THE ELSON LEGACY (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 6)

by Lawrence de Maria

  “Do you know who she is, Richie?” a hospital staffer asked him.

  “No clue. Do you think she’ll be all right?”

  “Well, I don’t think she’s in too bad shape. But lucky you found her when you did.”

  Melore left the hospital and resumed his regular patrol route. He called his dispatcher to see if anyone had reported a missing woman.

  “Nothing yet,” she said. “Maybe no one noticed she’s missing, or she’s homeless.”

  “I don’t think she is homeless. I mean, for someone walking through the brush in the rain, she didn’t look all that bad. I don’t know, there was something about her. Will you check with the Staties for me, Lois?”

  “Sure thing.”

  ***

  Melore finished his rounds and pulled into the station at 7:45 AM. He checked in with Lois to find out if she’d found out anything about the woman.

  “Nada,” she said. “I even called the hospital. She’s stable, but not talking. Don’t worry. We’ll find out. You look beat. Go home and get some sleep.”

  “Sounds like a plan. But I want to write it up first.”

  As Melore walked out of the station a half hour later, he almost bumped into his boss.

  “Mornin’ Chief.”

  “Good morning, Richie. Busy night?”

  “Not too bad. Did have something unusual, though. Found a woman wandering around in the woods between Clayton Turnpike and Doswell Road. A trucker reported it. She had no clothes on and seemed disoriented. She was cold and her arms and legs were pretty badly cut up, so I took her to Atlas General. Didn’t want to wait for an ambulance.”

  Melore looked at his chief for a reaction. Taking the woman to the hospital in a squad car was not standard procedure. It invited a lawsuit.

  “Showed initiative, Richie. I like that. Did she say anything to you?”

  “No. Just started crying, poor gal.”

  “Have we identified her?”

  “Not yet. No missing persons reports. Hospital says she’s stable but unresponsive. Lois is checking with the State Police.”

  “Derelict, maybe homeless?”

  “I suppose it’s possible, Chief. But like I told the folks at the hospital, she looked, I don’t know, pretty respectable, despite her injuries, which were minor. Her hands and feet had some cuts and bruises, probably from trees and such. I wrote it all up for you.”

  “Good. Thanks. Now, go home.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Suzanne Deerly-Johnson walked into her office and tossed her braided police cover on the wooden hat rack she’d purchased at one of the area’s innumerable garage sales. She was the black Chief of Police of an all-white police department, and also one of only two woman on the Atlas force, the other being Lois Paxton, the department’s liaison to local schools, who also filled in as a dispatcher.

  Lois was supposed to get off at 8 AM, but it was Sunday and Deerly-Johnson knew that she worked a couple of extra hours to give the next dispatcher some time to go to church and have some breakfast time with his kids. The added overtime expense was brought up at a meeting of the Town Council and the Chief was called on the carpet until she asked its members what was more important: a few dollars or God and children. It was one of the few battles she won against the Council, which refused her numerous pleas for more money to hire additional officers. The department was seriously understaffed and was stretched thin, to the point where it could only do basic police work. Serious investigative operations were almost nonexistent. It was as if the people who ran the town didn’t really want a competent police department. As the only African-American on the force, Deerly-Johnson often felt that she was being set up to fail. But she was too good a cop to throw in the towel.

  “Lois,” she called out to the small squad room, “do you have that report Melore wrote up?”

  “Be right there, Chief,” Lois said. “Got Clyde Spivey on the phone and he sounds hysterical.”

  Oh, Christ, Deerly-Johnson thought. Spivey was president of the Atlas Town Council, the most powerful attorney in the city and the bane of her existence. She sighed, wondering what he was complaining about now.

  “Chief! You’d better get out here!”

  Deerly-Johnson went out to see what had gotten Lois so excited. The woman looked up at her, her face drained of color.

  “He says Judge Elson is dead. Murdered!”

  CHAPTER 3 - LOOSE ENDS

  Staten Island, New York

  Two Months Later

  I was betwixt and between. At loose ends. Twiddling my thumbs. Caught between a rock and a hard place. Marking time. Alone with my thoughts. Running out of cliches.

