StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  “I was only trying to swing a land deal.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it—And how ’bout when you tracked down old Mr. Butler?”

  Trooper Moody couldn’t find the old gent, so the Butlers had come to me, fearing that forgetful Granddad had wandered off. He had, into the arms of a New Milford waitress, who had every intention of keeping him.

  It was mildly informative seeing my life through someone else’s window, but I’d seen enough. So before Janey could remind me about the time I rescued the Meeting House cat from a maple tree, I asked, somewhat harshly, “Why do you care?”

  “Reg Hopkins was not the kind of man to kill himself.”

  “I hear you’re living with your lawyer.”

  “So what? I have a legal separation. I can live with who I want.”

  “So what do you care?”

  “Our children have a right to know their father wasn’t a suicide.”

  “Nobody’s calling it suicide. It was an accident.”

  “Great. They’ll be relieved to know Daddy was only a drug addict.”

  “Okay. I see your point, but I don’t—”

  “He never was—until things got bad—maybe a toot on Saturday night. You know.”

  Like anyone else with an hour to spare for “Sixty Minutes,” I knew that somebody had to be snorting up the container shiploads of cocaine and heroin landing daily on America’s shores. But if such tonnage never left the confines of city ghettos, wouldn’t ghetto dwellers need snowplows to cross the street? The numbers suggested that even in the clean, lean, alive and alert ’Nineties, even upright citizens in bastions of reality exemption like Newbury, Connecticut, might enjoy a Saturday-night toot that had not escaped from a state-licensed bottle.

  So yes, Janey, “I know.”

  “So will you do it?”

  “Janey. If I start asking around, first thing I’m going to find is what you’re not telling me. So I ask you again, save me time and you money: Why do you care?”

  “Me and the kids are the beneficiaries of his life insurance.”

  “They won’t pay on an OD?”

  She nodded.

  “What about your lawyer? He must have an investigator he can recommend.”

  “Greg doesn’t want me to do this. He says forget about the insurance and let’s just get on with living.”

  For a minute or two, I watched the cars swish by on Main Street. Her fella sounded remarkably ungreedy.

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  “Enough to pay off the mortgage and keep us going a couple of years.”

  “How much?”

  “Eight hundred thousand—Ben. Don’t get all righteous on me. The house is mortgaged up the wazoo. I don’t have a way of making a living. Until I get one, that insurance money makes me and the kids independent.”

  “You mean you won’t need the lawyer?”

  “I mean I won’t need him for the money. If I want to make a life with him, fine, but not because I have to. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  I could. Sort of. I guess in every couple there’s always one person you like a little more. Reg and I had played together. Janey’s parents had moved up from Bridgeport when she was a sophomore, right before I left for Stonybrook. I hardly knew her.

  Adding up the nasty crack about my being broke, the reminder I’d served time, and the rape of the hillside on Mount Pleasant, I stood up to show her the door. And would have, if she hadn’t started crying.

  Chapter 4

  I said, “Excuse me, I’ll make some coffee,” and went out to the kitchen. I brewed a pot, slowly, and when I carried it and cups, sugar, cream, spoons, and Sweet ’n’ Low back on a silver tray, I banged into some chairs in the dining room to give her some warning and thudded heavily across the living room, through the foyer, and into my office.

  Janey looked refreshed.

  I said, after we’d poured and stirred, “Tell me again: What’s the main reason you’re sure Reg was clean?”

  She looked me straight in the eye. “The main reason? I just know, and I’ll pay to prove it. Can’t you buy into that, Ben?”

  I could; on that she had my sympathy, because when my cousin Renny was killed, everyone said he was a smuggler. I knew he wasn’t—just knew it. I told her, “I charge New York rates.”

  Janey said, “I hear twenty-five an hour is the going rate for private investigators in Connecticut. I’ll go thirty-five so you’ll concentrate.”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “But this is local.”

