THE ELSON LEGACY (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 6)

by Lawrence de Maria

  None of the names in the ledger looked familiar to her.

  “Is this what it looks like?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  We went into the City Registrar’s office. A clerk came over.

  “Howdy, Chief. What can I do for you?”

  The clerk looked warily at Kalugin.

  “Don’t mind him, Mary” Deerly-Johnson said. “I’d like to check some death notices.”

  “No problem. We just joined the 21st Century. Got them all on computer now.”

  She took us to a computer terminal and Deerly-Johnson read the first name from the ledger, Walter Gusweller. Mary typed the name in a search box and the death certificate appeared on the screen.

  Gusweller was indeed dead.

  “Can you print that out, Mary?”

  “Sure thing.”

  She did and we gave her another name. Then another. All dead. Except for the last name: Eunice Blanton.

  “No record of her,” Mary said. “I guess she’s still alive and kicking. What’s this all about, Chief?”

  When Deerly-Johnson hesitated, Kalugin said, “It’s confidential. I’m with the Internal Revenue Service, investigating Social Security fraud. Not a word of this is to get out.”

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk replied, thoroughly cowed.

  We took the 13 printouts to a table. I looked at Kalugin.

  “Social Security fraud?”

  “Could you think of anything better? Everyone is afraid of the I.R.S. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”

  I had to admit it was inspired.

  We started going through the printouts. The average age of the people in the ledger was 79. Of the 13 names, eight were men. All apparently passed away naturally, at least according to their death certificates: congestive heart failure, pulmonary disease, diabetes, cancer and other maladies common to the elderly and infirm. But it didn’t take us long to find the pattern . Even though the deaths were spaced out over eight years, the deceased had two things in common: all had died in a nursing facility owned by Malcolm Gruber and their death certificates were signed by part-time coroner, Alvin Blaloch. I looked at Deerly-Johnson and said, “probate.” We went back to the clerk.

  “Mary,” the Chief said, “are the probate files on the computer as well?”

  “Yes.”

  A half hour later we had our answer. The estates of all 13 of the dead nursing home residents were handled by none other than Clyde Spivey, identified as a “court appointed lawyer”. And all his cases were adjudicated before Judge Colver Elson.

  “This is one fucked up town,” Kalugin said. “I might have to retire here.”

  Then, we all looked at each other.

  “Eunice Blanton,” I said.

  “She was next,” Kalugin said. “Or is.”

  Gruber owned three nursing homes. Each of us called one.

  “Got her,” Deerly-Johnson said, hanging up a phone. “Serenity Home and Hospice. It’s out by the golf course. We’ll take my car.”

  With siren blasting, we got to the nursing home in five minutes. At the nurses’ station we asked for Eunice Blanton’s room.

  “What’s going on?” the nurse-in-charge asked.

  “Just take us to her room,” Deerly-Johnson barked.

  When we entered the room, it appeared as if we were too late. The woman in the bed was so thin and pale, I immediately looked to see if she was breathing. I was relieved to see the slight rise of her chest.

  “Eunice has not been feeling well,” the nurse said. “She sleeps most of the time.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “A lot of things,” the nurse said. “She’s old, after all,”

  “Does she get many visitors?”

  “Oh, no. There isn’t much family. A niece, I believe. But she lives in Lynchburg. Can’t remember the last time she was here. I don’t think they are close. If it wasn’t for Mr. Gruber, the poor woman wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.”

  “Gruber is a regular visitor?”

  “Yes. He is a wonderful man. He takes a special interest in residents who don’t have much in the way of family and are lonely.”

  I looked at Deerly-Johnson.

  “I bet,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” the nurse said. “What does that mean?”

  “Please go back to the nurses station,” the Chief said. “I want to ask Ms. Blanton some questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But you may not get much out of her. And she is easily agitated.”

  “We’ll be careful.”

  The nurse left and we tried to gently rouse the old woman. She finally opened her eyes but the nurse had been right. The woman was frightened and disoriented. She quickly became highly excited. I was afraid she’d fall out of the bed. Finally, Kalugin walked over to her. He gently picked up her hand and started singing something softly in Russian. She looked at him and smiled. Then she fell back to sleep.

  “That was very nice of you, Maks.”

  It was hard to believe this was the same man who the previous day had killed two men.

  “Arsenic,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She is being poisoned with arsenic. The leukonychia striata is obvious.” He saw my look of incomprehension. “Look at her fingernails. The white lines.”

  I picked up Eunice Blanton’s hand, which was light as a feather and cold to the touch. The white lines that ran parallel to the base of her nails were obvious.

  “Why hasn’t anyone noticed?”

  “Because the lines are not uncommon among old people, and can be caused by illnesses or injuries.”

  “Then why do you assume it is poison?”

  “Because she is in that book of death. If you check her medical records, she will undoubtedly have certain symptoms, such as diarrhea, vomiting, blood in the urine, night blindness and stomach pain. Her kidneys and liver will shut down. The final result will be coma and death. The lethal dose is between 70 and 200 milligrams a day for a healthy adult. Of course, for these poor souls, it would be less.”

  “How do you know so much about it?” Deerly-Johnson asked.

