6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6

by Frederick Ramsay

  “It is an anomaly that is very out of place.”

  “Charlie…can I call you Charlie? That statement is silly. It’s a tautology.”

  “Life is a tautology.” Charlie grinned.

  “That was very deep, Mr. Garland.”

  “You think? Would you say Proustian?”

  “No, but nice try.”

  “Freudian, then?”

  “Maybe, but not in the way you mean it.”

  “Will you two cut it out? I feel like, what’s his name, the old comic, Jack Benny.”

  “Okay. The icon carried something it shouldn’t have and which connects it to people who are not nice generally and a potential threat to my employer, specifically. We are here to tell you that Ike has gotten himself into another mess and we—that is the FBI and myself, figuratively speaking—will be hanging around for a while until the bad guys are caught, expelled, or dealt with in some appropriate fashion.”

  “All that for a break-in? Wow. I’d hate to see you guys when there are nuclear devices gone missing or—”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” Charlie wasn’t grinning any more. Ruth’s jaw snapped shut.

  “Thank you for the heads-up. I will take out my anger on the sheriff there if it’s all right with you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “No, mine. You should see what she does with plum sauce, Charlie…”

  “Ike, you are skating on very thin ice here. Charlie, while I have you here, I want to know what your people are up to in my old storage facility.”

  “Up to? Nothing important enough to bother you.”

  “Nonsense. You and your pals are in my building hatching dark schemes and plots. I leased that building to you back when the college found itself over a financial barrel. We are better off now, but I do not want to come to depend on that rent for ongoing expenses.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I have this awful feeling that whatever passes for an investigative reporter nowadays, which isn’t saying very much, I know, or God forbid, Michael Moore, will find his way in and do an exposé. And I will end up feeling like I popped up stark naked in the middle of the half-time show at the Super Bowl.”

  “An arresting image. You’re a lucky man, Ike.”

  “Cut the crap, Charlie. What’s going on in there?”

  “Sorry, can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Let me allay some of your fears. In fact, some of those would-be investigators have tried and come away empty-handed, alas.”

  “Who? When? Why didn’t I know about this? Ike, Did you know?” Ike raised his eyebrows a quarter inch and shook his head.

  “About every six months or so, The New York Times or The Washington Post receives an anonymous tip from someone down here suggesting that the things you fear most are, indeed, going on in your building. You have at least one disgruntled employee on your payroll, I gather. No doubt a faculty member passed over for tenure, a rival for your job, who knows.”

  “Comes with the territory, Charlie. So what then?”

  “Anyway, the paper then sends somebody down here, they snoop around and find nothing. Don’t worry, Ruth, you are covered, you could say. You should have no fears about being naked on national TV, so to speak. Unless…well, not on our account, anyway. I put to you a question, how did you use that building before?”

  “As a storage facility, for art objects. You know, it held the Dillon Art collection, or part of it.”

  “Then, there you are, it still is a storage facility. Not for art, however.”

  “A storage facility? The truth?”

  “Indeed. So, you need not fear Michael Moore, Mary Tyler Moore, or Saint Thomas More. Super Bowl. My, my.”

  “Why don’t I feel reassured?…Agnes?” Ruth barked.

  Agnes Ewalt stuck her head around the door jamb, “Yes?”

  “Coffee and some of those Danish things left over from the Building and Grounds Committee meeting, and why don’t you join us.”

  “Right away.” Agnes hustled off smiling.

  “She’s terribly disappointed, you know, Ike. She expected a real spy. She got Charlie.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Charlie, with respect, you are not Matt Damon, Sean Connery, or even Frank Lovejoy.”

  “Frank Lovejoy?” Ike asked.

  “You’re the classic film guy. I was a Communist for the FBI, that Frank Lovejoy.”

  “I know who he is. I’m surprised you do. I’d say Charlie was more on the lines of Rowan Atkinson.”

  “Mister Bean, yes, perfect.”

  “I drive all the way down here to help my friend yet again, to snatch him from the jaws of defeat and imminent disaster, and what do I get? No respect. If I weren’t so attached to the two of you…I include you now, Ruth, as I realize the labor it must have taken to salvage this man…if I weren’t, I’d pack up and leave this moment.”

  “But you won’t. You will spend the night. We will have a fabulous dinner on your expense account, imbibe too much, and—”

  “Sorry, can’t. Change of plans, Ike.”

  “Tommy Wainwright?”

  “Yes. I think he may have been connected.”

  “To this business?”

  “As I say, I think so, and maybe to your murder as well.”

  “That’s not good news. Why don’t you ever bring me good news?”

  “I’d rather bandy words with your future bride, Ike.”

  “You’re not telling me something, Charlie.”

  “Later, perhaps. I need to check a few things.”

  “Can you at least stay for a quick dinner?” Ruth asked, her face serious.

  Charlie shrugged. “An early one, but in a real restaurant. I saw the effects the local diner had on Ike’s colleagues.”

