Mallets Aforethought (18 page)

Damn.

On the way home Ellie said she was okay, but she looked just awful. “Look,” I said as we got into town, “you’ve got to rest. I know you feel you need to do more, but—”

“I’ll make you a deal,” she interrupted. “I’ll rest if you do something by yourself.”

It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t the only one thinking about how things would change once the baby was here.

“All right,” I said. “What?”

We drove down Washington Street past the massive granite Post Office building, turned left. “I want you to talk to Jimmy Condon and ask him where he was on Friday night. Get him by himself and ask him, and where Maria was, too.”

“And he’ll tell me because . . . ?”

“Because you’ll tell him you’re asking for me.”

I glanced at her, surprised. “Ellie, is there something I ought to know?”

We pulled up in front of her house. “I went to high school with Jimmy,” she said. “And that’s all I’m going to tell you now, because I promised him I never would.”

She looked down at her hands. “But he’ll probably tell you. Find him, Jake. We have to know if we can rule Jimmy and Maria out or not.”

Exasperation took hold of me. “Ellie, what if Jimmy just lies? There’s no reason to think he’ll tell me the truth.”

“Then you’ll know that. Jimmy’s got a tickertape across his forehead, what he thinks in words of one syllable on it. You’ll know.”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “I still don’t get it, but if that’s what you want . . .”

“It is. I’d go with you but I can’t. Because you’re right, I really do have to lie down.” She put her hand on my arm. “We already know Ginger’s not telling us the truth. I want to find out if we have to go after Jimmy too. Or instead.”

Her face said she hoped we didn’t have to investigate her old friend any further. It also said clearly that if she didn’t decide to get horizontal soon, her body would make the decision for her.

“All right,” I said a final time, and sat there watching to make sure she got inside the house. Then I drove away.

But I couldn’t find Jimmy immediately because I’d told Victor that I needed to see him that afternoon and he’d said he’d come. So I went home to wait for him and when I got there, the message light was blinking on my phone machine.

Oh, terrific. I pressed the message button.

“Ms. Tiptree, this is Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Farrell in New York. I’d appreciate your contacting me at your earliest convenience.”

My outgoing message didn’t mention my name. So Farrell knew who I was, where I was, and probably also what I was. Or at any rate what I’d been back when Jemmy Wechsler and I were a Gotham duo.

The call confirmed what I’d been expecting, that my name had come up in Jemmy’s case. And the last time I looked, prosecutors didn’t phone people to ask if they’d like to appear for the defense.

So just as I’d suspected, the choice Farrell had lined up for me was clear. I could testify against Jemmy and walk away. Or I could fail to cooperate and let the government try to build a second case.

Against me. Which by itself might not be so bad; I’d always been careful to stay on the right side of the law myself. So they wouldn’t have a lot of leverage to turn me against Jemmy.

But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that compared to my father, Jemmy Wechsler was small potatoes.

Pondering this I hauled my tools and a fresh tin of paint stripper up two flights of stairs to the third floor. I couldn’t hear the door from there but I would know if Victor came in; the hairs on my neck would bristle like porcupine quills.

My work area was a big whitewashed room with no curtains, just a wall of bare windows facing south. A paneled door lay flat across two sawhorses in the pale yellow light; over the course of a few days I’d put two coats of stripper on it already, removing most of the many coats of paint it had gotten in its lifetime.

But to keep your hands busy during a session of thinking, there’s nothing like yet another application of paint stripper so strong that if you spill some, it will eat a hole right through the floor.

I popped a CD into the player I kept up there. Golden light washed the room as k.d. Lang’s smoky voice drifted into it.

“Save me,” she sang as I opened the paint stripper and began applying it. But you could hear in her voice she wasn’t expecting much action on her request.

Me, either. Slopping on the paint stripper, I realized again that in the getting-saved department I was running on empty.

In the old days it would have been easy. I’d have called one of my fat-cat clients and pulled in a tiny favor. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief; Jemmy had led them all into my plush-carpeted reception area where they’d sat with their hands in their laps as if waiting for a session with the dentist.

