Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (6 page)

JAKE TIPTREE’S BIG OLD EASTPORT HOUSE WAS A WHITE
clapboard 1823 Federal with three full floors plus a two-story ell, forty-eight antique double-hung windows, each with its own pair of dark green shutters, and three tall red-brick chimneys.

The bricks needed pointing, the flashing around the chimneys needed tar, and as she backed the car out of the driveway she saw that the whole house needed painting again, too.

None of which came as a surprise. Moose Island, where Eastport, Maine, had been located for two-hundred-plus years, was a large granite rock sticking out of cold salt water. On it, an old wooden building was as tricky and difficult to maintain as a wooden boat.

The only difference was that if the house got a hole in it, the people inside wouldn’t drown. Or anyway not immediately.

“Who’s Chip Hahn?” Ellie asked as they pulled away down Key Street.

Jake sighed, eyeing the old green shutters in the rearview mirror. They looked as if they had a disgusting disease.
Paint, putty, scrapers
, she thought.

Plus someone to go up on a ladder and get the shutters and stack them in the workroom. But not until after the insulation material got used up. Until then, there wouldn’t be space up there to put shutters or anything else.

“He was Sam’s friend in Manhattan,” she answered. “He lived with his family in our building.”

It had been an Upper East Side penthouse with a doorman, a concierge, a private elevator, and a view, all so exclusive you practically had to show a pedigree to get in. That or a brokerage statement plus the deed to your place in the Hamptons.

“But I didn’t know much about them, and anyway, that was what, a dozen years ago?”

In those days, she’d been a freelance financial manager to the filthy rich, many of whom turned out to be so crooked, they made
the Soprano family look like the Brady Bunch. At that time she was the only money professional in the city with not one but two well-connected, high-octane criminal defense attorneys’ home phone numbers on her speed dial.

Her neighbors in the exclusive building would no doubt have been horrified had they known. Or perhaps not.

Anyway, the kind of clients she’d had then plus long workdays, way more money than she could spend, and a brilliant neurosurgeon husband so chronically unfaithful that his nickname around the hospital where he worked was Vlad the Impaler hadn’t done much for her neighborly instincts.

Or for her son’s well-being. “Chip spent a lot of his time at our place,” she added, “hanging out with Sam. Which turned out to be a blessing.”

By age ten, Sam had quite naturally been spoiled, scared, and furious, a perfect candidate for membership in a gang of preadolescent boys even angrier and more disaffected than he was.

Also, he’d had not-yet-diagnosed dyslexia. If you want to make the child of a couple of high-IQ parents feel worthless, try that one. “Still, I’m a little surprised Chip even remembers us,” Jake went on.

One day back then, Sam had gone missing, and when he finally came home, she learned that he and his pals had been riding the tops of subway cars for eighteen hours, in a contest to see who could stay on the longest. Sam had won, but in the process he lost six pounds and had to be hospitalized for severe exhaustion, dehydration, and an electrical burn that just missed being fatal.

Slowing at the foot of Key Street, Jake glanced to her right at the Motel East, a long, low wooden building perched over the bay’s edge. A new, sleek black Volvo sedan with New York plates sat in the parking lot.

It was the only car there, since what there was of the tourist season in Eastport having ended a month earlier. “I’ll bet that’s his.”

At the stop sign she turned left, then left again into one of the angled parking spots fronting the Eastport police station, across Water Street from the Happy Crab Bar and Grille. On the Crab’s sign, a cheerful crustacean teetered gaily on the rim of a boiling kettle.

“But what’s Chip doing way up here at this time of year?” she wondered aloud.

Once the Frontier Bank building, the Eastport police station resembled a red-brick wedding cake with its tall, arched windows on granite-slab lintels, gobs of ornately carved stone trim, and massive stone steps leading up to the front door. The bank’s old alarm box, helpfully labeled
Bank Alarm
in large white letters, still hung beneath a front window.

“Anyway, I don’t know Chip’s whole story,” Jake went on as she and Ellie got out of the car. “He was five or six years older than Sam. A real nerd, I thought back then. But he was very good to Sam.”

And good for him
, she added mentally, recalling Chip Hahn’s pear-shaped body, thick glasses, and earnest expression.

