Third Strike
Page 15
Olive Otero was shaking her head. “Nothing but trouble,” she muttered. “As if there wasn’t enough going on around here these days.”
“Look,” I said. “You know Larry Bucyck was murdered. I explained to you guys about a dozen times yesterday how he dragged me down here because of what he told me he saw the other night when he was fishing on Menemsha Pond, and how it frightened him. So doesn’t it make sense that what J.W. and I saw last night was pretty much what Larry was talking about? Those people who chased us in their cars had to be the people who killed Larry. Right? They would’ve killed us, too, if J.W. hadn’t cleverly eluded them. Surely you can see that.”
“It was you who shot out their headlights,” said J.W. “Otherwise we would’ve been dead before we ever got to the Land Cruiser.”
“You were the one who pulled the wool over that guard’s eyes,” I said, “pretending to be drunk. You would’ve fooled me.”
“Yeah,” said J.W., “but you were the one who snuck up on him and conked him on the head.”
“Now we’ve got a damn mutual admiration society,” grumbled Olive. “You’re heroes, both of you, okay?” She blew out a long breath, then stood up. “I guess you’d better show me where this mysterious Dr. Mumford lives, then. Let’s get this out of the way. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me. Come on.”
“I can give you directions,” said J.W.
Olive turned and glared at him. “You’re coming with me. Both of you.”
He held up both hands, palms out. “Okay, okay.”
I detoured to the kitchen to refill my coffee mug, and then the three of us went out to the driveway where a state-police cruiser was waiting with its motor running and a uniformed trooper sitting behind the wheel.
Olive slid into the passenger seat beside the trooper.
J.W. and I climbed into the backseat.
Olive half turned in her seat. “Okay,” she said. “How do we get there?”
J.W. gave the directions, and twenty minutes or so later we were creeping down the narrow roadway to Menemsha Pond.
I realized I’d only been there those two times, first with Larry and then with J.W., both times at night. Everything looked different in the daylight. Nothing was familiar. I never would’ve been able to find it, or recognize it if I managed to stumble upon it.
But after a few minutes, J.W. said, “There. That’s the place. Dr. Mumford’s house.”
The trooper pulled the cruiser into the driveway, and then the general layout began to look right. I thought I recognized the bushes where I’d hidden, and the place where I’d smacked the guard on the head with the rock, and the window J.W. had peeked into.
A silver-colored Lincoln Town Car was parked in the turnaround in front. No bullet holes in its grille.
The lawn in front of the house sloped down to the pond. A long dock extended into the water. The boat moored there was a center-console runabout, maybe sixteen feet long. The name on its transom was Penelope L.
No sign of a forty-footer guarded by men with Uzis.
“You sure this is the place?” said Olive from the front seat.
“This is it,” said J.W.
She opened the car door. “Come on, then. Let’s get this straightened out once and for all.”
J.W. and I piled out of the cruiser, and the three of us went to the front door. Olive rang the bell, and a minute later the door opened.
Standing there was a little white-haired man wearing chino pants and a green golf shirt. He had a newspaper in his hand and an uncertain smile on his face. “Can I help you?” he said.
“Dr. Mumford?” said Olive.
He frowned. “No…” Then he blinked. “You mean Lundsberg? That’s me. Nathan Lundsberg. Dr. Lundsberg, in fact. I am a doctor. Semiretired now.” He looked from Olive to J.W. to me. “So what can I do for you folks so early this morning? Won’t you come in?”
“Thank you,” said Olive quickly.
The man stepped aside and Olive went in.
J.W. leaned close to me and whispered, “That’s him.” Then he followed Olive, and I followed J.W., into the house.
Dr. Lundsberg led us into the living room, which was on the pond side of the house. The front was mostly glass. There was a fieldstone fireplace and a scattering of leather chairs, with two big sofas arranged so that those who sat on them could watch the ducks and terns on Menemsha Pond.
