THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON TRAFFIC on the Central Artery was thick and balky, not improving much even though I decided to use Route 93 north instead of Route 1. A nice day weatherwise, the promise of a better weekend up-country filled the lanes with the cars of people not used to commuter driving. I was one of them.
Sudden noises made me jumpy. The sound of a diesel truck venting its stack, the blare of a rap song over somebody’s radio, the skittering of a muffler and tail pipe not quite held up by wire twisted around a bumper. I tried to concentrate on my driving, to hum familiar tunes, but then I drew even with an old Chrysler in the breakdown lane, chuffing along with a blown front tire, an elderly man stoic behind the wheel. That grinding noise was a little too close to recent reality.
I let the Chrysler get ahead of me, to the sound of horns from behind me, then edged onto the shoulder and sat for a while, taking deep breaths. It didn’t help, so I made a break in the traffic and continued on.
At Route 128, I headed north, the traffic at first worse and then suddenly better. I got on Interstate 95, the pavement widening, the scenery improving a little toward the green side. Then good time until the New Hampshire tollbooth, and better time as I crossed over the bridge to Kittery and saw the billboard with WELCOME TO MAINE—THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.
I felt the next deep breath take hold, as though my whole chest were moving independently inside my rib cage, the organs reordering themselves into a more natural alignment. As the miles went by, I realized the jumpiness was dissipating, too, my hands resting steady on the wheel instead of being clamped to it. The next hundred miles of the trip wore less than the first ten.
Just before Augusta, I debated about where to stay, since I hadn’t called ahead to the Marseilles Inn. Ralph and Ramona might have a room, and then again they might not. In any case, I wasn’t about to impose on them for dinner, and I didn’t relish driving in the dark toward them after eating somewhere closer.
I took the Augusta exit and found a nondescript motel that advertised ESPN on cable. The proprietor, a gruff gent in a green and black lumberjack’s shirt, allowed as how the Kentucky Fried Chicken might be my best bet for dinner. I thanked him, paid in advance for my room, and walked by the ice machine to get to it. Plastic paneling, two double beds, a bathroom with just a shower and a washbasin, no tub and no vanity. However, the TV worked, ESPN coming in loud and clear and promising a baseball doubleheader, the second game at ten-thirty from the West Coast. I showered, put on some casual clothes from the suitcase, and went back out to the Prelude.
It was just getting dark, and I considered stopping in a bar first for some reliable relaxant. I drove past several in downtown along the river and one on the strip with my motel. None seemed inviting, and there were at least three vehicles outside each that looked enough like the high-wheeled pickup Owen Briss drove that I wasn’t dead sure none of them was his. I thought back to the advice about not doing something stupid, and I couldn’t remember whether Nancy or Beth had been the source. That did it.
I found a state liquor store in a shopping center and paid seven bucks for a pint of vodka. There was a payphone in sight, so I went over to it and called Nancy. I told her I’d arrived safely and about my plans for the night without asking if she’d inspired them. Then I found a gas station cum convenience store and bought a half gallon of orange juice, a bag of potato chips, and a box of pretzel logs. I stopped at the Colonel’s for a bucket of chicken parts, some original recipe, the rest extra crispy.
Driving sedately back to my motel, I put the vodka and the orange juice in the bathroom sink. Then I covered both bottles with ice from the machine outside my door. I tuned in the television, settled into bed, and watched a long inning of baseball over dinner and drinks. I had one screwdriver every inning thereafter until I noticed that the chips and pretzels were gone and that I wasn’t sure which team was ahead. That’s when I turned off the set, turned out the lights, and turned in for the night, missing the late game with little regret.
I came awake with a start, the sound of a key in the lock rousting me from a deep sleep, the sound of the door coming open making me realize I didn’t know where I was. The maid, pushing fifty as well as a laundry cart, jumped back out of the room, mumbling something that might have been an apology. I also realized that I hadn’t looked for a DO NOT DISTURB sign the night before.
My watch on the table between the two beds red 11:05. I’d slept for a good twelve hours, but didn’t feel any aftereffect of the drinking except for that cottony dryness around the tongue. After cleaning up, I checked out by dropping off my key with the same man in the same shirt. I had terrific pancakes in a local spot that was packed with people in all the odd rooms it had accreted over the years. Then I drove toward Gil Lacouture’s office.
“Hey, John Cuddy. How about a beer?”
“Thanks, but I just had breakfast.”
“How’d you find me?”
