“And you recognized the smell as Lars’s?”
“Not until he came into the restaurant tonight. He really was wearing a lot and I thought to myself that it was too much. Jed doesn’t like any scent with food and I rarely wear cologne when we eat. And then it occurred to me that it was the same scent that I had smelled before I was knocked out.”
“Of course, it could be that the person who hit you on the head was wearing the same cologne or aftershave,” Kathleen suggested.
“Of course,” Susan agreed.
“You don’t know that it’s some little-known cologne sold only in a far-off eastern port that Lars’s company imports just for his own use or anything like that?” Kathleen asked hopefully.
“Not that I know of,” Susan answered. “It’s just a hunch that it was Lars. But I’m pretty sure I’m right.”
Kathleen knew of no way to argue against hunches. She didn’t try. She sat and sipped her drink, thinking that if it had been Lars Voos, Susan may have been a lot luckier than she thought. Kathleen remembered the Voos child insisting her father owned a gun.
“You don’t think much of Hancock, do you?”
“It’s a very pretty town, at least what I’ve seen of it is,” Kathleen responded, adding to the credibility of Susan’s hunches.
“Oh, you don’t have to see it all. It’s all pretty. We have very strict ordinances to make sure it stays pretty, too.”
“Well, then …” Kathleen didn’t know what to say.
“But you don’t think much of the people who live here—the women, I mean.”
Kathleen looked at Susan and decided to answer. She’d been acting unprofessionally since entering the house, why stop now?
“I don’t know them enough to not like them,” she started, as tactfully as possible, “I just think that everyone here is a little too homogeneous and pretty—like your local ordinances that keep everything looking nice, I guess,” she added.
She must have looked guilty, because Susan began her answer by excusing her. “I know how you feel. I felt the same way when we first moved here. Only I was going to live here. We had just spent every dime we had for the down payment and closing costs on this house. The first woman I met here told me that she had always known that she would have a mink coat before her fortieth birthday. The second, when asked in some context about her goals in life, said she wanted to get her oldest boy to eat vegetables. If we had had the money, I would have packed up and moved right back to the West Side of Manhattan. I thought if I stayed here I would become like them; I thought that because I was here I must be like them.” She stopped talking and sipped her drink.
“And?” Kathleen prompted, interested in spite of herself.
“And I found out that the woman with the mink would go out of her way to help anybody. She was a materialist—dirty word, that—but when a friend of her son’s slashed his arm sticking it through the glass on their porch door, she took care of that child immediately, including laying him down on her brand-new antique Oriental rug. Sure, she likes material things and maybe they aren’t the things I like, but her priorities are in the right place.”
“And the woman whose goal in life is to get her son to eat vegetables?”
“Oh, her. She’s an asshole.” Susan chuckled. “She really is. And they exist in the city too.”
“Okay. Maybe I’ve been chauvinistic,” Kathleen admitted.
“Hey, don’t give up so easily,” Susan suggested. “There’s a lot wrong with living out here. And I can list those things.”
“So let’s hear the whole story.”
“Well, a lot of people say that the worst thing about the suburbs is that the women spend too much time and effort over their children, but I don’t agree. Oh, there are women who are giving up their own lives and trying to live out their dreams in the lives of their children, but I think that happens everyplace.”
“So what’s the worst thing then?”
“There’s too much space between what the husband does and what the wife does, I think. The man of the house goes into the city and does his thing and the wife stays around Hancock and does her thing. Because of the commuting time, the husbands are away from home for long hours. A lot of the time, the couple starts living two separate lives. You know, if you get a group of women around the pool or wherever, they’ll start talking about the marriages breaking up—there seem to be a lot of them right now in our group—and usually, the husband goes off with someone he works with. Of course, everyone thinks that it’s a midlife crisis on the husband’s part and that he’s just out after more or different sex, but you know, I don’t think so: I think it’s because the wives shut their husbands out of their lives here.”
“You mean … ?”
“I know, I’m not explaining very well. What I mean is that the wives build their own lives around their kids and school and their own social circle and the men pop in and out on weekends. I think the men begin to feel left out, whether they know it or not. And so they turn to someone who is more closely involved in their city life, their work life.”
“That’s interesting,” Kathleen commented, trying not to yawn. “You know, though, the only couple around here that works and lives here is the Manns.”
“And also the Ameses and the Vooses. Their main office is in Darien, although I understand they have a small office in the City. But they’re usually in Connecticut, I think. And Charline and Julia seem more involved in their husbands’ work than the rest of us—they’re always talking about shipments coming in and things like that.
“But you’re tired,” Susan continued. “Let me turn off this fake fire so we don’t wake up to a burned-down house and we’ll get to bed. Unless you think that we should make some coffee and send it outside to the police first.”
“They’ll have brought their own,” Kathleen murmured, too tired to remember all the stakeouts when she would have welcomed more than anything a cup of coffee that didn’t come out of a machine at 7-Eleven. “Let’s go to bed. I may be wrong, but I’ll bet Brett is here at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”
Susan, remembering the birth control, wondered for a moment about Kathleen’s relationship with her partner. But it was too late to get into that—even if she had known how to bring up the subject.
