1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1

by Frederick Ramsay

  Ike waited for her in the little house by her father’s swimming pool for four hours, surrounded by damp towels and the smell of chlorine. When the sun rose, he went home, humiliated. He had barely talked to her since.

  ***

  “It’s not important, Marge, not anymore.”

  “Oh, but it is. I almost came, Ike. I got home, went upstairs, and waited in the dark until everyone was asleep. I even went so far as to change into the right clothes, or what I thought would be the right clothes. I wore a sundress that was held up with elastic so all I had to do was let you pull it over my head and, bingo. Oh Lordy, I wanted you—the way kids want…whew. You never recapture that first one. It seems like you’ll die if you don’t get it.”

  “What happened?” he said, remembering his own ache.

  “I got cold feet. It took a long time for my parents to go to bed. They were arguing about something, me, I think. The longer it took, the more I thought about what I was about to do, and the more hopeless it seemed. I couldn’t marry you. My life was all planned for me, college, and then George. I just couldn’t say, ‘No, I won’t do that. I’m going to marry Ike Schwartz someday.’ Don’t you see, Ike? That’s the way we were brought up. Kids in the city discovered the sexual revolution early, but out here…you only went ‘all the way’ with the guy you were going to marry, and I couldn’t marry a…Daddy would never permit me to marry a—”

  “Jew?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I was seventeen, for God’s sake. I didn’t know anything. For what it is worth, that’s the only time in my life I ever committed an anti-Semitic act.”

  Ike gave her a crooked grin. Here were two near middle-aged people reliving an aborted love affair over two decades old and so much a product of full moons and new hormones as to be laughable, but neither laughed.

  “I cried all that night, and most of the next month. Then we went away for the summer and I forgot, almost. When I got back, you were off to Harvard, and I never saw you again until three years ago. But I still remember. I hurt you, and now I want to say it. Ike, I’m sorry.”

  “So am I, Marge, so am I. You did the right thing, you know. Maybe not for the right reasons, but you were right, it would have never worked.”

  “That’s the awful part, Ike. You know what my father told me on my wedding night? He said that Georgie was a nice boy and he hoped I’d be happy, but he’d always hoped I would hook up with you. Sweet Jesus, all those years, I thought I was acting out what he wanted, following his plan, because Daddy always knew what was best, and I blew it. He liked you and I never knew. I wasn’t living out his plan at all. He didn’t have one. I was living out my own. I didn’t even know my father well enough to know what he wanted or didn’t want, what he liked or didn’t like. And I found that out on my wedding night.”

  “Even so, Marge, it wouldn’t have worked. I was not going to live out my father’s plans for me, and I was not going to come home or have anything to do with it. I would have hurt you sooner or later. But I will tell you one thing, I have thought about that night often, and what might have been.”

  “Me too. Still do, as a matter of fact. You won’t tell George, will you?”

  Ike grinned. “How is George, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s just fine. He does what all his bank buddies do, play golf and go to important meetings.”

  “And the Carousel Motel?”

  “Just rumors, Ike, just rumors.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ike sat in his office and stared through the glass panel at the room that served as police headquarters. Six o’clock. Essie gone for the day. The press corps, reluctant to cover a story that seemed to be going nowhere, had decamped to Roanoke where a gruesome murder story took front and center. Ike had no illusions—they’d be back, but for the moment he had some peace.

  Billy had the three to eleven shift and sat in front of the radio transmitter reading Playboy. Saturday night. Things would get busy in five or six hours when paychecks were converted into beer or shooters, when kids in pickup trucks began to miss turns in the road, when college students with more money than sense began to tear through town on their way to God only knew where. But now things were quiet.

  Ike picked up the phone and dialed information.

  “What state, please?”

  “The District of Columbia.”

  “What listing?”

  “I want the number of a bar in Georgetown, O’Rourke’s.”

  “Thank you, just a moment.”