I stared at Lacouture, standing over a barrel grill with a white, puffy chef’s hat on his head and a long-neck Bud in his left hand. In his right he held a spatula, the butcher’s white apron covering a Hawaiian shirt that didn’t look as though a stain, no matter what color, would show anyway. Behind him a crowd of seventy or so men and boys of all ages mingled in a picnic ground on the bank of the river that ran through Augusta. Some were reaching for communal mustard and ketchup squeeze bottles, already taking bites from hot dogs and hamburgers on paper plates that wouldn’t stay flat for them.
I said, “Judy at your office said you’d be here. I don’t want to interrupt anything.”
“Don’t worry about it. This is just our father-son picnic. Another Lion can mind the store for a while. Hey, Cholly? Cholly!”
A round mound of seersucker shirt and green pants came over and took the spatula but not the hat from Lacouture, who wiped one hand and then the other on his apron, shifting the Bud as needed.
Scanning the crowd, I said, “Which one’s yours?”
“Sorry?”
“Which of the boys is yours?”
“Oh.” A small smile, maybe shielding some embarrassment. “I just do these for business generation, John. I don’t have any kids. Or even a wife, for that matter.” He perked a little. “So, what’s up?”
I looked at the crowd again. Cholly and at least four others were within earshot of us.
I said, “Can we step away from things a bit?”
“Sure, sure. Let’s go toward the falls.”
A pretty impressive waterfall was upriver of us, on a line with what I thought would be the end of downtown. The water dropped ten vertical yards onto jagged rocks the size of compact cars.
Lacouture said, “Couple springs ago, the Kennebec went to full flood stage, water rose more than forty feet.”
“Forty feet?”
“It ruined a lot of folks, carried away a few others. But that’s just the river’s way of showing us she’s still vital, like the stripers that feed through here.”
“Striped bass?”
“Right.”
“I thought they were more a saltwater fish.”
“They are, but they come up the rivers, too. Even the Hudson down by New York City, you can believe the papers. Of course, the ones down there might not be such good eating. I read about a rat popping out of the entrails of one being cleaned for a tourist who caught him. But anything out of the Kennebec would be mighty fine, I’ll tell you.” Lacouture eyed me, then took off the chef’s hat. “Somehow, though, I don’t think you’ve come all the way back to learn about our fishing.”
I said, “You hear about a shooting in Boston yesterday?”
Lacouture frowned. “Just some gang thing over the television. Girls, too, I think it was.”
“That was me.”
His eyes grew wide. “You?”
“One of the leads I was following down there got me targeted by a gang called Las Hermanas. They tried to kill me.”
“Christ.” Lacouture looked me up and down. “You all right?”
“Mostly.”
The lawyer grew more lawyerly. “Does this mean you don’t want to stay on Steve’s case?”
“It means I thought you should know about it from me firsthand.”
“Because you think this gang figures in with what happened up here.”
I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, at least not directly.”
“Why not?”
“These were high school kids, even junior high, some of them.” I swung my hand toward the picnic. “No older than a lot of the boys back there. I doubt they could have found Shea’s house up here, and given the way they dealt with me, they wouldn’t have been subtle enough to use a weapon like a crossbow.”
Lacouture seemed to process that. “All right, then why’d you say ‘not directly’?”
“Because I got onto them through Hale Vandemeer’s son and brother, who have pretty good motives for wanting the Vandemeers dead.”
Lacouture scuffed at the ground a little with the heel of a shoe. “I don’t know, John. Doesn’t sound much more promising than the gang possibility. Anything else?”
“Maybe. I also spent some time with the folks at DRM.”
“Anna-Pia and them.”
“Right.”
“And?”
“And they tried to sell me the ‘stop-at-nothing competitor’ theory.”
Lacouture nodded. “Steve’s already bought that.”
“I don’t blame him. From where he’s sitting, it’s the one thing that explains a nightmare he can’t understand.”
“Or wake up from.” He took a slug of his beer. “Something tells me you don’t buy it, though.”
“As a theory, it sounds good. As your only argument to the jury on what happened that night, it doesn’t hold up too well.”
“Bad TV movie.”
“What?”
“You know, made-for-TV movies? The star of the month from some stupid series getting his or her dramatic ‘big break’? Hell, John, even up here most of the jurors I’m likely to draw learn most of what they know from watching the tube. There’s kind of a bedrock sense they’ll have of what’s good TV and bad TV, and the competitor theory is going to sound like bad TV to them. Unless, of course, we can back it up.”
