Death Through the Looking Glass (8 page)

“I was going to call Rocco as soon as I finished my coffee.”

“Untrained civilian involvement only complicates our job.”

“What did you find out?” Rocco asked with interest.

“Karen and Tom Giles were filing for divorce; Karen is having an affair with Gary Middleton; and there's no proof that Giles flew the plane.”

“We were going over that ground again this morning.”

“Did you turn up anything at the lake cottage?”

“The blood spot near the telephone table matched with Giles's type. We're still convinced that the call you claim to have received was a hoax.”

“There's no way to trace a local call made within the town limits,” Rocco said.

Robin entered the kitchen through the back door. “Hey, what is this? A raid?”

The two small boys fishing at the end of the Lantern City town pier looked at Lyon with interest as he spread the balloon envelope and prepared the propane burner for ignition.

“What's that thing, mister?”

“A hot-air balloon. If you'll give me a hand you can have a ride.” The addition of four small hands helped speed up the preparations, and in twenty minutes the balloon had filled and the bag was bobbing over the basket. Lyon climbed into the gondola and swung the boys in beside him. As he began his preflight check, a police car drove onto the dock and stopped with a screech of brakes.

“What in hell's going on?” Chief Barnes yelled from the car window.

“Glad you're here, Barnes. Can you tell me exactly where the plane was found?”

“You'll be able to see the red marker buoy when you're aloft. Wait a minute! Get out of that thing and empty out whatever it is you fill it with.”

“Hot air, Chief.”

“Don't be smart, Wentworth. There's an ordinance against what you're doing.”

“A law against launching a balloon from the town dock?” Lyon gave the burner a five-second ignition. The loud whoosh of flame startled Barnes, and he drew back from the car window. The balloon quickly rose as the small boys gaily waved.

“Hey, this is neat-o, mister!”

Lyon nodded and tried to remember at what altitude he had been flying that morning. He decided to compromise at six hundred feet. It was a windless day, and drift was minimal. As he leveled the balloon, he looked seaward for the distant marker buoy.

He distinctly recalled having given a 170 bearing over the radio. He took a reading from the small pocket compass. It was unmistakable. The buoy lay 190 degrees off the town dock.

Lyon threw the switch underneath the carriage, and the hum of the electric typewriter immediately ceased. Danny Dolphin was becoming hopelessly confused. The morning's balloon trip at Lantern City had only complicated the situation, and now further progress with his naïve dolphin had become impossible.

“You try to keep them in the barn and they come through the front door,” Bea said from the hall.

“What are you talking about?”

“Girls. Girls with hardly any clothes on. The bereaved widow has shucked mourning black for more attractive attire.” She opened the door to admit Karen Giles, dressed in a brief tennis dress with ruffled panties.

“I'm in trouble, Lyon, and I need your help.”

Her hands began to steady after the second sherry. Lyon could envision his imaginary dolphin snorting with a disgusted flip of his tail and heading downstream toward the sea.

“I don't believe I've ever seen a stuffed toy that big,” Karen said with an echo of her youthful tone.

The six-foot Wobbly doll stood in the corner by the fireplace, with a nonchalant paw on the mantel. “He's loyal and can keep a confidence,” Lyon said. He looked at her, huddled on the leather chair, grasping the glass with both hands. “You said you were in trouble.”

“The police were back this morning. They kept pressing, asking me all sorts of questions about our life together and the divorce.”

“I told them. They would have found out sooner or later.”

“When I went to the club after they left, one of them followed me.”

“It stands to reason that when a husband is murdered, they are going to look at the wife very carefully.”

“It's more than a look. I think they consider me a suspect.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Make them leave me alone.”

“Rocco and I are good friends, but the case is being handled by the State Police.”

“I could retain you.”

“I'd be breaking some law or other.” Lyon looked out the window and down toward the river below. In the distance, a canoe with two occupants held to the main current of the stream.

It was a distant memory. “
Come on, Went! For Chris' sake, don't twist the paddle
—
in and out, in and out.”
The canoe turned a bend in the river and was lost from view.

He turned back to Karen Giles. “I suppose I'm already indirectly involved. I'd like to see the discrepancies cleared up. Have you talked to Gary Middleton since Sunday?”

“I was going to get to that. I called him this morning, and while we were on the phone the police arrived to take him to the barracks. You know about Gary and me?”

Lyon nodded. “When Bea and I talked with you, you mentioned that Tom was involved in some large financial transaction, that he'd been borrowing money to invest. Do you know any of the details?”

“No, not really. Recently Tom hadn't kept me informed about his business transactions. I know only that it was something on his own and not with the firm, and that he was involved with someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don't know, except that he was scared to death his partner was somehow going to do him out of his share.”

“How's that?”

“He made a remark one night. He said he knew Esposito was going to screw him; it was just a question of how and when.”

“Who's Esposito?”

“I don't know.”

The far wing of the house had once been intended for use as a playroom and still housed a Ping-Pong table. At the beginning of her political career, Bea had begun to utilize it as her headquarters. As a consequence, the table was covered with hundreds of copies of legislative bills, and along one wall were stored her most prized possessions—coded three-by-five file cards on all the voters in her senatorial district. As well as Lyon could remember, the code ran from I—extremely favorable toward Beatrice Wentworth, will contribute and work on campaign—to 7—get rid of that crazy broad.

Along another wall was a long bookcase stuffed with political reference works and telephone books. Lyon cleared a place on the Ping-Pong table and pulled out the phone books to look up all the Espositos.

One hundred forty-three Espositos were listed in the upper portion of the state. Lyon sighed and penciled on a scratch pad the few sentences he would use on each phone call.

On the ninety-third call a voice answered, “Esposito Enterprises.”

“Mr. Esposito, please. It's urgent.”

