One-Way Ticket

by William G. Tapply

  I put the donuts on his desk. Then I went over to the coffee urn in the corner, poured myself a mugful, and arched my eyebrows at him. He waved his hand over the mug on his desk and shook his head, still talking on the telephone.

  I went over and sat across from him.

  After a minute, he hung up. “Hey,” he said. He reached his hand across his desk.

  I shook it. “Hey.”

  He tapped the donut box. “Jelly? Glazed?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “Oh-oh,” he said. “Whaddya want?”

  I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and put it on his desk blotter.

  He pushed it back at me. “You can’t pay me,” he said. “I owe you my life. I’m not taking your money.”

  A couple of years earlier I’d hired Gordie, who was the best private investigator in Boston, to do some snooping for a case I was working on. The situation exploded on us in ways I never expected, and Gordie nearly died. I managed to rescue him and get him to a hospital, but his leg was permanently damaged.

  Before that, he’d loved the field work. Tailing people. Staking them out. Skulking around taking pictures through a telephoto lens.

  Now he hobbled around on a crutch and did all his detecting from his desk.

  He kept focusing on the fact that I’d saved his life.

  I kept reminding him that if it hadn’t been for me, his life wouldn’t have been jeopardized in the first place.

  “Let’s not argue about that again,” I said. “I am hiring you to ensure your confidentiality.”

  “You don’t need to pay me for that. My word is my bond. Not to mention, you can always bribe me with donuts.” He opened the box, leaned over, took a sniff, then plucked out a glazed donut. He took a big bite. “Mmm,” he said with his mouth full. “Take one.”

  I reached into the box and picked a jelly-filled. “Keep the token money, Gordie,” I said. “Let’s make it legal this time.”

  “Legal, huh? Cops involved in this?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.” I took the CD and the cell phone from my pockets and put them on his desk. “Take a look at the disc. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  He opened the plastic case and popped out the CD. He looked at both sides of it, then slid it into his desktop computer. I went around, stood behind him, and watched over his shoulder.

  When it ended, we watched it again.

  I went back and sat in the chair across from him.

  We both ate another donut.

  “Judge Adrienne Lancaster, huh?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay. Now I understand the twenty bucks. My lips are sealed. So who’s the kid with the beat-up face doing the talking?”

  “His name’s Robert Lancaster,” I said. “The judge’s grandson. His father and mother—and now, by extension, Judge Lancaster herself—are my clients.”

  “And you’re sharing this with me… why?”

  “Because you’re the best investigator I know, and you’re a technical wizard, and you’ve got state-of-the-art detecting equipment. Not to mention, I trust you. Since the cops aren’t involved, that leaves me. So I’m wondering if you can figure out where this video was made. And anything else you might notice.”

  “Find where it was made, find your hostage, huh?”

  I shrugged. “I just figure knowledge is power, and right now I’m feeling pretty powerless.”

  “Ignorance being weakness,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “How much time do you have this morning?”

  “I’ve got to be at the office by eleven.”

  Gordie looked at his wristwatch. “I’ll have to get back to you, then,” he said. “You want me to do this right, it’ll take a little while.”

  “Today?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll call you sometime this afternoon.”

  I stuffed the rest of my donut into my mouth, took a sip of coffee, and stood up. “I’ll make sure Julie puts you through regardless of what’s going on.” I reached my hand across his desk. “Thanks.”

  Gordie grabbed my hand. Instead of letting go, he said, “You know Arnie Coblitz?”

  “Coblitz?” I shook my head. “Don’t think so.”

  “Arnie’s a lawyer like you,” he said. “Partner with a firm on State Street. Month or so ago, his cousin from Czechoslovakia, a young woman named Sofia, came to Boston, visiting the states for the first time. She yearned to see the West—she used to watch old American westerns on Czech TV—so Arnie took her out to Yellowstone Park. You’ve been there.”

  “I have,” I said. “Wonderful trout fishing. But—”

  Gordie kept his grip on my hand. “So Arnie and Sofia are in the park hiking through the woods, and they get attacked by a pair of grizzly bears, a big male and a medium-sized female. The female goes after Arnie, who runs like hell and manages to climb a tree. When he looks down, to his horror, he sees the male bear devouring his Czechoslovakian cousin. Pretty soon, there’s nothing left of Sofia but one of her shoes, and the two bears go wandering away. So—”

  I tugged at my hand until Gordie let go. “I know what you’re doing,” I said, “and I don’t have time for it.”

  Gordie placed his hand on his chest. “You wound me deeply,” he said. “This is something Arnie Coblitz, your fellow barrister, told me just the other day. I assumed you’d be interested, inasmuch as you’re a lawyer, too, and you’ve also been to Yellowstone.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go ahead. Speed it up, though, will you?”

