Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  At first. “So on the plus side, we had plenty of money,” she said. “But on the minus side, some of it was dirty, because some of my clients were so crooked, their limos should’ve been fitted with machine-gun turrets.”

  And though she’d tried to ignore this fact about them, in the end, she couldn’t. After a while it had gotten so bad that she couldn’t buy a Ferrari, a new pair of Jimmy Choos, or a baby grand piano for the apartment where no one ever played so much as “Chopsticks,” without seeing a body in a car trunk or a forehead with an icepick in it, through the lens of her mind’s eye.

  “So eventually I gave it all up.” Not soon enough, she added mentally as around the table, they all listened with interest.

  Again she was tempted to mention a certain philandering brain surgeon, so chronically unfaithful to her that his nickname around the hospital was Vlad the Impaler.

  But that was no excuse. Besides, it would be unkind to Sam. “Just before I did, though, I got a visit from a fellow I knew.”

  Once, Steven Garner Sr. had been a regular client of the loan sharks in a certain New York crime family, one whose cohorts included guys with colorful nicknames like Sticksy and Bones.

  Not to mention Jerry “Da Bomb” Baumann. But by the time Garner came to her office, he was out of favor with his preferred lenders, on account of being too fond of dogs and horses.

  “Specifically, ones he could bet on,” she continued. “He owed so much money and repaid so little of it, he’d put his pals in an impossible position.

  “If they killed him, as they were threatening to do, they’d never get their money back. But if they didn’t, they would never get any back from anyone else, because no one would be scared of them anymore.”

  “Wow,” said Sam. He’d never heard any of this before. “So then what’d they do?”

  She smiled at him. You poor kid, it’s no wonder you got so messed up.

  She replied, “They decided to cut their losses. If he didn’t have fifty grand by the next day, he was guaranteed a spot in the nearest landfill.”

  So his pitch to her had been simple. No promises, no guarantee of a payback. She went on with her story. “A guy like that, you had to admire him. Just ‘Lend me the money, or they’ll kill me.’ ”

  “And they were your clients?” Ellie asked. “The men who were threatening to kill him?”

  She was trying to sound nonjudgmental, but Jake could tell she was a little shocked. Who wouldn’t be?

  “No, not those guys.” Fellows with names like Sticksy and Bones had never darkened her door; even Da Bomb had found it only by following Garner, probably.

  “But their bosses were, some of them.” The higher-up men in politics, banking, and law … the power, in other words, behind the cashmere-coated thugs everyone else thought headed organized crime in the city back then.

  To them, Jake’s unlucky visitor was just so much machine-gun fodder. They’d have him killed in the afternoon and eat dinner heartily with their families that night as usual, because when you were in their line of work, sooner or later you had to make an example of someone.

  Still, she wasn’t a fool, and she wasn’t about to hand over fifty grand on the strength of a sob story. “So I refused.” She finished the tale, looking around at the faces staring wide-eyed at her over their soup bowls.

  “Wow,” breathed Sam again. “I never knew you’d worked with such serious …”

  Criminals. The kinds of guys who would kill you as soon as look at you. Not that she’d seen it that way at the time.

  But back then, she hadn’t really looked at it very much at all, had she? She’d kept her own eyes conveniently averted from what she’d done, whom she’d done it for …

  “Yeah, well,” she said inadequately. “It’s not something I’m proud of. When your dad died …”

  In a cruel irony, Sam’s father, Victor, had succumbed to the kind of brain tumor he’d spent his life saving other people from getting demolished by.

  “… I did an accounting of all our money,” she went on. “His and mine, and whatever came from crooks, as best I could figure, I donated to a victims’ rights organization.”

  Which had hurt more than the fifty grand would have, not that it had set things right. It didn’t even begin to wipe out all the harm she’d done. And it didn’t make her feel any better now, either.

  What she had been back then was the dark place in her soul, and she would never really be able to make up for it. Even now, she still had nightmares about it. And in one of them, a guy with big ears and a really bad gambling habit asked her for money.

