All That I Have Read online

  “Put it in the car,” said Wingate.

  I went to our patrol car and put the summons on the dash, then returned to Wingate and the two Babcocks. Wingate was talking to Mrs. Babcock.

  “I saw Lucinda the other day,” he told her. “How is she doing?” Lucinda was Mrs. Babcock’s big sister. She had come out of the hospital after having a female operation.

  “She don’t seem to rally,” said Mrs. Babcock. “She don’t have any energy.”

  “I know it,” said Wingate.

  “Lucy ain’t young,” said Mrs. Babcock.

  “I know it,” said Wingate.

  “None of us is,” said Mrs. Babcock.

  “I know it,” said Wingate.

  We got in the patrol car and started back to the office. There, Wingate took out the summons, signed it, and handed it to me.

  “Just take it across and give it to the clerk,” he said. “Tell him it’s served.”

  “But it ain’t,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” said Wingate. “Chum knows where he has to be. He knows when. If he don’t, she does. Chum will show up. She’ll drag him in by his ear if she has to.”

  That was, oh, twenty-five, thirty years ago. Chum and Mrs. Chum are under the grass. Wingate’s over eighty, and I ain’t exactly green in the sap, myself. That business with Chum was sheriffing the way I was learning to do it from Wingate. Sometimes you have to hold back and let a thing develop, was one of his rules.

  It’s still good, too. It’s a good rule. But a kid like Sean tests it. Yes, he does. An old fool like Chum, you can let him develop and things will get better. He’ll come around, or if he don’t his wife will make him. You know that. With Sean, if you let him develop, you don’t know. Things may get better. They may get worse.

  9

  BIG LOOKERS ON THE DOWNSIDE

  Saturday is no day off for the sheriff. Evildoers, the unlucky, and our most faithful customers, the plain rock-stupid, are generally open for business well before noon, and then of course you build through the day Saturday to your big night of the week for bad behavior.

  I thought I’d give myself a ride over to Manchester that Saturday and have a visit with Emory O’Connor, see if I couldn’t get some kind of an idea about who it was we were dealing with at the Russians’ place. Then later on, I meant to poke around here and there, try to start Sean out of whatever hole he’d gone down. Deputy Keen, I guessed, would be doing the same.

  I was pretty sure Emory would be working, too. Saturday is a busy day in the real estate business, as in sheriffing. Is that because home buyers forget for the weekend that they’re going to have to work to earn the money to pay off all the debt they’re about to go into? I don’t know.

  Emory O’Connor did very well. He had his office in a nice old brick house right on the green in Manchester. He’d bought the place and spent a lot of money in fixing it up so it looked right, or a little better than right. Emory liked to make money, and he liked to spend money — and he was good at both.

  He was in his reception room talking on the phone when I walked in. He wasn’t happy to see me, but he held his hand up for me to wait, and when he got done with his call we went into his office and he shut the door. Emory took the chair behind his desk, and I sat across the desk from him.

  “What can I do for you this morning, Sheriff?” Emory asked me.

  “Well,” I said, “you can tell me who in the world is that fellow Tracy, at the place up in Grenada, who’s his friend with the slickeddown hair who don’t have much to say, who’s behind them. You can start by doing that for me.”

  Emory smiled and shook his head. “No, I can’t, Sheriff,” he said. “Not really. You know as much as I do. Tracy’s with the owners’ insurance company, in New York. I told you that. The other guy’s name I don’t know, either. I took it he’s one of the owners or their representative.”

  “Buster Mayhew, your caretaker, says the owners ain’t around much. He says they’re some kind of foreigners. He can’t understand what they’re saying.”

  Emory chuckled. “If you’ve talked to Buster,” he said, “you know he may not be the brightest guy who ever lived. He’s paid to make sure the doors are locked, basically. He’s not paid to be a linguist, Sheriff. He doesn’t have to talk to the owners.”

  “You do, though. Who are the owners?”