Dr. Lundsberg asked if we wanted coffee, and before I could say, Yes, Olive said, No, thank you.
Lundsberg took one of the leather chairs. Olive and J.W. and I introduced ourselves to him, then arranged ourselves on the two sofas.
“You’re a police officer?” Lundsberg said to Olive.
She smiled pleasantly. “I am.”
“And you, gentlemen?” he said to J.W. and me.
“We’re just friends of Officer Otero,” said J.W.
The doctor frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “You haven’t told me how I can help you.”
“You have a beautiful place,” said Olive.
He smiled. “I spend way too little time down here, I’m afraid. Soon I will retire completely. Then I think I’ll try living here year-round.”
“Is that your boat?” she said. “The Penelope L?”
He nodded. “It’s just right for putting around the pond, running over to Edgartown or Vineyard Haven. I like to do a little fishing. The stripers come into the pond on the tide.”
“Do you own another boat?”
“No,” he said. “Is there something about my boat? Is that why you’re here?”
“We’re looking for a bigger boat,” said Olive. “Something around forty feet.”
Dr. Lundsberg shrugged.
“I was told it was docked here,” she said.
“A forty-footer?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but whoever told you that was mistaken. Occasionally I have visitors who come in their boats. But I had no visitors last night, and in any case, I don’t even know anybody who owns a forty-foot boat.”
“Are there other people here?”
“Now, you mean? Here in the house?”
Olive nodded. “Yes.”
Lundsberg shook his head. “My wife passed on several years ago. Since then, I’ve been alone.”
“So there’s nobody else here?” said Olive.
“No. Just me, I’m afraid.”
“We heard you had a party last night.”
He frowned. “A party, you say?”
“A gathering. A meeting, maybe. Late. Around midnight.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but whoever told you that was mistaken. I was here alone. Just me. In bed by ten. I’m not good for much at night anymore. I retire early and rise early.”
“Did you hear any shooting?”
“Shooting? Like guns, you mean?”
“Yes,” said Olive.
He smiled. “Goodness, no. That’s what I love about this place. It’s quiet. The neighbors are very friendly, but they don’t live close enough to bother me. Perhaps this party you’re referring to, and that boat, and the shooting, maybe it was all happening at some other house on the pond. I wouldn’t know anything about it if that were the case.”
“We were told it was here,” said Olive.
“Were you told that by the same person who thought my name was…what did you say?”
“Mumford,” said Olive.
Lundsberg spread his hands. “Well, there you have it. Maybe somebody named Mumford was visiting one of my neighbors.”
Olive nodded. “You’re probably right. We were misinformed. It was probably somebody else around here.” She gave me and J.W. a quick frown, a little warning not to interfere, and then she stood up. “I’m sorry we bothered you on a Sunday morning, Doctor.”
Lundsberg stood up. “It was no bother. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. I’ll keep my ears open, and if I hear anything…”
He took the card, glanced at it, and put it on the coffee table. “I will. Of course.”
We all walked out of the house. Dr. Lundsberg followed us to the cruiser, where the uniformed trooper was leaning against the door gazing out at the pond. We shook hands with Lundsberg, piled in, and backed out of the driveway.
The doctor stood in his driveway watching us with a hand raised in a little wave.
“That’s him,” J.W. said to Olive. “Lundsberg is the man I saw last night.”
Olive turned and looked at him. “You sure?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
At the end of the driveway, J.W. said, “Go that way.”
The trooper turned onto the road so that he was following the route J.W. and I had taken when we were running away from the car that chased us.
“Where was it you dumped the Uzi?” he said to me.
I pointed. “Right up there, I think.”
“Stop here,” said J.W.
We stopped, and all four of us got out.
I stood there trying to visualize it—J.W. and I zigzagging down the road in the darkness, the car’s headlights coming up fast behind us, catching us in their beams, me stopping, kneeling, and letting off a volley of shots at the grille and headlights, the car, suddenly darkened, swerving off the road and into the bushes.
