Summerkill

by Maryann Weber

  “You look organized” was Baxter’s comment upon sitting down. “Any breakthroughs?”

  “Maybe some vague directions. First I want to know what’s happening about Mariah.”

  “Our evidence samples have gone to the state Violent Crimes Lab. Neighbors and friends are being interviewed, Steve’s up in Albany taking her picture around. My phone company contact won’t be in the office till this afternoon. Phil Thomson sounds borderline hyper. He’s trying for the position that Mariah died accidentally and the two deaths are not connected. He’d like me to try for it, too.”

  “Even with the marks on her shoulders and the lack of fingerprints?”

  “Even with. He’s storming my office at eleven, so we’d better get going on this Hudson Heights stuff. For starters, why is there so damn much of it?”

  “Your short answer is, because in the last decade or so there’ve gotten to be so many regulations. And regulators. They all want to make sure their tails are covered.”

  “Are we sure this works better than underregulation?”

  “Not any of the ‘we’s’ I associate with. Maybe if the communications were better. There are a lot of big-bucks professionals out there who cannot tell you in words—either aloud or in print—what the charts and diagrams and graphs they’re so fond of are supposed to show. And, even with the best of intentions, petitioners often misinterpret or fail to address aspects of the pertinent local laws. They’re scarcely models of clarity either and usually haven’t been codified in decades. Then, on a project as big as Hudson Heights you’re bound to have at least one state agency involved and probably several groups intervening, all with agendas that aren’t clearly spelled out and tend to be changeable on short notice. So eventually you end up with twenty-three thick binders crammed full of tail-covering materials that may or may not be either true or pertinent. And a bottom-line yes or no that is more likely to come out of lawyers’ conferences than public hearings, and to be based more on political fashions and game strategies than on what most people would think of as the public interest.”

  He laughed. “That’s the time-honored American formula for deriving bottom lines, Val; we just used to get there quicker and cheaper. So you’re telling me this much paperwork is normal for a project the size of Hudson Heights?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And you’re not optimistic about finding any revelations in those twenty-three binders?”

  “Not intentional ones. It might be easier to spot something that went off-line from the site plans. The big planning diagrams, with all the specs on them? Sort of like blue-prints—of course there’ll be those, too, for the buildings. This project must have had a dozen site plans, at least, from first to last. Where did you get the binders?”

  “I have an in at the town planning board. My dad’s in his fourth term.”

  “They’ll have the site plans on file, too. I can run out and pick them up after we finish.”

  “That’s not a wonderful idea. How long do you think it would take for some people who might get really upset about it to learn what you walked out with? Dad’s got a key to the office. He can pick them up tonight.”

  “Twenty-three binders and a big bundle of site plans will leave a noticeable hole no matter who makes it.”

  “We do not, however, have to advertise who makes it. Now, what have you got for me so far?”

  “How strong are you on the history of the site? Before Clete.”

  “Does it have much history? The bulk of acreage was in the Babcock family for I don’t know how many generations; Toby and his brother Ben were the last of the line. The land was mostly either farmed or undeveloped, and I doubt farming was ever much more than a break-even proposition. There was some logging on Crane Hill back in the thirties, and those industrial-waste dumpsites they rented out in the forties must’ve brought in welcome bucks. And I guess the gravel mine, where the quarry pond is now, did okay for a decade or so. All along the area was prime hunting territory: deer, rabbits, pheasants. Of course that was just seasonal income. When Clete came along and offered to put some serious money in old Toby’s hands, I doubt he put up much resistance.”

  “You’re good. Toby Babcock kept a bunch of records, including rough maps of the dumpsites and a partial list of what went into them. Also lists of hunting parties and what he charged them. He died not long after selling the property to Clete, and by the time Hudson Heights was proposed his brother was pretty much out of it. Mariah and her committee people visited Ben Babcock several times, trying to extract something in the background of the property they could use. Usually he couldn’t even remember his name. My point is, there isn’t much history to go by, at least that we know or probably ever will. As for changes after Clete took title— well, obviously the most glaring one was when he took something like thirty vertical feet off the top of Crane Hill.”

