by C I Dennis
Various people had filled me in on what had happened, including Rose, who was once again asleep and snoring in my visitor’s chair. My mother told me that Rose hadn’t left the room since I’d been wheeled in from post-op, except to walk the dog. It was Pallmeister who explained that Rose had run two miles down the road from Lussen’s cabin to get help, and that I was in and out of consciousness with the mother-of-all whiteouts when the EMTs got there. He told me that Goody and Cindy were in the morgue, Karen was nowhere to be found, and that both the State Police and Robert Patton had teams of people trying to reconstruct everything. They’d confirmed that Cindy Charbonneau had killed Don Lussen, based on phone location records. She had lured him to the water tower, no doubt on Goody’s instructions. They also backtracked to find the person who had sold her the bow, and he had identified her from a photograph, just as Roberto and I had suspected. He actually sold her two bows that day, including the one that Karen had shot me with. Diana the Huntress and her twin sister.
Duffy Kovich had been taken into custody with no resistance: a tire iron to the balls will do that to you. The campus cop wouldn’t have to worry about his pension anymore, because he’d be spending most of his retirement in jail, even with a plea deal. Kovich had told the State Police investigators that it was Fish Falzarano who had killed Matthew Harmony, and that Duffy had planted the bow in the mechanic’s shop. Matty was going to run off with Grace, and had threatened to expose everything if anyone tried to stop them. Fish was Angus Driscoll’s enforcer when needed, just as Duffy was Clement Goody’s, and the two tough guys had gotten to know each other. Fish told Duffy over a beer that Matty was stone drunk when he arrived at the cabin, probably because Grace had never shown up. It had been simple to put the gun in his mouth. Fish used the Ruger Super Redhawk that Grace had left with Driscoll, which had confused me before but made sense now, even in my postoperative fog. So it wasn’t just Goody who would kill to protect his smuggling operation; he and Driscoll had worked together, although Angus had covered his tracks more effectively.
No one knew who had lobbed the pipe bomb into Fish Falzarano’s car window. Pallmeister speculated that it wouldn’t have been Goody or his entourage, because although Goody and Driscoll were rivals for Grace’s affections, they also were partners in a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise. Whoever had done the job had been pretty determined considering that you would have only a few seconds of fuse time to act before the bomb blew up in your face.
Grace Hebert was gone. She and Karen were the loose ends. After more than two weeks of trying, I still couldn’t deliver on my promise to Mrs. Tomaselli to find her granddaughter and get her into rehab, and she was still at risk.
Angus Driscoll had been released from the hospital and had hired nurses to care for him in his home where Trish Lussen was also staying. Private guards were stationed around the property, and the State Police had backed off, as no one could tie Driscoll to anything indictable. I could testify about our bedside conversation, but the financier been vague, and a defense attorney would tear me apart if I took the witness stand. Angus had given me just enough information to point me toward Goody and take him out, which was exactly what he wanted, seeing how things had gotten out of control. I had unintentionally done his bidding.
I told this to the lieutenant, and he nodded in assent. He and I were finally working toward the same end, because what John Pallmeister needed was to find Grace, just as I did. In fact, he might have needed it more. Five violent deaths in two weeks was a big deal in the small state of Vermont, and Grace Hebert was the person who could tie them all together in a neat bundle. The doctor had told me that I would be out by Saturday at the latest, and I could go home to Florida, but that wasn’t in my plans. I was going to finish what I’d started: find the girl, and help John Pallmeister nail Angus Driscoll.
I felt Chan’s tongue licking my hand at the bedside. I was beginning to like the mutt.
Mutt?
“Oh, pardon me, I meant purebred.”
Grace is a long way away. Continents.
“That’s crazy,” I said aloud.
“What’s crazy?” Rose said, waking up.
“I was talking to the dog, not you.”
“Oh, here we go,” she said. “You were bad enough before, and now you’re looney tunes. That surgeon scrambled your brains like a frittata.”
