He scowled, as much as he could. Calvin is a tall, rangy young guy who can’t help looking pleasant. “I wish. I was stuck down in Riverton waiting to testify in a drug case. They can waste as much of your time as they feel like. But man, they call out your name your tail had better be there, ready to wag.”
“So now you’ve finished wagging it you’re on the Ryan Jessup murder?”
“Yep. Baxter wanted me to run a couple of names past you.”
“Such as?”
“What can you tell me about Johnny Armitage?”
I made a face. “Allegedly he’s the Garden Center crew chief. What else would you like to know?”
He grinned. “You were stuck with him most of the summer at Hudson Heights. Did he have any problems with Jessup there?”
“None that I noticed.”
“So why was he so pissed off at the guy? I hear his favorite terms of endearment were shithead and cocksucker.”
“Because Ryan was squeezing him. He used the drinking— I don’t know if anything else—to hold his salary down after the promotion to crew chief. Have you gotten around to checking where Johnny was that night?”
“Drinking at Blackie’s until around ten with a couple of guys from his softball team. The wife was already in bed and didn’t notice when he came in. She says it felt pretty early. How about Skip Boyles? His wife and kiddies are off visiting her folks till after Labor Day, so all we’ve got is Skip’s word he was home in bed.”
“Why Skip?”
“He was seriously ticked this spring, the way the Garden Center stiffed him. He didn’t make any secret of blaming Jessup, mostly.”
“Yeah, but hell, the way things are working out, he owed the man a thank-you present.”
“I guess. He keeps calling me on jobs. There was also that accident last summer at Hudson Heights—when he broke his leg. Could Jessup have had anything to do with it?”
“I don’t see how. Ryan and I were both away at a staff meeting when it happened. Ryan did give him a lot of grief on the paperwork, but it finally got done. I still can’t see why you’re interested in Skip. Can you feature him as even daydreaming a grudge killing?”
Calvin frowned. “No more than I can feature Johnny Armitage being smart and steady and sober enough to bring one off. But we have to check out all the possibilities. Baxter’s got a couple of men looking at the rest of Etlingers’ staff.”
“If I were playing sheriff, the first thing I’d want to look at would be Ryan’s financial records.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where the good stuff is? We didn’t find much in his apartment. “
“He’d never have kept anything important there. Ryan was paranoid when it came to security. There must be records somewhere, though. He was meticulous about having things down on paper.”
“You get any ideas as to location, let us know. Preferably not the rest of today—I’m off once I leave here. And Baxter does not take well to having his Saturdays interrupted. They’re for his kid.”
“Have he and her mom been divorced long? She’s married to Dr. Jensen now, right?”
“Yep. The marriage crapped out after Baxter took a couple of courses at Albany Law and realized he couldn’t stand the company he’d have to keep. Five, six years ago, that must have been. Laura’s ambitious—I guess she couldn’t see herself stuck as a deputy’s wife. Jeez, though, can you imagine being married to a dentist?”
“The last time we discussed it, neither of us could imagine ourselves married to anybody. How’s Baxter doing on this, do you think?”
“Hey, this kind of thing is his meat. Baxter gets bored when the answers come too easy. What he loves is to poke and prod around until he’s got all the pieces uncovered. Then he keeps playing with them till they fit right. He’s the best investigator in the department—nobody’d give you any arguments on that. Even Frank, who is also damn good.”
“What I meant, more, was how’s he doing as an almost brand-new sheriff who got the job by default and finds himself under a lot of pressure?”
“Well … Do you know Jerry at all?”
“Couldn’t pick him out of a crowd. Or did I mean lineup?”
“That was unbelievably dumb. Jerry didn’t run a very tight ship, his own or the department’s. But he kept people happy—schmoozing the pols, sweet-talking the union, smiling at the voters. All the stuff that drives Baxter nuts. And Baxter purely hates sloppy police work. The department’s accumulated way too much deadwood to suit him.”
