StoneDust (2 page)

“We were just listening to your radio scanner,” the first selectman informed the newspaper publisher.

“Sure. Eleanor and I used to come out here and do the same thing…Before the kids.”

“Shut up, Scooter.”

“Have fun.” He backed the Range Rover out and raced down his drive.

“You think there's really hay up there?” I asked.

“Ben, he heard it too. He thinks it's important. Could you please…”

She was really distracted—bed was the furthest thing from her mind—so I said I couldn't think of anything that would give me greater pleasure and ran back through the hedge into my barn, fired up the Olds, and headed north.

My Olds—my father's sedate old Oldsmobile, his very last car—had come with a standard engine better suited to powering a Brazilian sawmill than an American automobile. When I inherited the sedan, my cousin Renny—the best of the Chevalley boys—had in payment for a loan installed a lovingly bored and stroked Cadillac V-6. With Pirelli tires and beefed-up shocks and struts, the car, as Renny used to say, hauled freight. (Pink said that if General Motors had built 'em like that back in '85, the Japanese would have stuck to Walkmans.)

I sped north on an empty Route 7, secure in the knowledge that the only cop in twenty miles was babysitting a crime scene in the deep woods.

It was glorious late June. Apple, shad, and native dogwood had faded, but the mountain laurel was bleeding pink and hemlock forests hung heavy with pale green new growth. The only disappointment on the drive was a minor one, a slight shimmy in the low hundreds when, on a short straight, I rocketed past Scooter's Range Rover.

Once Crabtree turned to dirt, it was a full twenty minutes before the covered bridge hove into view around a bend. Ollie's cruiser blocked the road. Ollie stood behind it, facing me. His flashers were off. He didn't even bother raising a hand. He just stood there—mirrored sunglasses and full gray uniform, six-foot-five plus hat, arms folded like anvils across his chest—the message clear as an electric roadwork sign:
stop. turn around. get lost
.

I couldn't see much past him and his car, but it looked like someone had parked a dark Chevy S10 Blazer in the shadows of the one-lane bridge and left the driver's door open. The bridge itself, which spanned a fair-sized brook, running low this dry spring, was about fifty feet long with a shingled roof and barn-siding walls. A couple of square holes were cut between the timbers as unglassed windows, and in the light spill from one I saw an arm hanging white out the open door of the Blazer.

Chapter 2

As I drew within point-blank range of the cannon holstered at his waist, Trooper Moody said, “Get lost.”

Like many country troopers, Oliver Moody had grown up a younger son on a struggling farm. When big-brother Bob inherited the disaster, Ollie joined the Army, where he had enjoyed a couple of hitches in a famously sadistic MP unit. Discharged, he brought his talents to the state police and took up residence in a little saltbox Newbury provided next door to Town Hall. In his eyes I would always be the spoiled kid from the big house on Main Street.

In fact, there were several houses on Main Street bigger than mine, and I was never spoiled. My parents had neither the means nor the temperament, but if they had, Aunt Connie would have put a stop to
that
, thank you very much. I had run a little wild, however, and Trooper Moody had taken it as a turf challenge to tame me, which had, over the years, caused near equal suffering on both sides.

The fact that Ollie owed me a big favor, if not his life, didn't make him love me any more.

I said, “I'm going over to the reservation.” Thanks to some service my great-grandfather had performed, the Housatonic tribe turned to the Abbotts for their rare real estate dealings.

“Crime scene,” said Ollie. “Bridge is blocked.”

“So I'll leave my car and walk.”

“Ben, get the hell out of here before I punch you in the mouth.”

Given the absence of witnesses in the woods and our long, unpleasant history, Ollie would have enjoyed doing that very much. While I, a hundred pounds lighter and a lot shorter, would, in the long run, have suffered more than he.

I took a step left, and before he moved to block my view I saw that the white object hanging from the Blazer's door was definitely a man's hand. Then, with a jolt, I noticed the plastic WindVent installed on the window.

“Is that Reg Hopkins's Blazer?”

I sidestepped again and finally got a glimpse of the vanity license plate.

