Mallets Aforethought (20 page)

“A marriage counselor.” At that, all became clear. “So you suggested that to Maria?”

Oh, you big lummox, I thought. You big brave lug. Going to a marriage counselor for a guy like Jimmy Condon would’ve been like sailing off over the horizon to an unknown world.

And his buddies would have a field day with it. “Uh-huh. She wouldn’t, but then I found a free one. In Ellsworth, far away, so nobody would find out about it.”

“And that’s where you and Maria were on Friday.”

He nodded, and it began to make sense. Not only was marriage counseling dandy gossip fodder, Maria would also have another reason for keeping it quiet. Partnerships have a harder time getting business loans if the lending institutions think the partners might be breaking up.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “We were there. Maria’s real mad about the land deal we might’ve lost, too. Said if I hadn’t dragged my feet on it, Hector never would’ve had the chance to put his oar in.”

He sighed heavily. “Started out early, got back pretty late. Bring a cold supper along, so we don’t spend on anything but the gas, and Porter sleeps most of the way, so that’s good. I don’t know,” he added stolidly, “if it’s working.”

He stood up. “I’m not as smart as she is. That makes it hard for her, I guess.”

A racehorse hitched to a plow horse; no, it probably wasn’t easy. But as Ellie had said, Jimmy did have a ticker tape across his forehead; he was telling me the truth.

He pulled his gloves back on. “She figures she made a mistake marrying me. Going to try to make the best of it now that we have our boy. But it’s not easy being what somebody is trying to make the best of.”

“No. No, I suppose it’s not.”

Or eating your potato skins while you’re doing it, either, I thought as I drove away. All in all, it was a sorry little peek into someone else’s life that I could have done without, and as I headed home it only emphasized what, unhappily, I already knew: that behind the drawn curtains of the warmly lit houses I passed, anything could be happening.

“Hey, you know George,” Sam said later at the dining room table. “He probably just thinks it’s nobody’s business where he was or what he was doing.”

He dug into the seafood casserole, chock-full of scallops, shrimp, and other tasty morsels. “Wow, this looks great. Thanks, Will.”

I picked a piece of crab shell from between my teeth as unnoticeably as possible. It was eight in the evening, the house was full, and we weren’t having shepherd’s pie after all because Will came back unexpectedly from his fishing trip laden with provisions for a seafood feast. And apparently he’d made other stops along the way, because you couldn’t catch oysters in Passamaquoddy Bay and you surely couldn’t hook beluga caviar.

Clarissa Arnold took a sip of her champagne, another of Will’s contributions to the meal. “Well, if that’s it,” she replied to Sam’s theory, “he’s being a fool.”

Clarissa looked as usual as if she’d stepped from the pages of
Lawyer’s Quarterly:
low black heels, straight black skirt that ended chastely at the middle of her slim knee, a silk cable-knit sweater in a dark shade of old gold, plus a cashmere jacket.

“They’re not messing around,” she added, meaning the state people arraying themselves for George’s prosecution. “I’d say he has very little delay time before this gets bumped up to Superior Court. And at that point I won’t be able to yank him out again, like a rabbit out of a hat.”

She looked around at us. “George needs,” she emphasized, “to speak up for himself.”

“Does he know that?” Ellie asked. She was drinking ginger ale; me, too, in sympathy with her. “Really
know
it?”

An impatient frown creased Clarissa’s forehead. “I’ve spelled it out for him in terms even a child could understand.”

Her own little boy was still in Kennebunk with his dad and their extended family; she’d only come up for the evening to talk with Ellie, bring her up to speed.

“If Bob were here . . .” I began.

“No,” Clarissa said firmly. “I’m sure he’d be pleased by your faith in him, Jacobia, but it would take someone bigger than Eastport’s police chief to fix this. George doesn’t only need a character reference. He needs an
alibi
. And it still looks like he’s the only one who can supply it. Because—”

“Because he’s protecting someone,” Will Bonnet cut in. “That’s it, isn’t it? George is keeping his mouth shut on account of someone else.”

There was grit in the stuffing of the clams casino. But Will had worked so hard to prepare this dinner—even people in bad trouble needed nourishment, he insisted, and he wanted us to keep our strength up—that I ate them anyway, chewing carefully so as not to fracture any fillings.

