McMansion

by Justin Scott

  Tim’s big open face clouded over. “Yes.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “We won. Eventually. Billy and Eddie Edwards blitzed the court with lawyers and experts and every brand of bull you could think of. Cost my poor client fifteen grand in legal fees and he still hasn’t collected the judgment.”

  “But you had a good case?”

  “Ultimately, it proved impossible for Billy to deny that my client’s two acres of trees had arrived at Pawloski’s lumber mill on Billy’s trucks. Pawloski was really pissed because it made him look a crook, too, which he most certainly is not. He was happy to testify against Billy.”

  “So why didn’t your guy press charges?”

  “We couldn’t shake Billy’s story that he thought the trees were on his land. Not enough to get a criminal conviction. Best we could do was reparations to plant new trees. It was a joke. The judge had just been transferred up from Stamford, temporarily filling in—Remember Judge Clarke, that jerk who got the Conservation Department off Billy’s back?—He didn’t know a tree from a self-storage unit. You could see he had a picture that my client could just buy some eighty-foot-tall, hundred-year-old trees from Agway and stick ’em in the ground. Outside the courthouse, Billy laughed in my client’s face.”

  “Your client pissed?”

  “Not at me. He saw how it went down. Paid my bill and even sent some work my way. Why?”

  “I want to see where he stood with Billy.”

  Tim gave a big-shouldered shrug and said, “He struck me as a guy who would rather just move on.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that even if Ira’s client didn’t murder Billy, this guy would still not be a legitimate suspect.”

  “You mind if I tell him we talked?”

  Tim shot me the kind of look you can only shoot at an old friend. “If you were going to talk to him anyhow why didn’t you just drive out there instead of bothering me?”

  “Because he put up a huge iron gate and I can’t see the house from the road and he’s got an unlisted telephone number.”

  Tim shook his head and said softly, “Goddamned Billy. He had no idea how he hurt the guy.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. It wasn’t the first time I had found Tim to be a touch more complicated than his open face would suggest.

  “Sorry, Ben. I’ve said more than enough.”

  “Okay. I appreciate what you did say. And I won’t tell him we talked. Later.”

  “By the way, Vicky keeps saying we should invite you to dinner.”

  “I never turn down a free meal.” Vicky McLachlan—Newbury’s First Selectman and a good prospect for governor of Connecticut one day—could not cook worth a damn. But in her company, food was the last thing that came to mind.

  ***

  Tim’s client whose trees Billy Tiller had stolen was named Andrew Sammis. He was new in town, an apparently wealthy man who had bought one of the old estates that had been another rich man’s country house for the past sixty years. Unlike many newcomers, he had kept it intact. It was quite private, the house nearly a quarter mile from the road and no other houses in sight, a small, handsome, well-kept Greek Revival with white pillars that was dwarfed by a bloated Cadillac pickup parked in front.

  When I finally got through to him by trailing his cleaning lady, Marie Butler, through his gate and up his driveway, I was confronted in the parking area by a man a little bigger than me and several years younger who had recently erected an enormous gate and surrounded his property with ten-foot chain link fence and was now accusing me of trespassing, even as I stuck out my hand to introduce myself.

  Marie Butler—the town’s primary gossip—a big, loud woman who was never that anxious to get busy cleaning, shoved between us with introductions of her own. “This is Ben Abbott. I’ve told you all about him, Mr. Sammis. You know, from the Main Street Abbotts. His father married a Chevalley—and boy I bet he never heard the end of that from his parents. They were a pair of tight old Yankees.” She paused to gulp breath and it occurred to me that Marie did not think there was anything wrong with gossip. No way a person could be that good at it if she felt guilty. “He’s the real estate agent. The one who went to—”

  “Thank you, Marie,” I interrupted.

  “—jail for—”

  “Thank you, Marie.”

  “—fraud.”

