“I’m OK. Just a little tired. And I’m thirsty. Can I have that Coke now?”
Luckily I had one left in the fridge.
“I’m afraid I’m a little short of glasses.”
“That’s OK,” she said and started drinking from the can.
“We’re almost done, darling,” her mother said. Then she looked at me. “Is there anything else you need from us?”
“I don’t suppose you have an old photo of Savannah’s dad.”
“No, I’m sorry. He was kind of funny about that. Never liked to take photos.” She smiled. “There may be yearbook photos available from before we met. I can describe him, or at least what he looked like 14 years ago. He was very handsome. And well built. A little shorter than you, light skinned but Italian looks. Great smile. Light brown hair and brown eyes. I thought he was the cat’s meow when I first met him.”
“I’m proof of that,” Savannah piped up.
“Savannah!”
But we all laughed.
“Mr. Rhode, when can you start?”
“Right away. I expect to get my computers up and running today. But many of the people I have to contact won’t be in until Monday. Where can I reach you?”
“We’re at the Carlyle, off Central Park. You’d better take my cell number, as well.”
I wrote it down on the pad that had the other notes I’d been taking.
“Don’t they have facilities at the hospital for parents?” I saw the look on her face. I could have kicked myself. Savannah’s illness hadn’t quite progressed to that point yet.
“The hotel is more convenient,” she said, quietly. “And I thought Savannah might enjoy some luxury. It’s a nice little vacation for her.”
I handed back her pen and stood when they did.
“Will you allow me to take you both to lunch? Then I can drop you at the ferry.”
“That’s very kind. But we have car service waiting downstairs. Savannah tires easily and she needs a nap. And I promised her that we would have tea at the Plaza afterwards. We do it every time we’re in New York. She’s been looking forward to it.”
“I like those little sandwiches,” Savannah said.
“I’m a sucker for the scones,” I said.
When we left my office, Ellen James let Savannah walk ahead, then turned and put a hand on my arm. Keeping her voice barely above a whisper, she said, “I know you are the one who can find Billy. You will, won’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, without really knowing why. Or how.
The stencil guy held the door for us when I walked them to the elevators. When I got back to my office he was gazing reverently at his handiwork, as if he were El Greco deciding that The Burial of Count Orgaz needed more detail.
“I checked with the office,” he said. “Margie remembers that you did say ‘o,’ not ‘e’. Our bad. So the middle initial is on me. Had to redo the whole thing anyway. Looks great now, don’t you think?”
I was now Alton B. Rhode. He was so proud of his artistry that I didn’t have the heart.
“It’s a beautiful job,” I said, looking at what was soon to become the most expensive stenciling project in the borough.
“Anything else you need from me? Maybe a business logo or quotation above or below the names. A lot of people do that.”
“How about Death to the Infidels?”
“Catchy. Want me to price it out?”
Good Lord.
“Maybe some other time,” I said quickly.
He reached into his bag. I faced another clipboard. I signed with a flourish, even adding my new initial.
I didn’t feel like battling another Friday lunchtime scrum at the Red Lantern. Besides, I was still letting the dust settle after my run-in with the Carlucci thugs. So I grabbed a quick burger at the McDonalds down the street and brought back a large black coffee. McDonalds coffee is far superior to anyone else’s in my opinion, even those that charge three times as much for a fancy name.
After I moved most of the plants to the reception area, I spent the rest of the afternoon emptying boxes and assembling bookcases and furniture I’d purchased from IKEA. The last thing I put together was a computer workstation. I laid out all its components, as well as the plastic bags containing the nuts, bolts, screws, washers, plugs, dowels, castors and rollers that would hopefully turn the piles of laminated wood into something vaguely resembling the picture on the front of the box. The instruction booklet was 36 pages, and was divided into Swedish, German, French, Spanish, English and something that looked like Urdu. There was also a thick schematic folded in on itself like a Hagstrom map. I knelt down and spread out the schematic, which took up half the room. It was obvious I had inadvertently purchased a high-energy particle accelerator. The single Allen wrench included in the supplies did not seem up to the task. I’d gone this route before, so I’d taken the precaution of bringing my tool chest.
