StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  “No. She needed a ride and they probably knew each other. Everybody does. Then they drove twenty miles to the covered bridge and snorted up together and he died and she ran home.”

  “Twenty miles?”

  “Maybe she lived near the bridge.”

  “Ah. He gave a ride to somebody who lived out near the bridge.” We looked at each other, and Rita nearly ran into the flagpole at Church Hill Road.

  She slewed around it on screeching tires. I saw Ollie parked in the shadows of the Congregational Church. I thought for a minute he’d come after us, but he was either uncharacteristically mellow or lazy that night and he let us go.

  At the bottom of Church Hill we found Dr. Mead alone in his shop, gearing up for the end of the first movie at Town Hall. Rita had a single cone of her favorite coffee. I had pistachio in a cup and we retired to the Jag to eat in splendor.

  “But so what?” said Rita. “What good would it do you to find a witness to Reg Hopkins dying of an overdose? It wouldn’t help your client. What is her name?”

  “Janey.”

  “Mrs. Hopkins. Other than satisfying your curiosity, what good would it do?”

  “Earn my fee from Janey,” I said with little enthusiasm. “And, uh, I don’t know, put her mind to rest, at least.”

  “Who lives out that way?” Rita asked. “Isn’t it just woods?”

  “The Indians on the reservation…”

  The Jervis clan, a renegade family of petty and not-at-all petty criminals, inhabited the remote and empty land that adjoined the reservation. Aggressively opportunistic—ferocious if provoked—they specialized in cigarette smuggling, dope deals, car theft, and supplying uppers at the truck stops, as well as anything else profitable that struck their fancy. But they didn’t mingle with regular people and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine any of them hanging around the Fisk party; these were people who regarded my cousin Pinkerton as effete.

  They could have supplied Reg’s heroin—though they tended to run bigger deals above the retail level, and not in Newbury. I had one friend among them. But were I to ask Gwen Jervis what she knew about Reg’s heroin, much less his death, I’d receive as warm a response as from a Russian asked if she had been a KGB informer under the Communist regime. Besides, Reg had brought his own dope to the party; and in the unlikely event he’d bought it from the Jervises, he certainly wouldn’t have invited his supplier to join him at the party.

  “This isn’t getting me anywhere.”

  “Well, maybe you’re looking in the wrong place,” said Rita, engulfing the remains of her cone. She licked her lips, started the car, put my hand back on her thigh, and scattered Dr. Mead’s gravel on the way out of his parking lot, into the night.

  ***

  I woke up at two in the morning. Rita was thrashing around, and when I reached to soothe her, she drew back.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Here, I’ll rub your back.”

  The fire had died down to a glow that lit the ceiling. She threw off the light quilt and sat up, rubbing her face. “No, don’t—I’m sorry. My head’s running in circles.”

  “I’ll make you some warm milk.”

  “No, I can’t—Ben, can you go home? I’m just lying here, feeling you, and I just can’t sleep. You snore.”

  I groaned myself to my feet and stood reeling a moment, trying to remember where I’d find my clothes.

  Eventually, to my discomfort and amazement, I found myself driving home to Main Street, with something Rita had said earlier ringing in my ears.

  “You worship sex, don’t you?” she had asked.

  I could have answered in all truth that I worshipped sex with her. Or I could have said that she too had partaken of the sacrament with extraordinary reverence. But it had seemed at the time, and so much more now, like a question with no happy answer.

  As I drove by the General Store I saw windows lit upstairs where Vicky McLachlan had commandeered part of Tim Hall’s law office for re-election headquarters. Tim’s Subaru was parked below, and a couple of other cars belonging to the volunteers slogging away at a late-night envelope-stuffing and strategy session. Not only was Vicky tireless; she had a true leader’s gift for inspiring others to drive themselves too. I felt a sudden empathy, or sympathy, for the first selectman—an awful insight that she felt about me the way I felt about Rita.