“You’re telling me it’s been a little bumpy?”
“You gotta expect.”
“Won’t it get noticeably bumpier if this murder investigation doesn’t yield results in the fairly immediate future?”
“Possibility. Nothing we can’t handle.”
Given my take on the cages they’d need to rattle, I wasn’t so sure about that.
CHAPTER 9
It was almost seven Sunday evening when I turned off County Route 26 and on to Wilbur Creek Road. I’d meant to get back a little earlier and put in a full evening polishing up the plans for that prospective garden. Jake had set us up an appointment for Tuesday morning.
It hadn’t been a restful mini-weekend. At the last minute Jason decided he wanted to come along, somewhat to Vicky’s relief, though not to mine. With Jason you never know, but he’s usually okay left alone in the apartment; it is his sanctuary, his hidey-hole from the world he finds so menacing. When he’s away from home, all bets are off.
For a while I wondered if Jason and I shared some genetic defect. But I guess not. I had perceived life as chaos from day one; not until Pete and Janey got their hands on me did I begin to establish a territory for myself and make it orderly enough to inhabit. Jason, on the other hand, appeared to be fine until he was almost five and suffered three high-fever convulsions in a row. They seem to have blown connections in his brain; his EKGs sometimes show irregular patterns. There are medications that help even things out for a while, though none we’ve found that help consistently or enough, and none that he doesn’t come to hate taking. We keep trying.
At fifteen, Jason is a handsome boy and very articulate, but nobody can be around him for more than ten minutes without sensing something is off. In his dark phases, it doesn’t take nearly that long. He didn’t stick in the public school system or either private program we tried—they forced him to regularly go out into the world, and he can’t seem to hack that. He’s on home tutoring now, working sporadically and below grade level. Vicky still projects confidence, but I see little prospect of his ever getting a high school diploma or otherwise qualifying for certification as an independent adult.
He was fascinated that somebody had been murdered in my front yard and full of questions on the drive up. At the camp he kept following me around, trying out theories and concocting stories. Darkness does attract him. The upside was that the subject held his demons at bay while we were camping. It is possible, with Jason, that he’ll start shouting in the middle of a movie or wake you during the night, panicked, and there’ll be nothing for it but to head back to the apartment.
With Jason obsessing on murder plots, getting out of town didn’t feel that much like getting out of town. It made a nice change of pace for Vicky, though, and I did enjoy watching Alex and Galen in exuberant perpetual motion. The weather was great, the night starry. Around two I gave up on the trailer and took my sleeping bag down to the beach.
After I dropped Vicky and Jason off in Albany, I got to thinking about finances, trying to come up with more specific ideas on what role money might have played in the murder. Ryan had been both too frugal and too much of an operator not to have a pretty good stash somewhere, and it didn’t sound as if they’d found it.
Until she married Jon Keegan, my mother’s life had been a struggle to stay above the poverty line; they say she’s still tight with a buck. As an unfunded teenager I counted small change out of necessity, but I always intended to move on to larger denominations. My s
econd line of work, fixing up unattractive properties and reselling them, can be deliciously profitable when you guess right, and I have a knack for that. Today’s denomination is thousands, and I don’t tally things up every night. Skip Boyles, on the other hand, had never made really good money and he kept close watch on his finances. On other people’s, too. If Ryan had been up to anything worse than I knew about while he was still with Etlingers’, Skip could probably tell me. It seemed worth a detour to pick his brain.
Skip and his wife and three under-school-age kids live even farther out in the country that I do—their road is unpaved and washboardy in the best of times. On part of the tract his dad farmed he’d built a large, handsome log house from a kit, pretty much by himself. Professionally, we were a mutual admiration society. If I’d been religious, and if he had shown any ability to lighten up, we might have become good friends. I knew he never worked on Sundays, and since his kids weren’t around to spend time with, he ought to be as accessible as he ever got.
