Shadowed Paradise

by Blair Bancroft

  Which had made it easy to kill Mom. He wasn’t afraid any more. He was so much smarter than the county cops that it was ludicrous. He could do anything he damn well pleased.

  So the stupid dog brought home a skull. The skull of someone old enough to have mostly silver fillings, that’s all the newspaper said. They’d never find out it was Mom. She was “up north.” She was never reported missing. And there were how many dentists in Calusa County? No way could they make a connection.

  Too bad the grave had been flooded out. It was a nice spot. Pretty and peaceful. Mom wouldn’t like being shut in one of those metal drawers at the morgue. Or did they just use a cardboard box for bones?

  He knew now that he was invincible. The idiots thought Betty Siffert was an accident. He wouldn’t have to wait and worry any more. With just a bit of careful planning . . .

  He’d bought the latex gloves, carried a tarp and a spade in the trunk of his car. Time to go hunting.

  Maybe this weekend . . .

  Chapter Eight

  Claire pulled the covers up under Jamie’s chin, bent down and kissed his cheek. He heaved a great sigh. “Wasn’t it great, mom?” he burbled for perhaps the fifteenth time. “Do we really have to wait a whole year for the next time?”

  “’Fraid so,” Claire said, ruffling his shock of blond hair.

  “Mom?”

  “Umm?” Claire mumbled as she straightened up.

  “Are you gonna keep him?”

  “Keep him?” The words choked out past a sudden lump in her throat.

  “You know,” Jamie said in his most long-suffering tone. “Brad. Are you going to keep him?”

  Claire sucked in her breath. How to tell a small hopeful child that things didn’t always work out the way they might like?

  No need. Jamie already knew that. “Do you . . . I guess you’d like me to, right?”

  “O’course. He’s my friend.” Jamie had no doubts at all.

  Nice to be Jamie.

  “He–uh–might not want to be kept,” Claire temporized.

  “Sure he does. He likes us.”

  If only she could share Jamie’s confidence. “Remember when grampa taught you to fish?” she said slowly. “You have to reel a fish in before you can find out if he’s a keeper. And sometimes that fish just doesn’t want to be caught and gets clean away. So give it a little time, okay? It’s too soon to be talking ‘for keeps.’”

  Jamie studied her face with solemn intensity before snuggling contentedly into his pillow. “Okay,” he agreed, “but don’t give him much slack. Grampa says that’s how fish get away.”

  Claire ducked her head to hide a grin. Then again, Jamie giving her instruction in the fine art of husband-hunting wasn’t so amusing after all. With uncanny accuracy Jamie had pinpointed her weakness. She’d not only been dragging her feet, her hunting boots were frozen to the starter line. After what she’d been through, what Jamie had been through . . . no way, no how could she open herself up to that kind of pain again.

  But, dear God, Brad Blue was temptation incarnate.

  Taking advantage of Jamie’s holiday euphoria, Claire sneaked in a good night kiss. “I promise I won’t throw him back unless he turns out to be a nasty old shark. How’s that?”

  “Not Brad,” Jamie asserted stoutly. “He’s a good guy.”

  She hoped so. Claire went out, softly closing the door behind her.

  Jamie had such hopes. So did she, though both the hard-headed Claire and the hurt Claire, had trouble admitting it. And now, whatever tentative relationship she and Brad had, she was about to blow it to hell and gone.

  “When are you going to tell him?” Ginny had demanded that afternoon as Claire was packing the picnic basket.

  She’d resisted a retort of “Never,” toyed with the cowardice of “Soon,” and finally settled on a grumpy “I don’t know.”

  “It’s time you displayed some of the good sense God gave you,” Ginny scolded. “If that man’s worth having, he won’t care. And if he isn’t, good riddance. Don’t drag it out until Jamie’s heart’s as broken as yours could be. Not to mention Brad’s. He has feelings too, you know. I like that man, Claire. Give him a chance to show what he’s worth.”

