The Death in the Willows

by Forrest, Richard;

  “It seems to me that you’re always in the wrong places at the right times.”

  “You know as well as I do that there’s no evidence linking me to the murders. So, they got some charges against me. A fine and a year suspended is all I get when I cop a plea.”

  “You may be right,” Lyon said.

  Lyon appraised his wife as they waited for the elevator. She wore a sleeveless jade green sheath with matching teardrop earrings. “I like that outfit. Is it new?”

  “Five years ago, Wentworth. Thanks for noticing.”

  In the hotel dining room they waited by the maître d’s podium until a dark complexioned man in a tuxedo, carrying oversized menus, scurried toward them.

  “A reservation for Wentworth.”

  The man’s reaction was so immediate and marked that Lyon glanced at Bea to see if she’d palmed him a gratuity. “Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth. We are so happy to have you with us. Please come this way, Mr. Attkins is expecting you.”

  It was Bea’s turn to glance at Lyon as they were led toward a secluded table in a far corner. As they approached, John Attkins stood and extended his hand toward Bea. “So good to meet you, Mrs. Wentworth.”

  A waiter hovered nearby until he received their cocktail order. “I didn’t realize we had a dinner date, Mr. Attkins.”

  “As a senior officer of the company, I feel I have a responsibility during your stay in Miami. We offer a complete package of services to our clients.”

  “Including bribing the maître d’ to call you about our dinner reservation.”

  Attkins smiled. “We steer a great deal of business here, which makes them most cooperative. We do seem to have run into one snag, Mr. Wentworth. It’s about your company … Lunch Breaks Unlimited you called it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Information has come our way that the stock in that company is in fact held by a Mr. Heyman Shaw.”

  “I could be an intermediary for Mr. Shaw.”

  “Of course, but it is always so much easier if we all lay our cards on the table in the very beginning. I’m quite surprised to see you here, Mrs. Wentworth. We understand that you are running for Congress. You must be unopposed.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “I hope Mr. Croft MacKenzie was of help to you, Mr.… may I call you Lyon?”

  “I assume you mean by that that Croft is what you call cooperative?”

  “Many of the authorities in the area realize the worth of the Hungerford operation to the financial stability of Florida.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “It must indicate to you the depth of our facilities.”

  “It certainly does. I assume you knew Nick Pasic?”

  “He was one of our senior accountants. A loyal employee for nearly twenty years until something snapped. We conjecture that it’s tied up with the tragic death of his wife last year.”

  “And what he took with him when he left.”

  “Nick had access to a great many important items in our company files. Information that would be of great worth to the competition. I think I can assure you that the recovery of such items would be of great benefit to us, and we would be prepared to pay you—shall we call it an honorarium?—for their return.”

  “What makes you think I can find them?”

  Attkins smiled. “We don’t like to leave any possibility uncovered at Hungerford. We have many avenues of approach to a problem. However, there are certain aspects of your background that intrigue me.”

  “I write children’s books.”

  “Rather successfully, I’m told. But I have also heard that you are often involved in other matters.”

  “If I were to find the reels, what makes you think that I would turn them over to you?”

  “Why not? We are a perfectly respectable business. We lend money and buy into companies. We are the heart’s blood of capitalism: venture money.”

  “Someone else has already been trying to find the reels. At a cost of a lot of lives.”

  Attkins arched his eyebrow. “Someone else? Really, Mr. Wentworth.” He opened the oversized menu with its old English lettering and turned to Bea. “The duck à l’orange is excellent here.”

  “I thought I’d try the scampi,” she replied with a disarming smile.

  “Does it worry you that eighteen people have died in the attempts to kill Pasic and get the reels?”

  John Attkins looked up from the menu. His voice was low and modulated. “I do not worry about earthquakes in Greece either. The snails in garlic sauce are an excellent appetizer.”

  “I feel like melon.”

  “And you, Mr. Wentworth?” The ingratiating smile was becoming twisted. “Might I suggest …?”

  “My appetite has deserted me.”

  Attkins folded his menu, gathered the others, and placed them in a neat pile at the side of the table. They were immediately whisked away by the captain and fresh drinks served. “I was always taught that thoughtful men could speak reasonably and arrive at mutually satisfactory answers.”

  “That requires agreement on basic assumptions. I do not believe we’re here to discuss dialectics, just as we are not prepared for a gourmet selection bought by the Hungerford Corporation.”

  “The company provides needed financial services. No one questions our morality when they play a juke box, buy a pack of gum from a vending machine, or stay in certain hotels we finance. Are the sins of our fathers carried to the sons?”

  “I would prefer to discuss my business with Sergei Norkov in person.”

  “My father is quite ill with congestive heart failure and does not take an active part in the business anymore.”

  “It’s a long way from the Lower East Side to Harvard, isn’t it, Mr. Attkins?”

  “And my father is quite concerned that the trend is not reversed.”

  “Laundering dirty money and arranging murder does not seem to be much in the way of upward mobility,” Bea said.

