by Justin Scott
“No I didn’t, Ben. No one’s in there. I gotta lock up, now. Need anything?”
“No, fine, thanks.”
“You know the way out.”
I nodded toward the low stone wall at the wooded end of the old section.
I walked down there through the long shadows of evening light and stopped a moment at my father’s grave. Under his name and the dates of his life it said, “First Selectman.” Under that, his friends had persuaded my mother to allow them to have chiseled, “He Served His Town.” In a rare instance of voicing a complaint out loud my mother had remarked while he served the town: she had served warmed-over supper most nights of the week.
He had died, suddenly, when I came home from prison, and we had left most of a lifetime undiscussed. So it was with intense pleasure that I was able to say, “The president hopes you’re pleased.” Then I walked up the slope to the new area and sat on the damp grass in front of Brian Grose’s mausoleum and watched the low wall that lovers climbed on warm summer nights.
An older Honda Civic came along the dirt road that passed beyond the wall, trailing dust. The black-clad priest jumped out, ran around the car, opened the passenger door, and helped Charlie out. Charlie was limping. He was clutching a gym bag and seemed quite unsteady. The priest helped him over the wall and hurried up the hill.
I ran down and met them part way. “Charlie, you okay?”
“I had to give him a Valium,” said Father Bobby. “He’s so scared.”
“A whole bottle?” I said, and then to Charlie, “You’re okay, now Charlie. Everything’s going to be fine. Thank you, Father Bobby. You can split. I’ll take him from here.”
But the priest didn’t hear me.
“You brought the cops?”
“No, I didn’t.”
He was staring at the road beyond the wall, and I saw Arnie and Marian pull up in their unmarked unit.
“You brought the cops!”
My cell phone rang. I looked at it with a sinking heart. “They tracked my phone.” I answered. Sure enough it was Marian, climbing over the wall with her phone pressed to her face. “Don’t do anything else stupid. We’ll be right there.”
“You fool,” said Father Bobby. “You stupid fool”
Actually, I felt a little stab of pride that two stars like them could think I could get close enough to the killer to make it worth tracking me.
“All right,” said Father Bobby. “Stay with Charlie. I’ll deal with them.”
Good, I thought. A priest was almost as good as a lawyer when it came to giving up.
“Hang on to Charlie.” He spoke Spanish to Charlie. Charlie returned a dazed smile.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him to wait here with you. Let me see what I can do with the cops.”
I said, “There’s nothing left to do with the cops. Tell them you’re turning Charlie in. A priest is almost as good as a lawyer. Tell them my lawyer will meet us at the barracks.”
Father Bobby took the gym bag from Charlie’s hand and hurried down the slope toward Arnie and Marian.
“Hey, wait,” I said, “I thought you don’t want to talk to the cops.”
He quickened his pace, and waved to Marian and Arnie. It was part hello, part benediction. “Charlie, what’s in your bag?”
The snap in my voice penetrated and he said, “No my bag.”
I ran after Father Bobby.
Twenty feet from Marian and Arnie, he reached into the bag.
“Gun!” I yelled. “Not a priest. Not a priest. That’s Angel.”
Angel had not snookered the priest into setting up Charlie Cubrero. Angel was the priest. And the priest wasn’t a priest, but a stone killer named Angel.
“Gun!”
Marian and Arnie flared apart, Marian reaching for her shoulder holster, Arnie for the pistol on his hip, both shouting, “Stop. Police.”
But he was way too fast for them. God he was fast. He fired three times in a heartbeat. Three heavy caliber booms echoed like cannon fire. All three hit. Arnie pinwheeled backwards. Marian went down, clutching her body. Angel was on top of her before I could reach them, jerking her gun out of her hand and leveling both weapons to fire again at Arnie who was trying to stand. Marian flopped back on the grass arms and legs spread wide, thighs flashing white. She pulled her backup gun from her leg holster. But she had been hit too hard to be quick, and before I could get between them, Angel kicked it out of her hand.
