Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  “I think the paint was added later.” Cagey, cagey. She wanted the mirror. She wanted answers, too. Sometimes life really could be about getting both.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “That would reduce the value.”

  “If you say so.”

  She calculated furiously, and made a take-it-or-leave-it offer, as she had learned from Granny Vee: Never bargain, Amaretta had preached. Walk away politely but walk away. That’s the way to stay rich. Only with Kellen had Julia failed to heed this advice. Walking away had been impossible. Tessa had been forced to drag her. But this time, she promised herself—this time, she would walk away from Kellen. She would. She promised.

  Just as soon as she got a few answers.

  Frank pleaded other customers and high expenses, but Julia refused to budge, and, in the end, he yielded, because he knew, as she did, that the price was fair.

  As they shook hands, Julia said, in as casual a voice as she could manage, “People say you used to be a cop.”

  “A deputy,” he said at once, not lifting his gaze from the credit-card machine, which was the dial-up kind. “A long time ago.”

  “Thirty years ago.”

  A pause.

  “About that.”

  “When Gina Joule was—”

  He swiveled, a statue on a plinth, hands folded for prayer. “Sign here, please,” he said. His hands trembled.

  “I just wanted to ask—”

  “I know what you wanted to ask.”

  “Frank—”

  “We don’t talk about it.”

  “Who’s we?”

  He tore off her copy of the credit-card slip, handed it over. “You’re a newcomer, Julia. Not an old Landinger. Now, I like you. I like your family. I’m glad you’re here. And you know I think we need more minorities. But there are things”—he glanced toward the front of the store, where, a month ago, Jeannie had broken the porcelain train station; today Julia was alone—“that it’s not safe to talk about.”

  “Not safe?”

  “I’m not a brave man,” Frank said, and dropped his head again to prove it.

  Julia stepped in front of him, crowding his vision, making him look at her. “Frank, listen to me. You said you know why I’m here. I’m here about Gina. About what happened that night. You were a cop. A deputy. It’s not like the Landing has a lot of crime. You must have worked the case.” His wary eyes watched her. “Everybody says DeShaun Moton did it. The way you’re reacting now, I get the idea you don’t think that’s true.” Shying bonelessly away, he shook his head—in refusal, not denial. Julia clutched his shoulders, wishing she could shake it out of him. “Frank, please. This isn’t just curiosity. This is—it’s important. I have to know.”

  He hesitated, biting hard on his lower lip in agonized indecision, then crossed to the door and flipped the sign from HI, WE’RE OPEN! to BE BACK SOON! Then he beckoned her toward the back room. Julia, seeing that he was doing all the things you should never do when trying to avoid attention, worried about what unfortunate rumors might next fly through the chatty little village, but followed nevertheless.

  (II)

  THEY SAT AT A WORK TABLE drinking coffee. Chilly breezes sliced through a cracked window, but Frank Carrington, Yankee frugal, was not about to turn up the heat. Putting on an extra sweater was your job.

  Frank came straight to the point, the reluctant penitent who had decided to confess all.

  “You’re right, Julia. I worked the Joule case. Everybody did. Look. The whole force in those days was a constable, two dispatchers, and three deputies. It was us, the state boys, a couple of detectives they loaned us from the city. There was pressure. Political pressure. The newspapers. In those days we didn’t have so many professors. The town was…poor. Oh, sure, there were the big houses on the water, but mostly it was farmers and, on Main Street, a little bit of trade. We’re kind of far from the city, and we weren’t fashionable yet. So you see the problem. A little girl gets killed? The daughter of one of the few university types we have? Yes. There was pressure. Plenty of it. Old Arnie Huebner was constable in those days, and Tommy Highsmith was his boss. Tommy had been first selectman since Moses brought the tablets down from Sinai, and he must have been pushing eighty, but in those days the Landing was Tommy’s town. And Arnie would come in every day and tell us how Tommy was complaining. And the Joules, well, they were pretty well connected. The governor would call, some people from Washington—you get the idea. They’d pressure Tommy, Tommy would pressure Arnie, Arnie would pressure the rest of us.”