  “I read a lot.”

  I turned to the Chief.

  “All those symptoms can be attributed to other factors,” I said, “such as the diseases listed as causes of death on the certificates. If you check, I think you will find out that Gruber was solicitous of all the dead people in the ledger, visiting them frequently and poisoning them. Deaths in nursing homes are par for the course. There would be no autopsies and the only one who might have noticed anything suspicious was your part-time coroner and full-time funeral director, Blaloch. And if you dig deep enough, I bet you will also find that somehow Elson and the others arranged to have their victims turn over their insurance policies and assets to them.”

  “Dig deep is right,” Deerly-Johnson said. “The only way to prove any of this would be to exhume the bodies.”

  “If there are any to exhume,” Kalugin said. “If it were me, I’d cremate the remains.”

  I looked at him. Maks shrugged.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “They wouldn’t have been cremated,” Deerly-Johnson said. “In Virginia, a body must be autopsied by a state medical examiner before it can be cremated. They wouldn’t have taken a chance on that. No, the bodies are available, but I’ll need a court order. With probable cause.”

  “The ledger and a blood test on this lady should provide that,” I said. “The nurse mentioned that she has a niece. Get her to authorize the test. Close or not, she probably doesn’t want someone murdering her aunt. And find out if any of the 13 dead people in the ledger had next-of-kin. Some must have, no matter how far removed. They won’t be too happy to learn that they lost out on inheritances they probably didn’t even know existed. Do you trust the local prosecutor?”

  “Atlas doesn’t have one. We’re part of Culpeper County. The Commonwealth Attorney there is Mike Doyle. He’s got political
ambitions for higher office, maybe even Governor, but he’s a straight shooter.”

  “Go to him. This is the kind of case that can make him a national reputation. When he sees the ledger, the death certificates and Eunice Blanton’s blood test he’ll run with it, maybe all the way to the state house.”

  “It would be nice to keep this old lady alive,” Kalugin said.

  “I’ll get her transferred to the hospital and put under guard,” Deerly-Johnson said.

  CHAPTER 21 - SLEEP INTERRUPTED

  Things went more quickly than I expected. Michael Doyle turned out to be as ambitious and honest as Deerly-Johnson indicated. He descended on Atlas with a slew of investigators and a contingent of Virginia State Troopers sent by the Governor, who happened to be of the same political party as Doyle and also saw a political goldmine in the making.

  As I suspected, all 13 of the nursing home residents who died either had no living relatives, or only those that were too distant or uncaring to monitor what happened to the elderly victims, none of whom rated an obituary. Insurance policies, deeds, bank accounts, trust documents and the like were signed over to a corporation that Gruber set up to run his nursing homes. From there, the monies found their way into various shell corporations and offshore accounts. As Mike Doyle explained to me, the flood of extra cash was easily lost amid the Federal disbursements the homes received thanks to their not-for-profit status.

  “It all started with a little old lady named Mae Culverhouse,” Doyle said, “who had no family and actually did leave a small fortune to Gruber’s homes. Gruber and his golf buddies began talking and Judge Elson realized that they could use Mae’s money to keep paying the insurance policies of certain residents no one really cared about, and have them name Gruber’s business as their beneficiary. When the residents died, they would collect the insurance. It wasn’t long before they figured out they could speed up the process if they bumped off the old folks. As someone died, they used a portion of the insurance or other assets that had been signed over to keep up more policies. It was like a geriatric Ponzi scheme that could go on indefinitely, as long as they had one or two elderly residents whose deaths would go unnoticed each year.”

  It soon became obvious that Judge Colver Elson could not have orchestrated his scheme without at least the passive acquiescence of some local attorneys and court officers. The Governor quickly named Doyle as Special Prosecutor to clean up the mess. The media, of course, went berserk and soon a Grand Jury was empaneled. Spivey, Gruber and Blaloch were not immediately arrested and they all lawyered up, but their efforts at creating a solid front crumbled quickly. Doyle let it be known that the first conspirator in the door seeking a deal would avoid the death penalty.

  Blaloch was the first to crack, unnerved by the fact that his two henchmen, the Bodine twins, had apparently vanished. At my urging, Doyle hinted to Blaloch and his lawyer that Rufus and Abner were themselves cutting a deal. Their fused bodies had not yet been discovered in the smoldering barn. For all I knew, it might be months before they were. The local fire department had let the barn burn itself out and the police now had more on their plate to worry about than a fire presumably set by wayward teen-agers.

  “What makes you think the Bodines had anything to do with anything?” Doyle had asked me.

  “What makes you think they didn’t? Their disappearance is strange, isn’t it? What do you have to lose by throwing their names out there?”

  Doyle stared at me as if he wanted to say something else, but let it go. The Michael Doyles of this world don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But as a precaution, Kalugin decided to leave town. I would have, too, but when I called Laurene Robillard to fill her in on what happened, she said she was coming to Atlas and wanted me to stick around.

  ***

  “If I had known what it would lead to, I don’t think I would have tried to find out who I really was.”

