McMansion (2 page)

The tire tracks rutting the road had been laid down by many deliveries in and dump runs out. And, I suspected, numerous loads of stolen topsoil. It's illegal to strip mine house sites of their topsoil, but builders like Billy Tiller always managed to steal a few hundred yards before some alert citizen called the building inspector.

The many footprints would belong to truck drivers hopping down to roll back a tarp or take a leak, to machine operators, carpenters, immigrant day laborers hired to stack rock, and the building inspector stopping by to cite violations. I though it unlikely that the troopers had plaster castings of a single set of prints guaranteed to send the foolish rich kid they had arrested for the crime away for the rest of his life. Not that they needed them.

When Trooper Moody found him on the machine it was still running and had his fingerprints, in wet paint, on the controls. He had claimed that he panicked when he saw an arm sticking out from under the bulldozer and had tried to move the machine to help the victim.

Trooper Moody had not believed him.

Nor had Connecticut's chief state's attorney, an ambitious fellow who had good reason to hope that a high-profile TV trial would vault the victorious defender of public safety to the head of the pack running for the United States Senate.

Chapter Two

I wasn't the only one who disliked Billy's Newbury Common sign.

Some vandal had spray painted
ELF
on it in big letters. ELF stood for Earth Liberation Front, a secretive, amorphous radical movement that protested the waste and abuse of resources in general—and SUVs and sprawling McMansions in particular—by defacing SUVs and setting fires at McMansion construction sites.

In the same spray hand,
ELF
had been painted on the model house. Someone had also tried to burn it down. But the arsonist had misjudged the force of the weekend rain. The fire had not amounted to much, just some scorch marks, which I duly photographed. Continuing past the model to photograph the sign, I had a sudden, strong feeling I was no longer alone at the construction site.

My so-called sixth sense means one or two of the self-evident five are working overtime. Whether I had heard or seen or smelled something, I knew the direction to look to glimpse motion just inside the tree line behind the model house. I walked quickly toward it, trying to probe the shadows. I thought I saw another flicker. There was a crash of dry leaves and broken branches in the underbrush and I darted forward, running as fast as I could over a hundred yards of bulldozed ground.

When I reached the woods, three deer bounded up the slope, their white tails flashing until they vanished in the tree trunks. I stopped and listened hard. But whatever had crashed through the leaves did not do it again. Another ELF? Or a bear? No deer I'd ever met made that much noise.

I debated searching the woods. But an Earth Liberation radical would have a head start, and I was already winded from my broken field run, while a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black bear in June would be protecting her cubs. So I retreated back to the road and walked down to Billy's Newbury Common sign. I took a picture of it and the “Private” addendum, about which I and numerous other irritable literalists had already written peevish letters to the
Clarion
, reminding Newburians that the “common” was a custom of sharing land that the colonists brought over from England three hundred and eighty years ago, in which a pasture was used and maintained by all. Newbury, like most Connecticut towns, has one. Ours is called the Ram Pasture and represented an early version of “trickle down” economics in which folk of modest means could hope that when they grazed their sheep a rich man's ram cruising the common would leave in his wake a flock of lambs.

Billy knew perfectly well that a common was supposed to be public. He claimed deep New England roots at Planning and Zoning hearings, boasting that Tillers had settled in Newbury two hundred years ago. Therefore, he argued, no one had a right to limit how many houses he could build on his land. In truth, when Billy's ancestors did finally straggle into town from God knows where, Newbury's original settlers had long since planted crops, dammed the river, erected a sawmill and rousted out the French, the Indians, and the British Army.

But while I could not forgive the abuse of our language, I would not have defaced his sign, nor tried to burn his ugly model. I certainly wouldn't have killed him for it. Or even shot him in the leg. Which someone had done a year before the bulldozer got him.

I had witnessed that assault up close—smack in the middle of town—on our historic Main Street, which is lined with marvelous eighteenth and nineteenth century Colonial, Federal, and Greek Revival houses set far back from the road. I happened to be standing about four feet away from Billy explaining, diplomatically I thought, that in an overdue attempt to improve my character I had taken a vow never to sell ugly oversized houses of the sort he built. Granted I had had a Bloody Mary at lunch. Or two. Late breakfast actually, it being Monday, a slow day in my business because Monday is Newbury's day for my competitors to host open house tours of new construction and the weekenders have gone home.

