Death on the Rocks (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 1)

by Michael Allegretto

  The first number Maryanne Townsend had given me was her husband’s accountant. I called him. He was out for the day. I left my name and office number.

  Next I tried Townsend’s broker. He was in a meeting.

  The last entry was Townsend’s secretary. No answer.

  So much for work. I spent the rest of the day trying to beat the heat. Nothing much seemed to help. Except a cold beer in a cool bar with a satellite dish and the Royals game. Brett lined one to left-center in the bottom of the tenth to drive in the winning run. I collected my bets and bought the last round and went home.

  That night I had the dream.

  Sometimes I would go for weeks without it. Once, for nearly a year. The dream never changed.

  The woman was screaming. She was looking at me and screaming. I could see her face quite clearly. She was terrified. Shadow figures huddled around her. Two, maybe three. They were doing things to her, horrible things, unspeakable. I had to stop them, to pull them away. But I couldn’t move. My hands were tied behind me. “Help me,” she screamed, begging me. I fought to break free, but it was useless. “Please help!” I fought harder. One of the shadow figures raised a hand. It held a knife. “Oh my God, somebody help!” The blade was long and curved and it gleamed like ice. I strained against my bonds. And the woman screamed.

  I sat up, wide awake, my ears ringing. Whether from her screams or mine, I wasn’t certain.

  Much later, I went back to sleep.

  In the morning I took breakfast on the balcony. The day was already heating up, but it was cooler here than inside. And the view was better.

  From my third-story vantage point I could see over the back hedge. The apartment building across the alley had an Olympic-size pool. The secretaries and stewardesses were splashing about and working on their tans, which were coming along nicely.

  Below, in my backyard, things moved at a quieter pace. Vaz sat, as usual, in the shade of his favorite elm. He pushed wooden pieces across a worn and faded chessboard. The set was one of the few possessions he’d taken out of Mother Russia. Thirty years ago, he and his wife had walked away from their Icelandic hotel during an international chess tournament, strolled over to the American embassy, and politely requested asylum. Vaz and Sophia had the apartment under mine. They rarely worked on their tans.

  I finished my omelet, went inside and picked up the phone.

  Townsend’s accountant was still unavailable. So was his broker. I tried the secretary. This time someone answered.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice, soft and sexy.

  I told her who I was and what I was doing. She invited me to her apartment. Her voice was breathless and held unspoken promises. I wondered if she looked as great as she sounded. I wondered if Townsend had been getting any on the side. I stopped wondering when Yvonne Winters answered her door. She was short and gray and about sixty-five.

  “Please come in, Mr. Lomax.”

  “Thank you.” I felt like taking off my hat and I wasn’t wearing one.

  Her apartment was clean and cluttered with plants and knickknacks. It was near Capitol Hill, so finding a legitimate parking place had been out of the question. I’d left the Olds by a fire hydrant.

  “Would you care for tea?”

  “I’d love some.” I hated tea.

  She disappeared into the kitchen. I sank into an overstuffed sofa.

  And the cats appeared. Five—no, six—of them. They’d probably fled at the entrance of the big ugly stranger. They took their respective places about the room. A large yellow torn sniffed my pant cuff. He leaped heavily onto the sofa, gave me the evil eye, then curled up and went to sleep with one ear pointed in my direction.

  Yvonne came back with the tea. She sat in a chair across from me and primly tucked her skirt around her legs. I sipped. Chamomile. No one said being a private eye was easy.

  “How long did you work for Phillip Townsend?”

  “Six years. And what a pity he’s gone.” She said it with feeling. She missed him.

  “Who else worked at Eagle Oil?”

  “It was just Phillip and I.”

  “Tell me about the business.”

  “There’s not much to tell. Eagle Oil owns land in Wyoming that it leases to several major operators.”

  “Which are …?”

  “Exxon, Gulf, and Amoco. They all produce oil from Eagle’s fields.”

  “How did Townsend acquire the land?”

  “He inherited it from his father-in-law, Mr. Owen.”