SIXTEEN
Brett and Kathleen were drinking coffee; Chrissy and Chad were off to tennis lessons; and Jed had left for the City. Susan sat on a stool near her stove, stirring eggs and trying to count the number of meals she had eaten with the police since Friday.
“… I woke up this morning feeling that I know something that I don’t know I know,” Kathleen was saying.
“Maybe you need another cup of coffee,” Brett suggested.
Kathleen, convinced that the key to all these events was now somewhere just at the corner of her mind, decided to say nothing. “You really think there’s something to the idea that the Ames-Voos company is involved in bringing drugs into the country?”
“It’s called Farnsworth Import/Export,” Brett said.
“Farnsworth? Anyone we should know?”
“Evidently Farnsworth was the man who started the firm back in fifty-nine. It did a booming business during the Vietnam War. They got contracts for PX business and made a bundle, but after the war ended, either Farnsworth lost interest, or he had just been lucky to get those contracts in the sixties. The business was almost bankrupt when Miles Ames bought it in 1979. He’d been working for a big exporter in New York City, bringing in clothes from the Far East—sneakers from Korea, mainly—anyway, his father and mother died in a car crash and he used his inheritance to finance the deal. And—this is interesting—at the time, Farnsworth Import/Export was doing so badly that half-interest in the company was something like a hundred thousand.”
“And now? Oh, thanks,” she said, accepting the plate of scrambled eggs, sausage patties, and homemade scones that Susan had just put in front of her. Picking up her fork, she continued, “And now it’s worth wha
t?”
“Well, it’s not a public company. Right now it is solely owned by the Ames and the Voos families, but I have a friend in the IRS and he went into their computers yesterday afternoon—what excuse he gave for voluntarily working on a Sunday in the summer might be interesting to know—and he says the company is reporting a profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year.”
“Does that seem a little low to you?” Kathleen asked.
“Wait a minute. How can Julia and Charline live as well as they do on half of that?” Susan said, then realized that her comment was probably inappropriate. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I …” She was embarrassed. “I could eat in another room.” She picked up her plate and coffee mug as if to make good her offer immediately.
“No, stay right here,” Brett insisted. “In the first place, it is your kitchen, and in the second place, that is just the type of comment I want. My impression would be that the Ameses and the Vooses were living way beyond their income too, but you know better than I. So I’m inclined to suspect another source of money somewhere.”
“Well”—Susan was thinking hard—“you know, maybe they get those expensive things wholesale?”
“What things?” Kathleen asked, putting a piece of sausage in her mouth.
“Furs. Jewelry.”
“They have a lot?” Brett asked.
“Well, come to think of it, they probably have a new fur every two years or so. And they have marvelous jewelry—both of them. Of course it could be fake. I’d never know the difference.”
“Even if they get them wholesale, it’s still a lot of wealth to pull out of a business doing that type of billing—”
“What if they’re lying on their tax forms?” Kathleen interrupted. “Maybe they’re making a lot more than they put down.”
“They were audited two years in a row, according to my friend, and while, of course, you can hide things during an audit, I don’t think they could hide that much—not enough to account for jewelry and furs and those houses. And they didn’t get the houses wholesale. The money probably comes from an illegal source. The IRS thinks so too. They’re very interested in Farnsworth Import/Export.”
“You think drugs,” Kathleen said.
“Yes. They probably just smuggle the drugs into the country. They would sell them to the dealers,” Brett said. “I’m sure the Vooses and the Ameses aren’t doing any street selling. Not that that makes it any better, of course.”
The phone rang and Susan got up to answer it. “Hello … yes … he’s here.”
She handed the receiver to Brett, who had gotten up at the same time she had, obviously expecting a call.
“You think that this is all true? That it’s drugs we’re talking about?” she asked Kathleen, resuming her seat.
“It’s hard to tell, but I think Brett has a good idea that it is. He’s been talking to the various agencies involved in narcotics trafficking and the name Farnsworth Import/Export obviously wasn’t unknown to them. But that isn’t proof,” she added. “Most companies are being checked out these days. The drug problem has gotten too big to ignore any possibilities. So the fact that they know of the company doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“In this case it does,” Brett interjected, hanging up the phone.
“Our sources came through,” Kathleen guessed.
“No. Kevin Dobbs has been found and he says that he was getting cocaine from the Ameses.”
“What? I can’t believe it.” Susan was stunned.
“Maybe you’ll believe it if you hear it from him directly,” Brett said. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Field Club. It looks like he didn’t run away at all. At least he didn’t leave town. He spent the night in the boiler room in the basement.”
“What?” Kathleen and Susan ran out the door after Brett, asking questions.
“Who found him?”
“Did he say the cocaine came from the Ameses directly?”
“Who is he talking to?”
“What—”
“Just wait till we get in the car and I’ll tell you everything,” Brett said.
