The Hot Pink Farmhouse bam-2

by David Handler

  … then I heard another roar coming from that doorway right over there,” he recalled, shuddering violently. “It was Gentle Kate. She had herself a temper, my Kate. You did not want to make her mad…”

  “What happened here that night, Hangtown?” asked Mitch, his voice nearly a whisper.

  “Moose had awakened in the night. Couldn’t sleep. It was the heat. Kate gave her a cool sponge bath and got her back to bed. And then she came looking for me out here-thought I might want something to eat or drink. She found Crazy Daisy and me together in each other’s arms on the drop cloth, humping away… Kate let out a roar and grabbed the nearest thing she could find-a mallet-and she hurled it right at me. I-I ducked. Crazy Daisy didn’t. It hit her right between the eyes. Killed her dead on the spot.”

  Mitch had stopped working now. He was just sitting there, transfixed, his recorder taping the old man’s every word.

  “I murdered that girl!” Hangtown cried out, his voice choking with emotion. “Kate threw the mallet, but it was my doing. My pants I couldn’t keep on. My marriage I was trashing. A-and there’s more. Believe me, it gets even worse…”

  “Hangtown, are you sure you want to tell me all of this? I’m here as a member of the press, remember?”

  “There’s no point in holding back anymore,” he answered despondently. “Not with my Moose gone. What does it matter? What does any of it matter? Don’t you see, my life is over now!” He broke off, his barrel chest heaving. Tears were beginning to stream down his deeply lined face. “We… rolled her up in the drop cloth with her knapsack and the few pieces of clothing she had. Dug a hole up on the hill and buried her up there. No one else was staying here that weekend. It was just Daisy and us. I erected a cairn to mark the spot. It’s still there, not far from where they found the shotgun shell, in fact. It looks like something I did for a kick. But that’s Crazy Daisy’s marker… When folks asked us where she’d gone to, we told them she’d hitched a ride out of town early one morning, heading for New York. She’d been hoping to make her way down to Morocco on a freighter. She’d told a lot of people that. So no one doubted our story. And no one ever came looking for her. She had no one. And nothing-no driver’s license, no credit cards, no permanent address. She was just a drifter passing through. A lot of people passed through in those days. Not so many anymore. The world is not as kindly a place now.” Hangtown hung his head for a moment, his breathing ragged. It had to be Mitch’s imagination, but he could have sworn that Wendell Frye was actually growing older by the minute. “Within a couple of weeks she was forgotten by everyone,” he added hoarsely, stubbing out his cigarette. “Everyone except Gentle Kate and me.”

  “Whose idea was it to keep it from the police-yours or Kate’s?”

  “Mine, of course,” he answered bitterly. “All mine. Because the guilt was all mine. My selfishness cost that poor girl her life. Yet Gentle Kate was her killer-or so the law would say. She was the mother of my child. I loved her. How could I make her pay for my sins? The answer is, I couldn’t. So we buried Crazy Daisy and we tried to move on. Except she couldn’t. The guilt weighed on her, heavier and heavier. She couldn’t sleep. Barely touched her food. Big Mitch, that strong healthy woman just wasted away right before my eyes. Within a few weeks she was merely a shell of herself. I kept telling her: ‘Yes, what we did was horrible. But you have to get on with your life. You have Moose to think of.’ But it was too much for her. Four months later, she was dead. It’s truly amazing just how quickly we can go when our will to live is g-gone.” He let out a wrenching, painful sob. By the woodstove, Sam stirred slightly, but drifted back to sleep. “And I killed her, my friend. Just as surely as if I’d taken a knife and buried it in her chest. I killed her and I left poor Moose motherless.” He paused now, swiping at his tears with the back of his gnarled hand. “Kiki tried to be a mother to her but those two never did hit it off.”

  “Where did you meet Kiki?”

