Mausoleum

by Justin Scott

  He looked at me. “You saw Scooter’s email?”

  “I saw the doll house.”

  Dan looked like I had hit him in the face. “What did you do? Break into a dead man’s home?”

  “You hired me to investigate who killed Brian. What did you expect me to do, Google it?”

  He turned to Grace. “I hope you’re not taking this the wrong way.”

  “Who are your partners?”

  “My only partner is dead.”

  “Is it over?”

  “Yeah, until someone else tries to take over the board. A hundred and sixty unused acres of open space in northwestern Connecticut is an asset that won’t go away.”

  “One-hundred-and-sixty-two point seven-four,” said Grace. “And it is not ‘unused.’ It is waiting. Would you please resign or will the board have to force you out?”

  “Will you keep it quiet?”

  “Of course. I have no desire to air our laundry in public.”

  “Then I resign.”

  He turned around and started to walk out. Grace said, “I would like that in writing.” She shoved a pen and a sheet of letterhead across her desk and watched Dan write. When he was done and out the door, she said, “Well that’s that. Thank you for your help, Ben. Send us your bill.”

  “Let me hold off until I see if I can buy Charlie. I’ve given my word to a bounty hunter.”

  “Let’s hope he escapes safely home to Ecuador. It’ll save us a fortune.” She rubbed her eyes. “Dan is right. The wolves will keep on circling. Which is why the Association needs fresh blood in leadership.”

  ***

  Wondering, pondering, I drove out to my mother’s farm in Frenchtown. She was surprised to see me. I’d been more than usually remiss about visiting, lately. She made a pot of excellent coffee and insisted I eat some toast. Her enormous dark eyes bored accusingly into me as she reported that Aunt Helen said Sherman had a wonderful new lawyer. I knew that she feared that I was somehow involved in Sherman’s legal troubles. I assured her that I was not: I just happened to be driving behind him when he crashed his bike; and no one was more surprised than I that the cops had arrested him as he exited intensive care.

  “How can Sherman afford Ira Roth?”

  “Lorraine Renner is horse trading a movie for him.”

  “Lorraine?” She smiled as the meaning of that sunk in. “Helen didn’t mention Lorraine.”

  “Aunt Helen gave me the impression that she doesn’t like the idea of competing for the privilege of feeding Sherman free meals. On the other hand, I doubt the Renners will rate Sherman as a prime addition to the family, either.”

  My mother laughed. “What do they see in each other?”

  “Mutual perversity is my guess. Want to go for a walk? I’d like to see the plot.”

  She was, like most Chevalleys, happiest out of doors; and we had a pleasant stroll the length of the property, across the swamp, up barren fields, and through the woods to the Chevalley Cemetery.

  There were nine lonely headstones in the family plot, tilted by frost and enclosed by a tumbled wall overgrown with brush. They bore dates from the early 19th Century, when the Chevalleys finally got the money together to buy land no one in his right mind would try to farm. The most recent date on a headstone was 1920, after which the long climb up Church Hill to Newbury’s Village Cemetery did not daunt the generation that grew up with cars and trucks.

  “They’ve been stealing rocks from the wall,” said my mother.

  The tail end of a new subdivision was just visible through the trees. I saw a wheelbarrow track where someone had been trundling stone. I thought about tracking the thief down and threatening to realign his grill. Except he was just a homeowner who was willing to work hard for some rocks to build his own wall.

  “Do you still want to be buried here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right back.” I knew she didn’t want to come with me. She was too shy. But I had to do something before they got the idea that a headstone would look authentic in their family room.

  I followed the track into a backyard of a new house and knocked on the door. Dogs barked. A woman answered. I introduced myself and explained that my family’s burying ground was in the woods, and would they please stop taking stone. She was very embarrassed. They didn’t realize anyone lived there. She promised to tell her husband. I gave her my card, said he was welcome to call me, went back into the woods, and walked my mother home.

