Wicked Fix (5 page)

Reuben Tate with his throat slit, hanging upside

down by a rope knotted hard around his

ankles from one of the iron gates in Hillside Cemetery.

His eyes were open, strafing the stones of the old

graveyard with undimmed malice. A crow swooped

down, attracted by the glint of his upturned boot

cleats, and flapped off with a cheated caw. The puddle

below the body, dully glistening in the pale sunshine,

resembled fresh tar.

"Reuben," Ellie said softly, her face disbelieving.

I said nothing. We'd started our walk as we always

did, down Key Street to the bay which was just then

brightening to silver. On Water Street, cars and pickups

crowded around the Waco Diner, town men having

their eggs and coffee before heading out to work.

At the freight dock the Star Hoisin loomed massively,

cargo bays open. Guys in coveralls and rubber

boots went down the metal gangways to the finger

piers and onto the fishing boats, the grumble of diesel

engines mingling with the slopping of small waves

against the breakwater and the cries of seagulls. A bell

buoy clanked as tinges of deep pink rose behind the

Canadian islands, dark blue blotches against the lightening

sky.

As we walked, I'd been giving Ellie a few stock

tips. It was advice I had lagged away from following

for myself since I'd been in Eastport, but someone

might as well get the good of it. Ellie had been half

listening as she always did, or so I'd thought.

Now in the cemetery all thoughts of money flew

from my mind; instead I was busy trying to hold on to

my breakfast, breathing the way they'd told me to do

while Sam was being born. It hadn't worked very well

then, either.

Ellie reached out and touched a finger to Reuben's

leather jacket, as if to confirm what she was seeing.

The whoop-whoop of a squad car sounded somewhere

down on the waterfront.

"Be careful," Ellie murmured as if reminding herself,

"what you wish for."

I sat down hard, leaning against one of the old

gravestones with my head between my knees. The face

was bad, shrouded in red, and his hair was no longer

the pale whitish color of sun-bleached straw, but it was

the hands that really got to me. Stiffened into caked,

curved claws, they had obviously been at his throat.

"Nobody," I managed, "wishes for that."

Ellie turned slowly, expressionless. "No. Not anymore."

Then the sirens started again. I got up and called

Monday and snapped her onto her lead. The squad

cars were coming fast. Somebody must have seen the

body before we found it and gone to find Bob Arnold,

Eastport's police chief, to let him know.

The thought troubled me; there wasn't much traffic

on the cemetery road at this hour of the morning.

Moments later, Arnold's squad car appeared, speeding

between the maples and the larch trees that made

a bright avenue of the road in autumn. But behind

him were a couple of state squads, and that wasn't

right, either. All three cars pulled to the curb, cherry

beacons whirling.

Bob Arnold emerged from his squad and stalked

over to us furiously. "Jesus H. Christ," he grated.

"One's not enough?"

"One what?" I asked puzzledly, and then I knew:

the siren, and the state cops already in town. Another

body.

"He was alive when he went up there," I said, gesturing

at Reuben. "Somebody tied him and lifted him,

hung him upside down."

I was babbling. "And then ..."

"I get the picture, Jacobia." Arnold pronounced it

the Maine way: pictchah.

By now it was full morning and a pickup truck was

pulling in behind the squad cars. George Valentine got

out and walked over to Ellie, while Arnold and the

state guys conferred by the gate.

"The guy Victor sewed up last night," George said.

"In the bar? They found him down on the seawall a

couple hours ago, cold as a flounder."

A town truck with a bunch of orange traffic cones

in its bed parked behind George's vehicle, and some

fellows from the highway department began using the

cones to block off the road where it entered Hillside

Cemetery.

"Couldn't figure what happened," George went

on. "Bruises on him. And something blue sticking out

of his mouth."

"Blood all over his shirt," Arnold added, approaching.

"But that was from the events of earlier, in

the bar."

He looked at me. "No mystery there. We've got a

complete and fully detailed report of that. Fully," he

emphasized, "detailed."

Uh-oh. Suddenly one those details came back to

me: blue. But of course what I was thinking wasn't

possible.

Behind Arnold, the state men began marking off a

perimeter, using yellow tape weighed down with small

stones to form a circle about twenty feet in diameter.

"Tell me it wasn't," I said to George, who had

been at the restaurant with us. Who had seen ...

