Mausoleum

by Justin Scott

  Chapter Six

  Of the three things that could happen to Charlie Cubrero, two were vaguely likely. The combined forces of the ICE and the Connecticut State Police and local cops might stumble upon him hiding in one of the urban immigrant communities. Or Charlie would light out for some far away community or even all the way home to Ecuador and disappear. (If Marian was right that he was “good at” hiding and ICE was right that Charlie was a gang leader, he might conceivably be snorting coke in a nice hotel in Bogota.) That I would find him first, was so unlikely that I wouldn’t even bother.

  Except that Marian Boyce thought Charlie might be innocent. Rick Bowland thought he was a hero. The Village Cemetery Association had its venerable tail in a crack. And a supposed gang leader was someone I knew only as a hard-working, polite kid who was about to be treated very badly. So I got on the horn with people I knew in New York.

  A friend, a “buddy of mine” in Brooklyn-ese, steered me to a buddy of his, a private investigator who spoke Spanish. He was Puerto Rican, not Ecuadorian, and his accent was more Brooklyn than Caribbean, but he was guaranteed a stand up guy. Nor was he hideously expensive, which was an important consideration as I was not certain where the money was coming from. I gave him a bare bones situation report on the telephone, and when I was done Hector Ramirez confirmed that he was the straight shooter I had been promised by our mutual acquaintance.

  “Sorry, Buddy. No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “There is no way I can duke it with Homeland Security for a fugitive from a murder warrant.”

  “My clients believe the guy is innocent.”

  “Tell your clients to spend their dough on a lawyer.”

  I said, “It’s possible he’s so deep in the community we could find him before ICE.”

  “Believe me, Buddy. They got Federal funds paying Connecticut troopers and city cops to co-operate with Immigration, and paying ICE to be nice to the yokels. Wait ’til they nail the ‘sucker. If they don’t blow him away in the process, put your money on a lawyer.”

  Good advice. But it didn’t quite fit the peculiar situation, which, as Ramirez had pointed out, included the grim possibility of what could be called a fatal arrest experience.

  Stymied, I took another shot at my best possible witness, telephoned the White Birch biker bar and asked Wide Greg, the proprietor, “Has my cousin Sherman shown up yet?”

  “Staggering in as we speak,” said Greg, and hung up.

  I drove down to the White Birch, in Frenchtown, at the foot of Church Hill. The only motorcycle in the parking lot belonged to Sherman Chevalley. Interestingly, the other vehicle, a rusty pickup truck, was Donny Butler’s. (Even if Wide Greg owned a vehicle, no one could recall seeing him anywhere but inside the White Birch.)

  It had been some time since Connecticut banned smoking in bars, but so many cigarettes had burned over the years that the stench of tobacco would never disappear. By contrast, last night’s spilled beer smelled fresh. Decor consisted of an antique Miller High Life beer sign with spinning lights and a clock that didn’t work, tables scattered sufficiently far apart to prevent overhearing conversations that should not be, knotty pine paneled walls blackened by the aforementioned smoke, a remarkable long bar, and very few windows.

  It was early, well before noon. At the end of the bar nearest the door, the tall, angular Sherman Chevalley was nodding over his beer, apparently the latest in a long line of nightcaps. He seemed oblivious to his friend Donny Butler, Village Cemetery groundskeeper and gravedigger and puncher of Brian Grose in the eye, who was propping up the other end of the bar and yelling toward him. Wide Greg stood dead center the middle, reading the morning papers’ police reports.

  Sherman opened his eyes when I approached. They were broad slits of a hard green-grey color that resembled countertops in what my competitors called “gourmet kitchens.” Sherman’s hadn’t been wiped in a awhile.

  I said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. Got a minute?”

  Before he could stir himself to answer, Donny shouted down the bar. “Ben! That trooper—that friend of yours?”

  “Ollie’s no friend of mine.”

  “You can say that again,” Sherman muttered sleepily.

  “Not Ollie, for Christ sake!” Donny yelled. “Everybody knows about you and Ollie. Ollie hates your guts, ‘cause of the logging chain. The woman. The babe with the great ass.”

  “Well she’s not exactly a trooper. She’s a detective. And yes, she is a friend of mine, so let’s leave her ass out of it.”

  “Yeah, well she’s leaning on me.”

  “How?”

  “Keeps asking questions.”

  I said, “Sherman, don’t leave, I got to talk to Donny a minute,” and walked to the Donny end of the bar. The redness of his handsome, weathered face suggested that he had had enough to drink to appreciate simple sentences. “That’s her job, Donny. She’s a major crime squad detective. Murder is a major crime. Brian Grose was murdered at the cemetery. She’s asking everybody questions, including people who work there. You work there.”

  “I told her to get lost.”

  “What did you do that for?”

  “She was bugging me.”

  Wide Greg, ever-wary of information he should be able to deny knowledge of under oath, sauntered to the Sherman end of his bar to polish a vodka bottle, and I asked Donny, quietly. “Do you have an alibi that will stick?”

  “Not one I’m giving to her.”

  “Donny, she can make your life awful.”

