by Ted Thackrey
A glance into the obscene little chapel showed it quite undisturbed.
All right, then . . .
I turned the lights on room by room, making a complete circuit that ended at the front door. Angela wasn’t really much for patience; she had already stopped the engine and opened the door by the time I signaled for her to come inside and then stood aside while she rushed from place to place emitting occasional yelps of dismay, anger, and indignation.
Predictable reaction of the territorial animal to invasion of its living space.
Entirely normal.
But I wanted something more, and when I thought the initial emotions had run their course I grabbed her as she trotted by and shook her.
“Hey! Dammit . . . ”
“Settle down,” I said. “Check the valuables.”
She started to tell me to go to hell, thought better of it, and took a deep breath instead. I could feel the neck and back muscles change tone, coming back under control. And becoming conscious of me.
“All right,” she said then. “From the top.”
We started in the office.
The little wall safe was open and hadn’t been forced—nailing down my original suspicions—but a little line appeared between Angela’s brows as she checked through the papers I’d examined myself a few days earlier. She didn’t say anything, though, until she’d been through the contents of desk and worktable drawers that had been dumped on the floor and made a quick inventory of the contents, also dumped, of the bureau and nightstand in her bedroom.
“It’s all here,” she said, staring up at me from a heap of her possessions.
“You’re sure?”
“Of course! Look—these necklace chains are solid gold. Feel the weight? Nobody could miss knowing they’re valuable, but they’re still here and so is the coin collection Pete made when he was a little kid. Nothing too impressive, maybe, but it was worth six or seven hundred dollars. One of the few things I didn’t hock when I was trying to put the winery back in business. But here it is, out in plain sight. Preacher . . . what the hell is going on here?”
Instead of answering at once, I put her to work checking the rest of the house—reciting the most valuable contents of every room before going inside, and then checking what was left against that inventory. It took nearly two hours. But it told me everything I needed to know.
Then I set a kitchen chair back on its legs and made her sit in it.
“You’ve been through the whole house now,” I said, fetching a chair for myself and sitting down across from her.
She started to nod but thought better of it and shook her head instead.
“There’s the wine cellar,” she said. “Underneath.”
That was news to me. And it shouldn’t have been; I’d had plenty of time to get acquainted with the house and grounds while she was sick. How had I missed it?
“Most people don’t know it’s there,” she explained, noticing my puzzlement. “I guess the door was plain enough when the house was first built—probably got used at least three times a day, for meals. The cellar is bigger than the whole house above it and was probably where the family stored its special stock for aging.”
“But it’s not anymore?”
“Well . . . not really. They turned the door into a back wall for the kitchen pantry when the house was remodeled and wired for electricity maybe fifty years ago, and I lived here for two years without knowing about it until Pete came back from ‘Nam and showed me how to get it open.”
“That’s hard to do?”
“Not really, but you have to be careful because the back shelves of the pantry are attached to it and the stuff stored on them can fall off.”
“Show me,” I said.
A bare light bulb in the ceiling of the pantry showed that it had not escaped the searchers’ attention. Everything from the shelves was on the floor. But whoever had checked the room out was no fool; cans and plastic containers had been swept aside with abandon, but glass containers were carefully and separately stacked in what was obviously an effort to keep the floor clear of sharp and/or slippery objects.
Good thinking. But the main thing, from my own point of view, was that the back wall seemed as solid as any of the others.
“The catch is up here,” Angela said, reaching above her head to the top shelf and fumbling with something neither of us could see.
It gave her an argument and she came down off tiptoe briefly, snorted, and then made a second pass that finally produced a satisfactory-sounding click, followed by a sharp inward movement by the right side of the wall.
“Just a minute,” I said.
Angela peered quizzically at me over her shoulder, high-angled light emphasizing the deep color of her eyes, and I had a moment to be reminded—not for the first time that day—that Dom Gianelli’s little sister was also a mature and beautiful woman.
“What now?” she said.
“You never told Gideon about this,” I said.
“No. Why?”
“Because,” I said, “I don’t think anyone has been through this door for a while.”
She didn’t understand, so I ran my hand along the right-hand facing of the door. It came away with a dark streak of powder-dry red dust. I showed it to her and then blew it away with a single breath before following her into the gloom below.
The light switch was located, for some reason only the original builder would ever understand, halfway down the stairs. So, the first few steps had to be taken on faith, and I felt a certain craven gratitude that Angela seemed confident of her ability to find it. And that what I had seen above had convinced me that no one had been down the stairs recently. Otherwise, I’d have had to be in the lead.
An old-fashioned, nonsilent switch flooded the room below with brightness. And gave me a much-improved idea of its dimensions.
It was huge. Part of the ceiling was of wood; wide red-brown boards with a tracery of old square-headed nails that showed where they had been fastened to the floor beams of the house. But another section—down a small flight of stone stairs—was open-beamed and supported by columns of carefully set fieldstone. I wondered, irrelevantly, which had come first, the cellar or the house.
