3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3 (23 page)

Chapter 46

Ike cradled the phone and frowned. Steve Bolt had sounded like a drowning man, first because he was obviously frightened and second because a weak cell phone connection made him sound like he was speaking underwater. He wanted to know if Ike knew anything. Ike repeated the things he’d said before. He listened to Bolt’s retelling of the plan to rob Kamarov. He wanted to know what his chances were; if he told everything, could he get immunity. Ike wasn’t certain what sort of immunity he wanted but agreed as long as whatever he had to confess didn’t involve grand theft or murder in any of its prosecutorial forms he had a chance. He had to explain the differences between manslaughter and first degree. Bolt apparently remembered enough of the same information from an old
Law and Order
episode and agreed.

“Is there anything else? Anything you forgot to tell me?”

“Well, there was the license plate on the car.”

“The one you were kidnapped in?”

“Yeah.”

“What about it?”

“I got it.”

Ike wrote the number on a scrap of paper and said he might need Bolt to testify in court at some time in the future, and Bolt said that he’d have to find him first and hung up. Apparently he didn’t know that cell phones could be traced, and while pin-pointing the exact location might be difficult, they could get close enough. More importantly, Ike had also learned enough from Leon Weitz to know that once the right people were told about Whaite’s killing and that Bolt might be implicated, mountain justice would kick in. Whaite’s extended family would find Bolt’s hiding place and spit him out like a watermelon pit.

***

At one forty-five the search warrants from Floyd County arrived. Since the credit cards would have been stolen and the hit and run occurred in their jurisdiction, the county sheriff promised help as needed. Ike had nothing else to do until Sam and Karl arrived. Two o’clock, he’d said. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to go.

The door opened and Sam and Karl blew in with a gust of cold air.

“I assume you had to turn in your service piece with your suspension. I can loan you one or—”

“I have one, backup, no problem.”

“We’ll go in plainclothes, I think. Stick your gun in your belt, purse, whatever, and let’s go.”

***

Hollis limped into the bar. He’d lost one of his crutches the night before. He didn’t remember how or when. Hollis only drank beer and assumed that since it only had twelve percent alcohol, he could never get drunk. He, like many young and, in his case, stupid people, never connected their behavior with reality and went careening drunkenly through life or down highways, a threat to themselves and those around them. Donnie sat in the corner looking smug. Hollis wasn’t sure if he wanted to sit with him or not. He’d heard rumors.

“You hear about the fire police?” he said, and sat down.

“How many times I got to tell you, they aren’t called fire police?”

“What did he want with you?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle, and I guess they’ll be some respect for me around here from now on.”

“Why?”

“You don’t think that police’s car just happened to hit that tree, do you?”

“Jeeze, what did you do, Donnie?”

“I ain’t saying, but nobody messes with my stuff.”

The Creator, for reasons known only to him, had wired Hollis’ brain differently than the rest of humankind. Those who knew him realized he could read and did so, voluminously. He had a native intelligence in there somewhere that often popped out in the most unlikely places and times, but at the same time they said he didn’t have the brains of a hop toad. Even so, in the confused circuitry of his central nervous system, he heard Donnie’s unspoken message and intuitively knew he needed to put some distance between himself and his friend.

“Gotta go,” he said, stood, and winced as he put weight on his bad leg.

“Sit down, you just got here.” Donnie pulled him back into the booth by his shirttail. “Beer,” he shouted to the barkeep.

“Come and get it, Mr. Mountain Man.” Several of the regulars laughed. Donnie’s face turned red.

“You’d better watch it or—”

“Or what? You going to pull that little pop gun of yours and—”

The door swung open and three people sauntered in. Two were abnormally tall—a black guy and a redheaded woman. The third, tall enough, looked hard, like he could be trouble. Nobody needed to see badges to be told they were police. Nobody except Donnie and Hollis.

“I gotta go,” Hollis repeated and stood well out of Donnie’s reach this time.

“That’s them,” the tall woman said. “That’s both of them.”

