Flynn's In (8 page)

“Now they’re Vietnamese. Do any of them speak English?”

“Some. Not very well.”

“Ah,” said Flynn. “Peace and quiet.”

“You’ve got the idea.”

Flynn said, “Meetings happen here.”

They had come to the driveway in front of the clubhouse.

“Yes,” Wahler said slowly. “Meetings happen here.”

“Decisions are made here.”

In an overcoat, Cocky stood beside the station wagon. Over his right arm was Flynn’s bulky overcoat.

“Yes,” Wahler said even more slowly. “Decisions are made here.”

“Well,” said Flynn, getting into his coat. “Cocky and I are going for a ride. Find a widow and hear about the recently deceased. If the guard at the gate gives us any trouble,” said Flynn, “I’m liable to give him what passes for conversation at a board meeting of The Anarchy Society.”

Wahler put his hand on Flynn’s forearm. “You are coming back, Flynn.”

“Sure.” Flynn unlocked his car. “I want to discover who shot holes in Oland’s new waterproofs.”

N
o one was in the reception area of the lounge when they entered Timberbreak Lodge.

“I’ve seen broccoli farms that do a bigger business than this place,” Flynn muttered.

Cocky following him, Flynn went around the reception desk and, without knocking, pushed open the door marked “Manager Private.”

“There, Cocky,” said Flynn. “There’s your switchboard.”

The three women sitting at their switchboards looked around at them. They were docilely surprised, as cows are at seeing someone standing in their pasture.

There were switchboard stations for five operators.

Carl Morris came through the door from his office like an offended bull.

“This area’s private,” he said.

“I should think so,” said Flynn. “All these telephone lines for such a wee lodge would make even Maid Marian think twice.”

“Oh, it’s you, Flynn. I mean, Inspector Flynn. Who’s this?”

“Shake hands with Carl Morris, Cocky. The manager of this bustling hostelry.”

On the drive down from The Rod and Gun Club Flynn had told Cocky all the facts as he knew them, as well as one or two conjectures.

“You might as well come inside.” Morris went into his small office. “You understand. Some press came by earlier. At first I thought you were more of the same. Mister Wahler has said I can talk to you.”

“Ah,” said Flynn, looking around the closet-sized office as if it were The Hall of Mirrors. “This is where it all happens. Conventions are planned, pillowcase designs are considered, salad chefs hired and fired. Fascinating it is, to see the nerve center of one of the world’s grand hotels.”

Morris had closed the door behind them. “Sorry I can’t ask
you to sit down…” The only chair was behind the small desk. “Don’t get many guests.”

“Do you get any guests?” Flynn asked.

Morris sat on the corner of the desk. “Only those we can’t turn away. The occasional lost hunter, or stuck traveling salesman.”

“And they don’t stay long.”

Morris shrugged. “We don’t have any food service. No breakfast room. No bar. No ice machines. No swimming pool, sauna, or much hot water.”

“Not much repeat trade, I dare say.”

“If travelers insist, we rent them a cold bed for overnight and see them off early in the morning.”

“‘Insist?’”

“We turn the ‘No Vacancy’ sign on every night.”

“You’ve built a bad little business here. Was it much work?”

Morris chuckled. “Think I should write a book,
Reverse Management?”

“You might try it. More people fail in business than succeed. They might benefit from instruction.”

“It’s my job. I’m a hired employee.”

“Of The Rod and Gun Club.”

“You know it.”

“This packing case with no motel inside is simply a front for the far grander, more obscure establishment up the road.”

“The members have to say where they’re going, leave a number. So they say they’re going to Timberbreak Lodge. People call here. The ladies out there answer the phone saying Timberbreak Lodge.”

“And the calls are transferred to the members’ rooms at The Rod and Gun Club.”

“Yes. And when someone shows up here looking for one of the members, you know, a reporter, a lawyer, a difficult family member, someone like that, we say he’s out walking.”

“And the member comes down and meets the person here.”

“Right. Years ago, some reporter got hold of the Club’s phone number and called a member. That was okay; it had happened before. But the reporter got curious about The Rod
and Gun Club, what it was, exactly where it was, who its members are. To make a long story short, a very vague article appeared in
Eyebill
saying such a club exists, where powerful men get together—men whose interests otherwise don’t seem to connect—and hunt and fish out of season. And commit other various crimes—such as leaving their wives at home.”

