Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Part 12

He wanted me to ask.

I waited.

But he waited better: He half turned in his chair, picked up a gla.s.s and the pitcher, poured.

"You win," I said. "What was Phigg's big move?"

He poured himself water, sipped, looked at the gla.s.s, savored his moment. "He took up with Myna Roper."

I waited, watching Weinberg hide a smirk.

Finally I said, "Who the h.e.l.l is Myna Roper?"

"Beautiful girl, an Amazon, six feet tall and the prettiest skin I've ever seen. She handled phones and filing for a piano mover down the block, if memory serves. But what made her interesting was that she sat as a model, here and in the Village, to augment her income."

I poured myself a gla.s.s of water, watched Weinberg smile at nothing. "She was sketched and shot by thousands of h.o.r.n.y little carpetbagger artist-boys," he said. "She had the surprisingly rare capability of working in the nude and maintaining some dignity about it, which tended to make the h.o.r.n.y little artist-boys hornier, you see?"

"No."

"She played both virgin and wh.o.r.e in their sticky little dreams, and thus cowed the absolute h.e.l.l out of them."

"So Phigg worked up the guts to ask out a cute model," I said. "Was it really that big a deal?"

"Oh dear, I left out a pertinent detail." Weinberg sipped to mask his smirk, then set down his gla.s.s and looked me in the eye. "Mister Sax, Myna Roper was a great strapping negress. Black as the ace of spades, in fact."

CHAPTER NINE.

We felt another gust, watched rain rattle windows. "White guy dating a black girl," I said. "What year are we up to?"

"'Sixty-one. It's easy to pinpoint because we were all giddy over JFK and Jackie. Camelot, you know, 'Ahsk not....' All things were possible, which is why Tander Phigg's timing was exquisite, whether by luck or design."

"So n.o.body held it against them?"

Weinberg laughed. "Against them? They became celebrities, an absolute must-have couple at parties and openings! They were instant A-listers, though we lacked the term."

"Invite the mixed couple, prove how ... naughty you are?"

"I'm sure we all preferred 'progressive' or 'forward thinking,' but basically, yes."

"Phigg went from the s.h.i.thouse to the penthouse, just like that."

"Well put!" Weinberg said. "I don't think he realized exactly why, second-rater that he was. We used to have endless arguments about the couple. Some styled Tander Phigg a Machiavellian mastermind, especially when he parlayed Myna into a couple of one-man shows. I said nonsense, the schlemiel simply loves the girl. You could see it in his dull little eyes."

Esio appeared and spoke in Weinberg's ear. Weinberg looked at his watch. "Five minutes," he said to Esio. "My apologies," he said to me, making a what-can-you-do shrug. "A telephone meeting."

I said, "What happened to Phigg and Myna Roper?"

"I was just trying to recall," he said. "And let me say I've enjoyed this, Mister Sax. I've hit that dreadful age at which memories from half a century ago are far preferable to today's. Not to mention clearer."

He sighed, stared at nothing, tapped fingernail to teeth. "There was a vague disaster of some sort, as there had to be. n.o.body was certain what iceberg the SS Tander and Myna hit. The uncertainty led to b.i.t.c.hy speculation, of course. An abortion? A parental discovery? Who knows? But sometime in late 'sixty-one or 'sixty-two, Tander and Myna absented themselves without warning. I heard she headed south, where she'd come from, and he went back to Ma.s.sachusetts and daddy's money."

"Do you know where she came from?"

"South Carolina rings a bell, but please don't hold me to it."

"How about I leave you my number?" I said. "Maybe somebody else from back then remembers. You can ask around."

"You may give the number to Esio, but whom, exactly, would I ask?" He spread his hands. "They're all dead."

I thumped northeast on I-95, wipers set on intermittent in fading rain. I wished my truck had an automatic transmission, stared at the a.s.s end of a semi. Somebody had finger-written WASH ME on the semi's roll-up door. Underneath, somebody else had written BLOW ME.

It was just after four. I was tired, tired, tired. Felt like a week since I got cold-c.o.c.ked at Motorenwerk, but it was just three days ago. There'd been a lot of action since then, which was okay. But there'd been a lot of talk, too.

People talk too much.

Traffic gained speed once I cut north on I-91. But not much. There was no sense jumping lanes; I tucked in behind the BLOW ME truck and rode, thought about what to do next.

I needed to check in with Randall and Charlene but decided to take four hours without palaver while I could.

I half smiled. Palaver was a word from my dad, the only fancy word ever used by the welder from Mankato, Minnesota. He ditched me and my mom when I was eleven, hooked up with a stock-car team in Ma.s.sachusetts. When I was thirteen, I came east to live with him. That's how I learned to be careful what I wished for: By the time I moved in, my dad was drinking hard. I hadn't seen him but once since I dropped out during my junior year of high school.