  God knows what Sammis thought at that moment, but at least Marie calmed him down and got him off the trespassing subject. I pressed the small advantage she had gained for me by saying to Sammis, “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. It wasn’t exactly fraud. It had nothing to do with real estate. It wasn’t in Connecticut. And it was a long time ago.” He didn’t bite. I went on, “Wall Street. It was insider trading. According to the government.”

  “What did they give you?”

  “Three years.”

  Marie felt obliged to add, “In Leavenworth Penitentiary.”

  Sammis finally looked interested. “How’d they manage hard time on insider trading?”

  “There was a dispute about testifying against—” I started to say “a friend,” which wasn’t quite accurate, and settled for, “people I knew.”

  Sammis nodded and the guard inside him stood down and I knew quite surely that he too had served time, somewhere, for something. Which ought to make talking to him a bit easier.

  “Come on down to the barn,” he said. “Marie, you get started. I’ll stay out of the house until you’re finished.”

  “Don’t you want to talk to Ben in the house?”

  Sammis ignored her and we walked briskly to the barn where, in a woodworking shop equipped with both a table and radial saw, he was building bookshelves. “So why’d you sneak in here? The place isn’t for sale.”

  I decided to play it absolutely straight. If he had done time he probably still possessed a bullshit detector. I said, “I’ve got an occasional sideline. Sort of a half-assed private investigator for some of the local lawyers.”

  “Detective?”

  “Keeps me out of trouble and fills in the slow spots in the real estate.”

  “How did you get a PI license if you were convicted of a felony?”

  “Actually, I avoided getting a license for a long time, on the theory that if I had no license no one could threaten to take it away.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  I saw that I had no choice but to answer his before I could persuade him to answer mine.

  “I got my private detective license the same way I got my real estate license. I applied for—and was granted—what’s called ‘Relief of Civil Disability.’”

  I did not mention that my Aunt Connie had expedited the matter by calling in a favor, as she had, years earlier, for my Congressional appointment to the Naval Academy. Nor did I reveal that I had got a permit to keep my father’s gun collection the same way, and a license to carry, though the guns stay home in a safe in the cellar. The detective license actually turned out to be worth the trouble and expense—twelve hundred bucks up front, five hundred renewal every two years—as people respond favorably to labels.

  Sammis would not let it go. “How did a former stock salesman meet the work-experience requirement?”

  “You know more about Connecticut licensing law than most people,” I said. “Are you a lawyer?”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Still hoping he was going to answer mine, I said, civilly, “I gained my work experience in the Office of Naval Intelligence when I was in the service. A long, long time ago,” I added with a smile.

  “All right. What are you investigating?”

  “I’m working for Ira Roth. He’s a top-gun defense lawyer up here. He’s got a client—a kid, charged with murder.”

  “The kid who bulldozed Billy Tiller?”

  “It’s possible he didn’t.”

  “What I read in the Clario
n sounded open-shut—I mean him sitting on the bulldozer which was sitting on Billy Tiller. Is that not what happened?”

  “The order in which they stacked up is in question.”

  “Well, that’s what they pay lawyers for. I hope the kid is rich.”

  “His father is.”

  “Good.”

  “I gather you had a run in with Billy.”

  Sammis gave me a quick look. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Read it in the Clarion. Do you mind me asking what happened?”

  “Let’s just say that Mr. Tiller presented quite a challenge to my anger-management sessions.”

  “I heard he laughed about those trees.”

  “Yeah, he laughed. But I was going to get the last laugh. Would have, if your client hadn’t ended up on top of him.”

  “How?”

  “I had a plan.”

  “For revenge?”

  “Yeah, for revenge. What the hell do you think I’m talking about?”

  “Mind me asking how?”

  “Moot point, now.”

  He picked up a board, sighted down it, penciled an X on the crooked end, measured six feet, drew a cut line with a square and went to his radial saw and looked surprised that I was still standing there. “Goodbye, Mr. Abbott.”

  “Do you know how to drive a bulldozer?”