“E-FLU-NT? Looks like Reg to me. Somebody steal his car?”

Suddenly jousting with Ollie wasn't fun anymore.

Reg and I went back to marbles and Little League. More recently, our businesses had meshed on the occasions that Benjamin Abbott Realty steered new homeowners toward Reg Hopkins Septic—steering I did with an easy conscience, as Reg was a straight shooter in a service that bred hustlers. I hadn't seen much of him since Janey left him, and now I wondered, too late, what I should have done to help.

Ollie heard Scooter MacKay rumbling up the dirt road and transformed, grudgingly, from vicious bully to peace officer: “Get in your car and drive away or you're under arrest for obstructing an investigation.”

Couldn't argue with that. Didn't feel like it, if that was Reg's hand.

I turned around and walked to my car, at an angle that produced a view of the right side of Reg's Blazer. I thought I saw a scrape—a long scratch that ran from tail light to front bumper.

The Range Rover skidded around the bend like a pig on tiptoe. Scooter jumped out with his camera, glowering at my ten-year-old sedan, which had left his latest extravagance in the dust. “What happened?”

I told him that there seemed to be a dead man in Reg Hopkins's Blazer. His face dropped and he suddenly looked like a big dog that had been kicked for no reason.

“Reg?”

“His car.”

“Jesus. What happened to him?”

“I don't know. Except he's dead. Ollie ran me off.”

“Can't be Reg.” He headed toward the bridge.

I stopped him. “Do me a favor? Give me a wave if it's him.”

Ordinarily Scooter would have made a lame joke about journalistic ethics and I'd have countered with a lamer retort. Instead we held eyes a moment, until Scooter muttered, “We're too young for this.”

We'd all played baseball together, in Old Man Hawley's side yard, ridden bikes and hung out. We'd drifted a little apart, of course, when Scooter and I were enrolled in Newbury Prep as day students and Reg entered the public high school. Eventually he'd married a newcomer, which took him further from our sphere. But business, the Lions, and the Rotary had brought us back, and I felt the same numbing astonishment Scooter did that a kid from our childhood could actually die.

I got in the car and turned it around slowly while Scooter interviewed Ollie.

I watched in the mirror until he boomed, “Reg Hopkins?”

Then I eased past the Range Rover. Around the next bend I came within a foot of a head-on collision with a beige unmarked state police car. A siren whooped and lights flashed. I made a show of backing off the road, leaving so little room that she had to inch past.

“Hi, Marian.”

A very annoyed, very attractive brunette with all-business eyes I once called an arresting shade of gray lowered her window. “Ben, what are you doing here?”

“Fleeing,” I said, and when she didn't smile, I added, “Trooper Moody chased me.”

Marian Boyce was a terrific woman who deserved three good men: a decent stepfather for her little boy; an energetic lover; and someone to hold her coat while she fought her way up the ranks of the state police.

“Lobster night next week?” I asked.

“So you can pump me about the body in the bridge?”

“Did I pump you last time we had dinner?”

“I'm off lobster.”

“How about a picnic?”

She drummed the steering wheel with her big fingers and gave me an uncharacteristically shy smile. “I'm sort of seeing someone.”

“Congratulations. Bring him along.”

“Yeah, right…Listen, call me next week if you still feel like it.”

I stopped at the junction of Crabtree and Route 7 to wait for Scooter. The Newbury Volunteer Ambulance came along, slowly and without running lights, trailed by Dr. Steve Greenan's old diesel Mercedes. Steve doubled as an assistant medical examiner. I ducked down, too shaken to talk. Finally Scooter pulled alongside. He'd been crying.

“Steve thinks maybe some kind of convulsion.”

I almost felt relief. I'd been afraid he'd killed himself.

“From what?” I asked.

Scooter dried his eyes on his sleeve. “Maybe drugs…”

“Oh for crissake.”

“Yeah.” Scooter found a sudden interest in the Range Rover's instrument panel. I inspected my steering wheel, wishing I had stuck a little closer to Reg during what was by all accounts a particularly sad and destructive divorce.

Scooter said, “We asked him to dinner last month. He cancelled last minute.”

