The Death at Yew Corner

by Forrest, Richard;

  “Which Rustman was trying to break?”

  “Which he was breaking. We were winning the strike, Lyon. And we had already won the election for representation. It was a question of time until … that was when Marty disappeared. Now, more than half my people have gone back to work.”

  “I can’t imagine how kidnapping Rustman in order to break one strike at a relatively small convalescent home would be justified in anyone’s mind.”

  “It wasn’t just Murphysville. This was Marty’s first attack against the Shopton Corporation. They own a whole series of homes plus other businesses. Each one has the same union deal.”

  “That certainly gives Rustman’s disappearance more significance.”

  She hated them.

  As she stood before them she felt irrational, hating a living thing with such fervor. She had tried poison—iron sulphate in a mixture of two pounds to a gallon of water, but still they flourished.

  Bea Wentworth hated ignorance, people with closed minds, and weeds. On this particular morning she thought she might even reverse that order. The Japanese honeysuckle, a rampant vine with dingy white flowers, had captured the side of the parapet wall on the patio. Every solution she applied seemed to increase rather than hinder their growth. Four weeks ago she had pulled them by hand, back- and knee-breaking work that seemed to propagate them further.

  “Somehow you’re going to get it,” she said aloud. She sat cross-legged on the patio and examined her enemies. Intruder weeds, particularly the Japanese honeysuckle, should be burned out. She wondered if the governor would arrange for her to borrow a flamethrower from the National Guard. Dunbar’s Hardware probably sold a small garden unit, but her innate New England frugality made her hesitate to spend the money. There must be another way.

  She could hear Lyon’s typewriter in the study and knew that he was nearly finished with the book. Lyon … yes … his toy!

  Lyon sometimes felt that for a writer they were the two nicest words in the English language. He centered the typewriter carriage, flipped the paper down six spaces, and typed them carefully: The End. He leaned over his machine, drained from weeks of emotional effort and all-consuming work.

  The loud whoosh outside the study window made him reflexively push his desk chair back and retreat across the room. He knew what it was. When the whoosh was repeated, he saw flame spatter up toward the window. He dashed for the door.

  A hot-air balloon only a few feet from the house was in distress. The accident might kill the operator. He hoped he could aid him before the wind caught the envelope and pushed it off the edge of the parapet and down the ridge into the water below.

  He stopped in the patio doorway in amazement. Bea, dressed in a scanty halter and frayed shorts topped by a floppy hat, had his balloon propane tank in a wheelbarrow. She was balancing the burner against her waist as she aimed flame at the recalcitrant weeds growing along the parapet wall.

  “Beatrice! That’s overkill.” She didn’t seem to hear and flipped the lever for another burn. Lyon heard the phone in the kitchen and tumbled the receiver from its place on the wall.

  He spoke briefly to Rocco and hung up. He picked up Bea’s hearing aid from the kitchen counter and went out on the patio. He caught her attention and slid the small device into her ear. “Rocco just called. I think we had better go down to police headquarters.”

  She looked at the charred weeds. “You go. I have to finish these finks off.”

  “I think you had better come along. It’s about Kim.”

  She looked at him in alarm. “Something’s happened to her?”

  “She’s been arrested.”

  Kimberly Ward stood impassively before the camera as Jamie Martin adjusted the small sign hanging around her neck. White letters against a dark background spelled out her name, Murphysville P.D., and the date. Martin finished the adjustments and stepped back behind the camera.

  Rocco slouched against the wall with arms akimbo observing the proceedings as Lyon and Bea came to the door.

  “What’s the charge?” Lyon asked.

  “Assault.”

  Jamie Martin finished three sets of pictures and removed the sign from Kim. He began to fill out a form at a waist-high table. “Have you ever been arrested before, Mrs. Ward?”

  Kim shrugged. “You want everything?”

  “All prior arrests. We’ll find out eventually from the FBI files.”

  “Thirty-two times.”

