Foursome (35 page)

I nodded to keep him going. “Could she have told somebody?”

“No. No, we were going to start by telling Hale and Vivian about it at dinner that … that Friday. But there’d be no reason for anybody else—”

Shea stopped cold, though I hadn’t interrupted him.

“What is it, Steve?”

He shook his head. “I … I just remembered. As we were driving up that Friday, Sandy said … We were talking about raising the idea with Hale and Vivian, and I was being real careful about my words, because I didn’t want her to know I knew she was … the affair thing. And Sandy said, ‘Oh, I called Owen Briss last week about the plowing.’ ”

“The plowing?”

“The snowplowing. If we were going to be up here all winter, I’d need to have the road plowed, and sure as hell Ma Judson wasn’t going to spring for it.”

I pictured the plow on Briss’s property. “Why would your wife have spoken to Briss, though?”

“He mentioned to us once, when he first came to the house, that he did all kinds of other stuff, like chopping firewood, plowing in the winter, if we ever needed anything like that.”

“Yeah, but didn’t Sandy know you’d had a dispute with him?”

“No. No, I just told her that the guy had ordered the wrong things, and we’d have to do them differently. You see, I didn’t want to tell Sandy anything that might make her leery of moving.”

Like having an angry workman living a few miles away. “What did Briss say to her?”

“Something like, ‘You want your road plowed, call somebody who can do it right.’ He’s a blunt sort of asshole.”

“How did you leave it with your wife?”

“Just that I was going to straighten things out with him. But I …” Shea ran down. “I never got the chance to.”

I thought about it.

My client shunted his head until I looked at him.

He said, “I still don’t see the point, John. What the hell difference does it make if Briss knew we were thinking of moving up here?”

“I don’t know, Steve.”

The sun was a ways from going down, but the shade thrown by the dense trees kept me from seeing the big rock pushing through the top of the dirt road. I felt the Prelude bottom out on it, but fortunately the car kept jouncing along. As I pulled into sight of the mated trailers, Owen Briss was standing on the dirt that passed for a front yard, holding a beer can in one hand and straddling something beneath and between his legs.

The something was Cinny, her body drawn into the fetal position, the fists up, covering her face.

Never an easy day, I thought.

Briss looked over as the Prelude came to a stop, dust wafting up around me as I got out of it. He crushed the beer can, spraying himself a little with what he hadn’t drunk. I began walking toward them, no sign of Mourner, the spotted pointer. “Evening, folks.”

“Get off my property.”

I kept going. “Not till I get a few answers.”

“Man your age oughta know better than to talk like that.”

“Man my age was able to talk like that last week. Let her up.”

As I got closer, Briss backed off from Cinny. He threw the crushed can at me, missing by a mile. “What do you know about it?”

I didn’t think he’d need much goading. “To meet you is to know you, Briss.”

That got a roar and a charge. I moved to the side and used the edge of my shoe to scrape his right shin from knee to instep. He went down, more whining than roaring.

“Mother of Christmas! You broke my goddamn leg. You broke it!”

“Not likely.”

Cinny had uncurled and was sitting up, smiling demurely like a 1940s bathing beauty at the beach. The impression was spoiled by the jeans and torn blouse and bulges over the belt and pocket lines.

She said, “You saved my life.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

Cinny’s smile was unaffected. Briss had stopped writhing long enough to pull up a pant leg to check on his shin.

I said to him. “I want simple answers to simple questions. You feed me a line, and I think Cinny will know it, and she’s going to tell me so.”

“Damned right,” said Cinny.

I stepped toward Briss. “First, when did Sandra Newberg ask you about snowplowing the road to their house?”

He looked up from his leg. “What?”

“When did she call you about the snowplowing?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Week, two weeks before the killings, maybe.”

“What’d she say?”

“Said her husband and her were gonna move up here full-time. Said they’d need their camp road plowed, and was I interested in being the one to do it.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I told her to find somebody else.”

“Why weren’t you interested in doing the job?”

“Because her goddamn husband already stiffed me on the bannister work. What do you think I am, stupid?”

“We’ll come back to that. What did you do about it?”

“Do? I didn’t do nothing.”

