McMansion (3 page)

I went downstairs for a drink.

On the landing I thought, early day tomorrow. Do I want to go to New York feeling like garbage? I didn't want to go at all. Would a hangover make it feel any better? I could sleep it off on the train. But first I had to drive to the train and I'd be lucky to sleep an hour before it pulled into Grand Central. So I turned around and climbed the stairs to my bed celebrating a small victory.

***

One way to predict the weather in Newbury, some say the only way, is to schedule a trip away from town. That day is guaranteed to dawn sunny and clear-aired, with low humidity, a crisp northwest breeze, and an intense quality to the light that will thrust those who stay toward their camera, their oil paints, their gardening tools, a ball game, or their hammock. On such a morning I drove down to Purdys, New York, took the first parking spot I found, a mile from the station, and boarded the train to the city where I had enjoyed exciting years after the Navy, and ultimately destroyed my life. Or, at least, changed it.

The train ride south toward Manhattan was like entering a funnel. It started in open land where northern Westchester enjoyed a great spread of blue reservoirs, rushing streams, broad swamps, and the green backsides of private estates. But soon a piece of estate land, marked by grand old trees, had been taken to build a school. Soon after, condos appeared through the trees, creeping closer and closer to the tracks the further south we went. A river bed was captured in a trench beside the rails. Suddenly an auto body shop came in view, a jarring sight surrounded by fenders, bumpers, and crumbling old houses; seconds later a street with new houses and old houses being fixed up. I saw a car dumped in a stream, a factory with fading paint, a warehouse with broken windows, some rusty backhoes, rail yards, and suddenly the shiny office towers at White Plains and an expensive-looking, high-rise glass condo topped with a sign that read, “If you lived here you'd be home now.”

Now came the tight little downtowns of old neighborhoods that had once been villages, red brick tenements and apartment buildings, and more factories. A sudden green break marked the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, then walls of old factories converted to storage facilities, factories advertising space, factories offering plastic, leather, iron work, a strip club, then homeless men sorting glass and metal in a recycling dump on the East River. Across a girder bridge and into Manhattan with a brief glimpse of midtown, the Chrysler Building shining. A gridwork of tenements, and just past the 125th Street station the train slipped underground and ran the last eleven minutes in a dark tunnel that ended in Grand Central Terminal.

My consolation for leaving home was that on such a beautiful day New York was gorgeous, too, and as I walked across Vanderbilt to the Yale Club I hoped that my host would choose an outdoor terrace table at the restaurant on the roof.

Mr. Kimball was waiting in the restaurant, I was told by the hall porter, who directed me to the elevator. I shared it with a quartet of lovely Ivy League lawyers who I gathered from their conversation were heading upstairs to celebrate trouncing the U.S. Attorney in court that morning. They were younger than I thought lawyers should be and far more attractive than I thought lawyers could be, and I found myself wondering where my life would be now if I had met them back when. Except that back then they'd still have been at Yale. Or in high school.

I worked up a good smile as I entered the restaurant, and scanned the room while I waited for the lawyers to be seated. Before the maitre d' returned, I knew I'd be eating indoors. Mr. Kimball had to be the tight-lipped, full-of-himself businessman seated with his back to the wall like a gunfighter. The maitre d' walked me straight to him. He did not stand up when I introduced myself. That made him a peasant in my book, and I did not offer my hand. But I kept smiling because if I was going to do right by Ira Roth, I had better look confident.

“What do you think of the kid?” he asked without preamble.

“I've not met your son.”

“You haven't met him? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I'm here at your invitation.”

Mr. Kimball gave me an unpleasant look. “I would have thought you'd make the effort to visit the kid in jail. Get his side of the story.”

A wise shrink, who had helped me when I needed it, once told me that hotshot business types share essential personality traits with psychopaths. She explained that a high opinion of one's own magnificence, manipulation in the service of greed, and an inability to care about, much less notice, fellow members of the human race will not derail a career. Only when expressed physically are such character flaws judged criminal.

No longer smiling, though still confident, I said, “I decided that it would be more helpful to your son if I got the cops' side first.”

