The Dinosaur Chronicles

by Erhardt, Joseph

  Brill ran her finger around the loop of the teacup. “Is there any doubt that Greavey did the shooting?”

  “For a time there was. Dan and Joshua Greavey were accompanied on their hunting trip by a family friend, and for a time this friend came under suspicion. But the ballistics tests matched the slug to Dan Greavey’s rifle, and under the polygraph he insisted he had never given his rifle to anyone. That, coupled with the friend’s testimony—he was there when Dan pulled the trigger—settled the matter.”

  “So it really was an accident.”

  “Seems that way. This was before the days of blaze orange, y’know, so shooting at a rustle in the bushes often brought tragedy. And nailing Joshua Greavey right between the shoulder blades—” Carfack pointed his finger and squinted down an imaginary rifle “—at two hundred yards with an unscoped rifle would have been an unbelievable shot for a boy of fourteen to have done deliberately.

  “Ouch!” Carfack winced as his cat, evidently annoyed by the attention given the stranger in the house, jumped into his lap. Carfack held up his tea with one hand and began stroking the animal with the other. “Hector’s not declawed,” Carfack said, “and he sometimes confuses his papa with a pincushion.”

  Brill reached for the envelope. “May I?”

  Carfack waved his hand. “Go ahead.”

  Brill undid the clasp on the envelope and pulled out a half-inch-thick stack of paper. From the grayness of the reproduction, it was obvious that these were old-style photocopies from the days before xerography became the industry standard. Brill flipped through the pages, reading bits here and there. Occasionally she would look up, but Carfack would be sipping his tea or petting his cat; only the cat’s unblinking eyes seemed to follow her hands as she turned the pages.

  Time passed, and Brill hardly noticed when Carfack de-lapped his cat to refill her tea. Eventually the last page was turned, and she said, “There’s much less about the murder of his brother Timothy than I would have expected.”

  Carfack, back in his chair, said, “Agreed. The whole business with the brother is a mystery. Dan and Timothy were alone in their home at the time of the killing, and all we have are neighbors reporting a loud argument and a single gunshot. The voices were too muffled for the neighbors to figure out what they were arguing about, though one neighbor said he heard them mention ‘Samarkand.’”

  “Samarkand!”

  “A city in present-day Uzbekistan. It was a famous stop on the Spice Route, visited by Marco Polo, among others.”

  Brill shook her head. “I know where it is, but it doesn’t make any sense. What about Samarkand could have made Dan Greavey mad enough to kill?”

  “Beats me. And it beat everyone else. But there were only two people in the house: Dan Greavey and his brother. A shot was fired. No one left the house, according to more than one neighbor. When the police got there, only Dan was still breathing. So he must have done the killing, though motive has yet to be established.” Carfack shrugged. “If it ever can.”

  Brill nodded and glanced at her wristwatch. A full three hours had passed since she arrived at Carfack’s house. “Lord, it’s late, Doctor. I had no intention to impose on you like this. I only wish I could make a copy of these records so I could study them more thoroughly.”

  Carfack got to his feet, and Brill rose from the chair. Carfack stared at her for a long second and said, “It’s not a problem. Keep the copy you have. I have others.”

  Brill blinked and stared right back. Then she picked up the pages of Greavey’s file and held them up to her nose. What she had been reading weren’t photocopies, but xerographic copies of the original photocopies. She looked up at Carfack as she stuffed the sheets into the manila envelope. “Why? Why the extra copies?”

  Carfack guided Brill around the cat, which had resumed its accustomed spot on the rug. “After the fire in Drawer G, I became worried, so I had a copy made of my copy of Greavey’s file. I put that away in a safe place and left my first copy in my desk drawer. Three days after the fire, I was visited by a government agent—FBI perhaps, perhaps other—who asked me for ‘help.’ Said he knew about the fire and ‘hoped’ I had made a copy of Greavey’s complete file for use at my home office.”

  Brill said, “And you just let him have the file?”

