StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  “Yesterday you had the first selectlady.”

  Today it was Janey Hopkins, looking just about as crazed as last time I’d seen her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “It wasn’t burglars, was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was about Reg. Wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I told you. I warned you. They’re trying to stop us.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever killed Reg.”

  “Janey.”

  She looked away.

  “Janey. Give me your hand. Please.”

  She stood nearer the bed and extended a rough, dry hand. I held it in both of mine, rubbed the backs of her fingers. “Janey. From everything I’ve learned, the medical examiner had it right. Reg died of an accidental overdose. My advice to you is try to force the insurance company to settle. Let Greg try to negotiate something.”

  “Who beat you up?”

  “Trooper Moody had it right in the paper. Two swarthy individuals. They looked like they’d done hard time.” I hesitated sharing my fleeting impression—spawned in the heat of battle and less real now—that they’d come after me specifically. It was just a feeling and bound to set her off down one of the increasingly weird paths her mind was exploring.

  “I see you didn’t cash my check.”

  “It’s in my desk.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t want to rip you off.”

  She jerked her hand away. “Then give it back to me. I’m going to hire somebody else.”

  “I’ll give it back, of course, but I really wish you’d drop it. You’re making yourself a target for somebody who will rip you off.”

  “Someone will help me.”

  “Well, at least get Greg to recommend a detective. Lawyers know who they are.”

  “No. This is between me and—and them. Not Greg.”

  I reached for her hand again, and her blocky face screwed up in tears. “You don’t know what this has been like.”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “It isn’t fair.”

  “What isn’t fair?”

  She stared at me. Her mouth twisted with the same expression of distaste it had had the first day in my office, and for a long instant I thought she was about to spring a huge confession. Instead, she gently withdrew her hand and said, “Tear my check up. Mail me the pieces. Save me the hassle at the bank.”

  I said, “I’m probably out of here tomorrow. Give me a couple of days—a week. My head’s killing me. Give me a week, maybe less.”

  “What for?”

  “Just to check out one more thing.”

  Chapter 12

  Ollie came by the next morning with a suspect file of burglars who worked northwest Connecticut. It was a thin one. And while I recognized several of the criminals pictured—including a cousin by marriage into the Chevalleys—I was not surprised not to find my tattooed attackers. Neither was Ollie.

  “None a these mutts have the balls to shoot out my tires. Fact, probably none of ’em even carry.”

  “Tires? The newspaper said they shot at you.”

  “Scooter MacKay oughta write comic books. When I called him on it he blamed the Danbury editor. Tell you, Ben, the worst of these scum”—he pounded the file with a finger the dimensions of a normal forearm—“I’d trust farther than the media assholes running this country into the ground.”

  I looked at him and he stiffened with embarrassment. It was the first personal view he had shared with me in the twenty years we’d been at each other’s throats.

  “You got a gang file?”

  “What for?”

  “I think they did time. And they were young enough so they probably did it right here in Connecticut.”

  “You telling me we had a prison gang in Newbury?”

  “Well, obviously not the whole gang, or I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

  Ollie gave me a hard look. “I was afraid of that. I don’t know everything you’ve been getting into, Ben, but I’m telling you right now, you draw the wrong element into town and you’ll answer to me.”

  He misinterpreted my open-mouthed gape as a guilty plea.

  “I was wondering why we’d suddenly see a pair of hard cases. These guys weren’t locked up in Connecticut. You pissed ’em off in Leavenworth. Finally got paroled and came to even up the score. Well, you tell your slammer friends for me, if they want your ass they better make plans to meet you in New York.”

  “Ollie, nobody’s coming after me from Leavenworth.” In fact, I’d gotten the occasional late-night telephone call from guys between convictions asking me to wire a fast hundred. The one or two twisted souls who’d want my blood would not see parole in a thousand years. And no one had escaped the joint since 1910.

  “I knew it the second they opened up with that automatic. Said to myself, ‘Ben Abbott’s pissed ’em off and they’re shooting up my town.’ I won’t stand for it, Ben.”

  He stood up, towered over my bed. I had to put some effort into not flinching. “And you tell your friends for me. Leave their guns at home, or I’ll show ’em firepower they’ll never forget. Shootin’ up a street of wood-frame houses. People sleeping in their beds. What do they think we live in, some goddamned housing project?”

  Shaking with anger, he loomed a long moment, then stalked out. A liver-spotted hand tugged the curtain around the bed beside mine and the patient within asked, “Was that a peace officer?”

  “Sort of.”

  ***

  A navy blue Mercedes limo was waiting outside Danbury General, uniformed driver holding the door. “Good morning, sir. Ms. Long regrets she was tied up in New York.” My heart fell; I’d been hoping to find her in the back seat.

  On the seat was a note, redolent of Anaïs Anaïs. “Hospitals give me the creeps. Talk to you soon.”

  I tried the telephone, got her New York machine, said, “Thanks for the ride,” and sat back to enjoy it as much as I could, considering that every bump and sway irritated some part of me that ached, and that a fairly deep depression was one of the effects of getting pounded in the head.

  Halfway to Newbury, I said, “Charles, would you have time to swing through Plainfield?”