  “At Greta’s gallery. By then, three years had gone by. All I’d done was work. I buried myself in it. Kiki had come up from New York for my new show. I was instantly smitten. She was gorgeous, very elegant and sophisticated. I married her and brought her home, but Moose was already a confirmed tomboy by then, and she had no use for this perfumed New Yorker in high heels. After we had Takai, I tried to change my wicked ways. No more artists in residence. No more picnics. No more tender lovelies. I even sold my VW bus. I tried, Mitch. God, how I tried. But all that did was bring out my anger, which I took out on poor Kiki until she could stand no more. Eventually, she left me.”

  “Takai holds you responsible for her suicide.”

  “I’m guilty,” he conceded. “I killed them both-first Kate, then Kiki. And now… now I’ve killed Moose, too.”

  “What do you mean? How did you kill her?”

  “This is a burial ground,” the old man said in a hollow, faraway voice. “A curse hangs over this entire place. And over me. That’s why I can’t have people around. I’m not fit to be around them. So I smoke my smoke and drink my drink. I work and I work. But I never forget. Not ever.” He turned his intense blue-eyed gaze on Mitch. “That is my curse, don’t you see?”

  “What did you mean when you said you killed Moose, too?”

  “No, you don’t see,” growled Hangtown, ignoring Mitch’s question once again. Barely hearing him at all. “You’re too young. Your comprehension is limited by what you can understand. The real truth is what lies just beyond-it’s what you can’t grasp.”

  Mitch stared at the great artist, perplexed. “Hangtown, who else knows about Crazy Daisy?”

  “Jim does. I told Jim because he could understand what it means-he doesn’t belong around people either. Not since ’Nam. I’ve never told Greta. Never told the girls. My God, I couldn’t tell Moose. That would have destroyed her love for me.”

  Still, Mitch found himself wondering: What if. What if Moose had found out? What if Jim told her? Could this have had something to do with her death?

  Mitch’s eyes fell on the little tape machine that was recording every word of Hangtown’s gut-wrenching confession. He’d held this in for thirty years. Now the whole world was going to know. “Why are you telling me this?” he finally asked him. “Why now?”

  “Because it’s all over,” the old man answered tonelessly.

  “What is?”

  Hangtown sat there slumped at the workbench, looking mournful and defeated. The spark of life seemed to have gone right out of him.

  “Hangtown, who killed Moose?”

  No answer.

  Mitch tried it again, louder. “Hangtown, who killed Moose?!”

  At last the old master shook himself and gazed down at Mitch. He seemed very distant from him now. He seemed to be somewhere else entirely. “Don’t you get it, Big Mitch? The past did.”

  CHAPTER 10

  She was on her way to Mitch’s house to start dinner when the call came through from Felicity Beddoe-it seemed the lady was having trouble again with her next-door neighbor, Jay Welmers.

  The late-afternoon sunlight was slanting low through the trees by the time she pulled into Somerset Ridge, its rays casting long shadows on the wide, leaf-blown Chemlawns. The folks at one place were busy putting up their Halloween decorations. The orange-and-black bunting had a rough time competing for attention with all of those red ribbons and green ribbons tied around every other tree. Personally, Des was tired of looking at them. Could not wait for the school bond vote to be over and done with.

  Felicity Beddoe answered her door casually clad in slacks and a sweater. Her manner was no calmer than it had been before. The lady looked as if she’d snap like a breadstick if you laid a finger on her. Plus her face had broken out in hives. A pair of reading glasses was nestled in her short blond hair, and her kitchen table was heaped with folders and printouts.

  “Thank you for coming, trooper,” she said edgily. “I am so sorry to bother you again.”

  “I told you to bother me,” Des reminded h
er. “Is this about Phoebe?”

  Felicity gave her a brief nod. “I couldn’t stay at the office after she phoned me with the news. She’s at soccer practice right now. I felt it would be better if I spoke to you alone.”

  “Okay,” Des said easily. “What did he do this time?”

  “That man has cut a huge branch off one of the sycamores in between our houses. He’s been out there with a chain saw all afternoon.”

  “Is it his tree, Mrs. Beddoe?”

  “Technically, it is,” Felicity conceded. “He’s within his legal rights. I called over at town hall to find out.”

  “So…?”

