Death's little helpers jm-2

by Peter Spiegelman

  The drive ended in a rough circle of packed earth and gravel, bordered by wet lawn and maple trees. The farmhouse was straight ahead. It was two neat stories in white clapboard, with green shutters, a green shingle roof, and two brick chimneys. There was a flight of wooden stairs from the path to a deep porch and the front door. The barn was to the left and set farther back from the turnaround. It had a low stone foundation, and its sides were wide white vertical boards. It had a hayloft and a big sliding door- both shut- and only a few windows, all high off the ground. The meadow I’d seen from the road stretched out beside and behind it.

  I got closer to the house and saw that shades were drawn on all the windows. I climbed the porch steps and peered through the front door glass, but it was covered in a white curtain and I couldn’t see a thing. I pressed the bell, heard it chime someplace distant, and waited. After a minute or two I pressed it again. And again. Then I knocked loudly several times, and called out hello. And then I opened my pack.

  The hardware and the doorframe were for shit, and I was inside in less than two minutes with no damage done. I closed the door behind me and looked down a dim hallway that ran through the house all the way to the kitchen. The walls were pale yellow, and the wide plank floors were dark and smooth. A stairway climbed along the wall to the right. The wind picked up outside and I heard raindrops tapping at the windows, but nothing else. Light filtered through curtains and shades, but it was gray and somehow subterranean. I pulled on vinyl gloves and sniffed the air. It was musty and damp and smelled a little of ammonia, but of nothing worse. I took a deep breath and a quick walk around and satisfied myself that no one was home. Then I took it from the top.

  The attic was small, unfinished, drafty, and damp, and it was lit only by a single bulb and by the gray light that came in through the dormers. I pulled out my flashlight and flicked it on. Besides some storm windows and broken screens, and a box of moldy paperbacks, it was empty. The rain was steady now and loud above my head. I went down the narrow stairs to the second floor and into a bedroom.

  It was simply furnished with a pair of wrought-iron beds and a bureau in green painted wood. There were green chenille spreads on the beds, with bare mattresses underneath. The floor was partly covered with a green and gray hooked rug, and a large aerial photo of what looked like the Tanglewood grounds hung on the wall. The windows looked out on the back of the house, on lawn, a small grove of apple trees, and the dark wooded hillside beyond.

  The next bedroom was outfitted as an office, with oak file cabinets, a rolltop desk, and an oak swivel chair. There were framed New Yorker covers on the walls and dust and empty space in the cabinets and desk. There was even less in the small bathroom next door.

  Next door to that was the master bedroom. I stood at the threshold and looked it over and felt my pulse quicken. It was larger than the other rooms, and it had a little more furniture: a big cherrywood bed, a cherry bureau, a small black writing table and chair, a hooked rug on the floor, a black-framed mirror on the wall. But where the other rooms had been tidy and battened down, this one was scrambled.

  The king-sized mattress was stripped bare and lay askew on the bed frame. All but one of the bureau drawers stood open and empty, and that one was missing. I found it under the bed, and it was empty too. The closet door was ajar. There was nothing inside but a few hangers scattered on the floor, next to a pillow. The mirror was crooked and cracked.

  The master bath was more of the same. It was larger than the one in the hallway, and equipped with expensive new fixtures that looked very old. But all the drawers and cabinet doors hung wide and gaping, like a lot of missing teeth. I went downstairs.

  There was a study off the entrance foyer to the right. It was a narrow room with windows that looked onto the front porch, and it was furnished with a pair of green love seats, an oriental carpet, and Joseph Cortese’s music collection. The collection of vinyl, CDs, and DVDs filled six built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and made what I’d found at Danes’s place look like a starter kit. The sound system occupied a seventh cabinet, and it was arcane and ominous-looking. The speakers were hung on the walls, along with a dozen photographs of a smiling Joseph Cortese, standing with musicians and conductors and friends. I’d seen two of the photographs before- one at Danes’s apartment and the other at Nina Sachs’s.