After the introductions Jemmy would slip into the shadows again, eliminating the embarrassment his presence might cause if anyone saw them together; these guys couldn’t afford even a whiff of scandal and Jemmy was a snootful. Only the hope of a solution to their money troubles could have gotten any of them onto the same city block as my mobbed-up friend, much less into the same office.

In short, Jemmy knew everyone. But only I knew that fact, and I never told. For one thing, no one would’ve believed me; if for instance I linked him to the scion of one of the nation’s most celebrated clans.

Or to the scion’s . . . well, never mind which relative it was, but when she told me how much that little gigolo had gotten out of her I’d nearly fainted. Then I’d called one of my other clients; forty-eight hours later, the money had been recovered and the gigolo was in jail on unrelated charges.

But that was in the old days when the lips of the fellows I dealt with were greasy with the fat of the land. The only thing they’d feared was anyone learning how they’d met me at all. And because they feared so little I needed my own protection against them. Who knew when one of them would try to use me for a bargaining chip somehow, in some deal I didn’t want to even try imagining?

So in the eye of the pyramid on the dollar bill framed on my office wall, there was a camera. It took a snapshot of everyone entering my office with Jemmy, recording an association they’d have denied with their dying breaths. My stash of old mug shots couldn’t help me now, though. Revealing that I had them might get Jemmy out of a jam—I knew for a fact some of my old clients had leverage in Federal circles—but for me it would already be too late. Federal investigators interested in me would’ve taken note of the people around me, too, whether I was cooperative or not.

So it was obvious what I needed to do. I just wouldn’t enjoy doing it. Telling my fugitive father, I mean, that he had to go. Leave Eastport, maybe see me again and maybe not.

Hit the road, Jack. And the sooner the better.

“Rat poison really only comes in two varieties,” said Victor an hour later.

I already knew this. But I’d asked him over here to get some information from him, and when you want information from Victor you have to listen to what
he
wants to say, first.

And at the moment due to recent local events he was hot on poisons. “You’ve got your coumarin-based compounds, warfarin, the blood thinners. Animal leaves the premises searching for water. Dies outdoors.”

He had another swallow of wine. “Then there are convulsants. Strychnine’s one. You’ve got to catch ’em within minutes of their ingesting the substance. People, the accidental poisoning cases, I mean.”

More old news. But he was getting up a head of instructional steam. No sense knocking the train off the track.

“. . . Catch ’em fast, charcoal lavage. You pump a slurry of the charcoal into the gut, it absorbs some of the poison. Pump it out again, support all the vital signs meanwhile, maybe you’ve given yourself half a chance. But . . .”

He wagged a warning finger at me. Once upon a time if he’d done that I’d have bitten it off.

But he had been on a fairly decent run of behavior recently. So I just thought about biting it off.

“But it’s not often a strychnine victim even makes it that far. Strychnine gets absorbed fast,” he continued.

“Is there an antidote?”

He shook his head. “Treatment’s supportive. Anticonvulsant drugs, try to keep ’em alive until basically the stuff’s excreted and the effect wears off. Which,” he added, “is why it’s become a registry-only substance.”

I raised an eyebrow, which was all he ever needed. He moved along in his lecture, which was what
I
needed.

“The bottom line is, you’ve got to be registered to buy or use it,” he said. “But there used to be products you could buy.”

He refilled his glass. “I saw this case back in the city once, kid got hold of an old mole-bait from back in the fifties. Mole-Gone, I think it was called, and it was for putting into mole burrows in gardens and parks and so on.”

He frowned, remembering. “I guess it had been sitting in a cabinet for years and the kid just found it. The trouble was, the bait was made by mixing strychnine powder with peanut butter.”

He drank. “That was one we didn’t have a happy outcome on.”

When Sam was a small child he’d associated the skull and crossbones from poison labels with a cartoon character he enjoyed at the time, called Happy the Pirate. And when I learned of this I went a bit overboard in reindoctrinating him. As a result, for years he was terrified not only of pirates but also of parrots, eye-patches, hoop earrings, and anything else that buckled even the faintest swash.