“So other journals, more distinguished and thorough than
Eyebill
, became curious.”

“Yes. Of course. They sent up reporters and photographers and found Timberbreak Lodge.”

Flynn scanned the sagging belly of the office’s plywood ceiling. “The building looks like it was ordered in one piece from a factory in New Jersey.”

“Very nearly was. The members knew the
Eyebill
reporters were snooping, so they had a little time to get Timberbreak slapped together. We do have running water, and some of it is even in the pipes.”

“Build in haste, repent in leisure,” said Flynn. “In God we trust.”

“Ever since then, when the press gets curious and sends one or two up to snoop around, The Rod and Gun Club sends a few of its younger, less prestigious members down Friday, Saturday nights in hunting clothes, hunting and fishing licenses prominently pinned to their jackets, to sit around the lounge with six-packs of beer, yucking it up, and the press gets tired of watching them and goes away.” Morris ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair. “That’s how Timberbreak Lodge, The Rod and Gun Club at Bellingham, came to be. Sounds fancy enough, doesn’t it?”

“And you?” asked Flynn.

“I was born in the local hospital,” Morris said. “That’s how I came to be.”

“Why are you spending your life running an empty lodge?”

“I was a science teacher in the local regional high school.” Morris studied the back of his hands in his lap. “There was a school budget cutback. The Bellingham town fathers decided they wanted to educate their kids for Bellingham, not for the world at large. I was fired. Wife, kids, family here. Not really
educated for the world at large, either. What was I supposed to do, go out and cut timber?”

“Honest men do.”

Morris looked slapped. “What am I doing that’s so dishonest? I’m getting paid to run an empty motel. So I’m running an empty motel. Is that a crime?”

“You’re earning a big bonus this weekend, I think.”

Morris’ right hand cracked the knuckles on his left hand. “Nothing quite like this has ever happened before.” He stood up and went around his desk. Opened face-down on the desk was Bruno Bettleheim’s
Surviving and Other Essays
. “That’s a different world up there on the hill, Inspector. The members of The Rod and Gun Club aren’t from around here. And, honest, I only know who a few of them are. God knows who they are. I see the limousines and the helicopters come and go.” He stabbed his finger at the closed door. “And I know how many calls a week the various members get from The White House. From Ottawa. From Mexico City. From the heads of the security and commodity exchanges. Senate chambers. Even the Supreme Court, for Christ’s sake. I’m supposed to say ‘No’ to all that?” He sat on the wooden swivel chair behind his desk. “Those guys up there can do what they want to do. That’s clear enough. In this world, we’re all equals, Inspector Flynn, but some are more equal than others. I think you’ve heard that.
When the gods on Olympus want to play/Who are we, mere mortal men, to say, Nay?”

Flynn was looking at the man who looked too big behind his little, empty desk. “And if it comes to it, man, will you perjure yourself? Will you stand up in court and lie?”

“I’m told it won’t come to that. Mister Wahler says you, Inspector Flynn, will see to it that it doesn’t.”

“I will, will I?”

“I’ve shown reporters around today, walked them through ‘the evidence,’ played the good old country boy role, clucked with them over an ever-so-tragic hunting accident.”

“And they swallowed it?”

“They just wanted to shoot film, grab a story, any story, and get back to someplace warm. Sure they swallowed it. What’s to make them suspicious? Why should a country boy like Carl
Morris lie about the death of someone like Dwight Huttenbach? Obviously, there isn’t any connection between us.”

“And did you tell the same lies to Dwight Huttenbach’s widow?”

Morris snorted. “You think she wants to know the truth? She was driven here by a friend, Flynn.” Morris laid the palm of his hand flat on the wooden surface of the desk. “A male friend. All these people live and think in a way inconceivable to me. As soon as I opened the door to the room where we had put Huttenbach’s things, she backed right away. I doubt she’d even know what belongs to her husband and what doesn’t.”

“Where is she now?”

“Room 11. Behind the fireplace. She’s waiting for the Shaws to pickle her husband in preservatives and pack him in a box. She never even asked to see him.”

