3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3

by Frederick Ramsay

  “I got a call last night on my answering machine. Some guy said it was urgent and I should get down there right away.”

  Some guy?

  Chapter 6

  Sam and Whaite failed to find the caller. The contact had been traced to a payphone on the wall at a fire station. In an age of ubiquitous cell phones, it may have been the only payphone for miles. No one in the fire station could remember anyone using it.

  “Hey, it’s cold outside. It’s not like we was sitting and rocking out there like it was summer, Whaite.” Clint Kemp and Whaite grew up together. Clint gave Sam the once over as he spoke. “Well, well, now, ain’t you a tall drink of water.” Sam could feel the heat rising up her neck—half blush, half anger. She started to say something but Whaite cut her off.

  “Careful there, Clint. Your woman finds out you been making moon-eyes at this here deputy and I might pretty soon be investigating another homicide. ’Sides which she has got herself a black belt or two and might just save the little woman the trouble. Ain’t that right, Sam?”

  Sam hitched herself up to her full height and nodded. She was struck at the ease with which Whaite lapsed into the local dialect’s soft drawl. He’d told her he came from the area and she supposed it was a natural thing to do. She hoped the speech pattern wasn’t contagious. She had a tendency—she deemed it a bad habit—to acquire the cadence and idiom of any area where she lived. She never managed to sound like a native and frequently received odd looks from perfect strangers who wondered if she were mocking them. She didn’t have a black belt in anything.

  “Maybe you can help us anyway,” she said. “What do you know about this here Randall Harris?” It had started. She bit her tongue.

  “Stranger to me,” Clint said, and gave her a look.

  “Never heard of him? Never came to no spaghetti dinner at the fire house? Seems like everybody does…ouch.”

  “Something the matter, Sam?” Whaite seemed concerned.

  “Bit my tongue. Bad habit.”

  “I’ll tell you who might know,” Clint said, eyes still on Sam. “Steve Bolt. He hangs around with that Oldham kid. That’s the little creep that starts fires. I’d like it if he’s the fella you’re after. Burned his old man’s garage down for the insurance money only the company didn’t pay because they weren’t as stupid as he figured. So the old man went bust and left town. His wife always was a drinker but when he lit out she hit the bottle big time. Oldham had her put away.”

  “So which one? Bolt or Oldham?”

  “Bolt. Oldham ain’t got the brains of a toad frog.”

  “Where’ll we meet up with Bolt?”

  “He moved down in the Hollow back a while.”

  “He still there?”

  “Can’t say for sure. He got himself a job of some sort over in Floyd. He don’t say much and I don’t ask.”

  Whaite thought a moment. “He wouldn’t be kin to the Freeda Bolt that was in that song about being killed and left up on the mountain, would he?”

  “Can’t say. That murder were a long time ago and that fellow, Harmon, the one who did her, is long dead by now, too. But Bolt comes from that part of the county, so could be.”

  “Well, much obliged, Clint. We’ll be leaving.”

  “Good talking to ya,” Sam said and winced. They walked to Whaite’s car. “Who’s Freeda Bolt?” she asked.

  “Local story. Freeda lived in Willis and got herself pregnant. This guy Buren Harmon took her up to Bent Mountain, tied her up, strangled her, and put her in a shallow grave. A day later he went back to check and she was still alive so he strangled her again. Dimwitted, they said he was. That’s how they talked about slow folks then. Come out as a song some local boys wrote and recorded.” He looked at the sky. “I reckon we’ll have to pick this up tomorrow. That’s if it doesn’t snow.”

  ***

  Rose Garroway had volunteered to serve as the church’s secretary when Millicent Bass became the second murder victim in the church’s one hundred forty-year history. That is, as far as anyone knew for certain, she was the second and not the third. There were rumors of a duel fought between the Reverend Philip Burwell and a drummer from Pittsburg a century and a half ago. Burwell was related to Robert E. Lee in some way, but when the War Between the States broke out, folks had more engaging things on their minds. How the family of the deceased man from Pittsburg felt they never knew. He might very well have been the first casualty of that great conflict, John Brown notwithstanding. The residents of Picketsville believed so and derived a certain civic pride from the notion.

