“I would warn him when I saw a potential problem. If he wanted to bull ahead, anyway, it was his project, his money. If he wanted to save money doing it on the cheap, he was the boss.”
“Why did you lie for him about the punch up with Jeff Kimball?”
The engineer hesitated only a millisecond. “That was back when Billy was just getting started. Last thing he needed was a court case, or even a bad rep, for getting in a fight with a teenager. He was forming relationships with the banks. It would have screwed up everything.”
“What about Jimmy Butler?”
“Oh, God was that a mess.” Edwards closed his eyes and threw his head back and baked a while. Finally, he sat up and opened his eyes. “When the Jimmy Butler thing happened, I had one second to make up my mind and I thought, I'm the only one who can save Billy from this. The banks would have shut every project down if Billy was convicted of stealing that machine. Felons do not get construction loans.”
“Did he actually steal the machine?”
“Let's just say it kind of fell in his lap and he felt he deserved to keep it.”
“Jimmy Butler said the same thing, sort of.”
“One of those stupid things, Ben. Just one of those stupid things.”
“Pretty much destroyed Jimmy's life.”
“I did it, Ben.”
“Did what?”
“You know what.”
“Tell me.”
“I did it. I shot Billy.”
First thought through my mind? That's why Billy couldn't outrun the bulldozer. He'd been shot and wounded. And, that's why the killer ground him to pieces under the bulldozer. So the medical examiner wouldn't see that he had been shot. Evil Engineer wasn't a no-blooded psycho. He was just being careful.
Edwards stared back at me, holding my eye so effortlessly that I wondered if I had heard wrong.
“When?” I asked.
“When? What are you talking about? When was he shot.”
“You tell me, when.”
“Last year on Main Street.”
“What?”
“Sorry I almost hit you, too.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me you shot Billy Tiller last year?”
“I'm telling you, here and now, for the one and only time. I will not repeat it to anyone and if you say anything I will swear you are making it up.”
“Your word against mine?”
“You got it.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“So you stop wasting time trying to connect two unconnected events and concentrate on who killed him.”
“Concentrate on Jeff Kimball?”
“I don't know if Kimball did it. It certainly sounds like he did. But if you have reason to believe he didn't, go out and find who did.”
“Your lawyer Woodward asked me not to. He threatened to sue me or turn me in to the cops or something or other.”
“All Woodward meant was please stop fucking up our future with Billy's past. If you truly believe that kid is innocent of course you have to find out who did it.”
“Where did you shoot him from?”
“The Meeting House belfry.”
“They didn't find any shell casings.”
Edwards looked away. He got up, poured a bucket of water on the hot rocks, and stood swathed in steam. “I'm not stupid, Ben.”
“How'd you happen to miss?”
“I didn't miss. I shot him right in the leg where I meant to.”
“Hell of a shot right between the bones.”
“In that sense I did miss. I would have preferred to break a bone.”
“Why?”
“It didn't take genius to figure that out. You did come calling on my wife within hours of seeing that fucking flower on the coffin. If you want me to spell it out for you, I will. I shot Billy to warn him not to steal my wife.”
“Did it work?”
“They broke it off.”
I had a bracing cold shower and drove home, back to zero.
***
Saturday, Connie and I drove down to Kimball's watercress party in my mother's 1979 Fiat Spyder, a gift from my father, which she had driven rarely. It was an extraordinarily beautiful little roadster, British Racing Green, and there was something friendly about its flowing lines that made people smile and wave. My mother, who was fundamentally (if not pathologically) shy, had flinched from the attention. When my father died, she gave it to me, along with the Main Street house, and retreated to the remote and swampy farm she'd been born on in Frenchtown. Connie asked, as always, whether had I visited her lately and I said I had been out the weekend before last, repaired a fence and took down a tree for her.
It was warm and Connie demanded we put the top down. She was having one of her great days where you'd swear she wasn't a day over eighty-five. I bundled her in a lap robe and drove slowly so as not to blow off her hat.
Down in Newtown, we found Kimball's brand-new mega-mansion in a neighborhood of former estates chopped up by recent construction. Connie gave it a long, slow look and announced, “It appears they ran out of ideas before they ran out of money.”
