Nail Biter (10 page)

“But not lately,” she added.

“What's his name?” I turned back to my task. Two washers were required; only one of the proper size was in the packet. Typical.

“I shouldn't even be talking to you.” She lit another cigarette. “This guy, he's not funny. You really don't want to mess around with him.” She dragged on the cigarette. “I'm sorry I let you in here,” she said, exhaling a stream of smoke.

I was starting to be sorry also, but for a different reason. Probably only one of the faucets was actively leaking. But which? I should have checked before I took the handles apart.

“Luanne, I'm not going to mess with him,” I began. “I just need to know . . .”

She was turning out to be like every other addict I'd ever met. Just when you thought you'd gotten a little traction, they went passive-aggressive on you and slipped through your fingers.

On top of that, I could only fix one faucet handle. Common sense said to replace the washer that had already disintegrated. But that wasn't the one whose screw had been rusty.

And rust + metal = leak. Coming to a decision, I dropped the new washer into the cold-water handle receptacle, put the old-but-so-far-undisintegrated washer in the hot-water side, and tightened down both screws. Crawling back under the sink, I turned both valves on and straightened again, careful this time not to clobber myself on the way out.

Bingo. No leak; I dusted my hands off. Then motion flashed suddenly in the corner of my eye and I jumped startledly. With it came a humming sound, loud in the quiet kitchen.

“Christ!” Luanne uttered at my sudden movement, lurching up.

But it was only a fish tank, half hidden by the refrigerator on a far corner of the kitchen counter. The tank, I now saw, was inhabited by a dozen or so of the cheaper kinds of tropical fish: neons, small angelfish, others I didn't recognize.

“Sorry,” I said, sitting again. “I didn't notice the fish when I came in, that's all.”

“Damn aerator's on the fritz.” She crossed the room to reach down into the tank and jostle the mechanism in it. “You don't know how to fix those, do you?”

The hum faded as bubbles began rising; she dried her hand on a dishtowel. And no, I didn't know how.

“My mom sends food and stuff for them,” Luanne said, watching the brightly colored fish for a moment before turning to me again. “She says I ought to have some kind of pet.”

I pulled out another twenty, then a fourth, laid them on the kitchen table but kept my hand on them. “Last chance,” I said.

Luanne stared at the money. Then: “Mac Rickert. Don't ask me for his places, though. I don't know any. He won't deal to me anymore for some reason, I don't know that either. And I've heard he moves around a lot.”

Yeah, well, for eighty bucks you don't know much, do you?
I thought sourly as the phone rang in the front room. But at least I had the name. Tearing herself from the twenty-dollar bills on the table, Luanne went to answer.

“Yeah,” she said into the phone. “Sure, tonight. You want to come to my place, or . . . okay. But I can't talk now, so I'll see you later. No, I really can't talk. Sure, I remember you. I do, but . . . Okay, bye.”

She returned, trying to appear nonchalant. “Friend coming by?” I asked mildly.

This was what it came to when you had no skills and a habit as big as a house. “Yeah,” she said casually. But her hands shook as she lit yet another of the menthol cigarettes.

Dragging on it, she snatched up the twenties. “So've you got what you wanted? Are we done?”

Across the room the fish darted brightly among the plastic toys in the aquarium water, the tiny waterwheel rotating and the miniature frogman bobbing up and down as the aerator burbled.

“Mac likes animals,” she said irrelevantly, glancing at the tank. “Only thing ever softens him up. Or used to. I haven't seen him lately.”

I pushed my chair back. A dead neon tetra was snagged in one of the green plastic aquarium plants, but she hadn't seen it yet.

“Yeah, we're done. But Luanne, if you ever need any help . . .”

Her expression hardened; she'd heard it before, and she knew I didn't mean assistance with home repairs.

“. . . with the fish,” I finished as her eyes narrowed. “I mean sometimes people want to go away,” I improvised. “On vacation, or if they have to leave town for a little while for some reason . . .”