  “I didn’t shoot that freakin’ yuppie!”

  “You might have to prove that.”

  “That’s crazy!” Donny bellowed, turning redder and pounding the bar. “I’m not a killer.”

  I glanced up-bar at Greg, who looked pleased that nothing Donny had shouted could not be repeated happily in court. “You got any coffee?” I asked. Greg poured some black in a mug from the pot he had going for himself. I walked to it, got it, and walked back.

  “Donny. You know you’re not a killer. I know you’re not a killer. But they don’t know you’re not a killer, and they are looking for a killer—or at least someone they can convince a jury is a killer.”

  “You don’t understand, Ben. I don’t take that crap from anybody.”

  “She was just doing her job.”

  “Like I was telling Greg. Didn’t I tell you Greg? I don’t take crap from anybody.”

  Wide Greg was very good at ignoring such questions.

  Donny asked me, “What are they bugging me for? I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell both you and Greg why.”

  “What about me?” Sherman called down the bar.

  “I’ll tell all a ya. They’re bugging me ‘cause they can’t find that goddamned wetback.”

  I put down my mug. “Donny you keep talking about friends of mine in ways that aren’t, shall we say, respectful.”

  “The wetback is your friend?”

  “He worked for Jay. He’s a good kid.”

  “So why doesn’t he turn himself in?”

  “So why don’t you answer Detective Boyce’s question?”

  “Because I didn’t do nothing—Greg! Another beer!”

  “I don’t think so,” said Greg.

  “What?” Donny half rose from his stool. “Are you cutting me off?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “Donny, let me drive you home.”

  Donny got redder in the face. He started to set his jaw. Then his eyes went a little fuzzy and his cheeks a little slack and he said, “Oh come on, guys.”

  “Toss me your keys,” Greg said conversationally. “I’ll get one of the boys to drop your car off later.”

  Donny stood there a moment, swaying on the rungs of his stool. “Do I owe you anything?”

  “You’re fine.” This was not kindness. The White Birch was pay as you go until Greg extended a dispensation as rare as one papal.

  A
s I walked Donny out I said to Sherman Chevalley, “I got to talk to you. I’ll buy you a beer when I get back.”

  “Buy me one now so I’ll stay.”

  “Greg,” I called, “A beer for my cousin, please.”

  Instead of saying thank you to me, Sherman looked Donny in the face and said, “Pussy.”

  “What did you say?” asked Donny.

  “Pussy. Takin’ all that crap.”

  I got quickly between them and said, “Back off, Sherman.”

  My cousin, a man of few words, immediately threw a punch, which I slipped while managing to kick his feet out from under him. He landed on his back with a crash that shook the building and laughed. “You see that, Greg? The kid’s growing up.”

  Knowing Sherman too well, I was backing away as fast as I could, though not fast enough. Sherman sprang quick as a cobra, wasting a mere giga-second to pick up a bar stool to swing at my head. But if Sherman was a cobra, Wide Greg was a broad-shouldered barrel-chested mongoose. If you were to gather a hundred warring Hells Angels, Pagans, Mongols, and Devils Disciples in a parking lot, the rivals would all agree on one thing: Wide Greg was the fastest biker-bar proprietor on the planet.

  His sawed off baseball bat materialized in his hand. Before Sherman could hit me with the stool, he went down for the second time in two breaths, popped hard, but not so hard as to be concussed thanks to Wide Greg’s fine-tuned sense of proportion. Flat on his back, holding his head, groaning, his eyes grew large with terror. For how many weeks would Wide Greg bar him from the White Birch? How many long, lonely nights would pass alone with the History Channel?

  But Wide Greg did nothing to excess. Order restored, justice dispensed, he slipped his bat back in its scabbard of PVC pipe nailed under the bar, picked up a towel, and resumed polishing.

  I walked Donny out to my car.

  He looked around blearily. “What is this piece of crap?”

  “Rented from Pink. Put on your seat belt.”

  I got him home and up his front steps, in the door and up the stairs to his bedroom. When I came back down, his mother, a white-haired lady in her seventies with whom he moved in after his last divorce, was in the front parlor wiping her hands on dishtowel. “Oh it’s you. Hello Ben. Donny okay?”

  “Touch of flu.”

  She looked at me. “Yes, it’s going around this summer.”

  Mercy Mission accomplished, I went back to the White Birch where I found Sherman yawning over a new beer. “What was all that about?” I asked. “What were you on Donny’s case for?”

  Sherman shrugged.

  “And why’d you take a swing me? Donny’s your pal, I’m your cousin. What’s going on?”

  “Stressed, man.”

  “Over what?”

  “Stress.”

  “You’re stressed out by stress?”

  “Big joke. You’d be stressed too.”

  “Parole officer on your case?”

  “Naw. He don’t have anything on me…Nothin’ that’ll stick.” He glanced over at Greg polishing and lowered his voice. “Thing is, man, somebody’s leaning on me.”

  “Who?” I asked, wondering who would dare.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you mean leaning?”

  “Tried to kill me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Someone’s trying to kill you and you have no idea who it is?”

  “Nope.”