  “What kind?”

  “How about a Caterpillar D4?”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Abbott.” He put on eye protectors and ear protectors and turned on his saw, which made a remarkably loud and piercing noise.

  We had here a classic meeting of two alpha dogs, only one of whom could become alpha-alpha. The trouble with being alpha is you don’t always think that straight. Or think at all. Which can be a great advantage. Or a terrible mistake. Maybe it was because he reminded me of prison, but the blood suddenly storming through my mind told me that I could not survive if I backed down.

  I yanked the power cord from the wall.

  Sammis was remarkably quick. Moving as fluidly as a skater, he snatched up a battery-powered circular saw and held the long-toothed rip blade inches from my face. I looked at his index finger curled around the trigger switch.

  Chapter Six

  I tried to gauge his eyes through the safety glasses. They were glazed like marble with a mad dog stare. Again I looked at his index finger on the trigger and said, “You don’t have the balls, dude. You’ve been out too long and you don’t want to go back.”

  Sammis shocked me. I really didn’t believe he would trigger the saw. But he jerked the switch with all his might.

  I was right about one thing. He had been out of prison too long. He had not lost his anger, nor his desire to survive. But he had lost his edge. He had gotten so heated up that he forgot to press the saw’s safety switch with his thumb. And, thanks to the federal rules that were supposed to protect do-it-yourself handy men and women, the saw did not start. That surprised him long enough for me to pick up a whippy length of quarter inch steel rod he was building something with, point it at his face and announce, semi-truthfully, “I fenced for the Naval Academy. Why don’t we stop the rough stuff before you lose an eye?”

  He glared at me, glared at the steel rod, and glared at his saw, saw where his thumb had missed the safety, and threw it down on the bench. He looked angrier than scared, but he sounded weary when he said, “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”

  Sensible again, I backed out the door, went home and Googled him, which I should have done earlier. It took a lot of scrolling, but I found that Andrew Sammis had indeed done time. In Maine. Not for assault with bulldozer, but close. He’d been convicted of running over his wife with a pickup truck, which he had denied vehemently but unconvincingly. After a year in prison, his conviction had been overturned by an appeals court. Which not only freed him, but permitted him to inherit his wife’s considerable estate and collect her life insurance.

  I found it hard to believe that he would risk throwing away his new-found freedom and fortune to avenge some stolen trees. Still, I’d seen his anger in action, so I wrote an asterisk beside his name and continued down my list.

  I spoke with a homeowner who went red in the face about Billy’s trucks roaring through his neighborhood on Sundays. I found the president of a community group that had formed to try to stop Billy from scamming a grandfather-clause loophole in the zoning regulations to force single-acre housing into a two-acre neighborhood. I found people who blamed him for crowded roads, noisy leaf blowers, and bad-mannered newcomers with too much money. Everyone damned him for rising school taxes.

  “Welfare!” one apoplectic geezer sputtered. “It’s like we pay welfare to Billy Tiller. Our taxes go up to educate the kids who move into his houses. He keeps the profit.”

  None of them admitted knowing how to drive a bulldozer.

  More promising was a guy who had been suing Billy for shoddy construction work on his nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar McMansion. It didn’t sound like a thing that would go to bulldozers, but when I learned that the homeowner had rented a backhoe to excavate a pond in a wet spot in the back of his property—a wet spot that had already been a pond before Total Landscape filled it in one dark night to preempt a wetlands-protection challenge to that particular development—I figured I better talk to him.

  Billy had named the development Equestrian Ridge.

  The houses were wedged in a dark hollow and nine hundred and fifty thousand hadn’t bought much space. The big guy who opened his front door and stepped back to let me enter tripped on the curving staircase Billy had pried into the two-story entryway. I helped him to his feet. Something loud began to roar somewhere in the house and we both looked at the ceiling.

  A crystal chandelier shook musically.

  “My wife’s in the Jacuzzi,” he explained.