Like to a rehab facility, I thought. But Sam had warned me. And anyway it wouldn't have done any good.

“. . . and leave their pets,” I added. “I'm just saying I could come over and feed them for you, is all.”

She wasn't deceived and she didn't intend to take me up on my offer. But as she listened her mood softened grudgingly.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. Then, “So Sam's doing good, huh?”

“Yes, he is. Well,” I amended, not wanting to shame her, “he has his ups and downs. Like everyone.”

“Uh-huh.” She thought about that. “Um, listen, say hi to him for me. And . . . thanks for the money.”

“Sure, Luanne. Take care,” I said, leaving her there in the kitchen with the aquarium bubbling and the faucet fixed.

Right; everything hunky-dory, including a pocketful of extra money. She already had a date for tonight, too.

Or at any rate that's what Luanne was still calling it to herself, probably. And as I went out into the cold fresh air I knew the eighty bucks I'd given her wouldn't make tomorrow night any different.

Still, like everyone else who knocked on the door of her spotless little trick pad and asked or demanded to be let in, I'd gotten what I wanted.

And like most people who left, I supposed, I was satisfied but not particularly proud of the transaction.

Or of myself.

As I drove away from Luanne Moretti's house, the gnawing
of anxiety in my stomach sharpened. I'd wanted to rule out a bad notion, that Eugene Dibble could have had not only a partner in crime but one who'd killed Dibble, then maybe got nervous about a possible witness.

Or perhaps even worse, a partner who simply saw Wanda, liked the look of her, and came back later to grab what he'd taken such a fancy to earlier in the day.

But instead of eliminating this suspicion, Luanne had supplied me with a candidate. So next on my to-do list was a chat with the tenants, to find out if any of them had noticed anyone hanging around.

And to check on my boat. When I arrived at the rental property, though, no one was around, and in my annoyance at this I forgot all about the rowboat until I was halfway back to town.

Next time,
I resolved, and continued on home, where I found my housekeeper, Bella Diamond, already busy at the stove though dinner was still hours away.

“Mmm,” I said, sniffing appreciatively. “That smells like shrimp casserole.”

She'd already made the quince jam, the jars glowing jewel-like on the kitchen windowsill and the jelly pan clean and upside down on the dish rack. Now she turned from stirring the fragrant sauce of sautéed scallions, mushrooms, and garlic.

“That's right. Better'n a restaurant dinner, for sure.” She spoke with deserved pride.

Several generations of bad childhood nutrition showed in the bone structure of Bella's face, and she'd apparently decided to try making up for all of it by cooking for us. “I'm sure,” I told her inadequately, “it will be lovely.”

From the ingredients ranged out on the counter, I gathered that clam juice, chicken broth, oregano, and cream also featured in today's creation. The shrimp she'd peeled were in a bowl and the angel-hair spaghetti was out, ready to be dropped into the olive-oil-tinctured boiling water.

“With green salad and garlic bread,” Bella agreed. “Just the thing for a chilly fall day. And this nice dry raspberry wine to go with it.”

All of which spelled Bella's special brand of dinner-table heaven, as usual. I'd never meant to have a housekeeper but I'd won a week's worth of Bella's services at a church raffle, and after I helped clear her of the charge of bonking her ex-husband to death with a cast-iron skillet, her devotion to me became complete.

“Here, you strike me as if you could use cheering up,” she said, and poured me a glass.

I sank into a chair at the table. “Thanks. So what have you been doing besides working your fingers to the bone as usual?”

With skinned-back dyed red hair, big buck teeth, and pale green bulging eyes that reminded me of a pair of peeled grapes, Bella also kept Wade and me in pristine surroundings five days a week.

“Oh, not a lot,” she said, gesturing at the kitchen, which was so clean, Victor could have done brain transplants in it. She'd have come to work the other two days, too, if I'd let her, and now that I'd trained her to let Wade finish his beer before grabbing the bottle out of his hands to rinse it, she was working out just fine.

Also, Bella was a reliable Eastport information resource; in other words, a gossip.

