by C I Dennis
“Twice my usual.”
“That’s a lot.”
“My wife told me it was all gonna end bad,” he said. “I wish I could give the money back.”
“Where is it?” I asked him. “His hideout?”
“Top of the hill,” he responded without hesitating. Once somebody decides to get something off their chest you don’t have to push very hard—you stand back and get out of the way. “It took me a good part of last summer. I borrowed an excavator, and I poured most of the concrete before some other guys took over. He paid me a bundle so’s I wouldn’t tell nobody.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. But some people have died, and I need your help.”
“It’s cut into the side of the hill. Used to be an old root cellar but it’s a lot bigger now. The door’s on a special lock and it weighs a ton, so I put in a pneumatic assist. You need a remote fob thing I had made up.”
“Can you get me one?”
“Where are you?”
“Johnson Farm and Garden.”
“Ten minutes,” he said. “I’m gonna feel better once this is over, right?”
“Yes, you will. You’re going to be a hero.”
“Don’t know about that. My wife thinks I’m a fool.”
“I’ve had two wives,” I said. “That’s part of their job description.”
*
I was on my third mug of coffee at the Lovin’ Cup when I called Rose DiNapoli. It wouldn’t be dark for another hour, and I didn’t dare approach Goody’s hidey-hole in the weak afternoon light. The coffee shop was closed, but the manager had allowed me to linger while she cleaned up and paid bills. I told Rose about my discovery.
“You’ll need back up, of course. I’ll get someone to watch Trish.”
“I’m doing this solo,” I said. “A few days ago the State Police told me I was getting in the way.”
“Vince, you don’t have to prove anything.”
“I’ll have my Glock with me,” I said.
“Impressive,” Rose said. “Meanwhile they have a box of pipe bombs.”
“I’ll take a flashlight, too,” I said. “And some Band-Aids.”
“You’re being stubborn, but you already know that,” she said. “Here’s the deal. You call me before you get there, and then no later than an hour afterward. If you don’t phone me, I call in an air strike. Pallmeister, Patton, everybody. Got it?”
“You’re breaking my gul,” I said.
“Yes I am, and don’t you forget it,” Rose said. She was busting my ass all right, and in a strange way it felt good. It had been a while since anyone had worried about me like that.
*
I left Chan in the car and walked up from the bible camp buildings at the very bottom of the hill. A half-moon lit the way, which was fine, but it was also a liability, as Cindy Charbonneau had no doubt installed security cameras, and the extra light would make me more visible. I stayed well away from the driveway and snipped the electric fence with bolt cutters that I’d picked up at the Farm and Garden store. Cindy might see that the fence had been disabled, but she wouldn’t necessarily know where. And if she did, and they sent someone to intercept me, I had my gun and the cover of semidarkness.
It was a long way up a sloping pasture to the house, and then several hundred yards further to the root cellar near the crest of the hill. Beyond it was a barn that was too small to hold much in the way of animals or hay. Perhaps it was a springhouse, which was a common structure on the older farms. By the time I approached the entrance to the root cellar I was breathing hard enough to inflate a queen-size air mattress. If Chan were here he would be giving me grief for all my huffing and puffing, but I had left him behind because I had no idea what I’d encounter, and I didn’t want him to get hurt.
I had reached the hideout fifteen minutes after my initial call to Rose to tell her that I was under way, leaving me with forty-five minutes to complete my task before I’d promised to check in. The exterior of the root cellar was faced with irregular stone and looked like it had been there for a century, although I knew that Eric had done extensive work to the interior. The door was a gray rectangle of Barre granite—I recognized it because it was the same material that my father had fashioned into memorials and monuments during his forty years of working in the Barre sheds.
I flicked on my penlight and read an inscription that was carved into the face of the granite: Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
I recognized the passage as scripture, and it had Clement Goody written all over it: Y’all come in, have a drink or two, dine with me and my women, and hell yeah, we’ll end up in the sack. I decided not to knock. I didn’t need to, because I had Eric’s key fob, and he had told me how to use it. I stood back from the slab and pushed the button.
What happened next is hard to explain, because I don’t remember all of it.
I did see the slab swing open, hinged on the side. I remember the hiss of the lifters that Eric had installed. I remember the light coming out, and leaning in to see what was below, and then making my way down a narrow set of stairs. And that’s pretty much everything, because after that it was a blank—until Rose DiNapoli, Robert Patton, half a dozen SWAT guys from Patton’s team and two Lamoille County deputies woke me, lying on my back on a circular bed in Clement Goody’s hilltop hideout. The room around me was a near-duplicate of the one upstairs in his house with all the sex toys and video equipment. A motor under the bed hummed softly while I rotated in a slow, 360-degree arc. Rose found the control panel on the wall and turned it off. “Getting a little dizzy there, fella?” she said.
“What the hell?”
Robert Patton helped me sit up. “Didn’t know you were into the kinky stuff, Vince.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I came down the stairs, and that’s all I remember.”
“We had a look around while you were resting,” Patton said. “No pipe bombs. Pretty slick little bunker, but not even a firecracker.”
