3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3 (18 page)

Chapter 36

The rest of the week slid by, gray and cold. Slush and dirty snow lined Picketsville’s streets. Even the multicolored lights and decorations looked old and tired. Things seemed to move in slow motion. Essie stepped up and took over the day to day. She made the arrangements for the memorial service. She talked to, soothed, and supported Darcie. Pastor Jim from the Baptist church arrived and consulted. By Thursday all the important details had been taken care of. Ike felt relieved. That afternoon a woman in a black leather slacks suit sailed into the office. Essie directed her to Ike. She flashed her ID and asked for Charlie’s secure phone.

Ike handed it over. The day before, Sam had taken its back off and studied its circuitry. Ike had an uneasy feeling she’d also found a jack of some sort in there somewhere and had hooked it up to her computer. Whether she’d downloaded its encryption program or not, he didn’t know and he didn’t want to know. The last thing he wanted was the feds in his shop arresting his deputy.

Essie watched the woman’s every move, in and out.

“Miss Agency-Ain’t-I-Something didn’t get that hottie outfit at the Dollar Store, did she?” she said. “I bet you can’t even get one like that in Roanoke.”

“That’s ‘inside the beltway chic,’ no doubt about it.”

“Inside whose belt? Are you talking dirty, Ike, or am I missing something?”

“Inside the Washington Beltway—the navel of the universe, font of all true wisdom.”

“Okay, I got you, I think.”

Ike and Sam had inspected what was left of Whaite’s vehicle. Muscle cars from that era had two things working against anyone hoping to survive a crash in them. They were heavy, with too much of the weight in the front end. In a head-on, a 396 V-8 engine could easily blow through the fire wall and wind up in the driver’s lap. Worse, the Chevelle was pre-air bag. It barely made it into the seat belt era. Whaite never had a chance. They saw where the Jaws of Life had been used to get him out—too late to save his life. There was a very suspicious scrape along the driver’s side front quarter panel. They decided to keep that bit of information to themselves until they had time to assess it and make a plan. Right now, they did not want all the other deputies angry and out for blood. The chances of finding a hit-and-run driver were not good. They needed another angle and they hadn’t found one. Ike clenched his jaw. He’d find whoever did it. Nobody was going to take down one of his people.

***

T.J. stared out the second storey window down into the backyard of the house behind his. He had no idea how long he’d been standing there. The passage of time did settle easily in his mind. He owned a watch. He could tell time. But that was a discipline he had learned over a dozen years to please others. Time ticking away meant nothing to him. Memory difficulties, however, were not among the many deficits visited on him in his young life. On the contrary, his memory functioned perfectly. So, if he knew he was to be at a certain place at a certain time, he would not forget. He would look at his watch with almost compulsive regularity and when the large and small hands were in the alignment he needed, he would respond. He, like the inexpensive timepiece on his wrist, was amazingly punctual.

He stood close to the window, only vaguely aware of the cold sheet of air that coursed across its face and chilled the room. Like time, heat and cold were not prominent features in his awareness. Not that he didn’t know the difference; it just didn’t seem to register. He shivered briefly and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The wind rattled the window frame and swirled around the narrow confines of the small backyard below. The blue tarp on Donald’s truck lifted and flapped angrily in an icy gust, fell, and covered the truck once more.

Donald parked the truck right where T.J. remembered. Donald’s mother used to sit and drink there.

Hey there, T.J., how you doing?

I’m doing just fine there, Mrs. Donald’s Mother.

Well that’s good to hear, boy.

What’s that you have in that bottle? Is it water?

Oh yeah, it is. It’s special water, T.J. It’s fire water. Hee, hee.

T.J. never did see the fire come out of the water and he wondered about that sometimes. Mrs. Donald’s Mother didn’t act like other mothers, not like his. She laughed and sometimes fell asleep in the backyard with her fire water and Donald would come home and yell at her and T.J. would go to the front of his house because he didn’t like the words they said when they yelled. But she wasn’t there anymore. “Gone to the Loony Bin,” Donald had said. T.J. asked his mother what the Loony Bin was, and she said it was not a nice word and why did he want to know, and he said it was just something Donald said about where his mother went. An institution, she said. Later, his father said he, T.J., belonged in the Loony Bin, too, and his mother had cried.

T.J. missed the Christmas lights. Donald’s father always put up lights on the house. They would run all the way around the porch and up on the pointy part of the roof and out front. He had a Santa that laughed and had a light inside him, too. In town, in front of the post office, they used to have a manger and all those people, wise men and shepherds and, of course, the baby Jesus and his mom and dad. They didn’t put that up anymore, either. He never understood why, though his mother told him a hundred times.