I said, “Cinny?”

“I don’t know,” she said, twirling some hair around an index finger. “He’s a mean fucking nail-driver, he gets himself going.”

The carpenter glared at her.

I said, “What did you do about it, Briss?”

Sullen glance at me. “I told you, nothing.” He rallied a little. “You don’t have no badge. I can call—”

I decided to try a bluff. “I think whoever knew about their moving killed those people.”

The sullen look got lost. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“What are you saying? I wouldn’t plow for them, I’m gonna kill them?”

“You tell anybody about their plans?”

“No.”

“Nobody?”

Briss tended to his shinbone. “Well, I maybe mentioned it, is all.”

“Mentioned it.”

“Yeah.”

“Who to?”

Eagerly, Cinny said, “I know.”

The sign at the Marseilles Inn was flapping a little on the breeze coming off the lake. Walking toward the screened front door of the inn, I didn’t hear either sixties music or the noise of dishes and silverware.

Ralph Paine’s face came out before I got to the entrance. “John Cuddy! Didn’t think we’d be seeing you again so soon.”

“Neither did I, Ralph.”

His voice was light, but mine wasn’t, and he could tell. “What’s the matter, John?” His eyes drifted to my car. “Oh, I see.”

When I didn’t turn around, Paine came out the door and ambled toward me. I sidestepped carefully, but he just moved by me to the Prelude. As he knelt beside the left rear tire, I saw what he’d meant.

Paine touched his index finger to the puddle of brownish liquid growing on the ground under the wheel well. He brought the finger near his nose, then held it up for me to see.

“Afraid it’s clutch fluid, John. You must have cracked the case.”

The rock on Bliss’s road. “Can it be fixed?”

“Yeah.” A grunt as he got to his feet. “But not by me. We can call the garage in the morning.”

“Ramona around?”

“On the porch. Mondays we don’t serve dinner. Not much call for it.” His brows knitted a bit. “Why?”

“I’d like to speak to both of you, if I could.”

“Sure.” Not so sure, then a little more oomph in it. “Sure, sure. Come on.”

I let him go ahead of me.

Opening the screened door, Paine called out. “Mona? Mona!”

Her voice carried in from the porch. “Yes, Ralph?”

“Mona, it’s John Cuddy. He’s back.”

“Well, bring the man out here and then fetch him a drink.”

Ralph smiled and gestured I should go to the porch. “Screwdriver?”

“No, thanks.”

I waited until he processed that, then waited some more. He went in front of me to the porch.

Ramona was sitting in one of the elephant chairs, looking out at the lake, some sort of needlework in her lap and overflowing onto the wicker armrests. “Sorry I can’t get up, John, but if I do, I’ll send a million things to the floor.”

“That’s all right.”

Ralph said, “Have a seat, John.”

I shook my head.

Ramona looked at her husband and then back at me. “What’s the matter?”

“I just had a talk with Owen Briss.”

Ralph shifted his weight a little and leaned against the wall between the porch and the inn. “He was over here today.”

Ramona said, “Doing some finish work in one of the rooms. We’re having a little love seat built under one of the bay windows on the second floor.”

“I talked with Cinny, too.”

Ralph said, “Cinny? What about?”

Ramona looked at her husband and back to me a second time. “What’s the problem, John?”

“A week or so before the killings, Sandra Newberg let Owen Briss know they might need snowplowing done, starting this winter.”

Ralph and Ramona exchanged confused looks.

I said, “Cinny said that Briss told you two about it the next day.”

Ralph scratched his chin. “I believe he did.”

Ramona said, “We were kind of surprised, but … what difference does it make?”

I watched them. It was possible that a married couple could improvise a George Burns and Gracie Allen routine this well, but I doubted it.

I said, “Just surprised?”

Ramona frowned. “Well, Steve never said anything to us, so we didn’t pay much attention to it.”

Ralph said, “Mona, that’s not quite right.”

She looked at her husband. “What do you mean?”

“I remember hearing you talk about it in the kitchen that next morning.”

“You … remember?”

“Sure do.” Ralph looked to me. “I figured, Steve and his wife want to move up here full-time, that’s their business. But Mona, she was rushing around, trying to put breakfast on for a couple of guests, and she just sort of blurted it out.”

