Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  “From me, I guess. Like I told them, Jeremiah left here during the first commercial after the seven-thirty news started on Fox, so it was probably seven thirty-five or close to it. The car found him at ten minutes to eight. He’d walked about a mile, which takes around fifteen minutes. Don’t take rocket science.” He was getting tired of talking, I could tell. Or just resentful.

  “Was the driver that found him local or out-of-state?”

  “How the hell should I know? Wait, no, it was local, had to be, because it was that girl works at the drugstore in town, it’d closed at seven and she was on her way home.” He paused for a moment. “Smith said you was some kind of cop?”

  “Private. He came to see me about a problem.”

  “So whyn’t you call the cops and ask them?”

  “Sorry, Bill. Just an old habit. I apologize for taking up your time.”

  I heard the volume of a TV set in the background being turned up, had a vision of him sitting with a remote in his hand. And then there was a click and the line was dead: he’d hung up.

  So let the police handle it. Too bad I didn’t get back to Smith, but it’s out of my hands. Now he’d never be able to answer my questions about why Caleb Benson had reacted to me the way he had in the restaurant, about how he had known of Smith’s visit to my cabin, about why Smith was so concerned about his grandson. Smith was beyond telling me now. But I still had just over ninety dollars of his money in my wallet. I wondered if maybe Mr. Benson might need something more to worry about than his payroll or EPA regulations. Decided to give him something to worry about.

  Before tilting at his windmills, Don Quixote armed himself with a rusty lance. I picked up the gun and put it back into my jacket pocket, slipped the cell phone into the other pocket, and went out the door and into the night.

  Walking carefully in the dark, I followed the rutted trail of my own footsteps down to the Jeep. Cold air cut my nose and made my eyes water. Twice I called for Sylvia, but heard no sound of her, saw no sign. At the Jeep I paused and called her name again. Still no reply. I got into the Jeep, started it, flipped on the high beams, and drove down the last of the logging trail and out onto the town-maintained road. It was snowing again, not hard but steady, and the night flaked into what looked like volcanic ash in the twin headlight beams.

  I drove two miles north, farther than she could have walked in that time, and then turned around and went back four miles south. No sign of her. If she’d had a vehicle parked nearby, it must have been far enough down the road that I didn’t hear her start it, but close enough that she could get to it and get out of the area before I had finished my phone conversation with Grinder and come looking.

  But it didn’t make sense that anybody could make it down a rocky, hilly, twisting trail at a dead run in total darkness. Maybe she was still hiding back there in the forest, or maybe somebody picked her up. Maybe a coconspirator with a shotgun microphone and a cell phone or radio, and boots bigger than size ten.

  Heading toward town, I thought of Jeremiah Smith, and a slow anger washed over me. The plastic steering wheel creaked, protesting my painful grip on it, and I exhaled and let go, feeling the blood return to my fingers. The old man who’d been so alive yesterday afternoon, who’d come to get my help to save another life, was dead.

  He was about John Lincoln’s age.

  Snow swirled and danced ahead of me. Curtains of it brushed the road. I drove without really noticing much of anything until up ahead I saw a rusty sign with a bad case of the quaints and the cutesies: YE QUALITY MECHANIC. Grinder’s red tow truck was tucked beside it, in front of a house that looked like it hadn’t been painted in a decade or more. The blue light of television leaked out of one window, like a strange species of radioactive gas, and I guessed that was where Grinder lived. A mile north of that I came to the scene of the hit-and-run.

  The investigation had not yet wound down. An empty Vermont State Police car with its engine running and headlights on hummed on the gravel shoulder of the road behind a Northfield Police car, its engine also chugging. Both cars sent ragged gusts of exhaust into the night. In my headlights the gray vapor ascended through the snow like ghosts seeking heaven.

  Two men sat in the Northfield car. I pulled up behind them and was about halfway out the door when both of the cruiser’s front doors flew open and the cop on the driver’s side emerged and said, “Step out of the vehicle.” The passenger cop wore a state trooper hat and a cold expression, and in his hand a pistol pointed in my general direction.

