Skull Session

by Daniel Hecht

  From what I could see of the inside, it looks like a bomb went off."

  "Fire? Or—"

  "Not that I saw. Vandalism. I'd say kids have been going up there and throwing things around, in a major way, for a long time. This guy's got his work cut out for him."

  "Well. It's a good thing Mrs. Hoffmann's getting the place fixed up. Sounds like a safety hazard." Miller paused, and when he spoke again his voice had turned hard: "Okay, so listen, Pete. Once in a while, keep in mind we've got our own PR to think of. We want the kiddies to like the nice policemen. You understand? I don't want to hear of another complaint about you anytime soon. And I don't want to hear that your gun's been out unless you had good reason to think someone's life depended on it."

  "Gotcha," Rizal said airily. "Sir." Mo heard his heels click down the hall.

  Mo did find a slim file on the boy, Terry Bannerman, which he took back to his office. But he had a hard time concentrating on it. The discussion between Miller and Pdzal had gotten him wired up. A vacant house, up a hill in the woods, kids coming to vandalize it. It fit the picture perfectly.

  Mo checked his watch and found that he had another hour before the interview. Just enough time. He went up front to the dispatcher's desk and knocked to get her attention.

  "Carmen," he said. "You must know this area pretty good, right?"

  "In my job, I sure hope so." Carmen looked at Mo disapprovingly.

  "You ever hear of a place called Highwood? Supposed to be an old mansion."

  "Highwood Lodge. Over near the old Reservoir Road."

  "Can you show me where it is?" Mo gestured to the area maps that dominated the wall of the dispatcher's cubicle.

  Carmen scanned the maps and pointed to one. In the center of the page was the Lewisboro Reservoir, an irregular kidney-shaped lake about two miles long, starting just east of Golden's Bridge. To the north of the reservoir, sometimes paralleling the irregular shoreline and sometimes veering as much as a quarter mile away from it, ran Highway 138. To the south, zigging and zagging as it hugged the shore, ran the Lewisboro Reservoir Road.

  She put her red-nailed forefinger on the map. "Right about here. Just east of that new Briar Estates development."

  She returned to her seat while Mo looked closely at the map. The spot she'd pointed out was maybe a half mile from where the old road rejoined Highway 138. He'd been on that very road only a few days before, killing time before his appointment with the parents of Dub Gilmore.

  Mo's excitement sent a tingle of adrenaline to his fingertips as he traced the meandering shoreline road. Rizal had said something about a junked car that had been blocking the driveway. He'd turned around in that same driveway, the one with the old stone pillars. He brought his finger up the line of the shore road to its intersection with 138, then moved it west until it came to the sharp bend where Richard Mason had been killed. There was not much more than a mile between the fatal bend in 138 and the driveway to Highwood.

  Mo thanked Carmen, getting a distrustful raised eyebrow from her as he grinned wildly. Screw Carmen's attitude, he thought. Clearly, his luck was changing again.

  29

  MO LOOKED AT THE KID seated across from him and felt a twinge of sympathy. Sixteen was a lousy age—not yet allowed to be an adult, no longer permitted to be a child. Terry Bannerman was a tall boy, too skinny, who sat jiggling one leg and trying to look aloof. He appeared to take great interest in the parking lot, visible through the windows of the guidance office at John Jay High School, where a scattering of brown leaves blew between the ranked cars.

  Mo had decided on the show-them-you're-one-of-them approach, rather than the impress-them-with-your-authority routine, but so far it hadn't worked. Terry answered in monosyllables. He was wearing an aviator's leather jacket, khaki fatigue pants, and big Doc Martens, the boot of preference among the punk and skinhead crowd, but his slender frame and the rash of acne on both cheeks deflated his tough-guy pretensions. So far he hadn't once met Mo's eyes.

  In the outer office, a secretary clattered the keyboard of her computer, and a noisy printer spat out a stream of paper that draped down the front of the desk and refolded itself on the floor. When the secretary got up, Mo saw she was wearing a tweed skirt that came to mid-calf and drew smooth over the sweet curve of her thighs. She saw him looking her way and smiled pleasantly, and Mo felt a pang of longing.

