Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “My people still say suicide,” he said. “The word on Wall Street is that Wheatley’s company was in trouble.”

  “You have friends on Wall Street?”

  “I could grow to really dislike you, son. Good thing you’re on your way out over there and I don’t have to waste my time. Ol’ Morgo told me you’re about two inches from sucking eggs.”

  “From what my people tell me, two inches is all you’ve got, Jim.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll be paying us a visit out at my jail one of these days,” he said menacingly. “Just keep on giving me shit . . . I’ll make you feel right at home when you get there.”

  “You’ll take my shit as long as the widow decides to keep me involved in the investigation,” I shot back. “A billion dollars brings a lot of spank, doesn’t it, Sheriff?”

  “He was just another jumper as far as I’m concerned,” he said, poking me hard in the chest. “Probably had faggot problems like the last one.”

  When he lowered his meaty shoulder, I saw Evelyn Wheatley approaching us.

  “Thank you for coming, Officer Cantrell,” she said with a bright artificial smile.

  In Afghanistan, I had witnessed a similar reaction from a tribal chieftain after his youngest son had been murdered in an ancient border dispute. Until he had exacted his revenge on the neighboring clan leader, he acted as if the world were his oyster and the loss of his son no more consequential than the death of a piece of favored livestock.

  She had changed into a tailored beige pantsuit, and her black hair was woven into a French braid. She looked like exactly who she was, the determined wife of a billionaire who could steamroll anyone who stood in her path. At the moment, she was all take-charge. The grieving would come later.

  “I already informed Sheriff Dickey that I have retained the AuCoin Investigative Agency in New York City to represent my interests in this matter. Les AuCoin is sending a team of his best investigators up here to assist you. I hope that you will give them your full cooperation.”

  “Anything I can do to help, ma’am,” said Big Jim, pivoting to stand over her.

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” she said, dismissing him with a low-voltage smile, “but I was talking to Officer Cantrell.”

  Taking my hand, she led me toward the gray-suited man in the clerical collar standing in front of the picture window.

  “What is your first name?” she asked me.

  “Jake.”

  “Jake Cantrell, this is my friend Robin Massey. Robin . . . this is the officer I spoke to you about. He believes Dennis might have been murdered.”

  He looked me directly in the eyes. His handshake was firm and dry.

  “I’m very sorry that we have to meet under these circumstances,” he said in a honey-rich baritone.

  “Robin was my husband’s closest friend and roommate when they were students here at St. Andrews. He remains Dennis’s closest friend to this day,” said Evelyn Wheatley, ignoring the inaccurate tense.

  At one time, the Reverend Massey had probably enjoyed a full head of red hair. It was now reddish-gray and combed straight back from the crown of his distinguished forehead.

  “I will miss him more than I can say, Evelyn,” he said.

  There was nothing remotely evangelical about him. I had met plenty of five-star evangelists at Benning and other places I had served. He wasn’t like them. There was an almost serene grace in his manner.

  “Robin runs a halfway house for alcoholics and drug addicts in St. Louis,” added Mrs. Wheatley. “He has devoted most of his adult life to this cause. Dennis was one of his biggest supporters. He will tell you that Dennis would never take his own life.”

  Reverend Massey nodded in agreement.

  “Sheriff Dickey and that Captain Morgo refuse to accept anything we’ve told them,” she said. “That’s why I’ve retained the AuCoin agency.”

  “They don’t want it to be murder,” I said. “I’m sure you can understand why.”

  She nodded almost violently and said, “I don’t care who gets hurt. I want to know the truth.”

  “I’ll share everything I’ve learned with them as soon as they arrive,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she replied as a woman came up behind her and began sobbing. Evelyn Wheatley turned to greet her with a warm hug and a smile.

  Looking back at Reverend Massey, I remembered Lieutenant Ritterspaugh talking earlier that morning about my aura. This guy definitely had one. His brown eyes seemed to radiate goodness, and there was no affectation in them.

  “When did you arrive back in Groton?” I asked him.

  “Yesterday afternoon. I flew into LaGuardia from St. Louis on Thursday evening. Dennis and Evelyn picked me up at the airport, and I spent the night at their home in Mamaroneck. We drove up here together yesterday.”

  “You roomed together with him at St. Andrews?”

  “For the last three years we were here.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “Our senior year, Hoyt Palmer lived with us in the big suite on the top floor.”

  “Did he come back here for homecoming weekend too?”

  “He did,” said Robin Massey, “all the way from Helsinki, Finland. The three of us started planning this visit last year.”

  “Is he here now?” I asked, glancing around.

  “Hoyt isn’t feeling well. His wife said he was vomiting most of the night and is very dehydrated. Possibly something he ate on the plane.”

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Wheatley alive?” I asked.

  “About midnight . . . shortly before I went to bed.”

  “Did he say if he was planning to go out?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “What was his mood at that time?”

  “He was fine—relaxed and glad to be back here with us for the reunion.”

  “To your knowledge, did he have any enemies here in Groton?”

  He paused again and stared out the window at the lake. He was the kind of man who thought through an important question before answering.