Funny the things that pop into your head when you’re sitting with the only other person in the world who remembers them, too. Time to change the subject.

“Do you know Ginger Tolliver?” I asked.

Ginger was an attractive young woman who lived in the same time zone as Victor. So it was highly unlikely his babe-radar hadn’t registered her. But probably he knew Ginger for another reason as well.

“I met her today,” I went on, “and I’m curious. She seems quite pain-afflicted. Mostly from her back, I guess, even though it’s the thing that shows least.”

The taut, controlled lines of her face rose in my mind. Just looking at her, you knew she was in the kind of chronic pain that would have most people incapacitated.

“Yet she says she has to work. So I wondered . . .”

Victor was nodding. “She’s disabled, just based on her pain,” he confirmed. “I did the physical. Prescribed her the painkillers too, but she won’t take them.”

I blinked. This was more information than I’d expected him to offer, based on patient confidentiality.

“It’s no secret,” he added, understanding my look. “Ginger told me I could shout it from the rooftops if I wanted. If maybe it could help her disability case. But it hasn’t.”

I sat down, poured my own glass of wine. It was always good to have something in the emotional bank account with Victor. The memory of ten friendly minutes, for instance, so that next time he morphed into Doctor Doom I wouldn’t strangle him on the spot.

“So she’s not on disability,” I mused.

“Too young, and she was out of work for a couple years after the car accident. So she doesn’t have enough credits.”

Enough calendar-quarters with the minimum income, he meant; it was the other thing besides a work-preventing ailment that you needed in order to receive Social Security disability payments.

“Criminy,” I said, “can’t work so you can’t collect, can’t work so you can’t qualify to collect. Don’t you hate that?”

He nodded and for a moment we were unified in dismay. I used to see these problems all the time when I worked pro bono for an agency back in the city, and Victor faced it regularly at his clinic.

Then I thought of something else. “How did the car accident happen?”

He looked surprised. “You didn’t know? Ginger’s mother used to be Hector Gosling’s secretary. They were on the way to a title search in Machias, Ginger in the backseat.”

Uh-oh. Was that another motive rearing its ugly kisser?

“So he was behind the wheel that day?” I said. “And I guess his driving skills couldn’t have been much good, even back then.”

Stories abounded of Hector driving in the same damn-the-torpedoes manner in which he did everything else, with complacent disregard for any obstacle in his all-important way.

“Coming into Whiting, that long set of curves?” Victor said.

Whiting was a village on Route 1 about halfway to Machias. In its vicinity, thirty-year-old drivers did seventy and the seventy-year-olds did thirty, which to my mind was like putting the tortoise and the hare in a face-off and giving them bazookas.

“Passed on a curve,” Victor said. “Hit a town truck loaded with sand. Surprised me that Ginger would have worked for him.”

“She has trouble getting work at all. Maybe Hector’s the only one who’d hire her? Off the books, too, I’ll bet, so she’s not getting any benefits or Social Security contributions.”

“Could be. And from what I’ve heard of Hector Gosling that’s a situation he would enjoy.”

“It is obvious how much she hated him. I thought it was on account of him getting between her and her boyfriend.”

But now her lasting injuries from the accident provided yet another reason. “What happened,” I asked, “to Ginger’s mother?”

“Dead at the scene,” Victor replied.

Correction: two more reasons.

“Hector was about to ruin Jimmy Condon’s life, and he’d already done a number on Ginger’s,” I told Will Bonnet later when he stopped in to borrow an extension cord.

He was headed to Harlequin House to clean up some debris the other volunteers had left. Finding Jan Jesperson’s body instead of only hearing about it, as with Hector’s, had put a damper not only on lunch but on the historical society’s enthusiasm for the fix-up project.

With Will were two other helpers he’d found. One was skinny and scraggly with dirty-blond hair in a ponytail and front teeth that stuck out like a pair of half-raised light switches; the other was beetle-browed and obviously not the sharpest pin in the cushion.

“Hey,” Will told me, “that’s good. That means George isn’t the only one who really hated the old guy.”