  “Investors,” said Emory.

  “Investors,” I said. “There’s a good many investors, one kind and another, here and there, ain’t there? Do these ones have names? They pay you, don’t they? For managing the place? Somebody sends you checks.”

  Emory smiled again. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Big ones.”

  “Who’s name’s on the checks?”

  “Odessa Partners, Limited,” said Emory. He was sounding a little short.

  “Who are they?”

  Emory shrugged. “Investors,” he said.

  “Where are they located?”

  “Offshore.”

  Getting information out of Emory was like trying to get a turtle to stick its head out of its shell when you’ve caught it crossing the road.

  “Offshore, where?”

  “St. George’s, Bermuda,” said Emory.

  “Bermuda?”

  “Does that surprise you, Sheriff?” said Emory. “Bermuda’s a very — I guess hospitable is the word. It’s a very hospitable place.”

  “They’re Russians,” I said. “At the house in Grenada. They ain’t Bermudas. The place is full of papers in Russian, newspapers, magazines. They’ve even got Russian skin books. Bermuda? Do they read Russian in Bermuda?”

  “Look, Sheriff,” said Emory. “I’m not responsible for what they read. Bermuda’s where the checks come from. Have for several years. Very regular. Very useful. We’re in business, here, you know.”

  “I know you are,” I said. “I know you’re in business. And, talking about business, that insurance company in New York? Atlantic Casualty? Mr. Tracy’s company? That’s a business, too, ain’t it?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “ ‘Course it is,” I said. “But it’s the damndest thing. What would you say if I told you I called New York, and the telephone company down there never heard of Atlantic Casualty? There ain’t no such business.”

  “If you’re asking me whether that surprises me,” said Emory, “I have to tell you I can’t say it does.”

  “Don’t it kind of trouble you, though?”

  “Not in the least,” said Emory.

  “There ain’t much does, is there?” I asked him.

  “Look, Sheriff,” said Emory. “What do you want from me here? I’m in the real estate business. I’m not in the business of morality checks. Do I think Logan Tracy is a Sunday school teacher on vacation? No. Do I think Odessa Partners buys guide dogs for blind children? No. Do I care? No.”

  Look, Sheriff, says Emory. Look, Sheriff, says Logan Tracy. Look, this. Look, that. Your big lookers, these important fellows are. When you hear that “Look,” be careful. Go slow. Because the fellow who’s telling you to look don’t want you to. He wants you to think he’s an honest, plain-talking straight shooter who, when he says “Look,” is getting ready to level with you. He ain’t. He never is. He says look, but he means don’t look.

  “Do you follow me, Sheriff?” Emory asked. “I’m telling you that you know as much as I do here. I can’t help you. Much as I’d like to, I can’t. Now, I know how busy you are.”

  “I ain’t busy. I ain’t at all busy. Take your time. I’ve got all day.”

  “You do, maybe, Sheriff. I don’t. Can we wrap this up?”

  I got up from my chair. Emory stayed sitting behind his desk. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “Have a nice day, Sheriff,” he said.

  Well, I might have lost Emory’s vote there. Couldn’t be helped. No hard feelings on my end, though. Emory’s a businessman, sure he is. He’s in the real estate business. That means he’s a valuable man. The real estate business is big in th
ese parts, and getting bigger. On the whole, that’s a good thing. Now, to be sure, it does bring in people like Emory, it brings in your big lookers, people with a very high opinion of themselves based on what, when you take away their money, it ain’t always easy to see. The big lookers are the — what do you call the bad part of the good part? They’re the downside. Are ten thousand Emory O’Connors a downside? You bet they are.

  But still and all, I say thank God for real estate. Because it looks like real estate is about the only thing we’ve got left up here that people are willing to spend serious money on. Other good things people used to get from us, like milk, cows, tool and die work, lumber, sheep, saddle horses, wool, and the rest they’re getting from someplace else, but real estate’s something people want that we’ve still got plenty of. We’re adding more, too, every day, and we’re selling the hell out of it. It looks as though there’s no bottom to real estate.

