Triple Witch (15 page)

“Oh. All right, I guess,” he relented. The bulldog man was crossing the lawn toward us.

Willoughby made the introductions bare politeness required by pronouncing a name so quickly that I couldn’t catch it, adding the phrase, “consulting client.”

Which term, as we both knew, covers a multitude of sins. The bulldog man offered a limp hand. “Good t’ meetcha,” he muttered.

One of the llamas came over to the cedar fence and spat.

“Ha ha,” the creepy bulldog man said creepily.

Willoughby flushed. Even though the glob of spit hadn’t reached him, he seemed to feel it indicated a lack of respect. “Someday, I’ll use them for target practice,” he said darkly.

I wondered why he kept them at all. In my experience, his type usually went in for more decorative pets: exotic felines, or terrifyingly expensive tropical fish.

Looking bored, the llamas turned and walked away.

“You won’t shoot those animals,” the bulldog man said. His accent was British tinged with a background he had not managed to eliminate: Yorkshire, possibly. “You’ve paid out too damned much money for them.”

He smiled, exposing teeth in a bad state of repair. “You can’t,” he confided to me, “kid a kidder.” But his smile wasn’t pleasant and I didn’t think Willoughby was kidding.

“Go on, then,” Willoughby said ungraciously. “You can have the shutter. Root around in the Dumpster all you want.” He stalked away toward the house with the bulldog man following behind, and the two of them went in and slammed the door.

All of which piqued my curiosity, just on general principles. In the Willoughby department I was beginning to feel like an old bird dog; maybe it wasn’t my job to retrieve anymore, but I couldn’t get the scent out of my nose. Still, trying to find out more now would get me run off his place, minus one absolutely essential shutter, so I went on around back to the Dumpster like a good girl, and climbed onto it.

The day was glorious, just as before: the sun was shining, birds were singing, and there was a little breeze, so it wasn’t too hot. I’d brought gloves along this time, and the stuff I’d dragged aside on my last visit was still pushed out of the way, so all I had to do was cling onto a slender metal rung, balance on a heap of drywall scraps, and …

Darn: half a shutter, just out of reach. I scooted along the edge of the Dumpster, bypassing paint cans
and concrete sacks and noticing that, just by coincidence, I could see into Willoughby’s den of electronic iniquity from here. This time the blinds were open, although at this distance the text on his computer screen wasn’t legible, just a trio of solid ribbons moving vertically.

Like columns of figures. The two men’s heads, peering at the screen, were silhouettes: Willoughby’s long and narrow, the other low and flattened like the head of a toad.

Suddenly Willoughby’s head came up, turning alertly.

I busied myself retrieving the shutter; when I looked over again, the blinds at Willoughby’s den window had been closed.

And that was that. I tossed the shutter into my car and went down the lane, noticing something I’d missed, earlier: the small, glassy eyes of motion detectors where the lane met the road. No wonder Willoughby had bopped outside so fast.

Banks of computers, overseas visitors, big-ticket security items—it was all just so wonderfully, fascinatingly odd that I nearly went back up the lane again, to knock on his door and just ask Willoughby what the hell he was up to.

But instead, as I got on Route 1 heading north to Eastport, my cell phone beeped and I found out.

“Jacobia,” said Hargood Biddeford. “Some facts on our friend for you.”

“Great. Don’t mention the name, okay? I’m on the cell phone.”

“Right. Not exactly the most private method of …”

Rounding an uphill curve, I slowed for a loaded log truck, its engine roar drowning out Hargood’s voice as the truck driver downshifted for the long grade. Had I been born in Maine, this would have been my signal to pass, but I hadn’t so it wasn’t. Dust from the big rig’s
tires billowed into the car; I leaned over and rolled up the passenger side window.

“It seems,” Hargood continued, “there’ve been developments in his case, to wit: association with known criminals. Which as you know is against his terms of probation and could get him sent back to prison. If,” Hargood added, “you can call that country club he did his time in a prison.”

“So, you think somebody put the fix in? Told his probation officer to let him slip through the cracks, as long as he also slipped out of town? In other words, let’s let him screw up in someone else’s jurisdiction?”

I turned onto Route 190 toward Eastport; the lumber truck continued north.

