8

AS 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.

I walked down the corridor, my shoes smacking on the tiles. Up close, the door gave the impression of being saved and brought from an earlier building. I knocked once and heard Patsy Willis say to come on in.

She was behind her desk, feet up on a secretarial pull-tray, fingers interlaced across her stomach. The Stetson was dangling from a coat tree, her hair coarse and streaked with silver as it was pulled back behind her neck, the heavy hanks sagging down toward her ears like the roof of one of the swaybacked barns.

“Have a seat.”

“Thanks.”

The institutional chairs in front of her desk had gray metal frames and green leatherette seats and backrests. I took one of them.

She said, “I see you’ve met up with a black fly.”

“No contest.”

“They are some fierce. Anything else you’ll be needing from me?”

“Could I get a look at the murder weapon?”

“You mean the crossbow itself or the bolts?”

“Both.”

Willis chewed on that for a minute, then picked up a phone and pushed a button. “Colin? … Patsy. … Can you go over to the evidence locker and pick up the bow and bolts on the Shea case?”

I said, “Sheriff?”

“Hold on a second, Colin.” To me, “Yes?”

“Could I also have Shea’s keys?”

“His keys?”

“To the house down in Calem.”

Willis chewed on that, too. Into the phone she said, “Colin, bring all the keys we got from Shea, too. … Fine, thank you kindly.”

She hung up. “Five minutes. Coffee?”

“No, thanks. Maybe a couple other questions, though.”

“Shoot.”

“I’m still troubled about what you see as a motive for the killings.”

“Expect you’ll feel that way till the trial, too.”

Okay. “I understand the man that Shea bought his property from died kind of violently.”

“Kind of.”

“Possible for me to get a look at that file?”

“Not much to look at, and it’s hard to see where Tom Judson’s death fits into what you’re doing here.”

“Just trying to be thorough.”

Willis patted one of the hanks of hair, then shook her head. “No. No, it’s one thing to be cooperative on a current murder when you’re the investigator for the defense. It’s another to let you go fishing through old files on prominent local folks.”

Not an unreasonable position to take for a cop who’s also a politician. “Can you tell me something about what happened to him?”

She weighed that and nodded. “Outline it for you, anyways. Wasn’t my first death on the job, and it sure wasn’t the prettiest. Old Tom kept his spare liquor in his garage. He was partial to whiskey, and around here, it’s easy to start on it a little early in the day, especially when November reminds you of what lays ahead.”

“It happened in November, then?”

“Right—No, no, come to think of it, it was Halloween. Tom was in his big new place up on the mountain, playing around with his collection—bear traps and such—when the autopsy showed he was in no condition to be turning on a television without help. Somehow he primed a trap, then knelt on it or fell into it, and it closed onto his upper leg, severing that femoral artery there. I swear, there was so much blood around his garage, it was like somebody’d used a fire hose to spray it. He must have tried to pry the jaws open with his hands for a while before he passed out from the pain or blood loss.”

“So he bled to death in his own garage.”

“That’s right.”

“It was almost November, was his car there, too?”

“Yes. One car in a two-car garage.”

“Wouldn’t he have tried to drive out, get help?”

“Tom was owning a stick-shift Jeep Cherokee back then. Tough thing to manage a manual transmission with the clutch leg in a bear trap.”

“Telephone?”

“Looked like Tom tried to drag himself back up the three steps from garage into house, but couldn’t quite do it before he went unconscious.”

“Where exactly was his house?”

“Same place it is now. Or was, last time I checked on it.”

“And where is that?”

“On the mountain.”

“Which mountain?”

“The one above Marseilles Pond.”

“You mean behind Shea’s house?”

“That’s the one. We passed Old Tom’s driveway when I took you along the camp road, though you may not have noticed it.”

“The paved stretch behind the chain with the little orange flags?”

She nodded.

I said, “No sign of foul play?”

“Foul play?” Willis gave her haw-haw laugh and shook her head. “Mister, you’re gonna kill a man, you don’t go laying traps for him in his garage. Besides, Tom wasn’t the most loved of men in the community, but he put a lot of folks to work and food on their tables, and that goes for quite a ways around here.”

