by S. J. Rozan
“He sure as hell was, until you and your New York Jew lawyer fucked me up. Fucked me up real good. I sneeze in this county now, my fucking county, Grice yells for his lawyer. ‘Harassment.’ ‘Brutality.’ Where the hell you think he learned that shit, Smith? Fucking city lawyer shit!”
“Too bad it’s so easy to believe.”
Brinkman’s mouth twisted into an ugly shape. He made a grab for me but the deputy, smooth and graceful the way a fat man can be, slipped his bulk between us, his back to me, his cushiony hands on Brinkman’s arms. “Come on, Sheriff. Everyone’s upset here. I’m sure Mr. Smith didn’t mean nothing by it.”
Brinkman snarled, shook the deputy off, took a step back. “Oh, he did, Art. He sure did,” he said, controlled and soft.
He turned and looked at Wally Gould, still sitting stupidly in the dirt, staring at nothing. Then he turned back. “All right. Upstairs. Art, call the pretty boys at the state, find out where the hell they are.” His small eyes lit with a thought. “Smith, you packing a gun?”
“You know I am.” I held my jacket open so he could see the Colt under my left arm.
“Give it to me.”
I laughed. “You’re not in a good enough mood for me to reach for a gun, Brinkman. You take it.”
His hands clenched and he took a step toward me. Then he stopped, his eyes on mine, and the mean little smile came out of nowhere, spread like a stain across his face.
He reached for my holster, snapped the safety off, slid the gun out. It was the gun I carry when I have a choice, an old snub-nose five-shot. He looked at it wonderingly, held it out for Art to see. “Look at this shit. Christ, Smith, why don’t you get yourself a piece that works?”
“It works.”
“Oh?” He broke it open, sniffed at it. “Maybe so. Been cleaned lately.”
“I keep it clean. I like clean things.”
“How about that, Art?” He nudged the deputy. “A city boy that likes clean things.”
He pocketed my gun and moved toward the stairs, pushing me aside instead of stepping around me to show he could.
Upstairs the air was better. The company was the same.
Brinkman settled on a barstool, his back to the bar, his elbows resting on it. “Where’s Jimmy?” he asked Tony pleasantly.
“I ain’t seen him in a coupla weeks.”
“Oh, come on, Tony. Doesn’t he live with you? In that big old place your grandpa built?” Brinkman jerked a thumb in the direction of Tony’s house across the road from the bar.
“He moved out Christmas.”
“You throw him out?”
Tony’s eyes blazed. “Go to hell, Brinkman.”
Brinkman smiled. “Well, I’ll find him. You seen him, Smith?”
“I just came up night before last.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you come up?”
“I’ve been coming here for eighteen years, Brinkman. I never needed a reason before.”
“Well, city boy,” Brinkman drawled, crossing a shiny boot over his knee, “maybe you’re going to need one from now on.”
5
THE STATE TROOPERS’ Bureau of Criminal Investigation for the tri-county area was near Bramanville in a gray block building off the state highway. It was surrounded by a featureless field of grass and a parking lot. The grass was brown and thin now, at the chill end of winter, but spring wouldn’t make much difference to it.
I was sitting where I’d been sitting for close to an hour, in a one-windowed office at the end of a narrow corridor. The walls were paneled in wood-veneer pressboard and hung with a pin-dotted county map and photos of the governor. Glass-doored bookshelves held law enforcement manuals and phonebooks. A big wooden desk with a glass top sat diagonally across a corner of the room, facing the door. I sat facing the desk.
The man whose office it was, Senior Investigator Ron MacGregor, got up from behind the desk to shut the door. MacGregor was unremarkable to look at, medium height, medium build, about as much red, thinning hair as you might expect on a man pushing fifty. A few freckles still stood out on his thin face and he had tired blue eyes.