  Carfack said, “Course not. I played my role as a doctor. I asked him what his interest was. He said it had to do with the murder of the brother, that it was a law-enforcement issue. I told him he’d still need a warrant, and—lo and behold—he pulled out a warrant signed by some judge I’d never heard of. I made a few more objections, saying I couldn’t very well treat Greavey without complete records. He promised to send me a copy of the file, which, of course, he never did. Eventually I let myself be persuaded to go to my desk and hand over Greavey’s folder.

  “Some years later, after copy services became available to the general public, I went out and had twenty copies made of my backup of the file.” Carfack chuckled. “Those copies are scattered about in various places—except for the one in your hands.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “I’m eighty-seven. I feel all right—as ‘all right’ as one could hope to feel at my age. But I could kick off tomorrow. I hope to outlast Hector, but after he goes, I won’t be getting another cat.” Brill looked down at the cat, and Hector glared up from his spot, apparently aware that he was a topic of conversation.

  Carfack went on. “After I’m gone, I want someone to pick up the research. And believe it or not, you’re the very first person who’s applied, so to speak. True, I’ve spoken with other doctors over the years, and some have shown interest, but later they’ve begged off for one reason or another. Strange.”

  “I’m certain I’m not up to your level of expertise,” Brill cautioned, “especially when it comes to psychological and neurological trauma.”

  Carfack waved off the objection. “Come back sometime. I’ll show you my pathology notes, and you can work off them. At this point, I think cleverness and a knack for observation are more important than my ‘expertise.’”

  Brill’s fingers clammed around the yellow envelope, and she shifted her grip to a drier spot. Her mind worked through the details of Carfack’s disclosure, and she said, “In the file now in Drawer G, there’s a reference to Greavey having attacked an orderly and a physician, though no names are mentioned. Guidelines were set for staff not to talk to Greavey about his past or about any controversial issues of the day.”

  Carfack’s eyes narrowed. “When Greavey first arrived at the Institute, he was a very angry person. In his mind, he was being locked up for something that couldn’t have happened: the murder of a brother he never had. In plain English, he thought the rest of the world had gone nuts. It took some time for me to convince the objective part of his mind that something must have happened, that no one was out to ‘get’ him. But despite his anger, I don’t think he ever lifted a finger against me or any member of the staff. As to the restriction on topics of conversation, that’s hardly useful for treating the man, for getting back his memories, is it?”

  “No,” Brill said, “I didn’t think so either.” She hesitated once more as Carfack opened the front door for her. “So you think the guidelines are bogus?”

  Carfack shrugged. “I retired twenty years ago. I don’t know what’s happened recently. But if I had to guess, I’d say yes—someone is helping Greavey keep his secrets.”

  Chapter 3

  Gladys Brill arrived at the Institute the next day exhausted and with eyes straining to focus. She had lain awake most of the night, thinking over Eleanor Greavey’s disappearance and Aloysius Carfack’s revelations. She also wondered about the fake Eleanor’s knowledge of the first Eleanor’s conversations with Brill, and Brill had come up with several possibilities.

  One idea was that the two Eleanors were working together—colluding. But Brill had no idea what motive could forge such a collusion, so she put the thought aside. But suppose the fir
st Eleanor had kept a detailed diary, and the second Eleanor had found it and had memorized the entries. The first Eleanor could have died—or been killed—and the second was now using the information to bring off some bizarre fraud.

  More troubling was the possibility that the first Eleanor had been kidnapped, and that the information had been extorted from her. But that Eleanor had impressed Brill as being an intelligent woman. Surely she would have given some false information to tip Brill off. But perhaps the first Eleanor had been threatened with reprisals if she gave such false information, reprisals directed at friends or family. Brill shuddered as she walked down the hall to her station. The first Eleanor could yet be alive and a prisoner.

  One thing Brill had concluded. She needed the help of the authorities, and to get that help, she needed Daniel Greavey to say that the second Eleanor was not his sister. If Brill could get him to admit that, she might be able to get the FBI to start a kidnap investigation.