  He was working on his second cup of coffee. Julia had barely sipped her first. He had offered her a sticky bun that also looked like it had come down with Moses. Outside the window, afternoon wind swirled yesterday’s snow.

  “Local pressure, too. The president of the university. The Lands. Gina was one of theirs. And the Whisteds—”

  “Whisted? As in, Senator Whisted?”

  “Sure. You know the Senator was a student in those days, right? Well, his family was pretty prominent politically in this state. You know that. What you might not know is that Merrill Joule was his godfather. Mal was close to the Joule family. Used to have dinner at their house a couple of times a month. Well, after Gina died, he was one of the loudest of the voices yelling for justice. He must have been—what?—twenty-one? He organized search parties, I mean until her body washed up. Then, after we found her, he’d be on the phone five times a day demanding action. Did this for about a week, and then I guess somebody must have called him off.”

  “Called him off?”

  A tired shrug. Frank swallowed more coffee, pulled a sour face, then glanced toward the front shop window with such unease that Julia half expected the bad guys to burst in. “Well, he stopped bothering us. That’s all I know. But we kept looking. As a matter of fact, we didn’t really do anything else but work the Joule case.”

  A beat.

  “That’s the official story, anyway. And maybe it’s partly true. I mean, yes, there was pressure, and plenty of it. But there’s more. Julia, you know, the Landing—well, you probably think it’s kind of a conservative town, and it is. Back in those days, well, if anything, we were more conservative. I like to think nowadays we’re conservative in a useful way. But back then, well, we were conservative in a bad way. And, well, there’s no good way to say this.” The antiques dealer was in motion, as if the table had become too constricting, and the back room too small. He was prowling the shelves, peeking here and there as if to find the rest of his tale.

  “They didn’t want to solve it. There. They didn’t want to, Julia. They focused on DeShaun almost from the minute he was shot. Nobody else. Just DeShaun. There were rumors of a boyfriend, but we didn’t track those down. And there were other leads we didn’t check out.” Frank had found a perch, swinging long legs as he sat on a bench, jammed between a couple of New England–style sewing machines, one of which might or might not have been a genuine Shaw Clark “closed pillar” model. “All we did was concentrate on DeShaun. That’s what they told us, and that’s what we did. And Constable Huebner, well, he was mad about the whole thing, but what was he going to do? It’s a good job, constable, especially in a little town like this one, with no crime. So he went along.”

  Julia said, “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “They?”

  “You said they didn’t want it solved. You said they told you. I’m assuming that the same they told the constable what to do. Who were they?”

  The words came out flat and uninflected, as if forcing themselves between unwilling lips. “I don’t know. None of us knew. But there was pressure. We all knew that. And the constable said—”

  On his feet again, facing away from her, face pressed against the window. “It was a day just like this,” said Frank, and at first Julia thought it a non sequitur. “Snow pelting down like somebody was up there pouring it. We were in the squad room. That’s what we called it. It was kind of a joke. Really what we had was this li
ttle corner of the town hall, down in the basement, in the back. Must have been about four, because I was just coming on shift. Arnie was there, and Ralphie Nacchio—he’s dead now—and the day dispatcher, Cheryl Wysocki. She moved to Florida, I think. Anyway, it’s just the four of us there, and Arnie’s been at this meeting for hours. He comes in out of the storm, and he tells us, okay, that’s it, put the chairs back on the tables till next time. It was one of his expressions. He meant the hunt was over. This was, let’s see, um, three or four days after the black boy got shot. Four days, maybe. He came in and stood there dripping all over the floor and told us it was over, and how it was time to get back to business as usual. And Ralphie, well, Ralphie always had this mouth on him—he asked Arnie exactly what business was that. Because Ralphie was the one who’d heard those boyfriend rumors that the state boys never did anything about. And Ralphie had other leads, too. He was a good cop. Anyway, Ralphie said, um, if we’re not in the business of solving murders, we shouldn’t be in business. Arnie gave him this look he used to have if he thought you were being insolent? Like he might pick you up and put you through the window? Arnie said, the last time he checked, he didn’t follow Ralphie’s orders. Well, so Ralphie shut up. I respected Arnold Huebner. But this one was too much. Arnie was a good man, but in this case he was following orders, and the orders stunk. Call me a moral coward if you want. I didn’t argue, but I still couldn’t be a part of the force any more. Six months later—seven—I quit. Ralphie left the next year. And that was the end of that.”

