Dead Silence

by Randy Wayne White

  “Geronimo saved Will,” Tomlinson insisted as we trailered my boat back to Sanibel. “I can think of only one other explanation.”

  “Let’s share that information telepathically, too,” I suggested. “It worked so well on the way here.” Traffic was heavy on I-75, lots of Ohio and Michigan license plates and oversized Winnebagos. I was too tired not to concentrate on my driving.

  “Be as sarcastic as you want, I’m going to tell you anyway. William J. Chaser ...” Tomlinson repeated the name twice before asking, “Do you know what the J stands for?”

  I could see he was disappointed when I answered, “Yes. Middle name, Joseph. So what? If you’re going biblical on me, keep it brief. And please don’t rehash the whole Judas thing, okay?”

  “Doc, have you ever taken a close look at Will’s face?” Tomlinson asked. “A really close look, I mean. Cheekbones and eyes especially.”

  “Once,” I told him, “and that was enough. The kid still blames me for ordering him back into the limo. He didn’t say it, but I can tell. The way he glared at me, I think he wants to put an arrow through me, too.”

  Tomlinson thought that was hilarious. “Birds of a feather!” he kept repeating until we got back to Dinkin’s Bay and he sobered up enough to say he wanted to place the boy’s photo next to an old photo Tomlinson had of a man we’d both known and admired. A good man I’d been close to as a boy. His name was Joseph Egret.

  Tomlinson said, “I think there’s something there. Will and Joseph. They might be related. Seriously.”

  I groaned, trying to tune the man out.

  “Doc,” he argued, “a lot of Seminoles were sent to reservations in Oklahoma. And you’ve heard the rumors about how many children Joe fathered. The women loved him! I know, I know, he wasn’t a Seminole, but still . . .”

  “Tomlinson,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t know what planet you’re from, but it’s short one lunatic. Save it until we get back to the lab. I need to open a beer first, okay?”

  37

  On the last day of January, a Saturday, I flew to Pittsburgh and attended Detective Shelly Palmer’s funeral, accompanied by Sir James Montbard.

  Montbard had spent recent days in the Caribbean, judging from his tan, presumably stationed somewhere near Cuba waiting to nail whoever showed up to collect the ransom.

  “By coincidence,” he told me, “I have business in the Northeast. Happy to tag along.”

  It was no coincidence. Montbard was still working on some kind of assignment related to the kidnapping—that was my guess. I wasn’t certain who was behind the kidnapping, and Hooker might have useful information. As the Brit had said, socializing is a key part of our craft. That’s why I suggested we travel together.

  Shelly Palmer was buried east of Pittsburgh in Allegheny Cemetery, a park of rolling hills and trees overlooking the Allegheny River. A hundred friends, uniformed cops and family members were there, along with several dozen film crews.

  During the service, I noticed a man who was too broad-shouldered for the suit he wore. Instead of joining the others around the woman’s grave, he watched alone from the perimeter.

  I nudged Hooker Montbard, then drifted close enough to confirm that the man wore a wedding ring. For an instant, he and I locked eyes. He stared until I looked away, unsettled by the absurd notion that the man might perceive the truth of my guilt, a truth his former lover had carried to her grave.

  I decided to speak to him anyway. I believed that Shelly might want the man to know how it was the night she died. That he had been strong in her thoughts. But the man froze me with a warning look, then ambled away.

  Cops.

  The next day, Sunday, February first, Roxanne Sofvia behaved similarly at Nelson Myles’s funeral, or so she told me on the phone. Stood off by herself, faithful to the code of the unfaithful, maintaining a fictional distance from the man she had hoped to marry, still playing her role as mistress even though their affair had irrevocably ended.

  I chose not to attend the funeral. I could have.

  The night before, Hooker and I had flown from Pittsburgh International to JFK. He went to the Explorers Club, while I took a bus to the Hamptons. I hadn’t returned to a New York winter to socialize, but that’s not why I didn’t attend the funeral.