  Ike waited, picked up the pencil, jotted down the number, and hung up. Six-o-five. Charlie had said between six and seven. Ike decided to wait until six-thirty, twenty-five minutes away—time to have a quick beer, read the paper, work a crossword puzzle, or call Ruth. Instead, he sat and stared at the glass partition thinking.

  For three years, he’d enjoyed the luxury of quiet anonymity, and a career as sheriff away from all of it. Now, the whole world beamed in on him. Television crews from the national networks set up at the college. Stringers from all the major dailies were ensconced in Picketsville’s only hotel. The curious, the morbid, and people seeking a peripheral role in history arrived hourly to this little backwash of a town, filling its motels, boosting its economy, and annoying its inhabitants. The town’s only prior claim to notoriety was a very messy lynching of an African-American man accused, but never tried or convicted, of raping the lieutenant governor’s daughter. That was seventy years ago. The lynching had been given wide publicity. The discovery two days later that the girl had not been raped, indeed medical evidence proclaimed her virginity intact, had been buried with the shipping news, and the whole incident had not created half the coverage the robbery had.

  On the whole, he preferred the attention the town received now, but wished it had happened before, or later, or somewhere else to someone else. He had picked this hiding place so well. Who would have known he’d be found so quickly? Well, he couldn’t do anything about it now. Maybe, when it ended, the last picture taken, everyone would go away and leave him alone. Of course, if the case weren’t solved…my God, he thought, they might never let me go.

  Work it out. What? How? Who—it had to be someone inside. The Board decided to move the collection eleven days before the robbery—a coincidence? Not likely. The best time to pull this kind of job would be July or August, the Fourth of July, when nobody was around, students gone for the summer, police distracted by traffic jams, fireworks, accidents, entire families off to the beach, backyard barbeques, people asleep, not watching. Why do it now? All wrong, students coming and going—parked in the lane, a Thursday night, the slowest night for police. Too many things could go wrong, so why now?

  Because someone knew and they had to move the time up. What else?

  The locksmithing job rated as a work of art. Only a group with access to tradecraft could have planned and executed a job like this one. The Agency, the Bureau, the Mafia, or maybe one or two of the other private groups he’d run into from time to time, groups operated by large corporations with financial interests and assets more widespread and substantial than the government itself.

  They knew the collection was going to New York and it would be difficult if not impossible to steal it there. They knew, so someone told them. The board members and the people at the Dillon Foundation knew before the robbery. But they would be the last to engineer this, or would they? Why? Check the financial status of Dillon and the whole Dillon enterprise. Who else? Marge Tice? Ex-president Clough, the guy from New York? Maybe. Better check his background. And there was Ruth. Would she? Was some of that old radical, anti-authority dynamic still at play? What a mess. And where are the paintings now? If he could just recover them, it wouldn’t matter who stole them. Let the FBI track them down. If the paintings were back, he’d be left alone.

  Six twenty-five. Ike dialed the number for O’Rour
ke’s. On the twelfth ring, a voice with a false shanty Irish brogue answered. Ike asked to speak to Elwood Farnham. Forty seconds later, he heard Charlie’s voice recite another number and say, “Gimme a minute,” then, click, the line went dead.

  Ike hung up, waited sixty seconds, and dialed the new number. Charlie answered on the first ring.

  “You’re very prompt, Ike. I’m glad you remembered.”

  “Charlie, the whole business was schoolboy simple: you give me a name, a place, and a number. Six or seven days means today between six and seven—six or seven weeks means next week, same day same time and so on. Even if I had forgotten, I could have figured it out. And if I could, anyone could. Aren’t you worried someone will?”

  “With my job, who’d want to?”

  “You’ve got a point. Maybe a newspaper guy would like to catch you before a press conference or something. Why are we doing this, anyway?”