“I must have passed out,” I said as I sat up. The blood rushed to my head and I almost fell back onto the mattress, but I was regaining my consciousness, slowly. It must have been another whiteout, and someone had lifted me onto the bed. Or, several people had, because at six feet and two hundred pounds I’m not all that portable. “I’ve been doing that lately.”
“Related to your injury?”
“Maybe,” I said. “They want to operate on me again.”
“Let’s go,” he said. “Unless you’re waiting for your date, and we’re interrupting something.”
“I’m his date,” Rose said. She turned to me. “I’ll drive you home. And just so you know, you have one very pissed off dog waiting in the car.”
*
It was a long ride back to Barre with Rose at the wheel, Chan in the back seat, and me in the doghouse. Fortunately for me the Marquis’ exhaust noise made conversation impossible, which was fine, because I needed to be alone with my thoughts to process what had happened.
I had suffered a whiteout, and this time there had been no warning at all.
I’d ended up in Clement Goody’s super-secret boudoir, and somebody played a game of spin-the-detective until Rose had mercifully turned off the rotating bed. If Goody’s arms cache had been in the bunker, it was gone now. So much for my big bust.
My mother was asleep when we got to her house. I let Rose take the guest room and curled up on the living room couch to nurse my bruises from keeling over on Clement Goody’s floor. Someone must have been there, as I hadn’t dragged myself onto the huge bed.
I heard Rose’s snoring through the thin walls of the house. She’d put in a long day, first babysitting Trish Lussen and then rescuing me. She deserved the sleep. Sleep that doth knit the raveled sleave of care, as Macbeth had described it. I, on the other hand, didn’t deserve sleep. I’d thought that I was so close, but had come up empty-handed. I w
as still missing a common thread that would tie everything together, and it was something beyond where Goody’s weapons were hidden.
Human beings can generally stay out of trouble except for two things: money and sex. And if money was the root of all evil, sex was the rest of the tree. I had been operating on the assumption that Grace Hebert’s problems had to do with sex, seeing how every male I had met was trying to get into her culottes if they hadn’t already. Sure, money was involved, notably between Angus Driscoll and Carmela Tomaselli, who was pimping her own daughter. Money could also have been a factor between Donald and Trish Lussen. But I hadn’t taken a purely financial motive into account, because Goody and Driscoll seemed to be pulling all the strings, and they were both rolling in dough.
The cops weren’t even close to solving Donald Lussen’s murder, and they’d given up too easily on Matthew Harmony’s so-called suicide. Add in Fish Falzarano’s execution by pipe bomb and too many people were dying for the sake of a college drama major. What was it that Rose had called me? Pussy-blind? She had meant that I was oblivious to Grace’s negative qualities because she was beautiful. But that wasn’t my real blind spot: everything that I’d discovered so far had pointed to love, sex, and jealousy, and I’d accepted that as the motive behind the murders.
Perhaps that was wrong.
It was almost midnight and Roberto would have school in the morning, so I would have to do this myself. I dressed in my bathrobe and sat at my mother’s kitchen table with the only light coming from the glow of my laptop. I began to search, first for Clement Goody, and then for Angus Driscoll. My queries brought up thousands of hits—mostly accolades for their various accomplishments and puff pieces by journalists. Each of the men was a classic American success story in that they were stinking rich, and a fat checkbook meant automatic respectability in the good ol’ USA.
But the Internet is a deep and fertile valley, and a river of sludge runs through it. I would spend the next few hours wallowing in that muck to see if I could find what I was looking for. This was normally Roberto’s domain, but he had taught me a few tricks, and I had some of my own. I worked while Rose and Chan snored, and I hoped that I would find something before someone else died, like Grace Hebert, or even me.
FRIDAY
Where are you?
My phone buzzed with the text, and I realized I’d dozed off in front of my now-dimmed laptop. No matter—I’d found what I was looking for, as the checkout girl at Wal-Mart likes to hear me say. Oh yes, I’d found the goods all right, and it put a different spin on everything. Meanwhile, I was reading a text from Karen Charbonneau at four o’clock in the morning.
Nodding off at my mother’s house, I wrote back.
I need to see you. Urgent.
Where?
Morrisville, she wrote. How soon can you come?
Fast as I can drive. What’s wrong?
Tell you when you get here.
I slipped out of the house without waking anyone, including the dog. I took my mother’s venerable Subaru, as the Marquis’ bad exhaust would roust the whole neighborhood. The roads were dark and clear except for fallen leaves from the almost-bare trees. I felt a rush of adrenaline running through me, so much so that I didn’t bother to stop for coffee at the all-night gas station on the road that led to the Interstate. Karen must be in some kind of awful trouble, and I was deeply worried.
And once I straightened out whatever the problem was, I had some questions. I’d pulled a very smelly fish out of the River of Sludge, and Karen had to know about some of it, because she was close to Goody. His entire empire was a sham, and the New Commitment and Love Society was in financial ruin. And that was just for starters.
