The Chessman

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  Mrs. Kelch grimaced as he informed her how Bret Ingram’s widow desired to have a word with her. Dorsey had reluctantly agreed, and Cady walked a visibly nervous Terri Ingram up the driveway and introduced the two. Terri looked like a million bucks, and some change if you counted her short sleeve cardigan and white linen trousers, but Cady could tell she was anxious—the have-a-last-meal-and-light-a-last-cigarette sort of anxiety.

  Also, as prearranged, he asked Mrs. Kelch if he might use her restroom after drinking coffee on the long drive. In the bathroom Cady looked out the window into the backyard where Marly Kelch had played with her friends all those years ago. He noticed the toy dachshund still parked under the picnic table, as when he’d had last been there. Unfortunately, the dog noticed Cady at the same moment, stood up, and began yapping. Cady slowly backed away from the window until the dachshund ceased the racket. Evidently, Rex still harbored unpleasant feelings toward Cady. The feeling was mutual.

  Cady could hear voices from the living room, but couldn’t discern what was being said. Terri did the bulk of the talking, paragraphs at a time to Dorsey’s brisk one or two word retorts. Cady heard Terri’s voice begin to waver, so he opened the bathroom door, made fake hand-washing sounds, and joined the two in the other room.

  “Is everything okay?” Cady had asked, expecting to escort Terri back to the sedan.

  Dorsey Kelch gave him a slight nod. He turned to Terri and, while he was blocking Mrs. Kelch’s view, Terri mumbled “ahuh” and pointed from him to the door, none too subtly requesting more time. He got the message.

  “Excuse me while I make a phone call,” he said and headed out to the Buick.

  In the car Cady checked his voice mail. Just a message from Agent Evans asking if he could review the list of partygoers, suggesting that they might want to delve into the family and friends of Dane Schaeffer. Cady wondered if Jund had played a role in Agent Evans’ offer to help.

  Cady then dug through his briefcase until he found Agent Drommerhausen’s old profile on the Chessman and flipped to the section that chess expert Agent Hiraldi had helped the profiler compose. He had read this section repeatedly in the past and ran through it again.

  The UNSUB is playing at a championship level, several moves ahead of the competition. He’s utilizing a hell-for-leather approach, brazenly taking out his opponents. Your run-of-the-mill chess players play the game cautiously, out of fear, because they don’t know what will happen if they aggressively march their pieces down the chessboard, but experience tells them that the consequences will be rather dire. Great players understand exactly why it is that sheer aggression is usually punished. However, they also realize that if their opponent is not practiced enough to position his pieces strategically, an all out balls-to-the-walls attack thus makes perfectly good sense; vulnerable spots hidden to your average player are therefore mercilessly exploited.

  Cady looked at his empty cup of gas station coffee and realized that now he truly needed to use the restroom. Upon returning to Kelch’s house, Dorsey Kelch blocked his entrance, handing him Rex on a leash and a bag for any of the dog’s exhaust and asking if Cady could take Rex for his morning walk. Dorsey’s eyes were red-rimmed. He saw Terri across the room, tears slipping down her face. Cady took the leash, the barking dachshund, the special baggy, and left.

  “Rex didn’t go?” Mrs. Kelch asked upon Cady’s return as she took the empty bag and undid the leash. “He’s normally like clockwork this late in the morning.”

  Cady opened his mouth but said nothing.

  “Oh my God, Dorsey,” Terri said. “Look at his face. Rex went, all right, but the G-man didn’t pick it up.”

  “Oh dear,” Dorsey said. “I hope it was a block or two over. The immediate neighbors all know Rex.”

  “I’m going to use your restroom,” Cady said.

  He hurried down the hall, away from the duet of giggles, and wondered again exactly when he’d lost control.

  “…and Marly continued to wait tables at the Sea Shack whenever she was home on breaks to make tip money,” explained Mrs. Kelch. “Mike Dean, the owner, is a family friend from church and Mike would let Marly work evening shifts whenever she was in town. The Sea Shack is always packed.”