  “No,” said Julia, the analytical part of her mind trumping her flaming red fury. “No, Frank. That’s not the end of that.”

  “It’s all I know,” he insisted.

  “I don’t think so. You still can’t meet my eyes. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “Julia—”

  “There’s more to the story. And Kellen Zant knew what the more was, didn’t he? Maybe he even asked you about it, when he came in to buy the cheval.”

  Silence, but the chin lifted briefly before the antiques dealer swung away toward the window once more.

  “Come on, Frank. Why did you tell me all this?”

  “Because it’s time, Julia. It’s time for the lies to stop. It’s time for the town to pay.”

  “The town?”

  Rich with pain and rimmed with fear, the eyes met hers once more. “Arnie kept a diary,” Frank said. “And, well, I think he wrote down all the reasons he thought DeShaun didn’t do it. Maybe he even wrote down who he thinks did do it. And I’ll bet he wrote down who pressured him to say it was DeShaun.” He paused. “Nobody knows what happened to the diary, Julia. People around town know he kept one, but nobody knows where it is. Not even his boy. Mitch. Ten, twelve years ago, Mitch offered some kind of cash reward if anybody came up with it. No takers.” He glanced around the shop as if expecting to find the diary on the shelf. “Me? I think it doesn’t exist any more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it hasn’t turned up. See, Julia, ask yourself. Somebody puts pressure on Arnold Huebner to drop the case. Arnold Huebner’s diary goes missing. If I was the one who put the pressure on and I got my hands on the diary, I’d just burn it. I wouldn’t keep it around.”

  Julia remembered Tony Tice outside the restaurant, telling her about the item his client was trying to buy. She said, “Did you tell Kellen Zant any of this?”

  Frank swung back from the window. “Any of what?”

  “About the diary?”

  A slow shake of the head, as if the idea was new to him. “I’m sorry, Julia. It’s like I told you. Kellen Zant didn’t come to the shop to talk about Gina. He came to the shop to buy that antique mirror.”

  At the door, her carefully wrapped purchase in her arms, Julia had a final question. “What if the person who had it wasn’t the same person who put the pressure on?”

  The dealer spread his soft hands. “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “The diary. Arnold Huebner’s diary. Maybe whoever closed down the investigation didn’t find it. Maybe somebody hid it to keep it away from…from the bad guys.”

  “I guess that’s possible.” He sounded skeptical. “I don’t know, though. Because, if it was me who had it? I’d have made it public. Cleared that poor black boy’s name.”

  “I can think of two other possibilities,” said Julia, mostly to herself.

  “What are they?”

  “Maybe it’s still hidden, and the good guys haven’t found it yet. Or maybe—”

  But she stopped herself. She was not about to offer the worst possibility of all, that Kellen had somehow gotten his greedy hands on Arnold Huebner’s diary and, instead of clearing DeShaun, had auctioned it to the highest bidder.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t come around for a while, Julia. A fella could get into bad trouble, talking about these things.”

  (III)

  JULIA MARCHED OUT THE DOOR, the newly purchased Federal mirror from the Winterthur book under her arm, intending to hit Cookie’s before it closed, and hit instead a patch of black ice at the bottom of the steps. Her feet went out from under her, the mirror shattered on the sidewalk, and her head would have hit the nearest wall had a strong hand not chosen that moment to grab her.

  What happened next was confusing.

