The Sweet Golden Parachute

by David Handler

  Mitch recognized it as Bernard Herrmann’s score from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. An odd creative choice, he reflected as his amazing Technicolor dream unfolded before him. Because they were sailing in such perfect harmony out there, so in tune with the boat and the wind and each other.

  Except, wait, that wasn’t Maisie working those sails at all. It was Des, nimble as a cat in her yellow tube top and crisp white shorts. Pretty amazing since she did not know how to sail. Nor did Mitch. Come to think of it, this was not his sailboat. He had never owned a boat. He could barely even swim. Yet there they were—sailing with such joyful expertise it was as if they’d been doing it their whole lives.

  It’s about time, Mitch noted approvingly. Enough already with those dreams where Maisie was feeding ice cream cones to puppies. This was nice, him being out on the water with the new woman in his life.

  Only now, it wasn’t so nice. They weren’t sailing with the wind—they were running smack into it. It was whipping up their sails, pitching the little boat violently from side to side. The sky had turned stormy. There was lightning and thunder. And now he was remembering that Jim Cantore had warned him to stay off of the water today. It was getting incredibly choppy, huge swells washing over the deck, threatening to capsize them.

  “Come about, Des! We have to come about!”

  “Mitch, help me!…”

  But he was alone on deck. Des had been washed overboard. He jumped into the roiling sea after her, calling to her as his mouth filled with foamy salt water and the sharks began to circle. At least four sharks, moving in closer.

  “Des!…”

  “Mitch, help me!…”

  “Des!…” There she was, bobbing just out of his reach, her eyes wide with terror. Mitch reached his hand out to her in vain, sinking underwater himself, gasping. “Des!…”

  “Don’t leave me, Mitch!”

  And now he was going down and staying down. And she was the one reaching out to him and shaking him and shaking him and…

  With a yelp Mitch was suddenly awake in the morning light, his heart thudding, mouth tasting metallic. She was kneeling there on the edge of his bed, rousing him from his nightmare.

  He reached for her, hugging her tightly. “I won’t ever leave you,” he promised. “I swear I won’t.”

  She pulled away from him, having none of it. “What is up with you, son?”

  Because it was not Des. Allison Mapes was sitting there on his bed clad in his beloved No. 56 Lawrence Taylor New York Giants jersey. With her face scrubbed clean of makeup, she looked about thirteen. She also looked as if she thought he was insane.

  “You were shouting in your sleep,” she informed him. “You having a nightmare?”

  “I was drowning.” Mitch rubbed his eyes, gasping. Part of him felt as if he were still underwater, still fighting for breath. It had been such a vivid dream. A Des dream. He had moved off of Maisie and on to the master sergeant. This was significant, Mitch sensed, though he couldn’t yet grasp why. He sat up in bed, slowly recalling that second bottle of Chianti he and Allison had gone through. Also his ear-splittingly, inspired rendition of Leslie West’s Mississippi Queen.

  “You got any flip-flops I could borrow? One of your cats peed in my sneaker.”

  “Which one?”

  “The right one.”

  “No, which cat?”

  “The skinny one.”

  “That’s Quirt. He’s very loyal to Des.”

  “Kind of getting that. He spent half the night circling the sofa and glowering at me.”

  She’d been too tipsy to drive home, so he’d made up the sofa for her. It was the responsible thing to do. It was also the bargain they’d struck. And Allison had proven to be a stubborn little negotiator.

  “I really like your terrarium thingies. Didn’t notice them last night.”

  “Those are my seedlings. The domes keep Clemmie out. Otherwise, she tears them to pieces.”

  “No offense, but your life seems pretty much ruled by your cats.”

  “Well, yeah. We all need strong authority figures in our lives.”

  “Whatever. I made coffee. You take yours with cream, right? I should know that by now.”

  “Today I think I’ll go with two fingers of chocolate milk.”

  “Yum, I may try that myself.”

  “I’d better get a fire started. It must be freezing down there.”

  “I can do it,” she said, starting down the narrow steps to the living room. “Least I can do after making you listen to my sob story for half the night.”