  “So, okay,” Gordie said. “After the bears go away, Arnie climbs down the tree, hikes back to his rental car, and drives to the nearest ranger station. He tells the two rangers that his Czechoslovakian cousin just got eaten by this enormous male grizzly. So the rangers grab their high-power bear rifles, and they tell Arnie to get into the truck with them, and Arnie shows them where it happened. Poor Sofia’s shoe is still there. So the rangers start creeping through the woods, with Arnie right behind them, and pretty soon one of the rangers stops and whispers, ‘There they are,’ and he raises his rifle and shoots the female bear. ‘Hey,’ says the other ranger, ‘you shot the wrong bear. This guy said it was the big male who ate his cousin.’ And the first ranger looks at his partner and shakes his head and says, ‘And you believe some lawyer when he tells you the Czech is in the male?’”

  I tried not to smile. “Damn you, Cahill,” I said. “You did it again.”

  “Bad, huh?”

  “Awful,” I said.

  He grinned. “Thank you.”

  I got the hell out of there.

  Fourteen

  IT WAS A LITTLE after three that afternoon, and I had just ushered my last scheduled appointment of the day out of my office when Julie buzzed me. “Mr. Cahill on line two,” she said. “You want to tell me why a private investigator is calling you?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  I pressed the blinking light on my telephone console and said, “What’ve you got for me?”

  “You still mad?” said Gordie.

  “Why, because you inflicted another one of your horrible puns on me?”

  “I didn’t think that one was so bad.”

  “Only in comparison to all your others,” I said. “So tell me what you learned.”

  “Come on over and I’ll show you.”

  “No more donuts for you today.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I still got a couple left from this morning.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  I grabbed my jacket from the back of my chair and went out to our reception area.

  Julie was frowning at her computer monitor. She looked up, glanced meaningfully at her watch, and frowned at me. “Are we leaving already?”

  “I am. You may, too.”

  She waved at her computer. “I, for one, have not finished my day’s work yet.”

  I put both hands on the edge of her desk and leaned toward her. “I can’t talk about it
yet,” I said. “All I can say right now is, it concerns one of our clients. You know I’ll fill you in when I can. Okay?”

  She shrugged. “If you say so.”

  Ten minutes later I walked into Gordon Cahill’s office. He was at his desk talking to a strikingly pretty African American woman. I thought I might have recognized her from one of the Boston television news programs.

  I sat in the reception area and thumbed through a recent issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal until the woman stood up, shook Gordie’s hand, and came toward the door.

  She smiled at me, and I smiled back at her. Seeing her up close, I guessed I didn’t recognize her after all.

  Gordie waved his hand. “Come on over.”

  I went over to his desk.

  “Pull that chair around so you can look at this with me,” he said.

  I did that and sat beside him. “So what can you tell me?” I said.

  “I’m not sure what you expected.”

  “I have no expectations,” I said.

  “Let’s look at it, then.” He poked some keys, and Robert’s face filled the computer screen. He began to speak, and after a minute Gordie paused it. “Look here,” he said. He touched the screen with the eraser end of a pencil. “He’s got an old black eye plus this new wound on his cheek.”

  “I know about the black eye,” I said. “Happened a couple weeks ago.”

  “Well this one here”—Gordie pointed at the cut on Robert’s cheekbone with the pencil—“is only a day or two old, I’d say. That’s a new scab, and see how around it it’s still red?”

  “That’s good observing,” I said.

  “I was going to observe further,” he said, “not knowing this young man, that he seems quite comfortable, given the words he’s reading and the duct tape on his ankles, wrists, and chest.”

  “Comfortable?”

  “Unstressed. At ease. In control. You know him, right?”

  “Not that well.”

  “Could he be drugged or something?”

  “I don’t know. See, when I saw it, I just thought he was dealing with it. Stoic. Tough.”

  “Is he stoic and tough?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know him well enough to say. He’s just a college kid. He plays a lot of poker. Knows how to bluff.”

  “Maybe that’s what he’s doing,” said Gordie. “Playing it close to the vest. He’s not sweating. Nothing that looks like nerves. Nothing in his voice that would suggest he was anxious or worried or afraid for his life.”

  “I noticed that, too,” I said. “I looked at this disc with other people who know him. None of them seemed to think he was acting out of character.” I looked at Gordie. “What are you thinking?”

  “Thinking?” He shook his head. “Nothing. No interpretations or hypotheses, if that’s what you mean. I’m just observing.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Good.”

  “Anyway,” said Gordie, “that’s one of the things I was observing. A kidnapping victim, his life apparently in dire jeopardy, how he’s holding up. Pretty good, it looks like. So, let me…” He played the tape until the camera pulled back to show how Robert was taped to a chair. “Take a look here,” said Gordie. He paused the image, then manipulated the mouse and zoomed into the upper-right quadrant behind Robert’s left shoulder. “See? This looks like a bedsheet. Pale blue. You can see the creases and folds. They hung it behind him so that you wouldn’t see any details of the room.”

  “Interpret that for me,” I said.

  “Obviously,” he said, “they’re either very professional and thorough, or else they think somebody might recognize the room they’re in.”

  “Or both,” I said.

  “Right,” said Gordie. “Most likely both. Anyway, here’s the interesting thing.” He pointed with his pencil. “See that?”

  I looked. “I’m sorry. What am I looking at?”

  “See this lighter-colored section here?” He moved the pencil in circles over the hanging blue sheet.

