Mallets Aforethought (7 page)

Wade nodded. “Guys were prepared. Scallop season coming, no one wants to be out of action during the earning time.”

But despite my precautions, Tommy had overheard plenty. And not for him the indirect angle when full-bore would serve. “Is George in trouble about Mr. Gosling?” he wanted to know.

Wade answered him frankly. “George could end up in trouble if he doesn’t come up with a good explanation of where he’s been and what he’s been doing for the past couple of days. But he just doesn’t want to, and unfortunately that’s probably going to make them suspect him.”

Wade believes that the truth shall make you free, while I tend more toward the well-balanced portfolio, healthy cash flow, and a decent credit record as instruments of liberation.

A shadow passed over Tommy’s face, replaced by indignation. “That’s nuts,” he declared. “George wouldn’t—”

“All this will be straightened out soon,” I assured him.

“Yeah.” But he didn’t sound the least bit convinced. Then, “Hey, you know what?” He made a show of looking at his watch. “I gotta go. I just remembered I told my mom I’d help her, uh, clean out the refrigerator.”

Sure, that was it. The phone rang, diverting me from what I had been about to reply: that Tommy shouldn’t flimflam me, that I’d been flimflammed by the best and could see it coming a mile away. But later I was glad I hadn’t said it.

Because I couldn’t and didn’t.

“A
search
warrant?” I repeated in disbelief. It was Ellie on the phone and she sounded more distressed than I’d ever heard her before. “Ellie, are you sure?”

Wade frowned over to where I sat in the telephone alcove.

“But I thought . . .” I went on.

What?
he mouthed, and I waved him off.

“So did I,” Ellie told me, her voice shaking. “That they were going to give George time. But with all the media attention—oh, God, there’s a satellite van outside the house—I guess they had to do it right away.”

So much for Colgate’s help. I guessed the news vans and his bosses must’ve arrived simultaneously. And publicity plus bosses never spelled anything but C-Y-P.

Cover Your Posterior. Thus the decision would’ve been taken out of Colgate’s hands. “They’re there now?”

“Yes,” she said miserably. “Tearing through everything. They wanted to know where George has been working . . .”

So they would come soon enough upon Cory Williams and his pigs. And the poison. “Listen,” I said, “call Clarissa Arnold and . . . no, wait, she’s probably out of town.”

Clarissa had been a prosecutor before moving to Eastport and switching to the defense side of her profession, so she was good at quashing the high-handed notions of police bosses. But she was also married to our police chief, Bob Arnold, and would probably be in Kennebunk now helping tend to Bob’s sick mother.

“Will tried her,” Ellie confirmed. “He’s here with George, thank God. But yes, her answering service says she’s away.”

“We’ll find her,” I said. “Where else will they search?”

“I’m not sure. The truck, definitely, because they wanted to know where it was. They’re going there, to the repair lot at the Mobil station, after they’ve finished in here and with the shed.”

A mental picture of George’s inner sanctum rose in my mind: a trim little wood-frame structure behind his house, furnished with a pot-bellied stove, a workbench, and all his tools.

“Are they going to impound the truck,” I asked, “or search it there?”

“I don’t know,” she responded distractedly. Then her voice moved away. “Please, you don’t have to . . . Jake, it’s awful. Now they’re going through the baby’s things.”

She was nearly in tears. I could only assume they had George outside, since otherwise he’d be after them with a brickbat.

“Ellie, listen to me. You let them search. Don’t do anything and don’t say anything. Just wait for us.”

The boys were in the kitchen. Tommy must’ve realized the call was about George and stuck around. From their faces I could tell he and Sam had figured out what was going on and didn’t like it. Tommy in particular looked ready to weep.

“. . . come with you,” I heard Sam say to him, but he shook Sam off and went out alone, his expression grim.

Wade pulled his jacket on. “We’ll be there in a minute,” I told Ellie.

With,
I wanted to add,
our own brickbats.
But by the time we reached George and Ellie’s snug little cottage overlooking the water, the searchers had entered the shed. There they’d found a can of powder. Helpfully marked POISON, its label emblazoned with skull and crossbones, it was immediately taken into evidence.