  Worse, he’d brought his son along, probably hoping that the sight of the kid might persuade her. A little kid with ears just like his dad’s …

  “So then what happened?” Ellie asked. “After you didn’t give him the money he wanted?”

  Jake tried to reply and couldn’t, as more of the awful memory poured in. The kid, looking over his shoulder so reproachfully at her. But that wasn’t all she had seen in his eyes—not by a long shot.

  She just hadn’t let herself know it back then. She took a deep breath, let it out.

  “I don’t know for sure. I never heard from him again, I know that much. He wasn’t the kind of guy whose death would make the papers. Especially if—”

  She stopped. She’d thought enough time had passed so she could stop glancing over her own shoulder.

  Wrong. She cleared her throat. “Especially if no one ever found the body,” she finished. “But there was a photograph that got sent around not much later, of a guy tied to a chair.”

  She’d never seen it, not back then. The story was, though, that the postmortem photograph of Garner had even been sent to his wife.

  Her husband, murdered and tied to a chair … Just to make sure, according to the story, that other late borrowers got the message: Pay up, or your family will suffer, also.

  “And then we moved here,” said Sam. Her son was looking at her with an expression of horrified sympathy in his eyes, worse even than if he blamed her.

  Bella, too, and Ellie. I don’t deserve any of you, Jake thought as the silence at the table lengthened, everyone trying unsuccessfully to think of something to say to her that might make her feel better. Then:

  “Look,” said Wade, spreading his hands on the table. “First of all, the guy’s debt wasn’t your fault. Fifty thousand? You’d have to have been nuts. And second, maybe this guy just wants to scare you, harass you, you know. As a kind of punishment.”

  “No.” Everyone turned as Jake’s dad finally spoke.

  With his long gray hair tied back in a leather thong and his faded bib overalls pulled up over a red, many-times-laundered flannel shirt, Jacob resembled a living relic from the peace-and-love sixties.

  But instead of patchouli oil and flower power, his Summer of Love had featured revolutionary manifestos cranked out on a mimeograph machine in a Greenwich Village basement, plus plenty of black powder and fuse cord. For a while, whenever a protest got capped off by a spectacular but harmless explosion, he was who the cops had started looking for.

  Then Jake’s mother had been murdered and he’d had to go on the run for real, and Jake hadn’t seen him for thirty years.

  “This fellow means it,” he said now. “He’s not kidding.”

  “How do you know?” It was the last thing she wanted to hear. Yet his saying it was oddly comforting because it echoed what she already knew somehow.

  He looked levelly at her. He hadn’t murdered her mother, but she hadn’t known that for thirty years, either.

  “One”—he held up a finger—“he came all this way after all this time.”

  He had a point. “And two, that rat?” he went on. “That came in the cracker box?” He’d taken charge of disposing of the hideous thing. “It had this in its throat.”

  It was a small, rolled-up piece of paper. When he unrolled it, she saw that it had writing on it: DeAdDEaDdeADdEaD.

  “Oh,” Jake said weakl
y. The note didn’t mean anything, it didn’t even make sense, she told herself. But the message was clear.

  “You know what? He’s scaring me now. He’s really scaring me.”

  “Yeah. Because how many people can you think of who would do this?” her dad said. He put the rolled paper back in his pocket. “About time we started taking this guy a little more seriously.”

  “I’ll take him serious,” Bella muttered darkly. Her scowl warmed Jake’s heart.

  “So you think he really wants to hurt me, or …”

  Worse, she didn’t quite add out loud, but everyone heard it. Her dad didn’t mince words.

  “Yes, I do. And I think it was the motive last night, the girl on Sea Street.”

  “Oh, no—” Bella began sorrowfully, but Jacob cut her off.

  “I think he did it, even if the cops don’t. To put fear in your heart the way he thinks you put it in his old man’s. And …”

  “But isn’t that taking an awfully big risk?” Wade objected. “Kill someone? Just to scare somebody else?”