My search on the web had yielded foreclosure proceedings on the NCLS by an outfit called Sunbelt Capital Opportunity Fund against virtually all of Goody’s real estate holdings, including the bible camp. He was facing bankruptcy and was fighting to save his properties, but the money had dried up. The church membership currently numbered in the hundreds, not thousands, according to various message boards, and the weekly pledges had dwindled to a trickle. In addition to the real estate negotiations there had been a number of lawsuits and out-of-court settlements for sexual harassment, which didn’t surprise me in the least. Some of the chatter on the so-called Christian message boards was outright scathing and looked like it belonged on a teenage gamer board, not one that was supposedly populated by God-fearing adults. The worst of the invective came from the pastors of competing mega-churches, who had fallen on the harassment and bankruptcy rumors with a giddy, decidedly un-Christian display of contempt. They must have subscribed to an alternate version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you.
So, Goody’s back was against the wall, which explained his return to the bourbon bottle. And it might also explain why three people he knew had died in the past ten days. Three going on four if Angus Driscoll didn’t pull through.
I wondered how much John Pallmeister knew about this, and decided that he knew nothing. He’d fallen for the rich-equals-respectable paradigm, just as I was now going for the broke-equals-desperate theory. They were both assumptions, and were likely flawed, but I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen when the money evaporated, especially when people had become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Clement Goody wasn’t the type to let the repo man haul away his toys without a fight.
The question in my mind as I neared Karen’s apartment in a somnolent Morrisville was: what was Goody’s plan? He had to be scrambling for a solution. And how were the three murders related, if they were?
I found a parking place next to the building and rang the bell at the bottom of Karen Charbonneau’s stairs. I heard footsteps coming down. Just as the door opened the outside light shut off, and I blinked in the sudden darkness. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, shrouded in a black cape that covered her head and wearing sunglasses. As soon as she let me in she turned and began to climb the stairs without saying a word.
I followed and tried to take her arm but she shrugged it off. “Karen? What’s going on here?”
“I don’t want the light,” she said.
“This is a vampire movie?”
“Not funny,” she said as we reached the top. “Get over there. On the bed.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened? You said something was wrong.”
The shrouded figure turned toward me. A single candle on top of a bookcase across the room provided a weak backlight to her shape.
“It’s fine now,” she said. “Take your clothes off. You’re going to make love to me.”
“What? Karen? This is—”
“Just do what I say and I’ll let you go.”
“Let me go?”
“You want me, right? You love me?”
“Karen, what happened? You need to calm down and tell me about it. I came here to help you. You said it was an emergency.”
She lowered her sunglasses to look at me. “I want sex, Vince. That’s the emergency.”
“No way. Not until—”
“We’ll do this the hard way then,” she interrupted. “Get on the bed.”
Something was way, way wrong. I didn’t know her that well, but I hadn’t had the slightest inkling that she could go off the rails like this. The time was just before dawn, which is when peoples’ emotional clock is at its weakest—it was when we got the most suicide calls back when I was a cop—but Karen Charbonneau didn’t look vulnerable. She looked crazy, even though I could barely make out her face in the darkened apartment.
But I did see the gun. It was a Kimber Solo Carry, a center fire automatic that had just enough silver finish on the barrel to make it gleam in the candlelight. She held it a few feet from me, far enough away so that I couldn’t snatch it. “Clothes off,” she said. “You’re about to have the greatest lay of your life.”
“Karen, that’s wrong,” I said. “Put the gun down. You know that I have a two-year-old kid waiting at home for me, rig
ht?”
“Don’t guilt trip me, Tanzi.”
“Put it down,” I said. “I need your help. I found out that Goody is broke, which you must already know.”
“No way,” she said. I saw the gun lower by about an inch.
“He’s in foreclosure,” I said. “Everything is crumbling. That’s why he’s drinking, and desperate, and it’s probably why people are getting killed.”
The Kimber dropped to her side. “Why are you saying that? It’s a lie. Clement is fine.”
“Why are you acting crazy? And it’s time for you to tell me everything. I also found out about your sister. She bought the bow that killed Lussen. You were right to worry.”
“That’s another lie.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Oh for god’s sake,” she said. “This is a fucking waste of time. You’re not even that sexy.” She walked across the room and down the stairs. I heard the door slam as she left.
I found a wall switch and turned on the overhead light. The bright wash blinded me for a few seconds until my eyes adjusted and I noticed that I wasn’t alone.
Karen Charbonneau was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair across the room from me. Her hands and feet were bound with clothesline and her mouth was sealed shut with masking tape. She couldn’t say a word, and her eyes were glazed over with shock. I hurried across the room and pulled off the tape, trying to be careful not to hurt her.
“That was my sister,” she said.
“I realize that now,” I said. “How did she tie you up like that?”
Karen rubbed her wrists where the ropes had been, while I untied her ankles. “I was asleep,” she said. She wouldn’t look directly at me, as if she was ashamed. When I finally did catch her glance she looked exhausted and out of it, like she was somewhere far away from here.
“I have some questions,” I said.
“You’re wrong. Clement’s not desperate. He’s just going through a tough time.”
“Are you sympathizing with him? He might be behind these murders. I’m thinking it’s about money, and not about Grace.”