  Our negotiation was no contest. Janey had learned business tactics managing Hopkins Septic, while I’d been taught by M&A specialists who regarded their mothers as bargaining chips.

  “Naval Intelligence and jail weren’t local. Call me when you make up your mind.”

  “All right,” said Janey. “Seventy-five.”

  “Terrific.” I offered my hand. We shook, and I took a clean notepad from my desk.

  “Who are his friends these days?”

  “Same as always,” said Janey. “I moved to Plainfield; he got the friends.”

  I refrained from reminding her she’d gotten the house and the kids. “Was he dating anybody?”

  A look of profound distaste twisted her mouth like a dried leaf. “No one I knew.”

  I raised an inquiring brow, wondering why she seemed to care so much. She said, “Why don’t you go talk to his AA sponsor? He’ll tell you Reg was clean.”

  I told her I just might do that. She didn’t know the sponsor’s name—hardly surprising, as the second A stands for “Anonymous.”

  “You know how they stick together,” she said with a trace of bitterness.

  She gave me a check for a retainer. A hundred and fifty bucks. Two hours. She seemed surprised I didn’t want more. But I figured that two hours was plenty of time to locate someone who’d seen Reg bombed on Saturday night.

  I might even find somebody he’d shared his dope with, as he was a generous guy.

  ***

  It wouldn’t be right to inquire about Reg’s sponsor from any AA friend who had confided in me. But thanks to a revealing slip of the tongue at a recent Planning and Zoning Commission hearing, I knew a source I could legitimately tap.

  A woman new to town, who was applying for a variance to site a swimming pool too close to her neighbor, had requested that the commissioners stand up and introduce themselves.

  Rick Bowland was the first to rise. His mustache was trimmer than a midshipman’s salute, but he smoothed it anyway and straightened his necktie. “I’m Rick Bowland. I’m new in town too. I moved to Newbury two years ago this July with my wife, Georgia. We live on Mine Ore Road and I commute to IBM headquarters at Southbury.”

  Ted Barrett kept it short. “Theodore Barrett. I teach shop at the high school.” But as his laser-blue eyes and dazzling smile embraced her, the swimming pool lady’s knees appeared to go weak.

  I glanced at Susan, Ted’s platinum-blond goddess of a wife, who was sitting beside me in the audience. Her smile was serene: Ted was Susan’s and Susan was Ted’s, and woe to anyone who tried to get between them.

  Then came the slip. Eddie Singleton stood up and said, “I’m Eddie and I’m an alcohol—Oh.”

  Poor Eddie went red to his hairline. There was some embarrassed laughter, and a number of people found that the ceiling required their attention. At last Eddie shrugged, and, recovering nicely with a smile, said, “I’m also Edward Singleton, who owns the Smoke Shop on Church Hill Road.”

  So I walked down Church Hill to the Smoke Shop—a combination tobacconist and magazine stand—and browsed the racks until a high-school dropout paid for Car & Driver and left us alone. I brought my own Car & Driver to the cash register, but before Eddie could say hello, a UPS driver came in with a delivery and bought a Connecticut lottery ticket. Then, as he was going out, in burst eighty-year-old Al Bell. Al saw me and whooped, “Sa
y there, Ben, how about that Fisk party?”

  “Sounded like fun.”

  “I heard they had a stripper jump out of a cake. And she ran off into the swamp. Ben, single guy like you, should have wangled an invite.” Al winked.

  He’d been Newbury’s most prominent Lothario in his day, so I leered back to honor past glories. “The way I heard it, you had to bring a spouse.”

  “No, I hear there was a crasher, stayed late and joined in the festivities. Figured maybe that was you.”

  “No such luck, Al.”

  He bought some pipe tobacco and now he gave Eddie a wink as he asked me—as he always asked me, with a significant glance in the direction of Town Hall—“How you making out with the government?”

  I answered this reference to First Selectman Vicky McLachlan as I always did: “Just friends.”

