“Mister Finster, can I get you something to drink?
Ben was slowly coming back to reality. He wrenched his gaze off the image and gave an answer as if his words were first stuck in the mud, then accelerating to normal speed.
“Fisher. My name is Ben Fisher. I’m sorry what did you say? I was looking at this picture. How about that. A monkey riding a dog.”
“Yes, I guess the resort had a monkey at one time. The photo was still on the office wall when I closed on the place, and I thought what the heck I will leave it up. What a hoot. I should post this image on Flickr. Are you thirsty mister Fisher? I am jones-ing for a cup of coffee. Can I offer you one?”
Before he could answer, she was on her feet, heading for the kitchen. Ben got up as well. He walked back towards the kitchen where she was already busy at an espresso machine. “What a firecracker.” he thought to himself. “What is she like with caffeine in her system?”
She stopped what she was doing and took a close look at Ben. She gave him a thoughtful expression and then she said, “You have been here before haven’t you Mister Fisher.”
Ben wondered how he had given himself away. “What gives you that idea Ms. Morton?”
“When you walked in you didn’t hesitate in the mud room. You headed in the direction of the office while I stopped to remove my rubber gloves. You were studying every inch of the place as you walked. You knew who it was in the photo. Your face gave you away.”
“You seen all of that in a couple of minutes time? Am I that obvious?”
“Yes, you did. And not only that, I am guessing that you lived here in this house. Your parent’s owned this resort.”
“Now how in the world could you know that, Ms. Morton?”
“Please call me Carly. My friends all call me Carly. When you call me Ms. Morton, it makes me think you are talking to my mom. You call me Carly and I will call you Ben. So Ben, would you like cream or sugar in your coffee?”
“Cream please. So— Carly, are you going to tell me how it is you know I once lived here?”
“Let’s go back to my office Ben.”
Ben wondered how in the world anyone could keep up with this woman. She was back in the office in half the time it took him to get there. He thought that she reminded him of the human equivalent of Sonic the hedgehog, or Speedy Gonzales. When he caught up to her, she was already sitting behind the desk in her Herman Miller office chair. She had the black and white photo of the picnic in her hands. She was reading something on the back.
“Ben’s eleventh birthday. Nineteen sixty eight. Signed by Allie Fisher. How come you aren’t in the picture Ben?”
Ben thought, “Nothing gets by this woman. I will have to be careful.”
“Okay. You caught me. Are you sure you wouldn’t have been better suited to a career in crime investigation? You have taken a whole ten minutes to figure out I used to live here. What else do you know?”
“I know that you are either fifty-five or fifty-six depending on which summer month you were born. I know that the man flipping the burgers is probably your dad. What puzzles me is there are no kids in the photo.”
“It’s a long story. I was there with my friends, but we were all in the screen porch. We stayed inside a lot.”
“Okay Ben, you can tell me all about it during your stay. I have one cabin available. Number two. I was cleaning it when you arrived. All the others are full with the exception of number—”
“Four.” Ben interrupted. “You have number four opening up when— tomorrow?”
She smiled at him. It wasn’t often that someone could catch her off her guard. He guessed the correct number of the opening cabin, and she knew he was going to wait for it. She liked the game they were playing.
“I guess you will be waiting till tomorrow for number four then Ben.”
“Yes, I will Carly. Pen me in for tomorrow.”
He returned her smile.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Day of the Fire Part Two ( 1968 )
erriweather “Sunny” Rule had picked a bad day for sending the staff away. He had to get rid of them on occasion so he could take a gander at his cache of gold, half of which was still right here on the premises. All by his lonesome was the only way he could move about without anyone getting wise to him. A few months back, he had orchestrated the plan to move half of the gold into several banks in both Minneapolis and Chicago. With his staff abroad, he hired an armored car service which specialized in transporting the precious metal, and in one weekend, he had acquired a whole new key chain full of safe deposit keys.
He didn’t trust the banks. He never would. But he had no other choice than to move it as a hedge and a ruse to bluff his untrustworthy staff. He had caught some of them snooping around the place when they thought he was asleep or wasn’t paying attention. He might be older than dirt, but he wasn’t a feeb. His once-trusted right-hand man McCann had even been seen by him poking around suspiciously.
And McCann had just married the new nurse Rosa. He trusted her about as far as he could throw her. He had no idea what Butch saw in the woman. She was only average in appearance, not what you would call ugly, but not pretty either; and judging from Sunny’s conversations with her, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Sure, she was a decent nurse; she knew her way around a bedpan, but she was far too stupid to know when he was feigning sleep.
He would watch her with one squinted eye as she pretended to put things away or straighten out his dresser or his closet, none of which was in her job description. But he knew what she was really after. One time he caught her lifting his bowling bag and shaking it as if it were a gift-wrapped Christmas present from Santa Claus himself. He had to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing when she discovered that the bag actually contained a bowling ball. And there were the times when he heard McCann and her whispering outside his room in the hallway. What did McCann think? He was too old to hear them? No, he was positive they were in cahoots to find his cache.
Alright, he couldn’t trust them. But what else could he do? Hire a new staff? A new staff would be every bit as untrustworthy, if not more. It is better to have your enemy close so you know what they are up to.