“To one of your guests?”

Ramona said, “Oh, I remember now, Ralph.”

He scratched his chin again. “Thought you might.”

“G
IVEN UP ON MOTOR
vehicles, John?”

“My car broke down over by the inn, so I borrowed a canoe from Ralph.”

Dag Gates nodded amiably through the screen. He was sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs on his porch, Runty lying against his master’s hiking boot, ears up, watching me with his ghost eyes. Gates himself had a can of Miller’s on the small camp table to his right, a series of rope sections over the arm of the chair next to his right hand. No weapons in sight or within reach. Unless you counted Runty.

“Come on inside.”

I opened the screen door and stepped across the threshold, just far enough into the porch so the door wouldn’t slap me in the rump.

Gates said, “Have a seat?”

“No, I think I’d rather stand.”

“Suit yourself, John, but the signs are good for one spectacular sunset tonight. We could share a beer, watch her together in about half an hour.”

“I don’t expect to be here that long.”

He nodded again, thoughtfully this time, and reached for his beer. “What’s on your mind?”

“I figured it out, Dag.”

“Did you, now?”

“Yes. From the beginning, I couldn’t really put a finger on it. Some of the people back in Massachusetts had a motive for killing one or more of those three people and wanting Shea out of the way, but the thing required a lot of local familiarity and planning, which made it hard to believe somebody from down there was the one.”

Another nod.

“But I couldn’t see any motive up here. Why go after the seasonal goose that lays some golden eggs in a poorish area, even if a goose like Shea does kind of get on people’s nerves a little? It didn’t make sense, till I found out that the goose decided to stop migrating.”

Gates took a healthy swig of beer.

I said, “Or, more to the point, you found out about it, delivering eggs to the inn one morning.”

He set down the can, deliberately. “Well, you got half of it.”

“Tom Judson being the other half?”

Gates lowered his hand to scruffle Runty between the shoulders. “Old Tom did this to me, John, and I made him pay for it with the piece of land you’re standing on. Only thing is, it ate him up to think of me across the cove from him, on
his
land. So he found Shea and sold out, moving up atop the mountain to look down on me looking over at Shea and wincing, John, wincing every time I saw what he was doing to the land.”

“It was legal at the time, I’m told.”

“Legal and right, those are two separate concepts, John. Completely separate. Anyway, after I watch Shea’s construction crew strip the land and build his house and lay his ‘lawn’ all the way down to the waterfront, into what should have been a buffer zone for runoff, I couldn’t take it. Halloween night, I got on my old leg prosthesis and hoofed it up to Judson’s new place.”

“Hell of a climb.”

“Used his driveway. Took me a time, but I was all fired up. Old Tom, he was sitting in the living room, drinking and watching his television. All the natural beauty around him, John, and the man ossifies himself in front of the tube. Well, he listens to me for about ten minutes, then starts to laughing and pushing me out, out through the door in the kitchen to the garage, the ‘servant’s entrance,’ he called it. Then he went back inside, locking the door on me. I stood there, seething with frustration about him, what he’d let happen, and I see the cases of his liquor in one corner and all his traps hanging from hooks on the wall. So I figure where Old Tom’d walk to get to his car or his booze, and I use my hand and foot to open a trap and set her down in his path. Like a trick or treat, see? I figured, he’d sold out to Shea and let the land be ravaged, I couldn’t maybe do much about that. But he’d also done this to me, I’d show him what it was like a little.”

Gates stopped petting the dog. “But then I’m walking back home here, I figure maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Wasn’t right for him to do it to me, maybe it isn’t right for me to do it to him. So I get in the door, and I dial Old Tom’s number, only I don’t get any answer. I try three more times that night. Nothing. I’m not up to climbing all that way again, the stump’s killing me from the prosthesis. I decide I’ll try him again in the morning. Well, I guess Old Tom, he was running out of whiskey, and he went out to his garage to get some more. He tripped and went down into that trap on his knee, and what should have been a broken ankle or lower leg ended up getting him killed, bleeding to death, wiping off all my fingerprints as he thrashed around.”