Going down the stairs, I heard Jackie giggle.
“Journalists aren’t ethical?” he said. “I gotta remember that one.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We stumbled down the stairs, past the dining room and made it as far as the foyer when Jackie suddenly pulled up, said “hang on a sec,” and made a sharp right towards the ballroom. I had Leta’s little pistol hidden in the palm of my hand, and I surreptitiously handed it to her. Guns make me very nervous.
“Is it loaded?” I asked.
She smiled at me as she tucked it away in her waistband, hidden beneath her oversized wooly sweater.
“Yeah,” she said. “But it probably woulda just winged him. My shooting instructor said that beyond a range of about ten feet, the bullet tends to bounce off things. But if I had stuck the barrel in his ear …”
She smiled at me again. It was not a pleasant smile.
“Maybe you should take tae-kwon-do,” I suggested. “Learn how to kill someone with just two fingers, or a credit card or something.”
She kept smiling her evil little smile. But her eyes were a little different.
“Oh, shit,” I said, smacking my head. “You have, haven’t you? Taken martial arts?”
She nodded, still smiling. “My instructor said I was one of the most dangerous women he knew,” she said.
“You got a thing for instructors, don’t you?” I said.
She let it hang.
Jackie came running back, carrying a new, full bottle of Jack Daniels.
“A little fortification for the road,” he said.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Jack nodded at Leta. “I think we should take the lady home. It’s obviously been a rather long day for her,” he said.
“I can drive myself,” she said hotly. “I made it down here didn’t I?”
“Don’t get her mad,” I told Jack. “She’s rearmed and dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, go ahead and shoot me if you want,” Jack said laconically. “But we’re taking you home. We can help get your car back tomorrow if you want. But I think it would be safer if you went with us. Besides, we can talk a little on the way.”
Leta Papageorge thought that over. Then she nodded her agreement.
“Can I have some of that?” she asked, nodding at Jack’s bottle of Jack Black.
“That’s why I got it,” he said, and led the way outside.
The late Vitus Papageorge lived in a new gated subdivision, one of a thousand like it, that had been built in the hilly country of southern New Hampshire, designed to appeal to a generation of young commuters who didn’t mind making the traffic-clogged 90 minute drive down to Massachusetts and Boston in return for lots of cold fresh air, a homogenous community of other white, upper-middle class businessmen, and New Hampshire’s beneficial state tax system, which is to say no taxes at all. On anything. Which compares very favorably with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has a tax on everything. Of course, Massachusetts does offer some state services to its citizens, while New Hampshire’s attitude is “live free and die.”
Jack drove out of the club, turned left on the river road and headed north. He took the bottle of Jack from between his legs, took a pull and passed it over to me. I looked at it sadly, and passed it on to Leta, riding shotgun in the back seat of Jack’s sedan. I heard her gentle gurgle.
“Aren’t there open container laws in New Hampshire, too?” I wondered, sounding like a little old lady to myself.
“Only if we get caught, Hacker,” Jack grinned. “And I’m absolutely the best drunk driver in New England. Never been caught yet.”
“Always a first time,” I said, mostly to myself.
Jack was taking the scenic route, even though the night was black and moonless. The car rumbled over the frost-roughened country roads. I rolled down my window and took a draught of the cold, fresh air. We drove through the occasional pool of light from the odd streetlamp, and the sounds of the tires were reflected back up into my window from the ancient stone walls that lined the road. We passed the occasional house, each one of which had one window reflecting the blue glow of a television inside. I thought about the first settlers who had used the strength of their own backs and the help of a team of oxen to move these boulders out of their fields, acre after slow acre, in order to grow enough food to survive another harsh New England winter. It seemed a hopeless cycle of struggle against an unyielding land.
We passed an open meadow over which a blanket of mist hung like wispy fluff. Crickets sang morosely, knowing their days were numbered. After the first hard frost would come the cricket holocaust. The road dipped suddenly, and I felt the temperature of the air drop as well. I rolled my window back up and shivered.
Leta passed the bourbon back up to me. “Looks like you could use a shot, Hacker,” she said.
I turned and shot her a quick smile.
“I’m just trying to make heads or tails of this thing,” I said. “We keep taking two steps forward and running into brick walls. I thought this nice little scam Vitus had cooked up over the sewer project provided the perfect motive for someone to kill him, but Herb said not.”
“If you can believe Herb,” Jack reminded me.
“Oh, I believe him,” Leta said.
I turned again. “How did you know about it?” I asked.
She smiled her evil little smile again, her teeth flashing white in the darkness of the back seat.
“Oh, Hacker,” she sighed. “You are such a nice man. Naïve, but nice. Do you have a computer?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you back it up every week like they recommend?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “But I know I should.”
“Well,” she said. “I was the back-up for Vitus. Everything he did, I knew about, and filed it away. Not documents or anything like that – I told him years ago that if he ever got caught, I would deny knowing anything and everything, take all his money and go live in the south of France. And I made sure that I wasn’t personally connected to any of his deals. But at the same time, I made sure I knew everything about all of his deals. After all, it was my future at risk, too.”