  Mitch Huebner, broad and red-faced and boozily unshaven beneath his watch cap, had firm hold of her shoulders and jerked her to her feet, then saw who she was and got up in her face, thick finger waggling, demanding that she stop spreading all these lies about how he had broken her lights and refused to pay. Julia, dizzy from the fall, and dizzier from the coincidence of meeting him immediately after hearing Frank’s story, at first had literally no idea what Huebner was talking about. He said that it was hurting his business, that he never in his life had refused to pay for damage he had done, but he resented being pressured to pay for harm he had never caused, and his words were all gibberish to her, sheer gibberish.

  Then Mitch stopped and turned away and said what sounded like “Oof!”—exactly the way they used to write it in the comic books—and Jeremy Flew was between them, palms raised toward the larger man as if to make peace, but also effectively holding him away from Julia—at some risk to himself, she realized, should Mr. Huebner decide to take a hammy fist to the little man’s slender face.

  “Please leave Mrs. Carlyle alone,” said Flew reasonably. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, confused. Bleary eyes measured Flew, then flashed at Julia. “I’m not making trouble. She’s the one making trouble.”

  “Please do not put your hands on Mrs. Carlyle again.”

  “She’s telling everybody these lies—”

  “Please,” said Flew again, the voice of sweet reason in the middle of the wintry street. A couple of passersby had stopped to watch the fun. Julia, every bit as bewildered as Mitch Huebner, had no idea where on earth the sprite had materialized from.

  “This is a private conversation,” Huebner snapped, and tried to push past, but Flew moved with him, keeping between the adversaries.

  “Please do not do this, sir.”

  “She’s libeling me!”

  “I believe you mean she’s slandering you,” said Flew, still smiling.

  So Mitch Huebner put his hands on the little man instead, sweeping him aside in a rage, except that the bigger man wound up sitting on the frozen sidewalk, Flew still standing there with his hands up and out. Huebner started to get up, and Flew shoved him down again. It seemed to take little effort. His smile never wavered.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Mitch again, but with less force. He was so large and, to those in the Landing, so scary. Thirty years ago, he had been the great bully in the local schools: Landingers still trembled when they told the stories. But here he was, sitting on his derrière, obviously in no hurry to try getting up again. Julia felt for him.

  “A friend of Mrs. Carlyle’s.”

  “Well, you bet
ter not touch me again.”

  “Please stay away from Mrs. Carlyle,” said Flew again, like an automaton.

  Julia said, “Jeremy, wait.”

  “I’m just trying to—”

  “Let him up.”

  The little man stepped hastily back, and Mr. Huebner climbed to his feet. He jabbed an angry finger at Flew. “You try that again, you little bastard, we’ll see who winds up on top.”

  “No, thank you,” said Flew, with a polite bow. But he remained between the larger man and Julia, and she saw something in the playful eyes that frightened her.

  She said, “You’re right, Mr. Huebner. I’m sorry.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m sorry to have accused you falsely. I’m sure you didn’t break my lampposts, and I was wrong to tell anybody that you did. Please forgive me. I hope that you’ll be taking care of our driveway for years to come.”

  She shook his astonished hand, his huge paw swallowing her tiny one.

  “I’d like to ask you a question if I could.”

  “What question?” he asked, sullen eyes still on Jeremy Flew.

  “It’s about your father—”

  “What about him?”

  “I was wondering if you ever found his diary.”

  Violence rose in the puffy red eyes, and Flew, sensing the recharged atmosphere, moved closer. But Huebner only glared at her, then turned on his heel and stalked off.

  Escorting her to the Escalade, little Flew broke out in paroxysms of nervous laughter. “I never did that before. I’ve had self-defense classes for years, but I never got to use them. Know what? I can see why people go to war. It’s fun!”

  “When you win,” muttered Julia, who had seen humiliation and its close cousin, murder, warring in Mitch Huebner’s eyes before she sounded retreat. But Mr. Flew just went on laughing his delighted executioner’s laugh, and Julia, slogging through the snow, forgot to ask how on earth he had shown up just when needed. She was too busy wondering who exactly her husband had invited beneath their roof.