McMansion

by Justin Scott

  Ira owned an attorney’s poker face, but he was not able to hide the cold anger that radiated from his body like wind from a frozen lake. He took the headset off and dropped it on his desk. “Ben. I’ve been winning criminal cases since you were in diapers.”

  Maybe so, but I had met him shortly after that and I had never seen him so angry. Sounded to me as if—uncharacteristically too eager to please—Ira had allowed Jeff’s father to call the shots.

  ***

  I knew of two more incidents that might bolster the case Ira was making for Jeff Kimball. I had been holding off on both because Billy had really put the poor devils through the mill.

  I started with the more recent victimization. Jimmy Butler, a hard-working, decent, easily led little guy, got into trouble driving a 1972 ten-yard Mack dump truck he had been led to believe belonged to Billy Tiller. The Mack was hauling a flatbed trailer bearing a Link-Belt excavator which Jimmy said Billy had assured him was only eleven feet high, which turned out not to be true, but extremely germane. Clearance under the railroad trestle was eleven foot six inches.

  One could make a case—and the authorities did—that the driver should have measured his load himself, but Jimmy was in a rush because he was working several jobs to make payments on a brand-new yellow school bus he had contracted to drive for the high school. Being in a rush, he was going pretty fast.

  While railroad engineers prepared to test just how precariously the railroad trestle was dangling, Trooper Moody ticketed Jimmy for violating all the state laws that pertained to low clearance bridges. Then he ticketed Jimmy for driving without a fire extinguisher, for driving without a medical card, for driving without a state fuel stamp, for driving a truck that had not had its annual federal inspection, for driving with unsafe tires, for driving with defective brake lines, and for towing an unregistered trailer and for driving a commercial vehicle without a commercial vehicle driver’s license.

  Trooper Moody knew that Jimmy had a commercial license. He had left it in his school bus, not intending to drive a truck that day. But by then Ollie was in a vicious mood: traffic was backed up for a quarter mile and a hydraulic oil spill from the Link-Belt excavator resulted in numerous motorists skidding in a soup of powdered concrete and viscous fluids into each other and nearby ditches. Ollie cited each for making a restricted turn, and several people new to town for failure to update an address on a drivers license.

  The Clarion’s front-page photograph of four cranes returning a locomotive to the tracks was captioned, “Railroad crews tested the strength of the damaged bridge by running a locomotive over it.” Inflamed, the owners of the railroad were even madder than Ollie.

  I drove down to Frenchtown to get Jimmy Butler’s side of the story.

  His driveway was blocked by an enormous wrecker whose beefy driver was attaching a hook to Jimmy’s yellow school bus, which was parked beside his house, a low ranch in need of a paint job. While the wrecker might by some stretch of the imagination be hooking onto Jimmy’s bus to tow it in for repairs, the company name stenciled on the wrecker’s boom and the beefy driver’s pec-stretched shirt—Now Repo!—suggested something more ominous than a transmission job.

  Jimmy was watching from his front door and he looked very unhappy. I parked in the driveway of the empty house next door, walked up the scattered flagstones that made his front walk, and asked, “Is this as bad as it looks?”

  “Son of a bitching bank.”

  “How many months are you behind?”

  “Only six.”

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy.”

  “Goddamned Billy Tiller. It’s like he’s grabbing my balls from the grave.”

  “I thought they gave you back your license.”

  “The railroad told the DMV they’d sue the governor if they didn’t take me off the road.”

  “I thought Tim Hall helped you with that.”

  “Tim tried. But a bunch of parents said they’d sue the school board if they let me drive their kids. I have the whole goddamned state of Connecticut after me, and half the parents in Newbury. Just for doing a guy a favor.”

  “Weren’t you working for Billy?”

  “No! I quit soon as I saved up the down payment for the bus. I was ready to roll.”

  “Why were you driving his truck?”

  “He asked me would I run a rig back to Frenchtown. How was I supposed to know the cops were looking for it?”