MacGregor and I knew each other casually and accidentally. A good trout stream ran through the bottom of my land. I didn’t fish it often, because from where I was it was nearly inaccessible. My land was vertical, ten acres spread down the side of a steep hill, with a few shelves like the one the cabin was on and just enough of a leveling out near 30 that a road could be coaxed out of it. Only a fanatic would bother with the long, tricky climb down to the stream over boulders and slippery leaves, especially when about five miles south the stream flowed through county land with a well-kept path to it. I wasn’t that kind of fanatic, but MacGregor was, and one April afternoon a couple of years ago when roadwork muddied the water downstream, I drove in to find one of my windows forced open and some expensive-looking fishing tackle in my kitchen. A note, written in an unfamiliar hand on paper torn from a pocket notebook, was stuck on the reel. “Was fishing your stream,” it read. “Sprained my ankle. Why don’t you have a goddamn phone? Having enough trouble without this stuff. Eat the fish. I’ll be by for the gear.” It was signed “Ron MacGregor.”
I looked in the fridge. There were four beautiful trout in a creel. I took one out, wrapped it in newspaper, put it back on the shelf. Then I took the creel and the rest of the gear over to Antonelli’s and checked the phone book. There were two Ron MacGregors in the county; I hit it the first time. “Didn’t want your fish to rot,” I told him.
“You the guy in Lou Antonelli’s place? Why the hell don’t you have a phone? It took me an hour to crawl up your goddamn driveway.”
“Get a phone, people start calling you,” I explained. “You never know where it might end.”
I took him his fish and his gear, and we sat drinking beer in his split-level ranch for the rest of the afternoon.
Since then he’d fished my stream often. What he liked about my stream was the same thing I liked about my cabin: there was no one else around. What I liked about him was that he left his car at the top of the road and never stopped by to say hello without an invitation.
MacGregor sat back down. “You want another cup of coffee?”
“No,” I said. “That one was bad enough.”
I’d told my story twice, once briefly when MacGregor and his men arrived at Antonelli’s, then in more detail here for the benefit of MacGregor, a uniformed trooper, and a tape machine. I’d told it patiently and completely, gave details as I remembered them, answered questions as I could. I left out only two things. I didn’t say what the fight last night had been about—I didn’t really know anyway— and, though I gave MacGregor the keys on the silver ring and told him where I’d found them, I didn’t tell him whose I thought they were. When I was through, the trooper left, taking the tape to be transcribed.
With the door closed and the trooper gone, MacGregor frowned. He poked the eraser end of his pencil at my handkerchief, lying in the center of his desk with the keys on top. “Withholding evidence, Smith. That’s a bad business.”
“I’m not withholding anything. I’m giving it to you.”
“Tampering, then. What if there were prints on these?”
“Then there still are. I’ve had them gift-wrapped, Mac. They were safer with me than they would have been with Brinkman’s boys.”
MacGregor sighed with that weariness in a cop that a night’s sleep or a month’s vacation won’t cure. “That’s true. It’s the only reason I’m not going to chew your ass over this—now. What else have you got? The murder weapon, maybe?”
“Nothing else.”
“Why’d you pick these up?”
“I thought I recognized them. I wanted to see them in the light.”
“Oh? Private citizen wants to look at the evidence, he just scoops it up and walks off with it?”
“Private investigator, Mac. It’s in my blood. I’m sorry.”
“And?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”
“What do you think?”
“I think that when I’m sure I’ll tell you.”
MacGregor pushed at the handkerchief some more. “You’re pretty close with the Antonellis, aren’t you?”
“Tony and I go back awhile. I rented his father’s hunting cabin when I first started coming up here; when the old man died Tony sold it to me.”
“And Jimmy?”
“He was a kid when his father died, eight or nine. He used to spend some time with me, when I was up.”
MacGregor looked up from the handkerchief. “I heard you were like another father to him.”
“I wasn’t here enough for that, except one winter. I had troubles of my own around that time. The kid was good company. He didn’t talk much.”
“And when he was arrested?”
“Which time?”
“You know what I mean. Last fall.”
I shrugged. “He was looking at five to fifteen. He didn’t deserve it.”
“Says you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So you brought up a slick city lawyer and got him off.”
“I thought the troopers weren’t involved in that, it was a county thing. What do you care?”
