The Hot Pink Farmhouse bam-2

by David Handler

  “I don’t want to have to come looking for you,” Soave warned him.

  “He just gave you his word, Lieutenant,” Hangtown said balefully. “That may not mean much to you, but around here it means everything.”

  Soave struck his thoughtful, smoothing-the-mustache pose. “Okay, Mr. Frye. We’ll do it your way. As for you, Miss Frye, rest assured that a state trooper will be on the front gate twenty-four hours a day. Also a man stationed right here in the house. You have no reason to be frightened. But if anything does bother you, anything at all

  …” He handed her his card. “You can reach me day or night. Don’t hesitate to call.”

  Takai accepted the card, but said nothing in response, which left Soave thrown for words. Hastily, he turned to Des and said, “Did you try starting the victim’s car?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Des replied. “Key’s in the ignition.”

  “You ever drive that Land Rover, Jim?” Soave asked him.

  “We all drive it. Only car we got that can make it down to the plowed road when it snows.” Jim’s eyes narrowed at him. “My prints are all over it, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Soave told the uniformed trooper to give it a go. The trooper fetched a pair of protective latex gloves from the trunk of his cruiser and hopped in, Des and Soave watching him from the front doorway of the house.

  Moose’s Land Rover kicked over and started without a hitch, clouds of exhaust billowing from its tailpipe.

  “I thought she told her sister it was dead,” Soave said, astonished.

  “She did,” Des said, the trooper getting out to raise the hood for a look.

  “So what do you make of that?”

  “I take it you’ve never owned a vintage British automobile, Lieutenant,” Takai said rather archly from the entry hall behind them.

  Soave drew back slightly, sensing he was being dissed. “No, I never have, miss. Why does that matter?”

  “I’m terrible at jokes, but there’s an old one about the reason why the Brits drink their beer warm. The punch line is that the same outfit that does the wiring on their cars also makes refrigerators. They’re famously unreliable, in other words. Especially when the weather turns cold. You say a prayer that it will start. You tap the dashboard three times for luck. You stroke it. And, above all, you make sure you park it where the morning sunlight will hit its hood.”

  Which Moose had done. The Land Rover was sitting directly in the morning sun.

  “Doesn’t appear to have been tampered with,” the trooper called to Soave, slamming the hood shut.

  “May I drive it, Lieutenant?” Takai asked him. “I’ve lost my own car.”

  “I don’t see why not. But you ought to get yourself something you can really count on. If I lived around here I’d buy me a Grand Cherokee.”

  “Yes, but you don’t live around here, do you,” she pointed out.

  Soave stiffened. Now he knew he was being dissed.

  The phone rang in the kitchen. Takai went to answer it.

  “Yo, I’m beginning to see what you meant about her,” he muttered at Des.

  “Rico, I had me a feeling you would.”

  Takai wasn’t gone long. She looked somewhat pale on her return.

  “Who was it, girl?” Hangtown asked her, limping his way heavily from the living room toward them.

  “No one, Father,” she answered shortly.

  “Don’t be coy, damn it!” he thundered at her. “Who was it?”

  “It was just the school calling,” Takai said, her voice fading. “About why Moose didn’t come to work this morning. They… they wanted to know whether she’d be back tomorrow.”

  The old man let out a sob of pure anguish. “I’m not going to make it,” he cried out. “I will die. Oh, Lord, I will die!”

  C HAPTER 7

  Scareeee… reeee… yeeeeowww…

  Mitch was working his way through the chord changes in Hendrix’s lead-in to “Hey, Joe,” an achievement that for him ranked right up there with scaling Everest’s south summit, when the bad news came down.

  Scareeee… dee-dowwww…

  Playing his Stratocaster had been Mitch’s third choice for how to keep sane after Des went tearing off toward Winston Farms in the pre-dawn darkness. First, he had tried going back to sleep. An entirely logical thing to do. Clemmie certainly had no problem. But Clemmie also had a brain the size of a garbanzo bean. So Mitch got up and tried to channel his nervous energy into his reference book on Westerns-a sidebar on Quirt’s namesake, Quirt Evans, the wounded gunfighter played by John Wayne in The Angel and the Badman, a tidy little 1947 release with Gail Russell and Harry Carey that Witness ripped off some forty years later. But Mitch found he had about as much luck working as he did sleeping. The words on his computer screen were just meaningless squiggles. So he played.

