I said, “You’ve got a point. I shouldn’t be standing here wasting time.”
The man said, “Hah! Cops”-I was watching the way he held the gaff-“they sell coffee and doughnuts uptown at the 7-Eleven.”
“Probably my next stop-once you’re gone.”
“Uh-huh, now you’re tellin’ me to leave. I’m fifth-generation Bonnacker. My people killed whales on this beach.”
I said, “Virgil, if I ever hear anything about your daughter, I’ll find a way to get in touch. I’ll let you know, okay?”
The man appeared to sag. I had robbed him of his anger. “You cops, you think you know so much. Let me tell you something about them Tomlinsons. They’re evil. Big brains and dried-up hearts. You know how the old man made his fortune?”
I did, but he didn’t expect an answer.
“It’s blood money. Three generations fed on it. Everything crazy all rolled into one family, that’s the Tomlinsons. I should know. I worked for those sonuvabitches. When one of them murdered my Annie, they gave me a month’s bonus and fired me after they was all safe, gone back to Florida for winter.”
17
Tomlinson’s brother, Norvin, had been a member of an elite secret fraternity, Skull and Bones, at Yale. Tomlinson hadn’t volunteered the information, which irritated me. I knew because of things I saw in Norvin’s room.
Tomlinson pretended not to hear me say, “I’ve read that Skull and Bones stole Geronimo’s skull. Pancho Villa’s, too. They have a place off campus, not a typical frat house, called the Tomb. Some say they still have the skulls.”
I was looking at a photograph of fifteen young men standing in front of a grandfather clock. Norvin Tomlinson was near the center. The family resemblance was eerie. Norvin was a little taller, with short pale hair, but the haunted eyes were familiar. The brothers had the same look of sinew, bone and muscle.
Norvin was near the fraternity banner, which I recognized. It was similar to a Masonic symbol I had seen on rings: a primitive skull and crossbones, the lower jaw of the skull missing. The number 322 was prominent.
My uncle had been a Freemason, as was Hooker Montbard. He wore an antique Skull and Bones ring. It was Hooker’s interest in Masonry and the Knights Templar that had fired his conviction that artifacts from the Crusades were somewhere in the jungles of South America.
I stood, looking at the photo, until Tomlinson finally had no choice but to comment.
“That was Norvin’s senior year at Yale. It’s a weird fraternity, but our father was so stoked he bought Norry an MG convertible when he was tapped.”
“Tapped?”
“Chosen. Members of Skull and Bones are considered chosen people. I didn’t realize it’s such a huge deal until later, because Norry’s best friend was tapped the same year.”
Tomlinson pointed to one of the men in the photo. It was Nelson Myles, he said, the man who owned Shelter Point. I now understood the horse trainer’s reaction.
“They were our neighbors practically, that’s why I took it for granted being tapped. It seemed common. But it’s not.”
I turned to him. “You don’t think I’ve heard of Skull and Bones? Why didn’t you tell me your brother was a member?”
“I didn’t think it was important.”
I said, “Hey, old buddy, it’s me.”
His smile was a mix of chagrin and admission. “Sorry. I’ve got a problem with power, you know that. The Bonesmen scare the hell out of me. That fraternity produced how many presidents and vice presidents? A couple of Supreme Court justices and at least two directors of the Central Intelligence Agency. In almost two hundred years, no Bonesman has ever gone public with the fraternity’s secrets. Do you have any idea how much power they have?”
Fifteen minutes earlier, I had heard Virgil Sylvester say something similar about the Hamptons.
“But, hey, I did tell you I’m pretty sure Norvin was recruited by the CIA. It was almost the same as telling you.”
Sort of. Skull and Bones is a favorite of conspiracy kooks. The fraternity’s tradition of secrecy invites wild theories, but so do the few known facts. The OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was founded by Ivy League graduates. Most, if not all, Bonesmen are offered interviews by the various intelligence agencies. The amount of wealth and power the fraternity wields is remarkably disproportionate to its tiny membership.
Even so, the theories are ridiculous. I don’t believe that secret societies hatch international plots, for the same reason I don’t use comic books as research material. When I meet more than three people who can keep a secret when their lives aren’t on the line, I’ll starting giving conspiracy theories another look.