It was going to be a slog. My takeout coffee was gone, so I rummaged through some other boxes until I found the12-cup drip coffeemaker with which no respectable private eye office can function. Luckily the box with the Newman’s Own Organic Green Mountain Roast – another gift from Nancy the plant lady – was at the top of another pile. I took the carafe out to the men’s room in the hallway and filled it. I know I was supposed to run plain water through the machine first, but I thought a little dust and plastic shavings might give the caffeine a boost. I brewed all 12 cups.
It was well into evening when I finally finished the workstation. All the cabinets and drawers opened, even the one that slid out on rollers below the level of the desk to hold a computer keyboard so I wouldn’t get carpal tunnel. It did bang my knees, though. I hooked up my computer and attached all the cables and was mildly surprised that the high-speed Internet connection worked perfectly. I was tempted to begin a search for William Capriati on the web, but decided it could wait for the morning. The coffee was eating a hole in my stomach. I needed food and a hot shower.
There was a new guard in the lobby when I signed out, a frail-looking white guy who looked old enough to have been a sentry at Stonehenge. He wanted to chat. I was probably the last person in the building and it was going to be lonely overnight. I was dog tired, but I gave him 15 minutes. I’d been alone on post in much worse places – but alone on post was alone on post. I finally escaped after looking at photos of his seven grandkids. I was glad I didn’t have to lie about how cute they were. I bent my head into the rain and ran to my car. Ten minutes later I pulled into the driveway of the large side-hall Colonial I owned on St. Austins Place in West Brighton. St. Austins is a small street divided by a well-tended island strip. Well-tended because one of the families living on the block is related to the Borough Park Commissioner. The block is heavily canopied by trees, some of the oldest in the borough, and 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. Both are beautifully landscaped, as are most of the homes on the block. Just keeping up with the median strip is a challenge.
I parked the car and went in through the kitchen, which is off an illegal rear deck that two firemen built for me in their spare time. The house has been in my family since 1910 and is basically my inheritance. I thought I’d fix up the old place, sell it at a substantial profit and pay off the second mortgage my folks had taken out to put me through college. Might have, except for the year I spent in uniform and hospital pajamas, during which a crumbling real estate market made my plan moot. So now I just fix it up when I can afford to and live there. Old houses keep you busy. What isn’t broken or leaking soon will be. I got out of my wet clothes and fixed myself a martini, using olives I’d bought in a specialty shop. They were pickled in vermouth, thus saving me valuable time. I used 96-proof Bombay Sapphire gin, which also saves time.
There wasn’t much in the larder. Tomatoes, onions, asparagus and mushrooms, all of which h
ad seen better days and looked like they were trying to mate. But that didn’t stop them from smelling delicious sizzling in the Tuscan herb-infused olive oil from the same shop where I’d found my soused olives. I whipped three eggs, added some parmesan cheese and sliced up some day-old Italian bread. After the frittata was done, I fried the bread in the same pan, cracked open a bottle of cheap Chardonnay and watched an Asian Tour golf tournament on my kitchen TV. Then I went upstairs, stood under a steaming shower for 10 minutes, took some sort of pill and fell into bed. With caffeine, alcohol, cholesterol and a prescribed chemical I couldn’t pronounce sending mixed signals to my exhausted body, I slept fitfully, dreaming of dowels and cacti – and Ellen James.
CHAPTER 6 – POISONS
I felt like bear crap when I woke up. My head was pounding. I shook it and suddenly realized that some of the pounding was coming from downstairs. I looked at the clock. Just past 8 a.m. I stumbled downstairs and yanked the door open. Al Johnsen, still gripping the big brass door knocker, stumbled into the foyer.
“Jesus, Alton, you almost pulled my goddamn arm off!”
