THE ELSON LEGACY (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 6)

by Lawrence de Maria

  “How does the Red Lantern sound to you?”

  At the mention of my favorite watering hole, and the prospect of his own meatball hero, Gunner trotted over to a chair, picked up his leash and brought it over to me. I never taught him that. He just started doing it on his own when I mentioned a walk or food. I don’t know how he figured it out. Must be something in my voice. Or maybe the look on my face. Because if I said, “The Yankees need pitching,” he would have ignored me.

  In the elevator I started thinking about baseball and actually looked at Gunner and said, “They do need pitching.”

  This time, he did ignore me. Unlike the two women who were also in the elevator. They moved as far away from me as they could and sprinted away as soon as the doors opened to the lobby.

  It was a nice fall day, and I decided to walk to the Red Lantern, where parking would be at a premium in any event, thanks to football season. The Red ran one of the biggest NFL football pools in the city, with almost 2,000 players, from mobsters to judges, filling out weekly betting slips. One of the lawyers who ambulance chases at the Criminal Court in Stapleton once told me that it was not unheard of for a jurist to ask a defendant or his counsel if they had an extra betting slip handy.

  It was Wednesday, when many of the slips were dropped off, so all the parking spots, including those next to fire hydrants, bus stops and “No Parking” signs would probably be taken. Many cars were emblazoned with official stickers or emblems identifying them as police, fire, sanitation, judicial and Borough Hall vehicles.

  The one-mile walk took longer than it should have, since Gunner made a few stops at hydrants and trees, as well at Gottleib’s Bakery, where he was, as usual, given a donut because “that’s one good-looking pooch”. They never give me a donut.

  “I hope it ruins your appetite,” I said, as I brushed sugar powder off his nose.

  When I got to the Red, I said hello to the smokers standing outside. There are always a couple of them, in any weather. During the recent brutal winter, I mistook one of them for a statue, he was so motionless, until a long stream of smoke came out from his frost-enclosed lips.

  I found a stool at the end of the bar. Gunner curled up in a corner nearby. Roscoe Kane, the Red Lantern’s owner and resident bookie, came over. I ordered a beer. He poured me a J. Lohr Cabernet.

  “Mary made venison with a port wine reduction as the special,” Roscoe said. “You don’t drink beer with that.”

  You never knew what to expect as a special in the Red Lantern. Some days it could be kielbasi. On one occasion, it was elk, from a haunch brought back by a customer who had been out West on a hunting trip.

  “It’s not deer season,” I said as I sipped the excellent wine.

  “It’s never deer season on Staten Island.”

  Deer had disappeared from the borough decades ago. But their population had exploded in adjacent New Jersey and some hungry and obviously adventurous animals swam to Staten Island. It was estimated that the local herd now numbered almost a thousand animals.

  The locally sourced venison was delicious. When I left the Red Lantern, Roscoe gave me a bag with Gunner’s meatball hero, for which, of course, there was no charge. On the walk back to my office I made a point of crossing the street before I got to Gottleib’s Bakery. Gunner gave me a look.

  Back at my desk, I cut up Gunner’s hero, after taking a bite to make sure it wasn’t too hot. After my second bite, it was perfect. My concern for his well-being earned me another look. I filled Gunner’s bowl with the remainder of the meatball sub. While he ate, I returned the two phone calls on my answering machine.

  Laurene’s story was solid. I called her and told her that after I cleared up a few things, I’d head to Virginia.

  “That’s wonderful, Mr. Rhode.”

  “I think you can call me Alton, Laurene.”

  “I’ll try. Alton. Anyway, when you get to Atlas, you can stay at my grandfather’s house. You can get the keys and stuff from the local lawyer my D.C. attorneys are using. They trust her. I think because she’s new to the town. Her name is on that list I gave you.”

  “I’ll do my best, Laurene. But you must realize that might not be good enough. A lot of murders go unsolved. This isn’t like TV. And I don’t care what you pay me, if I’m convinced there is nothing more I can do, I’m coming home.”

