Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  I asked, but he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d told Maggie about Kris’s beauty school aspirations—

  —and when they’d gone I hauled the shutters down from the third floor where my father had stashed them again, because I had a feeling we might soon be spreading sleeping bags up there.

  But three flights of stairs separated the third floor from the cellar and I could only carry one heavy shutter at a time, so by the time I was done I’d had a workout.

  Which was why when Bob Arnold came by a little while later he found me in the yard, collapsed on a lawn chair.

  “Is Bella all right?” I asked, sitting up.

  He nodded. “Ayuh. For now. If the state boys come after her again,” he added darkly, “I doubt it’ll be just for questions. Drove by her place twenty minutes ago and she was still there, though. You training for a triathlon? Or just getting ready for summer complaints like everyone else?”

  By which he meant all the visitors the town would be getting, in . . . ye gods, only five days now. “Mine might be flopping on the third floor if Wade doesn’t get his act together,” I began.

  But then I stopped, noticing Bob’s expression. He hadn’t come by to talk about possible deficiencies in my hospitality.

  “Sam here?” he inquired.

  “No, he’s at the boat school this morning. Why? Do you want to talk to him?”

  “Nope,” Bob replied. “Just wondered.”

  In other words he didn’t want Sam to be around when he said what he’d come to say; oh, great.

  “Jake, why don’t you come on downtown and have a coffee with me?” he asked. “I don’t know why, but I always feel like I need a wingman when I go to the beatnik joint.”

  It was what Bob always called the Blue Moon. “You could wear a beret, start smoking French cigarettes,” I teased as we rode in the squad car down Key Street. “Write some free verse, read it aloud on Friday nights.”

  “Yeah. If I think of anything that rhymes with handcuffs, I might try it,” he said as we parked and got out.

  He jingled the cuffs on his belt as he spoke, eyes alert for the routines he monitored, which consisted of people’s usual locations, activities, and companions. It was the exceptions to the routines, Bob always said, that you had to watch out for.

  “Nice day,” he remarked.

  On Water Street, a beer truck was backed up to the side entrance of the Waco Diner. Two shaven-headed guys were helping unload the cases, their tattooed arms bare in the sun.

  Bob frowned at the sight. “Supposed to be three of them,” he explained at my questioning glance. “I think I might take a ride to Bozzy Maxwell’s later, ask his mom what he’s up to instead of showing up for his job the way his probation officer told him.”

  Like I said, exceptions. They could get you killed, he claimed, even in a little island town like Eastport. I was still wondering what exception had him visiting my house, inviting me for coffee. And I already suspected I wasn’t going to enjoy finding out.

  Once we got inside the Blue Moon and had our mugs and a pair of sandwiches—it was close enough to lunchtime and the kitchen was featuring shaved Canadian maple ham with arugula and smoked Gouda—he got down to the business of telling me.

  Or rather, he delivered it like a bolt out of the blue, the one thing I hadn’t thought of even though it was in front of my nose.

  “I need you to tell me Sam wasn’t in Lubec the other day, driving your car. The day Jim Diamond got killed,” he said.

  I grabbed my coffee mug, washed down a bit of the arugula that had snagged in my throat. “Funny, I was going to ask you some questions today, too,” I managed, vamping for time.

  Of course it was Sam that people would think of, not Maggie. Sam was the boyfriend of a victim’s estranged stepdaughter; in the absence of another suspect, all you’d need was a sprig of parsley to make him look like the blue-plate special.

  And now if I asked Bob any of my own questions, such as for instance more about Jim Diamond’s background, he’d know I was still very interested in Jim’s murder. And he would wonder if it was because I was somehow trying to protect Sam.

  Instead of Maggie, whom I didn’t want getting into trouble, either. And I especially didn’t want to put her there myself. “No,” I replied, “he didn’t have my car that day.”

  Bob watched me. “Seems like for a minute you weren’t sure.”

