He proved equally superior at gin rummy and double solitaire, the only two-person card games we had in common. But it did pass the close to an hour before Baxter showed up.
From a distance he looked as unruffled as ever. Closer up, you could see the taut, tired facial lines. My residual anger drained away. “Guess we’ve got ’em worried now,” I greeted him.
“Guess we have,” he concurred. “So—you still want to go on that date tonight?”
I stared at him.
He gave a little shrug. “The stakes got a whole lot higher these last few hours, and the options are shriveling up fast. If we can’t get hold of something good enough to build on, I don’t see a bright, shiny future for either of us around here. Possibly not a very long one, either, if Chauncy doesn’t keep his distress to himself.”
“Maybe you should write your memoirs, too.”
“Maybe so. I hauled out my maps and drove around some. You were right. Realistically, I can’t bring this off on my own. If you think the two of us can, let’s go for it.”
“There’s one thing I should tell you. I can’t guarantee soil tests will show what we need them to. It’ll depend on how rampant the contamination is and how well Thurman’s been able to shore things up. When the first batch of Cornell Pink azaleas crapped out, he showed me a pH reading—this measures acidity—that was too high for azaleas. In other words, the soil was sweeter than they can tolerate. It’s possible to acidify soil gradually, over a period of time, but there’s no chemical quick fix that would change the acidity enough for those plants, so we ended up replacing the top foot and a half of soil right around there with some that had a better pH to start with.”
“Assuming Thurman was faking the test results, he was getting rid of contaminated soil and replacing it with fresh?”
“Exactly. Not a permanent cure, but it could skew test results for a while. We can’t sample just that one area. If we go there tonight, it will not be a simple in-and-out run. Thurman always wanted to be told about plant problems as they developed, and you have to remember he knows much more about soil composition than I do. When it comes to where to sample, it might turn out to be a matter of can I out-guess him.”
“Are you saying maybe we shouldn’t do this?”
“Hell, no. I’ll get my stuff together.”
“Whoa. Aren’t we thinking dead of night?”
“That’s up to you. But I was wondering. The country club closes at what—one, two A.M.?”
“Two,” Calvin supplied. “I was out there for a wedding a couple weeks ago. Incidentally, guys, I’m in on this excursion.”
“Fine with me, but you’ll have to clear it with your boss. He runs a tight ship.”
Baxter nodded his head in Calvin’s direction. “Welcome aboard—I’m assuming you do like to live dangerously. What’s your point about closing time, Val?”
“That whoever’s keeping watch has an easier job of it from then on because there’s a big reduction in random movement that needs to be monitored. If Chauncy’s touched base already, you know they’ll beef up their manpower for that watch. They might anyhow, as a general precaution.”
“So?”
“There’s bound to be something doing at the club on a Saturday night, lots of coming and going all through the evening. Hard to keep track of. Mariah’s wake starts at eight, and most of our principals will be putting in some time there.”
Baxter broke into a smile. “Mariah would love it.”
CHAPTER 21
Baxter insisted on working out a detailed itinerary, so prepping for our mission took a while. First of all, he and Calvin needed to know enough about Hudson Heights to follow what I was talking about. Simply marking a route on a site plan wouldn’t do. Site plans bear scant resemblance to conventional maps, and most people, picking one up for the first time, will not make much immediate sense of it.
Our operations center was my dining table. We started out working with the plan of the entire development. Even though we were concentrating on the plateau, both men wanted to improve their familiarity with the overall layout. Complex though that is, you can identify a linear structure to it. Hudson Heights is essentially a ragged rectangle, oriented north-south along the river, much longer than it is wide. The golf course and adjacent residential areas wind sinuously around the north-south axis, with the plateau and its satellite terrace the western cumulation of an off-center cross-axis drawn closer to the south than the north end.
Where it got tricky was the elevation changes, of which Hudson Heights has an abundance. “Think of it in terms of levels, in roughly fifty-foot increments,” I tried finally. “Level one starts about fifty feet above Route 5 and the valley plane. There’s no spot lower than that in the whole development, even the quarry pond. Levels one, two, and three comprise the golf course and residential areas. Don’t think sharp cutoffs, though there are some of those; think mostly gentle ups and downs. Like the first hole would be Level three and a half. Level four is that terrace they smoothed off for the pool and tennis courts. Level five is the plateau.”
“Making that tunnel from the country club onto the golf course something like four and three-quarters?” Calvin asked.
“Something like. Yeah, I’d say there’s close to a fifty-foot slant, all told, between the lower level of the club and the approach to the first hole.”
“Can we key in which holes belong to which levels?” was Baxter’s more difficult question.
“Let me get some colored markers.” Starting with the elevations I was pretty sure of I tried to work out the various relationships from there. Absolutely correctly? Not a chance, but it provided at least a rudimentary idea of the ups and downs, one that Calvin, who’d had a little site-plan exposure from his backhoe moonlighting, came up to speed on pretty fast; Baxter struggled.
