HardScape

by Justin Scott

  “You’re a connection.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, I hear you found the poor man’s body. And now you tell me you and Stevie found Renny.”

  “Al Bell found Renny.”

  “Ben, should I be worried about you?”

  “No, Connie. It’s just a lousy coincidence. I’m sorry if you have to hear more embarrassing gossip.”

  “Ha!” She laughed, a little reminder that when it came to Society in this corner of New England, Connie Abbott set the standards and made the rules. “Now what am I going to say to that poor girl?”

  We descended the long slope to Frenchtown—fantastic on a bike, hell walking it home—past Chevalley Enterprises, which was shut for Sunday. The twenty-four-hour wrecker stood outside, draped with black crepe from the firehouse.

  If I thought that her rhetorical question about comforting Betty Chevalley meant she was done questioning me, I was wrong.

  “Did you know Mrs. Long?”

  “Very slightly.”

  “If she’s the girl I saw chatting you up at the cookout, she’s a great beauty.”

  “From you that’s a compliment.”

  “Shut up, Ben.”

  “Yes, Rita Long is a great beauty.”

  “I was reminded of your mother.”

  “The hair.”

  “And that woman who testified against you.”

  “Same thing,” I answered sharply. “Her hair.”

  “I always thought you were a fool for women.”

  “Not all women, Connie.”

  “Too bad. You’d grow out of it faster.…”

  Ahead lay Renny’s neat little ranch, built down the road from his parents’ ramshackle farmhouse. Trailers up the hillside housed brothers and sisters. The drive and the lawn were scattered with pickup trucks parked at urgent-looking angles. A gang of men with caps pulled over their long hair were hanging around the front door, sipping coffee from containers and morning Buds from cans. Aunt Connie asked, as I parked on the road, “Are you still seeing Victoria McLachlan?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Too bad. There’s a woman going places. She could use a good man around the house.”

  ***

  Caps flew and the gang at the door melted with a mumbled chorus of “Good morning, Miss Abbott.” She greeted each by name. There wasn’t a man among them who hadn’t raked leaves for her at some point in his boyhood. I got my usual allotment of “Hey Ben”s and a few consoling “Sorry about Renny”s. Pinkerton Chevalley stood off under a tree, looking like he would kill someone if he could only figure out who. I gave him a nod and a clenched fist, and he fisted back.

  Inside were women, coffee, and cakes. Renny’s mom—my Aunt Frances, a grandmother many times over at fifty-five—hugged me and shook hands with Connie, whom she called “Miss Abbott.” Aunt Frances was a Jervis, with just enough Butler and Trudeau blood to bring her indoors. She had cut a fabled swath through the young men of the town in her middle-school days before settling on Renny’s dad, my mother’s quiet older brother, who was nowhere in sight. Still a looker with her taut French cheeks, dark hair, and meet-me-in-the-hayloft eyes, she wore this morning the rigid smile of a woman who did not yet believe that she had lost her son. Any minute, she was telling herself, Renny would come walking in the door with a good story for his absence.

  Aunt Connie took her hand in both of hers. “I’m sorry, Frances.” She had a gift for making the simple phrase “I’m sorry” sound as if she grieved for Renny’s mom from the bottom of her heart. Because she’d never been married and had no children of her own, people accorded her a priestlike understanding of human loss and failure. Her presence was balm, her words wisdom.

  “May we see the widow?” she asked after a proper interval.

  Frances, obviously glad of a job, ran ahead to alert Betty Butler Chevalley. I trailed Connie into the bedroom, where Betty was sitting with a bunch of her sisters, all as redheaded and round (and ordinarily jolly) as she. They were stabbing out cigarettes and rising nervously for Connie, who trundled in waving them down with her pocketbook. She went right to Betty and took her hands and spoke quietly and urgently for a moment.

  Betty, who was twenty-three, looked like a child who had lost her pet. She’d been crying. Her fair skin was blotched, her eyes swollen slits. She turned to me when Connie let go of her hands.