“It pissed off every cop on this side of the state, Smith. We’re simple folks up here; we’re not used to being outmanuevered by lawyers with manicures and bow ties.”
“I didn’t like it either. I don’t like to operate that way. But the kid didn’t have a chance. Brinkman was out to get Grice and he was squeezing Jimmy hard. The whole scam was Grice’s; Jimmy wasn’t even in it for the money, just the fun.”
“How so?”
“You know what Grice paid Jimmy to drop those cars in the quarry? A hundred bucks each. It must have been worth a lot more than that to Grice to lose them.”
“So why’d Jimmy do it?”
“Because it was dangerous. You know how he did it?”
“Put the car in neutral and pushed, I’d guess.”
“You’d be wrong. He drove the damn things like a bat out of hell over the edge with the door open, jumped out just before they hit the water. Twice a car rolled over on him; once he got knocked on the head. He still doesn’t know how he made it onto the rocks that time; he didn’t wake up until morning.”
MacGregor shook his head. “He’s crazy.”
“No, he’s not. Just wild. Making a lot of noise so he won’t hear the sounds in the dark. No different from a lot of kids.”
MacGregor chewed his bottom lip. He had kids, too. Girls; but girls had their own ways of being wild.
He said, “You got any idea where I can find him?”
I said evenly, “No. Why?”
He threw down the pencil. “Oh, come on, Smith! You got a better suspect?”
“Why would Jimmy kill Gould?”
“I’ve got two theories and I haven’t even thought about it yet. Maybe it was Gould who tipped off Brinkman about the quarry, and Jimmy was pissed. Guys like Gould have turned out to be snitches before this. Or, maybe Jimmy was looking to move up in Grice’s organization and Gould was in the way.”
“And why leave the body lying around?”
“Maybe he meant to come back for it, after he figured out what to do with it. From the looks of that cellar, no one goes down there from one month to the next unless something blows.”
“Things blow all the time over there. Jimmy would know that.”
“Well,” he said, his eyes on the handkerchief on his desk, “maybe he went out to his car to get something and found he’d lost his keys, couldn’t get back in.” He looked at me again. “He can hot-wire the car; maybe he’s got another set of keys to the bar at home. Maybe it’s pretty close to morning anyway, Tony’ll be there soon. Maybe he figures he’ll chance it, leave the body, come back the next night. He’s big on taking chances, I hear.”
I looked at him levelly. “He’s not a killer, Mac.”
MacGregor didn’t answer, only shrugged.
“Can I leave?” I asked. “I’m starving.”
MacGregor sighed and his tone changed. “In a minute. Tell me something else. Brinkman has this bug up his ass about Grice. So why hasn’t he ever picked him up?”
“What do you mean?”
“I never heard Brinkman was crooked but I never heard he was Kojak, either. All the rackets Grice runs—protection, prostitution, even drugs—some jerk or other has run in Schoharie since the Creation. Never bothered Brinkman as long as the boys were local and kept their heads down. Then along comes some minor-league bozo out of Albany to do a little muscle work and all of a sudden fighting crime is more important to Brinkman than sitting on his duff watching his pension grow.”
“Jesus, Mac, I thought you and Brinkman were on the same side.” He glared. I asked, “What kind of muscle work?”
MacGregor snorted. “Union-busting. For Appleseed.”
“Scabbing at the baby food plant? God, that’s disillusioning.”
“Yeah. So Brinkman develops the same boil on his butt about Grice that he has about you—asshole from the city messing in his county, all that shit.” I raised an eyebrow at “asshole” but that didn’t stop him. “But in the four years Grice’s been around, Brinkman hasn’t managed to take him up even once. Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know. Well, maybe you know this. After your slimy lawyer sprang Jimmy Antonelli, Brinkman still had nine cars that his boys spent a week— and a hell of a lot of county money—pulling out of the quarry. If Grice was running dope up from Florida in them there must have been some other way to prove it. Why didn’t he or the DA even try?”
I stood up. “What the hell do I look like, the Answer Man? Ask Brinkman. I’m going to get some lunch.”