Billy had taken my remarks personally and got all red in the face, and I had thought, Well now I've provoked a very large angry man. I was trying to figure out where to poke him forcefully enough to make him reconsider his options, if I had to, when suddenly out of nowhere bullets started flying.

It was the first gunfire on Main Street since a mail coach driver urging his team Boston-ward with letters for Abigail from President Adams got into a dispute with an ancestor of mine who had come up with the lucrative idea of blocking the road with a toll gate. (A full century and a half before the Bloody Mary was invented.) As muzzle loaders are no longer the weapon of choice, a lot more bullets were flying this time.

Several scattered the windows in Billy's red pickup like rock candy. One parted the hair of a grandmother who happened to be walking her grandchildren to the General Store for ice cream and smacked into one of Town Hall's marble columns. Another ricocheted off the flagpole, the tallest in the state, and ended up embedded in the sturdy front door of a three-hundred-year-old saltbox. Another pierced my Benjamin Abbott Real Estate sign and one of the panes of glass my father had installed to convert our front sun porch into his and now my office. The last caught Billy in the leg, toppling him onto the broad tree lawn that separates the sidewalk from the street.

By long-standing agreement in our very wealthy state, Connecticut drive-by shootings are supposed to be confined to the city limits of downtrodden urban areas, so the State Police Major Crime Unit was soon breathing down Trooper Moody's thick neck. Everyone in Newbury assumed that Billy had ripped off or pissed off someone sufficiently to shoot him in the leg. But the crime squad didn't get any closer to finding that shooter than Ollie had, and they were still investigating a year later when the bulldozer eliminated their shooting victim.

I had heard a rumor in the White Birch that the shooter had actually telephoned Billy in the hospital to demand, indignantly, why Billy had called 911 from his cell phone while lying bleeding in the street, when they could have worked out their dispute in private. The motorcyclists loved that story and sided, to a man, with the caller. Billy told me, however, that it was total bull. He claimed that he didn't know who had shot him. Which I had thought was total bull, too, but none of my business.

The
Clarion
tried to report the shooting but ran out of steam in the second paragraph as neither Ollie nor the Crime Unit could add anything to the obvious and the only witnesses were people like me who recalled little beyond hugging the ground and praying. Undaunted by a paucity of facts, Scooter MacKay, the
Clarion
's publisher, editor, photographer, and ace reporter, fleshed out his story with a laundry list of the crimes that the State of Connecticut was investigating Billy for, which pretty much ran the gamut of things that a greedy, unscrupulous developer can do wrong.

I responded with a cranky Letter to the Editor.

Scooter MacKay has a huge, thunderous voice. We've lived next door to each other since we were born, and when he got home from the newspaper office he leaned out his dining room window and boomed at me crawling around in my perennial border, “Do you really want me to publish this?”

“Yes.” I could have added that it was easier to get a cranky letter to the editor published in Scooter's weekly than the
New York Times
, but we both knew that already.

“But you don't even like Billy.”

“I dislike shoddy newspaper reporting even more than rapacious developers.”

“Shoddy?” Scooter bellowed. “Who are you calling shoddy? You write letters complaining about McMansions, I print them. You write letters grumbling that new rich people are driving middle-class citizens out of town, I print them. You write grouching about gas guzzling SUVs, I print it. Did it ever occur to you to buy an ad?”

“You should pay me for filling all that space in your newspaper.”

Scooter yelled that I would be better off if I took change in stride. “You're too young to be a curmudgeon. Stop mourning youth passing by. Turn your anger into something productive.”

“Anyone with a half a brain should be angry,” I bellowed back.

“Lighten up!” Scooter suggested in a voice that echoed to Frenchtown. “The first cave couple lived in the biggest cave they could afford. Soon as they had reason to hope they might nail a mastodon in the near future, they moved to a bigger cave. People like space. You don't live in a small house. Why should they?”

The noise attracted the neighbors, led by my Great Aunt Constance Abbott, who emerged briskly from her front gate and crossed Main Street with the aid of a silver-headed cane. Well into her nineties, Aunt Connie was not as tall as she had once been, while a lifetime of abstemious habits had left her with so little appetite that she had grown too thin. But she still had a crown of thick white hair and she stood Miss-Porter's-School straight as she listened, briefly, to both sides of the argument.

“Change,” Connie pronounced, “is the only constant in our lives.”

“Yes, but—” Scooter started to agree and I started to dispute.