  John Attkins drank his drink and signaled for another with a flick of his finger. He seemed to anger, quickly brought it under control, and forced the smile back. “Your attitude is unctuous. Your morality, both of you, is a thin veneer that I could easily rip away.” He turned almost vehemently toward Bea. “You! A politician for ten years. Can you say that you never made a deal? Never compromised a position to achieve your own end? Never played both ends of the fence for political reasons? Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

  Bea flushed. “You sound like my opponent. Yes, I’ve done the things you say. I work within a system that doesn’t always work, that is built on compromise and the struggle between vested interests. But there is a difference. I have never knowingly compromised a position for another with the knowledge that the other side was backed by sources such as yours. Do you understand the difference?”

  “Attkins has been laundered, like his money.”

  Attkins’s eyes never left Bea’s. “Your husband kills men.”

  “He had to.”

  “If we have finished establishing the parameters of our sanctimoniousness, I’d like to dispense with the hypocrisy. You see, Mrs. Wentworth, I know who your husband is and what he does.”

  “I write books.”

  “An interesting avocation, and probably the most unusual cover I’ve yet discovered. For quite some time now, my associates and I have been most curious about your identity. Mail drops and deposits of your payments in Swiss banks does not offer the protection in depth we usually require. However, your methods were always excellent, and we continued to utilize your services. It did annoy us last year when our agent, who was observing your mailbox in Tarrytown, was found floating in the Hudson River. Annoying, but we understood and respected your need for secrecy.”

  “Your voice is familiar. You’re the one who has been calling me.”

  “Please don’t continue the charade any further. It was quite obvious to me when I saw the newsreels of the bus passengers after the hijacking. Really, a
fter that you could hardly expect to remain unknown to us.”

  “It wasn’t my gun.”

  “Old habits are hard to break, aren’t they? A bus that carried Nick Pasic—and our children’s writer who just happened to be carrying a piece. Afraid of street crime, Mr. Wentworth?”

  “Are you telling me that you don’t know the identity of the man you hired to kill Pasic?”

  “I do now. And I assume you have come in person to collect your fee—for Pasic and the return of the reels.”

  “I don’t have them.”

  “Why did you hire Hilly?” Bea asked.

  “He was rather close to the situation and might have information useful to me. As you know, I believe in covering all aspects of a problem. My associates are interviewing Mr. Hilly right now. I am sure he will cooperate. By the way, this is the last time we shall have such a discussion. In the future, I cannot take the chance that you might be wired. I will expect the reels to be delivered to my office in the morning. On the following day your money will be deposited to the usual account. Satisfactory?”

  “And if I don’t have the reels?”

  “Then I would say you are in trouble.”

  “I need time. A week.”

  “Four days.”

  “FOR A MAN WITH ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT BEFORE THE COMBINED FORCES OF THE MAFIA AND ALL OF ORGANIZED CRIME COME AFTER HIM—YOU SURE KNOW HOW TO BLOW A DAY!”

  Lyon opened one eye and half turned on the chaise longue set on the small balcony outside their hotel room. “Got my sherry? And where’s your hearing aid?”

  “Last time I swam with one on I brought in three CB channels.” She handed him a pony of sherry, plucked the small device from the bedside table, and arranged it in her ear. “Okay, do we await our fate or what?” She adjusted the hem of her swimsuit.

  “Why do women always do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Adjust the bottom of their bathing suits like that?”

  “Are you admiring, wondering, or merely being rhetorical?”

  “All three. I have what I consider a marvelous suggestion.”

  “You should have thought of that earlier, Wentworth. Rocco’s going to call, and look who’s coming across the parking lot.”

  They both looked at the couple crossing the lot toward them. Raven had two cameras slung across his shoulders, and carried a small picnic basket in one hand while the fingers of the other intertwined with Kim’s. There was a bouncy self-absorption about the couple as they moved toward the hotel.

  Bea stood at the balcony rail and waved. “Hello, down there!”

  Startled, Kim and Raven looked up and then waved back. In a two-handed basketball throw Raven catapulted the picnic basket toward the balcony. Lyon was forced to roll from his comfortable position on the recliner in order to grab the basket before it smashed into a glass-topped table.

  Raven made a low bow toward Kim, laced his fingers together for her to step in, and hoisted her toward the balcony. He followed her by vaulting the rail and retrieving the wicker basket from Lyon. Within moments he had set up a miniature bar, signaled to Kim to get ice from the bucket in the bedroom, and began preparing drinks.

  “I hope you can find the essence of a cherry for Bea’s manhattan,” Lyon said.

  “But of course.”

  “I’ll settle for an ordinary nontranscendental sherry.”

  “There will always be philistines amongst us.” He continued his elaborate barkeeping ritual.

  Bea shook her head. “Obviously you two had a good time, but did you find out anything?”

  “Negative all the way. We checked out bus terminals in Washington, Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia, Atlanta, and a couple of smaller ones along the way. No one recognized the picture of Pasic.”

  “He was unobtrusive-looking. He could have slipped by.”

  Lyon nodded. “All right. That’s all we can do in that area.”