  Loyalty can be demonstrated in a garden variety of ways. I admired Nelson Myles for the courage he’d summoned during his last hour, but I felt a more compelling loyalty to a family which had suffered fifteen years of his silence.

  Ironic, as Virgil Sylvester had observed, that his daughter’s body was found at Shelter Point Stables on the same day the man who had buried her was being lowered into his grave.

  It was ironic beyond the fisherman’s knowledge, I now believed.

  Had Nelson Myles decided the worth of Annie Sylvester’s life was equal to his own, he, too, might have benefited, not only from the kindness he would have provided but because the girl’s remains would have finally received forensic attention.

  It was one of the reasons I had returned to the Hamptons. While confessing to the girl’s murder, Myles had unknowingly caused me to doubt that either of us knew the truth.

  The details of the girl’s death were gruesome to contemplate, but details solve murder cases. Myles had told me he was certain he had used a seven iron. I had double-checked the golf bag in Norvin Tomlinson’s room and was equally certain that it was the nine iron that a worried Mrs. Tomlinson had replaced.

  Around seven p.m., after speaking to Virgil Sylvester and talking with Agent Sudderram several times, I checked into a hotel not far from the Tomlinson estate.

  I showered and dressed for dinner, then telephoned NYPD veteran Marvin Esterline. I had his cell number. He was off duty but sounded pleased to hear from me.

  I told Esterline that the body of Annie Sylvester had been found and then explained about the golf-club discrepancy. I couldn’t tell him how I knew, but I gave names and addresses. He agreed to keep me posted on the results of the autopsy.

  “If you played golf, you’d know that those two clubs are angled very differently,” Esterline assured me. “Depending on the wounds, it might be as obvious as the difference between a .38 slug and a .45. The medical examiner will know.”

  Next, I telephoned Harrington. He didn’t share my interest in the murder case, but he sounded interested in the possible killer after I’d briefed him.

  “A smart guy, Ivy League background, who was recruited by one of our intelligence branches. A guy who’s spent most of his life outside the country, but also an insider who has something to hide—that works for me,” Harrington responded, but there was something oddly dismissive about his tone.

  I said, “Are you agreeing just to be agreeable?”

  “You were describing the sort of person capable of planning something this big,” he replied. “I’m agreeing because I think you’re right. I think our guy recruited fringe-group types, already motivated, because he needed feet on the ground and didn’t want those feet to be his own. Smart, in other words. He let René Navárro plan and handle the really dirty parts—who better? I think the buried-alive deal was pure Farfel.

  “For Farfel and his other foot soldiers, the payoff was a chance to erase the past and also get rich. As in very rich—close to five hundred million in gems and gold and collectibles, if our people had made the drop.”

  I asked Harrington, “What was his payoff? The man we’re still looking for what? Money?”

  Harrington hesitated long enough that I knew he was holding something back. He told me, “I’ll call you on a different network,” and he did seconds later.

  “Okay, Doc, here it is,” Harrington continued. “We’re talking about a former black-ops agent. Worked overseas somewhere, using his real-world job as a cover. Exactly as you described. His payoff was a chance to destroy evidence that he was a traitor.”

  I said, “You’ve stopped being hypothetical. What am I missing here?”

  “You haven’t missed a t
hing. The man who organized the kidnapping was a traitor. Back in the sixties, he was studying leaves or rocks or something in South America and went south in more ways than one. He tipped off Castro before the Bay of Pigs invasion. That was his payoff: a chance to destroy the proof.”

  I was thinking, Leaves and rocks?, as Harrington told me, “A payoff the guy didn’t expect was a visit from a mutual friend of ours. I just got confirmation. I couldn’t cut you in, Doc—you know how things work.”

  I was confused and becoming frustrated. “Look, I’m in the area. Long Island. Tell me where you are and we’ll talk.”

  “No need,” Harrington replied. “Besides, you have a dinner date, don’t you? With the mutual friend mentioned. Maybe he’ll give you the details.”