“The dog thinks that Grace is somewhere far away,” I said. “Or—what I mean is—he’s a reflection of my subconscious, and—”
“And I’m going to get a nurse in here to lower your dosage before you strip off that hospital gown and start doing the chicken dance.”
I smiled. “Don’t encourage me, or I might.”
“Go to sleep, Tanzi,” she said. “They’ll find her.”
I was going to answer, but the medication was taking over, and the raveled sleave of care began to knit itself up again, along with my twice-punctured body.
SATURDAY
Spending the better part of a week in a hospital bed gives you plenty of time to think, and even with my partially mended brain I had put a few things together. The cops were working feverishly on locating the two missing women and had come up with nothing, but I had some ideas, and they weren’t just random observations from my dog-savant.
I acted on one of them by calling Eric Gagnier, who had returned from his hunting camp having bagged nothing aside from a three-alarm hangover. We had a discussion about his work for the recently-departed Clement Goody, and I learned a few things that I hadn’t known before. I also lined up a few resources, including a building contractor near Johnson, Vermont, who owned an excavator, a jackhammer, and a ground-penetrating radar device. Because heck, you never know when you might need one.
According to the morning shift nurse they were going to free me sometime before lunch, which was a crushing disappointment seeing how grilled cheese sandwiches were on the menu again and by my count this would have been number sixty-seven. I know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, and the hospital’s version was like a layer of Velveeta spread between two pieces of wet sheetrock. The longer you stay in a hospital, the better the chance that they will kill you, which is what motivates people to get cured and get the hell out of there.
Rose picked me up in the Marquis with the dog. Robert Patton had found some slush money in the Border Patrol budget to fix the muffler, and the silence was blissful. Rose initially thought that we were headed to my mother’s house, but I directed her onto Route 15 toward Johnson. We had some demolition to do.
Robert Patton was waiting for us when we arrived at Clement Goody’s bible camp. John Pallmeister would be joining us later. The place still looked pristine, although it would probably fall into decay while the preacher’s estate was sorted out, and would eventually be sold to someone who didn’t mind that the previous owner was a deceased heroin importer who had spread drugs in the name of salvation: Goody’s financial salvation, not the eternal kind. Patton opened the door of the car for me and I lumbered out. I had a cane, but I hardly needed it. My left leg had relapsed to the time when my limp was known as the Vinny Shuffle, but I felt completely well otherwise. I was on the cusp of solving a mystery, and that is the most restorative tonic known to man.
“What’s this about?” Patton said as we walked toward Clement Goody’s hilltop bunker. My friend the Border Patrol chief had his Saturday clothes on: a sweatshirt, beat-up jeans, and work boots. He’d neglected to shave, and he looked like he’d come from working on his woodpile. He pointed to the contractor I had hired who was backing an excavator down the ramp of a semi trailer. “This guy has been walking around for the past hour with a GPR unit. You got dead people buried in there?”
“Quick question,” I said. “What would you do if you had a hundred kilos of heroin in your basement? Sell it? We’re talking five million dollars, wholesale.”
Patton rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “I’d buy a big fucking yacht,” he said. “Loud music all night, chicks in bikini
s, open bar, waiters running around with bacon-wrapped scallops, you know. Same as you, right?”
“You would?”
“I have this flaw, Vince. I need to be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning. That kind of puts a damper the whole bikini yacht thing.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Let’s dig it up anyway,” I said. “We could always give it away to someone less fortunate than ourselves.”
Rose had gotten out of the driver’s seat and stood next to us. “Are you guys going to stand here and bullshit each other all morning?” She pointed to the approaching excavator. “You’re in the way.”
The three of us moved to the side while the big machine did its work. Half an hour later it had exposed an expanse of concrete that was even larger than the adjacent section where I had been held captive in the dark. Eric Gagnier didn’t have the plans, but he had given me the gist. What was underneath was anyone’s guess, because Eric didn’t know: another company had finished the project after he’d poured most of the cement, and they were long since paid off and gone.