  The living room was across the hall, and it connected through a wide entranceway to the dining room in the rear of the house. The furnishings were casual and comfortable-looking- slipcovered chintz sofas, fat leather chairs, a cherry coffee table, and brass lamps. There was a small linen chest beside one of the sofas, but it held nothing more than a deck of playing cards and a box of matches. Behind its brass screen, the fireplace was clean and empty.

  I heard a rumbling sound, and the dim light coming through the shades grew dimmer. I went to a window and looked outside. The sky was a tumbling mosaic of gray on gray, and rain was falling even harder. Leaves were flying sideways from the trees.

  I stood at the entrance to the dining room. A four-branch brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, above an old oak table and six oak chairs. There were three windows on the back wall and a connecting door to the kitchen on the right. There were moss-green curtains on wrought-iron rods over two of the windows. The third window, near the kitchen door, was covered only by a roller shade.

  I pushed up a wall switch, and the chandelier came on. It shed a thin yellow light from bulbs shaped like flames. I crossed the room and looked at the bare window frame. There were empty ragged screw holes in the upper left-hand corner, and in the upper right were the bent remains of a bracket. The smell of ammonia was more pronounced. I knelt down and played my flashlight along the floorboards. There was a long irregular patch of wood that was scuffed and scratched and lighter than the rest of the floor. The ammonia smell was even stronger, and there was a smell of bleach too.

  I took the putty knife out of my waist pack and worked it into the gap between the floorboards. I brought it out and there was something grainy, crumbly, and nearly black on the end. I shined the light along the irregular patch, in the seams between the floorboards. They were mortared with dried blood.

  “Goddammit,” I said aloud. My voice sounded shaky and strange in the empty house. I got to my feet and went into the kitchen.

  The kitchen was large and well appointed, with limestone countertops, glass-fronted cabinets, a green tile floor, and a pine table. I flicked on the overhead light. There was nothing in the big sink, but there was a new-looking coffeemaker on the counter and opened packages of paper plates and cups and plastic cutlery in one of the cupboards. The other cupboards were bare, and so was the refrigerator.

  A half-glass door at the far end of the kitchen led to a mud room, with a washer and dryer, a utility sink, and a door to some wooden steps and the back lawn. There was a plastic gallon bottle of bleach in the sink, and another of ammonia. Both were nearly empty. There was a metal bucket beneath the sink with a big scrub brush inside. Its worn bristles were stained a dark brown.

  Across from the dryer was another door, to what I thought was a closet. But I was wrong. It was a small rectangular room- a pantrywith deep shelves that wrapped around three walls and a rank smell that rushed up into my face. I ran my hand along the wall and found a light switch, and I felt an icy lump land in my gut.

  It was a nest.

  The floor was covered by a dirty blue gym mat and a sleeping bag and piles of wadded gray clothing, all surrounded by a berm of wet newspaper, greasy paper bags, and soda bottles. There was a large electric lantern on the lowest shelf, and a red portable radio, and on the shelf above that was a heap of torn and taped and badly folded road maps. The other shelves were bare. The odor was stinging- a humid, feral mix of decayed food, body odor, urine, and feces. And there was no mistaking it for anything else; it was a concentrate of what I’d smelled that day in Danes’s apartment building, when I’d gotten onto the elevator as Paul Cortese was getting off.

  “
Christ,” I whispered.

  I turned off the light and closed the door and went back into the kitchen, and as I did there was a flash at the windows and a deep rumbling in the sky. The lights flickered out and then came on again. I looked at my watch and looked outside. It was after four, but the sky looked more like midnight. The storm was early.

  I pulled out my phone and flipped it open. No signal. I went to the window. No signal. I moved around the room. No signal.

  “Shit.”

  I went to the entrance hall and doused the house lights behind me.

  The porch was no shelter from the sideways rain, and I was soaked in less than a minute. I turned the flashlight on and the beam leapt forward six feet and vanished in the swirling air. I went down the steps and onto a path that was fast submerging, and I headed for the barn. Gravel and mud squelched and slid under my boots. The barn was thirty yards up the path, and no more than a sketchy silhouette until the lightning. Then, for an instant, it loomed above me, stark and flat and bone white- like an X-ray against the metal sky- and then it was dark again. I leaned into the wind. My hair was plastered to my head and rain ran down my back. I pointed the flashlight at the path and avoided the larger potholes and fell only twice.