  He looked around at the others for agreement. “I mean,” he said, “in addition to the whole huge thing of just being able to kill someone at all. Human-being-wise.”

  “On top of which,” Ellie agreed, “that would make Jake more cautious, wouldn’t it? So it’d be counterproductive if his plan was really to do something to her.”

  But Jake’s dad just shook his head again. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, getting her nerves jangled, raising her suspicions—it makes it all more fun, increases the challenge for him.”

  He spoke sympathetically, but he wasn’t about to sugarcoat it. “That’s what he wants. I knew guys back in the city.…”

  He poured black coffee, the pot’s syrupy dregs, and drank some, over Bella’s protests.

  “Some of them were flat-out nuts. They’d get an idea, then things took on a life of their own. And then, of course, there’s what Wade said, the whole idea of murder.”

  He looked at Jake, his eyes steady. “Because if he’s never done it before, and he’s set on doing it to you …”

  She got it, chillingly. “A rehearsal.”

  “Good heavens,” gasped Ellie. But when she met Jake’s glance, it was in her eyes that she felt it also: that it could be true.

  Crazy, maybe. Utterly beyond the realm of normal behavior or thinking. But on a gut level …

  Down deep, it made sense: crime and punishment. Her crimes, which she’d foolishly thought she could leave behind and forget …

  Now, after all this time, someone had finally shown up to say otherwise. Wade rose from the table.

  “It still seems like a stretch. But if it is all connected and some scumbag’s got Jake in his sights …”

  He grabbed his jacket from where he’d hung it on the back of his chair, ready to go out right now and end the threat to her.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Sam, getting up as well.

  “No.” The word hung in the air; surprised, they all looked at her. “You won’t find him.”

  Sam and Wade looked mutinous, the rest confused. Bella spoke up. “But he has to be in town here somewhere. So why can’t they just hunt for him until they—”

  “Because there’s one thing you don’t know about him,” said Jake. “One specific thing. But I do.”

  She went to the window. “Like I said, his dad wasn’t a mob guy himself, but he knew them,” she said.

  “And more important, they knew him. His habits, his talents, and so on. And once in a while, they’d hire him to do a specific job for them.”

  She looked around the room. “Hideouts. He knew how to pick one, use its strengths, minimize its weaknesses.”

  Wade nodded silently, beginning to understand, as she continued. “He could figure out how to get in and out of almost anywhere without being noticed, what to bring along so a man wouldn’t have to leave for a while if he didn’t want to.”

  “You think your guy picked up tips from his father?” Wade wanted to know. “And … Jake, you’re really sure it’s him? From what you’ve said, he was just a young kid when you last saw him.”

  Regretfully, she shook her head. “I’d have known him sooner if I hadn’t been trying to bury the memory all this time.”

  Sam sat again. “As for his dad’s skills,” Jake went on, “even on a holiday weekend with everyone in town, I don’t think anyone could hide out for very long in Eastport without them. Wade, you said yourself your pals had their eyes peeled for him earlier.”

  He conceded her point with a nod.

  “He might be gone by now,” Bella suggested. But a downturn at the corners of her big green eyes said she knew that was an unlikely hope, too.

  “His dad once hid a fugitive from justice for six months,” said Jake, “right under the noses of the federal marshals and the guy’s own crew, who wanted to kill him before the marshals could get him and persuade him to betray them.”

  “Really?” said Sam, fascinated. “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing you need to know,” Jake replied. Bloody outcomes, unfortunately, were the norm when it came to those guys and their stories.

  “Aw, Mom,” Sam protested. But like the others, he understood now that the danger was real.

  And that she’d brought it upon them all. “Okay, then,” Ellie said briskly, breaking the spell as she got up and began clearing the table with quick, sharp movements.

  “You need to go find Bob Arnold again,” she told Jake. “Give him that paper and tell him what you told us. I know, it all sounds nuts.” She clattered soup bowls into the sink. “But I guess it’s not. Bob needs to know.”

