Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  Her gaze took in his thick shoulders and his hands resting on the steering wheel. “I heard that he’d been killed.”

  “Then yeah, it’s true.”

  Another wave of nausea washed over her, milder than those she’d suffered at school. Maybe she was getting used to the idea of Arthur’s murder. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an idea she wanted to get used to. “With a nail gun?” she asked warily.

  “You’ve got a reliable source.”

  She glanced across the road at the house. Sunlight spilled into the window cutouts, but she could see a glaring light burning inside. Were the drivers of the police cruisers in there, collecting evidence? How long did it take to collect evidence, anyway? Did the Rockford Police know what to look for? It wasn’t as if they’d had lots of experience investigating murders.

  She turned back to the man in the truck and found him gazing at her. His seat was slightly higher than hers, and she had to tilt her head to see him. “I’m a friend of Arthur’s wife,” she said, figuring she ought to explain her presence. “I’d heard—but I was hoping it wasn’t true.”

  “It’s true.”

  “And you know this because . . . ?”

  “I was the one who found him.” Before she could respond to his stunning admission, he motioned toward the house with his chin. “Here it comes. Brace yourself.”

  She twisted in her seat in time to see a uniformed policeman emerge from the gaping rectangle where a garage door would someday go—assuming the structure wasn’t razed and a memorial stone planted in its place, marking the location as the site of Arthur Cavanagh’s violent passing. Judging by the officer’s build, she guessed he was one of those cops who loved to eat doughnuts. His face was too pudgy for his flat-topped, visored police cap. Who had invented those hats, anyway? Police always wore them, and they seemed kind of pointless.

  Stay focused, she ordered herself as the officer sauntered across the dirt and gravel to her car. She opened the driver’s side window and smiled up at him. It occurred to her that, under the circumstances, smiling might not be appropriate, and she rearranged her face into a solemn expression.

  “Ma’am? What are you doing here?” he asked.

  She hated being called “ma’am.” It made her feel old. “I just . . .” She closed her mouth before saying another word, realizing she needed to think through her answer. Perhaps rubbernecking at a crime scene was against the law and he was going to give her a ticket. “I’m a friend of Patty Cavanagh’s,” she said. “I heard about Arthur, and I thought maybe it wasn’t true.”

  “Name?” he asked.

  “Elaine Lovett.”

  “If you’re a friend of Mrs. Cavanagh’s, Ms. Lovett, why aren’t you with her?”

  Good question, and she had to think for a minute before coming up with an answer. “If it wasn’t true,” she explained, “I wouldn’t need to be with her. So I thought I should find out if it was true first.”

  “This is a crime scene,” he said, sounding quite taken with his own importance. “If we have to cordon off the whole subdivision, we will. We don’t need folks coming through here and gawking.”

  Lainie considered reminding him she was Patty’s friend, not just a folk. But he didn’t seem to be reaching for his ticket book, so she decided to keep her mouth shut and count her blessings. “I’ll be on my way.”

  He glanced past her at the man in the truck. “How long are you planning to stick around, Mr. Stavik?”

  The man cursed under his breath, then turned his gaze to Lainie. “I could use a drink,” he murmured, his steady stare communicating quite clearly that this was an invitation.

  To her surprise, she said, “So could I.”

  Chapter Four

  IF SHE’D THOUGHT about it, she would have come up with plenty of reasons not to have a drink with him. For one thing, she didn’t know him. For another thing, she had soccer practice in two hours.

  But the tap room at the Old Colonial Inn was a public place, she’d driven there in her own car, and the beverage she’d ordered was a ginger ale. And she couldn’t recall the last time a man who wasn’t her husband had asked her to join him for a drink.

  Besides which, she was curious. This man had been the one to find Arthur Cavanagh’s corpse. How could she not spend a few minutes talking to him?