  “I was just thinking. One day’s like another when you’re in a routine, you know.”

  Routine being what that Lubec cop had been in the habit of noticing, too. And a jazzy little Fiat ragtop wasn’t part of it.

  “But I’m sure he didn’t,” I said, not adding why.

  He nodded slowly, savoring his half-decaf mocha java. Mine was good, also, or it had been until I stopped tasting it.

  “Why’d you ask?” I didn’t want to continue this conversation. But I didn’t want to be ignorant of the reason behind it, either, in case it was something else I hadn’t thought of.

  Bob’s look at me was unfooled. He knew there was more that I wasn’t saying. He also knew there wasn’t another car like mine in all of Washington County.

  Meanwhile, as I sat there the whole thing fell together for me: the Lubec cop had put my car in his report. But a truly fine suspect was already in the state’s crosshairs, so the local cop’s report of the car’s being there had been given the brush-off by the state investigators.

  They didn’t want their nice neat case screwed up. And the Lubec cop didn’t like that, so he’d called Bob Arnold for a chat.

  It was Bob who’d put two and two together and come up with Sam. And having done so, he’d decided to get proactive in trying to keep Sam out of a possible jackpot.

  “Question arose, that’s all,” he replied mildly. “Glad to be able to put an answer to it.”

  And, his calm gaze added silently, give you a heads-up. Bob didn’t think Sam had gone to Lubec and bonked Jim Diamond. But he did know the car had been there, even if he couldn’t prove it.

  Furthermore, he knew that if the fickle finger of legal fate got a reason to stop pointing at Bella—

  —for instance if my snooping should happen to show that she hadn’t killed Jim, but failed to replace her with a slam-dunk, no-doubt-about-it version of who had—

  —then the question of who had been driving my car that day would come up again, this time a lot more seriously.

  “So where are they on Bella, anyway?” I inquired. “Any idea of when the DA might decide to bring charges?”

  Bob shrugged. “Whole case is circumstantial. No prints on the weapon, no one saw her there that day. But she told ’em about the notes, can’t account for her time, and it turns out she had a key to Jim’s place, too. None of that’s looking good for her.”

  “Yeah, she told me about the key. So she could have had opportunity, and they know she thought he was threatening her. Do they know he was . . . ?”

  I rubbed my thumb and fingers together in the “money” sign. “A serious drain on her finances? Yep, they do,” Bob replied.

  Oh, terrific. “But it doesn’t make sense, if you were planning a murder, to bring along a frying pan for a weapon.”

  “Sure,” Bob answered. “But how many murders’ve you ever heard of actually made sense when you laid it out cut-and-dried?”

  Good point. Murder is a numbskull thing to do. Doesn’t stop folks, though. “So they’ll charge her pretty soon,” I concluded.

  “That’s what I’m hearing. They’d like more evidence but they have a game plan, so I think they’ll get what they want. Use some leverage, get her confession, end of story.”

  Leverage could only mean . . . “Kris? They’ll go after Kris?” By now my mind was racing. Where had Sam been that day, anyway?

  I didn’t know. Bob nodded through a bite of sandwich.

  “Yep,” he said again. “Kris had access to the key and the weapon as much as Bella did, and you figure she couldn’t have liked Jim. Guy’s ma
king a lot of trouble for them both.”

  He touched his lips with his paper napkin. “Not that Kris likes anyone much that I can tell, unless there’s a way she’s figured out that they can do something for her.”

  “Right,” I said bleakly. “I’ve noticed that, too.” I told Bob what Victor thought about Kris, that she was a gold digger.

  “But Sam doesn’t seem to have tumbled to it, and I’m afraid he never will.” Or anyway not until it was too late. Besides, at the moment that felt like the least of my problems.

  “Uh-huh. Wish I could help you there,” Bob said. “But if it was illegal to fall for the wrong girl, half the male population would be behind bars.” He ate the pickle off his plate. “Anyway, if Bella doesn’t play ball they’ll make noise about looking at Kris for it, and then that Bella will give in so fast it’d make your head spin, to keep her daughter out of hot water.”

