Mallets Aforethought (16 page)

I regarded her with new respect. If I could’ve slapped that fact into the heads of half of my clients back in the city, we’d all have ended up wealthier.

Somehow Maria had figured it out for herself, though, that life is risk. The only choice is, are you the taker or the taken?

“We had to get the land for the collateral, but also for the income. To help make,” she explained, “payments on this house.”

Yeeks; riskier than I’d thought. “That’s where the first land down payment came from? Second mortgage on this place?” An even scarier thought struck me. “Not from Hector, I hope? The second mortgage, that is.”

“Uh-uh. I’d never have talked Jimmy into that, even if I’d wanted it.” Maria’s small, determined chin lifted. “No, it was the bank. Preliminary approval and the deal was all made. A lady down the road owns the acreage and she had agreed to sell to us.”

Uh-oh. “An elderly lady,” I hazarded. “No family. And the land, if you didn’t buy it, would’ve ended up in her estate.”

“I suppose,” Maria said slowly. “I don’t think she’d been planning to sell it until we asked her.”

“The money would’ve been there, though,” Ellie objected, “in the woman’s estate, if they
did
buy it.” Catching my drift: that Hector could as easily have swindled the old woman out of the cash.

“Yeah, but who knows what kind of rackets he had going? What happened next?” I asked, turning back to Maria.

“Hector told the lady that it would be worth more if he got it zoned residential for her, put in roads, and parceled it off for house lots. Which we could’ve done, too,” she added. “But we didn’t want to.”

The child had fallen asleep in a shabby armchair, thumb in mouth. “We thought someday it could be Porter’s.”

A worthy objective, but they were way out on a limb. They needed to buy more land just so they could hang onto the house they were living in.

“So the lady started to back out,” I said. “Listening to Hector’s advice and waffling on the deal she’d made with you and Jimmy.”

“And the trouble was, we didn’t have anything in writing,” Maria confirmed. “And that was where things stood when Hector . . . Well, you know more about what happened to him than I do.”

Maybe. And maybe not. This was shaping up to be a much more interesting situation than I’d expected.

“Where was Jimmy?” Ellie spoke finally. “Last Friday and on Friday night.”

According to what Victor had told me that morning, the autopsy in Augusta had confirmed the medical examiner’s original estimate for Hector’s time of death: twenty-four to forty-eight hours from the time the M.E. had first seen the body

Which meant George was still firmly on the hook. “Out at the sawmill in Cooper during the day,” Maria replied evenly. “Bird’s-eye maple, he was having it cut for a furniture maker in Rockland. It had to be just so and he stayed till the end, to make sure that it was.”

“He didn’t leave for lunch or anything like that?” But the moment I’d said it I realized how foolish it was.

She shot me a look. “I make his lunch. It’s a twenty-mile drive to a lunch place from there. It’s not like they’ve set up a McDonald’s in Cooper, you know. And it’s cheaper.”

Of course. “Okay, so then what?” I asked her. “How about in the evening?”

She bridled, not liking the close questioning. Ellie put her oar in efficiently.

“Look, Maria, if you want Jimmy ruled out of it, just tell us where he was, that he couldn’t have been somewhere else killing Hector, that’s all.”

Ellie had her best don’t-mess-with-me face on, and she was using her stop-screwing-around-with-me voice to go with it. And for someone who resembled a storybook princess—even one with a watermelon in her middle—she could be very persuasive.

Maria gave in. “He was at the boys’ clubhouse, playing poker.”

“Boys’ clubhouse?” I looked at Ellie, who shook her head at me minutely.
Never heard of it.
“You mean like no girls allowed, swear an oath to get in, that sort of thing?”

“Yes, sort of.” Maria seemed embarrassed. “It’s Truie Benoit’s place, do you know him? Truman, that’s his real name. Anyway, Truie has a barn behind his house. Has a woodstove, an old icebox with a case of shorties in it, the guys go there in the evenings to play cards and smoke cheap cigars.”

“So that’s where Jimmy was? Playing poker with the boys?”

“Yes.” She nodded firmly. “I know he was there all evening because I dropped him off and picked him up. I needed the truck, there was a craft fair to get ready for at Porter’s preschool.”

“Well, there you have it, then,” I said to Ellie. “That’s where Jimmy was, so I guess we’ll know what to tell Sally Crusoe next time she tries to say otherwise.”