  If only it were that simple, Claire thought as her feet dragged down the hallway. No matter how strong the physical attraction, she had grave reservations about a relationship with Brad Blue. Could she bring herself to live in this foreign land called Florida? Could she live with Brad Blue—with who he was, what he was . . . or with the man she suspected he once had been?

  “Uh-oh,” Brad said as Claire walked into the brightly lit kitchen. “When you took Jamie to bed, I was under the impression you’d had the time of your lives. Now you’re looking at me like I’m Jack the Ripper. Care to give me a clue?”

  “We had a great time, but . . . well, there’s something we have to talk about.”

  Unflappable as always, Brad simply nodded, picked up Claire’s fancy beer stein, his own bottle of ale, and gestured for her to lead the way to the deck. They settled themselves on an antique wicker sofa cooled by a gentle breeze off the gulf. The stars were so clear—scattered all the way to the horizon where they dipped into the black void of the gulf—they might have been a painted backdrop.

  Florida could be beautiful, Claire thought, as melancholy crept out of the darkness and grabbed her by the throat. She could learn to live here. With the right man. So easy to chicken out, not say a word.

  Noblesse oblige.

  Claire began quietly. “You worked for the government, didn’t you?”

  Brad sucked in his breath, the brown bottle of ale poised an inch from his lips. Carefully, he set it down on the glass-topped coffee table. “Who told you that?” His question was as softly controlled as hers.

  “No one. It’s just that I’m so familiar with the breed. There’s a look, a stance, a something. When you’ve seen as many as I have, it’s not so hard to tell.” Claire’s eyes never left her hands, which were tightly clasped around her stein to keep them from shaking.

  “Would you care to tell me about it?” Claire detected the sudden hard edge beneath Brad’s bland tone. The flare of old instincts at the scent of a mystery.

  “I remember all those government recruiters on campus,” Claire said. “Men in suits who stood out like sore thumbs among the chinos and jeans. And then at Alumni Weekends—the old Blues . . .” Claire made a face. “I guess that includes me. Jim and I were both Yalies, though ten years apart.”

  She twisted the mug in her hands and found herself staring at a colorful image of Handsome Dan, the Yale bulldog grinning from the side of the beer stein. Beneath him, the Yale motto, Lux et Veritas. Light and truth. Oh, God! Hastily, she put the mug away from her.

  “Where was I?” she murmured. “Oh, yes, reunions. I could always tell the old Blues who worked for the government alphabet soups. Particularly the CIA types, who claimed they worked in some embassy or information agency. Later . . . later I developed a positive instinct for feds of every hue.”

  “I take it the experience wasn’t exactly pleasant.”

  “You could say that.” Brad’s silence, his willingness to listen, helped. Maybe, at last, she could get it all out.

  “After I graduated,” Claire said, “I got a job in New York. Marketing assistant in an ad agency. A dogsbody job, but it paid enough to move to the city and become part of the world that always lurked on the Connecticut horizon. The Big Apple. I couldn’t wait to get there.

  “And, no, I wasn’t disillusioned. Not at first. I was promoted twice in a year, and then I met Jim, your classic Prince Charming—bright, handsome, outgoing. He had a great job not far from my office in Manhattan.” Claire paused. “At InterBank.”

  Brad swore softly. There wasn’t a federal agent in the country who didn’t recognize the significance of the name InterBank. “God, Claire, I’m sorry,” he murmured. He wanted to take her in his arms, offer comfort, but he was afraid she might shatter, and thi
s was a story he had to hear. No way could he imagine Claire Langdon as part of the crime and sleaze of InterBank.

  “Jim was just the type of person they were looking for,” Claire said in a voice only faintly tinged with bitterness. “Ivy League, charismatic, ambitious, impeccable family background, lots of equally impeccable friends. The perfect American front for a foreign bank.

  “When we were married, we moved straight into a townhouse on the Upper East Side, complete with a view of the park and eventually a nanny to take Jamie to play in the park with all the other suitably nannied children. By the time Jamie was three we’d added an estate in Bedford. It even had a ballroom . . .

  “That’s it, really.” Claire brought her tale to an abrupt halt. She couldn’t go on. She thought she could get through it, but she couldn’t. “You can guess the rest. Two years ago when InterBank went down, Jim went with it.”