  “Maryanne’s father.”

  “Yes. Mr. Owen bought it back in the sixties. He risked his life savings on that desolate piece of ground. Nobody knew for sure there was oil under it. Not even Mr. Owen. But the first well hit and the field’s been producing ever since. It made him rich overnight. But it wasn’t enough for him.”

  “You mean he got greedy.”

  “No, bored. He couldn’t stand to just count his money. So first he bought a drilling company and then a construction outfit and then a trucking company. He was trying to manage them all on his own. Drove himself to an early grave is what he did. He died of a stroke five years ago.”

  “And Townsend took over?”

  She nodded. “But he couldn’t handle it all. Probably no one could. He kept the Wyoming land and sold off everything else. He let go Mr. Owen’s secretaries and hired me part-time.”

  “I see. What exactly did you do?”

  She looked at my cup. I sipped tepid tea.

  “Sorted the mail, typed letters, answered the phone. Which wasn’t often. I’d leave at noon.”

  “And Townsend?”

  “He read a lot,” she said. “Oil industry reports and so on. Truthfully, there wasn’t much for him to do. The lawyers took care of the contracts and leases, the accountants handled the taxes, and the lease operators sent in their checks each month.”

  “How much came in?”

  “It varied. Between fifteen and twenty thousand a month.”

  “And there was additional income from investments?”

  “Yes. But if you think Phillip was rolling in money, forget it. Maryanne spent it as fast as it came in.”

  Yvonne did not approve.

  “What did she spend it on?” I asked.

  She humphed and clicked her cup in her saucer.

  “Clothes, jewelry, whatever caught her fancy. Everything for herself and her daughter. Nothing for Phillip. They took trips without him. Weekends in New York or San Francisco. Last summer they spent two months in Europe. Phillip stayed home and looked after the business. Never once complained. He was too good for her if you ask me.” A flush had risen to Yvonne’s powdered cheeks. “She didn’t even cry at his funeral.”

  I said, “You told me you worked till noon. How late did Phillip stay?”

  “Five o’clock. Usually.”

  “He sometimes left early?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “Where would he go?”

  She looked away.

  “Home?”

  “No,” she said. “Maryanne wouldn’t approve. She expected him to work all day, as her father had always done. Always comparing him with her father, and Phillip never measuring up.”

  “Where would he go?”

  She fussed with her cup and saucer. “A bar.”

  “Which bar?”

  “Ship Tavern.”

  From her manner, I’d mistakenly assumed that she was going to name some sleaze joint. “In the Brown Palace.”

  She nodded.

  “One day I was downtown waiting for a bus. Phillip walked out of the hotel and nearly bumped into me. He’d been drinking.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “No, but he’d had more than one. He acted, well, cheerful. He drove me home. He confessed he spent many afternoons in Ship Tavern. He made me promise not to tell. It was our secret. Until now. I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. Not that it was such a big thing,
having a few afternoon drinks.”

  I thought of something else Townsend might have been doing in a hotel in the afternoon.

  “Yvonne, do you know if Townsend was seeing another woman?”

  She sucked in her breath.

  “Certainly not. Phillip was not that type of man. I would sooner expect Maryanne to have been unfaithful.”

  “I see,” I said. I was out of questions. Except for the obvious one.

  “What do you think he was doing on Lookout Mountain?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHEN I LEFT YVONNE Winters’ apartment, it was nearly five.

  Ship Tavern would be crowding up with business suits having one or two before they went home. I wasn’t in the mood for crowds. And it was too early to start any serious drinking. I decided to toss Townsend’s office. It would pass the time.

  The building was four blocks from the Brown Palace Hotel and Ship Tavern. Walking distance for Townsend. When he’d been among the walking.

  I pushed through the glass entrance and crossed the lobby to the elevators. I stood aside for a chatter of secretaries, then rode up to seven. The door at the end of the hall said “Eagle Oil” in raised brass letters. I let myself in with Maryanne Townsend’s key.