It hadn’t always been this way. McCann had been loyal to him for many years and that counted for something. He would have inherited it all if he had remained that way. Now that he had become Judas, he was worth only his thirty pieces of silver. Nothing more.
Sunny wished he would have mentioned his plans for Butch when he still had complete confidence and trust in him, before the change. He had once thought of him as a son, and would have given him it all. He had confided in Butch things that he would never tell another living soul. All that confidence must have indicated to Butch that he was a trusted friend. What had gone wrong? Was it just because Sunny was getting old? Had Butch changed over time, or was he always just pretending?
When he first had his shyster lawyer draw up the living will a few years back, he might have been smart to show it to Butch. He wanted to tell his friend that he would be richly rewarded for his loyalty after his passing, but he didn’t want the money to come in-between them. Money changes a person. The whole dynamic of friendship changes for the worse when there is money involved. The person who has it never knows who his friends are, and the person doesn’t have it becomes jealous and covets it. How could he know if Butch was really his friend if Butch knew that he was going to be the sole beneficiary of a fortune in gold?
The only other family he had was his kid brother, and who knows where the hell that chump was or even if he was alive? He never liked the kid growing up, and after his dad died the brother was constantly pissing and moaning about one thing or another; pointing his accusing finger and laying on all his holier than thou phony morality. By now his brother might be an orange-robed, head-shaved Hare Krishna at some airport; or maybe he was the priest in charge of doing the spit-shine on the Pope’s ruby slippers before the blessing every Sunday at the Vatican.
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Sunny thought for months about what he would do with his gold in the event of his inevitable demise. He finally had Dewey Cheat’em and Howe revise the document to leave only a stipend to McCann. He would be paid one half the sum of his current salary every two weeks for life. That would surely piss him off. His blushing dim-witted bride will have to go out and shake the trees for another invalid just to keep their meager income at half the same level. The rest of his newly on-the-books fortune in gold would be left to his saintly snot-nosed kid brother wherever he was. If his brother had a family, even better. Maybe the little piss-ant will have an entire brood of greedy little piss-ants all stabbing each other in the back to collect uncle Sunny’s gold.
The half that nobody knows about, the half that is still here, he would have to think about. The bankers would surely find a way to lose it if it was all in their greedy little hands. Uncle Sam would have a field day once he found out what was in all those safe deposit boxes. Their cash registers and adding machines will have to be water-cooled to keep from over-heating.
Sunny was wondering why he was even thinking about all this anyway. He was sure he would live to be a hundred. Hell, the last time he visited with his quack, the old man said that his ticker would keep on ticking forever by the sound of it. If his legs weren’t nearly useless he would be fit as a fiddle. His only problem was his damn legs. Every time he got up to walk, he could feel his bones rubbing together at his knees. Each time he did, they would swell up and hurt him for days.
Still, he had to get up and see his cache now and then. What was the use in having all that gold if you couldn’t hold it in your hands, run it through your fingers, feel its weight? It was a shame that he couldn’t buy a new set of legs with all his loot. It wasn’t the walking that gave him trouble, it was the ladder. Something had gone wrong with the ladder. Maybe it was rusted, or the cable holding the counter-weight had busted. He had to get it fixed before he could get back to the cache.
The problem with the ladder was in the forefront of his brain since it had stopped working a month ago. He considered hiring a man to fix it, but he knew that was absolutely out of the question. He would wait until after dark and he would take a good look at the apparatus. He had a flashlight equipped with a red lens to keep from being seen when he was outside, and he would be using it tonight to get a better look at the faulty mechanism. He would have to wait until it was very late— two-thirty in the morning at the very least.
He would set his alarm for one. That would give him enough time to go to the basement and get the oil can. Maybe the mechanism just needed a good oiling. If he was lucky enough, oiling the parts would get the ladder working. If not, he would at least get a closer look at it and order the necessary parts needed to fix it. The worst case scenario would be in a couple of weeks, McCann would need to be sent away again on another wild goose chase with a different safe-deposit key, allowing Sunny enough time to repair the ladder.
It was never easy when he had to send the staff away. He was used to having the help when he needed to get around. Only a year ago when his legs were still in working order, he could get around without a problem. If he sent them away back then, it was only an inconvenience. He was never a needy person.
Take food for instance— many men with his boodle would have a full kitchen staff complete with an over-priced, overbearing french chef preparing them fancy cuisine every night. He was just as happy with a fried baloney sandwich as he would be with any highfalutin Lobster Thermidor. Heck, during the depression he sometimes would eat nothing but onion and butter sandwiches for days on end, and they never did him any harm.
Sunny wheeled his chair over to the cabinet where he kept the brandy. The nurse always gave him the business when he asked for a second glass. One of the perks of sending the staff away was he could drink all he wanted without being heckled by a subordinate. He was always the early to bed, early to rise sort, but on nights when he needed to be up, such as tonight, he would take a drink or two extra to make him sleepy. One thing about booze, it brings a body way down; and then wakes it up in the middle of the night. He had learned that trick early on in his bootlegging days, when much of his business was transacted on the graveyard shift.
