McMansion (4 page)

Chapter Five

Landslides are almost unheard of in New England, where granite ledge crops out of the ground like pond frogs emerging for a wary peep. What farmers and gardeners laughingly call “earth” is actually a threadbare blanket of soil and stones stretched over solid rock, which is anchored to the core of the planet. (The occasional boulder that breaks loose is moved by frost and gravity into the next hole a person tries to dig.) So our hills are sturdy and you would have to go way out of your way to cause a landslide.

Billy Tiller had managed one that almost made the Richter scale.

Ralph and Sheila Gordon had the misfortune of living next to a slope Billy had been “developing” into a crush of McMansions he had named Newbury Walls. From what I could see from their driveway, all the Queen's horses and most of her men had fallen into their backyard.

They were an elderly couple of modest means, retired teachers living on Social Security and private school pensions. Mr. Gordon (he would always be Mr. Gordon to me, as she would be Mrs.) had taught me history at Newbury Prep. Mrs. Gordon had done her best to acquaint me with mathematics.

Had they been the sort to sue, they could have taken L.L. Bean to court for plagiarizing their lifestyle. Mr. Gordon wore corduroys and a vest over a flannel shirt and sturdy hiking boots. Mrs. Gordon had on cotton trousers and a sweater she had probably knitted herself. A black Lab slept at his feet. A cat sat on her lap. They offered me tea and they looked as gentle, and genteel, as a minister and his wife.

I broached the subject of Billy Tiller.

“I'm glad that son of a bitch is dead,” said Mrs. Gordon.

“And we pray he roasts in Hell,” her husband added.

Of the three kinds of gardeners in Newbury—crawlers, pointers, and checkbookers—checkbookers write a check to a landscape designer and go on a cruise; pointers instruct hired help what to dig, plant, weed, mulch, and prune; and crawlers spend most of their time on their knees, digging, planting, mulching, weeding, while occasionally standing to prune something overhead or turn their compost heap. The Gordons were crawlers.

They had devoted the happiest years of their lives to a patch of ground that had been one of the high spots on the annual Conservancy tour. They showed me glossy gardening magazines that had done four-color photo essays on their place. Then they led me to the window. Half a year after Billy Tiller's Total Landscape company started work next door, it looked like a Bolivian shanty town smacked by a hurricane.

“That used to be the pond,” Mr. Gordon said, pointing at a gray slick. “Over there, where you see the splintered crab apple, we had a small lawn.”

His wife smiled, wistfully. “The lawn shrank, annually, as we added new beds and borders.”

“We called it ‘border creep.'”

“Did Billy pay for the damage?”

“No. He said to sue him. We couldn't afford that.”

“Barely afford our property taxes the way they've been going up.”

Of their beds and borders, perennials, bulbs, bushes, corms, and rhizomes there was no sign, and I asked the million dollar question, hoping fervently that Mr. Gordon answered in the negative. Because, as much as I wanted to get poor Jeff Kimball off if it turned out that he didn't kill Billy Tiller, I certainly hoped that this nice couple had no more suffering on the horizon. “Did you do the machine work yourself?”

“Machine?” They laughed, in chorus. “Wheelbarrow.”

“I guess a wheelbarrow is easier to drive than a bulldozer.”

“I wouldn't say that,” said Mr. Gordon. “I was a Seabee in the Navy. Let me tell you a bulldozer is a lot easier to handle than a wheelbarrow. Especially by the end of the day. Thank God for Aleve.”

“And Old Fashioneds,” said Mrs. Gordon.

“I guess that was a long time ago.”

“When?”

“When you drove bulldozers in the Navy.”

“Forty years. What am I saying? Forty-two. Funny, how you never lose the knack. My unit had a reunion down in New Jersey last summer. We all went out to the Operating Engineers training site. Ever see it out on the Turnpike?”

I had, in fact, driving an elderly friend down to Camden to visit the battleship New Jersey museum. “Like a giant erector set.”

