Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  An hour and a half later by some miracle the truck was still running and I was driving Ellie home.

  “What did you tell them?” she wanted to know. “About why you were there in the first place?”

  “I said I’d stopped by to see her and found her that way, which was close enough to the truth to be convincing. I didn’t say anything else.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ellie said, shaking her head. “If Therese was a drug addict why was she attending a nursing meeting? And spending lots of money to do it if she stayed at a hotel and so on.”

  “Denial. Protesting too much. I doubt she saw herself as some kind of degenerate dope fiend. No one ever does.”

  Not until after we’d moved to Eastport did Sam stop viewing himself as a kid who just liked to have fun, even though by then he’d resembled Dracula’s midnight snack.

  Once Ellie’s appointment was finished—all fine, pregnancy on track, the baby coming any minute according to the doctor but not for a couple of weeks yet, according to her—she’d gone in to be with George. I’d visited briefly too. And as the nurses had said, there was no change.

  “Attending a convention might’ve been a way to tell herself that she was doing okay professionally,” I told Ellie. “Her job would’ve been all that stood between her and becoming a dealer.”

  It was an activity I’d seen no evidence of in my search of her neglected home; no other proscribed drugs at all.

  “Anyway,” I added as we took the turn toward Eastport, “we can stop at the bank, I’ll write a check for the painting work, and you’ll deposit it.”

  Turning east onto Route 190 made me feel better despite the morning I’d had. That big pale-blue sky spread wide open over the choppy expanse of Passamaquoddy Bay on the left, the bright flat water of Carryingplace Cove on the right. Even the truck, which had developed a nervous-making carburetor stutter as I’d pulled away at last from Therese’s house, now settled into a low grumble that promised to get us home.

  “Ellie?” She hadn’t replied. “We stop at the bank, right?”

  But she didn’t answer. She just gazed thoughtfully out the window as we sailed around the long curve past Quoddy Airfield. Then finally she turned to me, her green eyes speculative.

  “Therese was a nurse. She worked in a hospital. Had access to the equipment there, the pharmacy, supplies, and everything.”

  “Yes, but I’m still pretty sure what I saw was heroin. And anyway, it’s not easy to steal hospital drugs.”

  “Not the drugs,” she said as we reached the Mobil station. Tommy Pockets raised a listless wave of greeting as we went by. “Tell me again about the syringe,” she demanded.

  We’d been over it before. The truck coughed hard, bucking a little as we slowed. But then it recovered. “Well, it was a glass syringe.”

  Which was somewhat unusual. Almost all hospital syringes had been plastic for a long time. Victor said they were cheaper, and disposable too, eliminating both the expense of sterilizing them and the risk that sterilization wouldn’t work.

  “And it was dirty,” I said. “Grimy and used-looking. They glitter when they’re new, you know. But nothing else in her house was clean either.”

  We pulled into the bank parking lot. “So here’s a nurse with access to clean syringes,” Ellie said. “They don’t count them, do they?”

  In the hospital, she meant. I confirmed that they didn’t.

  “So you could,” she theorized, “just drop a few into your pocket.”

  “Yes.” When Sam was a baby, Victor had brought clean plastic syringes home for him to play with, in hopes it would get his son thinking about a medical career.

  “So,” Ellie went on, “Therese could’ve done that. Stolen all the clean syringes she might have needed. And even though she was an addict, she was functioning well enough to take proper cleanliness precautions with her hospital patients, or she would have been reprimanded for that. Yet for some reason she used a dirty syringe.”

  “Oh,” I said slowly, realizing now what she was getting at. “Aren’t you the clever one?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not clever at all. I’m just someone who saw three different glass syringes on three different stainless-steel trays in the hospital today. Clean ones, used ones. I could have picked up any one of them and just taken it home.”

  I used to spend a lot of time on the wards when I was first married. So I knew glass syringes were used for arterial-blood drawing, among other things, because the barrels were slipperier inside than plastic. That meant the patient’s blood would pump up into the syringe by itself, with less risk of artery damage than if it had to be sucked up by pulling on a plastic syringe’s plunger. I even knew where those glass syringes were kept: on a cart in the clean equipment room. Soiled ones often lay out on a tray destined for the sterilization department.

  “So someone could have taken one and used it,” Ellie said. “To fake Therese’s accidental overdose.”

  She rolled the window down; it went halfway, then jammed. “To try,” she added into the rush of crisp October air, “covering up a murder.”

  Neither of us spoke as we took the shortcut down Clark Street to her house, passing between small houses and neatly kept mobile homes with garden plots on one side, the grassy bluffs overlooking the bay on the other.

  “Even if you’re right—and I’ll admit her dying is one hell of a coincidence if you’re not—you know it’s not enough to go to the police with,” I said as I pulled over in front of George and Ellie’s cottage.

  “Yes,” she answered in a subdued voice. The burst of energy that had fueled her theorizing had vanished. “Because it could’ve been the way I said. Or not.”

  “They’ll say she just didn’t care enough anymore to bother with clean equipment. No one knew she meant to tell me anything. The convention dates are curious but they could be a coincidence, too. In fact, they argue the other way.”

