Mallets Aforethought (19 page)

I was putting pieces of leftover pot roast through a grinder to make shepherd’s pie. Wade wouldn’t be home tonight but Sam would—his father, not surprisingly, had backed out on their dinner date—and Tommy was staying too. Now the boys were in the dining room switching Sam’s gears from algebra to geometry.

And I still had Jimmy Condon on my agenda, all of which made me wonder why I’d ever thought moving to Maine would be a stress reliever.

“Yes, it provides other motives,” I agreed with Will. “What it doesn’t tell us is who else could’ve got hold of something as difficult to buy as strychnine powder.”

That was the other information Victor had supplied on his visit; that in addition to confirming the time range of Hector’s death, the autopsy had also confirmed the cause.

The scraggly helper with the ponytail had been slouched in the hall, studying his boots. Now he perked up. “Half a’ the old barns an’ sheds around here prob’ly got a can of it stuck away,” he said, “from back when you could buy it legal.” This guy looked as if he had a passing acquaintance with old barns and sheds, likely from sleeping in them.

“George got his from Cory, the guy with pigs,” Will added. “Cory identified the can, he told me. Had it out in
his
shed.”

“Yeah,” the scraggly guy put in. “Cory didn’t like the idea, using it himself. Scared of it. But you know George.”

Right; everyone did. If he thought he could earn an honest dollar at it, George would pack his pockets with nitroglycerine.

The beetle-browed guy spoke up. “Old man Gosling had some.”

I turned, surprised. “How do you know?”

Massive shrug. “Did yard work for him. Went in for a drink a’water, saw the can, his garage shelf. My name’s Ronny Ronaldson and I can read,” the fellow added to me with soft pride.

“I’m sure you can,” I responded, not knowing what else to say. His happiness at this accomplishment seemed to spur him on.

“You remember,” Ronny added to the scraggly guy, “when Jimmy Condon was findin’ work for me. That’s when. Jimmy,” he finished ponderously, “he’s a good guy. Cuts down trees.”

“Yes.” So Jimmy might have known about the poison, too, and Ginger probably would have because she also worked in Hector’s house.

“That reminds me,” Will told me. “I need to get hold of some syrup of ipecac. You happen to know where I can get some?”

“Um, yeah,” I said. Before I’d so cruelly abolished Sam’s love for the skull-and-crossbones character, I’d put a bottle of ipecac in every room in the apartment.

“Because,” Will explained, “I’m making a first-aid kit. With Agnes, you never know what might happen. I want to be prepared.”

Back when Sam was at the stage of putting everything in his mouth and if possible swallowing it, ipecac had made sense; it caused your stomach to eject whatever you’d eaten. And Agnes did seem to be regressing to the toddler stage.

“Drugstore,” I said to Will. “It’s over-the-counter stuff, you won’t need a prescription for it. But if you don’t mind a secondhand bottle you don’t have to buy any. I’ve got some.”

Two bottles, actually. Despite Sam’s having become much more choosy about what he ingested, Victor had sent them to me along with many other first-aid supplies soon after we had moved here. He also sent me a dozen roses with the heads cut off, but that’s another story.

“Take one,” I told Will, waving at the tin box on the shelf in the hall. “If I need two bottles I’m in worse trouble than any first aid can fix, anyway.”

He helped himself, then hoisted the orange coil of heavy-duty extension cord on his shoulder. “Come on, guys, if we want to get out fishing yet today, we’d better hustle it up.”

Then, turning to me, “After I finish up at Harlequin House I’ll be taking a look at one of the storefronts on Water Street.”

For his planned restaurant, he meant. Ellie said it was all he talked about when he was with her. Personally, I thought if he couldn’t keep bones out of his fish and dishes from exploding over warming flames, Will might want to go slow in the doing-it-professionally department.

In addition, that is, to my other doubts about the project. “After
that,
we’re going out fishing,” he concluded.

“On,” the big slow guy informed me delightedly, “a boat!”

Will smiled. “Yeah, Ronny, on a boat. George’s been letting me borrow it,” he added to me. “And Ellie says it’s okay with her, so . . .”

He shrugged. “Hey, I gotta reward these guys somehow. Tell Ellie I’ll check in on her later, will you?”