“We had a ball, driving machines. Old ones, antiques, new ones. Every kind of bulldozer you ever saw. Man they're a kick. You ever drive one, Ben?”

I shook my head, and looked down at his hiking boots, which were the kind L.L. Bean would advertise as offering firm support for climbing hills like the one behind the house lot where Billy died.

“You float across the ground. You feel like a lumbering god.”

His wife interrupted. “They didn't float for just anybody. Jim was the best. He made it dance.” Then she got an Ohmigod! look on her face. “Ben! You're not suggesting that—”

I assured her I wasn't and left after a decent interval of tea and small talk. But I had the strongest feeling I would not be invited back and felt more than a little ashamed of myself.

***

Doubt.

I climbed up the outside stairs of the General Store to see Tim Hall, who was my friend and lawyer of choice—Tim being a lot less expensive than Ira Roth. “Remember the guy who sued Billy Tiller for cutting down his trees?”

Tim's big open face clouded over. “Yes.”

“How did that work out?”

“We won. Eventually. Billy and Eddie Edwards blitzed the court with lawyers and experts and every brand of bull you could think of. Cost my poor client fifteen grand in legal fees and he still hasn't collected the judgment.”

“But you had a good case?”

“Ultimately, it proved impossible for Billy to deny that my client's two acres of trees had arrived at Pawloski's lumber mill on Billy's trucks. Pawloski was really pissed because it made him look a crook, too, which he most certainly is not. He was happy to testify against Billy.”

“So why didn't your guy press charges?”

“We couldn't shake Billy's story that he thought the trees were on his land. Not enough to get a criminal conviction. Best we could do was reparations to plant new trees. It was a joke. The judge had just been transferred up from Stamford, temporarily filling in—Remember Judge Clarke, that jerk who got the Conservation Department off Billy's back?—He didn't know a tree from a self-storage unit. You could see he had a picture that my client could just buy some eighty-foot-tall, hundred-year-old trees from Agway and stick 'em in the ground. Outside the courthouse, Billy laughed in my client's face.”

“Your client pissed?”

“Not at me. He saw how it went down. Paid my bill and even sent some work my way. Why?”

“I want to see where he stood with Billy.”

Tim gave a big-shouldered shrug and said, “He struck me as a guy who would rather just move on.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that even if Ira's client didn't murder Billy, this guy would still not be a legitimate suspect.”

“You mind if I tell him we talked?”

Tim shot me the kind of look you can only shoot at an old friend. “If you were going to talk to him anyhow why didn't you just drive out there instead of bothering me?”

“Because he put up a huge iron gate and I can't see the house from the road and he's got an unlisted telephone number.”

Tim shook his head and said softly, “Goddamned Billy. He had no idea how he hurt the guy.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. It wasn't the first time I had found Tim to be a touch more complicated than his open face would suggest.

“Sorry, Ben. I've said more than enough.”

“Okay. I appreciate what you did say. And I won't tell him we talked. Later.”

“By the way, Vicky keeps saying we should invite you to dinner.”

“I never turn down a free meal.” Vicky McLachlan—Newbury's First Selectman and a good prospect for governor of Connecticut one day—could not cook worth a damn. But in her company, food was the last thing that came to mind.

***

Tim's client whose trees Billy Tiller had stolen was named Andrew Sammis. He was new in town, an apparently wealthy man who had bought one of the old estates that had been another rich man's country house for the past sixty years. Unlike many newcomers, he had kept it intact. It was quite private, the house nearly a quarter mile from the road and no other houses in sight, a small, handsome, well-kept Greek Revival with white pillars that was dwarfed by a bloated Cadillac pickup parked in front.

When I finally got through to him by trailing his cleaning lady, Marie Butler, through his gate and up his driveway, I was confronted in the parking area by a man a little bigger than me and several years younger who had recently erected an enormous gate and surrounded his property with ten-foot chain link fence and was now accusing me of trespassing, even as I stuck out my hand to introduce myself.

