1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1

by Frederick Ramsay

  The letter went on to say that they, the New Jihad, would contact the Dillons to give instructions for the delivery of the diamonds and when they were away would inform them of the exact location of the paintings.

  “Ruth, tell me again how you got this letter.”

  “I don’t know. It appeared in my inbox sometime this evening. It was not there earlier because I would have noticed. I stayed in the office late because meetings I had all day kept me from clearing my desk and I wanted to get that done so I could at least have Sunday off. I hoped you and I might do something together. Sorry, maybe I am presuming. It’s just that last night…anyway, I stepped out of the office for a minute to use the restroom and when I got back, there it was.”

  “You noticed it right away?”

  “No. I had another letter I wanted to finish first and when I did, I put it in my outbox. That is when I noticed this envelope. It surprised me because I cleaned everything out, and except for the letter I just completed, I thought I was done for the night. I started to return your call and picked it up.

  “I opened it, wondering how I could have missed it. It is addressed only to me so I thought it might be a note from Agnes or one of the other office staff. But it isn’t, is it? And when you answered, I told you to come. Not the message I had in mind for you, I’m afraid.”

  “No. Are we the only two who have handled this?”

  “Yes, except, I suppose, for the writer, assuming, of course, whoever put it in my box was the same person who wrote it.”

  “We’ll want to check it for fingerprints. We won’t find any, except yours and mine, I’m sure, but you never know.”

  Ike looked at the letter a third time. It took up more than three quarters of the page. The wording seemed strange, awkward. Some of the sentences ran on. Phrases were repeated and peculiar constructions were used. The message was clear enough but could have been stated in half the words.

  “Odd bit of writing, don’t you think?”

  Ruth inspected the letter again. “It looks like it was written by someone not very familiar with English, or maybe someone under the influence.”

  “I wonder. Too bad we don’t use typewriters anymore. Typewriters, especially the old Selectrics, were traceable, if you knew how. The ribbons did not reverse, so you could read everything written on them. The Agency used to burn their ribbons inside the building and would never use them outside. But we live in the age of computers and word processors, and they are sterile and anonymous. Even the paper is indistinguishable. You don’t use watermarked paper, do you?”

  “I don’t know, Ike. I have to delegate things or go mad. Paper, pencils, furniture all goes to someone who has the patience to deal with it.”

  Ike tilted Ruth’s desk lamp up and inspected the paper. “We’re in luck. This paper has a Callend College watermark on it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, see for yourself.”

  “I didn’t even know we had the stuff.” She grabbed a piece of paper from her desk drawer and held it up to the light as well. It had the mark. “So that means that the letter was written here.”

  “Maybe. Or by someone who works here, or at least someone who has access to the buildings.”

  “That doesn’t help you at all, does it?”

  “Oh yes, but how much I can’t tell just yet. It depends on where this paper is used, everywhere, or just some places? And if only in the confines of the college, then maybe we can trace the computer it was written on. They tell me that there are ways of doing that. I’m not a computer person so I don’t know.”

  “I could ask Sam.”

  “Sam?”

  “We got a big grant from the Dillon foundation right after I got here, an inauguration present from M. Armand himself, to be used to install a sophisticated information management system. Dillon makes those things—computers, chips, electronic things—and he wanted us to showcase the future or something like that. I would have settled for having the roads and parking lots repaved.”

  “Yes, but who’s Sam?”

  “Oh, well, the grant meant installing an elaborate computer system, software, hardware, cables—I don’t know—all the stuff that goes with it. And that, in turn, meant hiring an information management systems coordinator—Sam Ryder, our techno-geek. We can ask Sam about the computer stuff and the paper, too. If I can figure out how this new phone works in house…let me see.…” Ruth consulted a card taped to the glass top of her desk. “Pound and the number…no, call the home number first then.…”

  Ike left her to her problem solving and paced around the room. The office was almost Spartan in its appointments—a few knick knacks and a handful of books. He glanced at the titles. Ruth, he noticed, had authored two of them. She failed to reach Sam at home and dialed an office number.

  “Sam? Good, Ruth Harris, yes, fine thank you, could you come to my office? What? You are in the middle of a what? Oh, I see. Well yes, I think you might want to do that. Ten minutes? Good.”

  She hung up with a puzzled look. “Sam said, ‘I will put the program on paws.’ Paws? Like little furry feet? Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Pause, not paws, to stop temporarily, pause.”

  “Oh. You have no idea what thirty-six hours without any real sleep does to my brain, Sheriff.”

  ***

  Harry Grafton’s hands started shaking. He stared at the bottle of sour mash bourbon on the dresser and licked his lips. He needed a drink. One couldn’t hurt—just something to steady his hands. He tasted the bile in his throat. His eyes felt like they were filled with sand. His collar was damp even in the air-conditioning. He looked at a sleeping Red Burnham and wished with all his heart he had the courage to shoot him.

