All That I Have (11 page)

At the department I had a note from Clemmie to call her dad. Was I making Addison work on Saturday? If so, we might be into something. Addison generally preferred to devote his weekend to toddy.

“It’s about your title search,” Addison said when I reached him.

“I’ve gotten a little farther with that, too,” I said.

“Farther, how?”

“Sat down with Emory this morning,” I said. “Emory says the owner of the place is some kind of investment company, I guess, in Bermuda. Odessa. Odessa Partners.”

“Well,” said Addison. “Yes. Odessa is part of it. Odessa is the Cub Scouts. They still had the training wheels on when they set up Odessa.”

“Training wheels?”

“Stop by the office Monday,” said Addison. “Or, no. Lucian? Come to the house. Come now.”

I drove out toward Devon, and at Addison’s I went right to the back of the house and came in through the kitchen. Addison was there, making a pot of coffee. He poured a cup for each of us, then uncorked the big jug of White Horse Scotch that he likes to keep ready to hand at all times. He held the bottle over my cup; I shook my head. Addison poured a shot into his coffee.

“I need this, don’t you know,” he said. “You and your god damned title search.”

We sat at the kitchen table, where Addison had laid out a folder full of yellow legal notepaper. He patted the folder.

“I can write all this up for you, if that’s what you want,” he said. “There’d be no point. And I won’t try to go through it now. We’d both go to sleep. You’ve got a Russian novel, here.”

“I never read a Russian novel,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Thousands of pages, hundreds of people, all with the same names, in places with the same names, doing the same things. That’s a Russian novel.”

“Okay,” I said.

Addison took a hit of his coffee.

“I didn’t get far searching the title at the town hall in Grenada,” he began. “I got to Odessa Partners. Then I came back here and got to work on them. Chased them from Bermuda on down into the Caymans and through the Caribbean, pillar to post, like a god damned booze cruise. Wound up in Amsterdam.”

“Amsterdam?”

“A Dutch company. I thought,
Hmm.
So I called an old classmate of mine. He works in The Hague. I’m not sure what he does, exactly, or who he is. Hell, I’m not even sure he knows who he is anymore. But he knew all about the Dutch company. He gave me some advice.”

“What was that?”

“Forget it. Drop it. Turn the page. Walk away. Move on.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t followed the thing all the way,” said Addison. “I don’t know that I could, come to that, or that my classmate could. Doesn’t matter. I’m out of it. So should you be. Your burglarized house is the property of people overseas who operate mostly in Russia, the Baltic, and on south: the Caucasus, Iran. Serious places, Lucian. Wide open places, these days. Good places to stay away from. Serious people, too — also good to stay away from.”

“What do they do?”

“They keep busy. They’re a gifted people, the Russians, but they do nothing by halves. And also, of course, they’re all quite mad. The Russians, don’t you know, have a claim to be the fourth-craziest people on earth, after ourselves, the Japanese, and the French — and I’m not sure they might not have the edge of the French, in an impartial trial.

“These people in Grenada,” Addison went on, “are in the energy field, mainly. Don’t ask me exactly what that means. I don’t know. But being in the energy field where they are today is like being in the bootleg liquor field used to be in, say, Chicago. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Why drop it?”

“Why not?” asked Addison. “You don’t have a dog in this fight, do you? Your office doesn’t, not really. Somebody scoped a place out, broke in, did some damage, left. So what? Happens every day.”

“There’s more,” I said. I told Addison about Sean, the missing strongbox, the Russian fellow Sean had taken down.

“Sean Duke?” Addison asked.

“You know him?”

“Everybody knows Sean Duke.”

“Everybody?”

“Everybody, Lucian,” said Addison. “He’s a popular young man. Come on, have a little one, here.” He pushed the jug toward me, but I didn’t want any. Addison took it back and gave himself another pop.

“If you find him,” Addison said, “Sean, you get him out of here. If he’s got something these people want, well . . . Do they know he’s got it?”

“They sent that Russian fellow to get it back.”

“You don’t know they did.”

“House full of Russians gets broken into. Couple of days later, here comes another Russian looking for the breaker. That’s a lot of Russians. This ain’t Moscow.”

Addison nodded. “Well,” he said, “you get your boy out of here, that’s all.”

“My boy?” I said. “He ain’t my boy.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Get him out, all the same,” said Addison. “Put him away someplace.”

“The way he’s going,” I said, “I won’t be the one puts him away. The state will.”

“No,” said Addison. “That’s no good. That’s jail. If he’s in jail, that’s serving him up to these people on a platter with an apple in his mouth. He needs to be gone, Lucian. Make him go.”

“I’ve got to find him first.”

“I can’t help you there. What was in the box he took?”

“Records, the fellow said. Business records.”

“Right,” said Addison. He sipped his coffee — if any of what he had left in his cup was coffee.

“Cossacks,” said Addison.

“Who?”

“Cossacks. You’d better catch up with this boy, don’t you know, Lucian? You’d better catch up with him before the Cossacks do. God damned Cossacks.”

I found Morgan Endor on the back road in Mount Zion that comes down from the ski resort on Stratton Mountain. It wasn’t a fancy place: no Russians’ house. She was in the kind of house the builders used to call a chalet, back when the ski promoters wanted you to believe you were getting, I guess, Switzerland in Vermont for your money instead of Las Vegas in Vermont, like today.