  About Steven Garner, his son, and what she’d done all those years ago. Or not done.

  “Okay,” Jake said reluctantly, hating the thought. “But after that,” she added, “I’m coming back here, and all of you are going to help come up with a plan to trap this guy.”

  Grabbing a sweater, for the sky had begun thickening with a thin afternoon fog, she waited while Sam went upstairs to get his own jacket.

  Meanwhile, Bella wiped the kitchen counters, even though they were already so clean brain surgery could’ve been done on them, while Wade and her dad went off to talk it all over between themselves.

  Ellie put her dishcloth down. “Jake, are you going to be all right? George will be fine with Lee for the afternoon, so if you wanted me to stay, I could.…”

  Jake managed a smile. “Thanks. But you go on home now. I’ll need you later.”

  To help put the plan together, she didn’t finish, and talk the rest of them into it, too. Because they loved her, and wanted her safe.

  But trapping Steven Garner was the only way to guarantee her safety or theirs, now.

  And traps … well, traps needed bait.

  AT JUST AFTER NOON, STEVEN GARNER PEDALED OUT COUNTY Road on the rental bike. Despite little sleep and having consumed only a few crackers, canned peas, and some juice recently—he didn’t count the junky stuff he’d eaten as actual food—he felt great.

  Terrific, actually. With ears carefully re-glued, a ball cap on his head, and sunglasses on his face, he had no fear of being recognized; amid the throngs crowding the island this weekend, he looked like any other average Joe out for a ride.

  And the dead rat in the box, not to mention the message in it, had been a stroke of genius, with another ride past her house ringing the bike bell only hammering the message home:

  That he was in charge. That he could do anything he wanted and get away with it.

  He grinned, turning his face to the sun. His plan, more than a dozen years in the making, was about to come to fruition, and with it, his old life to an end.…

  What he might do next, he hadn’t decided. But he’d done a bit of online research into the Philippines, which he thought he might enjoy. They were crazy about computers and gambling there; with his electronic expertise and knowledge of sports wagering, he felt confident he’d find a niche for himself.

&nbs
p; Imagining this, he coasted down a long hill leading back into the center of Eastport, between rows of neat, white wooden houses with crisply mowed green lawns and black-mulched flower beds brilliant with summer blooms.

  Cars lined both sides of each street now, and from every direction couples and little groups streamed toward the downtown festivities. Slowing, he hid among them, sometimes walking the bike and sometimes riding, just another tourist on a Maine island with nothing in mind but to watch a parade, see some fireworks tonight.

  When he reached the abandoned house on Washington Street, he slid the bicycle among some overgrown bushes, just as before, and waited until the coast was clear before slipping through the yard to the broken back door.

  Inside, dusty light slanted through gaps in the trash-bag window shades he’d fashioned. As he’d expected, once the sun was past its zenith he spied all the spots that needed patching, tiny untaped areas and flaws in the bags’ plastic.

  A feeling of urgency seized him at the sight, because it was crucial that no gleam manage to betray him tonight. Pulling the roll of duct tape from his pack, he moved methodically from window to window, bag to black plastic bag, sticking bits of tape onto the bright places until each tiny light-leak was abolished and the room stood in darkness.

  Next, now that the windows were shrouded, he turned to the lighting scheme he’d planned for the inside of the house, since once he had her here, he would need to be able to see her.

  In his mind’s eye, he envisioned it now: Her body, secured to the old wooden chair with the same tape he’d used to patch the trash bags at the windows.

  Her mouth, tightly covered over, too. And her eyes, taped shut only for as long as he wished to remain unseen by her. Until at last—

  This part he’d imagined a thousand times.…

  At last, he would reveal himself by the light of the many candles he was distributing around the room now, a hundred fires he would ignite so the shadows danced as the flames flickered—

  Two on a counter, three on the floor, everywhere more of the tall, white tapers until the room itself was like a candelabra bristling with waxy stalks, their sweet scent floating in the still, warm air.