  Mitch lay there and listened to her rattle around downstairs, remembering what she’d told him about the drugs, the boys, the men. Clemmie jumped up onto the bed with him, padding at his belly determinedly before she curled up there, purring. Allison returned with two mugs of coffee and handed him one. It was hot and strong. He gulped it gratefully.

  She perched on the edge of the bed with hers, smiling at him uncertainly. “I had a really good time last night. I feel really safe with you. Like I can say anything and you’ll understand. I just wanted to say thanks, and tell you if you ever feel like, I mean, if you want to…”

  “Actually, I’m the one who should be thanking you.”

  “Really, for what?”

  “You helped me through something that’s been bothering me.”

  She studied him curiously. “You’re my first, you know. The only guy I’ve ever stayed over with didn’t try to do me. I guess what you and Des have must be different from what I have with Stevie.”

  “It’s different,” Mitch acknowledged, stroking Clemmie.

  “Otherwise you would have, right? If you weren’t with her, I mean.”

  “In a New York minute.”

  “Kind of what I thought.” Allison’s round face glowed with satisfaction. “I’d better get going, hunh?”

  “Wait, you promised you’d tell me his name, remember? The married guy who took you with him on his business trips.”

  She scrunched up her face, chewing nervously on the inside of her mouth. “You’re not really going to hold me to that, are you?”

  “I totally am. A deal’s a deal. I was straight with you, wasn’t I?”

  “I guess,” she allowed. “Only, how come you’re so interested?”

  “Because Justine’s book is based on real people. Whoever publishes it has to know from the get-go if someone might cause problems.”

  “So it’s important?”

  “Very.”

  “Am I going to see you again?”

  “Are you kidding? I must be in McGee’s five times a week.”

  “I mean can we do this again?” Her eyes twinkled at him. “I could make you happy.”

  “I believe that.”

  “But it’s not going to happen, is it? Story of my life, I guess.”

  Mitch was about to tell her that she was much too young to have a story. But she did have one. Justine had put it down on paper. “We can be friends.”

  “Friends. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever had a guy as a friend. Nope, can’t think of a single one. You have girls as friends?”

  “Absolutely. My editor at the paper is a woman, and we’re very tight. We go to dinner together all of the time when I’m in town.”

  “And you don’t want to do each other?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “I don’t see how that could possibly work.”

  “It’s just understood, that’s all.”

  Allison sat in silence for a long moment. “You have to promise me you won’t spread this around town.”

  “I give you my word.”

  “If you tell anyone, it’ll get back to me. And I’ll hunt you down and I’ll hurt you.” She shifted around on the bed, gazing at him with a sadness that bordered on bottomless despair. “You really want his name, hunh?”

  Mitch took her soft, pudgy hand and squeezed it. “Listen, how about if I say it? Because I’m starting to think I know where this is going
and—”

  And then Allison blurted out the married man’s name and Mitch realized he didn’t know where it was going at all.

  CHAPTER 20

  IN DEATH, GUY TOLLIVER was nowhere near stylish.

  The jaunty old society photographer lay on his back, his head against a granite fieldstone, his left hand still wrapped around the empty bottle of lye that he’d drunk down. The human body instinctively wants to regurgitate a powerful corrosive such as lye—even in the death throes. So there were heavy burns around Tolly’s mouth. The skin was eaten away, tissue underneath red and goopy. Lye had come foaming up through his nasal passages, too.

  Des stood over the body with Soave and Yolie, their breath steaming in the chill, dry air. It had taken them nearly an hour to get down to Four Chimneys from their nice warm beds in their nice warm Hartford suburbs. The forensic nurse had beaten them, as had the crime scene techies. Everyone was hushed. It was barely seven in the morning, and this was an exceptionally not cheery way to start the day.

  “What are you thinking, Des?” Soave asked, breaking the silence.

  At first glance, Tolly’s death cried out suicide. It appeared he’d come down to these woods from the rose garden, chugalugged the lye and keeled over, hitting the back of his head against that granite. A scalp wound had bled down the back of his neck.