  “None that I know of,” he said firmly. “Here or anywhere else. On top of everything else in his life, Dennis was the chairman of the St. Andrews Board of Trustees. One of his passions was planning projects to help the college as well as several local organizations in the memory of distinguished alumni from the college’s past.”

  Massey’s eyes suddenly went south for a moment before they came back to meet mine.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

  “Nothing, really,” he said. “Old memories.”

  “To your knowledge, was he unhappy about anything?”

  He shook his head and said, “Dennis was very high on life . . . about the things he could accomplish with the great fortune he had been blessed to achieve.”

  Obviously, Massey didn’t know about Wheatley’s cancer either.

  “That’s another thing . . . his entire fortune was earned through an idea he had conceived to help our society . . . to help people eat healthier and enjoy a better quality of life. His whole life since college has been focused on helping others.”

  “That’s just what Mrs. Wheatley said about yours.”

  “In much smaller ways,” he said. “Infinitely smaller.”

  “Have you ever had military training?” I asked.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “After graduation, I served in the Peace Corps in India and then worked at a street clinic in Calcutta for eleven years before coming home,” he said. “Sometimes Calcutta felt like a combat zone,” he added with a wry smile.

  “I understand,” I said, and I did, having once hidden out in the untouchables’ quarter of Kabul for a week. “What about Mr. Palmer?”

  “Hoyt never joined the military either,” said Robin Massey. “Like me, he had the wanderlust. For him it was Europe. He’s lived in Helsinki for the last twenty years.”

  “What does he do?”

&n
bsp; “Hoyt Palmer is representative of an expression they use over there,” said Massey. “He’s as talkative as a Finn . . . which of course means just the opposite. For the last ten years, he has run a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to protecting the wildlands in the north.”

  “Another do-gooder,” I said, smiling.

  “We’ve all tried,” he said as Sheriff Dickey came up to us. He bulled in close enough to crowd us both back a step.

  “When do I get to talk to this other roommate?” he asked Massey, glancing down at his watch.

  “His wife, Inge, told me an hour ago that he might have to go to the hospital,” said the minister. “Apparently he is quite ill.”

  “From what she said, sounds like it might be food poisoning,” offered the sheriff. “Anyone else in your group gotten sick?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “I meant to ask you something,” said the sheriff to Robin Massey. “You married?”

  “No,” said Massey, grinning. “I guess I never found a woman who would put up with me.”

  The attempt at humor was lost on Dickey. He leaned in closer and said, “No offense intended here, Padre, but as far as you know, are there any homo connections to this thing?”

  “I’m not a homosexual if that’s what you mean,” said Massey, color rising in his cheeks. “And neither was Dennis.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Big Jim. “I’ve got nothing against them, but we had a suicide at that same bridge last year that turned out to be queer.”

  “Don’t misjudge my faith for weakness,” declared Massey. “If you continue to harass Evelyn or me with these innuendoes, I’ll come back here for your next reelection campaign and use all the Wheatley family resources to organize an effort to defeat you. Is that clear enough?”

  Dickey’s chin began bobbing up and down like a marionette as Massey stalked off to rejoin Evelyn Wheatley in front of the picture window. When they both turned to glare at him, he flashed them a grisly smile.

  The plainclothes deputies who had interviewed Wheatley’s fellow alumni in the fraternity had just finished their work, and I went over to talk to them. No one had seen Wheatley leave the fraternity house the previous night. Mrs. Wheatley had stated she’d gone to bed around ten. The last person who reported seeing Wheatley was an octogenarian alumnus who happened to be reading in the library at around midnight. According to him, Wheatley had been his usual enthusiastic self, stopping to ask if the old man was enjoying his time back at St. Andrews. They chatted for several minutes before he left the library.

  I decided to wait to see whether Hoyt Palmer would feel well enough to talk to us. In the meantime, a preliminary report arrived from the county coroner. The fire and rescue team had found Dennis Wheatley’s head wedged between two boulders in the gorge. Until an autopsy took place, it would be impossible for him to closely estimate the time of death. His best guess was that Wheatley had died somewhere between two and five in the morning. At the time of death, his blood-alcohol level was .31, more than three times the legal limit.

  Once they got into the autopsy, they would also find the cancer.

  None of it appeared to fit. According to his wife, he didn’t drink alcohol and had never done so during their twenty-year marriage. The man was acrophobic, and yet he had climbed onto the railing of the bridge with a concertina snare around his neck and managed to keep his balance for almost ten feet before he fell. Someone had cut the telephone line at the blue emergency box. It obviously wasn’t Dennis Wheatley.

  Something about the intricately braided rope was familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember where I might have seen it before. The use of concertina wire suggested a military connection, but a lot of other people had access to that stuff these days. I had seen it at a local construction site.

  I doubted whether Robin Massey had anything to do with Wheatley’s death, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in possession of information that might help solve the mystery. Possibly he didn’t realize the importance of what he knew. I rarely recognized the importance of what I knew anymore. What I really needed was another hit of George Dickel sour mash.

  The late October sun was slanting harshly through the windows, bringing with it an unnatural humidity that foretold the approach of Hurricane Ilse. I went out to the front lawn to get some fresh air.

