The Ironclad Covenant

by Christopher Cartwright

  Chapter Eleven

  Sam listened to Tom as he recalled the events down below.

  They waited at the site for another good two hours – much longer than any diver could possibly have stayed down below without being overcome by hypothermia. The dive boat never returned. According to the Annabelle May’s sweeping radar, there were no other boats anywhere within five miles of the dive site.

  After an hour of silence, Sam said, “There’s a chance the other diver surfaced somewhere already and is now surface swimming toward Isle Royale.”

  Tom crossed his arms beneath a thick woolen jacket. “Unlikely. I reached the surface a long time before him and my core body temperature was already low enough that I struggled to concentrate and my fine motor-skills were shot to pieces. I couldn’t even hold a compass, let alone have the attention span to maintain a heading for three miles to Isle Royale.”

  “So he’s dead, then?”

  “Drowned or froze. Either way, his friends left him to die.”

  Sam sighed. “And now we’re still no closer to finding out what’s so important about the wreck of the J.F. Johnson that makes her so important.”

  “What do you want to do?” Tom asked.

  “Let’s find somewhere nice to anchor for the night, then we’ll go visit our friend Mark at the dive shop again.”

  “Really?” A wry smile formed on Tom’s gregarious face. “You want to kick over that hornet nest again?”

  “Sure. Why not? It’s the only lead we have.”

  “For starters. It might just get us killed and we still don’t know who we’re trying to help here. There’s no doubt in my mind the good Senator was involved in something he shouldn’t have been or at least he knew about something and kept his mouth shut. Heck, if I had to guess, I’d say he was on the take for looking the other way. Either way, I don’t see a lot of innocent parties here.”

  Sam said, “Except the son.”

  “Yeah. Except the son.” Tom shook his head. “All right. Let’s go find a calm bay to anchor in and tomorrow we’ll go upset some nice folks down at the dive shop.”

  Sam waited for Tom to start the twin diesel engines. A moment later, he stepped outside the upper deckhouse and told him to drop the mooring lines. Sam slipped the rope out of the cleat on the bow and dropped the lines overboard.

  “She’s free,” he shouted.

  “Good-oh,” Tom replied, as he stepped back into the wheelhouse.

  Sam followed him and the Annabelle May quickly picked up speed, cruising toward the more protected side of Isle Royale.

  Ten minutes into the trip, Sam’s satellite phone – sitting in the charging cradle next to the navigation table – started to ring.

  He stepped over, picked it up and answered the call. “Hello.”

  Elise spoke without preamble. “found something from the statement you discovered written in red inside the wheelhouse of the J.F. Johnson wreckage.”

  “You found what happened to the Meskwaki Gold Spring?”

  “No. As far as I can tell, it’s nothing more than a legend used to drive hoards of gold prospectors into the region during the late nineteenth century. But I know who Stanford was.”

  “Really?” Sam felt a surge of hope. “Who?”

  “His full name was Stanford Perry.”

  “Go on!”

  “In the 1920s he was a laborer on a number of local barges and paddle-steamers. There’s no record of where he was born or when he came to Minnesota. You want to know what ship he was working aboard in 1931?”

  “He was on board the J.F. Johnson?”

  “That’s right. It gets better.”

  “Go on.”

  “After the events of the J.F. Johnson’s sinking, Stanford’s life appeared to make a dramatic turn for the better. Some say that he might have used the loss of the vessel to seize control of a local organized crime syndicate he was working for at the time. Maybe the previous boss died in the accident, I don’t know. But what I do know, is two years later, he was an important man about town in Duluth.”

  Sam said, “Tell me you know who his descendants are!”

  “His grandson was none other than Arthur Perry.”

  “Senator Arthur Perry’s family made its fortune in the bootlegging industry of the 1920s!”

  Elise said, “Exactly.”

  Sam ended the satellite phone call and hung it back on its charging cradle.

  He looked at Tom. “Change of plans. I’m going to Duluth to catch a flight.”