  I was tempted to ask with whom? Framed posters were shifting on their moorings. The floor vibrated underfoot.

  “I grew up in apartments. I never owned a house before. Is this supposed to happen?”

  I backed out from under the chandelier. “Depends on your builder. Not if he’s a craftsman like Ed Soares or John Blomberg. Or even Louie Minalgo,” I added, naming a cantankerous Yankee who did superb work if it wasn’t trout, deer, or turkey season. “Guys like them still build a solid house. Your wife could teach line dancing upstairs and we wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “That’s what I kept telling my idiot lawyer. Billy Tiller was a chiseling shoddy crook.”

  “How was your lawsuit going?”

  His face fell. “The lawyer told me she thought we’d lose. I was feeling pretty bad, before that kid killed him.”

  “I heard you dug a pond.”

  “I tried. I figured a backhoe was like driving a car. But it sunk in the mud. I finally had to bring in a pro. Dave Charney.”

  “The best.”

  He walked me out onto a scruffy lawn, the hallmark of a building lot scraped clean of natural topsoil, and showed me his pond. I told him it would look wonderful in a few years. Which it would, if the plants he had bought at the nursery to replace the mountain laurel flattened by Total Landscape matured before the deer ate them.

  Back indoors, his wife came down all flushed and pretty in a terry bathrobe. She complained to her husband, obviously not for the first time, that their Jacuzzi had consumed all their hot water, and insisted that I stay for coffee. On the way to the kitchen, we passed a living room which was empty but for a baby grand piano with the lid wide open and dust thick on the strings. She noticed that I noticed and said, “They told us to close it, but it looks so pretty open.”

  “Who plays?”

  “We’re going to get lessons for the kids.”

  The kitchen, the usual lineup of granite, stainless steel, cherry, tile, big screen TV, and marble bar leading to the family room, reeked faintly of bacon grease as a Billy Tiller “gourmet chef delight” was designed more for unwrappin
g takeout than actual cooking with a real exhaust fan that vented outdoors. Over excellent coffee, they both talked about how lonely they felt moving to Connecticut. I told them that Yankees warm slowly, and recommended volunteering at the high school or joining the community theater. Pitching in was always welcome. I did not mention that new people living in expensive houses on quiet cul-de-sacs often took the heat for the developers.

  “We’ll settle in,” the woman said. “We’ll make it home.” Then she smiled, “I always dreamed of living in a new house. With fresh paint and lots of room.”

  ***

  Ira Roth was wearing his wireless headset. He motioned me to sit while he wrapped up his call: “I know he’s a psycho. But he’s our psycho.”

  “Another client?” I asked when he rang off.

  “Another private investigator. What do you have for me?”

  I told him about Sammis and his wife’s insurance.

  “Nice work if you can get it.” He had a habit of keeping his headset on with the microphone stalk blocking his mouth, which gave the impression that he saved the good stuff for people on the other end of the line. “But a man who took Billy to court has demonstrated a certain willingness to stay within the law, which won’t much help our young gentleman. Find more people mad at Billy—mad enough to flatten him with a bulldozer.”

  “I don’t know, Ira. I’ve talked to a bunch. An amazing number of people know how to drive bulldozers, but—”

  “They don’t all have to know how. I’ll take some who were mad enough to hire someone to flatten Billy with a bulldozer.”

  “How many ordinary people would kill over trees or floods?”

  “All we need are people who seem like they could have killed the son of a bitch. Andrew Sammis and Mr. Gordon are a start, but I need at least a half dozen victims of Billy.”

  “I look forward to seeing you maul Sammis, but I can’t seeing dragging people like old Mr. and Mrs. Gordon onto the witness stand.”

  “Lamentable, but better than our client jailed for life—what do you have against Andrew Sammis?”

  “This doubt strategy is like throwing sand in the face of a charging bull. It might blind him, but he’s not going to stop. Is this your idea or Jeff’s father’s?”