Foursome (4 page)

Lacouture was watching me as I returned the photos to him. He said, “They don’t get to you?”

I thought back to Saigon and my time doing death cases with Empire Insurance and other situations since. “They get to me, Gil. After a while, you just learn not to show it.”

“Good.” Lacouture made a ritual of putting the photos back in the file, as if once they were secured he was safe from them again. “I’d hate to think anybody could look at those things without feeling something.”

“What did your client feel?”

The lawyer kept his face passive. “When Steve came back from the store, he walked up the path with a grocery bag in his arms and stumbled over the crossbow. He bent down to pick it up, couldn’t figure why it would be out behind the house instead of hanging in the garage where they kept it. Then he saw what happened in the house, bent over the bodies, tried to hold his … wife.”

I gave him a minute. “So, Shea’s prints were on the crossbow, and her blood was all over him.”

“Right.”

“Any prints on the arrows?”

Lacouture half grinned, then got himself back into lawyer pose and broadened it. “Nancy’s judgment about you seems confirmed. Steve’s prints on the one that killed his wife, no prints on the rest. And by the way, they’re called ‘bolts,’ not arrows.”

“Any other physical evidence?”

“Two shoes with blood on them.”

“You’d expect that, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t mean the shoes Steve was wearing. These were up in his bedroom closet.”

“They belonged to him?”

“Yes. And those shoes made footprints starting at Hale Vandemeer’s body and going across the great room, up the stairs, and to Shea’s closet.”

I thought about it. “Like Shea killed them, then realized he stepped in some blood and went upstairs to change into clean ones?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“For Shea to do that if Shea was the killer.”

“Exactly.”

Killers tend to make mistakes, especially if they panic. “How about motive?”

“None. Closest of friends.”

I remembered Beth’s comment. “Maybe closer than that?”

Lacouture shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“What did the friends do for a living?”

“Hale Vandemeer, he was a doctor. Also had some kind of business deal with his brother. Vivian Vandemeer was a housewife.’“

“How about Sandra Newberg?”

“She wasn’t working.”

“I thought you said she kept her name for business reasons.”

“She got laid off. Some insurance company down in Boston.”

“Which one?”

“Empire, I think.”

Small world. “I used to work for them.”

“Great. Might save us some time.”

He was going a little too fast. “What exactly do you want me to do, Gil?”

Lacouture spread his hands over the file, as though he were blessing it. “I’d like you to look into things up here, get a handle on what happened. Since this isn’t a bailable offense, Steve can’t be very much help to me. Then I’d like you to dig around down in Massachusetts, see if you can find anything I can use with a jury to get them to see another way this could have happened without my client being involved.”

I glanced through the notes I’d taken. “The TV news said Shea was with some defense contractor, right?”

“Steve
is
an executive with Defense Resource Management down by you.”

I’d vaguely heard of them as their initials, “DRM.” I said, “Is the company standing by him?”

“Absolutely. The general counsel there is the one who brought me into the case.”

“Name?”

“Anna-Pia Antonelli.”

“She a classmate of yours, too?”

“No. I’d represented Steve when he bought the land on Marseilles. When he was arrested, he called Antonelli.”

“He called her, not you?”

Lacouture gave me a strange look. “Yes. She checked me out, found I’d done a stint in the defenders. Steve trusted me from the property deal, and here I am.”

“Any way this could be connected to his work?”

“Steve seems to think so, but you’d have to ask him.”

I started a new page in the pad. “Any kids in either family?”

“Not for Steve and Sandy. The Vandemeers had one son, Nick.”

“How old?”

“Teenager. Still in high school and I guess not exactly a credit to the bloodline.”

“Addresses and full names for everybody in your file?”

Lacouture brightened. “Does that mean you’re coming on board?”

“I won’t be making up my mind until after I meet with your client.”

“I can arrange it for tomorrow.”

I closed up my pad. “Might be a help for me to see the crime scene beforehand.”

The grin. “I thought you might feel that way. Sheriff Willis can run you out there this afternoon.”

