McMansion

by Justin Scott

  Wide Greg edged closer to the PVC pipe he had nailed under the bar to hold his baseball bat. I said, in a big, cheery voice, “Good morning, cousins.”

  “What the fuck do you want?” asked Pink. I guessed he had not been to bed.

  He and I get on well, as a rule. Renny and I had hung tight as boys. Pink had looked after him, and me too, and what others considered flaws in my character, the willfully unevolved Pinkerton admired. Occasionally, when an investigation requires me to ask what might be construed as offensive questions, he comes along as backup and I feel as secure as a diplomat with a satellite link to a submarine full of cruise missiles.

  “Answers,” I went on cheerily. “Answers. I have questions for both of you.”

  Now Sherman was staring, too, unpleasantly. Chevalley men fall into two general body types. Huge and incredibly huge, like Pinkerton, form the larger group. A few are skinny. Sherman was of the latter, quite tall and remarkably strong, though thin as a snake. A snake with a deep, gravelly voice. “What kind of questions?”

  “First I have a question for Greg,” I said, turning to Wide Greg. “Good morning, Greg.”

  Greg nodded. Experienced at keeping order among the disorderly, he knew that I was trying to distract them from killing each other. He appeared mildly curious whether it would work.

  “Greg, my question for you is, could you bring another round for me and my family?”

  Sherman smiled a little. Pink looked suspicious.

  Silently, Greg opened three bottles, placed one each in front of Pink and Sherman, and brought me mine. I was still on my feet, standing at the end of the bar, very near the door. I placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and told Wide Greg, “I’ll need a receipt. It’s on the client.”

  Greg returned a dark look. The business had gone cash-only after Visa and MasterCard installed detectives in the parking lot with direct lines to their Lost and Stolen Card Divisions. I tipped my bottle in the direction of the boys down bar. “Cheers, guys.”

  This was the crucial moment. Like the moment the rodeo clown climbs out of his barrel to draw away the bull—in this case bulls—bent on goring the rider. “Pink,” I said, “remember when they shot Billy Tiller on Main Street?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember that rumor you told me?”

  “Which one?”

  “That it was a setup.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Was it?”

  “Was it what?”

  “A setup,” interrupted Sherman Chevalley. “You deaf or something? He’s asking you was it a setup?”

  Pink turned on him. “No, I’m not deaf or something. Are you stupid or something? Or are you just tired of looking at your face in the mirror because if you are I can change that for you.”

  “Out!” said Wide Greg, indicating the door with his baseball bat.

  Pink’s massive jaw dropped like a cinder block. “What did I do?” he protested, aggrieved as an eighth grader wrongly accused of lobbing a spitball. “Hey, come on, Greg.”

  Greg stood still as a ledge of granite.

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Out. One week!”

  There was a powerful dynamic operating. Surely, Pink felt no fear even though Wide Greg was aptly named and close inspection of his baseball bat might reveal bone splinters. But the White Birch was home. A permanent banning would leave a man with nowhere to go ever again but his car repair business during the day and his mother’s double-wide house trailer at night. A full week would be hell enough.

  “Out,” Wide Greg repeated, almost gently. “Don’t force me to make it two.” He turn his attention to Sherman, who was gloating. “One word and you are gone for three.”

  Sherman turned his attention to the interior of his beer bottle. Pink hulked to his feet, threw a wad of money on the bar, and shambled past me out the door. I followed and found him climbing mournfully into a borrowed car.

  “Here. Finish this.” I thrust my bottle in his huge paw.

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Nobody ever said life was fair.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Listen, Pink, that setup rumor, how did that go?”

  “It was bullshit.”

  “That’s what I thought at the time. But you insisted.”

  “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “You said you heard the shooter called him in the hospital. Said he was pissed because Billy called 911.”

  “It was bullshit.”

  “That’s what Billy told me.”

  “Billy knew what really happened.”

  “What was that?”

  “Ben, you don’t know a damned thing about anything, do you?”

  “Hey, I’m just a spoiled brat from Main Street. But tell me this. Somebody was warning him off. Weren’t they?”

  “Looked that way.”

  “They had probably warned him off a couple times. But he kept doing it, right.”

  “Billy always kept doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  “A land deal, maybe?”

  Pink shrugged, shaking the borrowed car. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe destroying something somebody cared about.”

  “Billy nuked a lot of stuff.”

  “Maybe he ripped off a supplier?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Maybe he didn’t pay somebody what he owed him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Pink, I’m not learning a lot from you.”

  “You’re not asking me anything I know.”

  “Or even heard a rumor about?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me this. What really happened? Who was the shooter?”

  Pink drained the beer I had given him. Slowly. Silently.

  “Was he alone? Did he have a driver?”

  “Driver? Are you fucking crazy?”

  “I’m only asking because he was shooting .22 longs, which was probably a rifle and how the hell do you fire a rifle repeatedly while you’re driving. For that matter, if he wanted to get Billy why didn’t he use a shotgun?”

  “You are so out of it.”

