Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  It was a good thought, but not practical. “Down-east Maine is too remote. Victor wants to be up here; the rest follows from that. To anyone else this area would look like a career dead end, but he’s willing to let it develop.”

  With Victor heading it, a local trauma center could attract whatever it needed, given time and patience: more money, a rising reputation, other staff.

  But without him, its chances were zippo.

  “Uh-huh,” Wade said quietly when I’d finished, which for him was unusual; ordinarily, his energy could charge a truck battery.

  “Sam all right?”

  I peered at him. “Hanging in there. What about you?”

  “Oh, fine.” He frowned at the ale bottle. “I guess. But this just makes me realize again that I shouldn’t have left Victor in the bar last night. I knew Reuben was after him but I walked away. So in a way this is—”

  All my fault, he was about to say, and I just stared at him. Self-flagellation was not exactly his usual habit.

  “Wade, there was nothing you could have—”

  He got up, his face severe. “Done? Yes, there was. A long time ago. But I didn’t do it.”

  He rubbed a big hand over his wiry hair. “I could have, but I didn’t. Just like last night. And now … look, one thing I know from working on the water is, no one’s going to do it for you. If you want something a certain way, you’ve got to make it that way. And when push came to shove last night, I did nothing.”

  Looking around the kitchen, he shook his head angrily. “Ah, hell. Got a nice old Remington shotgun in the truck, a guy wants me to work on for him. But in the mood I’m in, if I put a hand to it I’ll just screw it up. I’ll see you later.”

  With a grimace of self-disgust he pulled his jacket back on and went out, not even stopping to pat Monday, who watched him go with a look of hurt puzzlement in her eyes.

  I felt the same. Like many Maine men, Wade guards a core of privacy; he tells his secrets in his own time, when he is ready. And mostly, that worked fine for both of us.

  But at the moment I wasn’t in favor of secrets.

  Not at all.

  My lovely old white clapboard Federal was charming and historical, but its state of repair lent new meaning to the term fixer-upper. Calling it drafty, for instance, would have been putting it mildly. The way the wind blew through that old place in winter, I might as well have told the oil man to pump heating oil into the street, and burned it there without bothering to run it through the furnace.

  And winter, despite the brilliant autumn afternoon, was not far off. So, after Wade had gone, I trudged upstairs to start the weatherstripping project. With me I brought the clawhammer and the pry bar from my cellar workbench, a tack hammer and nails, the enormous heavy roll of copper weatherstripping I’d lugged uphill from Wadsworth’s Hardware, and a tape measure.

  Hauling them all into the big, bright front room overlooking the street, I began removing sashes from the room’s four tall double-hung windows, prying the exterior stops off the frames and lifting the heavy sashes—they are the things that actually have the glass panes in them—out of their channels.

  The trick is to avoid cracking the wooden pieces while prying them up, because you will need to use them again when you put the sashes back in; that, or pay a lot to have all new ones custom-made for you. So I proceeded carefully with a type of pry bar called a cat’s-paw, its blade wide and thin so as to slide deeply in and distribute the prying pressure.

  And it worked beautifully. Easing off the wooden strips, I lined the old square-cut nails up on the windowsill as I removed them. Nowadays, nails are manufactured from miles-long lengths of wire, thousands per minute, but these had been made one at a time by hand and I wanted to save them, though I wouldn’t be reusing them. They belonged to the house.

  From the window I could see all the way down Key Street to the harbor. Cars had already begun flooding into town, a whole week before the official beginning of the Salmon Festival, which Ellie said was going to go on come hell or high water and never mind the little matter of a couple of murders.

  In the park behind the old red-brick Peavey Library, men were busy setting up the striped awnings under which we would eat the salmon supper: steamed new potatoes and boiled corn and blueberry pie, and of course the grilled salmon. A group of town women were slapping a fresh coat of white paint onto the bandshell, where there would be live music. Ellie was among them, her coppery hair shining in the sun, and all over town I could see bright posters, placards, and banners announcing the upcoming festivities.