Hollis swallowed and looked behind him, hoping that she meant someone else. He thought about running but the three of them stood between him and the door and, besides, he had enough trouble walking. Running was out of the question. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Donnie’s hand move toward his pocket—the pocket where he usually kept his pistol.

“Don’t even think about it, Oldham,” the middle guy said. He flipped open his parka and flashed a badge. Hollis saw the butt of the Magnum in the guy’s belt. The wind went out of him and he collapsed back in the booth.

“Donald Oldham, I have a warrant for your arrest for grand theft larceny. Stolen credit cards,” the middle guy said and added, “And you, too, son. You’re Hollis somebody, aren’t you? What’s your full name, Hollis?”

Hollis might have answered had he not fainted dead away.

Chapter 47

Ike stared at Oldham’s hand. If it didn’t stop moving toward his pocket, he’d have to draw down on the kid and he didn’t want that. One more inch and he’d do it. His fingers closed over the butt of his pistol and tensed. At the moment he would have drawn, Karl took two long strides to Oldham and pinioned his arms at his sides. He then flipped him bodily out of the booth and face down on the table, knocking over a half-filled glass of beer. Oldham flailed about but Karl caught each wrist in turn and cuffed him. He rummaged in his pockets and withdrew an old colt .38 Police Special, a knife, a wallet, and four credit cards. Hollis slid off the bench and into a rumpled heap on the floor. Four men in the bar stood and applauded.

***

The Floyd County Sheriff’s Department provided an interview room and a holding cell. Hollis began blubbering his story the minute he came to. He had to be stopped until he had been Mirandized. Once done, he began again and spilled the whole story. Two deputies were sent to the middle school to pick up his brother, Dermont. Another search warrant arrived to allow a search of Hollis’ house. Ike guessed the FBI would be the next group in if Sam found what he suspected on the father’s hard drive. Hollis’ parents arrived and were ushered into the Sheriff’s office to wait. Ike let Donnie cool his heels in the holding cell. His gun was bagged and sent to the local lab for ballistics tests.

Ike and Karl, accompanied by a Floyd County deputy, drove to Donnie’s house. Ike sent the deputy into the house to search while he and Karl lifted the tarp from the truck in the backyard. T.J. had been right. The passenger side door and front quarter panel were badly damaged and showed evidence of red paint. It looked as though Donnie had tried to wipe it away but failed.

“Well, well,” Ike said. “If Sam is right, I guess we got our guy.” He bent over the fender and flaked off a sample of the red paint into an envelope. “We’ll need a tow truck to take this to the impound yard. In the meantime, I’ll get the lab working on this sample.”

Karl had climbed into the bed. He flashed his light into the corners and then lay flat and peered under the tool box. He reached in and grabbed something.

“I have a shoe,” he said.

“Just one?”

“Yeah. It’s been here a while, I think. It’s wet and the heel is loose, must not have been nailed on tight enough. It’s not scuffed, though.”

“You have gloves on, right?” Karl held up a latex-sheathed hand and gave Ike a look. “Sorry, had to be sure. Hand me the shoe and I’ll bag it.”

Ike took the shoe and held it up at eye level. It was the mate to Kamarov’s missing loafer. He turned his back to Karl and twisted the heel. The old-fashioned roll of microfilm dropped into his hand. He slipped the shoe, its heel restored, into a bag, and palmed the film.

“We’ll let the Floyd people finish up here, Karl. We have everything we need to sweat Donnie Oldham.”

“Too bad it’s out of our jurisdiction. I know the folks in Picketsville would dearly love to put this guy away.”

“Oh, we’ll have our turn. Don’t forget, for now, Kamarov is ours.”

“This guy did the Russian?”

“Yep.”

***

Donnie sat in the interview room with his arms folded across his chest. Ike sat opposite and stared at him for a full minute. Donnie squirmed and finally could not endure the silence.

“You got nothing on me,” he said.

Ike shrugged. “You’ve been read your Miranda rights?”

“Yeah, yeah. Big deal.”

“So why did you force Deputy Billingsly off the road?”

“Who says I did?”

