Foursome (5 page)

“Right.”

“Jail’s only a short drive, shouldn’t be too long.”

“Mr. Paine—”

“Huh, Ralph’s more like it.”

“Ralph, you know I’m here about the killings at the Shea house?”

He scratched his chin. “No, but I figured you might be. You have a key to Steve’s camp?”

“No. I assumed the sheriff would.”

“Probably does. If not, Steve keeps a spare on a nail under the third step of the back stairs to his kitchen.”

I stared at him. “How many other people knew that?”

“Couldn’t say, but probably quite a few. Summer folks have to leave a way for workmen and such to get in when they might not be there.”

I filed that. “The night of the killings, I understand Steven Shea came to the country store to buy some things.”

Paine seemed to get slower and more careful. “That’s what the wife tells me.”

“She was working there that night?”

“We both work there every day and every night till nine, Sundays till seven. We own the store and the inn.”

“I’d like to speak to her about seeing Shea that night.”

“Okay.” He turned to go, taking something out of his pocket. “I’ll leave you the key to the room. Lock up if you like, but if you’re here more than two nights, don’t be surprised you start forgetting to.”

“Thanks, Ralph.”

“I’ll let you know when Patsy comes by.”

“It can wait.”

Paine stopped and turned in the doorway. “Huh?”

“My speaking to your wife about Shea. I can wait till it’s convenient for her.”

Paine seemed to laugh to himself. “Patsy’s not the wife. Ramona’s the wife. Patsy, she’s the sheriff.”

The innkeeper closed my door behind him.

“S
ORRY TO TAKE SO
long, but I had to gas the truck.”

The big Chevy Blazer bounced over another rock in a rut on the dirt road from Marseilles around the lake. Sheriff P. W. “Patsy” Willis was behind the wheel, swinging it enthusiastically left and right to avoid the worst parts of the road. We’d left the paved section about half a mile from the village.

“Sheriff, how far is it from the village to the Shea house?” She looked over at me, then back to the driving. “From the country store to his gravel car park, three point four mile.” Gil Lacouture had said that Willis was the first officer on the scene. My guess was that she’d since measured the distance at least twice each way, just to be sure. Her hands on the wheel looked raw and knuckly, but the skin was soft when she shook hands with me outside the inn. About five-foot-seven, Willis was solidly built, with a sandy ponytail drawn back and worn under her Stetson and inside her brown uniform shirt. The pants were beige with brown piping, the shoes black Corfam, like parade shoes from the Army. The eyes were hazel and hadn’t blinked since we’d started talking.

We passed a paved driveway on the right with a chain across it. Faded orange telltales were tied to the chain, fluttering in the breeze.

I said, “How’d you get into police work?”

“Grew up maybe ten mile from here. Career opportunities for young ladies weren’t what you’d call wicked good. Saw a recruitment ad down to Augusta for the Army, thought I might give it a try, ended up in the Military Police.”

“Me, too.”

Her eyes left the road again. “That right?”

“Fort Gordon.”

“Augusta, Georgia. Thought it was some funny at the time, trading one Augusta for another, fifteen hundred mile away. I did my Advanced Individual Training there, let me see … fall of 1973.”

“I was a little before that.”

Her eyes didn’t leave the road this time. “Vietnam?”

“One tour.”

“One was more than enough for most, way I heard it.”

I didn’t say anything.

Willis said, “There was a self-defense instructor at Gordon when I was there. Blond. Louisiana boy, I think. We called him—”

“—‘Teen Angel.’ ”

Willis laughed, a genuine “haw-haw” roar. “Damn, he was good. Some of the noncoms still weren’t real happy about women coming through, but Teen Angel, he took the three of us in my cycle aside, taught us everything from Jukado that we might be able to use.”

Jukado was a mixture of judo, karate, and other disciplines. Teen Angel was an absolutely straight shooter whose only desire was to teach you how to stay alive when somebody else wanted the opposite.

Willis downshifted. “I recall the time he took us out, showed us knife-fighting. Said he wasn’t supposed to, but hell, he’d shown the boys going to Nam how to do it, he couldn’t see stopping with the girls going into worse places over here.”

Jesus, that took me back. To a sawdust pit on the fringes of the fort, Teen Angel and another guy, a black karate expert. Showing us, all male then, how to use the knife.

