Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  By now I was convinced of one thing, anyway. Ginger hadn’t hauled Hector from where he’d been killed, up a ladder and into a hidden room. She had enough trouble just hauling herself around.

  “No. I haven’t heard from him and don’t want to. I won’t put myself in the position of being let down again.”

  She got herself into the car and slammed the door hard as if to punctuate her final statement. It backed out the drive and was gone, leaving us standing outside Ginger’s beat-up trailer.

  Which turned out to be her mistake. For all her I’ll-do-it-myself-dammit demeanor, the grit and solitariness that must have been at times terribly lonely, even her caution in love . . .

  For all of that, she was too trusting.

  She had believed that once she left, we’d go too.

  Wrong.

  “Listen, you got me out here,” I told a reluctant Ellie as I fiddled with the lock on Ginger’s door. “And now that I am here, there’s something I want to know.”

  It was the kind of setup that if you turned the knob from inside, it unlocked: a safety feature unless you were a burglar.

  But if you were one, it was a convenience feature. I pulled the oblong plastic tab that held my movie-rental bar code from my wallet and weaseled it in between the door and the doorjamb.

  “And she’s not coming back soon, so stop worrying about it,” I said. “That girl wouldn’t miss a job interview if someone cut her other leg off.”

  Ellie glanced nervously around the trailer’s clearing, gold leaves carpeting the raggedy grass areas and more floating down. The silence was amazing. Only the rippledy-slap of waves against the dock broke the autumn serenity.

  “Jake, we’re breaking into her place, for heaven’s sake. We can’t just . . .”

  “Baloney and cheese,” I reminded her, “on Wonder Bread. And it’s jail food so it’s processed cheese. With a packet of yellow mustard. Those potato chips are rubbery and the instant coffee is barely lukewarm, with that white powder floating on it.”

  Ellie’s face hardened before I finished speaking. “Just get the damn door open,” she told me.

  I wiggled the plastic bar-code tab again. There was a metal strip over the opening between door and frame but it had been pried at in the past, maybe before Ginger owned the trailer, so it offered the lock-set no protection.

  The lock popped with a soft chuck! and the door swung wide.

  “In like Flynn,” I announced. “Come on.”

  Ellie followed and I shut the door behind us, noticing that the yellow cat had slipped in too. “Now, where is it?”

  I looked around at the toy-sized sink and stove, the box refrigerator, a tiny seating area, and a bath hardly bigger than an airliner restroom plus a curtained sleeping bunk at the rear.

  Where was the damned computer? Of course she would have one, I’d concluded after seeing the chess-dedicated one on the porch, and despite the cost I was willing to bet she was online. E-mail and chat rooms are the default social life of your standard Lonely Guy.

  Or Girl. “There.” I located the very basic but serviceable machine in the corner of the small living area, fired it up, and clicked the dial-up icon. A minute later a list of recent e-mails scrolled down the screen.

  “Okay.” There were a bunch from someone named Mark. I doubted there were two important men named Mark in Ginger’s life. Ellie watched over my shoulder as I moved the mouse across the pad and clicked on the most recent e-mail, dated the previous night.

  Before I could read it, though, a noise came from outside. It could have been the wind rustling the few remaining leaves in the birch trees or someone on the gravel path leading down to the dock and the lake.

  But it wasn’t. It was that damned little white sedan that I’d promised Ellie wouldn’t come back, turning into the driveway.

  I stabbed the power switch on the computer, grabbed Ellie, and we booked out of there so fast that by the time the car made it to the clearing we were in my own car with the engine started.

  “Forget something?” I asked as Ginger got out of the sedan. Hey, the best defense and all that.

  She eyed us both questioningly. “My job application. I left it in a desk drawer. Did you want something else?”

  Translation: What the hell are you still doing here? But I’d learned long ago from Jemmy Wechsler what to say when my hand got caught near the cookie jar.

  Never apologize; never explain. “No. We were just leaving.”

  Ginger stood watching as I backed around the sedan and out the drive. I was nearly to the paved road when she finally turned and went on into the trailer.

  “Did we lock it on our way out?” Ellie asked me.

  I headed back toward Eastport. “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, then. Maybe she won’t notice.”

  “That we were in there? Oh, she’ll notice.”

  I drove a little faster. Ginger said she hadn’t heard from this Mark guy she’d been engaged to. But she had, and though she couldn’t haul Hector’s body around, he probably could.

  Now I needed to find out what Hector Gosling had held over Mark Timberlake, and when Mark’s ship had last visited Eastport.

  “I don’t see why she should notice,” Ellie objected. “I know you didn’t shut the computer down. So it’ll go through its disk-checking routine when she starts it again. But maybe she’ll just think she—”

  “Shut it down wrong last time? Maybe.”

  I’d done it myself: snapped the switch off absentmindedly, not going through the steps the computer instructions prescribed. And I’d been surprised the next time I turned the computer on to realize I’d made this error.

  “But that’s not how she’ll know. Think about it, Ellie. What’s the last thing you saw just now?”

  “Oh,” she said. “We let . . .”

  “Right. So we know she lied. But she also knows we know.”

