The Hot Pink Farmhouse bam-2

by David Handler

  He nodded, swallowing. “What else do you want?” he asked, his reedy voice soaring an octave.

  She started up her cruiser, pulled out of the parking lot and headed north on Dorset Street in the 2-A.M. stillness. “I want you to be a man instead of a punk. I want you to be responsible.”

  “For what?” he asked, watching the road carefully, desperate to know where she was taking him.

  “For your little brother. And those ladies next door. They’ve got themselves a problem. And I’m going to tell you straight up what it is-your dad, in case you didn’t know it.”

  “I know it,” Ronnie said quietly.

  “What’s his story, anyway?”

  “He’s a dead man walking. His business is in the toilet. He’s bitter, broke, horny. Plus he’s a total ass.” Ronnie sneaked a hopeful look at her. “Word, did you break his nose?”

  “Why, what did he say?”

  “That he got hit in the nose with a golf club, by accident.”

  “Works for me,” she said, straight-faced.

  “You have it wrong, you know. He’s not hot for Phoebe. He’s hot for Mrs. Beddoe.”

  Des glanced over at him in surprise. “How do you know that?”

  “Phoebe told me.”

  “You two are friends?

  “Kind of.”

  “Why did your dad give Ricky that black eye?”

  “Because Ricky talked back to him.”

  “Ricky told me you gave it to him.”

  “No way. I love the little turd. All we’ve got is each other. He’s just afraid the law will come down on Dad and we’ll end up in some foster home.”

  She thought this over as she steered her cruiser up the Old Post Road in the darkness. “You like Phoebe a lot, don’t you?”

  “I mean, yeah…” he answered uncomfortably. “But they’re grooming her for the big leagues. She’ll go off to Yale, marry a lawyer.”

  “You could do that. Go to Yale, be a lawyer.”

  “I’m not that smart.”

  “Word, I used to be married to a Yale Law School graduate-they aren’t that smart.” She glanced across the seat at him. He looked incredibly young, riding there next to her. They always looked younger when they were in custody. And smaller. “From now on, Phoebe’s family to you. If I get one more phone call from that mother of hers, I’m busting you for tonight’s antics, understand?”

  “Does this mean you’re not busting me now?”

  “Depends. Do you realize the enormity of what you almost did?”

  “Why are you asking me that?” asked Ronnie, frowning.

  “Because if you don’t, then I’ll have to run you over to the Troop F Barracks in Westbrook, where they’ll lock you up in a cell for the night with the rest of the trash. Man, are they going to love that smooth white flesh of yours. In the morning you’ll be arraigned at New London Superior Court on-”

  “I understand,” Ronnie said urgently.

  “What do you understand?”

  “What I almost did tonight. How heavy it would have been.”

  “If your father steps out of line again, I want to hear from you. He lays a hand on you or your brother, he gets busy with the Beddoe ladies, you pick up the phone and you call me.”

  “You want me to rat out my own father to the police?”

  “Not to the police, to me.”

  “God, this is too freakin’ weird.”

  “Life is freakin’ weird. Get used to it.” Des came to a stop by the stone pillars at the foot of Somerset Ridge. “Up to you, big man. Either we deal or we head for Westbrook. What’s it to be?”

  “I’ll call you,” he said hoarsely.

  “Smart move,” she said, easing down the road toward his house. “I knew you had it in you.”

  “Damn,” Ronnie Welmers marveled, shaking his head. “You’re not very nice, are you?”

  “That’s where you are way wrong,” Des said, flashing a smile at him. “Remember this day, sweetness. Remember it often. Because I am the nicest person you will ever meet.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Des was out there enforcing the seventy-five-foot limit when Mitch pulled into the firehouse parking lot. The polling place was mobbed. Voters lined up out the door all the way to Dorset Street. Dozens of vocal demonstrators crowded the curb with save our school and WE CARE signs. It seemed as if every registered voter in town had shown up to weigh in on the future of Center School. And, quite possibly, the future of Dorset itself.

