All That I Have Read online

  “No. Sean is without style. That’s his power. What Sean has is an interior.”

  “An interior?”

  “An inner life. Sean has a great vulnerability, a great delicacy.”

  “You can tell that from his note,” I said.

  Morgan Endor didn’t say anything, but she kept that look steady, leveled right between my eyes.

  “Okay, Ms. Endor,” I said after a minute. “Maybe you’re right about Sean. But I ain’t concerned about his inner life. I think he might be in trouble. I need to talk to him. Where is he?”

  “He was at my house from about midnight,” she said. “He had these things with him. He’d been in some kind of fight with whoever had them, I gather. He asked me to take them to you, with the note. I did.”

  “You left him there?” I asked. “He’s still at your place?”

  “No. He left, too.”

  “To go where?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You said he’d been in a fight. Was he hurt?”

  “Not that I saw. He was keyed up. This other man had actually come after Sean, I gather, and Sean had, I gather, beaten him in self-defense and taken his clothes. Sean’s very physical.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was interested in that about him, as well,” said Morgan Endor.

  “I bet,” I said.

  No answer, but she cocked the hammer on the look she’d been giving me.

  “Did Sean say anything about the fellow he’d had the fight with?” I asked. “The fellow whose things we’ve got?”

  “He was after him,” she said. “That’s all. Sean said the man had followed him, was after him.”

  “He say why?”

  “No.”

  I handed her the license. “You know him?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Never seen him anyplace?”

  “No.” She looked closer at the photo. “Gomez?” she said. “He doesn’t look like a Latin type, does he?”

  “He sure don’t,” I said.

  She left a little after that. I gave her one of my sheriff cards and asked her to get Sean to come see me. She said she would. I wasn’t holding my breath for it, though. Morgan Endor made two women Sean had put up between me and him (three if you counted his mom). I wondered if this last one knew about the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, with her blue toenails and her snake tattoo and her SHIT HAPPENS T-shirt, back there in her trailer — her and Sean’s trailer. I would have guessed no, but you can’t ever tell with a fellow like Sean, who’s got a inner life.

  Morgan Endor had just gone when Deputy Keen came into my office. He looked at the pile of clothes with the little pistol on top.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “From Sean,” I said. I showed him the license.

  “Seen him around?” I asked Lyle.

  “Nope,” he said. “Gomez? California? What is he, a Mexican? He don’t look like a Mexican, does he?”

  “He ain’t,” I said. “He’s a Russian. He’s the fellow Timberlake had up on Diamond the other night.”

  “The nude?”

  “Same fellow,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “What makes me think so? I was there. I saw him. We had to wrestle the fellow to get him into the ambulance. It’s him. He was talking Russian.”

  “How come he’s got a California license?” Lyle asked.

  “Paid for it, I would guess,” I said. “Get one for you, too, you want one. Get you a couple. How many you need?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Well,” I said. “Call the barracks, to start with. Timberlake and them took the fellow down there the other night. Maybe they’ve still got him.”

  “I doubt it,” said Lyle.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  I picked up the phone to call the state police barracks in Brattleboro. Then I put it down again.

  “Tell you what,” I said to Deputy Keen. “You’re so hot to work on this case? Why don’t you take a ride out to Monterey, see Sean’s girlfriend out there. Crystal. You know Crystal?”

  “Don’t know the lady,” said Lyle. “I thought you’d talked to her.”

  “We didn’t hit it off too good,” I said. “See her. See if you can get anywhere with her, get any kind of line on where Sean has got to.”

  “I can do that,” said Lyle. “What if he’s there, Superboy? What if he’s with her? Bust him?”

  “No. Walk away. Call in.”

  “Walk away? The hell I will.”

  “The hell you won’t. Unless you want to lose your badge.”

  The deputy turned and started out of the office.

  “Deputy?”

  He stopped. “Sheriff?” he said, not turning, keeping his back to me.

  “If she does, if she gives you any line on Sean, I don’t want you galloping off after him. You call in. That clear?”