The exit for I-84 surprised me. I cut off a semi and settled in for the run to Ma.s.sachusetts.

Fathers and sons. Tander Phigg Senior, Junior, the Third. I thought about Phigg Junior's five happy years in New York.

It was easy to picture Phigg Senior the industrialist, getting p.i.s.sed when his son ran off to play Artsy Photo Boy. It was easy to picture Senior keeping tabs on Junior-informally, through the grapevine, or not so informally, through a detective. When Senior learned about the black girlfriend, he must've hit the roof. It was easy to picture him laying down the law, telling his son to cut the bulls.h.i.t and come home-or get cut out of the trust fund, the will.

As I thought this through I kept tripping over something. Figured out what it was while I crept toward the tolls where I-84 emptied into the Ma.s.sachusetts Turnpike. Chas Weinberg was fuzzy on some details, but he'd been dead-nuts certain that Phigg was a second-stringer, a dime-a-dozen wannabe.

That didn't square with the Tander Phigg, Jr., I knew, the Phigg whose stories got bolder as time pa.s.sed, who came on strong. The Phigg I knew was brash, a man who'd bragged about his river mansion and flipped up his polo-shirt collar even when he was living in a shack.

Far as I was concerned, brash was for the young. Hang around long enough, life stomps the brash out of you. But it seemed the opposite was true for Tander Phigg. Maybe that was why I hadn't liked him.

I wondered if there was more bad blood between Phigg and Trey than Trey had let on. Sure, Randall's timetable made him look like a long shot. But it couldn't hurt to learn more.

Ma.s.s. Pike East, homebound on autopilot while the sun set behind me. I faced a choice-Framingham or Shrewsbury? If I ran to Framingham I could fill in Randall, maybe get Trey to say more about his father.

But Shrewsbury meant Charlene, not to mention Sophie.

I smiled and headed for Shrewsbury.

Next morning. Sat.u.r.day. The sun rolled across my chest as I woke up, stretched in twisted sheets, opened my eyes.

Charlene sat on the bed in a towel, staring at me and idly scratching my chest. I looked at her blue eyes, her damp hair. She bleaches it. I pretend I don't know.

I said, "Time?"

"Ten past eight."

"Wow." I'm usually an early riser.

"You slept like a dead man. You snored like a chain saw. I kicked you."

I grabbed at her towel. She held it closed. "This bed," she said, and bounced a couple of times to remind me how it squeaked.

"Didn't stop us last night."

Charlene didn't laugh, didn't open the towel as I expected. "You came back here," she said. "Why?"

"I was on the Pike. I thought about here, I thought about my house. Here was where I wanted to be."

She nodded, looked at nothing, finger-twirled my chest hair without knowing it. After a while she leaned over and kissed my cheek. Then she rose and went to her walk-in closet.

I gave myself three minutes in the sunbeam, then hit the shower.

I stepped out the front door with three waffles in my belly. The rain had pushed the heat past, made perfect weather. I needed a Windbreaker now but knew I'd spend most of the day in a T-shirt.

The weekend plan was to drywall a room in the Framingham house. But I checked messages as I climbed into my truck and found the plan blown up: Randall had texted he'd be gone all weekend. Hadn't said where.

I frowned at the message and started to get sore at him, then felt like a jerk. He'd done more for me than I deserved. I shot him a text with the bare bones of what I'd learned from Weinberg: Phigg's years in NYC, his affair with Myna Roper, a black gal probably from South Carolina, Phigg whimpering back to Fitchburg.

Two seconds after I hit Send, the phone buzzed. It was Josh from Motorenwerk. I picked up and asked how Ollie was doing.

"He wants to see you," he said, so quiet I barely heard. Then he said an address and a few landmarks in Mason, New Hampshire, a border town near Rourke. He clicked off before I could ask anything.

Last thing I wanted to do on a Sat.u.r.day was slog north again, but I needed to hear whatever Ollie had to say. h.e.l.l, I needed to take a harder look at him for the murder-he obviously had bad blood with Phigg. It wasn't crazy to wonder if Phigg had learned about the heroin-packing scam and tried to work an angle somehow.

So seventy minutes later I was on Route 123, paralleling a railroad bed. I slowed and looked to my right for one of the landmarks Josh had mentioned-a mailbox set in a stack of steel wheels. Spotted it, pulled in, bounced a quarter mile down a dirt road. The road opened into a clearing.

I sat in my truck, looked around the clearing, didn't like the vibe. Two half-rotted F-100s and a Bronco were jacked up stupid-tall, monster-truck style. Jesus, one of the F-100s had a G.o.dd.a.m.n machine gun mounted in its bed, looking like something from the old Rat Patrol TV show. Four cheapo travel trailers, 1970s vintage, huddled in a half-a.s.sed semicircle. Three scrawny wild turkeys gobbled and pecked the hardscrabble.

