by S. J. Rozan
Only a fanatic would bother with the long, tricky climb down to the stream over boulders and slippery leaves, especially when about five miles south the stream flowed through county land with a well-kept path to it. I wasn't that kind of fanatic, but MacGregor was, and one April afternoon a couple of years ago when roadwork muddied the water downstream, I drove in to find one of my windows forced open and some expensive-looking fishing tackle in my kitchen. A note, written in an unfamiliar hand on paper torn from a pocket notebook, was stuck on the reel. "Was fishing your stream," it read. "Sprained my ankle. Why don't you have a goddamn phone? Having enough trouble without this stuff. Eat the fish. I'll be by for the gear." It was signed "Ron MacGregor."
I looked in the fridge. There were four beautiful trout in a creel. I took one out, wrapped it in newspaper, put it back on the shelf. Then I took the creel and the rest of the gear over to Antonelli's and checked the phone book. There were two Ron MacGregors in the county; I hit it the first time. "Didn't want your fish to rot," I told him.
"You the guy in Lou Antonelli's place? Why the hell don't you have a phone? It took me an hour to crawl up your goddamn driveway."
"Get a phone, people start calling you," I explained. "You never know where it might end."
I took him his fish and his gear, and we sat drinking beer in his split-level ranch for the rest of the afternoon.
Since then he'd fished my stream often. What he liked about my stream was the same thing I liked about my cabin: there was no one else around. What I liked about him was that he left his car at the top of the road and never stopped by to say hello without an invitation.
MacGregor sat back down. "You want another cup of coffee?"
"No," I said. "That one was bad enough."
I'd told my story twice, once briefly when MacGregor and his men arrived at Antonelli's, then in more detail here for the benefit of MacGregor, a uniformed trooper, and a tape machine. I'd told it patiently and completely, gave details as I remembered them, answered questions as I could. I left out only two things. I didn't say what the fight last night had been about—I didn't really know anyway— and, though I gave MacGregor the keys on the silver ring and told him where I'd found them, I didn't tell him whose I thought they were. When I was through, the trooper left, taking the tape to be transcribed.
With the door closed and the trooper gone, MacGregor frowned. He poked the eraser end of his pencil at my handkerchief, lying in the centre of his desk with the keys on top. "Withholding evidence, Smith. That's a bad business."
"I'm not withholding anything. I'm giving it to you."
"Tampering, then. What if there were prints on these?"
"Then there still are. I've had them gift-wrapped, Mac. They were safer with me than they would have been with Brinkman's boys."
MacGregor sighed with that weariness in a cop that a night's sleep or a month's vacation won't cure. "That's true. It's the only reason I'm not going to chew your ass over this—now. What else have you got? The murder weapon, maybe?"
"Nothing else."
"Why'd you pick these up?"
"I thought I recognized them. I wanted to see them in the light."
"Oh? Private citizen wants to look at the evidence, he just scoops it up and walks off with it?"
"Private investigator, Mac. It's in my blood. I'm sorry."
"And?"
I shook my head. "I'm not sure."
"What do you think?"
"I think that when I'm sure I'll tell you."
MacGregor pushed at the handkerchief some more. "You're pretty close with the Antonellis, aren't you?"
"Tony and I go back awhile. I rented his father's hunting cabin when I first started coming up here; when the old man died Tony sold it to me."
"And Jimmy?"
"He was a kid when his father died, eight or nine. He used to spend some time with me, when I was up."
MacGregor looked up from the handkerchief. "I heard you were like another father to him."
"I wasn't here enough for that, except one winter. I had troubles of my own around that time. The kid was good company. He didn't talk much."
"And when he was arrested?"
"Which time?"
"You know what I mean. Last fall."
I shrugged. "He was looking at five to fifteen. He didn't deserve it."
"Says you."
"Okay," I said.
"So you brought up a slick city lawyer and got him off."
"I thought the troopers weren't involved in that, it was a county thing. What do you care?"