  “At this time of night?” Tom asked. “Where?”

  “New York. The Senator lied to us and I want to know why.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Manhattan, New York City

  Virginia Beaumont glanced at the dead body on the pavement.

  The decision of whether to resuscitate someone or not never bothered her. Some paramedics saw it akin to playing God. But she didn’t see it that way. If there was ever any chance that her attempt might save a person’s life, she would try. If a person was dead, no amount of advanced life-saving medical intervention could change that.

  Her practiced blue eyes rolled across the body, searching for any sign of life worth chasing. Any agonal breaths or color left in the skin. There weren’t any. Her entire experience as a paramedic told her this one was hopeless. It was only as a human courtesy that she reached down for the central pulse on the neck of the bloated body, sprawled spread-eagled on the greasy pavement. There wasn’t any.

  The man was dead.

  The body lay on a cement plinth under the awning of a Chinese restaurant, next to a pile of oozing black trash bags. The dulled eyes of the man were open, having taken on the same featureless gray as the sky they stared at. Cold, soft stillness greeted Virginia’s blue nitrile gloved fingertips, as she knew it would. The morning air was just crisp enough to confine the stench emanating from the bags threatening to split and ooze onto the Baxter Street sidewalk, and from her position at a high kneeling crouch it occurred to Virginia that the air was mercifully bearable. It was definitely crisp enough to chill the dead and dying with a savage quickness, so time of death was anyone’s guess.

  Without removing his hands from his pockets, Virginia’s partner, Anton Mercia motioned with his elbow toward the cardiac monitor on the sidewalk adjacent to their kits. “You want me to take a rhythm strip, Ginny? “

  “Nah, don’t bother. He’s been dead for a couple hours,” she said, pointing toward the lividity at the bottom of his back. “And I’ve been telling you for three years now, don’t call me Ginny!”

  “Eh come on, one Ginny a month that’s all I ask,” he said, grinning white teeth through his chewing gum. Anton heaved two of the resus kits off the ground, and made for the back of the ambulance idling behind them, its exhaust bright white, tailing in the circling breeze. “I’ll let ‘em know to start the cops,” he said.

  They had been on scene for about forty-five seconds.

  Virginia absent-mindedly studied the body.

  The body was lying on its back, right cheek and shoulders resting on the filthy cement. The puffy right hand still clutched at the chest and the outstretched left gripped a paper bag with a tell-tale translucent spot where the fast food wrappers still permeated. A lemon-yellow shirt bulged at the buttons and peeped out between a well cut pinstriped tan and gray jacket. She heard the heavy side door of the truck slam shut, and Anton reappeared around the hood, smiling and waving at a horn blast from a brown UPS van that seemed taken by surprise by the ambulance facing the wrong way, half parked on the curb thirty feet from the corner.

  “This guy's wearing probably eight thousand dollars’ worth of suit, shoes and haircut,” Virginia said.

  “Yeah I noticed that. Check it out, Hermes shoes.”

  “Every day, I swear it just gets more and more weird."

  “Oh you mean like as opposed to a normal person's day at work?" Anton replied.

  "Hey I'm a normal person! I just do a weird job."

&n
bsp; "Yeah well, I'm sure this guy's normal too, just dead. And rich."

  Virginia’s lips curled in a wry smile. “So, what’s he doing dying here on a freezing corner in the trash with a bag of cheeseburgers?”

  “Getting dinner, I guess.”

  She smiled. “Last supper more like.”

  “Ha. Ha. It’s too early. And too freaking cold. You want to wait here while I step up to the corner for two large cups? It’s my turn, and we’re stuck here for a while no doubt.”

  They both knew that at police morning shift change, the chances of a prompt response for a not so recently deceased medical case found in the street was fairly low on the list of priorities, but a vigil had to be maintained.

  “Only if it’s accompanied with a cream cheese bagel in honor of our friend here’s dietary choices. I think he’d appreciate that.”