  I planted my boots in the mud and heaved on the sliding door, and it moved not an inch. I tried it again with no more success, and went around the corner of the barn, to the right. The building shielded me from the wind and a little of the rain, and I stayed close as I worked my way over stones and low vegetation toward the back end. I found another door about halfway along. I played the flashlight over it. It was a wide Dutch door with black iron latches and black iron hinges, and a shiny new hasp set into the doorframe. There was a shiny new lock hanging from it. I opened my waist pack and took out the pry bar.

  This doorframe was not for shit and neither was the hardware, and I put a lot of back into it and wasn’t subtle. There was a tearing sound and the hasp came away from the frame, along with some long galvanized screws. I pushed the door open and stepped in.

  It was black inside, and quiet, and it smelled of damp timber, damp earth, wet hay, and compost. There was a garage smell, too, of metal and rubber and gasoline and exhaust. And faintly, below these odors, was the scent of something else. I found a switch along the wall.

  Lights hung from the big central beam, but they were few and dim, and heavy shadows were everywhere. Still, the high points were plain: the black timber bones of the place and the packed earth floor; the ladder to the hayloft at the front of the barn, near the sliding door that was chained and locked; the row of open stalls on the long wall opposite me; the large open space in the middle, and the big black Beemer parked there. My heart was pounding.

  I walked to the car and the smell was stronger. I walked around the car. It had New York plates, of course, and of course they were Danes’s. The window glass was fogged inside, but not so clouded that I couldn’t make out the body in the back seat.

  33

  He was long gone, and stewed in his own juices- bloated, loose, and coming apart. And he’d been rolled, like an obscene sausage, in heavy plastic sheeting that was sealed at the ends with duct tape. The wrapping was stiff and translucent, and it clouded any features that might have been left on the body, but through it I could see a black irregular patch where the chest used to be.

  The car and the plastic had kept the animals out, but it couldn’t keep the smell in. It was suffocating and thick, and it boiled out of the open rear door and filled the barn in an instant. I closed the door and staggered back a few paces and ground my teeth to fight the heaving in my stomach. I blotted my eyes with my sleeve and pulled the collar of my sweatshirt up over my nose and stood for a while, taking shallow breaths. I thought about Nina and I thought about Billy.

  “Goddammit,” I whispered.

  I looked at the car. It was a crime scene- this whole place wasand I knew I should leave it in peace. But I’d left should behind a while ago- when I’d creeped the house and broken the lock off the barn door, or maybe much earlier than that. I shook my head. My vinyl gloves were wet and tearing, and I pulled them off and jammed them in my pocket. I reached into my waist pack and pulled out a fresh pair.

  “In for a penny,” I said to myself.

  I opened the driver’s door, and a fresh wave of dead smell rolled out. I ground my teeth against it and looked into the front seat. It was a mess. It was as if a cyclone had passed through the compartment and dropped the jumbled contents of a linen closet and a wardrobe and a medicine chest in there. Bedsheets and blankets and towels were tangled with trousers and underwear and shoes; shirts were knotted with pillowcases and socks, and the whole chaotic pile was shot through with toiletries: toothbrush, vitamin bottle, razor blades, dental floss, shaving cream. It was debris from the storm whose tracks I’d seen in the master bedroom of the farmhouse.

  There was a suitcase jammed into the foot well on the passenger side. It was brown leather and expensive-looking, just like the luggage I’d seen in Danes’s apartment. There was a brown plastic medicine bottle with a white cap near the brake pedal. I knelt down and shined the flashlight beam on it. It was for a prescription antibiotic, and it was made out to Gregory Danes. The trunk release was near the driver’s seat and I pressed it and the trunk lid went up an inch.