I had a question for her that Dag Gates already had answered. “Who found the body?”

“Was Owen Briss.”

“Briss tell you what he was doing up there?”

“Said Old Tom’d stiffed him on a job. Owen reckons a lot of people do that to him.”

Just then, there was a knock at the door, and another deputy came in with a big, flapped box that originally held photocopying paper.

Willis swung her feet down and said, “Thanks, Colin. Just put that right on the desk here, if you would.”

Colin set it down. He handed her a set of keys with a form. She used a desk-set pen to scribble something on the paper. Colin took back the form and nodded to me as he left the room, closing the door behind him.

The sheriff tossed me the keys and moved to the box, lifting out a clear plastic bag with an identifying decal pressed onto its side. “This here’s the one that got Mrs. Vivian Vandemeer.”

I put Shea’s keys in my pocket as Willis passed the bag to me. The bolt inside was about a foot long, gunmetal gray with black plastic fletching, the plastic fashioned to look like feathers. The arrowhead was only slightly broader than the shaft, the head and shaft for four inches below it still caked with dried blood.

“Can I see the others?”

She passed two more bags to me. The bolts seemed identical to the first, clearly a set or close to it.

“How about the crossbow itself?”

Willis showed a little flair in lifting the bagged bow clear of the box, maybe rehearsing the drama she’d create at trial when the prosecutor asked her a question like mine. Through the plastic, her strong hand hefted the crossbow at its balance point. The photo Lacouture had shown me didn’t do it justice. Gray with yellow bands around the barrel area, its modernistic design had a recurve on the bow end with an assault rifle’s stock and trigger area. The blood brown fingerprints still on it, the thing looked hideous, a death-dealer from the movie Road Warrior.

I said, “Can you show me how it works?”

Willis thought about that, then opened the bag and took the crossbow out. “It’s been all checked through the lab. Don’t suppose it can hurt none ’less I break the string.”

She flipped up a stirrup at the business end of the weapon. Lowering the bow to her right foot, she put the toe area of her shoe through the stirrup on the floor. Then she grasped the string with both hands, one on each side of the barrel, pulling the string back toward her waist until it caught on a lever at the top of the barrel to the rear of the trigger guard. Willis leveled the weapon at the far wall and pulled the trigger, the string making a “thwung” noise as it released and vibrated.

“Can I try it?”

Another hesitation. “Don’t see why not.”

I took the bow, guessing its weight at six or seven pounds, and recocked it the way she had. The pull was no more than fifty or sixty pounds, not enough strength required to automatically eliminate most people. I left the weapon pointed at the floor as I pulled the trigger. No kick, just an almost pleasant strum sensation from wrist to elbow, like the feeling of hitting a solid forehand in tennis.

I gave the crossbow to Willis, who put it back in the plastic. Returning bow and bolts to the box, she asked if there was anything else I needed.

“Just to know that you won’t be asking Rick whether my client talks in his sleep.”

A philosophical smile. “Law says we can’t put an agent in the cell with your man. Nothing says we can’t save the county some money by doubling up on accommodations with another accused felon.”

“And if the cell mate just happens to learn something useful to the prosecution and wants to demonstrate his value to society?”

“Then it would be up to the prosecutor to decide whether to do some horse trading with the man. Not my barnyard, that sort of thing. I’m just a simple peace officer, Mr. Cuddy.”

I’d made my point, and let it go at that.

I drove through the county seat and then back onto country roads that wound for ten miles through Maine carrying spring toward summer. Frogs peeped in trees, thicker in lower-lying portions of road. Some ducks flew overhead, their shadows crossing the road in front of the car. A porcupine waddled from the tree line onto the shoulder and shied away as I honked to keep it from being flattened.

