HardScape

by Justin Scott

  “Oh.” Our isolated, privileged hunk of America is still America. You don’t see crack and heroin peddled on Main Street, and addicts don’t break into farmhouses, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have citizens who prefer illegal drugs to honest alcohol. Knowing the back country like I do, I could lead the DEA to several marijuana patches. A while back they busted an estate house outside Norfolk, which had a crack lab run by types from Boston. But by and large, even though we’re not that far as the crow flies from gang-infested small cities like Waterbury, we don’t get all that much dope action in Newbury. So little wonder that every state trooper at Rita Long’s house was howling through the night in the direction of Al’s private airstrip. Careers were in the making. Suspicious death on a rich man’s estate offered promise, but the big headlines would have to wait for a juicy trial, where the lawyers would hog them. While a plane full of coke crashing into northwest Connecticut’s exclusive hills guaranteed a media feeding frenzy, with sound bites and on-camera backgrounders for all.

  “What a day,” said Steve, who was hunched over the wheel as he peered into an old man’s night-blind gloom.

  Without Trooper Moody to lead the way, it would have taken the state police all night to find Bell’s airstrip. We climbed Morris Mountain on a switchback dirt road, took a number of unmarked turnoffs, then ran through a deep wood, which opened suddenly on two thousand feet of mowed pasture. Steve’s headlights caught a drooping windsock. At the far end the police cars had clustered. We bounced across the grass. They’d aimed their rooflight at the plane, a little white Cessna, which had smacked its nose into a tree and bent its propeller into half a swastika. Out came the yellow tape again. A trooper hurried over and asked Steve to have a look at the pilot. I went with him, carrying his bag. Oliver Moody was guarding the entrance to the cordon. He saw me and said, “Get outta here.”

  I gave Steve his bag and went back to the car.

  The doctor returned shortly, looking grave. “Ben, I’m sorry.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Renny Chevalley.”

  Chapter 8

  My cousin Renny was the only Chevalley boy ever to fly.

  Chevalley women did all right, but the men just didn’t fit in. It was a rare Christmas when one wasn’t locked up somewhere for some misdemeanor or another. They tended to tumble out of the school system around eighth grade with enough reading skills to get a driver’s license. It took flush times for them to prosper: They were great with a chainsaw, but you couldn’t get one to work with a shovel for love or money; they were born to the seat of a bulldozer, but hadn’t the entrepreneurial skills to acquire their own machines, so only when the construction business boomed did they get hired. They made good truckers, until they drank too much, and when they drank they fought. And when they fought, normal people called the cops. They got better as they got older: My mother’s brothers made wonderful uncles.

  Renny stayed in school. In seventh grade Mr. Tyler, the shop teacher, taught him how to turn metal on a lathe. When the rest of us brought home our little wooden water pump lamps, Renny gave his mom a gleaming ship’s helm lamp made entirely of polished aluminum. When I started prep school, Renny rebuilt a Pontiac GTO which his big brother Pinkerton raced to victory on dirt tracks as far away as Maine. When I got accepted at Annapolis, Renny cracked up the GTO on 361. It was the night before he was to go to Hartford to receive first prize in a statewide shop-project contest for a chrome version of the ship’s helm lamp, and he nearly died. When he could walk again, he rebuilt a wrecked Piper Cub and learned to fly.

  I thought then there’d be no stopping him, a hope confirmed when he was accepted into the Air Force. But though his scores were high, and reportedly no one could outfly him on a simulator or a trainer, the cold north slopes and swamps of Frenchtown exerted their strange pull, and Renny was quite suddenly discharged. He wouldn’t talk about it, even when we went drinking. Years later, after I got out of prison, he told me he had quite simply gotten homesick. Air Force boot camp and flight school were the first time he’d ever slept farther from his bed than my house on Main Street. But he still wanted to fly, so he started working his way toward the Holy Grail of a four-engine jet license, which would allow him to pilot “Seven-fours,” as he called them, for the airlines.