Victor, tossing back that final martini. And afterwards

...

George nodded, looking unhappy. "Pried open the

guy's mouth, see what was in there, that's when we

found it."

One of the state officers went back to his car and

got on the radio, while the other began marking off a

second perimeter a few yards out from the first. At the

center of it all, Reuben hung there like some ghastly

flag.

"And to judge by how far down his windpipe it

was," Arnold went on, "I doubt that fellow just happened

to mistake it for a cheeseburger. I don't care," he

finished, "how rip-roaring drunk he'd got, couple

three hours earlier."

My mind's eye showed Victor readying himself for

impromptu surgery, in the course of which there might

be blood. So that Victor, always a poster boy for the

compulsively fastidious ...

"Mistook what?" Ellie demanded.

Monday stopped nosing around and sat down beside

me, wanting to go home. Me, too.

"Victor's tie," George said. "What the guy strangled

on."

He must have taken it off. Tucked it into his shirtfront,

first, but that hadn't been enough for him; it

might get dirty. So he'd taken it off.

"Part in his mouth, and the rest," Arnold supplied,

"damned near down into his lung. Have to wait for the

medical examiner, of course. And the way his dance

card's filling up already today, it could take a while.

But I'd agree the guy suffocated on it."

Somebody touched my shoulder and I jumped:

Sam.

"Mom? I think you better come. Dad's at the

house, and he's pretty upset." Sam kept his eyes

averted from Reuben.

"Oh, brother. He knows about the tie?" I asked

Arnold.

"Yeah. Teddy Armstrong remembered who he'd

seen wearing it. I talked to your ex-husband about it a

little while ago. Told him I'd see him at your house,

and I was on my way over there. But then," he gestured

in disgust at Reuben, "I got diverted."

I got up. To Victor, everything was always about

him. But this was going to put the frosting on it.

"Did Reuben have relatives?" Bob Arnold asked,

squinting at the body. Thinking, I supposed, about a

funeral.

Ellie shook her head. "His parents were from

away. Both gone now. Buried away, too, I've forgotten

quite where. They both had," she added, "that same

white-blond hair. And those white eyelashes--to look

at them, you'd think they must be brother and sister.

But," she came back to the practical present, "he didn't

have any brothers or sisters, himself."

Trust her to know; Ellie's memory contained a veritable

orchard of Eastport family trees. "Come on,

kiddo," I told Sam. "Let's go settle your father down. I

guess he must have left that tie in the bar last night.

He'd forget his head, you know, you feed him enough

martinis."

"Uh-huh," Sam agreed, not sounding convinced,

but I just laid it to general upset. When Victor gets

going, he can generate emotional shock waves that

would shatter the Rock of Gibraltar.

Ellie came too, looking grimly gratified now that

the first surprise of our discovery had worn off. She is

ordinarily the mildest of souls but her gentleness conceals

some icy attitudes, partly I think because her ancestors

were cold-water pirates, men who cut their

eyeteeth on barbecues of long pig and rum until a hurricane

blew them out of the Caribbean, eventually to

downeast Maine, back in the 1700s.

Since then her family had flourished in Eastport

and the surrounding towns, as tenacious as barnacles

and when necessary as coldly pragmatic. I got the impression

she felt some rough justice had been served

there in the cemetery.

George stayed behind with Arnold, calling on Arnold's

radio for sawhorses to hold more perimeter tape

and for a second body bag from the small stock of

them kept over at the medical clinic.

Which made two more body bags than our little

town tended to use in a year. When we have bodies in

Eastport they are generally the result of elderly people

--and by that I mean very elderly; in Maine, if you

should pass before the age of one hundred, your obituary

will call it unexpected--signing off more or less on

schedule.

So I still felt reasonably sure that the sudden run

on body bags was a statistical anomaly, not the beginning

of a trend.

Wrong.

Before Wade went out on the water that

morning, he'd brought all forty-eight of my

old wooden storm windows up out of the

cellar and lined them against the picnic table

in the side yard. I'd bet him I could remove the upstairs

window sashes and weatherstrip them before snow fell,

and he'd said that if I did he would repair and hang the

storm windows for me.

But when Victor is in trouble, he thinks he is a

swallow and my house is Capistrano, so I wasn't going

to get to the weatherstripping anytime soon.

"Sam," I said as we approached the back porch.