“Have you ever heard of a local guy named Mac Rickert?” I asked as she returned to tinkering with the shrimp sauce.

Her eyebrows went up as she stirred. “Um, yeah. Kind of like I've heard of the boogeyman, though.”

The wine was cold and delicious. I let it roll around my tongue for a while before swallowing and taking another sip, then pressed the cold glass to the side of my forehead.

Only then did what she'd said sink in. “Wait a minute, the boogeyman? You mean he's not real?”

A pang of irritation hit me. Had Luanne taken my cash and told me a fairy tale just to get rid of me?

Bella dumped the bowl of cleaned shrimp into the sauce. “No. It's just that no one much sees him,” she replied.

Cat Dancing watched from the top of the refrigerator as the morsels disappeared, then pronounced a disappointed cat-syllable and went back to sleep.

“Mac's an outdoors type,” Bella went on. “Lives in the woods, knows how to catch wild game to eat, make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Build a shelter, keep you from freezing to death in the winter, just out of pine boughs and such.”

“I see.” But guys like that weren't really rare around here, so I still didn't understand the boogeyman reference.

She poured another dollop of olive oil into the boiling water, then opened the spaghetti. “Funny thing about that, though. The hunting part, I mean. Few years ago when Mac still lived in town, he was the animal control officer.”

Extracting the spaghetti, she broke it all in half and began feeding it into the water. “And he was death on people who were mean to their pets, Mac was. He caught you tyin' 'em in the yard out in the cold, he'd take 'em right away from you.”

She tossed the spaghetti box out. “Take 'em home himself, he would, and if you complained he'd threaten to tie
you
out in the snow. Which people believed he
would
do, too. He's an imposing man, Mac Rickert is,” she added. “Mountain-man type of fellow.”

It was the second time that day that I'd heard of Rickert's supposed fondness for animals, or at any rate for ones that were under human protection.

“But if you shot 'em clean—game animals I mean, not folks' pets—well, I guess Mac thought that was different.”

The sweet perfume of olive oil wafted into the room. “Later on he had a business guiding hunting trips. Only the deal was, he would take you into the real backwoods, teach survival skills while you were bagging your moose. Or deer or bear, or whatever.”

“Uh-huh.” The wine had unlocked a kink in the back of my neck. I finished the glass and set it aside, touched the tender bump rising on my head where I'd banged it coming out from under Luanne Moretti's kitchen sink.

“But I gather Rickert's in another business now?” I asked, then related what Luanne had told me about him.

Bella dumped the cooked spaghetti into a colander, stepping back from the cloud of steam. “Drugs? That I didn't know about. Interesting, though,” she said, putting the drained spaghetti back into the pot along with a lump of butter half the size of my clenched fist.

“What is?” Oh, what the hell, one more glass of wine wasn't going to kill me any more than that butter would, or anyway not immediately. So I poured it.

“Well, it probably doesn't mean anything,” Bella answered. “But Jenny Dibble mentioned Mac Rickert this morning when I stopped in at her house on my way here to work.”

I sat up straight. Jenny Dibble was Eugene Dibble's recently bereaved wife. “Really. Why did you visit her?”

Bella sniffed as if the answer to this question ought to be obvious. “Girl's a grievin' widow, ain't she? Christian thing to do, stop by an' see if she might need anything.”

Of course. And to pick up any interesting facts that might be floating around while she was there, too.

“Which, by the way, she's already moving out of.” Bella tasted the sauce with a spoon. “The house, that is.”

“That didn't take long.” From down in the cellar came a low grinding sound, like a dentist's drill being run on slow speed.

“Nope. Getting her clothes together, leaving the furniture and so on. All junk, Eugene was an awful slob. I don't think that place holds many happy memories for Jenny,” Bella remarked.

She took a second taste, larger and more thoughtful than the first. “Married him on the rebound from her first husband, had a daughter already then. Girl's out of the house now, though, has been for a while. I don't know her at all.”