  Acquiring flight time and skills was a long, slow process without Air Force backing, and very expensive. He had worked as a flight instructor, an occasional charter pilot, and, for the last several years, as a “freight dog.” Freight dogs fly at night, shuttling between small airports to deliver bank checks to central clearinghouses. I rode along with him now and then; it was magnificent droning through a dark sky peppered with stars over astonishingly dark ground between clumps of light that marked the cities. We’d go to Hartford, Teterboro, Wilmington, Philly, and back to Hartford all before dawn, touching down just long enough to heave the bags aboard.

  Gradually, he had given up the dream to be an airline pilot. Some of it had to do with one of the Butler girls, whom he married on her eighteenth birthday. Along came a baby, and a second. His father decided to retire, and the logical thing was to take over his Frenchtown garage—a dank, greasy establishment with a surly dog on a chain that scared most customers off to Jiffy-Lube. Renny discovered a flair for business. He cleaned up the garage, invested in some modern tools, initiated a free towing service for his startled customers, and turned it into a going enterprise.

  I told Steve I had to see him.

  ***

  “Coming through,” growled Steve Greenan, gripping his medical bag in one hand and my arm in the other. He walked me past a grimly smiling Oliver Moody and right up to the plane. “You okay?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know.” We climbed up the bumper and onto the hood of a police car they’d driven close to use for steps. Its roof lights illuminated the cockpit. The windshield was shattered. Renny sat buckled into his seat. Blood had trickled down his face and dried, marring his dark, lean good looks. I noticed, for the first time, a wisp of gray in his temples. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket. It was open, and it and his shirtfront were dusted heavily in white powder.

  “I don’t believe this,” I said.

  “I’m real sorry,” said Steve.

  “Is that coke?”

  “Tastes like it to me.”

  “Renny wouldn’t fly dope.”

  The doctor’s silence said that he, like most of Newbury, wouldn’t put anything past a Chevalley boy.

  “Come on, Steve. He didn’t need this. He had his business. Right?”

  Steve said, “I’m just telling you it tastes like coke.”

  “Well, it’s not his.”

  “That might have been the problem,” Steve muttered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at him.”

  I looked and saw what I hadn’t noticed earlier. The cockpit was intact but for the shattered windshield, and the plane was barely scratched other than the bent prop. Renny’s seatbelt had held, and it looked to me like he hadn’t even hit the glass. Nor was there that much blood on his face.

  “What killed him?”

  “He’s been shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “The cops are creaming in their pants—Hold it!”

  I had reached to touch Renny’s face. Steve stopped me with a gnarled hand. “You don’t want to see the back of his head. …Come on now. Let’s get out of here. I told the cops I needed you for a positive ID.…Come on, Ben, I’ll drive you home.”

  I walked from the plane in a daze, barely aware of anything but the smile on Oliver Moody’s face. From his point of view, dead and injured Chevalleys and Jervises represented little victories. And in general I can’t say I blamed him; he was the guy who had to break up bar brawls and pull violent men off their women. But it wasn’t fair to Renny and I would never forgive that smile. It was some relief to feel angry.

  “You want your car?” Steve asked when we
got to 361.

  “No, I’ll leave it—Damn, I left the top down. I better get it. I’m sorry, Steve.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  The Longs’ floodlights were all blazing, and the young trooper was still guarding the door.

  I put the top up and led Steve back to Newbury, where I lit a fire and had a couple of JDs. I thought of driving over to see Renny’s wife. But I knew the whole huge clan would be there looking after her, which meant she’d be closeted with the women while the men drank, and I was much more in a mood for drinking alone.

  The third bourbon sent me reeling. I staggered upstairs, swallowed a handful of Vitamin B for the morning, got into bed, and tried to sleep. I lay awake a long time, thinking slowly, trying to come up with a plausible reason why a thirty-five-year-old businessman with two babies would fly cocaine.