"It pissed off every cop on this side of the state, Smith. We're simple folks up here; we're not used to being outmanuevered by lawyers with manicures and bow ties."
"I didn't like it either. I don't like to operate that way. But the kid didn't have a chance. Brinkman was out to get Grice and he was squeezing Jimmy hard. The whole scam was Grice's; Jimmy wasn't even in it for the money, just the fun."
"How so?"
"You know what Grice paid Jimmy to drop those cars in the quarry? A hundred bucks each. It must have been worth a lot more than that to Grice to lose them."
"So why'd Jimmy do it?"
"Because it was dangerous. You know how he did it?"
"Put the car in neutral and pushed, I'd guess."
"You'd be wrong. He drove the damn things like a bat out of hell over the edge with the door open, jumped out just before they hit the water. Twice a car rolled over on him; once he got knocked on the head. He still doesn't know how he made it onto the rocks that time; he didn't wake up until morning."
MacGregor shook his head. "He's crazy."
"No, he's not. Just wild. Making a lot of noise so he won't hear the sounds in the dark. No different from a lot of kids."
MacGregor chewed his bottom lip. He had kids, too. Girls; but girls had their own ways of being wild.
He said, "You got any idea where I can find him?"
I said evenly, "No. Why?"
He threw down the pencil. "Oh, come on, Smith! You got a better suspect?"
"Why would Jimmy kill Gould?"
"I've got two theories and I haven't even thought about it yet. Maybe it was Gould who tipped off Brinkman about the quarry, and Jimmy was pissed. Guys like Gould have turned out to be snitches before this. Or, maybe Jimmy was looking to move up in Grice's organization and Gould was in the way."
"And why leave the body lying around?"
"Maybe he meant to come back for it, after he figured out what to do with it. From the looks of that cellar, no one goes down there from one month to the next unless something blows."
"Things blow all the time over there. Jimmy would know that."
"Well," he said, his eyes on the handkerchief on his desk, "maybe he went out to his car to get something and found he'd lost his keys, couldn't get back in." He looked at me again. "He can hot-wire the car; maybe he's got another set of keys to the bar at home. Maybe it's pretty close to morning anyway, Tony'll be there soon. Maybe he figures he'll chance it, leave the body, come back the next night. He's big on taking chances, I hear."
I looked at him levelly. "He's not a killer, Mac."
MacGregor didn't answer, only shrugged.
"Can I leave?" I asked. "I'm starving."
MacGregor sighed and his tone changed. "In a minute. Tell me something else. Brinkman has this bug up his ass about Grice. So why hasn't he ever picked him up?"
"What do you mean?"
"I never heard Brinkman was crooked but I never heard he was Kojak, either. All the rackets Grice runs—protection, prostitution, even drugs—some jerk or other has run in Schoharie since the Creation. Never bothered Brinkman as long as the boys were local and kept their heads down. Then along comes some minor-league bozo out of Albany to do a little muscle work and all of a sudden fighting crime is more important to Brinkman than sitting on his duff watching his pension grow."
"Jesus, Mac, I thought you and Brinkman were on the same side." He glared. I asked, "What kind
of muscle work?"
MacGregor snorted. "Union-busting. For Appleseed."
"Scabbing at the baby food plant? God, that's disillusioning."
"Yeah. So Brinkman develops the same boil on his butt about Grice that he has about you—asshole from the city messing in his county, all that shit." I raised an eyebrow at "asshole" but that didn't stop him. "But in the four years Grice's been around, Brinkman hasn't managed to take him up even once. Why is that?"
"I don't know."
He shook his head. "You don't know. Well, maybe you know this After your slimy lawyer sprang Jimmy Antonelli, Brinkman still had nine cars that his boys spent a week— and a hell of a lot of county money—pulling out of the quarry. If Grice was running dope up from Florida in them there must have been some other way to prove it. Why didn't he or the DA even try?"
I stood up. "What the hell do I look like, the Answer Man? Ask Brinkman. I'm going to get some lunch."