  A nail pierced the tip of my thumb. Staring at the droplet of blood, I heard Ellie’s words suddenly in my mind:

  Why did Reuben have to come back now?

  The idea niggled at me as I brushed out the channels where the window sashes had been: dust and old paint chips, bits of the past undisturbed for years, much like the recollections of people returning to East-port for the festival. Many had grown up here, and now they were coming back to dust off old friendships, regale themselves with old memories, and generally indulge in a little harmless nostalgia for the good old days.

  Maybe Reuben had come back for the festival, also. From what I’d heard of him, he hadn’t had many friends. But I gathered he’d had victims. So maybe that was why he’d come back now: to prey upon them again.

  Thinking this, I unrolled some copper weather-stripping and clipped a length of it. One thing an old house teaches you right away is the value of a good tool; instead of tin snips, I had a cuts-all gadget that was sharp enough to amputate fingers. Using it and the tack hammer, I fastened the copper strip to the top of one of the upper sashes and trimmed it neatly to fit.

  Killing Reuben was one thing; having victims led logically to having enemies. But displaying his body, hanging it up like some bloody flag: that was something else. There was also the question of the other victim, the one with Victor’s dratted tie in his throat. How had he hooked into all this bad business—if he had? And then there was a final problem, one my mind kept skittering away from.

  I clipped another piece of weatherstripping, nailed it into the groove of the window channel. As I did so, a breeze moved stealthily, lifting the hairs on my neck. But it was only a cold draft coming in through the open window.

  Replacing the sash in the channel, I checked its fit to make sure it was tight but also free to slide easily up and down. Then I got out the real prize from my window-restoration toolkit: the gimlet. This is a device like a small, needle-sharp-tipped wood screw, but in place of the screwhead it has a wire-loop handle.

  Because the thing is this: once the exterior stop was lined up against the sash, there wasn’t room to use a power drill. But hammering a nail in was almost certain to split the old wood, and the old nail holes were too chewed up to use a second time.

  So, placing the window in its channel and snugging the exterior stop up in front of it, I pressed the sharp tip of the gimlet into the wooden strip, grasped the gimlet handle between my thumb and forefinger, and gave it a twist.

  Presto: a new hole, called a pilot hole, just smaller than the nail I intended to drive, so the nail would hold snug. And the hole was already made for it so the old wood could not become damaged. Pleased, I surveyed the bright window again, the wavery old glass turning the view to an impressionistic smear.

  Without warning, the remembered sight of Reuben rose in it like a nightmare, his flaxen hair bloodstained, his eyes gazing from behind a red shroud. His hands had been scrabbling in his last moments, but in death they dangled, his unkempt nails maroon crescents.

  In other words, they hadn’t been tied. Yet he had been alive when somebody hung him on the cemetery gate. Alive and kicking…

  I blinked the memory away, gazing determinedly at the boats in the harbor, the white clapboard houses etched sharp as ink sketches in the sunshine. But I couldn’t so easily get rid of the questions lining up one after another, like the old nails on the windowsill.

  Reuben was a
fighter. Even Teddy Armstrong, who tossed guys out of La Sardina with monotonous regularity, had hesitated to eject Eastport’s bad boy. And though he was a very small man, Reuben still must have weighed 130 pounds or so.

  Which would have made getting him up on that gate alive an interesting project. Almost, perhaps, as interesting as finding out who’d done it and why.

  But first, I had a decision to make.

  Well, two decisions, actually.

  Wade Sorenson is not a protective man in the usual sense. His idea of looking out for a woman, for instance, is to take her to the firing range and teach her to put six shots into a two-inch target circle at fifty yards. As he’d done with me, and when he was finished I could handle a wide variety of weapons.