  Dead tired and deeply depressed, I parked the Olds outside my barn so as not to wake Alison and Mrs. Mealy. Then I walked through my dark house, straight upstairs, dropped my clothes on a chair, and climbed into my own cold bed. I lay there awhile, trying to think up reasons why I wasn’t losing Rita, and eventually fell asleep.

  When I awakened, foggy-brained, to a noise, I thought she was telephoning me. But when I snatched up the phone, all I got was a dial tone. While, downstairs in the dark, whoever had clanged metal against the crystal bowl on the foyer table caused the first tread of the stairs to sigh beneath his weight.

  Chapter 11

  I owned a formidable gun collection I had inherited from my father: sidearms that included nineteenth-century horse pistols, several dozen revolvers, one a sweet little .38 the old man had kept in the night table, and a Navy-issue Colt .44 capable of blowing holes in a battleship.

  They were all registered: When I got out of prison I applied for relief of civil disability so I could get my real estate license. Aunt Connie helped speed the process, with the aid of old Judge Kinsolving, who owed her his appointment. While we were at it, I took out permits so I could keep my father’s guns, which seemed at the time of his death like an important link to him. As a mere white-collar criminal, I even had a license to carry.

  Unfortunately, when little Alison moved into the barn and got comfortable enough to bring her little friends over to watch my TV or bang on my mother’s piano, I locked the entire collection in an iron safe.

  The key was hidden in the top of my clothes closet. But the safe was down in the cellar, built into an old brick furnace, two floors and one housebreaker from where I lay in bed, listening to him come up the stairs.

  As it was likely that he had at least part of his own gun collection on his person, I picked up the telephone and punched up Trooper Moody’s number on the lighted keypad. Three-thirty in the morning, Ollie picked up loud and clear: “What?”

  “Ben Abbott. Somebody’s broken into my house.”

  I could imagine the conflict in Ollie’s mind: On the one hand, what a nice idea that a burglar would rob Benjamin Abbott III while he cowered in his bed. On the other hand, the housebreaker had invaded Ollie’s turf, and had had the nerve to do it three hundred yards down Main Street from the trooper’s own residence.

  “Where are your guns?”

  “Locked up.”

  “Mrs. Mealy?”

  “In the barn.”

  “You upstairs?”

  “In bed.”

  “Stay there.”

  We hung up. I eased out of bed and headed for the door, trying not to creak on the old chestnut floorboards. One of them groaned as if I was pulling nails with a claw hammer. I froze, listening. An answering creak drifted up the stairs. I glided forward again, reaching through the dark for the black iron key that protruded decoratively from the lock.

  I missed, brushed it with the back of my hand. It rattled like a sack of horseshoes. There was a thud in the hall and a gleam of light under the door. I twisted the key. The lock probably hadn’t been used since my parents had made love when I was four years old. It was like trying to turn a nail in a stump. I twisted hard with both hands. The key turned. The bolt shot into place. And I was locked in, safe as houses, until the door exploded inward, slamming me across the bedroom, over the bed and onto the floor.

  ***

  I got up fast; my skull was thundering where the door had smashed me and I felt like my life had been divided into two parts—before and after the pain. The beam of a penlight crept across the wall, stopped on
the lightswitch. A hand brushed it. The lights came on. My survival genie took one look and slunk back into his bottle.

  There were two of them, broad, squat Hispanics, powerfully built, wearing baggy pants and tight T-shirts. The one in back might have been Italian, but I didn’t care, because their bulging arms were speckled with blue-green prison tattoos. Gang symbols, I knew, but what really chilled me were the tears tattooed down the lead guy’s face. Where I’d done time, those tears represented murders, sometimes in increments of five to avoid crowding.

  I wondered how they happened to have strayed so far from their natural territory. Waterbury, the blighted old “Brass City,” was the closest gang town. But it was thirty miles from Newbury, as the crow flew, and a hell of a lot farther for a ghetto crow that had to drive country roads across countless borders of language, culture, and inclination.

  I said, “The money’s downstairs.”

  They said, “What you got up here?”

