HardScape (17 page)

Chapter 15

I slammed the closet door, kicked the visitor's chair in front of it, dove for the guy at the desk, and tried to pin his wrist. He was short, broad, and very fast. He chopped my jaw with his free hand. I slipped most of it over my shoulder and kneed him while I battled his other hand. He hit me again. I saw stars, kneed him again, and this time connected. He doubled over. I tore his hand out of the windbreaker. He held a badge on a leather case. “State police,” he gasped, straightening up and straight-arming my chest. “Back off. Now!”

“What?”

Major Case Squad Sergeant Bender pushed out of the closet, waving a search warrant.

“What's going on?” I was utterly baffled, aware only that the other cop was circling behind me, looking to throw a kidney punch.

My telephone rang. Bender picked it up. “Thanks. He's already here.”

Marian Boyce crashed through the door. “You horse's ass,” she said to Bender. “What took you so long?”

“Jailbirds know how to hide stuff.”

I looked from Bender to Marian. To her credit, she couldn't meet my eye. “What stuff? What the hell is this about?”

Bender handed me the warrant. I skimmed a blur of print. Blood and adrenaline were tearing around my head. I recognized my name and address. The warrant was signed by a county magistrate.

“What are you looking for?”

“Cash,” said Bender. “In a shopping bag.”

“What? What the—”

Alison hovered at the open door, her little jaw dropping. I took a deep breath and scanned the warrant a second time. It covered the house only, not the barn. She and her mother were safe. “Alison, may I introduce Sergeant Bender and—” I looked at the cop I had kneed. He was still holding his badge, but he didn't tell me his name. “This is Alison Mealy, my neighbor. Say hello to the nice police officer, Alison.”

She looked as bewildered as I, but she stepped into the room and gave me a reassuring little grin. “Hello,” she said to Bender.

“Don't offer your hand.”

“I wasn't going to. Are you okay, Ben?”

“I'm okay. Go home, hon. Go on, everything's fine.”

“Frisk him,” Bender ordered.

I backed up a step. “Let the child go first. Marian, would you please walk Alison home? Go on home, hon. It's okay.”

Alison didn't move.

I said, “Thanks for coming and getting me, Alison. I appreciate it.”

“Come on, sweetie,” said Marian, reaching for her hand. Alison ran like the wind.

“Spread 'em,” said Bender.

Boy, did a patdown bring back a lot of memories. I felt myself losing it, calculating the optimum moment to throw the two of them through the windows. The patdown is a humiliating example of the guard's power and the prisoner's lack of it. Particularly if the guard is doing it just to show you he can, which is what Bender was doing, knowing full well I hadn't gone armed to dinner with Marian; nor did he think I had palmed a lobster cracker from the table. To my surprise, instead of losing it, I went cold, like I had learned inside, just stepped out of my body and let them think I was still there. Marian returned as they were finishing and I asked, “How about a strip-search?”

“Watch your mouth,” said Bender's sidekick, backhanding my face. It was a stupid hit, opening his entire front from head to toe. I took full advantage.

There was a long, very ugly silence. Uniforms would have beaten me bloody with their nightsticks, but Bender, years out of uniform, did the right thing, saying to his partner as he helped him stand, “You asked for that,” and to me, “Next time, you'll need an ambulance.”

Marian's face was as unreadable as a Beijing street sign, though I didn't doubt that “next time” she would cheerfully hold their coats.

I sucked a knuckle where I'd opened up the cut I'd gotten from Connie's horn. “Up yours. You're in my house. Execute your warrant and get the hell out.” To Marian, I said, “Bender forced you, didn't he? Threatened your career. You went along, hating yourself.”

“No,” said Marian. “Sergeant Bender would not have thought of it. He doesn't like working nights. What did you do, Arnie? Stop for supper?”

“We found guns upstairs. He's got an arsenal.”

“All permitted,” I said. “They were my father's.”

“Gun permits for a convicted felon? Let's see 'em.”