“Not even a theory?”
“Yeah, I have a theory. But you won’t like it.”
“Try me.”
“Grice has protection, someone watching his back.”
“Oh, screw that. In New York maybe. It doesn’t work that way up here.”
“Come off it, Mac. A jerk who’d be nobody anywhere else drifts into the county, puts all the local talent out of business, and for four years even a jack-booted sheriff with a grudge can’t get near him. Did you know Grice left for Florida the night before Brinkman busted Jimmy? Left in a hurry, came back three days after Jimmy got out. It glows in the dark, Mac. Only a cop could miss it.”
MacGregor turned his face to the window, stared out over the brown grass to the trees that started abruptly beyond it. After a minute he reached over, punched a button on his phone.
“Craig? You got Smith’s statement yet? Well, bring it in. And bring in Tony Antonelli, too; I’m ready.” He dropped the receiver in the cradle. “Sign your statement and beat it. Don’t leave the county. You got a phone yet?”
“Not a chance.” I didn’t tell him about the cell phone. Up here in the hills, it’s close to useless anyway, which I can’t say I really minded. “You need me, you can leave a message at Antonelli’s.” I looked at his gray, tired face. “Cheer up, Mac. Fishing season starts in four weeks.”
Life came into his blue eyes. “Three weeks, three days. I’ve been tying flies all winter.”
“I don’t doubt it.” The door opened and Tony came in, with the uniformed trooper who’d taken my tape. The trooper handed me three typed pages; I glanced through them, signed the bottom of each.
“All right,” said MacGregor. “Go on. Just don’t disappear.”
“When do I get my gun back?”
“When we’re finished with it. Call tomorrow.”
I turned to Tony. I could read tension in the set of his shoulders. His face was opaque. “See you later,” I said to him. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded. I left MacGregor’s office, navigated past a pair of troopers in gray uniforms sitting at gray desks. I took long, deep breaths as I headed toward my car across the gra
y asphalt parking lot.
The damn car was gray, too. I couldn’t remember why that had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Off the highway just west of the trooper station there was a shabby Amoco station with a working pay phone. I called Obermeyer’s garage, letting the phone ring long enough for a mechanic to curse, crawl out from under a car, and pick up the receiver in a grease-blackened hand; but it didn’t happen. There was no answer.
I leaned against the chipped enameled steel panels of the station and watched a chunky kid in a green football jersey fill my car. I thought. Not that I had a hell of a lot to work on, but I thought.
I paid for the gas and a pack of Kents and turned back east, toward the village of Schoharie. I cut off the highway onto 1A, a county road. For a few miles 1A ran through pines and maples and birches, past some old frame houses that had needed a coat of paint for as long as I could remember, past a couple of trailers parked broadside to the road, until suddenly it opened out just before it started down into Schoharie.
Even in this season, when everything lay still and cold, not quite ready yet to take another chance, the sudden view over these hills could take your breath away. There was a promise of generosity and refuge in the soft contours, in the bowl of the hills, in the wide valley quilted with farms and fields. The river that flowed through here was choked with ice now and the hills were gray-brown where they weren’t pine; and in a dark, unhealed gash in the hills you could see the old stone quarry, three played-out pits, empty now of what had made them worth ripping the hillside apart for; and farther down the hill, the smaller, working pit. Still, coming down into this valley, even in winter, could make you believe home could be more than just a word.
Schoharie’s not the largest town in the county—that’s Cobleskill, where the state ag-and-tech college is—but it’s the county seat. Main Street runs half a mile, flat, straight, and tree-shaded. In each direction, like a caterpillar’s legs, short narrow residential streets branch off it. None is more than three blocks long, the houses thinning by the start of the second block.
On the east side of Main in the center of town stand the village hall and the county buildings: the executive offices, the courthouse, the sheriff’s office with the new jail annex behind it. They’re mostly brown brick, but the courthouse, the oldest of them, is a square-shouldered building of gray local stone, pulled from the quarry in the busy, prosperous days.