“I say you did. There is red paint on the damaged side of your truck. We have a witness who will testify it was not there the day before the crash. You slammed into him that night and forced him into a tree. You killed him just as surely as if you’d shot him with your pistol.”

“You can’t prove it. I scraped against some red-painted buffers at the Exxon station.”

“No, that won’t work. See, you’d have to identify the station and then there’d be witnesses who would say you were never there and, from where you are sitting, just figuring out which gas station to pick might pose a problem.”

“It don’t matter. Red paint is red paint.”

“Not this time. The man whose car you smacked into spent hours restoring it. It is, or was, a collector’s car, a show car, and he painted it himself.”

“So what?”

“When he went to buy paint, he got a deal, a bargain. He painted it with paint from a Harley-Davidson motorcycle supply house. You want to calculate the odds of another car being in your area that night painted with red motorcycle paint? See, the formulas for paints are fairly specific. Now, if he’d been driving a Ford, you might argue the paint could have come from any of the cars in the line—Lincoln, Mercury…But a motorcycle red Chevy Chevelle? No, you’re cooked, Oldham. The best you can do is plead out—an accident, slippery roads, all that.”

Donnie looked stricken. “Motorcycle—”

“Paint. Right. You will be remanded for that here in Floyd County. As soon as the lab work comes back on the paint, you can expect to be rearrested on at least three charges relating to Deputy Billingsly’s death.”

“Well, does that mean I can go now?”

“Oh my, no. Is that what you thought I said? No, there’s still the credit card theft. We’ve spoken to your friend Bolt, and though he would rather not, he will testify you knew about the cards.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Hollis talked. His brother practically wet his pants when the police hauled him in. He talked, too. We have surveillance camera photos of you at several banks using them. Since you went over the state line to do so, and since bank robbery is technically a federal offense, you will spend some time with the FBI soon. Special Agent Hedrick is on the phone with them now. He’s having a good week, as it turns out, but that’s not your concern. The FBI will want you to stay put, so no, you aren’t going anywhere.”

“Federal? Hey, it was all Hollis’ idea.”

“I don’t think so. No, that seems very unlikely. No one will believe Hollis came up with that idea. It seems so unfair, doesn’t it? Who’d have thought a couple of credit cards would get you in so much trouble.”

Donnie Oldham was never very big, but at that moment he seemed to shrink down to the size of a ten-year-old.

“How did you come by the cards?”

“I found them. I figured, finders keepers.”

“Wrong answer. Here’s what I think happened. You worked out the deal with Bolt to break in and take the cards after Harris left for Richmond, but you got greedy. You decided to rob Harris one day early, only you didn’t figure on him being a problem because he looked old and out of shape.”

Oldham ran his fingers through his thin hair and started to speak.

“Not yet, kid. So, you figure you’ll wait until he gets his cash and then you’ll rob him, only instead of handing you his wallet, he moves in on you. I knew him, he would have. So, what happened? Nothing to say…?

“Okay. What next…? He grabs your gun and in the struggle, it goes off. Naturally, you panic and pump four more rounds into him. You put the body in your truck and haul him out to the country. Am I close? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. The problem is—you dumped the body of the man you knew as Randall Harris in my backyard. Very stupid of you. If you’d dropped him anywhere else, another six feet farther west, even, you might have gotten away with it. But I recognized the man, see? His real name was Alexei Kamarov and he was, shall we say, connected. You wouldn’t believe all the people and agencies that have been looking for him.”

“You don’t know what you’re—”

“Spare me the tough guy crap. We dug bullets out of him and we have your pistol at ballistics. They will match. Then we have the shoe.”

“Shoe?”

“The dead man’s shoe. It must have been dark when you dumped the body. When we found him, he was missing a shoe. It wasn’t on the path from the road to the spot where you dumped him, so it had to be somewhere else. Guess what we found in your truck? Deputy Billingsly must have seen it that night. That’s what he was doing in your truck, but you couldn’t know that. You probably thought he was after you for the credit cards.”

“I thought he was a fire investigator. He had that red car—”

“He must have seen the shoe and would have asked for a warrant to search your truck the next day. The shoe puts Kamarov in your vehicle.

