StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  “So what’s the big secret? Why is she—”

  “You upset her, Ben. You scared her.”

  I found it difficult to imagine scaring Michelle. I said, “And I scared you guys too?”

  Ted said, “Ben, try to understand. You know this town. I teach school. I don’t want word getting around that I was at a party where a guy ODed on heroin. With the Board of Ed cutbacks and the new budget—and worse if Steve wins the election—who do you think would lose his job?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “From what I hear, half the town thinks you were swapping wives in Duane’s Jacuzzi.”

  “I went home.”

  “So did I,” said Bill.

  “So did Rick and Georgia,” said Duane. “Goddamned old lady gossips. Michelle and I were alone by two o’clock.”

  “Reg left at one?”

  “One-ten. And he wasn’t stoned. But who the hell would have believed that if we admitted he was there? Ben, considering some of the crap you’ve been through, you oughta know something about loose talk.”

  I agreed I did.

  Ted said, “There’s something else.”

  Bill and Duane eyed him warily. He turned to me. “According to the paper, the cops said he died of a hotload. You know?”

  “Super-strong dose,” explained Bill. “Bad batch.”

  “I read that.”

  “Well, from what I’ve heard, the stuff hits you like a ton of bricks. You’re gone in a second.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Well, doesn’t it stand to reason, Ben, that if he died of a hotload Reg couldn’t have driven from Duane’s to the covered bridge? He’d have dropped dead in Michelle’s kitchen.”

  “Good point. Maybe the first stuff he snorted wasn’t too strong. Maybe he took another hit in the car. I asked Michelle if I could check for traces.”

  “But either way, it’s not our fault.”

  “True…” I admitted.

  “You going to leave this thing alone now?” Duane asked. “Please?”

  I gave that some honest consideration. The thing was, I’d filled in nearly two more hours of Reg’s evening. But between one and three hours later, and twenty miles away, he was dead.

  “Maybe,” ventured Bill Carter, “maybe the medical examiner screwed up.”

  “How so?”

  “You read about it all the time. They make mistakes just like anybody else. Maybe it wasn’t heroin. Maybe he had a heart attack. Remember that thing in New Jersey last year? They said the guy had fallen on his head? Turned out when they dug him up and looked again, he had two bullets in his skull. Why don’t you go check that out? Leave us alone.”

  “Better yet,” said Duane, “why don’t you let a sleeping dog lie. Nothing you do is going to bring Reg back.”

  “Right,” said Bill Carter. “He’s dead and gone. Why wreck our lives?”

  “Too late to bring him back,” Duane repeated bleakly.

  “Michelle told me you came running when she freaked out.”

  “Boy, was she pissed. You know, she sees the kitchen table, she thinks of the kids. One thing I know, you can get in a lot of trouble messing with a woman’s house.”

  Bill groaned. “Tell me about it. Every house we’ve ever had, Sherry’s bananas until I built a mudroom for my boots. Man, you get inside those four walls, you better believe you’re in their space.”

  Ted nodded. “Susan’s the same way. Far as I’m concerned, my space ends in the driveway.”

  Duane offered a thin laugh of agreement. “Michelle’ll cut me more slack in the bedroom than the kitchen.”

  This camaraderie took us men about as far as it deserved to. In the silence that ensued, I asked, “Did Reg apologize?”

  “Oh, yeah. He was practically begging for her to forgive him. She’s just screaming, ‘Get out, get out.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “Sent her back to the party and walked him out to his car.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  Duane stared off at Fred Gill’s fields. It was milking time. A string of cows were plodding through a gate like a party of middle-aged ladies filing off a tourist bus. “Same thing he was saying to her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘Go home, sleep it off.’”

  “Sleep what off?”

  “Whatever was bugging him. He goes, Would I apologize to Michelle. I said I would. He got in the car and drove away.”

  “Did he thank you?”

  “For what?”

  “For interceding with Michelle.”