  “My orders are to take you anyplace there’s a road—but I gotta say, Mr. Abbott, you look like you ought to get straight to bed.”

  “It looks worse than it is.” My bruises were yellowing and they’d removed the bandages from most of the cuts on my face; one ear looked like Dr. Frankenstein had sewed it on with a turkey needle.

  In fact, I felt terrible, but that was the head stuff—a pair of minor concussions that healed enough to let me out of the hospital but still required rest. Basically, I’d had a headache since I woke up two days ago.

  “The state police barracks,” I said, “right next to the county jail.”

  “Oh, I know where it is, sir.”

  Of course he did; Rita had spent a few nights in the lockup before her then-husband sent enough Park Avenue lawyers to effect a hostile takeover of Canada.

  ***

  “Is Sergeant Boyce around?” I asked the trooper guarding the front desk.

  “No sir. She’s due in at sixteen hundred. That’s four o’clock. Want to wait?” He stared curiously at my bashed-up face.

  “How about Sergeant Bender?”

  “What’s your name?”

  I told him. He asked me to sign in and shortly Arnie Bender, a smallish man for a trooper, came out to collect me. He extended his hand warily. “What’s up, Abbott?”

  “I read in the paper you got a federal grant to computerize your gang files.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “By what right?”

  “Crime victim.”

  “I heard you got the face in a B and E.”

  “I couldn’t fi
nd the sons of bitches in Trooper Moody’s burglar file and I was thinking maybe we were looking in the wrong place.”

  “It’s Trooper Moody’s investigation. Tell him.”

  “Trooper Moody is a farmer.”

  Arnie Bender might have smiled if he were a smiling man. Like Marian Boyce, he was city-bred. He’d grown up in Hartford; Marian, in Bridgeport. Neither detective was at their best on grass. But put them on asphalt sprinkled with broken bottles, and they shone like icebergs in the moonlight.

  Bender had been Marian Boyce’s boss until, in the course of a case I got involved in, she caught up. His basic take on me was that I was a jailbird—his and Ollie’s word—who had gotten in the way of his career. On the plus side, he was a decent guy with his head on fairly straight, for a cop. I’d seen him do the right thing in the past and I was hoping he’d do it now. Also, he was a good detective, and good detectives like to lock up criminals.

  “They had prison tattoos. One of ’em had tears.”

  “What the hell were they doing in Newbury?”

  “I’d love to know.”

  “They come at you out of the slammer?”

  “Farmer Moody already asked me that.”

  Bender noticed the front desk trooper pressing his ear to the armored-glass air holes. He took my arm and led me into the detective room. It was a well-lit office like a real estate agent’s—a modern, national franchiser’s, not a quaint-and-musty shop like mine. He offered a chair beside his desk and coffee from a burnt-smelling maker. Figuring my headache couldn’t get much worse, I accepted, with half-and-half and sugar, and while he stirred, answered his question. “No one has any reason to come at me out of Leavenworth. Besides, these guys did state time.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “Frankly, they weren’t that tough.”

  Bender pointed at my ear. “How tough you want?”

  “They were local. Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury—Waterbury’s closest to Newbury. I thought we could start there.”

  “Makes no sense. These ‘gangstas’ have a pretty narrow world view. They’re not climbing in cars to raid small towns in the country. They don’t even know places like Newbury exist.”

  “These guys knew.”

  Bender leveled at me a marble-eyed state trooper stare. “This is not about you returning the favor to these whacked-out criminal thugs. This is about helping the police solve a crime.”

  “I’m not into revenge. I’d like very much to see you lock them up so they don’t come back to Newbury next time they’re short of spending money.”

  Bender liked that answer enough to log onto the state police gang task force file and swivel his monitor so we both could read the screen.

  The faces pictured made Ollie’s burglars file look like greeters at the shopping mall. None had been in a very good mood when asked to pose. Most looked so scary you had to admire the photographer’s courage. And yet, up close, under the scowls and behind the dead stares, many were almost children. Dangerous children, heavily armed, but children, who, had they been privileged to grow up in Newbury, might at worst be high-school dropouts.

  When we’d finished with Waterbury, Bender scrolled files for Hartford and Bridgeport. By the time I’d slogged through them, my headache had ballooned to the proportions of a hangover steeped in discount bourbon.

  “Want to see Norwalk?”

  “Okay.”

  “You look like hell.”

  “Truth in packaging. Let’s do Norwalk. Then I gotta crash.”

  We ran the Norwalk file, quickly, as its subjects were mostly black Jamaicans. I stood up, clutching his desk for support, and declined his invitation to peruse the Stamford gangs.

  “Go to bed.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “I hope you’re not driving.”

  “My limo’s waiting.”

  Bender looked at me closely. “I’ll have somebody drive you home. Pick up your car when you feel better.”

  “No, I’m serious. I really have a limo.”

  Bender walked me out to the street where Rita’s driver was buffing an already-gleaming fender. “How’d—”

  “Don’t ask.”

  In the car, I said, “Excuse me, Charles,” then raised the partition for privacy, telephoned Information, then Waterbury Hospital.