He didn't like that, but finally got smart enough to say, “I don't see any profit in telling you how to do your job.”

“Soon, I will interview your son—which of course Attorney Roth has already done.”

“What do you think of his story?”

“Until I discover otherwise, I'm assuming he's telling the truth.”

He said, “At first, I couldn't believe how stupid he was to get caught sitting on the machine. But when I went out there to the site I saw how isolated it was. I tried to put myself in his position. All alone, coming upon such a horrible sight, wanting to help, panicking….”

“You went there?” I asked.

“I had to see it.”

“Why?”

“Listen, Abbott. All that you and Roth have to do is create doubt. Reasonable doubt that the kid didn't kill that man. That's all we need.”

Clearly, he thought his kid did the crime. If it troubled him to regard his son as a murderer, he didn't show it. And what he said next indicated that as far as he was concerned the trial was nothing more or less than a contest to be won.

“I hired Roth because he's got a winning track record. What I want you to do is comb the entire goddamned county up there for doubts. They've got no witnesses to the actual crime. Find somebody else who might have done the crime. Find somebody else who wanted to do the crime. Doubt! All we need is doubt.”

“Attorney Roth has already given me those instructions.”

“Well I'm giving you them too. And I'll pay a bonus for every seed of doubt you find. Fair enough?”

“Ira's already paying me.”

“Well I'm going to pay you to try harder.”

“I appreciate your concern for your son. But I don't do things halfway. You don't have to pay me to serve Ira any better than I would without your paying me.”

“Mr. Abbott, stop being high and mighty! And stop pretending to be dense. If I have to fire Roth, I don't want to start from scratch with a new investigator. I want copies of all your reports to him.”

“If it's all right with Ira, you're welcome to them. If not, then you're not.”

“In that case, I'll fire him this instant and hire you on the spot.”

I stood up. “That would put your son at terrible risk. You won't find a better defense lawyer in Connecticut than Ira Roth, as you already figured out. And if you bring in New York lawyers, the judge will roast them alive. Slowly.”

He surprised me with a brisk smile. “Where are you going? You haven't had lunch. Come on, sit down. I'm just mouthing off. I'm wired about this mess. Fucking kid.”

I sat. He reached for the order chit and picked up the pencil. “What would you like?”

“I'll have one of your club's famous martinis. Vodka. Twist. Straight up.”

He said, “I'd join you, except I've got to go back to work.”

I figured I had already done a very good day's work. And it wasn't even one thirty.

He transformed into a thoughtful host, ordering a plate of dim sum to accompany my martini. We both decided upon Cobb salad for lunch and chatted amiably until the drink came. “Cheers—I say ‘fucking kid,' but he's had a tough time. The divorce—just at the wrong age. And then all those years living with his mother, who is a piece of work.”

He gazed longingly at my delicious drink. “It was not a friendly divorce. Knock down, drag out. And I came out of it the villain in the kid's eyes. Are you married, Ben?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“Never.”

He looked at me a moment, wondering why. With two more martinis in me, and a couple in him, I might have admitted that I regretted having foolishly blown not one, but two splendid opportunities.

“I gotta tell you, it's been nine years since I split and there hasn't been a morning yet I don't wake up smiling, Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty free at last.”

I offered the requisite rueful head shake.

Kimball said, “But the kid paid the price of my escape.”

Three sips down, I felt sufficiently magnanimous to say, “Well, we all get through this stuff in the end.”

He said, “The kid's big problem is that I became pretty well off after the settlement….Wealthy, I mean. I was paying big alimony and big child support. They're comfortable enough. But after the settlement, a project I'd been involved in hit big and I went from a guy who was doing better every year to…well, a rich guy. Only way to put it. I mean, I was a scholarship student, working summers in construction, and now I've got a penthouse and a house in the islands, and a country estate in Fairfield County. I bought there—Newtown?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“—thinking I'd be nearer the kid, but he never comes. Bought him his own Jeep. When I was his age all my old man ever gave me was a piece of free advice: put the beer can between your legs when you're driving through a toll booth.”

That seemed sensible, as far as it went.