I drove straight through Marseilles, timing how long it took to get to Steven Shea’s house on the pond. Twenty-one minutes creeping over the ruts that Sheriff Willis bounced over in her Bronco. Eighteen minutes coming to the village, as I knew where the bad spots were and how fast the Prelude could go over or around them. In a four-wheel-drive with high clearance and given his familiarity with the route, Shea ought to have been able to shave it to fifteen one way, even a little drunk. That squared with his estimates.

I then doubled back to the paved driveway that supposedly led up to Tom Judson’s house. The chain with the little flags was padlocked, the hasp looking like it was rusted into the body of the lock. I didn’t have a tool to snip the lock, and I didn’t fancy a walk in my suit up the mountain, even on pavement.

Back at the Marseilles Inn, I parked in front and went onto the porch. Ralph Paine was just inside the screened door, paint brush in hand.

“John, you were up early this morning.”

“I had to do some visiting.”

A nod. “Got a note saying you’d be checking out today.”

“Just have to bring my bag down from the room.”

“Well, since you’ve missed your breakfast, how’s about we throw together a little lunch for you?”

“Ralph, that’s not necessary.”

“I know. But it’s no trouble, and you can enjoy it on the dock. Ham and cheese on home-baked bread with beer and hand-cut potato chips all right?”

“Princely.”

“Be just a second. Go on down and make yourself comfortable.”

Somewhere on the lake, a loon was crying—or yodeling or whatever—as I walked to the dock and settled into one of the white chairs. It was made from resin and gave in just the right places, a high-tech descendant of Ma Judson’s caned rockers. There was a little resin table, too, so I put my legs up on it, calves rather than shoes on the white surface. The breeze off the water was cool, but the sun was warm, and I took off my jacket and rolled up the sleeves of my shirt.

A young girl in a bikini was expertly sailing a small skiff, what looked like real canvas not being allowed to luff except when she came about. Closer to shore, a man in a felt hat like Ma Judson’s cast with a fly rod from a big rowboat, the fluorescent line seeming to stand straight above his head on the back cast, then whistle forward smartly before landing lightly on the water. A very large bird with stilty legs like a cartoon stork waded in the shallows by some lily pads, stepping carefully and swinging its head in a scanning way toward the water around it.

A medium-sized fly landed on my arm. I was about to brush it away when I noticed that it had a trunk like an elephant, which it moved from spot to spot on my skin. The thing had a big red head and a shingled back in black and white, and was one of the oddest creatures I’d ever seen. I stayed still so as not to disturb it as the fly moved all over my arm, sounding with its trunk like a frenetic doctor with a stethoscope.

“John?”

I opened my eyes and realized the fly was gone but Ralph was next to me, a plate and mug and napkin in his hands.

“Oh.” I swung my legs down off the table. “Sorry, Ralph.”

Paine smiled as he laid out the meal for me. “No need to apologize. Something about being up here just slows things down for you. Like”—Paine looked around us, so much like Shea’s gesture about industrial espionage that I jumped a little—“like back when I was young and tried marijuana the first time. Just slowed things down so I felt I had all the time in the world to accomplish everything I ever wanted to do. Up here, it’s just sort of a natural high. We all get it.”

A telephone rang up at the inn. “Damn, I should buy one of those cordless phones. Enjoy your lunch.”

The bread was thick-sliced, the ham and chips the same way, and the cheese brought out a rounding taste in the beer. The best lunch I remembered in a while, I ate it at probably half the speed I would have a deli take-out back in Boston.

When I was finished, I put the plate on the dock and used the mug to anchor the used napkin on it. Then I put my feet back up and waited for Paine to return and give me directions to Owen Briss. The loon started in again, the big bird caught a little fish, and the fly or its cousin came back visiting.

I found myself hoping Ralph’s call would be a longish one.

The trailer was set back from the road about thirty feet, a couple of old lawn chairs dumped in front of it. There was no vehicle in the driveway, fifty feet of hardened clay and scant gravel. Strewn next to the driveway were a scoop-faced snowplow for a small truck, a refrigerator missing its door, and a crude brick barbecue with a filthy iron grill across it.