  Chapter Twenty

  Early the next morning, I phoned the Botsford Insurance Agency. Grace was already at her desk.

  “Okay,” I said. “You win.”

  “I hope you are going to say what I think you are going to say.”

  “If you think you can bamboozle the board into it, I’ll be president of the Village Cemetery Association.”

  “Consider them bamboozled. Thank you, Ben. May I ask what changed your mind?”

  “Funnily enough, something Dan Adams said last week: ‘Changes I hate, kids will take for granted; but we owe protection to the people already in the burying ground.’”

  “We’ll make our last stand in the cemetery?”

  “That’s what I told Dan—kidding, I thought.”

  “Thank you very much, Ben.”

  “Gotta go. I’m getting another call. Talk to you later.”

  It was Al Vetere. Whispering.

  “Say again, Al.”

  “I been calling and calling.”

  “I was in the woods with my mother. What’s up?…A little louder?”

  “I’m on stakeout,” he whispered. “In Bridgeport. I don’t want ’em to hear me.”

  I pictured a garbage can in an Ecuadorian neighborhood, partially concealing a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound white guy crouched behind it hissing English into his cell phone.

  “I got him. Bring the dough.”

  “Charlie?”

  “I’m watching the house. You got the cash?”

  “I can get there in two hours, maybe less. Tell me exactly where you are.”

  I telephoned Wes at home and told him to get over to Newbury Savings. I Google-Mapped the address Al had whispered. I looked out the window to see what surprise vehicle was waiting for me in the driveway. It was a bicycle. I telephoned Pink. “Very funny. I need wheels and I need them now. I gotta get to Bridgeport.”

  “Look in your barn.”

  I ran down to the barn.

  “All right!”

  Yesterday’s blue silliness had been replaced by a low-slung, lemon-yellow Mini Cooper. I fired it up, whipped out of the drive, stopped at Newbury Savings, ran in and ran out a minute later like a cartoon bandit with a canvas bag of cash.

  What a car! The first hour of the trip passed in forty-five minutes. I hadn’t gone so fast on country roads since a lady lent me her front-wheel drive Passat. It accelerated nearly as fast as my old Olds and bonded to curves like an Olympic bobsled. The color troubled me. The cops could see it coming for miles. Hyper alert, I spotted a state trooper coming the other way on the Black Rock Turnpike in time to slow her down to legal.

  But a second after we passed in opposite directions, he stomped his brakes, pulled a tire-smoking one-eighty and came after me with his light bar blazing. I hoped he wouldn’t delay my getting to Al Vetere, but I wasn’t worried. I was doing forty-five in a forty zone. I hadn’t had a drink since yesterday. I had not drifted across the yellow line in the middle or the white line on the verge of the shoulder. And I certainly wasn’t exhibiting road rage, as I had had the road to myself until the trooper came along.

  I pulled my license from my money clip and the Cooper’s registration from the glove compartment where Pink always left the rentals’ paperwork. The trooper walked a slow circle around the car.

  I opened the window. How often can any of us ever ask in complete innocence, “What’s the trouble, Officer?”

  “You’re driving my wife’s car.�
��

  ***

  The list of plausible explanations was short and not at all sweet. That I had stolen his wife’s car might play marginally better than I had borrowed the car from his wife, who trusted me because we were lovers. I floated one from in between, and hoped it would work fast.

  “I am test driving your wife’s car for her automotive maintenance center. If indeed you are—”I had seen the name on the registration— “Trooper Clark.”

  “I am Trooper Clark,” came the cold reply. “And you—” He shot a look at my license—“Mr. Abbott, are fifty miles from the repair shop.”

  He was exaggerating, but not by a lot. I said, “We are nothing if not thorough at Chevalley Enterprises.”

  “For an oil change? Get out of the car.”

  I got out keeping both hands in view.

  “You work for Chevalley?”

  “Betty Chevalley is my cousin Renny’s widow,” I said, intending to deflect the problem from Pink, whose name was more likely featured in police computers than Betty’s.