“The shoe, the ballistics, and Bolt will put you away forever, Oldham, and since murder, even murder two, outranks both bank robbery and hit and run on the big crime hit parade, I get to keep you.”

Epilogue

Charlie Garland had his feet up on the desk when Ike arrived.

“How’d you get here so fast?” Ike said.

“You called. I came—
veni, vidi, vici,
or something—Julius Caesar.”

“I know. You didn’t answer my question, and how about removing your size eleven triple E penny loafers from my desk.”

“Helicopter.”

“News Channel 4?”

“No, government issue. They had a delivery to make in Roanoke anyway, and I hitched a ride. They will be back for me in thirty minutes. Can you tell me what I need to know in that time or will you have to fly back to Langley with me?”

“There’s not much to tell, Charlie. I called you down here to give you a present and close the file on the Russians.”

“What have you got?”

“Well, they were definitely the men who snatched Bolt. I ran the license plate he gave me. It turns out to be a vehicle leased to their embassy. Not diplomatic plates. Just a car they used for odd jobs, you might say. I’m guessing they were the same ones who torched Bolt’s house and popped the guy in DC. You can check that bit up there. There is nothing either of us can do about that.”

“Right. You said you had a present for me. Couldn’t you have just sent it? Do you know how cold it is in a government-issue helicopter?”

“I didn’t want the Agency mail room to have a shot at it without your seeing it first.”

“Okay…what have you got for me?”

Ike slipped the roll of microfilm from its envelope and laid it on the desk. Charlie let his feet drop to the floor with a crash. He bent over the films. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and looked some more.

Ike pulled open a desk drawer. “There’s a magnifying glass in here.”

“Thanks. Do I dare ask where these came from?”

“Let’s just say they are a gift from our late friend.”

Charlie lurched back and nearly tipped over the chair. “You may have saved the Agency’s rear end, Ike.”

“Oh well, I could have done worse. Here’s the rest. There is a Bureau man you should call named Andover Crisp. He’s the guy who is, or was, running the black program. You should tell him that the game is up and that Kamarov will be buried down here. You should also tell him that whatever Kamarov promised is gone forever.”

“You could tell him, Ike. After all, you’re the policeman with an interest.”

“I am in enough hot water with the FBI as it is. You do it.”

“That’s it?”

“Just about.”

Charlie stood and grinned. “You know, Ike, a while back I thought we should bring you back in. We could make that happen, you know. Now I see you’re going to be much more useful to us on the outside.” He strode to the door, shrugged on his coat, and left. Ike listened to the thwocka, thwocka, thwocka of chopper blades and shook his head.

***

“How many times have you asked me to go away with you for a weekend?” Ruth fixed Ike with an unblinking stare. This had to be important.

“I don’t know. Let’s see, maybe once a week for six months, so that would be—”

“A lot, and I’ve always turned you down, right? Okay, I have a conference to go to in Toronto the second week in January. We can go a few days early and stay over the weekend. You put somebody in charge of your—”

“I just lost my only really experienced deputy. I’m not sure if I can—”

“You find somebody, Schwartz. You are going to the CASE Conference with me next month. That’s it.”

“I…okay. Give me the dates and, wait a minute, Toronto in January? That’s like in Canada, Ruth. They have snow and ice and cold. Can’t you find a conference in someplace warm, like the Bahamas or Maui?”

“I’m giving a speech or I wouldn’t be going at all. So, this is the one I am going to with you and,” her voice softened, “we need time and we need to talk, Ike. Important talk and we’ll never do it if either of us is within fifty miles of our offices. You understand?”

He read the concern in her eyes and there was more—something new.

“I’ll have to buy a suitcase, a necktie and…should I…? Oh my God.”

“What is it? You have a funny look. If it’s about not going—”

“No, no, I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“When all this started—the Kamarov business—Whaite called and asked if I wanted him to shove the body over the state line and let them handle it. It was a funny thing to say at the time.” Ike closed his eyes and shook his head. “It just hit me, everything that went down after that—Whaite’s death, Sam, Karl, even this trip—none of it would have happened if I had just said yes instead of no.”