  Since another killing preceded Millicent’s by less than two weeks, the congregation had nearly fallen apart. Murder is not something that visits a church often.

  Rose had served Blake and the congregation well. She knew everybody, had been a member of the church for decades, and had the serene disposition necessary to calm everyone. Unfortunately, she could not type, file, or function in the job. Blake was extremely fond of her and dreaded the day he would have to ask her to step down. There had been so many changes, he was not sure he wanted another, so it was with some trepidation that he returned the call posted on his caller ID.

  “Vicar,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the secretary’s job. You know, I am past eighty and even though you only need me four hours a day, it’s wearing me out. Now that the bad weather is here, I’m not even sure I can get to the office. You know if it snows, the plow won’t get down here for days.”

  “That’s not a problem, Rose. I can manage. There won’t be much to do, anyway.”

  “No, that is not what I meant. I want to give up the job. The only reason I haven’t done it sooner is, well, I know how much at loose ends you’ve been and without a replacement, I’d feel bad leaving you in the lurch. But now I have a solution.” Blake did not know whether to be pleased or sorry. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

  “As it happens, I do.”

  “You met T.J. this morning. Well, his mother is my niece. I told you T.J. is a junior. His father was one of those charming but ineffectual men you meet now and then—always dreaming up some get-rich-quick scheme. He tried this and then that—multi-level marketing, payphones, those hidden dog fences, gumball machines. He had a website and sold worthless junk to gullible bargain hunters. The government closed that down and…you get the picture. It was one failure after another.”

  Blake shuffled papers and wondered where all this was going.

  “When T.J. was born, his father seemed to straighten out. He had a son, after all. He talked about sending him to Harvard, of his becoming a doctor, that sort of thing. But when T.J. was diagnosed as retarded—I know, I’m not supposed to use that word, but I’m eighty and I don’t feel like learning all that new soft jargon—a spade is a spade as far as I’m concerned.

  “When Big Tommy found out that his son would never be rich, famous, or even average, he took it personally. His son became one more failure in a long string of failures. He took to drink and then to taking all those years of frustration out on my niece. She got a restraining order and he disappeared, but not before he cleaned out the bank accounts, mortgaged the house to the hilt, and if that weren’t bad enough, didn’t bother to pay his income taxes. My niece—her name is Gloria, by the way—is stuck with the lot, the debts, the back taxes, and is about to lose her house.”

  Blake started to say something, he wasn’t sure what, but Rose kept talking.

  “She supported her family off and on during those years by doing secretarial work. You said last month you wanted a full-time secretary. I hear the money is in the budget, and she needs the work. We will have the little apartment fixed up over the garage soon and she and T.J. will live there. It will be a blessing. Minnie and I are both getting to the point where having someone around will be a real godsend. So, it works for everyone. What do you say?”

  Blake did not know what to say. The usual drill would be to advertise the position, involve the Mission Board in the decision, and then
hire. On the other hand, one of the church’s obligations was to reach out to those in trouble and help them if it could.

  “I’ll tell you what, Rose. Have your niece come to see me. If she is all you say she is, I will take her on temporarily, like on probation. If she works out, and I am sure she will, there should be no objection to making the job permanent. And if she does not like us, well, she’ll have time to look around. Fair enough?”

  “Perfect. I’ll bring her to the church as soon as I can—unless we’re snowbound. It’s beginning to look bad.”

  Chapter 7

  The snow the television weatherman had been predicting for days, and everyone else anticipated or dreaded, arrived before dawn. Thick heavy flakes began to fall, lightly at first, and then heavier and faster. In an hour the ground disappeared. By six, the trees and roads, lawns and forests, were blanketed in white. Automobiles were no longer on the roads. Snowplows, salt trucks, and a few brave souls in four-wheel-drive SUVs or pick-ups were the only vehicles able to move, and none of them were in sight in Picketsville.

