Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“How long did the drive take you?”
“Up here, you don’t time that kind of thing.”
“Approximately.”
“Fifteen minutes. You’ve got to go slow over the road.”
“How long were you in the store?”
“Left it at nine.”
“How do you know that?”
“Ramona mentioned it. Looked at her watch and said it was closing time, she had to get back because Ralph wasn’t feeling too well.”
“Why did you have the Paines stock your expensive wine?”
Shea darkened again. “What?”
“Why did you have them stock a wine only you’d buy from them instead of getting it yourself by the case back home?”
He swallowed hard. “I … I figured, they’re a real convenience to have around, but it’s a tough life, trying to make it with just an inn and a general store. I figured, why not give them the business? Plus, this way I don’t have to worry about keeping a lot of wine in the house up here for guys to be tempted to break in and steal.”
Shea could have kept his supply at his house in Calem, and there were certainly other items in his lake house to encourage burglary. His answer didn’t just sound wrong, it felt wrong, too.
I said, “Okay. You’ve got the wine. Then what?”
“I take the bagful of stuff, wine included, and drive back to the house. I get—”
“How long does it take you this time?”
“Jesus, John. I don’t know. Probably a little longer, the sun’s all the way down, and that road plays tricks on you, you don’t respect it, even in a four-wheeler.”
“All right, so maybe twenty minutes. That’s about fifteen out, ten minutes with Ramona at the store, and twenty minutes back. Forty-five minutes total.”
“Sounds right.”
“You see anything on the drive back?”
“Anything?”
“Anybody.”
“Oh. No. It’s just us and Ma Judson on that road, John. Isolated.”
“What happened when you got to the house?”
“I pulled the truck up next to Hale’s car and got out with the grocery bag. Then I tripped over something on the path. The bag went flying as I caught myself against a tree, and I looked down, and it was the crossbow.”
Shea’s eyes got wide, his lips narrow. “I swear to you, John, I don’t think I even noticed the thing in the garage since last summer, but there it was, lying on a flagstone. I picked it up, then decided I needed a flashlight to gather up the groceries right, so I went to the back door.”
“You didn’t have a flashlight in the car?”
My question threw him a bit. “Well, yeah. Yeah, I did, but I wanted to ask somebody what the hell the crossbow was doing out there. I mean, I was mad about it, see?”
“Mad that it made you trip and drop the groceries.”
“Right.” Shea seemed to realize that didn’t ring very true, so he repeated, “Right,” a little louder this time.
“Then what?”
“The back door was open—I mean, closed but not locked, just the way I’d left it. We don’t usually lock things up when we’re here. I came into the kitchen, and nobody was there, so I called out. Then—”
“What did you call out?”
“What?”
“Yes. Your exact words.”
“Jesus, John, I don’t know. Maybe, ‘Hey, where is everybody?’ ”
“Nothing about the crossbow?”
Shea darkened a third time. “What do you mean?”
“I thought you were mad about it?”
“I was. But I figured, nobody’s in the kitchen, I need somebody in front of me to get mad at, right?”
“Go ahead.”
“So I went out toward the great room, and I … I …” Shea put his hand up to his mouth, like a little kid about to heave. Then he spoke through his fingers. “I saw Sandy. And Hale. They were … they had arrows through them. I don’t know … I think I must have started screaming … I just remember dropping down by Sandy, lifting her head up, trying to hold her and tug the fucking arrow out of her, but it made a noise, and she made a noise, but it wasn’t like her saying something or groaning, more like a rumble from inside her, and I knew she was dead. She wasn’t cold or anything, she was just so … still except for that noise, and I knew she was gone. And I held her and cried, and I don’t remember what else.”
I gave him a moment. Shea took the hand from his mouth and massaged his jaw, as though it had clenched on him.
“Did you move around the room at all?”
“Huh?”
“Did you go over to check on Vandemeer?”
“Oh. No, I didn’t. I don’t think I did anything but hold Sandy till … I remember Ma Judson being there, and Dag Gates from across the cove. Then just cops and … John, they’re reading me things you hear from the TV shows. They pull me into the station with just my car keys and wallet, not even my address book. They’re telling me I get to make one phone call.”
“You don’t remember going upstairs.”
