“I'm not blaming him. I just want to talk.”
Greg kept shaking his head. I kept talking. Finally he said, “Look, Ben. I've known you a long time.”
“A very long time. Remember the first nightâ”
“I've known Angel a long time, too.”
“So he'll believe you when you tell him you trust me.”
“No way.”
“Greg, I'm up against a wall. I need the man's help. I need his advice. I promise you I won't ask him to rat anybody out.”
Wide Greg sighed. He shook his head some more. Then he said, “Here's what I'll do for you. I'll go to him. I'll tell him whatever you want.”
I was surprised and I said so. “I didn't know you were a go-between. That's risky for a guy who owns his own legit business.”
“I'm not a go-between. I run a bar. But I respect the man and I respect you. So if I expedite something to help both of you, I'm ahead of the game.”
“I don't see it generating a lot of money, Greg.”
“Screw money. I'll take two men owing me favors any day.”
***
On my way home from the White Birch I stopped at the Newbury
Clarion
. Scooter was pounding away at the computer, with an ear cocked to the police scanner.
“Scooter? Remember that cranky letter to the editor I wrote?”
Scooter kept typing. “Which one?”
“About your Billy Tiller shooting article?”
“The personal attack on my integrity?”
“That's the one.”
“Including the implication that my news-gathering skill-set, as they say, was in need of an overhaul?”
“I wasn't necessarily implying that.”
“And the mocking reference to the fact that this small newspaper cannot afford to maintain a âcorrespondent' in Hartford, the State Capital?”
“Light-hearted humor is a gentle, effective device to capture the reader's attention.”
“Yes, I do remember that cranky letter. What about it?”
“You were actually saying something very subtle in that story, weren't you?”
Scooter finally stopped typing. He hit Save and turned to me. “It only took a year for you to figure that out? Why waste your time selling houses? You should be a detective.”
“I knew it! You knew something that you couldn't write. You meant that about the investigations.”
“Everybody knew about the investigations. Everybody knew they were going nowhere.”
“But you had some kind of an instinct that there was something else.”
“A newspaperman's instinct?” Scooter asked, absolutely deadpan.
“I wouldn't go that farâSeriously, Scooter. What did you know that you couldn't write?”
“None of your business. If I can't publish it I don't talk about it.”
“This is important.”
“So is integrity.” He turned back to his computer and cast over his shoulder, “That vertically positioned oblong in the wall is the door.”
“You caught a whiff of something.”
“Out!” Wide Greg could not have sounded more convincing.
“Was it bribery? A bribery investigation?”
“Goodbye.”
“Something about bribing a judge?”
Scooter stopped typing again. His eyes got big. “A judge? Are you kidding? Oh, I know what you're thinking. You think I found some great story about that jerk Judge Clarke? Sorry, Ben, the
Clarion
is a just a little weekly.”
“Scooter, you own the richest weekly newspaper in New England.”
“Being rich is not enough, I want a Pulitzer. But I don't have the goods on Judge Clarke. I've just got some off-the-record stuff I can't use without a lot of new information.”
“Were they investigating Billy bribing Clarke?”
“Not that I found out. The stuff I caught wind of was small town as small town can get. Although, let us remember that bribery is still bribery, still a serious crime.”
“Was it an EPA official he bribed?”
Scooter repeated himself word for word. “I've just got some off-the-record stuff I can't use without a lot of new information.”
“Is that investigation ongoing?”
“Ongoing? The briber is dead.”
***
I had learned just about all I could learn from asking questions. It was time to stop asking questions and take a chance. There was one “friend” of Billy's I hadn't talked to. At least recently. I telephoned his office.
“I think we should have another sauna.”
“I don't have time for a sauna.”
“I found some stuff in Billy's computer.”
“Bullshit, we cleaned everything out of the house before we let Fred show it.”
“You missed the laptop Billy stashed under a pallet of yellow bricks in the cellar.”
After a long while, Edwards said, “What kind of stuff?”
“Sauna stuff. Not phone.”
