by Stuart Woods
Stone took a deep breath, held the gun out in front of him in a combat stance and whipped around the corner, looking for any sign of movement, listening for any noise. The downstairs hallway was empty, but he heard the noise again, coming from the study.
Walking on tiptoe, even though he was barefoot, he went to the open study door and listened again. Nothing. He charged into the room yelling “Freeze, police!” the way he had done hundreds of times before, when he still was the police. Nothing. No one. He walked around the study, checking every corner, until he came to the alarm keypad glowing in the dark, near the door to the terrace. He checked the little screen: “Open window in master BR,” it said. The phone continued to ring. Stone tapped in the alarm code. The phone still rang.
Stone did a quick tour of the downstairs, checking every room, but found nothing. He got out his keys, went to Dick’s secret office door and opened it. The phone stopped ringing. Stone switched on the light in the little office and looked around, half expecting to find somebody there. Then he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. The wall opposite Dick’s desk was lined with cabinets, and one of them, with double doors, had a substantial lock on it.
He went through his keys until he found one that fit, then opened the cabinet. Inside, hanging on pegs, was an array of weapons: a stainless-steel riot gun with an extra-long magazine; a Beretta 9 mm semi-automatic, model 92, which was used by the armed services; a model 1911 Colt .45 officer’s model, with a beautiful mirror-blue finish and ivory grips; and a pair of Colt Government .380s finished identically to the larger pistol. So Dick had been well armed, after all.
The phone in the study started to ring. Stone rushed to answer it, lest it wake someone, then realized he was alone in the house. He picked it up. “Hello?”
“Stone? It’s Lance. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Stone said. “I was sound asleep, and I was wakened by a noise. I got my pants on and started downstairs, then I thought better of it, remembering that’s what Dick did. So I opened a window in my bedroom to set off the alarm, but it didn’t go off.”
“Yes, it did go off,” Lance said. “It’s silent, unless you program it not to be. The signal was transmitted to Operations, at Langley, and they called the house, but you didn’t answer, so they called me. Are you all right? Is someone in the house?”
“I’m all right,” Stone said, “and it appears I’m alone. I heard the phone ringing in Dick’s little office, but by the time I was able to get the door unlocked, it stopped. Then you called.”
“Are you alone up there?”
“Dino’s here, but he’s in the guest house.”
“There’s a manual for the alarm system somewhere in the house, probably in the little office, if you want to change the alarm from silent. It appears to be working properly.”
“Yes, I had the house checked out by an expert, and he says it’s pretty much impenetrable, unless you saw through a wall.”
“What expert?”
“A burglar.”
“What?”
“A guy Dino and I once busted for more than a hundred burglaries in New York. He’s out of prison now and living here. He’s a cabinetmaker.”
“Well, I guess that’s one kind of expert. If you’re all right, I’m going back to bed.”
“Sure, and thanks for calling.” They both hung up.
Suddenly, the front doorbell rang, and there was a hammering on the front door. Stone ran to the door, switched on the front porch light and looked through the peephole. Dino was standing there in his pajamas and robe. Stone opened the door.
“What’s going on?” Dino asked.
“I heard a noise in the house,” Stone said. “What woke you up?”
“The phone. I had just gotten up to piss, and I heard it ring. I wasn’t sleepy, anyway, so I came over.”
Stone closed the door. “Come in the study. You want a drink?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Dino said. “Keep out the cold night air.”
“Oh, let me show you something.” He led Dino into Dick’s little office and showed him the array of weapons. Dino picked up the officer’s .45. “I like this,” he said. “I’ll sleep with it under my pillow.” He checked and found a full magazine in the gun.
Stone pointed to a shelf that held a lot of gun leather. “Find yourself a belt and holster.” He went to the bar and got down a couple of glasses. As he was about to open the door to the ice machine, he heard the noise again.
Dino approached. “Is that the noise you heard?”
“Yes,” Stone said sheepishly.
“The ice machine, making ice?”
Stone sighed. “Yes. I wonder why I’ve never heard it before.”
“I think you’re a little too tightly wound,” Dino said. “Sit down and drink that bourbon.”
Stone followed orders.
Chapter 24
STONE WENT BACK to bed and tried to retrieve the dream with Arrington, but it wouldn’t come back. He overslept, not waking until after ten, and he felt fuzzy around the edges. He wasn’t accustomed to drinking in the middle of the night.