“It’s been there for weeks,” Ellie told me shakily. “George got it from Cory Williams, Cory wanted him to use it on the rats. George never really liked the idea but Cory kept at him so George finally got it over with, because Cory pays.”

And of course George hadn’t felt able to turn down honest work, or to tell Cory Williams how it should be done, either. If Cory wanted it some other way—a way for instance that included not having to buy a new substance—well, he was the customer. So George had used what Cory asked him to use and gotten on with the job.

Ellie’s fingers laced worriedly together. “George was going to give it back to Cory as soon as they were sure the stuff really got rid of the rats. He didn’t want it around here, not even out in the shed, once the baby came.”

It had been around, though, and that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst, or so I believed at the time, was when one of the warrant officers asked Ellie where George had been the night before, and she couldn’t tell him.

“I went up to bed early last night,” she began, controlling her voice with an effort. “He must’ve come in late. I didn’t hear him. He’s at work till eleven or later sometimes,” she added.

She took a deep breath. “And when I got up this morning he was gone again. Out on another job already.”

She didn’t know what job. The police had already spoken with Cory Williams and learned that George hadn’t gotten there until around nine. She only knew that in order not to disturb her, he’d spent the night downstairs.

He must have slept, she told them, on the daybed in the kitchen. He hadn’t made coffee before he left, though, and there had been no pillows or blankets in evidence.

“He could have gotten his coffee at the convenience store. And George would make his bed, not leave it for me,” she parried.

But when asked to say for sure that he’d been home at all the previous night, she couldn’t. Whereupon a disbelieving George was put in handcuffs, informed of his rights, and driven away.

Then
came the worst part.

“Let her talk it out,” said my ex-husband Victor Tiptree. “I don’t want to sedate her and she wouldn’t let me, anyway.”

I’d called him while the officers were still handcuffing George, and to his credit he’d come over at once. Now he tucked his stethoscope back into his bag, his hands moving precisely as befitted a brilliant brain surgeon, even one who’d given it all up for a remote general practice.

“And the baby’s all right too?” I asked Victor.

“Absolutely. No reason it wouldn’t be. Ellie’s vital signs certainly aren’t showing strain. Girl’s got a constitution like a sixteen-year-old.”

Which was only a bit younger than I was when I had Sam, and I don’t remember feeling sixteen in the days before our son appeared. More like a hundred and sixteen.

“Changed your mind about the CPR class?” Victor inquired mildly. Trust him to get a zing in, whatever the situation. “Sam says you forgot,” he added. “Maybe on purpose?”

I swallowed a retort:
The way you forgot you had a wife and baby son, back when you had so many girlfriends it was all you could do to keep track?

If Victor had carved notches in his bedposts he’d have ended up sleeping on toothpicks. But I refrained; he’d come when I called, tonight, and done what was needed. And nowadays that was enough.

Mostly. “Finding the dead bodies was a distraction, Victor.” Never mind that I’d forgotten his class
before
we found them, or that Victor’s analysis was perilously close to being on target.

“Sorry if I missed a pearl of wisdom,” I went on. I keep the peace as much as I can, but there’s no statute of limitations on postmarital vengefulness. “We’ll be there next week.”

“Tomorrow,” he corrected briskly. “What with the storm, so many couldn’t come that I rescheduled it. I’ve called everyone.”

So the class would be held on a Sunday morning, and never mind whether the change suited anyone else. If I had as much self-assuredness in my whole body as he does in his little finger, I would be Genghis Khan by now.

On the other hand, there’s not much worse than an insecure brain surgeon. “Fine,” I replied.

We were standing in Ellie’s kitchen with its green enameled woodstove, bright woven rugs, and big oak table with a pitcher of red rose hips at the center of it. Ranged on the windowsills were a dozen quilted-glass jars of grape jelly, glowing royal purple.

“Nice,” Victor remarked, glancing around. He looked just like Sam: same hazel eyes, lantern jaw, and confidential you’re-the-only-one-in-my-world smile. Sometimes that smile was the only thing that kept me from killing Victor, because Sam had it too.

