StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  She came on, a little slurry of tongue. I said, “Since when do radicals rat to pigs?”

  “You’re not a Pope, Mr. Abbott. You’ve got no call on solidarity from me.”

  “Neither was Martello.”

  “Little John was a misguided thug. But compared to you, he’s family.”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “That’s between you and the police. Or would you rather I had passed your name to the Knights?”

  “Remember the two hundred I gave you?”

  “Do you need a receipt for your taxes?”

  “Just do me a favor: Tell Spider I’m looking for him.”

  “So you can shoot him too?”

  “Pass the word.”

  “Again, I recommend skydiving, Mr. Abbott.”

  “Tell him! When Spider gets in touch, I’ll mail you another two hundred.”

  “Whatever you say. Only do me a favor and put it in your will so I’m sure to collect.”

  I banged down the phone. Plastic shattered and I was left with a handful of printed circuit boards and gaily colored wires. “Terrific.”

  I noticed the answering machine blinking and I lunged for it, thinking it was Rita. It wasn’t, of course—only someone who wanted to sell a house and to whom I already owed a call.

  I erased the message. I deep-sixed chunks of telephone.

  I counted coincidences.

  Little John Martello sold bad dope; the president of the Latin Popes had warned me herself. Bad dope had killed Reg. But when I questioned whether Reg was a doper, who broke into my house but Little John Martello? And friend Spider. Two Waterbury gangstas—whose sum total experience of rural Connecticut was a mugging on the Waterbury Green—had made a beeline for a town that was barely a blur on the map.

  And now—the day after I told the Fisk Frolickers that I knew Reg had died at their party and asked about Little John Martello—Little John Martello was shot.

  Lots of coincidences, but no connections. Spider, whoever he was, wasn’t in the gang file, and Madame President would march cheerfully to the scaffold before naming him, so I could only hope that Little John’s sidekick would respond to my message. Or stop by for another visit.

  In case he did, I got the key to the iron safe, went down to the cellar, and unlimbered the Old Man’s .38—a simple revolver even a child could handle—and locked it in my night table. I was hopeless with handguns, always had been. Dad had kept promising to teach me, but he never got around to it. My Chevalley uncles had made me competent with hunting weapons, but at the Academy, Navy instructors still discuss my sidearm exploits in the hushed tones traditionally reserved for capsizings, mid-Atlantic.

  I showered, thinking to clear my head, but when I climbed into bed, my brain was still spinning. At least I was done picking fights over Rita. Not that I didn’t mourn her. Nor, I supposed, would I stop dredging dimly recalled conversations I might somehow re-interpret for hope.

  But my anger had shifted focus in the course of the endless day, from lost love to my murdered friend. I felt it settle in for the long haul. When it was almost tangible—cool, like stone in the dark—I acknowledged what I had suspected the instant Sergeant Bender told me Martello had been shot: Whoever had murdered Reg had enjoyed dinner at Aunt Connie’s last night.

  Chapter 21

  I woke up humble. I’d been so full of myself in Connie’s library—so proud I had proved that eight people couldn’t sustain a lie—that I’d been hustled.

  With humility came insight: Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d been hustled.

  What if the important lie—the real lie—was not that eight friends had dumped an accidental OD victim’s body in the covered bridge? What if the real lie was that whoever had murdered Reg had tricked the innocent into conspiring in a cover-up?

  What if by frightening and bullying them into helping get rid of the body, the killer or killers had made them unwitting accomplices? What if he had forced them unknowingly to be his alibi?

  ***

  Why was Reg murdered? I didn’t know.

  How was Reg murdered? That was a question for a pro.

  Doctor Steve Greenan didn’t keep office hours anymore, but he still made house calls on his older patients and acted, of course, as an assistant county medical examiner. That part-time work brought in some money and provided, he confessed freely, the main excitement in his life. A tall man, stooped with age, he had delivered me and most of my friends. Aunt Connie, a generation his senior, still called him “Stevie” and thought he was “too handsome for his own good.”

  His twin brother, “Stonewall” Alfred, owned Greenan Oldsmobile, a small dealership up Route 7 where, since 1934, shrewd Yankee traders had discovered humility negotiating the price of a new car. I found Steve in the showroom, playing chess with his brother, who, between moves, was explaining to a customer that the reason he couldn’t lower the price of a block-long, ’73 gas-guzzling station wagon was that big comfortable cars were becoming quite rare.

  “Mildred said I’d find you here. She said it’s time to turn the compost heap.”

  “That’s why I’m here. How’s your head?”

  Alfred devoured a pawn and said, “Looks like you been using it to straighten dents in a backhoe.”

  Steve walked me over to the window and examined my face in the light and probed my skull with his powerful fingers. “This hurt?”

  “Sore.”

  “How about this?”

  “Awh!”

  “You’ll live. What’s up?”

  “Steve? Can we take a little walk?”

  The doctor looked at me curiously, called, “Back in a minute, Alf,” and we walked outside and strolled the double line of used cars.

  “I don’t know if you can discuss this. Tell me if I’m out of line.”

  “I will.”