  “Ike, trust me. I needed to keep this conversation off the phone log and away from any possible monitor. You remember the drill—all phones in the Agency are monitored from time to time, and I need to talk to you. It’s important and I couldn’t get to you before. But now you need me and I need you. We can deal. I have information and a name for you, but you will have to tell me things first. And speak up, I’m on a phone outside O’Rourke’s and you remember what Georgetown’s like on Saturday night.”

  “Charlie, I will never understand you. It must be the copper absorbed into your system from your penny loafers that makes people like you go mad. What do you want me to tell you?”

  “I need to know about Zurich, one step at a time, exactly as it happened.”

  Ike paused and considered. It made no sense. Why would Charlie want to know or care what happened in Zurich?

  “That’s the deal, Ike. I help you with your robbery, you give me the story. Don’t ask why, please. That comes later, if ever. Just talk to me.”

  Could he? He’d managed to suppress the images and pain for years. Why open it up now? Ike drew a breath and began, slowly at first and then more rapidly. He concentrated on the details, the technology, the precise sequence of events. As the words flowed he carefully pushed back the images, the sweaty little man, the blood and Eloise…. Someday, he thought, I will tell the whole story, but not now. Now it’s just facts. He forced himself to remember sounds, who said what, and when. Charlie listened, interrupting only twice; once to ask him to repeat the part about Peter Hotchkiss’ phone call, and then to ask if he were sure about the number of shots.

  “Two. You’re sure it was two?”

  “I’m sure. An SKS or an old Kalishnikov, maybe an AK47. Charlie, no mistake. Two.”

  When he finished, Charlie only said, “Thanks, that’s a help.”

  Help for what, Ike wondered. By now enough time had passed for it to cease being a public relations problem.

  “Okay, Charlie, your turn. What have you got for me?”

  “Two shots and a clean hit, a perfect hit. That’s interesting; Hotchkiss calls and then—one, two.”

  “Charlie, we have a deal. Tell me what you know about this robbery.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry. I was just wondering. I will need to talk to you again, Ike. When you’re all done with your robbery, promise me something…you’ll meet me in Washington, and go through some of this again. I’ll send you an address and we’ll meet.”

  “Sure, after the robbery is taken care of and if you don’t start talking to me about it, that could be sometime after I start drawing Social Security.”

  “Right, but remember, you promised.” He paused. “The problem you put to me was: who was available to do some professional, very professional, locksmithing. There are, or to be accurate, were, three possibilities. In order of likelihood, George Smythe from Great Britain, Achmed Harreem from Syria, and a new one, a guy named Grafton, Harold Grafton. He’s local. Smythe was my first choice because he could enter the country and mix in almost unnoticed. Harreem, on the other hand, would stick out like a sore thumb. We are a little sensitive about Middle Eastern passengers on our airlines. But Smythe is out, he got picked up for, of all things, too many traffic violations, and an English magistrate decided to make an example of scofflaws. So Smythe, a movie starlet, and a member of parliament were all spending fifteen days in the slammer when the job was pulled.

  “That leaves Harreem or Grafton. Grafton used to be one of ours, or, more exactly, the Bureau’s, a good one from what I hear. Things went sour for him a couple of years back, when his wife got that slow-to-kill cancer. Grafton ran out of money to pay medical bills, started to booze pretty bad. Then his work started to slip a little and he got into some kind of fight with his bosses. Anyway, four months ago he got sacked at the Bureau, and his kids were snatched by the wife’s parents and trucked off to Chicago, North Side somewhere. Two weeks ago his wife died and he disappeared, told his landlady he was going camping in the mountains. He paid his back rent in cash and took off. I think he could be your man.”

  “Any description, Charlie? I got a make on a guy, maybe five ten, graying curly hair, blue eyes, and class ring with a green stone, right ring finger. He may go one seventy-five—no, closer to one sixty-five with one of those faces that looks like was living on coffee and cigarettes, but not bad-looking.”

  “Sounds like our man, but I hope not. I hear he’s good even when he’s drunk, and the Agency could use someone like him. You know Crotty bought it in Istanbul?”

