by Philip Kerr
“Why was he in the panic room in the first place? Do we know?” asked Gisela.
“No. And he didn’t sound the alarm. Or if he did, it didn’t work and no one came. The front door was locked. So were all of the windows. No footprints in the garden. No broken tiles on the roof.”
“Recent threats?”
“Ekman’s wife told the police he received threats all the time, mostly on the website or in the mail, but that she wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary. Then again, she thought Ekman probably wouldn’t have told her if there had been. He tended to treat that kind of thing as an occupational hazard. Anyway, the Tarrytown PD handled the investigation with the assistance of the Bureau of Criminal Police from the New York staties.”
“So, an accidental death,” said Gisela.
“Ekman had a pet cat,” I said. “The cat was found dead, too.”
“It figures,” said Gisela. “Carbon monoxide poisoning. That stuff is invisible and odorless.”
“Except that the cat wasn’t found in the panic room but outside, in the gallery where the panic room was concealed.”
“Maybe,” said Helen, “when the door of the panic room was opened, a pocket of gas came out. Not enough to trouble Mrs. Ekman, but just enough to affect the cat.”
“There you are, Gil,” said Gisela. “I think Helen just solved your felinicide.”
“Hey, I thought you were supposed to be on my side,” I told Helen.
“I am,” she said. “But it just occurred to me. Maybe, unbeknownst to Mrs. Ekman, the cat followed her into the panic room, took a deep breath of the gas, came outside again, and died.”
“All right,” said Gisela. “Let’s try to keep the speculation to a minimum, folks. Gil. You said there was a third case that caught Bishop Coogan’s eye. Why don’t you tell us about that?”
“Willard Davidoff was a professor of human evolutionary biology at Yale University, the vice president of the American Humanist Association, a celebrated author, and a well-known atheist. In 2009 he was listed by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Just before Christmas last year, Davidoff gave a lecture at the Boston Public Library. His subject was ‘The Evolution of Superstition and Religion,’ and he argued that today’s religions are not a matter of divine revelation but of natural selection, in that only the strongest religions have survived by virtue of their fitness, which he defines as their willingness to exterminate other religions.”
“That must have gone down well in Boston,” said Gisela.
I grinned. “Actually, the lecture was a sellout. Afterward there was a party to which all of Boston’s Brahmins were invited. Before it ended, his publisher reported seeing Davidoff on one of the upper floors, talking to himself. She spoke to him and he ignored her. He was known to be an irascible character, so she was used to this and left him alone. No one saw him after that, and it was assumed he had gone back to his room at the Four Seasons. It’s a ten-minute walk. You could do it with your eyes closed. But the following morning a dog walker found Davidoff’s body in Olmsted Park, which is an hour’s walk in the opposite direction. He was still wearing his Rolex and carrying a wallet with three hundred dollars in it, so it was clear he hadn’t been mugged. His neck was broken and he appeared to have fallen out of a tree. His clothes were heavily stained with tree moss and there was bark underneath his fingernails.”
“Was he drunk?” asked Gisela.
“They found about a bottle of red wine in his system,” I said.
“That would sure make me drunk,” admitted Helen.
“The question is,” I continued, “was it the bottle of red that Davidoff drank in the Boston Public Library that persuaded him to walk three miles in the wrong direction on a cold night and then to climb a tree? Or was it something else? Someone on Huntington Avenue said they thought they saw a man answering Davidoff’s description running in the direction of the park at about ten-fifteen that night; and a nurse at a nearby hospital claimed she saw what could have been Davidoff almost getting knocked down by a city cab.”
“So what did the BPD have to say about it?”
“He came out of the library and walked in the wrong direction. When Davidoff realized he was lost, he chased after a cab, got lost some more, and found himself in Olmsted Park, where he met an accidental death. They picked the obvious explanation because the most obvious explanation is usually the correct one. Which is that Willard Davidoff climbed a tree when he was drunk and became one of the fifteen thousand Americans who died from falls last year.”
Gisela tapped her pen impatiently on her notepad. “And I can’t honestly say that I disagree with that.”