  Skchssschaheee… chaheeee…

  Mitch had no ear for music. He knew this. But he had the love and he had the power. And, in the immortal words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain’t bad. So he played, his pair of Fender twin reverb amps cranked up high, one set of toes curled around his wa-wa pedal, the other around his Ibanez tube screamer. He played, his eyes shut, tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth.

  Scareeeeeee… reeee…

  Until Des finally phoned to tell him it wasn’t Takai who was dead.

  “It’s Moose, baby,” she reported grimly. “At least we think it is. Her body’s burned beyond recognition.”

  Mitch was so stunned he could barely speak. “Any chance it’s not her?”

  “Slim to none.” Des explained to him how Moose had borrowed Takai’s Porsche to go see a beau and never returned. “She’d have to be pulling one of the most elaborate disappearing acts in history. Look, I don’t know if I’ll be able to see you tonight. My time may not be my own for a while.”

  “I understand,” he said, hearing the dread in her voice. “Are you okay?”

  She fell silent a moment. “I’m interfacing with my old crew from Major Crimes-first time since I put the uni back on. It’s weirder than weird.”

  “You’re doing what you want to be doing,” he told her. “That makes you way smarter than they are. Not to mention ten times hotter.”

  “Guess I just needed to hear the words,” she said faintly. “Thanks, baby.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve called me baby. You never did that before.”

  “Do you mind it?”

  “The next time we see each other, I’ll show you just how much I mind,” he said to her with tender affection.

  But as soon as he hung up the phone Mitch was overcome by feelings of confusion and helplessness. Twelve hours ago he and Moose were feeding Elrod together. And now, through no apparent fault of her own, she was gone. Why? He stood there for a long moment gazing out his windows at a lobsterman in a Boston Whaler as he chugged his way slowly out onto the Sound. Mitch wondered what it would be like to be that man. He wondered what was on his mind right now, at this very second. Then he shook himself and called Lacy.

  His editor answered on the first ring. She had just gotten in, but she already sounded alert and sharp as a razor. That was Lacy. “To what do I owe this honor, young Mr. Berger?”

  “I had a nice hook on that Cookie Commerce story,” he told her glumly. “Emphasis on the word had.”

  “You’re talking about Mary Susan Frye, am I right?”

  “Now how on earth did you know that?”

  “The first report just came in over the wire,” Lacy answered. “They passed it on to me because of who her father is. What’s going on out there? Talk to me.”

  He talked to her. Told her how he had befriended the reclusive Wendell Frye, hearing the immediate uptick of excitement in her voice. Told her about Takai and how she was hooked up with the Brat, who was building houses all over Dorset and offering to donate the land for a big new elementary school. And how his wife, Babette, president of the school board, was the one pushing hardest for it. He
told her about how Babette was squared off against the school superintendent, Colin Falconer-the hush-hush cyber-sex scandal, his suicide attempt. He told her about how this battle over Center School wasn’t about a school at all, but over the very soul of a quaint, rural New England village.

  As he talked, Mitch began to realize that he was pitching Lacy a story. He hadn’t planned to, but deep down inside he must have wanted to. Why else had he felt the urge to call her?

  “Mitch, how does the death of Wendell Frye’s daughter fit into all of this?” she asked when he’d finished filling her in. “How do the pieces fit together? Do they fit together?”

  “Lacy, I honestly don’t know. But I’d like to look into it.”

  “Go for it. I’ll talk to the magazine and call you back.”

  Mitch hung up and reached for a fresh notepad and started jotting down questions that needed answering. Questions like… How much of Dorset had Bruce Leanse actually bought up? What were his real plans? How did the school figure into them? How did Takai?

  Now his phone was ringing. He picked it up, thinking it would be Lacy.

  “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch who did this to my Moose!” Hangtown roared at him. “You hear me, Big Mitch? With my own two hands!”

  “Hangtown, I’m so incredibly sorry-”

  “He’s a dead man! Dead!”