Ellie nodded emphatically. “George would rather choke on his own spit than betray a friend. I’ll bet you’re right, Will.”

“But Ellie,” I objected. “That makes no sense. With the baby coming, or even without, you don’t believe he’d go to prison just so a murderer could go free, do you?”

“No, no. Of course he wouldn’t protect the actual murderer.” She waved a toast round loaded with caviar to make her point.

She’d said she wasn’t hungry but the stuff was so delicious she ended up eating it, and some casserole too, a little pile of crab shell and other inedibles heaped at the side of her plate.

“But obviously George was with
some
one, doing
some
thing. And if that someone could get in trouble for whatever it was . . .”

“He doesn’t want to put some other guy in the soup. So he’s waiting for the guy to speak up. But if he does, this guy maybe catches some sort of rap, himself?” Will asked thoughtfully.

Sam took a bite of casserole, winced and extracted something into his napkin. “That sure sounds like George, all right,” he said, after having a sip of water.

“I wish I’d been around that night,” Will went on. “If I had, we’d probably have been together. But no, I had to be in Boston on business,” he castigated himself. “Wasn’t even a big deal . . . hell, why did I have to pick
that
night?”

“What business?” Tommy Pockets inquired interestedly, which was encouraging. He’d been silent all evening.

“Talking to a guy about supplying fish for the restaurant,” Will replied genially.

That again. But hey, it was his money. “And picking up the ingredients for all this while I was at it,” he went on.

Including the imported caviar, I supposed, tiny beads of glorious subtlety that popped with a sweet-salt burst. I felt guilty eating it, knowing it cost a fortune, but I couldn’t resist. For one thing, it had no grit or shell bits in it.

“You left Agnes alone?” Ellie asked Will. Trust her to think of this. In response, he looked properly embarrassed.

“I shouldn’t have, probably. But the guy I needed to see was on his way out of town. And Aunt Agnes sleeps through the night. Turned out okay, but I did feel kind of bad about it.”

“Next time ask one of us,” Ellie suggested kindly, and he agreed to.

“Can we get back to the subject here?” Clarissa interrupted, still focused on George. “If he is protecting someone, he needs to figure out whose tail he wants caught in the door. His own or someone else’s, whose ideas of loyalty obviously don’t match his.”

I couldn’t think of anyone whose loyalty matched George’s, except maybe all the Knights of the Round Table put together.

Which brought me to a new thought. “There might be another possibility,” I said slowly. “Maybe he thinks we’ll straighten it out. Ellie and me.”

Once it was out of my mouth I thought it could actually be true. “We’ve done it before,” I added a little defensively, at Clarissa’s skeptical look. “Snooped around in deaths that were, um, unexpected, and been able to figure out . . .”

“Whodunnit?” This was news to Will, clearly. “Wow, you mean you two . . .” He looked at each of us. “Hey, I’m impressed.”

Clarissa wasn’t. “Whatever.” She brushed the notion off. “What I’m saying is that if something else factual doesn’t come up, he’s going to trial for it.”

“But,” Will objected strenuously, “it’s all circumstantial as it is. There’s no witness to say—”

“Right.” She batted his remark away, too. “But they’ve got strychnine out of George’s work area and they’ve got people who heard him say he’d gladly murder Gosling if he could find a good method. And he had a motive to kill Jan also, since George thought she and Hector were in it against George’s aunt together.”

She took a breath. “Jan was probably strangled, by the way. The knife was postmortem. Marks on her neck, not extensive but they were there according to the preliminary medical report.”

She paused, thinking. “I’m going to have questions for all of you individually as we go on. But for now, just for my own reference, when’s the last time anyone here saw Hector Gosling?”

Sam looked blank. “Don’t know. Not for a long time.”

An odd expression flitted across Tommy’s face in the moment before he spoke. “Last week, maybe? At the gas station.”

I hadn’t seen Hector at all lately but Will had. “Friday at around two,” he said without hesitation. “I was headed out of town, he was on his way in. I might not have noticed it was even him, but he was passing some other guy on a curve, I had to pull halfway onto the shoulder.” Will grimaced. “Bat out of hell as usual, and that big ugly kisser of his hunched over the steering wheel,” he said.