  I had no doubt he owed plenty on his business. Turning a rathole of a small-town fix-it shop into a seven-bay wonder of computer diagnostics costs plenty. He was into me for a few grand, part of which he had paid down by shoehorning the Caddy engine into my dad’s old Olds. I assumed he was carrying other personal loans, though the bulk of his money would have come from banks willing to take a chance on an upstart. Peebles Bank, I guessed, as their lending policies in the late ’Eighties were of the drunken sailor standard, and maybe Circle Bank, lately taken over by the government.

  On the other hand, his business was booming. (Chevalley Enterprises, he had named it, a blunt stick in the eye of the old families that were accustomed to controlling commercial endeavor in our neck of the woods.) His timing had been impeccable. Nothing like a recession to convince people they could eke a few more years out of the family cars instead of trading them in on new ones. So once the extended warranties ran out on their shiny ’88 Buick or ’87 Toyota, they turned to Chevalley Enterprises, which treated them better than the dealers, fixed it right, and kept it reasonable. The last time I’d been in for an oil change, all seven bays were working and Renny’d been talking about adding two more, if he could get the financing.

  Oliver Moody’s smile floated before my eyes as the bourbon washed over me. My last thought was that I’d misread him. The trooper’s pleasure in Renny’s death was not general. He hated two people in the world. Renny and me. His smile had said, One down, one to go.

  Chapter 9

  The telephone woke me. I should have let the machine take it, but I snapped it on the first ring and it was already in my hand before I was aware. I croaked a dry-mouthed, bourbon-fouled Hello, and the voice of my great-aunt Connie said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No, no, no, Connie. Just sitting here…” I found the clock. Seven.

  She mistook my sleepy confusion for hesitation and asked, “You have heard about Renny, haven’t you?”

  “Last night.”

  She was on the “Fish Line,” a telephone circuit used by older people who called each other in the morning to check that no one had fallen and needed help. It helped those alone to stay in their own homes rather than move to retirement communities, and it spread news faster than CNN.

  “I’m sorry, for you. I know you liked him. At any rate, I must call on the Butler girl. Would you like to come with me?”

  Connie was a forthright ninety, but, having been born very few years after the century, her manner of speech required decoding. “The Butler girl” was Renny’s wife. Everyone else called her Betty Chevalley, but Aunt Connie tended to remember the rest of us as the children we had been; also, she had no truck with Chevalleys. As a good Christian, however, she must call on anyone in need. “Would you like to come with me?” was her way of asking if I would drive her. She would drive herself—the sight of her peering under the rim of the steering wheel would scatter the few who hadn’t already taken cover at the first glimpse of her black Lincoln—but if I were to oblige she would take the sensible course. But she would not ask.

  I said, “I’d like very much to go with you, thank you. It’ll be easier seeing her together.”

  “Which car shall we take?”

  “Why don’t we take yours, Connie? I’ll drive if you’ll let me.”

  “Half an hour?”

  “It’s early, Connie. Maybe we’ll give them a little time. I’ll come over at nine.”

  ***

  I walked across the street to Connie’s. Her house is a Federal-era mansion, by far the grandest in town. She’s bequeathed it to the Historical Society, and if she ever dies—which doesn’t seem likely to those who know her—Newbury will possess one of the most lavish museum houses in New England, chockablock with pre-Revolutionary antiques, Persian carpets, and Chinese art, porcelain, and vases. Hers is the wealthy side of the Abbotts, and the fruits of some three hundred years of enterprise and ingenuity have funneled down to this one last old lady, who will leave it all to charity. I went around the back. She was waiting at the kitchen door with her coat, gloves, and hat already on. She was lean and trim. Good posture and a thick crown of curly white hair fooled strangers into thinking she was only eighty.

  “I’ve started the car to warm it,” she informed me, adding tartly as I offered her my arm down the steps, “If we don’t get there soon the poor thing will be obliged to offer us lunch.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  “We will not stay for lunch.”

  “Of course not.”

  “We will go to church at eleven.” Sunday. I’d forgotten my tie.

