Mausoleum

by Justin Scott

  “Really? With a behind like that?”

  “And a very good friend. How are you doing, Dan?”

  “Is she really a cop?”

  “She is a State Police detective lieutenant, a walking arsenal, and possesses a mind quicker than anything you can buy from Dell. How are you doing, Dan?”

  “Shouldn’t the guy paying you be asking how you are doing?”

  “Oh I’m doing very well, thank you for asking.”

  “Come on Ben.”

  “I predict, as I have been predicting all along, that the cops will announce a suspect soon. Either a name we all know. Or a stranger in town.”

  Dan did not react to that, saying only, “I thought we were paying you to get him first?”

  “Tell me something, Dan?”

  “What?”

  “Is there something you guys aren’t telling me?”

  “No!”

  “But you and Rick Bowland do seem obsessed.”

  “We already told you we’re just afraid that they’ll fool the judge into thinking that we are incompetent cronies who will destroy the association if the insurgents aren’t restored to power.”

  I almost repeated Henry Kissinger’s nasty take on academia: ‘The infighting was so vicious because the stakes were so small’. But Dan looked so unhappy that I could not quote such meanness. Particularly when he said loudly enough for the whole dining room to hear, “I mean I’ve got family in that ground, Ben. You’ve got family in there, too.”

  “Rick doesn’t,” I advocated for the Devil.

  Dan climbed very high on his horse. “The insurgents are pushing the kind of change that would change the cemetery forever. Rick Bowland is the kind of newcomer who works hard to keep this town the way it should be, not change it.”

  I said. “I would believe that sentiment more from a banker who had not jumped from Newbury Savings to the new national outfit that hands out mortgages for over-size McMansions to every bozo who pulls into town with zero down in his pocket and interest-only for the first two years.”

  Dan’s face got red. “Goddammit, Ben, it’s not my fault the town is changing. And you know that damned well.”

  “But that is not what is really troubling me.”

  “What’s troubling you?”

  “I’ve got friends jerking me around and I don’t like that.”

  “What?”

  “Since Brian got killed I’ve got friends lying to me, which I like even less than being jerked around.”

  Dan looked ready to throw a punch. Anne Marie started toward us, looking concerned about her glassware and crockery. I said, “Here comes Anne Marie. Maybe you and I should step outside?”

  “I won’t get in a fight where I pull my punches.”

  “I won’t ask you to pull your punches.”

  “But I will,” said Dan. “I’ll think what happens if you fall down and crack your skull, or a punch I could have taken ten years ago knocks my brains loose—it’s all right, Anne Marie, we’re just talking—and end up getting my head handed to me because that’s no way to win a fight.” He sat down in Marian’s chair and looked me in the face. “These changes you don’t like aren’t my fault, even if I am making a buck out of them. If I didn’t, someone else would. But it’s different in the burying ground, isn’t it? I mean that’s a place we should stop change. The town is our children’s town—they’ll live their lives as soon as we get old. Changes we hate they’ll take for granted. But the burying ground belongs to our parents. We owe protection to the people already there.”

  I had to smile. “We’ll make our last stand in the graveyard?”

  “And hope our children will do the same for us.”

  I offered my hand and said the only thing I could, “You’re a smarter man than I am, Dan.”

  ***

  Back in my office, I telephoned Sherman. No answer. Only after I had settled back with my feet on my father’s desk, did I realize how smart Dan Adams really was. He still hadn’t told me what they weren’t telling me.

  I called him in his office. “Did Brian bank with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he as solvent as he looked?”

  Dan hesitated a moment. “You got me in a conflict of interest, here, Ben, not to mention privacy issues.”

  “The way I see it, Brian’s dead. We’re alive. We’re not leaving an email trail. And unless you switched religions and didn’t tell anybody, neither of our phones are likely to be tapped by Homeland Security.”

  Again Dan hesitated. I heard his computer tell him, “You’ve got mail.”

  “Still with me Dan?”

  “What?”