  Brill began spending her spare moments at 7 South, talking to Greavey whenever she encountered him. By the end of the week, she was spending every afternoon coffee break with the man. In their talks, Brill tried to keep a professional demeanor; Dan Greavey seemed only amused.

  Once, Greavey had said, “You’re really trying to find out, aren’t you?”

  Brill had replied, “Find out what?”

  Greavey tapped the side of his head with his finger. “The memories I’m supposed to have locked up in here.”

  Brill said, “Regaining your memories is a legitimate goal of your therapy, Mr. Greavey.”

  “Yeah. Old Carfack seemed to think so, too.”

  “Anybody since?”

  Greavey’s reply was terse: “No.”

  “Not even Eleanor?” Brill didn’t specify which Eleanor.

  Greavey’s eyes narrowed. “She nibbles at the edges of my memory. But I don’t think she wants to know.”

  Two days after her meeting with Pengold, a padded brown envelope arrived on Brill’s desk. In it was the portrait she had used to gain the second Eleanor’s fingerprints. Brill restored the picture to its owner’s desk. Six days later, she received a call from the investigator himself. Pengold seemed pleased, if the tone of his voice was any indication. “Got some good stuff from my Dallas contact,” Pengold said. “Come by this evening and we can go through it.”

  “Anything on Eleanor?” Brill asked.

  “A bit. Come on by.”

  Brill arrived at Pengold’s office that evening at 7:30. The man had a card table set up against one wall. He offered Brill one folding chair and took the other. On top of the card table lay a thin manila folder. To the left and right, cups of thick black coffee bid a dubious welcome.

  “I’m expanding my work area,” Pengold said, and pointed back to the clutter on his desk. “To get to the wood on my real desk, I’d have to hire an archaeologist.”

  Brill smiled politely at Pengold’s little joke. “What have you found?”

  “About Eleanor or Dan?”

  “Start with Eleanor.”

  Pengold opened the folder. “The fingerprints hit, but not on any of the criminal data-bases. That was a surprise, because if the Greavey woman was as smooth a bunko artist as you say, I expected her to have a record. You don’t get that smooth without first stumbling once or twice.” Pengold flipped to a computer-printed ID showing Eleanor Greavey’s face. He said, “That’s why it took me so long to get back to you. I finally got a match in the federal employee data-base. Eleanor Greavey works for the Department of Agriculture, in some obscure subdepartment having to do with the ‘Records and Archives of Americana.’”

  “That’s a Department of Agriculture function?”

  “The Ag Department is a garbage heap of miscellaneous programs,” Pengold said. “Over the years it’s become a great place to hide political pork. You’d be surprised what’s in there.”

  “So is she who she says she is?”

  Pengold shrugged. “She seems to be. At least the Feds are convinced. Her picture matches the description you gave me, and her credit history goes back a long way. On the face of it, everything checks out.”

  Brill picked up the computer-produced picture. The image favored both Eleanor Greaveys, but even Brill had to admit that it favored the newer Greavey woman more. Had the first Eleanor Greavey now been the impostor? Nothing quite made sense.

  Brill sighed. “What about the Dallas report?”

  Pengold laughed. “There, we got lucky. Carlos—he runs the agency in Dallas that I work with now and again—he has a co-op student working right now. This boy’s a criminal justice major and a real go-getter. Carlos tells me the kid’s read all of the Dashiell Hammett stories and every bad P.I. novel written since. An over-eager pain in the ass. Anyway, to get him out of the office for a while, Carlos sent Mickey to Irving to dig up what he could on Dan Greavey. Mickey, of course, wanted to do a super job to impress the hell out of Carlos. And,” Pengold said, leafing through a dozen faxed sheets, “he evidently did. Carlos had told me that after all this time there wasn’t a snowball’s chance we’d get anything worthwhile.”

  Brill picked up some of the pages herself. “So what is this?”