“T.J., I’ve told you a hundred times. It’s against the law now.” Why would statues of all those nice God people be against the law? He put it down in that part of his brain with all the other things that he could not understand, like the moon changing shape. Cause and effect worked at a simple level. Brakes on—car stops, no brakes, car hits something. He could grasp an immediate outcome. Long term was another matter.

The wind tore at the covering on the truck again. T.J. watched as it lifted and fluttered like an uncleated sail. Donald’s special truck—the one the girls at The Pub liked so much. T.J. wondered, if he saved enough money working for Colonel Bob, if his mother would let him buy a truck like Donald’s.

When Mrs. Donald’s Mother lived next door, before she went to the Loony Bin, there were flowers in the yard. Now the thin dusting of snow only covered Donald’s bottles—the brown ones he drank from and then threw aside.

The canvas covering snapped in the wind and nearly tore away from the few milk bottle anchors that still held it. Donald stepped out on the small gray painted porch and down the stairs into the yard. He did not look happy. He looked like he might be ready for the Loony Bin. T.J. moved back from the window. He did not want Donald to see him. He did not know why, but some primal instinct, some response in the deeper recesses of his brain, the part not involved with cognitive processes, sounded an alarm and he yielded to it instinctively. For the first time in his life, he understood that Donald was not his friend.

He watched as Donald lifted the tarp from one side of his truck and inspected the passenger side door. T.J. stared at the truck, too, taking it in. He felt a little sorry for Donald. Too bad, it was his special truck.

T.J. had perfect vision. The eye doctor told him, “T.J., you have perfect 20/20 vision.” The woman who checked his eyes when he got his driver’s license said the same thing.

And his memory functioned just fine.

Chapter 37

It had been a particularly bad week for Sam. Her phone died. Her car developed a funny noise she couldn’t identify, and the closest Subaru dealer was in Roanoke. Sam stared at her phone. She’d tried to sort out the voice messages. They were all garbled. She deleted the lot. The new battery went dead in less than five minutes when she installed it, faster after that. So her problem lay somewhere within the phone itself. She wished she had a phone like the secure one Ike had been using. She had managed to unscrew the back cover plate, half expecting it to explode or release a deadly gas when she did. Nothing happened, which was her first clue there wouldn’t be anything useful for her to remove. She did find a computer receptacle built in it and had managed to fit a cable from her desktop to the phone. It required the same hookup as her Palm Pilot. She’d been able to explore the contents of its microchip, but every attempt she made to download or copy the program was blocked. She did pick up one or two ideas, however.

She checked in with Ike, who told her to draw another phone and turn in the old one. She should also post the new number and… She said she got it. Essie gave her a new phone—actually an old phone, but in better shape than the one she’d turned in. Her eye caught sight of Essie’s dog-eared copy of
Cat’s Eye
propped up on a shelf over her desk. Sam picked it up and flipped through the pages, noting the turned page corners where Essie had marked particularly salacious passages.

“You know, Essie, this is crap, unreal. This guy, Sledge, gets himself shot, stabbed, and God only knows what else and…nothing. Nothing happens. No six weeks in rehab so his gunshot wounds can heal. No remorse, no chance for failure, not a qualm, doubt, or hesitation. He just keeps pegging along, seducing air-headed women and filling page after page with one idiotic bulletproof moment after another.”

Essie took the book from her, a frown on her face. “But—”

“But you and I know that in the real world, our world, people get hurt. They bleed and die and suffer and usually because some moron or some greedy, angry, or evil bastard decides to do something irrational and stupid. And then, people get hurt—maybe die. But we’re real…the things we do every day…what Whaite did every day…”

At the mention of Whaite’s name Essie’s customary one-hundred-watt smile faded.

“It cost him his life and there was nothing romantic or heroic about it.” Sam felt tears in her eyes as she finished.

Essie stared at the book, leaned forward, took it between thumb and forefinger, and without a word dropped it in the wastebasket.

Sam nodded and pushed through the door. Outside, she wiped her eyes, took a deep breath, and called her parents. They would need her new number. There wasn’t anyone else to call. She thought about Karl and managed to pump up her anger sufficiently to keep from crying again.

***

Karl Hedrick snapped his phone shut and yelled at no one in particular. He’d been calling Sam for days, leaving voice messages. Sometimes the phone would ring and then drop the call. Sometimes it would switch him directly to voice messaging. His partner got wind of what he was trying to do and reported him. Karl found himself driving back to Washington, where, he was sure, a thorough reaming awaited. He made up his mind he’d give as good as he got. He called Sam one more time and discovered her phone had been removed from service and would he like to try a different number? What had happened, he wondered. One day everything is fine, the next, it’s all gone.

He called his own number. Maybe today there’d be a message, an explanation.

“Yes, hello?” A woman’s voice, she sounded young. “Who is this?”

“Karl.”

“He’s not available. Who’s calling?”

“No, I’m Karl. Karl Hedrick, I’m calling for messages.”

“Come on, who is this?”