“Upstairs? At the house, you mean?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“No. Why should I?”
“You know the sheriff’s people found shoes in your bedroom closet with blood on them.”
“They told me that.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“You have an explanation for why they were there?”
“Of course I do. The shoes were planted!”
“Planted.”
“By the killer. To set me up. Oh, they planned this out very cute, John, very cute.”
“Who’s they?”
He looked around, a conspirator about to share the important fact with his companion. The deputy outside the glass just watched us impassively.
Shea came back to me. “When I got the phone call—back here, I mean, when they brought me in, I called Anna-Pia Antonelli. She’s our general counsel.”
“Where you work now.”
“Right, right. At DRM. She—”
“Why’d you call her instead of Gil Lacouture?”
“Huh?”
“Lacouture represented you when you bought Tom Judson’s property, right?”
“Right.”
“Then why use your call on a lawyer in Massachusetts rather than your lawyer here in Maine?”
“I’m getting to that. Anna-Pia wasn’t there—home, I mean—when I called her, so I left a message, and she got back to me up here. She told me not to say a word, said she’d get in touch with our chief of security.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dwight Schoonmaker. He used to be government, now he like heads up our counterespionage stuff.”
Christ. “What do you mean?”
“Our business, it’s tough, John. Super tough nowadays, with the feds cutting back all the defense research and procurement programs that go with it. This whole thing—at my house on Marseilles?—this whole thing is a setup, something somebody who doesn’t like us is doing to keep us from getting a contract somewhere.”
“How?”
“By discrediting us through me! Don’t you see it? One of our potential clients is about to go with us, a competitor cuts us out by doing this to me and scaring the client away from us.”
I sat back in my chair, not sure how far or hard I should push him on the James Bond theory. “You talk this over with Antonelli and Schoonmaker?”
“With Anna-Pia, no. With Dwight, yeah, when they came up here.”
“Schoonmaker came up here to see you?”
“Yeah. Him and Anna-Pia both. She was off talking with the sheriff when Dwight and I went over the spy stuff.”
“Anybody else come up to see you?”
“Just Tyrone Xavier.”
“Who’s he?”
Shea smirked. “The guy who wants my job. Ivy League and upwardly mobile. You talk to him over the phone, you can’t even tell he’s black, ’less the name gives him away.”
I gave Shea the chipmunk look.
“Look, John, I’m not some racist asshole. I’m just telling you, like I’d describe Anna-Pia to you if her last name didn’t tell you she was Italian. You grew up Irish like me, right?”
“Maybe. Anybody else at DRM who could help me?”
Shea seemed a little surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, when I go out to DRM, is there anybody else I should talk with?”
“John, fuck, I don’t want you stirring things up out there.”
“Steve, you’re facing three counts of murder one. Your only theory of who killed those people is some business competitor. I have to find out about that to give Gil something to work with.”
“Hey, hey. I understand that. I do. It’s just … This thing blows over, that’s where I have to go back to.”
Blows over. “Steve, there’re other jobs.”
Shea shook his head. “Not after this kind of thing smears you. But DRM, it’ll take me back, no sweat. Just don’t stir things, okay?”
I looked down at my pad. “You have a secretary there I could talk to?”
“No. My secretary was an airhead and took off a week before this happened. Hitchhiking around Europe.”
“Since you’ve been in jail, has anybody else come to see you?”
“No.”
“Nobody from the Vandemeer family?”
A grunted laugh. “The Vandemeer family is now reduced to two, John. There’s Hale’s brother, Hubbell, and there’s Hale and Vivian’s son, Nicky.”
“How do I reach them?”
“Hubbell has a car dealership out past Calem, where he and Hale and Vivian all grew up.”
“How did the Vandemeer brothers get along?”
“Okay, I guess. Hale told me he was helping his brother out, with the fucking recession and all.”
“Helping him how?”
Shea rubbed his thumb and index finger together in a money sign.
I said, “How did Vivian get along; with her brother-in-law?”
“Okay, I guess.” A weak grin. “Sorry, I keep saying that. I never really thought about it, but I think Hub always had kind of a … yen for Vivian.”
“Jealous of his brother?”
“I just don’t know.”
“How about the son, Nicky?”
