7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7

by Frederick Ramsay

  “What’s new, Frank?”

  “Nothing changes. Amos Wickwire has taken up permanent residency, it seems. The mayor, we assume, is convinced you will return and he will catch you using public, that is to say, police equipment to work your private case.”

  “Poor Amos. It can’t be easy working for the mayor in an election year. Anything else?”

  “It appears our suicide, isn’t. The ME says he died of asphyxia, all right, but not carbon monoxide intoxication. He surmises that the man was hit on the head and then smothered somehow. Plastic bag, maybe. After that he was dumped in the van. The suicide is a setup.”

  “The dead man, who is he again?”

  “Worker from up at Callend, general duties, janitorial, I think. We’re still checking. We’re looking into his background now. His name is Marty Duffy. He arrived about the time the school underwent the merger to become a university. He rents in the trailer park, we think. We’ll find out more soon enough. Also, I’ve had a number of calls about the Comcast truck in the alley behind the stores near Lee Henry’s back door. Do I need to worry about that?”

  “Nope. I hear Lee is installing Internet and TV for her customers. Maybe she’ll put in a coffee bar too.”

  “Great. One last thing, and you are not going to like this. Essie and Billy have been snooping around Jack Burns. I had a call or two from his campaign people wanting to know who authorized the Sheriff’s Office to stalk their candidate. They threatened to call the Fair Election Committee and file a formal complaint.”

  “It’s my fault. I told them if they could connect Burns to a truck and so on, I’d consider Essie’s idea. Tell those two to cool it. I have enough tsouris at the moment and Burns may be a bad candidate for sheriff, but he is not a good one for attempted murder.”

  “I know, but there is one little problem the two of them turned up. He has no alibi for Sunday night and his cousin owns a platform truck like the one in the video.”

  “That’s not good, but still doesn’t move him into the picture. Did Grace turn up anything useful on Ruth’s cell phone?”

  “The caller used a store-bought throwaway, but she says she’s not done with it. Something about backtracking and matching a signal to other calls, locations, triangulation, or something.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Frank left to return to the office to work on his suicide/murder, and to ignore Amos Wickwire. He had to tell Essie and his brother to leave Jack Burns alone, at least for now. They were not happy.

  Ike and Charlie finished eating and made their way to Lee Henry’s Cuttery and Style. They announced their presence, and retreated through the back door to the ersatz Comcast van. A young man Charlie introduced as Travis Blasingame sat staring at the bank of computer screens and attacking a keyboard. Ike could only guess what all that activity meant, but no games appeared on any of the flat panel monitors.

  “Travis, are we ready?”

  “In a minute, Mr. Garland. I need to sync these two programs so that if one gets a hit, the other won’t keep searching for the same person.”

  “Ike, you have some additional lists and papers. Tell Travis how you wish to proceed.”

  Ike handed him the flash drive Karl had given him, the folder he’d received from Agnes, and the items forwarded to him from the Secretary of Education’s Office.

  “There are a lot of names there, Travis. Too many names for us to handle easily, and there are duplicates that may or may not be obvious at first glance or may only seem to be the same person. I want you to merge all of them into one comprehensive list. When you’ve done that, apply two or three discriminators to reduce the number of people we need to look at closely.”

  “No problem. Give me an hour to input all this and then I can start culling through the list. What discriminators do you want to use?”

  “Okay. First, a prior history of violence, record of arrests, particularly at demonstrations, appearance on a police blotter somewhere, that sort of thing. After that, any time they may have spent in any form of law enforcement.” Travis eyebrows shot up. “I think whoever drove the truck knew something about apprehending a vehicle during a chase. Third, their proximity to Washington, DC. I am assuming for this first cut through the data, that the person driving the truck lived nearby, within a few hundred miles at least. I know some of the more vocal opponents to the committee’s work will be found in places like Texas and Idaho, but the guy was driving a truck. That is not an easy vehicle to escape in, nor an easy one to acquire for a one-time use.”

  “How about we also look for stolen trucks, dark, older Silverados to be precise,” Charlie suggested.

  “Yes, in the greater DC area. That should include Northern Virginia, Maryland, the south Philadelphia area, and perhaps even as far as the Eastern Shore.”

  “Can do,” Travis said and began typing faster than before. “I’ll be awhile. You can wait here as the stuff begins to appear on the screen or go get a coffee somewhere. If you do, bring me one back.”

  “There’s no coffee pot in this luxury home?”

  “Could be but with the doors shut, and in spite of the filtered air, the aroma can get pretty overpowering, so no, no coffee pot.”

  “Lee has got a whole kitchen setup, coffee, pastry, and so on. You should feel free to step in there if you need to. Oh, and restrooms, too.”

  “Thanks, that’s a relief, or will be.”

  Charlie said he had some calls to make and would stay in the van. Ike decided to head to the hospital. He stepped out of the van and closed the double doors.

