Under the Lake

by Stuart Woods

  In the meantime, he was making his own provisions, just in case.

  As soon as Bo had left the office, Scotty had begun to fidget. She had thought she’d be nervous with him, after the events of yesterday, but he’d been much the same as usual, though she thought she’d caught a trace of sadness about him. But now, she wanted Sally out, and Sally was taking her time about going to lunch.

  “Listen, Scotty, why don’t you go first?” Sally said. “I’m not real hungry yet.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’m going to have lunch today, Sally. I’ve still got a couple of pounds to go.”

  “Listen, you keep up that fasting stuff, and we’ll be scraping you off the floor again. I think you scared Bo half to death.”

  “No, no, I had a big breakfast this morning. You go ahead and eat.”

  Sally took what seemed like half an hour to check her makeup and brush off her dress, then finally left the office. Scotty waited until Mike was on the radio, then picked up some papers and went to the copying machine. She placed them on top of the machine and pressed the On button. When Mike was finishing his radio call, she turned her back to him and flipped the papers behind the machine.

  “Oh, dammit,” she shouted.

  Mike turned. “What’s the matter, Scotty?”

  “Oh, I’ve dropped some papers behind the copying machine, and you know what the thing weighs. Give me a hand, will you, Mike?”

  “Sure I will.” He came over and helped her wrestle it away from the wall.

  “Just a couple of more inches, and I’ll be able to get behind it,” Scotty said. The gap opened; she wedged herself around the machine and recovered both the papers she had deliberately dropped and the lost ledger sheet of Bo’s. She shuffled them together to conceal the green paper among the others. “Got ‘em. Thanks, Mike.” Together, they moved the heavy machine back into place.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that sort of shoving, Scotty,” Mike said. “You might not be recovered yet.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, thanks. I am a little hungry, though. And I was going to skip lunch.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should do that.”

  “Tell you what,” she said, brightly. “I’ll split a pizza with you.”

  “Hey, you really are hungry.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on the radio, if you’ll go get it.”

  “Sure.” Mike put on his hat and left.

  “Anything but anchovies,” she called after him. Scotty ran for her purse, got the filing cabinet key, threw herself at the thing, and got it open. She pulled out the miscellaneous file, removed the other five green ledger sheets, made sure they were in the proper order, added the sixth sheet, and started to replace them in the file. They stuck halfway in. She ran her fingers between the pages to push aside the obstruction, and they met something small and thick. A notebook, she thought. John said there’d be a notebook. The front door to the office slammed. She spun around, the forbidden file in her hand. A man she did not know was standing at the counter.

  “I’d like to pay a parking ticket,” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” she said, relieved. She hesitated for a moment, then put the file on top of the cabinet, and went to help the man.

  She took the ticket. “That’s five dollars.”

  He opened his wallet and thumbed through some bills. “You got change for a twenty?”

  “Haven’t you got anything smaller?” she asked, looking toward the door nervously. Mike might be back at any moment; or worse, Bo.

  “Sorry, that’s all I’ve got.”

  Scotty took the twenty, went to her desk, opened a drawer, took out the cash box, unlocked it, put the twenty in and took out a five and a ten, conscious all the time of the unlocked cabinet and the deadly file, lying there, waiting to be discovered.

  “There you are,” she said, stamping the ticket and tearing off the stub. “And here’s your receipt.”

  The man left, and Scotty raced for the file. She reached in for the notebook and came out with a small, green booklet with a gold American eagle stamped on it. A passport. Quickly, she thumbed through the pages. Bo’s face stared at her from the photograph, but he was wearing glasses. Bo didn’t wear glasses. The passport was issued to a Peter Patrick O’Hara. The address was Bo’s.

  Scotty wanted a copy of this, badly, but she looked up and saw Mike standing across the street with a pizza box in his hand, talking to somebody. She went quickly through the passport; there were a lot of stamps, but only for two countries – Switzerland and the United States. She repeated the passport number to herself three times, aloud, returned it to the file, and the file to the cabinet. She was sitting at her desk again, making a note of the passport number, when Mike came in with the pizza.

  At ten minutes to twelve, Howell parked the station wagon where he could see the front door of the courthouse and waited. Bo’s story had been gnawing at him for days. It was plausible enough, but the reporter in him wanted it confirmed. At the stroke of noon, the girl who worked in the records office left the courthouse and turned a corner, out of sight. Howell went and did some grocery shopping and returned just before one o’clock, in time to see the girl go back in. Shortly, Mrs. O’Neal, the battleax of county records, left the courthouse. He had an hour.

  The girl looked surprised to see him. “I thought we’d run you off,” she said, laughing.

  “I lost the battle, but not the war, I hope.”

  “You want me to look for the map for you?”

  “Actually, there’s something else I’d rather see. Can you find me an old deed of transfer? Maybe from twenty-four, twenty-five years ago?”

  “Sure. We’ve got all those. I don’t need to ask Mrs. O’Hara.”

  “Good.” Howell read her the lot numbers he’d copied from the maps.

  “Right this way.”

  He followed her across the room and down a long row of filing cabinets. She consulted the lot numbers and the labels on the drawers. “Here we are,” she said. She opened the drawer, flipped through some files, and extracted a deed.