  “At the rate I’m charging the Cemetery Association, checking your email while talking to me gets expensive.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I can do both.”

  “The question was: ‘Was Brian as solvent as he looked?’”

  “Not quite.”

  That was a fairly common answer to a routine question I had learned the hard way to ask in both my businesses. There was a ton of money around these days. But not everyone had as much as they pretended. So maybe Brian Grose had not retired quite so comfortably as his fancy house implied. In theory he could have been in hock to nasty sorts. Or working some scam to get out of trouble that got him deeper into trouble.

  “How much less than he looked?”

  “I don’t know the whole picture. I don’t know where else he maintained accounts.”

  “But you have a gut feeling about his circumstances, Dan.”

  “You’re asking me to speculate.”

  “I’m asking you to help me ‘get him—meaning the killer—first.’”

  Dan said, “Let me put it this way and then I’m hanging up the phone: I don’t believe that Brian was ready to retire.”

  It made we wonder what Brian had been working at to stay afloat or build for the future. But it still wasn’t what Dan and Rick weren’t telling me.

  Chapter Four

  According to a lady I occasionally spoke to who worked in Superior Court over in Plainfield, the county seat, Brian Grose’s murder wasn’t a hit. At least not in the sense of a professional murderer for hire. The troopers were telling the Connecticut State’s Attorney it was personal. As in three gossiply-cuckolded trustees or a hot-tempered gravedigger.

  “A love thing?” I asked

  “Pissed off employee thing.”

  We were drinking coffee in a quiet booth in the Courthouse Diner, before the lunch rush started. I said, “I wasn’t aware Grose had employees.”

  “Do you mow your own lawn?”

  “As a matter of fact I do. My lawn, and sometimes the lawns of deceased owners whose houses I’m trying to sell for far-away heirs.”

  “Yeah, well you’re in the minority.”

  “I’ve been accused of that before.”

  “I’m not accusing, I’m just saying.”

  “Understood.” I kept forgetting that the lady who worked in Superior Court had no sense of humor. Every word and every fact carried the same weight, and whatever witticisms I managed to toss out dribbled down her metaphoric front like Halloween eggs lobbed at plate glass.

  “My lawn isn’t that big—my house is right in town. Besides, the perennial borders hi-jack grass every time I turn my back.

  “Hi-jackers?”

  “So are you saying his lawn guy did it?” In which case my vague suspects were off the hook again.

  “I’m not saying. They’re saying.”

  She was a skinny, leggy little thing, quite lovely in her own way, a way that included hiding her hair under a scarf most of the time and made the occasions she took the scarf off a pleasant surprise of honey-toned curls laced with silver. I had met her while filling out paperwork to interview a client on the wrong side of the bars, and we would have coffee now and then. I sometimes wondered why she was so generous with her inside information except I think sh
e got a little kick out of having a secret. She was married. Whenever I planned to see her, I updated my vows not to get involved with other men’s wives and the one time it might have gone that way—we were drinking wine instead of coffee—I said to her, “These things usually end in tears,” and she looked relieved.

  “‘They’ being the major crime squad?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” She was not a “sort of” person.

  “Homeland Security wants him, too.”

  Why would Homeland Security want a “lawn guy?” Simple— ever since someone had gotten the bright idea to fold the Immigration and Naturalization Service—which was supposed to keep out impecunious migrants—into the Homeland Security Department, which was supposed to protect us from murderous Muslims.

  Few Yankees still made a living mowing grass in our patch of Connecticut. Those who did employed immigrant help, because teenagers and college students were getting fatter and lazier every day. A recent phenomena had the first of the immigrant owned lawn services cropping up, with a Ecuadorian or Guatemalan or Mexican name proud on the pickup truck door. But not many. All of which suggested that the low-rent Feds I’d seen with Detective Marian were Immigration agents.

  “What’s the lawn guy’s name?”

  “Charlie something. I can’t pronounce it. Here, I wrote it down.” She handed me a paper napkin which spelled out “Cubrero.”