“The sheriff will take me there?”

“You bet. P. W. Willis was the first cop on the scene that night. Took the state police an hour.”

“Where do I meet Willis?”

“Marseilles Pond is two counties over from here, but even so, it’s ten miles from the jail. Be easier for you to just go to the inn and wait for the sheriff there.”

“The inn.”

“Marseilles Inn. It’s in the village and about the nicest place we could put you up.”

“So I’m on expenses till I meet with your client.”

“Steve insisted.”

“I notice you keep calling him by his first name. Practicing for the jury, Gil?”

Lacouture lost a little of the grin. “No. This is Maine, John. We personalize our clients even when we don’t have to.”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it. But actually, there’s another reason, too.”

“What’s that?”

Lacouture made the grin go sly. “I’d like to tell you that after you’ve met with Steve, okay?”

“Okay. One more thing.”

“Sure.”

“Can Judy tell me how I get to the Department of Public Safety?”

I left the department’s annex in Gardiner carrying a blown-down white cardboard about the size of a credit card with my photo on it. The words “PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR” and a four-digit license number were printed in red, other relevant information (like height, weight, and eye color) in black. The card stated it was good for only two months from date of issue. While it was being laminated, the clerk told me once that I must be awfully “well regarded,” twice that I dare not represent myself as a sworn peace officer, and three times that I was not to carry a concealed weapon.

By the time I drove back to Lacouture’s office, he was gone for the day, but he’d left the Shea file with Judy, and told her to let me take it to read over that night. She also gave me a handwritten map to the Marseilles Inn.

I drove west from Augusta on a divided strip like Route 1, then mended roughly northwestward for thirty country miles. At first the topography was drumlin hills and meadows, some with cows, others with swaybacked horses, a few with swaybacked barns, the roofs sagging against the walls. Some hay was still out, for the livestock, I guessed. The Prelude was pretty much the only vehicle going in my direction, and those passing me the other way were mostly pickup trucks Or four-wheel-drives, half of the folks waving to me as though we were neighbors passing on a common driveway.

A little farther on, the farms became fewer. The road started to climb more steeply and drop more sharply, signs for lakes and chainsaw repair and canoe refitting cropping up. A logging truck came around a bend in front of me, poaching into my lane with two trailered flatbeds of large hardwood trunks and nearly sending me off the road and down a hundred-foot slope. Other than that, the trip was uneventful and pleasant: a hawk soaring fifty feet overhead, a skunk wending its way across a narrow strip of pavement, robins and blue jays and other songbirds I couldn’t identify very audible whenever I passed through stands of trees.

As I reached the point on Judy’s map where I thought I had to make a turn, the tarmac crested, then descended gracefully to a long expanse of dark water nestled in a valley with a peak behind it. I could make out a few islands in the middle of the water, and just around another bend was a crossroads consisting of a small stone library, an even smaller red-bricked post office, a concrete-block country store, and a large clapboard building with a MARSEILLES INN sign in burned letters on a weathered background.

The inn was positioned at the intersection so that it stood catercorner from the country store. The inn’s backyard ran down to the lakefront and a large, squarish dock with white chairs on it. The roof sported gingerbread shingles and had a gable at either end above a covered porch with spindled bannister and latticework from the floor to the ground. The clapboards were painted a soft peach, the shutters and other trim a deep orange, creating an unusual but attractive color contrast. A cement boat ramp abutted the inn, entering the water at an angle that suggested it continued down to the bottom of the lake.

I pulled the car into a lot on the far side of the inn. Maybe twenty buildings, from rambling houses to small cottages, radiated from the intersection before petering out into small, homemade cabins along the lakefront and just plain trees in every other direction. I carried my suitcase in one hand and the Shea file from Lacouture’s office under the other arm.

The porch steps creaked a little, spooking a calico cat with only one eye that bounded off into the bushes at the end of the porch. At the top of the steps, I could hear an old Rolling Stones tune from behind a screened door.

