McMansion Read online

  A bright idea shot down. But he just didn’t look like a bulldozer operator, so it had seemed reasonable to ask. I thought of something else reasonable to ask. “Were you good at it?”

  “The teacher told me I was pretty hot.”

  Wonderful, I thought. “How well did you know Billy Tiller?”

  A jaw that up until now had appeared a little weak hardened perceptibly. He reached inside his orange top to scratch an itch. I was surprised by a glimpse of the ropey muscles of a mountain climber. Not as skinny as he first appeared.

  “How well did you know Billy?”

  “I only met him once.”

  “Trooper Moody told the prosecutor that you had some sort of a set-to five or six years ago.”

  “Yeah. I took a swing at him.”

  I sat up straighter. Ropey mountain climber muscles or not, Billy must have outweighed Jeff by a hundred and fifty pounds. It would be like me taking a swing at my cousin Pinkerton Chevalley, who occasionally entertained his friends at the White Birch by bench pressing a Harley Davidson.

  “I’m surprised you’re still among the living.”

  He shrugged.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “How did Trooper Moody find out?”

  “My mother filed a complaint.”

  I was curious why I hadn’t heard about this. It was the kind of story that got around. Although, of all of Billy’s well-deserved legal troubles, no one ever mentioned any kind of assault charges. Despite his size he was the classic nonviolent con man.

  “Jeff, it could help us both if you would tell me what happened.”

  “Why?”

  “I would like to know how the prosecutor might use it against you.”

  “They can’t.”

  “Why not.”

  “Juvenile court. Sealed records.”

  “How did it get into juvenile court?”

  “When my mother filed a complaint Billy Tiller and Eddie Edwards pressed charges.”

  “For what?”

  “Assault.”

  “One fifteen-year-old against two grown men?”

  “They said I attacked them with an ax.”

  I looked at him. “Did you?”

  “No!” He shook his head vigorously. “But they said I did….Their word against mine.”

  “But you said you took a swing at him. What kind of swing?”

  “I only tried to punch him.”

  “Why?”

  “I was really bummed,” he said with a single-minded sense of black-and-white reality that I would have associated with a younger kid. Before I asked why he was bummed, I said, “I’m having trouble picturing a fifteen-year-old boy throwing a punch at two grown men.”

  “It wasn’t two men.”

  “I thought you said there were two.”

  That earned me a look that asked, are you too stupid to talk and breathe at the same time? “Mr. Edwards wasn’t there.”

  “You just said—

  “Mr. Edwards wasn’t there. They only said that later when they lied about the axe.”

  “Mr. Edwards wasn’t there? Why did he say he was? He have something against you?”

  “He worked for Billy. Who do you think paid him?”

  “Billy Tiller was not Eddie Edwards’ only client.”

  “I don’t know about that. All I know is he worked for Billy and he lied. It was just Billy and me out in the woods. Or what used to be woods.”

  “What woods?”

  “Behind my mother’s place.”

  The only “woods” I knew behind Jeff’s mother’s house was a mind-numbingly ugly subdivision named Tiller Woods. Billy had built it on an overgrown farm he had inherited from a bachelor uncle. It had been his first development and it was everything you could hate about a subdivision, tiny lots crowded with big houses, vinyl siding, oversize garages facing the street, and every tree on the property laid waste. (I had actually entered it in the Connecticut Board of Realtors’ Ugliest-Neighborhood-in-the-State contest, an informal, unpublicized event held in the basement bar of the Yankee Drover. It lost, narrowly, to a New Milford neighborhood that boasted a defunct paper mill.)

  But for Billy, at least, it was beautiful. His uncle’s bequest had vaulted him out of a career that had ranged from assistant septic tank cleaner to automotive repair shop manager famous for “changing” his customers’ oil with other customers’ oil, thus saving the expense of buying new oil and disposing of the old. Tiller Woods had made him rich because even a wolverine could make a ton of money building houses on free land.