  “That’s no answer. You’ve got to let the law handle this.”

  “But that lieutenant’s a muscle-bound cretin-he’s actually trying to pin it on Jim!”

  “Des will keep an eye on things,” Mitch assured him. “Believe me, nothing gets by her. And if there’s anything I can do…”

  The old master was silent a moment. “Are you my friend, Big Mitch?”

  “You bet.”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “Just tell me how.”

  “Jim and me, we were smoking ourselves some homegrown when Moose was killed. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “You were getting stoned together.”

  “It helps me with my arthritis pain. Mornings are the worst. I can barely get out of bed. But I can’t tell them we were getting high because it’s a violation of Jim’s parole. They’ll send him back to jail. And, wait, there’s more-Jim still keeps his hand in. Had some dynamite plants growing out behind the cottages this summer. I’ve got pounds of the stuff stashed in my dungeon, Big Mitch, and a state trooper camped on my doorstep at this very minute-” Hangtown broke off, wheezing. “Will you tell Des for me?”

  “Tell her what, Hangtown?”

  “The truth-that I can vouch for Jim’s whereabouts. That he’s innocent. Only, you’ve got to whisper it in her ear, or they’ll set the dogs loose on him. Can you do that for me?”

  “I can. But I can’t guarantee how she’ll respond.”

  “She’ll do what’s right,” the old man said with total certainty.

  “Hangtown, there’s something else we need to talk about. I just spoke to my editor at the paper-”

  “You’re going to write a story about this. Of course you are. I understand.”

  “How did you know last night? That I might have to write about you. How did you know?”

  “I told you-you get a sense of things when you get to be my age. You lose your friends. The people who you love… they get taken from you. But you do gain that.”

  “I won’t quote you. Not unless you want me to.”

  “I don’t care, Big Mitch. Don’t care about that stuff anymore. My Moose is gone. My Moose is…” Wendell Frye let out a strangled cry. “Someone just cut my heart out.” Sobbing, he hung up the phone.

  Mitch’s own chest felt heavy with grief. Moose’s death was causing him to revisit emotions he hadn’t gone near since he lost Maisie. He didn’t want to go through this. He didn’t want to go to another funeral. He didn’t want to ask himself those awful, painful questions that had no answers, such as: Why does someone vibrant and good get snuffed out before her time while the cruel, the dishonest and the horrible just keep right on using up air and skin until a ripe old age? When he was on the job in a darkened screening room, alone with his notepad, Mitch never had to ponder such unanswerable questions. Hollywood movies steered carefully around them. Hollywood movies steered carefully around anything that made audiences unhappy. But out here in the sunlight, he did have to think about such things. Because if you got involved with people, things happened to those people, and not all of those things were good.

  In fact, sometimes it seemed that none of them were.

  And so he hopped in his old truck and went rattling over the wooden causeway toward town, where he could begin to deal with it.

  First he had to stop at Sheila Enman’s mill house in front of the waterfall on Eight Mile River. She needed to be told. It would be better if she heard it in person.

  The old schoolteacher was seated on a plain wooden chair by her kitchen window, her stooped, big-boned body clad in a ragged yellow cardigan and dark green slacks. Her walker-Sheila called it her giddy-up-was parked near at hand.

  Mitch enjoyed Sheila Enman immensely. She was a feisty old Yankee who’d lived in her wonderful mill house all of her life. She had great stories to tell, and age hadn’t slowed her mind one bit.

  Except today it seemed to have ground to a halt entirely. Gazing out of her window at the waterfall, Sheila was almost like a different person-vacant, remote and despondent. “Selectman Paffin just stopped by,” she said to Mitch in a muted, hollow voice. “Is it true, Mr. Berger? Is she really gone?”

  Mitch dropped into the chair next to hers. “I’m afraid so, Mrs. Enman.”

  “She had every reason in the world to be stuck-up. Her father’s position and all-Lord knows, Takai is. But not Moose. Never Moose. She was so sweet, so giving…” Sheila pulled a wadded tissue from the rolled-back sleeve of her sweater and dabbed at her eyes. “I must apologize, but I didn’t bake anything for you this morning. I just couldn’t bring myself to.”