Tomlinson said, “They recruited us heavy back at Harvard, too, of course, spook agencies. Thank God I couldn’t remember my Social Security number or they might have hired me full-time instead of just cashing in on my special skills. But you know about that.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know.” Tomlinson’s credentials to lecture on clairvoyance were better than most. He had participated in a program called Stargate by its many critics. The Pentagon preferred Asymmetrical Intelligence Gathering Research, and funded the study after discovering the Soviets were recruiting telepathic savants to work as “psychic spies.”
This wasn’t conspiracy theory fantasy, it was documented fact.
My friends in the intelligence community had confirmed that Tomlinson turned in one of the highest scores ever recorded on what must have been a bizarre test used to cull prospects.
We were in Norvin’s room-an apartment, really. One of several in the family’s thirty-room “summer residence.” The place had been built during the days of mustang capitalism, back when the Du Ponts, Rockefellers and Kennedys were making their fortunes.
Tomlinson had introduced me to the family maid, Greta Finnmark, now one of the caretakers. Good-looking older woman, blondish and busty, with Nordic eyes and a Nordic accent, who had to have been a knockout in her day. She slipped her arm through Tomlinson’s, cooing and smiling, saying, “Guards, my dear sweet boy, it is so good to have you home!”
Guards, short for Guardian -her strange pet name for Sighurdhr.
“Because, even as a child, he was always looking after people, trying to raise their spirits if they were sad,” she explained to me. Sincere, too, because she didn’t get it when I replied, “Oh, yeah, he’s a regular Boy Scout. Still raising everything he can.”
Greta led us through the restaurant-sized kitchen, then turned us loose in the first of two great halls. The furniture was covered with tarps, and it was cold as a cave. Greta had confirmed that the main house was rented each summer, then closed in the off-season.
“The rent charged by your family’s trust company is incredible!,” she had said. “For the same money, you could buy a house most places. But they pay. Oh yes, the rich people from New York, they wait in line to pay!”
There was a grand piano near the fireplace. Tomlinson tossed back the cover and played the first plaintive notes of “Clair de Lune” before he noticed that I was staring at a painting over the mantle. It had to be his great-grandfather, the man who’d built the estate. Remove the tux, add a decade of tropic seas, taverns, midnight water, rock ’n’ roll plus salt-bleached hair, and it was Tomlinson.
I wasn’t surprised when my pal stood and motioned me along, saying, “Speak of the devil, huh? Say good-bye to Hank-friendly name for a cold-hearted genius.”
“That was your father’s name, wasn’t it?”
“No, Dad’s name was Hank, as in Hank. The old man’s name was Hank, as in Henry. I told you how he made his dough. Blood money, which is why I’ll never take a cent of it.”
There it was again.
During World War I, the elder Tomlinson had made a fortune off of royalties from a couple of patents. Something to do with a synchronizing device that allowed airplanes to fire machine guns through spinning propellers.
I had read that the invention had changed the course of the war-m
aybe history-and accounted for huge kill ratios. In that war alone, the invention had facilitated many thousands of deaths.
From the great hall, Tomlinson led me to the west wing, which was sealed by massive doors. He was perturbed they were locked. “It’s the only modern section of the house, if you catch my meaning. There’s a five-car garage, so if anyone’s around…” I didn’t hear the rest because he jogged back to the kitchen for the key. But Greta said she didn’t have it.
“She’s got keys,” Tomlinson told me as I followed him outside, “but she can’t let me use them. It’s the same reason she pretends not to know anything about my brother or father. She’s scared.”
I said, “If her job’s on the line, can you blame her?”
“For sure. I loved that lady, man. With a rack like that, who wouldn’t? She was my wet nurse.”
I said, “Huh?”
He wagged his eyebrows- End of subject -before saying, “If there’s a trust company running the place, it means my father’s still alive. Hell, he could be on the property right now and she’d be a fool to tell me. Or my brother could be holed up here. Fifteen acres-there used to be anyway-including two guesthouses, staff cottages and a machine shop the size of a barn.