  “Did Billy know?”

  “Why do you think he conned me into driving it?”

  “What are you saying? He was setting you up for a fall?”

  “No, no, no. Jesus, Ben. No, Billy didn’t have anything against me. He probably figured that if I could get it across town and under cover he was home free.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why would a guy making the bucks he was bother stealing a truck?”

  Jimmy looked at me like I was fifth grader who had just lost his lunch in the back seat. “You didn’t understand Billy. Nobody did. He didn’t deliberately steal the truck. It somehow fell in his hands. When he found out it was hot he figured if he could just hide it long enough to strip it he’d make a few bucks and keep some parts.”

  “The truck was a hunk of junk.”

  “Haulin’ a fine machine on the trailer.”

  “But he already owned a bunch of fine machines.”

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “No, I don’t get it. Why would a rich builder steal a truck?”

  “Billy didn’t think he was rich. In his head he was still getting six bucks an hour driving a honey wagon for Old Man Hopkins.”

  “Come on, everything he touched turned to gold.”

  “Builders are gamblers. He knew he could lose it all in one week if the economy went bad just when he finished a bunch of spec houses.”

  Jimmy had a point, there. If prices went down because interest rates went up, he could be sitting on houses he had to sell, but couldn’t, with the banks calling in their loans. Development had been so hot so long it was easy to forget the bad times when the banks shut everybody down and then the Feds shut the banks down. There were years—a long way back—when there was not a single pickup truck at the General Store buying coffee in the morning.

  The repo man crawled out from under the front of the bus and moved a lever on the side of his truck. The boom groaned and the front of the bus began to rise from the driveway.

  “Besides, Billy knew you people on Main Street still looked down on him, no matter how much money he made.” Jimmy’s matter-of-fact observation of the tattered remnants of the old social order before the population doubled was delivered without rancor.

  “So what did he have against you?”

  “Nothing. I was handy. If somebody else was standing nearer he’d have asked him.”

  “What did the cops say when you said you were driving it for Billy?”

  “They asked did I work for him. I said I used to. Not any more. So why would you be driving a truck for him? they asked. I said, ask Billy. They went to Billy and Billy and Eddie Edwards told them I asked if I could park the truck in Billy’s barn.”

  “Their word against yours?”

  “I couldn’t prove I didn’t. The cops couldn’t prove I had actually stolen the truck, thank God. But the railroad and the parents were on my case, so they settled for taking away my license.”

  “So everyone went home happy.”

  “Except me. No license. I couldn’t drive the baseball teams last spring. Couldn’t drive for summer school. I couldn’t drive anything to make my payments.”

  “Did you confront Billy?”

  “Sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “He laughed at me.”

  “That must have pissed you off.”

  Jimmy watched his bus disappear around the corner. “When I heard that kid got him with the bulldozer I said to myself, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”

  I looke
d at him closely. “That was a pretty fancy job of bulldozer driving from what I saw.”

  “I could have done it easy. I’ve been running machines my whole life….All I can say is I hope the kid gets off.” He stared, blinking mournfully at the empty space in his driveway. “Couldn’t they get him time off for public service?”

  “I’ll suggest that to his lawyer.”

  Jimmy manufactured a smile.

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “See if I can find a job. Before they take my house.”

  “You behind?”

  “Only five months.”

  “Maybe you can work something out.”

  “Are you kidding? The mortgage company wants this house for a tear down. They already foreclosed on my neighbor.” It finally registered on me that the empty house next door had no For Sale sign. “With all the building going on the land’s worth more than the houses. They’ll tear both down, make one big lot and stick a McMansion on it.”

  ***

  It looked like date night at Home Depot.

  Couples were streaming in for a do-it-yourself evening out, sparkling with hope. The women wore makeup and had done their hair. Their guys hadn’t gone to quite as much trouble in the looks department, but most had showered, recently, and slapped some mousse on their hair or covered it with a clean cap. Walking in alone and feeling suddenly out of it, I recalled a time when I was a kid before guys rubbed “hair product” in their hair, before they invented Home Depot—back when lumber yards existed for the express purposes of humiliating men who weren’t contractors and offering women an opportunity to be leered at indoors.