But I’d done the math after Angus Driscoll had told me from his hospital bed that Goody still owed him three million dollars. Each load of heroin had sold for five million. That was a guess, but it sounded about right. Driscoll had fronted five, and he was expecting to double his investment. Goody had paid off Driscoll seven of the ten million that he owed him, and my thought was that the rest of the money hadn’t been paid because the third lot of dope was still unsold. No wonder the preacher had been hitting the bottle after years of sobriety. He had entered a treacherous world of greed, paranoia, and big-city scumbags who would kill people over a lot less than seven figures.
Rose and I took refuge in the car while the construction guys jackhammered through the concrete because it was impossible to talk outside. The noise stopped, and two of them lifted a ladder from their truck and lowered it down the hole they’d made. Rose and I got out of the car and joined Robert Patton, who was looking down into the darkened space.
“You up for this?” he asked me.
I shook my head, and Patton nimbly descended the ladder. Five minutes later he climbed back up and switched off the flashlight he’d been carrying. “Looks like friggin’ Architectural Digest down there,” he said to us. “It’s a whole house. Everything is top of the line, hidden under eight inches of cement.”
“Did you see any drugs?” I asked him.
“There’s a wall of cabinets, but they’re locked. They back up to the part where you got shut in. That was a blind, and we never would have found the rest of the place.” He held up a rumpled plastic bag filled with white powder. “But I did find this, lying on a table.”
“Sampling their own goods?”
“I also found a coffee pot, and it was still warm.”
“Someone’s down there?” Rose said.
“Not that I saw.”
Thirty yards away from us, the doors of Clement Goody’s springhouse opened up and the wooden floor began to rise. It tilted back at a forty-five degree angle, supported by lifters that were hidden under the sills.
Goody’s bolthole had been right under my nose.
Karen Charbonneau’s white Jaguar roared out from underneath building and tore past us. “Get the car!” I yelled to Rose.
Patton put up a hand to calm me. “No rush, Vince,” he said. “Pallmeister called me from the village. He’s almost here.”
Robert Patton radioed the State Police lieutenant from his Border Patrol cruiser. Soon afterward we were at the bottom of Clement Goody’s driveway, where Patton stopped to clear a row of tire spikes from our path. John Pallmeister had used them on the Jaguar, and the speeding car had skidded helplessly on four flat tires, fishtailing across the main road and into a field. Karen was outside of her vehicle, barefoot and dressed in a faded blue T-shirt and her underwear. She leaned face down over the hood while Pallmeister cuffed her. The lieutenant took her arm and walked her across the corn stubble to where we stood.
She rocked her head from side to side, eyes down, as if she wanted to say she was sorry, but she couldn’t face me, or mouth the words. The rhythmic head bobbing continued, and I realized that there was no apology coming. I’d seen it a hundred times when I was a cop: the Junkie Nod.
Karen Charbonneau was in heroin nirvana.
TUESDAY
I was about to do something that I seldom do: give up.
Rose had already gone back to Florida. We promised to see each other again, and this time I would follow through. I cared about her, and when we’d said goodbye in my mother’s driveway, she’d kissed me so hard I thought she was going to suck the fillings right out of my teeth. I like that in a woman.
Mrs. Tomaselli and my mother assured me that Grace Hebert was a lost cause. No one could fix the young woman’s problems except for Grace herself—assuming that she was still alive. I had done everything possible, used all of my skills, and had watched the body count rise. I should leave Vermont before more people got killed. John Pallmeister would appreciate that, seeing how I’d left him with weeks’ worth of paperwork on five violent deaths over the course of my investigation.