  After I rang off, I glanced over at Gunner, who, with a snout covered in marinara sauce, looked like Cujo.

  “Ever been to Virginia?”

  I closed up the office early. On the way home I stopped in the bank branch in my building, where I keep my business account and deposited Laurene’s check. I could have used the ATM machine, which has swallowed up any number of smaller checks without a problem, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  The cute little red-haired teller who I reciprocally flirt with from time to time, and who knows my typical balance, said “Wow” when she saw the deposit.

  “Way to go, Jake. Especially if this is from that hot babe I saw you waltz through the lobby with earlier.”

  “Jealous, Murph?”

  “Nah. She’s engaged. I saw her ring.”

  “From here?”

  “I could have seen it from Cleveland.”

  CHAPTER 7 - MAIN LINE

  The next morning I called Alice and told her my plans.

  “I know you have classes, but I thought we might stop by and see you.”

  “We?”

  “I’m taking Gunner with me.”

  “I’m always glad to see Gunner.” There was a pause. For effect. “And you, of course. But isn’t it a bit out of your way?”

  “You are never out of the way.”

  “I suppose sex will be involved.”

  “Well I can't speak for Gunner, but I think so.”

  “I'll get out my copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.”

  “Oh, so Gunner will be included.”

  After Alice stopped laughing, she told me where to meet her that afternoon after she finished teaching.

  After packing for the trip, I set out cans of tuna and salmon for Scar, the feral cat that uses my property as his base of operations. If they sold cans of sparrow, that’s what I’d get, because that is his preferred source of protein. Sparrows, other birds and squirrels have wised up to Scar recently. Not too many of them venture into my yard, unless Scar is easily visible sunning himself on my deck.

  One of the largest tomcats I’ve ever seen, he drives his name from the latticework of wounds on his face and his one and a half ears. There is not a doubt in my mind that he has prevailed in most of his fights. That makes me wonder what the losers, if still alive, must look like. When Gunner was a small puppy, Scar used to swat him around when he became annoying. He still will take a swipe at him, for old time’s sake. Despite that, they have become fast friends.

  I used to ask Wayne Miller, who lives nearby, to keep an eye on Scar. Wayne, the Artistic Director and Production Manager at the St. George Theater near the ferry terminal, often wondered why he had to take care of a cat that I didn’t actually own and which only stopped by when it suited his feline wanderings. I often wondered that myself. The last time I was away for any length of time, Scar never showed up at all and Wayne spent most of his time throwing out rancid cans of fish. I felt bad, and offered to leave out food for Wayne, but he didn’t take it well. He threatened to give Alice free tickets to The Vikings at Helgeland, an Ibsen play he was putting on at the St. George, knowing that she would drag me to it for the literary equivalent of a root canal. So, while I know Wayne would bail me out in a pinch, I’ve been breaking in a new Scar-watcher, Freddie Schultz, an incipient teen-aged delinquent whose family moved onto my block a year ago. Freddie and Scar immediately took to each other, which is all you need to know about Freddie.

  Only 14, Freddie already has quite a reputation for deviltry on St. Austins Place, the West Brighton block where I live in the 100-year-old side-hall Colonial my parents owned. St. Austins is a small street with large
houses on large plots. It is heavily canopied by trees, some of the oldest on Staten Island, and is divided by a median strip that the city tends like a botanical-garden, thanks to a family on the block related to the Borough Park Commissioner. The street is anchored on one end by a 100-year-old Lutheran church and on the other by a Mormon meeting hall built a few years ago on the site of a home owned by a descendant of Sally Hemmings, reputedly Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress. The street has a history of sexual shenanigans between spouses not married to each other, some of it true, and was once the target of a poison-pen attack that set neighbor against neighbor. I helped uncover the letter-writer, a local minister, and things have since quieted down, but the block still attracts its share of iconoclasts and rebels.

  For Freddie to stand out, you know he has potential. I like the kid, who reminds me a little of myself at that age.

