by Justin Scott
“You know darned well you can’t afford to pay your ticket.”
“Any chance of working it off with some community service?”
She said, “I’m too tired and hungry,” but she said it with a smile. If Vicky’s hair got her noticed, her smile won her votes. It was warm and quick and straight from the heart, a smile that seemed to promise each and every voter, I am hardworking and honest and the only difference between us is that you don’t have the time to run the government, so I’ll do it for you. A seductive smile.
“How about I cook you an omelet?”
“I don’t want an omelet.”
“Welsh rarebit and beer?”
I knew my woman. She practically rolled over and kicked her feet in the air.
“Come here. Let me look at you.”
I did.
“You’re limping,” she said.
“Hurt my knee.”
“You look like hell. You look like you’ve been sleeping in the woods. There’s pine needles in your hair.” She reached up and brushed them out. They fell on her desk.
She was good company when she wasn’t too busy, but she was busy most of the time. And she was sexy in the easygoing way women get when they feel free to pick and choose with whom, where, and when. As for where, she was happier at her place, a tiny cottage secreted behind the Congregational Church. It had a kind of a kitchen-living room about the size of a Chevy Blazer, and a somewhat bigger bedroom, which the word boudoir would have described perfectly, if the down and lace coverlet weren’t usually buried under paperwork.
“I’ll just straighten up while you cook.”
We had stopped at my place for beer and ingredients. I opened a couple of St. Pauli Girls and started melting cheese on the stove.
“So how’d you hurt your knee?”
“Keep a secret?”
She came out, wide-eyed. “Sure. What’d you do?”
“This goes no further. No kidding.”
“I swear on the souls of my unborn children. Come on, Ben. What’s going on?”
“A detective hired me to videotape a couple committing adultery.”
She looked puzzled.
“It’s a divorce case.”
“You took dirty pictures?”
“I didn’t. I was supposed to. I mean I agreed to. But I didn’t.”
“You’re weird, Ben.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Turned out it wasn’t. I couldn’t do it.”
“I should hope not.”
I told her about Alex Rose, and Alison Mealy’s braces, and how the evening had gone downhill from there, leaving out the precise reason I had stopped filming. The raccoon sent her into stitches, until I told her how Oliver had shot him. She got misty-eyed.
“Had to put him out of his misery.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that it’s so sad, they’re just living their lives and along comes this disease they’ve no defense against and we shoot them.”
Vicky had grown up in a big Irish-Catholic family in a close-in suburb and hadn’t acquired the sterner eye you get when you farm at the edge of the forest. I said, “Why don’t you tell Sally to look into oral vaccines? I read they’re experimenting in Belgium.”
Sally Butler was the dogcatcher. Rabies vaccine seemed a good way to steer Vicky McLachlan away from the adultery-taping subject, which I saw still troubled her. And later that night, in the dark, she asked, “Why’d you do it?”
“Alison—”
“Don’t blame the teeth.”
I told her my theory of ’Eighties dealmaking, wherein running the deal became far more important than the results.
“No,” she said, “you’re always trying to walk on the edge. It’s the only thing that excites you.”
“I got kind of excited a minute ago. Remember?”
“That wasn’t me. You were remembering what you saw through her window.”
As I formulated a reply, Vicky rolled over and said she was going to sleep. I moved spoonlike behind her, the way she liked, and kissed her back. It took me too long to realize she was crying.
***
Newbury celebrates Labor Day the third weekend in September, partly because the bigger towns have huge parades that siphon off the crowd we need to buy tickets to our fire department cookout, and partly because summer shouldn’t end on the first Monday of the month. Weatherwise, it’s a little risky, as we occasionally celebrate in a sleet storm, but the morning after my exploits at the Longs’ dawned warm and sunny as August.
Vicky sent me packing early; she had a speech to rehearse.
I limped home. My machine was blinking. Alex Rose.
I got his machine.
He called back.
“So how’d it go?”
“Lousy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“How lousy? You get caught or something?”