  The touch football game had ended. No one had bothered to pick up the construction cones on the lawn. The metal keg of beer was still sitting on the cafeteria table along the sideline. The ground was littered with empty cups. I picked one up and filled it from the tap. The beer was still cold.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost four o’clock, and I needed to leave for the Wonderland Motel by six if I was going to have enough time to search the room before Leila arrived. As I placed the still-full cup back on the table, I heard the wail of an emergency siren coming toward the house.

  An ambulance pulled up at the front entrance. When I got there, two emergency medical technicians were rolling a gurney out the front door. A man was lying on it, his chest and legs strapped tight to the frame. His eyes were closed, his face pallid and slack-jawed. That was all I saw before they lifted him into the back. Robin Massey was standing under the front portico as the ambulance headed off with its siren blaring. I walked over to him.

  “Hoyt Palmer?” I asked.

  “Yes. Apparently his blood pressure was dangerously low.”

  One of the sheriff’s squad cars was still parked in the turnaround. The front passenger door was open, and a deputy was sitting in the front seat listening to the football game on the radio. A tremendous roar went up from the stadium that we could hear all the way across the campus, and the deputy started pounding the dashboard.

  “He’s in . . . he’s in!” shouted the announcer over the crowd.

  As I turned to walk back to my truck, I heard another voice behind me.

  “You’re not in uniform, Officer Cantrell.”

  It was the reporter, Lauren Kenniston. She was wearing a rain jacket over tightly fitted corduroys, boots, and a red flannel shirt. Her auburn hair was hidden under a New York Mets cap.

  “This is a new design we’re testing out,” I said. “Makes it easier to blend in with the criminal element.”

  “We should compare notes on the Wheatley killing. Looks like it’s going to be quite a story.”

  I decided she didn’t have anything I didn’t have. At least not yet.

  “I don’t have any notes,” I said.

  “I gather you have balls,” she said.

  I was in enough trouble and didn’t respond.

  She pulled a card out of her jacket and handed it to me.

  “Text me if you need anything,” she said with a grin.

  I took it and headed over to my truck.

  9

  Bug was waiting for me when I opened the cabin door. When our eyes met, she heaved a long martyred sigh, as if my leaving her behind each day would eventually weigh on my conscience for eternity.

  I headed into the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator door, I stuck my head inside the freezer compartment and relaxed for a moment as the cold air cooled my face. At the back of the freezer, I noticed the braised sirloin tips in wine sauce that I had made for Bug earlier in the week and frozen in individual plastic containers.

  Removing two containers, I pulled off the tops and put them into the microwave for four minutes. Opening the large container of garlic-flavored brown rice I made for her each week and kept in the vegetable drawer, I dumped three handfuls into the top of a double-boiler saucepan. After running tap water into the base pan, I set it at low heat on the gas stove.

  Bug began to bark at the front door. Opening it, I saw the mailman driving away in his little carrier van. I brought the mail back inside and quickly sorted it on the kitchen counter. A utility bill, a monthly bank statement confirming my checking account balance of 243 dollars, and a couple of catalogues.

  Stripping off my clothes, I took a
quick shower under the lukewarm flow from the cold faucet. By the time I had dried myself, the food was ready. I served Bug’s dinner in her two favorite bowls, the first holding the braised beef tips and the second the steamed brown rice. She never liked the meal mixed together. I waited for her to take the first exploratory nibble before heading into my bedroom to get dressed.

  There was a clean pair of jeans in the bureau, and I put them on along with a white polo shirt and my old desert boots. Having no idea what might be waiting for me at the Wonderland Motel, I removed the army-issue Colt .45 from its hiding place in the crawl space next to the chimney and checked the magazine. It was full.

  I decided to use a shoulder harness under my blazer, but when I finished dressing, it didn’t feel right. For one thing, I had lost a lot of weight since leaving the army, and my chest disappeared under the loose-fitting folds of the jacket. Recalling the slight Eurasian-looking girl I had seen in Jordan’s video recording, I decided she didn’t warrant a .45 and put the pistol back in its hiding place.

  Walking through the kitchen, I glanced down at Bug’s food bowls and noticed that the one holding the sirloin tips had been licked clean. More than half the brown rice in the other bowl was gone too. She was lying on her Indian throw rug in the living room, licking her front paws.

  “I suppose some alien abducted your dinner, huh?” I said with a superior grin.

  She gave me a baleful stare before continuing to clean her muzzle with the back of her front paw. Making sure that the screen door to the porch was still propped open, I went out to the truck. A light breeze was pushing heavy air off the lake.

  As I reached the pickup, I heard movement behind me, and Bug appeared at my side. Her bushy white tail was wagging with excitement as she waited for me to open the door to the cab. What the hell, I thought, and decided to take her with me.

  Until about a year ago, I would just open the door and she would soar up five feet into the cab and land on her cushion with room to spare. Since then, she had lost all the spring in her hind legs. In my mind’s eye, I remembered the time near Kandahar when she leaped from a running position over a six-foot-high stone stockade wall. I was right behind her and had to use both hands to vault over it. We had both lost a few steps since.