The main building sagged like h.e.l.l. It was white forty years ago and had cinder-block front steps. A TV satellite lay in the yard where it'd fallen off the roof and never been fixed. Farther off I saw an outbuilding. Miserable dog-yelps carried from it.

I didn't like it one bit. If Josh and Ollie had landed here, that was their problem. I put my truck in reverse and was easing the clutch out when a screen door banged. "Mister Sax! Mister Sax!"

s.h.i.t. It was Josh, waving, fast-walking toward me, grinning. The grin didn't make sense until I looked hard-it was the nervous type that masked big-time fear.

I sighed and killed the motor. "What the h.e.l.l is this place?"

Josh's mouth fluttered like he wanted to cry. "You said take him wherever he wanted to go," he finally said, anger flashing through the fear. "This was it."

"I say again, what is this place?"

"Welcome," he said, sweeping his arm like Vanna White, "to the Beet Brothers' compound." Josh looked over his shoulder at the falling-down house, then leaned closer. "These guys are lunatics. Flat out f.u.c.king lunatics."

I took a guess. "One of them a half-a.s.sed doctor, a medic in the army or some such?"

"How'd you know?"

I shrugged. It was an easy guess. I fished under the pa.s.senger seat and came up with the Browning P35 I'd taken from Ollie at Motorenwerk. Stuck it down the back of my pants, grabbed my Windbreaker as I stepped from the truck, tied the Windbreaker's arms around my waist.

As we crossed sixty feet of dirt and weeds to the cinder-block steps, I told Josh to give me twenty seconds' worth of info on this s.h.i.thole.

"The brothers that own the place are gone right now," he said. "Hunting or stealing or whatever. They've got fifty-sixty acres on either side of the old railroad tracks, they f.u.c.k around down there all day. One of them was a medic in Vietnam, just like you said. Ollie's on a sofa in the front room, been there since I brought him."

We stepped through the screen door. I about puked at the smell. I read somewhere that smell and sound are the senses that touch off memories. The Beet Brothers' stench touched off a doozy: In my worst time, maybe fifteen years ago, I spent a summer in Lowell, Ma.s.sachusetts, in a half-a.s.sed camp a bunch of us b.u.ms set up behind an industrial park. One of the b.u.ms, a huffer whose face was always gold-flecked because that was his paint color of choice, pa.s.sed the time prowling for house cats and skinning them. He kept the pelts in the shack he'd built from cardboard and pallets. The rest of us gave the shack a wide berth, knowing he was even crazier than we were.

But one night, the huffer stole two dollars from a pal of mine. A half dozen of us got brave on Mad Dog 20/20, waited until the huffer pa.s.sed out, and flooded into his shack to kick the s.h.i.t out of him. It was mid-August, a hundred degrees easy.

When we swarmed the shack, the cat-pelt stench hit us like a mallet. Every one of us puked or pa.s.sed out or both. I remember seeing one guy's eyes roll up as he fell forward. It was more than a smell in there, it was ... an immersion. In death, hate, focused insanity.

This house smelled like that shack.

Ollie said, "You get used to it."

Behind me Josh said, "I haven't." He said it real quiet.

I followed Ollie's voice to my right. The front room was ten by twelve and had windows on two sides. The windows were wide open, thank G.o.d. An ancient console TV sat in the front corner of the room, set up with the first set of rabbit ears I'd seen in five years. On the tube: a court show, slightly fuzzy, a black woman saying her boyfriend had promised to split the rent but never did.

Opposite the TV was a couch, brown, older than the TV. Ollie Dufresne was propped up on it. He wore the same clothes I'd seen him in at his shop, his right pant leg split, that leg straight out on the couch. The leg itself looked much better than I expected, as if it'd been worked on by experts. A snow-white bandage wrapped the knee, an ice pack sat on top, and aluminum rods had been taped to hold everything straight.

Ollie wore half a smile as he watched me try to figure it all out. "Admirable field dressing, eh? One of the brothers did it, bless him. He's a sort of medical savant. He can't tell you who's president, but during a tiff in one of your more despicable African countries, I once watched him stuff ten yards of intestine back inside a man and sew him up with a safety pin and dental floss. The man was on his feet two days later, couldn't have gotten better care at Walter Reed."

I sat at the end of the sofa and breathed through my mouth. "Chrissake, what is this place?"

Behind me on TV, the woman's boyfriend said it was true he hadn't paid any rent, but he had made four payments on his girlfriend's car. Josh stepped to the TV and clicked it off.

From out back, maybe a mile off, we heard noise-a shotgun, at least two automatic weapons, a big-block motor, rebel yells.

Ollie and I locked eyes. At the exact same time we said, "Let's get the f.u.c.k out of here."