“Ira Roth mentioned you were in the music business.” Along with being a big political donor with friends in New York.

“We've morphed into fashion. Getting tough to make money in music, but there's a fortune in street clothes.”

“What kind of music?”

“Hip hop.”

Which would not have been my first guess. He was white—pale, blue-eyed white—not black, ethnic, nor even vaguely exotic. No ponytail. No unshaven grizzled cheek. No earring. His dark suit would have made an accountant yawn. And while he was wearing an interesting necktie, I was willing to bet it had been chosen by a young girlfriend in an attempt to keep her friends from giggling.

“What I'm saying, Ben, is this—the kid may be troubled, he may be a slacker, he may be a college dropout, but he is not a killer.”

“Trooper Moody, our state trooper, apparently told the state's attorney that there was bad blood between your son and Billy Tiller.”

“That came as news to me.” Kimball closed his fist and pressed it hard on the tablecloth, reminding me of yet another quality often shared by successful businessmen and psychopaths: charm as readily conjured as it was superficial. The gloves were off, again. We had returned to the purpose of my summons to New York. “Doubt, Abbott. Doubt. You will create doubt.”

Chapter Four

“Where'd you learn to drive bulldozers?” I asked, after they locked us in the interview room.

Jeffrey Kimball was a skinny twenty-one-year-old, lost in an oversize jailhouse running suit. He wore glasses and a hangdog expression that suited his circumstances. Actually, he looked less hang dog than equal parts resigned and relieved. Common emotions for many prisoners, relieved of having to act and make decisions.

He had a soft voice. I could barely hear the answer to my question. “I was studying landscape design and I wanted to earn money? So Dad got me into the union.”

A bright idea shot down. But he just didn't look like a bulldozer operator, so it had seemed reasonable to ask. I thought of something else reasonable to ask. “Were you good at it?”

“The teacher told me I was pretty hot.”

Wonderful, I thought. “How well did you know Billy Tiller?”

A jaw that up until now had appeared a little weak hardened perceptibly. He reached inside his orange top to scratch an itch. I was surprised by a glimpse of the ropey muscles of a mountain climber. Not as skinny as he first appeared.

“How well did you know Billy?”

“I only met him once.”

“Trooper Moody told the prosecutor that you had some sort of a set-to five or six years ago.”

“Yeah. I took a swing at him.”

I sat up straighter. Ropey mountain climber muscles or not, Billy must have outweighed Jeff by a hundred and fifty pounds. It would be like me taking a swing at my cousin Pinkerton Chevalley, who occasionally entertained his friends at the White Birch by bench pressing a Harley Davidson.

“I'm surprised you're still among the living.”

He shrugged.

“What happened?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“How old were you then?”

“Fifteen.”

“How did Trooper Moody find out?”

“My mother filed a complaint.”

I was curious why I hadn't heard about this. It was the kind of story that got around. Although, of all of Billy's well-deserved legal troubles, no one ever mentioned any kind of assault charges. Despite his size he was the classic nonviolent con man.

“Jeff, it could help us both if you would tell me what happened.”

“Why?”

“I would like to know how the prosecutor might use it against you.”

“They can't.”

“Why not.”

“Juvenile court. Sealed records.”

“How did it get into juvenile court?”

“When my mother filed a complaint Billy Tiller and Eddie Edwards pressed charges.”

“For what?”

“Assault.”

“One fifteen-year-old against two grown men?”

“They said I attacked them with an ax.”

I looked at him. “Did you?”

“No!” He shook his head vigorously. “But they said I did….Their word against mine.”

“But you said you took a swing at him. What kind of swing?”

“I only tried to punch him.”

“Why?”

“I was really bummed,” he said with a single-minded sense of black-and-white reality that I would have associated with a younger kid. Before I asked why he was bummed, I said, “I'm having trouble picturing a fifteen-year-old boy throwing a punch at two grown men.”

“It wasn't two men.”

“I thought you said there were two.”

That earned me a look that asked, are you too stupid to talk and breathe at the same time? “Mr. Edwards wasn't there.”