I said, “Yeah, we had coffee a couple weeks ago.” Actually, more like a month.

Back in Newbury I found Vicky at the Drover, sitting with a sullen crowd watching the Red Sox get pounded by the last-place Milwaukee Brewers. I ordered a Bloody Mary and hid in a booth. Vicky hurried over. I told her the little I knew.

“Oh, Ben. I'm sorry. He was a sweet guy…” There was nothing more she could say. She hadn't grown up in Newbury, so the connection wasn't deep. In fact, she and Reg had gone head to head on land-use battles. Battles Vicky had won.

We sat silently awhile. Vicky worried her lip. I said, “Relax. It's a damned shame. But it's got nothing to do with the election.” I patted her hand and made the kind of joke you can only make with friends: “Reg wouldn't have voted for you anyhow.”

And there it would have ended, for me at least, if Janey Hopkins hadn't showed up at my office the day after the funeral.

Chapter 3

Abbotts from Stratford cut the first deal with the Indians in this neck of the woods and bought what is now the central borough of Newbury for a dozen broadcloth coats, some ruffled shirts, seven guns, and forty pounds of lead. We were farmers and merchants and ministers.

Aunt Connie's branch of the family were more adventurous: Led by the piratical Constantine Abbott, they flourished in the China trade and plowed their profits into canals, whaleships, and railroads; but my people stuck close to Newbury.

Around 1900 Great-grandfather Benjamin—a minister with doubts—observed the farmers fleeing to the cities at the same time that wealthy city people were seeking bucolic retreats. He opened a real estate agency. His son led the town to write zoning regulations and
his
son, my father, got himself elected first selectman to enforce them. They never got rich out of it, but their legacy was Newbury's pristine Main Street, a historic medley of Colonial houses and Federal mansions, unblemished by Seven-Elevens, gas stations, or McDonalds.

Hidden down Church Hill are the Grand Union, a liquor store, biker bar, and similar amenities. But on Main Street the only visible commerce is the Newbury Savings Bank, where a flash advertising concept is a fresh coat of white paint; the Newbury General Store, so quaint that last year when I had it on the market I had to discourage a guy who wanted to truck it to Florida; the Yankee Drover, a white clapboard inn as respectable looking as the churches with which it shares the flagpole corner; and, of course, my “Benjamin Abbott Realty” shingle, and a few of my competitors.

The morning after Reg's funeral, Janey drove past all of them and knocked on my door.

“I have to talk to you about Reg.”

“I'm real sorry, Janey.” I offered her a chair beside my desk and whisked the current issue of the weekly
Clarion
off the coffee table. As Scooter MacKay couldn't very well publish the rumors that Fisks and friends were screwing each other's brains out Saturday night, Reg's death was page one in the
Clarion
, if not in the General Store.

Photos of the covered bridge, Reg's Blazer, the Newbury ambulance working morgue duty, and Doctor Steve puttering around the death scene illustrated interviews with Oliver Moody and Sergeant Marian Boyce.

Scooter had composed a somber editorial, likening the death of a friend to an interrupted dream. The only laugh in the entire paper that week was a murky story about a ginmill brawl up north, where a logger who'd been refused service had chainsawed the bar in half.

Janey Hopkins declined my offer of coffee and watched impatiently while I settled down. She was an athletic, solidly built woman whose face had gotten a bit gaunt under stress. She wore her brown hair short and loose, but her eyes betrayed her, narrow with anxious concentration. When she and Reg were riding high, she'd been a leader of the young golf-and-business pack.

Reg Hopkins had built himself and Janey a make-believe “English cottage,” circa Black Death era, with an authentic roof he had learned to thatch himself. My competitor Fred Gleason was handling the sell-off.

So I groaned inwardly, figuring she'd come to discuss their other property. The main parcel was a partially developed scar on a hillside off Mount Pleasant Road. The plan had been to carve a beautiful old orchard into twelve four-acre lots. In partnership with the party-givers Duane and Michelle Fisk, who owned Newbury Pre-cast Concrete and supplied Reg's tanks and galleys, they had bulled through a zoning variance and blasted a road up the hill, just in time for the real estate collapse.

