Foursome (7 page)

“I take it you don’t have a problem with burglaries out here.”

She smiled, a fresh-batch profile for the cookie commercial. “Leastways no repeat offenders.”

I said, “You in law enforcement, too?”

“Christ come to earth, no. No, I just read the papers from time to time about what goes on in the cities. I got Jack and Jill when they was pups from the pound. Littermates somebody left by the side of a quarry back in the country a ways. Runty, I’m just minding him for Dag, till he gets back from fishing.”

“He looks pretty big to be called ‘Runty.’ ”

“Dag named him that because on the TV show, they called Rin Tin Tin ‘Rinty,’ but Dag thought with only some shepherd in him, he ought to be called ‘Runty.’ You pumping me already?”

The smile was still fresh-batch, but the gray eyes were now as flinty as a country lawyer’s.

I said, “It would be a help if you could tell me what you saw and heard that night.”

“I can tell you the truth as I know it. I figure that’s my duty as a citizen. But I’m not about to let you record anything, and I’m sure not going to sign anything.”

“Agreed.”

“Come on up to the porch, then. I can scare up some lemonade, but it’s just the store-bought kind.”

“Thanks, that’ll be fine.”

I climbed the two wooden steps to the porch and tried one of the rockers while Judson disappeared into the house. With caning for seat and back, the chair was amazingly formfitting and comfortable, at least until I noticed Jack and Jill and Runty, still watching me.

Ma Judson reappeared without the shotgun but with two gas station giveaway glasses of lemonade. I took mine, tasted it, and said it really hit the spot. She gulped two or three ounces of hers and said they never could get it to taste like the real thing, but who wants to carry home ten dollars’ worth of lemons to make it right?

Judson set her glass down precariously on the small table. “All right, young man, now that you’ve softened me up, what do you want to know?”

“I understand you were the first one to reach the house after the killings.”

“Second.”

“The second?”

“Shea himself was there first.”

“Fair enough. What made you go over there?”

“Jack and Jill woke me up.”

“Woke you?”

“They sleep with me, back bedroom.” Judson seemed to blush a little. “On the floor, of course.”

“The police reports say the killings took place around nine
P.M.
”

“Wasn’t looking at any clock.”

“What I mean is, you were already in bed by then?”

“Young man, I’m seventy-one years old. I get up with the sun and go to bed by it. I try to sleep, too, at least when The Foursome wasn’t raising such a ruckus I couldn’t. Then I turned to my muffs.”

“Earmuffs?”

“That’s right. The first ones were invented by Chester Greenwood, over to Farmington, eighteen hundred and seventy-three. Called them ‘ear protectors,’ and every December, on the first day of winter, they celebrate with the whole town in earmuffs and a running race and parade and all sorts of things. In any case, though, those city folks over there made so much noise when they were up, I used cotton in my ears and muffs over them to get any sleep at all.”

“What kind of noise did they make?”

“Oh, that rock music and carrying on drinking strong spirits and what have you. Sound really travels over the water, hits off the east shore and then down to me.”

“When they made noise, did it upset your dogs?”

“At first Jack and Jill’d howl all night. I finally got them trained to where they’d just bark a bit when The Foursome turned up their phonograph.”

“Did you start calling them that from the news stories?”

“Christ come to earth, no, young man. That was what they had painted across the Queen Mary in their boat-house. ‘FOURSOME.’ They’d tear around this little cove, hollering and laughing and water-skiing, scaring the loons half to death. Marseilles Pond wasn’t meant for such carrying on.”

“Back to that night. What did you do after the dogs woke you up?”

“Well, now, I’m some sound sleeper once I can drop off, so it took me a minute to get the muffs off and the cotton out and figure what was bothering them. There was phonograph music coming from over there, but it was on when I went to bed, and wasn’t so loud it should have bothered Jack and Jill to waking me. Then I heard him.”

“Him?”

“Your client, I guess. Mr. Steven Shea. Screaming his bloody lungs out.”

“You heard Shea screaming?”

“I did. Well, I didn’t know it was
him
right then, you see. I had to get myself up and thought about starting the Bronco, but it’s been a little iffy lately, and—”

“Excuse me, the Bronco?”