  I finished my climb out of the car and put both my hands at my sides, where they could see them.

  The Northfield patrolman walked up to me. He looked to me the more competent of the two, a muscular man in his early thirties with close-cropped blond sideburns showing under the edge of his cap. He walked ramrod straight; his face was wide with large pale-green eyes and a long nose that looked like it had been broken once. Unlike his buddy, he had an air of authority that did not need a gun to front for it. He stopped just in front of me and said, “Help you with something?”

  “Bill Grinder tells me Jeremiah Smith was hit and killed along in here.”

  The patrolman’s face did not change expression. “And who are you, sir?”

  Nice to know I rated a “sir.” I told him my name and added, “I live on the other side of town, near the Roxbury line.”

  “You the PI? Moved here from Atlanta?” I caught the faintest whiff of derision in the last word, a phony Southern drawl. They never get that right. And they think we use “y’all” as a singular pronoun.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Contrary to what you see on TV, most cops hate PIs. They figure we make more money, have longer and more frequent vacations, and don’t have to live by all the rules. They’re wrong, but with reasons. One is there are a lot of incompetent PIs in the world, so most cops know by heart a dozen or more stories of investigations around the country that some private heat screwed up. Some of them spin yarns about brother cops getting seriously killed because a PI stuck his nose in where it did not belong.

  “Mr. Tyler, I need to see your ID.” The kid kept his tone flatly neutral, and my appreciation of his ability ratcheted up by maybe one notch. If I knew of some rotten PIs, I knew of even more small-town cops that had no grasp of professional conduct.

  I pulled out my Vermont driver’s license and handed it to him. Snow blew past so cold that it burned my cheek when it hit.

  Holding his flashlight up beside his left ear, the cop looked over the license, then turned the beam on me. “You carrying?

  “I am.”

  “Where’s the weapon?”

  “My right-hand jacket pocket.”

  “Take it out slowly and give it to me, handle-first.”

  So maybe he wasn’t as professional as I’d thought. But I complied, meanwhile telling him, “Word I got was that I didn’t need a concealed-carry permit in Vermont. I still have a valid one for Georgia.” I handed him the weapon.

  He offered no comment on what I understood about gun laws in Vermont. In the glare of his flashlight he inspected the gun, then broke the cylinder and spun it. He sniffed the barrel, then let his arm drop, pointing the weapon at the ground. “Got any others?”

  “No handguns on me or in the Jeep. That’s it. I have a shotgun in my cabin.”

  The state cop seemed to be antsy. He came around the cruiser holding his sidearm in both hands, barrel aimed just above my car. “What’cha got, Jess?”

  “PI. Got a piece, but he’s legal. I’ve heard about him.”

  The trooper made a flicking gesture with the barrel of his gun. He was starting to make me nervous, to make me wonder if he’d learned firearm technique from a qualified instructor or from watching Arnold and Bruce and Nick on Netflix DVDs. “What you figure you need a weapon for?”

  “Would you please not aim so close to my head?”

  “Holster it,” Jess told his state trooper friend.

  After a fiv
e-second pause, the ten-year-old’s I don’t hafta if I don’t wanna, the state cop decided he wanted to and put his sidearm away. Relaxing a little, I gave him as much as he needed to know: “I had the piece with me because yesterday Jeremiah Smith came to see me at my place. While he was there somebody torched his truck, and when we went to look at the damage, someone took a shot at us.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “I don’t know. Either he didn’t like Smith or he didn’t like me. I can’t imagine any scenario where the latter would be the case, so I’m guessing it was someone with a grudge against Smith.”

  It was too far to push on a cold, snowy night. Jess had not handed my license back to me. He passed it to the trooper and said, “Larry, do me a favor and run him for us.” In the back glow from the flashlight I saw him smile. “Sorry for this, but you know if we pig-ignorant cops don’t do it by the book, we get our asses chewed.”

  Larry got my license plate number, walked back to his cruiser, and climbed in. Jess hefted my gun thoughtfully in his right hand. “Before he gets back, tell me what’s your interest here.”