I had liked nothing about the deal. They had snookered old Mrs. Fosdick into selling it indecently cheap. Then they had weaseled out of proper retaining walls by heaping trap rock on a too-steep slope, so that the entry to the subdivision looked like the front door of a gravel pit. All I could say in their favor was that the Hopkinses and the Fisks weren't the only couples who had talked the banks into backing skeezy developments of land better left alone.

“He was clean,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“My lawyer just called. Greg Riggs in Plainfield?”

I nodded noncommittally. Greg Riggs, Esquire—a comer at the county seat, destined for an early judgeship—was handling Janey's divorce in a full-service manner, if gossip could be believed.

“Greg says the coroner is reporting a heroin overdose as cause of death.”

I didn't want to hear that. “The
Clarion
said it was a convulsion.”

Janey Hopkins was one of those people who spoke loudly and slowly to make a point. “The medical examiner will report that a heroin overdose caused his convulsion.”

“I see.”

The cops called it a “hotload”—a lethal high-grade heroin clumsily cut by crack dealers pushing a new product in a saturated market. Inhaled, to avoid AIDS-infected needles, it had already killed a hundred people in Connecticut. Like Reg, most of the victims were middle-class and white.

I looked out my window at the elms that cradled Main Street from the sky. It was too sad and dreary to picture Reg cruising the Blazer through some littered Bridgeport neighborhood, scoring, driving home to the thatched cottage he was about to lose to snort it up for a lonely evening's recreation. Hit like a sledgehammer. Euphoria. A stab of terror. Oblivion.

“No, you don't see, Ben. I'm telling you, Reg was clean. He hadn't done coke or had a drink in months. And he certainly didn't do heroin.”

I was curious how she knew that a man she had left six months before, and was in the process of separating from his house and his kids, hadn't backslid.

Janey said, “Ben, we got the kids, we got the business. We talked. A couple of times a week, on the phone. I know what he was going through. I would have known if he was doing it again.”

“But from what you say it sounds like he was.”

“Ben. Are you listening to me? He joined AA, for God's sake.”

I had heard. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I want you to ask around and find out what really happened.”

“What do you mean, ‘what really happened'? Ask what?”

She said, “Hey, I'll pay you. You're going broke here.” This last was accompanied by a derisive glance around my office.

A mite shabby, though clean and neat as a pin, it occupied a sunroom porch my father had winterized when he took over the business. The weeping cherry outside had long ago blocked the sun, so it smelled a little musty—in a cozy way that fit the floral-printed customers' couch, Dad's curlicued oak desk, the yellowing aerial photographs, and the handout maps and pamphlet histories of Newbury stacked hospitably on the coffee table.

“Why me?”

“Because you know everybody in town.”

“Plenty of people know everybody in town.”

“But you're trained. You know how to ask. Reg said you were in Naval Intelligence. Weren't you?”

“If there is such a thing.”

“An investigator.”

“Half-assed.”

“And he was always raving about how much you learned in jail.”

I frowned at the grieving widow, intending to shut her up. But she kept talking, plowing up the present, exposing a past most people had the courtesy to discuss behind my back.

“Reg used to say, ‘Ben learned stuff in prison the rest of us can't even guess.'”

By the time my turn came to sell pieces of the prettiest town in New England to country-home hunters, I had ventured much farther afield than my father and grandfathers. Yanked out of Newbury Prep in my junior year, I boarded at Stonybrook Military in preparation for Annapolis Naval Academy. Commissioned, I saw that part of the world you see from naval vessels and garrison towns, served out my obligation, and landed on Wall Street for the 'Eighties money boom. There I flourished—every bit the under-aged, overpaid insider—until a righteous United States attorney and a humorless Securities and Exchange Commission convinced a federal judge she'd be doing society a favor by sending me to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Three years. Or until I testified against my friends. Whichever came first.

I survived the three years and came home, to the relief of Aunt Connie and my mother and the delight of our neighbors, who finally had a big one up on the Abbotts. My father died the day I got out. Connie swung her considerable influence to speed up relief from civil disability so I could get my license, just in time for northwest Connecticut's longest real estate slump since the Erie Canal put our wheat farms out of business.