  “Are you talking about Tiller Woods?”

  Jeff’s jaw set again and he got a fiery gleam in his eye. For the first time I saw him as his father’s son. Not necessarily the sociopath-businessman, but a kid who would mature into a man tough enough to take what he wanted.

  “I grew up in those woods,” he said. “I could run out the back door and disappear. I used to camp in there. Sometimes I’d just go out and watch the animals come to the pond. Once a big weasel came down a silver birch to drink and he didn’t see me until he was this close, like you and me. And he stopped and he looked me in the eye, stared, like he was saying, ‘If you want to fight, we’ll fight. Unless you’d rather sit there quietly. Either way, fine with me.’ He was absolutely fearless…Sometimes I’d build a fire and cook a burger—you know, like wrapped in tinfoil and you throw it in the coals? Old Mr. Tiller, he didn’t mind. He didn’t farm anymore and it was all overgrown, thick. I never went near his house or anything. And then he died and all of sudden fat Billy Tiller and Mr. Edwards were stomping around and then the surveyors came and there were plastic tapes blowing in the wind. Fucking blue and red tapes. The color of destruction. And then one day, my birthday, Billy drove in on a big D-10 and just tore it apart.”

  Tears welled up in the kid’s eyes and trickled down his sunken cheeks.

  I looked away to give him some privacy. Then I asked, “Was that when you got interested in the Earth Liberation Front?”

  “I already knew about ELF. In school, we had checked out their website, found chat rooms. I mean I didn’t need Billy Tiller to prove to me that this whole damn country treats the environment like an ATM machine. Rip it off and you get free money. But I gotta say, it was one thing reading ELF postings, but a lot worse seeing the enemy in action right behind my own house.” And then, just in case Jeff Kimball had not admitted enough motive to give the state’s attorney anecdotes to dine out on at the next lethal-injection seminar, he said, swiping fresh tears from his eyes, “I hated that fat bastard so much.”

  “So why did you climb on the machine?”

  “I told my father’s lawyer. I told the cops.” He was tired. He just wanted to go back to his cell.

  “Could you tell me, please?”

  “I saw his arm. Like his mackinaw? No blood or anything. Just a arm in a coat, like your arm or my arm. So I jumped on to drive it off him. It was still running. But the second I got her in gear I thought, wait a minute, which way?”

  “Which way?”

  “Which way do I go? So I don’t hurt him.” His voice got stronger. More adult. “And then reality set in. It was horrible. Blood was seeping out of the sleeve. And my brain goes, whoa, I’ve got to find some way to lift it off him. We need machines. We need a heavy-lift crane. I was just turning on my cell phone to call 911 when Trooper Moody came up the drive.”

  “Did you actually dial 911?”

  “No, I was still waiting for a signal. Why?”

  “The cellular server should have a record that you dialed.”

  “Trooper Moody came before I got a signal.”

  “Wait a minute. You said you were waiting for the signal. Did you actually turn the phone on?”

  “Well, yeah. How do you think I knew there was no signal?
”

  I didn’t answer that it seemed like an easy story to make up. But I wondered would the cellular company have a record of Jeffrey simply turning his phone on. It just might help as circumstantial evidence that the kid was trying to call for help. I asked him what cell phone service he used. Mine hadn’t reached down there, but his might.

  And then, as I was leaving and the guard was taking his arm, I flashed on an image of Billy’s mackinaw-clad arm sticking out from under the machine. “Jeff? How’d you know it was Billy under the machine?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What would you have done if you had?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you have tried to save him anyhow?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean wouldn’t you?”

  I asked the guard, “Could we have another minute alone, please?”

  “Time’s up.”

  “Judge Laver is right across the street. He and my dad went to school together. It’ll take me ten minutes to get an order for more time. Why don’t you save us both the trouble?”

  The guard weighed the likelihood of my story against the long-term side effects of pissing off a grandee of the court system. He backed out and closed the door. I stood close to Jeff and said, “You still haven’t told me how you survived when Billy swung back.”