  Mitch tried to wangle a smile out of Des as he eased on past her into a parking space, but the resident trooper had her game face on. All he got was a curt nod.

  “Quite a lovely girl, isn’t she?” Sheila Enman spoke up from the seat next to him, her eyes twinkling at Mitch.

  “Yes, she is, Mrs. Enman,” he said, watching Des in his rearview mirror as First Selectman Paffin approached her with his hand stuck out and a broad grin on his face.

  “One helluva caboose on her, too,” the old lady observed, craning her neck for a better look. “Me, I never looked like that in trousers.”

  The polls closed at eight o’clock. The tally, which was posted on the town’s Web site later that evening, was surprisingly lopsided. The thirty-four-million-dollar school bond proposal failed by a no vote of 3,874 to 2,175. The Center School would be spared.

  Mitch was positively elated. He liked Dorset just the way it was.

  One of the reasons the no vote was so resounding was Wendell Frye’s generous bequest to the town. In the fine print of his amended will Hangtown had pledged one-half million dollars to Center School for the construction of a world-class art studio complex for Dorset’s young people. The money was not transferable to a new school facility-if the town tore down Center School, the bequest would be voided.

  Even in death, the old master’s voice was heard. And heeded.

  The day after the election Bob Paffin officially said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the parcel of land on Route 156 that Bruce Leanse had wanted to donate for a new school. The first selectman also announced that he would be forming a committee comprised of town committee leaders and school board members to find out exactly how much it would cost to renovate and enlarge Center School. Chairing the committee would be Colin Falconer, who would be restored to his post as Dorset’s superintendent of schools after completing a two-week medical leave. Colin was officially reprimanded for engaging in a “pattern” of inappropriate relationships, but the town leaders could not bring themselves to fire their troubled school superintendent.

  The likelihood of a huge, expensive lawsuit if they did may have had something to do with their decision, though they denied this vehemently.

  By chatting up the locals at the market and the hardware store, Mitch gathered that the prevailing feeling around town was that Babette Leanse had overreached-in her zeal to build the new school she had behaved in a reckless, irresponsible manner that was most definitely not Dorset. They were also convinced that her husband had known all about her unsavory scheme to oust Colin, in spite of her insistence that she had purposely kept him in the dark about it. The Leanses simply could not persuade a single soul in Dorset to believe that they did anything without joint, careful calculation. No one believed them. No one.

  Meanwhile, the word around town hall was that any future development proposal that Bruce Leanse brought before the planning, zoning or wetlands commission would be viewed most unfavorably. In short, the Brat was toast in Dorset, Connecticut. The Aerie, his self-proclaimed revolution in continuous living, would have to be built somewhere else. And it would be built, because people like Bruce Leanse didn’t quit. They kept right on going.

  In fact, he was already gone. When Mitch phoned him for a quote he got a phone machine message that said to try his New York office instead. Intrigued, Mitch drove up to the Leanses’ hilltop house and discovered they had cleared out. The house was vacant. And Ben was no longer enrolled at Center School-he’d been transferred out.

  Mitch s
pent almost all of his time in the days following Hangtown’s death trying to pull all of the pieces of his magazine article together. The Sunday magazine’s editor, who was labeling it “A Grisly Tale of one Famous Family’s Mutual Assured Destruction” wanted it as fast as Mitch could deliver it.

  Mitch was still pounding furiously away at it when Jim Bolan came bouncing across the causeway one blustery afternoon in his rusty old pickup, Sam the German shepherd riding next to him in the cab. Stashed in the back of the truck, under a tarp, was the completed copper tower.

  “He wanted you to have this thing, son,” Jim informed him, dragging deeply on a Lucky Strike. “It ain’t in his will or nothing, but he told me so right to my face. Day before he died.” Jim dropped the tailgate and carefully lifted out the six-foot-tall copper fountain. “He was real emphatic about it, on account of you helped him make it and all. Even made sure he signed it-etched it right there in acid, see?”

  Mitch stared at the great man’s signature, nodding dumbly. He could not speak.