  I clicked on the wall switches and closed the door.

  The suite was smaller than I’d expected, but plenty big enough for two people.

  Yvonne’s desk took up most of the reception area. It wasn’t dusty, so the cleaning people still came in. The wastebasket was empty.

  The desk had an IBM Selectric under a dustcover. Also a telephone, a Rolodex, a stapler, a box of paper clips, a pencil cup, and an empty bud vase. The shallow middle drawer was locked. I popped it open with one of Yvonne’s paper clips. Inside was more office junk—loose paper clips, Liquid Paper, pens, pencils, rubber bands. Stuffed in the back was a romance novel. Its cover showed a swarthy rake with bedroom eyes. He held a coiled whip in one hand, a young woman in the other. She looked confused. They stood on the edge of a cliff, his mansion in the background. The Pain of Passion was splashed in red across a darkening sky. Shame, Yvonne.

  I opened the top side drawer. Inside I found a pocket dictionary, a paperback secretary’s handbook, a cassette player, and half a dozen tapes. I played part of each tape. Two were blank. The other four featured Townsend dictating letters or reminding Yvonne of this or that or reminding her to remind him. There were traffic noises in the background.

  I opened the bottom side drawer. Paper, carbon, envelopes.

  Next to Yvonne’s desk stood a pair of gray metal filing cabinets. They were unlocked and empty.

  Apparently, DeWitt & Associates had carted off everything important. The rest remained pretty much as it had been the day the office died.

  Beyond Yvonne’s desk was a small room with a copy machine and shelves of office supplies.

  Beyond that was Phillip Townsend’s office.

  It was more functional than flashy. There was an executive desk and chair and two lesser chairs for visitors. There were framed prints on the walls. French Impressionists.

  A low bookcase fronted one wall. It was stuffed with books, manuals, and periodicals. I flipped through them. There were six-week-old copies of the Wall Street Journal, the Kiplinger Washington Letter, and Bond Buyer Weekly. There were volumes titled Computerized Investing, The Bank Credit Analyst, and Executive Wealth Service Tax Advisory. Townsend had spent a lot of time thinking about money.

  There was a stand in the corner with an IBM PC and an Epson printer and an empty plastic tray to catch the printouts. I didn’t see any computer disks.

  I turned to Townsend’s desk.

  It had a leather-trimmed blotter pad, a telephone, a pen stand, and a silver-framed photograph of the Townsend family. They smiled politely.

  Also on the desk was a daily calendar. The last entry was for Monday, June 10. Five days after Townsend had died. He’d written “PvD 10:00.” That was one meeting he’d never made. I turned back to Wednesday the fifth. Townsend had written “LR 6:00.” He might have made that meeting. He hadn’t spilled his brains down the mountain until sometime after nine o’clock.

  I wondered who LR was. Or PvD, for that matter.

  The desk drawers were locked, but they didn’t give me too much trouble. The shallow drawer held only a bottle of Bufferin and a roll of Rolaids. The deep drawers were jammed with dated revenue statements, technical analyses of stock market movement, graphs of interest rates, and daily trackings of the prices of gold and oil.

  At the bottom of one drawer, buried under a pile of tax forms, was a bulky manila envelope. I took it out and unclipped the flap.

  Inside was a videocassette.

  There was no title. Based on everything else I’d seen, I guessed it had something to do with oil or finance.

  Something about it bothered me, though. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out what. There was no video recorder in the office. Yvonne had her audio recorder and tapes. Why didn’t Townsend have a recorder for his videotape?

  Maybe DeWitt & Associates had taken it. But why take that and leave the computer and Yvonne’s cassette player?

  Okay, so Townsend didn’t keep a VCR at the office, so what? He probably had one at home. I looked at the envelope. It had been mailed to Townsend’s home. There was no return address. The postmark was April 10, about two months before he’d died.

  So apparently Townsend had received a videocassette at home, where he probably had a recorder, and he’d brought it to the office, where he didn’t have a recorder. Curious. Then he’d shoved it to the bottom of a drawer and buried it with paper. Also curious.

