McMansion (5 page)

“How?”

“I had a plan.”

“For revenge?”

“Yeah, for revenge. What the hell do you think I'm talking about?”

“Mind me asking how?”

“Moot point, now.”

He picked up a board, sighted down it, penciled an X on the crooked end, measured six feet, drew a cut line with a square and went to his radial saw and looked surprised that I was still standing there. “Goodbye, Mr. Abbott.”

“Do you know how to drive a bulldozer?”

“What kind?”

“How about a Caterpillar D4?”

“Goodbye, Mr. Abbott.” He put on eye protectors and ear protectors and turned on his saw, which made a remarkably loud and piercing noise.

We had here a classic meeting of two alpha dogs, only one of whom could become alpha-alpha. The trouble with being alpha is you don't always think that straight. Or think at all. Which can be a great advantage. Or a terrible mistake. Maybe it was because he reminded me of prison, but the blood suddenly storming through my mind told me that I could not survive if I backed down.

I yanked the power cord from the wall.

Sammis was remarkably quick. Moving as fluidly as a skater, he snatched up a battery-powered circular saw and held the long-toothed rip blade inches from my face. I looked at his index finger curled around the trigger switch.

Chapter Six

I tried to gauge his eyes through the safety glasses. They were glazed like marble with a mad dog stare. Again I looked at his index finger on the trigger and said, “You don't have the balls, dude. You've been out too long and you don't want to go back.”

Sammis shocked me. I really didn't believe he would trigger the saw. But he jerked the switch with all his might.

I was right about one thing. He had been out of prison too long. He had not lost his anger, nor his desire to survive. But he had lost his edge. He had gotten so heated up that he forgot to press the saw's safety switch with his thumb. And, thanks to the federal rules that were supposed to protect do-it-yourself handy men and women, the saw did not start. That surprised him long enough for me to pick up a whippy length of quarter inch steel rod he was building something with, point it at his face and announce, semi-truthfully, “I fenced for the Naval Academy. Why don't we stop the rough stuff before you lose an eye?”

He glared at me, glared at the steel rod, and glared at his saw, saw where his thumb had missed the safety, and threw it down on the bench. He looked angrier than scared, but he sounded weary when he said, “Get the fuck out of here and don't come back.”

Sensible again, I backed out the door, went home and Googled him, which I should have done earlier. It took a lot of scrolling, but I found that Andrew Sammis had indeed done time. In Maine. Not for assault with bulldozer, but close. He'd been convicted of running over his wife with a pickup truck, which he had denied vehemently but unconvincingly. After a year in prison, his conviction had been overturned by an appeals court. Which not only freed him, but permitted him to inherit his wife's considerable estate and collect her life insurance.

I found it hard to believe that he would risk throwing away his new-found freedom and fortune to avenge some stolen trees. Still, I'd seen his anger in action, so I wrote an asterisk beside his name and continued down my list.

I spoke with a homeowner who went red in the face about Billy's trucks roaring through his neighborhood on Sundays. I found the president of a community group that had formed to try to stop Billy from scamming a grandfather-clause loophole in the zoning regulations to force single-acre housing into a two-acre neighborhood. I found people who blamed him for crowded roads, noisy leaf blowers, and bad-mannered newcomers with too much money. Everyone damned him for rising school taxes.

“Welfare!” one apoplectic geezer sputtered. “It's like we pay welfare to Billy Tiller. Our taxes go up to educate the kids who move into his houses. He keeps the profit.”

None of them admitted knowing how to drive a bulldozer.

More promising was a guy who had been suing Billy for shoddy construction work on his nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar McMansion. It didn't sound like a thing that would go to bulldozers, but when I learned that the homeowner had rented a backhoe to excavate a pond in a wet spot in the back of his property—a wet spot that had already been a pond before Total Landscape filled it in one dark night to preempt a wetlands-protection challenge to that particular development—I figured I better talk to him.

Billy had named the development Equestrian Ridge.

The houses were wedged in a dark hollow and nine hundred and fifty thousand hadn't bought much space. The big guy who opened his front door and stepped back to let me enter tripped on the curving staircase Billy had pried into the two-story entryway. I helped him to his feet. Something loud began to roar somewhere in the house and we both looked at the ceiling.

A crystal chandelier shook musically.

“My wife's in the Jacuzzi,” he explained.

I was tempted to ask with whom? Framed posters were shifting on their moorings. The floor vibrated underfoot.

“I grew up in apartments. I never owned a house before. Is this supposed to happen?”