  And then I’d killed a man with one of them. That the fellow had been trying to kill Sam at the time was some consolation, as was my own nonlethal intention; the bullet was a dummy and the guy’s death was a freak occurrence. I’d meant to stop him, not end his life. But none of that changed the fact that the guy had not survived the episode. Since then, the weapons I owned—

  —a .25-caliber semiautomatic and an Uberti-made Bisley .45-caliber 6-shot revolver, the sort of gun you might see the good guys blasting at the bad guys, in the old Western shoot-’em-ups—

  —had remained securely stored with their trigger locks, cartridges, and ammunition clips in the lockbox in my cellar.

  On the other hand, if someone was going around slitting throats I did not want mine to be one of them. So I descended to the cellar, opened the lockbox with the only key, which I wore on a chain around my neck, and removed the handguns.

  The semiauto was metallic gray, only a little larger than my hand, and very light. The Bisley, by contrast, was a whopper with a blued-steel barrel, checkered grip, and weight enough to make you think twice about carrying it around; also, it’s got stopping power enough to drop an elk.

  Experimentally, I slid a clip into the semiauto. Then I just sat there on the cellar steps, holding it for a while. It was the Bisley I’d killed the man with, not the pistol. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that in the same situation, I knew that I would do the same again. And, after months of silently thinking it over, I knew that I could.

  It’s an interesting thing to learn about yourself. When I was sure of it, I put the handguns back in the lockbox and turned the key, snapped the light switch, and went upstairs. It was not yet time to start adding deadly weapons to my toolkit. And maybe it wouldn’t ever be.

  But they would be there, if I needed them.

  Next step: The drive to Machias took a bit under an hour and felt like five minutes. I had a question, and I needed an answer in order to make my second decision.

  The jail is located in the old red-brick county courthouse building, on a pretty side street that as I pulled onto it was quiet; most offices were closed on Saturday. But there were still official deeds to be done, apparently; inside, the lobby bustled with low-key but purposeful activity.

  I waited while the desk clerk consulted with somebody about my request. The verdict: yes, but with conditions.

  Okay by me. I followed the young police officer who was to be my chaperon down a dingy hall, past offices, a file library, and a coffee room. The uniform for female attorneys, caseworkers, and others who had business here today was longish rayon dresses, jackets, and flat shoes; for the men, jackets and ties.

  The inmates, by contrast, were all dressed alike: bright orange jumpsuits that would make them easy to spot in the woods, which is where you would head to if you wanted to escape around here. Victor looked ghastly in his, though under the circumstances I doubted that crisp tailoring would have made him look any better.

  The young officer sat on a plastic chair in the corner of the conference room. When Victor came in, I didn’t mince words.

  “Do not, I repeat do not make any incriminating statements to me.”

  I didn’t know what he might have said to Bob Arnold, on the trip down. All I knew was that perjury was not among the crimes I planned to commit for Victor.

  Which limited pretty severely the questions I could ask him. But there was one, and as I sat there looking at him across the table in that hideous little conference room, I understood that I already knew the answer.

  I’d just needed to see him, so it would be clear to me. And I needed to hear him say it.

  He understood; even on his worst days, of which this had to be a real standout, he was no fool.

  “Jacobia,” he said, and for an instant all his idiocies and posturings evaporated. He was just a man in an orange jumpsuit, tired and frightened.

  I’d loved him, once.

  “Jacobia,” he said, “please help me.”

  “I don’t see how all this affects your own situation,” Paddy Farrell sniffed, regarding me with a narrow look of unwelcome.

  Inside the old sardine cannery overlooking the boat basin, Paddy’s fabric-design studio was aggressively white: the pristine walls, recently painted woodwork, and high airy ceilings. On the polished tile floor a half-dozen wooden layout tables were covered with colored drawings and sketches, under track lights as bright as little suns.

  “Or why you want to go digging up old misery, on account of it,” Paddy added, his salt-and-pepper head tilted suspiciously at me.

  In one corner of the big work area, a chemistry-lab bench had been built in, complete with gas jets and oversized, brushed stainless-steel double-basined sinks. Another area was a display module with swatches of bright cloth in jewel-like hues spread on low tables, gleaming like a sultan’s riches.

