Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  I busied myself retrieving the shutter; when I looked over again, the blinds at Willoughby’s den window had been closed.

  And that was that. I tossed the shutter into my car and went down the lane, noticing something I’d missed, earlier: the small, glassy eyes of motion detectors where the lane met the road. No wonder Willoughby had bopped outside so fast.

  Banks of computers, overseas visitors, big-ticket security items—it was all just so wonderfully, fascinatingly odd that I nearly went back up the lane again, to knock on his door and just ask Willoughby what the hell he was up to.

  But instead, as I got on Route 1 heading north to Eastport, my cell phone beeped and I found out.

  “Jacobia,” said Hargood Biddeford. “Some facts on our friend for you.”

  “Great. Don’t mention the name, okay? I’m on the cell phone.”

  “Right. Not exactly the most private method of …”

  Rounding an uphill curve, I slowed for a loaded log truck, its engine roar drowning out Hargood’s voice as the truck driver downshifted for the long grade. Had I been born in Maine, this would have been my signal to pass, but I hadn’t so it wasn’t. Dust from the big rig’s tires billowed into the car; I leaned over and rolled up the passenger side window.

  “It seems,” Hargood continued, “there’ve been developments in his case, to wit: association with known criminals. Which as you know is against his terms of probation and could get him sent back to prison. If,” Hargood added, “you can call that country club he did his time in a prison.”

  “So, you think somebody put the fix in? Told his probation officer to let him slip through the cracks, as long as he also slipped out of town? In other words, let’s let him screw up in someone else’s jurisdiction?”

  I turned onto Route 190 toward Eastport; the lumber truck continued north.

  “Nah,” Hargood dragged the syllable out sarcastically. “What gives you that idea, that he got a break?”

  Hargood’s clients were respectable, middle-class people who’d made, most of them, stupid mistakes: skimming the registers in restaurant chains they owned, or omitting to pay withholding taxes. Usually there was some tragic story involved: a drinking problem or a gambling habit. Only rarely did his clients really scheme to defraud.

  But Hargood’s clients, unlike Willoughby, went back to jail for clipping their toenails crooked, and Hargood resented it.

  “Also,” he added, “around here word is he’s short of money.”

  “Really.” That didn’t fit with those expensive renovations on his house.

  On Route 190 I slowed through Pleasant Point, then pushed the speedometer back to fifty for the run across Carlow Island. Here the white pine grew nearly up to the road on both sides of the pavement, with sandy cuts leading back in to the building lots marked by the real-estate agents’ For Sale signs.

  “Thanks, Hargood. That’s very interesting.” A bee bumbled in through my window, buzzed angrily, and flew out again.

  “You’re welcome,” Hargood said happily. “Listen, about that plan you and I were discussing earlier—”

  Selling his telephone stock and socking away his paychecks, he meant. The bee buzzed back in and I waved, shooing it away.

  “Do it,” I said, and the passenger-side window exploded.

  24 “Now, Jacobia,” Arnold said, “let’s not go all wild-eyed. We don’t know anyone shot at you deliberately. We don’t know it was a shot at all.”

  “Arnold, we have had three murders in three days.”

  “Well,” Arnold conceded slowly. “There is that.”

  “You think that bullet was out there flying around for fun, and decided to break my car window?”

  Arnold frowned vexedly. Neither murders nor escaped prisoners were good for summer tourism, nor were random gunshots.

  “We don’t,” he repeated stubbornly, “know it was a bullet.”

  I just about flew out of my chair at him, whereupon he spread his hands placatingly. “All right, say it was a bullet. Say our pal Ike is still around, too, not down in Portland or points south the way any sensible escaped prisoner would be.”

  He held up his fingers. “One, we don’t think he’s armed. Ken got shot, but with his own little gull-popper—”

  A .22, Arnold meant; it was illegal to shoot gulls, but people still did it.