Willis said, “I still can see him, only my height, maybe an inch taller. He used me as his demonstrator, saying ‘All right, Troop, the human body, it’s real well protected if the attack’s from above. Skull’s thick, jaw’s strong, and the rib cage, it slants down like Venetian blinds, protecting all the vital organs. What that means, Troop, is that you hold the knife so’s the blade’s flat to the ground. Then you come up and in, under the slant of the ribs, get you a lung. Then you’re in there, you twist that knife to the right—I’m a rightie—hard as you can, Troop, tear up the lung that boy needs to breathe with. He won’t give you much more trouble after that. No, Troop, I—”

“—guaran-damn-tee you he won’t.’ ”

Willis haw-hawed again, then checked on me. “Don’t bother you to talk about it, does it?”

“It ought to, but it doesn’t.”

She mulled that a moment.

I said, “Where were you stationed?”

“Did my hitch around New York City. Patrolling the Bayonne docks on the Jersey side, trying to integrate and get some use out of the reservists they’d send down to Fort Hamilton over in Brooklyn, then bus over to us. Waste of the taxpayers’ money, putting those folks undercover as longshoremen, trying to catch a stevedore ripping off a shipment bound for Uncle. I finished up down there and come back up here, figuring law enforcement might not be for me. Then I met the husband.”

Based on Ralph Paine’s usage, I assumed Willis meant her husband.

“Yes, he was a good man. From down to Portland, originally. He went on the state police, come up here. Met him in January, married him in June. Fine man. When his twenty was up, he decided to run for sheriff. Hell, I knew most of the folks in the county, so one thing led to another, and I started working on his campaign and basically got him elected. Two month in office, and he dropped dead of a heart attack. I got appointed to fill out his term. Didn’t blow my foot off, so I got nominated to run the next time, surprised some folks, and won. That was two times ago, been in the chair ever since.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

She slowed the Blazer to climb a hill. “Haven’t blown my foot off yet.”

I put the heel of my right hand against the dashboard as we bucked down the far side of the slope.

Willis said, “Not much farther now.”

We’d passed only the one driveway and no houses since leaving the paved section. I said, “Nobody else lives on this stretch?”

The sheriff let a hand leave the wheel long enough to push back her hat. “Most of the frontage at this end of the pond was owned by Judson Lumber. They put in this dirt part so’s they could haul out logs when they cut. Only houses on it are your client, Ma Judson, and Dag Gates.”

While I’d been waiting for Willis, I’d read the sheriff’s office and state police reports in Lacouture’s file. “That’s Melba Judson and Donald Gates?”

“That’s right, only I’m not sure anybody’d know either of them by their formal names anymore. Ma, she was the first to get to your client. Dag come up just after her in his canoe.”

“I’d like to talk to each of them.”

Willis slowed down, then slewed onto a gravel track toward the lake. “First things first.”

The gravel snaked its way around a couple of huge trees to a broad clearing. At the back or west end of the clearing, a chipmunk scooted up a path that quickly disappeared into the woods at the base of the mountain. The gravel seemed pretty well raked and distributed to create a parking lot for at least ten cars, though it was empty as Willis killed the engine on the Blazer.

She said, “The villa de Shea.”

The house, at the east end of the gravel clearing, was monstrous. Some kind of wildly concocted contemporary, it was as though a giant’s spiteful kid had dumped a set of blocks on the site. The windows were all shapes and sizes, with a wide deck beginning at the back door on the west or road side of the house, continuing to the north side and apparently getting even wider at the east or lake side of the house.

I got out of the truck, nearly falling because I’d forgotten how high the chassis was off the ground. Willis landed nimbly on her side and met me at the headlights, the gravel crunching under our feet.

I said, “What’s it like from the front?”

“Worse. Don’t quite see why folks like your client bother coming to Maine.”

We walked around the north side of the house on manicured lawn and little flagstone inserts. The structure itself must have been ninety feet wide, and there were no trees whatsoever left between it and the water. Just lawn and what appeared to be an erosion gully with three ornamental footbridges over it, like something from an expensive suburban development. We stopped by the steps that climbed to the deck at the northeast corner of the house, the wind chimes above the doors to the house tinkling merrily in the breeze.