  “Yes,” I said. “Now I do. What about it?”

  “There’s light coming in from behind. It looks to me like there’s a window there.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “How does that help us?”

  “Hell,” said Gordie, “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. You’re the one with all the information. You’re going to have to figure that out.”

  I was looking at the bright spot. “It looks sort of roundish,” I said. “This patch of light.”

  “With some space between the sheet and the wall,” he said, “the shape would be distorted. But I’d guess it’s a window with daylight coming in, and it looks like it’s smaller and higher up on the wall than your regular house window. He could be in a basement. This could be one of those little cellar windows up near the ceiling.”

  I nodded. “This is good, Gordie. I’m not sure how it helps, but maybe it will. It would be an even bigger help, of course, if you could give me the address or GPS location.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” he said. “Anyway, that’s all I noticed on the visual part of the recording. This kid’s affect, the blue sheet, and that patch of light. I don’t have the equipment to isolate and amplify sounds. That might be worth doing, you know.”

  “Who can do that?”

  “State police. FBI.” He cocked his head at me. “I know I’m not supposed to know anything, or ask any questions.” He arched his eyebrows.

  I shook my head.

  “The family refuses to go to the cops, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “So it’s you?”

  I nodded. “It’s just me.”

  He looked at me for a minute, then shrugged. “As far as the audio is concerned,” he said, “I think I’m hearing something. It’s frustrating not to have the equipment.”

  “Play it for me.”

  “I can slow it down to half speed and fool around with the bass and treble, just like you can do on your hi-fi. Pretty low-tech, but better than nothing. Listen.” He fast-forwarded it for a few seconds, then paused it. “It’s coming up here.” He played it at normal speed. “Hear that?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to hear except his voice,” I said.

  “Ignore that. Listen for background noises.” He backed it up and played it again, and I detected a faint, rhythmical sound. It seemed to rise and fall over the space of about thirty seconds.

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I hear what you’re hearing. But I don’t recognize it.”

  “Me, neither,” said Gordie. “Let’s amplify it.”

  He reversed it again, made some adjustments, then played it at half speed. Robert’s voice deepened so that it sounded hollow and echoey. The rhythmical sound came through more clearly. It was a kind of soft thumping noise, as if somebody were slapping his hand on a table.

  “What do you make of it?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me. Like I said—”

  “I know. Better equipment. I can’t go to the cops.”

  “Talk to your clients,” he said. “It’s stupid not to bring in the pros.”

  “I’ll try again. So was there anything else?”

  “One thing,” he said. “Pretty obvious. I bet you noticed it, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No tape over the kid’s eyes.”

  I nodded. “That’s not good.”

  “No. It means they don’t care if he sees them.”

  “They could be wearing masks,” I said.

  “Let’s hope,” said Gordie.

  “Right,” I said. “Anything else about the disc?”

  “Nope. That’s it. What do you want for a dozen donuts?”

  “Don’t forget,” I said, “I also had to listen to your dumb pun. That’s a stiff price to pay. What can you tell me about that cell phone?”

  It was sitting on Gordie’s desk. He picked it up and bounced it in his palm. “You got yourself a brand-new, bottom-of-the-line, prepaid Motorola cellular te
lephone,” he said. “You can get these babies online from a hundred places from here to Tokyo, or from any Wal-Mart or Circuit City. Cost you about fifty bucks.”

  “Meaning you can’t trace where it was purchased?”

  “If there’s a way,” he said, “I don’t know it, and it would probably take weeks of legwork anyway. There’s no serial number or anything like that on it to distinguish it from all the others just like it. Whatever might’ve been programmed into it has been erased. I couldn’t even figure out its phone number.”

  “The phone’s a dead end, then.”

  “Well, again…” He looked at me and flapped his hands.

  “Right,” I said. “Take it to the cops.”

  He gave me the phone, then ejected the disc from his computer, put it in its plastic case, and handed it to me, too. “If there’s anything else I can do,” he said.

  I put the phone and the disc into my pockets. “I know,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Just don’t forget the donuts.”

  I turned to leave. Then I went back to his desk.

  He looked up at me. “You disappointed I didn’t have another story for you?”

  “God, no,” I said. “You remember on the disc how Robert was all taped up? Wrists, ankles, around his chest?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could a person do that to himself?”

  “Interesting.” He frowned. “Hmm…”.He gazed up at the ceiling. “I’m trying to visualize it,” he muttered. Then he looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t see how. The ankles wouldn’t be a problem, and maybe if you used your mouth you could tape your wrists together… although once you taped your mouth, you couldn’t do that, and if you taped your wrists first, you couldn’t very well tape your mouth. Anyway, that tape around his chest went around the back of the chair and it was right up snug in his armpits. Human arms don’t bend that way.” He shook his head. “Nope. You’d have to be Houdini or something. Why? You think—?”

  “I don’t think anything,” I said. “Just trying to get my head outside the box.”

  “Always a good plan,” Gordie said. “Listen, speaking of Houdini and boxes, did I ever tell you—”

  “I gotta go,” I said.