Connie withered us both with a fiery blue-eyed glance. “Everything changes. For instance, believe it or not I can remember as if it were yesterday a much quieter time in Newbury, before Main Street was paved, when next-door neighbors could conduct a civilized conversation without raising their voices.”

Everyone went home and Scooter, who is an honest man, published my letter.

Not so enormous caliber, it turned out. Mere twenty-twos. And not even the hollowtips used for shooting woodchucks, though it did tear up enough muscle to leave Billy Tiller with a limp.

Was the murderer the same person who shot him last year and figured to use a bulldozer this time just to be on the safe side? If so, why had he waited a whole year to try again?

I took a final look around Newbury Common and snapped some more photos of a self-propelled construction hoist used for lifting plywood and drywall to second floors, and a backhoe beside a utility trench, and the pounded roadbed. I did not harbor CSI fantasies that I would unearth some startling piece of crime-scene evidence the state police investigators had overlooked. But I did want to get some idea of their case, intending to bow out on a helpful note.

Chapter Three

“I don't want to do this,” I told the ELF kid's defense attorney, when we met that afternoon at his horse farm.

Ira Roth cast a contented eye on his green pastures, which were speckled with thoroughbreds and draped with white fences. The farm was so beautiful, so pristine—so kempt—that you just knew looking at it that a thriving law practice was helping the horses pay for it. Ira was a formidable country lawyer in his late sixties, wise, awesomely intelligent, arrogant, and quite intimidating. He had worked for, and against, my father before I was born.

“Why not, Ben?”

“Too personal. I didn't like Billy. I didn't like him at all. Billy Tiller represented everything I hate about the changes in Newbury. He represented greed and its byproducts, which we'll be paying for in our taxes for the rest of our lives.”

“What's new? That was your father's rant back when he was First Selectman. ‘They come, have their kids, drive the mill rate up and leave.'”

“Billy's kind of house represented waste of the worst—”

“No one's asking you to love the murder victim,” Ira interrupted, again. “Just gather the facts we'll need to defend my client.”

“Not liking him will cloud my judgment.”

Ira cracked a smile intended to display his good-humored wit. “I'll deal with the judge. You get the facts.”

“I mis-spoke, Ira. What I'm trying to say is that disliking Billy will diminish my focus. I don't want the job—Here you go. On the house.” I extended an envelope filled with printouts of my photographs, my notes typed up, and a Xerox of my sketch of the death site. I was comfortable with the quality of work the envelope contained. And fairly comfortable with the fact that I had told him the truth, if not the whole truth about why I didn't want the job.

Ira opened the envelope, read my notes line by line the way lawyers do, then looked carefully through the photos, referring repeatedly to the diagram. Ira wasn't telling the whole truth either. He, too, had subtext. At sixty-eight Ira Roth was no less ambitious than he had been at twenty-eight. Rich and famous in our small town—and a titan in the county courthouse—he had always hungered to make it in the Big Apple. His motivation to get the kid off was the contacts in New York City an acquittal would gain him through the kid's powerful father.

“Where are your GPS coordinates?”

“X marks the spot. Between the white oak, the hemlock, and that ledge.”

Ira sighed, “You're too young to be a Luddite.” Then he said, “But you're forgetting one thing.”

“What's that?”

“You owe me.”

People say that all the time. Even if they don't say it, they think it. But in this case, Ira was right. I owed him for a horse.

“The deal,” he reminded me, “was X number of hours of detective work in exchange for a champion racehorse. This—” He closed the envelope. “—is nowhere near the ‘X' we agreed upon.”

“And that ‘champion racehorse' is nowhere near Sea Biscuit.”

He was a big stallion named Redman who had actually won a few races, a decade ago, though not often enough to command a stud fee from any mare's owner who considered consistency an attribute worth breeding for. So Redman was spending his late middle age next door in Scooter's barn, eating.

Ira's smile went out like a vandalized street light. “I'm calling in my marker, Ben. When you needed a horse, I got you a horse. Now I need something in return. More field work. I need interviews with each and every one of the victim's enemies. People mad enough to kill him. I want those interviews conducted by a man with local knowledge, a man who knows everything going on in this town and everyone in it, a man whom people know and respond to—and trust, despite certain elements, shall we say, of your past. Worst case, we'll raise some doubt in the jurors' minds. Best case, we'll spook the State's Attorney into reducing the charges. Best-best case you'll provoke the guilty party into a confession.”