  “Just what I told you. Somebody fired at us yesterday, actually grazed Smith’s ear, and now he’s dead.” I was starting to shiver. Jess didn’t seem to be bothered by the wind.

  “Who you working for?”

  “Nobody’s paying me,” I said truthfully.

  “You didn’t report the shooting. That’s a crime in itself.”

  “I didn’t get hit. Smith was the injured party, and he decided it was a hunting accident.”

  “Yeah. You know I could toss your ass in jail. I could have your PI license pulled.”

  “You could, but I’m not working at it any longer. I retired when my partner died.”

  “Jim Lincoln.”

  “John. Heart attack.”

  “OK,” the cop said, handing me my weapon back. I guessed that he’d known John’s first name all along and that it had been a little test. What the hell, it didn’t cost a thing. “You see the shooter? Able to tell us anything about him?”

  “Didn’t see him. From tracks I saw near the Dog River, he wears size eleven or twelve boots. Big guy, I’d say.”

  Larry climbed out of the State Police cruiser and came back with my driver’s license. He handed it to me and growled to Jess, “He’s clean. And the car.”

  “Know anything about what happened here, Mr. Tyler?” asked Jess, putting a little extra twist on the “Mister.”

  “Heard from Grinder it was a hit-and-run.”

  “That all?”

  “That’s it. I thought I’d stop and see if I could help.”

  He slapped the door of my jeep. “Good to see a citizen with that kind of social conscience. Thank you for stopping, sir. Good evening.”

  My nose was freezing, and the snow was coming down harder. “No charge for the offer of help. Call it professional courtesy. And by the way, did the woman who found Smith have out-of-state plates on her car?”

  Larry bulled forward. “Damned odd question. What are you getting at?”

  “Just curious.”

  Jess elbowed in front of Larry. “Mr. Tyler, you realize we can’t answer a civilian’s questions on this matter.”

  “All right.”

  He hesitated, but then added, “If you hear anything we ought to know, or if you come across anything funny, you’ll notify us.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “I’d like to see the whole thing resolved,” I said carefully.

  Neither cop replied. Both of them walked back to their cars, over at least an inch of fresh snowfall. I slipped the gun back into my pocket, got in the Jeep, rolled the window up, and turned around. I drove back through near-blinding snow to Bill Grinder’s house, thinking resentfully that when old Don Quixote shambled off on his bony nag to pursue the elusive windmill, at least he did so in sunny Spain.

  7

  Bill Grinder grudgingly let me in. His living room looked as if it had been decorated by a taxidermist with delusions of grandeur. Deer heads, a moose head, a bobcat, and a baby bear stared at me with glass eyes. A flat high-definition TV screen not quite as large as a billboard occupied most of the wall beside the front door, and in its light spill I saw a sagging sofa and a cracked recliner, with small tables beside each of them cluttered with stuffed weasels, a family of rabbits, and a skunk. I imagined that I could smell it, but the sour air was really just full of the odors of dust, old wood, and moldy hides.

  Grinder half-sat, half-lay in the recliner. Lucy, an obese woman of fifty—I assumed she was his wife, but Grinder had just introduced her with “This’s Lucy”—was on the far end of the couch, wrapped in a flower-patterned house dress and munching stolidly on popcorn. They had been watching a show about a snotty young guy who faked being a psychic and showed up the ordinary cops. They didn’t look away from the screen as I talked to them, but Grinder, at least, answered my questions.

  “The woman that found him? Her name’s Tammy, Tammy Ehrlman. Lives in Riverton. Her old man is—what is he, Lucy?”

  “Town selectman,” Lucy said. “Tammy’s a good girl.”

  “Is she in the phone book?”

  He flipped a hand toward an end table. A Princess phone, a real antique of the sort that shows up on eBay, sat atop a dogeared and oil-stained local telephone directory. I opened it and squinted in the light of the TV until I found a listing for Ehrlman. I took out my cell phone and dialed it. A man answered.

  “Is Tammy there?” I asked.

  “Who’s calling?” His tone sounded more bored than protective.