  “Is it possible that Reg died of something other than a heroin overdose?”

  “Read the report. It’s public record. Scooter’s probably got a copy.”

  “I read it.”

  “In that case, you know the stuff he was snorting was powerful enough to kill a camp of lumberjacks.”

  “Could your boss have made a mistake?”

  “Highly unlikely. It’s a good office. The new toxicologist has got himself in place. Highly unlikely.”

  I was proceeding on thin ice. The fact was, a mistake had been made. I knew that Reg had not died in the bridge, he had been dumped there. So if Steve and the cops missed that, what else had they overlooked?

  “Could the state cops have screwed up somehow?”

  “How?”

  “Missed a wound or something?”

  “That was my job.” Steve’s mouth worked a little; it made him look older. “But anything I missed, I’d expect the M.E. would have found and reamed me out for it.”

  “Did he ream you out, Steve?”

  “Nope.”

  “But I’m out of line.”

  “You’re edging that way.”

  “I’m sorry…Could Reg have died elsewhere? Could the body have been moved? I know I’ve read there are ways you tell, but I was wondering…”

  Steve didn’t bite.

  “They taught me some basics at ONI. I seem to recall that fixed lividity sets in after four or five hours. After that you get no blanching. If I remember right, if a body were moved after that time, the ‘livor’ which settled down with gravity would not shift.”

  Steve still didn’t bite.

  I asked, straight out, “Is it possible to move a body and fool the M.E.?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Would time be a factor? How long the person was dead before he was moved?”

  Steve smiled. “If you’re planning on moving a body, Ben, and want to fool the old doctor, let me recommend that you move it and dump it in the same position it died. And do it very quickly.”

  “Would an hour be quick eno
ugh?”

  “Plenty, particularly if the old doctor was, shall we say, overly influenced by a preponderance of other evidence—like the dope on the victim matching the dope in the victim, et cetera, et cetera…”

  Steve threw his arm around my shoulders and walked me back toward the showroom. “You know, Dick Parmalee told me he’s trying to get ahold of you. Left a couple of messages. Wants to sell his house.”

  “Christ, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “I went up to give Vicky a hand with the phones. She thought you were coming, but you didn’t show. Tim said you haven’t been around.”

  “I got tied up.”

  “La France’s running strong. Old ‘Guns and Dogs’ stirred up the Scudder Mountain crowd. He’s got people signed up to vote with an X.”

  “Guns and Dogs” was Steve La France’s father, Frank, famous for his proclamations at town meetings that this country needed more people who owned guns and dogs. Scudder Mountain was home to woodies and hardscrabble farmers and retirees in house trailers who had not forgiven President Eisenhower’s radical liberalism. “Now he’s working Frenchtown.”

  “I had to go to New York. I’m back now. I’ll help. I’ve been busy as hell.”

  “I heard you been busy asking questions. All I can tell you, it’s a damned shame, but Reg Hopkins died a classic hotload death. We’ve had fifty in the state since January. The only thing that distinguished Reg from the rest was the potency he inhaled. The heroin in his stash was the most powerful recorded so far—so pure it could have been cut twenty times.”

  “Are you saying it wasn’t cut at all? Someone sold him pure heroin?”

  “Oh, they tried to cut it with baking soda. But they were sloppy and he got damn near the full hit. It’s not like cutting cocaine. And in the current market, heroin costs a lot less, so they’re not making any effort to knock it down.”

  “Did you see his stash?”

  “You’re edging that line again.”

  “What was it in? Plastic bag?”

  Steve laughed. “Where’ve you been? I thought you knew your way around. They don’t sell their poison in a plastic bag. Comes in a printed wrapper with a goddamned brand name.”

  “What was the brand name?”

  “Oh, this was really literate. Knight Out! Knight spelled with a K.”

  “Steve, I think it might be a good idea to do another autopsy.”

  Steve removed his arm and said coolly, “Why don’t you ask a cop?”

  Chapter 22

  “So how’d you get involved?” asked Marian Boyce.

  The sergeant and I were sharing a rock in the middle of the river, which, like the stream under the covered bridge, was running low. Our perch was streaked with Grumman Green paint where canoes had bashed it last spring. She had her bare feet in the water and her skirt hitched some distance up her strong thighs. Her unmarked Crown Victoria sat on the riverbank, muttering radio talk from the Plainfield barracks. It sounded like a lonesome drunk.

  “The widow didn’t want to believe that her husband died from a drug overdose.”

  “This the same widow who was divorcing him?”

  “Same widow.” I had already unwrapped sandwiches from the Newbury General Store. Now I opened cans from a six-pack chilling in the river—Diet Pepsies, this being a working picnic.

  “So the disbelieving widow hired a real estate agent.” Marian chomped reflectively on a smoked turkey sandwich. “Makes sense. Why go to the police for free when you can pay a real estate agent good money to solve a mystery?”

  “I tried to talk her out of it.”

  Marian gave me her road cop look—medium intensity—fine- focused to shrivel a speeder’s laminated operator’s license without injuring his hand. “I’ll bet you did.”