“Nah,” Hargood dragged the syllable out sarcastically. “What gives you that idea, that he got a break?”

Hargood’s clients were respectable, middle-class people who’d made, most of them, stupid mistakes: skimming the registers in restaurant chains they owned, or omitting to pay withholding taxes. Usually there was some tragic story involved: a drinking problem or a gambling habit. Only rarely did his clients really scheme to defraud.

But Hargood’s clients, unlike Willoughby, went back to jail for clipping their toenails crooked, and Hargood resented it.

“Also,” he added, “around here word is he’s short of money.”

“Really.” That didn’t fit with those expensive renovations on his house.

On Route 190 I slowed through Pleasant Point, then pushed the speedometer back to fifty for the run across Carlow Island. Here the white pine grew nearly up to the road on both sides of the pavement, with sandy cuts leading back in to the building lots marked by the real-estate agents’ For Sale signs.

“Thanks, Hargood. That’s very interesting.” A bee
bumbled in through my window, buzzed angrily, and flew out again.

“You’re welcome,” Hargood said happily. “Listen, about that plan you and I were discussing earlier—”

Selling his telephone stock and socking away his paychecks, he meant. The bee buzzed back in and I waved, shooing it away.

“Do it,” I said, and the passenger-side window exploded.

24
“Now, Jacobia,” Arnold said, “let’s not go all wild-eyed. We don’t know anyone shot at you deliberately. We don’t know it was a shot at all.”

“Arnold, we have had three murders in three days.”

“Well,” Arnold conceded slowly. “There is that.”

“You think that bullet was out there flying around for fun, and decided to break my car window?”

Arnold frowned vexedly. Neither murders nor escaped prisoners were good for summer tourism, nor were random gunshots.

“We don’t,” he repeated stubbornly, “know it was a bullet.”

I just about flew out of my chair at him, whereupon he spread his hands placatingly. “All right, say it was a bullet. Say our pal Ike is still around, too, not down in Portland or points south the way any sensible escaped prisoner would be.”

He held up his fingers. “One, we don’t think he’s armed. Ken got shot, but with his own little gull-popper—”

A .22, Arnold meant; it was illegal to shoot gulls, but people still did it.

“—we found that on his boat. The other two
didn’t
get shot, which if Forepaugh has a gun, why didn’t they? More likely somebody local went out, fired off a few shots for fun. Got,” he concluded disapprovingly, “a little careless. Which,” he went on, “I am going to find out about, and when I do, there will be a hot time in the old town, tonight.”

I wanted everyone to think I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, that having a shot whiz through my car window hadn’t even fazed me. The truth was, I’d managed to drive back to town all right—fast, to avoid being an easy target—but as soon as I arrived I’d called Ellie and my voice had begun shaking, and she got here in about fifteen seconds.

“Thanks for coming, Arnold. You’re probably right. Someone got careless, that’s all. Made me nervous.”

“Hmmph.” Arnold looked disgusted, clapping his hat onto his head. “I find the fella, whoever it was, I’ll make him nervous. I’ll make him just as anxious as hell.”

But at the door he paused, looking hard at me. “You be careful, though. Because I could be wrong about Forepaugh being long gone. About everything I’m thinking, in fact. So you just watch it.”

Then he was gone. “So,” Ellie said when the squad car had pulled away from the house, “what do you think?”

“Well …” I said, biting into one of the fresh doughnuts she had brought to help me get my strength back. Say what you want about Valium and Prozac and all; for nervous shock, there is nothing like a fresh, homemade doughnut.

“I think,” I went on, feeling my recovery begin, “what we have here is three hits and a near miss. Hallie visits me, she’s found dead, someone takes a shot at me. It’s not,” I concluded, “trigonometry.”

“Arnold thinks you weren’t shot at—or not deliberately, anyway—because he doesn’t think Ike would
have. Or could have, because he doesn’t think Ike has a gun,” Ellie said.

“Correct. Which makes some sense, actually, because if any weapons had been reported stolen around here recently, Arnold would know about it. And how else would Ike get a weapon?”

I finished the doughnut. “This brings us to: it could be Ike didn’t do any of it. Or he did all of it except shooting at me. Or I suppose it could be he really has gotten hold of a gun.”