  “That’s clear, Sheriff.”

  Deputy Keen left the office on a head of steam so hot you could hear him whistle. Another contented employee.

  When the deputy had gone, I called Brattleboro. I asked to talk to Lieutenant Farabaugh, the chief investigator down there. Dwight Farabaugh had started with the state police the same time I had, but he’d stuck with it. In his time, to put it the way Wingate did, Dwight had carried as big a sword as any, but he was getting ready to retire now. He’d been in the barracks a long time, he knew me, and sometimes he’d talk to me in English.

  “Well, Lucian,” Dwight came on the line. “How are things up in the woods? Pretty quiet?”

  “Pretty,” I said. “Had some excitement, though. You must have heard about it. Foreign fellow in a profound state of undress, became unruly, kind of, with your Trooper Timberlake. He ended up down there, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh,” said Dwight, “you’re talking about Ivan the Terrible.”

  “I probably am,” I said. “Where’s he?”

  “Oh, he’s long gone,” said Dwight. “Ivan was the star of the show around here for a little while. But, you know how it is, Lucian. Somebody held up a Seven-Eleven on Route 10, and now Ivan’s old news. How quick we forget.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” I said. “Did you ever figure out who he was, though?”

  “Oh, sure, we did,” said Dwight. “Hang on.”

  I heard him rattle some papers. Then he came back on the line.

  “Let’s see,” said Dwight. “Yevgeny Karagin. Yevgeny. That’s the same name as Eugene. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Born Moscow, USSR, 1975. Current citizenship, Czech. First arrested, Moscow, 1993. Arrested Vienna, Austria, 1996; again 1998. Grand theft. Arrested Rome, Italy, 2000. Arrested Mexico City, 2002. Fellow’s practically the whole damn UN, ain’t he? Decided to try his luck in the land of opportunity, it looks like. Arrested Dallas, 2002. Narcotics trafficking. Made bail. Took off. Can you believe it? The man jumped his bail. He absconded. Who’d have predicted that, Lucian? I’ll bet that surprised the hell out of them down in Dallas. Be that as it may, Ivan’s now a federal fugitive. Came in here last winter from Montreal on a US passport issued to Oswaldo de Gomez of Los Angeles.”

  “You ran his prints for all that?”

  “We did,” said Dwight. “Didn’t have much else to run, did we, seeing the condition of total, extreme buck nakedness in which the subject was received from your jurisdiction. Ran his prints. Got a hit via FBI. From Interpol. Get that, Lucian? Interpol. Pretty fancy stuff.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Ivan? Oh, we kicked him right up to Immigration on the border. Fired him right up there, I can tell you. We want nothing to do with fellows like Ivan. You know that. By now he’s on his way back to Moscow.”

  “Okay. I’m much obliged to you, Lieutenant.”

  “What have you got going up there that brings in this kind of critter, Lucian?”

  “I ain’t got nothing going,” I said. “I got to wondering
about him, is all. Like you said, it’s quiet up here.”

  “Sure, it is. Sure, you did,” said Dwight. “Is there anything else you need me to tell you, Lucian?”

  “I don’t guess so, Lieutenant,” I said.

  “Is there anything I need you to tell me?”

  “I don’t guess so, Lieutenant.”

  “Alright, then.”

  Clemmie looked at me over the top of the magazine she was reading. “Sean?” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “This photographer lady thinks he’s beautiful,” I told her. “ ‘Sean’s beautiful,’ she said. You think Sean’s beautiful?”

  “Sean?” said Clemmie. “No. I don’t know. No. He’s . . . I don’t know. He’s kind of cute, I guess. He’s got a nice mouth.”

  “A nice mouth?”

  “Well, yes,” said Clemmie. “Or, no. I don’t know. Why ask me? What’s Sean done now?”

  “I think he broke into a vacation place up in Grenada,” I said. “I don’t know that, but I think he did. Lyle Keen sure thinks he did. Then he — Sean — had a run-in with some fellow who nobody can figure out but who might be connected to the house Sean broke into.”