  He’d followed her to the landmark inn in his truck. At four o’clock on a weekday afternoon, the tap room was empty, and no one paid any attention to her wrinkled slacks and mussed hair or his faded jeans and thick-soled work boots. They sat at a small square table that looked a lot older than it was, its maple surface skillfully distressed and its legs slightly uneven so it wobbled whenever they lifted or lowered their glasses. A candle in an amber glass sat at the center of the table, adding faint illumination to the darkly paneled room. The Old Colonial Inn was more than two hundred years old, and although everything inside it had been refurbished, renovated, or replaced, the inn valiantly tried to transport its patrons to an earlier time.

  Lainie’s ginger ale tasted not the least bit historical. She was grateful for that.

  Bill Stavik ordered a beer for himself. They’d introduced themselves once they’d parked side by side in the Old Colonial Inn lot and climbed out of their vehicles. Now, facing each other across the tiny table, their chins lit from below by the candle, she told him she and Patty Cavanagh were long-time friends. Stavik, in turn, told her he was Cavanagh’s foreman. He’d shown up for work at eight thirty that morning and discovered Cavanagh lying dead on the floor in what would eventually be the great room of Unit Six. He had immediately phoned the police. All in all, it had not been one of his better days.

  Her first impulse was to offer sympathy, but she wasn’t sure he’d appreciate it. He was a big, burly man, the antithesis of Roger with his Brattle Street upbringing, his Buckingham Browne education, his degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law, and his gentlemanly polish—and even Roger, with all his refinement, had hated sympathy. Men weren’t fourth-graders, despite their tendency toward juvenile behavior. Lainie couldn’t pat Stavik on the head and say, “There, there, don’t worry. This isn’t the end of the world.” For Arthur Cavanagh, it was the end of the world. For Stavik, who knew?

  She figured her best recourse was to smile and nod and listen while he talked. She and Stavik were proof that a man and a woman could have a drink together in a restaurant bar without anything inappropriate going on. Just like Arthur and his companion last night. Maybe.

  “The scene was . . . I don’t know,” he said, then shrugged his boulder-sized shoulders. “It’s not like in the movies or on TV. It was like—there was this smell. Not a good smell. A construction site—at the stage Unit Six is at, it smells good. Clean plywood—a little piney, not live pine like the forest, but a clean wood smell with sawdust mixed in and fresh air blowing through. Have you ever smelled a construction site?”

  Lainie wasn’t sure she had. But she nodded to encourage him to continue.

  “Cav wasn’t supposed to be there. He never arrives at a site that early. I’m always the first person to show up. So I wasn’t expecting anything when I went into the unit. But it smelled . . . funny.”

  “Not like clean wood and sawdust?”

  “Like something just beginning to turn bad.” He grimaced. “Like old blood. You know that smell?”

  She was a woman who hadn’t yet gone through menopause. Of course she knew that smell.

  He drank some beer and lowered his glass. “I spent, I don’t know, three hours talking to the police this morning. They had me point out to them how I entered the house, where I was when I saw him, what I touched. I touched him, of course—to see if he was sleeping. I didn’t see the blood right away. I thought, hey, maybe the old lady kicked him out or something and he’d decided to spend the night at the site. Though with the kind of money he’s got, he coul
d’ve sprung for a hotel room.”

  “So you thought he was just asleep on the floor?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see the nail or the blood under his head at first. But the smell . . . So I went to him, touched him, checked for his pulse, tried some CPR. Then I saw the back of his head and . . .” He grimaced again. “I called the police.”

  “Who would have wanted to kill him?” she asked.

  “Everybody.” He grunted a laugh. “Cav was a son of a bitch. I guess you’re not supposed to say that about someone who’s dead.”

  “Whoever killed him must have known how to use a nail gun, right? Do you think it was one of the carpenters who worked for him?”

  “It could have been.” Stavik leaned back in his chair and teased the label on his beer bottle with his thumb. He had thick, callused fingers, blunt-tipped, with clean fingernails. “Not that it takes a Ph.D. to figure out how to use a nail gun. Lots of folks use them without knowing what the hell they’re doing.”