  He plugged doggedly ahead: "So you and Steve were pretty good buddies."

  "Yeah."

  "So what did you do? When you hung out together?"

  "Nothin'."

  "Like what, 'nothing'?"

  "Same old stuff."

  "That's not a lot of help. Look, Terry, I'm not after your ass or Steve's. I'm just here to try to find Steve, make sure he's all right. I need to know where you guys went, what you did, who you saw, who maybe Steve knew."

  Terry's gaze wandered past Mo to the outer office. "Sometimes we went to the Electric Grotto in Danbury."

  "What's that?"

  "Video games."

  "Great. What else?"

  Terry picked at his cheek and flashed an irritated glance just past Mo's left ear. "I don't know, okay? Same stuff. You go to parties, you go to games at school. Stuff like that."

  Partly the kid was dodging him, but mainly he just lacked the imagination to figure out answers that might be useful. Terry Banner-man, Mo decided, wasn't Rhodes material.

  Mo slogged on for another ten minutes, getting a couple of names of other friends, possible enemies, but basically getting nowhere. At last he flipped his notebook shut. "Okay, I guess that's it, Terry." He put his pen into his inner jacket pocket, letting Terry catch a glimpse of his Glock in its shoulder holster, then went on conversationally, almost as if talking to himself. "Funny, isn't it? You look around this area, everything seems like it's on the up-and-up, but there's some damn funny stuff going on behind the scenes. Like this thing with Highwood Lodge, for example, right?"

  That caught the boy off guard. "You know about that?"

  "Sure," Mo bluffed. "I mean, I know what I've heard. I haven't been up there yet myself. What was it like when you went up?"

  Terry looked at the door as if he were considering bolting. When Mo swung it shut, he looked almost panicked.

  "Look, Terry," Mo said. "You know what? I'm sick of dicking around with you. You're going to answer my questions right now. You're going to stop playing dumb. It's not cutting it with me." He went to stand over the boy. Terry leaned away from him. "What did you do when you went up to Highwood?"

  "I didn't go," the boy said resentfully.

  "But you know people who did. Steve did."

  "Yeah."

  "But he wanted you to go, right? And what did he say about it?"

  "That you could just go in and take whatever you wanted. Or fuck around, smash things. The doors weren't locked."

  "What else?"

  "He went up there once with some other guys. He wanted me to go with him, but I chickened out."

  "Why'd you chicken out?"

  "I didn't want to get caught. The driveway was blocked, you'd have to walk all the way up and back. Somebody'd see you."

  "Keep going," Mo said.

  "He said it was all fucked up in there. Somebody'd been trashing the place. After a while he stopped going up."

  "Because he was afraid he'd get caught?"

  "No. He said there was something screwy about it. Everybody knew about it. There was some kind of satanic rituals up there."

  "What kind of rituals?"

  "Everybody said something different. Maybe like calling demons.

  They said like a human couldn't do some of the stuff that was done up there—the way the place was trashed."

  "Who's 'everybody'?"

  "I don't know."

  "You're going to tell me, Terry."

  "I don't fucking know," Terry said. He seemed close to tears. "A lot of guys would say they knew something, but it's all bullshit, they were making things up so they could
sound cool. You could make up whatever you wanted. After a while people stopped talking about it."

  Mo went back to his chair and stood behind it, thinking, drumming his fingers on the wooden chair back.

  "Okay. That's all for today." Mo took out his wallet and handed Terry one of his cards. "This has my number on it. If you think of anything else, you call me up right away."

  Terry took the card, then stood up, putting his hands into his jacket pockets, waiting to be dismissed.

  Mo clapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Terry, you've been a lot of help. Do me a favor, will you? Don't mention to your friends that I asked you about Highwood. Okay? Let's try to keep the rumors down about this."

  "Yeah," Terry said noncommittally.

  Driving back to the office, Mo felt a little guilty about being so rough on the kid. Maybe there'd been another way to get him to open up, but Mo had gotten frustrated with his sullen, guarded face and posture of resentment. As he was leaving the school, he'd been relieved to see Terry talking with a very pretty girl, showing her what Mo guessed was the card he'd given him. Why are girls that age so lovely, Mo wondered, when the boys are such geeks? How do the girls manage to fall for the graceless, pretentious, self-conscious little pricks? A miracle of nature.

