Tanzi's Luck (Vince Tanzi Book 4)

by C I Dennis

  Chan.

  I let him out of the car and he quieted down, but he didn’t look at all pleased to see me. There was no lipstick message on the windshield this time. Instead, I found a note on the front seat. I took the note and the dog inside to look for my reading glasses.

  The message was written in careful, feminine longhand on the back of an envelope. Please take care of him. I can’t take him where I’m going. If you have to give him away, find a good home.

  Damn. Grace Hebert had swooped down like an owl in the dead of night and dropped off her gigantic dog, entrusting him to me. She couldn’t take him to wherever she was going? I filled Chan’s water bowl from the fridge while I tried to figure out what to do next. Call the Barre police and put out an alert for the Hummer? Not at 3:30 AM, the time that was displayed on the microwave’s digital clock. This wasn’t a big city—there would be no more than one or two cars on duty, and Grace undoubtedly knew the back roads.

  So, my quarry had come to me, but I’d missed the opportunity. By now she could be anywhere. I had only been asleep for a few hours; I needed more rest if I was going to be good for anything at daybreak. I glanced at Chan, who had finished slurping from the water bowl and was looking anxious. I led him outside into the drizzle for a late-night pee.

  “We’re going back to bed,” I said. “I’ll take you to Matty’s shop after breakfast. You can bite him if he doesn’t cooperate.”

  Chan perked up. Now you’re talking.

  *

  Three hours of fitful sleep later the dog and I were on the way to the Saab repair shop on the Barre-Montpelier Road. The Swedish company had stopped making the cars several years ago, but Vermont was still full of them—they performed well in the snow and lasted forever, assuming that you knew a good mechanic. The local joke was that SAAB stood for Something Almost Always Broken.

  Matty’s shop was on a side road behind a fast-food restaurant. The parking lot was littered with cars in various stages of decomposition: a few looked fixable, but the rest were slowly rusting carcasses that would be plundered for parts. The lights were on inside a solitary metal-sided building, and the only other person nearby was a man who dropped off a car, got into a waiting van, and drove off. I left Chan in my rental sedan and let myself into the premises.

  The area that served as a waiting room was empty, presumably because it was so filthy that no patron would consider taking a seat on one of the grease-stained couches. A Fox News commentator spewed outrage from a vintage television that was chained to the wall. I spotted an unkempt cluster of business cards on the counter: Matthew Harmony, SAAB Service & Sales. Adjacent to the waiting room was a double garage. Matty stood at the corner of the far bay, dressed in a grimy blue coverall with a welder’s mask tilted up from his forehead. He held an acetylene torch in one hand and a flint igniter in the other.

  “Fuck do you want?” he said as I approached.

  “A couple of questions, that’s all.”

  “Already told you to fuck off.” He flicked the igniter twice and the torch lit. I bent down to the base of the tank and turned off the gas supply. He began to protest, but I took out my wallet, removed one of Grace Hebert’s crisp hundred-dollar bills, and held it up in his face.

  “A hundred bucks says you can’t go without saying the f-word for five minutes.”

  The mechanic blinked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was, but if it would get rid of the attitude, it would be well spent. “What are you, an English teacher?”

  “You said you’d like to find her,” I said. “Why?”

  “I—wanted to give her the phone,” he said. “What do the cops want with it?”

  “It’s a part of a murder investigation,” I said. “It may hold evidence. A professor was murdered.”

  “She knew the guy?”

  “He was her faculty advisor. And her lover. That’s what the kids on campus say.”

  “Grace?” He looked surprised. “No way. She woulda told me.”

  “You two were close?”

  “Me and her? Not really. I mean, Carmela and me—”

  “But you did drugs together? You supplied her? Or the other way around?”

  “Man, that’s bullshit. I’m clean for like two months now.”

  “But she’s using again.”

  “No she ain’t.”

  “I saw her, and she’s using.”

  “Saw her where?”

  “Not important,” I said. “She’s gone again. I’ve got the dog.”