  “It’s the least we can do,” Anton said. “If you need me I’m on the radio and I have my cell.”

  “Okay, make sure you switch them on!”

  “Hmm. See you in a minute Ginny, with coffee to brighten you up a little”

  Discarding her gloves into a medical waste bin inside the ambulance, Virginia balled her fists in her armpits against the cold and stood over the body. Something about the whole picture was incongruous in her mind. The premise seemed perfectly plausible, guy lives too much of the good life, clogs his arteries and drops dead of the massive coronary he didn’t know he was harboring. She’d seen it a thousand times, but this one just seemed a little odd. She was trying to pin down the unformed thought when the cell phone in the guy’s pocket started to ring. It was the quack, quack, quack of the Duck ringtone on an I-phone and Virginia winced at the inappropriateness as she bent down and fished the phone from the slick silk lining of the guy’s breast pocket, and touched the green phone symbol above the words, Private Number.

  The woman’s voice was concerned, but not frantic. “Where are you?”

  In three words Virginia picked the caller's accent as uptown, her age around forty, and her build probably slight.

  “Ah ma’am, my name’s Virginia Beaumont. I’m a paramedic with the New York Fire Department.”

  “Where’s Rick?”

  Virginia grimaced. “Who?”

  “Arthur Perry. The man who’s cell I just rang.”

  “Oh.” Virginia sighed, heavily. “Do me a favor and stand by one moment ma’am.”

  Virginia nestled the phone into her ear and shoulder, as she crouched beside the body and patted the man’s other breast pocket and then withdrew the light brown billfold. Inside were three credit cards, two black and one silver, a thick wad of crisp bills and a Minnesota driver’s license, with an address in an exclusive suburb of Minnetrista. The name read, Arthur Perry. The picture seemed to match the lifeless face Virginia peered at over the top of the card she’d thumbed half out of the open wallet.

  “Are you there?" Virginia asked, wondering why she’d felt the need to answer the man’s cell phone in the first place.

  "Yes, what is it?"

  “I’m sorry to tell you this ma’am, but Arthur’s dead.”

  Silence on the phone.

  Virginia strained to hear over the din of the city. Even at 6:30 a.m. the blasting of horns was already at a feverish pitch, while the residents hit the streets fighting for a position in the morning crosstown jam.

  “Dear God!” The woman’s voice muttered.

  “Ma’am?”

  In a whisper, the woman asked, “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  “Quite sure, ma’am. It looks like it may have been some sort of medical problem but we can’t say for sure.” Virginia paused a beat. “We’re in Brooklyn. Are you far from here? Is there someone we can call for you?”

  The stranger sighed, deeply. “Thank God, it’s finally over.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Virginia had an attractive face, with a high jaw-line and full lips, which were set in an easy to get along with and engaging smile. Her short, curly blonde hair was tied back in neat double French braids that ended just above her shoulders. She had deep-set, intelligent light blue eyes and a well-defined nose with a small piercing through her left nostril, giving her a decidedly defiant appearance.

  She was above average in height, maybe five-ten or eleven. Her crisp dark navy paramedic uniform emphasized her slender figure as she walked with the determined stride of an athlete. Nearly fifteen years as a paramedic – five of those on the helicopter doing primary retrievals – had left her a lithe physique, toned, and with plenty of strength in her wiry muscles.

  The job just keeps getting stranger…

  She returned the last of the medical equipment to the Ambulance – a Lifepac 12 Monitor and Defibrillator – and returned to the deceased man.

  Virginia glanced at the man’s wallet. She took a photo of his Minnesotan driver’s license, in case she didn’t get the time to write his medical records until later in the shift. She searched the rest of the wallet, looking for any clue about the man’s life – where he’d been recently or any contact details of family. Finding nothing, she closed the wallet, leaving every one of the hundred-dollar bills in their place.