In his wake was a slight, bespectacled man wearing a dark suit and a religious collar. It was Norbert Kittelsen, pastor of the Lutheran church up the block. He hesitated on my stoop, looking befuddled.
“Won’t you come in, Father,” I said.
I wasn’t sure what one called Lutheran ministers, but I thought formal was the way to go since I also didn’t know why he and Al were visiting me at the crack of dawn. I hoped it wasn’t some sort of intervention.
“Thank you, Mr. Rhode. And please call me Norbert.”
Johnsen and his wife, Barbara, lived directly across the street. They had a fondness for drinking gin and tonics on their front porch to watch the sun go down, weather permitting. Otherwise, they did it indoors. I was often invited. Al’s ancestors hail from Norway and we usually ended the night drinking Svengluten, a potent liquor he brings back from his frequent trips there. I think it’s made from fermented tundra and whale blubber. One shot is my limit. More than that and everything starts to disappear down a long tunnel. I don’t know how he gets the stuff into the country. He gave me a bottle, which I’ve kept, unopened, in case I run out of paint thinner.
“I got a letter,” Al said, waving paper in my face before heading to my kitchen. I closed the door and we followed him. A letter?
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “Emails can be so impersonal. Want some coffee?”
“That would be nice,” Rev. Kittelsen said as Al slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. I offered the minister a seat and put on the coffee.
“We’ve got to nail this scumbag,” Al said, flinging the letter on the table like it was poison. Kittelsen looked uncomfortable. “Barbara thinks it’s hysterical, but I’m humiliated. I know some of the others have asked for your help.”
I suddenly realized what he was talking about. It was poison.
There were 10 families living on St. Austins, five on each side of the street. The houses are Tudors or Victorians, except for a brick ranch at the north end that must have made a wrong turn. The one next door to mine was designed by Stanford White, the famous pre-World War I architect shot by a jealous rival. I’m fairly certain that the hanky- panky on the block never reached Stanford’s libidinous level, but stories of wife-swapping, illicit affairs, secret passageways between homes and hidden attic love nests fueled many a fevered adolescent dream. I searched our house high and low for passages and secret rooms, and was terribly disappointed (if somewhat relieved) not to find any. But there was apparently still something in the water on the block because four of the 10 homes had received “poison pen” letters over the past year or so.
The Johnsens and I were among the six households that had until now been spared. Everyone assumed someone on the block sent them. They contained too much inside information and were driving a wedge between neighbors. Suspicions naturally devolved on those residents who were letter-free. The letters were always short and to the point, usually accusing a husband of sexual indiscretions ranging from drunken groping to outright adultery, and in the case of one woman’s pre-pubescent daughter, pedophilia.
I gave Al and Kittelsen each a mug of coffee.
“What’s your interest in this, Father?”
Old habits are hard to break.
“Al came to me for advice,” he said.
“I thought maybe he’d heard something, you know, from one of his flock.”
Kittelsen was known to be a busybody and a gossip, who dropped in for coffee and a chat with many of the women on the block.. Unmarried and pushing 50, there were rumors about his sexual orientation.
“Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to reveal a confidence,” the minister said. “However, I assured him that I had no information at all.”
I went to a desk in a small alcove off the kitchen and pulled out a folder with the copies I’d made of the earlier letters. I was apparently above suspicion as the letter writer, having fortuitously been away during all of the alleged incidents. Fortuitousness being relative, of course, considering that my absences were mostly related to being shot at by various insurgents. In any event, some of the letter targets had asked me to lend my expertise, pro bono of course, in the pursuit of the man or woman responsible. No one wanted to involve the police. I glanced at the most recent of the letters.
“Dear Rosalie,
You might consider spending less time in the kitchen making those bourbon baked beans that are the highlight of your annual Kentucky Derby party (they are wonderful!) and more keeping an eye on Chet, who spent most of the race rubbing Amanda Delfonti’s substantial ass. Really, the woman looks like Secretariat. Of course, I probably should be grateful he’s dropped down in class and is finally leaving me alone. The horn dog rubbed his woody against me during the Christmas brunch at the Conroy’s.”