“You are the answering service, right? You are answering my phone. Is that how you always answer it?”

“You’re sure you’re Mr. Hedrick?”

“Positive. I just checked my driver’s license and that’s the name on it. Now, are you the answering service or not?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Aren’t you supposed to announce that? Not just say hello?”

“Some of the girls do, but I think it’s so, you know, like formal, so I just say hello.”

“You realize that anyone calling me would have no idea that you were a service and might reasonably assume you were in my apartment when you picked up.”

“But I’m not in your apartment, am I?”

“How would I know that?”

“What difference does it make? I mean who wants to hear ‘Answering service, may I take a message?’”

“I would, because then I’d know who I was talking to and not make the mistake that I think others may have. Who told you to answer like that?”

“Nobody. I just thought, you know, it sounded more casual like.”

“Do you have a protocol you are supposed to follow?”

“A what?”

“Skip it.” He disconnected.

Karl had started his trip back to DC by taking Route 460 through Lynchburg. As he approached Appomattox it hit him. He pulled into a turnoff and sat staring through the window. If Sam had called him at his apartment and that airhead had picked up the call, she might reasonably think…He let his head fall against the steering wheel. He could not reach Sam. He had to be in DC for his meeting with his chief on Monday first thing, and he had been barred from connecting with her in the meantime. Somehow, the gods of love had abandoned him. He checked his watch. At the rate he was going, and with a stop for food, he’d make Washington by seven or seven-thirty. He’d take the weekend to think about the mess his well-meaning but tunnel-vision boss had created for him. But one way or the other, he planned to be back on this road, headed in the other direction, by Tuesday at the latest. He put the car in gear and continued north.

***

Ruth called Ike after dinner. Her usual in-your-face tone, while not totally missing, seemed significantly subdued. She had called, she said, to find out how he was holding up. Ike, in turn, banked down his
I gotcha
and they talked quietly for fifteen minutes. He did not bring up her nightmare, although the thought crossed his mind. She refrained from suggesting her faculty might have an issue with any of a number of police procedures. Overall, it was a remarkable quarter of an hour for them.

“What’s new in the search for the Russian guy’s killer?”

He filled her in and shared his doubts about Charlie Garland’s take on the homicide. “It’s really complex. Charlie is making it way too simple.”

“Perhaps you’re making it way too complicated?”

“Me? No. What makes you say that?”

“Suppose, just for the sake of argument, you are all wrong about your black programs and sub-rosa plots and schemes. What are you left with then?”

“Not much. What I can’t figure is why anyone would want kill Whaite.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to kill him, just hurt him and his fancy car, or he met up with a drunk driver, or it really was an accident.”

“Anything’s possible. The person he was tracking was a lead, not a primary, you see?”

“Yes, but I say again—suppose you have it backwards and this second or third degree lead is more than that?”

“Where is all this analysis coming from?”

“I’m an historian, Ike. I know that most great events arise from relatively trivial causes. An anarchist with a political agenda having nothing to do with the balance of power in the Balkans assassinates Archduke Ferdinand and all hell breaks out in Europe. The end result is a communist Russia, a world war, and a society that would never be the same. So don’t assume that a person removed from the center of things can’t be a significant player.”

Ike thought she might be on to something, but like many ideas people not familiar with his line of work offered, he needed to think it through.

“We have the service for Whaite tomorrow. Pop suggested sometime early next week for the holiday do. You okay with that?”

“Sure. What…is there anything special I should wear?”

“Wear?”

“Well hell, Ike, I don’t know how those things go. I know my Santa suit won’t work, but a scarf over my head? You all will wear a yarmulke, I guess.”

“Actually, it’s called a kippot, and no, we won’t. Just dress the way you would for a party. I’ve invited Leon Weitz, by the way. He wants to meet Abe. Thinks he’s local history.”

“You know he is. Are you okay, Ike?”

“Sure, fine.”

“You say so. Why don’t I believe you?”

“You are a suspicious woman who has a secret thing for policemen.”

“Not much of a secret anymore, sad to say. I liked sneaking around with my fascist cop. Does a nightcap by the fire sound good?”

“It does. Your fire or mine?”

“You don’t have a fireplace, do you?”

“I could make one. There’s a skylight in my second bedroom that would work as a chimney and I have the barbeque grill…”

“My study, fifteen minutes—no, make that a half hour. I need to get ready.”

“On my way. And if you want to wear your Santa suit—”

“What Santa—?”

“You said you could wear one to the—”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Wear your metaphorical Santa suit, then.”

“Half an hour, smartass.”

He hung up. He could use a break. He shrugged on his parka. The phone rang again.

“Sheriff Schwartz?”

“That’s me.”

“You don’t know me but I need to talk.”

“And you are?”

“This is Steve Bolt. I heard about your deputy and I think I’m in trouble.”