A Bat in the Belfry (21 page)

W
hen I got back to my house after dropping Ellie at hers, I had every intention of staying home for the storm’s duration. But then I went upstairs to wash my hands, and calamity ensued.

This way: I turned the hot and cold water faucet handles on together, which in my old house is the only way of not either boiling or freezing yourself to death. The faucet gurgled. Some water spat out. Then the water cut off, but the gurgling didn’t, and the next thing I knew, there was yelling down in the kitchen, followed by the banging of pans and clanking of buckets.

All of which, I knew from my sadly extensive experience in This Old Money-Pit, represented a broken pipe in the downstairs hall ceiling. And since every plumber in town was busy putting sump pumps into cellars not already equipped with them (in towns to our south it was rumored that the animals were lining up two by two), I had little choice but to put on my own plumber’s hat.

Which resembled a dunce cap, and some people said was made of tinfoil, but I had to do something before it started raining even harder inside the house than out. So I raced to the car, backed out of a driveway so flooded that the animal story started sounding halfway believable, and drove toward downtown and the harbor, where I expected to see an Ark floating.

There wasn’t, but if it kept raining like this, everything else would be soon. I left the car in a lagoon that hours earlier had been a parking lot, then rushed across the street through what was already a running stream. In the store, clerks hurried to keep up with sales of downspouts, drainage tiles, and spray caulk, gutter sections and connectors, and—for when all else failed—truly enormous blue plastic tarps, plus plenty of bungee cords to lash them down.

In the narrow old building with its wooden floors, exposed brick walls, and wide-bladed fans turning slowly near the high, stamped-tin ceilings, I found my way to the pipe section, where braided steel, copper, PVC, and PEX were all displayed, cut in lengths or dangling from big reels.

The store smelled as usual of paint, sawdust, and 3-in-One oil, mingled perfumes that always encourage me in fond beliefs that I’d be much better off without. Such as, for instance, the idea that no matter how bad the trouble is, a little elbow grease and an insane amount of determination can still make everything all right.

Well, that and the right tools. Buoyed by this notion, I chose two pieces of PEX pipe and an installation kit. It held a crimping tool, various sizes of compression fittings, and pipe cutters. The whole thing was more expensive in the short run than it would’ve been to splice in more copper piping, but over the long haul I figured I was saving on the psychiatric care I’d be needing if I ever had to work with copper piping again.

Because of two words: “soldering gun.” Personally, I’d rather try fixing a pipe with an AK-47. As I pondered this, the chatter around the cash register up front began penetrating my plumbing-obsessed brain. And despite the emergency at home, when I heard Lizzie Snow’s name, I couldn’t resist a peek around a display of work gloves—cloth, leather, insulated, rubberized, and thin plastic, just to name a few—to see who was there.

“She won’t arrest anyone,” said Beanie Rumford, leaning on the cash register counter. “She’ll just nag ’em to death. Make ’em wish they were in jail, y’know? Like their wives do.”

“Har har,” said his audience, a quartet of Eastport’s least admirable citizens. Lounging by the garden supplies were an enlightened crew of benchwarmers, second-guessers, and armchair quarterbacks, none of whom would ordinarily have been caught dead in the hardware store, since it reminded them too much of work.

But of course it was raining outside, so they were making an exception. “She ain’t no cop. She’s too good-lookin’ for a cop,” another of them chimed in; I guessed the rocket science programs Dinty Dutton had applied to must’ve been full. “Those legs of hers look like they go all the way to heaven, don’t they?”

As he glanced around for approval, Barron Hallie spoke up. “Don’t know what a woman’d want with that job,” he commented from behind a shrubby mustache. “Decent one wouldn’t, anyway.”

They didn’t know I was down the aisle, listening. “Oh, she’s decent, all right.” Beanie sniggered. “I wouldn’t mind her workin’ with me undercover, you know what I mean? Get it? Under covers?”

Apparently they all did, which surprised me considering that their combined IQ barely exceeded today’s temperature. More hilarity followed until I appeared with my pipes and my pipe-putting-together kit, which I may have set down on the counter a bit more firmly than necessary.