Ralph Paine had said getting to Briss’s place would be an adventure because the intersections along the dirt road weren’t marked. I realized I’d taken one wrong turn when the road ended at a log-barriered access to a small pond. I eventually got smart and followed what seemed to be the tracks of oversized tires. The tracks led me around a boulder like a blister in the roadbed and to the trailer.

Actually, trailers. It looked as though Briss had grafted a turquoise and white one onto the red and silver one that from its foundation of masonry blocks seemed the pioneer on the lot. A clothesline with both male and female items was spliced from a window frame of the trailer out to a tree at an odd angle. I thought about what Shea told me Briss did for a living. If dentists can have false teeth and barbers lousy haircuts, probably it was okay for carpenters to live in metal trailers.

I pulled into the driveway, and an old spotted pointer came out of nowhere to bay at me. His front paws reached my driver’s side window ledge, and the snout he stuck into my face seemed more intent on slobbering than biting. As I scratched him under the chin, the door to the red and silver part of the complex opened. A woman, in blue jeans and a shirt knotted at the navel, stepped out. Or vamped out.

Cinny, the “hand relief” woman from Gil Lacouture’s office.

I took a breath and got out of my car, the dog jumping up at me.

Cinny said, “Mourner, Mourner, you stop that, hear?”

The dog slumped down, cowed his head, and looked up at me for intercession.

I said, “That’s all right. He wasn’t bothering me.”

“Don’t matter. Wouldn’t want to see that fine suit all fuzzed up with dog hairs.” She swayed over to me. “You could maybe take it off, and I could … spruce things up for you?”

Cinny was about twice as close to me as she should have been for courtesy.

“No, thanks. I’d like to talk with Owen Briss, if he’s here.”

“Owen.” She showed disappointment. “I thought maybe you remembered me from Gil’s office and decided to come calling.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, Owen ain’t here, and probably won’t be back for a good bit. Pity for you to come all the way out here for … nothing.”

Cinny used an index finger to twirl some of her hair, like spaghetti around a fork. She gave off a subtle but deep odor that didn’t come from a perfume bottle.

I said, “Does Owen know what you do to earn spending money?”

She pouted. “Owen don’t own me. Truth is, he don’t even take care of me too well.” More hair twirling. “I mean, it ain’t like we’re married or nothing. I got no ropes tying me down, Mr. … ?”

“Cuddy, John Cuddy.”

“John. My daddy’s name was John. You might remind me of him if we was to … do some things together.”

I was thinking that a hand-relief specialist with a father fixation was not what I needed, when a big engine came revving up the dirt road. The engine belonged to a pickup truck with three gallons of primer on it and outlandishly big tires under it. The pickup belonged to a loutish guy with a few strands of blond hair combed across his scalp and sunburned forearms the diameter of normal people’s legs.

Cinny said, “Uh-oh, the man of the house.”

Briss stopped the pickup so as to hem my car in the driveway, the door to his cab showing a gouge mark running two feet horizontally. He opened the door and landed heavily on the ground. Without closing his door, which might explain the gouge mark, Briss started walking toward me. He was shorter than I’d guessed, only around six feet, but with enough torso under a flannel shirt to bow his legs. As Briss got closer I could see a faint beard and nostrils expanding like he was about to breathe fire through them.

Cinny said, “Owen. Owen! The man didn’t do nothing, I swear!”

Owen kept coming. No weapons or even tools that I could see.

Cinny said to me, “Best you make a run for it. I’ll try to slow him down some.”

She rushed up to him. His right arm lashed out in a backhand way, connecting with her right side and sending her to the ground.

I expected him to throw a punch, probably roundhouse. Instead he just grabbed me by the throat with both hands and started to squeeze.

I dipped slowly, as though he were driving me down, which wasn’t much of an act. When he started to lean into me, I joined my hands like a little kid learning to dive and drove up with forearms at a forty-five degree angle to his own, knocking them free. When my hands were at full height, I brought them down hard and fast, edges karate-style, into the muscles between his shoulders and neck. As Briss went to his knees, I drove my elbow into his jaw, rocking him back onto his ankles, then into the dust that should have been his front lawn.