  Cady scanned his list of names. “We’ve got Dean on the church list.”

  Dorsey smiled. “Mike’s almost eighty.”

  “Any sons?”

  “No.”

  “You said Marly gave private tennis lessons, but mostly to females, right?”

  “She’d help out her old high school coach, Curt Wently, with some of the girls on the team that had potential but needed some additional one-on-one play. Mostly fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds trying to make the varsity cut. Once in a while Curt would have her play against one of his new tennis stars, just to gauge how good they were.”

  Cady added a checkmark next to Coach Wently’s name and then went back to a timeline he’d developed. “You mentioned that Marly sometimes worked at the Pet Mart when in town?”

  “She started helping them clean out the cages and fish tanks when she was fourteen. Loved animals. Marly worked there part time until she was seventeen, when she realized more college money could be made waiting tables. But right up to the end she’d stop by the pet shop and visit. If a manager was out sick, they’d sometimes call to see if she could watch the store. If she was free, she’d cover the shift.”

  “Your daughter was very pretty.” Terri had been quietly paging through the family photo albums as Cady constructed his chart and discussed names with Mrs. Kelch and, upon closing the final album, had gotten up to look at the portraits lining the hallway. “Where was this picture taken?”

  “Her father snapped that shot of Marly on our trip to Yellowstone. Peter liked that close-up so much he had it enlarged.”

  “Such a special person, Dorsey,” Terri whispered, touching the frame lightly. “It’s a heavier world without her.”

  “That’s almost exactly what Jakey said on one of his last visits.”

  “Jakey?” Terri asked.

  “Jake Westlow. Marly babysat him when they were kids.” Cady thumbed through his notes. “Westlow took his own life after his mother passed away.”

  “Such sadness.” Dorsey spoke more to herself than to her visitors. “It seems as if it were only yesterday that Jakey said that. He stopped by a week or so before Lorraine lost her battle with cancer. She was in hospice at that point. We were paging through pictures in some magazine and something reminded us of Marly, and Jakey said, ‘The world is a much heavier place without her.’ A decade later and it brought tears to my eyes.”

  The room sat in silence for several seconds.

  “You must have seen a model in a fashion magazine that looked like Marly,” Terri said.

  “No.” Dorsey pointed to a stack of magazines on her coffee table. “I get Newsweek and, come to think of it, they had this story on father and son Farris—the elder senator and his congressman son.”

  “The two were pictured together on the cover.” Cady had read the human interest piece of fluff years back. Repeatedly. There was likely a photocopy of the Farris Dynasty Newsweek article in an old file in his cube at Hoover.

  “You’re right,” Dorsey said, nodding. “We paged through Newsweek and I told Jakey that Marly had known Patrick Farris when they were students at Princeton, before he followed in his father’s footsteps. Jakey hadn’t heard that before and asked if he could borrow the magazine.”

  “When was the last time you saw Jake Westlow?” Cady asked.

  “I was with him at his mother’s funeral a couple weeks later. A small affair. Lorraine didn’t have many friends. Jakey also stopped in a final time to say goodbye a week or so later. He’d made arrangements with a real estate agent to sell the house and had finished wrapping up his mother’s…life…and was heading back to his place in San Diego, where he was living at that time. Jakey was pretty broken up.” Dorsey shook her head. “If only I had known what was coming.”<
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  “Did you attend his funeral?”

  “As fate would have it, Agent Cady, I found out too late. It happened in California. I heard about it a month after the fact from a neighbor of a neighbor. I looked up Jakey’s obituary online. It was a short listing; the kind they have for young people where you get to thinking that it may have been a suicide. It broke my heart. There was no one from home there for him.”

  Terri did the math. “Jake couldn’t have been that much younger than Marly. No more than five years.”

  “Jakey was three years younger. Marly was about ten and he was seven when they first met, you know, kids playing in the neighborhood. But Marly acted older and soon Lorraine would grab her whenever she went out on a date and needed someone to watch little Jake.” A smile returned to Dorsey’s face. “Marly was three years older, but as Jake used to joke, he caught up with her.”