“Did you give the computer to the police?”
“Not yet.”
“Shouldn't you, if it's evidence?”
“In time.”
“Is it safe?”
“It's safe. Plus I burned a CD. In fact, I burned two. One for you to peruse at your leisure.”
“Let me ask you one thing?”
“What?”
“Is all this to help that kid?”
“My guess is the kid will be out vandalizing SUVs by the end of the weekâName a time, name a place.”
“I'm meeting the electrician at the Newbury Common job at six thirty. Meet me in the model house at six fifteen.”
“Let's make it six.”
***
At two o'clock I stashed my car in Fred Franklin's barn, climbed the hill behind his flooded hay field, and followed deer paths down through the woods. I found my way into the model house through a back door. No one saw me and I saw no one. Occasionally I heard the busy, hollow thrumming of an air compressor, so I assumed carpenters were driving staples in a house deeper in the subdivision.
By four o'clock I had visited every room from the cellar to the attic and made myself comfortable in what would be the living room. Windows were installed and the outside walls sheathed. But most of the interior walls were not yet Sheetrocked, and I could see bundles of electric wiring and computer and TV cables stretching between dense stands of two-by-six studs. More wire bunched from the unfinished ceiling. Sheetrock was stacked on the plywood subfloor, along with nail boxes, oak flooring, and the thinner steel-reinforced studs that would be used to build the pockets for the sliding doors leaning against a wall. The electricians had left their usual debris of stripped insulation, box knockouts, and scrap wire.
At five the compressor stopped and a truck drove off and things got quiet. I felt under my shirt for my father's .38, which I had holstered in the small of my back. It didn't make me feel that safe. I'm hopeless with a handgun, victim of a weirdly sidearm-specific, hand-eye uncoordination. It would have been nice if Ollie had left me Gwen's sawed-off.
I stood in the living room window, watching the woods, where shadows were falling. Something flew at my face. It happened too suddenly for me to do more than flinch. A downy woodpecker banged into the glass and fell to ground below the window. It flopped weakly, but before I could tell whether its neck broken or it would wake up soon with nothing worse than a headache, there was a second flicker of motion, far more purposeful than the first. A small falcon, a taiga merlin, swooped down, snatched up the woodpecker, and carried it to the edge of the woods. Pinning the struggling woodpecker with its talons, it began ripping out the smaller bird's feathers with its curved beak.
“What an amazing example,” Eddie Edwards called from behind me, “of when your number is up, your number is up.”
I asked, “Where the hell did you come from?” while I searched for his reflection in the glass. Outside, the birds were gone but for a few fluffy black feathers.
“Safe room.”
“What?” I was trying to locate exactly where he was before I turned around.
“This model has a safe room in the cellar so the owner can hide his family from hostage takers. Like the stars have in Hollywood.”
“What hostage takers?”
“It makes people feel like celebrities.”
He was speaking with the confidence of a man holding a weapon. But once again, I had underestimated him, I discovered when I turned to face him. Two weapons. I had expected the gun in his right hand, an alarmingly heavy automatic of the caliber that doesn't leave the trauma surgeons much to work with. The surprise was the curved tree saw in his left. He was, I recalled from our day in the woods, left-handed. He was wearing gloves.
“Lift your shirt.”
“I'm still not wearing a wire.”
“Lift it slowly.”
I did. “See. No wire.”
“Turn around.”
I turned around. “See, no wire.”
“Using only your thumb and index finger and lifting it by the grip, remove that weapon from its holster. Slowly. Good. Now throw it over there. To your right. Behind that pile of flooring.”
“What if it goes off when it lands?”
“No one will hear and the flooring will block the bullet. Throw it!”
I did. It landed with a thunk and did not discharge.
I turned around. “I wondered why a former running back couldn't outrun a bulldozer. What did you do to Billy? Gut him with your saw before you ran him down?”
“Castrated.”
“What did you say?”
“Partially. He was screwing my wife.”