  “My situation,” I snapped back at him, “is this: Victor’s in jail and if it comes to a trial, Sam may have to testify against him. Even if he doesn’t, he’s very upset over his father being in trouble. Also the money I personally have in jeopardy over the matter would pay off the national debt of Peru. So does that adequately sum up the reasons behind my interest for you?”

  At the far end of the studio, cubicles were sectioned off for computer stuff—workstations with candy-colored Macintosh hardware set up on them—and dye testing: the object, I supposed, of the chemistry equipment. Paddy didn’t only design fabrics; he tried out his ideas on actual pieces of cloth, to see what effects he could achieve before the work went into larger-scale trials.

  “Also,” I said, “jerk that he is, Victor didn’t kill Reuben. And I’d say an unjust murder conviction is going a little far.” In the personal revenge department, I meant; Paddy knew that my history with Victor wasn’t exactly silk-lined.

  He glowered, still deciding whether to talk to me at all. Meanwhile I thought again how much of a Renaissance man it was still possible to be, here in Eastport. Basic design, dye experiments, fabric tests: with no one around to tell him that he couldn’t do it all, Paddy just went ahead and did.

  It was, I’d gathered, an unconventional way of working. But stubborn, pugnacious Paddy had made a success of it; from his small Maine island studio here at the back of beyond, he did business with clients in Europe, South America, and Japan, as well as in the United States.

  In one corner of the studio hung the big weight bag and the punching bag that Terence worked out on when he wasn’t jogging or bicycling. His ten-speed leaned against the wall nearby.

  “And Wade,” I finished, “has got a mad-on at himself about something. I don’t know what, but I know it’s to do with Reuben.”

  I faced Paddy. “So are you going to help me or not?”

  He still looked unhappy, pained and put-upon in the extreme, but no longer so flatly rejecting. “You were awfully useful, solving that little tax problem I had earlier this year,” he conceded reluctantly.

  Paddy was good at earning money hand over fist, not so good at spending it on anything other than his beloved studio. Sending any of it to the government, for instance, was anathema to him. Thus his tax problems had ended up being soluble only by dint of my brushing off my tax-preparer credentials and going to Augusta
, and falling on my very own personal knees in front of the revenue officials.

  “If I could just cast doubt on the theory,” I said. “Show that somebody else is at least as good a suspect as Victor.”

  Paddy eyed me over another stack of colored sketches. The patterns were for watered silk in shades of salmon and turquoise, the effect a pearly shimmer.

  “A suspect,” he suggested thinly, “such as myself?”

  “No,” I denied, although the thought had of course occurred to me. Paddy had been pretty vocal about his feelings, the night before. “Just…”

  Terence Oscard looked up from a table where he was writing something in a spiral notebook. Lined up nearby with his writing things was a collection of potions, pills, lotions, ointments, and herbal remedies, all of which he used regularly to ward off real or imaginary ailments.

  “Paddy was with me all evening,” he said firmly. “All,” he emphasized, “evening.”

  The big man waved at the open staircase leading to the top floor, where Paddy had put the living area. Mounted on each of the pillars under the stairs, and on other pillars dividing the whole area of the workspace, were bright red fire extinguishers.

  The effect was of little drops of blood sprinkled evenly on a background of snow. But the cylinders were also reassuring; if a fire got started here it could take the whole downtown with it, not to mention all of Paddy’s investment.

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” I told Terence. His left hand, I noticed, was wrapped in an Ace bandage he hadn’t been wearing at La Sardina. But I paid little attention; probably it covered some minor wound that might, to a normal person, be worth a Band-Aid, or no treatment at all.

  “It means,” I went on, “Paddy can tell me all he knows about Tate and anyone who might have wanted to kill him, without worry about incriminating himself.”

  Which was not strictly true. If it came to these two having to alibi each other, I wouldn’t’ve put much faith in it. But it hadn’t come to that—at the time, I had no particular sense that it would—and in any case there was no sense saying so to Paddy.