by Tom Lytes
“It’s going to kill me. Clean is going to kill me.”
“Who?” Finley asked.
She dropped her hand to her side, and heard Finley’s voice like it was distant, from a different time and place.
Before the call disconnected and Peggy put the phone down, she heard, “Peggy, I’m coming down there. If you’re in trouble—”
17
Peggy didn’t really sit down, but rather folded like a reclining beach chair. She ended up in a small ball, with her feet tucked under her. In that position, she heard Barbara’s voice cut through the air like a foghorn.
“Peggy, are you here? I’ve brought you a cold macaroni salad. It’s still warm from cooking and needs to go right into the refrigerator.”
Peggy stood, and called out, “I’m in the back.”
Barbara came out the door to the back from inside the house. Hadn’t Peggy again locked the front door? Barbara held her extra key and a large Tupperware filled with macaroni and peas. There was a pool of what looked to be warm mayonnaise that went half way up the side, all around.
“Just going to put this in the fridge.”
Obviously, Barbara was comfortable in the house, unworried about giving Peggy space or privacy. She glanced at Barbara in the kitchen, preparing glasses of ice water.
“Thanks for the water,” Peggy said when the older woman returned and handed her a glass.
Barbara nodded and exhaled into the view. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of air in the woman.
“Can I ask you why you became a police officer?” Barbara asked finally. “Was it something you always wanted to do?”
“No, I ran away and joined the force.”
“Well, I suppose that mirrors some of my choices, at least the running away part. Trouble is, on a small island like this you’re not running far unless you decide to live past the bridge. I never did. So, the first time I ran away, it was a few houses south of here. The second was twelve cross streets north.”
Peggy laughed, despite herself. Barbara had been nothing but nice to her, and Peggy realized she needed to talk with somebody. She needed a connection to another human, and a distraction from thinking about Leonard. Certainly, his program wasn’t going to find her here, on this sleepy little island?
“I was riding horses on the show circuit, travelling with my boyfriend, Rhodes,” Peggy said. “Most of the time, we’d travel on Thursday and Friday, compete Saturday and Sunday, and then get back to New York late on Monday or early Tuesday. I won a lot, all the time. The problem was that I’m not rich, and riding is a rich person’s sport. The horses, vet bills, food and boarding for the animals, the travel, and everything else keep the sport rarified. There was no time to have a job with the travel schedule, and any job I could get wouldn’t have paid for all of the travel and competition entry fees anyway.”
Peggy hugged her knees. “I took a sponsorship from Clean ‘N Horsey Shampoo that paid for some of the expenses. But by far, there was one benefactor that allowed me to compete. He’s widely known to be a criminal.”
“Who?”
“His name is Bobby Touro.”
“Bobby Touro? Never heard of him.”
“Yes, he’s known in New York,” Peggy said. “When it comes to horses, he’s mostly involved in racing. He sponsors some teams and owns a breeding farm. All that is for betting purposes, but he supported my show riding too.”
She said, “He stayed out of my business for a long time, sometimes inviting me and my boyfriend to dinner parties between competitions. When we did go, he basked in the glory of our wins. He paid an awful lot of attention to me, personally.”
Barbara nodded. She said, “I know the type of man you’re describing, from experience. Believe me.”
“I didn’t have a problem with him taking credit,” Peggy said, “and his advances towards me were flirtatious, but not inappropriate. After all, I was doing what I wanted, and he was paying out a lot of money.”
Barbara nodded knowingly.
“Yeah, so one day out of nowhere, everything changed,” Peggy said. “My brother Doyle came to me and said it was time to pay back Bobby Touro.”
“Your own brother?” Barbara asked.
Peggy said, “Uh huh, his name was Doyle. At first, I didn’t know what he meant when he approached me.”
“How was he even involved?” Barbara asked.
“I didn’t think he was involved with me or with Bobby Touro,” Peggy said. “But I soon learned that just because Doyle was my brother didn’t mean he couldn’t be a total scumbag. Bobby Touro had his hooks into Doyle for something.”
“Do you know what he was using for leverage? I’d imagine it would have to be something significant if he was your brother. It would take a lot to break that family bond, after all.”
“I never did know. Doyle was stupid and greedy, so it wouldn’t have been hard to ensnare him.”
Right up until the end, Peggy thought to herself, Doyle was conniving. Peggy thought about the insurance fraud Doyle admitted to right before she killed him.
“So, my brother acted as a go-between for a while. Eventually Bobby Touro met with me and my boyfriend, Rhodes. It was on this dirt road outside of a bar, just over the New York border in Lenoxdale, Massachusetts.”
“This wasn’t a good situation, Peggy. It’s easy to see as you’re telling the story, but it all must have been thrilling at the time.”
“It wasn’t thrilling. We, at least I, was too inexperienced to the think anything of it.”
“What happened next?” Barbara asked. “And don’t leave anything out.”
“There’s a train that comes through there and the old factory buildings are in different stages of upkeep or neglect depending how you look at it. Anyway, we met Bobby Touro over there, and he told us we were going to start moving packages for him.”
