5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5 (2 page)

Chapter 2

A brisk wind blew out of the east and across the deserted beach. Late September in Dewey Beach meant few people, except for the weekenders down from Washington or Baltimore to winterize their properties before the big nor’easters blew down the coast, tossing beach equipment and sand against the sea walls and jetties. The chilly early morning air smelled clean and salty. Months before it carried the cloyingly sweet smell of coconut-scented sun block and the voices of hundreds of people trying to squeeze one more day, one more hour, of vacation from the time allotted them. Ike Schwartz placed his coffee cup on the deck railing, propped his feet up next to it, and watched, fascinated, as the sun struggled to clear the horizon.

Sunsets he knew. Sunrises were a relative rarity for him. In the Shenandoah Valley, sunrises were screened by the mountains to the east. The sun didn’t make a sudden appearance as it did at the beach. It seemed to just materialize and then the day began. But this…this was spectacular. The sky reddened, turned orange, and golden light bathed everything. Looking at it one could believe that every day arrived clean and innocent in that brilliant bath. Clouds trailing southward glowed pink and orange against a lavender sky, and then, pop, “Here comes the sun, here comes the sun…” I should do this more often, he thought. His only regret? No Ruth.

“A month’s vacation is what you need,” Ruth had said. “When was the last time you just kicked back?”

“I had that long weekend with you in Toronto.”

“That doesn’t count.”

It didn’t. They had spent the days talking about where they were headed. How could they blend two widely divergent careers and still make a go of it? She had a college to run, she’d said. President of Callend College, now Callend University, or not, she had to pitch in with the rest of the faculty. Next year would be a “make or break.”

“You will not always be the president of Callend,” he’d said.

“And what about you? Will you always be the sheriff of Picketsville? We have a way to go, Ike. We should take time out,” she’d said. “We are not in a place or at a time when either of us can commit to anything permanent.” Her voice had nearly cracked then. He’d let it pass.

He watched as the sun continued its ascent. The gold light faded to pale ginger ale and then flat daylight. He wished he’d persuaded his father to come to the beach with him. But Abe Schwartz’s ebullient and garrulous nature seemed to have died with his wife in December. Theirs had been a storybook love affair, and with her no longer a part of his daily equation, Abe looked old and worn. Nothing Ike could say would convince his father to accept his help.

“You go on down there, Ike,” he’d said. “I’ll be all right. I just need to say goodbye to your Momma my own way.”

He’d been saying goodbye for nearly ten months.

So, Ike, who had not had a vacation in years, rented a cottage off-season at Dewey Beach, Delaware, and now sat contemplating the stretch of deserted sand and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Somewhere across the horizon he imagined an Irish fisherman might be staring back at him.

He missed his routine, missed his friends, and missed Ruth. She had said, barely glancing up from piles of paper on her desk, “Maybe a weekend, Ike. I’ll try for a weekend. No, I can’t say which. Send me your address after you settle in, and if I can, I’ll surprise you. I’ve got your cell number.”

Grains of sand danced across the porch decking, urged along by the steady breeze and collected in miniature dunes beside his empty boots. He shivered and folded his arms across his chest. His coffee started to cool, and he still needed to make a decision about breakfast. Breakfast was his favorite meal, but he had never acquired the skills to make a decent one. He could fry eggs and bacon; who couldn’t? And making coffee only meant measuring the correct amount of grounds and water in the basket and pot, respectively. After that things became more complex. He tried to make those crispy diner hash browns and ended with greasy mashed potatoes. And you can forget fried tomatoes. His grits were invariably lumpy and had the consistency of Portland cement so, back home in Picketsville, he ate breakfast at the Crossroads Diner, where regulars gathered to be fed and abused by its proprietor.

The telephone rang. He’d been told the land line service had been discontinued. That bit of information had pleased him very much. He had his cell phone for emergencies and had instructed his staff not to call. He intended to leave it off but would check his voice mail a few times a day. A real emergency would require catching him when he had it on, or a call to the Delaware State Police. The phone rang again. Nobody he knew could possibly have the number, even if it was in service. He’d picked it up to listen for a dial tone when he first arrived. There had been none. But now…it rang again. Finally, to stop the noise and satisfy his curiosity, he looped a finger through the handle of his coffee cup and shuffled indoors.

“Yeah,” he said into a phone so permanently lubricated with a season’s worth of sun screen it nearly slipped from his hand. He half expected someone asking for the previous tenant or the owner.

“You had breakfast yet?” Charlie Garland asked.

“I won’t even guess how you did this, Charlie, but I have to tell you, it’s scary what you spooks can do.”

“I tried your cell phone but all I got was voice mail. You should stay in touch.”

“I had the reverse in mind, actually. What do you want?”

“There’s a nice breakfast place in Rehoboth Beach. I could meet you there.”

“Meet me? Where are you, Charlie?”

“I am sitting in an official-looking black SUV on Ocean Highway about ten miles out. Can you join me?”