“Pete said his father told him they built the old part of the cellar, the part downstairs, while they were still living in a tent up above,” she said. “They needed a cool, dark place for the wine more than they did a place to live. Sort of like pioneers, only you never think of pioneers being winemakers, do you? At first the cellar was all taken up with aging vats. Handmade from timber they poached out of the redwood forests north of here. Later they took most of the vats out—broke them up for firewood, I suppose—and put in storage racks.”
I looked around the room. It was almost empty.
“It’s just for the family now,” she explained. “I’d have had to rebuild it completely to use it for commercial storage. A modern winery needs air conditioning and humidity control and all kinds of goodies. So instead I put up those big ugly steel barns you probably saw just down the hill. Only half full now, but with luck . . . ”
Her voice had changed, softening and losing volume, and it seemed like a good time to break the mood.
“Looks like there’s a few bottles still lying around,” I said brusquely, moving to pick one out of the rack to the left of the pantry stairs.
Angela shrugged.
“Last of the old stock,” she said. “That rack and the two behind it were both laid down by Pete’s father. The bottles should be turned from time to time, but I’ve been too busy.”
I could believe that. The bottles lay neck-down in their individual slots with labels turned to the right and were covered with a thick coating of the same fine dust I’d noticed on the door above.
“The bottles over there are newer,” she said, pointing to a single rack on the right. “One of the things Pete did when he came home from ‘Nam was help with the harvest. ‘Touching home base,’ he called it. But when it was done, i
nstead of waiting for that wine to age in the vats, he bought a few gallons of year-old Pinot noir from a friend in Sonoma and bottled it himself.”
Suddenly she was shivering.
“Enough ghost stories for one night,” she said, hugging her elbows. “Let’s get out of here . . . ”
The temperature upstairs was probably the same as in the cellar. But it seemed warmer and having work to do helped the illusion.
Angela carefully closed and relocked the wine cellar door and we started there, putting the cans and jars and boxes and bottles back on the shelves and then moving out into the kitchen. The refrigerator had been emptied, and a lot of the more perishable items had to go into the trash. I sniffed a carton of milk that had been purchased just before we left for Best Licks and decided it had been sitting out at room temperature for about a day.
“So, our visitors must have dropped in yesterday,” I said, dumping the soured liquid down the drain.
“You and Sherlock Holmes,” she said from the floor, where she was whisk-brooming uncooked rice into a dustpan. “The main thing is that they didn’t take anything or do any real damage, except . . . oh, shit!”
She rocked back on her heels, cupped palms cradling fragments of something she had found under the table.
“Now why in hell,” she said, “would they take the trouble to break the last one of these?”
A single glance was enough to give me an answer I would have bet and raised on, but I decided not to tell her about it until I was absolutely sure.
“What was it—before?” I asked.
“Pete called it a Nara lantern. Nothing special, really. Not rare or anything, I mean. But he bought six of them in Saigon just before they shipped him home, and said he was going to put them in a kind of Japanese garden he wanted, out in back.”
I looked at the pieces and was more than ever convinced that my first impression had been correct.
“But the garden never got planted,” I said.
“Not even laid out,” she agreed. “First he was busy fixing up the house and working harvest and making the wine I showed you downstairs and going off to San Francisco. To talk to bankers, he said, though I guess that was bullshit and he really went there to make some dope deals.”
“The Nara lanterns,” I interrupted. “All six of them got here intact?”
“Yes. No—that’s right! Pete said one was already broken by the time he unpacked it, and then two more got cracked when he had them outside, seeing how they would look.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And let me guess: Two more of the lanterns came in for some rough handling shortly after Gideon Goode’s arrival.”
She stopped looking at the broken bits of stone and turned to give me the full benefit of that black-eyed double-O.
“Happened the day after he got here,” she said. “I got up that morning feeling as if I’d been moving around in a really bad nightmare, and he wasn’t in the bedroom, so I thought maybe he was gone. But no such luck. He was out on the porch. In back. With everything I’d had piled up there strewn around . . . sort of like the whole house is now.”
“Where were the remaining three lanterns?”
“Out there. Well, two of them, anyway—the ones that got broken later that day.”
“Gideon broke them?”
“Uh . . . yes. I guess so. He was trying to put them up outside. Said Pete talked a lot about the lanterns in prison and now he was going to put them up as a sort of monument.”
“But the monument never got made.”
She shook her head and her eyes said she wished she knew why I was so interested in a couple of cockamamie tourist-crap Oriental lanterns.
“It was an accident,” she said. “He had dug out a base for one of them and was ready to put it in place, carrying both of them down the back steps, when he tripped and fell and the lanterns broke.”
“You saw it happen?”
“Well, no. I was in the office, trying to force myself to concentrate on the bank statements. He told me about it.”
