by Stuart Woods
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry, I don’t. Kathleen is either dead or gone away, isn’t she?”
“All is not what it seems,” the old woman said again. “I wish I could help you more.” She closed her eyes and sighed.
Leonie beckoned to Howell to leave her, but when he tried, Mama Kelly clung to his hand.
Her eyes fluttered open. “Please remember that there is much here that will be hard for you to understand. You must try and understand. Your presence here has already done more good than you know. Believe me when I tell you that. But you must save little Kathleen. She is the future.”
She sighed again, and her grip on his hand relaxed. Howell moved away from her and followed Leonie into the living room.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?” he asked Leonie.
Leonie shrugged. “All I know is that she knows what she’s talking about.”
“She seems to think that Kathleen is still alive. Do you believe that? Or do you believe she’s under the lake?”
Leonie bit her lip and did not reply.
“Kathleen would be how old, now?”
Leonie sighed. “She was four years older than I was. That would make her thirty-six.”
Howell thought for a moment. He knew no woman of any description in Sutherland who was that age. “Leonie, do you think Kathleen could still be alive? Please tell me.”
Leonie shook her head. “I don’t know, John, but if Mama believes she is, that’s good enough for me.”
Howell took her hand. “Listen, it’s been a long time since I saw you. I miss you. Why don’t you come over this afternoon?”
She put a finger to her lips, and nodded toward the front porch. The creaking of the swing could be heard. “I’ll come when I can,” she said.
Howell thought, as he drove home, about what Mama Kelly had said. She didn’t make sense. Kathleen O’Coineen was dead, and her whole family with her. Howell wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did.
26
When Scotty arrived at the office, Bo was there ahead of her, shut in his office working like a beaver. It was very unusual for Bo to arrive so early in the morning. She rapped on the glass and stuck her head in his office.
“Morning. Coffee?”
Bo was hunched over his typewriter. There were papers scattered all over his desk. Among them, Scotty saw the green ledger sheets. “No thanks, I’ve already had some. Take my calls, will you? I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Sure.” She closed the door and went to her desk. Bo rose, walked around his desk, and pulled down the shades between his office and the station room. She had never seen him do that before.
Scotty worked her way through the morning on routine matters. She did the mail and answered the phone, taking messages for Bo.
Just before noon, the bell on the teletype rang once. Scotty went to the machine and tore off the printed message, it read:
PRSNL SHF B. SCULLY, STHRLND CO.,
LSCA 0910 0330 80. CNFRM. MSG ENDS.
Scotty ripped the message off the machine and went back to her desk, her heart pumping away. Quickly, she copied down every word and number, then put the original with Bo’s phone messages. A few minutes later, the shades went up in his office, and he came out with a large, thick, brown envelope under his arm. The green ledger sheets were no longer on his desk, and the filing cabinet was locked. She handed him the messages; the white teletype paper was easily visible among the pink telephone message slips. Bo ignored the phone calls and went straight for the teletype message.
His face showed no emotion as he read it. He went back into his office, tossed the fat envelope onto his desk, and sat down. For the better part of ten minutes he sat there, obviously thinking hard. Then he got up, walked into the station room, went to the teletype machine and sat down.
Scotty grabbed some papers and made for the copying machine, just next to the teletype. Bo was already typing but suddenly stopped. As his hand went to the paper, she shot a quick glance at it, but he ripped the transmission copy away before she could read it. It had been a very short message; she had seen only the last word.
Bo stuffed the paper and the original message into his pocket, went to his office, retrieved the large envelope and headed for the door. “I’ll be at Mac McCauliffe’s for a while, then at Eric Sutherland’s, but don’t call unless it’s an emergency, okay?”
Half an hour later, Bo left the lawyer’s office, his business done – signed, witnessed, and relegated to McCauliffe’s safe. It would be a long time before anyone read it, he reckoned. McCauliffe had not read what he had written, just witnessed his signature. Bo drove to Eric Sutherland’s. He had made his decision.
Sutherland didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “What have you learned?”
“I called Neiman’s and talked with the credit manager. He hadn’t had time to write to me yet, but he gave me all the information I wanted.” Bo took a sheet of paper from his inside pocket and consulted it. “Harold Martin MacDonald is a 71-year-old, retired insurance salesman from Atlanta. His house was burglarized four weeks ago and his Neiman-Marcus credit card stolen. The store has already cancelled the card and sent him a new one.”
“What does this mean, Bo?”
“This is what’s happened. Whoever burglarized MacDonald’s house took the credit card. For some reason, he didn’t throw it away. He’s apparently an itinerant burglar. He showed up in Sutherland and was attracted to your office because it’s set apart from the house. You can see it from a quarter of a mile down the road. He used the credit card to jimmy the lock, but your dog frightened him away before he had a chance to get into the office, and in his hurry to get away from Duchess and Alfred’s flashlight, he dropped the card. Mystery solved.”
“Were there any other burglaries in town?”
“No. I figure he was just passing through, and it looked tempting.” Bo grinned. “I reckon that Yorkie of yours that thinks he’s a Doberman scared him right out of town.”