  Because the last thing we’d seen as we backed away from the trailer was the grin on the face of the cat that Ginger had left outdoors.

  Sitting in the window, licking its paw, behaving for all the world as if it belonged there. Inside.

  Damn.

  On the way home Ellie said she was okay, but she looked just awful. “Look,” I said as we got into town, “you’ve got to rest. I know you feel you need to do more, but—”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she interrupted. “I’ll rest if you do something by yourself.”

  It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t the only one thinking about how things would change once the baby was here.

  “All right,” I said. “What?”

  We drove down Washington Street past the massive granite Post Office building, turned left. “I want you to talk to Jimmy Condon and ask him where he was on Friday night. Get him by himself and ask him, and where Maria was, too.”

  “And he’ll tell me because… ?”

  “Because you’ll tell him you’re asking for me.”

  I glanced at her, surprised. “Ellie, is there something I ought to know?”

  We pulled up in front of her house. “I went to high school with Jimmy,” she said. “And that’s all I’m going to tell you now, because I promised him I never would.”

  She looked down at her hands. “But he’ll probably tell you. Find him, Jake. We have to know if we can rule Jimmy and Maria out or not.”

  Exasperation took hold of me. “Ellie, what if Jimmy just lies? There’s no reason to think he’ll tell me the truth.”

  “Then you’ll know that. Jimmy’s got a tickertape across his forehead, what he thinks in words of one syllable on it. You’ll know.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. “I still don’t get it, but if that’s what you want . . .”

  “It is. I’d go with you but I can’t. Because you’re right, I really do have to lie down.” She put her hand on my arm. “We already know Ginger’s not telling us the truth. I want to find out if we have to go after Jimmy too. Or instead.”

  Her face said she
hoped we didn’t have to investigate her old friend any further. It also said clearly that if she didn’t decide to get horizontal soon, her body would make the decision for her.

  “All right,” I said a final time, and sat there watching to make sure she got inside the house. Then I drove away.

  But I couldn’t find Jimmy immediately because I’d told Victor that I needed to see him that afternoon and he’d said he’d come. So I went home to wait for him and when I got there, the message light was blinking on my phone machine.

  Oh, terrific. I pressed the message button.

  “Ms. Tiptree, this is Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Farrell in New York. I’d appreciate your contacting me at your earliest convenience.”

  My outgoing message didn’t mention my name. So Farrell knew who I was, where I was, and probably also what I was. Or at any rate what I’d been back when Jemmy Wechsler and I were a Gotham duo.

  The call confirmed what I’d been expecting, that my name had come up in Jemmy’s case. And the last time I looked, prosecutors didn’t phone people to ask if they’d like to appear for the defense.

  So just as I’d suspected, the choice Farrell had lined up for me was clear. I could testify against Jemmy and walk away. Or I could fail to cooperate and let the government try to build a second case.

  Against me. Which by itself might not be so bad; I’d always been careful to stay on the right side of the law myself. So they wouldn’t have a lot of leverage to turn me against Jemmy.

  But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that compared to my father, Jemmy Wechsler was small potatoes.

  Pondering this I hauled my tools and a fresh tin of paint stripper up two flights of stairs to the third floor. I couldn’t hear the door from there but I would know if Victor came in; the hairs on my neck would bristle like porcupine quills.

  My work area was a big whitewashed room with no curtains, just a wall of bare windows facing south. A paneled door lay flat across two sawhorses in the pale yellow light; over the course of a few days I’d put two coats of stripper on it already, removing most of the many coats of paint it had gotten in its lifetime.

  But to keep your hands busy during a session of thinking, there’s nothing like yet another application of paint stripper so strong that if you spill some, it will eat a hole right through the floor.

  I popped a CD into the player I kept up there. Golden light washed the room as k.d. Lang’s smoky voice drifted into it.

  “Save me,” she sang as I opened the paint stripper and began applying it. But you could hear in her voice she wasn’t expecting much action on her request.

  Me, either. Slopping on the paint stripper, I realized again that in the getting-saved department I was running on empty.

  In the old days it would have been easy. I’d have called one of my fat-cat clients and pulled in a tiny favor. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief; Jemmy had led them all into my plush-carpeted reception area where they’d sat with their hands in their laps as if waiting for a session with the dentist.

  After the introductions Jemmy would slip into the shadows again, eliminating the embarrassment his presence might cause if anyone saw them together; these guys couldn’t afford even a whiff of scandal and Jemmy was a snootful. Only the hope of a solution to their money troubles could have gotten any of them onto the same city block as my mobbed-up friend, much less into the same office.

  In short, Jemmy knew everyone. But only I knew that fact, and I never told. For one thing, no one would’ve believed me; if for instance I linked him to the scion of one of the nation’s most celebrated clans.

  Or to the scion’s… well, never mind which relative it was, but when she told me how much that little gigolo had gotten out of her I’d nearly fainted. Then I’d called one of my other clients; forty-eight hours later, the money had been recovered and the gigolo was in jail on unrelated charges.

  But that was in the old days when the lips of the fellows I dealt with were greasy with the fat of the land. The only thing they’d feared was anyone learning how they’d met me at all. And because they feared so little I needed my own protection against them. Who knew when one of them would try to use me for a bargaining chip somehow, in some deal I didn’t want to even try imagining?