The guttural voice announced simply, “E. here.”

“Before he died, Tom Giles assigned his interest to me.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and Lyon waited apprehensively for the puzzled questioning he had been getting on the other calls. “I see,” the voice of Esposito finally said. “And just what do you expect me to do?”

“I think we should meet as soon as possible.”

“Who is this?”

“Lyon Wentworth.”

“I will expect you at my home this evening, Mr. Wentworth. The address is 711 Braeland Drive, Tallman. Shall we say eight?”

“I'll be there,” Lyon said as the connection was severed. He tried to reconstruct the few sentences of the phone call in order to discover what had been said or what innuendo had been made that filled him with such a sense of menace.

“ALL RIGHT, WENTWORTH! I'VE DECIDED WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALL THESE WOMEN!”

Lyon turned to face Bea in the doorway. “Tie Robin to the wing of the plane.”

“Not exactly.”

“I never knew you went to bed so early,” Rocco said to the robed Lyon as they hunched over coffee in the study.

“I think it's called preventive medicine.”

“How's that?”

“Never mind. What do you know about an Esposito Enterprises in Tallman?”

“Why?”

“I'll fill you in later. Have you ever heard of them?”

“No, but I could call Pat Pasquale over there and see if he has anything on them. By the way, we had Gary Middleton at the barracks all afternoon. He took a polygraph.”

“How'd it turn out?”

“Christ, I don't know. The bastard lies about everything. For God's sake, we even got a spike when we asked him his name.”

“I imagine Gary and Karen head Norbert's list.”

“And mine too, unless you've come up with something.”

“Call Pat and see if he has anything on Esposito.”

Rocco dialed the Tallman police and asked to speak to Sergeant Pat Pasquale. “Pasquale, you wop bastard, how much did you make off the pad this week?… Rocco Herbert here.… Sure I can; I'm half myself. Listen, Pat. You ever hear of an outfit called Esposito Enterprises?… Uh huh, what do you have on them?” As Rocco listened, he flipped a pad out, cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder and made hasty notes. “Thanks, Pat. See you.”

“Well?” Lyon asked.

“Sal Esposito owns a chain of massage parlors, porno book stores, and a couple of bars with exotic dancers. He's been busted six or seven times, all nolles.”

“That sounds like syndicate stuff. I'm surprised he's not into book.”

“Pat suspects that he's the local layoff bank.”

“I think I'd like you with me in mufti when I meet with Mr. E. tonight.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That Tom Giles assigned his business interest in the transaction to me.”

“Christ, that's a good way to get yourself killed!”

“That's why I want you along.”

“You know, of course, that I can get in a sling over this. I'm limited because this is out of my jurisdiction. Norbert will have my—”

“What did you say?” Lyon interrupted excitedly.

“Esposito lives out of my jurisdiction.”

“No. ‘Limited.' You said ‘limited'—limited service.”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“What's the day today?”

“If you were a working man like the rest of us, old buddy, you'd have the date engraved on your heart.… It's the first—payday.”

“And the plane went down on, Sunday the thirtieth.”

“Or Monday morning the thirty-first.”

“The phone call from the lake house came after midnight Sunday—on the thirty-first. Damn! Let's go to the phone company.”

“You can't trace a local call.”

“We'll see, Rocco. Let's go down to the phone company and talk to the night supervisor.”

“One problem, Lyon.”

“What's that?”

“Don't you think you should put some clothes on first?”

Terrance Ralston, night supervisor of the Murphysville phone office, smiled and shook hands. “I'm sorry, Chief Herbert. Ma Bell can do a lot of things, but we don't keep records on local calls. Sometimes the subscriber will request it for business reasons of some sort, and we can attach a monitor to the line for counts, but that's about it.”

“Limited service,” Lyon said.

“I told you it couldn't be done,” Rocco said. “This is a waste of time.”

“Yes,” the supervisor said. “If the subscriber was on limited service, we'd have a count for the billing period.”

Rocco turned to face the still-smiling supervisor. “What's that?”

“People who own vacation homes, or retired people on small incomes, often have limited service. It costs less, and the phone's there if they need it,” Lyon said.

“That's right,” the supervisor agreed. “The monthly base rate is half the regular rate, but you get only thirty free local calls a month; after that we charge twelve and a half cents per call.”

“The Murphysville billing period is the thirtieth of each month, and the phone at the Giles lake house was cut by the time you got there. Which means that there was only the period from midnight until the time the line was cut that someone could have made a call on the lake-house phone, and that one call should appear on the register.”

“I'll be right back,” the supervisor said.

In five minutes they had proof from the phone company that a call had gone out from the Giles lake house between midnight and two.

“That still doesn't prove that it was Giles calling you,” Rocco said. “Hell, it could have been someone ordering pizza.”

“It was Giles,” Lyon said. “But I still haven't figured out how.”

7

“I wonder when he's going to finish the house,” Rocco said as he pulled the car to a halt in front of 711 Braeland.

A distant streetlight partially illuminated the long, low white building that stretched along the secluded lane. A high wall enclosing the backyard hid the rear portion of the house. The building's flat roof gave it an uncompleted look, as if the second story had been forgotten. Long rectangular windows periodically broke the building's front surface.

Lyon shrugged and stepped from the car. “Doesn't look like anyone's home, but let's try it.”

As they strode up the walk to the front door, Rocco put his arm on his friend's shoulder. “Listen, let me handle this. This Esposito's been in the rackets since he was a kid, and he's going to be a real hard ass.” He unconsciously shifted the weight of the small .38 in its spring holster under his civilian jacket.

“Let me play along with my Giles bit for a while.”

“See what good it does you, then I'll take over.”

Lyon pressed a small recessed doorbell. From the depths of the house they heard a deep musical tone. In moments the door was opened by a bowing Japanese.