  I felt a weird cerebral jolt. I was meeting Hooker Montbard at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor in an hour. I hadn’t seen Hooker since he’d left JFK for the Explorers Club the previous night . . . or, at least, told me he was going to his club.

  “Doc?” Harrington said. “You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to relax, take a few days off. In terms of the business we discussed, you did another competent job.”

  Competent: wild praise from Harrington. And it was true that Navárro was dead.

  I said slowly, “You’re not asking me to drop my interest in finding out who—”

  “We already know. You need to let it go, because what you’re pushing for is a waste of energy. I need you back, rested up, in good shape.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” I said. “I won’t drop it. We are talking about Tinman?”

  I didn’t have to explain the code name to Harrington.

  “You’ve got the right person. If he murdered that girl, I suspect it was to cover up for his idiot son—even the worst of us occasionally do noble things. But the police will never charge him because the guy we’re talking about has taken a long, long trip. Dr. Hank Tomlinson has . . .”

  Harrington allowed his silence to provide the word: disappeared.

  EPILOGUE

  In the middle of February, I had a total of two full weeks to myself and I spent them doing whatever I damned well pleased whenever I damned well pleased.

  I hung out at the marina. Traded stories with the fishing guides, bought lunch for Javier Castillo’s widow and daughters, and got tipsy one night with my sisterly cousin, Ransom Gatrell. We ended up aboard a water-soaked old Chris Craft named Tiger Lily.

  Tiger Lily’s owners, two respectable businesswomen, decided that at least once a year the only rule should be there are no rules, so one thing led to another, as it always does when the destination is known in advance.

  I exercised twice a day, running the beach, then swimming to the NO WAKE buoy off the West Wind Inn or jogging through Ding Darling Sanctuary and doing laps at the public pool.

  Pull-ups were done on the bar beneath my lab. Descending sets, beginning at twenty, then nineteen, eighteen and on down to one. If my Sunday voice signaled there was absolutely no way in hell to do one more, I reprimanded the traitor by starting with one pull-up and working my way back up to at least five.

  Sunday voice: It’s the voice we all hear that tells us to quit, take it easy, wait until tomorrow, why bother?, what’s the use?

  To discredit the voice, all I had to do was imagine Farfel coming toward me with the power drill . . . or spend five minutes on the phone with Otto Guttersen.

  Otto hadn’t had much free time either. For three days after Will Chaser’s escape, the man was the darling of daytime television, although he refused to discuss what he had endured as a captive after Mazar-Sharif, and he also insisted on wearing an absurd white ten-gallon hat.

  Because Guttersen was funny and honest, and a relentless advocate of his teenage ward—“Toughest little cuss you ever met, I bleep thee not”—network producers tolerated the man’s quirks.

  But Guttersen finally breached the limits of free speech by offending the guardians of political correctness. He told a national audience that Minnesota’s ACLU stood for Adolescent Commie Lutheran Yuppies, then went off on a tirade about sportswriters, calling them candy-asses for not voting his favorite Twins pitcher into the Hall of Fame.

  “What crawled up your knickers?” he fired back when the host rebuked him. “Only thing your screener said was don’t bitch about Ethiopians or call my boy a half-breed delinquent.”

  That was the end of the man’s TV career. It was also the beginning of unexpected problems.

  The Minnesota Family and Children Services Agency decided that Guttersen’s remarks justified an investigation. If Otto and Ruth Guttersen had assumed the legal role of guardians, why weren’t they in New York to intervene when William Chaser was kidnapped?

  The agency sought an injunction through federal courts—the boy was Native American, after all—demanding that he be housed in a neutral place, at least until the completion of three months of post-traumatic stress counseling. When the Guttersens agreed that counseling was a good idea, bureaucrats turned it around like a weapon, charging that a former POW who himself had refused counseling might be a dangerous influence on a fourteen-year-old.

  So the bureaucrats had won—temporarily. Will would soon be transported to an Oklahoma safe house administrated by a psychologist who had treated Will earlier. The psychologist told reporters that she had no personal bias in the case other than an interest in synesthesia, a perceptual handicap the boy sometimes suffered.