  To most Americans the crash of the world’s largest international bank was only a dull thud compared to war, terrorism, and corporate misdeeds that robbed people of their lifetime savings. Bunch of foreigners . . . what could you expect? InterBank was forgotten as soon as the newspaper was put aside, the television news switched to the latest sitcom.

  It might have been more of a sensation if the average citizen was aware of the truth.

  InterBank was a financial institution eager to provide any service. Want to finance a revolution? Launder your drug money? Avoid the tax collector? Rob your country’s treasury? Finance a terrorist attack? See your friendly neighborhood InterBank. Two hundred branches in sixty countries and a thousand ways to hide your assets . . .

  “In New York,” Claire added, offering a tidbit in the hope Brad would ignore the yawning gap in her story, “Jim was right up near the top. And I was somewhere out in left field.”

  She had been a naive idiot with her head in the clouds. She had had Jamie . . . and a miscarriage. She had had opera, theatre, ballet, charity events, elaborate weekend parties. She had a husband who gradually became less ebullient, thinner . . . withdrawn. Impotent. A husband who later admitted that part of his job had been to make sure his clients were provided with the finest call girls or whatever else their exotic tastes demanded. Once, he had even gone out in middle of the night to pay the gambling debts of an Arab sheik. Claire recalled, with self-loathing, that at the time she had found Jim’s outrage funny.

  James Langdon. Prominent executive at the bank that provided the ultimate in international banking service. Money available anywhere, any time. For anything.

  And she never guessed. Never realized. It was a bank, for Heaven’s sake. A pillar of the international community. A multi-billion dollar corporation whose executives lived better than many heads of state, hobnobbed with high-ranking government officials, the movers and shakers of free enterprise and private—very private—banking. They were flying high. Golden. Untouchable. Until their world crashed and burned.

  Brad’s voice cut through the flames of memory. Gentle but firm. Insistent. “Tell me the parts you’ve left out.”

  The house in Bedford had been built in the halcyon days before the first Great War. A New York stockbroker, grown rich on the boom times of railroads and oil, wanted a proper setting for the dynasty he envisioned as he became the proud father of his eighth child. Nothing less than the creation of his own English country house would do. Built of rough-hewn quarry stone in varying shades of gray, the house stretched along the top of one of Bedford’s rolling hills, gazing out over vast amounts of closely shaven green lawn and meticulously tended gardens. Just prior to 1929's Black Friday, an Olympic-size pool was added. It nestled at the foot of a hillside rock garden, a fall of water sliding down carefully constructed shallow runways to tumble with picturesque elegance and tinkling music into a lily pond above the shallow end of the pool.

  Inside the vast mansion the floors and fireplaces were imported marble, a different shade in each of the first-floor rooms. The focal points of the main salon, larger than most people’s homes, was a priceless Savonnerie carpet. The perfection of the room’s designer furnishings was never sullied by day-to-day living. A formal dining room, library, breakfast room, game room, screening room and exercise room also graced the first floor. The kitchen, which might have qualified for a world-class hotel, shone with a blinding array of copper and stainless steel, gleaming white cabinets, granite counters and white ceramic tile floor. A ballroom with Grecian columns, a wall of French doors and a mirror-polished floor of white ash occupied the entire west side of the imposing edifice. All in all, the stockbroker’s 1904 dreamhouse was deemed a suitable setting for an up-and-coming young vice president of InterBank. Jim Langdon had written an initial deposit to the real estate broker at the first showing.

  Claire, who found the gleaming gourmet kitchen and resident cook intimidating, immediately had a second kitchen installed on the second floor. Which still left eight bedroom suites, a playroom for Jamie and space for Jim Langdon’s elaborate office, which contained every state-of-the-art bell and whistle a wealthy executive could desire.

  The dormered third floor had servants’ bedrooms, mostly empty, and two separate attics. There was also, in classic tradition, an apartment over the garage for the cook/housekeeper, Emily Jeffers and her husband Bob, who had the responsibility of overseeing the smooth running of the household. The rest of the staff consisted of a nanny and a live-in maid. The gardener came five days a week, a three-man cleaning crew twice a week.