“Come on, boss,” I said. “This is a Yale professor, not some kid from the Skull and Bones. On a cold winter night in Boston, is climbing trees the normal behavior for an internationally famous sixty-five-year-old evolutionary biologist?”
“You know, it might be,” said Gisela. “He was climbing a tree looking for some rare beetle or a piece of fucking tree bark, but it’s what biologists do, Gil. On the other hand, perhaps the tree afforded him an excellent view through an attractive young woman’s bathroom window. That’s biology, too.”
“Don’t you think all of this is a coincidence? Each one of these guys seems like he was afraid of something. Three of them end up prematurely dead within six months of one another. It’s who and what they are that gives me an itch here. And I’m not the only one who wants to scratch it, boss. It was Bishop Eamon Coogan who put me onto this, remember?”
“Need I remind you of something you should have learned at Quantico, Agent Martins?”
That was me being bitch-slapped. Any mention of what I should have learned at the Academy always left me feeling like I was never going to make ASAC.
“Gil, I flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads all ten of them, do I whisper conspiracy? Or do I shrug it off as a coincidence? We’re the Federal Bureau of Investigation not the Foolish Bureau of Ingenuousness. Your request for a case file is an investigator’s Oscar Wilde line. One’s unfortunate, two is careless, and three is Title 18.”
Title 18, of the U.S. Code, Section 351, was what empowered the special agents and officials of the FBI to investigate violations of federal statutes.
“Helen? What do you think?”
Helen shifted uncomfortably on her chair and crossed her long legs, as if that might afford her some time to come down on one side of the argument or the other. I already knew Helen was in favor of further investigation. The question was, would she fold in the face of Gisela’s ace: Gisela was the boss.
“What you said about coincidence makes sense,” said Helen. “But sometimes it seems to me that life shows us what we need to know. Before I came into this room, Gil had me convinced there might be a real fire at the end of this smoke trail. Now I’m not so sure. On the other hand, if it were me, I’d probably trust his instincts, for a while at least. Maybe a week or two. Just to see what his nose turns up. Couldn’t do any harm. Might even do him some good.”
Gisela looked at Anne. “What do you think?”
“I get a nose for things, too,” said Anne. “I like patterns. I believe in them. I see connections where there are no connections. I hear what you say, boss, but I’ve an idea that there will come a time—not too long from now—when computers will make the idea of coincidence and randomness seem obsolete, and we’ll see things for what they really are. Coincidence will seem logical.”
Helen and Anne were right, of course. But so was Gisela. I made it three-to-one in favor of further investigation, although Gisela’s one was more than three, of course. I could tell she was a little disappointed that the sorority had sided with me, but that’s how it is, and maybe Anne and Helen had just had more time to think about the case than Gisela had.
“I have to justify this to Chuck and I don’t want him making me loo
k like some breast-Fed dancing around her handbag,” said Gisela. “Gil Martins is not the guy wearing a new set of balls here. I am, and I want to keep them for a while. If I do decide to green-light a domestic terrorism inquiry, what’s your next step, Gil?”
“Swoop down for a closer look. Helen and I would go to Washington, Boston, and New York. See if we can’t dig up more on those three deaths than the local police did. Hope that the lab guys find something on Osborne’s computer. And pray that we get a lead, I guess. Or maybe another victim. If someone is behind this, I doubt they’ll be satisfied with three deaths and one case of acute catatonia. Either way, I figure we can chase down all the facts in a couple of weeks. As it happens, I think you can spare me. Army CID’s got an informer alongside Johnny Sack Brown and they’re keeping us up to speed with the HIDDEN group’s plans to acquire a Switchblade system. Chicago FBI’s chasing up a lead on those two ELF fugitives.”
Gisela nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s all for now, folks. I’ll think about what you’ve all said and let you know my decision when I’ve made one.”