I found him in his veggie garden, harvesting tomatoes. He’s a compact, well-muscled man several years my junior, with thick summer freckles across the bridge of his nose and short hair white-blond from being out in the sun. Skip is innately conservative and cautious, a long-range, detailed planner. When the Etlingers pushed him out last spring, he’d been beside himself, having counted on two more seasons to build up capital before making his break with them. After studying the figures he anxiously showed me I’d predicted it would be fine. Yeah, he’d better take out a loan for a second backhoe, but he could carry it. The jobs would come. He might not be the cheapest contractor you could hire to take out some trees or regrade your front yard, but he’d do no more and no less than was needed, and do it right. Word gets around about such people. There are never enough of them.
“Are you rich yet?” I asked when he waved me over.
“Working on it. Twenty-six hours a day, it feels like. How’s it going with you?”
“Being a one-day murder suspect’s new and different, I’ve got to give it that. I guess they’ve talked to you?”
“Baxter, and then Calvin. There wasn’t much I could tell them. I haven’t a clue as to what the guy was up to recently. Except I’d be surprised if it was entirely honorable.”
“Wouldn’t we all? Nobody seems to know much. It’s like the man didn’t have a life beyond his work.”
“Wasn’t he an Elk? I remember him serving at a couple of the pancake breakfasts.”
“He’d joined the Rotary, too. Apparently he didn’t make any friends in either group, though.”
“He wasn’t a very friendly guy. Like when he came over to you at work, it was because he wanted something, and he didn’t waste any time letting you know what. You happened to run into him downtown, he’d barely say ‘Hi.’ Which was fine with me, and I expect you, too.”
“Oh, yeah. I couldn’t have cared less about his private life—until he turned up dead in my front yard. My guess would still be that he got killed because of something he was involved in at work, though. I just wish I knew what.”
“Well, it wasn’t only you and me he bummed out, trying to save a buck at somebody else’s expense. Doesn’t seem like enough to kill anybody for, though, the sort of stuff he was up to.”
“You probably saw more of it than I did.”
“I did keep an eye open. Of course there was that inferior materials business he tried to pull till you caught him. He sneaked in a pass-along ten percent markup on some of the plant orders. And—well, you already know this—he’d stiff fellow employees every chance he got. But as far as I could tell everything went to making the Garden Center’s bottom line look better. It should be interesting to see how an audit comes out. I assume one’s being done?”
“Hopefully. I’ve never known what the screwup was that got us stuck with Ryan in the first place.”
“I can fill you in there. You know how the Etlingers are about money: spend, spend, spend. They’d fallen seriously behind on loan payments, and the bank was starting to press. So Rodney got the brilliant idea of diverting sales tax collections to make the payments. This worked out okay for a while, until the state said hey, where’s our money? Unfortunately for him, they said this to Kate, regarding the store. She promptly ran to her dad with it.”
“I can hear Clete now. We didn’t then, though. Somehow they managed to clean things up quietly.”
“Well, almost. You remember Gladys, the white-haired lady who used to help out with the bookkeeping? She’s done our church books for years. Thinks the world of Eleanor. Gladys had a pretty good idea what Rodney up to, and it bothered her. Anyhow, she was there the morning Clete marched in with steam coming out of his ears. He laid down the law, loud enough for her to hear. He would kick in the funds to bail them out this one last time, but only if Rodney and Eleanor made an effort to clean up their financial act and kept their fingers out of the till, their hands off the books. He put them on an allowance, is what it amounted to.”
“And installed Ryan as his enforcer. Do you think it worked?”
“It helped, that’s for sure. For anything like an accurate picture I’d need to run a comparison.”
“In what areas?”
“Well, crew costs are easy enough to estimate if you have a rough idea of the hours involved. I’m familiar with the numbers on the Hudson Heights contract, the plus-minus max they agreed on.”
“We went over, I’m pretty sure.”