  “I remember Renny Chevalley,” said the trooper. “He was the pilot who got shot on a dope run.”

  I stopped being polite. “Your memory is long, but way off. Renny was a good man. He never did anything wrong in his life.” (True.) In case the trooper might have talked to Betty on the telephone, I added, “He was a good husband to Betty,” (Not entirely true, if you counted an incendiary love affair with Gwen Jervis, which Betty didn’t know about or didn’t want to.)

  The trooper with the long memory started looking me over. “Abbott. Abbott. I know the name.”

  “Are you stationed at the Plainfield barracks?”

  “What if I am?”

  Why did his wife have her car serviced to hell and gone in Frenchtown?

  One answer was that they were living apart. That he knew the car was in for an oil change meant he still saw her regularly, which could mean they were trading kids. I said something that I would not say if I weren’t trying to protect Betty and Pink, as I never played the Marian card. “I used to date an officer in the Plainfield barracks. We’re still friends.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Detective-Lieutenant Boyce.”

  “She was Trooper Boyce, then, and then Sergeant Boyce. It wasn’t that long ago, actually. She went up the ladder fast.”

  “That’s for sure. You’re the bird who did time, aren’t you?”

  “Full time. No parole. No probation. Debt paid. Home free. Which means you get to treat me as kindly as any other citizen.”

  He looked at his wife’s car. He looked at my license. But he wasn’t seeing either. “What do you mean you and Detective-Lieutenant Boyce are still friends?”

  For a vulnerable moment, he was not a hard-ass road cop with a long memory. Just a man who missed his wife.

  “Marian and I had lunch last week. Nice thing is, if you stay friends you don’t lose as much.”

  “How’d you pull it off?”

  “Carefully. Very, very carefully.”

  He almost smiled. “Where you taking my wife’s car?”

  “Straight back to the garage.”

  “You’re headed south. It’s north.”

  “I was about to stop and ask for directions.”

  “That way.” He handed back my papers and pointed north. He watched me turn around. He watched me pull away.

  Bridgeport receded behind me, as did any chance of getting there until I dumped the Mini back in Newbury and found other wheels. I phoned Al to tell him the bad news. I got his voice mail.

  Back in Newbury I gave Pink his Mini and demanded another car.

  “How’d you do in Bridgeport?”

  “Never got there and now I’m late. Is that Trans Am running?” I’d noticed it sitting in a corner of the shop for a few days, a faded-red, second generation hopped up Firebird from the 1970s that would give Charlie and Father Bobby’s Integra a run for its money when Pink’s mechanics got done with in.

  “Can’t have it. Just sold it to Miss Botsford.”

  “Grace? What does she want with a thirty-year old muscle car?”

  “Hell do I know,” said Pink. “Bald guys buy Corvettes, maybe old ladies buy Trans Ams.”

  “She’s not that old.”

  Pink shrugged. “Funny car for an insurance agent. It don’t even have air bags—Excellent brakes, though. Front disc, rear drum.”

  “I gotta get to Bridgeport, Pink.”

  “Mind me asking if it has to do with the sniper?”

  “What sniper?”

  “Scanner just picked it up.” He jerked his thumb at the scanner that trolled the police channels they monitored for the wrecker calls. “Some bail bondsman got blown away.”

  “Sniper?”

  It suddenly seemed like a good idea to steady my hands by pressing them on the warm hood of the lemon-yellow Mini, which also helped me not fall to the floor when my knees turned to water. If I were a sniper on a roof drawing a bead on two fools I had lured to Bridgeport, I’d shoot the smaller one first and take out the bigger, slower man second.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I beeped Marian four times. Finally she called me back.

  “What?”

  “Was that Angel in Bridgeport?”

  “None of your fucking business,” Marian said, and hung up; which I took as confirmation that poor, dumb Al had blundered into him while tracking Charlie Cubrero. I beeped her again.