  I carried the videocassette and Townsend’s calendar out to the front, and picked up the Rolodex from Yvonne’s desk. I locked the door on my way out.

  I parked across the street from the Brown Palace Hotel.

  The Brown Palace is built of native red sandstone and paneled with Mexican onyx. The central rotunda is nine stories high, which was awesome in 1892, when the hotel first opened to the delight of the silver barons and other members of high society, or what passed for society in those rawboned, whiskey-stompin’, buck-snortin’ days in Denver.

  Down the hall from the rotunda is Ship Tavern. It is full of old wood and burnished brass. It serves a decent drink and a great prime rib.

  The maître d’ was seating a party of four. He was of medium build, with thinning hair and an aristocratic air. Gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose like a jockey on a thoroughbred. I waited for him at his podium. When he got back, he didn’t look too pleased to see me. He stared hard at the front of my shirt where a tie should have been.

  “I’m working for the wife of a man who often came here,” I said.

  I gave him my card. The one with the raised letters. He wasn’t impressed.

  “And?”

  “I wondered if you knew him. Phillip Townsend.”

  “Mr. Townsend, yes, of course. He was a frequent customer.”

  His attitude had warmed a bit, but not much. I still wasn’t wearing a tie.

  “Was. Then you knew he died.”

  “Yes, and what a tragedy. I understand he left behind a wife and children.”

  “One child,” I said. “A daughter, Jennifer.”

  He nodded, satisfied that I’d passed his little test.

  “You say you’re working for Mrs. Townsend? How is she getting along?”

  “She’s managing,” I said. “Do you know her?”

  “I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting her. Excuse me a moment, Mr. Lomax.”

  At least he’d read my card. He seated a young couple. When he came back, he said pointedly, “We’ll be busy soon.”

  “I just have a few questions, Mr., ah …”

  “Please call me Henry.”

  He didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “Henry. How often did Townsend come here?”

  “Two or three times a week.”r />
  “For lunch?”

  “Yes. He’d stay the afternoon, sitting at the bar. It’s not something we encourage, but Mr. Townsend was an absolute gentleman. Certainly not a heavy drinker. He just seemed to, well, enjoy the company.”

  “Did he come in with friends?”

  “No …”

  “Or meet them here?”

  Henry shook his head, thinking. “Not that I recall. He talked with the bartenders, of course. Usually Alex. Alex Dunne.”

  “Is that him?” I nodded toward the bar. It was still packed and the bartender had his hands full.

  “No. Alex is off today. Tomorrow as well, I believe. You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Lomax.”

  People were waiting to get in. And they were wearing ties. Even some of the women.

  When I got home I poured whiskey over ice, switched on the VCR, and shoved in Townsend’s cassette. I watched the tape from beginning to end. Most of it was blank. Only the first twenty-five minutes had been recorded.

  It was a cheaply made porno film. It featured corny costumes, tinny sound, and no plot.

  Phillip Townsend was the star.

  CHAPTER 7

  I REPLAYED THE TAPE.

  The room was bare except for a table and a bed. Wall mirrors reflected a harsh overhead light. The camera was above and behind the bed, possibly behind a mirror.

  The door opened and in came the players—Townsend, two women, and a young girl who looked about thirteen. She was naked. The two women wore elaborate S&M outfits, featuring leather straps and puckered white flesh. Townsend looked like his photo. Except here he wore a cape, for chrissake, with a high collar and nothing underneath. Who was he supposed to be, the Devil?

  He spoke.

  “Tie her to the bed,” he said.

  His voice was raspy and high-pitched. Pre-game jitters, I guess.

  The women led the girl to the bed. She appeared to be drugged. When they tied her down spread-eagle, she resisted, but feebly.

  “Punish her with the whip,” he said.

  One of the women lifted a short, delicate whip from the table. She uncoiled it and began using it on the girl. Not hard, but hard enough to make her wince.

  Townsend gave explicit instructions to the other woman.