I booked an evening flight out of Burlington and bought a travel crate for Chan, who would accompany me home. Robert Patton offered to send a car, and I took him up on it, as my mother didn’t like to drive at night. Patton’s team had fully excavated Clement Goody’s hilltop bunker and had found the third load—ninety-five kilos of pure, uncut heroin locked inside steel cabinets. The hideaway was a warren of interconnected chambers and passageways with a control center that tracked every movement on the property. Karen Charbonneau had no doubt watched us arrive and drill into her refuge, and had then panicked and bolted, dressed in her underwear.
I almost felt sorry for her and for her dead sister—they had been sucked into the vortex of Goody’s deadly charisma. Of course this was not what the nuns had drilled into me in school: people are responsible for their own behavior, period. I have always accepted that as true, but there is another truth that is equally valid: we’re all suckers if the con is good enough. Anyone can be led astray, screwed over, and even sent out to do horrible things if the corrupter is skillful, and Goody was among the best I’d ever seen. He was rich, handsome, obsessed, and he was convinced that God was on his side, but as a lapsed Catholic and a practicing cynic I have figured something out: God doesn’t take sides. God is smarter than that.
I had several hours until Patton’s driver would come, so I spent the first few walking the dog around my neighborhood in Barre. We passed by the church where I’d sat in my starched Sunday clothes and fought off sleep during mass. We walked along the street where Fish Falzarano had grown up, a few houses down the block from where I’d visited Marie Rocchio’s little second-floor slice of heaven and had traded insults with Gary Petrullo. We strolled through the town center that had recently been gussied up with granite curbstones and new streetlights and looked better than it ever had, even in its heyday. We wandered past the cemetery where I’d slipped away with my underage friends to drink beer and smoke Kools. This was my home turf, both familiar and not, because the years have frayed the memories like a scrapbook with pages missing.
The dog and I ended up at the door of Carmela Tomaselli’s house. We didn’t arrive here by accident: I had intended this to be our last stop before going back to Florida. Carmela answered the door, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and lime-green stretch pants with a cigarette dangling from her lips. I tied Chan’s leash to a railing and stepped inside through the smoke.
“I thought you left,” she said.
“Soon,” I said. “I couldn’t find your daughter.”
“She’s still alive, right? Everyone else you found is dead.”
“I honestly don’t know. I wish I did.”
Carmela led me into her kitchen and took a stool at the counter. I stood while she extinguished her cigarette. “So what do you want,
Vinny?”
“Fish killed Matty,” I said. “You knew that before I did. Who told you?”
“I ain’t answering any questions. I already did that with the police.”
“My guess is that Fish told you, because he wanted to scare you.”
“Falzarano was pond scum,” she said. “Do you remember him back in school? The guy was a zero. I can’t believe he didn’t get himself killed in the army.”
“Did Matty teach you how to use the pipe bombs?”
Carmela Tomaselli gave me a blank look, and I continued. “Fish told you that he killed your lover, and then he threatened to do the same to you if you said anything about Angus Driscoll’s heroin business.”
“Driscoll was—”
“Was paying you to pimp your own daughter, and you finally felt guilty enough to do something about it?”
“You’re recording this, aren’t you? You’re still a fucking cop, right?”
“I’m not recording anything.”
“You’re going to turn me in?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said.
“I lost my job, you know,” Carmela said. “They did a random drug test, and I flunked. I can’t even pay the rent now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But you’re still going to call the cops on me.”
“I didn’t care much for Fish,” I said, “but you killed a man, and you almost killed Driscoll. You even tried to finish him off in the hospital.”
“So you already decided. You came here to tell me I’m fucked, right Vin?” She turned her face away before the tears began. I gave her a few moments to settle down. “Matty loved those stupid things. He made them in his shop. He took me up to the asbestos mine one afternoon and we blew up a few of them. My ears rang for days afterward. Matty was like a tough little kid, and they murdered him. You should have seen their faces when Fish opened the car window for me and I lit the fuse. It was like they already knew they were going to die. Fish tried to throw it back out, but it blew up in his lap, and I was halfway to my car with pieces of window glass sticking out of my back like a porcupine. I couldn’t hear nothing after that, either.”