Barbara said softly. “Nothing good could come from an arrangement like that.”
“You’re right, and that’s what my boyfriend thought. Rhodes said we wouldn’t do it. He said it wasn’t right, and if Bobby Touro didn’t want to sponsor our horse team we would get the money another way.”
“What did Bobby Touro say?” Barbara asked.
“He didn’t say anything to us,” she said. “He made a phone call to his men who were waiting at the Warchester’s, my boyfriend’s, family farm. Bobby’s men set fire to a hay barn and beat Rhodes’s father.”
Barbara made a “tsk” sound. She appeared to be looking, but not admiring the view.
“And then you started driving packages for Bobby Touro.”
“We moved packages that weighed hundreds of pounds all over the country.”
“That sounds pretty risky,” Barbara said.
“It was, but even that didn’t feel risky at the time. Other than knowing it was happening, everything else stayed the same. My boyfriend, Rhodes, handled the packages. We kept our distance from Bobby Touro. No more dinner parties. I didn’t have much to do with any of it.”
“And you got to ride your horses,” Barbara said.
“Exactly, but that all changed when we got pulled over for a routine traffic stop. We blew a bulb on the taillight of our trailer. Before we noticed it, a policeman did. His radar for trouble kept him searching through our things for a long time. Finally, he found several kilos of cocaine taped up in a box in the back of our trailer.”
“What did you do?” Barbara asked.
“I was paralyzed with fear. We were naïve kids, really, and were never in trouble before. We didn’t have firsthand experience with drugs.”
“I’m guessing the policeman didn’t see it that way.”
Peggy winced as she thought about it. “My boyfriend confessed to everything before I could even speak. Rhodes said the cocaine was his, and I had nothing to do with it. He was so chivalrous. I went
along with it by just saying nothing. There was a trial, and it was over really fast. I went free and my boyfriend went to jail. He’s still there.”
“He took the blame for you,” Barbara said. “Is that when you became a policeman?”
“Honestly, no,” Peggy said. “I became a policeman when my brother came to me right after my boyfriend’s trial. Doyle said Bobby Touro wanted me to be his girlfriend for a while. After everything that happened, it freaked me out. I enrolled that day in the police academy to get away from him. It worked. It changed the dynamic with Bobby, and I’ve been able to keep him from getting too close.”
“Given the circumstances that was pretty ballsy and smart.”
“The horse thing was over. There was no way I was going to be Bobby Touro’s girlfriend after what he did. My brother sold me out, and I had nothing going for me. It was the only thing I could think of to do.”
“What about your old boyfriend?” Leonard asked.
“Rhodes is still in jail and I don’t know if I love him,” Peggy said. “We tried to talk for a while after he was incarcerated, but it’s so difficult. It was stranger still while I was at the police academy.”
“I bet that was hard.”
Peggy nodded, “He was the smartest person I’ve ever known.”
What Peggy didn’t share with Barbara was how Rhodes claimed to be transitioning into a position of power. It didn’t make much sense. He was in jail after all.
Peggy was talked out, and she and Barbara sat next to each other. The back of the house, in the dim light, seemed stark against the backdrop of the ocean. A light rain sounded on the decks of the house as wind blew it onto the windows and sliding glass doors. Large container ships could be seen in the far distance with their brightly lit decks, as the color of the sky and ocean blended together, making it hard to tell when one began, and the other stopped.
Peggy didn’t mention in her conversation with Barbara, Leonard’s program, or that she was fleeing an FBI investigation, or that she’d killed her brother. She took a minute to go over the details she’d omitted from their conversation. It was almost a certainty that Leonard was warning her about his program
She let the fear of it settle into her thoughts. There could be something cleansing about being selected to die by his computer program.
Peggy thought to herself, “If I don’t have anything to lose, then I better start living with the things I’ve done.”
The question was, did she want to do it with Finley?
“I need some clothes, Barbara. Any nearby recommendations of where to shop on a police officer’s salary?”
Barbara nodded, evidently interrupted from her own thoughts.
“There’s a little boutique named “Almost Pink” located next to the Co-op and Sullivan’s Restaurant. I’m going back to the office to check on something. Would you like a ride in my golf cart?”
“No, thanks, I’ll walk,” Peggy said as Barbara stood and walked back through the house and out the front.
In a few minutes, Peggy took a right out of the driveway and saw the two boys she’d waved to the night before. They were riding their bikes along Middle Street. It seemed like the older one might have been speeding up, until the younger boy stopped along the road in front of her.
“Good morning boys, what are your names?” Peggy asked as she caught up with them.
“My Momma told me not to speak with anyone from there,” the younger one said as he pointed emphatically to Leonard’s house.
“Why is that?” Peggy asked.
“There’s all kinds of people coming from there all the time, and new people every day,” he said. “And a lot of women are over there, and they just come one time. My Momma says their dresses are too short. You’re unusual because I’ve seen you two times.”