  “Come on, Pink. Give me a break. Stop telling me I’m out of it. Help me here.”

  “There was no car.”

  “What are you talking about? Everybody saw a car.”

  “Did the cops ever find a car?”

  “No.”

  “Did they get a marker plate?”

  “No.”

  “You were there, Ben. Did you see a car?”

  “I saw a car go by fast.”

  “Did you describe it to the cops?”

  “I didn’t pay any attention to it. Then the shooting started.”

  Pink started his borrowed car and raced the engine, listening carefully. Then he pressed down hard and got ready to pop the clutch. “The way I hear it,” he yelled over the roar of the engine, “the shooter waited for a car to go by fast. Then he opened up. With a rifle.”

  “From where?” I shouted.

  “Meeting House belfry, I heard. I also heard he was in the clock cupola on Town Hall.”

  “That was a lot of shooting. Funny the cops never found any shell casings.”

  “Maybe they did and didn’t say. Maybe the shooter picked them up. Maybe he put a bag over the ejection port. Maybe it’s all bullshit. It doesn’t matter. He got him in the end.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He got him with the bulldozer.”

  “Who?”

  “I’d start with the kid sitting on the bulldozer.”

  Pink popped the clutch and tore away, laying down just enough rubber in Wide Greg’s parking lot to show that while he understood Greg’s need to keep things quiet and peaceful in a bar the town fathers dreamed of shutting down, a man still had a right to be hurt, angry, and deeply disappointed in Greg’s inabilit
y to distinguish the innocent from the guilty.

  I went back inside and asked Cousin Sherman how skilled an operator had to be to impale a crawling man with the ripper. Sherman answered at length over the next beer I bought him. The short version was, very skilled, or damned lucky.

  “For all we know the dude took four or five shots at Billy before he nailed him. You know: Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! while Billy’s squirming around trying to get away.”

  “I only saw one deep gouge.”

  “The way that machine was spinning around? Nobody knows how many shots he took with the ripper. Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!”

  “So, skilled or lucky?”

  “Or both.” Sherman peered into his empty bottle like he was mourning a dead friend. I bought him another, brushing aside his thanks with a casual, “It’s on Attorney Roth.”

  “No it ain’t. It’s on Jeff.”

  “Who?”

  “Little Jeff Kimball, that Ollie arrested.”

  “Well, in actual fact the beer is on his dad and he can afford it.”

  “The least he can do,” Sherman mumbled, running a dirty hand through stringy gray hair. His eye rose to the silent TV, which had a morning gun show on. A man dressed like a Marine was demonstrating how a .50 caliber rifle could shoot holes in steel.

  “What do you mean, the least he can do?”

  “That poor little guy. I never saw a little bastard so needing his old man.”

  “You know him?”

  “Know him? Who do you think taught Jeff Kimball how to drive a bulldozer?”

  “You taught Jeff to drive a bulldozer?”

  “What about it?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  He was right about that. I paused a moment to consider whether I was truly stupid. Or just not paying attention. “How did you happen to teach him?”

  “He paid me. His old man. The kid handed me the dough. But it was the old man’s check.”

  “Was this when his father got him the union job?”

  Sherman snorted. “Rich people aren’t as smart as they’re cracked up to be. The old man gets the kid a union job with Federal pay driving a machine—instead of some guy trying to make a living—and suddenly, ‘Whoa! How do you run a machine?’”

  “How’d they pick you to be the teacher?”

  “You know how they do the career day at the high school?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They roped me into showing the little bastards bulldozers. I brought my machine up there. Somebody remembered.”

  His attention shifted to the TV again, where the man dressed like a Marine was shooting holes in a concrete wall. “Hey, Greg? Remember that guy selling those .50 caliber rifles?”

  “No,” said Wide Greg, without looking up from his morning papers. Police reports in the Waterbury Republican, Danbury News-Times, and Bridgeport’s Connecticut Post offered a reasonably accurate headcount of out-of-town regulars free to drop by the White Birch tonight.

  “Come on Greg, you remember, he had a whole bunch of cool stuff. Bayonets, flash grenades.”

  “I don’t remember,” said Wide Greg.

  “And the conversion kit for your semi-automatic?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell was his name? Funny name. Angel! Latino dude from Waterbury. He calls himself Angel. Yeah. That’s it. Angel. Next time you see Angel, this Latino dude from Waterbury, tell him I—” Sherman hesitated, as if he had suddenly recalled the terms of his parole. “Tell Angel—tell him I know a guy who might want to buy one of those fifties.”

  Greg put down his paper and said with finality, “There won’t be a next time as there wasn’t a first time.”

  I nudged my cousin back on line. “Sherman, do you like teaching?”

  He nodded. “I figured out the trick to it. First you look real careful at the guy learning. Then you say, ‘Okay you’re good at this. And that. And this. Let’s work on this, at which you suck.’”

  “How good was Jeff?”

  “Good. Damned good.”

  “Good enough to kill Billy with the ripper?”

  Sherman said, “The funeral’s tomorrow.”

  “Billy’s? Are you sure?”

  “Damn sure.”