She reached over the seat and grabbed the bottle out of my hands.
“He knew that I would turn on him at the first inkling that something was going bad,” she said, after tipping the bottle back again. “Eventually, he came to rely on me as a sounding board. He was a smart little operator, but I made him smarter. And safer.”
“So you knew about the scam?” I asked.
“You mean the sewer deal? Oh, hell yes,” she said. “And next was going to be the new bridge over the river, and after that, a new irrigation system, and then probably a major reconstruction of all the greens. Vitus and Herb had a whole series of improvements planned for the next five years.”
“And they were going to skim off the top?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling again. “I don’t think any of the other projects would have brought in as much as the first hit. But a couple hundred thousand every year or so – all hidden from taxes – doesn’t hurt at all. And I heard Vitus say that Herb had been thinking about torching the clubhouse. The rebuild would have been expensive, but insurance would have paid and paid and paid.”
Jack whistled softly. “How would Vitus have convinced the members to keep paying for all this?” he asked. “We lost a bunch of old members over the sewer project.”
“And Vitus signed up twice as many new members at the increased membership fees to replace them,” Leta answered. “There just aren’t enough country clubs in the state to keep up with the demand. He was going to launch a new membership drive, mostly in Boston, which would have raised something like five million. That would have gone into the long-term capital fund to pay for the improvements. The club would get the new stuff, it’s just that Vitus and his friends would keep about one dollar out of every four for themselves. Clean, shiny, legal
dollars that couldn’t be traced.”
“Thanks to Herb Incavaglia,” I said.
“Man’s a genius,” Leta nodded. “Personally I always thought he was a weasel, but he knew how to move dollars around so fast that nobody could discover where they had gone.”
“Was Vitus this dirty in his other businesses?” Jack wanted to know.
“My husband loved only one thing,” she said, with a trace of wistfulness. “And that was getting away with as much as he could. Up here in New Hampshire, where the political parties come every four years for the presidential primary, he made a killing. See this? …” She held out her arm to show us the glistening diamonds on her inch-thick tennis bracelet. “Came from the Clinton campaign in 1992. Vitus’ bank served as their campaign finance headquarters. He charged them low rates for the banking, and a nice hefty fee for ‘consulting.’ We consulted before he bought it for me.”
“And your marriage?” I asked. “Did he get away with as much as he could there, too?”
She laughed. “Oh, Hacker,” she said. “I knew it. I had you pegged as a romantic. Look, people get married and stay married for all kinds of reasons. Some people want to settle in with a house, bunch of kids, relatives coming every holiday. I knew from the outset that Vitus wasn’t interested in all that. He wanted to make money, to make people do what he wanted, and to get away with stuff. It made him feel…I don’t know… alive.”
“And you?”
She took another pull on the bottle. “I guess I got away with stuff, too,” she said. “I had a pretty nice life. Did what I wanted. Lived on the edge. I guess it made me feel alive, too.” Her voice caught, at the end.
“You loved him, didn’t you?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. The car rolled through the dark countryside. I turned and looked into the back seat. Leta Papageorge was crying, silently, tears coursing down her cheeks.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We dropped Leta Papageorge off in her driveway, like high schoolers after a dance. Vitus’s imposing French chateau sat way back from the road. We passed the elaborate brick-and-wrought-iron entrance, crossed a wooden bridge over a marshy area, and wound up a hill covered with oaks and maples. A fancy outdoor lighting system had been installed, the uplights creating a dramatic leafy vista across the broad lawn. Jack stopped the car in front of Vitus’ five-car garage, where several other cars had parked. Bright floodlights from the house cast a harsh pool of light onto the driveway.
“You want us to come in?” Jack asked.
Leta took a last hit from the bottle. “Nah,” she said. “It’s pretty grim in there. Have you ever been to a Greek wake? The men are all sitting in the living room, smoking cigars, and the women are all out in the kitchen, making stuff. They’re all his people, so I’m pretty much persona non grata.”
“You have no relatives?” I asked.
“Only child,” Leta said. “Parents died years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” she answered. “I learned how to take care of myself a long time ago. If I don’t get asphyxiated by the cigars or clog up all my arteries with the baklava, I’ll survive these next few days and then figure out what to do next.”
A man, dressed in somber black, had come out of the house and was standing on the front walk, peering at our car. Leta got out of the backseat and waved at him. The man turned and walked back inside.
“See?” she said, as Jack rolled down his window. “I have this strange desire to go in there, turn on the CD player with some Rolling Stones greatest hits and dance around. But they would all just keel over dead if I did.”
Jack and I laughed at the image of the blond Leta boogeying around a half dozen black-suited Greeks, mouths agape, cigars sending swirls of blue smoke into the air.
Leta smiled at us and turned to go inside. After a few steps, she stopped, turned and came back to the car.