“My vehicle. Outside, you saw it.”

“I thought it was a Scout.”

“Lots do. Ford made it back in nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, it did. Made it to last, too. Standard transmission, none of this automatic nonsense.”

“So you decided to walk.”

“Well, run’s more like it. I took the road instead of the path. Even though the road’s a mite longer, it’s better lit if you have some moon, and we had some moon that night. Well, I throw a coat on over my nightdress and grab the Weatherby and get myself over there.”

“The Weatherby’s the shotgun?”

“Yessir. Weatherby Olympian. Twelve gauge she is, better than the day they made her. Six hundred dollars this feller was asking for his in
Uncle Henry’s
.”

“A gun shop?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Uncle Henry’s is a gun shop?”

“Christ come to earth, no.
Uncle Henry’s
is … well now, it’s like a weekly catalogue, I’d guess you’d call it, for swapping or buying. You got something you want to get rid of, you list it in
Uncle Henry’s
, and the world’ll beat a path to your door. Guns, boats, cars, furniture, you name it.”

“Okay. Back to that night, as you’re going to Shea’s place, did the screams continue?”

“No, not like an opera of them. More like one once in a while, some long, some short. Like the loons.”

I felt a little cold. “Then what?”

“Well, I got to the parking lot Mr. Shea had himself built, and I see his truck and the fancy roadster I know the other couple has, and the screams when they come are coming from the house. So, I go up on their—what do you call it, that dock they got built against their house?”

“A deck?”

“The deck, right. I get myself up there and come in the kitchen door, account of that’s open, let in every bug in creation. And there’s your client in the great room, kind of moaning, cradling his wife’s head and shoulders in his left arm like she’s a little doll.”

“Then what?”

“Then I see the crossbow in his right hand and the arrow thing—they don’t call it an arrow, I recollect—sticking out from the poor girl’s body, so I kick the bow out of his hand and keep the Weatherby on him.”

“He was holding the crossbow while he was holding his wife?”

“He was. One in each hand, like I told you. Then I see this other body, a man’s, kind of inside one of those fancy sliding doors, but like he took the screen door with it when he fell. And he’s got an arrow-thing in his chest, too. That’s when I heard something out past the front—deck, you call it?”

“Deck.”

“Deck.”

“What did you hear?”

“Heard Dag calling out.”

“You saw him?”

“No. I heard him. Something wrong with your hearing?”

“You knew it was his voice?”

Judson stopped. “I expect I know a neighbor’s voice, young man.”

“What was he saying?”

“He was asking if everything was all right, which it wasn’t.”

“Do you remember exactly what he said?”

“He said, ‘Mr. Shea? Mrs.’—no, that wasn’t it. She kept her maiden name, some Jewish—Mrs. Newberg, that was it. Then he said, ‘Everybody all right? I thought …’ ”

Judson stopped again.

I said, “That was it?”

“That’s when I yelled for him to get up and help me.”

“Help you?”

“Christ come to earth, yes. I didn’t want to take a chance using the telephone while I kept my gun on your client.”

“So Dag Gates came up the front steps to the deck?”

“He did. Said something profane I cannot repeat to you when he saw the body of the other girl out on that … deck.”

“You didn’t see her body?”

“Not right then. Not from inside the house, I mean. It was off to the side from where you’d notice it through the glass doors.”

“So Gates came into the house?”

“He did. Nearly lost his supper when he saw that first body out on the deck wasn’t the only one. I managed to get him on to the telephone to call Patsy’s office.”

“The sheriff.”

“How many Patsys you met up here, young man?”

“And how long before the sheriff arrived?”

“Didn’t have need to be a clock-watcher. I was paying attention to your client.”

“How did he seem to you?”

“Like he was putting on being quietly hysterical.”

“Putting on?”

“He had the bow in his hand when I came in on him.”

“So you think he did it?”

“You ever hear of ‘a smoking gun’? Well, that’s what Patsy called it when she arrived. ‘A smoking gun’ if ever there was one.”

“Why didn’t Shea run for it before you got there?”

“I don’t know. You’re his detective. Ask him.”