  “Des?…” Soave tugged at his goatee as the techies hovered around them, snapping pictures. “What are you thinking?”

  “It’s your case, Rico,” Des responded, thinking that she could have, should have prevented this. But she hadn’t. They hadn’t.

  And now Guy Tolliver lay dead on the cold, muddy ground. The forensic nurse believed that he’d been there for about twelve hours, placing his time of death at around dusk—the same ap-proximate time when they’d been interviewing Poochie and Gly-nis in the parlor.

  Soave began humming tunelessly under his breath, which was a thing that he did whenever he was shook. He had reason to be. Rico Tedone would have a lot of explaining to do in Meriden. “How about you, Yolie? Run with it.”

  “No way in hell this is a suicide,” she declared, shivering in her belted leather jacket. Yolie was strictly a warm weather girl. “Someone whacked this man on the back of his head, okay? And while he was semiconscious forced him to drink down that lye.” Yolie crouched next to Tolly, studying him closely. “We have finger marks on his neck and jaw here and here,” she added, using her Bic pen as a pointer. “Somebody pried his mouth open. And there was a struggle. His scarf thing… girl, what do you call these again?”

  “It’s an ascot,” Des said softly.

  “Yeah, the knot’s yanked halfway around his neck, see? And check out these bloodstain patterns on his neck. They’re all wrong.”

  “He bled down his neck,” Des agreed. “Which means he was either standing or sitting when he incurred the head wound. He was positioned here after the fact. There’s a bit of blood under his head, but no soak pattern, no drainage. The scalp injury didn’t happen here.” Des knelt next to Tolly’s grotesque body for a closer look at his left hand. “I see no lye on his wrist or sleeve. If he’d been holding that bottle himself when he drank the lye it would have streamed down his hand like a melted ice cream cone. Somebody positioned it in his hand after they killed him.” She stood back up, swiping at her muddy knees. “One more thing, and I can’t emphasize this enough—Tolly lived for style. Absolutely no way does he leave such a vile-looking corpse behind. Not even within the realm of possiblity.”

  “So we’re all in agreement,” Soave concluded. “What we’re looking at here is a staged crime scene.”

  “I’m betting he got it in the rose garden,” Yolie said. “The man’s bent over, working away at his pruning. Somebody bops him from behind, then carries him down here—out of sight, out of earshot—and forces him to drink that lye.”

  “We’ll search the ground up there,” Soave said. “If that’s how it happened, we’ll find the blood.”

  “This man was plenty good-sized,” Yolie went on. “One person couldn’t have horsed him all of the way across that field. And I’m seeing no wheelbarrow treads or whatever in the mud. That makes this another two-man job. We’re looking for the same pair who took out Pete Mosher, am I right?”

  “That’s a slam dunk.”

  Des said nothing. She was too busy playing it out.

  “What’s wrong with it, Des?” Soave asked, studying her warily.

  “It’s tight, Rico. I’ve got nothing.”

  “Yeah, you do. Something’s still bugging you.”

  “Nothing I can put my finger on. But this all just feels clanky to me. Too obvious. Too clumsy. Too… I don’t know, as if someone smart wants us to think they’re really stupid. Does that make any sense?”

  “Not so much.”

  “It appears to be a clumsy attempt to mask a murder as a suicide—the kind of thing somebody small time might try to pull off. Somebody like the Kershaw brothers. Except that whoever pulled this had to be calculating and cool. Check it out: If they’d waited until pitch dark they would have needed flashlights or lanterns. Way too risky. So that means they killed Tolly no later than six, six-thirty. For all we know, we three may still have been on the premises at the time. Plus we’ve got a cruiser stationed at the foot of the drive. And yet, somehow, they murdered this man right under our noses.”

  “I’m with my girl,” Yolie said. “We are not talking lame-assed raggies.”

  “What we are talking is desperate,” Des said. “They took an enormous chance. Tolly must have known something.”

  “This one’s on us, isn’t it?” Soave’s shoulders slumped defeat-edly. “We let it happen.”