  ***

  After the doors closed on Ike, Charlie began to work his way through the backlog of calls on his phone. The fact that the director had turned him loose to help Ike did not mean the rest of his projects could be ignored, or that they ceased creating difficulties. Most of them were delicate in the extreme and time-critical, and he couldn’t simply drop them. He stayed with it for a half hour and then closed the phone.

  “Travis, how about that coffee? If you’d like, I’ll check out the kitchen Ike described and fetch you one. Or you could take ten minutes and join me. Either way, I’m headed to the restroom.”

  “Sure thing. Give me a minute here first, though. There’s something I think you need to see.”

  Charlie rolled his chair down the narrow aisle and sat next to Travis, who touched the screen with the eraser end of a pencil.

  “See those names?”

  Charlie squinted at the list of four names Travis had isolated from the rest.

  “I think they’re ours.”

  “Oh, crap. You’re sure?”

  “I cross-checked them with our database, Mr. Garland. I’m pretty sure they are. Why are they on these lists?” Charlie tapped his foot and stared at the screen.

  “I can think of four possibilities, only one of which is good. We put them there and the FBI doesn’t know, not good. We put them there and they do know, that’s the good one. We didn’t put them there and the FBI doesn’t know, very bad. Or we didn’t, and they do, very, very bad.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Hang on, I need to think about it for a second. Damn those FBI guys. Why…?”

  “I was wondering the same thing. If they were on the Bureau’s list and they know who they are, why didn’t they tell us right away?”

  “Indeed, why? You are young, Travis. If you stay with us for a while, you will learn that while the several investigative bodies the federal government maintains cooperate, they do not trust each other. The business of keeping the country safe may be the primary task of us all, but behind the smooth façade of interdepartmental good will lurks a nagging sense of distrust born of competition and ego.”

  “Competition? For what? Don’t we all want the same thing?”

  “Indeed. That is the on
e saving constant in the equation. But it is the variables that hurt us, chiefly competition. We compete for the president’s ear, we compete for funding. We compete for prestige, for flattering press coverage, all the accoutrements of power and position. There is only so much money to go around and every institution believes it must grow or die. Can you think of a single university that doesn’t believe it needs a new student center, gym, research laboratory, and then when it gets it is satisfied?”

  “No, sir, I can’t. So how does all that relate to this list?”

  “It depends on which of the four possibilities I mentioned before are in play. If the FBI knows, it has determined, I guess, that these people pose no threat to the country in spite of their appearance on a roster of some sort. But they also know that we may have some lists as well and assume some of their people may be on them. This list is their equalizer. If we out their guys without letting them in on it, which we might very well do, they will counter with these. It is all very juvenile but what can you expect from institutions built by bureaucrats and funded by politicians?”

  “I don’t know. So, what do I do with this bunch?”

  “Okay, I’m making an executive decision here. I do not believe those birds are in any way a part of what we’re looking for. I am hoping for option number two, but I could be wrong. And because they are ours, and because they have access to information and assets which makes wrecking a car in the middle of Washington a very easy undertaking, we will temporarily assume the worst. We will delete them from the main file and enter them in a separate one. You will treat that file identically as the big one, but you will not tell the sheriff what we are up to, unless or until one or the other of them surfaces as a real possibility. And, because they are uniquely positioned, they might have information we can use. I, on the other hand, will notify the director who will, no doubt schedule some serious face time with them. You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good, do that and then we’ll go get our coffee.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Eden Saint Clare maintained she married Ruth’s father because she caught him on the rebound. In truth he’d run out of patience with a wife who exhibited subclinical paranoia, chronic anger issues, and a tendency to spend beyond their means. Eden, then Paula Cline and an undergraduate student, caught his eye and, as they say, one thing led to another. All of which explained the closeness in the ages of mother and daughter. The first Dr. Harris, Ruth’s father, had lately succumbed to Alzheimer’s. Once he’d crossed over the line from which no coherent responses could reemerge, he refused to recognize his wife, and when she entered his room, would slip into anxiety attacks or mild violent behavior. On the doctor’s advice, Eden stopped visiting.

  Since she’d gone from adolescence to motherhood and faculty wife without the usual twenty-something pause at young adulthood, she determined she needed to correct that misstep and had reinvented herself, emerging from spa treatments, surgery, and dubious exotic therapies, as Eden Saint Clare.

  Her husband had by then taken up with a fellow Alzheimer’s sufferer who bore an uncanny resemblance to his first wife, and he currently resided in a constant care facility in Oak Park, Illinois. Not coincidently, the facility happened to be close to his spinster sister. As she never cared for her sister-in-law when she was Paula and detested her as Eden, there existed little or no communication between the two—a situation which suited both of them just fine.

  Eden finally accepted the sad fact the man she had loved and whose child she’d borne no longer existed. The shell that remained might resemble him in some ways, might have his voice, and bear his name, but it was no longer he. That man had packed his bags and gone to wherever people go when they aren’t dead, but aren’t alive either. The Catholic Church used to proclaim the existence of Limbo. Too bad they gave that up. It would have provided a comforting destination for so many families dealing with a need for relief from the guilt they dealt with daily because of their inability to care for their loved ones properly, as well as the uncertainty created by a real lack of closure.