  The young officer looked startled and stopped writing. He glanced at Kim and then over to Rocco. “Thirty-two?”

  “Get them all,” Rocco said without smiling.

  “The form’s not long enough, sir.”

  “Use additional sheets.”

  Jamie Martin pulled a stool over to the table and sat down in a hunched position prepared for a long writing assignment. “Start from the earliest.”

  “1964, Selma, Alabama. Three times. I think they called it trespassing, or was there one trespassing and two unlawful assemblies?”

  “I’ll put trespassing.”

  “The Welfare Mothers’ march in Hartford. That was in sixty-eight or was it sixty-seven?”

  “Sixty-seven,” Bea said.

  Kim continued a recitation that seemed to cover every protest and civil rights march on the Eastern seaboard.

  “Please tell us what’s going on,” Lyon said.

  “You know, I have more to do than busting Kim. Somebody stole a damn dump truck from Wainwright Construction.”

  “Whom did she assault?”

  “Mary Washington.”

  “She’s one of the workers at the home, isn’t she?”

  “She’s become a scab, not a worker,” Kim replied as Jamie Martin began to roll her fingers on a fingerprint chart. “She broke the line and went to work.”

  “Kim slapped her,” Rocco said with resignation.

  “Twice,” Martin added.

  They finished the fingerprinting and the patrolman gave a powdered solution to Kim to cleanse her hands. “I shouldn’t have hit her, but God, it’s been a bad day. I think we’re losing the strike. All that suffering, and we lost. To make matters worse, somebody broke into the union office and stole about three grand of ours.”

  “That’s in Hartford, thank God,” Rocco said. “Pat’s got the case.”

  “Why do you keep so much cash around?”

  “It was emergency strike money, all we had. We parceled it out to those who needed it the most. Marty kept it in cash hidden in the office.”

  “Any forced entry?” Lyon asked.

  “No. They must have slipped the lock and knew right where the money was.”

  The uniformed officer had another form and looked at Rocco. “Own recognizance, Chief?”

  Rocco nodded. “As long as Mrs. Ward promises not to pull an Angela Davis on us.”

  Kim glared. “And how come there aren’t any brothers in your fascist gang, Chief?”

  “Because the brothers who live in this town won’t work for the lousy money we pay.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Now damn it, Kim!”

  Lyon took Rocco’s arm and led him down the hall. “What about the investigation.”

  “We’re going to Maginacolda’s apartment this morning. I’m meeting Sergeant Pasquale over there in half an hour.”

  “Mind if I come?”

  “Wish you would.”

  As they walked toward the parking lot and Rocco’s car, Lyon saw Kim and Bea go out the front door. Jamie Martin leaned out of the processing room doorway to look at Bea’s legs, which were still barely encased in skimpy shorts. Lyon didn’t know whether to be pleased at his wife’s figure or angry at the officer.

  Rocco parked the cruiser in front of a high-rise apartment building in Hartford. He was approached immediately by a uniformed doorman who leaned in the driver’s window. “Help you, officer?”

  “Sergeant Pasquale here?”

  “He’s with the super getting a key to five-oh-eight.”
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  “My friend and I will be going with him. Tell him we’re here.”

  The doorman gave a two-fingered salute to the brim of his cap and picked up a phone in the vestibule. Lyon and Rocco went into the lobby to wait. Lyon walked across the marble tile to examine a statue in a corner lit by recessed spots. It was a modernistic figure chiseled from Vermont marble.

  “You know what I’m wondering?” Rocco said behind him.

  “Yep. How a nurse’s aide making one hundred fifty dollars a week could afford to live in the ‘Towers’ where the apartments start at five hundred a month.”

  “Yeah, that too. But why would anyone steal a dump truck? Kids, I guess. Always the kids.”

  Detective Sergeant Pat Pasquale of the Hartford Police stepped out of the elevator. The short officer thumped Rocco on the shoulder. “Christ, you wop bastard! I think you’re still growing.”