She convulsed into a tight ball, rolled toward Arnie with a cry of pain and clutched at the back of her neck. I dove for Angel. He fired at Arnie, then turned both guns on me.
“Angel!” Marian shouted.
He whipped fiery eyes at her. She flicked her arm forward, pointing like a snake tongue. She’s hidden a second backup derringer in her sleeve, I thought, filling with crazy hope. But her arms were bare and dead silence told me she had no gun.
Something flashed through the failing light. Angel jerked back with a cry, dropped Marian’s gun, and clawed at his cheek. A five-inch throwing knife jutted from it at the odd angle of a boar’s tusk.
“Bitch,” he screamed, spraying blood. He ripped the blade out of his face and swung his own heavy weapon at Marian.
I got my hand around his wrist.
He was strong and his wrist was slippery with blood. But Marian’s knife had sent him into shock and I was motivated.
Chapter Twenty-three
Arnie told the troopers I was a hero.
They allowed it when Marian insisted I ride with her in the ambulance. She told the paramedic and the nurse that she was scared. The two worked on her the whole time. I crouched out of the way, holding her hand. They gave her something for pain but she stayed alert and kept asking, “How’s Arnie?”
I kept saying, “He’ll make it.” Arnie, in fact, was the less injured of the two, his bullet proof vest having stopped the slugs, which were so heavy the impact had shattered his ribs. The slug that hit Marian, however, had skidded across the fabric and inside of the vest where it had puckered open under her armpit.
“I can’t believe she could throw a knife,” the paramedic muttered to the nurse, to which Marian croaked, “It wasn’t like I had a choice.”
“Almost there,” said the nurse. “You’ll be fine.”
Marian whispered me closer. “I don’t want Bruce to see you at the hospital.”
“I’ll split. Don’t worry.”
“Come here.”
I put my mouth to her ear. The ambulance hit a bump and her lips touched me. “You know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” she whispered and I realized she was not one bit scared, but raging, and that it was a ploy to get me alone. “Who shot Brian Grose?”
“Angel did it.” I said.
“No he didn’t.”
I said, “Angel did it.”
“No he didn’t!”
“ICE says Angel did it.”
“He didn’t, you bastard. Tell me.”
I said, “Homeland Security says Angel did it, now that they’ve figured out he’s their missing gang leader. Your bosses say he did it. And the State’s Attorney already has a list of Angel murders from here to Ecuador.”
Marian raked me with a look of cold hatred. Then she closed her eyes and turned away.
***
I waited in the hospital parking lot, avoiding her boy friend. The Major Crime Squad caught up with me there, and we had a long talk about how it went down in the cemetery, and when it was over they shook my hand.
I waited until I learned she was safely out of surgery. Then, suddenly very, very tired, I phoned Pink. “I need a ride.”
“Already here,” said Pink. He’d figured out where I would end up without wheels and was just rolling into the parking lot on his Harley. I rode on back, helmetless and glad of the warm night wind, knowing I had to figure out what was right and what w
as wrong before I could decide between them.
Chapter Twenty-four
Next day, I waited until it was after business hours to stop by the Botsford Insurance Agency. Jeannie had gone home. Grace’s beautiful wooden office was quiet and peaceful. A regulator clock ticked on the wall and it was a comfortable sound.
I got right to it. Still on my feet, I said, “You and I have caution in common, Grace. We know too much not to. I learned caution in prison. You learned yours selling insurance all these years. You’ve probably seen every insurance scam known to man.”
“And woman.”
“How people set fires. Fake deaths. Stage car wrecks.”
“Most clients don’t,” said Grace.
“Oh I’m sure it’s a very small part of the business. But as in any business, the small part represents profit or loss. Miss too many fraudulent claims and there goes your living. Breaking even never pays the bills.”
“Insurance spreads risk, Ben. That’s all there is to it.”
“But insurance companies profit by minimizing risk. That’s where the money is. That’s why they give seminars to their agents on how to recognize fraud, forestall it. Don’t they?”