I backed out from under the chandelier. “Depends on your builder. Not if he's a craftsman like Ed Soares or John Blomberg. Or even Louie Minalgo,” I added, naming a cantankerous Yankee who did superb work if it wasn't trout, deer, or turkey season. “Guys like them still build a solid house. Your wife could teach line dancing upstairs and we wouldn't feel a thing.”

“That's what I kept telling my idiot lawyer. Billy Tiller was a chiseling shoddy crook.”

“How was your lawsuit going?”

His face fell. “The lawyer told me she thought we'd lose. I was feeling pretty bad, before that kid killed him.”

“I heard you dug a pond.”

“I tried. I figured a backhoe was like driving a car. But it sunk in the mud. I finally had to bring in a pro. Dave Charney.”

“The best.”

He walked me out onto a scruffy lawn, the hallmark of a building lot scraped clean of natural topsoil, and showed me his pond. I told him it would look wonderful in a few years. Which it would, if the plants he had bought at the nursery to replace the mountain laurel flattened by Total Landscape matured before the deer ate them.

Back indoors, his wife came down all flushed and pretty in a terry bathrobe. She complained to her husband, obviously not for the first time, that their Jacuzzi had consumed all their hot water, and insisted that I stay for coffee. On the way to the kitchen, we passed a living room which was empty but for a baby grand piano with the lid wide open and dust thick on the strings. She noticed that I noticed and said, “They told us to close it, but it looks so pretty open.”

“Who plays?”

“We're going to get lessons for the kids.”

The kitchen, the usual lineup of granite, stainless steel, cherry, tile, big screen TV, and marble bar leading to the family room, reeked faintly of bacon grease as a Billy Tiller “gourmet chef delight” was designed more for unwrapping takeout than actual cooking with a real exhaust fan that vented outdoors. Over excellent coffee, they both talked about how lonely they felt moving to Connecticut. I told them that Yankees warm slowly, and recommended volunteering at the high school or joining the community theater. Pitching in was always welcome. I did not mention that new people living in expensive houses on quiet cul-de-sacs often took the heat for the developers.

“We'll settle in,” the woman said. “We'll make it home.” Then she smiled, “I always dreamed of living in a new house. With fresh paint and lots of room.”

***

Ira Roth was wearing his wireless headset. He motioned me to sit while he wrapped up his call: “I know he's a psycho. But he's our psycho.”

“Another client?” I asked when he rang off.

“Another private investigator. What do you have for me?”

I told him about Sammis and his wife's insurance.

“Nice work if you can get it.” He had a habit of keeping his headset on with the microphone stalk blocking his mouth, which gave the impression that he saved the good stuff for people on the other end of the line. “But a man who took Billy to court has demonstrated a certain willingness to stay within the law, which won't much help our young gentleman. Find more people mad at Billy—mad enough to flatten him with a bulldozer.”

“I don't know, Ira. I've talked to a bunch. An amazing number of people know how to drive bulldozers, but—”

“They don't all have to know how. I'll take some who were mad enough to hire someone to flatten Billy with a bulldozer.”

“How many ordinary people would kill over trees or floods?”

“All we need are people who seem like they could have killed the son of a bitch. Andrew Sammis and Mr. Gordon are a start, but I need at least a half dozen victims of Billy.”

“I look forward to seeing you maul Sammis, but I can't seeing dragging people like old Mr. and Mrs. Gordon onto the witness stand.”

“Lamentable, but better than our client jailed for life—what do you have against Andrew Sammis?”

“This doubt strategy is like throwing sand in the face of a charging bull. It might blind him, but he's not going to stop. Is this your idea or Jeff's father's?”

Ira owned an attorney's poker face, but he was not able to hide the cold anger that radiated from his body like wind from a frozen lake. He took the headset off and dropped it on his desk. “Ben. I've been winning criminal cases since you were in diapers.”

Maybe so, but I had met him shortly after that and I had never seen him so angry. Sounded to me as if—uncharacteristically too eager to please—Ira had allowed Jeff's father to call the shots.

***

I knew of two more incidents that might bolster the case Ira was making for Jeff Kimball. I had been holding off on both because Billy had really put the poor devils through the mill.

I started with the more recent victimization. Jimmy Butler, a hard-working, decent, easily led little guy, got into trouble driving a 1972 ten-yard Mack dump truck he had been led to believe belonged to Billy Tiller. The Mack was hauling a flatbed trailer bearing a Link-Belt excavator which Jimmy said Billy had assured him was only eleven feet high, which turned out not to be true, but extremely germane. Clearance under the railroad trestle was eleven foot six inches.