  I said, “There’s a fifteen-thousand-dollar wristwatch in the attic.” There was, a gold Piaget moon watch I’d accepted, unwisely, from an arbitrageur, back when people wanted to do me big favors. It resided in the pocket of a rapidly dating mothballed Armani suit I used to wear while encouraging clients to steal other peoples’ corporations.

  The Hispanic filling my bedroom door said, “Bullshit.”

  The Italian, still behind him in the hall, said, “What, you got a gun up there?”

  Trapped, naked as the day I was born, in the space between the bed and wall, counting the minutes for Trooper Moody to get dressed and over here, my only hope was to get out the door and lead them on a chase through my dark house.

  So far as disabling them with a punch in the eye, à la Duane Fisk, was concerned, guys like these had started breakfast most mornings since they were kids with a punch in the eye. The fact that they were still alive at the ripe age of twenty meant they had won more fights in any given month than I had in my life—prep school boxing, Navy hand-to-hand, and Leavenworth shank duels combined. That there were two of them and one of me complicated matters further. But my main disadvantage, I learned at the price of first blood, was that I had not fully recovered from the door slamming my head.

  Everything had slowed a beat behind.

  I escaped the corner behind the bed by running right over the bed. That move caught the Hispanic by surprise, but not the Italian. He stepped right into my path, swinging a ring-studded fist at my face. I launched a body blow and slipped his punch—or thought I did. My moves were right, but so slow. My fist bounced on a boilerplate belly. His rings raked my cheek and nearly tore my ear off.

  I got past him—barely—stunned and bleeding.

  Halfway out the bedroom door, one of them brought me down with a flying tackle; my head banged the wallpaper across the hall. The other started kicking, allowing his partner to stand up and kick me too.

  In the hemmed-in space of the half-hall outside my bedroom, they got bored and decided to drag me into the open, which was their only mistake. My head was still muddy, but the moment’s respite allowed me to figure out where each of them was. When they dropped me in the main hall at the top of the stairs, and the one nearest my head aimed a kick at my nose, I seized his foot with both hands and twisted.

  A yell of surprise—punctured by a sharp crack—leaped in key to a shriek of pain. Still twisting, I braced my legs wide for purchase and tried to heave him down the stairs. And it would have worked, if his buddy hadn’t ruined it by kicking me in the groin.

  It was my turn to yell and yell I did, convulsed into a ball of pain, only dimly aware that one was cursing I’d broken his ankle and the other was grunting with the effort of each kick and then punch as he knelt down to work on my face.

  Bashing my skull in the hall hadn’t cleared my head, but the pain between my legs did and I never fully blacked out as he tore at me. In resisting I’d provoked them to administer what the street gangs, from Waterbury or Bridgeport or Hartford or whatever miserable ghetto had spawned them, called a beat down. With that realization, the survival genie slipped out for another look. Problem was, he didn’t have much to work with.

  A streetlight shining through the stairwell window revealed the Italian hopping on one foot holding his ankle with one hand and pawing into his pants with the other, while his partner kept trying to get to my face, which I was resisting both with my hands and the occasional weak kick. Happily he wasn’t wearing as many rings as the Italian holding his foot. But the Italian was reaching for a weapon. I prayed it was a knife. Turned out to be a gun—one of those glitzy semiautomatics tricked up to look like a machine pistol.

  “I’m bangin’ him, man.”

  “No!”

  “He broke my foot.”

  The Hispanic rose to block him. On the theory he was going to lose that argument, the genie levered me off the floor and drove a fist deep into his kidneys. He grunted and I thought I’d killed him. But he turned and backhanded me with a fist that had traveled through a hundred and eighty degrees and carried all his weight and considerable enmity. A long while later I heard the gun go off.

  I hurt so badly I didn’t know where they’d shot me. After a while, it appeared that maybe they hadn’t. If that were the case, they’d shot Trooper Moody. In a flash of pain-filled epiphany, I realized I deeply hoped that Ollie was not bleeding to death on my living-room floor. I headed downstairs to look and got there faster than I had planned, by losing my balance on the top step and tumbling to the bottom.