“Actually, you learn as much from experience. Dad used to say, ‘I’ve been doing this so long I would not trust my own mother.’”
“Or daughter?”
“He did not worry about his daughter. He was on top of everything until the day he was killed. I could not have pulled any wool over his eyes.”
“But you had learned from a master.”
“What are you driving at, Ben?—Sit down, Ben. Sit down. Take that chair.”
She indicated the customer’s chair and I sat.
“Somebody set a timer on Brian Grose’s mausoleum audio system so loud music would alert everyone at the Notables that there was a dead man inside. Why do you suppose he did that?”
“So that his body would receive a proper Christian burial and not rot alone.”
“Why do you suppose they shot him in the head? Twice.”
“So that he would not suffer a slow death from the wound in his chest.”
“That would be the kind Christian thing to do, but I wonder if they wanted to make absolutely certain that Brian was not alive to tell who shot him in the chest.”
“Minimizing risk?” she asked.
“Your phrase, not mine.”
“No, Ben, minimizing risk was your phrase. I said spread risk.”
“You are very precise, Grace. What we’ve been calling the chest wound was actually an exit wound. He was shot in the back.”
“I know.”
“I spent a lot of time thinking about that. A shot in the back doesn’t jibe with a—I don’t know, what would you call it?”
“Call what?”
“Crime of passion? For want of a better phrase. But the crimes of passion I’m familiar with involve face to face confrontation. You’re mad at somebody for doing you wrong—breaking your heart—you shoot them in front, face to face. Maybe the guy turns and runs, and you shoot him in the back, but there was nowhere to run in the mausoleum. As oversize as it looked compared to ordinary headstones, it was basically just a closet, inside. There really wasn’t enough room inside to run from somebody with a gun. Was there?”
She looked back at me with the same quizzical stare as she did from her portrait of her and her father. In fact, had there been a gold frame around her desk, I would have thought I was observing another painting by Andrew Morrison.
“But,” I said, “There is another kind of crime of passion. Not the kind that comes from a broken heart. But the kind that stems from revenge. Revenge in the old legal sense of an eye for an eye. Revenge isn’t even the right word.”
“Retribution?”
“Yes. Someone kills a member of your family. You kill them. Until the modern state demands the sole right to retribution, we are mired in feuding and tribalism. But state retribution can’t always satisfy the desire for retribution. The state introduces subtleties. The state—the court—entertains the possibility of nuances. The state might say: You think that person contributed to the death of your father by making his life hell, but making another person’s life hell is not punishable by death according to our laws.”
She started to speak.
I said, “Please, Grace, don’t. Don’t tell me anything. Just listen to me…Okay?”
She waited, still as stone, for awhile before she nodded.
I said, “But a person who didn’t agree to those laws and demanded her own retribution would be a person who commits a crime of passion—like the heartbroken lover—by shooting the son of a bitch, excuse my language, face to face. Which did not happen in Brian’s mausoleum…So why was he shot in the back if it was a crime of passion, and there was no room to run?”
I stood up, stood in front of the portrait of her and her father. “Don’t speak. Trust me, please.
“Two part answer: one reason he got shot in the back, it was retribution—real retribution for a real crime. But far more important is reason two. Not only was there not enough room to run, there was not enough room for the person holding the gun to protect the gun.” I went back to the chair, sat down, and looked at her hands folded on the desk. They were still.
“I’m terrible with handguns myself, but I was taught the basic rule—the safe and cautious basic rule is the lunge line—the imaginary line you draw in the air between you and person you are confronting. If they step inside it—if they cross it—you must shoot before they can take the weapon away from you. But in Mr. Grose’s mausoleum, there was no room for a lunge line.”
I looked at her. She was still composed, although there was color in her cheek that had not been there before. I found myself wondering if she kept a gun in the desk, and dismissed that thought as beneath us both.
