2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 (8 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Essie Falco collected her purse, picked up a stack of folders, and scanned her desktop. Satisfied she hadn’t forgotten anything, she waved and headed for the door. The folders she deposited on various desks for people’s action the next morning.

“Essie, did that FBI honcho ever call back?” Ike shouted before she could get out the door.

“No, Sir. You want me to track him down?”

“Tomorrow, first thing, please.”

The phone rang. Essie stopped and, tight lipped, checked her watch. Since her shift did not end for another two minutes, she dropped her purse and sprawled across the booking desk on her stomach, rump up, feet dangling, and arms barely reaching the extension.

“Sheriff’s Office, Falco. What? It’s for you, Ike,” she said. “It’s that Ms. Harris.”

She slid off the counter, smoothed her skirt, recovered her bag, and left.

“Hi, what’s up?”

“I need a favor, Ike. Please say yes.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Ike, it’s just this once. I need you to fill in at dinner tonight. I have some faculty members—”

“This is a faculty do? Ruth, you know—”

“Yes, I know what you think of us. And I know you’re just pig-headed enough to make my life difficult, but the Chairman of the English Department sprained his ankle and I need you to fill in.”

“I don’t know anything about English. Why don’t you ask Blake Fisher? Did I tell you he’s an expert on usage? Your crowd will just lap him up.”

“You did and I already have. He’s the ‘guest.’ You remember how these dinners work.”

“You roped me in once and I swore never again. The conversations your ivory tower friends engage in make me crazy.”

“Ike, this is me asking and I am desperate. Please, please, please—”

“On one condition.”

“Uh oh, are we talking about carnal bribes here?”

“Well, now that you mention it, that too. But no, I had an escape route in mind. I will receive a call requiring me to leave early and you will say, ‘Oh, too bad, Sheriff. Well thank you for coming’ or something like that.”

“Which is it? Carnal bribes or the coward’s retreat?”

“Both.”

“Well, I had something in mind for your birthday anyway, so okay. Will you really have a call coming?”

“Always a possibility—but for this shindig, a certainty.”

“You’re a hard man, Schwartz.”

“You’d better hope so. Why is Fisher the ‘guest’ anyway? I thought he left town for the day.”

“Well, I guess he plans to get back, I don’t know. Anyway, you know how it works. We have our dinner and then the faculty work through a topic. I need a substitute freshman English teacher. You said he might do. I thought we’d run him through the gauntlet and see how he manages before I make the offer. Besides, it was your idea in the first place.”

“Well, I’ll come, but I will not engage in intellectual pillow fighting with your buddies. I will eat and mumble unintelligible redneck nonsense until they leave me alone.”

“Will you promise to behave, Ike?”

“I will be mild-mannered Clark Kent. I will be your house boy. Do you remember the house boy from
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
”

“Yes, and the day you become anybody’s house boy, especially mine, is the day I join the John Birch Society.”

“Please, not them. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Now the NRA—”

“Oh, right. I should posse up with those cowboys.”

“Hey, there are some very nice people in the NRA.”

“Name one.”

“Tom Selleck.”

“The actor—Magnum P.I.?”

“Great show. But I liked him in
Quigley Down Under
better
.
That movie had a theme even you would applaud. Anti-imperialism, racial justice, standing up for the oppressed—”

“Isn’t that the movie where they ran a trailer at the end declaring no animals were killed or injured during the shooting of the movie?”

“That’s the one. Since no disclaimer appeared about humans who might have been injured or killed, we can assume they were not considered important. As I said—your kind of movie.”

“Give me a break. It wasn’t necessary to do it for people.”

“It was typical Left Coast PC.”

“Enough. Will you or won’t you?”

“Be good? I will. Not your house boy, but good, well pretty good, or maybe—”

“Seven o’clock sharp, and don’t you dare wear your Boy Scout suit.” Ruth did not like Ike’s uniform.

***

The sheet of paper with the column of figures and letters Sam retrieved from Waldo Templeton’s apartment lay on the desk beside her, begging for attention like a golden retriever—no sound, just an enormous presence. Sam drummed her fingers and stared. What were those figures? She reentered Templeton’s, now Krueger’s, computer and began searching through the files she’d only glanced at before—files she hadn’t found interesting. The Rockbridge County assessor’s office caught her eye. She went back to Krueger’s Internet history. He’d hacked into their database. She followed his path to the files he’d opened. Land records, sales, and titles formed into columns, dozens of them. She moved back and forth over the cybernetic landscape provided by the assessor’s office. Her instincts told her the paper and its figures were somehow linked to this site.