  “It wasn’t in the Clarion.” Billy’s five-line obituary had not listed burial plans or where to send donations in lieu of flowers.

  “I helped Donny Butler dig the hole. His machine was down.”

  “I didn’t think they’d release the body so soon.”

  Sherman shrugged. “They’ll be burying more coffin than body.”

  “So how good was Jeff?”

  “The kid is a natural.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said.

  “What’s wrong, Ben?”

  “I’m goddamned disappointed to hear that. I was pretty much convinced he didn’t kill him.”

  “Jeff? He didn’t kill Billy.”

  “What?”

  “Jeff didn’t kill him.”

  “You just said he was a natural.”

  “Yeah, but there was no way Jeff Kimball could have killed Billy Tiller.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “When the dude who did him ran the meat grinder on Billy, he rotated the machine right. Right?”

  “Sherman, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Jeff always rotated left.”

  Was I hearing the best news I had since Ira Roth called me? “Explain,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Jeff stomped the left brake every time, locking the left tread, so the right tread, which keeps turning, spins her left.”

  “Every time?”

  “I tried to break him of the habit. I told him, ‘You’re going to get hurt one day when you have to go the other way all of a sudden and don’t have time to stop and think about it and then it will be too late and you’ll end up under the machine when it rolls over on your fucking head.’ But he wouldn’t change. Or he couldn’t. I mean everybody’s got some dumb thing they hang on to, don’t they, Ben?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I ran into Ira’s office saying, “You have got to hear this,” the lawyer was explaining the world to someone on the other end of his telephone headset. He waved me to a chair, continuing affably, “You raise an excellent point sir and indeed I too often marvel at that fine line between the expense of documentation, the cost of due diligence, the price of disclosure versus the danger, shall we say, of standing less than fully prepared before the court.”

  Ira was not a fat man, despite the vest, but in his arsenal of effects he kept a fat man’s laugh, which he loosed, when his client stopped talking, in an eruption of merry wit and world-weary worldliness. “Quite right, sir. It is the client’s money. Not to mention the client’s liberty.”

  He motioned, again, for me to sit down—I was pacing—ran the poor devil through his goodbyes, and hung up with a satisfied sigh.

  “So Ben, where are we?”

  “The man who taught Jeff how to run a bulldozer told me that Jeff could not have killed Billy Tiller because the murderer rotated the machine on top of him in a right-hand pivot and Jeff always rotated left.”

  “Why did Jeff always rotate left?”

  “Kind of a mental tic. Always left. Billy’s murderer pivoted right.”

  Ira thought on it for a moment. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting in one way—I mean it’s good for us to know he could not have killed Billy, but—”

  “My client killed no one,” Ira interrupted.

  “But I am not convinced that the gentleman who told me will be an asset on the witness stand.”

  “Why not? Teachers make excellent witnesses. Forthright, articulate, accustomed to speaking in public, thereby commanding both court’s and jury’s respect.”

  “It’s my cousin Sherman.”

 
; “Ah,” said Ira. He looked out his office window, seemed to wish it was the window that overlooked his racehorses instead of the clapboard side of Newbury Savings and Loan, and observed, “You bring me a convicted felon to strengthen our case.”

  “At least strengthen our resolve.”

  “I understand Sherman won parole,” Ira mused, hopefully. He shook his head. “Cancel that thought. By the time Jeff’s trial starts Sherman will likely be locked up for something else. Well, looking at, or at least for, a bright side, you are right about resolve. Your resolve. You can believe even more surely that Jeff is innocent. Despite appearances. Perhaps this knowledge will inspire you to more heroic efforts. Perhaps locate a witness less likely to be served with an arrest warrant as he mounts the stand.”

  “I’ll keep looking. By the way, Total Landscape’s lawyer tried to lean on me last night. Told me to back off. Stop besmirching the reputation of the company’s revered founder.”

  “You’re kidding.” Ira looked as surprised as I had felt. “Really?”

  “I came close to punching him out.”

  “That would have secured your reputation. Did he say why?”

  “Bad for business.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Nothing I could file a complaint for.”

  “Of course not. He’s an attorney. So how did he lean on you?”

  “First he suggested that we could work hand in hand to preserve open space if I, quote, let the trial take its course. Then he threatened to report me to various agencies in Hartford.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Then he said they would drive me crazy with lawsuits, clearly implying that they could afford lawyers I couldn’t.”

  “I wish I had that in an e-mail,” Ira said grimly. “Did anyone hear?”

  “No. He was careful.”

  “Was Eddie Edwards there?”

  “Not in earshot.”

  “Strange—Well, I’ll tell you, Ben. It’s very corporate, actually. You get these guys who convince themselves that the company is sacred. Occasionally they get so over excited they’ll say something really stupid. What’s his name?”

  “Woodward. Owen Woodward.”

  “I saw him at the Lions. Up from Stamford, I think. I’ll check him out. You’ve made me curious. Okay, what else?”

  “Fred Gleason is selling Billy’s house. It wasn’t owned by Billy. It’s owned by the company.”