  “I will rustle us up a salad and Ike will turn some otherwise perfectly fine Angus beef into charcoal on the grill on my back porch. Okay? Ah, here’s Agnes with the coffee. Tell her some lies, Charlie. She had such high hopes.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  After they’d said their goodbyes to Charlie, Ike and Ruth retreated indoors. The evening had been warm enough for them to have enjoyed their brief meal outdoors on the porch, but the March chill arrived as the sun set and they’d fled inside to the den and a fire.

  “So, how did you like Charlie?”

  “I like him, Ike, and I hate him, too. Sorry, that’s a contradiction, I know, but there you are.”

  “It’s a paradox. I think we worry too much about absolutes.”

  “If you say so. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but don’t stop. We have precious little time together as it is. Opine away.”

  “Thank you. So, why do you hate him?

  “Because he represents many of the things I find disagreeable in this world, covert plotting and scheming, geopolitical posturing, dark, perhaps not very ethical, operations about which nobody gets a say and over which there is no oversight, and—this is the real reason—he regularly puts you in harm’s way.”

  “Regularly is too strong a word. I help him sometimes. He helps me sometimes. We’re friends. That’s what friends do.”

  “Okay, I understand that, I guess. I don’t like it, but I understand it. Anyway, before you ask the next question, I like him, I think, because in spite of all the bullshit you two get off, he genuinely cares about you. I wouldn’t want to bet the rent on it, but I’d wager he’d take one for you. And you for him.”

  “Probably. You never know what you will do until you’re called on.”

  “So there’s my contradiction. I like him and I don’t. What do you mean paradox?”

  “Paradox is defined, not very well I think, as a ‘seeming contradiction.’ It’s another hobbyhorse of mine, Ruth. If I didn’t know it beforehand, I learned in the police business that we deceive ourselves with ‘either/or’ situations. Contradictions do not allow for altern
ative views. It’s black or it’s white, period. All the ‘if you’re not for us, you’re against us’ crap, ‘if this, then that’ and so on.”

  “Syllogisms.”

  “Them, too, yes. The world does not operate in that kind of reality. That’s the world of polarized positioning and the fundamentalist thinkers who inhabit those poles, Jihadists, academics, lawyers, evolutionary psychologists, all the people who would shape our culture whether we want them to or not. The truth is that between black and white there is not just gray, but infinite shades of gray, and beyond that lies the distinct possibility that neither position is correct or perhaps both are correct, but in opposition to one another. Paradox.”

  “Like?”

  “Take an issue, any issue: gay rights, animal rights, whale hunting, global warning, water boarding, the make of car you drive, for God’s sake. Some idiot social evolutionist, whatever that is, declared driving a Cadillac indicates its owner’s lowered educational values; Saab or Prius owners, he opined, would be the quite the reverse. Moronic classism all wrapped up in pseudoscience, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the make of car that bird drives. We do not speak to each other with either civility or patience. If you don’t agree, you are either condemning or you’re condoning—either, or. No gray.”

  “Okay, okay, enough. Don’t you start. We sent Charlie packing, and now you are about to push me down the slippery slope of metaphysical double-think.”

  “It’s not metaphysics and it’s not double-think. Try this. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner twice over, no mean feat by the way, publishes a paper extolling the use of megadoses of vitamin C to treat the symptoms of the common cold. People try it. It seems to work. Break-through medical intervention! A professor at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine mounts a controlled research study and finds that vitamin C in large doses has no effect greater than a placebo on cold symptoms. Who’s correct?”

  “Scientific method wins, I suppose.”

  “Do you take three or five thousand milligrams of C when you feel a cold coming on? Don’t say no, because I know you do. Why?”

  “Because it works. But it shouldn’t.”

  “Consider the possibility that Pauling and Hornick, that was the professor’s name, are both right, that the scientific method, as good as it is in sorting out all sorts of things, does not reveal all, that we do not have a single, certain path to truth, and that the psychiatric maxim that holding two opposing views simultaneously is a sign of madness is untenable, but rather a nod in the direction of acceptable uncertainty—paradox. We allow they both may be correct. End of rant.”

  “Michael Specter would say you have succumbed to ‘denialism.’”

  “So, another county heard from. As I said, end of rant.”

  “Thank God. You are beginning to sound too much like the head of our physics department and his discourse on quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s Cat. I am weary of intellectual gymnastics. Besides, Scott Fitzgerald, among others, said that to hold two…whatever you said…was a sign of genius, so there.

  “I’m with F. Scott.”

  “You would be. Ivy Leaguers always stick together. Anyway, people don’t like uncertainty, and analysis of that the sort can only cause major headaches for a world clamoring for absolutes. Besides, I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Whoa. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

  “You don’t want to go to bed? We could watch television instead. The classic movie channel has The Great Escape on tonight.”

  “No television either. I have a busy day tomorrow, meetings starting at seven in the morning. That means I’m up no later than five-thirty.”

  “Gotcha. I will retire to my own quarters, watch James Garner, Richard Attenborough, and Steve McQueen tunnel out of the Nazi prison camp by myself. Perhaps I’ll even go on the Internet and look up Schrödinger’s cat”

  “Give him my regards. Now, give Mommy a kiss and then shove off.”