“You just said—

“Mr. Edwards wasn't there. They only said that later when they lied about the axe.”

“Mr. Edwards wasn't there? Why did he say he was? He have something against you?”

“He worked for Billy. Who do you think paid him?”

“Billy Tiller was not Eddie Edwards' only client.”

“I don't know about that. All I know is he worked for Billy and he lied. It was just Billy and me out in the woods. Or what used to be woods.”

“What woods?”

“Behind my mother's place.”

The only “woods” I knew behind Jeff's mother's house was a mind-numbingly ugly subdivision named Tiller Woods. Billy had built it on an overgrown farm he had inherited from a bachelor uncle. It had been his first development and it was everything you could hate about a subdivision, tiny lots crowded with big houses, vinyl siding, oversize garages facing the street, and every tree on the property laid waste. (I had actually entered it in the Connecticut Board of Realtors' Ugliest-Neighborhood-in-the-State contest, an informal, unpublicized event held in the basement bar of the Yankee Drover. It lost, narrowly, to a New Milford neighborhood that boasted a defunct paper mill.)

But for Billy, at least, it was beautiful. His uncle's bequest had vaulted him out of a career that had ranged from assistant septic tank cleaner to automotive repair shop manager famous for “changing” his customers' oil with other customers' oil, thus saving the expense of buying new oil and disposing of the old. Tiller Woods had made him rich because even a wolverine could make a ton of money building houses on free land.

“Are you talking about Tiller Woods?”

Jeff's jaw set again and he got a fiery gleam in his eye. For the first time I saw him as his father's son. Not necessarily the sociopath-businessman, but a kid who would mature into a man tough enough to take what he wanted.

“I grew up in those woods,” he said. “I could run out the back door and disappear. I used to camp in there. Sometimes I'd just go out and watch the animals come to the pond. Once a big weasel came down a silver birch to drink and he didn't see me until he was this close, like you and me. And he stopped and he looked me in the eye, stared, like he was saying, ‘If you want to fight, we'll fight. Unless you'd rather sit there quietly. Either way, fine with me.' He was absolutely fearless…Sometimes I'd build a fire and cook a burger—you know, like wrapped in tinfoil and you throw it in the coals? Old Mr. Tiller, he didn't mind. He didn't farm anymore and it was all overgrown, thick. I never went near his house or anything. And then he died and all of sudden fat Billy Tiller and Mr. Edwards were stomping around and then the surveyors came and there were plastic tapes blowing in the wind. Fucking blue and red tapes. The color of destruction. And then one day, my birthday, Billy drove in on a big D-10 and just tore it apart.”

Tears welled up in the kid's eyes and trickled down his sunken cheeks.

I looked away to give him some privacy. Then I asked, “Was that when you got interested in the Earth Liberation Front?”

“I already knew about ELF. In school, we had checked out their website, found chat rooms. I mean I didn't need Billy Tiller to prove to me that this whole damn country treats the environment like an ATM machine. Rip it off and you get free money. But I gotta say, it was one thing reading ELF postings, but a lot worse seeing the enemy in action right behind my own house.” And then, just in case Jeff Kimball had not admitted enough motive to give the state's attorney anecdotes to dine out on at the next lethal-injection seminar, he said, swiping fresh tears from his eyes, “I hated that fat bastard so much.”

“So why did you climb on the machine?”

“I told my father's lawyer. I told the cops.” He was tired. He just wanted to go back to his cell.

“Could you tell me, please?”

“I saw his arm. Like his mackinaw? No blood or anything. Just a arm in a coat, like your arm or my arm. So I jumped on to drive it off him. It was still running. But the second I got her in gear I thought, wait a minute, which way?”

“Which way?”

“Which way do I go? So I don't hurt him.” His voice got stronger. More adult. “And then reality set in. It was horrible. Blood was seeping out of the sleeve. And my brain goes, whoa, I've got to find some way to lift it off him. We need machines. We need a heavy-lift crane. I was just turning on my cell phone to call 911 when Trooper Moody came up the drive.”

“Did you actually dial 911?”

“No, I was still waiting for a signal. Why?”