  Yep, that’s what I thought, also. Whereupon if I managed to show that she hadn’t done it, I would just be moving a whole pack of trouble a lot closer to home.

  And at that point, it would be too late for Maggie to help by revealing she’d had the car. By then, the police might decide she was only saying so to protect Sam . . . oh, what a tangled web.

  “They’ll do it before the Fourth,” Bob added. “Afterward, the court’ll be jammed up with stuff people were up to while they were celebrating. All this summer hilarity stretches the county’s resources in the law enforcement department,” he added wryly.

  In other words, on top of everything else I was going to be deprived of Bella when I needed her most, just as I’d feared. It was a selfish way of looking at it, I knew.

  On the other hand, Ellie and I were the only ones doing anything on her behalf, so I absolved myself. “So what’d you tell the Lubec cop?” I asked. “I mean, just out of curiosity.”

  “What he already knew. That right now Bella’s officially only a person of interest,” he replied swiftly, this being the point of the whole conversation in the first place.

  “But if she lawyers up, or it gets to the point where they have to offer her a public defender,” he went on—

  Which it would; it was just a matter of time, now.

  —“whoever’s representing her is going to get the chance to put that car into play. Got to, to get any reasonable doubt. The car,” Bob emphasized, “that looks just like yours, that the Lubec cop saw on the day of Jim’s murder.”

  By which he meant that whatever I wasn’t saying had better get cleared up fast, because things were about to get serious.

  “Interesting music,” Bob remarked, changing the subject.

  He’d said what he needed to about Sam’s vulnerability, his belief that my car had indeed been in Lubec the day Diamond was clobbered, and his own questions about what it was doing there.

  Now the ball was in my court. “Yeah,” I replied about the music. “I think I like it.”

  It was a group called Funkhouse on a private CD label out of Massachusetts, a trio of music school guys, not exactly tuneful but very listenable. Maggie had told me about them the last time she and I had been in here together.

  Thinking of Maggie again made me feel even more anxious. This whole situation was developing so many traps, I was sure I’d put a foot wrong any minute.

  And if I did, someone who didn’t deserve it could end up in big trouble, maybe even my own son.

  But that wasn’t my only concern. “Bob, do I still need to be worrying about Sam and Kris? About the drinking parties and all?” By now the gatherings were the least of my concerns, but I still had to ask.

  Angling his head at the speakers set near the Blue Moon’s ceiling, he considered while his fingers tapped the complex beat of the music. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “There haven’t been any more big blowouts like the other night.”

  “Thanks for that, by the way. Your restraint,” I said.

  I didn’t add and for this conversation, now. He knew.

  “Don’t mention it. Way I look at it, official measures are the last resort when it comes to the kids, you know that.”

  He drank the last of his coffee. “So I guess the answer to your question is, maybe not right this minute. I just always hope a quiet period isn’t the calm before the storm, is all.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” But I was afraid it was. Another thought struck me as we went out. “Say, there isn’t some kind of charity scam going on around here lately, is there?”

  He glanced over in surprise. “Not that I know of. Why, you got a complaint about something?”

  “No. It’s just that a lady who says she’s with the Red Cross blood drive keeps showing up at my house, but I haven’t heard of her being anywhere else. Or seen her, either, except once right here downtown.”

  In front of the Waco, three shaven-headed fellows instead of two were now tossing crates off a shellfish truck. Spotting them, Bob nodded to himself and crossed a task off his mental list.

  “There’s a blood drive, I know that much,” he said. “Guys at the firehouse wanted me to sign up; I told ’em sure. Never know when I might be a quart low myself.”

  The flashback hit me hard as he said it: Bob wounded, down in the snow, nearly bleeding to death as he lay in my arms.