“Well.” Sutherland sat back and sighed. “All that certainly makes sense. I suppose I should be relieved, but I still think Howell’s up to something.”
So did Bo, now that he knew who Scotty was. She and Howell were clearly working together, but they weren’t after Sutherland. “Eric, I honestly don’t think you have a thing to worry about. I think you’ve been so worked up about this that it’s hard to let go of the idea, but please just try and relax, will you? Everything is okay.”
Sutherland stood up. “You’re probably right, Bo. Forgive me for hanging onto this idea for so long. I expect I’ll get over it.”
Bo left the house and drove slowly back toward town. He probably would never see the old man again, he knew. He was surprised to find that he felt some regret about that. After all, Sutherland had taken care of him. He’d demanded a lot, but he’d made Bo the second most powerful man in the county. God knows, he’d had a pretty good run.
But now, it was coming to an end. Scotty and John Howell had seen to that, even if they didn’t know it. They couldn’t know much, he reckoned. He’d been too careful for that. He didn’t feel immediately threatened. Just once more would put him over the top. Then he wouldn’t need Eric Sutherland anymore. He would be gone.
Howell looked at what Scotty had written down and compared it with the ledger.
LSCA 0910 0330 80
“Well, it fits, to a digit. I don’t know about LSCA; we still have to figure that out. But if these columns are dates and times and amounts, what we’ve got here is September 10 at 3:30 AM and $80,000.
Scotty whistled. “That’s the biggest payment so far. That’ll put him over the million mark.”
Howell nodded. “Must be pretty big, this one, whatever it is. And soon, too. The tenth is a week from tomorrow.”
“Yeah, and the one word of his teletype I could see was, ”CNFRMD.“ Whatever it is, is on.” Scotty wandered out onto the deck, and Howell followed. “You know,” she said, “I have the feeling Bo is wrapping somet
hing up. He’s been real busy the last few days, almost as if he were setting everything in order. That’s the sort of person he is; no loose ends for Bo.”
“Well,” Howell said, “when you think about it, a million bucks is a pretty good cutoff. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? A million bucks? Maybe that was always his goal. Invested wisely, he ought to get an annual income of, say, a hundred and fifty grand out of that.”
“Tax free? I could scrape by on that.”
“Well, Scotty, maybe your pigeon is about to fly the coop. This could be your last shot at him.”
Scotty nodded. Howell was right. It was more than just all the tidying up Bo was doing. His whole attitude seemed to have changed. Not just toward her. He still seemed embarrassed about their little roll in the hay, but there was something more. He had seemed sad, lately, as if he had lost something important.
“Well, we’ve got to figure out what LSCA is, that’s all. We’ve got to catch him with his hand in the cookie jar.”
“You’ve got to catch him. I don’t much care about the cookie jar; I don’t care how much he’s got stashed in Switzerland. I want to know what happened to the O’Coineens, and Bo’s got to know something about it. I still think he’s shielding Sutherland.”
“Well, look at it this way, old sport,” Scotty said, digging him in the ribs, “if he pulls off whatever it is on the tenth and then splits, how’s that going to help you? Maybe if we – I stress we – can catch him in the act, he’ll be more in the mood to talk about what’s under the lake.” She went back into the house, got her purse, and sat down next to the phone.
Howell flopped down next to her. “I guess you’re right,” he said ruefully. “He’s not going to be much help to me if he’s in Switzerland.”
Scotty took a small, black object from her purse, dialed a telephone number, waited, then held the black thing to the phone and pushed a button. “That’s right,” she said, “and don’t you forget it.” There was a silence on the phone, just a crackle of static, and then, from a distance, she heard her own voice shouting, “Jesus Christ, Mike, will you stop that? You scared the shit out of me! C’mon, grow up, will you!” Then Mike’s voice answered, “Aw, come on, Scotty, a little goose is good for you now and then.” Then there was a click on the line.
Scotty hung up the phone. She felt as if she’d been struck in the chest with a heavy object.
“Scotty. Scotty? What’s wrong?” Howell was looking into her face, worried. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, shit,” she replied. “Bo knows.”
27
Bo drove slowly out of town, north, then west along the lakeshore. All the car’s windows were down, and the scent of pines blew faintly through. He remembered when he was in Korea; in the worst of times, when he wanted to summon some feeling of home, he would conjure up that scent, cool and evergreen.
The valley had smelled like that, too, before the lake, except when hay was being cut, then the two scents had mixed in a perfume that had been headier than anything he had experienced since. He still loved the pine. The smell of new mown hay made him claustrophobic and ill.
He circumnavigated the shining water in an unhurried fashion, taking in the trees, with their first hint of autumn color, and the light bouncing and playing on the lake’s surface. Switzerland was beautiful, too, he remembered, but the thought didn’t make him feel any better.
Everything was in place. The corporation had been formed – Central Europe Security – there was an accommodation address in Zurich, with an answering service on the telephone. The managing director was a Swiss lawyer who held the same position with God-knew-how-many other such paper corporations. An ad had been placed in a law enforcement journal, seeking applicants for a job with the company. The two dozen applicants had received letters saying that the job had been filled. Bo’s application had, of course, been accepted. He had a stock of letterheads with which to outline the terms of his great good fortune, when the time came. The time was growing near.