So instead of growling “Ben learned stuff he'd rather forget,” I slid open my desk drawer and stole a glance at the recent entries in my checkbook. Nothing there I hadn't feared, and no happy surprises, either.

Business had been picking up, as some people, at least, began making money on Wall Street, and I'd had a pretty good half year. But I still had to pay off the grim years that preceded it and catch up with all the put off expenses—like a roof on the house, a furnace and a paint job. The good news was that I'd finally paid my arrears tax bill at Town Hall.

Janey kept pushing. “You helped that woman who shot her boyfriend.”

“She didn't shoot her boyfriend.”

“She was new in town. Reg was your friend forever.”

“I felt affection for her.” In truth, I would row to the Arctic for Rita Long, but that was none of Janey's business. Nor was it her business why I was sure Rita hadn't shot her boyfriend. And it was certainly not her business, nor anyone else's, exactly what had happened to the murderer. Suffice it to say, Rita was not in jail.

It appeared, however, that Janey had made an avid study of
my
business: “Who'd you feel affection for on Scudder Mountain?” she demanded. “Reg said you were in that up to your eyeballs.”

“I was only trying to swing a land deal.”

“That's not the way I heard it—And how 'bout when you tracked down old Mr. Butler?”

Trooper Moody couldn't find the old gent, so the Butlers had come to me, fearing that forgetful Granddad had wandered off. He had, into the arms of a New Milford waitress, who had every intention of keeping him.

It was mildly informative seeing my life through someone else's window, but I'd seen enough. So before Janey could remind me about the time I rescued the Meeting House cat from a maple tree, I asked, somewhat harshly, “Why do you care?”

“Reg Hopkins was not the kind of man to kill himself.”

“I hear you're living with your lawyer.”

“So what? I have a legal separation. I can live with who I want.”

“So what do you care?”

“Our children have a right to know their father wasn't a suicide.”

“Nobody's calling it suicide. It was an accident.”

“Great. They'll be relieved to know Daddy was only a drug addict.”

“Okay. I see your point, but I don't—”

“He never was—until things got bad—maybe a toot on Saturday night. You know.”

Like anyone else with an hour to spare for “Sixty Minutes,” I knew that
somebody
had to be snorting up the container shiploads of cocaine and heroin landing daily on America's shores. But if such tonnage never left the confines of city ghettos, wouldn't ghetto dwellers need snowplows to cross the street? The numbers suggested that even in the clean, lean, alive and alert 'Nineties, even upright citizens in bastions of reality exemption like Newbury, Connecticut, might enjoy a Saturday-night toot that had not escaped from a state-licensed bottle.

So yes, Janey, “I know.”

“So will you do it?”

“Janey. If I start asking around, first thing I'm going to find is what you're
not
telling me. So I ask you again, save me time and you money: Why do you care?”

“Me and the kids are the beneficiaries of his life insurance.”

“They won't pay on an OD?”

She nodded.

“What about your lawyer? He must have an investigator he can recommend.”

“Greg doesn't want me to do this. He says forget about the insurance and let's just get on with living.”

For a minute or two, I watched the cars swish by on Main Street. Her fella sounded remarkably ungreedy.

“How much money are we talking about?”

“Enough to pay off the mortgage and keep us going a couple of years.”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred thousand—Ben. Don't get all righteous on me. The house is mortgaged up the wazoo. I don't have a way of making a living. Until I get one, that insurance money makes me and the kids independent.”

“You mean you won't need the lawyer?”

“I mean I won't need him for the money. If I want to make a life with him, fine, but not because I have to. You can understand that, can't you?”

I could. Sort of. I guess in every couple there's always one person you like a little more. Reg and I had played together. Janey's parents had moved up from Bridgeport when she was a sophomore, right before I left for Stonybrook. I hardly knew her.

Adding up the nasty crack about my being broke, the reminder I'd served time, and the rape of the hillside on Mount Pleasant, I stood up to show her the door. And would have, if she hadn't started crying.