  “My name is Oakley Tyler. I was a friend of Jeremiah Smith’s.”

  A pause, then, “Tammy can’t come to the phone, Mr. Tyler. She’s sedated. Got all shook up finding him there, so she took a sleeping pill and went to bed. She needs to sleep it off.”

  “Can you tell me if she was driving her own car when she found Mr. Smith?”

  “She was.”

  “Does it have Vermont plates?”

  “What? Sure. And the tag’s current.”

  “Does anyone in the household have out-of-state plates?”

  “What?” he asked again. “No. Why?”

  “I’m trying to locate a possible witness,” I said.

  “Well, I think you’d need more to go on than that,” he said. “Look, I don’t know of anybody around here who drives a car with out-of-state plates, OK? If you want to talk to Tammy, she’ll be at work in the morning.”

  He hung up on me. Before I could put my phone back in my pocket, Lucy’s moon face turned toward me, her eyes wide. “What about out-of-state license plates?”

  “I had a lead that a car seen near the site of the accident had out-of-state plates.”

  “Can’t be anybody from here. You live here, you got to get Vermont plates.” She creased her forehead. “I don’t get out much. Bill, you seen anybody driving around town with out-of-state plates?”

  “Shit, no,” he said. The show broke for a commercial. Grinder frowned at Lucy and said, “You got to talk all the damn time? Whyn’t you haul your ass back up the street and watch your own damn TV?”

  She gave him an indignant look. “You invited me over! I made dinner for you and Jeremiah.”

  “And we ate it, didn’t we? You want a medal?”

  “I want you to answer this man’s question,” she said. “Stop stalling, Bill. Anybody around here driving with out-of-state plates?”

  He glared at her, but he said, “I see ’em all the time. People coming up for the skiing, or the fall colors. Go hiking in the summer.” He turned to me. “Guess you ain’t figured out that this is kind of a tourist town. Thought you was a big famous detective. How about you, Tyler? You got out-of-state plates on that Jeep of yours?”

  “No. Bought the vehicle at the dealer in Barre, just outside Montpelier.”

  He snorted. “We get flatlanders comin’ in here, drivin’ up property prices and taxes, and they all think they’re smarte
r than us Vermonters.”

  “And you think I’m one?”

  “Shit.” The show was back on. He turned back toward the TV. “Jeremiah was my friend,” he said.

  I didn’t know where I stood with these two. I said, “I’ll go in a minute. First, though, can you tell me anything about Jeremiah’s grandson?”

  Lucy said, “I know who he is, know him to see. He’s a reporter. He lives in Montpelier.” She giggled and jerked her chins toward Bill. “He don’t like him, ’cause the boy’s a liberal!”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “No, it’s true,” she said. “He’s always writing about how we ought to save the owls—”

  “Shit,” Grinder commented.

  “—and all that stuff. He wants to make people stop cutting trees on their own land.”

  Bill turned a scowling face to me. “That boy wants the damn government in everybody’s business! Let him have his way, half the damn state’d be unemployed.”

  “Where does he work?”

  Lucy knew: “Writes for This Week, little local paper, comes out every Friday.”

  Bill grunted. “He spreads some of his crap around in magazines, too. Vermont Life. The New Englander. Liberal shit.”

  “Did he live with Jeremiah?”

  Lucy didn’t know, but Bill did: “Hell no. That old coot couldn’t stand the boy for more than an hour at a time. No, Jeremiah lives—lived—in a house trailer just north of North-field, but the boy has an apartment in Montpelier.” Bill’s face showed a quiet struggle of emotion, and then he said, “Hell, I don’t wanna give you the wrong impression. They bickered and all, but you know, they was family. The boy, Jerry, he lived with his mom and Jeremiah for about four, five years when she was sick, but after she died Jerry wanted to move out on his own.”

  I stood to leave and hesitated. “Do either of you know a Native American woman named Sylvia?”

  Grinder grunted. “Don’t know any Injuns. Don’t want to.”

  I persisted: “This one’s young, late twenties, early thirties. Straight black hair, long, down to the middle of her back. She wears buckskins and moccasins.”