Cinny, on knees and elbows herself, spoke in a hushed voice. “I swear.”

I rotated my head and regulated my breathing to avoid hyperventilating. It occurred to me a bit late that I probably should have been watching out for Mourner to join the fight, but when I finally spotted him, he was huddled under the bumper of my car, taking things in calmly from a prudent distance.

Walking toward the house, I picked up one of the lawn chairs and brought it to where Briss was coming around. I sat down about four feet away, enough space to give me time to rise if he wanted more. The way he looked up at me, he didn’t.

“My name’s John Cuddy, Mr. Briss.” I held up my Maine ID, so he could see it, then put it away. “I’m investigating the deaths on Marseilles Pond.”

Briss got himself into a sitting position and looked over at my Prelude. “Ain’t no cop’s car.”

“I’m private.”

Cinny said, “A private eye?”

I stayed on Briss. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t answering nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Man comes on my property, and on to my woman, he goddamn don’t—”

“Owen, I told you. The man didn’t try nothing!”

Briss ignored her. “He don’t get squat from me.”

I said, “I understand you worked for Steven Shea.”

“That sonofabitch! He stiffed me!”

Sometimes people say they won’t help, then can’t help themselves from doing it. “Why?”

“Claimed he told me he wanted spindles. Goddamn, estimate like I give him, no man in’s right mind would of thought he was getting spindles.”

“You do a lot of work for him on the house?”

“I did. Ain’t nobody better’n me on finish stuff. Nobody. He had a big outfit do the shell and some roughing in, but he’d heard the kind of work I do and wanted me.”

“Heard from who?”

Briss seemed to realize how much he was talking. “None of your goddamn business.”

“I can just ask Shea, or I can show you a couple more tricks. Your choice.”

Cinny said, “Was Ralph and Ramona.”

Briss said, “You goddamn slut, keep your mouth shut!”

“Owen, this man’s from the city, all right? He can take you with one hand, and I don’t need you all beat up just to not give him something he’s after.”

Briss started to look to Cinny, then didn’t. He muttered something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“I said Ralph and Ramona give me a recommendation to him. I done some work for them, lots of work, when they took over the inn and the country store.”

“And everything went fine with Shea until the spindle fight?”

“’Course it did. I do quality work. Ask anybody.”

“You know his wife?”

“Shea’s?”

“Yes.”

“Met her just the once. She was the kind could go from zero to bitch in six point five seconds, like somebody else I could mention.”

“Owen, now don’t you go starting on me.”

“Why not?” he said.

“Because you know I only got mad account of you was supposed to take me to see Anthrax and them down to SeaPAC.”

I said, “Anthrax and SeaPAC?”

Cinny twirled some more hair. “Heavy metal. Anthrax and Poison and a bunch of other bands were gonna be down to the Performing Arts Center.”

I went back to Briss. “Shea and his wife didn’t oversee your work?”

He shook his head. “They weren’t much around when I was over to their camp.”

“How come?”

“He made a goddamn big thing about it. That I wasn’t never to be there working when he was up with his ‘guests.’ ”

“The Vandemeers?”

“How am I supposed to know? The man paid the money, I did what he wanted. Even the garage—”

Briss stopped.

I said, “What about the garage?”

“Nothing.”

“You go into that garage much, Briss?”

He stopped, seemed to think about it. “No way. Always bring my own tools to a job. Wouldn’t touch none of his.”

“How about the crossbow?”

“What the goddamn you talking about?”

“The crossbow that was used to kill the three people that night. I’m told it was kept in the garage.”

“Then talk to the one that told you about it. I ain’t never seen no crossbow.”

“But you did know where the key to the garage was kept?”

Briss seemed to think again. “Had to.”

“Why?”

“Kept some lumber in there when I was working on the house in bad weather.”

“But you never saw the crossbow?”

“Never seen it. Never touched it. Don’t know nothing about it.”

Not likely. “I also understand you didn’t exactly get along with Tom Judson.”

