McMansion

by Justin Scott

  My so-called sixth sense means one or two of the self-evident five are working overtime. Whether I had heard or seen or smelled something, I knew the direction to look to glimpse motion just inside the tree line behind the model house. I walked quickly toward it, trying to probe the shadows. I thought I saw another flicker. There was a crash of dry leaves and broken branches in the underbrush and I darted forward, running as fast as I could over a hundred yards of bulldozed ground.

  When I reached the woods, three deer bounded up the slope, their white tails flashing until they vanished in the tree trunks. I stopped and listened hard. But whatever had crashed through the leaves did not do it again. Another ELF? Or a bear? No deer I’d ever met made that much noise.

  I debated searching the woods. But an Earth Liberation radical would have a head start, and I was already winded from my broken field run, while a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black bear in June would be protecting her cubs. So I retreated back to the road and walked down to Billy’s Newbury Common sign. I took a picture of it and the “Private” addendum, about which I and numerous other irritable literalists had already written peevish letters to the Clarion, reminding Newburians that the “common” was a custom of sharing land that the colonists brought over from England three hundred and eighty years ago, in which a pasture was used and maintained by all. Newbury, like most Connecticut towns, has one. Ours is called the Ram Pasture and represented an early version of “trickle down” economics in which folk of modest means could hope that when they grazed their sheep a rich man’s ram cruising the common would leave in his wake a flock of lambs.

  Billy knew perfectly well that a common was supposed to be public. He claimed deep New England roots at Planning and Zoning hearings, boasting that Tillers had settled in Newbury two hundred years ago. Therefore, he argued, no one had a right to limit how many houses he could build on his land. In truth, when Billy’s ancestors did finally straggle into town from God knows where, Newbury’s original settlers had long since planted crops, dammed the river, erected a sawmill and rousted out the French, the Indians, and the British Army.

  But while I could not forgive the abuse of our language, I would not have defaced his sign, nor tried to burn his ugly model. I certainly wouldn’t have killed him for it. Or even shot him in the leg. Which someone had done a year before the bulldozer got him.

  I had witnessed that assault up close—smack in the middle of town—on our historic Main Street, which is lined with marvelous eighteenth and nineteenth century Colonial, Federal, and Greek Revival houses set far back from the road. I happened to be standing about four feet away from Billy explaining, diplomatically I thought, that in an overdue attempt to improve my character I had taken a vow never to sell ugly oversized houses of the sort he built. Granted I had had a Bloody Mary at lunch. Or two. Late breakfast actually, it being Monday, a slow day in my business because Monday is Newbury’s day for my competitors to host open house tours of new construction and the weekenders have gone home.

  Billy had taken my remarks personally and got all red in the face, and I had thought, Well now I’ve provoked a very large angry man. I was trying to figure out where to poke him forcefully enough to make him reconsider his options, if I had to, when suddenly out of nowhere bullets started flying.

  It was the first gunfire on Main Street since a mail coach driver urging his team Boston-ward with letters for Abigail from President Adams got into a dispute with an ancestor of mine who had come up with the lucrative idea of blocking the road with a toll gate. (A full century and a half before the Bloody Mary was invented.) As muzzle loaders are no longer the weapon of choice, a lot more bullets were flying this time.

  Several scattered the windows in Billy’s red pickup like rock candy. One parted the hair of a grandmother who happened to be walking her grandchildren to the General Store for ice cream and smacked into one of Town Hall’s marble columns. Another ricocheted off the flagpole, the tallest in the state, and ended up embedded in the sturdy front door of a three-hundred-year-old saltbox. Another pierced my Benjamin Abbott Real Estate sign and one of the panes of glass my father had installed to convert our front sun porch into his and now my office. The last caught Billy in the leg, toppling him onto the broad tree lawn that separates the sidewalk from the street.