“The cellular server should have a record that you dialed.”

“Trooper Moody came before I got a signal.”

“Wait a minute. You said you were waiting for the signal. Did you actually turn the phone on?”

“Well, yeah. How do you think I knew there was no signal?”

I didn't answer that it seemed like an easy story to make up. But I wondered would the cellular company have a record of Jeffrey simply turning his phone on. It just might help as circumstantial evidence that the kid was trying to call for help. I asked him what cell phone service he used. Mine hadn't reached down there, but his might.

And then, as I was leaving and the guard was taking his arm, I flashed on an image of Billy's mackinaw-clad arm sticking out from under the machine. “Jeff? How'd you know it was Billy under the machine?”

“I didn't.”

“What would you have done if you had?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you have tried to save him anyhow?”

“Well, yeah. I mean wouldn't you?”

I asked the guard, “Could we have another minute alone, please?”

“Time's up.”

“Judge Laver is right across the street. He and my dad went to school together. It'll take me ten minutes to get an order for more time. Why don't you save us both the trouble?”

The guard weighed the likelihood of my story against the long-term side effects of pissing off a grandee of the court system. He backed out and closed the door. I stood close to Jeff and said, “You still haven't told me how you survived when Billy swung back.”

“He didn't really swing. He just shoved me out of the way.”

“Then why'd your mother press charges?”

“It was just a kind of a slap,” he explained, with no rancor. “But my face was red and it made her mad.”

“I saw your dad, yesterday. He hadn't known about that.”

“Yeah, well my mom was mad at him that year.”

“Do you mind me asking why you never told him.”

“I didn't like his girlfriend.”

“You know, your father came up here to look at the site. Where it happened.”

“He did?”

I said, “I wondered about your father. He didn't seem the type to be a hip hop mogul.”

“He's not, but he thinks he is. You should see his latest girlfriend. He buys her fur coats and a Hummer that gets ten miles to the gallon.”

“Still, it must be kind of cool having a father in the music business.”

“He's just an investor,” Jeff said scornfully.

“For what it's worth, he's on your side.”

That jaw hardened again. “Yeah, well it's a little late for that.”

“Too late to help get you off? Or too late to make up for past wrongs.”

“Both.”

“Did he visit you here?”

“I wouldn't see him.”

I drove back to Newbury thinking about all the kids of divorced parents I had met while showing houses being sold for the settlement. Even though they knew I had come to sell their home out from under them, they would tour me so eagerly room to room, noting a million details. They always knew so much more about houses than their parents did.

Brave kid, taking on Billy at fifteen. Or just mad enough to kill?

But to wait six years?

***

“Jeff Kimball tried to call for help on a Verizon cell phone,” I reported to Ira. “My call record lady can't find a connection.” I kept a corporate account at one of the on-line data brokers and I'd used them enough so it had gotten personal, which usually sped things up. “I'm wondering if you know somebody there who could check it out whether they registered his signal.”

The attorney was not impressed. “I got just off the phone with the state's attorney. The cops already checked with Verizon. They have no record that Jeffrey turned on his cell phone, much less dialed 911.”

I sat in his client chair and stared at my boots. “I was afraid of that. I couldn't get a signal when I was out there. But each service is different. Maybe his worked there, but the signal hadn't locked in yet.”

“The prosecutor put it more succinctly.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Your client is lying.'”

“They can't prove that.”

Ira sighed.

“What?” I asked.

“The curse of getting older is having to explain the world to the young—They don't have to prove that Jeffrey didn't dial 911. There's no record. Nothing to say the kid isn't lying. Find Billy Tiller's enemies, Ben. It's the only way.”

***

The town has grown so much that I didn't recognize all the names in the
Clarion
“Police Reports” to which I turned for a refresher course on Billy's misdeeds and offenses. I pulled them off several years of the newspaper's website archives—
Clarion
-Online, offering a Newbury version of Google, supplemented by publisher-editor-reporter Scooter MacKay's availability next door to fill in blanks from memory. Then, long list in hand, I went calling on people who were mad at Billy Tiller.