“I was right about there,” I said, pointing fifteen or twenty feet up the road. “I knelt there, on the side, let off some shots, then turned and ran. I tossed the gun up there.” I pointed again at some underbrush alongside the road.
Olive went to where I remembered kneeling in the roadway when I shot the Uzi at the car. The trooper joined her. Both of them bent over at the waist and began pacing around, peering hard at the ground.
“Looking for cartridge casings?” said J.W.
Olive grunted. J.W. and I joined them.
After about ten minutes, Olive said, “There’s nothing. So where do you claim you threw the Uzi?”
“I don’t claim it,” I said. “I did it.” I walked up the roadway, trying to remember. “Somewhere along here,” I said. “It was on this side of the road, I’m sure of that.”
The four of us poked and probed at the bushes and weeds alongside the road until it became quite evident that no Uzi was there.
“This is a big fat waste of time,” said Olive. “Let’s go.”
“Somebody cleaned it up,” I said. “We’re not making this up.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Olive. “If we’d found just one empty cartridge in the road, I’d believe you. But there is not one shred of evidence that this is anything but some fantasy you two guys have concocted.”
“You know us better than that,” said J.W.
She shrugged. “I thought I did.”
“Why would we concoct a fantasy like that?”
“You tell me.”
“Mumford,” he said. “That’s how Larry Bucyck heard Lundsberg’s name. Mumford, Lundsberg.”
“Not that close,” Olive said.
“Well,” said J.W., “Mumford or not, I’m telling you that Lundsberg is the very man I saw pointing his laser light at the map last night in that very living room where we just were.”
Olive didn’t say anything.
“I know Larry wasn’t that reliable,” I said. “But the point is, he told me his story, how he’d seen a big boat similar to the one we saw last night come into the pond and tie up right there, on that same dock, and he told me how he got caught in their spotlight. And then he brought me here the other night, to this house. And then he got murdered. That was no fantasy. You know that. And then last night I brought J.W. here, and we saw what we saw.”
“Well,” said Olive, “I’ll tell Sergeant Agganis what we found out—or what we didn’t find out—and he can decide what he wants to do. Now let’s get out of here.”
We got into the cruiser and headed back to Edgartown. Olive didn’t say anything, and neither did J.W. or I. Even when they dropped us off back at J.W.’s house, she didn’t say anything.
J.W. and I stood in his driveway and watched the cruiser back out and pull away.
“She’s not that happy,” I said.
“Neither am I,” he said.
“Lundsberg covered it all up.”
“He and his cohorts,” said J.W. “I got a glimpse of a face last night that looked familiar. Wish I could place it, but damned if I can.”
We went inside. Zee and the kids were at the table eating their breakfast cereal. J.W. went around and gave them all a kiss.
“Where’ve you guys been?” said Zee.
“It’s a long story,” said J.W. “I’ll tell you later, okay?”
She shrugged. “I imagine it’s connected to the long story you’re going to tell me about where you were until two A.M. last night.”
“It is,” said J.W. He poured himself a mugful of coffee.
So did I. “Now what?” I said to him.
“Follow me.”
I followed him into my bedroom. Guest room by night, J.W.’s office by day. He sat at the desk and switched on his computer.
I pulled a chair up beside him. “What’re you doing?”
“Googling Dr. Nathan Lundsberg,” he mumbled.
I watched the screen. Pretty soon a list popped up, URLs to click on, each with a two- or three-line annotation. J.W. scrolled through the list, then clicked, and another list popped up, and so forth through several pages of lists. Scanning the annotations, it appeared that we’d found two Dr. Nathan Lundsbergs. One of them, Dr. Nathan Lundsberg, Jr., was not our man. This one, based on the years of his college and graduate-school degrees, was around forty years old. He had a Ph.D. in mathematics from Purdue University and was a professor at Oregon State. He’d written some scholarly articles and had coauthored a textbook.