  I couldn’t have pronounced it either, except I knew the guy. Sort of.

  ***

  I drove a subcompact Toyota Yaris, Pink’s latest entry in my find-new-wheels contest, back across the county to Newbury. Didn’t love the name and thought the color would look better on a polo shirt, but it was a cute little thing if you liked cute little things in automobiles, which I did not. Pink didn’t either, but he was having fun jerking my chain since I had expressed an interest in sensible gas mileage.

  I drove up and down some long driveways looking for the assistant chief of Newbury Volunteer Hook and Ladder Number One—Jay Meadows, proprietor of Meadows Landscaping—and finally found him on the Cruson place, mowing Dr. Dan’s croquet court. Jay shut down the machine and pulled foam plugs from his ears.

  I said, “Hello, Boss.”

  He’s the first boss I’ve had in years, but I had joined Hook and Ladder Number One, and Jay knew a lot more about fire fighting than I, the new volunteer. Although, in fact, so far I’d attended a lot more car wrecks than fires.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I’m looking for Charlie. I thought he’d be with you.”

  “Quit. Some rich guy up on Morris Mountain is paying him the same as me and guaranteeing forty hours a week winter and summer.”

  So I drove out to the Morristown district and nearly to the top of Morris Mountain where a failed dairy farm was being transformed by a Seventh Avenue garmento who had sold his handbag company to a frozen food conglomerate. Up until then, the garmento’s idea of “the country” had been the northern half of Central Park, so he had not been deterred from plowing his profits into stony ground that had bankrupted the last four generations of farmers who had tried to eke a living out of the place. Too ignorant to believe in failure, and too rich to fear it, Fred Kantor and his wife Joyce were already winning prizes for their artisan cheese, organically-raised knitting wool, and grass-fed beef.

  On this summer day, the results looked magnificent: reddish-gold hayfields rippling in the breeze, emerald pastures, pristine white fences, happy horses, contented cows, decorative sheep and cheerful goats. They had painted the old barns barn red and moved a bunch more barns and outbuildings Fred had purchased around New England onto the property and painted them barn red, too. They had added a kitchen and dining room to one side of the old farmhouse and guest suites to the other, each bigger than the original, which huddled between them like a small bird with big wings.

  I had sold them the land and they greeted me, as always, with huge smiles, that got wider when I repeated the phrase I always did: “Money well spent.” I loved them for it. Not only was it beautiful, but they had saved a hundred acres from development.

  “Guess what Fred bought,” said Joyce.

  “A general store.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m in real estate.”

  Truth be told, I knew by sheer coincidence. An email from a friend in Montana mentioned that a local general store had been bought lock, stock, and barrel by somebody in Newbury, Connecticut. With Scupper McKay busy dodging the Feds, the only other likely candidate had to be Fred Kantor who had been collecting so many old buildings there were rumors he was starting a folk art museum. But today I was more interested in a white clapboard dormitory he had built for his immigrant farmhands. Competition for reliable manual labor was getting fierce and Fred had triumphed over the lawn mowing guys like Meadows by hiring year round with two weeks paid vacation.

  I asked, “Have you seen Charlie Cubrero?”

  Fred and Joyce’s smiles dimmed and their sun-leathered faces wrinkled up like 3D topo maps.

  “You’re not the first to ask.”

  “Immigration?”

  “Trooper Moody was just here looking for him.”

  “Ollie? Did he say why?”

  “No, but he reminded me—threatened me—that quote, ‘Harboring a fugitive is a crime.’ The guy’s a real charmer. I called our attorney right away.”

  Resident State Trooper Moody ruled his vast domain by terrorizing the terrible, brutalizing bullies, whacking wife beaters, reining in the rambunctious, detaining drunks, and luring the law-abiding into his radar traps. The second son of a dairy farmer, and a former U.S. Army MP, Ollie knew how to defer to the grandees of the old social order without losing an ounce of his authority, but he got a little confused by the recently-very-rich like Fred and Joyce who reached for lawyers like shotguns.

