Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (9 page)

Trey laughed a long time. “You’re fucking-A right I didn’t,” he said. “Pardon my French.”

I said, “Yesterday somebody asked me what I thought of your father. First thing came to mind was horse’s ass.”

“Okay.”

“But he did some good things,” I said. “He got sober. He stayed sober a long time. Helped plenty others sober up, too.”

“Huh.”

“How much did Randall tell you about things?”

“My father hanged himself in Rourke, Hew Hampshire.”

Randall had played it smart—had sketched things out for Trey, leaving me room to spin the details when the time was right and do some digging while I was at it.

I said, “You surprised your father killed himself?”

He took his time. Finally he said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Ego,” Trey said. “No. Almost ego, but not quite. Self-importance. He thought the sun would forget to rise if he wasn’t around to remind it.”

“That’s about the way I see it.”

“What are you saying?”

I shrugged, drove. Moved right to take I-93 North.

Keeping a peripheral-vision eye on Trey to gauge his reaction, I said, “Your father died flat broke. He was collecting cans and eating crackers in an abandoned shack.”

“
What?
There is absolutely no way that can be true.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I guess the cops and lawyers’ll tell you more.”

“How? Is there any chance he had a drug or booze habit? Prescription meds, maybe?”

“No.”

“Gambling?”

“Not that I know of. It would’ve been hard for him to hide that, the circles he ran in.”

“What, then?”

I shrugged and made a snap decision not to talk about Motorenwerk. Yet. “All of us Barnburners thought he was loaded,” I said. I saw the question on his face. “It’s an AA group. The Barnburners. Tight bunch. Your father must’ve mentioned it when you were a kid.”

“I suppose so,” he said. “I didn’t listen to him much.”

I nodded. “From what your father said, your grandfather ran a big paper mill and left your father a bundle. We thought he was set for life.”

“Me too.” Half laugh. “Truth be told, I thought
I
was set for life.”

“You’re taking it pretty well.”

Shrug.

I needed to get him going. “Phigg Paper, was it?”

Trey straightened in his seat and put on a radio-announcer voice. “In 1928 Tander Phigg, Senior, a twenty-one-year-old immigrant from Liverpool, stood on the banks of the Nashua River. Phigg had the clothes on his back, four dollars, and a note from his father asking any fellow Liverpudlian to take on the youth as an apprentice. But he also had a dream: to dominate the market for paper receipts used in the fast-growing cash-register market.”

“I guess you heard that story a few times around the dinner table, huh?”

“Worse,” Trey said. “That was the intro to an industrial film my dad made about the company. He used to bring in a projectionist after Sunday dinner. We’d watch it in his study.”

Trey was quiet as we crossed into New Hampshire. He was a smart kid. I could feel him organizing his thoughts, making sure he told it clean and clear, maybe crossing out details he didn’t want me to know.

Trey’s grandfather, Tander Phigg, Sr., launched Phigg Paper Products, Inc., in 1928, just in time for the Depression. Married a Catholic girl in 1932 despite her mother’s promise to kill herself out of shame.

“Yikes,” I said. “Different world back then, huh?”

Trey waved a hand. “Basic histrionics. She didn’t kill herself, in case you’re looking for a family suicide history.”

Like I said—smart kid.

In 1934, the Catholic girl died while delivering her first child, Tander Phigg, Jr. Unlike virtually all men of the day, Phigg Senior never remarried. This led to rumors about the old man and the German housekeeper/nanny who raised Phigg Junior. The rumors were true, Trey had decided long ago.

Phigg Paper Products hung on through the Depression, then struck government-contract gold during World War II, then took off in the postwar boom. Tander Phigg, Sr., became an old-fashioned industrial baron. He was the biggest employer in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for more than a generation. He kept his name out of the papers and gave wads of money to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, even though he’d never set foot on campus and never would.

Trey went quiet again, staring up I-93 as it narrowed to two lanes. We had maybe twenty minutes to Concord, and I wanted more info. I thought of another guy I knew a while back, the son of a physicist. The son made 80 million bucks as a venture capitalist—and felt like a failure. “Your father was the son of a great man,” I said. “That’s not always an easy thing.”

Trey nodded slowly and looked at me, maybe reevaluating me, before he went on.

Tander Phigg, Jr., was an only child, raised by the nanny he loved like a mother (and whom, most likely, his father loved like a wife). He went to a bunch of brand-name boarding schools but left them all suddenly and quietly. Nobody ever explained why, so he must’ve been thrown out, Gentleman Jim style. He finally scraped together a high school diploma and started at UMass Amherst in 1952.

Trey’s tone made me glance over. I said, “What’s wrong with that?”

“The sons of the rich did
not
go to UMass back then,” he said. “Harvard, Dartmouth, maybe Bates or Williams in a pinch.”

“Big deal.”

“It was then, and my father, and
his
father, knew it. Trust me.”

Phigg Junior graduated on schedule in 1956. As far as Trey knew, his father didn’t do a single memorable thing in the four years. Diploma in hand, he tried the MBA program at UMass’s Isenberg School. Dropped out after two semesters.

Long pause now. We were hitting the southern edge of Concord, didn’t have a lot of time left. I said, “And?”

“At that point,” Trey said, “I do believe my father rose up on his hind legs for the first and only time in his life.”

“Finally.”

“Yeah.” Half a smile again, Trey cutting his eyes my way. “Yeah, finally.”

Trey had pieced together the story while he grew up—his father refused to talk about that part of his life and got pissed whenever Trey tried to.