She pushed back from her desk and stretched. It had been a long day. Her shift ended at three. The clock on the wall read six-thirty. Sam often worked late. It never felt like an imposition. She loved her work and she would be eternally grateful to Ike Schwartz for giving her the opportunity to join the sheriff’s office. She’d pursued a double major in college—Computer Science and Criminology. She dreamed of becoming a law enforcement officer, but because of her poor eyesight, she’d hedged her bet. She’d had a long love affair with all things electronic, and if she couldn’t pass a physical for the FBI or a metropolitan police department, she would at least have marketable skills to flog. As it turned out, she failed four physicals for the same number of police departments and ended in a series of information technology jobs, none in law enforcement, the last at Callend College. Then she got the offer from Ike to join the sheriff’s office. Ike seemed less interested in her fitness than in her ability to build computer systems and databases and, he admitted, he needed at least one female officer in a town whose major industry was an all-woman college.

Ike poked his head in the door.

“You still here, Sam?”

“Yes, Sir, I am.”

“Go home.”

“In a minute,” she replied. Ike turned to leave.

“Ike.” She still struggled with calling her boss by his first name even if everyone else did. “Do you remember when I told you about the rumors of an industrial park locating here?”

“Yeah. In fact I think the land rush may have started. My father had a pair of speculators talking to him already. And I see out-of-town cars all over the place lately. What about it?”

“I think there is something not quite right about it. I picked up the story months ago on what was supposed to be a secure site.”

Sam called herself a recreational hacker. For her the challenge lay in breaking in, not taking things out. She had a rule which she obeyed, even though no one could call her on it if she didn’t. At one time or another she’d managed to scan all of her bank records, her personnel file at every place she’d ever worked, and numerous other sites, even some considered top secret. She didn’t leave a calling card as some of her hacker friends did. They needed that ego lift. Sam just slipped in and then slipped out leaving no footprints. She felt particularly proud of that. No one had ever traced any Internet B and E back to her.

She did break her rule one time. Her roommate married a man in the navy—one of those hurry-up weddings in Las Vegas. The wedding chapel had ninety pictures stored in its computer but wanted five hundred dollars for a CD of the set. After being skinned by a series of hidden charges, the couple had pretty much run out of money and had to pass. That night, Sam hacked into the chapel’s computer and downloaded all ninety. She never did anything like that again.

Now, as the sheriff’s office’s computer geek, she reckoned all her wiles and sub-rosa software were kosher and that the hobby she’d once pursued knowing she risked arrest and prosecution had become her profession, and it would be others who put their pensions at risk.

“So, the anxious look on your face is there because…?”

“I’ve been into Krueger’s machine and it is choc-a-block with attempts to confirm that rumor. He broke into Ibex and Crane. They are the developers of the project. He downloaded some files. Anyway, I went into Ibex and Crane, using his roadmap.”

“And that led you to what conclusion?” Ike sounded a little peeved.

“Well, for one thing, the break-in was too easy.”

“Too easy? Might it also be that you are too good?”

“No, thank you for that, but I meant too easy.”

“And that is important in what way?”

“If, and I am just guessing here, but if they were going to build near Picketsville, the proposals and acreage estimates would not be posted in such a way that any moderately bright young man or woman could get at them. This information is just lying there like cheese in a mouse trap. I think they planted it on this site so that people would try to steal the data.”

“To what end?”

“Disinformation. I think they intend to locate elsewhere. They let this one hang out there where anyone with a modicum of Internet skills could get it and be led into thinking Picketsville would be the site. It’s a trap.”

“Well, it makes some kind of sense, I guess. Go home, Sam. You can pick this up tomorrow.”

“I will pretty soon. There are half a dozen files and these discs and floppies I want to look at first.”

“Sam—”

“Its okay, Ike. This is like my hobby and I don’t have anything on tonight. Don’t worry about me. Is there anything I can do for you while I’m fiddling around in Krueger’s computer?”

“Well, not while you’re in the dead man’s computer, but you could write a one-page manual for the rest of us on how the intercom works. I looked at the instruction book and I don’t have either the time or patience to sort it out. It reads like someone translated it into English from Polish after it had been translated originally from Korean, which I expect is how it went, and I don’t want to have to talk to someone in Bangladesh if I need help. I want something that says something like, for Essie, push number one, for Sam, push number two—something like that.”

“No problem. It’ll be on your desk in the morning.”

“Great. You really are going to work late tonight?”

“It’s not work, Ike.”

“Can you do me another favor then? At eight-thirty or so, call me and tell me I have to come to the office immediately.”

“Why do you need to come here tonight?”

“Sam, I am a patient man. I am a tolerant man. I have endured all sorts of lunatic talk in my life and survived. But, for me, listening to a small group of over-educated, over-opinionated intellectual dilettantes drives me nuts inside an hour. I’m giving them an hour and a half. Then you will rescue me and save the town the embarrassment of a multiple homicide.”