  Twice a day, Guttersen telephoned me. When he lost his temper and went off on some rant, I swung the conversation toward more positive things. The most positive was the fact that Guttersen, a paraplegic, had stood on his own dead legs and wrestled René Navárro to the ground.

  Unless a person believes in divine healing—I do not—there had to have been a cellular awakening in the man’s neurological system since his injury.

  Otto wouldn’t tell a TV host what Farfel had done to him, but he told me. His motor cortex had been damaged. The strip of brain is only centimeters beneath the skull, dead center at the top of the head.

  When Guttersen offered to explain, I stopped him, saying, “No need. I already know how he did it.”

  Farfel had almost done it to me.

  With Tomlinson’s help, we assembled research papers and forwarded them to Guttersen’s neurologist, who probably thought we were a pain in the ass but accepted the data with thanks.

  A study from the University of Washington School of Medicine was among several that offered hope. It dealt with brain plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to sprout new synaptic connections and access latent neuron pathways, unused conduits that an emergency situation might unmask.

  “Kind of like a lizard growing a new tail,” Guttersen had responded when I told him about it.

  Lizard?

  “Exactly,” I said.

  What pleased me most, though, during that empty time was being alone.

  Low tides were midmorning, and I had my Maverick loaded with buckets, killing jars, a net and a single iced bottle of beer ready to go each day. I walked the exposed bars, collecting anemones, brittle stars and calico crabs for my tanks, and I dug five dozen sand worms—Loimia medusa—to fill an order from New Mexico, and then a dozen live angel wings for the Department of Architecture, University of Nebraska.

  Angel wings are fragile shells, moon white, thin as onion skin yet durable. A professor wanted to graph the structural makeup and apply the data to an amphitheater his classes were designing.

  Because my company, Sanibel Biological Supply, requires a telephone and a computer, I wasn’t totally isolated in the world that is Dinkin’s Bay. Along with regular business calls, I also began receiving the occasional hang-up call.

  It is something that should concern anyone, but I was doubly concerned because I have lived a life that is doubly complicated.

  According to caller ID, the calls came from a pay phone in Fort Myers. After the fourth time the phone rang and I listen
ed to an indecisive silence before hearing click, I contacted a friend, and discovered the pay phone’s location: a health club only five blocks from Memorial Hospital.

  That afternoon, I mailed a typed note to Dr. Leslie DiAngelo but left it unsigned.

  I hope you have recovered. On Fridays, sunsets are pleasant here.

  I also made it a point to speak with Hooker Montbard when I could. He was still planning his expedition to Central America and I was still eager to go. I was also eager to find out the parallel reasoning the man had pursued to discover the truth about Tinman.

  Yet whenever I hinted at the subject, he would demure, saying, “Next time we’re at the Explorers Club, old boy, we’ll trade stories over a whiskey.”

  Hooker weakened, though, when I e-mailed him an article from a Cartagena newspaper about the political changes taking place in Cuba. It had to do with an organization that for decades had operated underground on the island because Fidel Castro feared the group might undermine his power. It was about the Freemasons.

  Translated, the article read, in part: The Cuban population, however, has always embraced the secret knowledge that one of Cuba’s greatest heroes, José Martí, was a devout Freemason, as was Simón Bolívar, the “George Washington” of South America. In the secret lodges of the island, José Martí’s writings were preserved and shared.

  In Havana, Freemasons are now uniting and saying publicly what they could not say even before Castro came to power: Independence demands the overthrow of tyrants, including the tyranny of religion.

  I could imagine Hooker smiling and chuckled, “Ford, old man, please don’t tell me you’ve joined the lunatic fringe and begun to believe in silly conspiracies.”

  During those easy weeks, Tomlinson often dropped in, but that was okay. I hadn’t told him about his father. If the time was ever right or if he asked, I would. Not until. It wasn’t as if the two men were close.