Stone Quarry

'Says you.'

'Okay,' I said.

'So you brought up a slick city lawyer and got him off.'

'I thought the troopers weren't involved in that, it was a county thing. What do you care?'

'It pissed off every cop on this side of the state, Smith. We're simple folks up here; we're not used to being outmanuevered by lawyers with manicures and bow ties.'

'I didn't like it either. I don't like to operate that way. But the kid didn't have a chance. Brinkman was out to get Grice and he was squeezing Jimmy hard. The whole scam was Grice's; Jimmy wasn't even in it for the money, just the fun.'

'How so?'

'You know what Grice paid Jimmy to drop those cars in the quarry? A hundred bucks each. It must have been worth a lot more than that to Grice to lose them.'

'So why'd Jimmy do it?'

'Because it was dangerous. You know how he did it?'

'Put the car in neutral and pushed, I'd guess.'

'You'd be wrong. He drove the damn things like a bat out of hell over the edge with the door open, jumped out just before they hit the water. Twice a car rolled over on him; once he got knocked on the head. He still doesn't know how he made it onto the rocks that time; he didn't wake up until morning.'

MacGregor shook his head. 'He's crazy.'

'No, he's not. Just wild. Making a lot of noise so he won't hear the sounds in the dark. No different from a lot of kids.'

MacGregor chewed his bottom lip. He had kids, too. Girls; but girls had their own ways of being wild.

He said, 'You got any idea where I can find him?'

I said evenly, 'No. Why?'

He threw down the pencil. 'Oh, come on, Smith! You got a better suspect?'

'Why would Jimmy kill Gould?'

'I've got two theories and I haven't even thought about it yet. Maybe it was Gould who tipped off Brinkman about the quarry, and Jimmy was pissed. Guys like Gould have turned out to be snitches before this. Or, maybe Jimmy was looking to move up in Grice's organization and Gould was in the way.'

'And why leave the body lying around?'

'Maybe he meant to come back for it, after he figured out what to do with it. From the looks of that cellar, no one goes down there from one month to the next unless something blows.'

'Things blow all the time over there. Jimmy would know that.'

'Well,' he said, his eyes on the handkerchief on his desk, 'maybe he went out to his car to get something and found he'd lost his keys, couldn't get back in.' He looked at me again. 'He can hot-wire the car; maybe he's got another set of keys to the bar at home. Maybe it's pretty close to morning anyway, Tony'll be there soon. Maybe he figures he'll chance it, leave the body, come back the next night. He's big on taking chances, I hear.'

I looked at him levelly. 'He's not a killer, Mac.'

MacGregor didn't answer, only shrugged.

'Can I leave?' I asked. 'I'm starving.'

MacGregor sighed and his tone changed. 'In a minute. Tell me something else. Brinkman has this bug up his ass about Grice. So why hasn't he ever picked him up?'

'What do you mean?'

'I never heard Brinkman was crooked but I never heard he was Kojak, either. All the rackets Grice runs— protection, prostitution, even drugs—some jerk or other has run in Schoharie since the Creation. Never bothered Brinkman as long as the boys were local and kept their heads down. Then along comes some minor-league bozo out of Albany to do a little muscle work and all of a sudden fighting crime is more important to Brinkman than sitting on his duff watching his pension grow.'

'Jesus, Mac, I thought you and Brinkman were on the same side.' He glared. I asked, 'What kind of muscle work?'

MacGregor snorted. 'Union-busting. For Appleseed.'

'Scabbing at the baby food plant? God, that's disillusioning.'

'Yeah. So Brinkman develops the same boil on his butt about Grice that he has about you—asshole from the city messing in his county, all that shit.' I raised an eyebrow at 'asshole' but that didn't stop him. 'But in the four years Grice's been around, Brinkman hasn't managed to take him up even once. Why is that?'

'I don't know.'

He shook his head. 'You don't know. Well, maybe you know this After your slimy lawyer sprang Jimmy Antonelli, Brinkman still had nine cars that his boys spent a week— and a hell of a lot of county money—pulling out of the quarry. If Grice was running dope up from Florida in them there must have been some other way to prove it. Why didn't he or the DA even try?'

I stood up. 'What the hell do I look like, the Answer Man? Ask Brinkman. I'm going to get some lunch.'