  “May I speak with John Martello? He’s a patient.”

  My Hispanic hadn’t made the Waterbury gang file, but my Italian had: John Martello, alias Little John, alias Large John, alias Latin John.

  Martello had owned a string of assault charges before some armed robbery landed him at Somers Correctional. There, probably, he had joined a Hispanic-Italian gang called the Latin Popes. According to Bender’s file, the Popes were big in Waterbury.

  “No, sir, we have no patient under that name.”

  “Martello. M-a-r-t-e-l-”

  “No John Martello, sir.”

  “I was sure he was in. He hurt his foot pretty bad—could you switch me to Emergency Room?”

  She switched me. Early afternoon must have been a slow time in Emergency, because I was answered by a resident who sounded unharried. “Martello,” I said. “John Martello. They told me he’s not checked in the hospital, but he came in with a broken ankle Saturday night.”

  “Hold on…Nope. No John Martellos this week. You state police?”

  I figured that an affirmative mumble couldn’t really be construed as impersonating a police officer.

  “Like we told you: The only ankle-foot injuries are a couple of old ladies, a construction worker who fell off a roof, and a ten-year-old who got his foot caught in the tracks.”

  “What construction worker?”

  “Middle-aged guy. Nothing like what you wanted.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up and closed my eyes, still wondering how a ghetto gangsta had found my house to rob in a small town on the far side of his planet.

  ***

  I woke up in my driveway with Charles murmuring, “You’re home, Mr. Abbott.”

  Alison came running down the driveway and demanded to prop her little shoulder under me. Between the two of them, I got in the house and up the stairs. “Mom cleaned up the mess.”

  “Thank her for me.”

  “She couldn’t get all the blood off the hall carpet.”

  “Well, it’s an old Persian. They look bloody anyhow.”

  “You’re disgusting, Ben.”

  I sat on the bed. “Muskrat, would you please take Charles down to the kitchen and find him some lunch and a cup of coffee? Charles, thanks for the ride.”

  Alone, I sagged back on the bed and worked up the energy to take off my clothes. I wasn’t too surprised Martello hadn’t shown up at the hospital; having sprayed gunfire at a state trooper, even the most mentally blighted would reason that the cops would be canvassing emergency rooms all over the state. Also, despite the satisfying crack when I twisted his ankle, young bones didn’t snap that easily, and I very likely just tore some cartilage or popped out the joint, which his friends were quite capable of popping back.

  The gang file had listed all sorts of known particulars, including hangouts. Martello’s local watering hole was Ramos’s Bar on Foundry Street. One of these days, when I felt a lot better than I did now, I would stop in Ramos’s for a quick one.

  Chapter 13

  “Knock, knock? How are you?”

  Late-morning sun was pouring in my bedroom’s side window. My head still hurt, but I was getting used to it, and Vicky looked fresh as the day in a scoop-neck cotton dress, so I said, “Fine, except I’m truly and totally and completely baffled.”

  She bounced into the room, gave me a little peck on the cheek, and made me lean forward while she fluffed my pillows. “Want coffee?”

  “Not yet. How are you? Who’s running the town?”

  “What baffles you?”

  “The Fisks’ mystery guest.”
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  “Oh, Ben. Not that again.”

  “It’s bugging me.”

  “Drop it. You have to get better and sell some houses.”

  “I’m not showing any houses till they take the stitches out of my ear. I look like I’m made out of spare parts.”

  “Not to mention coming over to headquarters to give me a hand.”

  “I’ll be on my feet tomorrow. But somehow…somehow.”

  “Drop it, silly.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Or won’t.”

  “Won’t.”

  “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  “Why am I doing this?…Friend of mine, back in the Academy? Matt Titus. Best sailor you ever saw. He hated any boat that wasn’t going as fast as it should. He’d do sail changes until the winch grinders were vomiting. The way Matt was about slow-moving boats, I am about wanting to know what the hell is going on.”

  “In other words, you’re a gossip.”

  “I am not a gossip.”

  “A typical small-town gossip. You’re as bad as Marie Butler.”

  “I am not!”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean that, Vicky.”

  “Fine.”

  “Gossips spread it around. Not me. I don’t live off it. But point me at something like poor Reg and I want to know it all.”

  “Please stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Ben, you’re so goddamned selfish sometimes. Steve La France is this close to taking the nomination away from me. Every f—god-dammed thing that goes wrong in town is my fault and right now you’re turning a simple tragedy into a big deal.”

  “I am not.”

  “Everyone is talking about you going around asking stupid questions. Maybe you don’t mind being taken for a fool—”

  “Doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”

  “But you’re wrecking things for me.—Wait two weeks? Just two weeks. Shut up for two weeks. Let me lock Steve back in his Liquor Locker and then you can go around and ask every stupid question you want.”

  “Yeah, but after you get the nomination you’ll be bugging me about the election in November.”

  “There isn’t a Republican in Newbury I can’t paint the walls with. But a conservative Democrat like that bastard—like my worthy opponent in the Liquor Locker—will split my party and get one of those goddamned Republican Butlers elected and then where will we all be? If you don’t care about me, think of Alison.”