HardScape

by Justin Scott

  “She’s no slut.”

  “I’m afraid it won’t help to quote you on that.”

  “Ira? I just remembered something.”

  “What?”

  “I told Vicky McLachlan.”

  “How about Scooter MacKay? He could print an insert for the Clarion. Or do a mailing.”

  “Only Vicky. I’m sorry. I forget. It was sort of…”

  “Pillow talk?” Ira growled.

  “Pre-pillow talk.”

  “Well, it would be nice for Mrs. Long if you pillow talk Vicky into keeping it under her hat.”

  “We’re not talking any more.”

  Ira looked thoroughly disgusted and echoed Alex Rose: “With friends like you, Mrs. Long won’t need enemies.”

  “Can you talk to Vicky?”

  “I’ll have to reflect on that. Vicky’s a smart woman. She knows that testifying about your pre-pillow talk won’t be the finest moment in her career. But if the state’s attorney somehow gets wind of your escapade, and subpoenas Vicky, she will tell it straight and true.”

  “She doesn’t owe me anything,” I admitted.

  “It’s not that. She’s too smart to lie.…Or too honest. You’re sure you didn’t tell anyone else?”

  “Positive. But Ira, Rose knows. And if he’s protecting Long to protect himself, what’s to stop him from blabbing it to send Rita down the river?”

  “Look at the bright side,” Ira said grimly. “That would pretty much validate your theory that Long hired Rose to kill Ron Pearlman.”

  “Very funny.”

  “While I get to tell the jury, She’s not a kinky slut, it just looks that way.”

  “Do you know about the picture?”

  “What picture?” Roth asked in a voice that didn’t like surprises.

  I described Rita’s drawing of Ron.

  “A skull instead of a face? Where is it?”

  “Disappeared.”

  The lawyer sighed. “She probably hid it.”

  “She swears she didn’t.”

  “Well,” he said carefully, “I would hope that someone who has influence with her would persuade her to make damned sure it stays hidden. Better yet, burn it.”

  He opened the door for me. “How’s your Aunt Connie?”

  “Hanging in there.”

  “Please give her my regards.”

  “Thanks. Ira, how bad are Rita’s chances?”

  “About as bad as yours were when you went down.”

  “She didn’t do it.”

  “Well, she has one advantage that you didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Counsel.”

  “I had lawyers up the wazoo.”

  “Always wondered why you didn’t call me. What was the matter? Didn’t trust a country lawyer?”

  “I considered it, Ira.”

  “I’d have gotten you off.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to get off.”

  “But you were framed.”

  “I know, Ira.” I’d been pondering this since New York, trying to understand why I didn’t hate Leslie Harkin for selling me out.

  “You didn’t break the law.”

  “No.”

  “So why didn’t you call me?”

  “I broke the spirit of the law, Ira. I plundered. I deserved to go down.”

  “That is your crazy aunt talking Puritan claptrap.”

  “Clean slate, Ira. I’m not guilty anymore.”

  ***

  Rita was huddled in the car with her arms crossed tightly. “Now what?”

  “He’ll follow up—quietly, I think.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “No. But he has to follow it up.”

  “I’m scared.”

  She said she was scared, but she acted more like mad. Flooring the Jag, she scattered rooster-tails of Ira Roth’s driveway gravel. All the way home she treated me to a blistering critique of her lawyer. She dished his taste in furniture—yecho-modern; his horses—swaybacked; the roofline of his ranch house—which she characterized as Wild West so-what.

  Actually, Ira had invested a fortune in creating an authentic Western spread, much as she and Jack had done Ivanhoe. Nor were they alone in grafting wacky fantasies onto the countryside. Ira’s immediate neighbor inhabits a Norman farmhouse, and the guy over the hill, Reg Hopkins of Hopkins Septic fame, lives in a Tudor cottage under a roof he learned to thatch himself. Of late I had been noticing a lamentable penchant for stucco tricked up to resemble Santa Fe adobe. On the plus side, most of the so-called contemporary architecture was hidden in the woods.