Willis said, “When Shea and his wife built here three year ago, you were allowed to clear-cut thirty foot of width for every hundred foot of frontage. That’s not permitted anymore, but … what’s done is done.”

“The bridges are an especially nice touch.”

She looked to me, confirming my sarcasm. “Carpentry is fine. Owen Briss, he did most of the finish work here, and he knows what he’s doing. But …” Willis moved her hand at the bridges like a baseball manager finishing an argument with an umpire.

I pointed to a stone structure at the water’s edge partially hidden by brush and trees. “That a boathouse?”

“It is. Tom Judson had an old-timey camp like his sister’s on this site before he sold to your client. That boathouse was already there, so it got grandfathered against the new zoning laws.”

“Can you orient me on where we are?”

“Sure can. Let’s go down by the water.”

We walked down the gentle slope. Paralleling the gully, you could see a lot of sand and silt lying in it.

I said, “The erosion from the clear-cutting?”

“Some. The rest is because of runoff from the roof and driveway. There used to be a whole … ‘buffer’ is what the environmental people call it. You can ask Dag about those things, he’s up on them. I do know that once you cut and build as much as your client did, you got basically a big sluiceway for the water and not much holding her back from the pond.”

At the water’s edge, Willis began to point. “Northward now, to our left, the shoreline runs about two point five mile to the village. Bit longer by car, as I said.”

“Three point four miles.”

“Right. Now, think of the north end by the village as the base of a fiddle, with a lot of little islands kind of dotting the area around where the strings would cross the hole. Then the pond kind of tapers as it runs south toward us, with the far right or south over there the end of the fiddle’s handle.”

“How long is it, total?”

“Bit over three mile in length, north to south.”

“Hell of a ‘pond.’ ”

“Maine defines anything over ten acres a ‘Great Pond.’ Sometimes a body of water’ll be called a lake, but more often we just use ‘pond.’ ”

“How wide is it?”

“Maybe a mile and a half at the north end, tapering down to oh, half a mile right acrost here.”

I looked to the opposite shore. It seemed closer than a half mile, but then water’s deceiving that way. “How deep?”

“Need a map to be real accurate on that, but she goes from about five to six foot around the shoreline down to about fifty right smartly, and in some channels, down to two hundred.”

“Two hundred feet deep?”

“Marseilles’s not just a great pond, but a fine one, too.”

She gave out a tempered haw-haw noise.

I said, “Where’s Ma Judson’s house?”

Willis swept her hand to the right. “The handle of that fiddle bends just a mite as it goes southward, but Ma’s place is only a little piece down from here.”

A narrow, trodden path seemed to follow the lakefront toward the south.

“How about Dag Gates?”

Willis smiled. “Acrost from here.”

I brought my head to the east shore. “Where?”

“You’re looking right at his place.”

“Across the pond?”

“Now you’ve got it.”

This time I studied the shoreline on the far side of the “handle.” “I can’t see anything but trees and rocks.”

“Dag done well that way. Give you a hint. See those three rocks right at the water that kind of stand up together just south of the biggest birch?”

“The birch is the white trunk.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I see the three rocks.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Sheriff—”

“That middle rock, that’s Dag’s dock. Weathered spruce.”

I studied it a little more. Once you knew it, you could see it. Maybe.

Suddenly there was movement in the brush to our right. A little animal appeared, running steadily along the water’s edge, stopping once to chitter away at us before continuing into the brush on our left. It looked like an animated fur neckpiece.

“Was that a mink, Sheriff?”

“Fisher. She’ll circle the pond twice a day at about that speed, foraging for food along the shoreline.”

“Looks like it burns more calories than it finds.”

“Guess not, she’s still here.”

I looked at Willis.

She said, “What else you want to see?”

“How about the boathouse?”

“Fine.”

We walked over to the stone structure, a little more imposing when you were right next to it. “We need a key?”

Willis reached up to a wooden eave under the old roof and came up with one that opened the regular-sized door on the side. The interior had a stale smell, dank from dampness, pungent from oil and gas. A cigarette boat with more room devoted to engine than reserved for passengers was lolling in the water. The concrete parapet let me see its stern. FOURSOME.