  She was staring at the screen of the phone in her right hand, holding the dead guy’s wallet in her left hand still flipped open when Anton popped around the corner, paper bag in his teeth, a large yellow cup of lidded hot java in each hand. Virginia didn’t move. Anton placed the coffees on the hood of the truck and deftly dropped the bag from his teeth into his waiting hand at waist height. At six feet eight inches tall, it was a pretty smooth move. To his dismay there was no reaction from his partner.

  “Did you break my personal golden rule and answer the dead guy’s phone?”

  “Yep.”

  “The wife?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “It was... well, a little weird.”

  A white Ford Interceptor nosed around the corner and mounted the curb with two wheels and stopped toe to toe with the Ambulance. The paramedics went quiet, waiting to hand over the scene.

  An older man in a suit approached with a younger female partner. “Good morning. Who’s the treating paramedic today?”

  “I am,” she said. “Virginia Beaumont’s my name.”

  Without preamble, the detective asked, “What have you got?”

  “Fifty-five-year-old, Mr. Arthur Perry. Looks pretty clear he had a massive coronary while eating breakfast… or dinner, perhaps? But the medical examiner will work that one out for you. His wallet and phone are here. There’s a heap of cash still in his wallet and no sign of a struggle or physical trauma. The man was found clutching his chest.”

  The detective looked at her. Undistracted by her good-looks, he said, “That’s something, at least. Should be a pretty much open and shut case. Just the way we like them first thing in the day.”

  “You want anything else from us?” she asked.

  “Nah. You’ve probably got more important things to do to help the living than wait around here while we work out what to do with the dead. We’ve got your number if we need you.”

  “All right. Have a good shift.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  The detective placed his cold hands in his pockets and gave the body a cursory glance. It was practiced and professional, without any real interest, as though after thirty years dealing with homicides, it was beneath him to look after someone who’d abused his body until he dropped dead of a heart attack.

  A moment later, the detective swore.

  Virginia turned around out of curiosity. “What is it?”

  “That pin above his right breast pocket.”

  She glanced at it. “Yeah, I noticed that too. Any idea what it means? It looks like an Alumni pin or something to an Ivy League University to me, but I wouldn’t have a clue which one. I couldn’t afford any of them, so I wouldn’t know.”

  The detective sighed. “That’s a senatorial pin. Which means we no longer ha
ve a dead guy here – we have a dead senator. And senators don’t get to die without a serious investigation, which means my day has just been thoroughly fucked.”

  She smiled, politely. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Not your fault. But I’m going to need to ask you some more questions, now.”

  “Sure. I understand.”

  Over the course of the next two hours, Virginia went through everything she’d done in the twenty-five minutes since arriving on the scene with the Senator. It went right down to the nitty-gritty of what she touched, where she touched it, why she determined the guy met their well-defined resuscitation protocol for reasons to withhold resuscitation attempts. Who she’d advised of that decision, and who she’d spoken to since.

  When she’d finally finished, the detective asked, “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the wife called.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He sighed. “That’s important. What’s her name?”

  “Oh, Christ! I didn’t get it. I’m sorry.”

  “What about her number. Maybe we can ring her back.”

  “The Senator’s cell showed her number as private.”

  “Really?” The detective raised an incredulous eyebrow. “That’s interesting.”

  Virginia felt her heart race. It wasn’t like her to neglect obvious things. A career as a paramedic had taught her to be specific – refer only to the facts – it was a unique combination of fatigue and an ongoing problem with her father’s ill health that had caused her to start making mistakes. She sighed, and pressed on. “Why’s that interesting?”

  The detective shrugged. “Well, if she’s his wife, you’d think her number would be in his cell phone, wouldn’t you?’

  “Good point.”

  “Did she say she was his wife?”

  “No. It was sort of implied. At the time I didn’t give it another thought. I assumed the guy had obviously had a medical event, and there wouldn’t be much to this case.”

  The detective restrained a slight grimace, like he could already imagine where this sort of case was going to lead him. “All right. Not your fault. You told her he was dead?”