Plum Island

by Nelson DeMille

  Fredric Tobin was saying, “Mr. Corey, I sense that you think I know more than I’m telling you about the Gordons. I assure you I don’t. However, if the county or town police wish to take a statement from me, I’ll be happy to oblige. Meanwhile, you’re welcome here as a customer, and you’re welcome to my home as an invited guest. You are not welcome to my office, and you’re not welcome to question me any further.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Good day.”

  “Have a good lunch.” He got into his Porsche and off he went.

  I looked back at the Tobin tower flying the black Tobin flag. If Mr. Tobin had any physical evidence to hide, it might be at his waterfront home or perhaps in his apartment on the top floor of that tower. Obviously, a consent search was out of the question, and no judge was going to issue a search warrant, so it looked like I’d have to issue a midnight search warrant to myself.

  Back in my Jeep and on the road again. I called my answering machine and retrieved two messages. The first was from an unidentified Snippybitch from the NYPD Absence Control Unit telling me my physical was moved up to next Tuesday and asking me to acknowledge the message. Whenever the bosses can’t get ahold of you, they ask personnel or payroll section or health services division to call you about something that you have to reply to. I hate sneakiness.

  The next message was from my former partner, Beth Penrose. She said, “Hi, John. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but it’s been crazy here. Anyway, I know you’re not officially involved with the case, but I have a few things I’d like to discuss with you. Why don’t I come out tomorrow afternoon? Call me or I’ll call you, and we’ll come up with a time and place. Take care.”

  So. The tone was friendly, but not as friendly as when we’d last spoken in person. Not to mention the kiss on the cheek. I suppose it’s not a good idea to be too gushy on an answering machine. More to the point, whatever heat had developed during that intense two days would naturally cool off when she returned to her turf and her own world. It happens.

  Now she wanted to discuss a few things with me, which meant she wanted to know what, if anything, I’d discovered. To Beth Penrose, I had become just another witness. Well, maybe I was being cynical. Though maybe I had to move Beth Penrose out of my mind in order to fit Emma White-stone in. I was never good at balancing multiple relationships. It’s worse than carrying a dozen homicide cases at the same time, and a lot more dangerous.

  Anyway, I needed a gift for Emma, and I spotted an antique shop on Main Road. Perfect. I pulled over and got out. The wonderful thing about America is that there are more antiques in circulation than were originally made.

  I rummaged around inside the musty place and the proprietress, a nice little old lady, asked me if she could help.

  “I need a gift for a young lady.”

  “A wife? Daughter?”

  Someone I don’t know well but had sex with. “A friend.”

  “Ah.” She showed me a few things, but I’m totally clueless about antiques. Then I had a brilliant idea and asked her, “Are you a member of the Peconic Historical Society?”

  “No, but I belong to the Southold Historical Society.”

  Good lord, there were certainly enough of these things around. I asked, “Would you know Emma Whitestone?”

  “I surely do. A very fine young lady.”

  “Exactly. I’m looking for something for her.”

  “How nice. What is the occasion?”

  Standard postcoital token of affection and thanks. “She’s helped me do some research in the archives.”

  “Oh, she’s very good at that. What were you looking for?”

  “Well … this is silly, but ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated by pirates.”

  She sort of chuckled. Maybe cackled. She said, “The famous Captain Kidd was a visitor to our shores.”

  “Was he?”

  “There were many pirates who came through here before the Revolution. They plundered the French and Spanish in the Caribbean, then came north to spend their ill-gotten gains, or to refit their ships. Some settled in these parts.” She smiled and said, “With all that gold and jewels, they quickly became leading citizens.” She added, “Many an original fortune around here was founded on pirate’s plunder.”

  I sort of liked the old-fashioned way the woman spoke. I commented, “Many a modern-day fortune has corporate piracy behind it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that, but I do know that these drug runners today are much like the old pirates.” She added, “When I was a girl, we had the rum runners. We’re law-abiding people here, but we’re on the sea routes.”

  “Not to mention the Atlantic Coastal Flyway.”

  “That’s for birds.”

  “Right.”

  After another minute of chat, I introduced myself as John, and she introduced herself as Mrs. Simmons. I asked her, “Does the Southold Historical Society have any information on pirates?”

  “We do. Though not much. There are some original documents and letters in the archives. And even a reward poster in our little museum.”

  “Would you happen to have an authentic pirate treasure map I could photocopy?”

  She smiled.

  I asked her, “Do you know Fredric Tobin?”

  “Well, doesn’t everyone? Rich as Croesus.”

  Who? I asked, “Does he belong to the Southold Historical Society? Mr. Tobin, not Croesus.”

  “No, but Mr. Tobin’s a generous contributor.”

  “Does he visit your archives?”

  “I understand he did. Though not in the last year or so.”

  I nodded. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t Manhattan, that this was a community of about twenty thousand people and that while it wasn’t literally true that everyone knew everyone else, it was true that everyone knew someone who knew someone else. For a detective, this was like walking knee-deep in pay dirt.

  Anyway, at least one of my searches was over, and I asked Mrs. Simmons, “Could you recommend something for Ms. Whitestone?”