  When Rita finally noticed I wasn’t responding, she screamed at me. “Would it be too much goddamned trouble for you to investigate where Alex Rose was when Ron was murdered?”

  “My next step,” I assured her. “I’m going to check out your alarm company.”

  “Why?”

  “Jack told me Rose reported that Ron was shot before the state police called. When I asked Rose how he knew, he said the alarm company told him they’d heard it on their police radio. I’ll believe him after I talk to whoever called him.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” said Rita. “The alarm company has strict orders to report to Rose every time there’s a problem. He telephoned me on ‘raccoon night’ twenty minutes after I hit the panic button.”

  “Hmmm. I thought I had a way to trip him up.”

  “He wouldn’t be that stupid. Come on, Ben, you’ve got to find out where he was the afternoon Ron was shot. Force him to give you an alibi. Then trip him up.”

  Wondering how I would go about doing that, I picked up my car at her house and drove home.

  ***

  Trooper Moody was waiting in my kitchen, out of uniform. He wore heavy boots, work pants, and a commando sweater stretched tight as shrink-wrap around his enormous chest. I liked him better in trooper gray, which promised, however falsely, that he would be constrained by the peacekeeper’s oath.

  “Who let you in?”

  “Jailbird, you’ve got problems.”

  He kicked my feet out from under me, picked me off the floor, and threw me a long way into the dining room.

  Chapter 25

  I skidded across waxed chestnut and crashed into a heap of chairs. Oliver loomed in the doorway.

  They taught us to box like gentlemen in prep school. The navy was in the killing business. The rule at Leavenworth was Destroy. But in all three institutions, a good big man usually beat a good little man. Oliver Moody had me by half a foot and one hundred pounds. If he didn’t know all my dirty tricks, he was tough enough to absorb punishment while he puzzled them out. I looked for a weapon.

  It had stood on the mantel since the house was built—a heavy brass candlestick made by William White, who had come over on the Mayflower. I mapped a route to it, under the dining table, and looked elsewhere before he noticed.

  “Don’t get up. You just lay there and listen.”

  “I listen better on my feet.”

  “Remember what happened last time you got up when I told you not to.”

  Like yesterday.

  “I remember you made me cry in front of my friends.”

  “Somebody had to teach you little bastards respect.”

  We were hacking around on a Saturday night—Renny and me and Scooter and the Butler boys—and suddenly there was the new resident state trooper, staking out his territory with a measured beat of bootheels drumming on the grange-hall porch. He was twenty-five, fresh out of the military police, and knew how to inflict savage pain without leaving a mark.

  “Remember what happened to your vehicle?”

  Oliver Moody went red. I got ready to roll under the table. But then, to my surprise, he regained control of himself and, instead of bounding into the dining room to kick my head in, whipped a flat, silvery object out of his pocket.

  “Recognize this, jailbird?”

  “Loo
ks like a TV channel zapper, Ollie,” I answered, concentrating on not looking at the candlestick and worrying how hard to hit him with it. I’d wreck my own life if I killed the man. But if I didn’t hit him hard enough to knock him cold, Oliver Moody would break my arms and smash my teeth with it at his leisure.

  “It’s a remote control for a Sony camcorder.”

  “What?”

  “Lets you make videos of yourself.”

  “So?” That was what he had found in Rita’s woods. The damned thing had fallen out of its nest on the camcorder. I hadn’t noticed it and neither, apparently, had Rose when he got it back in the mail. I didn’t like how pleased with himself Ollie looked. “So?” I asked again.

  “It’s from a camcorder purchased in New York City at Grand Central Camera by a guy named Alex Rose.”

  “So?”

  “Alex Rose is a private detective.”

  Boy did Ollie look happy. I said, “So?” again.

  “Two weeks ago Alex Rose was in your Oldsmobile when I issued you a summons for speeding.”