  “Oh, yeah. He was babbling apologies. ‘I won’t do it again.’ All that stuff.”

  “But he wasn’t stoned.”

  “I honestly don’t think he was…So where do we stand, Ben? You going to drop this? Tell Janey that’s the way it was and let’s get on with our lives?”

  I gave a noncommittal shrug, little more than a twitch, and turned away from him to watch the cows come home. I wondered what exactly I’d say to Janey when she brought up the paste-up note threatening her kids.

  “It would be great if you sell Mount Pleasant.”

  “Sure would…” We all started shuffling in the direction of my car and soon I had the door open and my hands on the wheel.

  “You guys really didn’t stay the night?”

  “Hell no.”

  “How come?”

  They looked at one another. Ted said, “Sherry’s mom called, Margy was throwing up.”

  “My mother was with our kids,” said Bill. “They were fine, but she got sick.”

  I turned to Duane. “What about Rick Bowland?”

  Duane glanced at Ted. Then, in lowered tones, “Just between us and the lamppost, Georgia got drunk as a skunk. Rick had to throw a hammerlock on her to get her into the car.”

  I looked at the three of them, watching me intently. “Hell of a night.”

  “A pisser,” said Bill.

  Ted shrugged.

  Duane nodded. His eye was puffing up where I’d hit him and he suddenly looked weary and old, as he had at the funeral. “One thing I’ll tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It sure beat Reg’s night.”

  Chapter 10

  Rita Long fed me grapes, gingerly.

  Like a little girl slipping Milk-Bones to an eager Labrador retriever, she seemed less afraid of being bitten than drooled upon. Her blunt fingers smelled of paint (she had been working in her studio when I arrived). Her nails were spatular, an indication, according to the digital physiognomists, that she was a problem solver.

  She was also an extraordinarily beautiful woman with long black hair and startling blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. Yet tonight, when I saw her for the first time in weeks, she was, as always, more beautiful than I remembered. Between grapes, I remarked upon that impression. Rita shrugged it aside: “That’s just because you’re in love.”

  Couldn’t argue with that. Which was just as well because we found enough to argue about anyway, on a wide range of subjects, all circling and skirting my desire to be near her and her desire to be away.

  Her grapes, sweet red imports, were the culmination of an array of treats she’d brought up from Fraser-Morris. Sated on smoked fish, marinated meats, asparagus, and chocolate—all washed down with Veuve Cliquot—I ate them more for taste than need, while plotting routes north and south of her fingers.

  “Getting cool,” I observed.

  We were cozied up in her favorite perch, a bench in the top of a tall tower that climbed the southwest corner of her thirty-or-so-room stone mansion that we bedazzled locals had dubbed “The Castle.” It commanded a hundred acres of Morris Mountain—a large estate by Newbury standards—and gorgeous views that sloped miles south and west to the river. An evening chill was moving down the mountain as the sunset burned itself out and it seemed like a fine time to go inside somewhere warmer. Her bedroom had a very nice firep
lace.

  But Rita said, “Run it by me again: Twice Duane Fisk claimed that Reg Hopkins wasn’t stoned? But first he said Reg was stoned?”

  “I think it’s cool enough to build a fire.”

  “He sounds confused.”

  “He’s upset. The two of them were like brothers.”

  “And Duane’s wife—what’s her name?”

  “Michelle.”

  “Michelle said she saw him actually snort the heroin?”

  “She happened to be screaming at me, but yeah, I think that’s what she said.”

  “Screaming mad, so she could have been exaggerating?”

  “Possible.” As we were seated side by side, my hand fell quite naturally on her thigh.

  Rita inched closer and put a warm arm around me when I complained again of the cold. “And the reason none of them spent the night at the Fisks as they planned was what?”

  “A sick child. A sick mother. And a drunk wife.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “I wish to hell I had questioned them separately. I shouldn’t have gone out there with Ted.”

  “The shop teacher?”

