that Connecticut ground is cold and wet even in summer.” His voice trailed off.

  “Your back to the fence?” I coaxed. “Looking downhill?”

  “Everything I saw was mine. I could look downstream into my woods and listen to the water. Birds. Little animals I couldn’t see at first. But I had learned that if I stayed still they’d come out.

  “All of a sudden I heard glass break. I turned around and just across the fence was Dicky Butler. Drunk. He was trying to smash the neck off a new bottle.

  “He saw me and he called out, ‘Hey, King. Got a corkscrew?’

  “I could smell his sweat and breath twenty feet away. I tried to ignore him. I truly did. But he started taunting me. ‘Hey big man, you got a big party today? My dad’s having a party, too, down in the pasture.’”

  “The pig manure.”

  “I must remember to hire you next time I need some ferreting.” His intelligent eyes probed mine. “Seriously, come up to the office. I’m going to put you on retainer. I’ve got projects all over the world you could help me with. Did you keep any decent suits?”

  “They smell of mothballs.”

  “I’ll have Bert take you shopping—Of course I knew what Butler was threatening and I wasn’t worried. I’d already dealt with the pig problem.”

  “By bribing our resident trooper.”

  Henry King said, “I enjoy negotiating with moralists; they’re so inflexible that they’re predictable.”

  I didn’t care if he meant Ollie or me. “Then what happened?”

  “I folded up my stool and started to go. ‘Hey, big man!’ He kept calling me that. Big man. ‘He
y! I’m warning you. No more helicopter. My old man’s really hurting. Leave him alone.’

  “I know you warned me not to get into it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I went up to the fence. I said, ‘Tell your father I’ll buy him any farm in Newbury he wants. Tell him he can have money, too. You can start over, no debts, modern equipment, new breed cows.’

  “He just grinned at me. Filthy, yellow teeth. I felt helpless, like I was back in grade school. You know, when some slum kid leans on you because he has nothing else in his life but to make you hurt. And you can’t do anything about it. And keep in mind, Abbott, I had just been informed that his father had tried to blow up my dam….

  “But I stayed cool. I turned my back on him. I walked back to my house, took a shower, and dressed for my party. And just as I was easing into the swing of it, Dicky Butler blew up my dam, destroying my lake, and, since he blundered and killed himself in the process, turning a vicious act of vandalism into an ongoing annoyance.”

  “No. You didn’t go back to the party until after you killed him.”

  “I didn’t kill him. You just went through it yourself. I had neither the motivation nor the means. For Christ sake, Abbott, how could I kill a jailhouse brawler half my age?”

  Killer question. King was in pretty good shape for his age, solidly built, but shorter than Dicky, who must have out-weighed him by fifty pounds. I’d seen King’s temper. But how could he take a man so much bigger, stronger, and younger? What anger had super-charged his strength?

  King’s deepset, hooded eyes shifted toward the stream, again. This was a man who yelled that a coffee cup with a spot on it was “filthy.” At his cookout I’d seen him scrub his fingernails as fastidiously as a surgeon.

  I got it at last.

  The wolf had marked his territory.

  “Dicky pissed in your stream. He opened his pants and pissed in the stream.”

  King stared off into the trees for a full minute. Then he stared at me. Then he looked around, confirming that we were alone in the woods. He sounded detached, at first, like a man narrating a movie, but soon righteous with passion.

  “The stream was low. Just a trickle. It had been a while since the rains….I saw this ugly yellow stain spread down from his property into mine—These backwoods scum were destroying everything I had worked for. I threw myself through the deer fence. It stung like bees, which made me madder, and I threw a wild punch. He fell backward, laughing at me.

  “Then he stood up and I thought, this monster’s going to kill me. I was terrified. I’m sixty years old. I hadn’t been in a fight since I was sixteen. I was going to die in the woods, beside a pile of broken bottles. Then it was like a miracle. He stopped to put on a glove.

  “It was the best chance I’d get.

  “I grabbed his wine bottle and hit him in the head. I didn’t mean to kill him. I figured the bottle would break and stun him and I’d run. But it didn’t break. It caught him right in front of the ear and crushed…His head split, like I’d dropped a cantaloupe or something. I only meant to stop him from killing me….Can’t you understand that, Ben?”

  I could imagine his fear at the moment a brawler like Dicky Butler climbed menacingly to his feet. Had I gotten my hands on the bikers’ wrench I’d have easily, accidently killed one of them down in Derby. “You could plead self-defense.”

  “I’m not pleading anything. It’s over. He’s dead and buried and it’s time for the rest of us to get on with our lives.”

  I recalled a line from a Mary-Chapin Carpenter song Julia had played on the jukebox: “The world is kinder to the kind who won’t look back.”

  That depended on what they were not looking back on.

  “So you had a body on your hands,” I said.

  “As you’ve guessed.”

  “With its head bashed in.”

  “He would have killed me.”

  “And a nearby dam set conveniently to explode.”

  “In that I was damned lucky.”

  “The famous luck of the Silver Fox?”

  “Not the first time it’s rescued me.” He smiled in gratitude to the Higher Power that arranged such things.

  “But this time you stretched your luck,” I said. “You overreached. You weren’t satisfied with lucky and convenient. You got greedy.”