“Fine,” I replied, just as happy to see the three of them go. I still had the vegetables to chop for shepherd’s pie and somehow I didn’t think doing it with a steak knife was going to meet Will’s food preparation standards, dish explosions or no dish explosions.

But just then Tommy came into the kitchen, maybe for a soda or some milk. It could have been anything. Whatever he’d wanted, though, he didn’t want it anymore once he’d spotted the scraggly guy.

“Hey,” the guy said lazily, his close-set eyes narrowing in sly recognition. “How’re ya’ doin’, kid?”

“Okay.” Tommy’s face looked suddenly carved of stone as he turned and walked out.

The scraggly guy chuckled. “Kid don’t like me. Thinks he’s better’n everybody, is that kid’s trouble.”

He pulled a cigarette from the off-brand pack in his shirt pocket. “Don’t light it in here, please,” I said automatically.

He shot an unfriendly look at me, then tucked it away. “Kid had better be careful when his uncle gets out,” he observed.

Perry Daigle, he meant. His voice took on an ugly edge. “All Perry wanted was his stuff out of the house. He shows up, that kid there goes and calls the cops on that bogus violation-of-protection beef the old lady’s got goin’. Next thing, Perry’s got ninety days on a DUI he had pending. You want to tell me that was accidental? Wasn’t fair. Perry’s all right.”

All of which reminded me of the charming company George must be enjoying, locked up with Perry and a bunch of other roughnecks as bad or worse.

“Come on, guys,” Will said hastily with an apologetic glance at me. “Better get a move on. We don’t want to be out on that bay after dark if we know what’s good for us.”

He urged the other two out ahead of him. “Sorry about that,” he said when they were gone. “Weasel’s kind of a jerk.”

“Weasel? Perfect name for him.” I was annoyed.

Will shrugged. “Wesley’s his real name. Wesley Bodine. Don’t worry, I won’t bring him around anymore.”

He really seemed sorry. So I accepted his apology and he left, too, promising to return the cord to me as soon as he finished with it.

Then I returned to my original project: grinding up the pot roast. But shortly thereafter I heard an astonishing
thump!
from the dining room, and a half-sobbed curse.

Rushing in, I found Tommy alone, cradling his right hand. And from the bloody mark on the old gold-medallion wallpaper I knew what must have happened.

He’d slammed his fist into the wall. For Tommy, it was an unthinkable outburst. “Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m great.” He sank into a chair, dropped his injured hand into his lap, and with the other hand began sullenly drawing on a scrap of cardboard with his protractor. The point hadn’t yet gone through the cardboard into the table but it was about to.

“Watch out for the tabletop,” I cautioned him gently.

In response he snapped it closed one-handed and dropped it into its small black fake-leather case. It was the kind of kid he was, that he still had his high-school math-class protractor in good order and in its original box.

“Anything I can do?” I asked. His knuckles were ballooning.

He shook his head. “They should keep him in jail a hundred years. But they’re so
stupid,
they’ll let
him
out.”

Perry Daigle was himself so dumb that in his defense on the assault charge he’d told the judge how Tommy’s mom needed someone to keep her in line now that her husband was dead.

Tommy’s father having been no prize either. Sam appeared in the door with the book he’d apparently gone to fetch. “Hey, what happened?”

“Tommy’s had a little mishap. Get a towel with some ice in it, please,” I said.

Take your time,
I added with my eyes. Sam nodded and went.

“But they’ll put
George
in jail,” Tommy went on grievingly.

A thought struck me. “Tommy? Do you have something to tell me? Maybe
you
know what George was doing when Hector was killed?”

He shook his head mutely, turned his tear-streaked face to me. “No. I don’t know what he was doing; I wish I did.”

He knew something, though; that the world was a hard, unjust place where the good guys didn’t always win. I wasn’t sure why the people who’d already absorbed that information always seemed to be the ones getting new lessons forced on them.

People like Tommy, for instance, with his sociopathic uncle eternally poised to deliver a two-fisted refresher course and the one guy who’d always been in Tommy’s corner locked up, unable to help.

Because George was refusing to alibi himself. And the biggest question was still . . .
why?

It was late afternoon when I finally set off to find Jimmy Condon, crossing the causeway and turning south on Route 1 in the already fading light.

Purple shadows gathered along the east side of the road as I reached the turnoff to Cooper and began the long winding climb uphill past houses, sheds, and barns. Some places had the cabs of eighteen-wheelers parked in their driveways; others featured homemade signs advertising smoked salmon, lawn mower repair, or quilts.