“I take it you’ve been asked to the President’s dinner party.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Good luck. You have my sympathy. I’ll make the call.”

Chapter Sixteen

Ike parked his car on the circle that swept around the front of Callend’s main building. Once out of its air conditioning, he removed his blazer and put it over his arm. The sun would set in an hour or so and the temperature would drop, but right now he succumbed to the heat and humidity. He was a big man, nearly two hundred pounds and tall. The ratio of his surface area to total volume—the law of cubes—should have worked in his favor, but it didn’t. The perspiration started five yards from the car. He walked along the moss-grouted brick pathway around the building’s south wing and down a gentle grade to the President’s house. He inhaled the fresh scent of newly mown grass.

The architect who designed Callend’s buildings in the late nineteenth century also drew up the plans for Stonewall Jackson Memorial Church. Like it, the original buildings for what was then known as the Virginia Female Academy had been constructed from local limestone. There the similarity ended. Callend’s buildings stood as monuments to Victoriana while the church was a Norman jewel box. The President’s house had, like the college’s main building, a spacious porch which enclosed it on three sides. It also put on display Callend’s famous wisteria, which laced its perimeter and, finding no more porches, doubled back, periodically sending tendrils skyward in a vain attempt to climb even higher. In the springtime, thousands of its heavy purple panicles covered the entirety of the porch and softened the chiseled limestone’s stark gray. By September, however, the flowers were long gone and the leaves were beginning to brown.

He climbed the front steps and followed the sound of voices into the front hall. French doors opened out onto the porch at multiple locations. With all those entryways, Ike thought the house would make a perfect setting for an Agatha Christie play complete with charming, dark villains with names like Percy or Reginald. Men and women skulking from room to room, doing the crime, alibis intact. Loyal wives and fragile heroines in gloves, cloche hats and, of course, a big scene at the end when the sleuth would sort it all out. Never happen in real life.

He deposited his jacket on a sofa by one set of doors. The aroma of southern cooking displaced the scent of cut grass. Members of the catering crew, in dark slacks and crisp white shirts, moved quietly through the rooms. Some were setting the dining room table while others served drinks to guests on the porch. He walked to one of the sets of French doors in the large drawing room. Three men were engaged in conversation on his right as he stepped over the threshold. One man, wearing fawn slacks and a rumpled hunter green corduroy jacket with scuffed leather elbow patches and a carefully coifed gray beard and ponytail, glanced briefly in Ike’s direction and held out his glass.

“Another Martini, only this time really make it really dry. All I want of the vermouth is that it be formally introduced to the gin, but they are not to become intimate—and an onion this time, not an olive. This is supposed to be a Gibson.” He turned back to his companions, arm and glass still extended. A black faculty member wearing a shirt cut like a
dashiki
gave Ike a look that said, “Now you know how it feels, White Boy.” Ike paused, controlled a flash of anger that painted the back of his neck red. In the last several months he’d found himself snapping at acquaintances and strangers alike, having no patience with people like this bearded twit who assumed too much. He retreated into the living room and flagged down a passing waiter.

“Here,” he said, “fill this glass for the old guy with the ponytail. He wants straight gin and an onion. And can you get me a gin and tonic? I’ll be out there,” he pointed to a second set of doors, “with Dr. Harris.”

The waiter nodded and retreated to kitchen. Ike found Ruth with four other guests, including Blake Fisher.

“There you are,” she said and looked at her watch, “and on time. Sheriff, you know Doctor Fisher, I think.”

“
Doctor
Fisher?” Ike said, and inspected the reedy clergyman with renewed interest.

“D. Min,” Fisher said.

“Ah.”

“And this is Candice Omanaka, our newest member of the Department of Dance.”

Ms. Omanaka stood barely five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet. Ike wondered if she bought her clothes in the children’s department and if they would have a booster seat for her at the dining room table. An unworthy thought and he suppressed a smile at the image it conjured.

Ruth also introduced Dr. Franz Weimar, Foreign Languages—German to be precise. No surprise there, and Jack Farragut, also new to the faculty and apparently pressed into dinner party duty at the last minute because of his position in the English Department. Ike sensed Jack wished he were somewhere else. They had that in common and in a different set of circumstances he might even like him. Farragut had that tall, athletic leanness usually associated with young men more at home riding surfboards than wearing mortar boards. The sort of young man the CIA used to recruit from campuses back when Ike worked for them.