  Hunger was beginning to gnaw at his stomach, but he felt good. Here was another possible link to Highwood, another line converging on the southeast end of the Lewisboro Reservoir. Mo could intuitively tell it was a live lead. Should he talk this over with Barrett? No. It would be better not to push his luck with him until he had something more substantial.

  One thing was clear, though—it was time to pay a call to Highwood. An off-the-record visit. Miller had said somebody was fixing the place up—the owner's nephew. Maybe he'd be willing to talk to Mo, let him look around the place. It was worth a try.

  30

  PAUL, I'VE GOT SOME GOODIES here! Want to see?" Lia stood at the big table in the smoking room with papers spread out before her as Paul refilled and started the heater. The late-night call had set into motion all kinds of dire imaginings, which Paul could visualize with perfect clarity. The worst was an emergency with Mark. His hands responded to his growing anxiety all by themselves, ringing the bell, grabbing things out of the air. He'd have to call Janet as soon as the heater was up and running.

  "Oh, this is juicy! Your cousin Royce was quite a young man. Look at this: juvenile court papers, complaint forms, suit settlement terms. All from the mid-sixties. Here's a letter stating reasons for his expulsion from Phillips Exeter Academy."

  "I guess that's why Vivien needed someone in the family to do this—keep the dirty laundry out of public view."

  "Can't blame her!"

  The papers Paul picked up turned out to be complaint forms from 1965, signed by Raymond and Lois Clausen, with a Lewisboro address. They claimed that they'd caught Royce Hoffmann in the act of breaking windows at their house. The Clausens stated that Royce was doing it because they'd caught him before, looking into their windows late at night; they had told him not to come back or they'd call the police, and he'd resented their threats.

  "A difficult kid," Paul said. "Royce would have been around fourteen then. What'd he get expelled from Phillips Exeter for?"

  "You told me Royce liked guns, right? Apparently he threatened his roommate with a loaded World War II Luger. They also thought having live hand grenades in the dorms was a bit much."

  "He was just ahead of his time. No kid would go to school with less, nowadays."

  Lia laughed. "What I love is that Vivien wrote all these stirring letters in his defense—that he was just sorting things out his own way." She snorted. "That he was just a very bright boy who was having a difficult time expressing himself."

  Paul looked over the other papers. In 1967 Royce and some friends had stolen a car and rolled it into the reservoir. The family of a local girl had taken out a restraining order on him to prevent him from harassing their daughter, for whom he had apparently conceived an infatuation. The ugliest details were mentioned in the terms of a settlement of a suit, brought by a family who claimed that Royce and a friend had killed their two St. Bernards by feeding them lumps of hamburger filled with razor-blade chips.

  "The question I have," Lia said, "is did he grow out of it, or is he still searching for new and interesting modes of self-expression?"

  Paul was just heading out to the kitchen to call Janet when a white van rolled into the driveway, and he went outside to greet the electrician. Stewart Cohen turned out to be a short, compact, middle- aged man, with dark, wiry hair and intelligent, nervous eyes. He wore new blue jeans and a baby-blue down jacket, and carried a slim steel box that served as both clipboard and briefcase. His helper, in his late teens, was tall and thin, wearing a hooded New York Knicks sweatshirt and garish, high-tech basketball shoes.

  "I'm glad you could make it here on such short notice." Paul said.

  "Hey, send me a check and I'll follow you anywhere." Cohen gestured at the headless statues in the garden. "Looks like the French Revolution all over again. Whole place looks like hell—what happened?"

  "I keep waiting for someone to tell me. It's a lot worse inside". Cohen turned away and rolled open the van's door, speaking over his shoulder. "The strong silent type here is Kenny Wechsler, my assistant.

  Also my sister's son and coincidentally my nephew."

  "I heard it was some kind of cult came up here," Kenny said, "like one of those satanic cults. Used the place for rituals."

  "Where'd you hear that?" Paul asked.

  Kenny took a pair of battery-operated double spotlights from his uncle. "Friends, I guess," he said.