  ***

  Essie wig-wagged to Ike as he pushed through the door. “You’re late again, Boss. You weren’t fooling around all night with Miz Harris, I hope. You need to be some discreet, you know.”

  “For your information, Mrs. Sutherlin, I was at home alone last night enjoying television and a cup of hot cocoa.”

  “Movie, maybe; cocoa, not.”

  “Either way, you can update the town gossips. I spent a chaste evening alone. What beside tsouris have you got for me today?”

  “The D.C. Metro cops called about a cell phone that went missing that their techs have located somewhere around here. They want us to pick it up if we find it.”

  “They don’t expect us to go looking, do they? We are not a big-city outfit and we are not deluged with the antics of gangbangers, bad guys, and politicians gone wild, but we still have a full plate.”

  “No, I don’t think so. They thought, you know, if we ran across it and all.”

  “Did they give a name or specifics?”

  “Nope, just a heads up.”

  “That’s not much help. Okay, if anyone reports a lost cell phone or turns one in, you can let them know. In the meantime, give them a call back. We need a name at least. Where’s Frank?”

  “He went to interview a couple who were at the clinic place but had left and then were out of town. He thought they might have seen something. He’ll be back in a bit. There’s fresh coffee. I made it myself, and there’s some pastry leftover from yesterday.”

  “Thanks, but no. I need to check the Picketsville grapevine for news. I’ll be at the Crossroads for breakfast and my morning abuse by its proprietor. You can reach me there.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  ***

  Frank Sutherlin sat across from Brad and Jessica Phelps and waited. The two were painfully young and she obviously pregnant, a condition he guessed to have been the unanticipated outcome from a poorly executed honeymoon.

  “So, what can you tell me about Friday night?”

  She looked at her husband and started to speak but he held up his hand to silence her. “We won’t get into any trouble will we? I mean, if the men we saw find out we identified them, they might come back for us.”

  Too much television, Frank thought. The cop’s bane: CSI. “Why would you think that?”

  “Like, if they were involved in a murder and they thought we might testify against them, they could try to silence us, or something.”

  Frank suppressed a sigh. “Well, in the first place, we don’t know who or what happened. Secondly, many people were there that night and they certainly couldn’t hurt them all, and finally, believe it or not, that isn’t the way things happen, generally. Bad guys are arrested, tried, and put away. Period.”

  “Okay, but we want police protection if they are caught.”

  Frank tried not to roll his eyes. The next thing they’ll probably ask is; do we want DNA samples?

  “No problem, tell me what you do remember.”

  “Ask him about the DNA,” Jessica said.

  “Yeah, well, Okay…that night, Jess was having what she thought were labor pains so we went to the urgent care place only it was full of sick kids. The nurses and all they, like, blew us off. You know, Jess is in labor maybe, and this nurse person, or whatever, not a real doctor, for sure, asks, like, three questions and says, like, go home, you know?”

  “I see, well they generally know what they’re doing. Were you in labor?”

  “No, it was gas.” Jessica reddened at the memory. “But, hey, I mighta been.”

  “So you were saying?”

  “Oh, yeah, so we were trying to figure out what to do, you know, like ask for a second opinion or something, when these two guys drag this other guy in and sit him down.”

  “Yeah, and they see us looking so they say, he’s been drinking and maybe has a heart attack. Then we left.”

>   “You didn’t see if they went to the desk to sign him in?”

  “No, we up and left. All those kids spitting up, it was making me nauseous, you know?”

  “Do you think you could give me a description?

  The two thought they could and between them managed to describe two men who could have been Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro.

  Or not.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The news at the Crossroads added little to Ike’s information base. Most of the morning denizens wanted to know where and how all those kids got sick, how could they all come down sick all at once, and was there any truth to the rumor that the town’s water supply had been tampered with. Buster Hawkins allowed as how he heard of something like that happening in Pennsylvania somewhere, too. Ike’s statement that most of the kids were from families on private wells had no impact on their speculation about terrorist plots and the general decay of the American way. Nor did it change their opinion. He hadn’t expected to learn much, but he knew that once in a while, somebody knew or heard something that was sufficiently eccentric to head him in a new direction. Not today. Still, breakfast never failed to cheer. He entered the outer office and confronted his staff of deputies.

  “You are here, not out serving and protecting. I must assume you have things to tell me. Otherwise, I want to know why you are, in fact, here not there.” He jerked his thumb toward the door.

  “I have a name,” Essie said. “I called the D.C. cops and they told me. They said they were sorry I had to call back. Something about a new dispatcher. Don’t that just bake your beans? Anytime somebody messes up a message they blame it on the dispatcher, right?”

  “Essie, you can’t know that for sure,” her husband, Billy, said.

  “Oh, I can. How many times you done that to me before we were married? And Ike here ain’t above it either.”

  “Point taken, Essie,” Ike said.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Okay. Got it. What name are you talking about?”

  “The missing cell phone thing, that guy. Oh, that’s the good part. It’s that the one you all been trying to figure out who he is.”

  “What?”

  “Zaki, Sacci, whoever. The D.C. cops called him Sacci, though. They said his fiancée reported him missing.”