“Anyone working under cover with you would need a gas mask,” I told Beanie as the clerk rang up my purchases; the cloud of garlic and chewing-tobacco fumes hanging around Beanie today was even more stunning than usual. “Haven’t you got anything better to do than gossip?”

Because the idea of Lizzie Snow being a cop was silly. For one thing, cops didn’t have to go wandering around on their own snooping into things like missing nieces and possibly murdered sisters; they had all the snooping resources in the world.

“Ain’t gossip,” Barron protested stoutly.

The clerk went to check a price. With the pipe stuff, I’d picked up a can of Spackle, some plaster buttons, a putty knife, and a can of white ceiling paint, since the burst pipe was above the ceiling and that meant taking some of the ceiling down.

“Heard it straight from Paulie Waters,” Barron said, but I ignored him, still busy with my own thoughts.

Of course, taking the ceiling down meant patching it back up again; besides, I could always use ceiling paint. Oh, the happy life of the old-house fix-up enthusiast; tra-freaking-la.

“He thought there might be something hinky about her, so he went an’ ran her licence plate,” said Barron. “Turns out she’s a Boston po-lice officer, sure as shootin’.”

Which got my attention, even if he had mispronounced it:
ossifer
. I turned sharply to him.

“That’s right.” Barron looked delighted with himself. “And that’s not all. Paulie says he thinks pretty soon she’s gonna be our brand-new Eastport chief of police.”

So there, smarty-pants
, his defiant expression said, and I was about to reply, but just then, as the clerk returned, Paulie himself came in, the bell over the door jangling brightly. The good-looking young Eastport cop was Bob Arnold’s second-in-command, and so might reasonably have thought the chief’s job would be his should it become vacant.

But the scowl on his face said something had disappointed him recently. As he caught my eye his mouth formed a bitter line, then he turned away, pretending to compare the advantages of a tack hammer versus a rubber mallet.

So maybe
, I thought with dismay as the clerk told me what I owed—if there were taxi meters for old-house fix-up expenses, mine would’ve overheated and burst into flames by now—
maybe the stories about Bob leaving Eastport were true
.

And maybe
that
was Lizzie’s secret: she was replacing him. No wonder Paulie’s face looked stormier than today’s weather …

So forbidding, in fact, that although I approached him, when I got up close he looked exactly as if he might bite my head off, and I decided to ask Bob Arnold about it instead.

If the rumor was true, though … oh, man, just what I needed: a smart, energetic, and slim-as-a-switchblade cop zipping around town, reminding me every day with her edgy style and her fearless attitude that she was, as Sam would have put it if he weren’t so mad at her,
da bomb
.

And I wasn’t, anymore. Not to mention that if she had lied by not saying she was a cop in the first place … well, why?

Oh, I didn’t like it a bit. Or what I found when I got home, either: when I walked in the door, I found that the pipe leak had enlarged quite a lot, and as a result my back hall bore a strong resemblance to a certain famous watery honeymoon destination.

So I spent the afternoon replumbing not only the bathroom but the mysteries of compression fittings, which when you’re perched atop a stepladder with your head stuck up through a hole in the ceiling is not exactly a cakewalk. But finally I got it sorted:

First, shut off all the water in the house. Next, hacksaw out the broken part of the pipe. Measure the cut end’s diameter, slide on the correct compression fittings, butt the new piece’s ends up to the existing-pipe ends, and slide the fitting over the two mated pieces like a sleeve. Then crimp the fitting and repeat the process at the other end of the replacement piece, and …

Presto, no more Niagara Falls. And with any luck, that would be the day’s final emergency, since besides fixing the leak I’d also done what I could about that carpenter-ant-weakened church steeple; not much, but at least it would get looked at soon.

As for Chip Hahn, he had a lawyer, so we didn’t have to set that up for him. I’d called the courthouse, talked to a pleasant clerk, and discovered that yes, he was still there, but no, he had not been arrested. I asked the clerk to find out if he wanted us to come and stay with him, or bring him anything.

Which wasn’t strictly in her job description, of course. But she did it and the answer came back no. Meanwhile, Ellie and I had agreed that we’d start asking around in the morning, once the storm had gone by, in case anyone in town knew anything we might find interesting on Chip’s behalf.