  Laurene and I were sipping some of Colver Elson’s bourbon in the den where he was murdered. I’d picked her up that afternoon at the same private airfield that Maks had used. She also flew in by private jet, supplied by her rich fiancé. I was beginning to wonder if anyone flew commercial anymore. We were sitting on a couch in front of the bay window looking at the pine cones falling from the trees.

  “I’m going to sell that goddamn chair,” she said, pointing to the one where Elson sat when the ice pick was driven through his eye. “In fact, I’m going to sell this whole place and give the money to the family of that boy who was killed. He’d be alive if it wasn’t for me.”

  “And your grandfather and his crew would have kept right on killing old people, Laurene. None of this is your fault.”

  She crossed her elegant legs and sighed.

  “I know. But finding out that I am descended from a murderer is hard to take.” Her eyes glistened. “I was so happy to imagine I came come from respectable folks.” She laughed harshly. “What a fucking joke. Who would have thought ‘hooker’ looks better on my resume?”

  “Don’t be a ninny,” I said. “You are not an Elson. You are a Robillard. And soon to be Laurene Robillard Lewinsohn. You will be hobnobbing with the rich and famous on Wall Street, some of whom kill more people with a pen than Elson ever did with a sword, or arsenic. Besides, no so-called respectable clan lacks a murderer or two hanging from the family tree. You’ve straightened your life out, Laurene. I won’t let you screw it up now because you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “You won’t, will you?”

  “Here’s looking at you kid,” I said, in my best Bogart voice.

  “That’s from a movie, isn’t it?”

  I’d forgotten how young she was. She held out her glass and I got up and fixed us two more drinks.

  “I’m still going to give the money to the Browne family.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Do you think I’ll ever find out who killed my grandfather?”

  “Hard to say. I don’t think Spivey, Blaloch or Gruber had anything to do with it, but the suspect pool is now immense. The lawyers he basically blackmailed into his scheme. The women he allegedly abused. Hell, even the relatives of the people in the nursing homes. Maybe one of them figured the scheme out. I’ll stick around if you want, but the State Police are now involved. They have a better chance of finding the killer now than I do.”

  “No. You’ve done more than anyone could have asked. “You must want to go home.”

  “No argument there, kiddo. But come on, I’ll take you to dinner in town. I know a good French bistro. Unless you want some week-old Chicken Kiev.”

  ***

  It was 1 A.M. when I awoke from a dead sleep, the best I had since arriving in Atlas. Beef Bourguignon and a good claret will do that. Not to mention the fact that just about everyone who might do me harm in that part of Virginia was either dead or in jail. I wasn’t worried about a serial ice pick killer returning. Judge Elson had obviously been the target.

  But I did wake up, drowsily. You tend to do that when someone is fondling your private parts. I automatically rolled to the side, cupped a firm breast and kissed an erect nipple.

  “Alice,” I whispered.

  She laughed and then moaned slightly. Only in the tiny part of my brain that was functioning rationally was there the realization it wasn’t Alice. The breast was too small, the laugh different. Even the fingers in the hand working in my groin felt strange. Not unpleasant, but strange. I reached back to the bedside table and turned on a light. Laurene Robillard lay there naked. The last I’d seen her she was headed up to a second-floor bedroom.

  Now, I was fully awake. She rolled on top of me and leaned forward. Her breasts brushed my lips as she reached down to insert me. I reached down and stopped her.

  “What the hell are you doing, Laurene?”

  My voice was hoarse. She was gorgeous.

  “You’re the detective. You tell me.” Her face looked both aroused and mischievous. “I just wanted to thank you for everything. Just relax. I’m
really good at this.”

  I rolled her over on her back and pinioned her arms. I looked down at her lovely, smiling face. I kissed her hard.

  “I appreciate the offer,” I said, breaking the kiss. “But I’m with someone, now.”

  She arched her pelvis and ground it into mine.

  “It sure feels like you want me.”

  “A man would have to be dead, and maybe cremated, before you couldn’t get a reaction out of him, Laurene. You are a knockout. But I like you too much to fuck you.”

  “I don’t love you, if that’s what you think,” she said. “I just want to give you a little pleasure.”

  “What about Barry?”

  “This has nothing to do with Barry. After we get married, I’ll stop giving it away.”

  I laughed. And so did she. I rolled off her. She sat up.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  She leaned down and gave me a peck on the cheek.

  “I’m going down to get a drink of milk. Do you want anything?”

  I shook my head.

  “See you in the morning,” she said. “Toodles.”

  I watched her walk out my bedroom. She had a wonderful, tight little bum. I took a deep breath and shut the light.

  “Barry, you lucky son-of-a-bitch,” I whispered. “You hit the damn lottery.”

  CHAPTER 22 - A MOTHER’S LOVE

  When the sun came up, I went down to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. I looked out the window. There was a slight mist, but I could see Laurene standing by the old well at the rear of the property. I watched her as she walked back to the house. She was holding something in her hand that from a distance looked like a large white rag.

  “Good morning, Alton,” she said when she entered the kitchen. She gave me a mischievous smile. “Sleep well?”

  “You know damn well that I didn’t.”

  She laughed.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  I poured her a cup of coffee.

  “Look at this,” she said, holding out the rag.