  “Really?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the accidents. Nail guns are a useful tool, but they can cause some nasty injuries.”

  “Do you think Arthur was killed by accident?”

  Stavik pondered the question, then shook his head. “If Cav had been alone there, the usual nail gun injury a guy does to himself is in his hand. You’re bracing a stud or something”—he planted his left hand palm down on the surface of the table, while his right hand mimed squeezing some sort of trigger—“and you’re hammering along, and you just don’t move your hand fast enough, and a nail pierces it.” He pounded his right hand into his left. “Sometimes the hand gets nailed right into the board. Pretty gross,” he said, smiling at Lainie.

  She took a sip of soda, wishing she could wash away her queasiness.

  “A nail through the foot isn’t too uncommon, either,” he went on. “Someone puts the gun down without locking the safety, and it bounces on the floor and fires a nail. There’ve been cases where a second person gets injured—say, if you’re nailing through plasterboard and you miss a stud, and you don’t realize there’s a guy standing on the other side of the plasterboard.

  “Nail guns are what they are. With a regular hammer and nails, about the worst injury is when you smash your thumb. With a nail gun, you can aim through the air. And you’ve got all that compression velocity.”

  Lainie hoped he wouldn’t go into technical detail about the speed of projectile nails from nail guns. She felt nauseous enough just envisioning the accidents he’d described.

  “But a nail to the back of the head?” he continued. “That would be pretty hard to do by accident. Just about impossible to do to yourself.”

  “That was where he was shot? In the back of the head?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lainie shuddered. She wasn’t squeamish—primary school teachers couldn’t afford to be—but the whole thing was just so . . . icky. It was the sort of thing she expected to see on a TV crime show or the eleven o’clock news—the sort of thing that happened to people she didn’t know. People she knew died of cancer, or old age, or heart attacks. They died in hospitals, plugged into machines, or if they were lucky, they died in their own beds in their sleep.

  Her grandfather had gone that way, and while her grandmother had come unglued the following morning when she’d awakened to find a dead body lying next to her, her grandfather had gotten a pretty sweet deal. He’d been ninety-two, and while he’d been something of a schlemiel throughout his life, he’d certainly demonstrated excellent technique when it came to dying.

  “I don’t see how anyone could claim Cav died by accident,” Bill said. “But the way the police are working this thing . . . I don’t think they know what the hell they’re doing.”

  “The Rockford Police don’t have much experience investigating murders. Fortunately,” she added.

  “They ought to bring in some cops who do. Murders happen in Boston, Lowell, New Bedford. Cops from those cities ought to come in and help them out.”

  “What do you think the local cops are doing wrong?”

  He gazed past her, as if searching for an answer in the paneled wall behind her chair. “I’m no expert. But they didn’t need to grill me for three hours, what little I had to tell them. They acted like they thought I had important information.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “What kind of information? He was there when I arrived. He was dead when I arrived. All the tools on site—including every nail gun we’ve got—were locked in their storage bin, and the key to the storage bin was in Cav’s pocket.”

  “How do you know it was a nail gun?” Lainie asked. “Couldn’t someone have used a regular old hammer?”

  Bill snorted a laugh. “Right. Go up to someone, ask him to turn around and then go tap-tap-tap with a hammer and nail against the back of his skull. That would work.”

  “In other words, the nail gun could hit him from far away.”

  “Only if you’ve got good aim. Whoever nailed Cav—sorry,” he said, cringing at a pun Roger would have found uproariously funny. “Whoever killed him was probably pretty close. But you’d need the propulsion to pop the nail through his skull that way. A hand hammer, I don’t know. A skull is pretty thick. And Cav was one of the most hard-headed bastards I knew,” he added, this time grinning to show his pun was intended. “By the second tap, he’d have turned around and flattened his attacker, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.” It all sounded so gruesome, so cold. A hot murder would involve knives, or strangulation, or some sort of up-close-and-personal engagement between killer and victim. A nail gun was detached. Mechanical. Chilly. “What’s going to happen with Emerson Village Estates? Are you still going to build all those houses there?”