“Old Hank would crap his burial skivvies if he knew the place was being rented. Commoners? Yuppies? God forbid, a Protestant. Damn, I should’ve brought a flashlight. But you’ve got one, I bet. The ultimate flashlight snob.”
I said, “I do, and you might be right,” as I took a mini ASP Triad from my pocket. Palm-sized, but it fired a beam so bright it was considered dangerous. I shined it through a garage window. Empty. Next, we went to the machine shop. It was a museum piece of 1890s technology. Industrial lathes, metal stock, instruments for precise threading and tolerances. Both guesthouses were locked, no sign of activity through the windows.
In a wooded area was a cabin where Tomlinson said he’d often slept on summer nights. I watched him stand on tiptoes, feeling along an overhead beam, until he said, “I’ll be damned,” then showed me what looked like a Wonder Bread bag twisted into a knot. Inside were two brittle Trojan packets and a rusted harmonica. Unfortunately, the harmonica still worked.
Outside was a faded outline of a catcher painted on the wall. Sixty feet six inches away was an indentation where there had once been a pitching rubber. Tomlinson stopped blowing on the harmonica long enough to tell me, “Fifty to a hundred pitches a day,” then showed me where his first and only dog, Elvis, a springer spaniel, was buried.
He was right, the estate was huge, at one time a self-sufficient village. It would take a full day to search the place.
We returned to the main house. As I followed Tomlinson up a winding staircase, I said, “When you told me rich, I had no idea,” hoping he’d put the damn harmonica away if I kept him talking.
He clomped up the steps, eyes sweeping over familiar details. “The only difference between doves and pigeons is where they crap. I was one of the fortunate ones-materialism sucks if you’ve had everything. Plus, my old man made us get jobs, so I learned at an early age that employment sucks, too. I didn’t choose to be a boat bum, God chose me. He replaced my thirst for status with a thirst for beer. It’s a calling, sort of like religion or drug exploration.”
He still had his sense of humor, and the harmonica was in his pocket. Good.
We’d reached the fourth floor. There was another door, this one sealed with a steel bar used as a dead bolt. Greta had told us only the first three floors were used by renters. The top floors were family storage.
I said, “If it’s okay, I think I can get in,” then took out a tiny restraint cutter. As I worked on the top bolt, I asked Tomlinson what it was like to return after almost twenty years.
“Weird, man. But it could get weirder if the old digs haven’t changed. My room was on the fourth floor, Norry’s on the fifth. It matched his elevated opinion of himself. What’s the antonym for identical twins? Mirror opposites? That works. Never once did I see him shed a tear. Farting was as close as he came to showing emotion. He was a mathematical wizard. And talk about a damn know-it-all!”
I said, “I’m convinced. As different as night and day, you and your brother. Know-it-alls get tiresome quick.”
“Okay, okay, but he was obsessive, too. You’ll see, if his room’s the same.”
It was. Library shelves alphabetized. Model cars and airplanes, a ’68 Corvette fastback, surfer blue I wanted to touch but the place was too much like a museum. Trophies for chess, basketball and… golf. Tomlinson gave me a knowing look before I leaned to inspect a bag of clubs.
“Is the nine iron still missing?”
I checked again. “No. Just the cover.”
He nodded slowly, thinking about it but not surprised. “My mother was still alive then. That woman would have gone to the gallows for Norvin. But me? She threatened adoption after my first arrest for possession. On the phone, I said, ‘Mother, I chose LSD, not IBM. Think of it as a business trip.’ She didn’t think it was funny either. What’s funnier is how some parents say they don’t have favorites.”
I smiled but was picturing something else, the mother sneaking in to replace the nine iron. If true, a young girl’s death had taken seed in this space, a room that was more like a shrine.
Virgil Sylvester’s bitterness was not misplaced.
Put her head on a tee, he had said. A commercial fisherman, not a golfer. Or were rules about using tees different in the Hamptons?
I looked at Tomlinson, who wasn’t smiling now. I didn’t ask.
After finding the Yale photo, I began picking out other mementos associated with Skull and Bones. Miniature death’s-heads, a map of Deer Island-Bonesmen owned the place, supposedly. There were also caricatures of a flat-faced Indian holding a Winchester: Geronimo.