  Chapter 31

  Henry King looked at me like I had lurched from the gutter to shake an empty cup in his face. He had unburdened himself. He would deny anything repeated by the real estate agent with the checkered past. My word against his, no corroboration.

  “Greedy? What did you want me to do, wreck my life by confessing to the cops? Forget it.”

  I said, “You know that’s not what I mean. You got greedy.”

  “You promised to return the glove, Abbott.”

  “Butler’s dynamite wasn’t booby-trapped. Your people removed it immediately. There was no way Julia would take a chance leaving it in place. But when you had to get rid of the body, you got this great idea to put the dynamite back and blow the dam.

  “Except somebody noticed there was a variety of dynamites. All different types. And it occurred to them what Mr. Butler had done.”

  “What had he done?” asked King.

  “He didn’t want to get caught any more than you want to get caught. He used untraceable dynamite. Leftovers he picked up from jobs here and there—not hard for a guy with a license. That’s when you got greedy. You figured if you had to lose your lake in the process of covering up your murder, you might as well turn a profit.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Two birds with one stone. You sent my stupid cousins up to Butler’s farm and stole his legitimate dynamite—traceable explosive he had purchased at Pendleton Powder—and used it to blow the dam onto Dicky’s body.”

  “You’re nuts, Abbott.”

  “That’s how Mr. Butler knew the instant the Feds traced the dam explosion to Pendleton Powder that you had switched loads and killed his son. Got to hand it to you. You thought fast under all that pressure. It was a great plan. Butler got interrogated, harassed, and jailed. At best the poor guy’ll be locked up forever, at worst, you’ll drive him crazy. Either way, you’ll get his farm.”

  “Then why did I pay for his defense?”

  “That was my idea and you loved it. For twenty-five thousand dollars, you looked innocent. Cheaper than half a million to buy him another farm. Dollars to doughnuts, while you pretend to pressure the state’s attorney to drop the case, Josh Wiggens’ll keep tossing raw meat to Detective-Sergeant Boyce.”

  I turned away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll bring the glove up to your house. I’m done with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve already photographed it, and scraped samples of Dicky Butler’s sweat. Detective Boyce can get a DNA match out of his coffin.”

  “So what?”

  “The glove alone won’t convict, but it sure will scare the hell out of the people who covered up for you. I’ll turn them if it takes me all year.”

  King sighed. “I can only hope that you’ll get bored and stop slandering me after six months.”

  “I’ll start with Josh Wiggens.”

  “Do it before lunch, if you want coherence.”

  “How about Bert Wills?”

  Henry King took off his cap, ran his hand through his hair, and jammed it on again. Then he looked me straight in the face. “You’ll find Bert in my wife’s bedroom. Or on warm nights, in my sunken garden.”

  I tried to look shocked. Shocked. “You know?”

  “Of course I know, you idiot. He keeps her off my back until I can work out an affordable divorce.”

  Sounded awfully like Julia would be registering at Tiffany’s.

  I said, “If that’s so, then Bert has lots to lose. And more to win by selling you out. Even if he didn’t help you carry the body, he probably knows who did. Josh w
ould be my guess. But I don’t have to guess. My friend Detective-Sergeant Boyce is a smart woman with political ambitions. And a real bear of a confessor. You know how she breaks people down? Once she knows what to ask, she says, ‘Bert, Josh, whoever, the door to immunity from accessory to murder is here. First one on line gets through.’ Before you know it, Bert gives up a piece. Josh gives a piece. And my friend hands you to the State’s Attorney.”

  Henry King plunged a hand into his pocket and whipped out a Motorola two-way. “Front and center!”

  Josh? I prayed to see him saunter from the forest. Or Bert Wills? Even Jenkins hugging Mrs. King’s shoes? But no such luck, and no surprises. I saw Julia Devlin moving through the trees.

  She walked past me, eyes down. I’d expected defiance, or anger at me, or a look of love for King, but she just stared at the leaf-strewn ground. Yet something easy in her stance spoke of pride or resolve. It was very puzzling.

  “Julia,” King said, “Ben has the glove in his car and he claims to have taken photos and scrapings from it. We’ll want them from his house.”

  I said to Julia, “You didn’t find it in my house last night because I put it in my glove compartment. And I am willing to believe that you were looking for more than the glove.”

  She said to King, “There is nothing he can prove.”

  “He’ll push, and push, and push until someone falls. I can’t allow it.”

  Julia gathered herself, and yet couldn’t seem to raise her head. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

  When I looked back at King, he was smiling the bored smile of a victor anxious to get on to other things.

  And when I turned to Julia she was already airborne, lofting at me like a panther.

  Chapter 32

  Aunt Connie was sitting down to afternoon tea, miles away, but she saved my life. Thanks to her sharper eye than mine, I knew why Julia Devlin never carried Henry King’s bags. And remembered it in time to take her flying kick on my chest instead of my throat.

  I picked myself off the ground, confident that I outweighed her by enough. She knew too, of course, and was standing easily with a pretty little gun braced professionally in a cross-wrist grip.

  “Don’t.”

  It never crossed my mind. Here was the warrior woman I’d imagined last March at Fox Trot, the grandee’s daughter fighting Moors. If it was any consolation, I was an accurate judge of character, only slow on the uptake.