  At the department I had a note from Clemmie to call her dad. Was I making Addison work on Saturday? If so, we might be into something. Addison generally preferred to devote his weekend to toddy.

  “It’s about your title search,” Addison said when I reached him.

  “I’ve gotten a little farther with that, too,” I said.

  “Farther, how?”

  “Sat down with Emory this morning,” I said. “Emory says the owner of the place is some kind of investment company, I guess, in Bermuda. Odessa. Odessa Partners.”

  “Well,” said Addison. “Yes. Odessa is part of it. Odessa is the Cub Scouts. They still had the training wheels on when they set up Odessa.”

  “Training wheels?”

  “Stop by the office Monday,” said Addison. “Or, no. Lucian? Come to the house. Come now.”

  I drove out toward Devon, and at Addison’s I went right to the back of the house and came in through the kitchen. Addison was there, making a pot of coffee. He poured a cup for each of us, then uncorked the big jug of White Horse Scotch that he likes to keep ready to hand at all times. He held the bottle over my cup; I shook my head. Addison poured a shot into his coffee.

  “I need this, don’t you know,” he said. “You and your god damned title search.”

  We sat at the kitchen table, where Addison had laid out a folder full of yellow legal notepaper. He patted the folder.

  “I can write all this up for you, if that’s what you want,” he said. “There’d be no point. And I won’t try to go through it now. We’d both go to sleep. You’ve got a Russian novel, here.”

  “I never read a Russian novel,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Thousands of pages, hundreds of people, all with the same names, in places with the same names, doing the same things. That’s a Russian novel.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Addison took a hit of his coffee.

  “I didn’t get far searching the title at the town hall in Grenada,” he began. “I got to Odessa Partners. Then I came back here and got to work on them. Chased them from Bermuda on down into the Caymans and through the Caribbean, pillar to post, like a god damned booze cruise. Wound up in Amsterdam.”

  “Amsterdam?”

  “A Dutch company. I thought, Hmm. So I called an old classmate of mine. He works in The Hague. I’m not sure what he does, exactly, or who he is. Hell, I’m not even sure he knows who he is anymore. But he knew all about the Dutch company. He gave me some advice.”

  “What was that?”

  “Forget it. Drop it. Turn the page. Walk away. Move on.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t followed the thing all the way,” said Addison. “I don’t know that I could, come to that, or that my classmate could. Doesn’t matter. I’m out of it. So should you be. Your burglarized house is the property of people overseas who operate mostly in Russia, the Baltic, and on south: the Caucasus, Iran. Serious places, Lucian. Wide open places, these days. Good places to stay away from. Serious people, too — also good to stay away from.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They keep busy. They’re a gifted people, the Russians, but they do nothing by halves. And also, of course, they’re all quite mad. The Russians, don’t you know, have a claim to be the fourth-craziest people on earth, after ourselves, the Japanese, and the French — and I’m not sure they might not have the edge of the French, in an impartial trial.

  “These people in Grenada,” Addison went on, “are in the energy field, mainly. Don’t ask me exactly what that means. I don’t know. But being in the energy field where they are today is like being in the bootleg liquor field used to be in, say, Chicago. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “Why drop it?”

  “Why not?” asked Addison. “You don’t have a dog in this fight, do you? Your office doesn’t, not really. Somebody scoped a place out, broke in, did some damage, left. So what? Happens every day.”

  “There’s more,” I said. I told Addison about Sean, the missing strongbox, the Russian fellow Sean had taken down.

  “Sean Duke?” Addison asked.

  “You know him?”

  “Everybody knows Sean Duke.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Everybody, Lucian,” said Addison. “He’s a popular young man. Come on, have a little one, here.” He pushed the jug toward me, but I didn’t want any. Addison took it back and gave himself another pop.