“If you needed to sum Chip up in a word, it was ‘podgy,’ ” she said. “And you wouldn’t think a kid like that would be good at sports, but he was, and that’s how he took Sam under his wing. Played catch with him, took him to ball games and so on.”

They climbed the police station’s half-dozen granite front steps.

“Chip taught Sam to ice-skate down at Rockefeller Center one Christmas Eve, and after that he took him out for dinner at the Russian Tea Room. It was,” Jake added with a half-wondering pang of nostalgia, “before it closed.”

When his father and I were too busy working
, she thought but did not add.

“Chip’s family had a big resort cabin on a lake somewhere in upstate New York, too. One summer Sam learned to sail there, and water-ski.”

At the police station’s big glass front door they paused. “That’s how he found out he liked boats.”

Which for Sam had turned out to be a lifesaver; nowadays he was in school for an engineering degree and was already licensed by the Coast Guard to pilot any number of heavy work vessels. He wanted someday to own a tugboat fleet, which as an alternative to drinking himself to death, Jake thought was a fine plan.

“You know …” Ellie began as they entered the police station’s cramped vestibule.

“Yes
,” said Jake, knowing Ellie’s concern without having to be told. “Don’t worry.”

About what they might be getting into, she meant. Over the past few years, together she and Ellie had enjoyed quite a career looking unofficially into local bad deeds, even clearing up a few when no one else could.

But a recent episode involving a kidnapping, a very bad guy, and a final, frightening twist that neither of them could quite manage to forget had spoiled their appetite for other people’s business.

For a while, anyway. “No more snooping,” Jake said as they passed through the vestibule and then a second set of glass doors. Finally: “There he is.”

Inside, Chip Hahn sat nervously on a wooden bench, across from the high marble counter where once thrifty Eastport ladies had waited to deposit their savings into the Christmas club. The counter now held a display box of neighborhood-watch brochures.

Chip looked up when he heard the door. He wore a thin polished-cotton jacket over a tired-looking white shirt, no tie, and dark brown slacks. A pair of black wing tips were on his feet.

He’d lost some of his baby fat since the last time Jake had seen him, but his hands still made the anxious, automatic washing motions she remembered from a dozen years ago, and his round face looked guilty as hell about something.

Uh-oh
, Jake thought as she spotted this. Chip jumped up when he saw her, his expression changing swiftly to one of relief.

“Hi. Thanks for coming,” he began, sticking his hand out as he
smiled uncertainly, looking from Jake to Ellie and back again. But Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, interrupted this greeting impatiently.

“Is everyone taking stupid pills around here today, or what?” Bob demanded from behind his desk.

He was pink, plump, and balding, with pale blue eyes, a few thin strands of blond hair combed over his shining forehead, and small rosebud lips that did not look at all as if they belonged on a police officer.

A child beauty-pageant contestant, maybe. “Because first I got a guy,” he went on abrasively, “who said his car was stolen, and I drove around half last night looking for it.”

He eyed Chip suspiciously, as if the young man now standing across from him might be responsible for the missing vehicle. “But then a couple hours later he calls again, he says the car’s right back where he left it.”

He took a breath. “So that’s a mystery. Next, I got a bunch of middle-school kids hanging out on the breakwater, also last night, screamin’ about a guy in a scary mask from a horror movie. They’re sayin’ he yelled at ’em and chased ’em.”

Jake knew better than to interrupt. “Then,” Bob went on, “I get this guy, first damn thing in the a.m. before I even finish my coffee.”

He waved at Chip, then at his big green-and-white paper cup, still nearly full. The local grocery store’s delicatessen did a mean hazelnut-mocha lately, and Bob was hooked on the stuff.

“And,” Bob finished, “the guy whose car got stolen? He says there’s a scary mask in the trunk; he never saw it before.”

Chip opened his mouth to speak, which Jake could’ve told him was a bad idea. She motioned for him to shut up. Wisely, he did.

But she had a feeling that this sort of wisdom was not one of Chip’s strong points. Or Charles, as he apparently wanted to be called now. She looked back at Bob.

“So now your friend here says his lady friend’s run off to somewhere, he can’t find her, and how come I don’t hop right to it, bring in the FBI an’ call out the National Guard?”