  I closed the car door and went around back. There was a flash of blue light through the high barn windows, and a sizzling sound, and an almost simultaneous crack of thunder. The building shook and I felt the pressure wave in my shoulders and I was sure that the windows had shattered. The weak lights failed and found themselves again. I looked up at the windows and saw they were intact. I lifted the trunk lid.

  The first thing I saw was the missing curtain rod from the farmhouse dining room, and the missing green curtain. The rod was bent and the curtain was stiff with dried blood. Beneath it was another insane pile. Rather than linen closets and wardrobes, it looked as if someone had whirled a refrigerator together with a desktop. The food was on top- a carton of milk, eggs, butter, a foil bag of coffee, bread, a box of Swiss breakfast cereal, a bottle of red wine- all curdled and rotten and gone to mold. The smell wafted up at me, competing with- and momentarily defeating- the dead smell. It was a small reprieve. Below the food was hardware.

  I saw the cell phone that was never answered, an electronic organizer the size of a deck of cards, and the laptop that was missing from the docking station in Danes’s apartment. I saw a wineglass, cracked and dark with dregs and mold, and a snarled skein of black power cables wrapped around it all. The papers were underneath.

  Some of them were newspapers-New York Times, Journal, FT- and some were magazines, and some of them were glossy pamphlets and catalogs. But the milk carton and wine bottle had drained on the pile, and left the electronics sticky and spotted with odd pink scabs and the papers mostly illegible. I picked carefully through the mess and stopped when I got to the briefcase. It was a black leather satchel, and it was empty except for an accordion file. The file was red, with a long flap and an elastic band, and it was mostly unscathed. I slid it out and opened it up.

  There was a thick sheaf of papers inside. I thumbed through them and my heart started to pound. There was a bench behind me, near the Dutch door, and I sat on it and read.

  Mostly, they were stock research reports, with titles like “Fly Me to the Moon: A Survey of Online Travel Agents,” and “Going, Going, Gone: Valuation of Internet Auction Houses,” and I recognized the names of the authors- Irene Pratt, Anthony Frye, others- as members of the Pace-Loyette equity research department. The reports were in chronological order on the pile- oldest to latest- and every page of every report was marked CONFIDENTIAL in dark capitals in the upper left-hand corner and DRAFT in the upper right.

  The report at the top of the pile had been written by Irene Pratt, and it was fifteen months old. It was eight pages long and surveyed stocks of video-game software companies, and it ended with a recommendation to buy the shares of three
different firms. Stapled to the bottom of its last page was a rectangular strip of paper. It was from a fax machine, and it confirmed the transmission, some fifteen months back, of an eight-page fax from a number with a 212 area codea New York City number- to a number with a 203 area code- a number in Connecticut.

  The last report on the stack was barely three months old. It had been written by Anthony Frye and another man from Pace, and it concluded with sell recommendations on the shares of four companies. It was six pages long, and it too had a fax confirmation stapled to its last page- six pages sent to a number in Connecticut. In fact, each of the twelve reports in the stack had a fax confirmation fastened to it. The sending phone numbers were different in each case, but the receiving numbers were all the same. They suggested that someone had been faxing drafts of Pace-Loyette’s confidential research reports to someone else in Connecticut, and that whoever it was had been doing it for well over a year.

  It was the pages I found tucked between the research reports that told me why. There were twelve of them, one following each of the research reports, and they were typed- not printed- on the simple yet elegant letterhead of the Kubera Group. They were investor statements.

  The dates corresponded roughly to the dates on the research papers, lagging them in each case by a week or so, and they reported the performance of only one investment: a 15 percent share in a fund that had the innocent-sounding name of Kubera Venture Twelve. It was an investment, apparently, that had done quite well. On the first statement, dated fifteen months back, the investor’s stake in Kubera Venture Twelve was worth just under five million dollars; on the last, its value had more than doubled. I guessed that the investor must have been quite pleased with that performance, but as he was currently wrapped in plastic and dissolving in the back seat of a car, I’d never know for sure. But maybe Marcus Hauck could tell me- it was, after all, his signature on each of the statements.