  “A run-in?” asked Clemmie. “You mean a fight?”

  “Call it that, I guess,” I said. “Kind of one-sided, maybe. Call it half a fight.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “Not too bad. A little knocked around. Might have had his shoulder dislocated, it looked like. Hard to say; he couldn’t speak English.”

  “Who couldn’t?”

  “The fellow. Russian fellow, he was.”

  “No,” said Clemmie. “Not him. Sean. I meant Sean. Was Sean hurt?”

  “Oh. No. Not Sean. Sean knows how to fight.”

  “He does?”

  “If he don’t, he should. He’s done enough of it, here and there.”

  “I always think of him at the funeral,” said Clemmie. “That sad, sad little boy.”

  “He ain’t a little boy any more.”

  “No,” said Clemmie. “He isn’t. You said a photographic lady. What photographic lady?”

  “Lady up in Mount Zion,” I said. “She’s a photographer. She takes photos. Takes photos of men. Get it? She thinks Sean’s beautiful. He’s her model, or something, it looks like.”

  “What does that mean, her model?”

  “What do you think it means?” I said. “I asked you, though: is she right? Is Sean beautiful?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” said Clemmie. “He’s not my type.”

  7

  THE ISSUE

  Right at quitting time Thursday we’d had a call from Emory O’Connor, the real estate fellow in Manchester whose company managed the Russians’ house. One of the owners, or somebody working for the owners, had been to the house that day.

  “I’m afraid there’s an issue,” Mr. O’Connor said.

  “I guess there is,” I said. “I saw it. Whoever got in there about took down that whole wall.”

  “That isn’t the issue. Can you meet us up there tomorrow?”

  Us?

  So Friday morning at nine, I was back in Grenada, on that mountain, on my way to get a look at some of those famous Russians.

  Going up their million-dollar driveway, I thought, not for the first time, how differently rich and poor set on a piece of land. If there’s harm done, nine times out of ten it’s the rich who do it, not the poor. All my life, this mountainside up here had been the back of the backcountry. Out of the way, steep, heavily wooded, it had been perfectly good boondocks: good for logging, good for hunting, good for bears and porcupines. As the ass end of creation, it had done very well.

  A poor man, if he had settled in here, would have bought a quarter-acre lot right on the road and moved in a trailer or put up a plain little house. He wouldn’t have been able to afford to do anything more. Then by and by, suppose his house burned or he moved his trailer, in two years, less, it would be as if he’d never been here at all.

  A rich man is different. He can afford to do whatever he wants, so he does a lot. He does everything. He buys the whole mountain, he clears ten, twenty acres at the top, he gets in heavy equipment, builds a road a quarter-mile long to his house site, puts in ponds, walls, banks, berms. If there’s a hill where he don’t want a hill, he grades it; if there’s a dip where he don’t want a dip, he fills it. He changes the whole place, the whole land, so it’s to his liking — and he changes it forever. He turns the ass end of creation into real estate. Maybe the bears and the porcupines are still there, but now they’re his bears and his porcupines, in a way they never were the poor man’s.

  It’s when the money moves in that the neighborhood goes to hell, it looks like to me. Have a rich man for your friend, if you can, but a poor man for your neighbor.

  When I got to the house, I found two vehicles parked in front: a wagon that I took for O’Connor’s, with Vermont plates, and a Mercedes limousine, New York plates, with a man the size of your woodshed standing beside the driver’s door, waiting. I parked the truck and got down. The driver of the Mercedes — I guessed he was the driver — beckoned to me, and I went over to him. Without saying a word, he proceeded to pat me down. Patting people down is something I have done a fair amount of myself, and I know good work when I see it. This fellow knew his business. He went over me as though I’d just flown in from Damascus or Teheran, carrying a heavy suitcase that went tick-tock. When he got done, he nodded and pointed toward the house, so I passed him and went on in.

  Inside were Emory O’Connor and two others, standing in a hallway with a high ceiling. O’Connor I knew, a bit. We shook hands, and he introduced me to one of the others.