“He was not. You're using your wife. It's a story covering something else. You didn't shoot Billy over Caroline and you didn't kill him for her, either. You killed him because he was going to rat you out to the state's attorney for bribing Judge Clarke.”
“That's not true.” He said it so matter-of-factly I had to wonder was Scooter right.
“What is true?”
“What would you do in my position? Here's this jerk you pull up from nothing, you put a pen in his hand and say sign here. Do this. Do that. Keep your mouth shut, I'll do the talking. You'll get rich. You'll be an important man. You'll be the biggest builder in Newbury.”
“You didn't pull him quite from nothing. In fact I'll bet you never gave him the time of day until he inherited his uncle's land.”
“I started years before he inherited. I mean here's this petty crook who was the only heir of a bachelor uncle in poor health?”
“The long view. So you coached him away from small time thievery, tried to make him see the long view, warned him not to get caught for small stuff.”
“But he did get caught for small stuff. Billy bribed a wetlands inspector. There were so many ways around the inspector, but he stuck his hand out and Billy filled it. I tried to drum it into his head. Never, never bribe low lifes. Bribe their bosses. He wouldn't listen.”
“I thought it was Judge Clarke.”
“Clarke was terrified that I would flip him if Billy turned me in.”
“Why didn't you kill Judge Clarke? Do the entire state a favor?”
“No need. Lucky bastard comes out of this smelling like a rose. He'll be a valuable friend in the future. Everything else stops right here.”
“You're forgetting Billy's laptop.”
Edwards smiled. “I am willing to bet my life there is no laptop. First of all I never saw Billy use a laptop. Second, you made a stupid mistake, Ben. Your lie was too specific. There was no laptop under those bricks. I stacked them there myself while we were cleaning out the cellar.”
I heard a car door slam and wondered had I just gotten luckier than I deserved.
Edwards said, as if we were gathering to discuss the details of a new subdivision, “I asked Owen Woodward to join us.”
This made no sense. But Eddie took the long view. He had set me up identifying his wife's peony so I'd believe his shooting story when I connected him through my cop connections. He had “confessed” so I would not suspect him of murder. It had been a preemptive attack.
“In here, Owen! We've got company. Look who came to visit.”
Owen Woodward took one look at me and got a very unpleasant look on his face. “Mr. Certifiable. What, did you catch him trespassing, Eddie? Hey, Ben, any reason why we shouldn't beat the crap out of you before we call the cops?”
I couldn't see how he fit into this.
Woodward turned to E. Eddie Edwards. “Eddie, what isâWhat are you doing, Eddie?”
He didn't fit into it, but the gun was more than the lawyer could process and he got a slow start. Even if he had bolted instantly it probably wouldn't have helped. Eddie Edwards was astonishingly quick. He shot Owen Woodward in the chest, had me back under the gun in a split second, bounded across the floor to where the heavy slug had thrown Woodward, and placed the saw in the dead man's hand.
“Bad blood between you two. He braced you at Town Hall. You braced him in his office, scared the hell out of his secretary. Today he threatened to cut your balls off with a tree saw. You shot him. Self-defense. Except that he was a tough ex-Marine. Even as he was dying, he got the gun away from you and shot you in the head.”
“How did he get your tree saw?”
“My saw is back at my house. He must have bought this one at a tag sale. Sorry about this, Ben. I tried everything I could to keep you out of this.”
“Including a car wreck.”
“Anybody else would have gotten the message.”
“Some message. The only reason I'm not dead is I was wearing a five-point seat belt.”
He pointed the gun at my head.
I closed my eyes. I covered my ears. I backed up and kicked a trip wire of electrical cable that I had strung from the rafters, down the wall, and across the floor. The thunderclap roared through my hands and the flash seared my eyelids. For Eddie Edwardsâstaring down the barrel of the gun he was holding in both handsâAngel's flash grenade was much louder and brighter.
He fired his gun anyway, jerking the trigger repeatedly. But by then I was rolling across the floor and picking up the nearest reinforced steel wall stud.