“John Mann found Kevin in the boiler room this morning—about half an hour ago, in fact. He was checking up on some strange sounds he’d heard and went downstairs and there was the kid, asleep. The noises were Kevin snoring. Seems he had taken food from the kitchen and even had a shower last night after everyone left the Club. Evidently Kevin was confused and didn’t know what to do when we started questioning him. He’d planned to take off and stay with a friend out west somewhere, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave.”
“So he stayed here and planned to do what?”
“He stayed here. I don’t think he had any plans, at least I couldn’t tell from what Sergeant Mann said,” Brett said.
“But John said that Kevin has confessed to taking drugs? Drugs that he bought from the Ameses?” Kathleen asked, to be sure she had heard right the first time.
“Exactly … but here we are. We’ll be able to ask him everything ourselves.”
They found Kevin and John Mann in the bar, sharing a pot of coffee.
“Would any of you like some?” Mann offered.
They all refused and got right down to work. “I think you had better tell us the whole story from the beginning, Kevin,” Brett said. “You might want to have a lawyer present, though.”
“I’ve already told everything to Sergeant Mann,” Kevin answered, obviously close to tears. “I don’t think I need a lawyer now.”
“Well, take your time. And don’t worry. These things can be worked out,” Mann said. “Let’s just say this is all off the record, okay?”
Brett had never heard the term used in police work, but he was willing to go along with anything to get information. And if the locals were willing to bend the rules, he certainly was. “Just do as Sergeant Mann says and tell us everything.”
Kevin got off to a slow start, but when he was finished with his story fifteen minutes later, they had a pretty good idea of what had been happening to Kevin Dobbs for the last year: how he had started using marijuana and cocaine on weekends and at parties, how he had found himself a part of a new crowd of friends, all of whom were involved in drugs to some extent, some more, some less; and how that world had broken up at the end of March.
There had been a drug bust at a party Kevin was planning to attend. Luckily, he was late, and as he drove up to the door, he saw the police take the kids away. It didn’t take more than a glance for him to get the picture of what was going on and to turn his car around and get out of the vicinity. Kevin had already been picked up by the police that month and he knew that they were not going to hush up a repeat happening. He swore that he was going to lay off drugs and stay away from that group, period.
Well, he’d left that group all right. Summer was coming and kids were going their different ways, and it was fairly easy for him to stop seeing them. And besides, he had started his summer job at the Field Club. It kept him busy, and for a few days, he thought that he wasn’t even going to miss the drugs.
But he did. And with his friends gone, he didn’t have access to dealers. Kevin had even thought about going into the City and seeing what he could find there when one day he had gone to the tennis shack for something. There he found Paula Porter doing a line of cocaine. It was the meeting of two minds. And what they had in common wasn’t sex.
They met a few times the first week. Paula, it seemed, liked the company and was more than willing to treat him to the drugs. As Kevin explained it, she was hooked emotionally more than anything else: she was in need of the diversion that drugs gave her. And with Kevin around, she seemed to end the one worry left in her life: she felt more secure sneaking off to use the drugs. It was no accident that everyone thought she and Kevin were having an affair. She had started the rumor herself, knowing that no one would break in on their trysts if they thought they stemmed from a romantic desire to be alo
ne.
After a few weeks of meetings every afternoon, though, things changed. As Paula got to know Kevin, she became demanding. If she was willing to supply the drugs, she wanted more than an alibi for her time from him. She decided that he should be the one to run the risk of picking up the drugs.
“And that’s when she told you that she got the coke from Miles Ames.” Brett interrupted Kevin’s story to get this straight.
“No, originally I was supposed to believe that the coke came from the Ameses’ gardener. His name is Clancy. He’s from the Dominican Republic—an illegal alien, I would guess. He doesn’t know very much English and I was supposed to give him envelopes with money in them and he would pass over the drugs. But it didn’t take any brains to guess that this guy probably couldn’t add two and two in English and someone else was behind the sale. Then, about the third time I went to the Ames house, I saw Mrs. Ames and Mrs. Voos standing behind a hedge watching the whole transaction. Actually, I saw their reflection in the window of the garden shed. They were hiding and watching the whole thing. The next day, when I went back for more, I thought that Clancy would be gone and the police waiting for me. I was scared to death. I don’t know why I went. I guess”—he hesitated—“I guess the drugs had gotten to me. I really couldn’t stop going. Anyway, that day was the same as usual. And the day after and the days after that. I guessed then that the Ameses and the Vooses must know about everything. And I realized that they must be supplying the drugs. One day, when I got there a little early, I saw the gardener get a package out of the trunk of that big navy Mercedes that Lars Voos drives. He opened the package and took out the coke that he was going to sell to me, and then he took the rest of the box up to the house and gave it to Mrs. Ames.” Kevin looked at the floor, not seeming to have anything to add.
“And this went on until the day Paula Porter died?” Brett asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you kill her?”
“My God, no.”
Kathleen thought that the boy hadn’t realized until this moment that he was a suspect in a murder case. Had he only been worried about getting caught using drugs? As Kevin went on, she thought that maybe that was the truth.
Murder at the PTA Luncheon Page 21