  “You saw,” she said. “Did they hurt him?”

  “He couldn’t have felt a thing.”

  “That’s what Dr. Greenan said.”

  “I’m sure he’s right.”

  “Renny didn’t do anything.”

  “I know.”

  “But the cops searched here. They searched, here with the kids. They handcuffed Pink. They scared my kids. And Oliver Moody said they’ll be back. They’re going to search the garage.”

  “I’ll call Tim Hall. Keep ’em away from the kids, at least.”

  Renny’s mom came in and asked if Connie would like some coffee. She started to say No thank you, but noticed the gaggle of Butler girls eyeing her like the grande dame from their favorite soap opera and said, “Yes, thank you. Would it be possible for me to sit down here?” Girls leapt. A chair was offered and they gathered around.

  I went out and joined the guys. Joey Meadows got a cold one from his truck and pressed it into my hand. I said, “Here’s to Renny,” and drained half of it in a bourbon-sluicing swallow.

  “Anybody know was that his plane?” I asked.

  Gary Nello said, “I hear it was rented.”

  “You saw him?” Pete Stock asked me.

  “Yeah. He never felt a thing.”

  “So how’d he crash?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really think he could have tried to fly. Doc said the whole back of his head was gone.”

  “So he crashed and then he got shot.”

  “Unless the guy who shot him crashed it.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s what happened. Guy shoots Renny, tries to take off, and blows it.”

  “Why didn’t he just dump Renny?”

  “Maybe he was going to ditch the body in the water.”

  I said, “There was coke all over everything. Like a bag broke.…Who would bring coke by plane?”

  Several men looked off at the woods.

  Freddy Butler gave me a hard stare. He was a weaselly little guy who hung around some of the Jervises. He drove a new four-wheel-drive Ford pickup with a show bar and flame decals, though he hadn’t had a job since the lumberyard went bust.

  Someone else mumbled, “I hear they drive the stuff in same as grass.”

  “Who up here would buy that much?” I asked.

  “Maybe there’s some more spics with a factory.”

  “They wouldn’t need Renny,” Joe Charney scoffed. “What do you think, Renny flew it from Colombia in that little plane?”

  “I don’t think Renny flew it from anywhere,” I said, a pronouncement met with silence. We batted it around awhile. Few thought smuggling cocaine was the end of the world, though most, but not all, agreed it was pretty stupid, especially since you could get murdered doing it. Pink wandered over from his tree, fished a fresh Bud out of his truck, and stood shaking his head. “This whole damned thing don’t make no sense. Somebody’s bangin’ us.”

  “Did you know he was flying again?”

  “Told me he was flying some charter jobs. Taking rich people out to Block Island.”

  “Where’d he get the time?”

  “Made the time. The bucks were good. Needed the bucks.”

  “Was he doing it a lot?”

  “Once, twice a week most of the summer.”

  “Where’d he get the plane?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean what airport did he drive to? He didn’t fly out of Al’s field, did he?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he drove down to Oxford. They got an airport. Maybe he flew out
of somebody else’s field right here.”

  “But where’d he get the plane?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I slipped a hand around Pink’s thigh-sized bicep and walked him back to his tree. “Pink. Do you think he was flying dope?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pink, for crissake, it’s me. Was he flying dope?”

  “I know it’s you. I don’t know. I ain’t his nurse.”

  “Would Betty know?”

  Renny’s big brother regarded women as flawed food-and-sex machines. “If Betty found coke she’d powder the baby’s ass with it.”

  “So who would know?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pink, looking away.

  “Come on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pink, give me a break.”

  “Maybe Gwen Jervis.”

  “What?” I was astonished. Between my real estate business and my far-flung family, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot going on in Newbury that I didn’t know about. “Gwen Jervis?”

  “Hey, you give women a couple of babies, they don’t want to do it any more. Renny’s normal. Guy’s gotta get his ashes hauled. Right?”

