Summerkill (14 page)

“So now you’ve finished wagging it you’re on the Ryan Jessup murder?”

“Yep. Baxter wanted me to run a couple of names past you.”

“Such as?”

“What can you tell me about Johnny Armitage?”

I made a face. “Allegedly he’s the Garden Center crew chief. What else would you like to know?”

He grinned. “You were stuck with him most of the summer at Hudson Heights. Did he have any problems with Jessup there?”

“None that I noticed.”

“So why was he so pissed off at the guy? I hear his favorite terms of endearment were
shithead
and
cocksucker
.”

“Because Ryan was squeezing him. He used the drinking— I don’t know if anything else—to hold his salary down after the promotion
to crew chief. Have you gotten around to checking where Johnny was that night?”

“Drinking at Blackie’s until around ten with a couple of guys from his softball team. The wife was already in bed and didn’t
notice when he came in. She says it felt pretty early. How about Skip Boyles? His wife and kiddies are off visiting her folks
till after Labor Day, so all we’ve got is Skip’s word he was home in bed.”

“Why Skip?”

“He was seriously ticked this spring, the way the Garden Center stiffed him. He didn’t make any secret of blaming Jessup,
mostly.”

“Yeah, but hell, the way things are working out, he owed the man a thank-you present.”

“I guess. He keeps calling me on jobs. There was also that accident last summer at Hudson Heights—when he broke his leg. Could
Jessup have had anything to do with it?”

“I don’t see how. Ryan and I were both away at a staff meeting when it happened. Ryan did give him a lot of grief on the paperwork,
but it finally got done. I still can’t see why you’re interested in Skip. Can you feature him as even daydreaming a grudge
killing?”

Calvin frowned. “No more than I can feature Johnny Armitage being smart and steady and sober enough to bring one off. But
we have to check out all the possibilities. Baxter’s got a couple of men looking at the rest of Etlingers’ staff.”

“If I were playing sheriff, the first thing I’d want to look at would be Ryan’s financial records.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where the good stuff is? We didn’t find much in his apartment. “

“He’d never have kept anything important there. Ryan was paranoid when it came to security. There must be records somewhere,
though. He was meticulous about having things down on paper.”

“You get any ideas as to location, let us know. Preferably not the rest of today—I’m off once I leave here. And Baxter does
not take well to having his Saturdays interrupted. They’re for his kid.”

“Have he and her mom been divorced long? She’s married to Dr. Jensen now, right?”

“Yep. The marriage crapped out after Baxter took a couple of courses at Albany Law and realized he couldn’t stand the company
he’d have to keep. Five, six years ago, that must have been. Laura’s ambitious—I guess she couldn’t see herself stuck as a
deputy’s wife. Jeez, though, can you imagine being married to a dentist?”

“The last time we discussed it, neither of us could imagine ourselves married to anybody. How’s Baxter doing on this, do you
think?”

“Hey, this kind of thing is his meat. Baxter gets bored when the answers come too easy. What he loves is to poke and prod
around until he’s got all the pieces uncovered. Then he keeps playing with them till they fit right. He’s the best investigator
in the department—nobody’d give you any arguments on that. Even Frank, who is also damn good.”

“What I meant, more, was how’s he doing as an almost brand-new sheriff who got the job by default and finds himself under
a lot of pressure?”

“Well … Do you know Jerry at all?”

“Couldn’t pick him out of a crowd. Or did I mean lineup?”

“That was unbelievably dumb. Jerry didn’t run a very tight ship, his own or the department’s. But he kept people happy—schmoozing
the pols, sweet-talking the union, smiling at the voters. All the stuff that drives Baxter nuts. And Baxter purely hates sloppy
police work. The department’s accumulated way too much deadwood to suit him.”

“You’re telling me it’s been a little bumpy?”

“You gotta expect.”

“Won’t it get noticeably bumpier if this murder investigation doesn’t yield results in the fairly immediate future?”

“Possibility. Nothing we can’t handle.”

Given my take on the cages they’d need to rattle, I wasn’t so sure about that.

I
t was almost seven Sunday evening when I turned off County Route 26 and on to Wilbur Creek Road. I’d meant to get back a little
earlier and put in a full evening polishing up the plans for that prospective garden. Jake had set us up an appointment for
Tuesday morning.