  “He caught up with her?” Terri asked, confused.

  “He took these tests they have, went through some special programs, and he wound up graduating from high school in Marly’s class. Jakey was this boy genius. At his request, Peter and I pulled some strings to get him into Reading Central Catholic. We had to go a few rounds with Lorraine over the Catholic thing, but she knew her son was an extraordinary boy and feared he might get lost in the public school system. He was extremely bright in math and English, but a true prodigy in the sciences. Reading Central had never seen anything like him. Nor since. Aced any test you set in front of him without breaking a sweat.”

  “Very impressive.”

  “I did feel a little sorry for him back in high school, though, and not just because of, well, his family situation—having no father at home—but more from a social acclimation standpoint, not fitting in with the other kids. You see, he grew up so fast. Too fast, in retrospect, bearing in mind how it all turned out in the end. Jakey was this fifteen-year-old senior, a great athlete in his own right—a wrestler—but still a highly sensitive fifteen-year-old boy surrounded by these young men. He stood apart. Jakey was in twelfth grade but not of twelfth grade, if you know what I mean. I think Marly made that thorny transition a little easier for him.”

  “He loved her, didn’t he?” Terri asked.

  “I think Marly was the first friend Jakey ever had. Perhaps his only friend. This was Jakey’s second home. We would cook extra dinner in case he showed up. Quite a pair those two goofballs made, lying in front of the TV playing all sorts of games—checkers, Battleship, Monopoly, that Ker Plunk marble game. They both got into tennis back then, played every night at the school courts. Marly had the knack and really took off. Jakey went to all her matches, her home matches anyway, to cheer her on. Yes, Terri, to your point—Jakey loved Marly with all his heart. At first and always.”

  Chapter 26

  “But Jake Westlow is deceased,” Terri repeated. “Wouldn’t you call that the proverbial dead end?”

  They were seated at a table on the lower level of Trattoria Nicola’s, the hotel’s Italian restaurant. The trip back to D.C. had been animated, more so than the grim trek out to Reading. Terri had heard Cady’s side of the conversation as he read off the additional names and reported his findings back to Agent Preston.

  “Think of the pattern we’ve witnessed so far, Terri. Your husband’s death is made to appear an accident. Dane Schaeffer’s death is sculpted a suicide. If Westlow were the Chessman, knowing the activity he was about to undertake—up to and including the slaying of a sitting United States congressman—faking his own demise would throw us off track, providing him maximum elbow room.”

  “But Jake committing suicide wouldn’t be out of the question. Some people are too bright for their own damned good. The shooting star burns out quickest. Marly dies a tragic death. Jake’s mother dies a slow and painful death. Suddenly, he’s all alone in the universe.” Terri took a slow sip from her glass of Pinot Nero. “Probably never got over the love of his life dying so young.”

  “That’s the likeliest scenario. A quick peek at the autopsy report will settle everything. If that’s cut-and-dry, we’ll move on and see what Marly’s tennis coach and those three other names have been up to in their free time.” Cady pushed one of his remaining mushroom raviolis across his plate with his fork. “I’m proud of you, Terri. Meeting Dorsey Kelch today took a lot of gumption on your part. That’s something I don’t think I’d have it in me to do.”

  “Sure you would, G-Man. You’d just have done it in your own way.”

  “Did you offer her the resort?”

  “Right before you brought Rex back. Dorsey laughed and told me she wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do with a lake resort in Minnesota.”

  “Did you get what you were looking for?”

  “I thought I’d feel better.” Terri shrugged. “But I guess we’re all open wounds in search of a Band-Aid.”

  “You think I’m an open wound?”

  “You especially,” Terri said, smiling. “By the way, I notice you’re not wearing a ring anymore.”

  “Someone I recently met gave me pause to consider what ghost was haunting me…or what deluded statement I was trying to make. I see you’re no longer wearing yours.”