  “This is Mr. Tracy, Sheriff,” O’Connor said. “He’s up from New York, from the insurer. Sheriff Wing.”

  “Logan Tracy,” the insurance company’s man said. He was a heavy, kind of soft fellow who looked like a college football player gone to seed. He had on one of those leather jackets that cost a few hundred dollars and that New Yorkers and others seem to think make them look like country people. But what country?

  I shook hands with Mr. Tracy and looked to the third man, but nobody offered to introduce me to him, then or ever, and he never spoke a word that day. He was another kind of thing altogether, it looked like. He wore a gray suit and a dark tie. His shoes were polished. His hair was long, coal black, and slicked down and combed back around his head. He wasn’t trying to look like a country man. He wasn’t trying to look like anything. Was he a Russian? He might have been. He might have been from Pluto. Where he was not from was anyplace near here or anyplace like here.

  “This way, Sheriff,” said Logan Tracy. He turned toward the room we had seen the other day, the study. I followed him. Emory O’Connor started to go with us, but Tracy told him to wait where he was, in the hall with the third man.

  Somebody had picked up. The papers and other things that had been spilled over the desk and floor last Friday were put away. Tracy sat himself down on the edge of the desk and looked at me.

  “This is a nice property, Sheriff,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “The owners keep it as a getaway, you know?” he said. “They come up here to relax. They don’t want a lot of activity or trouble. They certainly don’t want police going over the place. They are here to relax and have fun.”

  “Who are the owners?” I asked him.

  Tracy went on. “There are valuables in the house,” he said. “You’ve seen some of them: TV, electronics, appliances. There are cameras, firearms. There are artworks.”

  “Is the gentleman in the other room one of the owners?”

  “We have an inventory,” Tracy said. “Everything is accounted for. Except one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  The quiet, slick-haired fellow who had been waiting with O’Connor had come to the study. He stood in the doorway.

  “A safe,” Logan Tracy said. “A small, fireproof safe. Steel. It was in the bookcase, there.
”

  “How small?”

  Tracy held his hands in front of him, about a foot and a half apart. He looked over at the man in the doorway. The man nodded.

  “It’s a keyed safe,” said Tracy. “It’s strong, might weigh forty or fifty pounds. Still, easy enough to carry away.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Records.”

  “Records?”

  “Business records, Sheriff. Nothing of value to a common burglar. Nothing that could be sold. Records.”

  “What kind of records?”

  “Look, Sheriff,” said Tracy. “I’ve told you that’s irrelevant. The point is, these things have no value.”

  “But the owners want them back,” I said. “They want them back pretty bad.”

  “They do,” said Tracy. “Have you been investigating this, at all, Sheriff?”

  “I’ve asked around.”

  “You’ve asked around. Have you asked Sean Duke? Our information is that somebody called Sean Duke did this. Do you know him?”

  “Where do you get your information?” I asked Tracy.

  “That’s no concern of yours, Sheriff,” he said. “Do you know Duke?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is he the breaker?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he your main suspect?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Have you questioned him?”

  “Not yet. Have you?”

  “What do you mean, Sheriff?”

  “Somebody else was up here looking for Sean Duke a few days back,” I said. “Found him, too. Might have wished he hadn’t. Fellow from Russia. Fellow named Eugene.”

  “I know nothing about that, Sheriff,” said Tracy.

  “Does he?” I looked over at the man in the doorway.

  “No,” said Logan Tracy.

  “How tough would your safe be to get into?” I asked Tracy.

  Tracy looked at the man in the doorway, who shook his head slightly.

  “Tough,” said Tracy.

  “Then it’s likely whoever took it threw it away,” I said.

  “Would you be apt to find it, then?”

  “Depends on where they threw it.”

  “Look, Sheriff,” said Tracy. “I’m not going to spar with you. That gets us nowhere. Let’s be clear, shall we? Somebody broke in here and robbed us. Maybe you know who it was, maybe you don’t. It doesn’t matter. We want him caught. That’s what you do. We’re on the same side, here.”