  “The guy was also a good friend of mine.”

  “Emotionally involved too? That always clears the head.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “And now, stymied, unable to deliver, stressed out, you invite me on a picnic to pump me.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that crudely.”

  “There’s nothing crude about two people who like each other enjoying—providing they take precautions—enjoying—Oh! You thought I meant pump me for privileged police information. Silly Marian, what a jerk I am.” A steel-edged smile suggested that there was only one jerk in the river and she wasn’t it.

  “What are the odds,” she asked, “that someday you will invite me out for a meal not to pick my brain?”

  “I thought you’re seeing someone.”

  “I can still enjoy a meal out.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Hassle-free.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “He’s a nice quiet Pratt and Whitney sales engineer. He just got promoted. He’s very handsome. He used to be a tennis pro.”

  “Does Jason like him?”

  Jason was her six-year-old, and remarkably well-adjusted for a child who shuttled between Marian’s condo in Plainfield and his dad’s resident state trooper cottage in North Stonington on the far side of Connecticut. Weekly, trooper uncles handed him across the state in patrol stages. With a birthday on the horizon, there was talk of chipping in for his own riot gun.

  “Seems to.”

  “The guy sounds great.”

  Marian shrugged. “Low maintenance—unlike certain people I know.”

  “I need help,” I said. “I’m in over my head.”

  I saw the fire ignite in her eyes and knew too late I’d made a mistake. Brilliant. Like a con artist suddenly forced to hide two peas under three shells, I had to conceal First-Select-Mystery-Guest Vicky and my Jacuzzi-dipping, body-moving friends, while trying to bamboozle Sergeant Marian into guessing that the empty shell held the truth.

  I dropped my sandwich, lunged for it, and fell in the river. Marian pulled me out, dried my face with a wad of paper napkins. The diversion hadn’t worked. Thoroughly undistracted, she asked, “Have you broken the law?”

  “No.”

  “You realize, I now assume you’re lying?”

  “Marian, you know I’m not a liar.”

  “Yeah, that’s what’s confusing me…Start at the beginning.”

  “I already told you the beginning.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  I was still rolling toward the fire, downhill, no brakes. “Let me make a suggestion that will help both of us.”

  “If I were meeting you for the first time, at this point I would draw my weapon.”

  “But you do know me.”

  Marian reached out and touched the back of my hand. I felt a sexual jolt and saw it crackle through her too. It was so intense I forgot that one reason she was such a successful detective was that she was brilliant at shifting gears—a woman qualified to play good-cop-bad-cop all by herself.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “I suggest you take a cold hard look at the autopsy on Reg Hopkins.”

  She nodded as indifferently as if I had remarked that I’d read in the paper there was a sale on table lamps at the Danbury Mall. “Why?”

  “Get a court order to exhume his body and get the Plainfield M.E. to re-examine it for a closer look at what killed him.”

  “Wha’d you have in mind?”

  Her apparent indifference was driving me over the top. Pose or not, it had the effect of making me talk louder, faster, and without restraint. “Find out if someone deliberately injected him with superpure heroin.”

  “Injected?”

  “With a needle? Tell the M.E. to look for marks.”

  Marian nodded and looked away, but not before I saw the fire leap like volcanoes.

  “You like that.” I wondered what I had unleashed. “Don’t you?”

  “Tell me where you got this idea.”

  Oh, boy. “Well, I can tell you every place he went the night he died, from when he left his office un
til a little after eleven o’clock.”

  Marian jumped up, skipped across the rocks, up the riverbank to her car, and came back with her notebook. “Tell me.”

  I did.

  “And then?”

  “I can also tell you that everyone who saw him says he was stone-cold sober.”

  “And then?”

  “And shortly after two o’clock his Blazer was seen in the covered bridge.”

  “Who saw it?”

  “Couple of guys trying to leave the reservation. They couldn’t because it was blocking the bridge.”

  “I asked who saw it.”

  “They didn’t realize the body was in it.”

  “Why not? The door was open, the courtesy lights must have been on.”

  I scampered off thin ice. “Apparently his battery had died. Also, it had tinted glass. Also, they’d been drinking.”

  Marian made a note I couldn’t see and repeated, “Who?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Won’t. But I believe them. I know exactly what they were doing that night. I checked them out.”

  “Excellent, Ben. That’s a great relief. The real estate agent corroborates the witnesses’ stories and assures the Major Case Squad detective that the witnesses riding around the woods at two in the morning who saw the victim’s car didn’t see the victim, didn’t share their dope with the victim, didn’t kill the victim.”

  “My Great-aunt Connie says sarcasm is the language of the devil.”

  “My dad says amateurs are idiots.”

  I smiled. Touché. She didn’t.

  “It took me twelve years to make Major Case Squad. You’ve got some nerve jerking me around.”

  Bad cop, I could handle. “These guys aren’t dopers. They didn’t kill Reg Hopkins.”

  We traded cold glares. Had it gone on much longer, the river would have iced up. Marian broke first. Not that I was any tougher than she was. But she surmised, correctly, that even if she could find some excuse to lock me up, I could never rat.