A basket of kindling stood by the stove, a pine rocker and low footstool pulled up in front of it. Tucked into one corner was the white enameled daybed with a quilt spread on it. “I ought to try something like this,” Victor said.

Victor’s kitchen, in the big white Greek Revival house just down the street from mine, was about as cozy as the inside of a refrigerator. He paid ready lip service to style and comfort but rattled around his own old place like a marble in a box, trying and failing to solve the mystery of ordinary human-beingness.

Which was the other reason I didn’t kill him: that he tried. From the table he picked up the papers the police had questioned Ellie about before they left.

“This,” he said, “is strange.”

I’d put the place back together from the mess the searchers had made of it. The baby’s room, newly painted in pale yellow and white, smelled of garlic and tobacco; I had opened a window.

“Right,” I said. “It’s what’s upset her most, I think.”

Me too. I kept trying to understand those papers: that because of them everything was suddenly so much worse than I’d thought. Ellie’s voice went on from the parlor: quietly, but the edge of hysteria in it was audible.

“Does it mean what it looks like?” Victor asked.

“I suppose so.”

“Then how could they not . . . ?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

Together the pages comprised a copy of the last will and testament, prepared by a Bangor law firm, of Paula Valentine, George’s recently deceased aunt. Jan Jesperson was listed as executor. The envelope they’d come in was postmarked a few days earlier.

The warrant officers said they had found two copies of the document in George’s shed, and they’d taken one with them, Ellie insisting she’d never seen either copy before. Now I searched through the pages again, hoping I’d been wrong the first time I read them.

As I did so Will Bonnet came into the kitchen, poured a cup of mint tea from the pot on a trivet atop the stove, and returned to the parlor to offer it to Ellie.

“Come on, hon,” I heard him telling her solicitously. “Drink a little of this.”

Will was a kind man, I thought distractedly; his own elderly relative was lucky to have him. “It means,” I told Victor, “that Gosling and Jan Jesperson didn’t quite get the last laugh.”

Not that it was any consolation now.

The opposite, in fact. “So all this legal stuff about trusts and predeceased and so on . . .”

“Victor,” I cut in impatiently, “it means that George inherits everything. His aunt left her estate in trust to Hector Gosling but only for so long as Hector lived. After that . . .”

After that it belonged to George. And if what I’d gathered about his aunt’s net worth was true, it was a jackpot.

Her house was a gorgeously restored Victorian overlooking the harbor, with a fabulous bay view. Every tradesman in town had drunk from the well of its never-ending maintenance: plumbers and landscapers, painters and roofers, electricians and purveyors of custom-built windows, to name but a few.

And Paula paid in cash, which she’d gotten by unloading about a zillion acres of timberland back when the paper companies were buying instead of selling it. So there’d be liquid assets, too.

“You know,” Victor said, “this might not look so good.”

Like I said: a brain surgeon. “Right, and if he hung a sign around his neck saying ‘I did it,’ that probably wouldn’t look so good either.”

Because if George had known about this will before Hector died, he’d had a far better motive for murder than I’d feared.

Victor picked up his medical bag. “Look, I doubt Ellie will need me any more tonight. Call if she does. And . . .”

He eyed me suspiciously. “You did,” he added thinly, “manage to remember to tell Sam you’d signed him up for the class?”

Ah, yes; there was the Victor we all knew and loved. If he hadn’t bought his own house he could’ve moved into a wasp’s nest. The other wasps would never have known the difference.

“I told him.” It’s amazing how well you can speak and bite your tongue at the same time, when you have as much practice as I do. “And Victor,
you
remember. You’re not to talk about this.”

As it was, the news of George’s arrest would be a sensation and Ellie would be facing it soon enough.

He frowned. “You must think I’m a fool.”

I smiled sweetly at him. “Thanks for coming. Really, Victor, it was awfully good of you. I appreciate it.”

Sam says Victor is like an English muffin: butter lightly. Mollified, he went out into the darkness.

Standing in the doorway while he got into his car, I watched a skunk shuffling among the trash cans. George hadn’t had time to bring the cans in before the police took him. Victor’s headlights showed the skunk trundling away; George was so tidy, there wasn’t a meal for a housefly in those cans.