  “He didn’t really swing. He just shoved me out of the way.”

  “Then why’d your mother press charges?”

  “It was just a kind of a slap,” he explained, with no rancor. “But my face was red and it made her mad.”

  “I saw your dad, yesterday. He hadn’t known about that.”

  “Yeah, well my mom was mad at him that year.”

  “Do you mind me asking why you never told him.”

  “I didn’t like his girlfriend.”

  “You know, your father came up here to look at the site. Where it happened.”

  “He did?”

  I said, “I wondered about your father. He didn’t seem the type to be a hip hop mogul.”

  “He’s not, but he thinks he is. You should see his latest girlfriend. He buys her fur coats and a Hummer that gets ten miles to the gallon.”

  “Still, it must be kind of cool having a father in the music business.”

  “He’s just an investor,” Jeff said scornfully.

  “For what it’s worth, he’s on your side.”

  That jaw hardened again. “Yeah, well it’s a little late for that.”

  “Too late to help get you off? Or too late to make up for past wrongs.”

  “Both.”

  “Did he visit you here?”

  “I wouldn’t see him.”

  I drove back to Newbury thinking about all the kids of divorced parents I had met while showing houses being sold for the settlement. Even though they knew I had come to sell their home out from under them, they would tour me so eagerly room to room, noting a million details. They always knew so much more about houses than their parents did.

  Brave kid, taking on Billy at fifteen. Or just mad enough to kill?

  But to wait six years?

  ***

  “Jeff Kimball tried to call for help on a Verizon cell phone,” I reported to Ira. “My call record lady can’t find a connection.” I kept a corporate account at one of the on-line data brokers and I’d used them enough so it had gotten personal, which usually sped things up. “I’m wondering if you know somebody there who could check it out whether they registered his signal.”

  The attorney was not impressed. “I got just off the phone with the state’s attorney. The cops already checked with Verizon. They have no record that Jeffrey turned on his cell phone, much less dialed 911.”

  I sat in his client chair and stared at my boots. “I was afraid of that. I couldn’t get a signal when I was out there. But each service is different. Maybe his worked there, but the signal hadn’t locked in yet.”

  “The prosecutor put it more succinctly.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Your client is lying.’”

  “They can’t prove that.”

  Ira sighed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The curse of getting older is having to explain the world to the young—They don’t have to prove that Jeffrey didn’t dial 911. There’s no record. Nothing to say the kid isn’t lying. Find Billy Tiller’s enemies, Ben. It’s the only way.”

  ***

  The town has grown so much that I didn’t recognize all the names in the Clarion “Police Reports” to which I turned for a refresher course on Billy’s misdeeds and offenses. I pulled them off several years of the newspaper’s website archives—Clarion-Online, offering a Newbury version of Google, supplemented by publisher-editor-reporter Scooter MacKay’s availability next door to fill in blanks from memory. Then, long list in hand, I went calling on people who were mad at Billy Tiller.

  Chapter Five

  Landslides are almost unheard of in New England, where granite ledge crops out of the ground like pond frogs emerging for a wary peep. What farmers and gardeners laughingly call “earth” is actually a threadbare blanket of soil and stones stretched over solid rock, which is anchored to the core of the planet. (The occasional boulder that breaks loose is moved by frost and gravity into the next hole a person tries to dig.) So our hills are sturdy and you would have to go way out of your way to cause a landslide.

  Billy Tiller had managed one that almost made the Richter scale.

  Ralph and Sheila Gordon had the misfortune of living next to a slope Billy had been “developing” into a crush of McMansions he had named Newbury Walls. From what I could see from their driveway, all the Queen’s horses and most of her men had fallen into their backyard.

  They were an elderly couple of modest means, retired teachers living on Social Security and private school pensions. Mr. Gordon (he would always be Mr. Gordon to me, as she would be Mrs.) had taught me history at Newbury Prep. Mrs. Gordon had done her best to acquaint me with mathematics.