“I mean, if Shea had killed those people with the crossbow, why wait around, screaming, until help arrives, then stay after you got there?”

“Young man, I don’t know these things. I only know what I saw and heard. As you told me would be fine.”

I didn’t want to lose her. “Did you notice anything else in or around the house?”

“No. I wasn’t ‘around the house,’ though, just inside it. After Dag called for Patsy, him and I stayed right there in the great room, watching Mr. Shea.”

“Any footprints?”

“Just some bloody ones, running from near the man’s body by the glass door across the floor and—well, now. I don’t think I actually saw the footprints go up the stairs to the second floor, but I remember Patsy and the state police talking about them.”

I pushed back in my chair. Ma Judson was a good enough observer to be able to keep straight what she’d seen from what she’d been told. And with her forthright manner, she’d make a devastating witness however she dressed.

Coming forward again, I said, “How did Dag Gates get here that night?”

“By boat, same as he always does.” Judson squinted past me at the lake. “Same as he’s doing now.”

I turned. Something that looked like a war canoe was coming toward us, maybe a hundred yards out, apparently under motor, though I heard no put-put sound rolling in front of it. One man seemed to be in it near the back, sitting sideways. To run the motor, I guessed.

I turned back to Judson. “Quiet.”

“Dag uses only electric.”

“Electric?”

“Electric motor. Call them ‘trolling motors.’ He’s a man with some respect for the environment. Gave more than most for it, too.”

“How do you mean?”

She crossed her arms. “I reckon that’s for him to tell you, he wants to.”

Okay. “I understand Steven Shea bought his house from your brother.”

The flinty look, and the arms hugged themselves tighter. “Then you heard wrongly, young man. My brother gave away that land, practically. Out of spite.”

“Spite for what?”

“I think I’ve said all I will on that point.”

“I can just ask him.”

“Your client? You certainly—”

“No, not my client. Your brother.”

Judson stood up. “Young man, my brother is dead some years now. And this interview is over.”

The old woman clomped down her steps and marched toward the water, where the canoe was coming in.

I
FOLLOWED
M
A
J
UDSON
down the path to her dock, square like the one at the inn but much smaller. There was an old wooden rowboat, stern in the water, bow and midships hauled up onto a second, sunken dock that functioned as a ramp. She was making room on the square dock, moving a folding chair, tackle box, and fishing rod to the side so that the man bringing in the green, square-back canoe could land and get out.

He was about my age, with a black, droopy mustache and scraggly beard. His hair reminded me of Patsy Willis’s: It was long, pulled back into a ponytail, and tucked inside the collar of a pale blue shirt with epaulets. The pants were cutoff khaki shorts, splotches of what I hoped was fish blood all over them. His eyes were the color of his shirt and slanted wisely up toward his temples, the smile beneath the mustache toothy and open. All in all, he looked like a biker masquerading as a game warden.

Except for two things. His left arm and right leg were missing, neither stump even visible under shirt and shorts.

Ma Judson said, “Dag.”

The man smiled broader. “Ma, you stepping out on us?”

Judson blushed again, as she had about the dogs sleeping in her room. “Oh, you go on now.”

His left foot did something to a black pedal on the bottom of his canoe. A buzzing noise I hadn’t really noticed suddenly stopped, the pedal’s electric cord running to a truck battery under his seat. He used the right hand to put a rope between his teeth, waiting until the canoe nudged the dock to lever himself up from a sitting position in the stern of the canoe to a sitting position on the edge of the dock, like someone coming out of a swimming pool without using the ladder. Then Gates got his left foot under him and stood up in a hopping motion, swaying in a practiced way until he was in front of me and balanced a little to the left of vertical.

He extended his hand. “Dag Gates.”

“John Cuddy.” His shake felt like the jaws of an alligator, the arm muscles like bunched cords under the skin.

Gates took in my clothes. “What brings you out here, John?”

His voice had more of New York than Maine in it, the words pronounced like a Brooklynite but with the clipped pacing I’d been hearing all day.

Ma Judson said, “Already been through this myself, you don’t mind. I’ll fetch Runty for you, Dag.”

“Thanks, Ma.”