“Sure, why not. Are you going to tell me why you’re in Delaware at this hour, or will that be the price of breakfast?”

“The Avenue Restaurant, on Rehoboth Avenue, a block or so from the beach, I’ll be there in five minutes.”

***

“Trasker, fetch!” Barney threw the stick—farther this time. It sailed over the edge of an embankment and out of sight. The big German shepherd galloped away and disappeared over the rim of a streambed. He waited. The seconds ticked by. By now the dog should have come crashing back to him, stick in mouth. That worried him. He knew the dog was probably okay, but ever since the Dumonts’ two shepherds, Fritz and Otto, disappeared the previous month, he’d become slightly paranoid about Trasker. He knew he could take care of himself and, unlike Fritz and Otto, rarely strayed far from home.

“Trasker!” he called. The dog’s head appeared briefly. It stared pleadingly at him and dropped out of sight again. He heard low whimpering.

“Trasker, here boy.” The dog barked loudly. He walked toward the sound.

“What is it?”

Whimper.

The embankment dropped away sharply to the streambed. The dog seemed to be worrying something—the stick? Wet leaves piled up at the brook’s edge. It had risen with a late September thunderstorm the previous afternoon, and now splashed over and around a series of flat rocks which seemed to have been placed in it like stepping stones. They appeared oddly out of place.

He sidestepped down into the swale and walked toward the dog. It looked up at him, uncertainty in its eyes. He stepped forward to see what it had in its mouth. It didn’t look like the stick he’d thrown. The dog growled as he drew closer—a low rumble. Trasker never growled at him. Something was amiss. The dog turned sideways, dodged away a few feet, and wheeled to face him again, its jaws still clenched around the object. The man looked at the ground just vacated by the dog.

Bones. He couldn’t be sure. Human, animal? He couldn’t tell. He leaned forward and looked more closely. A skull of some sort, sloping head, certainly not human. A dog? No sharp canine teeth, not a dog. His limited knowledge of biology in general and skulls in particular, led him to believe that a predator, a dog or meat eater, would have sharp teeth. A dentist would know. An arrangement of long and short bones. It wasn’t so much the bones that worried him, but their seeming placement on the ground—as if they had been set out with some sort of plan in mind. Something was not right. The dog seemed to study him.

“Trasker, drop it.” He said. The dog hesitated. He repeated his command. The dog retreated a few steps, snorted and dropped the bone—a large bone—too large to be a rabbit or any local wildlife. He slipped the leash back on the dog and climbed back to the meadow floor. He hurried to his car, put the dog in the back seat, and called the Sheriff’s office. He was no expert, but some those bones could be human, or not. Either way, the whole scene had a spookiness about it. He did not consider himself to be either superstitious or intuitive, but he sensed something bad, perhaps even evil, had happened there.

Chapter 3

Ike found the restaurant and slipped into a booth across from Charlie Garland. He and Charlie had a history. After Ike left the CIA, Charlie had soldiered on in his job as a public relations man—a position Ike knew provided a cover for what Charlie really did. Ike never asked what that was, but he knew.

“So, to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” Ike said, and studied the menu. He didn’t know why he did so. He always asked for the same thing.

“You don’t need that. I’ve already ordered for you,” Charlie said, and sipped his coffee. The place was filled with breakfast aromas and sounds, bacon frying, coffee gurgling in large stainless steel urns, and toast. Ike inhaled. Surely it beat any scent manufactured by a Paris
parfumerie
. If women were serious about snagging a man with scent, he thought, they might try something called Diner #1.

“Of course you have,” Ike said. He knew from experience that in many ways he was distressingly predictable. That Charlie knew his breakfast preferences and probable bar order did not dismay him anymore, but he sometimes worried that if he were so predictable he ran the risk of being compromised? The waitress brought him his coffee. “I ask again, Charlie, what—”

“In a minute, Ike. I am studying the people with the mirror over the counter.”

“Studying? As in looking for someone or somebody?”

Charlie turned to face Ike and grinned. “Just practicing. Are you enjoying your vacation?”

“I was, until you called. I watched the sun come up this morning. Lovely. But you didn’t drive down here from Langley to ask me that.”

Charlie studied Ike like he would a steak at a butcher’s shop. Finally, apparently satisfied with his choice, he nodded and pulled a folder from a soft leather case lying on the bench beside him.

“No, you’re right. I need a favor,” Charlie said, voice lowered and serious.

“And that would be?”

“My niece’s fiancé disappeared three months ago. I want you to find out what happened to him.”

“He disappeared? Disappeared, as in missing person, disappeared, as in snatched, or just disappeared, as in mysterious?”

“The latter. He had his pilot’s license and filed a flight plan from Martin State Airport—that’s north-east of Baltimore—to Salisbury and took off. He never made it. That was the Fourth of July.”

“An accident, surely. No, you wouldn’t be here asking me to track him down if that’s what you believed. It’s something else, isn’t it?”