It hadn’t been a restful mini-weekend. At the last minute Jason decided he wanted to come along, somewhat to Vicky’s relief,
though not to mine. With Jason you never know, but he’s usually okay left alone in the apartment; it is his sanctuary, his
hidey-hole from the world he finds so menacing. When he’s away from home, all bets are off.

For a while I wondered if Jason and I shared some genetic defect. But I guess not. I had perceived life as chaos from day
one; not until Pete and Janey got their hands on me did I begin to establish a territory for myself and make it orderly enough
to inhabit. Jason, on the other hand, appeared to be fine until he was almost five and suffered three high-fever convulsions
in a row. They seem to have blown connections in his brain; his EKGs sometimes show irregular patterns. There are medications
that help even things out for a while, though none we’ve found that help consistently or enough, and none that he doesn’t
come to hate taking. We keep trying.

At fifteen, Jason is a handsome boy and very articulate, but nobody can be around him for more than ten minutes without sensing
something is off. In his dark phases, it doesn’t take nearly that long. He didn’t stick in the public school system or either
private program we tried—they forced him to regularly go out into the world, and he can’t seem to hack that. He’s on home
tutoring now, working sporadically and below grade level. Vicky still projects confidence, but I see little prospect of his
ever getting a high school diploma or otherwise qualifying for certification as an independent adult.

He was fascinated that somebody had been murdered in my front yard and full of questions on the drive up. At the camp he kept
following me around, trying out theories and concocting stories. Darkness does attract him. The upside was that the subject
held his demons at bay while we were camping. It is possible, with Jason, that he’ll start shouting in the middle of a movie
or wake you during the night, panicked, and there’ll be nothing for it but to head back to the apartment.

With Jason obsessing on murder plots, getting out of town didn’t feel that much like getting out of town. It made a nice change
of pace for Vicky, though, and I did enjoy watching Alex and Galen in exuberant perpetual motion. The weather was great, the
night starry. Around two I gave up on the trailer and took my sleeping bag down to the beach.

After I dropped Vicky and Jason off in Albany, I got to thinking about finances, trying to come up with more specific ideas
on what role money might have played in the murder. Ryan had been both too frugal and too much of an operator not to have
a pretty good stash somewhere, and it didn’t sound as if they’d found it.

Until she married Jon Keegan, my mother’s life had been a struggle to stay above the poverty line; they say she’s still tight
with a buck. As an unfunded teenager I counted small change out of necessity, but I always intended to move on to larger denominations.
My second line of work, fixing up unattractive properties and reselling them, can be deliciously profitable when you guess
right, and I have a knack for that. Today’s denomination is thousands, and I don’t tally things up every night. Skip Boyles,
on the other hand, had never made really good money and he kept close watch on his finances. On other people’s, too. If Ryan
had been up to anything worse than I knew about while he was still with Etlingers’, Skip could probably tell me. It seemed
worth a detour to pick his brain.

Skip and his wife and three under-school-age kids live even farther out in the country that I do—their road is unpaved and
washboardy in the best of times. On part of the tract his dad farmed he’d built a large, handsome log house from a kit, pretty
much by himself. Professionally, we were a mutual admiration society. If I’d been religious, and if he had shown any ability
to lighten up, we might have become good friends. I knew he never worked on Sundays, and since his kids weren’t around to
spend time with, he ought to be as accessible as he ever got.

I found him in his veggie garden, harvesting tomatoes. He’s a compact, well-muscled man several years my junior, with thick
summer freckles across the bridge of his nose and short hair white-blond from being out in the sun. Skip is innately conservative
and cautious, a long-range, detailed planner. When the Etlingers pushed him out last spring, he’d been beside himself, having
counted on two more seasons to build up capital before making his break with them. After studying the figures he anxiously
showed me I’d predicted it would be fine. Yeah, he’d better take out a loan for a second backhoe, but he could carry it. The
jobs would come. He might not be the cheapest contractor you could hire to take out some trees or regrade your front yard,
but he’d do no more and no less than was needed, and do it right. Word gets around about such people. There are never enough
of them.

“Are you rich yet?” I asked when he waved me over.