  Howell skimmed through it, and it seemed straightforward enough. The property had transferred from Donal O’Coineen to Eric Sutherland, and O’Coineen had signed it. Or had he? Howell thought for a moment. “Would you have a record of old business licenses?” he asked. In addition to being a farmer, O’Coineen had been a well digger, Enda McCauliffe had said.

  “Sure. In what name?”

  “Donal O’Coineen. Try 1951.” He followed her to another row of filing cabinets.

  “Here you are,” she said, extracting a sheet of paper. “Here’s the renewal application for 1951.”

  Howell took the application and the deed to a window for better light and compared Donal O’Coineen’s signature on the application with the one on the deed. They were identical, or near enough. O’Coineen had signed over his land to Eric Sutherland, and almost immediately after that had taken his family and left the farm. Shortly afterwards, the roadbed had given way, and the farm had been obliterated. It all added up. Howell felt disappointed. The story had excited him, and now it was over. At least he could get back to work on Lurton Pitts’s book, now, with this O’Coineen thing settled in his mind.

  He took the deed and the application back to the girl. “Thanks,” he said. “I really appreciate it.” He was about to hand her the papers, when his eye caught something, and he took them back. Under O’Coineen’s signature on the deed was another signature.

  The document had been witnessed by one Christopher F. Scully.

  23

  Scotty burst into the cabin, startling Howell, who was banging away on the word processor.

  “I’ve got him, John!” she cried. “He’s dirty and I’ve got him!”

  Howell clutched his chest. “Well, do you have to give me a coronary in the process? I’m at that age, you know.”

  “You’ll be younger than springtime when I’ve told you what I’ve found,” Scotty said, throwing herself on the sofa and kicking fee
t in the air, losing her shoes in the process.

  “All right, all right, what is it? What have you found?”

  “Bo has got a passport,” Scotty crowed, triumphantly.

  Howell looked at her incredulously. “So what? So have several million other Americans.”

  “Not in the name of Peter Patrick O’Hara, they haven’t.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s got Bo’s picture in it, but O’Hara’s name. It’s a phony!”

  “Is that it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is that all you’ve got? You’re going to ring up the FBI and turn him in for a phony passport? This is going to get you a Pulitzer? I can see the headlines in the Times now – ‘INTREPID REPORTER CATCHES SHERIFF WITH INCORRECT TRAVEL DOCUMENT.' Swell.“

  “Well, listen, that’s not all,” Scotty replied, undaunted. “The only place he’s been is Switzerland. Lots of times.”

  “Oh, that’s different. Make that headline, 'REPORTER UNCOVERS SHERIFF’S SKIING HABIT.'”

  “Come on, John, don’t you know what’s in Switzerland?”

  “Alps.”

  “Banks, dummy. Secret banks. Banks you can walk into wearing a bad wig and a false nose, carrying a suitcase full of thousand dollar bills, and they don’t ask any questions.”

  Howell looked thoughtful. “What did you do with the copies of Bo’s ledger sheets?”

  “In your desk drawer.”

  Howell got them and spread them on the dining table. “Look at this,” he said.

  Scotty ran over. “What? What?”

  “These lumps of numbers that were interspersed throughout the ledger pages. Look at this first group.” He pointed.

  D121 A 1845

  F0720

  L002 F 1005

  Z 1110

  S241 Z 1611

  F 1716

  D122 F 1200

  A 1645

  “Okay, I’m looking.”

  Howell read through it and did some mental calculations. “Right. Yeah. It’s just shorthand for an airline schedule. See? The times are on the 24-hour clock. Depart Atlanta on Delta flight 121 at 6:45 PM, that would be, arrive in Frankfurt at 7:20 the next morning. Get Lufthansa 002 at 10:05, arrive Zurich at 11:10. Then back to Frankfurt on Swissair in the afternoon, and a noon flight back to Atlanta the next day.”

  “Great! Check the other groups.”

  Howell moved along the pages. “Some variations. Look, this time he came back through New York; another time he went out through New York; another time through London instead of Frankfurt. Mixing it up. Doesn’t want some bright immigration officer to remember his face.”

  “Don’t they do any sort of checking on the passport in immigration or customs?”

  “Yeah, they run your passport number through the computer to see if it’s real and if you’re some sort of problem – history of smuggling, that sort of thing.”

  “But his passport isn’t real. Wouldn’t they catch that?”

  “It probably is real, just false. Bo wouldn’t have much trouble running over to the courthouse, finding an old birth certificate of somebody who’s died, probably as an infant, and using that to apply. I don’t know if the state department checks with the courthouse, but even if they did, Bo would find that easy to handle.”

  “How does he get the money out, then?”

  “Carries it. U. S. Customs doesn’t look in your baggage on the way out of the country, only on the way in. He wouldn’t go through customs in London or Frankfurt, because he’s just changing planes inside a restricted area. And Swiss customs, if they looked in his luggage, wouldn’t bat an eye. Can you imagine how much cash must get carried into that little country every year?”

  “How much money has he moved, then? Add it up.”