  “—we found that on his boat. The other two didn’t get shot, which if Forepaugh has a gun, why didn’t they? More likely somebody local went out, fired off a few shots for fun. Got,” he concluded disapprovingly, “a little careless. Which,” he went on, “I am going to find out about, and when I do, there will be a hot time in the old town, tonight.”

  I wanted everyone to think I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, that having a shot whiz through my car window hadn’t even fazed me. The truth was, I’d managed to drive back to town all right—fast, to avoid being an easy target—but as soon as I arrived I’d called Ellie and my voice had begun shaking, and she got here in about fifteen seconds.

  “Thanks for coming, Arnold. You’re probably right. Someone got careless, that’s all. Made me nervous.”

  “Hmmph.” Arnold looked disgusted, clapping his hat onto his head. “I find the fella, whoever it was, I’ll make him nervous. I’ll make him just as anxious as hell.”

  But at the door he paused, looking hard at me. “You be careful, though. Because I could be wrong about Forepaugh being long gone. About everything I’m thinking, in fact. So you just watch it.”

  Then he was gone. “So,” Ellie said when the squad car had pulled away from the house, “what do you think?”

  “Well …” I said, biting into one of the fresh doughnuts she had brought to help me get my strength back. Say what you want about Valium and Prozac and all; for nervous shock, there is nothing like a fresh, homemade doughnut.

  “I think,” I went on, feeling my recovery begin, “what we have here is three hits and a near miss. Hallie visits me, she’s found dead, someone takes a shot at me. It’s not,” I concluded, “trigonometry.”

  “Arnold thinks you weren’t shot at—or not deliberately, anyway—because he doesn’t think Ike would have. Or could have, because he doesn’t think Ike has a gun,” Ellie said.

  “Correct. Which makes some sense, actually, because if any weapons had been reported stolen around here recently, Arnold would know about it. And how else would Ike get a weapon?”

  I finished the doughnut. “This brings us to: it could be Ike didn’t do any of it. Or he did all of it except shooting at me. Or I suppose it could be he really has gotten hold of a gun.”

  “So which way do you want to go from here?” Ellie asked.

  I finished my tea. There was only one course of action that covered all the bases.

  “Down,” I told her, “to the cellar.”

  25 Back in the city, I knew a fellow whose job was to take the Mob’s money and put it in banks. Using the proceeds of extortion, prostitution, gambling, drugs, counterfeiting, hijacking, strong-arm, and protection rackets, he bought CDs and Treasury bills: the safe but low-interest kinds of investments normally purchased by people who can barely bring themselves to pull the money out from under the mattress at all.

  With his own cash, however, he was more imaginative: He bought weapons, filling his modest Brooklyn Heights apartment so thoroughly with them that he barely had room for furniture, so he used to come to my place and sit on mine.

  One day I asked him why, since he never touched any of the mob’s cash—

  —well, actually he did, but that was much later, and it is another story—

  —and since he was so cautious in investing it that he would never lose any—

  —well, not unless banks failed and governments fell, which they didn’t, and he didn’t expect them to—

  —he needed enough firepower to wipe out a tank division.

  Jemmy Wechsler grinned. And he said: “Jacobia, pure of heart works better when you’re armed to the teeth.”

&
nbsp; Which was why I now removed the silver chain from my neck, struggling as always to work the clasp, so that the small brass key on the chain fell into my hand. Seeing the chain reminded me again of Hallie, and sent another thump of guilt reverberating through my heart.

  Then from the lockbox Wade had installed in my cellar, I removed the Bisley. With it I had put in hundreds of hours of target practice; Wade, in addition to being a fine marksman, is a wicked good teacher. By now, I was pretty good with the Bisley.

  But the trouble with it is, there is no part of the human body designed to withstand its stopping power. Even a wing shot can result in death, from shock or hemorrhaging.

  So, after considerable thought, I’d recently bought a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Along with the Bisley, I removed this unattractive but serviceable item from the lockbox, along with its ammunition clips. Then I examined the smaller gun.

  The grey metal surface of the weapon felt cheap and shoddy, which it wasn’t. There is just something about an automatic that makes it seem unsporting.