  “I guess I don’t have to tell you it’s kind of valuable,” Jim mentioned. “Last piece he ever did. Miz Patterson can sell it for you if you ever-”

  “Never,” Mitch said hoarsely. “I’d never sell it.”

  “Up to you, son,” Jim said easily. “It’s yours. Want to crank her up?”

  They filled the twenty-gallon copper holding tank in Mitch’s bathtub and set it in the center of the living room. The copper tower stood smack in the center of the tank, stabilized by the weight of the water. A submersible pump went right into the tank. Jim connected it to the tower’s skeleton of copper tubing with a short length of plastic hose. As soon as Mitch plugged it in he could hear the pump burp and gurgle. Within a few seconds it had pushed the water all the way up to the top of the tower. Then, slowly, it trickled down through the hundreds of nooks and crannies in between the copper boxes as it made its way back down into the tank to be recirculated again and again.

  Mitch stood there watching and listening, transfixed. So did Jim. There was something positively hypnotic about Hangtown’s copper tower. Something timeless and magical. Mitch couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly. Maybe there were no words to describe it, he reflected, because it touched him in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with the intellectual side of his brain. He only knew that he was in the presence of great art.

  “What will you do with yourself now?” he asked Jim as the two of them stood gazing at it reverently.

  “Same as before,” Jim answered. “Take care of the place. Watch his back. He wrote it into his will-I’m live-in caretaker for the rest of my natural days, if that’s what I want. And I guess it is. Right now, I’m helping Miz Patterson catalog all of the pieces he never disposed of.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, just yell,” Mitch offered. “And if you ever feel like stopping by some night to watch Celebrity Deathmatch, my door’s open.”

  “Likewise, son,” Jim said warmly, clapping Mitch on the back. “I haven’t got me no cable TV, but you want to come by for a beer, you don’t need to call. It’s just me, Sam and Elrod the pig now.”

  “Well, at least you won’t be alone,” Mitch said, smiling at him.

  Jim’s lined, leathery face fell. “No, I won’t be alone. There’s plenty of ghosts there on that farm. Too damned many ghosts, you ask me.”

  “I think we should make a special pact in honor of Hang-town,” Mitch said as they lolled there together in the sparkling new bathtub, sipping ice-cold Moet amp; Chandon.

  Des had moved into her new house that morning. The place still smelled of fresh paint, but it was extraordinarily bright and airy and clean. Awesome view of the lake, too.

  “Pact?” Des’s eyes were shut, her ankles resting lazily on Mitch’s shoulders. She seemed a bit more at ease now that she had her own digs for herself. And those eight furry boarders of hers were in her own garage instead of Bella’s. It had bothered her, not being settled. “What kind of a pact?”

  “I think we really should try to grow one day younger every day for the rest of our lives. What do you think of that?”

  “I think,” she replied, “that it sounds like a plan.”

  “More potato chips?” Mitch reached for the jumbo bag on the edge of the tub.

  “Man, how can you keep eating those things?”

  “What else am I going to do with them?” he asked, shoving several into his mouth. “Besides, I never got paid in one-hundred-percent grease before. I could get used to this.”

  “Well, don’t,” she sniffed. “Or I’ll have to put you on a diet of carrot sticks and five-K runs.”

  Mitch had discovered her at her easel when he got there, working on a portrait of Takai Frye in death, her chest blown open by the Barrett, her beautiful face frozen in a final scream. It was truly horrifying, but it was how Des coped. So she drew while Mitch labored over a printout of his article, and some time after midnight they popped open the champagne and collapsed in her tub together.

  “Why didn’t you do it?” he asked her quietly. “Why didn’t you shoot Hangtown?”

  “Baby, I’ve thought about that a lot,” she replied, staring down into her long-stemmed glass of bubbly. “And I really don’t know.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  Her face tightened. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “Deep down inside you felt he deserved to live and Takai didn’t.”

  “She deserved a trial,” Des pointed out. “She had a right to a trial. She didn’t get one.”