  “I still think that should’ve been illegal.”

  “On what grounds? Crane Hill might have been the highest spot in the county—it still is, for that matter—but no level of government was protecting it as such. It was on private property in an area with no zoning in place, and the change didn’t impact anybody else’s property. Making a hill a little shorter did not violate any federal or state land-use restriction. Clete was too shrewd to wait and try to do it after the development application was submitted. That would have led to a major stall, not to mention a flood of lousy publicity. As a private property owner he had every right to quietly turn his hill into a plateau, and if some people got offended, so what?”

  “Oh, I understand. There’s nothing wrong with Clete’s grasp of political realities. My question is, was this the only reason for his timetable? Might there have been something about that hill he needed to hide, disguise, in some way fix before anybody got a chance to take a good look at it?”

  “It would be good to run that past Skip. He reads land really well.”

  “So must you, for your rehab business.”

  “What I read mainly is surfaces, contours. Skip’s got a feel for the underpinnings. Subsurfaces and structures surprise most of us in the business from time to time. Him, hardly ever. I don’t know that he’s ever looked at the Hudson Heights plateau from the angle of what Clete might be trying to cover up, but there are several things about it he made clear he didn’t like.”

  “Such as?”

  “First of all, taking so much off the top of Crane Hill. Skip thinks the violence of the procedure could have caused an internal imbalance, though it might take a while to manifest and he can’t begin to guess how it would show. He and Thurman had some friendly theoretical arguments over that.”

  “Working for Clete, Thurman could hardly have been open to such an idea.”

  “Maybe not officially, but Thurman’s into geological truths. When I had a problem with part of a paved path that kept buckling, he estimated the cause might be an unstable rock pocket and dug down to find it.”

  “Then there was something to Skip’s theory.”

  “Well, maybe, but we’re talking a very small area, no more than three by six feet. As far as I know there haven’t been any other instances of that sort of problem. Skip also thinks that trucking in so much fill to push out the sides of the plateau is bound to lead to stability problems.”

  “You’re suggesting the country club building or the inn could start sagging in the middle? Maybe even collapse?”

  “God, no, nothing that dramatic. Those buildings are both oriented to the cliffs on the river side, which thank goodness couldn’t be built out. The topping-off exposed a mostly rocky surface. It was a bitch to set that lower level of the country club into, but except for that one little problem area it’s proved very stable, though hardly user-friendly from a landscaping perspective. We had to—you could say ‘veneer’—with several feet of topsoil, to be able to plant.”

  “You couldn’t just put back some of the soil they took off when they scalped the hill?”

  “It’s too rocky
. That soil got pushed off the inland-oriented facings of the hill, where they increased the surface area by building up from below. There’s a lot of imported fill in those areas, too. In some places the outside twenty feet or so of current surface is pretty much that. They’ll be vulnerable to serious erosion until the anchoring vegetation takes hold and grows a little.

  “You asked for something that went wrong? Back in June Johnny Armitage screwed up on the degree of slope for one section of that fill area and cut it too steep. Afterward it rained for two days straight and the hill shrank about ten feet. Plus there was a whole lot of mud down where they were installing the tennis courts.”

  “Could this go as a serious potential problem?”

  “It goes as human error, if you want to call Johnny human. It just made a big mess and frayed a few tempers, including mine. Skip wasn’t worried about the edges, anyhow. The area he’s concerned about is farther in—the parking lot, basically—where there was enough reshaping and filling out that the land needs a few years to finish settling. He says paving it over and driving cars around on it right away is begging for excessive ongoing maintenance. Skip wouldn’t have put the parking lot there, to start with, for aesthetic reasons. Neither would the architect. They’d both have brought the pool and tennis courts up top and restricted cars to the lower level, which is a natural terrace, somewhat enhanced. But they weren’t paying the bills, and it’s Clete’s perception that most people would rather be near their vehicles than their secondary recreational facilities.”