“He’s probably still living in the house in Calem.” Shea shook something off. “Bad kid.”
“How so?”
“Druggie, runs around with this Hispanic girl from the city. I know, I know, but that’s how I think about people, John, size them up. I think about their backgrounds, where they’re from originally, to help me see where they’re coming from now. The only way to sell, John. The only way.”
“What’s the girlfriend’s name?”
“You’d be wasting your time with Nicky and her.”
“Her name.”
“Oh, fuck, what is it? Bianca—no, that’s Jagger’s ex—Blanca. That’s it, Blanca.”
“Last name?”
“No, it’s her first name.”
“I mean, do you know her last name?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
I put a question mark after “Blanca.” “If I need to see your house in Calem, how can I get into it?”
Shea seized up, as though the smaller, simpler things were giving him the most trouble. “Fuck, Hale and Vivian had a set of our keys, but the sheriff here has mine, and probably”—a faraway look took over his eyes—“probably Sandy’s too, I guess.”
Quietly, I said, “Alarm system?”
“No.”
“Anybody else I should talk to?”
The eyes came back to me. “What do you mean?”
“Anybody you can think of who’d have a reason for doing something like this.”
“A reason? Who the fuck could have a reason for doing something like this?”
“How about you, Steve?”
He froze. “Me?”
“Yeah. The sheriff seems awfully confident, but she hasn’t said boo about motive. You have one?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about—”
“I said no!”
I decided to deflect him a little. “How about a guy named Owen Briss?”
“Briss? That pain in the ass. He’s supposed to be working on my place, right? I give him enough things to do, it’s like I’m supporting him. Me alone. Well, I tell him, I want that bannister to the second floor to look antiquey, right? So I tell him, put spindle pickets in the thing. So he nods his head and gives me an estimate, and I tell him to go ahead like I did with all the other things, but this time he fucks up, get me?”
“How?”
“He puts in the straight pickets, not spindle ones. So they don’t look right, and I tell him I want him to pull them out and do it right. And he wants more money. So I tell him to fuck off, he can’t get a specification right when he hears it, what good is he?”
“You think he might try something to get revenge?”
Shea shook his head vigorously. “No, no fucking way. He’s got the brains of a jackrabbit. Maybe. Oh, he’s a great guy with a hammer and saw, but not something this elaborate, John. No fucking way.”
The brown eyes suddenly got misty. “I promised that balustrade for Sandy. As a present to her.” He turned to me. “You remember that song Laura Brannigan did like ten years back?”
“Which one is that?”
“It’s called ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?’. That new guy, Michael Bolton, he does it now. I never could picture a guy doing that song, you know that, John? I never could till now.”
I folded my pad. “Everything going all right for you in here?”
“Jail, you mean? Oh, yeah. It’s not … well, you read and hear things about it being … like, homos and all, right? Well, it’s not fucking like that here.” The grunted laugh again. “Jesus, John, I’m using ‘fuck’ all the time now. It’s because of this bunkie I got last week.”
“Cell mate?”
“Yeah. Bad dude named Rick. Tough, but straight. He’s wised me up on how to do time without being done myself. Besides, this is a county jail in Maine, not some state prison like Walpole down by us.”
I thought about it. About why they’d give an accused multiple-murderer a bunkmate. About Sheriff Patsy Willis mentioning that she surprised people. “Look, don’t say anything to Rick, all right?”
“What?”
“Don’t talk with Rick about your case.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t know he isn’t a plant.”
“A plant?”
“Like the shoes in the closet. Except he can pass on what he hears.”
Shea looked incredulous. “Jesus, John. This is Maine, remember? They’re not like that up here.”
“Steve, let me tell you something. They’re like that everywhere.”
A
S HE LET ME
out the second door of the double-trap, Carl Higgs said, “Sheriffs back. She’d like to see you before you leave.”
The deputy led me through the control area and out another barred door into what seemed a less secure corridor with benches and a water fountain. Over the coffee machine were signs like BRING YOUR OWN MUG—STYROFOAM NEVER DEGRADES and a few others. Higgs pointed to a doorway that reminded me of my office: The top half was pebbled glass and had the word “SHERIFF” calligraphed in a quarter-moon arc.