Parting Shot

Three Cal

I knew the name Madeline Plimpton.

She was old-stock Promise Falls. I wasn’t exactly an expert on the town’s history, but I knew the Plimptons were among those who’d established the town back in the 1800s. I knew they’d founded the town’s first newspaper, the Standard, and that Madeline Plimpton had the distinct honor of presiding over its death.

I didn’t know why she wanted to see me. She wouldn’t say in our phone call. Clients don’t usually want to talk about these things over the phone. It’s hard enough doing it in person.

“It’s delicate,” she explained.

It usually was.

I wouldn’t call her place a mansion, but it was pretty upscale for Promise Falls. A Victorian-style home built back in the twenties, probably four or five thousand square feet, set well back from the street, with a circular driveway. It was the kind of place that, at one time, would have had a black jockey lawn ornament out front. If it had ever actually had one, someone’d had the good sense to get rid of it.

I was behind the wheel of my new, aging Honda. I’d traded in my very old Accord for a merely old Accord. This one was equipped with a manual transmission, and shifting through the gears allowed me to imagine myself as someone younger and sportier. My first car, some thirty years ago, had been a Toyota Celica with a four-speed stick shift. Every car I’d had since had been automatic, until now.

I parked out front of the main double doors, my car outclassed by a black Lexus SUV, a white four-door Acura sedan, and a BMW 7 Series. The combined value of those three cars probably exceeded my total income for the last two decades.

I was half expecting a maid or butler to materialize after I pressed the bell, but it was Madeline Plimpton herself who opened the door and invited me in.

I put her at about seventy. She was a thin, nice-looking woman, bordering on regal, dressed in black slacks and a black silk top, a tasteful strand of pearls at her neck. Her well-tended silver hair came down to the base of her neck, and she eyed me through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Weaver,” she said.

“My pleasure. Please call me Cal.”

She did not invite me to call her Madeline.

She led me from the front hall into the dining room, where things had been set up for tea. China cups, milk and sugar cubes in silver servers.

“Can I pour you a cup of tea?” she asked.

“Thank you,” I said.

She poured, then took a seat at the head of the table. I pulled up a chair near the end, to her right.

“I’ve heard good things about you,” she said.

“I suppose, as a former newspaper publisher, you have good sources,” I said, smiling.

I caught her briefly wincing and thought it was my use of the word former. “I do. I know just about everyone in this town. I know you used to work for the police here. That you made a mistake, moved away for a few years to Griffon, where you set yourself up as a private investigator, and then came back.” She paused. “After a personal tragedy.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ve been back here a couple of years.”

“Yes.” I dropped a sugar cube into my tea. “So I guess I passed the background check. What seems to be the problem?”

Ms. Plimpton drew a long breath, then raised her cup to her lips and blew on it. The tea was hot.

“It’s about my grand-nephew,” she said.

“Okay.”

“My niece’s son. It’s been quite a year for them.”

I waited.

“My niece and her son live in Albany. But life for them there has become untenable.”

I was pretty sure I knew what that word meant.

“And why would that be?” I asked.

Another pause. “Jeremy — that’s my grand-nephew — had some issues with the courts this year that attracted an unfortunate degree of attention. It’s made life very difficult for him there. Some people who don’t seem to have much appreciation of the justice system have been harassing Jeremy and my niece, Gloria. Late-night phone calls, eggs thrown at the house. Someone even left a death threat in the mailbox. It was written in crayon on a piece of paper that had been smeared with excrement, if you can imagine such a thing.”

“What do you mean by ‘some issues,’ Ms. Plimpton?”

“A traffic mishap. It got blown out of proportion. I mean, I’m not suggesting it wasn’t a tragedy, but the fallout has just been over the top.”

“Ms. Plimpton, maybe you should start at the beginning.”

Her head made a tiny side-to-side motion. “I don’t see that that’s necessary. I’m interested in engaging your services, and it’s not important for you to know all the details. Although I can tell you that Gloria is almost more a daughter to me than a niece. She came to live with me when she was a teenager, so our relationship is...”

I was waiting for her to say “closer.”

“Complicated,” Ms. Plimpton said at last.

“I don’t know what service it is you expect me to perform,” I said.

“I want you to protect Jeremy.”

“What do you mean, protect? You mean you want me to be his bodyguard?”

“Yes, I suppose that would be part of it. I’d want you to assess his security situation and, as you say, perform bodyguard duties.”

“I’m not a bodyguard. Maybe what you need is a bouncer.”