  “That fuckin’ dog,” he said. I withdrew the hundred-dollar bill. “Aw, fuck. I knew I couldn’t do it.”

  “Double or nothing,” I said, holding two of the bills now. “But no more bullshit. What were you doing on Shelburne Point?”

  “Shelburne Point? What are you talking about?”

  Like Donald Lussen, he had answered a question with a question. Stalling. I held the bills up again and waited.

  “I—got a customer there,” Matty finally said. “It was a pick up. I drop off my car and drive theirs back to the shop.”

  That was possible, but it had taken him too long to answer. Something was wrong, and I decided to do a Chan. Bite him in the ass and see what happens.

  “You were screwing her, weren’t you?” I said. “Both of them. The mother and the daughter.” I waited for a reaction.

  Matthew Harmony’s reaction was to walk over to a tool chest and remove a chrome-plated combination wrench that was two feet long. He pointed it at me like a sword.

  “Get out of my shop,” he said. “And you can take your fuckin’ money with you.”

  *

  Chan and I were passing the shore of Lake Elmore where it follows the highway. We were taking the slightly longer but more scenic route to Johnson, and I caught his eyes in the rearview mirror: Why are you still driving?

  “Too much going on,” I said. “I can’t afford not to.”

  Tell that to the people you kill when you nod off at the wheel, he said. He was right, of course. Once I’m on a case I am just as strung out on it as Grace Hebert was on heroin. Addictive behavior is a Tanzi family tradition. It drowned my father in booze, crippled my brother Junie with drugs, and kept my sister Carla in a permanent marijuana fog. And I was just as guilty. One more hit, one last drink, and one more day at the wheel, seizures or no seizures, because hey, this was really, really important, and that trumped everything else. Until it all came crashing down.

  I should have called Dr. Jaffe and booked an appointment, but I couldn’t do it. It would have felt like calling the morgue and saying save me a spot. I had been through so much over the last few years with my head injury that I had been conditioned to fight for survival, and then recovery, and then a semblance of a normal life, and giving up even the slightest bit of ground meant failure. The pride that had helped me heal was strong medicine, but it was now clearly getting in the way of common sense. I knew that, but I kept on driving.

  Matty had told me a lot by saying a little. When I’d needled him about Donald Lussen’s amorous connection to Grace, a signal flare had gone off. And when I’d trotted out my suspicion that he and Grace were lovers, he hadn’t denied it. Instead, he’d threatened me. People think that they can safeguard every dark secret within themselves, and if you allow them to, they will. That’s why I have trained myself to be obnoxious when necessary, even though it goes against my nature. It produces results. Matthew Harmony hadn’t actually mouthed the words, but I was convinced that he and Grace were lovers. Or maybe they had been, until Donald Lussen came along…

  Aha.

  A motive, Chan said from the back.

  “Possibly.”

  Donald Lussen sent seventy-one text messages to Grace’s phone over the course of the two weeks that Grace had been missing. Did Matty read them, flip out, and kill Lussen? Why was Lussen texting her if he already knew that she was hiding out at Clement Goody’s house?

  “See what I mean about the one-answer-begets-a-hundred-questions thing?” I said to
Chan, but he was asleep again. With or without the dog’s confirmation I had just placed Matthew Harmony on the suspect list. He was the only one on it, so he was at the top. I would call John Pallmeister when I got to somewhere with a cell signal and would float this by him. Matty seemed more like a punk than a killer, but every text from Lussen might have felt like another pin in the voodoo doll. It fit, for lack of anything better.

  This didn’t solve my own problem, though, which was to find Grace. My visit to Johnson would include a few house calls: I had Donald Lussen’s home address, and I was going to drop in on his widow. That one would be a bit delicate, and I would need to tread carefully.