“Working on it. Twenty-six hours a day, it feels like. How’s it going with you?”

“Being a one-day murder suspect’s new and different, I’ve got to give it that. I guess they’ve talked to you?”

“Baxter, and then Calvin. There wasn’t much I could tell them. I haven’t a clue as to what the guy was up to recently. Except
I’d be surprised if it was entirely honorable.”

“Wouldn’t we all? Nobody seems to know much. It’s like the man didn’t have a life beyond his work.”

“Wasn’t he an Elk? I remember him serving at a couple of the pancake breakfasts.”

“He’d joined the Rotary, too. Apparently he didn’t make any friends in either group, though.”

“He wasn’t a very friendly guy. Like when he came over to you at work, it was because he wanted something, and he didn’t waste
any time letting you know what. You happened to run into him downtown, he’d barely say ‘Hi.’ Which was fine with me, and I
expect you, too.”

“Oh, yeah. I couldn’t have cared less about his private life—until he turned up dead in my front yard. My guess would still
be that he got killed because of something he was involved in at work, though. I just wish I knew what.”

“Well, it wasn’t only you and me he bummed out, trying to save a buck at somebody else’s expense. Doesn’t seem like enough
to kill anybody for, though, the sort of stuff he was up to.”

“You probably saw more of it than I did.”

“I did keep an eye open. Of course there was that inferior materials business he tried to pull till you caught him. He sneaked
in a pass-along ten percent markup on some of the plant orders. And—well, you already know this—he’d stiff fellow employees
every chance he got. But as far as I could tell everything went to making the Garden Center’s bottom line look better. It
should be interesting to see how an audit comes out. I assume one’s being done?”

“Hopefully. I’ve never known what the screwup was that got us stuck with Ryan in the first place.”

“I can fill you in there. You know how the Etlingers are about money: spend, spend, spend. They’d fallen seriously behind
on loan payments, and the bank was starting to press. So Rodney got the brilliant idea of diverting sales tax collections
to make the payments. This worked out okay for a while, until the state said hey, where’s our money? Unfortunately for him,
they said this to Kate, regarding the store. She promptly ran to her dad with it.”

“I can hear Clete now. We didn’t then, though. Somehow they managed to clean things up quietly.”

“Well, almost. You remember Gladys, the white-haired lady who used to help out with the bookkeeping? She’s done our church
books for years. Thinks the world of Eleanor. Gladys had a pretty good idea what Rodney up to, and it bothered her. Anyhow,
she was there the morning Clete marched in with steam coming out of his ears. He laid down the law, loud enough for her to
hear. He would kick in the funds to bail them out this one last time, but only if Rodney and Eleanor made an effort to clean
up their financial act and kept their fingers out of the till, their hands off the books. He put them on an allowance, is
what it amounted to.”

“And installed Ryan as his enforcer. Do you think it worked?”

“It helped, that’s for sure. For anything like an accurate picture I’d need to run a comparison.”

“In what areas?”

“Well, crew costs are easy enough to estimate if you have a rough idea of the hours involved. I’m familiar with the numbers
on the Hudson Heights contract, the plus-minus max they agreed on.”

“We went over, I’m pretty sure.”

“Not surprising. You had several guys I’d never hire working out there. And then somebody was telling me about this mudslide,
after Johnny got carried away with some grading? Since it was his fault, I assume you guys had to do the cleanup?”

“Part of it. Matt put some of his people on it, too.”

“I bet they billed the Garden Center, though.”

“Knowing Clete, you’re probably right. Okay. Hudson Heights must’ve accounted for the bulk of the billing this season. They
had maybe nine or ten other contract jobs, small ones, plus the usual maintenance jobs. You’re saying we’d need the labor
and materials figures on all that kind of stuff since Ryan’s been around. What else?”

“This season and last would be enough. Overhead has to be factored in, of course. Debt reduction, if they’ve separated that
out. Store inventory and sales. With round numbers in all those categories I could come up with a pretty good idea of what
their books should look like. It turns out the official picture is substantially less rosy than mine, maybe Ryan managed to
do something for himself, too? My guess is that’s not what you’d see. I’ll be happy to take a look, if Baxter asks and gets
me the figures.”