  The stable was choked with fumes. The sun spilled in on a 1960 four-door sedan, black as midnight and bright with chrome. “Connie, please remember, don’t start the car before you open the door.”

  “Let’s go!”

  She barreled in, waving the fumes with her pocketbook. I helped her with her seatbelt and drove out of the stable, stopped to close the door—no electronic door-openers in this house, thank you very much—went down the drive and on to Main Street.

  Driving her old Lincoln Continental is to return to those decades we’ve come to call The American Century. Big as a full-size pickup truck, it has a powerful V-8 engine unencumbered by air-pollution controls, capable of propelling its several tons of steel, sheet glass, and chrome to velocities that might surprise Oliver Moody’s hopped-up Fury.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “To Renny?”

  “Yes, Renny. Why did he do it?”

  My question exactly. When I didn’t answer immediately, Connie said, “You are aware he was smuggling cocaine?”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not? They said the airplane was crammed full.”

  “I saw.”

  “You were there?” She looked at me sharply, her bony face and snow-white curls frozen in sudden astonishment and—I was shocked to see—fear. For one second I could see her thinking, Oh, Lord, Ben was in on it.

  “Steve Greenan took me to identify the body.”

  “What the devil for? He’s known Renny since he was born.”

  “He knew I wanted to see him.”

  Connie nodded, relaxing back in the seat. “Stevie Greenan was always a very thoughtful boy. So you saw. Is it true he’d been shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t you believe?”

  “Connie, it doesn’t make any sense. Renny’s not a criminal. He was a businessman.”

  “Businessman? A Chevalley? Come on, Ben. I know you liked him, but really.”

  “Did he fix your car?”

  “He was an excellent mechanic. And he picked up and delivered the car. I never had to go down there, thank God.”

  “Connie, he had seven mechanics working for him, two tow-truck drivers, and a secretary. He became a businessman.”

  Connie was no fool. “It takes a lot of money to hire seven mechanics, two tow drivers, and a secretary, not to mention purchasing the tools, the trucks, and the office. Where did it come from?”

  “Banks.”

  “Perhap
s he was having difficulty paying them back.”

  “Maybe. But I just don’t see him doing that. Some people are naturally honest.”

  “Some people are brought up properly.”

  “Some people were lucky that way,” I reminded her, remembering the time when I was fifteen and she, seventy, drove me down to Danbury, to the movies, to see The Man Who Would Be King. Vaster than television ever could be, it was the best thing I had ever seen. When it ended I just slumped in my seat, dreading the daylight outside. “Would you like to see it again?” she asked.

  “Could we?”

  “Certainly. Come along.” Puzzled, I followed her down the aisle. I thought she’d said we could see it again, but here we were walking out as the people for the next show filed in. We hurried to the box office and Connie asked to buy two more tickets. The kid selling tickets looked at her like she was a visitation from The Exorcist and the manager came running to see what was the trouble. Connie set him straight. She paid for two more tickets and we went back in and saw it again. She had always been easy to talk to, and I asked her why she’d paid again when we could have just sat there for free.

  She said, “We honor the objects of our desire by paying for them. And we honor the people who created them.”

  She had never approved of Renny as my friend. She was behind my father and mother’s decision to send me to the Newbury School and, when she feared I was getting a little too wild, off to Stonybrook Military. She had interceded personally to get my senatorial appointment to Annapolis. And she’d attended every day of my trial, taking up residence at the Carlyle Hotel.

  “Do you suppose,” she asked as we drove down Church Hill, “that there is a connection?”

  “Between what and what, Aunt Connie?”

  “Between the two killings.”

  “Oh. You heard about the man at the Long place.”

  “I heard he was where he shouldn’t be.”

  “How so?”

  “Mr. Long was away. Mrs. Long was entertaining.”

  Connie glanced sidelong at me. Most of the elderly blue-eyed people I know around here get watery-eyed as they get older. Not Connie. Hers were dark and sharp enough to cut.