Madeline Plimpton sighed. “Well, perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way, technically. But you are a former policeman. You’ve dealt with criminal elements. I would think that being a bodyguard really wouldn’t be straying all that much from what you actually do. And I’m perfectly prepared to pay you round-the-clock for as long as your services might be required. One of the reasons I chose you was because I understand you have — I don’t mean to be insensitive here, Mr. Weaver — but I understand you have no family. It wouldn’t be disruptive in ways that it might be to someone else.”

I wasn’t sure I liked Madeline Plimpton. But then again, in my line of work, if you only worked for people you wanted to be friends with, you wouldn’t eat.

“How old is Jeremy?” I asked.

“Eighteen,” she said.

“And what’s his last name?”

She bit her lip briefly. “Pilford,” she said, almost in a whisper.

I blinked. “Jeremy Pilford? Your grand-nephew is Jeremy Pilford?”

She nodded. “I take it that you are familiar with the name.”

The entire country was familiar with the name.

“The Big Baby,” I said.

Madeline Plimpton winced more noticeably this time. She looked as though I’d poured my hot tea over her veined hand.

“I wish you hadn’t said that. Those words were never used in his defense. That was something the prosecution came up with and the press ran with, and it was insulting. It was demeaning. Not just to Jeremy, but to Gloria, too. It reflected very badly on her.”

“But it came out of the defense strategy, didn’t it, Ms. Plimpton? It’s basically what Jeremy’s lawyer was saying. That was the argument. That Jeremy had been so pampered, so excused from ever having to do things for himself, from ever having to accept responsibility for any of his actions his entire life, that he couldn’t imagine that he was doing anything wrong when he—”

“I know what he did.”

“When he went out partying, got behind the wheel totally under the influence, and killed someone. With all respect, Ms. Plimpton, that’s not what I would characterize as a traffic mishap.”

“Maybe you’re not the right person for this job.”

“Maybe I’m not,” I said, setting down my cup and pushing back my chair. “Thank you for the tea.”

She reached out a hand. “Wait.”

I waited.

“Please,” she said.

I pulled my chair back in, rested my hands on the top of the dining room table.

“I suppose it’s reasonable to expect that your reaction is unlikely to be any different from that of anyone else I might approach. Jeremy has not been good at winning people over. But it was the judge’s decision not to send him to jail. It was the judge who decided to put the boy on probation. It was the judge who was persuaded by Mr. Finch that—”

“Mr. Finch?”

“Jeremy’s lawyer, whom you just referenced. Grant Finch. It was Mr. Finch who came up with the defense strategy, and to be honest, no one had high hopes that the judge would find it convincing. But we were ecstatic when he did. Sending Jeremy to jail would have been a terrible thing for the boy. After all, he is still a boy. He’d never have survived prison. And as horrible as the backlash to the sentence has been, it’s still better than Jeremy being behind bars.”

“Except now he’s living in fear,” I said.

Madeline Plimpton offered a small nod of acknowledgment. “That’s true, but these things pass. Jeremy could have gone to jail for several years. Social consternation over his sentencing will last a few months at most, I should think. The world is always waiting for the new thing to be outraged by. A hunter who kills a prize lion in Africa. A woman who tweets a joke about AIDS. A dimwitted politician who thinks a woman’s body knows how to shut down pregnancy following rape. That other judge, who gave the light sentence to the boy who raped that unconscious girl. We are so thrilled to be angered about something that we want a new target for our rage every week. Jeremy will be forgotten about, eventually, and he will be able to return to a normal life. But in the meantime, he needs to be safe.”

I wondered about when the family of the person Jeremy had killed would get back to a normal life, but decided not to pose the question out loud.

“So yes, to your earlier comment, he was branded the Big Baby. A teenager who was coddled as though he were an infant. The prosecuting attorney mentioned it once in passing, and the media loved it. CNN turned Jeremy into a flashy logo. The Big Baby Case, with lots of jazzy graphics.”

“As someone who once ran a newspaper, you must have some understanding of how those things happen.”

“Indeed,” she said. “But just because I owned a media outlet does not mean I approve of everything the media does.”

“I really don’t know that I can help you, Ms. Plimpton,” I said. “But I could probably recommend some agencies to you. Ones that don’t really do much in the way of investigations, as I do. They’re more like tough guys for hire.”

“I don’t want Jeremy surrounded by a bunch of thugs.”

I shrugged.

“Would you at least meet with them?” she asked. “With Jeremy and my niece? At least meet them and then make a decision about whether you want the job? I’m sure once you spoke with them, you’d realize they aren’t the caricatures they’ve been made out to be. They’re real people, Mr. Weaver. And they’re frightened.”

I got out my notepad and pen from the inside pocket of my sport jacket. I uncapped the pen.

“Why don’t you give me their address in Albany?” I said.

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Ms. Plimpton said. “They’re here. They’ve been here for a few days now. They’re out back, on the porch, waiting to talk to you.”