  Sam surveyed her six loaves of whole wheat bread, two gallons of milk, and twenty-four rolls of toilet paper. She had succeeded in beating several dozen shoppers to the milk the night before and felt very satisfied with herself. The fact that she never ate that much bread, drank that much milk, or used that much toilet paper in a month did not deter her from joining with her neighbors in a pre-storm, late-night sortie to the supermarket. Even though snowfalls in this part of the country rarely lasted more than a day or kept folks at home more than two at the most, the threat of snow and isolation brought out hibernating instincts in even the most rational.

  She wasn’t sure if she would be able to get out later in the afternoon for her meeting with Whaite and, in the meantime, she would catch up on her reading. She actually looked forward to a day, or at least part of a day, shut in by the weather. As long as the power stayed on and the furnace worked, she felt content. She grabbed G. K. Sentez’s latest Scott Sledge thriller, Cat’s Eye, from the bedside table, flopped into her favorite chair, and settled into a three-hour stint of comfort reading. She felt guilty about not working—for about five minutes.

  ***

  “Ike?” Charlie’s voice sounded far away and tinny, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a garbage can.

  “I’m here, Charlie. What do you have for me?”

  Ike and Charlie Garland went back many years, back to the time when Ike had been a field operative for the CIA and Charlie served as a PR flack. It turned out that Charlie attended to much more than an occasional press conference, but no one knew that, or if they did, they kept it to themselves.

  “I can’t talk much. I’ve been looking into our little problem and I think we should get together—not here. Can you meet me somewhere?”

  “Charlie, it’s snowing like we’re in Reykjavik. This town is going to be a driving disaster for the next forty-eight hours. We’ll have ice and—”

  “I’ll send a helicopter.”

  “You’ll send a what?”

  “We have to talk and you don’t have a secure phone. I need to change that—”

  “Whoa. Slow down, Charlie. This is about you-know-who, right?”

  “It’s a little complicated, Ike. I can’t…you know the drill.”

  “Well, if you want to keep this low key, sending in a Blackhawk with no markings is hardly the way to go about it.”

  “News Channel 4. It’s their chopper. We’re going to borrow it for a while. They’re doing a story on the big storm in the valley. Where’s a good place to set it down?”

  “Not a good idea, Charlie. I don’t need to be a public figure. No, delete that. I refuse to be a public figure until I know what’s going on. Since we found Alexei, I feel like I’m in somebody’s crosshairs. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll get my Jeep out of the garage and, if it will start, I’ll drive up to Weyer’s Cave. There’s an airport there, Shenandoah Valley Regional. The FBO is an Avitat. Your pilot will know what that means. Fly whatever you want there and we can talk without forty-teen people looking on.”

  ***

  Sledge dropped to the ground and rolled to his right, jerking the Kimber Executive II from his waistband in one smooth easy movement. He snapped on its custom Belgian chrome alloy noise suppressor and squeezed off two quick shots at the dark man wearing what looked like a fur yarmulke. The heavy-load “cop killers” splashed a large hole in the guy’s chest. The surprised look on his face disappeared in a puddle of Macon Blanc-Villages ’97 as he pitched forward on Sledge’s table. The fur yarmulke sailed past him like a kosher Frisbee. Its former wearer gurgled a curse in Thai and lay still.

  Scot surveyed the mess he had made of his lunch. The wine bottle had shattered on the sidewalk and its contents were now puddled up around the creep with the hole in his chest. “Good year, bad vintage,” he thought. The chicken paprika had bounced off the table and skittered six feet to the wall.

  “Too bad about that—Serbs really know how to do chicken.”

  He recognized two Manchurians in ski masks who bore down on him riding a pair of champagne Honda Goldwing Air Rides, their muffled motors huffing so quietly Sledge nearly missed their coming. He pivoted his pistol fractionally and sent another parabellum bullet into a critical half inch of the first bike’s racing Michelins. The tire blew, the front wheel twisted sideways, and the bike flipped its rider over the handlebars, arms flailing, only to land face down on the cobbled street at seventy miles an hour. He left a bloody streak for twenty meters and disappeared into a pile of African watermelons, which tumbled over him, effectively blocking the street.