  “Some fisherman is going to hit the jackpot when he cleans a largemouth bass. I tossed that ring as far into the lake as I possibly could.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “You shook up my world last week, G-Man. No way I go back to painting cabin walls after that bombshell. I haven’t been able to think about anything else. What Bret did was unforgivable. What he did was vile and immoral—all those young women the Zalentines murdered would still be alive today if he hadn’t covered up for them. Nobody deserves to die like Bret did, but it’s hard to mourn now that I know his secret. Time wounds all heels, I guess, and Bret’s past finally caught up with him. Anyway, I’ve cut all ties.”

  “I’m sorry, Terri.”

  “You’re following the truth, Drew. The chips are falling where they may. I guess I’m falling where I may. You’ve got nothing to apologize for—well, except the dog thing.”

  Cady shook his head. “I hate Rex.”

  Terri broke out laughing and pushed her plate, now empty of chicken parmigiana, aside. It was good to hear, Cady thought. What a difference a day makes.

  “So what do you do when you’re not chasing bad guys and flabbergasting widows?”

  “Ever hear of numismatics?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the study of currency. In my case, I collect rare coins.”

  “So the G-Man is tall, dark, and geeky?”

  “I know—a lot of people make fun of it.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of it, Drew. I was making fun of you.”

  “Good one,” Cady said. “Do you like studying history?”

  “I catch the History channel now and again. Whenever I do I feel that I should watch it every day.”

  “I’m a history buff. Most of my collection contains rare American coins. Here’s a major nerd alert for you: I’m an associate member of the American Numismatic Society.”

  “I bet the Holiday Inn gets awfully nervous when that bunch shows up for the annual banquet.”

  “We keep the joint rocking till almost nine o’clock at night.”

  “What coins do you have in your collection?”

  “My stuff’s pretty much nickel and dime. Literally. I scored an 1851 Silver Three Cents piece earlier this year, designed by a chief engraver named James Barton Longacre and made at the Philadelphia Mint.” Cady grabbed his pen from the breast pocket of his sport jacket and sketched the coin on the back of his wine coaster, then slid it to Terri. “A giant ‘C’ with the Roman numeral III inside.”

  “A three-cent piece seems like an odd number.”

  “That’s where the history comes into play. The California Gold Rush began in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill. You remember the ‘Forty-Niners’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, as a result of the gold rus
h, the price of silver rose and people began to hoard and melt the silver coins since they were worth more as metal than as currency. Coins worth less than their face value back then were mostly rejected. At this same time, the United States postal system had reduced their basic rate to three cents. Congress came up with the idea to create a three-cent coin with just enough precious metal—silver—in it to avoid being worth less than the coin’s face value, but not enough to make it worth melting. These coins were small and thin, but they served their purpose in the purchasing of postage stamps.”

  “Interesting. How big is your collection?”

  “A few dozen coins. None of which cost me very much—I’m an amateur aficionado on a K-Mart budget.”

  Terri stared at Cady. He could tell something was on her mind, something eating away below the surface. She appeared hesitant, but after another moment, Terri made her decision.

  “Speaking of history, Drew, after you left Grand Rapids I went online and read every newspaper account on the murders of the Zalentine twins, K. Barrett Sanfield, Dane Schaeffer, and Patrick Farris that Google came up with. The more-recent articles after Dane Schaeffer’s death mentioned that an unnamed FBI agent had been with the congressman at the time of his…assassination…and that the agent had been brutally attacked by the killer.” Terri’s eyes danced briefly over the scars crisscrossing Cady’s right hand. “I’m sorry, Drew.”

  Cady nodded. He felt himself begin to blush so he grabbed the bottle of Pinot Nero, refilled Terri’s glass, and emptied the remaining wine into his own.

  “Dessert?”

  “What?”

  “Here comes the waitress.”

  “Oh.”

  In a high-backed booth across the room, a man with black hair and John Lennon glasses signaled his waitress for another glass of ginger ale. His bruschetta lay off to the side, completely untouched. The man appeared to have been stood up. He checked his watch before glancing slowly around the dining room, eyes settling on Cady’s table for a moment before returning to the Washington Post’s daily crossword laid out on his table.