  “So he can now see directly into Phoebe’s bedroom window from the second floor of his place,” she said angrily. “He no longer has to tiptoe around in the dark to spy on her-he can do so from the comfort of his own home!”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Come look for yourself if you don’t believe me,” Felicity insisted, leading Des out the French doors onto the bluestone terrace.

  When the developers had cleared the land for Somerset Ridge they’d wisely left a stand of four gnarly old sycamores as a natural divider between the two houses. By hacking off a lower limb from the rearmost tree, Jay Welmers had cleared himself a bird’s-eye view of the back of the Beddoes’s house from several of his upstairs windows. Felicity was right, no question.

  “Tell that girl to draw her curtains,” Des said, as they stood there listening to the harsh whine of his chain saw. He was still busy over there somewhere cutting the branch up into pieces.

  “Twenty-four hours a day?” Felicity demanded, her cheeks mottling. “Look, you may as well know this-I’ve contacted a realtor today. We’re putting our place on the market. I can’t take this anymore.”

  “If that’s the case, why did you call me?”

  “Because I-I…” She was unable to say the words aloud. All she could do was wave her hands helplessly in the air.

  “What does your husband say about this?” Des asked gently.

  “Richard still doesn’t know about it,” she confessed.

  “And is that loaded gun still in his nightstand drawer?”

  “Yes,” Felicity said faintly. “What I thought I’d tell him was

  … I thought that I’d like to live closer to work. Mystic or Stonington.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do this, Mrs. Beddoe. You can’t let fear rule your life.”

  “But I’m not comfortable here anymore,” Felicity said, shooting a nervous glance over Des’s shoulder at Jay Welmers’s house. “You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “I totally can. But if you leave, he wins.”

  “Let him,” she snapped. “I’ll still have my husband in one piece.”

  “You need to stay. If you leave, it means that I’ve failed, and I don’t handle failure well.”

  Felicity Beddoe said nothing in response. Just stood there wringing her hands, utterly distraught.

  “Look, why don’t you give me another chance before you pack up the moving van? Just one more chance, okay?”

  “If you’d like,” Felicity allowed, her voice lacking conviction. “Go ahead.”

  Des followed the sound of the chain saw. She found Jay Welmers out in front of his garage in the driveway, cutting the sycamore up into logs and loading them into a garden cart. The big, flabby financial planner-make that onetime financial planner-was not used to such demanding physical exertion. His red face was flushed a dangerous shade of purple, and he was positively drenched with sweat. His bulging gut stuck wetly to the front of his pink polo shirt, and his shirttail had worked itself loose from his tartan slacks, revealing a whole lot of fat white booty crack when he bent over. Most unappealing. His rottweiler, Dino, was chained to the post of the front porch just as before, barking at Des madly. The boys were nowhere to be seen.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Welmers,” she said, tipping her hat at him politely.

  “It’s my tree,” he declared without so much as looking at her. “It’s on my side of the property line. I can do what I please.”

  “I thought you wanted to be neighborly.”

  “I do,” he grunted, heaving a heavy log into the cart.

  “That being the case, it seems to me you could have mentioned something about this to Mrs. Beddoe before you did it.”

  Jay paused to swipe at his purple face with a sopping-wet hankerchief. “She won’t speak to me. Hangs up as soon as she hears my voice. You call that neighborly? You call that fitting in? Besides, what business is it of hers if I want to prune one of my trees?”

  “She thinks you did it so that you can see through Phoebe’s bedroom window.”

  “She’s crazy!” Jay erupted. “Why would I do that? I’d have to be some kind of a pervert!”

  Des took off her hat and twirled it in her fingers for a moment. “Are you?”

  Jay went back to loading the cart with logs. “You’ve got a lot of nerve asking me that.”

  “Okay, then I’ll ask you something else: Why don’t you pull this stuff when her husband’s around?”

  “How would I know when he is or isn’t around?”

  “You look through their windows, that’s how.”

  “You know, I don’t think this is fair at all,” he protested angrily. “From the second you came over here you’ve made up your mind that I’m in the wrong. You don’t care what I have to say.”