He poured himself a generous glass and rolled his chair over to the window. He liked looking out at the small lake. When other men of substance were building their fine homes on Green Lake or Lake Geneva, his daddy was building this place on a body of water that was not much bigger than a mud puddle. He always said he built it here because it would be quiet. His dad would say, “The other lakes are full of millionaire’s progeny roaring around all hours of the night in their daddy’s noise-making Chris-crafts, while their daddies are up all night hobnobbing at their parties getting the skinny on whose buying ‘em the biggest and fastest boats next year just to out-do their neighbors.”
In his younger days Sunny had rented out a house in Lake Geneva to throw a bash for some of his Chicago whiskey-buying customers. In two days time they were right in the middle of things, playing chicken in the rented yacht, and raising hell on the water with all those snot-nosed rich kids. They nearly rammed one of the Wrigley boys broadside until Wrigley turned at the last minute, and the fun never stopped until they destroyed half of the fuel dock which held the lake’s only gas pumps.
He remembered yelling at the loud-mouthed fool he allowed at the bridge to throw the boat into reverse to stop it, and what does the bone-head do? He leaves the controls and gets himself in-between the bow and the dock to show how to stop her. Sure, stop a thirty-thousand pound boat without hitting the reverse! What a bone-headed goof of a skipper that guy was. Sunny smiled at the thought of the dolt trying to stop a floating house by holding his hands out. And what did the guy grab hold of to stop the yacht? The fuel pump! It bent over at a ninety degree angle before the hull of the boat began disassembling the wooden dock board by board. No, he liked the quiet of the little lake he was on just fine.
He went and poured himself another tall glass of brandy. He was feeling warm with the last glass, and this one was putting him just right. Who needs a staff! He put the glass in his crotch and rolled back over to the window. He heard the far-away rumble of a thunderstorm. He always liked the sound of distant thunder. He watched as two boys in one of the rented yellow boats rowed towards the crowded raft at the girl scout camp. He decided to get a better look at them through his telescope. Oh to be young again. He would trade all his gold to be as young as the boys in that yellow boat. The new guard-dog decided to spoil the moment and make some noise of his own.
Damn he hated that dog. Sure, it kept the neighbors and over-eager solicitors from snooping around the place, but the last dog had the common sense to only bark at people. This good-for-nothing mutt barks at anything and everything. Who ever heard of a dog that barks at a thunderstorm thirty miles away? He took another pull on the brandy and made a mental note to put a bullet in the dog’s head at his earliest convenience. He would just send Butch out to another junk yard and this time, one of the questions will be, “Does Fido bark at storms? Because if it does we don’t want him. No thank you! The last animal we had barked at storms a hundred miles away. The damn thing barked when there was a change in barometric pressure. Hell, he barked at mosquito hawks when they buzzed too close to his head.”
Yep, he might even take the revolver with him tonight. It would cap off the festivities with an appropriate send off. “Here, Rover. Here, boy. Blam! Bye, Rover, hope you have a nice trip. Say hi to the great dog catcher in the sky.” Sunny smiled again. The thought of a new improved guard dog made him smile. Three stories down the animal was still barking and yelping and growling, and the storm which was the cause of the God-forsaken racket was clearly passing many miles to the south. Yep, he might just introduce Rover to his friends, Smith and Wesson.
The fool dog finally stopped barking. Sunny had peace and quiet once again. He rolled sloppily back to the liquor cabinet. This time, he left the tumbler and brought the b
ottle back instead. He was going to have a party. A going away party for his four-legged friend Fido. Then he was going to fix the ladder and have a look at all his lovely gold party favors. He would carry some out to have them close at hand. Ten for him and ten more in the memory of poor old Spot, who barked a few too many times on this fine summer evening. He took a pull from the bottle. The brandy was tasting very fine indeed, better with each new sip. He would have liked to be partying with his good old buddy Butch; just like the good old days, when they would shoot the bull in the tavern where they met.
But Butch was having a party of his own with that dim bulb he calls a wife. Why did he marry her? He did it to keep her close. Yeah boy, keep your enemies close so you know what they are up to. Sunny was still thinking about Butch when he finally slipped away into never never land.
Sunny was right about Butch. Butch did indeed marry Rosa to keep her close. What else could he do? He needed her to be on board. She had to think he was in love with her so if she ever seen or heard something, she would tell him. He wasn’t going to be Rule’s right hand man all these years only to have a dim-witted nurse find the gold while he was away. His boss had sent him down on another errand to Chicago. He had to go so his boss wouldn’t be suspicious. The bank would document for Rule all the details, so he couldn’t send someone else in his place.
He had thought a long time about how he could make the next trip, and watch his boss at the same time. He carefully planned the details well in advance. He would be in Chicago or Minneapolis or wherever at the appointed time to open the safe-deposit box and to sell the precious metal. He would sign all the necessary documents. He would have all the receipts needed with his signature for the gold transactions, as well as the fuel, the parking, the hotel room, the room service, everything. As far as Sunny Rule is concerned, Butch McCann is being a loyal servant and taking care of his business just as he is being told.
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