Having served more than a year and a day—three times more, in fact—I had had to apply for relief of civil disability to get my realtor's license. While I was at it, I had applied to renew my father's gun permits under my own name. His old desk was my physical connection with him, more than the guns, which he really never shared; but in the first months outside of prison, the right to keep them had seemed very important.

“Goddamned pussy courts,” growled Bender, holding the permits to the light as if suspecting a forgery. “Look, the jailbird is licensed to carry! What'd you tell 'em, you sell houses for cash?”

“Only to cops and drug dealers.”

For a white-collar felon, the gun permits had come easier than my realtor's license, as it allows me to hold money in escrow. Only after Connie had invited a Plainfield judge down for tea did I finally get the right to run the business.

“Marian,” I asked, “why the charade? Why not just knock on the door with your warrant? I'd have let you in. Would have offered you coffee. Wine, even.”

“You invited
me
,” she said. “Remember? The warrant came through. And I took the opportunity to conduct a clandestine search. Sometimes it works better that way.”

She was explaining but not apologizing. I said, “I presume you know by now you struck out.”

“We're not done,” growled Bender.

“If you want to stay up all night to make a stupid point, I can't stop you. I'll be in the library.” I went in and closed the door behind him and sat with my books. I couldn't bear to see them pawing through the rooms. An hour later, Marian stuck her head in. “We're done.”

“Close the door on your way out.”

“I had a nice time at dinner,” she said.

“We'll have to do it again.”

“You might want to know I really did accept your invitation before the warrant was processed.”

“Can I ask you something, Marian?”

“Sure.”

“What if we'd had some more wine and you'd decided to accept my invitation to come home with me for brandy and dessert?”

“Might have happened.”

“Yeah, what would you have done if we came back here and your partners were still here?”

“In that case, I might have gone for the strip-search.” She smiled. I didn't. She said, “Good night.” I didn't.

I got out the vacuum cleaner, started on the top floor, and worked my way down to the kitchen. Then I mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned the guest bathroom, which one of them had used.

***

They came back in the morning with a warrant for the barn.

“You sure I didn't move my shopping bag after you left?”

“We watched the house.”

“Am I a suspect?”

“Renny Chevalley was shot late in the afternoon. You left the cookout at three-thirty and called on Mrs. Long at five.”

“I took a shower.”

“Plenty of time to drive up to the airstrip, shoot your cousin, before you called on Mrs. Long.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“But not impossible.”

Alison had left for school. I took her terrified mother out for breakfast at the Church Hill Diner while they searched the barn, and tried to convince her that everything would be all right. Janet Mealy kept nodding her head, agreeing that the case had nothing to do with her, but the haunted look in her eye was still there when we got home to the empty barn. She asked to borrow my vacuum cleaner, and I went to see Tim Hall, my lawyer, who listened and assured me he wasn't worried.

“Can I sue for harassment?”

Lawyers are like Br'er Rabbit. Don't throw me in that briar patch, don't make me go to court. Tim said he didn't think a harassment suit was a good idea. The cops were just doing their job, pursuing an investigation. “I'm sure the warrants were good,” he said. “Forget about it. They're just clearing up loose ends.”

“They wouldn't do this if I hadn't been in prison.”

Tim shrugged. He's young, with a big, broad, open face and a perpetually worried light deep in his eyes. He'd taken over his father's firm, as I had mine, picking up the old man's bank retainers and a client list comprised of the older families. He does their wills and their trust accounts for grandchildren's college and tries to defuse their occasional feuds, but real estate closings are his real bread and butter, so he was currently starving, like me. His father had been a force in the region; the jury was still out on whether he would be too. I suspected that in the long run—a couple of decades—he might, though if he did he would do it quietly.

He asked, quietly, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“Yes. I didn't do it. Neither did Renny.”

“Would you like me to call Ira Roth?”

“What the hell for?” Ira Roth was
the
criminal lawyer in the county. Nobody could remember the last time he had lost a case.