  “Don’t be sorry about that, Mrs. Enman. Don’t even think about it.”

  “But I have such a favor to ask. That is, if you don’t mind…”

  “Of course not. Anything.”

  “Will you take me with you when you go to her funeral?”

  Mitch sighed inwardly and said, “Absolutely. I’ll be happy to.”

  Dorset’s town hall was a sober two-story brick building with dignified white columns, a flagpole and a squat bronze monument out front honoring the village’s Civil War dead.

  Inside, it smelled of musty carpeting, mothballs and Ben Gay. The office of First Selectman Paffin was just inside the front door. He kept his door open at all times-if anyone had something to say to him, they could simply walk right in. One of those quaint small-town New England customs that Dorset cherished.

  Ordinarily, Mitch found town hall to be about as lively as a wax museum. Today, its corridors were buzzing. People dashing in and out of one another’s offices, gathering in doorways for urgent conversations about Moose’s death, their voices animated, eyes shiny. Today, the natural order of things had been knocked utterly off-kilter.

  The town clerk’s office, where property deeds were recorded and kept, was all the way down at the end of the hall. Connect the dots, Jim Bolan had urged Mitch. Here were the dots.

  The town clerk was a chubby, pink-cheeked grandmother named Jessie Moffit. “Do the troopers have any idea what happened yet, Mr. Berger?” she asked Mitch eagerly.

  Which Mitch thought was a bit odd, since he and Jessie had never actually met before. He drew two conclusions from this, just in case he’d harbored any doubts. One was that everyone in Dorset knew him when they saw him, and two was that the new resident trooper was wasting her hard-earned money at the Frederick House. They all knew.

  “Not yet,” Mitch replied. “But I’m sure they will.”

  The property deeds were kept in a walk-in fireproof vault that looked as if it belonged in Dodge City, stuffed full of gold. Hanging from an inside
wall was a U.S. Geological Survey map of Dorset’s wetlands and estuaries. The plot plans were kept in an oversized map book. Jessie found him the map for the area of Connecticut River frontage where Hangtown lived, also the map encompassing Jim Bolan’s old farm and the proposed site for the new elementary school. The deeds were recorded and filed by an index number. To find out a property’s index number he had to look it up in the index book under the deed holder’s name. Which presented a problem since he was trying to learn the deed holder’s name.

  Not to worry, clucked Jessie, who sent him down the hall to the assessor’s office to dig up who had been paying taxes on the properties in question. After spending two hours there, combing through surveyer’s map books and grand lists, and another hour back in the vault, Mitch was able to piece together not only who owned the major parcels of undeveloped land surrounding the proposed school site but when they had taken title to them.

  Jim Bolan had not exaggerated. Huge chunks of land had changed hands in the past twenty-four months, just under three thousand acres of pasturage and forest in all-a vast amount of land for the precious Connecticut shoreline. The parcels formed a half-mile-wide ribbon between Route 156 and the river, bordered on the north by Uncas Pond and on the south by state forest. The ribbon was a continuous one, with the notable exception of Hangtown’s farm, which was situated right smack-dab in the middle and enjoyed the choicest river frontage.

  Jim Bolan’s old farm was now owned by an outfit called Great North Holdings of Toronto, Ontario. Great North also owned two other parcels, 88 acres and 232 acres apiece. Bruce Leanse owned some 400 acres in all. Twenty that he lived on. Ten that were earmarked for the new school. The rest were presently under development as housing sites. Pilgrim Properties of Boston, Massachusetts, had bought three parcels numbering 40 acres, 22 acres and 410 acres. Two more chunks of land, totaling 860 acres, were owned by Lowenthal and Partners of New York City. The remaining 600 acres belonged to Big Sky Development Corporation of Bozeman, Montana.

  A good start, Mitch reflected as he emerged, bleary-eyed, from the vault, feeling every inch like Erin Brockovich, minus the push-up bra. Now he’d have to find out who was behind all of these different companies, and what, if anything, they had in common. A journalism school buddy of his was a real estate reporter on the newspaper. In exchange for two seats to the premiere of the new Tom Cruise, she would tell Mitch how to track these people down.