  “To begin with, all the police records are gone. They were warehoused until they expired, and then they were carted to the dump. What Mickey did was find an old lady still living in the community who had known the Greaveys. This was harder than it sounds, because the woman had married several times and the name she now uses in the retirement home where she lives has no resemblance to the one she had when she lived down the street from Dan Greavey. I won’t bore you with the details, which included searching through property records and marriage certificates, but Mickey did a good job.”

  Brill grinned. “I’ll send him a Christmas card. What did he find?”

  “You can read it for yourself, of course, but here are the interesting bits. This woman Mickey found, a Cora Fipps, lived four houses away from the Greaveys. According to her, the Greavey household was not a happy one. The police would stop by at least once a month to deal with Dan Greavey’s old man. Joshua Greavey, by this woman’s account, was evidently not a very quiet drunk.”

  Brill asked, “Any reports of abuse in the household?”

  “Ms. Fipps implies it without saying so.”

  “What about Dan’s brother and sister?”

  “Fipps says that as soon as the sister reached her eighteenth birthday, she took off west—to California. This infuriated the old man, who may have taken his anger out on his wife, and on Dan. As to the brother, he’s a bit of a mystery. He was the oldest of the siblings and in his mid-twenties when Eleanor left. There was talk that he had some government job, because he was all the time flying on airplanes to and from the east coast. Cora Fipps remembers seeing Timothy Greavey arrive home from a trip once. She was walking down the sidewalk, passing the Greavey house, when a cab pulled up and Timothy got out. She had kind of a crush on him, so she talked to Timothy as he was unloading his luggage, and she remembers the colored stickers on his bags. Some said ‘D.C.’ Some said ‘Miami.’ Others were in Spanish.”

  “Exactly when was this?”

  “Late fifties, early sixties. She can’t pin it any closer.”

  “It’s too bad we don’t know more about the brother,” Brill said. “There’s an answer there; I feel it.”

  Pengold said, “If I ask Carlos to do any more work on this, he’ll charge me and I’ll have to charge you. I’ve about exhausted my favors from him.”

  Brill picked up her copy of the report. “And I’ve about exhausted my favor from you. Let me think about it before you do any more work.”

  Pengold nodded. “I can give you a good rate.”

  —

  The next day at work, the state inspector for hospitals and institutions arrived at Brill’s work station just before lunch, when Brill was at her diplomatic worst, and just as old Mrs. Blevins tried to strangle her roommate with an IV line.

 
It took all of Brill’s lunch hour, and then some, for her to straighten out the chaos and schmooze the inspector into not filing a report. By the time she arrived at 7 South for her afternoon tete-a-tete with Daniel Greavey, Brill had had two coffees and four crackers to eat since breakfast.

  If Eleanor Greavey nibbled at Dan Greavey’s memories, that afternoon Gladys Brill bit on them with garden shears. Greavey, of course, never wavered from his denials. He had had no father. He had had no brother.

  Brill finally said, “All right! You didn’t have a father. You didn’t have a brother. Who did you have?”

  Dan Greavey had been flustered by Brill’s combative mood, but now he relaxed. “Well, there was Diego.”

  Brill blinked. “Who was Diego?”

  “Diego Samarand. My best friend.”

  Brill had her hand around a paper cup filled with brand-X cola and nearly spilled it into her lap. Her mind whirled. Samarand! So it wasn’t the fabled city after all—the witness had simply misheard a name.

  Brill too eased back in her chair. “I’m sorry I fussed at you today. You’ve heard about Mrs. Blevins?”

  Greavey nodded. “You were mixed up with that?”

  “With the inspector breathing up my elbow. So tell me about Diego. Did you know him from school?”

  Greavey shook his head. “I think he went to the colored school. But he lived up the street from me, and we did a lot of stuff together. Fish. Play ball. Hunt squirrels. And his mom made the best black-bean and rice sandwiches this side of the Mississippi. I spent a lot of time at his place. All I could.”

  “It was that much better than staying at your house?”

  “Ye—” Greavey stopped in mid-answer. His eyes glazed, and he stared at Brill for a long time. Slowly he said, “I’m not sure now. I think ‘yes,’ but I don’t know why.”