He passed Taylor’s Fish Camp and turned east along the south shore of the lake. The grocery store where John Howell had kept him from being blown away passed on his left. On the outskirts of the town, Bo stopped the car and got out. A freshly painted wrought iron fence separated him from the cemetery. He found the gate and walked in. He had not been here for years.
It had been an oddly sympathetic thing for Eric Sutherland to do. After years of fighting the valley people for their land and finally getting it, he had, quite unexpectedly, exhumed the bodies from the valley churchyard and reinterred them here, at his own expense. Nobody had really thought about the cemetery, except, apparently, Sutherland.
Bo walked slowly among the headstones. Family names he had grown up among – all Irish – were etched on them. Most of the plots were ill-kept and overgrown. So many of the families had left when they sold their land, and others who still lived in Sutherland apparently didn’t care. Bo, himself, had not been out here since the reinterment and consecration of the ground. He passed Patrick Kelly’s grave. The plot had space for Lorna and her children when their time came. The Kellys still thought of themselves as valley, not town.
On a little rise at the center of the burial ground, under a large oak tree, he came to his own family plot. He stopped in astonishment. The grass was thick and freshly cut, and there were flowers no more than a day old on his mother’s grave. He wondered who could possibly care about this when he, himself, had never bothered.
They were all distant figures to him. There was the small stone of his older brother, who had been retarded, and who had died at ten of polio the year a number of children had been killed or crippled by the disease. Then there were the stones of his mother, Dierdre, and her brother, Martin. Their deaths still bewildered him. When he had been in Korea, Martin had shot Dierdre in the head, then turned the pistol on himself. Martin’s mind had been going for years, people said, and had finally snapped. Bo could only remember how much they loved each other and him, and the pain of their deaths came back to him again. This was why he never visited the graves. He turned and walked quickly back to the car.
Bo sat in the driver’s seat and rubbed at his eyes. He thought about Switzerland, and the thought made him homesick for where he was. Would it be this way when he was there, being paid a handsome yearly income by a fictitious firm, living high on the hog? He didn’t want to go.
Maybe he could still save it here. Scotty and John Howell couldn’t know anything. How could they? He had been too careful. But even if they did, why should he allow them to drive him away? He began to feel an increasingly strong resolve to stay and survive. God knew, he was a survivor if he was anything. And anyway, Eric Sutherland might really come through one of these days. McCauliffe had let slip that Sutherland had made a new will. Bo wondered what was in it. There might be a lot to stay for, after all.
It had been a long time since Bo had killed anybody, but to preserve what he had here, to keep from being uprooted from a place he loved, that might be a price worth paying again. Anyway, if he had to, he could find a way to do it and get away with it. The thought of doing it to Scotty stabbed at him, but, he was beginning to see, it might not be possible to avoid it.
“I thought you intercepted the letter.”
“I did, but when he didn’t hear from Neiman’s, he must have called them.”
“Well, you’re fucked, now, Scotty.”
“So give me some advice. You’re the ace reporter, what do I do now?”
“Do? Why, you get your ass out of here in a hurry, that’s what you do.”
“Why?”
“Why? Jesus, because Bo can’t let you go on doing what you’re doing. He’s got to take you out of the picture, and, probably, me with you. Listen, Scotty, take the ledger sheets to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. If you can find a sympathetic ear there, you might get somebody to get a search warrant, then swoop down on Bo and find not just the ledger sheets, but other stuff, too. There’s the pa
ssport charge. You might get a decent story out of it, yet. All this time under cover, working in his office; you should be able to get some good stuff in print.”
“What stuff? How I collected parking tickets and ran the radio on Mike’s lunch hour? Boy, that’s really sexy, isn’t it. No, I want more than that.”
“But you can’t get it, now. Don’t you see that? He’s not going to make a wrong move while you’re around – that is, if he allows you to go on living.”
“He’s going to make a move on the tenth of this month. Look at it from his angle, John. He’s pretty cocky, you know. He’ll think he can pull off this next thing right under my nose.”
“Well, he wouldn’t be too far off the mark, would he? All you’ve got is this schedule, and even though you know when it’s going to happen, you don’t know what or where do you?”
“No, you haven’t. You won’t live a week. Listen, Scotty, if you don’t pack up and get back to Atlanta today, I mean right now, I’m going to go to Bo and tell him who you are and blow your whole ball game.” Howell knew, even as he said this, that it didn’t carry much conviction, but he felt he had to try to get her to protect herself.
“He already knows who I am, smartass, or thinks he does. If you do that, I’ll come up with a good story. I’ll tell him I was dipping into my expense money at the paper and got fired and changed my name out of shame and came up here to lose myself. Anyway, if I go, you’ve got to go, too. He’ll know you know everything I do. How can you find out about the O’Coineens then?”
That stopped in his tracks for a moment. “No, no,” he continued, but with even less conviction, “if he brings it up, I’ll just tell him that you came up here to find out if he was dirty, then couldn’t find out anything and left.”