“You guys realize that Herb is gonna call somebody, right?” she said. “He’s just a finance guy, not a muscle guy, but he knows the people who hire the muscle guys. You might want to think about that before you do something stupid.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Jackie said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Can I borrow your little six-shooter?”
Leta laughed, but not in a mean way. “Naw,” she said. “You might get hurt worse.”
“Worse than what?” I wanted to know.
She smiled enigmatically at me and walked away.
When she was inside, Jack turned around in the driveway that was big enough for an 18-wheeler, and drove away. We rode in silence through the black night for a while, thinking about what Leta had said.
“So,” I said. “Do we have a plan?”
“A plan?” Jack echoed.
“Yeah. You know…what we’re gonna do next. What we’re gonna do if Herb’s leg-breakers come calling. What we’re gonna do if they actually break something. When we’re gonna call Detective Tierney and ask for police protection and the witness protection program? That kind of plan.” Jack laughed. I guess it was my gallows humor. “Don’t get hysterical on me, Hack,” he said. “We’ve just yanked on a piece of string. Whatever happens next depends on who, or what, is tied to the other end.”
“And you don’t care if the other end is attached to Guido with a baseball bat and an unhappy disposition?”
“Che sera sera,” Jack said.
“Swell,” I said.
He laughed. “Actually, Hack, this is one of those rare times when our profession serves us well.”
“The other is the buffet lunch at the U.S. Open, right?” I said.
“Perhaps,” Jack laughed. “But the way I figure, no one is going to bust our legs or throw us into the river. I am, after all, the all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful publisher of the Lowell Citizen. And you, after all, write about golf for a major Boston paper.” He paused.
“On second thought,” he said, “Your ass may be grass.”
I laughed. “I get your point, you shithead,” I said. “The mob isn’t going to waste us because that would rain down upon them lots of unwanted attention.”
“A veritable cloudburst,” Jack nodded.
“So what are they going to do?”
“Probably try to scare us a little,” Jack said. “I know Rene Lemere, and he’s not a big-time criminal. He isn’t going to rock his boat by throwing us over the side. But he may want to talk tough to us and let us know he’s very displeased.”
“And what do we do?” I wondered.
“Play dumb and find out what he knows,” Jack answered.
“And when does all this take place, O great knower of everything?”
Jack smiled at me. “Probably when we least expect it,” he said.
We rode in silence into the city, the dark river silent beside us. We rumbled over the metal grating of one of the bridges, cut down a few empty city streets and finally pulled into Jack’s semi-hidden riverside estate. The house was quiet inside. I waited in the living room while Jack went and checked his messages. He was soon back. “Nothing,” he said. We agreed to rise early and head for the club for the final day’s tournament rounds.
“Sleep tight,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” I answered.
And it was a long night of tossing and turning. Every breath of wind, every creaking of a tree or rustling of a leaf, every barking dog or rumble of tires on the road outside caused me to bolt upright in bed. About 3:30, I gave up and turned on the light to read. Sometime shortly thereafter, I fell asleep, the lights still on, the book on my chest. It must have worked, for the boogeyman didn’t come.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jack woke me at seven. I felt around the bedsheets carefully, checking for horse’s heads. Nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“I called the pro shop,” he said. “We’re not scheduled to tee off until 10:30.”
“How is this gonna work?” I asked, yawnin
g. “We gotta play five nine-hole matches in one day?”
“Naw,” Jack said. “Teddy said everybody will just play two matches today, and any flights that are tied will have a sudden death playoff. Or flip a coin.”
“So if we still have three hours, I can go back to sleep,” I said hopefully.
“You could,” he said. “But I think we should go have a big breakfast. Get carbo-loaded for the day. I know a diner not far from here that makes the best Bloody Marys. They don’t have a liquor license, of course, but that’s why they’re so good.”
“You should have been a moonshiner,” I said. “You have the right attitude for it.”
“I knew a lot of those guys back at Wake Forest,” Jack laughed. “Salt of the earth fellows. Really fine people.”
I groaned, but I hoisted myself out of bed and into the shower. Half an hour later, Jack and I were tooling north away from the river. I scanned the front page of the Lowell Sunday Citizen, filled with the lurid story of the country club president murdered in the cart barn. Police were said to be following several “promising leads” in the case. There was a sidebar under a nice black-and-white photo of Vitus, dressed in his banker’s pinstriped suit, which painted a portrait of a powerful local pooh-bah, cut down tragically in his prime. Nothing about Papageorge’s former trouble with the federal banking authorities, nor, of course, anything about his scam with the sewer lines. Just a long list of his business accomplishments, his club memberships, his donations to the Boys Club, along with some nice quotes from the governor and junior senator from New Hampshire.
“Nice reporting job,” I said, as Jackie drove down a bumpy country road. “Makes Vitus sound like the second coming of Andrew Carnegie.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t want to publish the guy’s warts in his obit,” Jack said. “Save that for the blockbuster scoop to follow in a couple days.”
“We’re gonna rip the cover off?” I asked, smiling.
“Indubitably,” he grinned back.
Death at the Member Guest Page 17