  “Is there any chance the parking lot’s unsafe?”

  “Not according to the engineers. That is very thick concrete they’ve used for paving, and they expect it to act like a press, to compact what’s underneath. They concede it might crack in a few places the first couple of years, but that should be it. We’ll see, I guess. The other thing Skip objected to about the plateau was the drainage system. It’s set up so that accumulating groundwater is channeled down to the quarry pond area. Most environmentally conscious designs today go with holding basins, which you can draw from when you need to water. For the plateau, water has to be pumped up.”

  “Do you know why they went with the pumping system?”

  “As far as expenses go, it would have been pretty much a wash. With our annual rainfall, you’d have needed an auxiliary pumping system anyhow. Clete didn’t like the idea of having stagnant water up there, breeding mosquitoes and God knows what else. Now that we’ve got the West Nile virus scare, it’s looking like a prudent decision.”

  “As he’s no doubt pointed out.”

  “Loudly and often. As far as the plateau is concerned, everything else I can think of that got summarily changed, from the number of stalls in the ladies’ locker room to size of the pavers along the entranceway, could be attributed to Clete’s second thoughts. As for what went wrong—really nothing special. I can keep looking, but I don’t have much idea where.”

  “Why not the golf course? It wasn’t as dramatic as chopping off the top of a hill, but there’s been a lot of land reshaping.”

  “True. But if we’re going on your premise that they got rid of Skip and wanted to get rid of me because of something we might glom on to at Hudson Heights, I can’t see how the golf course would figure into it. We weren’t involved there. Both of us put in a little time on the south entrance to the residential loop—and no, I can’t think of anything special about that. Mostly, we worked on the plateau. When Ryan was out there, he was usually on the plateau, too. If he noticed something we didn’t, I can’t believe it had anything to do with landscaping. Ryan didn’t know squat about that.”

  “Ryan knew numbers. Ryan had a nose for actionable numbers, maybe.” He shook his head. “Beyond that, I still don’t have a clue what animated this guy. What was his goal? Blackmail on the installment plan, which it looks like what he was into here, though apparently he settled for a one-shot payment back in Watertown, is a high-risk activity. Your victim has to be looking for ways to shut you down, and the longer it goes on, the less benign those ways stand to get. I have to think whoever he hit on would’ve been unable to raise the kind of cash his information was worth all at once, but he figured they could manage five thou a month. For how long, did he suppose? And then what?”

  “We can’t even be sure that whatever he was extracting money for had to do with Hudson Heights.”

  “Pretty sure. This morning I quizzed Skip about that analysis of the Garden Center books you put him on to. His projections and what actually shows look very close. Skip thinks Ryan was genuinely trying to get the place on a sound financial footing. No way was there an extra five thou a month to appropriate for himself. And he must have known enough about the family’s personal finances to realize they’d be hard-put to come up with that kind of cash even three months in a row. If you wanted to blackmail the Etlingers, you’d go for a lump sum, make them sell something. The cash-flow approach wasn’t going to fly.”

  “All right, Hudson Heights. There’s been lots of money flowing around there. Mostly out, my new client in Platteville thinks, but hell, why not out to Ryan?”

  “Why to Ryan is more the issue.”

  “Do you want to hear the only, only thing I found any cause to wonder about this morning? It’s going to strike you as stupid.”

  “Not until I hear it.”

  “All right: I never saw it, nor ever will—it’s under God knows how many tons of dirt now. That road up to where you guys dove off into the quarry pond? Why was it there?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, then asked, “Could it have been left over from the logging days? That’s all that occurs to me. I shouldn’t have called it a road—track is more descriptive. Two tire ruts, seriously overgrown between. Where we stopped was as far as we dared go, but it looked like the track had once continued on a ways. I never wondered why. When you’re a teenager, you assume things are put there to accommodate you.”