  Al roared off in his Jeep and finally Eddie and I were alone. I said, “Sometimes I think Al assigns me his fantasies.”

  “Whatever keeps him going, right?”

  “Eddie, I wonder if I could ask you a sort of personal favor.”

  “Like what?”

  “Could you possibly ask Reg’s AA sponsor to give me a ring?”

  Eddie stopped smiling, though his open face remained friendly, if a little puzzled. “Why?” he asked.

  “Between us?”

  I usually bought my newspapers at the General Store, and I don’t smoke, but I did stop in for magazines. And, of course, we saw each other monthly at the P&Z meetings.

  “Sure.”

  “Apparently the Plainfield medical examiner is going to report that Reg died of a heroin overdose.”

  “What?”

  “I know. Same feeling I had. Some kind of super-potent load. Probably never knew what hit him.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Anyway, Janey can’t buy that Reg fell off the wagon. Any wagon. Booze, dope, she says he was totally clean. She doesn’t know who Reg’s sponsor was. She asked me to check it out with him.”

  “What for? She dumped him six months ago.”

  Eddie’s expression made it clear whose side he was on, so I saw no profit in explaining about the life insurance. “I think it has to do with their kids. She wants to be able to tell ’em Dad wasn’t a drunk.”

  “He was a recovering drunk,” Eddie said bluntly. Like most of the AA people I knew, he had a gentle manner and it was hard to tell whether I was annoying him or whether he was just trying to get the facts straight.

  I said, “That’s what I thought. And that’s what Janey thinks. But she doesn’t know his sponsor…Since I heard you at the meeting last month, I thought I could ask you.”

  “Jesus, that was weird,” said Eddie. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and you know, I think some part of me just wanted to come out of the closet…Listen, I’ll give him a ring. You going to be in your office?”

  I walked home, went through my bills, culled a few I could put off, and renewed a couple of house ads in the New York Times. Then I wrote a new one for the Richardson place, a lovely old estate that was going to earn me a wonderful commission one of these days.

  I was out in the kitchen heating the rest of the coffee in the microwave, which I use exclusively for warming coffee and taking the chill off refrigerated red wine—information I make a point of sharing with aggressive oenophiles—when I heard Joe Pitkin’s house-painting van clatter into the driveway, aluminum ladders banging like a train wreck. Joe swung down, carrying his lunchpail, and I opened the kitchen door as he knocked.

  “I was just thinking about you. Wondering if I could get away with painting just the front of the house.”

  “Or bulldoze it,” said Joe.

  This was a once-a-month or so spontaneous visit. While he emptied his lunchpail on the table, I made myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich, poured my coffee, and gave him a cup for his.

  “Eddie told me you were asking about Reg.”

  “You?”

  I was surprised. Painter Joe—who I recommended to new homeowners as the best housepainter in Newbury—was an especially upright citizen: daddy of four, Little League coach, deacon at the Frenchtown Methodist Church. Then I recalled that AA meetings were held in that church basement, with the parking lot privately around back. I wondered if he was the good Samaritan who had founded the chapter. I had seen him at the funeral and he had looked pretty broken up. Now Joe sat there placidly munching on a liverwurst sandwich.

  I said, “Thanks for coming. I’ll keep this quiet, of course. I’ll tell Janey what you say, but I won’t name you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Janey doesn’t want to believe that Reg died snorting heroin.”

  Joe gave me a look and stopped chewing.

  “She heard from her Plainfield lawyer that’s going to be the medical examiner’s finding.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, according to Janey, he used to—recreationally—when he was still drinking.”

  Joe Pitkin put down his sandwich. “I’d be very sad if Reg Hopkins was snorting heroin or drinking alcohol.”

  It seemed to me that someone who served as a sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous had probably seen plenty of what old-fashioned Christians like my Aunt Connie would call backsliding. “Sad or surprised?”

  “Anybody can relapse.”