  Abby Jones, whose first name is really Habika, has taken two weeks vacation and was in Los Angeles, helping her daughter find a suitable off-campus apartment. Naomi has been living in a dorm but wants to move into an apartment complex with some friends for the upcoming fall semester. Her mother insists on checking out both the potential apartment and the potential roommates. Abby spent 20 years in the Army, in the Military Police, before becoming a security guard. She occupied a lobby desk in my building and we bonded over eggplant parmigiana heroes from the Red Lantern tavern in nearby Rosebank. She soon quit her job to come work for me. Her knowledge of crime, both from the Army and from Leon, her gang-banger half-brother, has proved invaluable. She’s helped me solve a couple of cases that had me stymied. (Another brother who works for the cable company has made me the envy of everyone in my building who has ever dealt with a cable company.)

  Abby doesn’t suffer fools, least of all me. She runs my office like an Army post. I feel sorry for Naomi and her roommates.

  Alice Watts, the woman I love, is spending the summer teaching at Bryn Mawr on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia. I met her at the pool at Wagner College. I was abusing my hard-earned and free access to the school’s athletic facilities and she was coaching the Wagner women’s swim team. When I first saw her, she was surrounded by long-limbed and supple college co-eds, but I only had eyes for her. Her limbs and the rest of her were also first-rate and I liked the fact that she wasn’t put off by the bullet holes in my torso. An almost-Olympic-quality swimmer, Alice also teaches philosophy at Wagner but was now searching for a bigger academic pond, something that makes me and Spencer Bradley, Wagner’s President, very nervous. The stint at Bryn Mawr is obviously a stepping stone. Alice maintains an apartment in Greenwich Village, where I maintain a chest of drawers. And she has a chest of drawers (and two closets, of course) at my house on Staten Island. She’d only been gone two weeks and I miss her. I wasn’t sure how I would react to her going away permanently. We’d have to cross the bridge over that academic pond when we came to it.

  Armin Rahm, who runs the Russian mob in Staten Island, Brooklyn and now parts of New Jersey, was in Florida with his father, Marat. The Rahm crime family, always seeking new opportunities, is forging alliances with its counterparts in the huge Russian community in Miami.

  “Who knows Cuba better than a Russian,” Armin explained to me. “The Communists were idiots. The Mafia is weak. Now that the U.S. has come to its senses and opened the island up again, wait until you see what a Russian capitalist can do there.”

  “You were born here and went to an Ivy League school,” I reminded him. “You’re more American than Walt Disney.”

  “Good point, Alton. But it makes my father happy when I act Russian. By the way, we are taking a side trip to Naples, on the Gulf. One of those mansions you told me about when you were down there a few years ago may be a good place for my father to own and use in the winter. He is slowing down. Florida’s warm weather will be good for him. And you know how Russians like to be near the water.”

  “Primarily for body disposal. But why not Miami?”

  “Too many Russians.”

  So off they went. I even miss Maks Kalugin, Rahm’s fire-hydrant-hard pet assassin, who spent the early part of our relationship trying to talk his boss into killing me. More recently,
he has saved my life a couple of times. We’re not on each other’s Christmas-card list, but Maks now occasionally smiles at my jokes. A mixed blessing, considering his teeth.

  On the other side of the law, Cormac Levine, the best detective on the District Attorney’s squad, is also out of town, on a trip to Ireland, to visit the village near Dublin where his mother’s family originated. Cormac is half Jewish and was fretting about the trip until I did a Google search for him and found several bagel places in and around Dublin. I even located one restaurant that specialized in Kosher food.

  “Are you crazy,” he said. “I’m not eating that crap. What about Italian restaurants?”

  He left with a list of those.

  So, just about everyone I knew was somewhere else. I felt like I had missed the warning about an impending nuclear attack.

  I looked over at Gunner.

  “When are you leaving?”

  I had recently started bringing him to the office on a regular basis.