“Well, it sounds like you have a good Momma,” Peggy said. “And she is giving you good advice about strangers. I’m from New York and I’m a police officer. My name is Peggy.”
“I saw your police car,” the young boy said. “I thought maybe you were here to arrest Mr. Leonard, the man who lives there.” He was pointing to Leonard’s house. “Do you think he might be a vampire?”
“A vampire?” Peggy asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “And maybe you’re a special policeman from New York who handles vampires.”
The boys must have spoken about the possibility before because they were both nodding now. Their blue eyes seemed to be especially radiant as the whites of their eyes expanded. Peggy never saw eyes so wide open.
“No, Mr. Leonard isn’t a vampire. I know that for sure.”
“The devil then, maybe that?” the younger boy said cautiously.
“No, just a man who is trying to learn some things about himself and life, I think. Everyone learns about things at different times.”
The boy nodded, thinking about that.
“I learned to surf when I was five,” the young boy said.
“Right, that’s very young to learn how to do that,” Peggy said.
“Do you know how to surf?” he asked Peggy.
“No, I’ve never done it,” she said.
“We need to go now,” the older boy was pulling on his younger brother’s shirt.
“You run along then,” Peggy said as she smiled at them. “Next time I see you, maybe you can tell me your names.”
“We’ll see,” the younger boy said.
He smiled at her and the two of them rode their bikes at high speed, just up the street, and turned into a driveway. She looked to where they must have come from and saw their bike tracks disappear down a beach access path. She could see that the boys would pass Leonard’s house whenever they were on their way to the beach.
Peggy walked to the right as she left the driveway and strolled down the street a dozen or so blocks. As she came upon the commercial district she went into Almost Pink and selected two Boho Maxi Dresses, three peasant shirts, some shorts and two pairs of sandals.
18
When Peggy arrived back at the house, she quickly changed into one of her new dresses.
Another sleeve of Saltines caught her eye, and she ate them two at a time as she dialed Finley’s number.
Finley connected the call and started right into conversation. “Peggy, did you tell the mayor about my tires getting shot out?”
“No, Fin, we talk about police work. He’s my boss. Why do you ask?”
“Half of the people I see in town ask me if I’m too tired to solve the murders. Or my hair is looking a little flat. More than one person asked me in the span of two hours if I needed to get some air.”
Peggy did nothing to stifle her laugh. The mayor was having his fun at Finley’s expense. She almost felt bad about it.
“I know the mayor sits up in that café all morning, assailing people with his stories, making stuff up. Will he ever stop?”
Peggy didn’t think Finley called to complain about people talking about him. She’d walked out to the lawn, which was an extension of the beach, really, with weeds barely adding enough color to lend the area a green tint from afar. Up close, it was a combination of voracious, fast growing weeds that spread like a splatted snow ball, and a plant with spiky balls that stuck into your feet if you stepped on one. Peggy tiptoed through the yard until she was on the unsullied sand of the beach.
“Anyway,” Finley said, “there’s something else about Leonard Roberts.”
“What did you find?”
“I put his known images through the face recognition software the FBI uses to find terrorist in crowds of people and threw his image against all the databases we have.”
“Good idea, Finley.”
“Thanks, so it turns out he wasn’t in our military, hasn’t been incarcerated and he didn’t appear in most of the databases where we find people.”
Impa
tient, Peggy was holding back. Finley must have had something substantial if he was taking her through all the details of his process.
“Then, I thought about something else.”
“What Fin,” Peggy said, playing along. Her feet were in the water, and sand rushed out from under her feet with each wave. “Tell me.”
“Certain companies with government contracts actually work directly with us on security when they hire people. We don’t keep active files on their employees, necessarily, but there’s a healthy communication back and forth between us. Even when they hire people who aren’t working on Defense Department contracts.”
“I’m kind of following. Get to the end, Fin. You found something on Leonard?”
“Boeing hired Leonard Roberts to input data at their South Carolina campus. He only worked there for three weeks.”
Peggy swung her braid from one shoulder to the other.
“Three weeks—”
Finley said, “Yes, almost no time at all, and inputting payroll reports. Quite a comedown for a computer whiz.”
“Unless there were other reasons to be there,” Peggy said.
“Exactly. And I think I know why Leonard would take a menial job at Boeing. He wanted access to their massive computers.”
Peggy whistled. “I never thought about that. The program Leonard runs would need to be hosted by a big computer. But wouldn’t Boeing find out and scrub it from its system?”
“Okay, my thoughts were the same. I called Leonard’s old Microsoft boss and ran the question by him. This is where it gets interesting. Another of Leonard’s side projects was essentially parasitic computing where software runs stealthily on a huge mainframe - taking up a small fraction of a host computer’s capacity. Leonard may have never intended to own the computer that ran his program.”
“How would that work?”
“As the program expands, from time to time it seeks out a bigger and better host mainframe. It finds it much the same way it tracks people through cyberspace. The program tracks the computers it runs into as it monitors people’s computer activity. Any computer it comes into contact with is a potential host.”