  “And Reg hadn’t been in the program very long, had he?”

  “Reg was coming up to his first anniversary.”

  “I thought he only joined up after Janey left him.”

  “Almost a year.”

  “So the divorce had nothing to do with it.”

  “Probably the other way around,” said Joe.

  “You mean because Reg stopped drinking and Janey didn’t?”

  “Been known to happen. Maybe when he got sober he figured out what he wanted was different than what she wanted. But you could talk circles all day trying to make things simple when they aren’t.” He pulled a bandanna from his overalls and wiped his mouth, then waited patiently while I thought of something smart to ask.

  “When’d you see him last?”

  “Saturday after work. The day he died, I stopped by on my way home. He was doing paperwork. Said he’d be at the Sunday meeting.”

  For the first time since he’d carried his lunch into my kitchen, Joe Pitkin seemed unsure. It wasn’t his expression. It was the way his hands got quite suddenly busy, wrapping up the second half of his sandwich, popping it into the lunchpail, drawing out a Granny Smith apple. He weighed it in his palm like the pitcher he had been, debating a knuckleball versus his slider—a slider that had broken the heart of many a strong boy, myself included.

  “Isn’t there a Saturday evening meeting?” They were listed in the Clarion.

  “He wasn’t going.”

  “How often did he usually go?”

  “Almost every day. Which is the one thing that surprises me a little. Most people who relapse have stopped going to meetings.”

  “Did it bother you he wasn’t going Saturday night?”

  Joe smiled and took my eye with his. “You can’t hold a man’s hand twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes just being available is the best you can do.”

  “Joe, were you worried?”

  “No,” he said quickly.

  “Did you ask him to reconsider?”

  “I invited him home for supper. Reg said he had to work late, but he promised he’d get a bite at the diner.”

  “Promised?”

  “You can get in trouble when you get too hungry. Low blood sugar. It’s something to look out for. Reg knew that. He promised he’d take a break at six.”

  “And that was the last you saw him?”

  “I drove over to Lori Match’s to give her an estimate. Couple of bedrooms. Indoor work I can do on a rainy day. Lori’s not in any rush. She doesn’t need them until leaf season.”

  I nodded.
Lori Match owned Matchbox, a tourist home on Church Hill Road.

  Joe said, “On my way home I saw Reg’s Blazer at the diner.”

  A silent orange error light started blinking in the back of my brain. I wish I could report that my years on Wall Street had tuned my ear to falsehood, but in fact, the lie lay in hometown geography.

  Janey Hopkins had claimed that the AA crowd stuck together; Joe had suggested why she sounded bitter, but now he was holding something back. I marked time while I debated what to do.

  “Six o’clock?”

  “Five after.”

  “Just like he promised.”

  “Like he promised…What are you going to tell Janey?”

  “Not much. I’ll tell her I talked to his sponsor and his sponsor was surprised and saw him stone-cold sober at five o’clock. But I’ve got to find somebody who saw him sober at ten o’clock. And midnight.”

  “Maybe that medical examiner is screwy. Or the lawyer heard wrong.”

  I made my decision as we shook hands at the door.

  “Joe, the Church Hill Diner is not exactly on your way home from Lori Match’s, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’d go up the hill around the flagpole. The diner’s down toward Frenchtown.”

  Joe ducked his head and gave the floor a rueful smile. “Yeah. Right. I was praying hard I’d see him there, and I thanked the Lord when I did.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You know, the only thing worse than getting ripped off by a friend is suspecting a friend.”

  “Can I ask you something, Joe?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you swing past the diner because—I mean, why’d you suspect him? Did something happen at Reg’s office?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You said you were relieved to see him there. Were you surprised? Like maybe you didn’t trust him?”

  Joe crossed his big arms and hugged his lunchpail to his chest. “Maybe I didn’t.”

  “Because of something he said?”

  “No.”

  “Something that passed between you?”