For all I knew he had tapped the Longs’ phone lines, in which case he would know the alarm had gone off. I told him the truth, in general terms. “I’ve decided against a rematch. I’ll mail you your camera.”
“Hold on.”
“And your money,” I said, and hung up. The bank was open till noon on Saturday, as was the post office. I bought a blank videotape, went home, wrote Rose a check for his five thousand dollars, packed the camera in its bag in a box some books had come in, stuffed the empty spaces with crumpled newspaper and the spare tapes, and walked the whole thing down to the post office, where I mailed it and insured it for five hundred bucks. Then I went home and cleaned my grill and my long-handled tongs and spatula, and took them to the lawn behind Town Hall.
They’d wheeled out the fire engines for the kids to climb on and hung a banner that read NEWBURY ENGINE COMPANY NO. 1, FOUNDED 1879. Doug Schmidle, the Town Hall custodian, was hammering together a viewing stand. Gary Nello was setting up a soda machine lent by the Yankee Drover. Mildred Gill had rigged a forty-gallon corn boiler, and the ladies of the Newbury Engine Auxiliary were spreading paper plates, ketchup, relish, and mustard on folding tables.
We arranged the cooking grills in order of splendor. First was Rick Bowland’s gas-fired volcano-stone, hooded monster that had enough instrument dials and gauges to monitor a public utility. We put him downwind, because he didn’t know any better. In the middle was Scooter MacKay at his thirty-six-inch charcoal-burning Weber. Last, and upwind, was mine. I stuck in the extra legs, which raised it to waist height. Rick Bowland nudged Scooter. “What in hell is that thing Ben’s got?”
Scooter was not about to take guff from anyone who cooked on bottled gas. He had a big voice. “You know what gets me?” he boomed. “Used to be a man would apologize for buying a gas grill; now the sorry ’suckers don’t even understand they weenied out.”
“What?”
“You’re a lost generation,” said Scooter. “Benighted mall babies.”
Rick tried to weasel out of it by ragging me. “Yeah, okay, but what is that you got there, Ben?”
“This is a triple-length charcoal grill for cooking meat, chicken, and vegetables out of doors. It’s based on a hibachi design. I bought it on sale at Caldor’s down in Danbury for nine dollars, and I fully expect old friends to toast marshmallows on it beside my grave.”
“Nine dollars?”
I said, “We need a plan. Rick, I’ll bet you’ve got real control of your heat with that baby.”
“Believe it.”
“Why don’t you toast rolls and cook the dogs. Scooter and me’ll do the burgers.”
“Hey, this thing’s great on burgers.”
“We’ll do the burgers,” said Scooter. He’s an excellent newspaper publisher, but too free with the Weber’s dome, so I said, “I’ll do rare, you do medium and well.”
At noon Vicky mounted the new pumper to give her speech. Quite a crowd had gathered by then, and the first selectman didn’t disappoint. She lionized our brave vol
unteer firefighters and suggested that when we make our contribution we compare the ease of check writing to the discomforts of waking up in the middle of the night to fight a neighbor’s fire. She got a beautiful swipe in at her Republican opposition, likening their control of the state budget to the rabies epidemic, and wound up with a fierce call to every school-girl on the lawn that one of them had darned well better become president of the United States.
She ended it on “Let’s eat,” which swelled the drift toward the grills to a floodtide.
The next hour was a blur of hands thrusting open buns in my direction. I was just holding my own, rare but not raw, with the lines in order. Beside me, Scooter was smoking them medium, raising his dome with billowy flourishes to general applause. Poor Rick started some sort of grease fire that brought the firemen running with a high-pressure hose. Then I had a little fire, which I was knocking down with a water spray bottle, when I heard a harried Scooter say, “Rare? See my colleague at the nine-dollar grill.”
I heard Pinkerton Chevalley, Renny’s big brother, snicker, “She can have mine rare anytime,” and I looked up into the smiling face of Rita Long, who said, “They tell me you’re a rare man.”