Tomlinson told me he’d heard the same thing: Bonesmen had stolen Geronimo’s skull from an Apache cemetery out west and kept it locked away in their Tomb stronghold.
“We got into a big fight after I jumped Norry’s case about it. It was just after he’d joined. You know me, simpatico with the Skins. I kept pushing, but he wouldn’t answer the question. Simple: Do you assholes have the great chief ’s skull?
“Some of the AIM founders, the American Indian Movement, they were like my brothers in those days. I did sweat lodges and the whole Ghost Dance thing. Four days, no food or water. Ate my first peyote button, which wasn’t part of the ceremony. Not smart, it turned out. Peyote on an empty stomach. Wow!
“Back then,” Tomlinson added, “I was an absurd adolescent only about ninety percent of the time. But there were moments of clarity.”
I was looking at lists of names in a trifold frame, as Tomlinson told me that his mother’s family and his father’s family all went to Yale. “When I chose Harvard, it was like I’d pissed on the flag… which I’d actually done, by the way.” He started to elaborate, then reconsidered. “No need for the nasty look. Shallow up, Doctor.”
“These are all Bonesmen?” I turned the frame so he could see it.
“The oldest to the newest, left to right. Every member of Skull and Bones since whenever the hell it started. Eighteen hundreds? You’ll find my father’s name and Norvin’s. Plus a surprise. It’ll jump out at you.”
The roster started with the class of 1838. The list was alphabetized. My eye slowed on familiar names. Four U.S. presidents. Lesser-known State Department and CIA icons: William Bundy; Richard Drain; Dino Pionzio, a CIA deputy chief; Winston Lord; William Draper, an early proponent of the United Nations.
Beside every name was a date, with one exception.
Henry A. Tomlinson. No date.
Tomlinson was looking over my shoulder. “Google it on the Internet. Type in ‘Skull and Bones membership list.’ It’ll come up the same way.”
“No date? I don’t get it.”
He shrugged, and picked up a bronze figurine of Geronimo. “No idea. We’ll never find out. It’s why they scare me. Part of the reason
I turned traitor. But Norvin joined the corporation. Every Bonesman gets a big chunk of money from an endowment… and one of those.” Tomlinson looked from the photo to an ornate grandfather clock in the corner. “They’ve got their fingers in everything, man. Oil, the military-industrial complex. The whole New World Order thing. Some people even believe they were behind the JFK assassination.”
I had been nodding patiently until then. Tomlinson is among the many educated, intelligent people I know who are willing to believe that world events are steered by sinister groups and secret alliances, but I have my limits.
I said, “Skull and Bones, it’s part of the great Right Wing Conspiracy. Or is it the Left Wing now? I can’t keep track.”
“Make fun if you want, but power attracts power, and power corrupts.”
“Yeah? I think there’s a genetic conspiracy that compels primates to believe in dragons and herd like dumbasses. Fraternity boys don’t participate in murder just because they share a secret handshake-especially after they’ve become successful adults.”
“I don’t know, man…” Tomlinson lost the thread as his eyes moved to the ceiling, the walls. “Norry will inherit this place if smack doesn’t kill him. He’s welcome to it-and all that bad juju that’s hooked to the package. I feel guilty saying that, Doc. Blood. .. family. They’re still in my heart, you know? I envy the ones who stay close, but it’s not my karma. Some people are born alone. I was. You were, too.”
His lips were pursed as he stared at the figurine. “I knew the girl who disappeared. She was sweet. She had a pale violet aura: poetic. Her family worked for us. To hurt someone defenseless. To take a club and…” He grimaced. “I don’t want to think my brother could do something so… vile. Or my dad. We never got along, but he’s my dad, man.”
I said, “It could have been someone else. Or maybe it didn’t happen the way you think. Her body wasn’t found, no charges filed.”
“I’d like to believe that, but I don’t know.” He sat on the bed. “It took a while after the girl was murdered, but they both flipped out. Dad went to the Amazon to study fossils and never came back… that I know of. Norry went to Indonesia to study Islam but found the Poppy God instead. Running from their consciences. I think.”
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