It was built of stone and stucco, with a fake slate roof, an attached five-car garage, cliché turrets at either end, and clerestory windows meant to light a chapel. All this was crammed onto a three-acre lot that dropped steeply to a stream. The bit of lawn not covered by house, swimming pool, and tennis court had been planted too closely with specimen trees that would smother each other next summer. Outdoor speakers blared Joey Girl recordings, and I found it remarkable that Kimball's neighbors, huddled in McMansions that looked almost modest in comparison, were not replying with shotguns.
There was valet parking, a rarity in our neck of the woods. The car ahead of ours was a BMW 800 series with New York license plate that read GONADS. The car behind us was a Ferrari. The fat guy driving looked happy to be arriving with two girls, labels I use advisedly.
“Child-free?” asked Connie.
Barely. Middle-aged and older men, who wore pink and white shirts flowing over their bellies, were squiring thin wives and girlfriends who looked like they would still be in high school if only they were smart enough. Many of the ladies were pregnant. Those not wore ready smiles. After I established that the kid parking cars knew the purpose of a clutch, I gave Connie my arm and we went looking for our host.
It was a generous party, food and fine wine everywhere, waiters passing champagne and small delights. No one was swimming in the swimming pool, which had a dark blue-gray bottom and a trompe l'oeil disappearing waterfall of the clever sort that for some reason very quickly became trite. A volleyball net hung between two trees. No one was playing. A pro in whites waited forlornly on the empty tennis court. A condensed croquet lawn was unoccupied. Twenty guests were watching tennis on a television on the patio, while inside the house others clumped around wide screens showing movies. No one seemed to know each other or why they were all invited. Nor did any I asked know where our host was.
We finally found Kimball in the kitchen with a dark-eyed girl (advisedly, again). She was wearing enough blush, eye shadow, mascara, lip liner, and lipstick to sing an Italian opera, and an apron with appliquéd tomatoes on her breasts and a tomato leaf for her crotch. Although there was plenty of hired help aroundâCentral American kitchen maids in tee shirts and blue jeans, and sprightly gay waiters wearing dress shirts and black bow tiesâshe and Kimball were cooking up a storm, heaping plates with hot hors d'oeuvres, which servants galloped off with, and swigging red wine from huge goblets.
“Hey, Abbott. You made it.” In polo shirt and tennis shorts he looked considerably less stiff than I remembered. But behind the act, his eyes were as busy as they had been at the Yale Club, and twice as opaque. Although, waving spatula and tongs, he seemed to be having fun. Proudly, he introduced his helpmate, Amanda.
I introduced Aunt Connie. Until we'd found the kitchen she'd been walking around with lips pursed tighter and tighter, but something about Kimball's pleasure at the stove (or, God knows, Amanda's apron) appealed to her and she melted them both with her most gracious smile. She even accepted, and pronounced splendid, a Pernod-drenched shrimp. It was the first time I had ever seen her eat finger food without plate, fork, and napkin.
“I have to ask,” said Amanda. “Where did you find that vintage Lilly Daché hat?”
“In my closet,” said Connie.
“Bruce,” said Amanda, “let's knock that off. I could sell the shâthe hell out of it.”
“Amanda is our merchandising consultant,” said Kimball. “She's nailed our market with the wannabees.”
“Wagamamas! Not wannabees.”
“Where,” Connie asked, “is the watercress?”
“Huh? Oh, down by the stream. I sent people down to get some.”
“We'll help,” said Connie.
“It's kind of yucky mucky down there,” said Amanda.
“Nonsense. We came armed to participate as your invitation proposed. We have boots in the car. Come, Ben. Walk me down to the stream.”
“Good Lord,” she muttered when we got out of the house.
“I think we can pass on the boots. It didn't sound like his pickers were guests.”
Connie held her silver-headed cane on one side and my arm on the other and we ventured down the sloping lawn. “Fascinating,” she said. “These new kind of new rich. That man hasn't a self-conscious bone in his body.”
“He doesn't seem worried about his kid in jail, either.”
“The lively Amanda diverts. Such a pretty smile.”
“I couldn't see it through the makeup.”
“Ben.”
“What?”
“The world is changing, Ben. Do you ever worry that you fight too hard not to change with it? Principles and standards are good and necessary, but when you are young you can make yourself very lonely by resisting the way things are.”
“I'm not worried.”
“You're in danger of turning into a curmudgeonly bachelor.”
Fast as lightning, I changed the subject to, “The fair Amanda was actually pretty sharp, for her years.” It didn't work and we were on to a theme that Connie never used to bug me about, but had become important to her, recently.
“Men should marry, Ben. If only to get a second point of view in the house.”