“So which way do you want to go from here?” Ellie asked.

I finished my tea. There was only one course of action that covered all the bases.

“Down,” I told her, “to the cellar.”

25
Back in the city, I knew a fellow whose job was to take the Mob’s money and put it in banks. Using the proceeds of extortion, prostitution, gambling, drugs, counterfeiting, hijacking, strong-arm, and protection rackets, he bought CDs and Treasury bills: the safe but low-interest kinds of investments normally purchased by people who can barely bring themselves to pull the money out from under the mattress at all.

With his own cash, however, he was more imaginative: He bought weapons, filling his modest Brooklyn Heights apartment so thoroughly with them that he barely had room for furniture, so he used to come to my place and sit on mine.

One day I asked him why, since he never touched any of the mob’s cash—

—well, actually he did, but that was much later, and it is another story—

—and since he was so cautious in investing it that he would never lose any—

—well, not unless banks failed and governments fell, which they didn’t, and he didn’t expect them to—

—he needed enough firepower to wipe out a tank division.

Jemmy Wechsler grinned. And he said: “Jacobia, pure of heart works better when you’re armed to the teeth.”

Which was why I now removed the silver chain from my neck, struggling as always to work the clasp, so that the small brass key on the chain fell into my hand. Seeing the chain reminded me again of Hallie, and sent another thump of guilt reverberating through my heart.

Then from the lockbox Wade had installed in my cellar, I removed the Bisley. With it I had put in hundreds of hours of target practice; Wade, in addition to being a fine marksman, is a wicked good teacher. By now, I was pretty good with the Bisley.

But the trouble with it is, there is no part of the human body designed to withstand its stopping power. Even a wing shot can result in death, from shock or hemorrhaging.

So, after considerable thought, I’d recently bought a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Along with the Bisley, I removed this unattractive but serviceable item from the lockbox, along with its ammunition clips. Then I examined the smaller gun.

The grey metal surface of the weapon felt cheap and shoddy, which it wasn’t. There is just something about an automatic that makes it seem unsporting.

“Yeeks,” Ellie said when she saw it. “I didn’t know you had that.”

“Neither does anyone else but Wade,” I said, snapping a clip in and thumbing the safety on. He’d gone over it, checked it for manufacturing flaws, and taught me to shoot it. “And now you.”

She nodded, understanding what I didn’t say: Hallie
hadn’t only been warning me, just before her death. She’d also been warning Ellie. And if anyone tried to hurt Ellie, he was going to find out how unsporting an automatic weapon could be. I put the Bisley in my bag and dropped the .25 in my sweater pocket.

“Arnold might be barking up the wrong tree,” Ellie said. “Or rather, there might be more trees to bark up than he realizes.”

I’d reported to her my impressions of Baxter Willoughby, before Arnold arrived.

“Still, we can’t just tell Arnold that,” she added.

“No. His thoughts are set on Ike Forepaugh. Besides, I don’t want Arnold spooking Willoughby if it turns out he’s in this some way.”

“But maybe we could get Arnold’s thoughts turning in the proper direction.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Well,” Ellie said consideringly, “I don’t know how it was back in the big city. But in Eastport if you want a man to come by some information casually, some way that he can turn it over in his mind for a while without going off half-cocked about it …”

I caught her drift. “You talk to his wife,” I said.

Clarissa Dow was a dark-haired, diminutive woman who’d come to Eastport as an investigator for the State District Attorney’s office, and stayed to marry Arnold; she’d also established a small law practice here. Her brisk manner and no-nonsense street smarts had put people off, at first, but now, six months later, they had come to appreciate her hard-as-nails way of handling a legal problem, especially when it was their legal problem.

Climbing the stairs to her office overlooking Water Street, I smelled flowers, and when I reached the top, I saw why: a dozen red roses stood in a glass vase in the
waiting area, evidence that Arnold was glad to have her back after her week at a legal convention in Portland. I sat in one of the wooden straight chairs in the anteroom, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait too long; after a moment I heard chairs scraping back, and voices mingling in tones of farewell.

Except for one voice. “I don’t
want
to! You can’t
make
me! I
won’t
—”