  So in the eye of the pyramid on the dollar bill framed on my office wall, there was a camera. It took a snapshot of everyone entering my office with Jemmy, recording an association they’d have denied with their dying breaths. My stash of old mug shots couldn’t help me now, though. Revealing that I had them might get Jemmy out of a jam—I knew for a fact some of my old clients had leverage in Federal circles—but for me it would already be too late. Federal investigators interested in me would’ve taken note of the people around me, too, whether I was cooperative or not.

  So it was obvious what I needed to do. I just wouldn’t enjoy doing it. Telling my fugitive father, I mean, that he had to go. Leave Eastport, maybe see me again and maybe not.

  Hit the road, Jack. And the sooner the better.

  “Rat poison really only comes in two varieties,” said Victor an hour later.

  I already knew this. But I’d asked him over here to get some information from him, and when you want information from Victor you have to listen to what he wants to say, first.

  And at the moment due to recent local events he was hot on poisons. “You’ve got your coumarin-based compounds, warfarin, the blood thinners. Animal leaves the premises searching for water. Dies outdoors.”

  He had another swallow of wine. “Then there are convulsants. Strychnine’s one. You’ve got to catch ’em within minutes of their ingesting the substance. People, the accidental poisoning cases, I mean.”

  More old news. But he was getting up a head of instructional steam. No sense knocking the train off the track.

  “. . . Catch ’em fast, charcoal lavage. You pump a slurry of the charcoal into the gut, it absorbs some of the poison. Pump it out again, support all the vital signs meanwhile, maybe you’ve given yourself half a chance. But . . .”

  He wagged a warning finger at me. Once upon a time if he’d done that I’d have bitten it off.

  But he had been on a fairly decent run of behavior recently. So I just thought about biting it off.

  “But it’s not often a strychnine victim even makes it that far. Strychnine gets absorbed fast,” he continued.

  “Is there an antidote?”

  He shook his head. “Treatment’s supportive. Anticonvulsant drugs, try to keep ’em alive until basically the stuff’s excreted and the effect wears off. Which,” he added, “is why it’s become a registry-only substance.”

  I raised an eyebrow, which was all he ever needed. He moved along in his lecture, which was what I needed.

  “The bottom line is, you’ve got to be registered to buy or use it,” he said. “But there used to be products you could buy.”

  He refilled his glass. “I saw this case back in the city once, kid got hold of an old mole-bait from back in the fifties. Mole-Gone, I think it was called, and it was for putting into mole burrows in gardens and parks and so on.”

  He frowned, remembering. “I guess it had been sitting in a cabinet for years and the kid just found it. The trouble was, the bait was made by mixing strychnine powder with peanut butter.”

  He drank. “That was one we didn’t have a happy outcome on.”

  When Sam was a small child he’d associated the skull and crossbones from poison labels with a cartoon character he enjoyed at the time, called Happy the Pirate. And when I learned of this I went a bit overboard in reindoctrinating him. As a result, for years he was terrified not only of pirates but also of parrots, eye-patches, hoop earrings, and anything else that buckled even the faintest swash.

  Funny the things that pop into your head when you’re sitting with the only other person in the world who remembers them, too. Time to change the subject.

  “Do you know Ginger Tolliver?” I asked.

  Ginger was an attractive young woman w
ho lived in the same time zone as Victor. So it was highly unlikely his babe-radar hadn’t registered her. But probably he knew Ginger for another reason as well.

  “I met her today,” I went on, “and I’m curious. She seems quite pain-afflicted. Mostly from her back, I guess, even though it’s the thing that shows least.”

  The taut, controlled lines of her face rose in my mind. Just looking at her, you knew she was in the kind of chronic pain that would have most people incapacitated.

  “Yet she says she has to work. So I wondered . . .”

  Victor was nodding. “She’s disabled, just based on her pain,” he confirmed. “I did the physical. Prescribed her the painkillers too, but she won’t take them.”

  I blinked. This was more information than I’d expected him to offer, based on patient confidentiality.

  “It’s no secret,” he added, understanding my look. “Ginger told me I could shout it from the rooftops if I wanted. If maybe it could help her disability case. But it hasn’t.”

  I sat down, poured my own glass of wine. It was always good to have something in the emotional bank account with Victor. The memory of ten friendly minutes, for instance, so that next time he morphed into Doctor Doom I wouldn’t strangle him on the spot.

  “So she’s not on disability,” I mused.

  “Too young, and she was out of work for a couple years after the car accident. So she doesn’t have enough credits.”

  Enough calendar-quarters with the minimum income, he meant; it was the other thing besides a work-preventing ailment that you needed in order to receive Social Security disability payments.

  “Criminy,” I said, “can’t work so you can’t collect, can’t work so you can’t qualify to collect. Don’t you hate that?”

  He nodded and for a moment we were unified in dismay. I used to see these problems all the time when I worked pro bono for an agency back in the city, and Victor faced it regularly at his clinic.

  Then I thought of something else. “How did the car accident happen?”