  He had come by the previous evening and I gave him keys and reiterated my warning about using my house for wild parties.

  “I’m not old enough to know anyone to party with,” he said, reasonably. “But watch out when I hit 16.”

  I also reminded Freddie that part of his job was also to keep an eye on the house. There had been a spate of burglaries in the area.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” he’d told me, looking around my living room. “A burglar would think you’d already been robbed.”

  ***

  The drive to Bryn Mawr down first the New Jersey and then the Pennsylvania turnpikes took about an hour and a half.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” I said as I wound my way along Old Gulph Road, one of the exclusive streets leading up to the college. Gunner, sitting in the back of my four-year-old Hyundai Santa-Fe, probably didn’t hear me. His head was out the window, his acute canine senses absorbing sounds, sights and smells humans were not privy to.

  Most humans probably also couldn’t afford the houses we were passing. Bryn Mawr is not only the name of one of the “Seven Sisters” colleges, it also designates one of the richest demographics in the United States. It sits smack in the middle of the "Main Line", a string of suburbs extending northwest from Philadelphia along Route 30, also known as Lancaster Pike. These suburbs include some of the richest bastions of what some people used to call “old money”, although a lot of “new money” has driven the price of area mansions into the stratosphere. The suburbs are also noted for their educational institutions. In addition to Bryn Mawr College, Villanova University, Rosemont College, Haverford College and Bucker College are all within a few miles of each other on Lancaster or a stone’s throw of it. And the very-ivy University of Pennsylvania is a quick ride into Philadelphia on the commuter line. I knew the area well, having played rugby against Villanova’s team during my own college days.

  Alice had told me to find something called the Uncommon Grounds Café in the Marie Salant Neuberger Centennial Campus Center, which is where I sat sipping a plain black coffee, which the coffee shop barista thought was the quaintest of orders, when Alice found me. I wasn’t hard to spot, surrounded as I was by adoring co-eds. Actually, Gunner was surrounded. None of the girls tried to pet me.

  “Ah, the old ‘use the cute dog to attract women’ trick,” Alice said, sitting down.

  She was dressed in a grey cashmere crew-neck sweater over a wool plaid skirt and looked fabulous, every bit a Seven Sisters professor. The co-eds were better dressed than I’d expected, but next to Alice they looked bland. Seeing her, Gunner, of course, went berserk. After settling down, he went back to the co-eds.

  “I must point out that I didn’t have a dog when you fell for me, sweetheart.”

  “You had bullet holes, almost as good.”

  “So, this is him, Ms. Watts,” one of the girls said. “The private eye.”

  “Yes. Isn’t he adorable, too.”

  The girls laughed and drifted away.

  “Nice kids,” I said. “And none of them spoke like they had marbles in their mouths.”

  “A lot of them are very grounded. They don’t act or talk like the rich bitches in a John O’Hara novel. Times, they are a changing. Want to see the college?”

  We took a tour of the huge campus, resplendent in late spring flowers. Alice pointed out the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, the Eugenia Chase Guild Hall, the Eleanor Donnelley Erdman Hall, and the Marjorie Walter Goodhart Hall. After the Clarissa Donelley Haffner Language Hall, I asked if we could stick to buildings with simple names.

  “It will be dark soon,” I said.

  We cut across a large athletic field and let Gunner run free. His breed is very protective and he never strayed too far from us. We let him tree a few squirrels.

  “It seems that he could catch them if he wanted,” Alice noticed.

  “No fun in that,” I said.

  “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?”

  “Great area. I used to come out here occasionally when Holy Cross played Villanova in rugby. But we never hung around with Bryn Mawr girls. They thought we were unclean.”

  “You might have showered after the game.”

  I laughed.

  “You know what I mean. Like lepers. Maybe it was because we all went out after the match with the guys from Villanova. They didn’t have the best reputation.”

  “After you bashed each others’ heads in you went out drinking together? Like the opposing armies met in No Man’s Land at Christmas in World War I?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No girls?”