  “Yeeks,” Ellie said when she saw it. “I didn’t know you had that.”

  “Neither does anyone else but Wade,” I said, snapping a clip in and thumbing the safety on. He’d gone over it, checked it for manufacturing flaws, and taught me to shoot it. “And now you.”

  She nodded, understanding what I didn’t say: Hallie hadn’t only been warning me, just before her death. She’d also been warning Ellie. And if anyone tried to hurt Ellie, he was going to find out how unsporting an automatic weapon could be. I put the Bisley in my bag and dropped the .25 in my sweater pocket.

  “Arnold might be barking up the wrong tree,” Ellie said. “Or rather, there might be more trees to bark up than he realizes.”

  I’d reported to her my impressions of Baxter Willoughby, before Arnold arrived.

  “Still, we can’t just tell Arnold that,” she added.

  “No. His thoughts are set on Ike Forepaugh. Besides, I don’t want Arnold spooking Willoughby if it turns out he’s in this some way.”

  “But maybe we could get Arnold’s thoughts turning in the proper direction.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Well,” Ellie said consideringly, “I don’t know how it was back in the big city. But in Eastport if you want a man to come by some information casually, some way that he can turn it over in his mind for a while without going off half-cocked about it …”

  I caught her drift. “You talk to his wife,” I said.

  Clarissa Dow was a dark-haired, diminutive woman who’d come to Eastport as an investigator for the State District Attorney’s office, and stayed to marry Arnold; she’d also established a small law practice here. Her brisk manner and no-nonsense street smarts had put people off, at first, but now, six months later, they had come to appreciate her hard-as-nails way of handling a legal problem, especially when it was their legal problem.

  Climbing the stairs to her office overlooking Water Street, I smelled flowers, and when I reached the top, I saw why: a dozen red roses stood in a glass vase in the waiting area, evidence that Arnold was glad to have her back after her week at a legal convention in Portland. I sat in one of the wooden straight chairs in the anteroom, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait too long; after a moment I heard chairs scraping back, and voices mingling in tones of farewell.

  Except for one voice. “I don’t want to! You can’t make me! I won’t—”

  The office door opened and a little girl appeared, about six years old and prettily dressed in a plaid smock, white stockings, and patent leather shoes. Flashing dark eyes and black ringlets framing a heart-shaped face completed the initial impression of a child straight out of an old-fashioned storybook.

  But I knew little Sadie Peltier only too well, and the only story she belonged in was a horror story. Flinging the door back, she stomped into the anteroom and spun around.

  “Old witch! I hate you! I’m not sorry, and I won’t say I am even if you kill me!” Then she raced downstairs. Moments later, I heard her in the street.

  “Do you know what they did to me up there? Well, do you?” she was demanding at the top of her horrid little lungs. “They bashed me and crashed me and smashed me.”

  Looking shell-shocked, Sadie’s parents staggered from the office and helped each other down the staircase without a word to me, while Clarissa waved me in.

  “Good heavens,” she commented as Sadie’s voice faded down the street. “People told me about her, but I really had no idea.”

  “She’s a handful,” I said. Sadie’s parents were perfectly nice people, and how they had managed to produce the equivalent of a Tasmanian devil was a mystery to everyone. “I gather she has to apologize for something, or somebody’s going to sue?”

  Clarissa nodded. Since moving from Portland, she had let her hair grow and stopped wearing makeup, except for lipstick. The effect was softer, less the career woman who would eat broken glass for a promotion and more the professional person, actually interested in doing the job right.

  Her fingernails, though, were still perfect ovals, always clear-polished. She tapped them thoughtfully on her desk.

  “Something like that,” she allowed. “Tell me again a little about Sadie? I need some background if I’m going to get her folks out of a mess, and I never quite comprehended …”

  I nodded. “Comprehending Sadie is like trying to understand a hurricane. Either you’re in it and no words are necessary, or you’re not and you don’t quite get it. Sadie is a terror.”