In Eastport, when lady friends ran off, their boyfriends did not often call the cops. More often, they felt lucky the cops had not been called on them. Not all the time, but still.

“She’s not my lady friend,” Chip protested tiredly and with the air, frustrated and beginning to be annoyed, of a person who has said this a number of times already.

“I told you, she’s my boss, and she didn’t run off. She’s been missing since last night; she just disappeared right off the street. I’m afraid someone took her.”

He turned to Jake in appeal. “We were coming out of a bar. The one at the end of the street overlooking the harbor, called The Artful Dodger? I was outside, a little ways down the street, waiting for her, but she didn’t catch up, and when I went back to look for her—”

That there was more to this story Jake couldn’t help seeing in Chip’s expression, and Bob Arnold was even more familiar with the looks on liars’ faces than Jake was.

It was one reason why he was not precisely leaping to Chip’s aid, Jake realized. But she could get to the bottom of that later, she decided.

“Poof,” Bob said, eyeing Chip skeptically. “Gone, like a fart in a hurricane.”

“Wait a minute,” Jake told Chip. Or Charles. They could get reacquainted later, too.

For now it just seemed clear that a young woman was missing. “Start over, Chip; tell me the whole thing right from the start. Why are you here in the first place, and just exactly what were you and this—”

“Carolyn Rathbone,” he supplied. “That’s her name. She’s a very
popular true-crime writer, two bestsellers, you must have heard of her. She wrote
Young Blood
, which is—”

“I know what it is,” Jake said. She’d have had to be dead not to. Even here in Maine, the ads for the book had resembled an artillery barrage: TV, radio, Internet, the works.

“But that doesn’t answer my question,” she added. “What were you two doing here in Eastport?”

He flushed uncomfortably. “We’re writing a new book—Carolyn is, I mean—on the Dodd family crimes. And the … the weird events that happened here.”

Oh, brother
, Jake thought. As far as Bob was concerned, Chip might as well have said they were planning to do a tell-all book on the Appalachia of the Northeast, which was what many people who didn’t live in downeast Maine thought of the place.

Wrongly, smugly, and utterly unfairly, boyfriends and their lady friends’ habits notwithstanding, and Bob resented it keenly. Now he leaned back and clasped his hands over his ample front.

“Weird events, huh?” He made a sour face. “Well, whoop-de-do. Now I can die happy.”

Even without comparisons to Appalachia, Bob thought most media stories about Eastport ranked right up there with Charmin, in the what-are-they-good-for department. But he saved his deepest scorn for the ones created by persons from away—by which he meant anyone who wasn’t actually born right here on the island—and that went double for stories about local tragedies.

Which the Dodd family misfortune certainly was. Jake and Ellie glanced resignedly at each other while Chip rushed on.

“You see, a couple of years ago, these two Eastport brothers married two sisters, also from Eastport. Rich girls, the last two descendants in some big local industrialist family.”

“Yes
,” Jake said. The whole town knew the sad tale. Joseph Paducah Lang, the great-great-grandfather of the “rich girls” in question,
had been a prosperous sardine can manufacturer back in the days when the sardine was king around here, in the late 1800s.

If you could call what they did back then “manufacturing.” Putting things together one by one with your hands, however fast, didn’t seem to quite fit the word’s definition. Chip went on.

“Next thing you know, one of the Dodd brothers falls off his boat, body never found,” he said. “Randy Dodd, his name was.”

This wasn’t news, either; the opposite, actually. The story had made the Bangor papers.

“And after that, both women got murdered,” said Chip. “Or,” he added hastily as Bob made to object, “one did, for sure. Anne Lang Dodd, Roger Dodd’s wife, was stabbed in her own kitchen.”

Yes, just six weeks ago. By a person unknown, and it’s too soon to be here trying to make money on it, Jake thought. Writing a book about it, or whatever.

But perhaps the timing hadn’t been all Chip’s idea. He had, after all, said the missing woman was his employer, and it was her name on the books’ covers.

“The other one,” Chip said, “Randy Dodd’s wife—”

Cordelia Dodd, he meant. She’d been the pretty one; sweet-natured, too, by all accounts, if not terribly bright.