  “Because if she was at the convention, then how could she know for sure what George was doing,” Ellie agreed dispiritedly. “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  She managed a smile as she got out. “Thanks, Jake. Tommy can bring the truck back later.”

  I waited until she’d gone inside. Then, depressing the gas pedal carefully to avoid stalling the engine, I drove the truck home. There to my surprise I found my father in the cellar peering into the hole he’d dug.

  With all that was going on I’d nearly forgotten about this repair work. “Dad, I’d have done that. You didn’t have to . . .”

  He smiled easily. “I know. But my fingers just got kind of itchy for it. Man can’t swing a pickaxe for his daughter once in a while, what can he do? That old dirt,” he added of the floor he’d just opened, “was soft as butter.”

  He leaned his spade against one of the old hand-hewn posts holding the ceiling up. Knowing the posts stood on butter didn’t comfort me.

  But knowing my dad was around to take care of them did, all of a sudden. I’d had him around for such a short time, and yet I already didn’t know what I was going to do without him.

  “You called the D.A. back yet?” he asked.

  For his workday he’d tied a red bandanna around his thinning white hair. The sleeves on his flannel shirt were rolled over his ropy forearms and a battered leather belt held up pants so old, they consisted more of patches than of the original fabric.

  “No.” My head still wasn’t clear of the sight of Therese, dead on her sofa. Then what he’d asked hit me. “How’d you know about it?” I hadn’t told him about Attorney Farrell’s call.

  He shrugged. “Only logical. They get Jemmy, they come to you. His little running buddy.”

  “I was not his . . .”

  But I had been. “I found another body,” I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully. It was another thing I liked about him; his I’m-so-shocked circuits had gotten burnt out long ago. Then he seemed to change the subject.

  “You may be wondering,” he intoned prof
essorially, “why I’ve dug the new sump-pump hole so far from the old one.”

  A good six feet away. And I hadn’t, but he was going to tell me. After his long fall in the 60s, my dad had landed hard on the facts of the physical world: how things worked, time and gravity and the unchanging properties of substances.

  “Pressure,” he said. I looked down at the metal barrel in the hole, its top removed and holes punched into its sides. The holes were about the size of the pointed tip of a can opener.

  “Water flows into the holes, fills the barrels, lifts the floats, flips the switches on the sump pumps,” he recited.

  “I know that. I built one myself, remember? But I don’t see why . . .”

  “Why it matters how close the barrels are,” he agreed. “But think about it. If they were always equally full . . .”

  “I get it. But they’re not and if the holes share a wall . . .”

  His pale blue eyes gleamed. “I couldn’t have said it better. Sometimes water in one hole will push toward the other hole, and sometimes the opposite. Stress, one way and then the other, until the wall between ’em starts deteriorating. Starts to collapse and then it does collapse. Not good.”

  “No. No, that wouldn’t be good.” Because the whole point of two holes was to have two pumps going independently.

  To make even more sure the collapse didn’t happen he’d begun excavating a slot about a foot wide, several feet deep, and three feet long, between the old hole and the new one.

  “You going to fill that with concrete?”

  He shook his head, applying the pickaxe again. “Stone and mortar. Stronger together than either one alone.”

  Of course. “I want to finish it today,” he added. “Get the mortar in and give it plenty of time to dry before it’s so cold outside that it might even freeze down there.”

  “Not much chance of that, though. It stays pretty warm.” So far the furnace was the one thing that hadn’t gone kablooie in my old house.

  He looked wise. “No, I don’t suppose so. But if the mortar does freeze it’ll blow it all apart. Ice expands, pressure gets in there from a direction you didn’t expect.”

  “Oh.” Then, “Dad, I’m going to have to go down and see that district attorney. It’s the only way.”

  “You lawyering up first?”

  “Yep. Make them mad.” I figured I’d ask Clarissa Arnold; she didn’t have experience in this area of the law as far as I knew. But her lips were able to form the syllable, “No.”

  Which was all I wanted. If I drew fire by hiring a lawyer and then keeping my mouth shut, I figured the Feds would get so angry at me that they might be diverted from paying attention to anyone around me.

  Such as my dad. “But you’ll still have to go.”

  He plucked a cigarette from the rumpled pack in his shirt pocket and lit it, still leaning on that pickaxe. Only he could smoke in the house, and only in the cellar.

  “What, you’ve got a better idea?” I demanded. “If they come snooping around me, Dad, they’re going to find you.” Because even I couldn’t divert them forever.

  He dragged on the cigarette, changed the subject again. “The dead person you found, who was he?”

  “She,” I corrected. “I think she was about to give me an alibi for George, only she decided to get high when she got home from work last night and miscalculated her cruising altitude.”

  I took a deep breath. “That or someone killed her.”

  “I see. Bad?”

  He meant the experience of finding her. “Bad enough.”

  I told him about the squalor, the atmosphere of defeat that had seemed to hang in the little house like poison gas. “But we don’t really know she was killed and if we say that to the cops, they’ll think we’re just drumming up a wild theory.”