“Mm-hmm,” Ellie concurred. She was rising with an effort. “I guess we will. It’s a good preschool, then, is it?” she asked Maria disarmingly. “Because we are already looking around for one.”

I happened to know that Ellie meant to keep her child out of school for as long as possible, having herself been packed off at the earliest legal moment. But there was no sense letting Maria know we didn’t believe her; thus the distracting small talk.

She got up, picked a few dead leaves off a geranium. “Oh, yes. Porter loves it. Don’t you, honey?” The little boy wandered in sleepily to lean against her, clutching her skirt.

“We trade goat’s milk and vegetables for his tuition, and firewood in the winter,” she went on. She cupped the dead leaves in her palm, probably for deposit in that compost keeper. Heaven forbid a shred of organic matter shouldn’t be recycled. But her hand closed tensely around the leaves and you could sense the relief coming off her in waves as she walked us to the door.

Minutes later we were backing out the driveway, me feeling anxious to go home and waste a bread crust or something just to prove that I could.

“I’ll bet she makes them eat their potato skins,” I grumbled as we reached Route 190 and I signaled to turn back toward Eastport.

“Yup,” Ellie replied distantly. “Go the other way, okay?”

It was nearly noon. “Ellie, don’t you think you should . . .”

“Rest?” She snapped the word out. “No. Because it’s almost lunchtime. What do you think they serve for lunch in jail, Jake? Baloney and cheese? Stale chips, instant coffee?”

At home George got a cooked lunch, say a hot turkey sandwich with stuffing and gravy. Piece of pie, maybe, and fresh coffee.

A car pulled up behind me. It was the one I’d thought might be following us earlier, a beat-up old black muscle car with a big mismatched front grille and a crack in its tinted windshield, its plate too smeared with grime to read. I didn’t care for it. But when I turned left toward Route 1, it went the other way.

Ginger Tolliver’s place lay beyond the Route 1 intersection, way up a side road at the far end of Boyden Lake. It was a long drive, deep into the countryside, and Ellie looked pale.

I pulled over, meaning to take her home.

“Please,” she said quietly, putting a hand on my arm.

So I didn’t.

“How’d
you
know Maria was lying?” I asked Ellie as we drove up the winding two-lane that led toward Ginger’s place.

“The gambling part, of course.” To our left a river bubbled merrily over gleaming rocks; to the right, boulder-studded fields spread uphill to a row of windbreak cedars.

“I can go along with the woodstove and the icebox full of shorties,” she added. “As long as Jimmy didn’t bring any of the beer or a single stick of firewood.”

“Yup. That’s what I thought. And unless they were playing for bottle caps Jimmy wasn’t gambling. Maria would as soon toss dollar bills out the window and you can safely assume he doesn’t have a dime that she doesn’t know about.”

“And three fellows betting aren’t going to let a fourth in just for fun,” Ellie concurred.

“How about the part about Maria dropping him off and picking him up, though?”

“That she was at a craft fair meeting?” Ellie shrugged. “I don’t see any problem, there. Or with the fact that Jimmy could have borrowed one of the other guys’ cars. If I tell my friends I was supposed to be with them, I was. You know how it works.”

“In other words same story as for Jimmy: I was with
them
. Just a different set of people backing it up for each of them.”

The road made a snakelike set of wiggles through a sunlit stand of hardwood, the leafless branches gleaming pewter-colored.

“The minute Sally started telling her latest story, you can be sure Jimmy and Maria’s pals closed ranks around them,” Ellie went on. “A wealthy lady from away implicating an Eastport boy?” She snorted softly. “Now that word’s starting to get out about when Hector died, Jimmy’s buddies and Maria’s, too, will swear on a stack of tide charts that Jimmy and Maria were with them Friday night. Make Sally look like as big an idiot as they can. Which,” she added, “shouldn’t be difficult.”

Ellie didn’t care for Sally either, since what she’d done to Jimmy she could as easily have done to George. It was a class thing, that the peasants shouldn’t eat so much as an apple from a tree without getting the landowner’s permission.

“They’ll make Sally look foolish for implying that Jimmy could’ve killed Hector,” I agreed. “But it also screws
us
up.”

A woodcock ran out from the underbrush and paused at the gravel edge of the road, eyeing us brightly. With a ridiculously long bill and plump body atop long, sticklike legs, it looked more like a carved bird than like something that lived in nature.