  Red left the bottle out in plain view to torment him, he knew that. One drink, that’s all. He heard Red laugh. Harry looked up and saw he was awake, waiting.

  “What’s the matter, Grafton, bottle singing a love song to you? Go ahead, have a drink. Have two. Take the whole bottle.” Red laughed again and sat up. “Go ahead and drink up some courage, Rummy.”

  Harry left the room—walked out into the warm May night and wished he were dead.

  ***

  “Tell me about Parker. All your man said was he was hit on the head. It must have been a very hard hit.”

  “Or a lucky one.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Robbery is one thing, murder another. Terrible. Nobody deserves that.”

  “Lots of folks in town would disagree with you about that. If anybody deserved it, they’d tell you Parker was at or near the top of their list.”

  “Your list, too?”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Ike, nobody deserves to die. You’re not a capital punishment supporter.”

  “No, I’m not, as a matter of fact. But deserve and warrant are different concepts. I don’t think the death penalty is warranted. But some people agree that if anyone deserved to die—”

  “I don’t see the difference but I’m happy to discover that you and I do agree on something.”

  “Yes, that’s a nice change, isn’t it? But I’m not sure we agree.”

  “No arguments tonight, please,” she said. “Cruel and inhumane is enough—leave it.”

  “Except cruel and inhumane punishment is a sliding scale, formulated when beheadings and torture and public hangings were in style. Joseph Guillotin invented his gadget as a humane way to behead people, a great leap forward in the humanitarian approach to death. The electric chair was thought to be a similar advancement over hanging, the gas chamber an improvement over it and so on to lethal injection. Now you will say all capital punishment is cruel and inhumane. It is a moveable target and, for me, not substantial enough to affix a moral code. So I prefer the sanctity of life.”

  “If I weren’t so
tired, I could start a major debate here.”

  “You could, but I’ll bet you dinner and a movie that you’d get a draw at best.”

  Ruth sat up, challenge in her eyes and about to reply, but she was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Chapter Twenty

  Donati took the telephone from Angelo. “Yeah.”

  “This is Artscape. What are you doing? I told you to be careful with the pictures. They’re ruined.”

  “You wanted the collection taken. We took it. You didn’t say anything about being neat. Besides, do you have any idea how long it would have taken us to do the job your way?”

  “But it will take years to restore the pictures.”

  “What’s with you? Your people are threatening to burn the damned things. What difference does it make if the paint is scratched?”

  There was a pause at the other end. “My people say they don’t want to pay the full price for the goods. They’re damaged.”

  “Tell them if they don’t pay, they go down—starting with you. Do you think I am stupid? Do you think I don’t know who you are, where you live? I know who you talk to, who you sleep with, and I know how to get to you. Would you like me to tell you your address? How about the name of your lover—lets see, he’s—”

  “All right, all right. I take your point. What happened to Parker?”

  “Wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “You might get a line on two students. Find out if they’re worth any money. You could sweeten the pot by throwing them into the mix. You know, return the hostages, an extra five mil.”

  “Hostages? What hostages?”

  “Minor complication. The Parker guy went to spy on some kids in the bushes. Had to drop him and take the kids. We can kill them, or sell them back with the paintings.”

  “That’s crazy. They know who you are. They can identify you.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason you won’t. They will want to stay alive. They will want to be sure their families and friends do not have accidents or hurt themselves. You know drive-by shootings are a real problem nowadays. They, and you, don’t want something like that to happen, do you? No, they won’t say anything. Besides, I have an airtight alibi. Feds won’t believe it, but they won’t be able to break it either.”

  “You are a monster.”

  “I’m a monster? The people you represent kill women and children in suicide bombings. They drop skyscrapers full of people, and you call me a monster? Did you think this operation could be done without somebody getting hurt? People die. I have people working with me I will eliminate as soon as I get my payoff. I can’t risk having them run around loose. One talks too much, the other’s a drunk. Push me and you get added to the list. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You got a pencil? Write down these names.”

  ***

  “Oh, Sam, come in. This is Sheriff Schwartz. He has some questions he wants to ask you about our computers. Sheriff, this is Samantha Ryder, our resident computer expert.”

  Sam turned out to be a woman with mouse brown hair that clung to her shoulders, thin and unremarkable in every way except that when Ike stood to shake her hand he found himself looking at her nose. She stood at least three inches taller, in sandals. She could not weigh more than one hundred and forty-five pounds. Except for a chest that would turn a Hollywood starlet green with envy, she looked like she could be sucked up through a soda straw. She shook Ike’s hand. She had a grip.

  “Sam, we need help. Dr. Harris received a letter relating to the robbery. In a minute I want you to read it and tell me if it is possible to trace it in any way, assuming someone wrote on one of the machines here. I’ve been told that something like that is possible, but I don’t know for sure. The letter is on the desk.”