  I also wanted to revisit the West Eden Bible Camp. This time I would take a good look inside the closets, provided that no one else was there. The house would be locked, but I had a set of lock-picking tools at my mother’s, left over from my somewhat-misspent youth, and I knew how to use them. Even if Goody had installed decent hardware on the doors of his house, it was nothing that I couldn’t handle. I didn’t know what I would find inside, if anything, but you don’t want to sit still in my profession. You have to keep circulating, asking people obnoxious questions, and lifting up rocks to see what unpleasant things might lie beneath. You get your hands dirty sometimes, but I hardly noticed, just like Matty might not have noticed that his shop was filthy and he was caked in grease.

  I love my job, and I was ready to get my hands dirty. I wasn’t about to shuffle off to the sidelines because I had experienced a couple of fainting spells. Grace Hebert needed me.

  *

  The Lussen residence was two miles up Clay Hill Road, beyond the college. It looked like it had once been a working farm back when you could eke out a living on a few dozen acres as long as you grew all of your own food and heated your home from the woodlot. The property consisted of a white clapboard house about the size of Clement Goody’s cape before the addition, a main barn stained in the classic faded-red, and several other outbuildings. Everything was in perfect shape, and the grounds were dotted with ornamental trees and perennials. A half-dozen Belted Charolais stood in a pasture looking like bovine Oreos with their black heads and hindquarters separated by a white band around their middles. They weren’t milkers—more likely the place was a hobby farm, and the cows were four-legged tax deductions. I smelled manure, and money. Keeping livestock around for fun wasn’t cheap, and I wondered if Donald Lussen was a Trustafarian: a city boy who had gotten the farming bug, but who lived on the dividend checks that arrived monthly from the wealth managers in Boston.

  Chan was still asleep, so I left him in the car and approached the house. I stood on the freshly-painted front porch and rang the bell. A thin, prematurely gray woman of about forty opened the door. She had the high forehead and clear, piercing eyes of someone who you might see at a book discussion group or working in a library. She looked exhausted, which was no surprise as her husband had been brutally murdered a little more than forty-eight hours ago.

  “Mrs. Lussen?”

  “I won’t speak to the press,” she said. “I’m entitled to some privacy. People have been here all morning, and I need some peace.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m sorry about what happened. This is about something else.”

  “Then state your business.”

  “I’m looking for Grace Hebert. She was a student of your husband’s. She’s been missing, and I was hoping to see if you might help.”

  “How would I help? I don’t know any of Donald’s students.” The slender woman stood at the threshold like it was electrified and if I came any closer I would get a nasty shock.

  “He knew her well. They were close.” I hadn’t meant to drop a bomb so soon, but this was going to be a very short visit if I didn’t.

  “You can come in,” she said. I followed her into what the old farmers called a parlor: a small room to the side of the entryway where the family would gather and sing along with a piano or a mandolin. “Sit,” she said, pointing to a Victorian-era couch. She took a seat as far across the room as she could. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Vince Tanzi. I’m helping Grace’s grandmother. Grace has been missing for weeks, and I spoke with Donald three days ago, but he said he didn’t have any ideas about where she might be.”

  “So why do you think I would?”

  “He wasn’t telling me the truth,” I said. “She was at Clement Goody’s place on Hog Back Road. She’s been hiding out there. Someone was threatening her life.”

  “Donald wouldn’t lie.”

  “He did. Goody said he knew where she was. You know Clement Goody?”

  “Who are you exactly, Mr. Tanzi?”

  “I used to be a cop. Do you know Clement?”

  “I’ve met him at gatherings,” she said. “He underwrote one of Donald’s productions. So if you already know that she’s there, how can she be missing?”

  “She took off again. I saw her at the house, but she’s gone.”

  “Then you have a problem, don’t you?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I said. I was summoning the will to drop another bomb.

  “Meaning?”

  “Did your husband socialize with Goody? Go to his house?”

  “They were friends,” she said. “Associates more than friends. Donald helped Clement with his sermons, and Clement was talking about producing one of my husband’s plays. Donald was a playwright as well as a professor.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and quite brilliant, too. He should be famous, but he never had the confidence.”