  “Well, there were some Villanova girls. And, of course, girls from Bucker. They liked us manly types. The Villanova guys even had a limerick about Bucker girls.”

  I repeated the ditty.

  “That’s disgusting, even for Catholic school boys. Bucker College happens to be an excellent school. One of the oldest on the Main Line.”

  “Hey, I’m just repeating what they said. I’m sure the sexual activities of Bucker co-eds were no different than those of co-eds here at Bryn Mawr. For all I know, the boys at Penn and Haverford had a dirty limerick about Bryn Mawr, as well.”

  We spent an enjoyable few minutes trying to devise just such a limerick, but ultimately gave up.

  “Bryn Mawr is tough to rhyme,” Alice said. “Let’s eat.”

  She had rented a small garden apartment in Ardmore about 15 minutes from the campus. Alice had finally purchased a car, a 2010 white Volvo. I followed her up Lancaster Pike. I wanted to take her to a fancy restaurant but she pointed out that such establishments were few and far between in neighborhoods that catered to student appetites. I suggested a trip into Philadelphia but she insisted that a little home cooking would be good for me and Gunner.

  “I have a wonderful little kitchen. I’d like to break it in.”

  Alice had been teaching at Bryn Mawr for more than a month.

  I needn’t have worried. “Home cooking” consisted of a stop at a grocery store for some wine, beer and gourmet dog food, and another stop at a Chinese restaurant for takeout. We bought extra pork dumplings in case Gunner didn’t like the dog food.

  ***

  After dinner, sated with moo shu pork, shrimp with candied walnuts and the couple of dumplings Gunner let us have, Alice and I sat on her couch sipping the last of our wine. Gunner was asleep.

  We were silent for a while. I stroked her hair.

  “Do you still think about her? I mean, being on the Main Line.”

  I paused. I knew who Alice was talking about. Ronnie Frost, my first real love on Staten Island, was a freshman at nearby Rosemont College while I was at Holy Cross. I was looking forward to visiting her when she moved away suddenly, leaving me bereft. Many years later, two homicide detectives from Massachusetts came into my office and told me she was dead.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. Remember, I’m the one who said you had to find out who killed her. I wouldn’t like you as much if you didn’t think about a girl you once loved. Within reason, of course. I don’t want you thinking about her when you are ‘Buck
ing’ me’.”

  I knew she liked the limerick.

  “Usually, I’m thinking about who will give me CPR. And what’s this ‘like’ stuff? I thought you loved me.”

  “I’ll always love you. But it’s also great that I really like you, too.”

  Gunner rolled over and yawned.

  “Everyone’s a critic,” Alice said. “But maybe I am getting too sappy.”

  She got up and headed toward her bedroom, crooking a finger at me.

  “Let me show you some of the sexual proclivities of a part-time Bryn Mawr professor.”

  Gunner got up and followed us. We closed the door in his face. After a couple of desultory barks, he took it well, because he stopped. We undressed and lay side by side in bed.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Is it my imagination, or is your left breast slightly larger than your right?”

  “Many women have tatas that are not exactly the same. Most men don’t even notice.”

  “Probably because they are too busy.”

  “But you did.”

  “I’m a trained detective.”

  “I hope you don’t mind. It’s probably partly your fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are right-handed.”

  “So?”

  “You pay more attention to my left breast. It’s a scientific fact that excessive fondling can increase the size of a breast.”

  “You're pulling my leg.”

  “Stop bragging. You know perfectly well that’s not what I’m pulling.”

  Things progressed rapidly after that.

  “Jesus,” I said when I got my breath under control, “thank God, you’re not a full-time Bryn Mawr professor.”

  Gunner was scratching at the door. At critical junctures, Alice is not the quietest of lovers.

  “He probably thinks you were being murdered.”

  She colored slightly.

  “Speaking of murders,” Alice said. “What does Savannah look like now?”

  “Her name is Laurene, and she’s all grown up.”

  “She was all grown up when you first met her. She was just acting young.”