  Eden had grieved her loss and had moved on, she insisted. Easier said than done. These thoughts and the pain that always accompanied them were on her mind as she sat at Ruth’s bedside stroking her hand and murmuring snippets of old memories.

  “You remember the time you decided to be a hippie, honey? You had that awful boyfriend who played a guitar and didn’t bathe. Your father nearly had a cow.”

  It had been a huge row at the time, the first time he’d actually yelled at her. He had a position to maintain, he’d said, and as her mother she should bring the girl to her senses, he’d said. Eden smiled at the memory. Could that have been the first sign of the disease that eventually overwhelmed an otherwise extraordinary intellect? Who knew?

  Ike slipped into the room.

  “Speaking of having a cow, here’s Ike, who probably will if he doesn’t slow down and relax.”

  “Nice to see you too, Eden.”

  “Ike, I have to leave for a few days. I have to fly to Chicago. There’s been a problem with Ruth’s father.”

  She lowered her voice so that Ruth could not hear. “His sister, that’s Ruth’s aunt Joan, is contesting the fact that I receive his university pension and Social Security. She claims that since she is now the primary caregiver, she should at least get the pension. She’s hired a sleazebag lawyer and I have to go to Chicago and set them straight. Also,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, “the Doc said he does not have much time left, so it’s important for the old bag to stick her paws in ASAP. I, on the other hand, need to make the arrangements for the eventual end to this sad story.”

  “Sorry to hear about all that. Do you have a good attorney? I went to school with a guy who practices out there and—”

  “No problem, Ike. When you are married to the Dean of a Law School, you get to know a lot of lawyers. I have whole firms at my disposal.”

  “Right. Leave me an address where I can reach you if there is a change.”

  She handed him a three-by-five card. “I’m way ahead of you. I’ll be here.”

  Ike glanced at the card and slipped it in his pocket.

  “Have to run, Honey,” Eden said, loud enough for Ruth to hear. “See you in a few. Ike will take care of you now.”

  Did he see her eyelid flicker again? Was anybody in there? He cleared his throat and decided he would read to her from the book she’d started but never finished when the two of them last spent a weekend in the mountains at his A-frame. Something easy and not overly stimulating, but entertaining enough to require the engagement of her faculties, assuming there were some on line—to make her think. He opened the book to the page marked with an envelope which also had a shopping list scrawled on it. They’d made chili that night…that night. He folded it and began to read.

  It had started innocently enough. A week after her sixtieth birthday, Darcie saw her cat savaged by her neighbor’s pit bull. The image seemed so real that she dashed into the back yard screaming at the dog’s owner. He, a glass of lemonade in one hand and a tattered copy of Agatha Christie’s A Holiday for Murder in the other, nearly fell out of his Pawley’s Island hammock at Darcie’s verbal onslaught. Cleopatra, the cat in question, watched all this with feline disinterest. Her neighbor, momentarily stunned, recovered and had some strong words for Darcie in return. Mixed in among them was the news that Jaws (the name of pit bull in question) had spent the day at the vet’s and had not yet returned. At that moment Cleopatra announced her presence by rubbing against Darcie’s legs. Abashed and thoroughly confused, she retreated to her kitchen and poured a bowl of milk for the cat.

  Ike flipped the book over to glance at the cover. Digby, it read. He did not recognize the author. He checked the inside and saw it was a collection of short stories. He continued to read as Darcie discovered she had been visited or cursed with
second sight and in the end had successfully shared some loot with a woman with whom she’d briefly shared a jail cell. The story line seemed a little thin but the O’Henry ending pretty much saved it. He thought that with the right actors and director, a decent little comedy-crime movie might be assembled along the lines of the classic Lavender Hill Mob. The cheerfulness these musings tried to force into his conscience faded, and darkness descended on his psyche again.

  He did not see any more movements in her eyes. He hoped she’d enjoyed the story. He’d probably never find out. He wondered if she would ever finish the book. That thought depressed him even more. He left before she sensed his mood, if indeed she could. He didn’t know how much she picked up, if anything.

  He wanted to hit something.

  ***

  Scott Fiske, Ph. D., didn’t often feel inadequate. Oh, sometimes one of the younger faculty with a brand new degree and a research grant in his back pocket triggered an old reflex and he got that sinking feeling, but he had conquered most of that and now he was on top. He’d managed to sidestep the difficulties he’d encountered in the past, learned to compensate for the gaps in his background, and as far as anyone knew, he could stand with any of them. Scott might be glib where others were thoughtful, but at his level, glibness had its positives—just check out the majority of the country’s elected officials. He talked a good game and thereby gave the illusion of competence. If you didn’t look too closely, he was what he pretended to be. And the truth of the matter was, he really did function ably in his current position. The great irony of the academic world is that the qualifications required to rise to the top in administration are not the skills one needs to function in those positions. Scholarly research and a long list of juried publications does not make one a good administrator. Scott lacked many of academe’s more conventional trappings, but he did know how to make things happen.