  Howell got a calculator and added the column of two-digit figures in the right margin. “Well, if these figures represent money, he’s got $940,000 in a Swiss bank.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Amazing how much savings a hard-working fellow can accumulate in just over three years, isn’t it?”

  “But we’ve got him, now. We’ve got the goods.”

  “Got him for what?”

  “Well, to begin with, the passport. I’ve got the number, it could be traced.”

  “Obtaining a false passport. Okay, my guess is that’s a one-to-five sentence in a country club federal prison. With good behavior, out in, say, eight months.”

  “Well, there’s the drug dealing.”

  “What drug dealing? I don’t know about any drug dealing. Neither do you.”

  “But his ledger sheets.”

  “We don’t know what the ledger sheets mean. A schedule, maybe, but we don’t know of what. Besides, all we’ve got is photocopies of some numbers and letters in block capitals. You could have forged those. You’ve had enough access to Bo’s handwriting, haven’t you?”

  “Well, yes, but… ”

  “They were illegally obtained, too. Never stand up in court.”

  Scotty frowned. “Isn’t it illegal to take large amounts of money out of the country?”

  “Nope. If you take out more than $5,000 in cash or negotiable instruments at one time, there’s a federal form you have to fill out, but he wouldn’t bother. Now, the money’s gone. How’re you going to prove he took it out?”

  “His travel schedule. He’s never spent much more than a day out of the country on these trips. It’s obvious he’s ferrying money, isn’t it?”

  “Obvious, maybe, but not provable. He likes skiing but gets tired the first day.”

  “How about the IRS? They could get him for tax evasion, couldn’t they? I mean, that’s how they got Al Capone.”

  “Evasion of taxes on what? I repeat, the money’s gone. Nobody saw him take it, that we know of. Swiss banks don’t talk to the IRS. Al Capone was a visible figure in lots of visible businesses.”

  “Well, Bo’s dealing in drugs.”

  “I doubt it. Bo’s too smart to push junk. Look at his schedule. He’s being paid off by somebody to look the other way. That’s what’s going on. Maybe.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What now, then? How’re we going to nail him.”

  “How’re you going to nail him, you mean. My interest lies elsewhere.”

  “Okay, how’m I going to nail him?”

  “Well, he’s been to Switzerland since his last payment, so there’s no money in his mattress to find. But you’ve got this schedule. What ever he’s doing he does every few weeks. Let’s see, it’s five weeks since the last one, so, if he’s still in business, he’s due for another what-ever-it-is pretty soon. If we can figure out what it is, and if you can catch him at it – I mean, flat red-handed, squinting into a flashbulb, well, that’s your best shot.”

  Scotty flopped down on the sofa, looking determined. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m going to have to catch him at it, whatever it is.”

  “Something else, Scotty, something maybe a lot harder.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to have to live to tell the tale.”

  “You’re a real optimist, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a realist; you’d better be, too.”

  Howell got up and walked out onto the deck. Scotty followed him and flopped into a chair. It was dusk.

  “Days are getting shorter,” Howell said.

  “Yeah, the leaves will be turning soon. Happens earlier up here than in Atlanta. They say it’s gorgeous.”

  “Scotty, what is Bo’s full name? Do you know?” “

  “Sure. He’s touchy about it, though; prefers Bo. Sally told me. It’s Christopher Francis Scully.”

  “I thought it would be.”

  “Why? Where’d you hear Bo’s full name?”

  “Pay attention for a minute. Eric Sutherland’s story is that he went to see Donal O’Coineen alone and finally talked him into selling up. Sutherland put the money in the bank, and O’Coineen
and his family picked up and left. That’s Sutherland’s story, and Bo backs him up on it. Bo heard from the older girl, Joyce, later.”

  “That’s what you’ve told me.”

  “The vision, or whatever it was, seems to back up Sutherland’s story, too. A man in a 1940 Lincoln Continental convertible, top up, drives down the mountain to the farm, gets out, goes in, stays awhile – I don’t know how long – leaves the house, drives away. Sutherland owned a Continental convertible, didn’t sell it until the mid-fifties.”

  “I thought you were all through with the O’Coineen thing. What’s got you back onto that?”

  “I just thought it needed some more checking out. I went to the courthouse this afternoon and dug out the transfer deed that Sutherland filed, and, just to check out O’Coineen’s signature, his license for his well-digging business.”

  “Signature genuine?”

  “Yep.”

  “So?”

  “The transfer deed was witnessed by Bo Scully.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “That means Bo must have been at the meeting between Sutherland and O’Coineen.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “Yeah, except Sutherland says he went alone, and Bo says he wasn’t out at the place for nearly a month before the O’Coineens left.”

  “Well, if he was at their meeting, why would Bo deny it?”

  “That’s what’s got me stumped. The whole reason for any suspicion of Sutherland all these years – all the rumors that have sprung up – is that Sutherland’s story of meeting with O’Coineen was unsubstantiated. If Bo was at the meeting and witnessed the document, then why hasn’t he said so? Why hasn’t he backed up Sutherland’s story and taken the heat off him?”

  Scotty gave a low chuckle. “You’re hooked on this one, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Howell replied. “I guess I am.”

  24