  “Our attorney is writing Trooper Moody a letter.”

  “On the assumption,” Joyce interrupted, “that Trooper Moody can read.”

  “What about Charlie? Have you seen him?”

  “Not since Thursday. He disappeared. All of a sudden. Took one of the boys with him and split.”

  “I heard he wasn’t like that.”

  “You’re telling me? He was the best man on the place.”

  “Jay Meadows swore by him. Before you hired him away.”

  “Yeah, well, Jay couldn’t pay him in the winter. I offered a better deal than washing dishes for six bucks an hour.”

  I refrained from explaining that grass didn’t grow in the winter and that the ground was frozen too hard for a landscaping guy to dig holes for plants. Fred had been farming in Newbury long enough to know that.

  He said, “Obviously an immigration problem.”

  “Ollie doesn’t have time for immigration.”

  “Yeah, but the immigration people were here yesterday.”

  “Really?”

  “Trooper Moody was following up—we’ve got a screwed up scene, Ben. The only people who want to work on the place are criminals? Come on. To treat a guy like Charlie like a criminal is—well—criminal.”

  “And Trooper Moody didn’t mention any other problem? Any other reason he was looking for him?”

  Fred Kantor gave me a look that reminded me that he had not gotten rich by accident. “Jay Meadows wasn’t the only person Charlie worked for before me.”

  “He mowed Brian Grose’s lawn, I was told.”

  “Well until they arrest somebody for shooting Brian Grose the cops are going to talk to everyone who knew him. Right?”

  ***

  Right, of course. Except that one day last fall Jay Meadows brought Charlie and a tractor out to my mother’s place in Frenchtown to help me pull some stumps. I had never seen anyone handle a machine better than Charlie, not even my Chevalley cousins who could drive backhoes before they could walk. I had also seen few people work as hard. And fewer still were as sweet-natu
red and gentle as the twenty-one-year-old kid from Ecuador who carried Spanish-English phrases on a sheet of paper in his back pocket and smiled like I had given him the stars and the moon when I slipped him an extra twenty at the end of the day.

  Driving back to Main Street, I resolved to persuade my lawyer friends and acquaintances to take his case pro bono when the cops caught him.

  Chapter Five

  But they didn’t catch him.

  Next day—Wednesday, three days after Brian was shot—they went public.

  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of Homeland Security and the Connecticut State Police held a joint news conference in Hartford, the state capital. Their purpose was two-fold: to show that Federal and State authorities were cooperating to capture the worse kind of dangerous fugitive alien; and to ask the public for help tracking down Charlie Cubrero, an illegal immigrant they wanted to interrogate about the murder of Newbury resident Brian Grose.

  The re-capped press conference led the Hartford TV station’s evening news.

  The ICE spokesman explained that the ICE “fugitive team,” was one of seventy established around the country to hunt an estimated half-million fugitive aliens who had been deported but hadn’t actually left America, or had snuck back. As three hundred officers clearly couldn’t catch all half-million, they were “concentrating on getting the more dangerous people off the street.”

  How dangerous was Charlie Cubrero? Very. According to Homeland Security, Charlie was leader of a slum gang in Quito, the capital of Ecuador; such gangs were establishing themselves in the United States. According to the Connecticut State Police, Charlie had argued with Brian Grose over money, bought a gun, and was thought to be hiding in the Hispanic communities of either Waterbury, Danbury, Hartford, or Bridgeport—cities scattered widely around the central and southern parts of the state. The TV station showed file footage of a neighborhood of two story houses in either Waterbury, Danbury, Hartford, or Bridgeport with small, swarthy people on the sidewalk and low-riding automobiles with black-tinted windows, dual exhausts, spoilers and xenon headlights in the street.

  It was a pretty good press conference. The troopers and Homeland Security did seem to be co-operating. Charlie Cubrero sounded like the fugitive alien from Hell.