With that under their belts, both men found it relatively easy to master the layout of the plateau. In shape, it’s a ragged polygon: a long, almost straight side fronting the river, and four soft-edged segments making up the remainder of the perimeter. There aren’t many major design elements on this surface. Both of the two large buildings hug the straight edge of the river cliff to their west. The country club stands a little in from the northern perimeter; the inn, a skinny rectangle, is all the way south, with a moderate southwest orientation. Until the inn opens vehicular traffic in and out from the access road is restricted to one of two routes. For delivery trucks, there is a ramp down to the lower level of the country club. Everyone else is channeled into a porticoed drive-through in front of the club entrance, where their vehicles are surrendered for valet parking. They end up in the large, three-feet-high walled parking lot that occupies roughly the northeast quadrant of the plateau.
The short east-west roadway between country club and parking lot also has walls, much lower ones. They serve as a visual divider between the two large, distinctly different landscaped areas on the plateau. The core of the difference lies in the amount of vegetation. Willem’s design for the area north of the crossing road between country club and parking lot incorporates a lot of it, including many tall shrubs and small trees. South of the road, he left the space much more open. He envisioned a plaza: sunny, with paved walkways fringed by beds of flowering annuals, spoking out from a central paved seating area replete with fountain. At the edge of this plaza, near the south wall of the parking lot, is the site of Johnny Armitage’s infamous mudslide. It had been designed as the gateway down to the pool/tennis-courts terrace. Shortly after new soil was trucked in and packed down to restore the former land lines, a railed stairway was installed and the slope itself was densely planted with cotoneaster, barberry, and other tough shrubs to discourage erosion.
For our excursion, sizable areas of the plateau surface could be avoided altogether: the entire western side, where the two buildings stood, and of course the concrete surface of the large parking lot. There might be interesting stuff under there, but how would we get to it? Between the paving and the out
er walls was a four-feet-wide strip of vegetation, carpeted with turf plugs from Batavia. I wanted to sample the eastern and southern stretches of this perimeter, which struck me as prime territory for seepage.
We could also pretty much ignore the plaza-to-be. With construction supplies for the inn stacked all around and no serious cleanup yet undertaken, there were too many possible extraneous soil contaminants. Besides, that area did not afford enough cover to sample in safety. Of course I did want to check where Johnny’s mudslide had occurred. It would be interesting to see how the soil read out, and maybe even more interesting to measure down around the tennis courts, where the mud had ended up. We could check both areas in comparative safety on our way in.
So basically, our target was that large landscaped area between the country club and the parking lot. That’s where the Cornell Pinks were, along with something like 250 other species of vegetation, large and small. I’d made up my mind where to sample and I could draw in all the major plant clusters and most of the minor ones from memory. Diagramming our path for maximum cover took only a few minutes.
“I’d dearly love to sample around the quarry pond, too,” I said wistfully, looking up. “See what effect the drainage runoff’s having. But they’ve made that area damn near inaccessible. It would have to be another trip, preferably in daylight.”
Baxter stared at the clutter in front of him on the table. “In daylight and legal. We’ve already got plenty to cover tonight. Let’s check over what we have with an eye to escape routes, in case we need to abort at some point.”
I nodded my agreement. “We’ll need to factor in the security setup.” I proceeded to summarize what I already knew. There were twenty-four-hour manned gatehouses at the north and south entrances to the golf-course/residential loop road; you had to be either a resident or an expected visitor to get in. All driveways would open off that road, and a number of areas along it would be set aside for small parking lots. There was a lot of green space, part of neither the course nor anybody’s yard. The master plan called for numerous foot and bike paths, a few of which were already established. Three of these paths would access the tennis-courts/pool area, and from there people could climb those stairs to the plateau. By car, resident or non- and whatever your reason for going to the plateau, you had to drive up along the steep access road bleeding off Route 5. This road could be gated shut at its bottom end and regularly was when the country club was not open. “But I figure there are a few more wrinkles,” I said when finished.
Indeed, Baxter assured me. Besides the night lighting up top, there were motion detectors along the access road and covering all building access points. TV cameras panned the surrounding area. Information from these sources was monitored throughout the night from a small first-floor room in the country club. If something looked wrong, one or both of the armed gate-booth personnel would be drawn in to investigate. How many calls they’d gotten he didn’t know, but presumably they’d been able to handle whatever problems arose on-site without the need for police involvement. In the months since the country club opened, the sheriff’s department had never been summoned.
“It’s not a bad system,” he pronounced. “Those entrance checkpoints give residents a feeling of security, and the parking setup unobtrusively monitors golfers and other club guests while there are people in the plateau area. The sensors and cameras take over when it’s supposed to be deserted. It’s not cumbersome, it’s reasonably tight. Not foolproof, of course. You haven’t mentioned it yet, but I do assume you know a way in.”
“As it happens—”
In the earliest stages of the project, while the major reshaping for the golf course was being done, things were wide open. Then, before they started work on the country club building, the walled access road was put in, a guard installed at the bottom gate to sign workers in and out. The way around that annoyance was simple. Since the residential accesses were not yet manned, you just drove in along the loop to its highest elevation, which was not far from the pool/courts terrace, parked your car, and hiked on up to the worksite. Matt griped but decided he could live with a few people doing this. Most of the guys figured they got enough fresh air and exercise on their jobs and drove in as close to them as they could.