  “Sure.” He stubbed his smoke out carefully, took up his pickaxe again. “Don’t want to cry wolf at this stage. And a dirty needle or syringe, that wouldn’t ring any bells. Junkies are the other category of people cops think are always stupid.”

  They weren’t; back in the city, one of Sam’s little friends had figured out a way to get tax refunds by filing phony returns for nonexistent businesses. Another cut out the middle man and went right to the source. He’d hacked the city’s computer so that it issued checks directly to him, without phony filings.

  “What other items of interest have you come up with, any?” my dad asked.

  Something in his tone said I should summarize it for him; that and the way his eyes glittered. In daily life it was easy to forget, but he was smarter than the average bear.

  Way smarter. “Well, basically nothing.” I went on to tell him about Ginger Tolliver, too solitary to have gotten help and not physically able to have moved Hector’s corpse alone, and about the Condons, desperately strapped financially and their only chance to get out of it thwarted by Hector.

  “But the thing about Therese is, even if she did have any information that would help George, I don’t see how anyone would have known she meant to talk with me. And people do overdose, you know. It really could have been just a coincidence.”

  “Uh-huh. You believe in coincidence?”

  “No.” I took a deep breath. “Not usually. But like I said, there’s nothing to convince the police of anything else. Meanwhile, Ginger’s not much of a candidate anymore and the Condons have got a good story too, one they can prove. Besides . . .”

  Seeing them together had crystallized the other thing I’d felt about them as well. “They’ve got this little boy. I think that’s why they’re hanging in on their marriage. And if you could have seen the looks on their faces at the hospital, when he was sick . . .”

  “You don’t think they’d do something to put their child at that kind of risk, of what would happen if they got caught? Or if one of them did?” he asked, very quietly.

  “Right,” I said, seeing too late how thin the ice had gotten beneath our feet all of a sudden. He blamed himself for what had happened to my mother.

  “People do, sometimes,” he said, evenly. “They do things that hurt their kids.” His gaze rested steadily on me.

  I looked straight back at him. “Not on purpose. Not them.”

  And not you, I added silently. But I hadn’t always known that and some baggage is nearly impossible to get rid of; you get so used to the weight on your shoulder, you feel it even after you think you’ve finally put it down.

  My father resumed digging. It was a big job. But he always said that every stone you moved was one to the good, and sooner or later in any project there were no more stones.

  I hoped he was right. When he spoke, it was on the subject of Jemmy again.

  “Think it over once more before you decide what to do, Jake. From what you’ve told me about him your pal wasn’t born yesterday. He might have a plan. And remember what I told you about pressure, that it can come at you from a direction you weren’t expecting.”

  In other words, I was missing an angle.

  “What?” I asked. “What else haven’t I thought of?”

  He just shook his head. “Don’t know. If I did I’d say. Seems like what you’ve got is all stones, though, no mortar to hold it together. Don’t you feel that way about it?”

  He was insightful, all right, but he could be infuriatingly cryptic too. Mostly it happened when he didn’t quite know himself what he was talking about, just that there was something.

  “Yeah,” I conceded, “I do.” No mortar, all stones. Mortar of course being the stuff that holds stones together.

  Like the why of what was happening to George, and the why of Jemmy’s having given my name to the Federal authorities who were holding him.

  If I had the reasons behind those two things, I thought the rest would form a pattern as simple and stable as one of my father’s stone walls.

  But I didn’t. “Anyway, be careful,” he said.

  “Yeah, you too,” I replied, and was about to say more.

  Maybe a lot more. Only
just then over my head I heard three successive floor thumps as one after another the household pets abandoned the furniture they’d been lounging on.

  For which in my experience there could only be one reason.

  Someone had come into my house.

  Chapter 9

  Tommy, what’s wrong?”

  The two dogs shoved their bodies up against him, sensing his distress but not understanding what it meant or how to fix it. He’d been crying and in the hand he’d bruised by slamming it against the wall the other night he clutched two grubby bits of paper.

  “I should’ve given you these right away instead of hiding them, but I didn’t. And I’m so sorry. Maybe they’d have changed things somehow, but… oh, jeez, I’m just so freaking sorry.”

  He thrust the papers at me. I peered at them, astonished. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded. “As soon as you found them why didn’t you . . .”

  “I couldn’t,” he replied wretchedly. “When I heard that the police were at George’s house I knew they would search his truck. They always do that, the police, when anyone gets in big trouble. On TV, they always search their house and their car.”

  “Didn’t they ask you about the truck? They must’ve known you’d been working on it and might’ve seen something in it.”

  He nodded, gulped in a breath. “Yeah. I said no. And I guess they all believed me. They never asked again.”

  “Tommy.” I felt even more stunned at what he’d done. “You lied to the police? But why?”

  It was as if Little Bo Peep had owned up to slaughtering all the sheep. Tommy’s examples in life had consisted of a long line of sleazy guys, ones who lied, cheated, stole, and beat up women. Perhaps in reaction he’d rejected all forms of bad behavior, becoming an honest, hardworking—if underachieving—solid citizen.

  Until now, when it seemed he’d begun thinking big: obstructing an investigation, concealing evidence, and I didn’t know what all else. He had a swift answer, though.