He sat up in bed and called Arrington’s home in Virginia. A maid answered.
“She’s not here, Mr. Barrington. She’s in New York, she and Peter. You can reach her at the Carlyle.”
“Thank you,” Stone said. He called the Carlyle and asked for Mrs. Calder.
“Hello?” she said, sounding chipper and cheerful.
“It’s Stone.”
“Oh, hi. I was about to call you. I’m in New York.”
“I know; I just called you.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. You want to have dinner tonight?”
“I’d love to, but it’s a plane ride.”
“What?”
“I’m in Maine.”
“Why? What are you doing in Maine?”
“I have a new house on an island called Islesboro. Why don’t you summon up the Centurion jet, and you and Peter come up here for a few days?” As the widow of Centurion Studios’ largest stockholder, she had access to their jet.
She was silent for a moment. “All right, but it will have to be tomorrow, maybe the next day. I have some shopping to do here.”
“Tell the flight department at Centurion that you’ll be landing at Rockland. I’ll meet you there in my airplane. It’s only another ten minutes of flying, but the strip on the island is too short for a jet.”
“All right. What will I need in the way of clothes?”
“Nothing you couldn’t find at L.L. Bean.”
“I’ve got to run; I have a hair appointment, but I’ll call you later and give you an ETA.”
He gave her the number and hung up, feeling wonderful. He bounded out of bed, shaved, showered and began getting dressed when the phone rang. “Hello?”
“It’s Ed Rawls. I need to see you at Don Brown’s house right now.”
“Okay. Where’s the house?”
Rawls gave him directions.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
Stone finished dressing and went downstairs. Dino was having breakfast in the kitchen, and Stone grabbed a piece of his toast. “Come on. We have to be somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Not far.”
It was a beautiful day, and they took the little MG, top down.
“Arrington and Peter are coming up tomorrow or the next day,” Stone said.
“You’re horny, huh?”
“Oh, shut up.”
They drove through some woods and stopped at the end of a short, paved driveway. There were other cars parked there.
The house was a shingled Cape Cod with a porch. The front door was opened by an obviously upset woman wearing an apron. Rawls emerged from another room and waved them in. Harley Davis and Mack Morris were seated in the living room, while Jimmy Hotchkiss talked on the phone. Stone introduced Dino to everybody, then followed Rawls into a bedroom.
&n
bsp; “Uh, oh,” Dino said.
Don Brown, The Old Fart who used the electric scooter, was sitting up in bed, a bullet hole in his right temple and a much larger hole in his left. A Colt .45 lay on the bed, and brains and blood were scattered around the bedspread.
“We’ve got another one,” Rawls said.
“How long have you been here?” Stone asked.
“Less than half an hour. I’ve mostly been on the phone calling people.”
“Has somebody called the state police?”
“Jimmy’s on the phone with them now.”
“Let’s get out of this room,” Stone said. “Have you touched anything?”
Rawls shook his head. “I know better than that.”
They went back into the living room and took seats, while the woman served them coffee.
“This is Hilda,” Rawls said. “She found him when she came to clean the house.”
“What time do you normally get here, Hilda?” Stone said.
“Usually, at nine,” the woman replied. “But it was ten, today; I had to do Mr. Brown’s grocery shopping. I always do that for him.” She went back to the kitchen.
“Dino,” Stone said, “you ask the questions.”
Dino nodded. “Gentlemen, did any of you know Mr. Brown to be depressed?”
“This wasn’t suicide,” Harley Davis replied.
“Please, just answer the question.”
“Don wasn’t depressed,” Mack Morris said. “He was pissed off.”
“About what?” Dino asked.
“About being in that fucking wheelchair thing. He didn’t like it at all; he was permanently pissed off about it.”
“Did he ever talk about suicide?”
All three men shook their heads. “He wasn’t the type,” Rawls said.
“Is the gun his?” Dino asked.
“Probably; he had a .45,” Rawls said. “If the cops don’t find another one, then it’s his.”
Jimmy hung up the phone. “The state boys will be on the next ferry,” he said, looking at his watch. “They should be here in an hour or so.”
“Gentlemen,” Dino said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d all go sit on the porch until the cops get here. Stone and I will take a look around the house.”
The four men went outside, and Dino went into the kitchen, followed by Stone.
“Hilda,” Dino said, “when you got here this morning, did you find anything unusual about the state of the house?”