A Friend.”
I thought the Secretariat reference unkind, although the writer was right on the money about Mrs. Delfonti’s butt. Otherwise the letter was fairly typical. Al’s letter was lying on the table. Even from a distance I could tell that it was written by the same person.
“Listen, Al, I know you must be upset. But you must be relieved that you finally got a letter. At least you and Barbara can’t be accused of writing them.”
“Read it,” he said morosely.
I picked it up.
“Dear Barb,
Perhaps if your husband spent less time sipping cocktails on his deck and more time with his lawn mower and hedge clippers, your place wouldn’t look like Yucca Flats. It’s a disgrace to the neighborhood. Even some of the perverts on the block take better care of their property.”
“A Friend”
I had to read it twice.
“Yucca Flats?”
“It’s where they tested the A-bomb in 1945,” Kittelsen said.
“I know. I wonder if it refers to before or after the blast.”
“I know you think that’s funny, but he’s gone too far this time,” Al said. “How can I ever hold my head up around here?”
I must have looked clueless, which considering my recent activities, wasn’t hard, because Al grabbed my arm.
“Don’t you get it? All the other guys have been accused of chasing skirts, feeling asses and, well, being guys. Whoever wrote that says I’m ignoring my fucking rhododendrons! Sorry, Norbert. Apparently I don’t even have the balls to make a pass at someone at a neighborhood party. If this gets out…”
I would have laughed, but what he said made sense. At least to another man. It was a low blow.
“When’s the next block shindig? Maybe you can pinch a few asses, to get on the board, so to speak.”
“That’s what Barbara said. You’re as screwy as she is. I need help here. And you know what’s really aggravating? I just hired a landscaper to clean up the place. He’s coming next week. Now I have to cancel him because whoever wrote that letter will think it worked. I won’t give the prick the sat
isfaction.”
This time I did laugh.
“It’s probably a prickess.”
Kittelsen cleared his throat in embarrassment. Al looked at me. Then he laughed.
“So, any luck finding out who it is?”
We kicked around a few likely suspects. Kittelsen threw in a couple of names. That surprised me. We were doing exactly what the letter writer hoped everyone was doing. Pretty soon no one on the block would be speaking to each other. Their kids wouldn’t be allowed to play together, and when they tricked or treated on the block that candy would be ditched, lest it really be poisoned.
“Don’t tell anyone about your letter,” I said finally. “And tell Barbara to keep her mouth shut. I’ll figure something out. I’ll even let my yard go to seed for a while so yours doesn’t look too bad.”
The good humor I felt thinking about Al’s predicament only lasted a few minutes after they left. Then my general physical malaise returned. I needed a good workout. Running was out, at least for a few more weeks. But the docs encouraged upper body work and swimming.
I packed a small gym bag. Ten minutes later I entered the campus of Wagner College. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The cool front had left behind the kind of brisk and breezy autumn day that invariably makes people remember their childhood. Grymes Hill, one of the highest points on the entire Eastern seaboard, was a good place to be on such a day. Manhattan glittered in the distance. I could see New Jersey’s Watchung Mountains 20 miles away. I used my key card to raise the gate at the faculty parking lot behind the gym. I wasn’t on the faculty but Dom DeRenzi, the Athletic Director, had wrangled a parking pass to go along with my free membership to the gym. The locker room was deserted. I changed into swimming trunks and threw my other stuff into a vacant locker, securing it with an old-fashioned rotating combination lock. I always thought of high school when I did that. I really wasn’t worried about being robbed but I couldn’t fit my gun in my suit without someone making an obscene remark. I didn’t expect trouble on a college campus. But then again, neither had anyone at Virginia Tech.
CAPRIATI'S BLOOD (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 1) Page 5