“Not from what I’ve seen so far. I think DRM would like to have Shea back, but not at the expense of losing a big deal over him. This theory is their way of keeping all options open while committing to none.”
Lacouture used a thumbnail to worry a corner of the label on his bottle. “You don’t have any evidence on a competitor. Does that mean you think it’s impossible?”
“No. And I’m going back up to the lake and try it out on people who might have seen something beforehand. Just don’t make it the linchpin of your defense, okay?”
Lacouture looked up from his bottle. “But you still believe Steve’s innocent.”
A while since I’d thought about it. “Yes. I do.”
“I’m glad to hear that. You get deep into a big case, you lose your sense of perspective.” Another sip of beer. “So, do you need anything more from me?”
“Maybe. Shea ever tell you he had some kind of … secret?”
Lacouture gave me the lawyer look again. “Secret? About what?”
“I don’t mean the affair.”
Bewilderment that seemed genuine. “The affair?”
“Between Hale Vandemeer and Sandra Newberg.”
“No. Oh, no.”
“Shea never told you?”
“Not a word. If he had, I would have told you. You sure he knew about it?”
“For motive, you mean?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Nicky Vandemeer said he dropped the news on Steve around a month ago. At least one other person—a neighbor down in Calem—was aware of the affair, and both Nicky and the neighbor spoke to the cops about what they know.”
More scuffing with the shoe. “John, this is not good news.”
“There may be worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shea ever say anything about any other secret?”
An edge of panic crept into Lacouture’s voice. “A-nother secret? About what?”
“I don’t know. Except it might have something to do with DRM, based on the source that brought it up.”
A slow, then emphatic shake of the head. “No. No, John, Steve told me DRM is into a lot of stuff that’s ‘secret’ in the kind of national security sense we used to respect in this country. But he never even implied to me that he had a secret himself. What do you think it is?”
“I’m hoping you can arrange for me to see him again this afternoon so I can ask.”
Lacouture made a face as though somebody forgot to ice his beer. “I can do that. But John, go easy on Steve, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s having a little more trouble adjusting to jail.”
None of the pickups outside the bars on Friday night belonged to Owen Briss. I know, because the truck parked at a careless angle outside the Marseilles Inn had that distinctive gouge mark on the driver’s side door. What looked like half a load of lumber lay in the bed of the pickup, extending past the tailgate with no red flag on the extension. I got out of my car just as Briss, wearing an old chamois shirt and cutoff shorts, stepped through the front door of the inn and onto the porch. The sounds of sixties rock trailed behind him, something from the Byrds, I thought.
The balding head reared liked a horse that had seen a snake. “The goddamn hell do you want?”
“Nothing with you, my friend.”
As the carpenter bristled, Ralph Paine came out behind him. “John! Mona said you’d called up from Augusta. How are you?”
“Well, Ralph, thanks. Okay to come in?”
“Okay? Why shouldn’t it be?”
Briss moved down the steps before I started to move toward them. “I got a truck needs unloading.”
He began sliding two-by-fours forcefully onto one shoulder. Ralph watched him thoughtfully, then came back to me. “John, why don’t we get you signed in and all, so Owen can have a free hand with the lumber?”
“Fine by me.”
I got my suitcase out of the car, but let Briss go first with his load, stomping up the steps ahead of me.
As the rear end of the wood disappeared down a first-floor hall, Paine turned down the radio and said quietly, “You had a run-in with Owen, then?”
“I did.”
“Most do. He’s a fine carpenter, but a mite hard to get along with. He won’t bother you long’s I’m around.”
“Good. I’ve had enough trouble for a while.”
Ralph nodded. “Saw the late TV news last night, tape from Boston. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry for your troubles there. How long can you stay with us?”
“I’m not sure. Couple of days, maybe.”
“Well, whatever. Your room’s waiting for you.”
“Same one’s available?”
“We make that effort.” A broad grin.
“Terrific.”
“Be having dinner with us tonight?”
“I’ll be gone most of the afternoon, but I’d love to, if there’ll be an empty chair.”
“Empty chair? John, that little nook in the corner’s just been crying for you.” Paine dropped the jovial mood. “The thing in Boston. Sounded like it was kind of tough.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “Kind of.”
“Tell you what, then. You come back here after whatever you’ve got to do this afternoon. I’ll set something up for you, take your mind off things.”
“Ralph, don’t go to—”
“Won’t be any trouble at all. Just need some clothes you don’t mind maybe getting wet.”