  “Rose let you out of the house this morning with your pop gun, Pat?”

  The sergeant cocked his head. “I got to think about that one before I decide how insulted I am.”

  “You got the key to the Maginacolda place?”

  “Let’s go.” They walked into the waiting elevator.

  Apartment 508 had obviously been furnished by a decorator. The small vestibule, living room, kitchen, and bedroom were done completely in white and black. A massive curved sofa covered with a tufted white material rounded one wall. Casual pillows of black were strewn intermittently along its length. The carpet was white and the drapes black. Pasquale stepped into the bedroom and looked up at the ceiling where a large mirror was positioned directly over the bed. He whistled. “A goddamn French whorehouse.”

  Lyon sat on one of the steps that led down from the front door to the living room. He leaned against a wrought-iron rail. The two police officers began a meticulous search of the apartment. With inflation, it would be difficult to make an estimate as to the cost of the apartment’s furnishings, but the expense was considerable. Maginacolda lived well.

  Rocco found two savings account passbooks and a checkbook in a table drawer. He rapidly flipped pages to check their last balances. “How much?” Lyon asked.

  “Fourteen in one, nineteen in the second, and a balance brought forward in the checking account of five.”

  “Total assets of thirty-eight thousand.”

  “That we know of.”

  Pat came out of the bedroom with a .45 automatic held in a handkerchief. “Hey, look at this.”

  “Loaded?”

  “Full clip.”

  “If you look near where you found that, you’ll also find a pair of brass knuckles or a blackjack,” Lyon said.

  Pat looked at him sharply. “How do you know?”

  “I have the feeling that Maginacolda was more than an aide and shop steward. He was probably involved in more than a little strong-arm work.”

  Rocco glanced around the apartment. “It must have paid well.”

  Jason Smelts hid behind an unlit cigar and glared at the two police officers and Lyon seated before his desk. His salt-and-pepper hair was waved and styled, while the seersucker suit seemed almost a caricature of what the well-dressed union president should wear. The union headquarters was located in Hartford in a neat one-story building centered on a well-landscaped plot. Smelts’s office was a large room with a broad mahogany desk, which was free of any work clutter, and a neat row of garishly upholstered side chairs, which were a testament to bad taste. Lyon wondered if Smelts and Maginacolda shared the same decorator.

  Smelts waved the cigar like a brandished cutlass. “Find Rustman and you’ve got the guy who blew Maginacolda away.”

  Pat flipped a pad from his sport jacket pocket. “Exactly what were your dealings with Mr. Maginacolda, Mr. Smelts?”

  “Friend and advisor.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Week ago. He came in here right after he lost the election with Rustman.”

  “Did he say anything that might make you think he was fearful for his life?”

  “Yeah. He said that Rustman was real trouble. Not that that fact was news here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Ever since Rustman broke away from this union and formed his own, he’s been attacking our locals whenever he gets a chance.”

  “By attacking, what do you mean?”

  “Trying to get control.”

  “Through NLRB elections,” Lyon said.

  “Same difference. Who’s he?” The cigar made a rapierlike thrust toward Lyon.

  “Wentworth’s from Murphysville,” Rocco said with an unspoken implication that Lyon served on the force.

  “Did Maginacolda receive any salary or fees from the union?” Pat asked.

  The cigar was thrust in the mouth. “That’s union business.”

  “It’s police business now,” Rocco said.

  “I can have a court order in thirty minutes,” Pat said.

  Jason Smelts shrugged. “A little here, a little there. Mike was what we call one of our troubleshooters. You can’t expect a guy to do that without a little extra on the side.”

  “How much is a little?”

  The shoulders shrugged and the cigar waved expansively. “I’d have to ask the bookkeeper. Come back in four or five …”

  “A ball-park figure,” Rocco said in a tone that Lyon had heard so often in past interrogation sessions.

  “Forty or fifty. Somewhere in that area.”

  “Forty what and how often?”

  “Thou a year.”