“Well, you know,” said Tim. “You've been in the real world longer than I have. When you have a problem you hire a specialist, right?”

“I can't afford Ira Roth, for one thing. I can barely afford you. For another, I don't think I have that sort of problem.”

“Yet,” said Tim.

I stood up.

“He might not be able to help, anyway,” said Tim, walking me to the door. “I hear the Long attorneys have retained him to plead Mrs. Long's defense if they indict.”

“That's sensible.”

Tim agreed. The two-thousand-dollar suit crowd did not set well with local judges.

“What's the word? Do you think they'll indict?”

“Gossip is they don't have that much of a case against her. Seems to me the state's attorney will have to pull some additional rabbit out of his hat. What's he got? Her gun, which somebody else could have used. No witness. No priors. Lovers' quarrel is a dandy motive, but if they indict on that alone, Ira would probably win a motion to dismiss before they even seat a jury.”

“Good. So he'll have time to bankrupt me. Good seeing you, Tim.”

“How's Aunt Connie?”

“Sore. And mad as hell about her car.”

“I saw it. Lucky you're both alive.…Can I ask you something?” He had followed me all the way to the landing outside the front door of his office, which he rents upstairs from the General Store. It used to be a storeroom and still smells sweetly of kerosene and grain, though no one's hitched a horse outside in a long, long time. In his father's day, farmers and businessmen trooped steadily up the outside wooden stairs, and it was said that no one ran for Congress from our side of the state before he paid a call.

“What's up?”

“What's with you and—I mean, are you—”

“Am I what?”

“Are you seeing Vicky McLachlan?”

“We're friends.”

“Oh.”

I looked at him. Tim wasn't yet thirty and a very young thirty at that. He seemed young now, young and confused. And, it dawned belatedly on me, crestfallen.

“Why do you ask?”

My attorney stammered.

Like any sensible country lawyer, he had worked for Vicky's election campaign as soon as he realized her chances of winning, so I knew he had seen her in action and had observed something of the forces that drove her. I laid a calming hand on his arm.

He said, “I'm just…” and ran short of words, again.

“Do you ever go out with her?” I asked, not so innocently.

“We had sandwiches in her office yesterday.”

“That's Vicky.”

“Well, I'll tell you, Ben. She's really something.”

“Terrific woman,” I agreed.

“But I've heard you two—”

“Friends,” I said, “just friends,” with a strange feeling that I was burning a bridge I would regret. Tim was a nice guy. Vicky could use a nice guy. I said, “She's got a big future. The only possible downside would be if it bothered you to play second fiddle to an ambitious woman.”

“I don't care about that stuff,” said Tim. “Seems to me if you love each other it's all shared anyhow.”

“Don't let that talk get around, you'll be disbarred.”

Tim laughed, light as a balloon. “Jeez, I'm glad we talked.”

I descended the wooden stairs beside the General Store with mixed emotions: happy for Tim, provided he was reading her signals correctly; slightly relieved that I was no longer under the gun; and yet wondering if I would regret it. I also wondered if the honorable thing to do would be to go over and tell Vicky goodbye. Or should I just let things drift? I walked over to Town Hall and asked the clerk if the first selectman was in. She was.

She stood up behind her desk and offered a cheek, which I kissed.

“Hello, stranger.”

“Hi.” I hadn't seen her since the braces imbroglio.

“How's Connie?”

“Much better.…I was just up at Tim's.”

“What's happening?”

I filled her in on the Renny thing and the police search. She commiserated and seconded Tim's advice to lay the groundwork at least for retaining Ira Roth.

“I'll call him, if you like,” she offered. “Ira owes me a favor. You won't have to pay him unless you need him.”

“I'll tell you if it comes to that. Thanks.”

Vicky glanced at her watch. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“I was just talking to Tim and…”

“And?”

“He's got good taste in women.”

She got it right away and turned neutral. “What are you saying?”