  “That will keep the cops out,” Sledge muttered satisfiedly.

  The Manchurian’s Uzi skittered toward a woman in a Versace pink halter and Capri pants. She ignored it.

  The second rider hit the first bike and soared, Evel Knievil-like, high into the air, barely missing four men in Armani suits at the next table. If they hadn’t been leaning forward over their lentil soup, they would have been decapitated as the bike and its rider vanished over the low wall of the café and fell a thousand feet into the Orinoco.

  “He said something in Thai,” Scot said, knowingly. Now he knew where to look for the Prime Minister’s daughter.

  Sam threw the book cleanly across the room at the trash can next to her desk. She missed and the book sat, propped like a pup-tent, against the wall. She was not in the habit of cursing but she could not contain herself. Some pungent phrases followed the book to its resting place. She felt cheated. She’d bought the book because it promised a good read, an international thriller. Instead, she got Scot Sledge, a man described as the new James Bond. Sledge had, according to the jacket, no fewer than three black belts in as many varieties of martial arts, a Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern Philosophy, spoke six languages fluently, and served in the Navy SEALS. By page one hundred forty-seven, she’d had enough of the mindless plotting and idiotic actions by the equally moronic hero. Ph.D. or not, Scot Sledge had the intellectual capacity of a Pop Tart. He careened around Europe eating gourmet meals, which were described in mind-numbing detail, drinking expensive gin, and making inane remarks to his female counterpart. He left broken furniture, limbs, and hearts in his wake. He had been shot, stabbed, run over by a Mini Cooper, and changed his appearance and identity four times. It was ridiculous.

  “Can’t anyone write a decent thriller anymore?” she said to the trashcan. “Is it too much to ask for the plot to be at least plausible and the characters realistic?” She realized that this was the eighth in the Sledge series and by now the author didn’t have to work at his craft. His books were all marked, By Best Selling Author… and that was sufficient to move them briskly off the shelves. She was about to search for another book—something uplifting or maybe technical—when the cell phone rang.

  “Hey, Sam, where you at?”

  “Home alone in the snowstorm, Whaite.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to be at the offi
ce.”

  “I figured with the storm we wouldn’t be going south today. You said you’d call if we were.”

  “Yeah, but there’s still work that can be done. You still driving that Subaru?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s got four-wheel drive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then get on down here. I expect there’s stuff you can do on the computer.”

  “Like look up Randall Harris?”

  “Ike’s been called out of town and this little homicide is getting sticky.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Hey, Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you pick me up? I don’t want to risk the Chevelle on these roads and the truck’s engine is in pieces in my garage.”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  Sticky?

  Chapter 8

  Donnie talked to Hollis and as he’d guessed, Hollis wanted a cut of anything the PIN number produced. They argued about the amount over a couple of beers—then a couple more. At one point, Hollis took a swing at Donnie, who went to get his gun. By that time, neither of them could see, much less shoot straight. Hollis ran out into the snow only to slip on the shallow steps that led from Donnie’s back porch. He landed face down in the snow next to the truck. It was not clear how in doing so he broke his leg, but he did, and that ended the argument.

  Donnie took him to the hospital in Christiansburg, no mean feat under the circumstances. The roads out of Willis were nearly impassible and Donnie was drunk. He turned west at Floyd. The road between Floyd and Christiansburg is a challenge on a dry, calm, summer day, winding and twisting through the valley. Luckily, Donnie had had the presence of mind to toss four fifty-pound sacks of sand into the truck bed and that helped keep the rear end on the road. Somehow he found the ER in spite of the weather and avoided killing them both. Hollis received a shot of Demerol in the ER, which seemed to mellow him a bit, and, before the local anesthetic wore off, he agreed to a thirty percent cut, which Donnie figured would amount to less than ten because he had no intention of telling Hollis about all the transactions he would make. Leg set, Donnie loaded Hollis back into his truck and skidding and slewing on the same road, took him back home, where the two of them proceeded to polish off the remainder of the beer.