  Gunner stopped gnawing away on one of the huge elk antler dog chews Alice gave him for Christmas and looked at me. (My present was a golf club, which he tried to chew first until I put it out of reach.) Reading from a brochure, Alice had explained that the dog toys were “American-sourced, naturally-shed elk antlers from the Rocky Mountains” that would give a canine “hours of chew time, beneficial vitamins and minerals, and cleaner teeth”. They did last a long time, and Gunner loved them. That wasn’t at all surprising, since it was pretty obvious he had more than a little residual wolf in him. His not-too-distant ancestors probably dined on elk whose antlers were not “naturally shed”, unless mauling counts.

  Gunner started out as a fluffy little puppy that Alice instantly fell in love with, which was one reason I had to keep him. He was a gift to me from the Rahms, the other reason I had to keep him. Old Russian proverb: “Man Who Declines Puppy Will Sleep With The Sturgeons.” Actually, I made that up, but Alice got a kick out of it.

  Gunner is named after a Medal of Honor winner whose murder I solved and avenged, after a fashion. In any event, a lot of people died or went to jail. He is still technically a puppy, although hopefully near his full size. He is already slightly larger than, and looks much like, an average German Shepherd, with a proud head and a sable red coat.

  As Kalugin happily informed me many times, Gunner is a Byelorussian Ovcharka, a breed that is a mix of East Siberian Laikas and German Shepherds. Also known as East European Shepherds, “Charkas” are known for their toughness, loyalty and superior intelligence, traits that served the breed well on the Eastern Front during World War II. The Red Army bred East European Shepherds prior to the war for military use, police work and border guard duties.

  “He will keep you in line,” Maks said.

  In fact, a little research convinced me that Gunner and I would get along famously. The breed is also used as therapy dogs and as guide dogs for the blind. Their sense of smell is acute, and many Charkas are used as sniffer dogs. Tough, smart and good-looking. We were made for each other.

  Gunner went back to chewing and I decided that the only sure cure for inaction was action. Perhaps I could work on one of my cases. Keep busy. Track an errant spouse. Solve a mystery.

  Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. I also didn’t have any clients.

  I picked up the phone and called Ron Mazzuco, one of the senior partners in the law firm that owned my building to see if his lawyers had any work for me. The reason I had such a nice corner office on the North Shore of Staten Island overlooking New York Harbor, at an affordable rent, was that I did grunt work for the lawyers when asked. Mostly skip traces and an occasional insurance fraud case.

  “Everything is quiet,” Ron said. Then ominously, “Too quiet.”

  Ron reads a lot of mystery novels.

  “I can’t even work for free,” I said to Gunner after hanging up.

  He didn’t even bother to look at me this time.

  I was about to go back to feeling sorry for myself when Gunner’s ears perked up and he stood.

  I, of course, had not heard anything that would have made my ears perk up, even if they could perk. Everyone knows that the typical dog’s senses, particularly as related to sounds and smells, are much more acute than any man’s. True to his breeding, Gunner had graduate degrees in both. I knew from experience that he was reacting to someone getting off the elevator in the hallway and walking toward my office. From where I sat, I probably wouldn’t have heard a gunshot.

  A moment later I did hear the door to my outer office open. Gunner began to growl and move purposefully toward my inner-office door. Then he stopped. Usually that meant he recognized the tread of whoever was approaching. Usually someone who worked on my floor, a friend or regular visitor. Dogs can occasionally make mistakes, of course. I mean, hell, they are only human, right? But Gunner was pretty reliable. Anything that exhibited malevolent intent, including a Cape Buffalo, would have a hard time getting past him.

  Gunner’s tail started wagging. It wasn’t a Cape Buffalo.

  “Hello, Mr. Rhode.”

  “It” was a beautiful woman. Gunner likes women. I think it’s more than the fact that he doesn’t consider them a threat. I think he likes the way they smell. Gunner and I are alike in that respect. Of course, if he doesn’t figure it out by himself soon, I’ll have to tell him that the most dangerous creature in the world is a beautiful woman. At least that’s what the Mafia kingpin says in Prizzi’s Honor, the great Richard Condon novel. And he should know. And it’s entirely possible that a woman will walk in and plug me full of holes some day, probably with good reason. But since I don’t want my dog chasing away beautiful women, I’ll take my chances.