“You never married. You seem fine.”
“I am not, nor have ever been, a man. Women do just fine, unmarried. Men haven't the imagination to go it alone. They wither. If you lack an example, look at your unmarried Chevalley cousins.”
“I've always thought that for every unmarried Chevalley there's a lucky woman who got away.”
Connie laughed, and got off my case for the moment.
We walked slowly down the slope, found the stream where we expected to, and spied four burly guys in muscle shirts picking greenery. None looked happy to be standing in water over their Guccis.
“Ben,” Connie whispered. “Those gentlemen are enormous.”
“Those gentlemen are bodyguards,” I explained. One had a shaved head, two wore ponytails, the fourth had a buzz cut. What they had in common, beyond the arms and chests swelling black tee shirts, was their fastidious neatness, not a hair out of place. (Though the bald guy wore a trim mustache.)
“Whom are they guarding? I've never considered Newtown that dangerous a place.”
“Our host made his fortune in hip hop music.”
“Clearly, Mr. Kimball is not one to overestimate the taste of the American public. But I don't see the connection to bodyguards.”
“Most hip hop performers are African-American. Do you see any African-Americans at this party?”
“I see fat white businessmen and six-foot girls who weigh a hundred pounds.”
“For that matter, do you see any musicians or singers or performers and anyone of any color who could be called âthe talent'?”
“I don't know that I could discern a talent for hip hop.”
“Is it possible that the bodyguards are here to discourage disgruntled talent from gate crashing?”
“You have always been cursed with a villainous imagination, Ben. I think that it is far more likely that Mr. Kimball invited his New York City employees up for a day in the country.”
More to the point, why I was invited? “You guys need some help?”
A fellow who looked like he would really rather be administering chin checks to the unruly in a Chelsea dance club hefted a nearly full trug of greens and said, “Thanks, buddy, we're almost done.”
“That is not watercress,” Connie called.
“Say what?”
“You've picked forget-me-nots. See the little blue flower?”
“Taste any different?”
“It tastes terrible. And I would imagine it's poisonous.”
All four looked in their trugs. “Jesus H!âSorry, lady.”
“Man, what are we going to do? Mr. Kimball said go down and pick it. Who's going to tell him it's poison?”
“He might have been referring to that,” said Connie, indicating a patch of darker green vegetation twenty yards down stream.
They started wading toward it. Connie cried, “Stop!”
“What?”
“Climb out of the water.”
They exchanged looks and shrugged and obeyed docilely.
Connie said, “Approach the watercress from downstream. That way you won't muddy the water. Good, that's it. Walk down there. Good. Now dump the forget-me-nots back in the water. Don't worry, they'll take root again.”
I didn't think any of them looked worried. Though I did notice one or two eyeing Connie with an expression of almost aching loneliness, as if wanting to connect with a human, never knowing how and now suddenly sensing the opportunity.
“Take your scissors and shear the watercress just at the surface. You'll be so glad you did. It will be much easier to clean.”
From the back of the four I heard a muttered, “We gotta clean this crap, too?”
If Connie heard she pretended not to.
***
“Took you long enough,” Kimball grumped to the bodyguards shuffling into the kitchen at Aunt Connie's slow pace.
“Ralph, Edward, Charles, and Henry were kind enough to help me up the hill,” said Connie, relinquishing the anvil arm that had been gallantly offered by the biggest, Henry. “And they've picked you a fine cropâAmanda, dear, would you have another apron?”
Amanda helped her into one with strategically placed lemons. “Would you like a stool, Miss Abbott?”
Connie allowed that she wouldâshe was pale from the climbâand settled gratefully at the zinc table, where she instructed the hulking four in the fine points of watercress grooming. Kimball motioned for me to join him outside. He paused at the bar beside the barbeque, which was inside the house, presumably for the pleasure of those who liked their cookouts indoors. “Champagne?”
“Perrier. I'm driving.”
“Sure?”
I would have liked a glass or four very much, but there was something going on here I didn't want to miss.
“Your aunt is a character.”
“I'm glad I could bring her along. On a day like today when she's feeling well, she really enjoys getting out.”
“How old is she?”
“She remembers when her mother first got the vote.”
“Wow. So how's it going for the kid?”
It occurred to me that I had never heard him refer to Jeff as his son. It was always the kid. Not even my kid. “Well, he's convinced one person he didn't kill Billy Tiller.”