Ellie had said she’d email Lizzie Snow’s photos of her niece around, too; what that increasingly odd story was really all about I couldn’t begin to guess. Could the guys in the hardware store be right?

Looking out into the rain-swept evening, I hoped not, and not only for my own sake. As a potential police chief, Lizzie fit Eastport the way a roofing tack fits a finishing nail’s pre-drilled hole: you can hammer it in there, all right, but it’s not going to do the job like you wanted and it’ll always look funny.

For now, though, all I could do about any of it was stay home, with no plans to go out any more tonight. But that just goes to show how life can turn on a dime, doesn’t it? Because not much later I was in a strange car, sneaking down a dark street through wind-driven rain while following a possible murderer.

And that was the good part of the evening.

•  •  •

“T
hat’s them.” Lizzie pointed across the dark expanse of rain-swept Water Street.

“I’m telling you, they were there last night, and they were watching.”

At the church, she meant, right after poor Karen Hansen had been knifed to death. “I mean they were fascinated. Way more than the rest.”

She’d arrived at my place while I was in the hall, cleaning up after the pipe repair.

“Jake,” she’d said, standing on my back porch with the rain hammering down behind her, “can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said. What I wanted to say was “Liar, liar.” The more I’d thought about it, the more believable that rumor about Lizzie being a cop sounded.

But I didn’t feel like confronting her about it; for one thing I had no control over who the next Eastport police chief might be, and for another, with my hair still full of Spackle globs and my eyes gritty with plaster dust, I didn’t give a hoot if she was secretly Bozo the Clown as long as I could get into a good hot shower real soon, now.

So I just stood aside to let her past the stepladder, the spackling tools, the hacksaw, a tub of Spackle, a plastic drop cloth, the opened can of plaster buttons, and the electric screwdriver.

Due to the leak, I’d had not only a water emergency but also a ceiling emergency, and when I reached up to smooth Spackle onto a plaster button, I’d nearly had a ladder emergency. But she didn’t go past the mess, because she wasn’t staying; instead, she wanted me to go with her.

“I’ve got an idea about your guest’s situation,” she’d said, blinking raindrops out of her long dark eyelashes, “something that might help him out, and I’m going downtown to check into it a little more.”

Phooey
, I’d thought, looking out past her at the rain; also, who knew what she was really up to? On top of that, she looked scrappy and determined even in her current wet, bedraggled state; good heavens, this woman annoyed me. But it was Chip she was talking about, so of course I went and got my raincoat.

Now the three boys she’d pointed out stood huddled in a doorway of one of the closed shops on Water Street, while we sat in her Toyota in a dark parking lot half a block distant.

“You’re sure?” I asked. “They were outside the church last night?”

The boys pushed and jostled, smoking and roughhousing as well as they could in the tight space. I didn’t know their names, but the scruffy trio was a familiar sight most evenings on one downtown corner or another. I’d even seen them in snowstorms.

“I’m sure,” Lizzie answered quietly. “I barely noticed them last night by the church, but when I was driving through town a little while ago …”

She’d spotted them, and remembered. Her scarf slipped, exposing a deep bruise forming on her neck. Feeling my gaze, she touched it lightly. “Seatbelt got me.”

But she didn’t want to talk any more about the accident she had been in. Then Sam spoke up for the first time from the back seat. “Those guys are trouble.”

At the last minute, he’d hustled out and hopped into the car with us uninvited, still in work clothes and with his penlight stuck in his shirt’s boatyard-monogrammed breast pocket; seeing it reminded me of how much I wished he hadn’t quit the job.

“One of their usual crew isn’t here tonight. But that tall one down there now is especially bad,” he added. “Harvey Spratt.”

“Uh-huh.” Lizzie’s gaze returned to the youths. “I didn’t figure any of them for charity workers.”

Sam still blamed Lizzie for the fix Chip was in, but even a hint that there might be other suspects was catnip to him. So he obliged her by naming the other boys horsing around in the doorway.

“Not that you couldn’t get their names from Bob Arnold, too,” he added. “He knows ’em all real well.”

To his dismay, though, once he’d ID’d the foursome she went on to grill him about Chip: Work? Hobbies? And the big questions: How did he get along with women? Any problems in that department?