  I rose from my chair.

  “Yes,” I said, for want of anything better to say.

  “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Rhode?”

  CHAPTER 4 - UPTOWN GIRL

  She was exquisite. Gunner, in a sign of interspecies admiration, was now wagging his tail to beat the band.

  Her features began to fall into place. She waited patiently. Then, it clicked.

  “Savannah.”

  She gave me a smile of pure pleasure.

  “You remember me. But it’s not Savannah.”

  “Sorry. An honest mistake. How are you, Laurene?”

  She walked over and held out her hand. I took it. Then, she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. After she did, it seemed only natural, despite our shared history.

  “What a beautiful dog!”

  She crouched down and took Gunner’s head in both her hands. He lapped her face. Did I mention that he was very intelligent?

  When last I saw Laurene Robillard, she was a 19-year-old call girl who pulled one of the greatest scams I’d ever been privileged to be part of. And it was a privilege, even if I was the mark. It was a work of art. As Cormac uncharitably put it, I fell for her act “hooker, line and sinker.”

  She stood and sat in my client chair, crossed her legs and rested a crocodile-embroidered handbag on her lap. I sat and stared at her. Gunner went back to his elk.

  Laurene didn’t look like a girl, call or otherwise, now. No longer razor thin, but still lithe, she was wearing a camel-hair blazer over sleeveless silk print dress. Her right wrist was bangled with a colorful variety of bracelets. There was what looked like an engagement ring on her left hand. It was a big enough piece of ice to sink the Titanic, but I reserved judgment. Given her knack for artifice, it might have been role-playing on her part. Her blond hair was cut short and swept back. The effect, along with the arch of her long eyebrows, gave her a slightly feline look. I’d thought of her often. I was not proud of the way I’d treated her during the Capriati caper. Not that she didn’t deserve it. After all, she almost got me killed. But since she didn’t, I could feel magnanimous. Funny how that works, when it concerns gorgeous women.

  She reached in her bag and took out an e-cigarette.

  “Do you mind?”

  “No,” I said, “but the medical jury is sti
ll out on those.”

  “A girl has to have some small vices,” she said. “I’ve already got most of the big ones covered. Besides, it helps to calm me. I’m a bit nervous seeing you.”

  “No reason to be. You look wonderful, by the way.”

  “Thank you. And you look just like I remember you.”

  “My apologies.”

  She laughed. Then she picked up a small framed photo from my desk. In it, Alice Watts held Gunner, back when he could be held.

  “She is beautiful,” Laurene said. “Your wife?”

  “Friend.”

  She put the frame down next to the only other object on my desk, a photo cube containing pictures of Derek Jeter, Eli Manning, Mickey Mantle and Secretariat that I’d cut out from various magazines. Abby had given me hell about the cube, accusing me of preferring a bunch of jocks and a horse over Alice Watts, who she liked immensely. Abby didn’t appreciate my admittedly snide remark that I never met a women who could win the Belmont by 31 lengths. She bought me the frame, and versions of Alice, with the recently added Gunner, has deservedly occupied it ever since.

  “I was worried about you, back then, after you figured out the scam,” she said. “I’m glad you came through everything all right. Did you ever find out who set you up?”

  “Yes.”

  When I didn’t say anything else, she let it go. Laurene had been in the kind of business where asking too many questions was bad for business. That made me wonder what she was doing now.

  “And how have you been?” I asked delicately.

  She laughed.

  “You want to know if I’m still hooking. The answer is no.”

  She held up the hand with the diamond rock.

  “I’m getting married.”

  I usually try not to raise my eyebrows, but this time I failed.

  “Sadie Sadie, married lady.”

  “And, in case you are wondering, yes, he was a client. Knows everything about me, and doesn’t care.”