  “What is your price range?”

  “Nothing is too good for Ms. Whitestone. Fifty dollars.”

  “Oh … well …”

  “A hundred.” She smiled and produced a porcelain chamber pot with a big jug handle, decorated with painted roses. She said, “Emma collects these.”

  “Chamber pots?”

  “Yes. She uses them as planters. She has quite a collection.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. I’ve been holding this for her to see. It’s late Victorian. Made in England.”

  “Okay … I’ll take it.”

  “It’s actually a bit over a hundred dollars.”

  “How big a bit?”

  “It’s two hundred.”

  “Has it ever been used?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Do you take Visa?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you wrap it?”

  “I’ll put it in a nice gift bag.”

  “Can you put a bow on the handle?”

  “If you’d like.”

  Transaction complete, I left the antique store with the glorified bedpan in a nice pink and green gift bag.

  Okay, off I went to the Cutchogue Free Library, founded in 1841 and still paying the same wages. The library was at the edge of the village green, a big clapboard building with a steeple that looked as if it had once been a church.

  I parked and went inside. There was a tough-looking old bird at the front desk who peered at me over a pair of half specs. I smiled and breezed past her.

  There was a big banner hung at the entrance to the stacks which read: “Find Buried Treasure—Read Books.” Excellent advice.

  I found the card catalogue, which, thank God, wasn’t computerized, and within ten minutes I was sitting in a reading alcove with a reference book in front of me, titled The Book of Buried Treasure.

  I read about a John Shelby of Thackham,
England, who in 1672 was thrown from his horse into a thicket where he found an iron pot containing more than five hundred gold coins. According to the treasure trove laws of England, all hidden or lost property belonged to the Crown. However, Shelby refused to give the gold to the king’s officers, and he was arrested, tried for treason, and beheaded. This was probably a favorite story of the IRS.

  I read about the treasure trove laws of the United States government and of the various states. Basically, all the laws say, “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”

  There was, however, something called the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities, and it was pretty clear that anything found on federal land came under the jurisdiction of the secretary of either Agriculture, Defense, or the Interior, depending on the land in question. Furthermore, you needed a permit to dig on federal land and whatever you found belonged to Uncle Sam. What a great deal that was.

  If, however, you found money, valuables, or any sort of treasure on your own land, it was pretty much yours, as long as you could prove that the original owner was dead, and/or the heirs were unknown, and that the property wasn’t stolen. And even if it was stolen, you could claim it if the rightful owners were known to be dead or unknowable, or enemies of the country at the time the money, goods, or treasure was obtained. The example given was pirate treasure, plunder, bounty, and all that good stuff. So far, so good.

  And to make a nice situation even nicer, the IRS, in some unbelievable lapse of greed, required that you pay tax only on the portion you sold or otherwise turned into cash each year, as long as you weren’t a professional treasure hunter. So, if you were a biologist, for instance, and you owned a piece of land, and you found buried treasure on it by accident, or as a result of your archaeological hobby, and it was worth, say, ten or twenty million, then you didn’t pay a dime in taxes until you sold some of it. What a sweet deal. It almost made me want to go into treasure hunting as a hobby. On second thought, that’s what I was doing.

  The book also said that if the treasure has historical value or is associated with popular culture—and here, lo and behold, the book gave the specific example of Captain Kidd’s lost treasure—then the value of the treasure would be greatly enhanced, and so forth.

  I read for a while longer, learning about the treasure trove laws and reading some interesting examples and case histories. One particular case caught my eye—in the 1950s, a man was going through some old papers in the Admiralty Section of the Public Records Office in London. He found a faded letter written in 1750 by a famous pirate named Charles Wilson, addressed to Wilson’s brother. The letter had originally been found on a pirate ship that was captured by the British navy. The letter read, “My brother, there are three creeks lying one hundred paces or more north of the second inlet above Chincoteague Island, Virginia, which is the southward end of the peninsula. At the head of the third creek to the northward is a bluff facing the Atlantic Ocean with three cedar trees growing on it, each about one and a half yards apart. Between the trees I have buried ten ironbound chests, bars of silver, gold, diamonds, and jewels to the sum of 200,000 pounds sterling. Go to the woody knoll secretly and remove the treasure.”

  Obviously, Charles Wilson’s brother never got the letter since it was captured by the British navy. So, who found the treasure? The British navy? Or maybe it was the man who found the letter in the Public Records Office two hundred years later. The author of The Book of Buried Treasuredidn’t finish the story.

  Point was, there is a place called the Admiralty Section of the Public Records Office in London, and God knew what you could find there if you had time, patience, a magnifying glass, a knowledge of old English, and a little greed, optimism, and sense of adventure. I was sure that now I understood the Gordons’ lost week in London last year.

  I had to assume the Gordons had read what I was reading now and knew the treasure trove laws. Beyond that, common sense would tell them that anything they found on Plum Island belonged to the government—no fifty-fifty split or anything—and that anything they claimed to have found on their rented property belonged to the owner, not the tenants. You didn’t need a law degree to figure out any of that.