“Well, Mr. Brown was dead in his bed,” she said.
Dino nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”
“Well, the vacuum cleaner is normally in the broom closet, but it was sitting in the kitchen, by the back door, there.” She pointed. “And there wasn’t no bag inside it.”
Chapter 25
STONE AND DINO WENT and stood in the bedroom door, so as not to disturb anything further by entering the room.
“He’s sitting up in bed,” Stone said, “so whoever shot him woke him up first.”
“Unless he wasn’t asleep when the guy arrived,” Dino said.
“The TV isn’t on, and there’s no book present, so he wasn’t sitting up in bed reading. Nobody just sits in bed, doing nothin'.“
“Maybe you’re right. But why would the guy wake him up?”
Stone shrugged. “Maybe he had something to say to him before he shot him.”
“Like what?”
“Like, 'Here’s one from your pal, Joe,' or whoever ordered the hit.”
“You should write novels.”
“Short stories, maybe. There’s always a little story that goes with a murder. This wasn’t the burglary story, was it?”
“Nothing seems disturbed.”
“Let’s take a look outside,” Stone said.
They walked through the kitchen, where Hilda was sitting, disconsolately, drinking coffee, and out the back door. The sea was, perhaps, thirty paces away, and they avoided walking on the path, looking for footprints.
“Got a good one here,” Dino said, pointing.
“Deck shoe,” Stone said. “See the little ridges? That narrows the suspect list to everybody on the island and everybody on the coast of Maine.”
“Big deck shoe,” Dino said. “Size eleven or twelve. There are other partials here, going in both directions, but just this one good one.”
“That’s more than the cops found at Dick’s house,” Stone said. “I’d consider that a break.” He walked down to the rocky beach and pointed. “Some scrapes on the stones here; our man arrived by boat and pulled it ashore, but only a foot or two.”
“Must have been a sizable boat,” Dino said. “Not just a whatchacallit… ?”
“Dinghy.”
“Yeah.”
They walked back up toward the porch, and Dino pointed: “Sand and dirt on the porch.”
“That’s about it,” Stone said. “Let’s take a look out front.”
They walked around the house.
“Too many cars and people here to find any usable footprints,” Dino said, “but I’m satisfied the killer came by boat.”
Stone walked up to the porch, where the Old Farts and Jimmy Hotchkiss had sat down. “Where’s the nearest house?”
Rawls pointed. “Over there, a couple of hundred yards.”
“The cops will want to know if anybody heard the shot.”
“Why? We know he was shot.”
“Fix the time of death,” Dino said.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Anybody got any thoughts about this killing?” Stone asked the group.
“We’ve all got the same thought,” Harley Davis said.
“Don and Dick were of different generations,” Stone said. “Would they have ever worked together on something?”
“Not recently,” Rawls said. “Don’s been retired for, I think, six years.”
“Where was his last posting?”
“Berlin.”
“And where was Dick at the time?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Could it have been Berlin?”
Rawls shrugged. “Everybody based in Europe got to Berlin sooner or later.”
Stone and Dino sat down on the front steps, and everybody fell silent.
An hour later a state police car drove up, and four men got out. Sergeant Young was the driver. “Good morning,” he said.
“No it ain’t,” Rawls replied.
“What have we got here?”
Stone and Dino took him into the house and showed him the corpse in the bedroom, then told him what they had observed since arriving, including the footprint. “Nearest house is a couple of hundred yards over there,” Stone said, pointing. “They should have heard the shot.”
“It’s a whole lot like the other killing, isn’t it?” Young asked.
“Sure is,” Stone replied.
“What did Dick Stone and Don Brown have in common?”
Stone spoke up. “They both lived on the same island, and they both worked for the same government agency. Brown retired six years ago.”
Stone and Dino left the sergeant and the crime-scene people to their work and went back to the front porch.
“Ed, when did you last talk to Don?”
“Last night, after supper, about nine.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Don called me, wanted to have lunch with the three of us tomorrow, that is, today. Said he had something to tell us.”
“Any hints about what he wanted to tell you?”
“No. Don liked to think things over before he spoke.”
“You think it had anything to do with Dick’s murder?”
“My guess is yes. He asked me to call Harley and Mack, and I did.”
The other two men nodded.
“He wouldn’t have made a lunch date if he’d intended to shoot himself,” Rawls said.