  Sam leaned over the desk and examined the letter. She picked it up by its edges and held it up to the light, as Ike had done earlier.

  “It’s our paper and that means it was probably printed here. I can’t be sure about where though.”

  “Because of the watermark? Do all of the departments or printers use this paper?”

  “Yes, at the moment. The vendor who sold us our printers included a couple of hundred reams of that paper as part of the deal. I guess he hoped we’d be impressed and maybe buy more. Either way it helped with the sale. The margin we work with in purchases of this sort is pretty thin, so anything extra helps. Of course, it’s possible that whoever wrote this took paper home, printed the letter, and brought it back, but I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, nobody except me and the staff in IS knows about the watermark, and it’s not noticeable unless you go out of your way to look for it. As far as most people know, it’s just plain twenty-pound bond.”

  “So, if the letter were typed and printed here, could you tell us who wrote it?”

  “Not who wrote it, but where it was written, at which work station. We installed a very sophisticated network. All work stations are connected to a main print server in the basement. There are other servers, of course, for backup, data bases and so on.”

  She looked at the puzzlement in Ike’s eyes and continued, “A print server is a machine that spools—lines up print jobs and sends them to the printer. We have thirty-five printers in the LAN…sorry, that’s the local area net, LAN. So we have one for each department or office like this one. Oh, and there are three printers in the library for student use. The job comes to the server and it sends it back to the appropriate printer.”

  “Why not just send the job straight to the printer? My computer just sends the stuff straight over to my printer. It seems a lot of trouble to send it to a server and back.”

  “Well, in your case, part of your hard drive is your server. Check out your printer utility sometime. It has all the features a server has and…sorry again…I tend to go on. Anyway, no matter how we set all this up, the job would have to go to a print server of some sort. It could be another computer in the department or a separate box, but unless you have a printer for each computer, like yours, you need a separate server. We chose a high-capacity server to assure that the printing got done no matter what situations came up. For example, if a departmental printer went down, or even ran out of paper, the server would route the job to an alternative printer, usually the nearest one, and then tell you where you could pick it up. Folks get ticked when their jobs get backed up.”

  “Every printer in the college is connected to the server?”

  “Yes, sir, every one.”

  “Okay, but I don’t see how this helps us.”

  “Well, as I said, we have very sophisticated servers. One keeps a log of all the documents processed. The log can tell us where the job came from, file name, and so on. We can look at the log and see what jobs have been done and when.”

  “You can do all that?”

  “We can. Look, this is a one-page document, so that eliminates all of the files that are larger. Next, look at the number of words in the document. The log keeps track of them too. That will narrow it down even more, and so on until we have the document and the source. Of course, if the person who wrote this knows the system, it might take some time.”

  “And if they know a lot about it they could beat it?”

  “Well, yes and no. It’s iffy either way.”

  “What do you mean, iffy? You either can or you can’t.”

  “It’s not that straightforward, Sheriff. First there is the matter of a search warrant and then—”

  “A what? I’m not tossing a room here. I just want some information from you. Ruth, tell her to give me the information.”

  “Dr. Harris, there is a whole new cor
pus of law covering electronic data. Information of this sort is viewed the same as paper files and property. If I give the sheriff the information and it leads to an arrest, and if there was no search warrant issued to obtain it, it would be inadmissible in court.”

  “Sam, I appreciate the point. How do you know all this anyway?” Ike asked.

  “I had a double major in college. The second was criminal justice. I hoped to be in law enforcement, computer forensics. Got turned down by the FBI—bad eyes.”

  “She’s right, Ike, we can’t let you have the information without a warrant.”

  “I don’t believe this. It’s Saturday night. It’ll be Monday before I can find a judge and get that warrant. Here’s a chance to cut through a lot of details and you are going to scruple over this?”

  “Have to, Ike. Matter of principle. How long is that whatever…how long before the data will be available, Sam?”

  “It depends. The library files are backed up and the system rebuilt every night—they tend to get corrupted. But these files will be logged in for ninety days. All the data will be there on Monday.”

  “I can’t wait until Monday,” Ike shouted. “Sam, you want police work? You got it. I am hereby deputizing you into the Sheriff’s department. Under county law, you don’t get a choice in the matter if it is clear that we are in a state of emergency, smoking gun and so on. Determination of that state is left to the prerogative of the instituting officer—that’s me—subject to appeal and review, and so forth. Now, as my deputy, you will go and find me the source of this letter.”

  “You can’t do that,” Ruth protested.

  “Can, and just did.”

  “Do I get a badge?” Sam asked.

  “What? A badge. Well yeah, but—”

  “Does it mean I can carry, too?”

  “Carry. You want to carry? You own a gun, Sam?”

  “Yes, sir, a Glock 17.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re going to need one, but yes, as a deputy, you can carry.”

  “Sam,” Ruth interjected, “You can’t be serious. What about search warrants? What about the—”