In June, however, with the first few houses occupied and the residents demanding their promised perks, the entrance gatehouses were manned. This brought out the explorer in me—having to check in and out every single day felt too Big Brotherish for my taste. The eastern edge of the tract, away from the river, had no bordering road, not even a rutted dirt one-laner. No fencing, either, but a deep woodsy buffer, which was punctuated by a meandering stream about as shallow as the one behind my house and much narrower. Except maybe during a couple weeks in spring in high snowmelt years it was not an effective barrier for a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Farther east beyond the stream was private property, farm holdings most of it, few of them currently under cultivation. These were served by a narrow, badly out-of-shape county road. I looked around until I found a bleed-off from that which took me over to the water. A little tree clearing on the other side, and I was in. I’d never told a soul about this trail-blazing and only used the route a few times. When I did go that way, I carefully parked the Bronco out of sight from the road. As far as I knew, my secret remained intact.
I’d taken the route on one of my last visits to Hudson Heights, and it was still passable. They hadn’t started building in that sector yet, so we could get almost to our disembarkation point without passing any houses. We debated taking two vehicles but opted for one, the desirability of alternate getaway routes cancelled out by doubling the chances an unauthorized shape would be spotted. So: we knew the way in, we had our working circuit diagrammed out, and it was almost eight. Time to go, I thought.
Baxter didn’t, quite. “Before we leave I want you to fax an update to your lawyer.”
“I already did, while Frank was minding me this afternoon. On the off chance the right opportunity knocked.”
“Did you say you were going to Hudson Heights tonight?”
“I didn’t know that, then. I said ‘when I could.’”
“Fax her the time, too. And tell her who you’re going with.”
It was Calvin’s Blazer we took rather than my Bronco, black with red stripes being deemed more inconspicuous than unadulterated red. We didn’t try for the cat burglar effect, but all three of us wore jeans and dark, long-sleeved shirts. The men both carried pistols; I was offered the chance but declined. For communications we had Baxter’s cellular phone.
Frank was working overtime to take charge at headquarters, prepared to sound an alert if necessary. He had been told where we were headed and must have had a good idea what we were up to, but you can’t get hung by your thumbs for mere speculation. Baxter deemed it safer for all concerned if the rest of the department was informed after the fact.
We didn’t talk much, driving over. Hunched behind the wheel, Calvin looked really into the project. Baxter’s expression was pensive. I was so high on the idea of finally doing something instead of being done to that I felt utterly removed from such considerations. We were right, we were deserving, we would succeed. It’s as well I am not usually blessed with such certainty.
“What the hell!” Baxter exclaimed as we approached the Route 5 entrance to the plateau road. Clearly the country club would not be jumping tonight: the gates were already shut.
“There’s a sign. Calvin, slow up a little.”
“Closed. Either of you catch any of the rest of it?”
“The printing’s too damn small. I’m pretty sure ‘family’ was one of the words.”
“‘Death in the family.’” Baxter sounded positive. “Well, she was Chad’s aunt.”
“How many country clubs close on a Saturday night because somebody’s aunt died?” I asked, outraged.
“It could be tonight’s function involved people who’d be mostly at the wake anyhow. Maybe there wasn’t even a fu
nction scheduled—it was going to be a walk-in night and they decided not to bother. Maybe Clete’s famous sentimentality kicked in. Who knows? Whatever, there goes any prospect we had of mingling up on the plateau. We may as well reschedule for later.”
“To what advantage?” I demanded. “Even if that sign should have read ‘Closed to Cover Our Tails,’ the people we don’t want to run into are more likely to be up there on the lookout after the wake than now. And it could be a ritual closing, like it says. There wasn’t anybody manning that gate.”
“No need. Anything so much as touches the lock, an alarm sounds up in the control room. But you’re right, later isn’t likely to be better and could be worse. Okay, we go for it now.”
“Right.” Calvin speeded up noticeably in honor of the verdict. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that my heart had speeded up too. I hadn’t figured on anything like that until we were actually dodging around among the vegetation.
“At least the moon shouldn’t be a factor,” Baxter mused out loud. “Our cloud cover isn’t supposed to lift till morning.”
“I hope they got that right.”
“Another plus: At this temperature, we shouldn’t even work up a sweat.”
“Not unless we have to run real fast,” I muttered.
“Getting a few nerves, are we?” he asked mildly. Slowly, casually, he worked his hand behind my waist and down. It wasn’t a bad preoccupation for the remainder of our journey to my own private trailhead.
For that part of the route, moonlight would have been a plus. There was so much overgrown vegetation, especially as we neared the stream, that trying to get through without headlights would have been suicidal. When Calvin briefly cut down to the parking lights we lightly brushed a couple of trees.
We crossed the water without incident and continued slowly on through the woods on the Hudson Heights side. As they began to thin, Baxter said, “Calvin, cut the lights as soon as we’re beyond the good tree cover—in case they’ve put a lookout up on the plateau. I wish we could avoid passing under those fancy streetlights they’ve installed along the road.”
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