They were joined a moment later by Monsignor Dunnigan. Dunnigan asked for sherry and immediately engaged Fisher in a lively discussion about the reaction in the Anglican Communion to the drift by conservative Roman Catholics toward enunciating a doctrine of Mary as co-Redemptrix. Dunnigan seemed to enjoy the discussion. Fisher’s responses seemed wearily polite. Down in the southern extension of the Shenandoah Valley, excursions into arcane theology did not play well. Actually, they didn’t play at all. Farragut shifted his eyes between the two men, like a man watching a tennis match, alternately confused and annoyed. Finally, he excused himself and joined the others at the opposite end of the porch. Ike went to find a waiter and another gin and tonic.

All of these activities were brought to an end when a gong reverberated through the building. Ruth collected her guests and mother-henned them into the dining room.

“Fisher,” Ike said, “a word?”

“Certainly, Sheriff. What can I do for you?” The two men stepped aside to let the others pass.

“Can you make some time available for me sometime this week?”

“Do I get a choice?”

“This is not about Templeton. It’s about my mother. She’s not well and…I don’t think she has a lot of time left. Every time the phone rings, I think this must be it.”

“She’s not well?”

“Cancer. Anyway, you know I’m Jewish, as is my dad. My mother ‘converted,’ but she was raised Episcopalian and now—”

“How’s your father holding up?”

“As well as might be expected. They were a match made in heaven, I think. Whether in yours or Abe’s, I’m not sure. Well, I was going to ask you to see her and…do whatever it is you do.”

“Certainly.”

“It’s been a long time since…well, you know, and I think she feels she might not be allowed to—”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Thank you, Reverend.”

“Blake. Reverend is not—”

“I know, I know, but as I said…okay, and if there is anything I can do to—”

“Well, now that you mention it, there is a little matter of a speeding ticket your young man, Deputy Billingsly, gave me—”

“Sorry, but you’ll have to suborn a magistrate to fix that one.”

“Well then, how about rescuing me from any more theological calisthenics with the good Monsignor.”

“That, I can do. I’m expecting a phone call to pull me out of here. Shall the emergency it will call me to also require the services of a priest?”

“I have no doubt it shall, Sheriff. I can feel it in my bones. Someone, somewhere in the very near future is about to experience a crisis of conscience. Of course, the Church must make herself available.” Fisher grinned. “You won’t forget, will you, Sheriff?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, one more thing. I was looking through my things and discovered something’s missing.”

“What?”

“A gun. I left a message at your office with a woman named Falco.”

Essie, good at logging in messages, not so good at passing them on.

“What kind of gun are we talking about?”

“A .32 caliber Colt automatic.”

“You own a pistol? That seems an odd thing for a minister to own.”

“It was my father’s.”

“You father gave you a .32 Colt?”

“Yeah. I’ve never used it or anything. My mother didn’t want it in the house so I said I’d take it. Is there a problem?”

“Nothing…it’s just that a .32 Colt auto is considered a ladies’ piece, you know?”

“A what? Did you say
ladies’
?”

“Sorry. The figure of speech predates political correctness. In its day, it meant a pistol more appropriate for a woman to carry than a man—small caliber, short barrel, fits in a purse, and so on—not the sort of thing you’d expect a man to use. Though I did read somewhere that Pretty Boy Floyd used a .32 Colt.”

“Pretty boy…who?”

“Depression era gangster…before your time. Mine too, come to think of it.”

Dunnigan zeroed in on Fisher as they took their seats, intent on continuing their debate. But Blake waved him off with a smile.

“Father Dunnigan,” he said, “enough theology for one night. Let’s talk about more important things—food, fine wine, and who have you got in the World Series?”

Ike found a place card with his name on it and discovered he had been put at the end of the table next to the Gibson drinker. He introduced himself to Ike without betraying any sign that he had recently mistaken him for a waiter.

“Everitt Barstow,” he said and extended his hand. “You must be new to the faculty. I’m Chemistry. This is Antoine Baxter,” he gestured to the
dashiki
clad man, “and that is Foster Prendergast.” Baxter looked a little embarrassed, and Prendergast jerked his head up and down like a chicken pecking corn.

“Antoine is head of Ethnic Studies and Prendergast is our mathematician. So you are with…?”

“The Picketsville Sheriff’s Department. I’m the sheriff,” Ike said and waited. The reaction was predictable and immediate. Their eyebrows, like six mismatched caterpillars, went up and then down and then reconfigured themselves into carefully crafted neutrality. Synchronized swimming had nothing on those beauties. Everitt Barstow cleared his throat and studied his water glass. Baxter made a sound somewhere between a snort and a grunt. Prendergast simply smiled and waited for more information. Ruth took her place at the head of the table opposite Ike and sat. Her guests followed suit. Ike glanced surreptitiously at his watch. He had forty-five minutes to go before he could expect a call from Sam.