  A small V appeared above the bridge of Clarissa’s nose. “I wonder if she’s bad enough, or even strong enough, to fill the entire trunk of a car with … well, cat droppings? Because that’s what she’s supposed to have done, and she even admits it. But I’m not sure I believe …”

  I had to laugh, although probably to the victim it had not been funny. “Depends on how mad she is at you. If you don’t give her candy when she wants some, or you stop her from kicking all the slats out of your picket fence, she might just fill your whole house up with cat droppings. So what did someone do to her, first? That is, what provoked her attack?”

  Clarissa looked rueful. “Took away her spray paint. Which she was allegedly using to redecorate a white French poodle. The poodle didn’t mind, but the owner did. Seems it’s a show dog—the people were visiting in Eastport, just for the weekend—and the dog’s out of the running, now, for some important prizes.”

  “Oh, my. And if she apologizes for the dog and the trunk they won’t make a federal case out of it?”

  “Uh-huh. But if she doesn’t—she doesn’t appear very likely to—then they will. And they can do it. The husband’s a lawyer, himself.”

  Clarissa brightened unconvincingly. “Well, I’ll think of something. It’s not your problem. How are you, anyway? I heard you had some excitement, this afternoon.”

  Actually, it might be my problem. When Sadie was upset, windows began breaking and small fires began starting, all over town. Still, I was here on another matter.

  “Somebody shot my window out,” I said. “Arnold thinks it was just careless gun handling.”

  “But you don’t.” She sat back a little, her attention fully focused on me, now: another reason people had come to like her.

  “No. Or anyway I’m not sure. The thing is, everybody figures that just because Ike Forepaugh was hooked up with Ken, back when the two of them were in jail, that Ike must have killed him.”

  “And you don’t think that, either.” Even though she’d been in Portland, Clarissa was fully up to speed on Ken Mumford’s murder. People joked that the only thing Arnold could do fast was pick up a telephone call from Clarissa; that, or make one to her.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see how Ike could’ve got to shore after killing Ken. The water’s too cold to swim in, and if he had some accomplice with another boat, who?”

  Clarissa nodded thoughtfully. “But the jailhouse connection is such a good one, and Ike is such a
dirtbag, and there’s really no evidence for anybody else. And he seems to have disappeared, a sure sign of a guilty conscience.”

  “Maybe. What’s his story, anyway?”

  She counted off on her fingers. “Drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest, DUI, aggravated assault, armed robbery … shall I go on? Those,” she added, “are just the highlights.”

  “Moving right up the criminal career ladder. After all that, murder could be a logical next step.”

  Clarissa looked thoughtful, trying to decide whether or not to tell me something. “Look, keep this under your hat. We don’t need to start a panic. But there’s also some evidence he’s been around in town, or at least that he’s still in the area.”

  “Such as?”

  “A cap that some fellows in town say belonged to him. And a beat-up old bowie knife. They were with a bedroll and some other things in a cave, in the cliffs at Broad Cove.”

  “Interesting. So maybe he was camped out there.”

  She nodded. “It does make sense, if you don’t want to get caught, to lay low. Not go out hitchhiking or something, out on the highway.”

  “I guess it does. Does Arnold know this, yet?”

  Clarissa shook her head. “Just happened. One of the state guys came up looking for Arnold to tell him, while Sadie and her parents were here. I told the state officer,” she grinned wryly, “that Eastport cops carry radios, just like the ones in the big city. After I weaseled the information out of him, of course.”

  “Of course.” Sometime in a previous life, I thought, Clarissa had been a bloodhound. But I was forgetting my mission.

  “I don’t suppose the name Baxter Willoughby has come up in the investigation? Just … hypothetically.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Not that I know of. Should it have?”

  “No. I mean, probably it wouldn’t.”

  Getting caught once, back in New York, would have made him more cautious. The only way to nail Willoughby for anything now would be to catch him actually doing it; he was not the kind of guy, anymore, who would just let himself happen to come up in an investigation.