“We’ll go talk to her,” said Flynn.

Carl Morris stood up behind his desk. “You ask us to care that some spoiled kid choked on his silver spoon last night? Well, I don’t care. The spoons at my house may be aluminum but I need ’em to feed my kids. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

“Yes, it makes sense,” said Flynn. “It makes so much sense, regretfully, it even makes a fence four meters high make sense.”

F
lynn knocked on the door of Room 11.

“Who is it?” inquired a woman’s voice.

Flynn did not answer.

Presently the door was opened by a short man in his early thirties wearing a well-cut jacket and slacks. His moustache was pencil-thin.

“Yes?”

He did not resist Flynn and Cocky entering the room.

A woman in her late twenties, tailored suit, sat with a straight back, crossed ankles, in one of the two plastic chairs in the room. On the table between the two chairs were used coffee cups.

“Carol Huttenbach, I’m Inspector Flynn. I’m with the police. This is Detective Lieutenant Concannon.”

“I’m Max Harvey,” said the man coming around from behind them, returning to the other chair. “I drove Carol up.”

“You have my sympathy, Mrs. Huttenbach.”

“Thank you. I suppose I could ask you to sit on the beds.” Her hands were clasped in her lap. “This place is so frightfully cold.”

“I must say,” drawled Max Harvey, “when I talked to Chief of Police Jensen I didn’t get the impression his staff is so grand as to include an inspector and a detective lieutenant.”

“You’ll be going back today?” Flynn asked.

There was no luggage visible in the room.

“Yes. The children…We’re just waiting for the undertakers…”

“I understand.”

“The manager put us in this room to get us away from the press.”

“Did you talk to the press at all?”

“I did.” Max said, as if it were a joke. “As a friend of the family.”

“What’s there to say?” Carol Huttenbach’s voice was low and shivering. “A terrible hunting accident…”

Standing halfway across the small, dark room, Flynn kept his hands in his overcoat pockets. “Why don’t you tell me anything you can.”

“Why don’t you tell me anything
you
can, Inspector,” Carol said sharply.

“Carol…”Max said.

Flynn waited for a moment, waited for questions which would reveal her contempt for what she had been told, what she had been shown.

Instead, her eyes sought neutrality in the farther wall.

“Just general things,” Flynn urged, “about your husband.”

“He’s dead,” she said angrily.

“Did he come here often?” Flynn asked.

“Yes. Often. To this dump. This freezing dump. Packed up his damned guns and fishing rods and woolens and waders and came up here. To this…place! Timberbreak Lodge: The Rod and Gun Club. Look at it! Not even a place for us to get a sandwich!”

“This is your first time here?”

“Of course. And last.”

“Your husband always came alone?”

She looked at Max a moment, sighed, and shook her head.

“It’s all right, Carol.”

“You don’t believe your husband was alone, Mrs. Huttenbach?”

Carol Huttenbach started to say something, and stopped.

“It’s all right, Carol,” Max Harvey repeated. “Inspector Flynn is not from the press. He’s a policeman. And he knows if he repeats what you say, to the press, he’s in trouble. That right, Flynn? They have to know things before we go. Better to be frank with them, than to be dragged back to this…God-awful place.”

Flynn waited, unsure of the source of her anger.

Cocky sat on the bed nearer the door.

“Where is she?” Carol Huttenbach blurted.

“Where’s who?” Flynn asked.

“My God,” she sputtered. “It’s a man’s world, all right, isn’t it? The hotel manager—”

“Carl Morris,” Max Harvey said.

“That sheep-dipped town cop—”

“Chief Jensen,” Max Harvey said.

“You two. You tell me Dwight went outside in the middle of the night to clean his gun and the gun discharged and blew the top of his head off. That can happen to anybody. Especially Dwight, so cocksure of himself he was as careless as a pampered two-year-old. What did you
men
do with the woman he was with? Just send her packing in the middle of the night? Just because Dwight was a man and you’re all men and ho-ho-ho, men will be men, belly up to the bar, boys, no need to mention he was with a woman, just pack her off before the little wife gets here?”

Flynn turned slightly, looked at Cocky, then at Max Harvey, then back at Carol Huttenbach. “What makes you think he was with a woman?”