Tander Junior, miserable in the MBA program, had hauled off and told Tander Senior, a man who’d been working fourteen-hour days six days a week for thirty years, that he’d snapped pictures at UMass football games and turned out to have a knack for it. Tander Junior was dropping out of B-school and heading for New York to study photography.

“Can you imagine,” Trey said, “the scene when my father laid all this on
his
father, a first-generation immigrant workaholic industrial baron who’d never so much as seen a talkie?”

I exited 93. State Police HQ was just a few traffic lights east. I said, “Friction?”

“
Beyond
friction!” he said. “‘You are not my son.’ ‘Never darken my door.’ ‘Where did I go wrong?’ ‘Was it because I never remarried?’ The works.”

But Tander Phigg, Jr., stuck to his guns, moved to New York City, and enrolled in photography classes. After a few months on broke street he called his nanny-mama, who figured out a backdoor way to get him trust-fund income.

I pulled into the lot. Trey and I swapped cell numbers. I had errands, said I’d pick him up when he finished with the detectives.

He popped the door of his rental, got a foot out. “There’s got to be more,” I said. “Give me a teaser.”

“My dad had five happy years in New York,” Trey Phigg said. “His
only
five, as far as I’ve ever been able to figure.”

He slammed the door and trotted up the steps. I watched him. In Vietnam, he probably had the same build as most men. Here, he was a hell of a skinny dude.

I wondered how much truth he was telling.

*   *   *

As I drove strip-mall roads looking for a Home Depot, my cell rang. It was a New Hampshire number I didn’t recognize. I picked up but said nothing.

“H-hello?”

The voice was familiar, but I wasn’t sure where from. Said nothing.

“Mister Sax?”

I realized it was Josh from Motorenwerk. “Go ahead,” I said.

“You said to call you if—”

“Go ahead.”

“Something’s going on at the shop. I made a coffee run. When I came back, a bunch of guys were climbing out of two Escalades.”

“What guys?”

“I recognized Ollie’s Montreal guy. He usually shows up with a huge driver who’s probably a bodyguard, too. But today there were three
more
guys in another Escalade.”

“Where are you?”

“I parked a few blocks over. When I saw all those guys, I decided to stay away from the garage and call you.”

“Good.”

“Should I call the cops?”

I thought about Ollie fighting his guts out even with his arms pinned and his nose smashed. He was a warrior.

Presented with something like this, the Rourke PD wouldn’t know whether to shit or go blind. They’d slough the mess off to the staties as fast as they could. The staties would figure out the gist. They might not prove anything, but they could sure put Ollie out of the drug-running business.

I didn’t want that.

Yet.

“Don’t call the cops,” I said. “Cruise past the garage every ten minutes, and call me again when the Escalades are gone.”

“Are you sure?”

I clicked off. “No,” I said to an empty Dodge. “I’m not sure at all.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

An hour later, done at Home Depot, I sat parked in the state police lot and waited for Josh to call back. Trey bounced down the steps and hopped in. “The tail of my poor rental car is riding low,” he said.

“Eighty pounds of drywall screws and a hundred pounds of joint compound’ll do that.”

We hit 93 South. I said we might detour through Rourke. Trey said that was okay by him. I asked what the detectives had talked about.

He said, “Not much—forms, releases, where should the body go. Like that.”

I said, “Huh.”

He turned to face me. “Okay, that’s the second time.”

I said, “Second time what?”

“The second time you’ve acted like you don’t believe my father killed himself.”

“You got all that from a ‘Huh’?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

He was right. I hate when people play dumb. Might as well treat Trey Phigg the way I’d want to be treated myself. “The statie who showed up when I found your dad was a sharp guy,” I said. “He didn’t like the way your dad’s necktie was knotted. Said it looked awkward as hell, hanging yourself that way.”

“And?”

“Like I said, he was a sharp cop. And your dad didn’t strike me as a suicide, and you said he didn’t strike you that way either.”

“So you think
I
killed him? Flew halfway around the world with my wife and my boy, hopped off the airplane, drove to New Hampshire, and fucking hanged a man I hadn’t seen in four years?”

“It wouldn’t be the dumbest way I ever saw a man kill.”

“What about the other police, the detectives I just spoke with? Nothing but sympathy and filling out forms and arrangements to transport the body. Are they all idiots?”

Their sympathy might have been a play to get Trey talking, but I didn’t tell him that. At the very least, they had to be doing the same as Randall—working up a timetable to see if he could have cleared JFK customs and driven to Rourke before I found Phigg’s body. “Cop work is about clearing cases,” I said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, the obvious answer’s the right answer. Look at your dad through a detective’s eyes. He’s an alcoholic. Sober a long time, sure, but no cop believes there’s such a thing as a
former
drunk. Your father used to be rich, but lately he lived in a shack. To most cops, it’s pretty simple. Tander Phigg fell a long way, burned through his money, decided to check out.” I made a fist and thumped the steering wheel. “Case closed, what’s for dinner.”

We slowed, funneled into road construction. Trey looked out his window awhile. Finally he said, “You think somebody killed him?”

“Maybe.”

“Who? Why?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first, you tell
me
.”

“Tell you what?”

“Your dad’s five happy years.”

My cell rang. It was Josh. “Come quick,” he said. In the background was a noise like a bear trying to bite through a trash-can lid.

“Ollie hurt?”

“He needs an emergency room, but he doesn’t want to go.”

“I’m in traffic. Be there soon.” Click.

Trey said, “What was all that?”

I finger-drummed the wheel. “That possible detour to Rourke I mentioned? It’s on. Tell me about those five happy years.”