  The phone rang and Bea answered. “Hi, Big Chief. What blows in the political winds up there?… I see. I’m basking in the sun.” She glanced at Kim. “They’re saying I’m so unconcerned about the race that I came to Florida for a tan.… How do I stand on what?… Abortion and gay rights?… I know. It’s not your fault. Here’s Lyon.”

  Lyon took the phone and balanced a yellow legal pad on his knees. “What do you have?” He began to write notes. After five minutes he hung up and spread a road map across the bed next to some national geodetic maps he had purchased the day before. The others crowded around the bed as he began to draw a wiggly line from Miami to New York City.

  “What information did Rocco have?”

  “Credit slips from the American Express card in Collins’s name.” He traced the route on the map. “Collins, AKA Nick Pasic, picked up a rental car in Orlando, then drove to Pensacola, Florida. From there he went up into Alabama and over to Georgia at Columbus.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “He rented the car in Orlando. Gassed up at Pensacola and got gas again at Phoenix City, Alabama. That’s just across the river from Columbus, Georgia. He stayed overnight in a motel outside of Atlanta. After Atlanta he gassed up again in Murphy, North Carolina, crossed into Tennessee, up to Nashville, then into Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He stayed overnight again at Willows, Kentucky.”

  Raven said, “He must have had a few while he drove. That’s a crazy way to get to New York.”

  “From Kentucky into Ohio, a stop outside of Columbus, another slip from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and then to New York, where he turned the car in.”

  Bea ran her finger along the line Lyon had traced on the map. “The route he took is at least 300 miles out of the way.”

  “He was trying to avoid detection.”

  “And to hide the reels somewhere along the route.”

  “You know, Lyon,” Bea said, “we could spend the rest of our lives tracing that route and trying to find those things.” She looked pensive a moment. “What about dates? Did he spend more time in one place than another?”

  Lyon glanced down at the pad. “We don’t know where he was between Miami and Orlando, but we do know about those stops in Atlanta, Murphy, and Willows, Kentucky.”

  “That’s not much help. What else did Rocco say?”

  “That the credit card in the name of Collins was based on a false ID that Pasic had been building for nearly a year, and it even extended to his obtaining a passport in that name.”

  “I can use that,” Raven said. “How did he arrange it?”

  “It’s time-consuming but not difficult. Any library has back newspapers. You pick a year, usually the same as your own date of birth, and pick out lists of birth announcements. You keep checking names until you find one that died as an infant. You apply for a birth certificate, by mail, in that name, Social Security card, driver’s license, and passport. Pasic even established bank accounts and obtained credit cards in the name of Collins.”

  “Then he’s planned this since his wife died?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Then the computer reels aren’t stuck away in any old place. A great deal of thought went into where he secreted them.”

  “Rocco also said that some characters from Rhode Island have been in town asking about us.”

  “One of the families?”

  “That explains how Attkins had so much information on us.”

  “What do you think about Attkins’s remark about Croft’s ‘cooperation’?”

  Lyon shrugged. “I don’t know. But we can’t take any chances. The innuendoes have destroyed our ability to use Croft.”

  Bea began to align copies of the geodetic maps alongside the road map with mounting excitement. “We found mountain-climbing things in the Pasic camper. Just suppose he were going to hide those things in a place almost inaccessible to the ordinary person. A high place, rock cliffs, where only the most experienced climber could go.” She ran her fingers along the maps. “Look, outside of Bryson City, North Carolina, there’s a place called
Nantahala Gorge. See how the contour lines merge together above the road? That means a nearly sheer cliff rises straight up from the valley.”

  Kim nodded agreement and pulled another projection across the bed. “Right, hon. But look at Willows, Kentucky. I’ve been through there and the place is filled with limestone cliffs.”

  “What did you say?” Lyon asked.

  “Willows is a dinky little place in the middle of the mountains and miles away from anything.”

  “You said limestone cliffs?”

  “Yes, you know, those little skeletons that piled on top of each other millions of years ago and are now mountains.”

  “There’s Kennesaw Mountain outside of Atlanta,” Raven said. “And he did spend time near Atlanta.”

  Bea slapped the maps in dejection. “It’s impossible! Most of his nutty trip north was either in or near mountains. Even if we knew which specific mountain and which particular cliff … it would still be impossible to find the reels.”

  Lyon stretched out on the vacant twin bed and crossed his arms behind his head. “Pasic spent too much time and took too much risk on the theft of the computer reels … he was a meticulous and methodical man. He would have left us word where he hid them.”

  “I think it died with him.”

  “No,” Lyon said slowly. “I don’t think it did. In fact, I think he left a map telling us exactly where to look.”

  14

  “WENTWORTH, WHAT IN HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!”

  “You had better adjust your hear …”

  “I CAN HEAR. I’M MAD! If you know the answers, tell us.”

  “In due time, hon.” Lyon began to fold the maps neatly.

  Bea turned toward Raven and Kim. “He’s that way, you know. What are we going to do? I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to go along with him.”

  “I’d like to know where we’re going,” Raven said with his usual smile.

  “Different places. Bea and I will go to Atlanta to pick up something, and Raven, if you’ll drop Kim off in Orlando?”

  “You want a trace on what Nick Pasic was doing there, how long he stayed, where, and so forth?”