Briss seemed genuinely thrown. “Judson?”

“Yes.”

“The hell does that old bastard have to do with anything?”

“I heard that you went up to his house to have it out about some money he owed you.”

“The rich bastards are all the same. You do your work for them, they stiff you.”

“And you found him dead.”

“Cold as stone.” Briss grinned for the first time, showing horsey teeth and not that many of them. “All his money didn’t do Judson no good. All it did was let him buy enough drink to bleed himself to death when he caught his leg in that trap. Same with your client, you know? All his money, just made him kill those people.”

“Why?”

“Can’t rightly say. I never had much money to learn from.”

I stood up, Briss flinching until he realized I was done with him.

I said, “I might be back with more questions.”

From the ground, Briss said, “Come back here again, you’d best have better’n a crossbow with you.”

I walked to the Prelude, got in, and started up. When I saw Mourner reach the rear of the trailer, I put the car into first and drove between Cinny and Briss over his dirt front yard and back onto the road toward Marseilles.

Gil Lacouture’s receptionist, Judy, was nowhere in sight. After about twenty seconds in the waiting area, I called out. “Hello?”

Lacouture’s head came around his doorjamb, waving me to come in. As I entered his office, he was just replacing the telephone receiver.

“John, good to see you again. Take a seat.”

I did, laying the Shea accordion file on his desk. “You want to hear a summary, or you want a written report?”

“Summary.”

I gave it to him, everybody I’d seen in the order I’d seen them. Lacouture smiled when I got to Owen Briss and Cinny.

“That girl does keep popping up.”

“You don’t see any conflict in representing both her and Steven Shea?”

“Conflict? How?”

“This isn’t like an accidental death the cops think Shea hoked up. This is cold-blooded triple murder, Gil, and if you can’t give the jury somebody other than Shea for it, they’ll hand Shea to the hangman.”

“Maine doesn’t have the death penalty, John. Abolished it in—”

“You know what I mean. You can’t go in there without some theory of the case, somebody to finger as the real killer when obviously somebody did it.”

“John, first of all, as a lawyer up here, you run into conflicts all the time. You resolve them without losing clients, or you go out of business.” Lacouture pursed his lips. “You think Cinny would be a good alternative suspect?”

“No. I don’t think even Briss would be. But at least he’s somebody who has a motive for getting even with Shea, and that’s more than I got from anybody else.”

“No, I don’t see Briss for this kind of thing. I met him once. Kind of an in-your-face brawler. Not the kind to play Robin of Sherwood Forest.”

“Gil?”

“Yes?”

“Robin Hood used a longbow, but if I were you, I’d lose the clever allusions before I got before the jury.”

Lacouture straightened just a little. “I’ve been before plenty of juries, John. You get to know what you can say to them and what you have to say offstage to keep your sanity. I’m looking at a murder scene that makes the Manson family seem like sitcom material, and I’m representing the accused, who has no motive and claims he didn’t kill anybody.”

“Yeah, well, you’re still going to have to give the jury a target if Shea didn’t do it.”

“If.” Lacouture leaned back in his old leather chair, swiveling it just a little from side to side. “Tell me, what did you think of my client?”

“Three things.”

“Which are?”

“One, I didn’t like him.”

Lacouture lips pursed again. “Kind of the air of snake oil around him, isn’t there?”

“Two, I don’t think he did it.”

Lacouture grinned and slammed his palm on his blotter. “God, I’m glad to hear somebody else say that, somebody who’s talked with him. I thought I was losing my touch when I first interviewed him, wallowing in all that idealism the defenders tour should have drilled out of me. He’s not the greatest or most sympathetic guy in the world, but—remember when you were in here before, I told you there’s something else about Steve that I didn’t want to tell you? Well, that was it. I don’t think he did it, either.”

Lacouture continued to grin, then when I didn’t say anything, his lips went back to pursed. “All right. That’s two things you noticed. What’s the—”

“Third, I don’t think Shea has a clue who might have done this to his wife and friends, and neither do I.”