  “What?”

  “He may have been gunning for me, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe for the same reason he shot Sherman Chevalley.”

  “What? When?”

  “Maybe the motorcycle accident wasn’t an accident.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ben. What are you into?”

  “Over my head, maybe.”

  “Sounds that way,” she said, carefully.

  “I think we better talk, and not on the phone—why don’t you bring Arnie to my place?”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t want to be seen with you. Make it the picnic rock.”

  I drove up along the river and, after it veered away, turned onto a dirt road that re-joined it. The water was low. The picnic rock was a flat piece of ledge exposed in the middle of the river, twenty feet from the bank. Marian and I used to cavort on it. Once, to the amusement of the Newbury Riding Club, which trotted by on their carriages in period costume. Stepping stones offered a dry route across the water. Marian and Arnie were already there, sprawled in the sun like wolves on a coffee break. I step-stoned out to them.

  “You two clean up well.” They’d caught sleep since I’d seen them staking out Brian Grose’s library—showered, shaved, washed hair, found fresh clothing and improved their diet. But despite the pleasant surroundings, which included a lot more sunshine than they had enjoyed skulking indoors for days, neither appeared in a pleasant mood. Arnie said, “What is going on?”

  “When I met him in Danbury, the bail bondsman was trying to make a buck playing bounty hunter on the side. I convinced him that my clients would pay better than the Feds so they could get the credit for turning him in.”

  “Why?”

  “My clients are in a court action trying to retain control of the Village Cemetery Association. It’s small town politics. But it is very real to them.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You will go home when this over. They live right here in Newbury. Okay?”

  “What’s the Sherman connection?

  “What I’m going to tell you is confidential.”

  “We’re the police, Ben,” Marian reminded me, and Arnie said, “In case you forgot.”

  “You can’t use this against Sherman.”

  “We can and will use any illegality against Sherman.”

  “I’m not ratting him out. You give me your word, or this conversation is over. Come on, you know as well as I do that Sherman will be back inside for some damned thing
or another soon enough.”

  “No way, Ben. You come to us with some make-or-break deal, we’ll knock a few miles off a speeding ticket. But we are not authorized to plea bargain. You want that, you talk to the prosecutor.”

  I declined to remind them that their prosecutor would offer what they recommended and tried to move along by saying, “If Sherman shot Brian Grose, of course you can have him. I’ll hand him to you myself. But he didn’t and you know it.”

  “Stop presuming what we know,” said Arnie.

  “What’s the Sherman connection?” asked Marian.

  I watched the sun dance on a rock-strewn stretch of rapid water. “Okay, I’ll give it to you as hearsay. You want hearsay?”

  “What hearsay? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about hearsay—something I can not testify to in court because I overheard some guy saying it in a bar. It was too dark to see who the guy talking was. Here’s what the guy I couldn’t see in the dark said to another guy I couldn’t see in the dark either: he said that Sherman recognized a guy he saw coming out of Grose’s mausoleum right after Grose was shot. Sherman had seen him around and thought he was called Angel.”

  “How did Sherman know that Grose was shot?”

  “I heard that he went in to see what he could steal and saw the corpse, saw the bullet holes, and put two and two together.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He knew that Angel had seen him see him. Sherman thought quick and decided to blackmail Angel—threatening to tell you what he saw if Angel didn’t pay him off. In his defense, in Sherman’s mind, blackmail was sort of preemptive self-defense.”

  “Huh?”

  “He figured that since Angel would come after him anyhow, he might as well scare him off and make a buck.”

  “Good thinking,” said Arnie. “Now Angel had two reasons to shoot him.”

  “Only after sabotaging Sherman’s bike didn’t kill him.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “Sherman told the guy I couldn’t see in the bar who told the other guy I couldn’t see. I just heard hearsay. Keep in mind, Sherman won’t repeat it to you in a million years. Besides, it has nothing to do with anything. Because I don’t think Angel shot him, either.”