EIGHT
A week later, with nothing to show but a handful of expense receipts and inconclusive field reports, my swoop felt more like a belly flop. We’d struck out in Washington and New York, and now that we were in Boston, it looked as if we were going to strike out there, too. The only consolation was that we were staying with my mom and dad at their large South End house—a ten-minute car ride away from the Boston FBI office in downtown where we endured the silent mockery of our colleagues. Cops and feds have the hardest eyes in the world. Every time I looked at one of these guys, I knew they were thinking the same thing: You flew up from Houston to investigate the death of a guy who fell out of a fucking tree? We didn’t find anything of interest in the police report at headquarters on Cambridge Street; and we didn’t find much at the scene of Willard Davidoff’s death in Olmsted Park. Except, perhaps, the tree itself.
“That’s a fifty-foot sycamore,” said Helen. “I wouldn’t try to climb that tree on a summer’s day. And I’m someone who likes climbing.”
“You do?”
“Sure. I go bouldering sometimes at the Texas Rock Gym on Campbell Road.”
“Bouldering?”
“It’s climbing without a rope.”
“That sounds like a description of my career in the Bureau.”
“It can be pretty exhilarating, if that’s what you mean.”
“Sure. Until you fall.”
“And you think that’s what happened here. To you? With this investigation?”
“I’m still in the air, perhaps, but the outcome of that already looks clear enough.”
“We learn from our mistakes. Isn’t that what they teach us at the Academy?”
I shrugged. “I always liked this park.”
“Ever bring any girls here?”
“Just you.”
“My lucky day, I guess.”
“Not so far.” I looked back at the tree. “This is the right tree, yeah?”
Helen turned and looked at the Boston Police Department cruiser parked on Jamaica Way. “That’s what they said. They found tiny pieces of tree bark and moss on his clothes. And bits of his skin on that branch.”
I shook my head. “Yes. But how the fuck did he climb a tree like this?”
Helen took off her jacket and handed it to me. “Only one way to find out. You test a theory with an experiment. That’s scientific method. Galileo.”
“Yeah, well, be careful, Helen. Galileo discovered gravity. Just make sure you don’t discover it, too.”
“Actually, you’re wrong.” Helen took hold of the tree trunk and looked up for a handhold. “Galileo proposed that different bodies would fall with a uniform acceleration.”
“Same kind of shit.”
“The point is that between Galileo and Aristotle there were just a lot of guys with theories they never bothered to test.”
“I knew there was a reason I never brought any girls to this park.”
Helen jumped up, caught a branch, and pulled herself up with one arm and then two.
Instinctively, I went to help her.
“Don’t touch me,” she said sharply.
“Sorry.” I snatched away my hands and clasped them penitently behind my back.
“I meant—I have to do this on my own, like he did; otherwise there’s no point.” She swung her legs up and hooked the branch she was holding with her calves.
“Yes, of course. Stupid of me.”
She let go of the branch with one hand and pulled her skirt up around her waist, affording me a spectacular view of her underwear.
“This park is sure looking up,” I said.
“I can see that you are.” Helen took hold of the branch again and wrestled her way around until she was sitting on top of it.
“I’m just assisting in a scientific experiment,” I said.
“And what’s the conclusion, Galileo?”
“You’re a good-looking woman.”
“From where you’re standing.”
“True. How old are you, Helen?”
“Twenty-seven. Why?”
“Willard Davidoff was twice that age and more. If he climbed this tree, I’m George Washington.”
“That was a cherry tree.”
Helen swung down, dropped onto the grass, and then pulled her skirt over her tan thighs. “’Sa matter? Never seen a pair of panties before?”
“Sure. You’ll find my DNA on most of the lingerie shop windows in Houston.”
“Right. Who needs sniffer dogs with you around, huh?”
“It wasn’t my nose I was pressing up against the glass,” I said.
“Well, that’s all right then.”
“I sure wouldn’t like you to get the wrong impression about me, Helen.”
“No, everything’s quite clear to me now, Agent Martins. I’m beginning to understand your wife.”
“I wish I had your capacity for understanding. I don’t mind telling you, Helen, I’m having a tough time figuring how the BPD could ever have confused a sixty-five-year-old science professor with Indiana Jones.”