She opened the door to my knock and stood there in the doorway, looking at me as though she didn’t know who I was, or maybe I was the fellow pumped out the septic tank but she hadn’t called the fellow pumped out the septic tank.

“Sheriff,” she said.

“That’s right, Ms. Endor,” I said. “Can I come in? I won’t be long. I’m still looking for Sean.”

“He’s not here.”

“I know.”

She stood back so I could walk in.

Inside was a long room with a stone fireplace at one end and windows looking south over the mountains. The sun was in the windows, and a big tabby cat was asleep in the sun on the carpet. The cat didn’t offer to move when we walked in. We had to step around it.

“That’s a calm cat,” I said.

Morgan Endor looked down at the cat as though she hadn’t noticed it till now.

“Is it?” she said. “I suppose it is. It belongs to my parents, actually.”

She sat on a couch facing the windows. In that strong light she looked older than I’d thought she was when she came to the office — nearer forty-five than thirty-five. She was starting to have lines at the corners of her eyes, and her neck was getting lean. Sean wasn’t exactly robbing the cradle this time, it didn’t look like.

“I won’t lie to you, Sheriff,” said Morgan Endor. “Sean’s been here. He was here last night. I told him you wanted to see him. I told him you thought he was in some kind of trouble. He laughed.”

“What time did he leave?” I asked her.

“About eight.”

“That’s eight last night?”

“Eight this morning, Sheriff.”

“Where was he going when he left?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ms. Endor,” I said, “here’s what we’re up to in this thing. Sean’s been working at a big house over in Grenada. It’s a vacation place. Nobody’s there, mostly. We think Sean broke into the house looking for valuables.”

Morgan Endor was looking at me. She raised her eyebrows a little. “Go on, Sheriff,” she said.

“We know Sean,” I said. “We know he ain’t the Young Republicans. We know he was working at the place. He knew the setup there: nobody home, no neighbors, rich people with lots of goods. We know he knew the house was burglar alarmed, but we also know he knew it’s so far out in the woods that he’d have all kinds of time to go through it between when the alarm went off and any law could get there. He wouldn’t have to worry about getting around the alarm: he could just bust his way in, which is what he did.”

“Suppose he did. Why tell me?”

“You’re his friend.”

“I didn’t say that. I said he was an acquaintance.”

“So you did. And I said I needed to talk to him, that he was in trouble. I still do. He still is.”

“Is he?” she asked. “I wonder. Can you prove any of the things you’ve told me?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t. That’s the thing. Sean ain’t in trouble from me, not really, because I can’t go after him without proof. But there are other people in this thing, too, and they can do whatever they want.”

“What other people?”

“People who own the house Sean busted into.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know for sure. I’ve been trying to find out. But they are very bad news, I know that. They know Sean went into their place. If they catch up with him, they won’t need proof to do what they have to do. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Yes, Sheriff, I see. But even if you’re right about Sean, it’s for the police to act. It’s for you. Why would these people think they had to do anything?”

“Because Sean took something from their house. A kind of a little safe or strongbox, I guess. They’re not in a hurry for the police to get their hands on it, but they’re ready to go some way to get it back, it looks like, or what’s in it. They’re ready to go a long way. You don’t know about anything like that?”

“Certainly not,” said Morgan Endor. “What was in it that’s so valuable to your people?”

“They ain’t my people,” I said. “I don’t know what was in it. They don’t say.”

“You think the man Sean fought was from these people?”

“That’s what I think.”

She smiled then. “Sean didn’t seem to have much trouble with that one, though, did he? I gathered you found him tied to a tree naked. Sean handled him, didn’t he?”

“Sean was lucky,” I said.

“Sean’s a lucky young man.”

“You think so?”

“I think you worry too much about him.”

“About Sean? I don’t worry about Sean. I’m doing my job.”

“Is that what you’re doing, Sheriff?”’

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Well,” she said. “Maybe you worry too much about those other people, then.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I saw the fellow. I saw the gun he had on him, too. So did you. I worry about fellows who carry guns. Don’t you?”

She shrugged.

“I worry about them because there’s apt to be more than one to a litter,” I said.

Morgan Endor smiled again. “Sean can take care of himself,” she said.

Sean can take care of himself ? Wrong.
Not for a day, he can’t, not for an hour. Sean can do a lot of things. He can fix your roof. He can pick up a two-hundred-pound flowerpot and toss it through your patio door. He can steal your strongbox. He can mop the floor with your imported evildoer. He can go all night putting the old inner life to his lady photographer in her chalet, get up, cup of coffee, slide right down to the trailer park and roll the doughnut with the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Sean can do all those things. But take care of himself, he cannot.

Morgan Endor thought he could, or she said she did. She was wrong if she thought so. But she didn’t look like she was often wrong about things. I didn’t get Morgan Endor. I didn’t get her name, I didn’t get her age. I didn’t get her when she came to the office with the Russian’s pants, and I still didn’t get her. I couldn’t figure her out. In sheriffing, that happens, too. You don’t always figure everybody out. There are some people you never do get.