  Many women appeared to be test driving new guys. The guys looked happy to buy into Home Depot’s I-can-do-it-myself promise—build that deck, tile that bathroom, install that Jacuzzi, lay that parquet, expand that kitchen. They puffed up around the tool department. But the women were leading the way toward Bath and Kitchens and while they let the guys stop, briefly, like dogs at hydrants, they were unfolding sheets of paper with measurements written down.

  I was hunting a bankrupt contractor named Georgie Stefanopoulos, who used to specialize in decks, pool houses, and the surrounding landscape. We had played ball together when we were kids. By the time I returned to Newbury from my excursion into the wider world, Georgie owned a very large landscaping outfit. Last time I was here buying pressure-treated posts for Redman’s corral, I had spotted him wearing a name tag that said “George” and an orange apron that read, “I Can Help In Any Department.”

  I found him in Lumber, surrounded by flocks of customers, and trailed him as he answered questions on an orbit from Hardware to Plumbing to Electrical, outside to Gardening and back through Kitchen, Bath, Floors, Paint and Mill Work and back to Lumber, where I was finally able to make myself useful helping George help a carpenter on crutches who was buying three-quarter-inch birch-veneer plywood. We were breathing hard by the time we trundled the carpenter and his wood through checkout and loaded his pickup. I stood with George while he had a cigarette in the parking lot.

  He hadn’t put on a pound since high school, still a tightly wound little guy, with arms and legs as taut and strong as aircraft cable, the woven stainless steel wire rope that will not stretch.

  “How you doing with the probation?” I asked. Management was on his case, he had told me last time, for flaring up at a customer who had annoyed him.

  “Where’d you hear about that?”

  “You mentioned it last time I saw you.”

  “I did?” He laughed, dryly. “I was spilling my guts, like the rage counselor said to. Yeah, it’s okay, now. I’m off.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Freakin’ stupid thing to be congratulated for. Freakin’ idiot customer endangers his life and everyone in the aisle by climbing a wood rack and I’m the one who gets in trouble. They had a guy killed in the wood rack couple of years ago. It’s like a factory floor in there but people treat it like they’re buying cotton balls in the drug store. I had no idea how stupid people were ’til I got into retail.”

  “I’ll bet you miss construction,” I said, unsubtly. He looked mad as hell and that’s exactly the frame of mind I wanted him to discuss his nemesis Billy Tiller.

  He said, “I miss the money. I miss being my own boss. I miss my garage full of machines. I don’t miss the headaches.” Then he launched into more philosophy than he would have back then. “Freakin’ customers, come to you thinking they want a pool or a deck or a—a…”

  “Patio?”

  “Doesn’t matter if it’s a patio or pool or freakin’ pool house. They want the same thing. They want a dream realized.”

  This was a conversation that would have made more sense in a bar, on the third round. I blamed his sessions on channeling rage.

  “But since they are incapable of expressing their dream in any concrete manner, they expect you the contractor to express it for them so that the job looks exactly like what they dreamed—note I say dreamed, not imagined, as they don’t have any freakin’ imagination to speak of, only a checkbook and a desire to own something perfect they can show off to their freakin’ friends.”

  “I wanted to ask you about Billy Tiller.”

  “Billy? That scumbag. Funny coincidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re talking about dreaming, here, right? That’s what Billy sold. From the get go. From the time he got out of high school.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Billy was a con man.”

  “He started a con man. But he became a developer.”

  “He was a con man.”

  “Originally,” I said. “But he became—”

  “Remember the oil change scam?” he laughed. “There were cars in Newbury that shared the same oil for three years running. God knows how many turbos he burned up.”

  George was surprising me. He sounded almost admiring of a man I had assumed he hated. “My favorite,” he said, “was the car rental scam.”