  This was not something that a younger Soave would have admitted out loud, Des reflected. “We’re dealing with some serious customers here, Rico. And they’re totally messing with our heads again. But we’ll nail them.”

  “Who had access to this site? Run it for us, will you, Des?” “Claudia was around, as were Eric and Danielle. Bement got home by six, so he’s in play. And he made a point of telling me the Kershaw brothers were leaving for the day when he got here. So they’re in play, too.”

  “Don’t forget Glynis,” Yolie said. “And the old lady.” “So we know where to focus our attention.” Soave rubbed his hands together briskly. “We’ll go at them, one by one.”

  “Pull over to the curb, wow man,” Des cautioned him. “I didn’t know this until a half-hour ago, but there’s more.”

  She continued down the footpath through the trees, Soave and Yolie trailing along behind her, until she emerged at the hard, frozen shallows where the Connecticut River met its eastern bank. Here, all was icy winter calm. And here, things got considerably more complicated. Because the footpath didn’t end at the water. It hugged the bank for as far down river as the eye could see.

  “I discovered this while I was waiting for you to get here,” Des explained to them. She’d also phoned Mitch on her cell to tell him about Tolly. Things weren’t real until she’d shared them with him. He’d sounded upset by the news. Also strangely preoccupied. “After a half-mile or so it comes out at a state-run boat launch at the foot of Kinney Road. During the summer, people put in their kayaks there. This time of year, it’s pretty much deserted. Someone could have parked there yesterday afternoon and hiked in and out, totally unseen.”

  “There’s no fence to keep people out?” Yolie asked, stamping her feet against the cold.

  “It’s posted to keep the hunters out, but no fence.”

  Soave shook his head disgustedly. “Who’d know about this?”

  “Anybody who’s ever spent time here. Claudia’s husband, Mark, for one. And Milo Kershaw used to be caretaker here. They’re in the mix, Rico.”

  Soave tugged at his goatee. “What’s the link, Des? Why have Pete Mosher and Guy Tolliver both turned up dead in the last twenty-four hours? Why did they have to die? What did they have in common?”

  “Rico, I honestly…
” She broke off, her memory suddenly tweaked by something that had bothered her earlier. “I have no idea. But I think I know who will.”

  Poochie’s KitchenAid power mixer was in high gear, roaring away on the counter like a jumbo jet as it creamed together butter and brown sugar.

  Dorset’s first lady was in high gear herself. “I crave gingerbread this morning,” she exulted as she raced around the kitchen, flinging flour and baking soda into a bowl, followed by ground ginger, powdered mustard, coarse ground pepper, cinnamon, cloves. “Tolly loved my gingerbread. The secret is adding one cup of hot, strong coffee for moisture. And good molasses, of course. God, how I love the smell of molasses!”

  Glynis Fairchild-Forniaux sat at the table with her briefcase before her, looking very somber. Claudia sat there with her, as did Bement and Danielle.

  “Mummy, please sit down, won’t you?” Claudia said anxiously.

  Poochie pulled a pair of loaf pans out of a cupboard. “I can’t sit.”

  Eric couldn’t either. Or wouldn’t. The gangly farmer was pacing around the kitchen like a restless, petulant teenager, heaving his chest and making it abundantly clear that he wanted to be somewhere else. Pretty damned juvenile, Des felt, considering how upset his mother was over Tolly’s death.

  Danielle was well aware of this. Her eyes repeatedly made contact with his, silently pleading with him to park his geeky self at the table.

  He refused, clomping back and forth in his work shoes. “We’ve got soup kitchen detail,” he complained over the whirring mixer. “How long will this take?”

  “Not long,” Soave said, standing there with Yolie and Des.

  “Eric, would you kindly show some basic human consideration?” Claudia said reproachfully.

  “Would you kindly buzz off?”

  Claudia abruptly got to her feet and shut off the mixer, leaving them in blissful silence. She took Poochie firmly by the shoulders and steered her toward the table. “Mummy, these officers need to speak with you. Sit down for a minute, will you?”

  “There’s no need to manhandle me, Claude,” Poochie said indignantly, perching next to Bement. “What is it, Des?”