  “Gwen?”

  “You got a problem with that?” Pink, never far from looking dangerous, began to look very dangerous.

  “Well, she’s his cousin and—”

  “They’re not making babies, they’re just doin’ it.”

  “Okay. I’m just a little surprised. I thought things were great with Betty.”

  “Long as Renny had Gwen, things were great with Betty,” said Pink. “You don’t know shit about life, do you?”

  I went back to the others and asked bluntly whether anyone had heard any talk at all about my cousin flying coke. I got some shrugs and some “No”s and “No way”s, while a concerted shuffling of boots and battered running shoes separated me and the group. All but Freddy Butler, who draped one elbow on his flame-covered hood and gave me another hard look.

  “You’re going to piss some people off if you don’t shut up.”

  In school Freddy had been the little kid who made friends with the bully, so I didn’t take him very seriously.

  “What people, Freddy?”

  “I’m just saying you don’t want to step in the middle of something.”

  “Because for a second there it sounded like you were threatening me.”

  “Not me, Ben.”

  ***

  There are four corners on Main Street at the flagpole and three churches. The fourth corner is the Yankee Drover Inn, in whose cellar bar I would ordinarily be reading the Sunday Times with a Bloody Mary. Instead, I was across the street sitting next to Aunt Connie in the front pew of the Episcopal church, listening to a hastily written sermon on the subject of the Sixth Commandment. Ordinarily, Reverend Owen would have dusted off his regular Autumn Sermon—“To everything a time, a time for sleep and death”—but while our two killings had occurred too late for the morning papers, he’d risen to the occasion. There wasn’t much he could say about Ron without getting heavily into the Seventh Commandment, and besides, nobody knew him. But Renny was local, and to give Landon his due, he never once credited the cocaine story. He just stuck to the fact that Renny had been murdered.

  He asked the congregation to join hearts with our neighbors in the Catholic church across the street—Renny’s church—whose parishioners would be mourning one of their own. This was no small thing, considering that there were many old people in our congregation who had been raised to believe that Catholics kept guns in their churches for the day the Pope would order war on the Protestants.

  As we shuffled out after the benediction, on line to shake Reverend Owen’s hand, Connie asked, “Where was your mother? I thought we’d see her there.”

  “Aunt Frances told me she had just left.”

  “Well, sometime this week it would be nice if you would drive over there with me. I’ve not seen her in some time, and I heard she’s a little low.…You do see her regularly, don’t you?”

  “I go for dinner.”

  “How often?”

  “I’ll call her. Maybe we could drive over Wednesday.”

  “Landon,” she said as she pumped the minister’s hand. “That was an excellent sermon.”

  “Sad days,” he said. He was young and, I knew, wavering in his faith. He’d told me one night sitting on the lawn in front of the church that he felt useless when his parishioners’ lives got twisted. He was thinking about going back to school to study psychology. It seemed a practical thing to do, but the decision to leave the church was tearing him up.

  ***

  Oliver Moody was directing traffic as the Catholic, Congregationalist, and Episcopal parking lots emptied simultaneously. He held everything up for Connie to cross the street. Whatever he held for me in his gaze was hidden behind his sunglasses. I walked her home, offered her lunch at the Yankee Drover. She said she was ready for a nap. I wandered back across, without Oliver’s help this time, into my office to check my silent answering machine, left a note on the door where I could be found, then walked to the General Store for a paper, and finally into the cellar bar of the Yankee Drover, where I ordered a Bloody Mary and a burger and settled into the cool dark. The place was nearly empty, as it would remain until the regular parishioners drove their wives and mothers home. Tony Franco, the owner, who tends his own bar on Sundays, set down my spicy, straight-up Bloody and said, “There’s a guy in the booth asking for you.”

  I watched in the back bar mirror as he emerged from the shadows. He had exchanged his “country” clothes for a “Sunday best” suit, neatly tailored for his ample frame.