Chapter 5
Hard to tell how long I stood staring at her.
She asked, “Wha’d I say?” and the fire I’d just put out flared up between us, prompting shouts from Scooter and Rick—who were still downwind—and a threatening advance by the high-pressure hose men, who had apparently found some beer someplace.
“Rare,” I said, spatula-ing my best burger onto her bun with my left hand while extending my right to introduce myself. “Ben Abbott. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
She had a diet Pepsi in her other hand, but she extended an elbow with a grin, saying, “Rita Long. We’re new in town.”
“Oh, yes. Fred Gleason found your property.”
“Are you a realtor, too? Right, right. I’ve seen your sign. You have that lovely Georgian house near the flagpole.”
I like newcomers. They don’t say hello thinking, Bertram Abbott’s kid. The one who…She just took me as the guy who lived in the Georgian house near the flagpole. God, she was beautiful, lovely as I had seen last night, but now—dressed in pleated khaki pants and a faded workshirt—very much the married lady, friendly, but not flirting. Had I met her this way for the first time I’d have thought, Gorgeous, pleasant, and totally unavailable. Knowing what I did know, I thought, Loyal to her boyfriend, gorgeous, pleasant, and totally unavailable, a woman not about to run around on more than one man.
She asked, “Do you do appraisals?”
“Same as Fred. We’re not bank appraisers, but we can certainly recommend a price range. Do you have a friend looking?”
Before she could answer, a greasy hand thrust a hamburger bun between us—Pinkerton Chevalley, availing himself of thirds, and a look down Mrs. Long’s shirt. I dripped hot grease on his thumb, but it apparently didn’t penetrate the calluses. Mrs. Long had backed away, and now she wandered toward the ketchup table. Pink demolished his third and reached for fourths.
I saw Rita Long look across the lawn with a secret smile, followed her gaze, and there was the boyfriend, munching a hot dog. He flashed a grin and circled through the crowd, pausing to investigate the new pumper, glancing repeatedly in her direction as she moseyed about. I decided they were recent lovers, deep in the eros stage, where every utterance was eloquent, and every motion erotic. And, just as last night, I admired their fun. They must have laughed themselves silly in bed.
He looked maybe a little older than he had in the buff. He wore chinos and a pinstriped shirt with the sleeves rolled up and had an air of being very much in charge of something. He reminded me of a type I’d met when I was working the Street—guys who started a medium-sized business and were looking to raise money to expand; or hotshot managers working a buyout. Only this one was smiling, like he’d already closed his deal. Once when he looked across the lawn at her she was watching some kids, and his face practically melted. In fact a video of his expression would have doomed them worse than last night’s. He was nuts for the woman, which I found understandable. She seemed nuts for him too, which meant they had problems. I wondered if they had any inkling that her husband knew.
Mrs. Long came back.
“Another?”
“No thanks, that was great. Listen, do you have time to come out and give me an appraisal?”
“Your house?”
She glanced to either side. “Would you?”
I had more time than a retiree, but fair was fair and friends were friends. “Well, Fred Gleason is—”
“I’d like a private opinion.”
“Ah.”
“Ah?”
I decided that the only way to talk to this woman was to talk as if I had not seen her making love to her boyfriend the night before. Which meant I had to be my totally nonjudgmental realtor self. What was a private opinion? Well, it was not the first time I’d been asked by one side of a marriage to appraise the honeymoon cottage.
I said, “You know, of course, this is a hard time to sell, even a unique house like yours.”
“But I would still like an appraisal. I’ll pay the going rate.”
“No, no, no. I don’t work that way. I’ll come out and have a look.”
“How about after the cookout?”
“I can make it out there by five.”
“Perfect. I have to run down to the mall. I’ll make it back by five. After you look, it’ll be time for a drink.”
***
As I’ve said, there was nothing flirtatious about Rita Long. Even so, I felt that drinks at the Castle was the best offer I’d had in a week. Vicky McLachlan approached while I was packing up my grill: A bunch were drifting over to the Yankee Drover for post-picnic beers. I said maybe later, but I had to work. I got a look, and a question: “Who’s the lady with the black hair?”