  Paul led them through the kitchen door and into the main room, where he paused to let them absorb the scene. Kenny gawked openly, his weak mouth open, while Cohen drummed his fingers on his metal case.

  "Holy shit," Cohen said at last.

  Down in the furnace room, Cohen set up the spots and gave the circuit breakers and wiring tree a quick once-over. In the bright glare of the lights, with the distorted shadows of the three men moving over the broken machinery, the furnace room seemed hellish, Paul thought. All that was needed to complete the picture would be a fiery figure with horns and cloven hooves. He shook his head to clear the image, which he blamed on Kenny's remark.

  "This is going to be a delightful job, I can see that," Cohen said, kicking at the rubble. "Three days at least, probably four or five."

  Paul went back upstairs, intending to make the call to Janet, only to find Dempsey's old Buick station wagon pulling up at the terrace stairs. He talked with the old man briefly and gave him the floor plan he'd drawn, showing the locations of the broken windows. "A lot of them will need to be rebuilt and reglazed. Some will only need a few panes, and we can reuse the old mullion leading. I was thinking we'd clear an area of the floor in here and you could set up shop, take out the windows one at a time." Looking at Dempsey, the gray stubbled cheeks, yellowed eyes deep in whorls of wrinkles, Paul suddenly felt unsure how much he could ask of the old man. "If carrying them down's a problem," he finished, feeling suddenly awkward, "I'd be glad to—"

  Dempsey's eyes caught his. "I think I can manage these, Paulie. Thanks." There was only a little reproach in his tone.

  There was something uncomfortable between them, a guardedness. Not anything he wanted with Dempsey Corrigan. "How are you?" he asked. "Things okay?"

  Dempsey clapped him on the shoulder, squeezed his muscle there with surprising strength. "Things are as okay as they can be for an old fart who's trying hard to outrun his regrets and not always succeeding."

  "You've never struck me as a person with a lot of regrets."

  "Yeah, well. I don't have many, but those I've got are extraordinarily fleet of foot." Dempsey grunted humorlessly. "Lemme get to work now. Where's a goddamned broom? I've got to clear some floor space. Can't be walking on this crap every step I take."

  It was definitely not the time to hit Dempsey with the question
s he'd been wanting to ask: whether he knew anything about Falcone, the Herculean gardener, or about the odd vault of a room off Vivien's bedroom, or about the KKK photos and the possibility of an earlier episode of vandalism. Let alone the trickier questions: What was it between Vivien and Aster? What was it between Vivien and Dempsey? What drove Ben over the edge?

  Dempsey's dark mood added another question. Something was definitely amiss with the old man—what? Paul's abdomen convulsed and he gagged violently as the tic closed his throat.

  31

  WITH EVERYBODY FINALLY AT WORK, Paul went to the kitchen. He had just reached for the phone when it shrilled w at him. Adrenaline shot into his fingertips. Don't let it be bad news about Mark, he prayed. Let it be Vivien, or Becker's Heating. Or anything routine and normal. He snatched the receiver, cutting off another ring.

  "Hello?" He could hear his own pulse in his ears.

  "Hello," a man's voice said, "I am trying to reach Paul Skoglund."

  There was a touch of an English accent, vaguely familiar.

  "This is Paul. Who's this?"

  "Well! Paulie!" the voice laughed. "This is your cousin Royce!"

  Paul was so startled he couldn't speak for a moment. "We—we were just talking about you," he said at last.

  "Speak of the devil, eh? It's been a long time, hasn't it? Do you have a minute, Paulie?"

  "Sure, I've got a minute," Paul said cautiously. Hearing suspicion in his own voice, he continued: "I'm sorry, Royce. I'm—I just barely put the phone back on the wall. I wasn't expecting anyone to call."

  "And I'll bet you weren't expecting it to be me, were you? I assure you, it's a surprise for me to encounter you at Highwood."

  "How did you know I'd be here? I take it you talked to Vivien."

  Royce chuckled. "No, actually—I had a most delightful conversation with your mother. Who gave me the unexpected news that you were in the neighborhood, so to speak."

  "Where are you?"

  "I am calling from Manhattan. I own an apartment here, although I seem to spend most of my time in Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Your mother tells me you've been living in Vermont?"