“Not surprising. You had several guys I’d never hire working out there. And then somebody was telling me about this mudslide, after Johnny got carried away with some grading? Since it was his fault, I assume you guys had to do the cleanup?”
“Part of it. Matt put some of his people on it, too.”
“I bet they billed the Garden Center, though.”
“Knowing Clete, you’re probably right. Okay. Hudson Heights must’ve accounted for the bulk of the billing this season. They had maybe nine or ten other contract jobs, small ones, plus the usual maintenance jobs. You’re saying we’d need the labor and materials figures on all that kind of stuff since Ryan’s been around. What else?”
“This season and last would be enough. Overhead has to be factored in, of course. Debt reduction, if they’ve separated that out. Store inventory and sales. With round numbers in all those categories I could come up with a pretty good idea of what their books should look like. It turns out the official picture is substantially less rosy than mine, maybe Ryan managed to do something for himself, too? My guess is that’s not what you’d see. I’ll be happy to take a look, if Baxter asks and gets me the figures.”
“What if I’m the one asking? I can access most of those figures, and I really do not appreciate having bodies turn up in my front yard.”
“I guess you don’t.” There was a little too much speculation in the look he gave me. “Okay. Bring them on out, if you want, and I’ll give you a read.”
• • •
From a distance I could see that my driveway was blocked just short of its end by a sheriff’s department car. Approaching, I recognized my visitor as Baxter himself—in the process of dismantling the crime-scene corral. I parked behind his car and walked on in, Roxy racing ahead. “Hi, there. I like the looks of that.”
“I thought you might. It was a useless formality, but we could lose points in court for closing up shop before everybody was sure they didn’t need anything else from it. How was the north country?”
“Rustic. Invigorating water temperature. Noisy. Seven people and a dog in a trailer is a lot.”
He thought about that. “You, Roxy, your sister, the boys, their sister and her boyfriend. Did your mother come along?”
The involuntary noise I made sounded much like a snort. “Mommie Dearest called me Friday—didn’t like seeing her name in the paper. It was our first contact in twenty-five years. Fine with me if it went another quarter century.”
“Is your sister out of touch with her, too?”
“Vicky split the day after Ma and Jon Keegan made it official, which was a few months before I got packed off. They did not want either of us back. Her being so young—she’d just turned sixteen—the state wouldn’t go with Vicky as my guardian, so it had to find a place for me to live.”
“Birchwood.”
“Do you have a private source for that, or did Jack Garrett’s follow-up story make the Record?”
“First page, today’s Capital District section. I was surprised. It was like pulling teeth trying to get personal information out of you the other day. You opened right up to this guy.”
“We negotiated a trade: more about me for his source on the Keegans’ names and that inaccurate account of what happened in family court.”
“Kate Etlinger. She told me, too. Stopped by my office Friday afternoon.”
“Nice of her.”
“A little payback, maybe, for sleeping with her husband?”
Whatever reaction he wanted from that, he wasn’t going to get it. “Could be,” I said calmly. “So how did Jack’s story come out? Birchwood saved my life. When I start talking about Pete and Janey and what happened there, I tend to gush.”
“Hey, it’s nice that we manage to do the right thing for our troubled kids once in a while. My daughter was impressed with your basketball career. How come I don’t see a hoop anywhere on the premises?”
“The boys haven’t screamed loud enough yet. Three high school and two college years were plenty for me. You take a lot of elbows when you’re typecast to hang out under the basket. I’m not that fast and all I can shoot reliably is fouls.”
“You were good enough for college level.”
“A two-year ag and tech school like Marysville is minimal college level. They were willing to spring a few bucks for a big body, and since my higher education was a self-financed proposition I said why not. When I went on to Cornell they offered a teensy partial scholarship to be a backup center. Third on the charts. I decided I could bring in more money in a lot less time working. Besides, I’d purely hate to sit the bench.”
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