  “I remember now. I was showing him a house. But I don’t recall introducing you.”

  “The Mercedes Benz parked in your driveway belonged to Mr. Rose.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said from the floor. “Rose dropped his remote control while you were giving me a ticket. You found it and ran a license check on his car to find his address in order to return it. And just to be sure it was really his, you went all the way to New York City on your day off to confirm the serial number at the store where he bought it. I’m impressed. Way beyond the call of duty, Ollie. Public service par excellence.”

  “You dropped it, jailbird.”

  “Me?”

  “You know where?”

  I looked at him like he was nuts.

  “You dropped it in the woods behind the Long house the night before Mrs. Long’s boyfriend got shot.”

  “You’re losing me, Ollie. If the remote control belongs to Alex Rose, wouldn’t any normal human being conclude that Rose must have dropped it in the woods behind the Long house?”

  “Rose was watching the Sox on Lori Match’s TV.”

  Lori Match owned Matchbox, one of the last old-fashioned tourist homes in the area. It was on Church Hill Road, with a discreet neon sign that glowed TOURISTS.

  “Rose stayed in Newbury?” I asked. “Stayed the night?”

  “Never left the house. I noticed the Benz parked there and checked with Lori.”

  “He told me he was going back to New York.”

  “Guess he lied.”

  “So?” I still didn’t know what Ollie wanted, but I knew that as soon as I got rid of him, I was going to ask Lori Match where Rose went the next morning.

  “So you tell me, Ben.”

  “Tell you what, Ollie?”

  Ollie pulled a black, leather-covered sap from his jeans. “Tell me you went back the next day and shot the boyfriend.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I didn’t hear you, Ben. Tell me again.”

  “Oh for chrissake, Ollie. It’s the ’Nineties. Cops don’t beat up white people in their own homes.”

  “It’s my afternoon off. I’m playing poker with some of the boys at the barracks.”

  I got scared. Ollie may have been stupid, but there was nothing quite as frightening as a bully with a plan.

  “I figure it went down like this,” he said. “First Rose pays you to videotape his boss’s wife screwing around.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You’re broke. You’re behind in your taxes. So you tape ’em screwing—or you try to, ’cause they spot you and call me and you run off in the woods. So Rose says, You screwed up. I won’t pay you unless you shoot the guy.”

  “What?”

  “You figure, what the hell. The money’s good. You don’t know the guy. You sneak in the house and steal one of their guns.”

  “It’s got burglar alarms like Fort Knox.”

  Ollie smiled. “Maybe somebody gives you the gun.…”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll get to that.…Anyhow, you shoot the guy like it’s a hunting accident.”

  “Ollie, go bounce your cockamamie idea on Sergeant Bender. Just don’t be surprised when he laughs.”

  “You want a laugh? I’ll give you a laugh.” His reptile eyes never left my face as he switched the blackjack from his right hand to his left and reached back into the kitchen and produced a large, two-by-three artist’s sketchpad. He flipped the cover, revealing a penciled landscape—a meadow with a split-rail fence. “See this little signature at the bottom of the picture?”

  “Can’t see that far from the floor, Ollie.”

  “It says ‘Rita Long.’ See? ‘Rita.’ ‘Long.’”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Landfill.”

  “What?”

  “Found it in a mini-dumpster of construction garbage. Guess whose?”

  “Newbury Society of Artists’?”

  “Longs’.”

  “Were you picnicking in the dump? Or did someone happen to give you a tip? Like maybe an anonymous tip? Like maybe someone called in the night and heavy-breathed, Check out the Long garbage.”

  “Check this out, jailbird.” He flipped back the landscape and there was the sketch of Ron Pearlman, naked, with skull.

  “What’s that supposed to be?”

  “Chest and legs remind me of the boyfriend who got shot.”

  “Could be anybody.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “No, Ollie, I don’t.”

  “I think she’s bent.”