I nodded without further comment. That accounted for the peculiar dust Suleiman had noticed on the uncut stones Gideon sold him—and on the ones offered so many years before by Pete Palermo. What better way to move uncut stones into the country than as an integral part of a routine tourist souvenir? You might fault the ex-Green Beret’s honesty, but never his intelligence.
“The last lantern. That one,” I said as she looked back at the fragments in her hands. “He—Gideon, that is—didn’t know about it?”
“No. It was inside. In here.”
“Out of sight?”
“In the back of one of the lower cabinets. I don’t know why I kept it. But . . . ”
“But now it’s gone.”
She didn’t answer and I let the subject drop. Sufficient unto the day. We started working again.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
The footsteps of these spiritual terrorists trace a wanton path of doom and destruction through the whole history of mankind.
FIFTEEN
There was one more item that needed to be discussed, and I waited for it to occur to her.
We finally got the kitchen sorted out and back into what would have passed for sensible order if I hadn’t known better, and Angela made up a pot of the chicory-laced coffee to give us fortitude for the rest of the job. It helped. But disarray throughout the house was so total that we finally decided to settle for the bare minimums necessary to life, and let the rest go until the next day.
I was manhandling the heavy couch back into an upright position in the living room and trying to remember if I’d seen any spare light bulbs in the pantry when Angela entered from the direction of the bedroom and said, “Hey, I been thinking—maybe we shouldn’t get the place looking too much better than it did before. A thing like that could be kind of a commentary on the way . . . ”
She stopped talking suddenly and I glanced at her. She was frowning and looking at me. I waited for her to say the words.
“Preacher?”
“That what they call me.”
“We’re . . . not going to report this to the sheriff or anybody. Are we.”
It was a statement, not a question, and I was grateful. Her mind was working again and the conclusions she was about to draw were the right ones. A promising sign, and absolutely necessary if we were to have any chance against Gideon.
“No.” I said. “We’re not.”
She thought about it some more, picking up a cushion and putting it back in one of the out-of-place chairs, to give herself a place to sit.
“But wouldn’t it be . . . normal . . . to make some kind of report? I mean, if we weren’t pretty sure who it was broke in here?”
“Are we sure?”
“Damn straight!”
I grinned at her, and after another moment or two of indignant anger she grinned back.
“All right, then,” she said. “So, we do know. It had to be Gideon himself. In person. Someone might have been with him, sure. Maybe a couple of someones, seeing how much got messed up; I just don’t think one person alone could have done all that.”
She paused, waiting for me to say something, but it seemed like a good time to keep my mouth shut. She was doing fine.
“He was looking for something,” she went on when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to interrupt. “And that’s kind of weird, because you’d think he’d found everything he wanted while he was living here. God knows, I couldn’t and wouldn’t have stopped him.”
The black eyes blinked suddenly and then snapped wide open focusing on me.
“Someone in San Francisco,” she said.
I nodded, not grinning anymore.
“Something you did there, someone you went to see, or someone who saw you. It set him off. And if I’d been here—”
She shivered involuntarily and took a deep breath or two but didn’t dwell on the idea. Which was more good news. The Gianelli family seemed to be made of resilient
stuff. And she was going to need every bit of it. I waited for her to take the next step.
“But I wasn’t,” she said. “So instead of trying to beat or frighten whatever he wanted out of me, he did the next best thing and tore my house apart. Looking for something. But what?”
I could have told her, of course. And I almost did. But she was still buying cards.
“Something Pete brought home from ’Nam,” she said abstractedly. “Not money. And not dope, either, because that stuffs perishable and no one would take a chance on stashing it anywhere for very long . . . oh, shit! The Nara lanterns!”
I finally let myself nod.
“Not the lanterns themselves, though,” she said, still rolling. “Something—in them. Not just inside, like in a box, but an actual part of the lanterns themselves.”
Enough, already.
“Diamonds,” I said. “Uncut stones that Pete bought in Singapore. And yes, the break-in here was probably a direct result of things that happened in San Francisco. And I went there because of some papers, old receipts and such, that I found here in the house while you were sick.”
She waited for me to go on, but I didn’t have too much more to offer.
“If it matters,” I said, “I think someone, maybe not Gideon himself but someone close to him and acting for him, would have been around sooner or later anyway. There was a tick on me—I was being followed—by the time I arrived at my appointment in San Francisco. Someone knew I was coming, and the information had to come from here. From Glen Ellen.”
She shook her head violently. “I didn’t—”
“Nobody thinks you did. Or could have. Remember, I was with you most of the time. Besides, I just don’t see Gideon leaving you alone here without some good way of making sure you didn’t get your act back together and start talking to the law. He couldn’t leave anyone in the house, so the next best thing would be a tap on the phone—with someone nearby to monitor it and take appropriate action as necessary.”