Ellie spoke reluctantly. “I haven’t seen him. But he called me. The day before we found him. Around three in the afternoon.”

About the time George had gone off everyone’s radar. I turned to Ellie in surprise. “You didn’t tell me Hector’d called you. What did he say?”

She bit her lip. “I didn’t want to tell anyone. And I don’t know what he wanted. When I saw it was his number on the caller ID box, I picked up the phone and put it down again. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t get the chance to say anything to me. He’d already said plenty.”

“He’d called before?” But of course he had. The foul-mouthed harangue was among Hector’s best-known conversational strategies.

Will was already nodding agreement. “Harassing them. He’d been doing it awhile. Telling George he’d better stop talking about him or else, George told me. Not specific threats, just playing the heavy as per usual.”

I’d been a victim of it myself once, after opposing Hector’s plan to build a cinder-block dwelling for the residents of the poor farm, and turn their current pleasant spot into high-rent condos.

“It just wasn’t something I’d wanted to complain about,” Ellie told me in explanation. “George either. And I never connected it with . . .” Her voice broke.

“So Hector was alive until then,” I concluded. “But it doesn’t really matter because it’s the time
afterwards
that George won’t talk about. And unfortunately under these circumstances saying nothing is almost as bad as confessing.”

Clarissa’s nod was grim. “Almost. They’ll eat him alive. I’m sorry, but all they need is to get past reasonable doubt. And the doubt so far is pretty
un
reasonable.”

“Unless you know him,” I said.

“Unless you know him,” she agreed, but her tone made clear how little help she expected from that.

She got up. “Thank you, Will, for a lovely dinner.” She had eaten almost nothing but managed to move things around on her plate so it looked as if she had.

“Tell him I said to stop,” Ellie said suddenly.

We all turned to her. “I mean it,” she told Clarissa. “Tell him I said I don’t care what it is. I want him to say what he was doing the other night, and who can back him up on it. And I want it now.”

Clarissa eyed her appraisingly. “You know,” she said slowly, “that might actually work.”

But I noticed she didn’t say she would try it. Instead, she stooped to embrace Ellie. “Anyway, I’ll let you know what happens. I will,” she repeated, “do all I can.”

“Best to Bob and his mom.” Ellie’s smile held back a flood of tears. She would weep when she was alone.

In the hallway Clarissa pulled on her coat while Sam and Will began clearing the plates and glasses. Ellie still sat at the dining room table with her fingers pressed to her lips.

“You didn’t sound eager to have us poking at it,” I said to Clarissa. “I mean, in case Ellie’s ultimatum doesn’t work, why not try finding out a little more about what might be going on?”

Clarissa didn’t look at me, pulling a pair of fake-fur-trimmed galoshes onto her feet. “What are you going to find, though? It’s what worries me about Ellie’s idea, too. Think about that while you’re digging around, Jake. I have client confidentiality to fall back on, but given your reputation around here you need to be aware that you’re almost certainly going to be called to testify.”

“Oh.” I took a step back. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Ellie couldn’t be made to testify for the prosecution. She was George’s wife. But I had no such shield. If we found anything that incriminated George further instead of clearing him, I might have to stand up in court and say so.

She went on. “Look, I didn’t want to say this at the table. But he was desperate, Jake. The two of them get along all right on their income, when it
is
just the two of them.”

Out in the kitchen Tommy had begun questioning Will about the caviar. “. . . fish eggs?”

Mutter of assent from Will, as I caught Clarissa’s drift. “But with the baby coming, it’s different,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Kids’re expensive. I ought to know, most of what I earn goes to cover it. Anyway, I’m still hoping I can get him off this without incriminating him in something else. So I think I’ll hold off on Ellie’s idea for a little while.”

Tommy’s voice again, astonished: “
How
much a pound?”

Will replied, “You bet. I just read an article in the paper, some guy tried to bring in about four hundred pounds. But those fish are beluga sturgeon, endangered. The stuff’s restricted. Anyway, the article said the shipment was worth two and a half million.”

Tommy’s amazed intake of breath was audible all the way to the hall, as was what Will said next.

“Now let’s change the subject, okay? It’s not polite to talk about what somebody’s gift is worth,” he added gently.