"Not even a theory?"
"Yeah, I have a theory. But you won't like it."
"Try me"
"Grice has protection, someone watching his back."
"Oh, screw that. In New York maybe. It doesn't work that way up here."
"Come off it, Mac. A jerk who'd be nobody anywhere else drifts into the county, puts all the local talent out of business, and for four years even a jack-booted sheriff with a grudge can't get near him. Did you know Grice left for Florida the night before Brinkman busted Jimmy? Left in a hurry, came back three days after Jimmy got out. It glows in the dark, Mac. Only a cop could miss it."
MacGregor turned his face to the window, stared out over the brown grass to the trees that started abruptly beyond it. After a minute he reached over, punched a button on his phone.
"Craig? You got Smith's statement yet? Well, bring it in. And bring in Tony Antonelli, too; I'm ready." He dropped the receiver in the cradle. "Sign your statement and beat it. Don't leave the county. You got a phone yet?"
"Not a chance." I didn't tell him about the cell phone.
Up here in the hills, it's close to useless anyway, which I can't say I really minded. "You need me, you can leave a message at Antonelli's." I looked at his gray, tired face. "Cheer up, Mac. Fishing season starts in four weeks."
Life came into his blue eyes. "Three weeks, three days. I've been tying flies all winter."
"I don't doubt it." The door opened and Tony came in, with the uniformed trooper who'd taken my tape. The trooper handed me three typed pages; I glanced through them, signed the bottom of each.
"All right," said MacGregor. "Go on. Just don't disappear."
"When do I get my gun back?"
"When we're finished with it. Call tomorrow."
I turned to Tony. I could read tension in the set of his shoulders. His face was opaque. "See you later," I said to him. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded. I left MacGregor's office, navigated past a pair of troopers in gray uniforms sitting at gray desks. I took long, deep breaths as I headed toward my car across the gray asphalt parking lot.
The damn car was gray, too. I couldn't remember why that had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Off the highway just west of the trooper station there was a shabby Amoco station with a working pay phone. I called Obermeyer's garage, letting the phone ring long enough for a mechanic to curse, crawl out from under a car, and pick up the receiver in a grease-blackened hand; but it didn't happen. There was no answer.
I leaned against the chipped enamelled steel panels of the station and watched a chunky kid in a green football jersey fill my car. I thought. Not that I had a hell of a lot to work on, but I thought.
I paid for the gas and a pack of Kents and turned back east, toward the village of Schoharie. I cut off the highway onto 1A, a county road. For a few miles 1A ran through pines and maples and birches, past some old frame houses that had needed a coat of paint for as long as I could remember, past a couple of trailers parked broadside to the road, until suddenly it opened out just before it started down into Schoharie.
Even in this season, when everything lay still and cold, not quite ready yet to take another chance, the sudden view over these hills could take your breath away. There was a promise of generosity and refuge in the soft contours, in the bowl of the hills, in the wide valley quilted with farms and fields. The river that flowed through here was choked with ice now and the hills were gray-brown where they weren't pine; and in a dark, unhealed gash in the hills you could see the old stone quarry, three played-out pits, empty now of what had made them worth ripping the hillside apart for; and farther down the hill, the smaller, working pit. Still, coming down into this valley, even in winter, could make you believe home could be more than just a word.
Schoharie's not the largest town in the county—that's Cobleskill, where the state ag-and-tech college is—but it's the county seat. Main Street runs half a mile, flat, straight, and tree-shaded. In each direction, like a caterpillar's legs, short narrow residential streets branch off it. None is more than three blocks long, the houses thinning by the start of the second block.
On the east side of Main in the center of town stand the village hall and the county buildings: the executive offices, the courthouse, the sheriff's office with the new jail annex behind it. They're mostly brown brick, but the courthouse, the oldest of them, is a square-shouldered building of gray local stone, pulled from the quarry in the busy, prosperous days.
I parked on the nearly empty street a block up from the courthouse. I fed the parking meter—six minutes for a penny, half an hour for a nickel—because the sheriff's office was half a block away and Brinkman knew my car.