  When I opened my eyes again, Ollie was standing over me, shining his Mag light into them.

  “Look what happened to you.”

  “You get ’em?” I asked—or slurred—through puffed and bloody lips.

  “Shot my tires out.”

  “Sons of bitches.”

  “Want an ambulance?” he asked cheerfully.

  I started to say I didn’t really need one. Before I could, the Mag light turned red, and then black. I had the weirdest feeling that Rita Long had gently draped her jet hair over my face. But when I woke up, I was in a sunlit hospital room and the woman holding my hand was Vicky McLachlan.

  ***

  I took in the room, the curtain around the bed beside mine, the view of a cemetery from the window, a hanging TV, Vicky’s pretty face and neat little legs crossed at the knee. Later I woke up again and asked, “What happened?”

  “You have two concussions,” she said, speaking very slowly.

  “How did I get concussions?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  I shopped back in my mind. “I fell down the stairs.”

  “Yes.” She nodded, encouraging me to go on. “Do you remember how you fell down the stairs?”

  “Drunk?”

  “No, dear. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember Trooper Moody’s light in my face. Did Ollie—”

  “No. You telephoned him at three in the morning.”

  “Rrrrright.” I snapped my fingers, or would have if an IV weren’t taped to my hand. “There was somebody in the house.”

  “Oh, thank God. They said you might not remember anything.”

  It was coming back in a rush. “I have a feeling I’d just as soon not—What’s that?” I pointed at the newspaper in her lap.

  “Danbury Republican,” she said, offering it to me. “Scooter got a byline.”

  “Good for him.”

  It was open to page five and I saw the headline: “Prominent Newbury Real Estate Broker Hospitalized in Burglary Attempt.”

  “That sounds like I’m the burglar.”

  “Not in the context.”

  “Oh, wonderful…Give me that thing.”

  “Special to the Danbury Republican,” Scooter had written. “Benjamin Abbott III, prominent Newbury real estate agent, was hospitalized early this morning after a burglary attempt on his Main Street home.”

  “For crissake, he makes it sound like I’m r
obbing my own house.”

  “Scooter said they edited him.”

  “Jeesus…Oh, here it gets better…‘Abbott foiled the burglary when he awakened and challenged the burglars later described by resident State Trooper Oliver Moody as “Swarthy individuals possibly of Hispanic descent.” According to Trooper Moody, Abbott “put up a pretty good fight and scared them outside where they pegged a couple of shots at me, disabling my cruiser so I could not give chase.” Trooper Moody radioed the Plainfield barracks, where, according to a State Police spokesman, it was discovered that due to continuing budget cuts, “We had no more cruisers anywhere near the Newbury area.”’ Great. My house gets broken into and Ollie gets the story and the cops complain about their budget…Oh look, you’re in it too. ‘Newbury First Selectman Victoria McLachlan, in response to a charge by re-nomination challenger Steve La France that Newbury is rapidly becoming unsafe for decent families, replied that…’ The ink blurs here. What did you say?”

  “According to Scooter, I said, ‘Newbury is still as close as you can get to heaven in modern America.’”

  “You said that?”

  “I don’t know. I was really upset.”

  “What happened?”

  Vicky stared long and hard. “You were lying here unconscious, you stupid bastard.”

  “What did I—”

  She got up. “I’m glad you’re awake. Goodbye.”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “No problem.”

  She left. A while later somebody brought me lunch. Then an elegant Indian resident physician strolled in and asked me some questions. Later Steve Greenan stopped by with the resident, who, I was pleased to see, treated Steve with enormous respect.

  The next day Dr. Mahadevan said to me, “Do you know that old man is a real GP? I hardly ever meet one.”

  “He delivered me.”

  “That explains it.”

  “What?”

  “They say he rode with you in the ambulance.”

  “At three in the morning?”

  “Not easy for such an old man. Ah, I see you have another visitor.”

  “Another?” Hoping Rita.