The other Dr. Nathan Lundsberg appeared far more abundantly on the Google list. He was our white-haired man of Menemsha, which J.W. verified by finding a fairly recent photograph of him. Lundsberg was born in 1932, the only son of wealthy parents, earned his MD from Harvard, and embarked on a career as a specialist in public health. He’d served on the NIH and was a member of the Surgeon General’s staff during the Reagan administration. For the past twenty years he’d apparently been out of both public service and private practice. Instead, he’d spearheaded the creation and funding of health clinics in the villages of Nicaragua and Guatemala and Haiti. He’d appeared at public functions with Presidents Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush and Bill Clinton and Joe Callahan, plus numerous governors and senators. He’d lobbied both the United States Congress and private foundations for policies and for money. He’d given graduation speeches at universities. He’d received a dozen honorary degrees and had an endowed chair named for him at the Harvard Medical School. He’d written op-ed articles for The New York Times and the Washington Post on the subject of children’s health in Central America. He’d written a book called It Takes More than a Village.
Dr. Nathan Lundsberg was eminent as hell. He had devoted his life to doing good works. I felt ignorant, never having heard of him before.
The doctor had a son, Nathan Junior, the math professor, and a daughter, Penelope, an elementary school teacher in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Lundsberg’s wife, Julia, had died thirteen years earlier.
“Named his boat after his daughter,” I observed.
“The man’s a damn saint,” muttered J.W.
“So why’s he hanging out with men carrying Uzis?” I said.
“Lemme keep reading,” he muttered.
I sat back and let J.W. scroll through more of the stuff that Google found for him.
An hour later he flexed his arms, arched his back, and groaned. “I don’t know,” he said. “If he’s diverting funds from his clinics to accounts on the Cayman Islands or enslaving Nicaraguan children and selling them into prostitution, Mr. Google d
oesn’t know it. I find not a breath of scandal, not a hint of wrongdoing. He’s devoted his life to the health and general well-being of poor people in strife-torn little nations.”
I shook my head. “We’re missing something, then.”
He nodded. “I guess the hell we are. We could look some more, but I don’t have any more energy for it.”
“So now what do we do?”
“I don’t know about you,” said J.W., “but I’m going to church.”
I laughed. “Sure you are.”
“No, really. It’s Sunday, and I’m going to church.”
“You don’t go to church,” I said. “You’re like me. You’re a pagan.”
He shrugged. “I like the music.”
“I like the music, too,” I said. “I have several CDs of sacred music. Handel and Haydn, Beethoven and Bach and Mozart. Wonderful stuff. But you don’t need to go to church to hear the music.”
“You coming with me or not?”
I smiled. “I didn’t bring any church clothes. Sorry.”
He shrugged.
“Is Zee going with you?” I said. “Want me to stay with the kids?”
“Zee won’t go. I won’t even ask her.”
“You,” I said, “are up to something.”
He smiled. “Maybe I am. And maybe I’ll tell you about it. Nobody dresses up for church anymore, you know.”
“If it was my own church,” I said, “if there was such a thing as my own church, which there isn’t, maybe I wouldn’t bother dressing up, either. But if you want me to attend somebody else’s church, I’d have to wear a jacket and necktie. To dress casually in somebody else’s church would be disrespectful.”
J.W. cocked his head at me, then nodded. “That’s incredibly old-fashioned of you.”
I shrugged. “It’s how I was raised.”
“I have some extra jackets and ties. They’ll fit you.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
J.W. grinned. “Just don’t hold me responsible for the music.”
Chapter Eleven
J.W.
Bach often bores me, but I like some of his work and that of other composers inspired by Christianity, and I’ll attend a church service that offers a mass or an oratorio or other religiously oriented music I’ve heard and enjoyed. The Island Community Chorus sings such pieces often and well, and occasionally a church choir will give one a shot. Religions have inspired so much great art, architecture, and music that it’s almost enough to make you a believer.