  “If you find him,” Addison said, “Sean, you get him out of here. If he’s got something these people want, well . . . Do they know he’s got it?”

  “They sent that Russian fellow to get it back.”

  “You don’t know they did.”

  “House full of Russians gets broken into. Couple of days later, here comes another Russian looking for the breaker. That’s a lot of Russians. This ain’t Moscow.”

  Addison nodded. “Well,” he said, “you get your boy out of here, that’s all.”

  “My boy?” I said. “He ain’t my boy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Get him out, all the same,” said Addison. “Put him away someplace.”

  “The way he’s going,” I said, “I won’t be the one puts him away. The state will.”

  “No,” said Addison. “That’s no good. That’s jail. If he’s in jail, that’s serving him up to these people on a platter with an apple in his mouth. He needs to be gone, Lucian. Make him go.”

  “I’ve got to find him first.”

  “I can’t help you there. What was in the box he took?”

  “Records, the fellow said. Business records.”

  “Right,” said Addison. He sipped his coffee — if any of what he had left in his cup was coffee.

  “Cossacks,” said Addison.

  “Who?”

  “Cossacks. You’d better catch up with this boy, don’t you know, Lucian? You’d better catch up with him before the Cossacks do. God damned Cossacks.”

  I found Morgan Endor on the back road in Mount Zion that comes down from the ski resort on Stratton Mountain. It wasn’t a fancy place: no Russians’ house. She was in the kind of house the builders used to call a chalet, back when the ski promoters wanted you to believe you were getting, I guess, Switzerland in Vermont for your money instead of Las Vegas in Vermont, like today.

  She opened the door to my knock and stood there in the doorway, looking at me as though she didn’t know who I was, or maybe I was the fellow pumped out the septic tank but she hadn’t called the fellow pumped out the septic tank.

  “Sheriff,” she said.

  “That’s right, Ms. Endor,” I said. “Can I come in? I won’t be long. I’m still looking for Sean.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I know.”

  She stood back so I could walk in.

  Inside was a long room with a stone fireplace at one end and windows looking south over the mountains. The sun was in the windows, and a big tabby cat was asleep in the sun on the carpet. The cat didn�
�t offer to move when we walked in. We had to step around it.

  “That’s a calm cat,” I said.

  Morgan Endor looked down at the cat as though she hadn’t noticed it till now.

  “Is it?” she said. “I suppose it is. It belongs to my parents, actually.”

  She sat on a couch facing the windows. In that strong light she looked older than I’d thought she was when she came to the office — nearer forty-five than thirty-five. She was starting to have lines at the corners of her eyes, and her neck was getting lean. Sean wasn’t exactly robbing the cradle this time, it didn’t look like.

  “I won’t lie to you, Sheriff,” said Morgan Endor. “Sean’s been here. He was here last night. I told him you wanted to see him. I told him you thought he was in some kind of trouble. He laughed.”

  “What time did he leave?” I asked her.

  “About eight.”

  “That’s eight last night?”

  “Eight this morning, Sheriff.”

  “Where was he going when he left?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ms. Endor,” I said, “here’s what we’re up to in this thing. Sean’s been working at a big house over in Grenada. It’s a vacation place. Nobody’s there, mostly. We think Sean broke into the house looking for valuables.”

  Morgan Endor was looking at me. She raised her eyebrows a little. “Go on, Sheriff,” she said.

  “We know Sean,” I said. “We know he ain’t the Young Republicans. We know he was working at the place. He knew the setup there: nobody home, no neighbors, rich people with lots of goods. We know he knew the house was burglar alarmed, but we also know he knew it’s so far out in the woods that he’d have all kinds of time to go through it between when the alarm went off and any law could get there. He wouldn’t have to worry about getting around the alarm: he could just bust his way in, which is what he did.”

  “Suppose he did. Why tell me?”

  “You’re his friend.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said he was an acquaintance.”

  “So you did. And I said I needed to talk to him, that he was in trouble. I still do. He still is.”