  Had they been the sort to sue, they could have taken L.L. Bean to court for plagiarizing their lifestyle. Mr. Gordon wore corduroys and a vest over a flannel shirt and sturdy hiking boots. Mrs. Gordon had on cotton trousers and a sweater she had probably knitted herself. A black Lab slept at his feet. A cat sat on her lap. They offered me tea and they looked as gentle, and genteel, as a minister and his wife.

  I broached the subject of Billy Tiller.

  “I’m glad that son of a bitch is dead,” said Mrs. Gordon.

  “And we pray he roasts in Hell,” her husband added.

  Of the three kinds of gardeners in Newbury—crawlers, pointers, and checkbookers—checkbookers write a check to a landscape designer and go on a cruise; pointers instruct hired help what to dig, plant, weed, mulch, and prune; and crawlers spend most of their time on their knees, digging, planting, mulching, weeding, while occasionally standing to prune something overhead or turn their compost heap. The Gordons were crawlers.

  They had devoted the happiest years of their lives to a patch of ground that had been one of the high spots on the annual Conservancy tour. They showed me glossy gardening magazines that had done four-color photo essays on their place. Then they led me to the window. Half a year after Billy Tiller’s Total Landscape company started work next door, it looked like a Bolivian shanty town smacked by a hurricane.

  “That used to be the pond,” Mr. Gordon said, pointing at a gray slick. “Over there, where you see the splintered crab apple, we had a small lawn.”

  His wife smiled, wistfully. “The lawn shrank, annually, as we added new beds and borders.”

  “We called it ‘border creep.’”

  “Did Billy pay for the damage?”

  “No. He said to sue him. We couldn’t afford that.”

  “Barely afford our property taxes the way they’ve been going up.”

  Of their beds and borders, perennials, bulbs, bushes, corms, and
rhizomes there was no sign, and I asked the million dollar question, hoping fervently that Mr. Gordon answered in the negative. Because, as much as I wanted to get poor Jeff Kimball off if it turned out that he didn’t kill Billy Tiller, I certainly hoped that this nice couple had no more suffering on the horizon. “Did you do the machine work yourself?”

  “Machine?” They laughed, in chorus. “Wheelbarrow.”

  “I guess a wheelbarrow is easier to drive than a bulldozer.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Mr. Gordon. “I was a Seabee in the Navy. Let me tell you a bulldozer is a lot easier to handle than a wheelbarrow. Especially by the end of the day. Thank God for Aleve.”

  “And Old Fashioneds,” said Mrs. Gordon.

  “I guess that was a long time ago.”

  “When?”

  “When you drove bulldozers in the Navy.”

  “Forty years. What am I saying? Forty-two. Funny, how you never lose the knack. My unit had a reunion down in New Jersey last summer. We all went out to the Operating Engineers training site. Ever see it out on the Turnpike?”

  I had, in fact, driving an elderly friend down to Camden to visit the battleship New Jersey museum. “Like a giant erector set.”

  “We had a ball, driving machines. Old ones, antiques, new ones. Every kind of bulldozer you ever saw. Man they’re a kick. You ever drive one, Ben?”

  I shook my head, and looked down at his hiking boots, which were the kind L.L. Bean would advertise as offering firm support for climbing hills like the one behind the house lot where Billy died.

  “You float across the ground. You feel like a lumbering god.”

  His wife interrupted. “They didn’t float for just anybody. Jim was the best. He made it dance.” Then she got an Ohmigod! look on her face. “Ben! You’re not suggesting that—”

  I assured her I wasn’t and left after a decent interval of tea and small talk. But I had the strongest feeling I would not be invited back and felt more than a little ashamed of myself.

  ***

  Doubt.

  I climbed up the outside stairs of the General Store to see Tim Hall, who was my friend and lawyer of choice—Tim being a lot less expensive than Ira Roth. “Remember the guy who sued Billy Tiller for cutting down his trees?”