“I think so, but the FAA, the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board, Maryland officialdom, have all washed their hands. As far as they are concerned, it was an accident. He flew on a moonless night into a fog bank. He was an inexperienced pilot and they think he probably drove himself into the bay. Death spiral. No wreckage has been found, and no body. I need you to find out what happened.”

“What do you think happened?”

“No idea, but there’s this.” Charlie pulled out a small tape recorder and punched play. Ike listened as a tinny voice pleaded on the phone, “Lizzy, call your uncle Charlie. Tell him that there is something really bad going on—”

“You notice anything in that message?”

“You mean besides the static and thump at the end?”

“The message, Ike, the message.”

“Did he know what you do for a living?”

“Sort of, yes. Enough obviously.”

“He said call you. Not the police, not the Coast Guard, just you. He thought he saw something that belonged in your bailiwick, and judging by his tone of voice, something that frightened him.”

“So it would seem. Will you help me?”

“Charlie, helping you begs the question. What do you want me to do.”

“I don’t want to screw up your vacation but—”

“Not to worry. The truth is, I have been on my vacation for exactly three days. Never mind what I said before, I am bored to the proverbial tears. I can give you three and a half weeks, that’s all. But I have to tell you, I don’t know what I can do that others haven’t already done.”

“You used to fly, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly. The ops planners, in the wisdom born of chronic isolation, got it into their collective pointy heads one year that it would be a good thing if their field agents could fly—watched too many movies, I think. We all qualified, twin engine, IFR rated. But I never really did much with it after that.”

“But you can or could if you had to?”

“Yes, probably.”

“Back track, Ike. Start with Martin State Airport. Talk to the flying instructor up there. His name is Trent Fonts. Maybe he knows something. Fly the same course and see where it takes you. You know how to do this stuff better than I.”

“I’m a little rusty.”

“I’ll buy you some oil.”

“You can’t do this yourself?”

“You know I can’t. If Homeland Security, the FBI, or any other involved agencies found out a CIA employee was working a case on their turf—”

“Right.” Ike sat back and contemplated his coffee cup. “I don’t know. A guy flies out one night and disappears. No wreckage—”

“There may be wreckage, just not visible.”

“What do you mean, just not visible?”

“He owned an old war bird, a Korean War spotter plane, a big heavy-duty Cessna high-wing. It was painted camo. If it splashed and sank in the mud in the Chesapeake Bay, there’d be no way—”

“I thought all those planes had orange Day-Glo nosebowls.”

“He and his co-owners painted it over with more camo.”

“That legal?”

“No idea. They did it, though. I think they had a notice from the FAA to correct that, but I can’t be sure.”

“Great, so the top side would be lost in the mud, The underside of the wings would have been light blue and—”

“Ike, there was no wreckage sighted, period.”

“I’ll do what I can, Charlie. Three and a half weeks, max.”

Charlie pushed his eggs and hash browns aside, slipped Ike a thick envelope and the folder he’d removed from his case earlier, and stood.

“It’s all in here. Money, credit cards, IDs, names, reports, some photos, everything I have. I’ll check in with you in two days,” he said, and vanished through steamed up glass doors.

***

Frank Sutherlin’s new sister-in-law, Essie, waved at him on her way to the ladies’ room. It was the third time in the last two hours. Frank was a bachelor. He’d asked his mother if there was something about women’s plumbing he missed in biology class. He described Essie’s frequent trips by his door. Dorothy Sutherlin had raised seven boys and counted her blessings that six of them were still alive and that Frank had moved back home when her son, Billy, married and moved in with his new bride. She beamed.

“I’m fixing to get me a grandbaby,” she said.

So that was it. The phone rang and he picked up. Essie, who normally sat at the dispatch desk, had not returned and no one else was available.

“Sheriff’s Office, Acting Sheriff Sutherlin speaking. No, it’s…Frank…Billy’s off today. Out buying booties if I hear right.” He listened to the caller, said he’d be right out, and hung up. Essie rounded the corner.

“Do you have something to tell me, Essie? A little secret, perhaps?”

Essie stared at him wide-eyed. “I don’t think so. You know maybe I should see a doctor. I am spending way too much time in the can lately.”

“That’d be a good idea, Sis. Or you can save yourself a copay and call your mother-in-law.”

Essie frowned. “Mother-in-law…Ma?”

“Yeah. Listen, I just took a call from a Barney Dunhill. He’s a professor up at the college, I think. He found a stash of suspicious looking bones out in the park. I don’t think it’s anything, but I’m going to drive out there and see, just in case. Tell Charlie Picket to watch the store while I’m gone.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Acting Sheriff, sir. How’re you making out with Ike being away?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I would have been happier if he’d given me a couple more weeks to get used to this place before he took off for vacation. What’s that place he’s at?”

“Delaware someplace, is all I know. Billy said to call him if you need anything.”

“He’s okay with Ike making me the acting and not him?”

“Billy? Shoot, yes.”

“Okay, I’m off.”