I opened the door. A black portable boom box rested on the reception counter, the music much louder inside the foyer. It took me a moment to place the Stones piece. It was “Gimme Shelter.”

“Helluva song for an innkeeper’s radio, huh?”

The voice was gruff but friendly, an accent more like the Philadelphia “O” than Judy’s choppy Maine rhythms. The man behind it was early forties, barrel-chested and big-boned, with reddish brown hair and a shambling walk. He wore denim coveralls streaked with paint over a blue T-shirt with breast pocket and old hiking boots. He held a paint bucket and brush in his right hand, and the smile on his face nearly reached the sideburns.

I said, “A golden oldie.”

“Oldie? You’re not a Mainer, right?”

“Right. Boston.”

“Well, mister, up here you’re going to realize something right off. This is current stuff. The Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, Cream. The stations are called The Mountain, Ocean, The Blimp—and speaking of blimps? If Led Zeppelin got their act together, they could be the Grateful Dead of Maine, touring one little town after another, from Kittery to Fort Kent, packing them in at every stop, then just heading south and starting all over again.”

“Like painting the Brooklyn Bridge.”

He looked down at his bucket. “Huh?”

“The crew that paints the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time they finish, it’s time to start painting at the beginning again.”

He cocked his head but kept the smile. “I think I’m going to like you. I’d shake but—”

“John Cuddy.”

“Ralph Paine. You’re the one Gil Lacouture’s office called about?”

“I am.”

“Well, we’ve got two rooms with a private bath and a telephone both. Gil said be sure to give you one. No problem since we just lost the bugs.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The bugs. The black flies. Little bitty things, look like fruit flies with a thyroid condition. They bite you, spit some kind of stuff in the bite, and you bleed a drop like a picture of the Savior on the cross. Then you get yourself a welt the size of a nickel lasts about a week. You still might see one or two if you go into the woods, but we’ve got stuff for that, you decide to. That’s how come we’ve got the rooms.”

“Because the flies are gone?”

“No, no. Because nobody can really predict in advance when they’ll arrive or when they leave. See, they arrive sometime in early May, usually, but we don’t get rid of them till the darning needles come out.”

“The darning needles.”

“That’s what we called them back in Philly, anyway. Up here, they’re dragonflies.”

“The dragonflies come out and eat the black flies.”

“You bet. Like the Battle of Britain in reverse. Instead of rooting for the little planes against the big planes, you pull for those dragonflies to down about a hundred black flies every minute.”

Paine seemed to notice my gear for the first time. “Tell you what you do. You just set those things here, and I’ll get into my innkeeper outfit and be right back out. Wife’s over watching the store, so I’m kind of on my own for now.”

I told Paine not to hurry. I took an old oval-back chair, the next two rock anthems that came over the radio supporting my host’s view on music mix.

Paine reappeared in a pair of clean, creased brown pants and a long-sleeved oxford shirt over the blue T. I signed the middle of a page in a leather-bound register, then got led up a wide, carpeted staircase.

Over his shoulder, Paine said, “We’ll put you on the second floor. Got some bigger rooms on the third, but they’re not really opened up yet, and besides, they’re more for families, what with the bunk beds, and all.”

We turned right and stopped at what I thought would be a rear room.

Paine said, “This one’s probably the one you’ll want, but there’s another I can show you, too.”

He opened the door without using a key and ushered me into a broad room with a four-poster mahogany bed and matching dresser and nightstand. An internal doorway previewed a shower-and-vanity bathroom with no tub but lots of towels. At the back of the room was a window overlooking the lake. I could see the square dock and chairs at the water’s edge below, just the hint of houses shielded by trees and other foliage across the bay. Three preteen girls were trying to place a blanket on the grass, turning it this way and that like firefighters positioning a net under a potential jumper.

I turned to Paine. “This will be tough to beat.”

“Other room’s on the street side. Noisier and no …” He moved his hand toward the window.

Conscious of Lacouture’s client, I said, “Same price?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then this one’s fine.”

A nod. “Settle yourself in. Gil said I was to call the sheriff for you.”