  It had happened several years earlier, but it still felt painfully vivid. “Right,” Bob said quietly, his somber look letting me know he recalled it as well as I did.

  Although from an entirely different perspective. Still, I’d settled the blood drive question. “Bob . . .”

  “What?” He turned, waiting patiently as I struggled with the impulse to tell him everything, even about Maggie.

  But then the impulse passed, and as he watched it happen he nodded minutely again. He trusted me; also he thought he owed me. He believed I’d saved his life back then, which maybe I had.

  Besides, from the legal point of view it was early days yet. Bella hadn’t even been charged—

  Bob wasn’t saying so, but from his manner I thought he didn’t believe she’d killed Jim Diamond, any more than I did—

  —so he was cutting me some slack. Anyway, for all either of us knew an event might still happen that would change things for the better.

  One did, too. Happen, that is.

  But it didn’t make things better.

  In fact, looking back on it now I have to say that the making it all worse part of the program was only just beginning.

  When I reached my own front yard I had a brief interchange with Bella, the details of which I barely bothered to process before sending her home. One thing the current confusion did seem to have improved was my ability to deal decisively with her; if I didn’t, she would drive me all the way around the bend instead of only halfway around, as she’d done already.

  Next, I noticed that my father’s old truck was here. Inside the house I found that he’d cleared up all the plumber’s mess and brought the shutters back upstairs again.

  Also, he’d apparently decided to put the cleaned hinges onto them, or I assumed as much when I saw him out by the picnic table with a shutter in front of him. But as I joined him there and saw what he was really up to, all the pleasure I’d felt at the notion of for once not having to do it myself fled instantly.

  “Dad, why are you . . . ?”

  The newly cleaned hinges were piled on a sheet of newspaper. But he wasn’t doing anything with them. Instead he was filling up the screw holes in one of the shutters with plastic wood.

  “Hate to tell you this,” he said when he saw me. “But I had a whack at that hardware.”

  My heart sank. Each shutter took two hinges and, because I’d bought them secondhand, each already had six screw holes, three per hinge. And now as I watched, I remembered what I’d forgotten about the process of taking all of those hinges off, to ready the shutters for painting.

  They’d been loose, the screws falling out of the holes. That meant the holes had to be filled with something the screws could bite into. And six screw holes
times twenty-four shutters added up to . . .

  Wordlessly I picked up another woodworker’s syringe. He’d thinned the plastic wood with turpentine so it could be drawn up into the syringe’s barrel and forced out through its nozzle.

  “Got to be done,” he said sympathetically.

  Next came the drying time; the plastic wood had to harden. After that each hole needed drilling again, with a drill bit just a little smaller than the hinge screw that was destined for it.

  Only then, and after several more hours of careful drill work, could the screws be reset without fear of their falling out again. Or worse, falling out after the shutters were rehung, so that in the next big storm they would fly right off the house.

  As always, having my hands occupied with a physical task put my mind at ease. But not for long.

  “Jake,” he said, filling another screw hole. “I saw Sam an hour or so ago up in Calais.”

  It was the next town to our north, and it had a McDonald’s, a Subway, and a Taco Bell. Sam and his buddies went there often.

  “So?” I wiped up some stray plastic wood.

  “He was at Kendall’s jewelry store. I was there picking up your package,” he reminded me.

  Right; I’d ordered a brass plate for the front door, with my last name and Wade’s engraved on it.

  “He didn’t see me,” my dad went on. “He was buying a ring. Little chip diamond.”

  The words hit my heart like punches.

  “I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think he really means to marry that girl.”

  Kris, he meant. “Oh, good lord.”

  Sidelong look from my dad. “You know,” he pointed out, “you married Victor. Seems like you managed to end up all right.”

  “That was different. First of all, I only did it because there was nobody to stop me. And at the time Victor wasn’t a big threat to my sobriety, only my sanity.”

  My father nodded. “Very true,” he agreed in the tone he used when he meant he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, but that I should reexamine my assumptions about it.