  “Mrs. Long?”

  “Look at this thing. She’s nuts.”

  I recalled Rita’s explanation and my friend the painter’s opinion and tried to keep it simple for the man with the blackjack. “The picture isn’t finished, Ollie. It’s like looking at the frame of a house. House isn’t finished until you nail on the shingles, right? She didn’t draw his face yet. That’s all.”

  Ollie didn’t buy it for a second. He knew a naked man with a fleshless skull when he saw one. And he had strong opinions about the sort of woman who would draw such a picture.

  “Nuts. Whack-o. This proves it. I think they had some fun and games. Think it got out of hand. Maybe he hurts her more than she wanted.”

  “Ollie,” I interrupted. “Not everyone’s concept of ‘fun and games’ involves pain.”

  I might as well have interrupted an avalanche.

  “—hurts her more than she wanted,” he repeated. “She waits until he turns his back the next day and blows him away.”

  He sounded so damned sure that even I found myself wondering: Did Rita shoot Ron? Were Rose and Jack Long madly scrambling to keep her out of jail? If you bought her drawing for what it looked like—forget art, forget technique—it raised the awful question: Who knew what was in the woman’s head?

  “Kind of lets me off the hook, doesn’t it?”

  “Not if she gave you the gun.”

  “Where’s my fingerprints?”

  “You wore gloves.”

  “No,” I said. “Something’s wrong here. Ollie, what do you want?”

  “I want you as a witness.”

  “Witness to what?”

  “To her screwing her boyfriend. To being weird enough to kill him. What are you protecting her for, unless she paid you to shoot him for her? Cop a plea, Ben. Save yourself.”

  “You looking for a promotion, Ollie? Is that why you’re playing detective?”

  “You think I can’t move up?”

  “It never occurred to me. I thought you liked it here.…”

  The fear that flickered on his face looked as out of place as a McDonald’s on Main Street.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s it. The budget.” He wasn’t stupid, he was desperate, and in his desperation he had surrendered the moral high ground
.

  I stood up slowly. He watched me, carefully, but made no threatening move.

  “The budget?” I asked again. “Right?”

  “Goddamned town. Worked here twenty years. Now they want to save a couple of bucks on my house.”

  I almost felt sympathy for him. Connecticut’s budget was a mess, thanks to the recession, the Reagan deficit, and a tax code that had worked wonders in the eighteenth century. The state had cut county funds and the counties were dumping the towns, forcing the towns to slash school programs, ignore potholes, and raise dump fees. Another way to save money was to stop paying for a resident state trooper, hoping that when crime happened the troopers would fan out from the county barracks. Which they would, with all the fine perception of an invading army, many hours after Ollie would have restored order. So, for the sake of some forty-nine thousand dollars a year, some people in Newbury advocated firing Trooper Moody.

  It had happened in neighboring towns already. Ollie would lose his town-supported house and be transferred to some godforsaken part of the state where, in his late forties, he would have to start from scratch cowing the natives.

  Better—much better—to help the state’s attorney crack a big murder. Get promoted to a nice, air-conditioned office. Up his pay. Increase his pension.

  I said, “You haven’t shown Bender and Boyce that remote control yet, have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Or the picture?”

  “I’m still building my case.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ollie, you’re taking a hell of a chance withholding evidence. Isn’t it your job to report evidence as you find it? They’re the investigators. You’re the donkey.”

  “Screw you.”

  “You’re also so far off base you’re in the skybox. Rita Long didn’t kill Ron Pearlman. Neither did I.”

  “Says you.”

  “We didn’t both do it.”

  “The state’s attorney says she did it. I’d give my left ball to tie you in.”

  “First you say I killed him for Rose. Then you say she killed him. Then you say I killed him for her. You can’t have it three ways, Ollie. You’re just not thinking this through.”

  Oliver Moody put down the sketchpad and switched his blackjack back to his right hand. “I’m not worried. You’ll clear things up for me.”