  I looked at him. He looked back.

  Sherman was a first class liar. His vast arsenal of mendacity had been honed in prison where congenital prowess takes on a professional edge. It made him an excellent judge of character and a keen observer of motive. I did not doubt that someone was trying to kill him. Several of the worlds he inhabited could generate enemies; some, for sure, who regarded death as an appropriate closing argument. But I did doubt that he didn’t know who.

  “Something from inside?”

  “Naw. I didn’t have any problems inside.”

  That I believed. Sherman was just too ornery for fellow prisoners to bully and too anti-social to hook up with a gang.

  “So how’d they try to kill you?”

  “Hack-sawed the brake cables on the Harley.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You’d be sure if you lost both brakes doing 90 on Route 7, came round a bend, and found a semi jackknifed across both lanes.”

  “How come it didn’t work?”

  “What do mean?”

  “You’re still living.”

  “Oh. Yeah, well there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  “How’d you stop?”

  “Couldn’t stop.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I went under him.”

  “How?”

  “Slid.”

  I tried to picture Sherman and seven-hundred pounds of motorcycle sliding sideways under a trailer truck like a runner stealing second base. Failing, I asked, “How did you pull out of the slide?”

  “Got lucky,” said Sherman.

  “So you’re still a little shaken up.”

  “I ain’t shaken up.”

  “You just said you were stressed.”

  “I’m stressed, ‘cause I don’t know what he’s plannin’ next.”

  “Did you tell Ollie?”

  “Yeah, right. Tell Ollie.”

  “Could I see the cables?”

  “Already changed them out.”

  “Where’d you put the broken ones?”

  “On the junk pile.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  “You don’t believe me?” Sherman asked dangerously.

  “I want to see for myself.”

  We said good-bye to Wide Greg and drove to Sherman’s junk pile which contained enough parts to build half of many vehicles and machines. It was in and around the sagging barn behind his mother’s house trailer. Any Chevalley worth his name had a heap like it, though rarely as deep. Sherman’s had been started by his grandfather, who had inherited items from his grandfather, so that the green 1975 Jeep pickup front fender visible under a defunct cement mixer represented a mid point in a buried time line that probably originated with a chrome bumper from a ‘37 De Soto. We found his discarded Harley brake cables tangled in a coil of copper cable that looked suspiciously like a grid element strung between poles to transmit electricity. “Aren’t you taking a chance keeping this ‘scrap?’ What if Connecticut Light and Power comes looking?”

  “I gotta sit on it. Copper just took a nosedive. Goddamned commodity speculators, biggest thieves on the planet.”

  We untangled the Harley cables and had a look in the daylight. There were three lines, two for the front brake calipers, one for the rear. Sherman showed me where they had snapped. If it were only one I would have suggested they just broke from wear. But all three had broken. “See this little nick?” said Sherman. “That’s where they cut it—you see here’s the cut, here’s the break. And look at this scrape. The saw slipped, and he went back and finished here. Right?”

  “You really ought to show this to Ollie.”

  “I’ll handle this myself.”

  I asked how, if he didn’t know who was after him. But there was no talking to Sherman when he made his mind up. I was quite sure that he knew exactly who had done it. I asked again who it might be, but he still wouldn’t tell me, so all I could say, “If I were you I’d keep my eyes open.”

  Sherman yawned and pressed large fingers to his temples. “Man, my head hurts.” Then he changed the subject. “Wha’d you want to talk about?”

  “Remember Sunday you had the gas engine at the Notables?”

  “Notables?”

  “In the Cemetery.”

  “Sure. I had the saw, too. Really cool. Did you hear that sucker screaming?”

  “Sherman. The guy was killed. Remember? Shot? In the mausoleum?”

 
“Yeah? What about him?”

  “You were there, early. Right. Setting up the engine?”

  “And the saw. I figure they shot him when I had the saw running loud. You think?”

  “I don’t know. Steve Greenan told me he was maybe dead longer than that.” Steve was a retired doctor who worked part time as an assistant medical examiner. Aunt Connie having helped him pay for medical school, and he, having attended my mother and father, and delivered me, Doc Greenan was generous with information. “Sherman, did you notice anybody at the mausoleum?”

  “I saw the guy who got shot. Freaking yuppie who gave Donny Butler a hard time.”

  “You saw Brian Grose go inside?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know. Right after I got there.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About ten.”

  “So you’re saying Brian Gross went inside around ten in the morning?”

  “About.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “Latino dude was hanging out.”

  “Charlie Cubrero?”

  “I don’t know one of them from the other.”

  “Did you tell the cops?”

  “I don’t talk to cops.”

  I said, “Sherman, please stop bullshitting me. You’re on parole. When the cops questioned you they surely reminded you that you are on parole, and they probably leaned very hard on you to tell them what you saw being there early. What did you tell them? You must have told them something just to get them off your back.”

  “I told them I saw a Latino dude.”

  “Did they show you a picture?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you recognize the guy in the picture.”

  “Nope.”

  “You told them nope, or you didn’t recognize the guy?”

  “I told them nope I didn’t recognize the guy.”

  “Did you?”