Helen inspected her hands for a moment before spitting on them and then rubbing them on a handkerchief I handed to her.
“I never did like science very much,” I said.
“Too intellectually demanding for you, I suppose.”
I grinned. “You’re not supposed to talk to me like that. I’m your supervisor.”
“That’s what makes it such fun.”
“Let’s get out of here before you say something you’ll regret.”
We walked back to the rental car we’d left parked behind the BPD cruiser. The two gumps praying into their styrofoam coffee cups regarded us with obvious amusement. They were both from the Irish Riviera—some shit suburb—overfed shiesties with breath like sour mash.
“Fucking guy fell out of a tree, I guess,” I said.
“O! Light dawns on Marblehead.”
Both of the cops laughed but that was okay. Cops have to have their laughs. Maybe cops most of all.
I had good reasons for not wanting to eat at home. For one thing, my monosyllabic answers about Ruth and Danny had been noted by my mom and dad, and I hardly wanted to expand on our trial separation—which was how Ruth’s lawyer had described it. To do that, I might have had to mention my own infidelity and Ruth’s religious fanaticism. This was still a touchy subject with my father. I didn’t want to upset my parents—they seemed so much older and more decrepit than I remembered. But Helen wouldn’t hear of it. Besides, she was more interested in my parents’ home than in food.
From the outside, at least, it was like any other town house in that part of Boston: tall, with bay windows, a stoop, and climbing ivy that was no good for the red
brickwork, not that my father cared much about that; on the inside, however, they had made the place look like a real home from home, which is to say it was an exact facsimile of the house we had lived in back in Glasgow. There were stained-glass skylights, soft tartan furnishings, a lot of solid Victorian mahogany furniture, and, on the walls, several dull Scottish landscapes and several portraits of unforgiving, stone-faced ancestors and relations, including my father’s brother, Bill.
Not long after leaving Scotland to live in Boston—I was fourteen—my father gave me some advice that I’ve always tried to stick to.
“Be slow to take offense, Giles. Learn how to be tolerant and how to live and let live. Remember this: intolerance, bigotry, bearing a grudge—these are all the things we’re leaving behind.” This was rare advice from my dad; he wasn’t ever one for telling people what to do. In consequence, I’m difficult to provoke, which, from the Christian point of view of turning the other cheek, is good, I suppose. But it also made a few people believe that I didn’t care about anything very much. So everyone was surprised when I joined the Bureau. Nobody was more surprised than my dad; no one was prouder of me, either. And he never seems to tire of telling me so. “America has been good to our family, Giles,” he would say in an accent that—even after more than twenty years—still sounds as if he lives in one of the nicer parts of Glasgow. “I’m very glad that you’ve chosen to pay her back.”
Looking back at things now, I understand there was a lot more to the advice he gave me as an adolescent than just the desire to stop me from turning out like a lot of my countrymen. More important, he didn’t want me becoming like my uncle Bill.
By now Uncle Bill must be seventy-six years old and I haven’t seen him since we left Scotland in 1990; I’m almost certain my father hasn’t, either. You see, my uncle Bill went mad and is still confined to an asylum somewhere in Scotland. One time, not long before my family left Scotland, my father came back in tears from a visit with Bill, swearing he would never go again. My own memories of Bill are as vivid as if I had seen him yesterday. For almost ten years he was a doting uncle, but he gradually became a frightening person for anyone to meet, even his nephews and nieces. I remember the furious but entirely silent arguments Bill had with people who simply weren’t there. There’s a proper psychiatric term for what was wrong with Uncle Bill, but my dad says that it was just a case of someone having an abnormally heightened sensitivity to the disappointments of everyday life. That’s an easy situation to find yourself in if you happen to live in Scotland. Once I asked Dad who it was that Bill believed he was arguing with, and Dad told me he thought it was probably one of his other personalities. Another time Dad said he thought it might be God or the devil, and when I asked which he thought was more likely, Dad just shrugged and said, “It’s all the same thing.” That was before my dad announced his own atheism, but all the same, you could see the writing on the wall even then.