  “I missed that one.”

  “Don’t you remember, when he had the garage, Billy got a car rental franchise?”

  “Right. Pink mentioned that. So Billy’s repair customers had to rent a loaner instead of getting it free. That’s not exactly a con.”

  “He didn’t do it for the customers. He did it for the parts.”

  “What parts?”

  “Batteries, tires, transmissions. Entire engines. Which he would swap out of the rentals and replace with the guts of clunkers.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The man was a genius.”

  “But are you saying he was con man as developer, too? I thought he had kind of moved up a rung.”

  George shook his head. “It’s not a big jump from cheap con man to developer. They’re both into risk. They’re both opportunistic. Both amoral, if not immoral. And they’re both naturally entrepreneurial.”

  “Not every developer is a crook.”

  Georgie looked off into the middle distance, as if somewhere between the Home Depot, Stew Leonard’s, and a discount liquor warehouse, he might glimpse one who wasn’t. “Maybe not,” he conceded at last. “But these are people who get stuff done. Which means getting your way over other people. You gotta hand it to them. They’re self-starters. Say what you will about Billy, he was a self-starter. And a darned smart one, too.”

  “Do you think Billy was really smart?”

  “You better believe he was smart. Listen, I was in business a long time. He was one of the smartest guys around. Smart businessman. Smart con artist. All he needed was a break. When he got it—when his uncle left him the farm—he went from a small time grifter to a big time developer. How? Simple. It’s the same head. And don’t forget, you make your profit by cutting corners, which can include not paying your freakin’ bills to suckers like me.”

  “If you knew that, why did you get involved with him?”


  George tossed his butt under a Volvo. “I was your classic con victim. I wanted to believe. I needed to believe. I needed the work. I was suddenly in trouble. Got overextended. He offered a deal that could have saved me. Hell, it would have if he had kept his word and paid me what he owed me. Instead I’m bankrupt and working for fifteen bucks an hour. At this rate I’ll have my debts cleared up in 2030.” He said it in a bantering tone, but his eyes were bleak.

  “Couldn’t you earn more driving a machine?”

  George looked at me, hard. The tendons in his neck went taut. “I won’t drive another man’s machine. I tried. Couldn’t stand it.”

  “What did you think when he got killed?”

  George laughed. “Not what I would have predicted.”

  “What would you have predicted?”

  “That I’d be glad. I actually opened a beer and started to toast the kid who got him. Couldn’t.” He looked across the lot at the couples streaming into the big store. “I don’t know what happens. You get older or what, I don’t know. But it just didn’t seem right to laugh about a dead guy. I mean, if anyone deserved to get killed it was Billy. But it’s not funny. He was killed. Think about his last moments. You want to be that scared? You want to make somebody that scared? Even somebody you hate? I mean, would you really do that to somebody?”

  He looked at me, demanding an answer. I said, “No.”

  “Neither would I.…I know what you were thinking, Ben. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Chapter Seven

  Jeff Kimball’s mother looked like she had been drawn with sharp pencils and a straight edge. Her hair fell in a direct line to her shoulders, her cheek bones were high and strained her skin, her chin was pointed. She had a surprisingly full mouth, turned down at the corners. There was anger in her face, but she was not severe, not with the despair that clouded it like a bruise.

  “What can I tell you?” she asked, meaning she had nothing to say. Maybe not, but I was running out of options.

  We were standing at the front door of her once-pretty clapboard farmhouse. The paint was fading and newer homes were crowding the property. On one side, a road opened into the heart-stoppingly ugly mansions of Tiller Woods—Billy’s first project. On the other side were a raised ranch that dated back to the mid 1990s and a late 1990s McMansion. Trees had been cleared and a foundation poured for a third house, which would be even bigger than the McMansion. Even if I hadn’t already checked the records at Town Hall, it would be obvious that Jeff’s mother had been reducing her tax bill, or making ends meet, by selling bits and pieces of her land.