“Mrs. Long. She and her husband built the Castle.”
That got me another look, and “Nice work if you can get it”—a reminder, not that I needed one, that the future governor of Connecticut had not been elected first selectman at age twenty-six on chestnut curls and smile alone.
I showered the smoke out of my hair and put on my uniform, tweed jacket over my arm in the warm afternoon. I was about to get into the Oldsmobile when I thought, What the hell, last warm day for a while. I stashed the Olds in the barn and pulled the cover off the Fiat. It was a ’79 Spyder 2000 roadster, British racing green, that my father had bought new for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. It had less than twenty thousand miles on it because my mother felt it was too flashy, no matter how often the old man told her how pretty she looked in it. She did, in fact; but when she moved back to Frenchtown she left it for me.
By daylight the grounds of the Long Castle were something to behold. The driveway paralleled a serpentine pond, complete with snowy egret, which would have done Regent Park proud. The hardscape surrounding the house was splendidly conceived and brilliantly executed.
“Hardscape” isn’t in Webster’s. It’s a word coined by landscape designers to distinguish elements constructed from those that are grown—masonry from nursery, cobblestones from coreopsis. (The designers are divided on the corresponding use of “softscape” for gardens, grass, and trees. The better ones I’ve known would cross a swamp at night to avoid even hearing the word.) Hardscape is what you see in winter when the flowers are dead and branches bare. It forms the character of a house, like the bones behind a face.
I had heard that the Castle’s granite walls and flagstone terraces, the cobblestone motor court, the sweeping drives and the paths that meandered among the as-yet-unplanted garden beds had been built by Italian stonemasons, who usually worked down in Greenwich and Cos Cob. It showed. We’ve got a few good local masons around Newbury, but there was a finished polish to this work rarely seen north of Long Island Sound. Walls that looked like dry stone had been c
emented by an artful hidden-mortar technique; while I could not have slipped my business card between the slates of the front walk.
“I love your car,” Rita Long greeted me. She had changed out of her workshirt into a snug cotton sweater. “What is it?”
I told her how I’d gotten it from my mother, and complimented her landscaping and the quality of the stonework. She explained that they had owned a big place in Greenwich. “When we decided to build here, Jack said we should use the workmen we knew. I felt a little funny cutting out the local guys.”
“Tough call,” I agreed. “Plenty of good mechanics up here, but it’s nice to go with people you like. Who’s the architect?”
“It was Jack’s plan. I drew it, and then we paid an architect to work out the structural details.”
“Nice. Who did the outside?”
“I did.”
“Really?” I looked again. I don’t care how talented an artist is, or how stylish an interior decorator, only one in a million retain their sense of scale outdoors. The sky is simply not a ceiling. I see magnificent houses every day with dinky steps, postage-stamp terraces, misplaced swimming pools, and tennis courts fenced like zoos.
She hurried to explain. “I had wonderful help. The masons saved me from a million mistakes.”
I had no trouble imagining a mason making an extra effort for Rita Long. Her smile, the breeze in her hair: “Move this wall? No problem, Signora, it is only granite. Guido, per favore, the jackhammer.”
I glanced up at the turret. The archers’ slits were authentically narrow. A few sturdy yeomen could hold off anything up to tanks. “There’s a rumor around town that you shoot deer from your turret.”
“Oh, God. Jack did. Once last year, during hunting season. I told him I’d shoot him if he did it again.”
“So the deer are safe.”
“From Jack,” she laughed. “Guaranteed. Are you ready to see the inside?”
We went in and wandered the many rooms, most of which were still unfurnished. A central staircase lit by skylights was magnificently paneled in rosewood. “Who’s the cabinetmaker?”
“It’s old. When Jack’s mother died, we ransacked her apartment. She had it done in the Nineteen-Twenties or ’Thirties. It was so gloomy there, but here the light makes it work, doesn’t it?”