Marie Butler—the town's primary gossip—a big, loud woman who was never that anxious to get busy cleaning, shoved between us with introductions of her own. “This is Ben Abbott. I've told you all about him, Mr. Sammis. You know, from the Main Street Abbotts. His father married a Chevalley—and boy I bet he never heard the end of that from his parents. They were a pair of tight old Yankees.” She paused to gulp breath and it occurred to me that Marie did not think there was anything wrong with gossip. No way a person could be that good at it if she felt guilty. “He's the real estate agent. The one who went to—”

“Thank you, Marie,” I interrupted.

“—jail for—”

“Thank you, Marie.”

“—fraud.”

God knows what Sammis thought at that moment, but at least Marie calmed him down and got him off the trespassing subject. I pressed the small advantage she had gained for me by saying to Sammis, “I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea. It wasn't exactly fraud. It had nothing to do with real estate. It wasn't in Connecticut. And it was a long time ago.” He didn't bite. I went on, “Wall Street. It was insider trading. According to the government.”

“What did they give you?”

“Three years.”

Marie felt obliged to add, “In Leavenworth Penitentiary.”

Sammis finally looked interested. “How'd they manage hard time on insider trading?”

“There was a dispute about testifying against—” I started to say “a friend,” which wasn't quite accurate, and settled for, “people I knew.”

Sammis nodded and the guard inside him stood down and I knew quite surely that he too had served time, somewhere, for something. Which ought to make talking to him a bit easier.

“Come on down to the barn,” he said. “Marie, you get started. I'll stay out of the house until you're finished.”

“Don't you want to talk to Ben in the house?”

Sammis ignored her and we walked briskly to the barn where, in a woodworking shop equipped with both a table and radial saw, he was building bookshelves. “So why'd you sneak in here? The place isn't for sale.”

I decided to play it absolutely straight. If he had done time he probably still possessed a bullshit detector. I said, “I've got an occasional sideline. Sort of a half-assed private investigator for some of the local lawyers.”

“Detective?”

“Keeps me out of trouble and fills in the slow spots in the real estate.”

“How did you get a PI license if you were convicted of a felony?”

“Actually, I avoided getting a license for a long time, on the theory that if I had no license no one could threaten to take it away.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

I saw that I had no choice but to answer his before I could persuade him to answer mine.

“I got my private detective license the same way I got my real estate license. I applied for—and was granted—what's called ‘Relief of Civil Disability.'”

I did not mention that my Aunt Connie had expedited the matter by calling in a favor, as she had, years earlier, for my Congressional appointment to the Naval Academy. Nor did I reveal that I had got a permit to keep my father's gun collection the same way, and a license to carry, though the guns stay home in a safe in the cellar. The detective license actually turned out to be worth the trouble and expense—twelve hundred bucks up front, five hundred renewal every two years—as people respond favorably to labels.

Sammis would not let it go. “How did a former stock salesman meet the work-experience requirement?”

“You know more about Connecticut licensing law than most people,” I said. “Are you a lawyer?”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

Still hoping he was going to answer mine, I said, civilly, “I gained my work experience in the Office of Naval Intelligence when I was in the service. A long, long time ago,” I added with a smile.

“All right. What are you investigating?”

“I'm working for Ira Roth. He's a top-gun defense lawyer up here. He's got a client—a kid, charged with murder.”

“The kid who bulldozed Billy Tiller?”

“It's possible he didn't.”

“What I read in the
Clarion
sounded open-shut—I mean him sitting on the bulldozer which was sitting on Billy Tiller. Is that not what happened?”

“The order in which they stacked up is in question.”

“Well, that's what they pay lawyers for. I hope the kid is rich.”

“His father is.”

“Good.”

“I gather you had a run in with Billy.”

Sammis gave me a quick look. “Where'd you hear that?”

“Read it in the
Clarion
. Do you mind me asking what happened?”

“Let's just say that Mr. Tiller presented quite a challenge to my anger-management sessions.”

“I heard he laughed about those trees.”

“Yeah, he laughed. But I was going to get the last laugh. Would have, if your client hadn't ended up on top of him.”