  I noticed a desk covered in papers at one side of the room, under an antique window. The mottled, imperfect glass panes let in a wobbly sunlight. “Is this where he wrote?”

  “No, this is where I pay the bills,” she said. “Donald wrote in his sugar shack, as he called it. He would go there when the college wasn’t in session and write nonstop. It was an obsession.”

  “Where is this shack?”

  “Belvidere Mountain, in Lowell,” she said. “It belonged to the asbestos quarry. Donald bought it for twenty thousand dollars with fifty acres of land. No heat, except for a fireplace. You couldn’t drag me there. I don’t know how this relates to your missing student.”

  I decided to hold Bomb 2.0 in check. The woman’s husband had just died, and if she didn’t know about his dirty laundry, there was no reason to trot it out. She was telling me a lot, and my mental wheels were turning. I wondered if the State Police had already visited Donald Lussen’s getaway cabin. If they hadn’t, I would.

  I was about to ask another question when the front door opened. I glanced out the front window and saw a black Lincoln Town Car in the driveway with the engine running and a tall man in a chauffeur’s uniform standing outside it. A much larger man entered the parlor—I might have described him as obese, except that he carried the weight like muscle. He was about the same age as Clement Goody but twice his size. He wore a button-down blue dress shirt under a black fleece vest, with gray flannel trousers and casual shoes. His pink face was framed by neatly combed white hair. The man gave me an assessing glance and then ignored me. “Car’s waiting, Trish,” he said to Donald Lussen’s widow.

  “I’m already packed,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Tanzi. I’m going to my father’s house until things quiet down.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Thanks for your help on this.”

  “Help with what?” The huge man asked her, not me.

  “I’m looking for a missing student,” I said, and he gave me a disapproving glare. I knew that face, but I couldn’t place it. Everyone knows everyone in Vermont, but I’d been in Florida for thirty years. “Do I know you?”

  “Angus Driscoll,” he said. “And no, you don’t know me. I remember everyone I’ve met.”

  This was true. Angus Driscoll was a Burlington stockbroker who was also the political kingmaker for the state of Vermont. He was the ultimate networker, fundraiser,
and back room wheeler-dealer, and it was said that he never forgot a face. You didn’t become governor, senator, or dogcatcher without his blessing.

  So—it wasn’t Donald Lussen who had the money, it was his wife: Trish Lussen, née Driscoll. Mrs. Lussen had excused herself to fetch her bag, and I moved toward the door. I waited for her, because I had one more question. It had been prompted by Angus Driscoll’s introduction, because there was something else that I knew about the Driscoll family: they lived in an exclusive, Kennedy-like compound on Lake Champlain at the far end of Shelburne Point.

  “Do you know Matthew Harmony?” I asked her as the three of us went down the front steps to the driveway.

  “Why don’t you leave her alone, fella?” Driscoll said.

  “Matthew fixes my car,” Trish said. “Donald knew him.”

  Angus Driscoll gave me a look like if I said one more thing he would sit on me, which would be like one of the Belted Charolais stepping on a frog.

  We got into our cars, and Chan began to growl. “What?” I asked him.

  The driver.

  I looked more carefully at the car next to me. Angus Driscoll had gotten into the back seat with his daughter. The man sitting at the wheel was looking back at me, and it had been a long time since we’d seen each other, but this time the connection was as fresh as if it had been yesterday.

  Driscoll’s limo driver was a mug from Barre named Fish Falzarano. They called him that because his eyes were so widely separated he looked like a grouper, and his small mouth and puffy cheeks made it worse. The last time I’d seen him he was a seventeen-year-old street punk and I was a rookie on the Barre force. Fish and two other kids had broken into a corner store and were loading cases of Budweiser into a car that they had hotwired an hour before. I’d had the dubious honor of presiding over Falzarano’s first juvenile arrest, and others had followed. What was he doing working for a legit guy like Driscoll? He must have recognized me too, because he gave me the finger before backing the Lincoln out into the road.