Past the corner store in Meddybemps, the road turned sharply and crossed the old railroad right-of-way. The last locomotive was no more than a memory now. A few hundred yards later the rusty blade of a bucksaw nailed to a tree stump marked the dirt rut leading up to the mill.

When I pulled in, Jimmy Condon was coming out of the old red trailer that served for an office. Whole trunks of trees in a pile higher than the trailer made a wall on one side of the yard, while the cutting apparatus made a boundary on the other.

If Will Bonnet looked like the Hollywood version of Paul Bunyan, Jimmy was the ox, a massive man with a big head, enormous shoulders, and hands the size of Ping-Pong paddles. But he wasn’t so big, I noted automatically, that he couldn’t have fit through that trapdoor in Harlequin House.

I got out of the car, bending to pat a yellow dog wiggling up to me in happy welcome. Jimmy pulled his gloves off and came over too.

“H’lo, Jacobia. What brings you way out here?”

“Hi, Jimmy,” I replied, remembering what George said about him once, that he was the kind of guy who made “simple” into a compliment. Hard work and straight answers were Jimmy’s stock-in-trade; for one thing, he wasn’t equipped for anything else.

On the other hand, if Maria was the brains of the pair, Jimmy was the heart. “I came because Ellie asked me to,” I told him.

The sun was on the horizon, pouring red-gold light onto the carpet of sawdust covering the yard. No sense wasting time. “She said if I told you I was here on her behalf, you’d tell me what I need to know.”

His brow furrowed. “She did, huh? You talked to Maria yet?”

“Yes, Jimmy, we did. Maria says you were playing poker with your friends on Friday night, and she was at a school thing.”

Jimmy received this information impassively. “Uh-huh.” You could see the gears of his mind turning over slowly as he lined up what he should say. “That’s right,” he offered at last.

“But Jimmy,” I went on, “Ellie says that might not be so.”

His eyes met mine, gentle but implacable. “I don’t remember. If Maria says that’s what happened . . .”

“Jimmy. She’s in trouble, Ellie is, and I’m trying to get her out of it. Her and George both. But I’m not interested in getting you into any. Now, Ellie wouldn’t tell me anything about why she thought you might help her. She says she promised you she wouldn’t.”

His lips pressed together. Then he said, “Yeah. Ellie keeps promises. She always did, even back in school. You could talk to Ellie.”

“I know. And what I’m telling you is, I keep them too. Exactly the way Ellie does. Whatever you were doing, as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with Hector Gosling, I’ll never tell a soul. But Jimmy, I need to know. Ellie needs to.”

He looked away. “Please, Jimmy,” I said.

He didn’t like it. But the mention of Ellie had set other wheels turning in that big head of his. “You better come inside.”

In the trailer all vestiges of domesticity had been stripped away and replaced by pure, uncosmetic functionality. Insulation strips covered the walls, holes knifed in it around the windows. The floor was plywood stained black in the traffic areas, chairs and a table rejects from a landfill. A utility lamp on an orange cord was the only light.

Jimmy waved a big hand at a rickety wooden chair; I sat. “You can’t tell,” he impressed heavily upon me. “Maria doesn’t want it getting around. She says it would be real bad for business.” His gaze darkened. “She’d be mad, she knew I told.”

“All right. Then she won’t find out.” If, I added mentally, it’s not George’s get-out-of-jail-free card.

“Ellie tell you about when that Sally was spreading all her stories? Said I stole from her?” His chin thrust out mutinously.

“She told me. But what about it? And what’s that got to do with . . .”

“Maria got mad then too. Said I was dumb. Said I should’ve known better. But it was only scrap wood.”

His eyes met mine in appeal. “No one else had use for it.”

“I understand.” The dog had come in with us; now it put its muzzle in Jimmy’s lap, its tail wagging anxiously.

He smoothed its head. “I didn’t know what to do. But back in school I used to ask Ellie and she would tell me. So when Maria wouldn’t stop being mad . . .”

The light dawned. “You asked your old friend what to do.”

He nodded in misery. The light streaming in through the windows went suddenly grey as the sun dropped below the horizon.

“Ellie said wait a while, and if that didn’t fix it, maybe Maria and me should go to, like, a marriage doctor,” he told me.