  By long-standing agreement in our very wealthy state, Connecticut drive-by shootings are supposed to be confined to the city limits of downtrodden urban areas, so the State Police Major Crime Unit was soon breathing down Trooper Moody’s thick neck. Everyone in Newbury assumed that Billy had ripped off or pissed off someone sufficiently to shoot him in the leg. But the crime squad didn’t get any closer to finding that shooter than Ollie had, and they were still investigating a year later when the bulldozer eliminated their shooting victim.

  I had heard a rumor in the White Birch that the shooter had actually telephoned Billy in the hospital to demand, indignantly, why Billy had called 911 from his cell phone while lying bleeding in the street, when they could have worked out their dispute in private. The motorcyclists loved that story and sided, to a man, with the caller. Billy told me, however, that it was total bull. He claimed that he didn’t know who had shot him. Which I had thought was total bull, too, but none of my business.

  The Clarion tried to report the shooting but ran out of steam in the second paragraph as neither Ollie nor the Crime Unit could add anything to the obvious and the only witnesses were people like me who recalled little beyond hugging the ground and praying. Undaunted by a paucity of facts, Scooter MacKay, the Clarion’s publisher, editor, photographer, and ace reporter, fleshed out his story with a laundry list of the crimes that the State of Connecticut was investigating Billy for, which pretty much ran the gamut of things that a greedy, unscrupulous developer can do wrong.

  I responded with a cranky Letter to the Editor.

  Scooter MacKay has a huge, thunderous voice. We’ve lived next door to each other since we were born, and when he got home from the newspaper office he leaned out his dining room window and boomed at me crawling around in my perennial border, “Do you really want me to publish this?”

  “Yes.” I could have added that it was easier to get a cranky letter to the editor published in Scooter’s weekly than the New York Times, but we both knew that already.

  “But you don’t even like Billy.”

  “I dislike shoddy newspaper reporting even more than rapacious developers.”

  “Shoddy?” Scooter bellowed. “Who are you calling shoddy? You write letters complaining about McMansions, I print them. You write letters grumbling that new rich people are driving middle-class citizens out of town, I print them. You write grouching about gas guzzling SUVs, I print it. Did it ever occur to you to buy an ad?”

  “You should pay me for filling all that space in your newspaper.”

  Scooter yelled that I would be better off if I took change in stride. “You’re too young to be a curmudgeon. Stop mourning youth passing by. Turn your anger into something productive.”

  “Anyone with a half a brain should be angry,” I bellowed back.

  “Lighten up!” Scooter suggested in a voice that echoed to Frenchtown. “The first cave couple lived in the biggest cave they could afford. Soon as they had reason to hope they might nail a mastodon in the near future, they moved to a bigger cave. People like space. You don’t live in a small house. Why should they?”

  The noise attracted the neighbors, led by my Great Aunt Constance Abbott, who emerged briskly from her front gate and crossed Main Street with the aid of a silver-headed cane. Well into her nineties, Aunt Connie was not as tall as she had once been, while a lifetime of abstemious habits had left her with so little appetite that she had grown too thin. But she still had a crown of thick white hair and she stood Miss-Porter’s-School straight as she listened, briefly, to both sides of the argument.

  “Change,” Connie pronounced, “is the only constant in our lives.”

  “Yes, but—
” Scooter started to agree and I started to dispute.

  Connie withered us both with a fiery blue-eyed glance. “Everything changes. For instance, believe it or not I can remember as if it were yesterday a much quieter time in Newbury, before Main Street was paved, when next-door neighbors could conduct a civilized conversation without raising their voices.”

  Everyone went home and Scooter, who is an honest man, published my letter.

  To the Editor,

  I’m trying to understand why, in your recent article about the state police investigation of the gunning down of Billy Tiller, the Clarion provides a list of Connecticut state agencies currently investigating the Newbury businessman. I don’t understand what state probes conducted from Hartford have to do with the subject of Newburians getting shot on Main Street.