  “No, I didn’t. Tough.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve been trying to get this Grafton guy to replace Crotty, but we can’t find him. The Adirondacks is a big place. We’re waiting for him to come out, unless, of course, he’s mixed up in this.”

  “Yeah, sure, the Agency worries about that stuff. You guys would hire Jack the Ripper if you needed him and wouldn’t care a rat’s rear end what he’d done before or did after you’re done with him.”

  “Now, Ike, you’re not serious. We sometimes contract with specialists but—”

  “Like the Mafioso when we wanted to snuff Castro?”

  “Now, you know nothing ever came of that. It was just an idea, a little conversation, which leads me to part two. They’re involved in this somehow.”

  “Who? The Mafia or Castro?”

  “I can’t be sure but it sounds like the guys doing this job are contract professionals, and that means the Mafia directly or indirectly. I can’t tell you for sure, but whoever is behind the job didn’t do it themselves. They bought talent from New Jersey.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. Anything else?”

  “Well, if you can get us Grafton.…”

  “You want him that bad?”

  “The boss wants him. Since Crotty died, we are pinched. Something must be cooking, something big—the director pulled out all the stops to find him.”

  The new director was a man of unremitting honesty and surprising modesty, who possessed no political skills whatsoever. Given these characteristics, it was problematical how long he’d stay in office. Whatever negative feelings Ike had for the Agency, he liked and admired its director.

  “Charlie, I don’t think I can do much, but I’ll try. Is that good enough?”

  “It’ll have to be. I’ll send you some stuff to give him and tell him if he’s available. Thanks, and if anything else turns up, I’ll be in touch. By the way, how do I do that?”

  “Pick up the phone and call.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, down here we just talk to each other—no codes or instructions to call out-of-the-way bars or use funny, made-up names. Just pick up the phone and say, ‘Ike, this is Charlie, I’ve got some information for you.’”

  “I can’t do it, Ike. It would ruin the image I’ve been working on for almost twenty years. Tell you what, I’ll call and say I’m Elwood Farnum, which will mean it�
�s urgent. If you can’t talk, or you just get a message, you call O’Rourke’s. If I say, ‘It’s me, Charlie,’ then there’s no rush and you call me at the office. Okay?”

  “Charlie, you are nuts. By the way, I need a picture. Can you send me a picture of Grafton?”

  “Sure, I’ll e-mail it to you. You do get e-mail out there?”

  “Sheriff,” Ike rattled off, “at Picketsville dot gov. By the way, who is Elwood Farnum anyway?”

  “Can’t say, read it on a Christmas card my sister got last year. Liked the name. Has a nice nasal quality to it—Farnum, lovely. Be talking to you.” The phone went dead.

  Ike wrote Essie instructions to make copies of the picture, but to remove any indication of its source or the person’s name, and give them to the team. Then, with time on his hands, Ike sat and took inventory: contract professionals, murder, possible kidnapping, possible Mafia, a rogue FBI man, and not a clue why the job was done. Who would steal five hundred million dollars in traceable, unsellable artwork? And for what? I am missing something, something important, but what? The phone’s ringing broke his train of thought.

  “Ike, it’s Ruth, I think you’d better come out here now.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ike scanned the letter twice, an indistinguishable product of computer-generated word processing. The message, exclusive of its political rhetoric, was simple and straightforward: fifty million dollars in diamonds, none to exceed two carats in weight, were to be paid to the New Jihad as ransom for the stolen art work. A representative of the Dillon family, M. Armand Dillon himself, preferably, was to buy time on a specified local television station, agree to the terms and apologize for the role his company played in the oppression of the poor of the world. A second sheet of paper—this one was fuschia—bore a message from the New Jihad—a hate-filled anti-American, anti-Semitic tirade that ended in calling for the downfall of the “Great Satan of the West and its Jewish lackeys.”