  Young Ricky came out the front door of the house now, dribbling a basketball. His black eye had faded to a sickly shade of yellow. “Hey, trooper,” he called to her, waving.

  “How’s it going, Ricky?” she called back.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Jay demanded as the boy started down the driveway.

  “Nowhere,” Ricky replied, sticking out his pugnacious, bully-boy chin. Clearly, it was a defensive pose that came from dealing with his father. “Just over to Trevor’s.”

  “Well, don’t you stay there for dinner,” Jay ordered, jabbing at the air with his finger. “She’s always feeding you, and I don’t like it. Understand?”

  Ricky said he did, and kept on going down the driveway. Jay grabbed up his chain saw and headed into his vast three-car garage with it. Des followed him. There was one car parked in there, a Ford Explorer. A tractor mower sat in the space next to it, alongside the boys’ bicycles. The rest of the garage was used for storing trash barrels and tools and empty beer cans. Lots and lots of beer cans. As Jay hung the chain saw up on a hook on the wall, Des hit the button that lowered the automatic garage doors behind them.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

  “Giving you some free advice,” Des replied pleasantly, as the doors slammed tightly shut. The overhead light stayed on. Otherwise, they would have been standing in the dark. “For your own good-I think you should let this thing go. You’re heading down a slippery slope.”

  “So are you, honey,” he warned her, his eyes flicking over to the closed doors.

  “I’m telling you straight up, Mr. Welmers. No good is going to come out of this.”

  “And I’m telling you-mind your own damned business.”

  “Sir, this is my business. You’re driving good people out of Dorset.”

  “That’s not my problem,” he said with a shrug. “I have my rights.”

  “So do other people,” Des countered. “Your son Ricky, for instance.”

  “What about Ricky?”

  “Where did he get that black eye, Mr. Welmers?”

  “He gets in fights. I told you.”

  “I know you did. I just didn’t happen to believe you.”

  “That’s your problem, not mine.”

  “Okay, I’m schooled to you now,” Des said, nodding her head at him. “In your choice little corner of the world, it’s never your problem. You do whatever you feel like doing, and if somebody else objects, that’s their problem. You’re not going to cut Mrs. Beddoe any slack, are you? No matter how I put it to
you, you just won’t let her up. Does that about cover it?”

  Jay raised his chin at her, his nostrils flaring. “Not totally, no. I’d be a lot happier with a resident trooper who isn’t looking to stir up trouble. Maybe you don’t fit in here yourself, young lady. Have you thought of that?”

  “Not really,” Des said, raising an eyebrow at him. “But I sure am standing here wishing you’d elaborate on it.”

  “Okay, now you’re getting all touchy,” he said, with a faint smirk on his face. “Right away, you think this is about race.”

  “Don’t kid me, Mr. Welmers. I’ve been black all my life. And it’s always about race.” She moved in closer to him. “You think I’d be more at home in the projects, is that it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I wish you would,” she said, shoving him in the chest with her hand.

  “Hey, you can’t lay hands on me that way!”

  Des shoved him again, rougher this time. “What’s the matter, don’t you like colored folks touching you?”

  “Cut that out, lady!”

  “Say it, Mr. Welmers.” She shoved him again, right up against the garage wall. Her face was only inches from his now. “Say what you really mean. Or aren’t you man enough?”

  “I’m man enough to tell you to leave people like us alone!” he roared back at her.

  “People… like… us.” Des smiled at him, her huge wraparound smile, the one that could light up Giants Stadium. “Thank you so much for that, Mr. Welmers. That was just lovely.” Now she removed her hat, placing it carefully on the hood of the Explorer, whirled and punched Jay Welmers in the nose-a strong right that came all the way up from her hip. She could feel the cartilage crunch under her fist. He let out a strangled, high-pitched sob as the blood began to spurt out of his nostrils, but he stayed on his feet. Until she punched him in the stomach, putting her full weight behind it. Now he fell to his knees and threw up, instantly filling the garage with the smell of his sour, beery vomit.