  “I should have braced him while we were alone.”

  “The one who tried to hit you with the two-by-four?”

  “He didn’t mean it. Ted’s not like that.”

  “Well, he was with the two-by-four.”

  “Yeah, but I—I just don’t get what set him off like that. Actually, I do. He’s been through hell the last few years. Chapter Eleven, lost everything—Anyway, I don’t know that their leaving early means a whole hell of a lot.”

  “Not that you’ll ever know, since they’ve gotten together to compare excuses.”

  I explored the loveliest thigh in Plainfield County.

  Rita bit my shoulder. “You know what I think about these neat little dovetailed stories?”

  “What?”

  “The leaving of Reg was a lot messier, louder, and more emotional than they’re telling you.”

  I agreed, exploring further. “When the screams and tears were over and he’d finally gone, no one felt much like group immersion in hot water.”

  “Believe it. I mean, how would you feel?”

  “That would depend on my fellow immersee. If it were you, for instance—”

  “No groups.”

  “Christ no.”

  “So now what?”

  “Why don’t we build a fire?”

  “I mean, what do you do next?”

  “Let’s sleep on it. I’ll think about it in the morning.”

  “Obviously, you have to find out what happened after one-ten, when Reg left the party, because the missing hours between that first selectman woman at six-thirty and the ice cream shop at eleven were spent scoring his hotload of heroin.”

  Rita’s “obviously” was stronger than I felt. But, willing to accede to anything that would speed us indoors, I nodded, adding only, “And God knows what other pharmaceutical oddities.”

  “Drugs sound so ‘old hat’ these days.”

  “They always hit later here. Acid and pot arrived in the ’Seventies, long after city flower children had cut their hair. Now ’Nineties Newburians snort ’Eighties coke. Come the millennium, they’ll be smoking crack.”

  “So the hours after he left the Fisks’ have to be your next goal.”

  She was probably right. The answer lay within that slot of time I’d narrowed between his life and death. “A goal I’ll pursue tomorrow morning.” I stood up, thinking I’d drag her indoors by the ankles. She jumped up too. “Ice cream.”

  “Huh?”

  “We were talking about the ice cream shop.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want ice cream.”

  “Let’s see what’s in the freezer.”

  We ran down the circular stairs and up a long corridor into a kitchen a four-star chef would have been honored to perform in. Rita used it mostly for the storage of takeout menus, and indeed, neither of the Sub-Zeroes held any ice cream.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Dr. Mead’s.”

  I followed her to the garage, where an old Land Rover and a shiny new V-12 Jaguar awaited her pleasure. She headed for the Jag.

  “Hey, you want to drive?”

  “No, you drive.” I’d guzzled the lion’s share of the Veuve Cliquot, and besides, being driven by a beautiful woman in a flashy car has always struck me as one of the joys of life. The garage door rose and the Jag fired up nine or ten cylinders. Rita cursed gently until eleven and twelve woke up. She lowered the top and soon we were tooling down her long and curvaceous driveway under a sky alight with stars.

  “May I use your phone?”

  Her hand went smoothly from third gear to the telephone to me to fourth. I dialed Painter Joe Pitkin, interrupting a television show. He found a quieter phone in the kitchen. His wife hung up, and I asked, “Let’s say for a minute you decided—for whatever reason: stress, misery, lost love, divorce—decided you really wanted to get high.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Such a thing could happen on a lousy day, right?”

  “Or a wonderful day. What’s the question, Ben?”

  “Could you in such circumstances talk yourself into thinking: Since I’m an alcoholic and booze is my problem, it would be better if I got high on dope instead?”

  “Are we talking about me or our friend who’s passed over?”

  “Our friend who has passed over.”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “I know, I know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. But—”

  “The point is, our friend has passed over.”