  “Really? I assumed they were mostly there to get in my way.”

  He reached over to pat my hand. “You should talk to somebody who might remember more about that track. I know just the person.”

  • • •

  It didn’t feel a bit warmer at eleven than it had at six, and the sky was shedding a fine mist, just enough to make me keep giving my windshield single swipes with the wipers. Not optimal weather for a country outing.

  Patroon County, being mostly rural, has many tucked-away pockets, delineated with unlabeled roads that either dead-end or eventually take you to someplace recognizable. Close to an hour after Baxter went off to argue with Phil Thomson, I had managed to follow his directions into one of these pockets and arrived at a clearing centered by a small, squared-off box of a house, white-painted and plain. You could call it a cottage if you deleted all connotations of charm. The ID Baxter had given me was not so much the structure as what I would find in the yard—a neat alignment of retired vintage cars, none of them restored quite to the point of running and all, he said, wired to an alarm that would go off in the sheriff’s department at any sign of tampering. This was a wise precaution, given their isolated location and the likelihood that their combined worth exceeded a quarter of a million dollars.

  In addition to the silent, unmoving vehicles there were reddish chickens who ignored me and a cat who took off into the sparse woods surrounding the clearing as soon as I stepped out of the Bronco. An aging dog of indeterminable breed barked heartily but kept his distance, unwagging tail wavering between slightly above and decidedly below horizontal. The precipitation was the other side of drizzle now, not a pleasure to hang around in. Still, since I was expected I figured my best move was to let the dog announce me and await developments.

  The man who emerged from the building was wiry and gimpy, his left leg several inches shorter than his right. Red-tanned skin stretched taut across his skull, which was decorated on top by a fringe of white hair that stood up in little tufts. He did look old enough to have been around for whatever was to
be remembered about Crane Hill. With poetic license, you could project him as having been around when the retreating glacier carved the Hudson Valley and sculpted it. I smiled tentatively. “Mr. Kanser?”

  He nodded. “You will be the young lady Baxter sent out. Why do you stand there in the rain? Hansel won’t hurt you.” In affirmation, the tail came up and wagged a few times before the dog turned away and meandered off. I followed Mr. Kanser into the house.

  The small living room carried that slightly stale smell peculiar to places inhabited by the elderly. It also had what was probably a stronger connection to Baxter than the old cars: a lot of wooden furniture. Not Baxter’s style—these pieces were of dark wood, heavy, very intricately carved. My Grandmother Wyckoff had a chair and bureau in similar style, though of inferior quality; they’d come over on the boat from Germany with her parents. According to Baxter, Mr. Kanser had come over on a boat with his parents in the early 1930s. I wouldn’t be surprised but what the furniture had made the trip too.

  It must have been my day to feel confined. Mr. Kanser’s living room was no more than twelve feet square, and wherever there wasn’t furniture, irregular stacks of books and magazines, none of them recent-looking, obliterated the floor space. We settled into two of the heavy chairs. Baxter had cautioned that my host was not one for idle chat, so I started right in. “I hear you’ve done a lot of hiking.”

  Mr. Kanser nodded. “I have climbed all the high peaks in the Adirondacks and the White Mountains. I have done the Appalachian Trail and in New Zealand the Milford Track. And many times the Heilbronner Weg in the Alps.”

  I nodded in appreciative ignorance. “You’ve hiked some right around here, too?”

  “One cannot properly hike in this area,” he corrected. “The elevations are insufficient. One can walk. This I do often.”

  Emil Kanser’s English was only faintly accented, but his speech patterns marked him as an immigrant, or else someone who got his idea of how people talk from books. I saw neither television nor radio in the room. “You used to, um, walk in the Crane Hill area, Baxter tells me.”