I crossed in the middle of the block, creating a two-car traffic jam, and stepped onto the cracked and uneven concrete sidewalk. There was no grass verge here. Beyond Main Street's half mile there wasn't even a sidewalk.
The Park View luncheonette was at the end of a block of two-and three-story brick buildings with their dates set in stone at their cornices. The luncheonette's storefront windows were clouded, the way they always were on a cold day. Beads of water streaked them from inside; dish towels lined the low Formica sills, catching the condensation before puddles formed and dripped onto the checkerboard linoleum.
The chrome-legged tables at the front were empty except for two old men with plaid wool jackets and rheumy eyes. I walked past them, sat at the counter on a stool whose green vinyl cover was bandaged with silver tape.
At one of the rear tables a giggling group of adolescent girls who should have been in school were drinking Cokes and puffing on cigarettes without inhaling. At another a young woman ate a sandwich while a baby in a high chair rubbed his hands in his apple sauce. A man and a woman with a city look about them were spread out at the back table drinking coffee and reading the Mountain Eagle. There were people who said that people like them—yuppies with money to spend—would be the salvation of the county. A class above weekenders like me, they would buy the shabby farms, hire locals to repair the buildings and tend their gardens and look after their horses while they were back in the city making money. A few of the local cafes had put in cappuccino machines, and the A 8c P in Cobleskill was starting to stock arugula and endive, for the ones who’d come already. But the drive from New York is long, and summers are short up here in the hills. There's no cachet to a place in this county, nowhere to wine and dine your weekend guests, no one to see or be seen by. People with an eye for beauty and a need for quiet would come here, but they always had. And the moneyed crowds would continue to go elsewhere, as they always had.
Ellie Warren stepped from behind the counter to refill coffee cups and chat. She turned when she saw me sit; her thin face lit in a big gap-toothed grin.
"Well, hi there, stranger!" She came to the counter, plunked the coffeepot down, gave me a peck on the cheek. "I haven't seen you since before Thanksgiving! Where have you been?"
"I haven't been up, Ellie."
She nodded, her eyes glowing conspiratorially. "Making yourself sc
arce?"
"You think I needed to?"
She laughed. "Probably didn't hurt." She pushed a string of faded red hair back from her face. "Hey, hon, what happened?" Her long thin fingers touched the cheek she hadn't kissed.
I winced. "Nothing; it's okay. But I'm starving. What's good?"
She smiled wickedly. "Nothing here. Come by my place later, I'll fry you some chicken that'll make you cry."
"How about a sandwich to hold me till then?"
"If you have to."
"A BLT on toast. And coffee."
Ellie waltzed down the counter, stuck my order on a spindle at the kitchen opening. She came back, poured my coffee, leaned her elbows on the counter.
"How've you been, Ellie?" I asked through the coffee.
She spread her skinny arms, grinned again. "As you see. Not getting older, getting better."
"You couldn't get any better, Ellie. How's Chuck doing?"
Ellie's son Chuck was twenty-one, a loud, wild boy. He and Jimmy Antonelli had been inseparable troublemakers for years. Brinkman had arrested them more times than anyone could count on drunk-and-disorderlies, as public nuisances, for property damage, willful endangerment, trespassing, and once, after they'd stolen a car, for grand theft. The car turned out to belong to a cousin of Ellie's, who refused to press charges.
Until the boys were seventeen, all Brinkman could do was grit his teeth while the family court judge sent for Tony and Ellie. He'd lecture them, let them pay the boys' fines, and send them home. But finally even the judge got disgusted. As soon as they were old enough by state law to serve time as adults, he started sentencing them to weeks at a time in the jail behind the sheriff's office.
Brinkman had enjoyed that.
Ellie laughed. "He's doing great. Basic training is over and he's been at sea a couple of weeks now. I've got a picture. You want to see?"
"A picture? I thought you'd be good for a dozen, Ellie."