  “I was led to believe that he was a shop steward at the Murphysville home,” Lyon said. “In that case, he would have been elected by the workers there.”

  “What do the rank and file know? When we get a small shop not big enough for a full-time BA, we put our own man in there to get things going. We put out the word we want him elected.”

  “BA?”

  “Business agent. A paid member like me.”

  “You transferred Maginacolda from one shop to another—when you needed him?”

  “That’s right. And when Rustman attacked in Murphysville, I put my best man in there—Mike.”

  “Doesn’t sound very democratic.”

  “When Rustman came after us, we fought fire with fire.”

  “Can you be more explicit about that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Exactly how did you combat Rustman’s union?”

  “Well, hell! The usual ways. We talk to the rank and file, hold elections, work through the NLRB, the usual.”

  “And lean a little on people?”

  “Them’s your words, not mine.” Jason Smelts leaned back in his chair and observed them warily through a protective haze of cigar smoke.

  “Are you affiliated with the AFL-CIO?” Lyon asked.

  “We’re an independent.”

  “Where are your members located?”

  “We got members in a couple dozen nursing homes, five hospitals, maintenance workers in about fifty buildings, a few places like that. We’re still growing.”

  Pasquale flipped the pages of his pad and cleared his throat. “Mr. Smelts, since Maginacolda was involved in …” The detective fumbled for delicate wording. “Strong-arm tactics.”

  “I didn’t say that. He was a trained representative in personal persuasion.”

  “In his attempts at persuasion, is it possible that he developed enemies?”

  Smelts shrugged and stubbed out the cigar. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  Or heads, Lyon thought. He didn’t care for the tone and aura that seemed to surround this union and could understand why Kim and Rustman were so bitterly opposed to its existence. If Kim’s knowledge was correct, this maverick union was involved in sweetheart contacts and probably was siphoning off union dues and using brutal tactics to keep the membership in line. It stank.

  “Do you have any names, Mr. Smelts?”

  “I gave it to you when you first came in here. Rustman. Fi
nd Rustman and you got the guy.”

  Curt Falconer drove his sports car too fast as he thought about what had just happened back in the apartment.

  She had called him a goon again. Screw her! He’d locked her in the closet. So what if he was a goon? It put the bread on the table and she never had it so good.

  She had pounded on the closet door. What the hell? Let her stay in there for four or five hours and she’d calm down. Then he’d gotten tired of listening to her whimpering and had opened the door and jerked her out so fast she fell across the floor and lay in the corner crying. He’d pulled her clothes from the closet and thrown them in a heap on top of her.

  “Get the hell out!”

  She’d only sniffled. When he got back tonight, if she was still there, okay. If not, that was okay too. So, maybe he was a goon—whatever the hell that was. It beat delivering beer kegs to sleazy bars all day. The college football scholarship had looked good at the time, with maybe a shot at the pros four years later, but he couldn’t cut the classroom crap no matter how painlessly they tried to set it up. He’d played the one season and had never gone back. That was followed by two seasons with a semipro team in Waterville, and then the beer deliveries for a distributor—rolling kegs into bars eight hours a day—and no real dough at that.

  The deal with Smelts had worked out beautifully. He and Mike had worked the local unions where Smelts sent them. After a few days on the job, trouble had always ceased.

  That was until the last time. Somebody had gotten to Maginacolda in the middle of the night and wasted him. Falconer shifted in the seat of the convertible and felt the weight of the .38 holstered under his left arm. They wouldn’t get him that way. He’d take over where Mike left off and get the local back in the union where it belonged. With Rustman gone that wouldn’t be difficult.

  He turned off Route 98 and went down the secondary road that led toward the Murphysville Convalescent Home. As the car rounded a bend, Falconer saw a truck stopped in the road. A man in a red safety vest waved a flag at him until he braked the car.

  The man with the flag climbed back into the cab of the dump truck and began slowly to back up the large vehicle. With each gear shift the rear of the inclined bed truck seemed to inch closer to his car.