  Or is the Clarion subtly speculating that the shooters were actually a gang of frustrated investigators for the departments of Revenue Services, Environmental Protection, Consumer Protection, Motor Vehicles, and Labor? Perhaps the Clarion’s Hartford correspondent spotted them piling into a car and driving down to Newbury to rake the subject of their inquiries with large caliber bullets in the interest of saving taxpayers the expense of a trial?

  Benjamin Abbott III

  Main Street

  Not so enormous caliber, it turned out. Mere twenty-twos. And not even the hollowtips used for shooting woodchucks, though it did tear up enough muscle to leave Billy Tiller with a limp.

  Was the murderer the same person who shot him last year and figured to use a bulldozer this time just to be on the safe side? If so, why had he waited a whole year to try again?

  I took a final look around Newbury Common and snapped some more photos of a self-propelled construction hoist used for lifting plywood and drywall to second floors, and a backhoe beside a utility trench, and the pounded roadbed. I did not harbor CSI fantasies that I would unearth some startling piece of crime-scene evidence the state police investigators had overlooked. But I did want to get some idea of their case, intending to bow out on a helpful note.

  Chapter Three

  “I don’t want to do this,” I told the ELF kid’s defense attorney, when we met that afternoon at his horse farm.

  Ira Roth cast a contented eye on his green pastures, which were speckled with thoroughbreds and draped with white fences. The farm was so beautiful, so pristine—so kempt—that you just knew looking at it that a thriving law practice was helping the horses pay for it. Ira was a formidable country lawyer in his late sixties, wise, awesomely intelligent, arrogant, and quite intimidating. He had worked for, and against, my father before I was born.

  “Why not, Ben?”

  “Too personal. I didn’t like Billy. I didn’t like him at all. Billy Tiller represented everything I hate about the changes in Newbury. He represented greed and its byproducts, which we’ll be paying for in our taxes for the rest of our lives.”

  “What’s new? That was your father’s rant back when he was First Selectman. ‘They come, have their kids, drive the mill rate up and leave.’”

  “Billy’s kind of house represented waste of the worst—”

  “No one’s asking you to love the murder victim,” Ira interrupted, again. “Just gather the facts we’ll need to defend my client.”

  “Not liking him will cloud my judgment.”

  Ira cracked a smile intended to display his good-humored wit. “I’ll deal with the judge. You get the facts.”

  “I mis-spoke, Ira. What I’m trying to say is that disliking Billy will diminish my focus. I don’t want the job—Here you go. On the house.” I extended an envelope filled with printouts of my photographs, my notes typed up, and a Xerox of my sketch of the death site. I was comfortable with the quality of work the envelope contained. And fairly comfortable with the fact that I had told him the truth, if not the whole truth about why I didn’t want the job.

  Ira opened the envelope, read my notes line by line the way lawyers do, then looked carefully through the photos, referring repeatedly to the diagram. Ira wasn’t telling the whole truth either. He, too, had subtext. At sixty-eight Ira Roth was no less ambitious than he had been at twenty-eight. Rich and famous in our small town—and a titan in the county courthouse—he had always hungered to make it in the Big Apple. His motivation to get the kid off was the contacts in New York City an acquittal would gain him through the kid’s powerful father.

  “Where are your GPS coordinates?”

  “X marks the spot. Between the white oak, the hemlock, and that ledge.”

  Ira sighed, “You’re too young to be a Luddite.” Then he said, “But you’re forgetting one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You owe me.”

  People say that all the time. Even if they don’t say it, they think it. But in this case, Ira was right. I owed him for a horse.

  “The deal,” he reminded me, “was X number of hours of detective work in exchange for a champion racehorse. This—” He closed the envelope. “—is nowhere near the ‘X’ we agreed upon.”

  “And that ‘champion racehorse’ is nowhere near Sea Biscuit.”