I returned a look as dubious as that deserved.

Ira ignored it.

I asked, “Who's in his will? Who inherits?”

“I don't handle his affairs anymore. He switched it all to Total Landscape's attorney. Last I saw it went to his wife, but that was before the divorce.”

“Maybe he left it all to a lap dancer married to a homicidal bulldozer operator.”

“I'll see if I can find when they're going to read the will. But your job, first thing tomorrow, before the interviews, I need my client's father handled properly. ‘Properly' includes convincing the high-powered, impatient gentleman that he has hired the best criminal attorney money can buy to defend his son.”

I handed him another envelope.

“What's this?”

“Money for the horse.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “Where'd you get it?”

“I'm doing fine.”

Ira shrugged. “There's so much money around at the moment, I guess even an orangutan could earn a living selling real estate.”

“I've seen several driving Lexuses.”

He sighed happily. “I love boom-times money. Those who possess it think it's because they're deserving or intelligent—often both. I've got more work than I can handle defending clients who should have known better. And people are coming out here to buy horses at prices to rival Kobe beef.” He nodded at his long, fence-lined driveway and sure enough, up it came a Cadillac Escalade towing a horse trailer. “That fool has no clue that he is towing an announcement that he will meet my price just to take the animal home with him this afternoon. Let these good times roll.”

“Yet another reason I don't want this job. I've got tons of work down on the Gold Coast.”

“Divorce work?” he asked, nose wrinkling.

“I don't do divorce.”

“Why not?”

“I don't feel like videotaping couples who happen to like each other more than they like their spouses.”

“The money's in divorce.”

“Actually, there's better money in pre-divorce.”

“What the hell is pre-divorce?”

“Checking out prospective spouses. Is the guy the ‘international executive' he claims he is? Is her Mensa membership genuine? Is his S-Class Mercedes leased, borrowed, or stolen? Is her Jag a gift from Daddy or her lover? Is he still living with his mother?”

“Sounds you should take down your real estate sign.”

“The sign's been there a long time, Ira. When the old locals sell, they want an Abbott to handle it.”

Pursuing multiple livings was a old tradition in hardscrabble New England. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Abbotts had often farmed on the side, while selling or teaching or preaching. When a congregation rebelled or grew bored, there was always the plow. Scooter McKay's great-grandfather kept pigs after he founded the
Clarion
, secure in pork chops if an editorial offended advertisers. So does the second arrow in my quiver allow me the freedom to pick and choose the old-fashioned houses I prefer to sell and investigations I find compelling.

For that matter, Ira knew darned well that his own father had supported the pro bono side of his law practice by lending money and buying land. Although in the old man's case his lending often turned into giving, and he bequeathed most of his acreage to the Land Trust. Ira had not inherited the generosity gene. His attention shifted back to the horse trailer. He stood up and shoved my envelope back at me. “A deal's a deal, Ben.”

“I know that a deal is a deal, Ira. All I'm doing is offering to change the terms if you'll agree.”

“Keep your money. Detective hours for a horse. Your detective hours.”

“Why are you insisting?”

“I want it done right.”

“Okay,” I said. A deal was a deal.

“You can start by going down to New York, tomorrow, and getting his dad off my back.”

***

I drove home to Main Street and went out to Scooter's barn, squeezing through the hedge that separates our long, narrow yards to see if the damned animal needed anything. But he was busy, giving a ride around the paddock I had built for that purpose to my young neighbor Alison Mealy.

Alison and her mother lived in the old stable hand's apartment over my barn, which was why the horse resided in Scooter's. Alison's mom cleaned houses for a living and helped out at Main Street dinner parties. Alison, who was twelve, had a missing drunk for a father and me for a friend. She's a skinny little child, but blessed with a superb physicality that put her completely in charge of a horse big enough to kill her if he felt like it. I admired her. I liked watching her flourish. She made me feel useful. Not that I did much. All she needed was a trustworthy adult to take notice of her. I could do that.

“Thank God you're here,” Alison called. “Tom's hungry and I've got to stay with Redman 'til he learns this jump.”

“Maybe he doesn't feel like learning to jump. He's older than you are.”

“He's not old he's just lazy.” She patted his head, growled in his ear, “Come on, you misery!” and dug her heels in. Redman obliged with a desultory shamble and actually cleared the hay bale she aimed him at. “Good! You beautiful horse. Good. Good….Ben, Tom really is hungry.”