  Bill rolled his shoulders in another shrug. “I guess that depends on what happens with Cav’s company. He owned the business. Someone’ll inherit it. His wife, I’m figuring.”

  What in the world would Patty do with a construction company? She was a terrific soccer player, and she’d organized some successful cake sales for the PTO, but did she know how to run a business?

  “If she doesn’t want it,” Bill said, “I suppose she can sell it. It ought to be worth a lot.”

  “If she sells it, what would happen to you?”

  “Either the new owner would keep me on, or he’d fire me and I’d find work somewhere else. I’ll be all right. Some of the crew, though . . . They may wind up scrambling for jobs. It’s a mess, you know? Everyone figured on good, solid employment over the next three years. That was the schedule for Emerson Village. Three years, minimum.”

  “Why didn’t you get along with Arthur?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “Nobody got along with Cav.”

  His busty blond friend seemed to be getting along with him just fine last night. “Why not?”

  His gaze challenged Lainie. “You’re friends with his wife. You must know the guy.”

  “Not that well, really,” she admitted. “I’ve known Patty at least ten years—ever since we both joined the Colonielles. A soccer team. We’ve been teammates a long time.”

  “Soccer? Really?” He seemed tickled by that. His eyes widened and he leaned back in his chair, as if he needed to assess her from a new angle. “How’d you get into soccer?”

  “I started playing as a kid and fell in love with it,” she told him. “All that running, kicking, teamwork—it’s a fun game. I played in college, and now I’m playing for—” she cut herself off before mentioning the Under-Fifty League. Not that she was embarrassed about her age, and really, under fifty could mean she was anywhere from twenty to forty-nine. But she just didn’t want to discuss her age. “A women’s league in town.”

  “I was a baseball player myself,” he said. “High school, college . . . My daughter’s playing on her high school softba
ll team now. I get to as many games as I can. It’s hard, though. Cav doesn’t let anyone off for anything. Or didn’t, I guess.”

  Bill Stavik had a daughter. She noticed no wedding ring on his finger, but, unlike Patty, some people had the good sense not to wear precious jewelry when it could get lost or damaged—like working at a construction site, for instance.

  And the fact that he was married and he and she could still have a friendly drink together proved, yet again, that Arthur’s drink at Olde Towne Olé last night might have been totally respectable.

  Lainie relaxed in her antique-looking ladder-back chair. She hadn’t been aware of any particular tension inside her, but there must have been some, because now it was gone and she felt her spine sag a little. For her first time having a drink with a man who wasn’t Roger, she felt oddly relieved that her companion was looking for nothing more than someone to sit with him while he recovered from a traumatic experience.

  “So, when you’re not playing soccer, what do you do?” he asked.

  “I teach fourth grade at Hopwell.” At his quizzical look, she clarified. “The Hopwell Primary School. You’re not from Rockford?”

  He shook his head. “Lexington.”

  “That’s a fine school district,” she said, then laughed at how pompous she sounded. Lifting her glass to sip, she glimpsed her watch. “Speaking of soccer, I’ve got a practice in forty-five minutes. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should return to reality, too.” He drained his beer, pulled a ten-dollar bill from his wallet, and waved Lainie’s credit card away. They walked together out of the taproom, through the musty Colonial entry hall and into the balmy late afternoon. “I feel better,” he said. “Talking helps.”

  “Beer helps sometimes, too.”

  He smiled. He was about half a foot taller than she—no taller than Roger, certainly—but his bulk made her feel petite. His physique was thick and hard, all muscle and sinew. With shoulders and arms like his, he could probably still smack homers out of the park without exerting himself. If his daughter took after him, she could probably smack homers, too.