  He was a big stallion named Redman who had actually won a few races, a decade ago, though not often enough to command a stud fee from any mare’s owner who considered consistency an attribute worth breeding for. So Redman was spending his late middle age next door in Scooter’s barn, eating.

  Ira’s smile went out like a vandalized street light. “I’m calling in my marker, Ben. When you needed a horse, I got you a horse. Now I need something in return. More field work. I need interviews with each and every one of the victim’s enemies. People mad enough to kill him. I want those interviews conducted by a man with local knowledge, a man who knows everything going on in this town and everyone in it, a man whom people know and respond to—and trust, despite certain elements, shall we say, of your past. Worst case, we’ll raise some doubt in the jurors’ minds. Best case, we’ll spook the State’s Attorney into reducing the charges. Best-best case you’ll provoke the guilty party into a confession.”

  I returned a look as dubious as that deserved.

  Ira ignored it.

  I asked, “Who’s in his will? Who inherits?”

  “I don’t handle his affairs anymore. He switched it all to Total Landscape’s attorney. Last I saw it went to his wife, but that was before the divorce.”

  “Maybe he left it all to a lap dancer married to a homicidal bulldozer operator.”

  “I’ll see if I can find when they’re going to read the will. But your job, first thing tomorrow, before the interviews, I need my client’s father handled properly. ‘Properly’ includes convincing the high-powered, impatient gentleman that he has hired the best criminal attorney money can buy to defend his son.”

  I handed him another envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Money for the horse.”

  He looked genuinely surprised. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  Ira shrugged. “There’s so much money around at the moment, I guess even an orangutan could earn a living selling real estate.”

  “I’ve seen several driving Lexuses.”

  He sighed happily. “I love boom-times money. Those who possess it think it’s because they’re deserving or intelligent—often both. I’ve got more work than I can handle defending clients who should have known better. And people are coming out here to buy horses at prices to rival Kobe beef.” He nodded at his long, fence-lined driveway and sure enough, up it came a Cadillac Escalade towing a horse trailer. “That fool has no clue that he is towing an announcement that he will meet my price just to take the animal home with him this afternoon. Let these good times roll.”

  “Yet another reason I don’t want this job. I’ve got tons of work down on the Gold Coast.”

  “Divorce work?” he asked, nose wrinkling.

  “I don’t do divorce.”

>   “Why not?”

  “I don’t feel like videotaping couples who happen to like each other more than they like their spouses.”

  “The money’s in divorce.”

  “Actually, there’s better money in pre-divorce.”

  “What the hell is pre-divorce?”

  “Checking out prospective spouses. Is the guy the ‘international executive’ he claims he is? Is her Mensa membership genuine? Is his S-Class Mercedes leased, borrowed, or stolen? Is her Jag a gift from Daddy or her lover? Is he still living with his mother?”

  “Sounds you should take down your real estate sign.”

  “The sign’s been there a long time, Ira. When the old locals sell, they want an Abbott to handle it.”

  Pursuing multiple livings was a old tradition in hardscrabble New England. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Abbotts had often farmed on the side, while selling or teaching or preaching. When a congregation rebelled or grew bored, there was always the plow. Scooter McKay’s great-grandfather kept pigs after he founded the Clarion, secure in pork chops if an editorial offended advertisers. So does the second arrow in my quiver allow me the freedom to pick and choose the old-fashioned houses I prefer to sell and investigations I find compelling.

  For that matter, Ira knew darned well that his own father had supported the pro bono side of his law practice by lending money and buying land. Although in the old man’s case his lending often turned into giving, and he bequeathed most of his acreage to the Land Trust. Ira had not inherited the generosity gene. His attention shifted back to the horse trailer. He stood up and shoved my envelope back at me. “A deal’s a deal, Ben.”

  “I know that a deal is a deal, Ira. All I’m doing is offering to change the terms if you’ll agree.”

  “Keep your money. Detective hours for a horse. Your detective hours.”

  “Why are you insisting?”