  The management and clientele of InterBank liked to party, and Bedford was just far enough out of Manhattan to inspire a sense of freedom. Mrs. James Langdon found herself hosting weekend houseparties on a regular basis. The guest list ranged from Manhattan money to government movers and shakers to an international array of InterBank’s wealthy and secretive depositors. The Langdons were off and running near the head of the pack of New York’s brightest and most successful young professionals.

  On the day Claire Langdon’s world of luxury began to unravel, she and Jamie were in the upstairs kitchen happily absorbed in decorating Christmas cookies. She had flour on her nose and in her hair, the telltale kiss of cinnamon candy on her lips. The apron she was wearing over a pair of old jeans was a disaster of dough and colored frosting. Jamie was carefully adding raisin eyes to give his gingerbread man sight when they were interrupted by an almost breathless maid who had, uncharacteristically, run up the stairs.

  “Two men downstairs,” she panted. “They wish to see you.”

  The house in Bedford had many visitors, none of them uninvited.

  “I can’t see anyone now, Consuela,” Claire protested. “I’m a mess.”

  “Must,” the maid said firmly. “Big suits, these men. They give card.” Belatedly, the maid held out a business card.

  Dear God. Claire’s breath whooshed out as if she’d taken a blow to the stomach. Jamie, though only five, looked up, eyes wide as he sensed his mother’s disquiet.

  “It’s nothing,” Claire lied to her son. “I’m just such a mess to see visitors. Your gingerbread man looks great. Be my big helper, please, and see how many you can finish up while I’m downstairs. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Claire took a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. “Consuela, tell the gentlemen I’ll be down in a minute.”

  She was half way down the hall to her room when she stopped. Jim would be shocked if she appeared before visitors in any condition but perfection, but there was something ominous about these visitors that screamed at her from the simple black lettering on a white card that read Douglas A. Chalmers, Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was perhaps better to appear promptly, flour smudges and all. Surely baking Christmas cookies made her one of the good guys. Didn’t it?

  Why on earth was she panicking? The FBI had come to the door in Connecticut in the days when she was still living at home. All they had wanted was information about the son of a neighbor who had applied for the Peace Corps. As Claire descended the long curved staircase, forcing her feet to a digni
fied rhythm, she mentally cataloged her Bedford neighbors for those with children of college age. That was it, of course. Or something equally innocuous. Had to be. There couldn’t be any other reason for the FBI to pay her a visit.

  By the time Claire reached the relative intimacy of one of the smaller parlors she had rationalized herself into a semblance of normalcy. Head high, every bit the gracious lady of the manor, she walked into the room, only realizing what she must look like when she saw the startled looks, hastily suppressed, on the faces of the two dark-suited men as they rose to their feet.

  “Oh, sorry,” Claire burst out, stripping off her apron and tossing it carelessly on a Directory chair reputed to having once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. “Christmas cookies.” She seated herself and motioned the men back into their chairs. “What can I do for you?” she inquired politely.

  Special Agent Douglas Chalmers would have blended into almost any surroundings. He had a calm everyman face, straight brown hair, medium blue eyes, whose sharpness was well hidden behind quiet professionalism. He was your friendly neighborhood Boy Scout grown up to college professor. His companion, Special Agent Sestak, was young, not long out of the academy, Claire guessed. His dark eyes were alight with interest in his surroundings and, very possibly, with interest in whatever had brought them here.

  It wasn’t going to be the Peace Corps. Claire knew it.

  When introductions had been made, Chalmers, without elaboration, politely requested Claire’s assistance. As he reached into his inner jacket and took out a folded piece of paper, Claire wondered if that was also where he kept his gun. The whole scene was surreal. Sitting in this early twentieth century parlor full of European antiques, talking to two men with guns. “Mrs. Langdon,” Chalmers said, unfolding the letter-size piece of paper, “would you please look at this list and tell me if you recognize any of the names on it?”