  It had probably crossed Tom’s and Judy’s minds that an easy solution to the problems of ownership was to simply keep their mouths shut if they found anything on Plum Island. But maybe somewhere along the line, they realized that their best course of action—the most profitable in the long run—was simply to change the location of the discovery, announce the find, bask in the publicity, pay taxes only on what they sold each year, and go down in history as the handsome young Ph.D’s who found Captain Kidd’s lost treasure and became filthy rich. This was what any bright and logical person would do. It was what I would have done.

  But there were a few problems. The first was that they had to get anything they found on Plum Island off Plum Island. The second problem was to rebury the treasure in such a way that its rediscovery not only seemed plausible, but would withstand scientific scrutiny. The answer to that was the eroded bluffs.

  It all made sense to me. It made sense to them, too, but somewhere along the line, Tom and Judy did or said something that got them killed.

  Fredric Tobin had lied to me about a few facts, and about his relationship with the Gordons, which seemed to be open to different interpretations. Plus, Tobin was either broke or on his way. To a homicide detective, this was like a flashing red light and an alarm bell.

  Not only had Tobin befriended the Gordons, but he’d seduced—or at least charmed—Emma Whitestone, historian and archivist. It all seemed to fit. It was probably Tobin who’d somehow tumbled on to the possibility that there was buried treasure on Plum Island. And it was probably Tobin who paid for the Gordons’ week in England to research this and maybe try to pinpoint the location.

  Fredric Tobin was my prime suspect, but I wasn’t discounting Paul Stevens or anyone else on Plum Island. For all I knew, this was a larger conspiracy than I first thought, and it could involve Stevens, Zollner, and others on the island, plus Tobin, plus … well, Emma Whitestone.

  CHAPTER 21

  I found Whitestone Florist easily enough; I’d passed it dozens of times in the last three months.

  I parked close by, checked my hair in the visor mirror, got out, and strode into the store.

  It was a very nice place, full of … well, flowers. It smelled good. A young fellow behind the counter asked, “Can I help you?”

  “I have an appointment with Emma Whitestone.”

  “Are you John?”

  “None other.”

  “She had to do some errands—hold on.” He called into the back, “Janet. John is here for Emma.”

  From the back came Janet, a woman of about forty-plus, and also a younger woman of about twenty-five whom Janet introduced as Ann. Janet said to me, “Emma asked if you could meet her at the historical society house.”

  “No problem.”

  Janet continued, “Emma said she had no way to get in touch with you.”

  “Well, no problem. I can find the house easy enough.”

  Ann said, “She may be a little late. She had some deliveries and errands.”

  “Not to worry. I’ll wait there for her. I’ll wait all night if I have to.” Did I need three people to brief me? Obviously, I was on display.

  The young man handed me a business card and said, “Call here if there’s any problem.”

  “I surely will. Thank you all for your help.” I got to the door, turned, and said, “Emma has a really nice place here.”

  They all smiled.

  I left. I easily got a passing grade on that.

  Back in my Jeep and on the way to Cutchogue Green. I really didn’t like myself for even thinking that Emma Whitestone was in cahoots with Tobin and who knew who else. I mean, she had the entire staff of Whitestone Florist there to check out her new friend.

  On the other hand, when you wind up in the sack with a woman you just met, you have to wonder if it’s
your charm or her agenda. Still, it was I who sought her out, not vice versa. Where did I get her name? Margaret Wiley? No, I’d found it earlier in the Gordons’ Rolodex on Plum Island. All of these people seemed to be interconnected. Maybe Margaret was in on it. Maybe the entire adult population of the North Fork was in on it and I was the only outsider. I mean, it was like one of those creepy horror flicks where the whole village is witches and warlocks, and this clueless tourist shows up and before long, he’s dinner.

  I drove into the small parking lot of the historical society mansion. There was no florist van there, but there was a ten-year-old Ford in the lot.

  I left the chamber pot on the rear seat, thinking this might not be an appropriate time to present it. Perhaps after dinner.

  Anyway, I went to the front door, and there was another Post-it note that said simply, “Enter.”

  So I did. Inside the big foyer, I called out, “Emma!” No answer. I walked through the various rooms of the large house and called out again, “Emma!” No answer. It seemed inconceivable that she’d unlock the door and leave the house with all these antiques around.

  I went to the foot of the stairs and called out again, but no answer. It occurred to me that she could be on the potty, and I shouldn’t be calling out to her. If she had waited, she could have used her gift.

  Anyway, I began climbing the stairs, which were creaky. I’m not saying I would have liked to have had my gun, but I would have liked to have had my gun.

  So, I got to the top of the stairs and listened. No sound except the sound a creaky old house makes. I decided to go into the upstairs parlor, which was halfway down the long hallway.

  I tried to walk without making the damned floorboards creak, but every step made them squeak and moan.

  I got to the door that led to the parlor. It was closed, and I swung it open. The damned hinges absolutely squealed. Jeez.

  I stepped inside, and from behind the half-open door, there was a scream. I turned quickly, and Emma lunged at me with a sword and stuck it in my gut. She yelled, “Take that, you blackhearted pirate.”