  “She got what was coming to her, and we both know it. That’s why you didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “Maybe so,” Des conceded. “But don’t ever tell anyone that. Because I’m supposed to protect them all, regardless of how I feel about them. If I showed a preference that would make me, I don’t know

  …”

  “Human,” he said, grinning at her.

  Her almond-shaped green eyes narrowed at him. “And that’s okay with you?”

  “Of course it is. If you weren’t human, then I wouldn’t be able to love you as much as I do.”

  “Damn, I wish you wouldn’t say things like that,” she said, her voice clutching. “It’s just not… fair. You could at least warn me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, stroking her smooth, slender calf. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Crazy Daisy. Hang-town told me about her while I was acting as a journalist, and that made it confidential. I didn’t like keeping it from you, believe me.”

  “He told you that day the Deacon came for dinner, didn’t he?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You had something heavy on your mind when you came in the door. You weren’t all there.” She reached for a wash-cloth and dabbed at her face with it. “Let’s say Hangtown didn’t die. Let’s say he’s still alive…”

  “Okay…”

  “Would you still be putting that in your article?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Mitch confessed, sipping his champagne. “He wanted me to. All I kept thinking about was how it would change the way people looked at his art. Change it for all time. And for what-something that happened thirty years ago?”

  “A girl died, Mitch,” Des reminded him.

  “Believe me, I know that,” he said, watching her. “You’re not okay with this, are you? Me not telling you about it.”

  “Nooo, I’m cool,” she said slowly. “Deciding what’s right isn’t that simple, no matter how much we want it to be. I mean, if there’s one thing I’ve learned at the art academy, it’s just how many different shades of gray there are. But if you’re feeling guilty, I know how you can make it up to me…”

  “Go for it.”

  “How would you like to mentor a troubled teenaged boy? He loves movies, he’s incredibly bright. He’s also a garbagehead with an attitude, but put seventy-five pounds and a pair of baggy khakis on him and, whoop-dee-damn-do, he’s you.”

  “This is Ronnie the Mod Squad kid
, am I right?”

  “You are.”

  “I take it the first selectman is pleased that you shut them down?”

  “Hey, I’m Dorset’s new fair-haired girl,” she cracked. “So what do you say-will you give it a try?”

  “I can’t say no to you. Why is that?”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Des said demurely, caressing him with deft, knowing fingers under the water. “What would you think about Bella moving in here for a while? Until she finds a place of her own.”

  “I think it would be great,” Mitch replied enthusiastically.

  Her eyes searched his face carefully. “You do?”

  “Absolutely. You’ll feel better about spending more time at my place if you know that she’s here watching your charges. Plus we’ll get a good, honest brisket dinner every Friday night. Major sandwiches with the leftovers. Of course, I’ll have to grow us some horseradish

  …”

  “I’m serious, Mitch.”

  “So am I, girlfriend. I’d be thrilled if you never spent a single night here. Stay with me out on Big Sister. We should be waking up in each other’s arms every morning. We should be together. What do I have to do to convince you of that?”

  She fell into a guarded silence for a moment, her body tensing next to his in the tub. “You liked Moose, didn’t you.”

  “Sure, I did.”

  “No, I mean you liked her.”

  Mitch gazed at her in astonishment. “Why do you say that?”

  “Maybe I can read your mind sometimes, too.”

  “What a scary concept.”

  “It isn’t pretty, now that you mention it. Are you sorry how things turned out?”

  “I’m sorry that she’s dead, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s not,” she said, leveling her gaze at him. “And you know it.”

  Mitch let out a sigh of sheer frustration. She still didn’t believe they were for real. Was still protecting herself against getting hurt. “If you’re wondering whether I’m sorry that you and I are together, the answer is no, you hardheaded doofus. Sooner or later everybody has got to believe in something. And somewhere along the line-I don’t know when, I don’t know how-you are going to have to believe in us. I sure as hell do.” He reached for her hand, his fingers intertwining with hers. “Okay…?”