One could make a case—and the authorities did—that the driver should have measured his load himself, but Jimmy was in a rush because he was working several jobs to make payments on a brand-new yellow school bus he had contracted to drive for the high school. Being in a rush, he was going pretty fast.

While railroad engineers prepared to test just how precariously the railroad trestle was dangling, Trooper Moody ticketed Jimmy for violating all the state laws that pertained to low clearance bridges. Then he ticketed Jimmy for driving without a fire extinguisher, for driving without a medical card, for driving without a state fuel stamp, for driving a truck that had not had its annual federal inspection, for driving with unsafe tires, for driving with defective brake lines, and for towing an unregistered trailer and for driving a commercial vehicle without a commercial vehicle driver's license.

Trooper Moody knew that Jimmy had a commercial license. He had left it in his school bus, not intending to drive a truck that day. But by then Ollie was in a vicious mood: traffic was backed up for a quarter mile and a hydraulic oil spill from the Link-Belt excavator resulted in numerous motorists skidding in a soup of powdered concrete and viscous fluids into each other and nearby ditches. Ollie cited each for making a restricted turn, and several people new to town for failure to update an address on a drivers license.

The
Clarion
's front-page photograph of four cranes returning a locomotive to the tracks was captioned, “Railroad crews tested the strength of the damaged bridge by running a locomotive over it.” Inflamed, the owners of the railroad were even madder than Ollie.

I drove down to Frenchtown to get Jimmy Butler's side of the story.

His driveway was blocked by an enormous wrecker whose beefy driver was attaching a hook to Jimmy's yellow school bus, which was parked beside his house, a low ranch in need of a paint job. While the wrecker might by some stretch of the imagination be hooking onto Jimmy's bus to tow it in for repairs, the company name stenciled on the wrecker's boom and the beefy driver's pec-stretched shirt—Now Repo!—suggested something more ominous than a transmission job.

Jimmy was watching from his front door and he looked very unhappy. I parked in the driveway of the empty house next door, walked up the scattered flagstones that made his front walk, and asked, “Is this as bad as it looks?”

“Son of a bitching bank.”

“How many months are you behind?”

“Only six.”

“I'm sorry, Jimmy.”

“Goddamned Billy Tiller. It's like he's grabbing my balls from the grave.”

“I thought they gave you back your license.”

“The railroad told the DMV they'd sue the governor if they didn't take me off the road.”

“I thought Tim Hall helped you with that.”

“Tim tried. But a bunch of parents said they'd sue the school board if they let me drive their kids. I have the whole goddamned state of Connecticut after me, and half the parents in Newbury. Just for doing a guy a favor.”

“Weren't you working for Billy?”

“No! I quit soon as I saved up the down payment for the bus. I was ready to roll.”

“Why were you driving his truck?”

“He asked me would I run a rig back to Frenchtown. How was I supposed to know the cops were looking for it?”

“Did Billy know?”

“Why do you think he conned me into driving it?”

“What are you saying? He was setting you up for a fall?”

“No, no, no. Jesus, Ben. No, Billy didn't have anything against me. He probably figured that if I could get it across town and under cover he was home free.”

“That doesn't make sense. Why would a guy making the bucks he was bother stealing a truck?”

Jimmy looked at me like I was fifth grader who had just lost his lunch in the back seat. “You didn't understand Billy. Nobody did. He didn't deliberately steal the truck. It somehow fell in his hands. When he found out it was hot he figured if he could just hide it long enough to strip it he'd make a few bucks and keep some parts.”

“The truck was a hunk of junk.”

“Haulin' a fine machine on the trailer.”

“But he already owned a bunch of fine machines.”

“Don't you get it?”

“No, I don't get it. Why would a rich builder steal a truck?”

“Billy didn't think he was rich. In his head he was still getting six bucks an hour driving a honey wagon for Old Man Hopkins.”

“Come on, everything he touched turned to gold.”

“Builders are gamblers. He knew he could lose it all in one week if the economy went bad just when he finished a bunch of spec houses.”

Jimmy had a point, there. If prices went down because interest rates went up, he could be sitting on houses he had to sell, but couldn't, with the banks calling in their loans. Development had been so hot so long it was easy to forget the bad times when the banks shut everybody down and then the Feds shut the banks down. There were years—a long way back—when there was not a single pickup truck at the General Store buying coffee in the morning.