“Because they
did
have a motive,” I added. “If they don’t buy that woodlot and Jimmy doesn’t start managing it quick—”

Cutting on it, I meant, and selling contracts, too, for wood to be cut from it later—

“—they’ll lose their house,” I said. “And my problem with the whole thing is that Sally’s b.s. comes in so handy for them.”

“Because we don’t know if their story might be to cover their tracks on Hector or just a hit-back at Sally’s gossip,” Ellie agreed. Then she frowned suddenly.

“What’s the matter?” I pulled over, startling a wild turkey into emitting a loud
gobble!
and strutting into the sumac bushes.

“Nothing.” Tiny beads of sweat glistened on her forehead.

“You swear, Ellie?” I peered closely at her. “Because I’m telling you, if you have this baby out here in the woods I’ll . . .”

Well, I didn’t know what I would do so I didn’t finish the threat. She mustered a weak smile.

“Swear. I said it’ll be a while. I’m just uncomfortable.”

“Yeah.” I pulled the car back onto the road. “When I was in your boat I started asking Victor for spinal anesthesia at about thirty-six weeks.”

Actually by that point he’d been threatening to inject the stuff into my brain. There’s a chance the nubile X-ray technician he was dating at the time might’ve added to my distress, too.

“I hope this kid doesn’t turn out like Victor,” Ellie murmured. “I mean precocious like him.”

“Awful thought.” Victor had finished college at thirteen and medical school three years later. He’d been the youngest first-year resident his hospital ever had; if anyone complained, they were going to make him get a Ph.D. first, then return to hands-on medical practice.

But no one did complain. Even back then, Victor could charm the birds out of the trees.

When he wanted to. “Don’t worry, though,” I told Ellie. “There’s not much chance it’ll turn out like Victor. Mutations like him only happen every billion or so years.”

She managed another smile. Then: “Jake? How much does it hurt? To have the baby, I mean. Tell the truth.”

I thought a minute. “Pain’s not what you’ll remember.”

She glanced at me, scenting evasion. But I saw no point in scaring her since after all there’s no bail-out option. If there were I’d have taken it seconds after I reached the delivery room. I’d have taken heroin too, if any had been on offer.

On the other hand, it’s evasion that scares
me
. And Ellie could smell it a mile away.

“Look,” I relented. “It hurts like a son of a bitch, okay? It really does. But the instant it’s over you won’t care. Trust me on this, you won’t.”

I was about to go on. But as we reached the road leading into the woods I thought maybe she didn’t want to know about the heroin-desiring portion of the program after all.

Because all she said was, “Turn here.”

Hector Gosling’s ex-housekeeper Ginger Tolliver turned out to be a tall Nordic beauty with masses of braided yellow hair pinned in complicated fashion atop her head. In a red-and-green reindeer sweater and green stretch pants, her appearance suggested skiing and other strenuous winter activities.

Or it would have except that her left arm ended in a hand so unusual that it was impossible not to look at it.

“Car accident,” she explained when we’d pulled up into her drive and gotten out. Her place was a trailer on a woodsy cleared spot, with a lake visible through the trees behind it.

Ginger’s hand was a sort of claw fashioned out of the thumb joint, working pincerlike with what remained of the scarred palm.

“It’s okay,” she added, seeing my embarrassment when she caught me staring. “Everyone always wants to know.”

She wore a built-up shoe, too, that didn’t entirely correct her spine’s curvature. Her ice-blue eyes had tight lines at the corners and her mouth betrayed a burden of chronic pain.

Victor would’ve had a team of specialists lined up in about ten seconds. “Can’t they do some kind of . . . ?”

“Surgery?” A brief, bitter laugh. “I’ve had enough surgery. Besides, I don’t have any way to pay for more.”

She limped ahead of us into a screened porch. “The surgery that might help,” she told us, “is experimental, according to my benefits administrator. And when Medicaid pays, Medicaid calls the tune.”

We followed her onto the porch. “Sit,” she said brusquely, waving at a pair of plastic lawn chairs alongside hers. “I was out here relaxing. But soon I have to go to a job interview.”

My surprise must have shown on my face. She gave me a “d’oh” look. “Well, what do you think? Hector’s dead, isn’t he? So I need a new job. I’m not going to retire on a pension, that’s for sure.”