“So with no room to protect the gun the instant he saw it, and with a clear, cool sense of doing the right thing by taking retribution, the only place to shoot him was to wait until he turned around—maybe to put on music—and shoot him in the back. Or, if the shooter had hidden in one of the casket drawers and popped out gun in hand, shoot him in the back before he could reach the door.”
Again, she started to speak. Again, I said, “Please don’t tell me anything.”
“I won’t. But I do have a question. How did the person justify her right to retribution?”
“Well, that goes back to the insurance business. You minimize risk by minimizing fraud. You learn the tricks of arsonists, fakers of death, stagers of automobile crashes. Along the way you learn a lot about fires. Disappearances. And car wrecks. Criminals get away with fraud when we accept general premises. Such as: rickety wooden structures burn down; people who disappear on cruise ships fall overboard; ninety-five year old gentlemen fall asleep at the wheel, veer onto the curbing, spin out, hit the curbing again, roll over, and are killed.”
Grace said, calmly, coldly, “The driver who ran my father off the road was not the murderer. He was a monster for hire. The man who hired him was the murderer.”
“I will ask you only one question, Grace. Are you sure that Brian Grose hired that man?”
“Beyond any doubt. Dad stood in the way of taking over the association.”
“You told me that until I told you about the condos, you thought it was about that stupid mausoleum. But you really knew he wanted the land, didn’t you?”
“Brian was a simple, ruthless, disappointed man. It was a long time before I understood how disappointed, and by then it was too late. His dream was to become important and wealthy. His idea of importance was to live in a six-thousand-square-foot apartment in Beverly Hills, or on Fifth Avenue in New York City. His idea of wealth was to never have to work. He had had his eye on a Fifth Avenue apartment, but by the time he made his pile and cashed out prices had gone through the roof. The new hedge fund money had inflated two million dollar properties into twenty million properties.
He couldn’t keep up with men younger than he who were earning hedge fund money. Priced out of New York, priced out of Beverly Hills, he concocted a scheme he thought would work in a small town. My father stood in his way.”
“I am so sorry, Grace. And I don’t know what to do.”
“Do nothing,” she said. “It will all work out.”
Chapter Twenty-five
It was the first time Scooter had put my picture on the front page of the Newbury Clarion since I rescued the Meeting House Cat from an elm tree. Aunt Connie was not entirely pleased. “It used to be that this sort of news was reported inside the paper, quietly, with dignity, and there was no need for photographs.”
“Scooter’s got to fill space.”
“Well, I suppose that’s true. Anyhow, it’s a handsome picture. And Grace looks lovely, too.” Connie had spread the Clarion on her tea table. The article was below the fold, under a picture of Grace Botsford handing me the gavel with which her father had brought Village Cemetery Association meetings to order since the 1950s.
“And I must tell you again that I am so pleased that you took the position. I’m sure it will be a constant bother, but there are certain obligations a young man of the town should honor. What’s your first order of business, Mr. President?”
“I’m going to use that gavel on a couple of trustees. They demand to vote on whether or not Brian Grose can be buried in his mausoleum.”
“Well of course he can!” Connie practically snorted. “He’s dead and he owns his plot—I presume his dues were paid?”
I nodded. “Dues are paid and they are not disputing that he is dead. It’s the ugliness factor.”
“In a hundred years,” said Connie, “no one will notice.”
***
The meeting was like herding cats, but I came up with a compromise. No one liked it, of course, but they went along when Grace Botsford said essentially what Connie had said: The man was dead and his dues were paid up. Brian could stay, we agreed, but absolutely no more McTombs would ever be allowed in Newbury’s village cemetery. Which, when it became time to bury him, turned out to be an even better idea than we thought, because the Bastion Mausoleum company, which had arranged the funeral as the final act of its full service for rainmakers, had, like England’s Victorians, hired actors to be mourners. The actors were dressed in black, but were so happy to have the work that it was hard to believe their expressions of grief, much less their sighs, as they slow-marched behind the casket. One very pretty young woman was a convincingly-copious weeper until she was heard to whisper to a colleague, “This is so cool.”