  “Home at last?” said Alex Rose. He looked smug as a CNN correspondent in the middle of a brand new war.

  I said, “Your camera’s in the mail.”

  He said, “They’re gonna arrest Mrs. Long for murder.”

  Chapter 10

  Renny held a monopoly on my emotions, and at first the strongest feeling I could rouse for Rose’s news was surprise that the New York P.I. knew his way around my town better than I.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I bought a friend in the Plainfield state trooper barracks. Tipped me off in time to get Mr. Long up to the house with a limo load of lawyers.”

  “Shouldn’t you be holding their coats or something?”

  Rose’s beefy face got hard at the edges. “You got a problem with me?”

  “I got a problem with everybody at the moment. I just lost a friend. If you don’t mind I’d rather drink alone. Even if you do mind.”

  “Your cousin Renny. I’m sorry, fella. I didn’t know you were close.”

  I turned back to the political cartoons in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday Times and stared at a gag line I’d already read three times.

  Rose said, “Rita’s innocent.”

  “I know that.”

  “She didn’t shoot him.”

  “You don’t have to convince me.”

  “I want to know exactly what you saw when you found the bastard. They’re basing the case on the M.E.’s opinion of the angle of entry.”

  “He wasn’t a bastard. He seemed like a decent guy.”

  “Screwing his friend and partner’s wife.”

  “She chose well. So did he.”

  “That why you didn’t do the tape? You fell for them, didn’t you? You liked them as a couple. I’m not surprised. I had a witness in New York, a gay waiter, raving on about how romantic they were.”

  I raised the paper and tried to read Anna Quindlen, who was pulling hard for another Pulitzer with a piece about forty-year-old male dropouts and the families they left behind. No problem; I had a few years to go, and no one to desert when I got there.

  Rose said, “Let’s get back to when you found the body.”

  “Why are they charging Rita Long?”

  “Her sh
otgun. Her fingerprints.”

  “Powder test?” I asked through the paper.

  “Passed it But she could have scrubbed. Or she could have worn a glove.”

  “Anyone suggesting a motive?”

  “Lovers’ quarrel.”

  “Bull.”

  “Old reliable. Juries do love the lovers’ quarrel.”

  “Long’s standing by her?” I asked.

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Why? I thought he wanted a divorce.” I lowered the paper. Guys were coming in to the bar, discussing whether the Boston Red Sox would disappoint us in the playoffs. The optimists were betting they’d wait to disappoint us in the World Series. This occasioned some shouting.

  Rose raised his voice to be heard. “Why? Hey, just because he’s rich doesn’t mean he’s smart. Maybe he loves her. Maybe he figures with Ron out of the way, he’s got a clear field with his wife again. Catch her on the rebound.”

  “Who was Ron?”

  Rose looked surprised. “You don’t know?”

  “Nobody told me. How should I know? I just know she called him Ron and he used to be Long’s partner, a fact you neglected to mention.”

  Rose did not apologize. “Ronald Pearlman,” he said. “Sold his father’s furrier chain before the fur market crashed. Bought a Hong Kong chip factory and merged with LTS.”

  “LTS? What is that, Long Techno-Something?”

  “Long Technical Systems. I thought you knew all this from your M&A days.”

  “I worked my miracles in the Rustbelt—Rita told me Long bought Ron out.”

  “He hates partners. Ron had brought him excellent manufacturing capability, but once he had those offshore factories, it galled him that Ron would split the profits.”

  “Did they fight?”

  “Over what? Ron goes from let’s say ten million bucks from his father’s business to two hundred and fifty million bucks for his Hong Kong operation. The guy’s thirty-eight with enough money to buy Rhode Island. He’s got it all.”

  “Except his own wife.”

  “Some guys are greedy.”

  I wondered why, if Rita wanted to run off with Ron, she had wanted to sell the Castle when he had a quarter billion bucks in the bank.