  “But—”

  “Ben, listen. You’re emotionally involved in this. I’m emotionally involved. I spoke to a guy I know from meetings. A bigshot guy who knows everybody in Plainfield, okay? I asked him, I said, ‘Could the coroner have made a mistake? Could maybe Reg have been kicked by a mule or choked on a candy bar or something?’ Now this guy knows, Ben. He talked to the coroner—off the record, one bigshot to another—and there is no doubt in his mind that poor Reg died of a heroin overdose. Okay? No doubt.”

  He took my silence for disbelief.

  “The reason they’re all so sure is now that the cops are on to these ‘hotload’ things, they’re double checking. They’re taking samples of tissue and stuff to try to trace it to the seller.”

  “Lots of luck.”

  “Yeah, well, you know more about that than I do. But no doubt that Reg died of heroin.”

  He fell silent. I could hear the TV in the distance. Finally, I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Not half as much as me. Good night, Ben.”

  I pressed the End Transmission button and watched eyes beside the road in the headlights. Rita glanced at me. I took her hand.

  “I’m thinking maybe Reg bought his dope as backup, kind of a failsafe device in case the evening he had hoped for—like a visit with friends—went sour…Everybody knows when they’re not welcome.” I pictured him crashing the party, meeting cold hostility, fading away to the Fisks’ kitchen, spreading his stuff on the table. “I mean if he felt alone and rejected, he wouldn’t be the first person to think, Why not get high? Right?”

  “Right,” said Rita.

  “So who was the ‘mystery guest’?”

  “Reg was the mystery guest.”

  “But how do the gossips turn a guy coming in late, annoying everybody, sneaking off to the kitchen to do his dope, into a woman who runs off into the woods?”

  “You should see the looks I get in the General Store. People want to believe everything. As long as it’s bad.”

  “Beautiful widows fire the imagination.”

  “Your imagination.” She laughed. Then, quite suddenly somber, she added, “You know, one of the reasons I go away so often is for plain, simple privacy.”

  “What are the other r
easons?”

  She glanced at me. By the glow of the Jaguar’s instruments I saw a deep sadness in her expression. She looked back to the road without speaking.

  No way I wanted to open the subject of where she went. Or with whom. Or even if there was a “whom.” I said, “I wonder if Reg brought the mystery guest.”

  “Didn’t the kids who saw him say he was alone?”

  “At night, behind the tinted windows? What could they see?”

  “Are you saying maybe she left with Reg? Hey, maybe Reg delivered the cake the stripper jumped out of.”

  I shook my head. “He couldn’t fit a cake that big in the Blazer.”

  “Sure he could.”

  We argued the relative dimensions of Chevy Blazer cargo space and the size cake a stripper required. Rita was convinced such a cake would fit. I wasn’t so sure. We devised a formula where either the cake came in two parts, to be assembled on site, or the stripper was a tiny woman.

  “Five-one or -two. Hundred and five pounds.”

  “A petite.”

  “I always think of strippers as big.”

  “That’s because of presence. They look big on stage.”

  “You’ve seen strippers on stage?” I asked. “Hey, I got an idea. Let’s get a bunch of cake mix and kind of bake one around you.”

  “I’m not petite.”

  “For comparison.”

  “If you want petite, I’ll drop you at Town Hall.”

  Sometimes, when Rita was in a particularly kind mood, she did me the courtesy of acting jealous. I did her the courtesy of protesting innocence and my undying love, which was essentially true, despite my recent half-hearted attempt to talk Vicky into snuggling on Scooter’s lawn tractor. Unfortunately, protestations of undying love were no sure route to Rita’s heart. If anything, they scared her off.

  I changed the subject. “Assuming Reg did not deliver the stripper in the cake, was the guest already there when he arrived, or did she come after?”

  “You keep saying ‘she.’”

  “The rumors say ‘she.’”

  “Maybe ‘she’ gave him the heroin.”

  “He already had heroin.”

  “Maybe he gave her a ride,” Rita mused. “Maybe he offered her his heroin.”

  “As an inducement out of the woods and into his car?”