“I'll get right on it. Where is he?”

“In your kitchen.”

“Can anyone explain to me why your horse's mascot”—a barn cat that came with Redman because it is supposed to be the calmative stable-mate of a high-strung thoroughbred—“spends so much time in my house?”

“He likes you, Ben.”

I squeezed back through the hedge and joined Tom in my kitchen. I put down clean newspaper, opened a can, forked “Mixed Grill” onto an old glass dish, put it down in front of him, and stepped back quickly.

***

I had an e-mail from one of the franchise brokers asking to show a house I had an exclusive on and which I knew she only wanted to show to demonstrate to her corporately moved client how much better her just-built modern McMansions were than an “authentic New England Antique.” She had a point, if you liked spa-size bathrooms, “gourmet-chef-delight-granite-islanded” kitchens, and a “Costco room” for storing your bargains in bulk more than you liked old gardens, low ceilings, chestnut floors people had polished for three hundred years, and a fireplace in every small room.

Delete.

Then I remembered she was kind of cute, and raising two children on her ill-gotten gains, so I retrieved it from Recently Deleted and replied, “Be my guest. But please make them take their shoes off because it's still the sellers' home.”

I also had several pointless “just touching base” voice mail messages from clients who were afraid to be alone with their cell phones. Delete. Delete. Delete. I had a happy message from a guy who had secured a mortgage for the Barlowe cottage in the Borough that I had showed him. I had an even happier message from a Greenwich couple: their (substantial) check was in the mail for establishing that their daughter's reticent fiancé was neither a fortune hunter nor a child molester, but a wealthy venture capitalist who enjoyed his privacy. And I had a message from Ira's client's father's secretary: lunch at the Yale Club of New York City at one tomorrow.

I went up to the attic, found a suit, a white shirt, and a necktie and hung them on the back porch to air the mothballs. I located a pair of Aldens and buffed them to a quiet sheen and searched out some socks to go with them. I went on line to check the MetroNorth schedule. Wanting a drink, I settled for opening a bottle of rosé and re-heating the second half of last night's osso buco.

In bed I had scary dreams. Huge animals—bulldozer surrogates, of course—chased me in circles until I sprang awake with a pounding heart. I calmed down eventually, but stayed awake, worrying about things. First came money, which I had too much of lately. Last time that had happened I had ended up in trouble; if, as Ira suggested, money confused, huge money confused hugely. I worried about screw-ups I'd precipitated; women I had alienated. I even worried about the future, which used to spring up each morning cheerfully as the sun. Not so much mine, but the world's, or more specifically the town's. Newbury was changing, as was the world, shifting in a crass direction I did not like. I felt myself growing sour and I didn't like that either. I missed seeing the future spring up each morning cheerfully as the sun.

I thought about Billy Tiller's killer and was surprised to feel fear.

I'd certainly known a few killers. More than most people, having served time at Leavenworth—the penalty for a youth misspent on Wall Street—and before that serving my country in the U.S. Navy, where I'd met naturals who had managed to stay out of prison by enlisting as close-combat instructors. I had even bumped into one or two right here in Newbury. But if this guy had really meant to do what he did with the bulldozer, grinding Bill's body to pulp, he presented a picture of a man not so much cold-blooded as no-blooded. Someone who resided in a far beyond where ordinary people were not encouraged to stay or even visit.

But could this be the same guy who shot Billy last year?

Tough call. On one hand, shooters are remote types. On the other, he had sprayed a lot of bullets at Billy and a crowd of innocent bystanders that day. Had he pumped the trigger as frantically as he had erased Billy's body with the bulldozer? Or as coldly?

I voted for cold. How “frantic” could he have been while handling the machine as skillfully as he had? If I guessed right that Billy had scrambled under the cutting edge and hid under the moving machine when it caught up with him, then the act of plunging the ripper into him was the act of a very collected, calm, cool guy. Exactly how difficult—how much skill required—was a question I should have asked Sherman Chevalley.

And why, I wondered, was I so sure the guy was a guy? Mostly because I hadn't met any female bulldozer operators, I supposed, which suggested certain limitations on my part. Male or female, I realized—while the sights I'd photographed in the afternoon bubbled before my eyes—I didn't like this person one bit, feared him or her, and felt repulsed.